August 8, 2014

Rand Paul is the new flip-flop king: How he’s purging his scary positions — and lying about it

Rand Paul is trying to rebrand himself as a crossover candidate -- by running furiously from his freakiest stances

SIMON MALOY

Good news, everyone. We’ve managed to elect a government so disastrously inept and so thoroughly incapable of projecting an image of basic competence that the libertarians are getting a renewed burst of public attention. “Has the ‘Libertarian Moment’ Finally Arrived?” asks Robert Draper’s lengthy New York Times piece on the limited-government movement that’s eager to capitalize on our deep, bipartisan dissatisfaction with the people we keep electing to office. “Today, for perhaps the first time, the libertarian movement appears to have genuine political momentum on its side,” Draper writes.

The best expression of that momentum is the fact that Rand Paul, Kentucky’s libertarian/conservative/Tea Party/Republican senator, is considered a credible candidate for the presidency in 2016. And to hear Paul’s supporters – and quite a few media types – say it, the senator has “broad” or “crossover” appeal that derives from his proud libertarian heritage. Sure he’s a tax-cutting, regulation-shredding, small-government conservative, but he also opposes military adventurism of the sort that landed us in Iraq. “Rand is the Republican who has the best chance of keeping and energizing the base while going into their constituencies,” a Paul aide told the Daily Beast. “It’s kind of dangerous to have a Republican like Rand.”

Of course, Rand Paul has learned what libertarians have known ever since the movement began: People tend not to vote for libertarians. And so while he’s sticking to anti-interventionist foreign policies and opposition to the war on drugs, he’s also busily shedding large chunks of his libertarian past. If Rand Paul has “crossover” appeal, it’s not because he espouses libertarian positions – it’s because he’s purging himself of his own principles.

Pretty much every politician who wants to be elected president dabbles in moderation to some extent. They make a calculation: If I temper my stance on issue X, some people will call me a flip-flopper, but more people will vote for me. Most of the time, those politicians go through the sometimes genuine, though mostly contrived, explanations for why they’ve “evolved” on that issue. But Rand Paul’s not bothering to own up to his shifting ideology. He’s replacing the extreme positions he once vociferously defended with mish-mashes of conservative pablum and denying that he ever once let libertarian dogma take him down some very scary paths.

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http://www.salon.com/2014/08/08/rand_paul_is_the_new_flip_flop_king_how_hes_purging_his_scary_positions_and_lying_about_it/

August 8, 2014

The new Richard Nixon lie: John Dean on why he would have loved the Tea Party

On anniversary of Nixon's fall, John Dean talks Tea Party, taking out Gordon Liddy & Watergate conspiracy theories

DAVID DALEY

This week marks the 40th anniversary of Richard Nixon’s resignation, just steps ahead of likely removal from office for the Watergate coverup. In his new book, “The Nixon Defense,” John Dean — Nixon’s legal counsel during Watergate — has generated an amazing historic record. He transcribed all of the Oval Office tapes related to Watergate and allows them to stand as a guide to what the president knew and when he knew it.

Nixon does not come out looking good. While some of these tapes were transcribed earlier by historian Stanley Kutler, and others were transcribed by Watergate prosecutors, no one has published a complete record until now. And it’s clearer than ever, from these transcripts, that Nixon helped encourage and orchestrate the White House coverup as soon as the days after the burglars were arrested in June 1972 inside the Democratic National Committee headquarters.

Dean himself remains a fascinating figure. For going into the Oval Office in March 1973 and telling Nixon that the Watergate coverup has created a cancer growing on the presidency, he’ll always be considered by some to be one of the honest men inside a corrupt White House. To others, Dean is a turncoat, a traitor, an architect of the coverup who switched sides when it became legally necessary and politically expedient. There are even conspiracy theories that place him at the center of everything.

In a wide-ranging conversation last week at the Warwick Hotel in Manhattan, we talked about Nixon’s role in the coverup, what he might have done differently, and about what it takes to tell the president that there’s a cancer growing inside the presidency. We also worked through some of the alternate Watergate theories, most interestingly the one where Watergate burglars with CIA ties intentionally sabotaged the operation. And Dean said that while Nixon has gotten credit for a progressive domestic agenda, it was the priority of one aide, and he wasn’t interested in it.

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http://www.salon.com/2014/08/08/john_dean_on_richard_nixon_hes_in_the_middle_of_this_its_for_him_blessed_by_him/

August 8, 2014

U.S. airstrikes target Islamic State militants in northern Iraq

Source: Washington Post

By Karen DeYoung and Loveday Morris August 8 at 8:58 AM

U.S. military aircraft carried out airstrikes on Islamist militants besieging Kurdish forces in northern Iraq, the Pentagon announced Friday.

