July 29, 2014

McCain: 'There Just Aren't The Votes There' To Impeach Obama

By CATHERINE THOMPSON Published JULY 29, 2014, 7:01 AM EDT

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said Monday that the votes to impeach President Barack Obama are simply not there in the U.S. Senate, even if Senate Republicans thought the maneuver necessary to stop what they see as an abuse of executive authority.

"We're not gonna impeach the president of the United States. There just aren't the votes there even if we believed that it was warranted," McCain told host Mike Broomhead on Phoenix radio station KFYI.

The Arizona Republican instead encouraged electing a Republican Senate majority as a means of curbing the President's "misbehavior." He also said that impeachment talk among more conservative Republicans presents Democrats with an easy opportunity to fundraise against the GOP.

"I think the Democrats view [impeachment] as a good way to raise money to use against us, and I don't want to let that happen," he told Broomhead. "But I do believe the President has broken more laws by executive order -- let me put it this way, I think he's abused the executive branch in a way I don't recall any other President doing that, by these executive orders that are just directly contrary to the law."

more + audio:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/john-mccain-there-arent-enough-votes-for-impeachment

July 28, 2014

MS Gov Blames Obama For Jump In Uninsured After Refusing To Expand Medicaid

By DANIEL STRAUSS Published JULY 28, 2014, 10:50 AM EDT

Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant (R) blamed President Barack Obama for a reported increase in uninsured Mississipians. The problem is, Bryant didn't acknowledge that he's been a staunch opponent of expanding Medicaid under Obamacare and refused to encourage enrolling in private coverage through Healthcare.gov.

Bryant directed his blame at Obama in response to a question about a WalletHub study that showed an increase in the percentage of uninsured Mississippians. The study found that the uninsured rate increased by 3.34 percentage points to 21.46 percent of Mississippi's population, according to the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal.

"If statistics show that the ill-conceived and so-called Affordable Care Act is resulting in higher rates of uninsured people in Mississippi, I'd say that's yet another example of a broken promise from Barack Obama," Bryant said.

An estimated 137,800 people in Mississippi were left uncovered by health insurance because the state did not expand Medicaid.

more
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/phil-bryant-uninsured-mississippi-blame-obama-expand-medicaid

July 28, 2014

Scott Brown supporter calls female NH Dem leaders ‘fascist c*nts’ in racist email

A noted supporter of former Massachusetts senator Scott Brown, currently running for the U.S. Senate GOP nomination in New Hampshire, responded to an email solicitation he received from a Democratic fundraiser, calling the entire New Hampshire all-female leadership, including Brown’s opponent, “fascist c*nts.” What followed was worse.

According to Buzzfeed, Charles C. Benzing, who had been cited as supporter of Brown in a July 9 press release from the Brown campaign, sent the letter to the fundraiser on July 16. Benzing was one of one hundred people listed in the press release as ‘grassroots supporters.’

In the letter, Benzing, begins by expressing his displeasure at receiving the solicitation, referring to the women as “fascist c*nts.”

In a shocking display of racism and misogyny, the letter continued: “These four whores have been and will continue to be wrapped up in their fantasies of sucking n*gger/spic cock and licking n*gger/spic a**holes and not doing what is important for the country.”

more
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/07/28/scott-brown-supporter-calls-female-nh-dem-leaders-fascist-cnts-in-racist-email/

July 28, 2014

GOP candidate sings ‘Dixie’ as his ‘national anthem’ at Alabama secessionist event

By David Edwards
Monday, July 28, 2014 15:26 EDT

Video has surfaced of a Maryland Republican nominee for Anne Arundel County Council singing “Dixie” as the national anthem at a secession conference in Alabama.

Over the weekend, Grove City College psychology professor and blogger Warren Throckmorton uncovered video of Michael Peroutka speaking to the 2012 League of the South national conference in Wallsboro, Alabama.

Peroutka generated controversy after winning the GOP nomination because he believes that the current U.S. and state governments are no longer valid, and should be destroyed by secession or other means.

“You need to secede and then you need to have the biblical understanding of law and government, and make the applications,” Peroutka told the League of the South in 2012. “So we need to take the biblical understand of law and government into account no matter what the outcome is with respect to the crumbling of the current regime.”

more
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/07/28/watch-gop-candidate-sings-dixie-as-his-national-anthem-at-alabama-secessionist-event/

July 28, 2014

Rand Paul’s Daddy Issues

Olivia Nuzzi

The man that led the Kentucky senator to Washington could prevent him from entering the White House.

Just a few months into his campaign for the Republican nomination for the United States Senate in 2009, Kentucky’s Rand Paul was interviewed by Alex Jones, a noted conspiracy theorist who spreads his message on his syndicated radio show and on his website, Infowars.com. Jones is a moon landing denier who believes the government acted as a guiding hand for the September 11 attacks and the Oklahoma City bombing, buys into the New World Order—the theory that a group of so-called elites are conspiring to form a singular, totalitarian global government—has accused American pop stars of being purveyors of Illuminati mind control—and that’s not even the half of it. Paul, his eyes wide, offered, “I think it’s a little scary in our country that we’re doing what's called ‘political profiling.’ People are worried about profiling people for the color of their skin. Now we’re profiling people for the color of their thought.” For any candidate laboring to gain admittance to America’s most exclusive club, the interview would have seemed an unlikely pit stop—but Rand Paul was not just any candidate.

