Florida throws a grenade into the GOP primaries schedule

The shit's going to hit the fan now. Florida has just screwed up the GOP primary schedule. South Carolina and Arizona are practically ready to go to war.

Florida's Republican presidential primary contest will be held on Jan. 31, 2012, instead of March 6. The scheduling change is likely to ruffle feathers among Republicans in other early primary states.

This week, as 2012 primary calendar watchers trained their gaze on the state of Florida -- where the deadline to decide the date of its presidential primary loomed -- it was anticipated that Florida would follow Arizona's lead and move its primary up the calendar, thus placing Florida in conflict with the traditional early primary states and threatening to throw the agreed-to primary schedule into complete chaos. Well, this morning, the zero hour was reached, and Florida has opted to unleash havoc.

According to the reports bubbling up on Twitter, by a 7-2 vote, the Florida GOP has selected Jan. 31 as the date of its primary. This move is in violation of both Republican National Committee guidelines and the mystic traditions handed down by the ancients that dictated that Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina shall be forever entitled to be the first four contests in every presidential election cycle.

Michelle Malkin attacks the First Lady for shopping at Target

OF COURSE right wing idiots are jumping to attack the First Lady for shopping at Target. Here's Michelle Malkin:

The East and West Wings of the White House are guilty of more cheesy stage-managing than the Emmy, Oscar, and Tony Awards shows combined.

Last week, the glamour queen wore more than $40,000 worth of diamonds while partying with hubby at several high-priced fundraisers in New York. Her bling made international headlines and photos.

To counter the negative diva buzz as most Americans face hard economic times, Mrs Obama somehow managed to turn up at an Alexandria Va. Target (with her "shopping assistant" in tow).

[...]

Snortalicious headline: "Michelle Obama shops incognito at Target (Photo)."

Such tools.

[...]

Looks like she left the bling at home.

But her shirt and sunglasses are about as "incognito" as Lady Gaga's outfit at her younger sister's graduation.

[...]

I bring "shopping assistants" with me when I go to Target, too! My daughter pushes the cart. My son hangs off it.

Celebrity first ladies...they're just like us!

Note to Ms. Malkin: Hate makes you ugly and stupid.

NRA’s wacky conspiracy theory

Jon Stewart tackles an egregious case of Obama Derangment Syndrome: The Vice President of the NRA alleges that Obama signing a bunch of laws the NRA wanted and NOT taking away our guns is somehow proof that Obama wants to take away our guns.

Go figure.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Wayne's World
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

Rick Perry’s very bad day

Rick Perry’s day SUCKED.

The best Rick Perry speech I ever heard

I’ve changed my mind about Rick Perry. This is the best Rick Perry speech I’ve ever heard.

The best Rick Perry speech ever.

9/11 conspiracy theories attacked by...

Well, this is amusing at least.

It turns out that the leader of Iran is a 9/11 truther. But he's being slammed for his 9/11 conspiracy theories by... al Qaeda!

CAIRO (AP) — Al-Qaida has sharply criticized Iran's president over his suggestions that the United States government was behind the Sept. 11 attacks and not al-Qaida, dismissing the comments as "ridiculous."

During his trip to New York last week for the U.N. General Assembly, Ahmadinejad claimed in an interview with The Associated Press that explosive material and not planes brought down the World Trade Center. He stopped short of saying the United States staged the disaster, but said that as an engineer, he's sure New York's twin towers were not brought down by jetliners.

Smackdown in New York

The two are good pals, but that doesn’t keep Jon Stewart from giving Bill O’Reilly a good smackdown over taxes.

Here’s part 1:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Exclusive - Bill O'Reilly Extended Interview Pt. 1
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

and part 2, that happened off the air:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Exclusive - Bill O'Reilly Extended Interview Pt. 2
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

Mace cop to be investigated

The cop who maced Occupy Wall Street protesters without provocation will be investigated. He's done similar things before. Will he actually be fired this time around?

Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said at a press briefing on Wednesday that the Internal Affairs Bureau would investigate Anthony Bologna, a senior New York Police Department officer who pepper-sprayed young women at the "Occupy Wall Street" protests.

On September 24, four female protesters were rounded up on East 12th Street in an orange-colored mesh by police and subsequently sprayed with mace, seemingly without any provocation. The incident was captured on video by several people.

“I don’t know what precipitated that specific incident,” Kelly said, claiming the protesters were engaged in "tumultuous conduct" and "intent on blocking traffic." He said the incident had been referred to the independent Civilian Complaint Review Board and that the department would investigate it as well.

A diverse coalition of people have pledged to occupy Wall Street until something is done about corporate greed and the financial system's undemocratic influence on the U.S. government. The protesters have been camped out in New York’s old Liberty Plaza, one block from the Federal Reserve, since Saturday.

If ignorance is bliss, why are teabaggers so angry?

Was white powder a protest of Chaz Bono?

Chaz Bono appearing on Dancing With The Stars has conservatives and right wing bloviators on Fox News up in arms, and once again the show is receiving white powder in envelopes. Is this some right winger's protest of Bono?

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - An envelope containing white powder and addressed to the "Dancing With the Stars" TV show caused a security scare on Wednesday but was found to be harmless.

Police were called to CBS Television City in Los Angeles -- where the ABC ballroom contest is filmed -- after powder was found in a mailroom envelope.

Los Angeles police spokeswoman Diana Figueroa said the substance was found to be "not dangerous."

"It was addressed to 'Dancing With the Stars'," she added. It was not known if a specific name was included.

Teabaggers are not popular at all

The Tea Party's unfavorable rating continues to grow... Americans just don't like what they see when they look at teabaggers.

From Talking Points Memo:

The Tea Party movement has had some PR problems since the almost-default of the summertime debt fight. TPM has reported on the increasingly negative view of the conservative movement Americans have taken, and on Tuesday there was more bad news: CNN/ORC polling, which has tracked the Tea Party’s popularity since January 2010, shows that a majority of Americans now views it unfavorably.

