Irony Alert: GOP contenders take turns bashing Wall Street

Republican presidential candidates are increasingly adopting anti-Wall Street rhetoric, as they assail Democrats’ tactics to rein in big banks and appeal to voters’ distrust of the financial sector.

In recent weeks, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry declared he is "fed up" with Wall Street's antics, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) slammed Goldman Sachs and Ohio Gov. John Kasich derided the banking industry as rife with greed.

The fiery language comes as the landmark 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law nears its fifth anniversary next month. The Democrat-backed statute, Congress’s response to the 2008 economic crisis, put into place hundreds of new regulations, including new designations for “systemically important” financial institutions.

"We have more banks with more concentrated assets in the United States, and the systematic risk is perhaps greater now than it was when the law was signed," former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) told reporters this month.


http://thehill.com/policy/finance/244859-gop-contenders-take-turns-bashing-wall-street

Josh Marshall: Rachel Dolezal isn't 'transracial', she's a liar.

I read the Rachel Dolezal story before it got picked up by any national outlets in the original story in the Coeur d'Alene Press on Thursday (yes, epic aggregation fail ... what can I say I was traveling). If you've only read pick-ups or follow-ups, read the original if you get a chance. It's an amazing piece of reporting and will make you appreciate what a great thing small paper journalism is - just an amazingly detailed piece of shoe-leather reporting. Since I read it I've been trying to think what if anything there is to add beyond the peristaltic WTF that seems to be the near universal response.

So let me just go with bullet points.

Point 1: The one simple thing is the online debate about whether Dolezal is simply 'transracial' like Caitlyn Jenner is transgender. No. It's not like that. In fact, I think we can dispense with this entirely because I have not seen anyone suggesting this anywhere online who wasn't just some wingnut concern-trolling transgenderism and frankly racial identity itself. You can dress yourself up however you want and identify however you want. But when you start making up black parents and all the rest that went into this story, you're just lying. Full stop.

When I was a little boy I lived in a very mixed race environment. My mother's best friend and her best friend's sister (among many other biracial couple in their social set) were both married to African-American men. They, obviously, had African-American children. And in a thousand little ways they had acclimated and identified with the African-American family, social sets and even to some degree the broader African-American culture they had become part of. All except for the part of them being ... well, WHITE. What identification, solidarity, whatever was what it was. They weren't making up phony life stories.

Skin color tone is biological. But race really is a social construct, as my grad school prof, Doug Cope, helped me understand. And often, especially for racially ambiguous people, it's a permeable one. But if you invent black parents and say you were born in a teepee you're just lying. As for the folks pushing 'transracialism', please just shut up. You're either guilty of malicious provocation or you're just really stupid.


http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/severely-black-the-rachel-dolezal-story

TV anchor thanks Obama for saving his life with ACA

Capping a weeklong defense of the Affordable Care Act, President Obama sat down with a cancer-surviving "Extra" anchor who thanked the president for saving his life.

“You pretty much saved my finances and my life,” Extra correspondent Jerry Penacoli, who suffered from stage 3 melanoma and early-stage thyroid cancer, told Obama in a rare Rose Garden interview.

The interview marks Obama’s third appearance discussing the healthcare law this week, at a time when the Supreme Court could decide any day on a case that could disrupt coverage for millions.

In the friendly exchange on Thursday, Obama described Penacoli as the “perfect example” of someone who has benefittted from the healthcare law. If not for the law, Penacoli would have hit the "lifetime limits" on his coverage and been forced to foot the bill for cancer treatments.


http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/244815-obama-sits-down-with-cancer-surviving-anchor-during-healthcare-push

Rachel Dolezal's Adopted Brother Claims She Told Him Not to 'Blow Her Cover'

In a new interview, one of Rachel Dolezal's adopted siblings calls her apparently years-long disguise as biracial "basically blackface" and said she asked him years earlier not to "blow her cover."

"She just told me, 'Over here, I'm going to be considered black, and I have a black father. Don't blow my cover,' " Ezra Dolezal, who is of African-American descent, told BuzzFeed.

Rachel's parents first outed her to local media in Spokane, Washington, where she is the head of the local NAACP; and they have said she has no trace of African American ethnicity.

Ezra offered this theory for Rachel's alleged deception: He claims she said she was mistreated as one of the few white students at Howard University, a historically black college, where she graduated in 2002.

"She used to tell us that teachers treated her differently than other people and a lot of them acted like they didn’t want her there," Ezra told Buzzfeed. "Because of her work in African-American art, they thought she was a black student during her application, but they ended up with a white person."


http://www.people.com/article/rachel-dolezal-brother-ezra-interview

After Sexist Comments From Tim Hunt, Female Scientists Show Just How ‘Distractingly Sexy’ They Can Be

Female scientists took to Twitter this week to fire back at a Nobel laureate who said he was in favor of sex-segregated labs because women are distracting and “fall in love with you” and cry “when you criticize them.”

Nobel Prize-winning scientist Tim Hunt made his comments Monday during a speech at the World Conference of Science Journalists in South Korea.

"Let me tell you about my trouble with girls,” Hunt said at the conference. “Three things happen when they are in the lab: you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them they cry."

Female scientists responded to Hunt’s sexist comments by uploading photos of themselves using the hashtag “#DistractinglySexy.”



Some call me a dirty girl, some call me a soil scientist. #distractinglysexy #womeninscience

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/tim-hunt-distractingly-sexy-scientists

Nothing to see here. Just our Second Amendment in action.

The man who launched an early morning attack on the Dallas Police headquarters has a history with law authorities, causing a lockdown in 2013 after threatening to kill his family and shoot up schools and churches near Paris, Texas.

