Needless To Say, I'm Watching Fox News Right Now

What a horrible week for Republicans.  Confederate flags are coming down all over the country, and the GOP just lost its bullshit Obamacare lawsuit. The America-hating pieces of shit at Fox News are beside themselves in anger.  I love it.

Although I predicted this exact result in the Supreme Court, I also held out hope that I would be wrong and that the Court would strike down the Obamacare subsidies for the folks living in states relying on the federal marketplace.  The resulting shit-storm within the GOP would have been a glorious thing to behold. Oh well.  Republicans can act out as much as they want right now over this decision, but the bottom line is that they really dodged a political bullet here.

The one thing that is undoubtedly enraging Republicans the most is that Obama won big today.  I think this whole lawsuit was more about the GOP's intense hatred for America's first Black president than anything else.

The Push-Back Begins . . . (Updated)

Here we go:

Some Spartanburg County lawmakers support removing the Confederate battle flag from the Statehouse grounds, but state Sen. Lee Bright, R-Spartanburg, characterized the movement to remove it and other Confederate monuments as a “Stalinist Purge.”

Shortly before Gov. Nikki Haley called on lawmakers to work together to have the flag removed, Bright said the flag doesn't symbolize hate to him but instead recognizes those who had fought with honor during the Civil War. People throughout history have misused symbols, and the Confederate battle flag is not an exception, Bright said. Just because a symbol may be abused doesn't mean it should be banned, he said.

Other radical right wingers are starting to come out of the woodwork to criticize Gov. Haley's call to take down the flag.  One conservative tweeted yesterday: "I hope the voters remember this and send her ass packing." Republican Alabama Rep. Gary Palmer stated yesterday that calls to remove the flag came from "people that have an agenda seeking to exploit a tragedy," and he concluded: "to me, that’s beyond contempt."

Even some Republicans who now support the effort to remove the flag are saying that the flag's symbolism was co-opted by a bunch of radical racists.  Of course, such an attempt to re-write history is complete bullshit.

John Oliver said it best the other night when he responded to Sen. Lindsey Graham's statement that the confederate flag has been used by some folks "in a racist way"  Oliver's response:

"Yeah, it has -- in fact, I believe the first time the confederate flag was used in a racist way was the exact second they finish sewing the very first one -- it was right around that time."

Anyway, I stand by my statement that South Carolina will not take that flag down. The racists in South Carolina who designed the original "compromise" to take the flag off the capitol dome -- and move it to an even more prominent place in front of the statehouse -- anticipated that future attempts would be made to take the flag down entirely.  And that is why they made it very hard to do so: it would require a two-thirds vote from both houses of the General Assembly.

Good luck with that.

UPDATE:  Go here to read more on why the flag will not be coming down.  Read this as well.

Why All The Talk Of Taking Down The Treason Flag Is Complete Horse-Shit

After I posted on Friday that there is no way South Carolina would take down the confederate flag currently flying in front of its statehouse, I noticed a lot of movement on the issue.  One Republican assemblyman even stated that he would introduce a bill in December to take the flag down.

Well, it's easy to engage in such talk when last week's massacre is still fresh in everyone's memory.  But I guarantee you that once the shock of the neo-confederate terrorist act starts to wear off, so will the fervor surrounding the flag.  Why do I say this?  Because it's South Carolina we are talking about.

One need look no further than a few feet away from where that flag currently waves. Right next to that fucking flag pole is a monument honoring terrorist Ben Tillman.  As Nancy LeTourneau at Washington Monthly recently noted, an inscription on that monument honors Tillman's “life of service and achievement … In the home loving and loyal, to the state steadfast and true for the nation.” But as Will Moredock notes here, Tillman was an evil, hate-filled asshole:

Ben Tillman’s long and bloody public career began in 1876 at what would ultimately be called the Hamburg Massacre.

The then 29-year-old Tillman led the members of the Sweetwater Sabre Club, a.k.a. the Edgefield Redshits, against a local militia group, all black. Several African-American militia men were killed in a pitched battle with red-shirt-wearing white terrorists. After the militia surrendered, five of them were called out by name and executed. A few weeks later, when vigilantes captured a black state senator named Simon Coker, Tillman was present when two of his men executed the prisoner while he was on his knees praying.

Later, the terrorist leader Tillman explained his intentions on that fateful July 8 day: “It had been the settled purpose of the leading white men of Edgefield to seize the first opportunity that the Negroes might offer them to provoke a riot and teach the negroes a lesson; as it was generally believed that nothing but bloodshed and a good deal of it could answer the purpose of redeeming the state from Negro and carpetbag rule.” In a 1909 speech at a Red Shirt reunion in Anderson, Tillman reiterated this point, noting that he believed in “terrorizing the Negroes at the first opportunity by letting them provoke trouble and then having the whites demonstrate their superiority by killing as many of them as was justifiable.”

He added, “That we have good government now is due entirely to the fact that Red Shirt men of 1876 did all and dared all that was necessary to rescue South Carolina from the rule of the alien, the traitor, and the semi-barbarous negroes.”

If this guy is so beloved in South Carolina that they gave him a monument in front of the state house, does anyone think the state will make any legitimate effort to remove the confederate flag from the premises? Not bloody likely, particularly given that President Obama said the other day that the flag should be taken down and put in a museum.  I suspect most Republicans in the South Carolina General Assembly will opposed the flag's removal on that basis alone -- they are sure the hell not going to let a some uppity Black man tell them what to do.

Indeed, I expect to soon see at least one bill in front of the General Assembly requiring that the height of the flag pole be increased and the monument honoring Terrorist Tillman be made larger. And why do I think that will happen? Because it's South Carolina!

South Carolina's Confederate Flag Quandary

Jon Stewart, in last night's excellent Daily Show monologue, told his audience that he had no jokes for them in the wake of the recent terrorist attack on the Black Church in South Carolina. I agree that it's pretty hard to find anything funny about nine people being gunned down in a place of worship by a white supremacist.

But I have to admit that there is one thing I find somewhat hilarious about all this, and that is the Catch-22 South Carolina currently finds itself in due to its long love affair with the fucking confederate flag:

After Dylann Storm Roof allegedly shot up an AME church in Charleston, S.C., killing nine people, two flags were lowered more than 100 miles away in Columbia, the state’s capital. Atop the South Carolina State House, the U.S. flag and South Carolina’s palmetto flag flew at half-staff as the manhunt for Roof ended with his capture in North Carolina and prayer vigils were planned. The show of respect would have been appropriate even if one of the state legislature’s own — state senator Clementa C. Pinckney — had not died in the attack.

But a third flag within view of the State House — the Confederate stars and bars — flew as high and as proud as ever, flapping in the breeze on a sunny day.  This looked bad.

Fucking-A it looks bad, particularly given that the shooter in question displays a confederate flag license plate on his vehicle.  But there is not a goddam thing South Carolina can do about it. The flag will have to stay right where it it, flying proudly in the racist breeze, no matter how bad it looks.  And that's what I find hilarious.

They certainly can't take it down because that would be an admission that the flag is in fact racist, something that its advocates strongly deny. Even if the governor thought it was a good idea to take it down, she couldn't do it because "only the General Assembly can do that," and it would require a 2/3rd vote by the Assembly to do so. But I doubt Gov. Haley would want to remove the flag, My understanding is that any politician who openly advocates removal pays a heavy political price.

Yes, that flag is there to stay, particularly given that there are no doubt a lot of people in South Carolina who think that now -- i.e., immediately after nine Negroes have been gunned down in cold blood -- is the best time to have that rag flying because they do indeed view the confederate flag as a symbol of white supremacy.  We know that the gunman undoubtedly feels that way, and does anyone out there really think he's the only person in that state who does?