The poll shows that only 28 percent of Americans do view the Tea Party favorably, versus a full 53 percent who don’t. The poll shows that less than twenty percent don’t have an opinion of Tea Partiers, which is the lowest yet — an issue on polling the movement has been that many Americans simply didn’t know enough about it. That has clearly changed since the beginning of last year.

In January 2010, the Tea Party was actually viewed favorabilty by a plurality in the CNN poll, with 33 having a positive view against 26 percent. That unfavorable number continued to grow through out the midterm elections of 2010 (in which a number Tea Party endorsed candidates won) and started to really climb during the period which the Tea Party contingent in Congress has had an effect on policy. Throughout 2011 their unfavorability has been in the high forties and now the fifties.

CNN is not the only organization to find that the Tea Party brand is suffering. A recent AP poll found a similar trend, although the CNN survey showed unfavorability within the same time period to be higher.

Stats I’d like to see

Stats I'd like to see: percentage of people who believe Obama is a Muslim who have never had dental care.

Get money out of politics

Dylan Ratigan is a hothead, and sometimes he goes off the rails, but he’s got a good idea: get money out of politics. He’s launched a petition to ban all financial contributions to candidates for federal office.

It’s a pipe dream, of course. It’ll never happen. Not in our lifetimes, anyway. But I signed the petition and you can too.

http://www.getmoneyout.com/

Eric Cantor: Hypocrite supreme

Eric Cantor is a great example of what today's Republicans are all about: "Fuck everybody else, BUT I BETTER GET MINE!"

After threatening to hold up disaster relief for the whole country, Eric Cantor is angrily asking FEMA where the relief for HIS district is.

"House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-7th, is pushing for information on the status of Gov. Bob McDonnell's request for federal disaster assistance for Louisa County residents in the wake of an earthquake there last month," reports the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

On Friday, Cantor held a conference call with Federal Emergency Management Agency and Louisa County officials. A readout of the call provided by Cantor's office indicates that he asked FEMA officials about the timeline and process for determining whether the agency would grant federal assistance. 'FEMA said they have received the Governor's request and sent it to the White House for a decision but could not provide any specific information on timing," the readout said. "Even when asked for an estimate based on past applications they were unable to do so.'

Clearly it's a bit rich that Cantor is trying to make sure disaster relief funds get to his district as quickly as possible given that he was perhaps the key actor in the Capitol Hill showdown which threatened to halt all of FEMA's activities.

There's another implication here, though, that Cantor may ultimately be responsible for the delay. If he'd just said nothing -- never insisted for emergency supplemental funds for disaster relief be offset -- then disaster aid wouldn't have gotten mired in a budget fight, and the funds might have been easier to come by.

The political perfect storm

Politicians dream of finding an issue they can stake a claim on that a vast majority of Americans support. Politicians dream of finding this issue and having their opponents be squarely on the other side of it.

In politics, that's having the perfect storm on your side, blowing against the opposition.

This is exactly what President Obama has found with the so-called "Buffett rule."

Public Policy Polling for Daily Kos & SEIU. 9/15-18 . Registered voters. MoE ±3.1% (no trendlines):

Q: Do you support or oppose ensuring that people who make over a million dollars a year pay the same percentage of taxes or more on their total income as those who make less than a million dollars a year?

Support: 73
Oppose: 16
Not sure: 11

Heckler calls Obama “Antichrist”

An apparent religious nut interrupted President Obama at a fundraiser in Los Angeles, shouting about Jesus Christ and God. As security escorted him out, he screamed that Obama is the Antichrist.

What the hell are they putting in communion wafers these days?

The President handled it quite well, however. (Video)

Hezbollah "missile sites" in Cuba?

Michele Bachmann warns that Hezbollah may put "missile sites" in Cuba.

No, really.

(From Raw Story)

Republican presidential candidate said Monday that it would be “foolish” to normalize trade with Cuba because Hezbollah could soon have “missile sites” there.

“Why would you normalize trade with a country that sponsors terror?” the candidate asked a crowd of supporters in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “There is reports that have come out that Cuba has been working with another terrorist organization called Hezbollah. And Hezbollah is looking at wanting to be part of missile sites in Iran and, of course, when you are 90 miles offshore from Florida, you don’t want to entertain the prospect of hosting bases or sites where Hezbollah could have training camps or perhaps have missile sites or weapons sites in Cuba. ”

Bachmann was most likely basing her fear on an unsubstantiated report from the Italian publican Corriere della Sera, which was picked up by numerous conservative websites earlier this month (see here, here, here and here.)

Even if that report were true, it makes absolutely no mention of “missile sites.”

America hates the government. This means Republicans are winning.

It's long been a backroom political strategy of conservatives to make the American people hate government. The more negative we are about government, the happier Republicans are. That's why you'll always hear Republicans trashing government, complaining about it, and calling for the elimination of as much of it as possible. Which leads one to question why they want so desperately to be in charge of something they hate so vehemently. (The answer is, they want to destroy it to put more power in the hands of corporations.)

And especially with a Democrat in the Oval Office who is not only a member of the "wrong" party but apparently the wrong skin color, conservatives have stepped up their hate campaign against government to irrational levels. And with their feverish obstructionism, they appear to be succeeding.

 

According to a Gallup poll released Monday morning, Americans’ views of their government’s job performance have reached a critical level of negativity.

The Gallup poll found a record-high 81 percent of Americans are dissatisfied with the way the United States is being governed. The poll showed majorities of both Republicans (92 percent) and Democrats (65 percent) are unhappy with the government’s performance.

Gallup explains that the tremendous pessimism and negativity may be a result of shared political power in Washington, “with Democrats controlling the White House and U.S. Senate, and Republicans controlling the House of Representatives.” In this scenario, both Republicans and Democrats can blame the government without having to point the finger at their own party.