Jones has recalled encountering Paul for the first time nearly two decades ago, when he heard him on Republic Radio, with personality Mark “Mark from Michigan” Koernke, another conspiracy theorist and part of the militia movement in the 1990s. Paul was on the air, Jones remembered, speaking on behalf of Ron Paul, his father, who was running a tough campaign for reelection to Congress in Texas. “It’s just weird how time flies. [Rand will] probably end up being president if we’re able to turn this country around. He’s got a real shot at it, except for the electronic voting machine fraud. I can read the tea leaves as anyone can,” Jones told his listeners.

Jones was right—about the tea leaves. Paul has secured his status as the early frontrunner for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. He is being baited daily to say, definitively, that he is running. The younger Paul is the successor to the Ron Paul throne. He inherited his fans, his donors, his staff, and his friends in the media. But to continue on the path to the nomination that he is on, he will have to prove that he is mainstream enough to win—which will mean, in part, emancipating himself from the very person who gave him literal and—not so long ago—political life, and from the fringe allies, like Jones, he was handed.

All the while, his father continues to make headlines with his every eyebrow-raising utterance.

more
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/07/28/rand-paul-s-daddy-issues.html

July 28, 2014

GOP’s 30-year spin job is over: Why we are NOT a center-right nation

From minimum wage to the environment to abortion, America is far more liberal than the media or the right admit

JOSHUA SAGER

It is a persistent belief among many in the political and media establishments, fed by decades of right-wing propaganda, that the United States is a “center-right nation” that finds progressives to be far too liberal for mainstream positions of power.

If you look purely at electoral outcomes, those who assert this appear to have a fairly strong point. The last several decades of federal politics have been dominated by center-right policies and truly left-wing politicians have been largely marginalized (e.g., Bernie Sanders). Even Clinton and Obama — the last two Democratic presidents who, theoretically, should be leftists — are corporate-friendly moderates who have triangulated during negotiations with Republicans to pass center-right policy compromises (e.g., Obama’s Heritage Foundation-inspired ACA or the Clinton Defense of Marriage Act compromise).

While electoral results may support the idea of a center-right nation, looking beyond electoral politics — which involve a mixture of policy choices, party politics, fundraising and propaganda — and focusing purely upon raw policy preferences leaves us with an entirely different picture.

Here is a compilation of polling data from various reputable American polling organizations, describing the policy preferences of the Americans people over the last year.

more:
http://www.salon.com/2014/07/28/gops_30_year_spin_job_is_over_why_we_are_not_a_center_right_nation/

July 28, 2014

The “Ted Cruz is smart” trap: Why this garbage is false — and dangerous

The Texas senator convinces all of his enemies to praise his intellect. Here's why they're wrong -- and should stop

NATHAN ROBINSON

Even Ted Cruz’s critics seem to concur on one point: whatever else you might say about him, the man is very smart. Mother Jones magazine has called him the “thinking man’s tea partier.” Josh Marshall, in a mostly withering assessment, made the same obligatory concession to his being an “incredibly bright guy.” Jeffrey Toobin’s recent, ostensibly critical New Yorker profile of Cruz is full of quotes about his being “the smartest guy in the room,” his “sophisticated” constitutional views, and the “extraordinary” erudition of his senior thesis.

Cruz likely finds all of this very pleasing indeed. In his interview with Toobin, Cruz quotes Sun Tzu, saying that “every battle is won before it’s fought. It’s won by choosing the terrain on which it will be fought.” In getting those who despise him to genuflect to his intelligence, Ted Cruz has already won one battle. Jeffrey Toobin may lace his piece with dismissive sneers, yet somehow he still contributes to the ever-growing heap of liberal respect for Cruz’s mental acuity.

But there’s no reason to keep this up. For one thing, it doesn’t seem especially true. It can’t really be that we think Cruz has a sophisticated mind, given that the only thoughts he produces are angry pants-on-fire platitudinous drivel. Even those who lavish praise on his oratory seem to agree that his heat-to-light ratio nears the infinite, and that “thoughtfulness” and Ted Cruz cannot exist in the same room. His only memorable quotes appear to be cheap jokes, and the most notable speech of his entire career is not his own, but Dr. Seuss’. Nobody who has witnessed a few minutes of Cruz’s piece of senatorial performance art would have thought to label him a thinker, were it not for the preexisting consensus that he is one.

more
http://www.salon.com/2014/07/28/the_ted_cruz_is_smart_trap_why_this_garbage_is_false_and_dangerous/

July 26, 2014

Strange bedfellows: Putin, the Chomskyite left and the ghosts of the Cold War

So-called radicals who side with the Russian despot on Ukraine are stuck in a poisoned Cold War narrative

ANDREW O'HEHIR

One of the weirder side effects of the Ukraine crisis and the West’s heated confrontation with Vladimir Putin’s Russia has been the reappearance of all kinds of complicated ideological rifts and conflicts left over from the Cold War. It’s as if the disease that afflicted and divided the world between 1946 and 1991 went into remission for 20-odd years but was never cured; given the right combination of rising temperatures, demagoguery and widespread confusion, the virus woke up and spread in all directions. Another way of looking at this question is that Cold War fever never abated in America but was diverted to other purposes, most notably the unsatisfying and amorphous “war on terror,” in which the goals, the tactics, the strategy and even the enemy were never entirely clear. In that context, the rise of a renewed Russian imperial power was almost a relief to the powers that be. It was like encountering a high school sweetheart who’s still looking foxy at the 20-year reunion dance.