No doubt there are a good number of South Carolinians who want the flag to remain right where it is in order to show their support for what Dylan Storm Roof did the other day. After all, the flag "was first raised over the Capitol in 1962, largely to express defiance of the civil rights movement." Killing Black Folk is certainly one way to express such defiance.

Why not compromise and fly the flag at half-mast you ask? Well, they can't do that  because it is not on a pulley system, but is "held in place by a padlock."  I have no doubt that a chain also helps secure the flag. After all, a padlock isn't much good without a chain. Perhaps it is a chain that was actually used on slaves back in "the good old days."

That wouldn't surprise me one bit.

The Real Reason Republicans Hate Obamacare . . .

From Egberto Willies at Daily Kos:

Republicans have had over five years to come up with something different that could reduce the deficit, provide health care, and remain completely private. The reason they cannot is that Obamacare used Republican tenets to build Obamacare, a private-based system. Had the president implemented Medicare for all (single payer) by getting rid of insurance companies that continue to skim up to 20 percent of premiums for false overhead and profits, they could demagogue and attempt to change it to a more inefficient system. That was the genius of Obamacare. It was built on the Conservative Heritage Foundation principles that most Republicans once supported along with a dose of progressive middle-class protections.

Willies' post also contains a video of Democratic Congressman Sander Levin's excellent response to Paul Ryan's bullshit attack on the ACA. Levin summed it all up with this line explaining the real reason the GOP is mad at Obamacare: "Your frustration is millions and millions and millions of people are benefiting, and have health care when they did not before."

I admittedly do not pray all that much, but I am praying that the Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court side with the plaintiffs in King v. Burwell and strike down the Obamacare subsidies for the folks living in states relying on the federal marketplace. Such a ruling would put the turd squarely in the pocket of the Republican-controlled Congress because it would force the GOP to make an effort to preserve health coverage for the millions who stand to lose it, most of whom reside in Red States.  I would really enjoy watching something like that unfold.

But I don't think that will happen.  Chief Justice Roberts had the chance to kill Obamacare while it was still in the crib, and he didn't pull the trigger.  I doubt he'll do it now, given how many millions of people would be hurt by such a ruling.  And I doubt Justice Kennedy would vote to strike down the subsidies, so I am predicting a 6-3 decision with Roberts and Kennedy siding with the liberals.

But I could be wrong, and I hope that I am.  If the Court does pull the trigger, then the resulting shit-storm within the GOP ranks would be a thing of beauty.

We're Gonna Miss You, Jon . . .

Yet another Iraq War Criminal is trying to re-write history, and Stewart is having none of it:

This Is The Kind Of Shit That Happens When You Listen To An America-Hating Idiot

Via Steve Benen:

As regular readers may recall, [Grover] Norquist is an anti-tax crusader who's convinced all kinds of GOP policymakers to sign something known as "the pledge" - in order to get ahead in their party, Republicans agree in writing never to support raising any tax on anyone by any amount for any reason.

But occasionally, far-right policymakers discover that the mindless, knee-jerk commitment stands in the way of actual governance in the real world. Louisiana's Republican-dominated state government, for example, is facing an enormous budget crisis, caused in part by Gov. Bobby Jindal's (R) tax breaks. Now the state can't get its fiscal house in order, and as TPM reported, it's asking Norquist to give Louisiana a break.

I can't help but laugh when I read stuff like this.  Of course, Norquist told the Louisiana Republicans to go fuck themselves, and some pretty hilarious blow-back has ensued.  As Benen notes, The Times-Picayune -- in slamming Jindal -- called Norquist "Louisiana's unelected governor," and one observer quipped:  “With all due respect to Grover Norquist, this is like begging your dealer for permission to go clean.”

Louisiana isn't the only state suffering from the effects of Republican fiscal malfeasance.  Radical right winger Sam Brownback is currently running Kansas into the ground with all his gubmint-hating fuckery.

But cheer up, Louisiana and Kansas -- I know things are tough now, but your suffering will help show the rest of the country once and for all that Republicans and their policies are bad for America.

The 2016 Democratic Nominee Must Be Someone Who Opposed The Iraq War

And unfortunately, that ain't Hillary. Greg Sargent explains it this way:

[T]he current line of questioning for Republicans and Hillary Clinton about Iraq — “would you have supported the invasion knowing what we know now?” — is deeply flawed, and risks whitewashing the real history of the run-up to the war. Now, however, it seems possible that this weak line of questioning might actually aid and abet the current GOP strategy for talking about Iraq. 

As Bob Costa notes, this whole history re-write thing by the GOP is ultimately geared toward blaming Obama -- and ultimately Hillary -- for what's going on in the Middle East right now:

The political endgame for Republicans is a general election where Clinton can be portrayed as someone who initially backed the U.S. mission but did not see it through. In that sense, foisting blame on Obama is only the first step in the GOP’s aims. Knowing their ownership of the invasion in the eyes of voters has not faded, they would like to distance themselves from the messy debate over weapons of mass destruction and make the Islamic State — how it rose and how to stop it — the central political battleground on foreign policy.

That's the whole problem -- Hillary supported the invasion of Iraq!  She is therefore in no position to call the GOP on all its recent history-rewriting bullshit, and neither is any Democrat who supports her run for the presidency.  And for Christ's Sake, we certainly can't count on the Mainstream Media to go after Jeb Bush and the rest of the GOP on this Iraq Re-Write Fuckery.

Indeed, perhaps the only folks who will ultimately be in the position to call bullshit on the GOP are the voters themselves, and that all depends on whether the American people have a good collective memory on how we got into Iraq in the first place.  But as I implied in my post yesterday, I think that memories might be fading in that regard.

UPDATE:  Obama chimed in on this debate today.  He said this (via Steve Benen):

"I'm very clear on the lessons of Iraq. I think it was a mistake for us to go in in the first place, despite the incredible efforts that were made by our men and women in uniform. Despite that error, those sacrifices allowed the Iraqis to take back their country. That opportunity was squandered by Prime Minister Maliki and the unwillingness to reach out effectively to the Sunni and Kurdish populations."

C'mon, Barack -- you can do better than that. Benen suggests the following:

I suspect, if I were in the president’s shoes, I might be tempted to say, “Wait, those guys who were wrong about everything and lied the nation into a catastrophic war that destabilized the region are trying to blame me? Are they insane?”

Fucking-A.

I Know I Seem to Be Beating A Dead Horse On The Matter of the GOP Iraq War Re-Write . . .

. . . but I am continually writing on this subject because the metaphorical horse in question appears to be far from dead.  As recently as two weeks ago, I honestly thought that the question of whether Bush and Cheney manipulated intelligence in order to get the war they wanted was answered long ago and the answer was that they most definitely lied this country into war.

But I spoke to a friend yesterday who will go unnamed (Dan), and he had read David Brooks' recent column on how the Iraq Debacle was basically an honest mistake and Dan more or less bought into Brooks' argument (Dan, by the way, was no fan of the Bush/Cheney Administration and keeps himself well-informed on the issues). In my friend's defense, why not buy into what Brooks had to say? After all, not only is he a New York Times columnist, but he is also one of the more thoughtful conservative writers out there.

No doubt the following paragraph from Brooks' piece sounded particularly convincing to Dan:

* * * There’s a fable going around now that the intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was all cooked by political pressure, that there was a big political conspiracy to lie us into war.

That doesn’t gibe (sic) with the facts. Anybody conversant with the Robb-Silberman report from 2005 knows that this was a case of human fallibility. This exhaustive, bipartisan commission found “a major intelligence failure”: “The failure was not merely that the Intelligence Community’s assessments were wrong. There were also serious shortcomings in the way these assessments were made and communicated to policy makers.”