Why Rick Perry lost the Florida GOP straw poll

All the right wing pundits are falling over themselves to say Perry lost Florida because of his comments about illegal immigration -- you know, not punishing children of undocumented immigrants, somehow, that's supposed to offend Republican voters. But the reality is Perry lost Florida because he called Social Security a Ponzi scheme.

Rick Perry’s FL campaign co-chair believes she can raise the dead

Pam Olsen, Rick Perry’s Florida campaign co-chair believes she can raise the dead.

Once again, I must repeat my disclaimer whenever I post one of these nutty conservative stories: I’m not kidding. She thinks she can pray for dead people and they’ll come back to life.

But Pam Olsen also believes that natural disasters are God’s punishment for “tolerating” gays. Or something. And some stuff about how Christians are commanded by God to take over the planet. So I guess believing you can bring the dead back to life is just par for the course.

The death cult

So who are these fired up Republican voters? They are people who cheer someone who’s executed a lot of people. They cheer, and actively call for, letting someone die who doesn’t have insurance. They boo an American soldier actively serving in Iraq.

Not long ago they were cheering the news that our credit rating was downgraded. They cheered when America didn’t get the Olympics. They complained about Obama killing Osama bin Laden, or at the very least, like one Fox News commentator did, used it to fear monger that Obama would start killing conservatives next.

Politics sometimes is a game where you paint your opponents in the worst terms, where you try to shine the worst possible light on them. But with Republican voters like these, all Democrats have to do is make sure Americans hear what they’re cheering, and booing, for.

The anti-conspiracy conspiracy

The NRA people made boatloads of money fearmongering about President Obama’s secret desire to take all our guns away. Never mind the fact that he’s made no movement toward anything even resembling taking guns away, and has only paid lip service to tighter controls on assault weapons – something even Dick Cheney claims to be for.

So how does the NRA respond to this absolute lack of Obama doing anything like what they said he was going to do?

Why, claim Obama NOT taking away guns IS A PART OF THE EVIL CONSPIRACY, of course.

Once again, I must add the disclaimer that I’m not making this up.

If this isn’t an another excellent example of Obama Derangement Syndrome, I don’t know what is:

You just can’t please some people.

In the eyes of National Rifle Association (NRA) executive vice president Wayne LaPierre, President Barack Obama’s decision not to pursue gun control legislation is a “massive conspiracy,” and just another reason not to give him a second term.

“[The Obama campaign] will say gun owners — they’ll say they left them alone,” LaPierre told an audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Friday. “In public, he’ll remind us that he’s put off calls from his party to renew the Clinton [assault weapons] ban, he hasn’t pushed for new gun control laws… The president will offer the Second Amendment lip service and hit the campaign trail saying he’s actually been good for the Second Amendment.”

“But it’s a big fat stinking lie!” the NRA leader exclaimed. “It’s all part of a massive Obama conspiracy to deceive voters and destroy the Second Amendment in our country.”

“Obama himself is no fool. So when he got elected, they concocted a scheme to stay away from the gun issue, lull gun owners to sleep and play us for fools in 2012. Well, gun owners are not fools and we are not fooled,” La Pierre declared.

Um…

Your guess is as good as mine.

Obama BRINGS IT

President Obama is BRINGING IT on infrastructure and the economy. Right now, he's giving a speech in front of a bridge in Cincinnati, Ohio that's in such poor condition it's been labeled as functionally obsolete, and pointing out the need to pass the jobs bill to put Americans back to work fixing our infrastructure.

Yes, and the bridge is in guess whose district? ROFL.

President Obama has THE winning campaign strategy with a HUGE majority of Americans. Screw what the polls say today, the Republicans know it and you're going to see them get desperate.

The smartest thing any politician has ever said

Nobody got rich on their own.

Courage

A Republican Senator is showing some bipartisan courage – he’s resigning from his leadership position in order to give himself the freedom to work and compromise with Democrats.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Alone in a cabin in Northern Ontario last month, Sen. Lamar Alexander considered the debt limit deal Congress and President Barack Obama had recently, noisily struck. He thought about the debates still to come in the 2012 election year, the issues he cared about, and his own future in the Senate.

Then the Tennessee Republican, 71, typed out a speech on his laptop and set it aside, to "let it cool."

Alexander served it up Tuesday, announcing from the Senate floor that he is giving up his No. 3 position in the GOP leadership for the freedom to write laws with Democrats, if need be.

"In the leadership, you always give up some of your independence in exchange for a seat at the table," Alexander said in a brief hallway interview. "I am giving up my seat at the table in exchange for some more independence."

It was an implicit rejection of the partisanship that has become the rule in a chamber designed to resolve the nation's toughest public policy questions.

But it wasn't clear, either, that Alexander would win an election to be the vote-counting whip under GOP leader Mitch McConnell, who set the tone early on by declaring the Republicans' top political priority would be denying Obama a second term in the White House.

Bill O'Reilly threatens to quit

If this doesn't make you support the President's call to raise tax rates on the rich to the same paid by the middle class, I don't know what will.

Bill O’Reilly Threatens To Quit If Higher Taxes For Millionaires Are Enacted

Multiple polls show independents and moderates support taxing the rich

It's THE winning campaign issue for 2012, and President Obama is firmly on the right side of it with the American people. And the Republicans with their silly obeisance to Grover Nordquist have handed it to him.

Greg Sargent:

It’s the meme that won’t die: Obama’s newly aggressive push to raise taxes on the wealthy is about nothing more than playing to the Dem base, and his “class warfare” risks alienating the center.

David Brooks today complains that Obama’s “populist cries” will “fire up liberals but are designed to enrage moderates.” The Hill insists that Obama’s new posture is merely designed to “shore up or win back his base.” Mark Penn helpfully warns Obama that his “class warfare” is tantamount to “abandoning” the center. Mark Halperin pronounces that analysis ”essential reading.”

