Quote of the Week

"I think we need to step back and face the music.  America has changed.  America has changed.  We are not the same country.  The other side is winning."

- Rick Santorum, explaining to an NRA crowd why he hates America so much. Santorum also stated: "Whether it's through Obamacare, whether it's through redefining marriage, you name it, they are coming at it."

Remember: He made these comments at a fucking NRA convention. Jon Stewart has all the details here.

Couldn't They Make It A 200-Day Hunger Strike Instead?

Hilarious:

A Virginia-based evangelical Christian group known as the Family Foundation is planning for its members to fast and pray for 40 days and 40 nights later this year in an effort to fight same-sex marriage.

According to LGBT website FrontiersLA.com, the Family Foundation announced earlier this week that members will be refusing food from Aug. 27 to Oct. 4 in support of the state’s Marriage Amendment, passed in 2006, which defined marriage in Virginia as a right reserved only for heterosexual couples. The Amendment was overturned earlier this year and goes before the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on May 11.

I think when a hate group like this one claims that its members are going on a hunger strike, there should be an organization that monitors these people to make sure they are actually not eating.

Look, I get it that these folks really dislike gay people -- but do they hate them enough to not eat for 40 days? Kinda doubt it.

Who Gets The Blame For GOP's Cliven Bundy Racism Debacle?

That's easy -- Sean Hannity should get all the blame.

Why do I say this? Because Hannity embraced this Bundy character as basically the Second Coming of Christ -- albeit a deadbeat, extreme-right-wing, hate-filled Christ, but a Second Coming all the same. So if you are going to embrace a guy like this, the very first things you must do are (1) realize any guy who believes in the shit Bundy believes in is probably a racist, and (2) send someone over to his ranch to educate this guy on how Republicans should engage in racist talk. 

Fox News could have hired Newt Gringrich to go over there -- nobody does racial code-speak better than he does -- and basically tell Bundy, "Look, you should probably avoid speaking about race, but if you feel compelled to do so, you need to use the proper codewords." 

Like I said, Gingrich can do this stuff in his sleep and I am certain he could have given Bundy some good pointers.  Who can forget such Gingrich racists hits like "Obama follows a 'Kenyan, anti-colonial' worldview," or "Obama is the 'food stamp president'" or other GOP-approved dog-whistle phrases like "welfare queen," "shared Anglo-Saxon heritage,” "voter fraud," or "where's the birth certificate?"

But Hannity didn't do any of the necessary groundwork beforehand, and that allowed Bundy to say shit like this:

“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said. Mr. Bundy recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids — and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch — they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.

“And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”

That's not speaking in code -- that's called speaking your mind, and radical right wingers just cannot do that publicly, even in today's radicalized version of the Republican Party.  Rick Santorum found that out the hard way when he famously said,"I don't want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money."

Anyway Hannity -- when you find some other asshole out there to be the new poster boy for the Republican/Fox agenda, do a little prep work first.  You'll be happy that you did.

Willing To Die Due To Hatred for Obama (With Update)

My wife was recently contacted by a friend she hadn't spoken to since high school.  This friend has some pretty serious health problems, and told my wife all about them.  She then added that her health insurance was cancelled last year.  My wife then asked the obvious question:  "Well, did you look into ObamaCare?"

The friend responded:  "No -- my husband and I refuse to have anything to do with that man."  She then added that if her health problems continue and the medical bills started to pile up, then she and her husband would sell some of their stuff to pay those bills.

This floored me. Here is someone who would rather sell off all her worldly goods and risk death than sign up for ObamaCare.  I can't imagine someone willing to die over racial hatred for a President, but there it is.

I hate Dick Cheney.  Anyone who has read my blog knows this.  I hate him with every fiber of my being.  I think he's a war criminal and I also think a particularly warm place has been reserved for him in the lowest depths of the Infernal Regions.  But if he had come up with an idea that would have saved me a lot of money, I would have taken advantage of it despite my intense hatred for him.

But not this woman.  She hates Obama so much that she'd rather die than sign up for health insurance under ObamaCare.

When I heard this story, the first thing that popped into my head was suicide bombers, who have so much hatred that they are willing to die in order to inflict a wound on the people they hate.  But the analogy isn't a very good one because my wife's friend isn't hurting anybody except herself by refusing to sign up for ObamaCare.  What makes this even more sad/hilarious is that the individual health care mandate -- the centerpiece of ObamaCare -- was a fucking Republican idea!

Anyway, if this woman were to die due to her health problems, she should be given the Darwin Award.

UPDATE:  On a somewhat related note, here is what a TPM reader had to say about the current state of racism in America:

I believe Fox has changed what counts for permissible rhetoric on race and social ills in this country. And I think that the old, suppressed views on race from the childhood of older Boomers and the remaining Depression-era generation are liberated by that permissiveness. It's not Fox spewing hate that makes these people hate. They already hated, but for decades it just wasn't ok to say it out loud, and you saw little of it in the mainstream media. Now, however, it's ok to say it out loud because the guys on TV say it, and so others must also believe it. Scary stuff.

I couldn't agree more.

Truer Words Have Never Been Spoken

"Not all [Republicans are racist], but to a significant extent, the Republican base has elements that are animated by racism, and that's unfortunate."

- Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.).

Nooooo!!!

Last week, I tried to cheer up members of the GOP over the fact that they are losing ObamaCare as an issue for the 2014 election.  I told them:  "Well, look on the bright side, Republicans -- you'll always have Benghazi! to fall back on."  But if conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer has his way, they won't be able to do that.