Sounds pretty convincing, right? The only problem with what Brooks wrote is that it is complete, unadulterated horse-shit. Simon Maloy at Salon provides the one detail that Brooks either forgot about (unlikely) or intentionally ignored (very likely):

The Robb-Silberman report was not “exhaustive” – the commission was specifically instructed not to investigate how Iraq intelligence was manipulated by policymakers. That task fell to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which found that George W. Bush and his closest advisers regularly made definitive statements about Iraq’s weapons programs and terrorism ties that were either unsubstantiated by available intelligence or didn’t reflect disputes within the intelligence community.

Yeah, you read that right -- Brooks used a specific report to support his position that there was no intelligence manipulation by policymakers, even though the writers of that report were specifically told not to investigate how Iraq intelligence was manipulated by policymakers.  Given that I could not believe Brooks would be so duplicitous careless, I actually followed Brooks' own link to the Robb-Silberman report, clicked through to the report's actual text, and found this in the introduction:

"[W]e were not authorized to investigate how policymakers used the intelligence assessments they received from the Intelligence Community. Accordingly, while we interviewed a host of current and former policymakers during the course of our investigation, the purpose of those interviews was to learn about how the Intelligence Community reached and communicated its judgments about Iraq's weapons programs--not to review how policymakers subsequently used that information."

I naively hoped that the GOP (with the exception of Dick Cheney, of course) had finally decided to stop lying about Iraq.  I had also hoped that the New York Times had learned something from the Judith Miller Fuckery and actually started paying attention to what its writers were writing, particularly on the issue of the Iraq War and how we got into that quagmire in the first place.  I am now forced to conclude that Republicans will never stop lying about the Iraq Debacle and that the New York Times still has a lot of work to do.

Now That The Iraq War Will Once Again Be An Issue In A Presidential Election . . .

. . . shouldn't the Democrats give some serious thought to whether Hillary is the right candidate for 2016?  A couple days ago, I wrote:

When Republicans bring up her initial support for the Iraq Debacle (which they will certainly do), Hillary must push back by stating that the only reason Republicans are running with this issue now is because they are attempting to re-write the history of that war. She must point out that BushCo intentionally lied to Congress and the American people with regard to the threat Iraq posed, and she should go into great detail with regard to what these lies were.  And yes, she should explicitly state that these liars -- Cheney included -- should be serving time in prison right now for war crimes.

Hillary did chime in today on this issue by once again admitting her vote to authorize the Iraq War was a mistake, and then she said this:

"What we now see is a different and very dangerous situation. The United States is doing what it can, but ultimately this has to be a struggle that the Iraqi government and the Iraqi people are determined to win for themselves and we can provide support, but they're going to have to do it."

Not good enough, dammit. Her comment demonstrates why Hillary should not be the Democratic nominee in 2016. Given that she voted to authorize the war, she is not in the position to take on the Republicans as they desperately try to "revise" the history of the Iraq Debacle.

You say it is not fair for me to criticize Hillary when so many other politicians got it wrong?  Well, the fact is that lots of people saw that the plan to invade Iraq was bullshit well before hostilities began. Twenty-two Democrats in the U.S. Senate -- and one Independent -- voted against authorization. All Senate Republicans, however, voted for it.  Barack Obama, before he became a US Senator, said this during the run-up to Iraq War:

I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars.

I think it was Winston Churchill who once said: "History is written by the victors."  The corollary is, of course, that the losers don't get to write shit. The Republicans, however, are trying to turn that truism on its head.

Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, and the rest of the losers who caused that massive clusterfuck in Iraq -- and the current crop of their GOP apologists -- are desperately trying to re-write history. We cannot, as a people, let them succeed.  All of their victims -- namely, the tens of thousands dead and injured American troops and the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis -- deserve better.

What Paul Krugman Says . . .

"*** Iraq was not a good faith mistake. Bush and Cheney didn’t sit down with the intelligence community, ask for their best assessment of the situation, and then reluctantly conclude that war was the only option. They decided right at the beginning — literally before the dust of 9/11 had settled — to use a terrorist attack by religious extremists as an excuse to go after a secular regime that, evil as it was, had nothing to do with that attack. To make the case for the splendid little war they expected to fight, they deliberately misled the public, making an essentially fake case about WMD — because chemical weapons, which many believed Saddam had, are nothing like the nukes they implied he was working on — and insinuating the false claim that Saddam was behind 9/11.

 "*** It was quite clear at the time that the case for war was fake — God knows I thought it was glaringly obvious, and tried to tell people — and fairly obvious as well that the attempt to create a pro-American Iraq after the invasion was likely to be an expensive failure. The question for war supporters shouldn’t be, would you have been a supporter knowing what you know now. It should be, why didn’t you see the obvious back then?"

Amen. Read Krugman's entire post here.

Quote of the Week (And Why We Cannot Let The GOP Re-Write Iraq War History)

"[Jeb Bush's] first answer to Megyn Kelly’s question was the most honest one. Yes, knowing what we know now, he would still have invaded Iraq and he has the team of dunces to prove it."

- Ambassador Joe Wilson, commenting on Jeb Bush's recent flip-flopping on the Iraq question, and noting that Jeb has now surrounded himself with some of the very same idiots who lied this country into a war with Iraq in the first place.

Wilson's op/ed addresses what has really been bothering me this past week concerning Jeb's recent Iraq fiasco, and it has little to do with what Bush said and more to do with how the GOP is using his misstatements in an attempt to re-write history.

The Iraq Debacle was not a failure in intelligence, as Republicans continue to claim.  As Ambassador Wilson states, "deliberate political abuse and fabrication of intelligence" are what actually got us in to that clusterfuck twelve years ago:

The deliberately cherry-picked intelligence was concocted in order to influence the decision that led to the deaths and injuries of tens of thousands of Americans, countless hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and the quagmire in the Middle East in which we have been enmeshed for the past decade. As the head of British intelligence reported back to his government after meetings in Washington in June, 2002: “The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” Alan Foley, the Director of the CIA's Weapons Intelligence Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center (WINPAC) told his people in late 2002 or early 2003: “If the president wants to go to war, our job is to find the intelligence to allow him to do so.”

Although I am certain the Republican Party wants us to forget all of this, here are some of the high points of the Bush/Cheney fuckery that got us into Iraq:

• Condi Rice said, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," even though there was no evidence that Saddam had an active nuclear program -- Christ, Saddam's own son-in-law, prior to the U.S. invasion, told us after he defected that there was no Iraqi nuclear program and another high level defector similarly told the U.S. that Iraq had absolutely no active weapons of mass destruction program.


• Remember the "high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production" that Saddam reportedly possessed and that George W. Bush referred to in his 2003 State of the Union?  That was all horseshit, and BushCo knew it was horseshit at the time they made the claim.


• In a 2001 interview, Dick Cheney said, "It's been pretty well confirmed that (9-11 ring leader Mohammed Atta) did go to Prague, and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in (the Czech Republic) last April, several months before the attack."  Such a meeting, however, did not happen, and Cheney knew that.


• The Bush Regime was constantly linking Saddam to al-Qaeda (and thus to the 9-11 Attacks), even though no such link existed and in fact Saddam and bin Laden were "natural enemies."

This is just a taste of the panoply of lies that resulted in the greatest U.S. foreign policy blunder of all time, and the last thing Americans should do is allow the GOP to re-write the history on this.  

As readers of this blog know, I've never really forgiven Hillary Clinton for voting to authorize the 2003 invasion of Iraq.  She has since admitted that her vote to invade was a mistake, but she needs to go much further on this.  

When Republicans bring up her initial support for the Iraq Debacle (which they will certainly do), Hillary must push back by stating that the only reason Republicans are running with this issue now is because they are attempting to re-write the history of that war. She must point out that BushCo intentionally lied to Congress and the American people with regard to the threat Iraq posed, and she should go into great detail with regard to what these lies were.  And yes, she should explicitly state that these liars -- Cheney included -- should be serving time in prison right now for war crimes.

Put the turd in their pocket, Hillary.