So let’s be clear about this: It’s all utter nonsense. This is not how the White House sees things. While it’s true that Obama’s new posture is partly about firing up his base, he and his advisers also view it as the best way to win back moderates and independents. They may be wrong about this, but that’s how they see things. They believe the way to win back those voters — even as he seeks a deficit reduction deal — is for Obama to be seen as a fighter for jobs.

To insist that this is only about winning over disaffected Dems is to misstate the nature of the bet the White House is making, which is a bet on where the true center of the country lies. Worse still is the unstated assumption underlying much of the analysis: That there’s no way the middle of the country could possibly embrace Obama’s new approach.

But as it happens, strong majorities of moderates and independents support tax hikes on the wealthy as the best way to close the deficit.

Done with compromise

President Obama has sought a course of compromise and statesmanship since he's been in office, and even more so after the midterm elections where he took the message from Americans that they wanted Democrats and Republicans to work together since they voted for a divided government.

But one can't make the mistake anymore that Obama plans to campaign for 2012 on compromise. Obama's message now seems to be, "I tried working with Republicans for nearly 3 years, you can see the result: They block everything out sheer partisan hate. The time for compromising with them has passed. They've lost their chance. Now it's up to you to not only re-elect me, but send me some Democrats and moderate Republicans who are willing to work together so we can finish getting our economy back on track and put Americans back to work!"

And with the American Jobs Act and the call to raise the wealthy tax rates to what they are for the middle class, something an overwhelming majority of Americans support, he has found THE winning campaign issue for 2012.

And the Republicans handed it to him because of their obstructionism. He's turned the Republicans' partisanship against them. He can do that BECAUSE he tried a course of compromise for so long, and this is why moderates and swing voters are going to come around to his side in droves.

Once again, Obama has been playing chess all along.

DADT RIP

Ring the bells! As of 4 minutes ago, DADT is officially dead, and gay soldiers can serve openly in the United States military.

Time for him to get off the stage now

Ralph Nader, who's announced he's planning a primary run against President Obama, has just nailed his coffin shut.

Speaking to Salon, Ralph Nader praises Sarah Palin‘s anti-establishment  bona fides, and saying, "she’s a lot smarter than most people credit her."

Those poor, oppressed Christians

Christian leader John Hagee is offering up some more of that patented Christian whining about how bad they have it in America.

Hagee: “Secular humanism is a pagan god and America is bowing at the shrine. It has filled our drug rehab centers, it has filled the divorce courts, it has filled the shelter for battered wives, it has filled the rape crisis centers, it has filled the mental hospitals and single bars, it has filled the penitentiaries and the roster guests for the brain-dead television shows you see from New York. Think about that, we’re in a moral free fall where your children can be taught witchcraft by Harry Potter; that Heather has two mommies; you can substitute Christmas for a midwinter holiday, call it anything you want to but don’t call it Christmas, kick God out of the Christmas event; you can let your daughter go to school and she can get an abortion without your permission or without your knowledge but she cannot get an aspirin without your knowledge. Something is dreadfully wrong when you as the parent cannot control the destiny of your own child. America has turned its back from the God of the Bible and it is time for the church of Jesus Christ to stand up and speak up and say we have a right to the destiny of our own children!”

Those poor Christians. If only they could find some country somewhere where they could be free, where they could have an endless media presence, where they could have their own TV networks, their own radio networks, their own media companies, where they could have un-taxed companies and buildings, where they could display their emblems on clothing, cars, jewelry and billboards, and where politicians and government officials could openly follow and pay public obeisance to their god. If only they could find a country like that! Those poor, poor, oppressed people!

Andrew Breitbart wants to shoot liberals? I dare him to start with me.

Andrew Breitbart is inciting violence against liberals, threatening that they “have the guns.”

I dare you, Andrew, I dare you and all the other gun-toting teabaggers who think you're so tough: Come point your guns at me. I dare you. Come point your guns at me and see if you can scare me into shutting up. I double dare you.

The only way you can shut me up is by actually shooting me. Do you have the guts to do that? If you don't, then shut. the. fuck. up. you tiny little impotent clowns. And even if you shoot me, if I survive I won't shut up. No, you're actually going to have to put the gun right in my face and shoot straight. I dare you.

 

Tea Party favorite Andrew Breitbart told a conservative audience in Massachusetts that conservatives outnumber liberals and have most of the guns. He also claimed that the military is ready to take action against liberals if violence ever erupted between liberals and conservatives.

“I’m under attack all the time. They call me gay, there are death threats… There are times where I’m not thinking as clearly as I should, and in those unclear moments, I always think to myself, ‘Fire the first shot.’ Bring it on. Because I know who’s on our side. They can only win a rhetorical and propaganda war. They cannot win. We outnumber them in this country, and we have the guns… I’m not kidding. They talk a mean game, but they will not cross that line because they know what they’re dealing with.

Then he claimed that some senior military officials have personally assured him that they’ll join the right wing in a civil war.

Obama is calling out the Republicans

I've seen complaints about this around the progressive blogosphere, that Obama wasn’t calling out the GOP by name. But it appears the President already had plans to name the Republican Party as what’s standing in the way of getting the country back on track.

WASHINGTON -- In certain corners of the progressive political universe, there has been ongoing frustration with the Obama White House for attacking the institution of Congress as a whole rather than its Republican parts.

The angst surfaced briefly, and most recently, during the introduction of the administration's jobs bill, when President Barack Obama stood before Congress demanding action without pinpointing the party most likely to hold it up. Since then, however, the president has drawn sharper lines when castigating the legislative branch, noting specifically that many of the job creation ideas he's adopted once had Republican support. In the White House's talking points on its latest legislative proposal -- a new tax on income over $1 million -- there's another sharp elbow thrown the GOP's way.

"Unfortunately, Congressional Republicans believe the burden of deficit reduction should only come from spending cuts to critical programs, including Medicare and Medicaid, and refuse to ask millionaires and billionaires to pay their fair share to get our fiscal house in order and reduce the deficit," the bullet point reads.