Krauthammer told Republicans yesterday that the time has come to throw in the towel on Benghazi! and move on to some other fake scandal:

"Politically speaking the administration has won. They ran out the clock. If we had a select committee from the beginning, really had coherent hearings unlike what we’ve had, which were disjointed hearings that let all things sort of slip away, we really would have been somewhere. We would have gotten to the bottom of this. But as a political fact, this thing is done," [Krauthammer] said on Fox News about congressional Republicans' many investigations into how the Obama administration handled the attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya.

You can watch the video of Krauthammer giving up on Benghazi! here.

Oh For Christ's Sake

Geesus:

Aaron Miller, the Minnesota Republican Party’s nominee for the 1st Congressional District, said this week that he wanted to win because learning about evolution made his daughter cry, and he wanted to make sure that schools were not forced to teach it.

The Mankato Free Press reported last month that Miller told a story to a Republican county convention about how his daughter became “very upset because she had to learn about evolution at school.”  Miller claimed that even the teacher expressed agreement with the daughter, but said that the evolution lesson was a requirement.

Something tells me that these folks are not big fans of the new Cosmos show.

The GOP's ObamaCare Problem In A Nutshell

You can put this in the "you're really just figuring this shit out now?" category (from Sahil Kapur at TPM):

One congressional GOP health aide, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly, said his party is as determined as ever to fight Obamacare, and will remain so as long as it exhibits failure. He said devising an alternative is fraught with the difficulty of crafting a new benefits structure that doesn't look like the Affordable Care Act.

"If you want to say the further and further this gets down the road, the harder and harder it gets to repeal, that's absolutely true," the aide said. "As far as repeal and replace goes, the problem with replace is that if you really want people to have these new benefits, it looks a hell of a lot like the Affordable Care Act. ... To make something like that work, you have to move in the direction of the ACA. You have to have a participating mechanism, you have to have a mechanism to fund it, you have to have a mechanism to fix parts of the market."

I was just talking to a friend the other day about this exact issue. Republicans keep claiming that they want to "repeal and replace" ObamaCare, but the problem for the GOP is that there are only a limited number of ways to achieve health care reform without creating government-run health insurance. As Kapur noted in his article, there is a reason the Republicans have failed to come up with a replacement for the ACA: "The popular parts of the law, most notably the preexisting conditions guarantee, are unsustainable without unpopular parts like the individual mandate."

But I'm convinced now more than ever that it was never the intent of the GOP to replace ObamaCare.  If the Republicans really thought that the country needed health care reform, they could have pushed it through Congress during the eight years Bush was in office. 

Conservative Bill Kristol, in 1993, wrote a memo wherein he argued that health care reform would be a political disaster for the GOP.  Kristol wrote that a successful Clinton health care bill would "relegitimize middle-class dependence for 'security' on government spending and regulation" and would "revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests."

I guess Kristol's memo explains why Republicans are so violently opposed to the individual health care mandate, even though it was their own idea.  Republicans simply have no interest in being viewed as the generous protector of middle-class interests, and they will do whatever it takes to prevent the Democrats from being viewed that way.

A Real Obamacare Death Panel (With Update)

Earlier today, President Obama announced that at least 7.1 million Americans have signed up for health insurance through exchanges during the Affordable Care Act's first open enrollment period.  In his speech, Obama said: “There are still no death panels. Armageddon has not arrived. Instead, this law is helping millions of Americans.”

Although the President is right that Armageddon has not arrived and the ACA is helping millions of people, he is wrong about one thing -- there is in fact an Obamacare Death Panel, and the members of that panel are Rick Perry, Rick Scott, Nathan Deal, Pat McCrory, Tom Corbett, Bill Haslam, Bobby Jindal, Mike Pence, Robert Bentley, Nikki Haley, Mary Fallin, Phil Bryant, Scott Walker, Sam Brownback, Gary Herbert, Butch Otter, Dave Heineman, Steve Bullock, Dennis Daugaard, Sean Parnell, Paul LePage, and Matt Mead.

The folks populating this list are the Republican governors of the states that are refusing to expand Medicaid under Obamacare.  As the President said today, millions of Americans still remain uncovered "in part because governors in some states for political reasons have deliberately refused to expand coverage under this law."  What he did not say is that this GOP hissy fit is going to lead to the death of thousands of Americans.

According to a recent report published by researchers from Harvard Medical School, the number of deaths attributable to the lack of Medicaid expansion in opt-out states will be between 7,115 and 17,104 per year. Way to go, GOP.

Anyway, when things are going bad for the Republicans, I always turn on Fox News because it is usually hilarious.  Well, tonight did not disappoint.  Megyn Kelly had this pissy tone of voice as she started her program by trotting out the usual GOP anti-Obamacare talking points. And Bill O'Lielly was so angry over the Obamacare news that he actually started out his program with a segment on . . . wait for it . . .  Benghazi! (I swear I am not making that last part up).

Bottom line: a bad day for the GOP and Fox News always means a great day for America.

UPDATE:  Some Republicans are finally starting to realize the problems associated with putting all their eggs in the ObamaCare basket for 2014 (from The Hill):

Anxious Senate Republicans are worried party leaders are focusing too much this election year on ObamaCare and not enough on jobs and the economy.  The concern among GOP centrists comes as President Obama and congressional Democrats are crowing about a surge in late enrollments and claiming the political winds are shifting around the Affordable Care Act. ***

[S]ome Republicans, including a senator who requested anonymity, fear the issue’s potency could fade following the March 31 enrollment deadline as news media move to other stories. “It’s got to be a much broader appeal than one piece of legislation,” said [GOP Sen. Dean] Heller, who isn’t up for reelection in 2014.

Heller’s comments are strikingly similar to those from Sen. Charles Schumer (N.Y.) and other Democrats who say voters are not as focused on ObamaCare as Republicans believe.

Well, look on the bright side, Republicans -- you'll always have Benghazi! to fall back on.