UPDATE:  Right on cue:

"The question was whether it was a mistake, and my answer was it was not a mistake. I still say it was not a mistake, because the president was presented with intelligence that said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction ... [Bush] made the right decision based on what he knew at that time. We learned subsequently that information was wrong. My answer is, at the time, it appears the intelligence was wrong."

- Marco Rubio, on this morning's Fox News Sunday.

Pandering To Idiots

Greatest right-wing conspiracy theory ever?  You decide:

Over the summer, the U.S. military is launching a training exercise called “Jade Helm 15,” which ordinarily wouldn’t generate any headlines at all. It’s a series of training drills throughout the Southwest, from Texas to California, for about 1,200 special operations personnel, including Green Berets and Navy SEALs.

In some right-wing circles, however, “Jade Helm 15” is the basis for an extraordinary conspiracy theory. The idea gets a little convoluted – fringe theories often are – but the unhinged activists apparently believe the Obama administration, in conjunction with the U.S. military and Wal-Mart, is planning to impose martial law on much of the country. As they see it, the plan also includes gun confiscation and “secret underground tunnels.”

The "pandering to idiots" line -- which I believe should become the slogan for the Republican Party generally -- came from Todd Smith, a GOP veteran of the Texas legislature who retired in 2013. Gov. Greg Abbott (R-Of Course) ordered the Texas State Guard to “monitor” the military exercises in order to keep tabs on the operation and to ensure Texans that “their safety, constitutional rights, private property rights and civil liberties will not be infringed.”  Former representative Smith was none too pleased by all the idiocy:

[Smith] said he is “horrified that I have to choose between the possibility that my Governor actually believes this stuff and the possibility that my Governor doesn’t have the backbone to stand up to those who do.”  He said he wrote because the thought that the U.S. military would be a threat to Texas is “embarrassing” and it is important “to rational governance that thinking Republicans call you out on it.”

“Is there ANYBODY who is going to stand up to this radical nonsense that is a cancer on our State and our Party?” Smith asked.

Both the Pentagon and Wal-Mart have issued statements dismissing these rumors, which should put an end to all this conspiracy talk.

I'm kidding, of course.

UPDATE:  Jon Stewart weighs in (at 5:35):

The Daily Show
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More On Florida's Obamacare Debacle

As I mentioned here last week, Florida Governor Rick Scott has decided to sue the Federal Government instead of fulfilling his campaign promise to expand Medicare under Obamacare, and he's taking as lot of heat -- from Democrats, Republicans, and the Press -- for this wrong-headed decision.

Jonathan Cohn at HuffPo posted a great piece yesterday on this ongoing fight in Florida, and I found the following section of his article particularly interesting:

Over 10 years, the researchers found, making Medicaid available to all low-income people [in Florida] would cost about $71 billion above and beyond what the state's Medicaid program would otherwise cost. That's a lot of money, for sure. But roughly $66 billion of the total, the researchers found, would come from the federal government. That would leave Florida taxpayers on the hook for the remaining $5 billion, with at least some of that money coming back to them in the form of reduced spending on other programs.

To put it another way, expanding Medicaid in Florida would likely require a net investment by state taxpayers that, over the course of a decade, would work out to less than a half-billion dollars a year. That's without accounting for any additional growth and tax revenues that the huge infusion of federal dollars might provide. That's also without accounting for the more than $1 billion a year in that, without expanding Medicaid, Florida would probably have to scrounge up in order to help hospitals defray the cost of charity care.

In other words, Rick Scott and Republicans in the Florida House hate Obama so much that they are willing to turn down $66 billion in Federal money over ten years, money that would provide health care coverage to 800,000 Floridians.  Now that's a lot of hate.

If that doesn't make any sense to you, well then you are not alone. The Tampa Bay Times called Scott's position "indefensible," stating that "[h]ospitals cannot eat $1 billion in charity care, and Florida cannot turn down billions in federal Medicaid dollars because House Republicans don't like the Democratic president." Cohn agrees:

[C]onservative fervor to block or repeal the Affordable Care Act has always seemed a bit disconnected from reality, given that the law consists almost entirely of pieces that existed, without such fuss, long before Obamacare came along. The lone exception is the "individual mandate," the requirement that people carry insurance or pay a fee. And that's an idea that plenty of conservatives tolerated -- and some even supported -- less than a decade ago. In fact, it was a conservative expert at the Heritage Foundation who many historians credit with the idea.

No, the level of hostility to Obamacare makes very little sense -- unless it's about something beyond the policy particulars. It could be the fact that Democrats finally accomplished something big, for the first time in several decades, thereby expanding the welfare state at a time when conservatives thought they were on their way to shrinking it. Or it could be the idea that, on net, the Affordable Care Act transfers resources away from richer, whiter people to poorer, darker people. Or it could be the fact that "Obamacare" contains the word "Obama," whose legitimacy as president at least some conservatives just can't accept.

I, of course, think this is all about Obama and the fear some right wingers have that history will view his presidency as not only legitimate, but as a legitimately successful one.  Indeed, I can't think of anything that would infuriate a racist Republican more.

Quote of the Week

“Watching these channels all day is incredibly depressing. . . . I live in a constant state of depression. I think of us as turd miners. I put on my helmet, I go and mine turds, hopefully I don’t get turd lung disease.”

- Jon Stewart, on what it’s like to watch a fuck-ton of Fox News as part of his Daily Show hosting duties.

GOP Hatred For America's First Black President: Why It Is A Bad Thing Politically

It's a bad thing politically because it makes Republican politicians do stupid shit, like Florida Governor Rick Scott announcing yesterday that he is going to sue the Federal Government to force it to give Florida funds from a program that will soon be non-existent.

Why would he do such a dumb thing you ask?  Well, because of Obamacare of course:

The suit, which has yet to be filed, is only the latest round in an ongoing feud between Scott and CMS in connection with LIP.  The program is scheduled to expire in June under an agreement between Florida and the federal government. Federal health officials have said they are open to negotiating a successor program, but no deal has been reached.

The negotiations took a turn Tuesday, when CMS told Florida's Agency for Health Care Administration that any decision regarding LIP would be tied to whether the state accepts federal Medicaid expansion money — a politically charged policy option that Scott once supported, but now opposes.  Scott blasted CMS on Thursday, saying that linking the two issues violated a U.S. Supreme Court ruling "that the president cannot force Medicaid expansion on states."

"Not only does President Obama's end to LIP funding in Florida violate the law by crossing the line into a coercion tactic for Obamacare, it also threatens poor families' access to the safety net health care services they need," Scott said.

I've got a great idea, Governor: Instead of wasting your state's resources on a bullshit lawsuit based on a crisis that you manufactured, why not expand Medicaid under Obamacare, something you already promised to do? Then 800,000 Floridians -- including the poor families you claim to care so much about -- can get access to health coverage. I promise it won't be that hard. Just pretend that a black man didn't sign the Affordable Care Act into law and it'll all be good.

Needless to say, Gov. Scott is taking quite a bit of heat on this from all sides. In fact, Florida's Republican Senate President Andy Gardiner criticized the Governor over this, stating that the federal government "has no obligation to provide LIP funding," and that "it is difficult to understand how suing CMS on day 45 of a 60-day session regarding an issue the state has been aware of for the last 12 months will yield a timely resolution to the critical health care challenges facing our state."

The Traitor McCain Sides With Supreme Leader of Iran (Updated)

I was somewhat stunned that Obama did not rip into the GOP after 47 treasonous Republican Senators signed that bullshit letter to Iran last month.  But, as usual, he kept his cool.

Those days might be over:

President Barack Obama said Saturday that partisan wrangling over the emerging nuclear agreement with Iran and on other foreign policy matters has gone beyond the pale, singling out two senior Republican senators for particularly harsh criticism. "It needs to stop," he declared.

Obama complained that Sen. John McCain of Arizona had suggested that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry's explanations of the framework agreement with Iran were "somehow less trustworthy" than those of Iran's supreme leader.