GOP: Raise taxes on the middle class!

So much for that Grover Nordquist no taxes pledge... Paul Ryan and Herman Cain are pushing to raise taxes on the middle class in order to pay for more tax cuts for the wealthy.

WASHINGTON -- Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said on Sunday that House Republicans would oppose President Barack Obama's payroll tax cuts for both employers and employees, arguing that the policy had already failed to provide a sufficient boost to the economy. "It hasn't worked," Ryan said, suggesting the current temporary tax cut should be allowed to expire, which will amount to a 50 percent tax hike on workers making less than $106,000 per year.

He also said that he opposes the president's plan to require millionaires to pay the same tax rate as the middle class. "Class warfare might make for good politics, but it makes for rotten economics," he said.

As chairman of the House Budget Committee and the author of a long-term plan that radically alters Medicare and slashes tax rates for the wealthy as well as social spending, Ryan serves as something of an economic spokesman for House Republicans.

GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain, who followed Ryan on "Fox News Sunday," seconded his opposition to the tax on millionaires as well as the payroll tax cut extensions. "It's too little, too late," said Cain.

It’s about time!

If I had access to any church bells, I'd ring them over this. President Obama is going to propose raising the tax rate on the wealthy to match the same percentage the middle class pays. IT'S ABOUT FUCKING TIME!

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama is expected to seek a new base tax rate for the wealthy to ensure that millionaires pay at least at the same percentage as middle income taxpayers.

A White House official said the proposal would be included in the president' proposal for long term deficit reduction that he will announce Monday. The official spoke anonymously because the plan has not been officially announced.

Teabagger splitting begins

The teabaggers splitting of the GOP beings. House Speaker John Boehner is getting a primary challenger.

Get ready for some uncensored graphic television ads on abortion in the 2012 primary race against House Speaker John Boehner for the 8th Congressional District.

That’s the plan of tea party activist David Lewis who announced his candidacy on Friday and said he will unveil those ads Monday on his website.

The 26-year-old Batavia resident and married father of a 2-year-old girl said he’s riding on a single issue: Boehner’s support of a federal budget that provided funding to Planned Parenthood, which Lewis calls “the largest killer of unborn babies in America.”

Republican health care plans

Rick Perry's health care plan: "PRAY FOR LEECHES! AND YOU GOTTA PAY FOR THOSE LEECHES!"

Ron Paul's health care plan: "BEG YOUR FRIENDS TO GIVE YOU LEECHES!"

Michele Bachmann's health care plan: "RICK PERRY'S LEECHES MAKE YOU MENTALLY RETARDED!"

Mitt Romney's health care plan: "I BOUGHT ALL THE LEECH COMPANIES AND FIRED EVERYBODY!"

Jon Huntsman's health care plan: "I RODE A LEECH TO THE DEBATE!"

Rick Santorum's health care plan: "NO GAY LEECHES!"

Newt Gingrich's health care plan: "IF YOUR LEECH GETS CANCER, DIVORCE HER ASS AND MARRY A YOUNGER, PRETTIER LEECH!"

Herman Cain's health care plan: "LEECH PIZZAS, YOU BITCHES. NO MUSLIM LEECHES!"

Sarah Palin's health care plan: "WHAT'S A LEECH?"

He's baaaaaaack!

The progressive politician who arguably gave us the first election of George W. Bush is back. Ralph Nader says he's planning a Democratic Party primary challenge to President Obama. And he announced it on Fox News, giving them all erections. Even the women.

Ouch.

Donald Trump, after having dinner with him in a fancy restaurant, forgets Rick Perry's name.

Sarah Palin drug habit? Makes sense.

Let's see... She can't keep a job. She always needs cash. She babbles on and on without making sense.  Hmm, I don't think Sarah Palin is snorting coke -- I think she's smoking crack!

Religious right wingers get even more medieval

There’s a new kind of marriage theology sweeping right wing religious fundamentalists. It says that a man should never ask a woman to marry him, because then that makes it HER choice to say yes or no, AND THAT’S WRONG.

No, I’m not kidding. This marriage view actually posits that the man is supposed to select who he wants, and then ask the woman’s father. At no point does the woman have any say in the matter. It’s strictly between the man and the father.

Oh, and one more thing: No state-issued marriage licenses. That would be “binding yourself to perverts.”

Once again, I’m not kidding.

Is Solyndra an Obama scandal?

Right wingers are tumescent over Solyndra, something they think they can inflate into a scandal and pin on President Obama. But is it Obama’s fault?

Not quite.

It’s often claimed that the Solyndra loan guarantee was “rushed through” by the Obama Administration for political reasons. In fact, the Solyndra loan guarantee was a multi-year process that the Bush Administration launched in 2007.

You’d never know from the media coverage that:

1. The Bush team tried to conditionally approve the Solyndra loan just before President Obama took office.
2. The company’s backers included private investors who had diverse political interests.
3. The loan comprises just 1.3% of DOE’s overall loan portfolio. To date, Solyndra is the only loan that’s known to be troubled.

Because one of the Solyndra investors, Argonaut Venture Capital, is funded by George Kaiser — a man who donated money to the Obama campaign — the loan guarantee has been attacked as being political in nature. What critics don’t mention is that one of the earliest and largest investors, Madrone Capital Partners, is funded by the family that started Wal-Mart, the Waltons. The Waltons have donated millions of dollars to Republican candidates over the years.

Read the rest here. It’s eye-opening.

The pettiest politician in history

Louie Gohmert has to be the most immature, the pettiest politician in the history of the United States. This just illustrates the level of the insanity of Obama Derangement Syndrome.

I had never heard of Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) until yesterday. But if they give awards for inspired political mischief, Gohmert is an instant Hall of Famer.