A man who identified himself as James Boulware, 35, was reportedly shot and killed by police this morning after launching an attack on police headquarters from a heavily armored van — described by its manufacturer as a “Zombie Apocalypse Assault Vehicle and Troop Transport” — firing on police cruisers and leaving bombs in the parking lot.

In 2013 , Boulware was involved in a family argument, choking his mother and assaulting his uncle, before going to his brother’s house in Paris, where he took multiple weapons, ammo, and body armor, according to KXII.

Later, during a “face time” call over the Internet, he threatened to kill all of the adult members of his family, as well as making a vague threat about schools or churches along the way.


http://www.rawstory.com/2015/06/dallas-shooter-was-a-conspiracy-theorist-who-threatened-to-shoot-up-schools-and-churches-reports/comments/

Bill Maher compreas Fox News Sraff to Game of Thrones characters.

On HBO’s Real Time, host Bill Maher gave a backhanded compliment to Fox News host Megyn Kelly, admitting that she is awful, while at the same time lauding her for being the sanest of a bad bunch at Fox that includes Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity.

Addressing her less than artful comment that Dajerria Becton, the McKinney teen who was assaulted by officer Eric Casebolt, was “no saint,” Maher accused Kelly of being “overtaken by clueless white girl syndrome.”

“But of course now we’re at the inevitable stage where Rush Limbaugh and Fox News try to figure out how the victim was really a thug who had it coming, Maher explained. ” Megyn Kelly was talking sensibly the other day about the 15-year-old girl who had her face pushed down into the lawn, when suddenly Megyn was overtaken by clueless white girl syndrome, and she said the girl is no saint either.No saint, yeah, because she lingered.”

Maher the noted that Kelley reminded him of another blonde on TV, Daenerys Targaryen, the “Mother of Dragon’s” on HBO’s Game of Thrones.

“It reminded me, it’s that we think of Megyn Kelly as the sane one over there at Fox News. That’s just because she’s surrounded by Hannity and Bill O’Reilly,” Maher said. She’s like the blonde dragon girl on Game of Thrones. Everyone else is a zombie, or a dwarf, or f*cking their sister, so she looks normal.”


http://www.rawstory.com/2015/06/bill-maher-on-sane-megyn-kelley-everyone-else-at-fox-news-is-a-zombie-a-dwarf-or-fcking-their-sister/

'Liberal' M$NBC host Alex Wagner scrambles to Bush family's aid.

During a segment of Thursday afternoon’s Now on MSNBC, Washington Post reporter Janell Ross intimated that likely GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush is hiding a major family scandal, causing host Alex Wagner to scramble to distance the network from such unverified claims.

While discussing Bush’s controversial 1995 comments about single mothers, Ross said, “I was rather stunned, I guess, to hear that these things had been written in a book at a time when the governor probably had his own issues that he was struggling with in his personal life.”

She added: “It seems like a strange time in your life to suggest that public shaming is a good way to address problems.”

“Explain,” requested an intrigued Wagner. “You’re intimating something there.”

“I am and I’m trying to be as delicate as possible,” Ross replied, “but, in all honesty, the governor has some own issues in his own family that some might argue are worthy of some public discussion or shaming.”

Wagner immediately clarified for the audience that MSNBC is unaffiliated with any such reports. “To be fair, none of those have been corroborated,” she said. “We have no reporting on that; NBC News cannot report on that. You are a reporter for the Washington Post.”


http://www.mediaite.com/tv/msnbc-guest-suggests-jeb-bush-has-family-scandal-alex-wagner-distances-from-claim/

California Republican suggests abortion is responsible for epic drought

A California state Republican has a novel new solution to the state’s crippling drought: Ban abortions and God will let it rain.

State Assemblywoman Shannon Grove is under fire for suggesting that abortion was to blame for California’s water woes in comments before advocates and religious leaders at the California ProLife Legislative Banquet last week. In her remarks, first reported by RH Reality Check, Grove tipped her hat to Texas for passing an omnibus anti-abortion bill in 2013 – a move she suggests prompted God to pay it forward.

“Texas was in a long period of drought until Governor Perry signed the fetal pain bill,” Grove said, according to RH Reality Check. “It rained that night. Now God has His hold on California.”

Following a flurry of headlines over her comments, Grove went on to defend her point to her critics on Facebook and walk back her remark.

“Is this drought caused by God? Nobody knows. But biblical history shows a consequence to man’s actions; we do know for sure that California’s water shortage crisis has been compounded by liberal politicians’ poor decisions - not properly managing our water resources and refusing to build water storage for decades,” Gove wrote.


http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/republican-suggests-abortion-responsible-epic-drought

Jeb Bush to women on welfare in 1994: 'Get a husband'

Washington (CNN)Jeb Bush insisted during his unsuccessful first run for the Florida governor's office that an alternative to welfare for women is to "find a husband."

The Republican 2016 presidential contender's comments came in the heat of a 1994 campaign that has come back to haunt him -- particularly as he seeks to run an inclusive campaign aimed at broadening the GOP's appeal.

That year, Bush, with a more strident style and in a different era in the debate over welfare reform, saw a controversial remark he made in July seized on by reporters and by his opponent. Bush said that marriage is one of three options for women to get off welfare assistance.

"If people are mentally and physically able to work, they should be able to do so within a two-year period. They should be able to get their life together and find a husband, find a job, find other alternatives in terms of private charity or a combination of all three," Bush said....

In 1994, when Republican primary opponent Jim Smith hit Bush for those comments in a television commercial, Bush didn't back away in a September news conference.

"How you get on welfare is by not having a husband in the house -- let's be honest here," he said.

"Men are not on welfare, that's the point," Bush said. "That's the point -- men are not on AFDC."


http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/11/politics/jeb-bush-to-women-on-welfare-in-1994-get-a-husband/