"That's an indication of the degree to which partisanship has crossed all boundaries," an exercised Obama said in a news conference at the end of the two-day Summit of the Americas. "And we're seeing this again and again." ***

Obama, speaking at a news conference in Panama City, said it was understandable that people would be suspicious of Iran, even that they would oppose the nuclear deal.

"But when you start getting to the point where you are actively communicating that the United States government and our secretary of state is somehow spinning presentations in a negotiation with a foreign power, particularly one you say is your enemy, that's a problem," he said.

Of course, this isn't anywhere near far enough -- Obama should be constantly questioning the patriotism of these treasonous bastards. But it's a good start.

And by the way, if McCain and the GOP love the Supreme Leader of Iran so much, then they should invite him to speak to a Joint Session of Congress.

UPDATE:  Here is a great New York Times Editorial on the GOP's efforts to de-legitimize America's first Black president. [h/t JB].  The editorial correctly points out that all the new GOP fuckery (e.g., the treason letter to Iran, all the secessionist horseshit, the Asshole McConnell's anti-American position with regard to foreign governments and climate change) is really just the same old crap we've seen before:

It is a peculiar, but unmistakable, phenomenon: As Barack Obama’s presidency heads into its twilight, the rage of the Republican establishment toward him is growing louder, angrier and more destructive.

Republican lawmakers in Washington and around the country have been focused on blocking Mr. Obama’s agenda and denigrating him personally since the day he took office in 2009. But even against that backdrop, and even by the dismal standards of political discourse today, the tone of the current attacks is disturbing. So is their evident intent — to undermine not just Mr. Obama’s policies, but his very legitimacy as president.

It is a line of attack that echoes Republicans’ earlier questioning of Mr. Obama’s American citizenship. Those attacks were blatantly racist in their message — reminding people that Mr. Obama was black, suggesting he was African, and planting the equally false idea that he was secretly Muslim. The current offensive is slightly more subtle, but it is impossible to dismiss the notion that race plays a role in it.

It is my sincere hope that Obama responds to all of this by personally attacking McCain, McConnell, Cotton, and the rest by calling them traitors, because that's what they are -- they are traitors who have aligned themselves with the hardliners in Iran. Time to put in a raise, Mr. President.

Exactly Right

Brian Beutler sums up my problem with an early Hillary coronation:

[A]ll candidates are fallible, and most of them are human, which means every campaign labors under the small risk of unexpected collapse. The one real advantage of a strong primary field is that it creates a hedge against just such a crisis. Right now either Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker or Jeb Bush is favored to win the Republican primary, but if both of them succumb to scandal or health scares, the GOP can shrug it off knowing that other seasoned Republicans have infrastructure in place, and are poised to swoop in if necessary.

If nobody serious challenges Hillary Clinton, nobody can be her understudy. In the near term that isn’t a problem, but if doubts about her inevitability develop late in the year or early next, the placid silence in the Democratic field will grow eerie. ***

If Hillary does end up getting the nomination, she'll almost certainly pick a Latino running mate, probably Julián Castro, former mayor of San Antonio and current HUD Secretary. Jeb Bush, the inevitable GOP nominee for 2016, will also pick a Latino running mate, and I'm pretty sure that person will be Marco Rubio.

The Obama Doctrine

“You take a country like Cuba. For us to test the possibility that engagement leads to a better outcome for the Cuban people, there aren’t that many risks for us. It’s a tiny little country. It’s not one that threatens our core security interests, and so [there’s no reason not] to test the proposition. And if it turns out that it doesn’t lead to better outcomes, we can adjust our policies. The same is true with respect to Iran, a larger country, a dangerous country, one that has engaged in activities that resulted in the death of U.S. citizens, but the truth of the matter is: Iran’s defense budget is $30 billion. Our defense budget is closer to $600 billion. Iran understands that they cannot fight us. ... You asked about an Obama doctrine. The doctrine is: We will engage, but we preserve all our capabilities.”

-- Barack Obama.

Quote of the Week

"Can any of you identify a critic of the Iran deal who was right about the war in Iraq?"

- Steve Benen.

The GOP's "Blame Obama For Everything" Syndrome

I've noticed over the last few years that whenever anything negative happens, the GOP always blames Obama for it.  A recent example of this is Indiana Governor Mike Pence (R) blaming Obamacare for the massive cluster-fuck Pence created when he signed hate legislation into law last month.  Here are some other examples of this:

• Ted Nugent blames Obama for racism and the high rate of suicide among veterans in the United States


• Republicans blame Obama for the Social Security "crisis"


• Fox News blamed Obama for inappropriate selfies taken in front of a New York City fire 


• Conservatives blame Obama for the Blood Moon  


• Republicans blamed Obama for GOP Senator Tom Cotton's letter to Iran   


• John Boehner blamed Obama For Boehner inviting Netanyahu to speak before Congress (even though Boehner intentionally failed to inform Obama that he was invitiing Netanyahu to speak) 


• Rudy Giuliani blamed Obama for the murder of two NYPD officers in 2014 


• The GOP blamed Obama for Ebola 


• Louisianans blame Obama for the Federal government's poor response to Hurricane Katrina (even though he was not president at the time)


• Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R) blamed Obama for Brownback's poor showing in the 2014 primary 


• Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) blamed Obama for being indicted last year  


• Pat Robertson blamed Obama for the corruption charges filed against former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell (McDonnell -- who blamed his wife for these charges -- was ultimately convicted of eleven corruption charges) 


• Republicans blamed Obama for the government shutdown in 2013

Most Republicans are furious that Obama has been elected (and then reelected) president. Forget the fact that Obama is the most conservative Democrat ever to ascend to the presidency -- the GOP apparently believes that a Black man has no place in the White House, even one whose politics is clearly right-of-center.

The one thing that terrifies these people the most is the idea that history may view the Obama Presidency as a successful one. The Birther Movement is a direct reaction to this. That fear also explains why the Republican Party's first impulse when something bad happens is to immediately blame Obama for it no matter how ridiculous it is to do so.  It's so bad in fact that some Republicans even blame the President for things that happened before he became president.

My Favorite Quote from The 2016 Presidential Campaign Trail (So Far)

“There’s nothing in my record that would suggest that I’m a moderate.”

-- Jeb Bush, last month in Iowa.

I love this quote because it perfectly captures the current state of the GOP and explains why this country is in a political mess right now.

I remember a time when being branded a liberal was a bad thing if you were a Republican but being a moderate was perfectly acceptable. In the current political climate, however, there is no such thing as liberal Republicans (they are now called "Democrats") and a moderate within the GOP ranks is viewed with contempt, especially during the presidential primary season.

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Fantasyland) Triples Down On Her Own Bullshit

I posted this a little over a year ago:

Every time the GOP claims to have found someone who has been hurt by the Affordable Care Act, it turns out that the alleged "victim" was actually helped by health care reform.

A recent high-profile example of such chicanery was Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers' mentioning of poor "Bette in Spokane" during the Republican response to the President's State of the Union address.  Of course, Bette's tale of ACA woe turned out to be complete horseshit. ***

Well, it seems that McMorris Rodgers failed to learn her lesson from that debacle.  A couple days ago, she took to Facebook and requested that her constituents submit Obamacare horror stories on the fifth anniversary of the passage of the ACA.  That also turned out to be a mistake:

[Morris Rodgers] instead found her Facebook page filled with testimonials to the benefits of the Affordable Care Act. ***

A lot of folks shared stories. They were of a kind CMR didn’t want to hear — and is largely insulated from hearing on trips home to by-invitation “Coffees with Cathy” in her Eastern Washington district.