As reported by Mary Katharine Ham, yesterday Gohmert introduced the American Jobs Act. No, not that American Jobs Act. Not the $447 billion hodge-podge of proposals that President Obama announced last week as his plan to revitalize the economy. Gohmert’s bill is a simple two-pager that does nothing but repeal the federal corporate income tax. The title “American Jobs Act” was available for Gohmert’s bill because no one has bothered to introduce the president’s bill.

Beating up on the First Lady

Hey, remember how the big name left wing bloggers, pundits, politicians and MSNBC hosts were always beating up on First Lady Laura Bush, calling her names, insulting her, accusing her of all sorts of evil things, making fun of her appearance and generally making her a punchline to as many jokes as they could invent?

Yeah, me neither.

Obama is a bigger tax cutter than Bush

(h/t Daily Kos)

The Center for American Progress crunched the numbers and discovered:

With the huge Recovery Act tax cuts and the enormous December 2010 tax cuts combined, President Obama has already signed into law tax cuts amounting to more than $900 billion from 2009 through 2012. Even after accounting for legislation that the president signed that increased revenue during that period, President Obama has cut taxes by more than $850 billion in his first term, or approximately 1.5 percent of GDP.

Republicans: NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!!!

As expected, the GOP is deciding to play politics rather than work with the president on putting people back to work and helping out the middle class. The GOP plan is quite clearly to trash the economy to keep Obama from being re-elected. As the new bumper sticker says, they're "keeping millions out of work to put one man out of a job."

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The top Republican in Congress on Thursday dismissed President Barack Obama's jobs-creation package as a "poor substitute" for policies that would boost the economy and ruled out tax increases as a way to close the country's budget gap.

In a high-profile speech, House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner called on a special congressional committee to consider tax reforms that would close loopholes but not raise rates as part of its bid to cut the deficit.

Boehner's speech was a comprehensive statement of Republican principles as Congress works to bring down the stubbornly high 9.1 percent unemployment rate and tame the national debt.

Republicans have already said that they do not support many elements of Obama's $447 billion jobs package and will not back the tax increases he has proposed to pay for it.

 

Republicans’ latest “job creation” idea? Deregulating snakes.

If anything shows they're not serious about job creation, it's this. Of course, we know they're not serious about job creation because if jobs get created, Obama's re-election chances improve.

Yesterday, taking their anti-regulatory zeal to absurd new heights, House Republicans claimed that a proposed rule from the Interior Department that would “designate the Burmese python and eight other snake species as ‘injurious’” — therefore “make it illegal to import them or transport them across state lines” — is a threat to job creation. They even brought a snake breeder to testify before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, who said that the rule could “devastate a small but thriving sector of the economy.”

This is simply the latest salvo from the GOP against regulation, as it seeks to undo everything from labor protections to environmental safeguards (with several Republicans calling for the complete dismantling of the Environmental Protection Agency). Republicans have also been fighting the implementation of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, on the grounds that tighter regulation of the banking sector will kill jobs.

New York’s 9th

If this election were to be held a month from now, I think we'd see the opposite result. Obama has THE winning strategy for 2012, and the Republicans are obliging by saying NO to everything, and killing themselves by attacking Social Security.

But alas, it came to late to help in New York's 9th.

Republican Bob Turner beat Democrat David Weprin to win Anthony Weiner’s seat.

…voter frustration with Obama put Weprin in the unlikely spot of playing defense. A Siena Poll released Friday found just 43 percent of likely voters approved of the president’s job performance, while 54 percent said they disapproved. Among independents, just 29 percent said they approved of Obama’s job performance.

Democrats coming home

Disaffected Democrats are coming home. Dems who supported him in 2008, stayed home or voted for publicans in 2010, are returning to Obama for 2012.

The survey (PDF) by the group Third Way, a think tank that supports moderate policies, found that 43 percent of Obama voters who supported Republicans in 2010 ("switchers") and 78 percent of those who didn't vote in 2010 ("droppers") either strongly or moderately approved the president's performance during his first term.

Of the droppers, 73 percent said they would definitely or probably vote for Obama in 2012, while only 34 percent of the switchers said they would vote for him if the election was held today.

A majority -- 53 percent -- of both switchers and droppers saw the economy and jobs as the most important issue in the presidential election next year.

Obama attacked over A PAPER CLIP

I thought they cared about government spending? How much money did Obama save not having the jobs bill professionally bound and instead used a simple clip? But no, that simply won't do for those suffering from Obama Derangement Syndrome.

And if the President HAD bound the bill, they would have attacked him for NOT using a paper clip.

 

In the annals of mindless partisan sniping, this may place at the top.

This morning, Fox & Friends joined the New York Post in attacking President Obama for using a paper clip. Read that again: They attacked Obama for using a paper clip.

The Post's story today on Obama's jobs bill is headlined "O gives jobs 'clip' service; $447B 'tax hike' plan bound by chintzy fastener," and its first two paragraphs attack Obama for his choice of document fasteners:

President Obama's plan to reverse the nation's staggering jobless rate is held together with a paper clip!

"Here it is," Obama said, waving a copy of his jobs plan during a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden yesterday, an enormous paper clip binding the pages together.

Steve King accidentally reveals the GOP’s true agenda

A Republican congressman has accidentally revealed what their TRUE agenda is. Hint: it ain't creating jobs or doing anything to help the economy so long as Obama is president.

The real issue is not the Republicans’ willingness to work with the president to create jobs, because they have no intentions of compromising or working with the president. Representative Steve King (R-Iowa) revealed the true Republican agenda when he said, “If we find a window, we can maybe do some things together. Beyond that, I will tell you that it’s going to be important just to hang on and get a new president and a new configuration in Congress.” King’s comment reveals there is nothing Republicans will do to help create jobs. It is not shocking that Republicans are going to wait and hope for a Republican president and majority in both houses of Congress because they have done nothing since President Obama was inaugurated except obstruct meaningful legislation to improve the economy or jobs. Indeed, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has said since 2009 that the Republican’s goal was making sure President Obama only served one term. Now King says they are just going to hang on until 2013 before making any moves to create jobs.