The principal symptom of Cold War virus is a form of bipolar disorder, an insistence on viewing the world in Manichaean terms, divided into warring camps of good and evil, light and darkness. This seems to be such a fundamental component of human psychology that none of us ever resists it entirely; maybe it’s necessary to find absolute moral bedrock somewhere. Among the radical or progressive left, those people most likely to take a critical view of American policy and power, this bipolar disorder has produced many varieties of arcane self-torment and infighting over the years. In the old days, someone on the left was always available to apologize for the worst excesses of Stalin or Mao or Pol Pot or whomever: OK, maybe the Khmer Rouge prison-state wasn’t exactly paradise on earth, but Western aggression was mostly to blame and at least the cadres were fighting Yankee imperialism.

This lamentable tendency to make excuses for the inexcusable, and not infrequently to embrace tinpot tyrants on the flimsiest of ideological grounds, has reappeared alongside other symptoms of Cold War disease. Here’s where my own version of the disorder kicks in, I suppose: I identify with the impulse behind this tendency, but not so much with the results. It’s never a bad thing to be suspicious of the official narrative, as supplied by the State Department and the New York Times, which seeks to present the current Ukrainian crisis as a simplistic confrontation between the “forces of democracy” and the sinister, vodka-infused and quasi-totalitarian Black Hand of Sauron — I mean Putin. Amid the genuine worldwide shock and grief over the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, a heinous war crime presumably committed by pro-Russian rebels with Russian-supplied missiles, it takes rigor and courage (not to mention a certain analytical coldness) to observe that we’re not necessarily seeing the bigger picture.

more
http://www.salon.com/2014/07/26/strange_bedfellows_putin_the_chomskyite_left_and_the_ghosts_of_the_cold_war/

July 25, 2014

The New Gay Agenda, According to Michelle Bachman: Legalize Pedophilia

By Mark Joseph Stern

I generally apply the Fox News principle to Michele Bachmann: Her outbursts of bigoted argle-bargle are so absurdly hateful that they serve as their own best satire. But this week, Bachmann came up with an anti-gay conspiracy theory that, I regret to say, might actually need debunking. On the conservative talk show Faith and Liberty, Bachmann insisted that, once the gay community succeeded in legalizing polygamy, it would set its sights on legalizing pedophilia:



Where did Bachmann get this idea from? Her own feverish, paranoid imagination, of course. The canard that gay people—mostly gay men—are all salacious child predators was once commonly held in America, but today it’s been relegated to the darker corners of the anti-gay right. We shouldn’t be surprised that Bachmann still clings to this vicious myth; this is, after all, the woman who called the Lion King gay propaganda.

In fact, we may have reached a point in the gay rights struggle when, rather than castigating people like Bachmann, we should thank them for admitting what their Christian conservative brethren are too cowardly to say out loud. Surely there’s still a sizable (if shrinking) contingent of Americans who think gays are pedophiles who should be stoned to death. At this stage, they might as well come out of their own closet and show the country what unalloyed homophobia really looks like. In an era when conservatives can soft-peddle their anti-gay animus as respect for “traditional marriage,” it’s refreshing to see someone come out and admit that they’re just plain disgusted by gays. For the first, and probably last, time in her life, Michele Bachmann may have just done the gay rights movement a favor.

###

http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2014/07/25/michelle_bachmann_says_gays_want_to_legalize_pedophilia.html

July 25, 2014

GOP: Lerner's hard drive 'scratched'

House Republicans said Tuesday that new evidence suggests that former IRS official Lois Lerner’s missing emails might have been recoverable, raising new questions about the IRS’s handling of the Tea Party controversy.

Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) said that the committee had learned that Lerner’s hard drive was “scratched,” and that private sector specialists likely could have recovered emails.

IRS technicians also recommended that the agency seek outside help in recovering the emails, before the hard drive was recycled. A Ways and Means spokeswoman said the information came from an analyst with the IRS’s criminal investigations unit, which examined Lerner’s hard drive.

The IRS has said for weeks that Lerner’s hard drive crash left them unable to reproduce all of her emails for more than two years.



Read more: http://thehill.com/policy/finance/213038-gop-lerners-emails-could-have-been-recovered#ixzz38RK9B4QD

The analyst was probably a part of a team made up of analysts; they rejected this leaking analyst's analysis. Wouldn't be surprised to see the analyst being exposed and proclaimed a whistleblower.