An encore ass-kicking as thorough as that one would normally cause someone to back down, but not McMorris Rodgers.  Oh no.  She instead decides to stick her head even deeper into her own posterior orifice:

After yesterday's story on the surprising response she got from constituents when she asked for "Obamacare" nightmares, she doubled-down with a press conference and mentioned several so-called Obamacare horror stories, presumably heartfelt stories that had been sent to her. ***

But, there are a few problems with these accounts. For one thing, there are only five. Five whole stories of the Affordable Care Act being a nightmare, compared to the thousands of positive comments on her Facebook page. Secondly, all five stories (including the ones below) were lifted directly from the House Republican leadership website, which was posted days before her press conference. ***

One of the "horror stories" from the GOP website relates a tale of woe of a woman from Georgia, but the reason she is having difficulty is because Georgia -- in a hissy fit caused by hatred for America's first Black president -- has refused to embrace Medicaid expansion.  Another "horror story" involved one of the "junk plans that the ACA shut down because they were bad for consumers."

Keep digging, Cathy.

Sea Level Rise = "Nuisance Flooding" in Florida

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Neil DeGrasse Tyson adds: "The science is not political -- that's like repealing gravity because you gained 10 pounds last week."

Obama Kicks Some GOP Ass

This is well worth watching:



Steve Benen's take:

Obama wasn’t taking on a straw man in his remarks – he referenced actual claims from GOP lawmakers and candidates. One said the president’s economic agenda would “diminish stock prices,” which turned out to be backwards. Another said the nation faced “trillion-dollar deficits as far as the eye can see,” which was also turned out to be the opposite of reality. Another predicted that Republican policies might get unemployment down to 6% by 2016 – and it’s 5.5% now, well ahead of schedule.

Hilariously, most Republicans are still trying to convince the American people that none of this stuff is happening. Ted Cruz's recent speech is a good example of this willful ignorance.

Funny Stuff

From The Wall Street Journal:

Soon after the U.S. and other major powers entered negotiations last year to curtail Iran’s nuclear program, senior White House officials learned Israel was spying on the closed-door talks.

The spying operation was part of a broader campaign by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government to penetrate the negotiations and then help build a case against the emerging terms of the deal, current and former U.S. officials said. In addition to eavesdropping, Israel acquired information from confidential U.S. briefings, informants and diplomatic contacts in Europe, the officials said.

The espionage didn't upset the White House as much as Israel’s sharing of inside information with U.S. lawmakers and others to drain support from a high-stakes deal intended to limit Iran’s nuclear program, current and former officials said.

The hilarious part is that the White House reportedly discovered the Israeli spying operation "when U.S. intelligence agencies spying on Israel intercepted communications among Israeli officials that carried details the U.S. believed could have come only from access to the confidential talks, officials briefed on the matter said."

Fourth Graders Get Close-Up View of Republican Fuckery

This is both sad and hilarious:

Fourth graders from Lincoln Akerman School in Hampton Falls received a warm welcome at the State House last Thursday. They and their teacher, James Cutting, were guests in the Gallery.  That reception quickly turned chilly as students got a glimpse of the cold, harsh realities of politics in the Granite State.

In the spirit of learning by doing, students drafted a bill to learn the process of how a bill becomes law. They proposed House Bill 373, an act establishing the Red Tail Hawk as the New Hampshire State Raptor. Even though it passed through the Environment and Agriculture committee with a majority vote, some representatives were far from receptive.

Rep. Warren Groen, a Republican from Rochester said, "It grasps them with its talons then uses its razor sharp beak to basically tear it apart limb by limb, and I guerss the shame about making this a state bird is it would serve as a much better mascot for Planned Parenthood."

Groen made that horseshit comment in front of the visiting fourth graders, and Republican Representative John Burt followed it up by stating: "Bottom line, if we keep bringing more of these bills, and bills, and bills forward that really I think we shouldn't have in front of us, we'll be picking a state hot dog next."

The bill was killed by a vote of 133-to-160.  Jim Cutting, the kids' teacher, had this to say on NPR the other day:

I think that they were a bit discouraged to hear anybody speak against their bill. Most of the comments I don't think that they really - I think that they had a sense of the tone of it and they were tuned in to the reaction of other people, whether it was their families that were with them. There was some laughter on the House floor, and one child asked, why did people laugh at us? But I think that, in particular, the Planned Parenthood comment was not something that they really understood.

Well, join the club -- I don't get it either.  Perhaps the best way to explain that comment to kids is by simply telling them that Republicans are assholes and leave it at that.

Obama 1, Netanyahu 0 [Updated]

I guess Bibi didn't think this one through:

When this week got underway, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu apparently thought he was going to lose his re-election bid. This fear led the Israeli leader to adopt some desperate measures.

“I think that anyone who moves to establish a Palestinian state today, and evacuate areas, is giving radical Islam an area from which to attack the State of Israel,” Netanyahu said Monday. “This is the true reality that has been created in past years,” he added, vowing to increase settlement construction in East Jerusalem.

Asked if that meant Netanyahu intended to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state if he remained prime minister, he replied, “Indeed.”

Bibi has since tried to walk back this "flip-flop," but nobody appears to be buying it. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said today that Netanyahu's pre-election statements show that he is "no longer committed to a two-state solution," which “means that the United States is in a position to re-evaluate our thinking.”

The big problem for Bibi is that most everyone thought he was full of shit anyway when he endorsed the two-state solution:

[I]n Washington, many officials have long suspected that Mr. Netanyahu was never serious about making peace with the Palestinians or about the American-brokered negotiations toward such an outcome that collapsed last spring. So when a right-leaning Israeli news site asked him directly on Monday, “If you are prime minister, a Palestinian state will not be established,” and he answered, “Correct,” they pounced.

Mr. Earnest said, “This is not a situation where the prime minister is creating some daylight between himself and President Obama,” Rather, the remarks created some daylight between Mr. Netanyahu and “Democrat and Republican presidents in the United States and every single member of the House of Representatives,” he said, referring to a unanimous House resolution late last year endorsing a two-state solution.

What I like the most about this whole clusterfuck is that Bibi will certainly try to get the United States to bail him out, but we won't because Obama absolutely hates Netanyahu.

Payback's a bitch, ain't it.

UPDATE:  From The New York Times:

President Obama waited nearly two full days before making a congratulatory phone call to Mr. Netanyahu on Thursday evening, as his administration was still seething over the Israeli leader’s pre-election comments.

In a striking indication of how bitter tensions remain between the two, Mr. Obama told Mr. Netanyahu directly that the United States would have to “re-assess our options” after the prime minister’s “new positions and comments” on the two-state solution, according to a White House official who spoke without authorization to detail the private conversation.

It'll be interesting to see how Republicans in Congress respond to all this. Of course they'll support Bibi over Obama, but I look forward to seeing how it will all play out.

Quote Of The Week

"[M]aybe from our perspective, the newly honest Netanyahu government isn’t such a bad thing ***. American governments can give up the endlessly frustrating task of trying to negotiate a Palestinian-Israeli settlement, because the Israeli leader is now on record saying he wants the occupation to be permanent. And with Netanyahu’s journey from the far right to the far-far-right, we can be less concerned with his opinion about Iran’s nuclear program or anything else, and treat him like what he is: an ideologically radical factional leader, albeit one capable of winning one-quarter of the seats in his country’s parliament."

- Paul Waldman.

Tom Tomorrow

[click to enlarge]

Tehran Tom, The Traitorous Twit

Here is the most recent cover to the New York Daily News, a publication which actually supported Romney for President in 2012:

HuffPo has got the goods:

Tuesday's scathing front page accuses Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and their "traitor" GOP colleagues of trying to "sabotage" President Barack Obama's nuclear talks with Iran. In a bizarre move on Monday, Cotton and 46 other Republican senators ignored protocol and sent an open letter to Iran's leaders, warning that whatever agreement reached with Obama would not be bound by the constitution.