Game on!

President Obama sends the American Jobs Act to Congress.

Obama is a weak leader?

I’ve seen the comment made several times in our discussion forums – President Obama is a “weak leader.”

I don't think he's a weak leader -- he got more accomplished in these first three years than any other president in modern history.

I do think, however, that he really believes that as president, it's not his job to be just the president of Democrats, but of all Americans. The reason this looks strange to us is because we got used to G.W. Bush's way of doing things for eight years – GWB’s whole presidency was just for Republicans, with a big "fuck you" to the other half of the country who didn't vote for him. Obama is not that way.

What people saw as Obama "moving to the right" was really Obama responding to the results of the 2010 election. In other words, unlike the last president, he LISTENED to what the voters told him from the bully pulpit of the voting booth.

So for those on the left who sat out the election and didn't vote out of spite, or anger, or disappointment, well, this is the result.

Sadly, what many of us on the left seem to want these days is fights to the death, not pragmatism. We want Obama to say "fuck you" to half the country, even though NOTHING would ever get done as a result. We don't want statesmanship. Compromise is a dirty word. Working together is "weak." We want bloodsport.

But see, that's why today's Republican Party is the way it is -- they've given themselves over completely to that kind of thinking. If the Democrats act the same way, it most certainly will not make anything better. So we've got to find another way if there's to be any hope at all.

Coming together as one nation to remember

President Obama marks the tenth anniversary of the September 11th attacks and pays tribute to the first responders, those serving our nation in the military, and those who lost their lives on that tragic day.

Rubble Speech revisited

h/t Daily Kos:

(Click to embushinate)

Eric Cantor is scared

Eric Cantor is scared. He doesn’t want the president to take his jobs plan directly to the American people.

“This is my objection to the message that was delivered tonight. The message was: either accept my package as it is, or I will take it to the American people. I would say that that’s the wrong approach. What we’re here to do is try to transcend differences, not let them get in the way in the areas we can make progress on.”

Eric Cantor being afraid that President Obama will go before the American people is the single best reason Obama needs to get out there NOW.

GOP debate on MSNBC

Bottom lines from tonight’s Republican debate:

Michele Bachmann is done. She's completely irrelevant now.

The rest of them are irrelevant too. But Michele had such a huge lead before Perry got in the race, her shrinkage is as noticeable as George Costanza’s junk after swimming in cold water.

Huntsman looked good -- or should I say, he looked like the least unreasonable candidate on stage. And he got a pretty fair amount of air time. But is it enough for moderate Republicans to brave teabagger wrath and dare to support him openly, facing down threats of violence from the tea nutters? I don't think so.
So the whole show was about Rick Perry and Mitt Romney. And of the two, the show right now belongs to Perry.

But the big story out of this debate is this: Rick Perry is clearly the candidate who is running on getting rid of Social Security and Medicare. (He doubled down on calling Social Security “a Ponzi scheme.”) So let him go try and sell that to the American public. The Ayn Rand-addled tea crazies love it, but America doesn't. Good luck, Rick.

Oh, and they're all against minimum wage too. So let's all sit back and watch them go before voters dealing with shrinking paychecks and promise to make those paychecks even smaller. That’ll go over terrific!

Mitt Romney, at the very least, decided to separate himself from Perry by promising to "protect" Social Security, not to get rid of it. (Of course, what he means by "protect" is privatization, but at least he pays lip service to it.)

Biggest applause of the night? When the moderator prefaced a question to Perry stating how many people he's executed. The crowd loved it. So that shows you what kind of people we're dealing with.

And there you have it. It's the Rick Perry show, with Mitt Romney trying to keep up.

And more than likely, the Obama campaign is breathing a big sigh of relief.

From Rachel Maddow’s blog

A tale of two tweets

by Tricia McKinney

This morning two tweets appeared within four minutes of each other in my news feed.

First I saw this:

And then this:

Should rich people be allowed to vote?

After hearing a right wing commentator on Fox News opine how “un-American” it is to let poor people vote, I started thinking.

I wonder if they would freak out if a progressive pundit made the argument, “It would be un-American for people who make more than $500,000 a year to have the right to vote, because they probably own or run big corporations that are already donating millions of anonymous dollars to Republican politicians, not to mention spending billions on lobbying. So they already have a voice, and a big one at that. To even the playing field, only poor and middle class people should have the right to vote.”

I’ll bet you could hear the screeching from Fox News headquarters a thousand miles away.

A GOP operative leaves the cult

This is a fantastic article, a clear-eyed condemnation of the state of our political system today, and what the Republicans have done to it. And a Republican operative wrote it.

Mike Lofgren, posted on truthout.org:

It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant.

In his "Manual of Parliamentary Practice," Thomas Jefferson wrote that it is less important that every rule and custom of a legislature be absolutely justifiable in a theoretical sense, than that they should be generally acknowledged and honored by all parties. These include unwritten rules, customs and courtesies that lubricate the legislative machinery and keep governance a relatively civilized procedure. The US Senate has more complex procedural rules than any other legislative body in the world; many of these rules are contradictory, and on any given day, the Senate parliamentarian may issue a ruling that contradicts earlier rulings on analogous cases.

The only thing that can keep the Senate functioning is collegiality and good faith. During periods of political consensus, for instance, the World War II and early post-war eras, the Senate was a "high functioning" institution: filibusters were rare and the body was legislatively productive. Now, one can no more picture the current Senate producing the original Medicare Act than the old Supreme Soviet having legislated the Bill of Rights.

Far from being a rarity, virtually every bill, every nominee for Senate confirmation and every routine procedural motion is now subject to a Republican filibuster. Under the circumstances, it is no wonder that Washington is gridlocked: legislating has now become war minus the shooting, something one could have observed 80 years ago in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself.