President Obama responded to Sen. Tom Cotton's letter by hilariously stating:"I think it's somewhat ironic to see some members for Congress wanting to make common cause with the hard-liners in Iran -- it's an unusual coalition,"  The President's statement apparently inspired Democratic Colorado Rep. Jared Polis to tweet: "Tehran Tom took his case directly to the Iranian government." Polis also tweeted: "Tehran Tom asks Iranian Revolutionary Guards for help in battle against US diplomats."

Asked whether the signatories to the letter were traitors, Sen. Cotton "replied negatively and said they were just trying to speak for the American people."  This whole thing kind of reminds me of when people begin sentences with the phrase, "I don't mean to be racist, but . . . "

Anyway, the Radicalized Right was quick to come to Tehran Tom's aid, saying that he is a veteran of the Iraq War and thus somehow immune to such criticism.  But I seem to remember that Benedict Arnold was a military man and war veteran as well.

When Too Much Was Not Enough (w/ updates)

It seems that America's Radicalized Religious Right is pissed off at Jeb Bush because he did not do enough to save Terri Schiavo, whose cerebral cortex had basically turned to liquid as a result of massive brain damage following cardiac arrest:

Standing at the pulpit of his Sioux City, Iowa, mega-church a decade ago, Reverend Cary Gordon wept over the death of Terri Schiavo, a brain-damaged woman who had her feeding tubes removed more than 1,500 miles away in Florida. Now, the politician mostly closely associated with trying to keep her alive is coming to the state searching for support for his prospective presidential bid.

To much of the world, it appeared as if Jeb Bush, then the governor of Florida, stood his ground against those who wanted to take Schiavo off life support. But that's not the picture that emerged for some in a crucial constituency in the state with the first presidential nominating contest.

“I’m displeased with Governor Bush,” Gordon said in an interview this week. “He could have informed law enforcement, called up the National Guard, or told the county sheriff’s office not to let it happen.” * * *

Christ, where do I even begin with something like this (now that I'm done laughing my ass off)? As the above-linked article points out, Jeb's over-the-top efforts to save Schiavo's body "were supposed to be an antidote to his troubles with the conservative base." Instead, it turns out that members of the American Taliban hate him over it.

As Jesus famously said, there's just no pleasing some people:



(h/t Ed Kilgore)

UPDATE:  I completely forgot about this (from July 2005):

Even after congressional intervention, politically-inspired misdiagnoses, and widespread slander, the Terri Schiavo matter lingered on when Florida Gov. Jeb Bush asked a prosecutor to investigate why Schiavo collapsed 15 years ago, under the notion that her husband may have called 911 too slowly. Thankfully, this lunacy came to an end yesterday when the prosecutor told Bush there was nothing more to probe.

As I wrote nearly nine years ago, a particularly warm place in Hell has been reserved for Jeb Bush and the rest of those Republican motherfuckers who refused to let Schiavo's husband do the right thing for his brain-dead wife.

UPDATE II:  Hunter at Daily Kos has more on this here.

Idiot Scalia Zinged By Government Attorney During Oral Argument in Anti-ACA Case

Brother Benen provides the details:

During oral arguments this morning in the King v. Burwell case, Justice Antonin Scalia heard Solicitor General Don Verrilli warn of dire consequences if the Supreme Court strips millions of families of their health care insurance subsides. The Republican jurist just didn’t believe the consequences would be ignored by the people’s representatives. It led to an unintentionally amusing exchange:

     SCALIA: “What about Congress? You really think Congress is just going to sit there while all of these disastrous consequences ensue? I mean, how often have we come out with a decision such as the ­­ you know, the bankruptcy court decision? Congress adjusts, enacts a statute that takes care of the problem. It happens all the time. Why is that not going to happen here? “

     VERRILLI: “Well, this Congress?”

The room, not surprisingly, erupted in laughter. Congratulations, Congress, you’ve literally sunk to the level of a punch line.

A few days ago, I told a friend that I really hoped the anti-Obamacare lawyer would tee-up this particular argument so that the government lawyer could could hit it 300 yards down the fairway.

However, it did not occur to me that Scalia would actually suggest that Congress -- after trying to repeal Obamacare fifty-five fifty-six times -- would just simply turn around and fix the language at issue.

I thought he was smarter than that.

I Laughed Out Loud When I Read This (Updated)

Some conservatives apparently think that Rand Paul was not clapping hard enough during Netanyahu's war-mongering speech to Congress yesterday:

Standing among his colleagues, all of whom were vigorously applauding the speech, Paul could be seen delivering a slow clap while looking relatively detached amid the cheers.  * * *

Commentators pounced.

"What if I clap, but only half-heartedly?" the anonymous Hot Air writer Allahpundit imagined Paul saying, calling it proof that the libertarian senator is struggling to prove his conservative credentials.

RedState.com writer Dan McLaughlin, alias Baseball Crank, compared it to the popular GIF of Orson Welles clapping in "Citizen Kane." National Review rounded up reactions from various Twitter users.

But perhaps most agitated by the scene was Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, a vocal supporter of Israel, who took to Twitter to blast Paul and those coming to his defense.

The first thing that popped into my head after reading this was the following scene from The Great Escape, particularly the part starting at 1:24, where the SS officers appeared stunned by the Camp Kommandant's half-hearted return of the Hitler salute:



The big difference, of course, is that Hitler was actually the leader of Germany. Netanyahu is not even an American citizen let alone an American political leader, yet conservatives nonetheless think that Rand Paul did not demonstrate sufficient allegiance toward this foreigner.

UnFuckingBelievable.

UPDATE:  Jon Stewart eviscerates Netanyahu and his bullshit speech:

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The Wall Street Journal Gets It

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal editorial page attacked House Republicans over their handling of DHS funding.  Read all about it here.

Just in case you missed it, House Republicans handed Boehner an embarrassing defeat last Friday when they voted down his plan to fund the Department of Homeland Security for three weeks.  The WSJ editorial correctly described this debacle as a victory for Obama:

"The sad if predictable irony is that this is exactly what Mr. Obama hoped to incite with his November immigration order. He wanted to goad an overreaction that made the GOP look both anti-immigrant and intemperate enough to shut down the government."

I think this analysis is absolutely correct -- Obama is tapping into the overwhelming hatred the GOP feels for him and using it for his own political benefit.  The editorial also noted that the GOP's failure in this regard gives Obama an opportunity "to gain the political high ground on national security."

But, as Sahil Kapur of TPM pointed out today, it gets even better:

Congress just gave the Supreme Court a glimpse of what to expect if it drives a stake through the heart of Obamacare: CHAOS.

Oral arguments in King v. Burwell are this Wednesday, and they come amidst peak dysfunction in the new Republican-led Congress, which would be tasked with fixing the law if the justices rule that federal exchange subsidies for Americans in some three-dozen states are not allowed under the language of the Affordable Care Act.

There is no way in hell that Republicans would be able to do anything to mitigate the disastrous effects that an anti-Obamacare ruling in King would cause, even if they wanted to (which they don't). Christ, the GOP can't even do something as simple as fund the Department of Homeland Security without fucking it all up.

Let's hope at least a couple of Supreme Court justices (namely, Kennedy and Roberts) take this into consideration.

Quote of the Day

“If this were a wind mill project or a solar project, Republicans would have been hair-on-fire crazy supporting the property rights of farmers and ranchers. But because it’s an oil pipeline, it’s fine.”

- Jane Kleeb, founder of the anti-Keystone group Bold Nebraska, on the use of eminent domain by a foreign company to seize land in the United States.

Donald Trump Struggles To Be Birther-Consistent

This is interesting:

Billionaire Donald Trump, the most prominent “birther” to question Barack Obama’s eligibility to serve as president, asserted Friday that Sen. Ted Cruz must clear up legal doubts about his own eligibility due to his birth outside the United States.