Bachmann shakeup

Could be trouble in the Michele Bachmann campaign. She has faded quite a bit since Rick Perry got in the race, and now her campaign manager, Ed Rollins, and his deputy have stepped down. Rollins is reported to have told someone, "It's a Perry-Romney race."

Is Bachmann done?

Perry pulls out of big GOP presidential forum

This is pretty big news -- Rick Perry is pulling out of a big GOP forum. This was a huge event for Republican candidates to prove how right wing they are.

Apparently, Perry's big prayer meeting for the problems in Texas haven't helped one bit. In fact, things have gotten worse. He's pulling out of the forum to return to the state because of spreading wildfires.

CONWAY, S.C. - Texas Gov. Rick Perry will return to Texas immediately after a morning town hall hosted by Rep. Tim Scott, R-S.C., because of wildfires in Texas, press secretary Robert Black said Monday.

He will miss the presidential forum hosted by Sen. Jim DeMint in Columbia, S.C. that is scheduled for 3 p.m.

Perry's aides say the Texas governor will be at the GOP presidential debate scheduled at the Reagan Library on Wednesday. It will be Perry's first debate appearance since he declared his presidential candidacy.

Perry’s prayers not working very well

God is REALLY not listening to Rick Perry's prayers. If prayer is going to be a Perry policy for handling the nation's problems, voters should run screaming the other way.

A fast-growing wildfire fanned by winds from Tropical Storm Lee torched an estimated 300 homes near Austin on Sunday, and thousands of people in hundreds more homes had to evacuate overnight.

"It's catastrophic," Texas Forest Service Fire Chief Mark Stanford was quoted by the Austin American-Statesman website as saying. "It's a major natural disaster."

The fire had burned through 14,000 acres and was 16 miles long, threatening some 700 more homes in Bastrop County, just east of Austin. Aerial units estimated that 300 homes were destroyed or damaged.

In neighboring Travis County, fires caused evacuations and burned homes in neighborhoods to the north and west of Austin.

Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton

If Dick Cheney says Hillary Clinton would have been a better president, I guess that makes me happy I voted for Obama.

The Dick Cheney lovefest

Watching Chris Wallace slobber as he shamelessly open-mouth kissed Dick Cheney is not the way I want to spend my Sunday morning. The Hannity nose injection into Cheney ass was more than enough.

Romney’s expanding mansion

Some idiot Romney supporter actually praised Mitt for expanding his California mansion, saying that it will create jobs. He said, “You created more jobs with your house than Barack Obama has in the last three and a half years.”

Uh, yeah, right.

But actually, there IS something Mitt could do that I would respect. A little, anyway. If he hired a construction company that only buys material made in the US, from companies that haven’t shipped jobs overseas, and which is actively hiring Americans to help get the economy moving again, then yeah, I would acknowledge that.

So, will you, Mitt? And if it turns out that this construction company benefitted in any way from an Obama stimulus, will you admit it?

Conservative says it’s un-American to let poor people vote

Do you think it's un-American to let poor people vote? This right wing commentator thinks so.

I give this idiot credit for one thing: Being honest about a core conservative belief that other right wingers are too afraid to admit.

Many conservatives appear to think badly of poor people, but Matthew Vadum of the Capital Research Center takes it a step further. According to the title of his latest article for American Thinker, he believes that "registering the poor to vote is un-American."

"Why are left-wing activist groups so keen on registering the poor to vote?" Vadum asks. "Because they know the poor can be counted on to vote themselves more benefits by electing redistributionist politicians. Welfare recipients are particularly open to demagoguery and bribery."

"Registering them to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals," he continues. "It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country-- which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote. ... Encouraging those who burden society to participate in elections isn't about helping the poor. It's about helping the poor to help themselves to others' money."

Soon you will know the power of the dark side.

The rotting carcass of Dick Cheney doesn't think Sarah Palin is fit to be president.

Congratulations, teabaggers!

Thousands of jobs created per month in 2011 (data source)

Perry & Bachmann go at it

Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann are tearing into each other.

From CNN:

Rick Perry's GOP presidential campaign blasted as "blatantly false" a new ad put up in South Carolina by a pro-Michele Bachmann "superPAC," in a press release Thursday.

The Texas governor's campaign said the ad misrepresents the governor's fiscally conservative record in his state. Veteran political operative Bob Harris is behind the 30-second spot through "Keep Conservatives United," the so-called "super PAC" he founded in July in support of (but independent from) Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann's run for the GOP nomination.

The commercial, much like the group's first web video, takes aim at Perry over his Lone Star state record.

"Rick Perry's spending more money than the state takes in, covering his deficits with record borrowing. And he's supposed to be the tea party guy?" the spot says. "There is an honest conservative, and she's not Rick Perry."

Congress in the way of creating jobs? Obama will sidestep it.

President Obama is rolling out a jobs plan that doesn’t need Congress.

President Obama is either fed up with Congress or he's testing his own administration's mettle. Or both.

On Wednesday, Obama took a now-familiar path in adopting a program--this time a jobs and infrastructure effort--that can happen entirely within his domain. Obama directed several federal agencies to identify "high-impact, job-creating infrastructure projects" that can be expedited now, without congressional approval.

One week before he will make a major address to Congress on jobs, Obama is making sure they know he plans to move forward without them. The president has also directed the Education Department to come up with a "Plan B" updating the 2001 No Child Left Behind law in the absence of congressional action. The message to Congress is clear: Do your work or we'll do it for you.

Under Wednesday's order, the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, and Transportation will each select up to three high-priority infrastructure projects that can be completed within the control and jurisdiction of the federal government. The effort is labeled as a "common-sense approach" to spurring job growth "in the near term." In practical terms, that means speeding up the permitting and waiver processes for green-building or highway projects to get the government out of the way. One of businesses' foremost complaints with government infrastructure projects is that the paperwork is too cumbersome and creates unnecessary delays, according to White House economic advisers.