“It’s a problem. It could be a difficult problem, but he admits that he was born in Canada,” Trump told reporters in Iowa on the eve of the first major gathering of 2016 presidential hopefuls.

“He’s a friend of mine. I have great respect for him. But …certainly it’s a stumbling block and he’s going to have to have it solved before he goes too far,” Trump said.

Trump states that Cruz is "going to have to have it solved before he goes too far." Solve what? The facts are not in issue because, as Trump points out, Cruz admits he was born in Canada.  In other words, Cruz admits to having the same eligibility problem that Trump believes dreams Obama has.

Cruz doesn't need to solve anything. Instead, Donald Trump needs to come to terms with his own racism.

Quote of the Week (Updated)

“Chemotherapy turned off for perhaps 12,000 people, dialysis going dark for 10,000. The horror stories will be real.”

- Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), warning fellow Republicans that they had better have an alternative ready to go in the event the Supreme Court guts Obamacare subsidies in three dozen states.

I could be wrong, but I don't believe the Supreme Court will hold that 75% of Obamacare has been illegally implemented, which is what the plaintiffs in King v. Burwell want the Court to do.

Chief Justice Roberts, back in 2012, had the opportunity to kill this particular baby while it was still in the crib.  He declined to do so then, and I don't see him doing it now, given that millions of people currently have health coverage under the ACA.

UPDATE: Bonus Historic Quote:

“If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.”

- Benjamin Netanyahu, on Sept. 12, 2002, during testimony before the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee.

In case you didn't hear, the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 is now widely considered to be the biggest foreign policy blunder in American history, and Bibi was one of the most vocal cheerleaders in support of that epic cluster-fuck.  For Christ's Sake, Netanyahu actually guaranteed that a U.S. invasion of Iraq would have "enormous positive reverberations."

My Favorite Part About The Bill O'Reilly Falklands Fabrication Scandal?

That's easy.  What I really like is that it is starting to seep into the mainstream media.

I've repeatedly heard mainstream outlets -- as part of their coverage of VA Chief Bob McDonald's false claim that he was in Army special forces -- compare McDonald's situation to the embellishments made by Brian Williams and Bill O'Reilly about their "combat" experiences.

O'Reilly knows that Fox News will never fire or suspend him over this, particularly given that Fox undoubtedly hired O'Reilly to lie about stuff.  But what probably worried O'Reilly the most is that the mainstream media would start lumping him in with Brian Williams.

Well, that is exactly what has happened, and even an idiot like O'Reilly knows that it will be pretty hard to un-ring that particular bell.

Rudy Giuliani Is Starting To Chicken Out

How brave:

After doubling and tripling down on his controversial comments regarding President Barack Obama's lack of love for America, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani on Sunday moved closer to something of a mea culpa. "My blunt language suggesting that the president doesn’t love America notwithstanding, I didn’t intend to question President Obama’s motives or the content of his heart," Giuliani wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.

Of course he intended to question the President's motives. Christ, he even used The C Word when talking about Obama the other day.

What undoubtedly happened is that someone in the GOP told Giuliani that unless he pulled his head out of his ass right quick, he's going to turn into Donald Trump or Glenn Beck. So now Rudy is beating a hasty retreat, which is too bad because I was really enjoying his meltdown.

Historic Quotes of the Week (As Well As A Fairly Recent One)

"The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That's not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don't represent peace. They represent evil and war."

- President George W. Bush, from remarks made at Islamic Center of Washington, D.C. on September 17, 2001.

"[I]t would be a huge mistake for we, as Americans, to assume that this represents some kind of--or should lead us to some kind of condemnation of Islam. That's clearly not the case. This is a perversion, if you will, of some of these religious beliefs by an extremist group. We have extremists associated with, you know, every imaginable religion in the world. But this is by no means a war against Islam."

- Vice-President Dick Cheney, on Sept. 16, 2001.

"We are not at war with Islam. We are at war with people who have perverted Islam."

- President Barack Obama, on February 18, 2015.

Bonus Quote of the Week

“Well, you know God created man first. Then he took the rib out of man to make woman.  And you know, a rib is a lesser cut of meat.”

- South Carolina State Sen. Thomas Corbin (I'll let you guess what party he's from).

Quote of the Week

"The House has done its job -- why don't you go ask the Senate Democrats when they're going to get off their ass and do something other than to vote no?"

- Speaker of the House John Boehner, who has apparently forgotten that Republicans now control the Senate.

Needless to say, I am thoroughly enjoying the trainwreck that is happening now that the GOP completely controls the legislative branch.

The Great Unraveling Begins

Here we go:

A senior Israeli official suggested on Friday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been misled into thinking an invitation to address the U.S. Congress on Iran next month was fully supported by the Democrats. Netanyahu was invited by the Republican speaker of the house, John Boehner, to address Congress on March 3, an invitation Boehner originally described as bipartisan.

The move angered the White House, which is upset about the event coming two weeks before Israeli elections and that Netanyahu, who has a testy relationship with Democratic President Barack Obama, is expected to be critical of U.S. policy on Iran.

"It appears that the speaker of Congress made a move, in which we trusted, but which it ultimately became clear was a one sided move and not a move by both sides," Deputy Israeli Foreign Minister Tzachi Hanegbi told 102 FM Tel Aviv Radio on Friday. The interviewer asked if that meant Netanyahu had been "misled" into believing Boehner's invitation was bipartisan, a characterization Hanegbi did not contest.

Of course, that is complete horseshit. Bibi and his people knew from the start that this was going to be a partisan affair. Christ, the whole point of this particular fuckery was to embarrass Obama.

I'd be surprised if Netanyahu's speech was cancelled, though -- that would amount to an admission that it was a mistake to schedule the speech in the first place.  Such an admission would show weakness on the part of Bibi and the Republicans, and the last thing right-wingers want to do when they're trying to make Obama look weak is to look weak themselves.

And speaking of right wingers, why do Republicans keep stepping on their own dicks when it comes to the issue of rape?

The Time Has Come For Democrats To Launch Their Obamacare Counter-Offensive

It looks like Republicans are finally starting to get bored with trying to repeal Obamacare (from Dana Milbank):

In Tuesday’s repeal effort by House Republicans — their first of this Congress and their 56th overall — it became clear that they had succeeded at one thing: They had bored even themselves into a slumber.

For much of the debate Tuesday afternoon, no more than a dozen seats were occupied on the pro-repeal side of the House. More than once, the GOP had nobody available to speak.

Word is that this latest attempt to repeal will die a quick death in the Senate because the 60 votes needed to prevent a filibuster simply aren't there. But I believe it would be a mistake for the Senate Democrats to filibuster this bill.

Harry Reid should simply come out and say there will be no filibuster and that the House Bill repealing Obamacare will receive an up-or-down vote in the Senate. Both Reid and Obama should state publicly that they want an up-or-down vote so they can get the Senate Republicans on the record as to which ones want repeal and which ones don't.

Obama can then veto this bill, doing so while a dozen Americans who would be dead today if it wasn't for the Affordable Care Act stand behind him.  Hell, Obama can even hand out pens afterwards.

You see, when the previous fifty-five votes to repeal Obamacare took place, the Affordable Care Act hadn't been fully implemented yet.  But that is no longer the case, and if a member of the House or the Senate votes right now to repeal, that means this individual is voting to take health coverage away from millions of Americans.

I think Sun Tzu once wrote that the best time to attack an enemy is when he is falling asleep.  Well, maybe he didn't actually write that, but he should of.  The GOP is getting bored with trying to repeal Obamacare, so the time has come for the Democrats to hit back hard and make the Republicans own their repeal votes.  After all, the 2016 General Election is just around the corner, and I suspect that millions of voters might not like the fact that the GOP is trying to take health coverage away from them.

Quote of the Week

“That idea has some merit to it.”

- Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, on Ted Cruz's statement that he would throw himself in front of a moving train if that’s what killing health reform would take.