The airstrikes targeted artillery being used by militants of the Islamic State extremist group against Kurdish forces defending the Irbil, the Kurdish regional capital, the Pentagon said. It said the artillery was used “near U.S. personnel.”

The U.S. action came after President Obama authorized airstrikes against Sunni Muslim extremists who punctured Kurdish defenses in a powerful offensive in northern Iraq on Thursday. Obama also sent U.S. military aircraft to drop food and water to besieged Iraqi civilians in the region.

Obama, in a statement delivered at the White House late Thursday, said that strikes would be launched against extremist convoys “should they move toward” the Kurdish capital of Irbil, where the United States maintains a consulate and a joint operations center with the Iraqi military.

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Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/islamic-state-militants-seize-christian-town-in-northern-iraq-thousands-flee/2014/08/07/942a553a-1e2b-11e4-ab7b-696c295ddfd1_story.html?wpisrc=al_national

August 8, 2014

First remains identified among 55 bodies found at notorious FL reform school

Source: Reuters

George Owen Smith, a 14-year-old caught with an older boy in a stolen car, was sent in 1940 to a reform school in the Florida Panhandle, never to be seen again by his family.

His remains became the first to be identified among 55 bodies dug up from unmarked graves last year on the campus of the Dozier School for Boys, the University of South Florida announced on Thursday.

The school, infamous for accounts of brutality told by former inmates, was closed by the state in 2011.

“It feels pretty good, really after 73 years. It’s a feeling of relief,” Ovell Krell, 85, Smith’s younger sister, told Reuters on receiving confirmation of his whereabouts.

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Read more: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/08/08/first-remains-identified-among-55-bodies-found-at-notorious-fl-reform-school/

August 8, 2014

Karl Rove super PAC pushes another fake Obamacare horror story in Colorado ad

A commercial produced by Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS super PAC criticizing the Affordable Care Act is the latest to use a horror story that’s been debunked, KDVR-TV reported.

In the ad, a woman identified as “Richelle” describes herself as part of a “single income family” that could not afford healthcare under the law, commonly known as Obamacare, when her husband decided to form his own business. Text flashing on the screen says, “Richelle had to go back to work.”

“Sen. Mark Udall’s (D-CO) vote for Obamacare has hurt families in Colorado for small business owners that are trying to make it and support their family,” she says in the ad. “Mark Udall should repeal Obamacare.”

The ad closes with a message urging viewers to contact Udall and ask him to support a bill that would repeal the law.

In reality, however, Richelle McKim’s LinkedIn profile revealed that she has been steadily employed since July 2008, when she worked from home for her husband’s company. Since leaving that position in May 2010, she has also worked for Wattenberg Anadarko Petroleum and her current employer, Noble Energy. Between them, both companies have donated $93,550 in campaign contributions for state Rep. Cory Gardner (R), who is running to unseat Udall.

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http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/08/08/karl-rove-super-pac-pushes-another-fake-obamacare-horror-story-in-colorado-ad/

August 8, 2014

It’s Do or Die for Scott Walker in Wisconsin

David Freedlander

The controversial Republican governor is in a dangerously close re-election race—and even a too-narrow victory could give the GOP doubts about a presidential candidacy in 2016.

In less than three months, Scott Walker will either be a top-tier candidate for president of the United States, or he will be forgotten, consigned to a footnote of history.

Right now, it is impossible to predict which is more likely.

Polls showing the Wisconsin Republican governor tied with his Democratic opponent, Trek Bicycle executive Mary Burke, with less than 90 days to go before voters head to the polls, even though Burke has been outspent and remains little-known to many voters.

“I think there is some truth to the claim that these polls have oversampled Democrats,” said Brandon Scholz, a Republican consultant out of out Madison, WI. “But having said that, this is a close race. That is not a closely-held secret around here.”

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/08/it-s-do-or-die-for-scott-walker-in-wisconsin.html

August 8, 2014

The Big, Long, 30-Year Conservative Lie

Monica Potts

Inequality, conservatives insist, is natural. Trying to combat it will slow growth. Well, guess who now says otherwise? Standard and Poor’s.

First came Occupy Wall Street, and its pitch-perfect slogan on inequality: “We are the 99 percent.” After that movement fizzled, Thomas Piketty, the handsomely ruffled French professor, released a 685-page book explaining that we really were living in a new Gilded Age in which the wealth gap was as wide as it had ever been. Finally, in June, one of the plutocrats sitting atop the piles of money he made in the digital revolution, Nick Hanauer, wrote an article in Politico magazine—it’s the most-shared story ever on Politico’s Facebook page—warning that the pitchforks were coming, and rich people like him should advocate for a healthier middle class and a higher minimum wage.

The debate over inequality is now raging, and most Americans are unhappy about the widening divide between the haves and have-nots. Hanauer has been making the same case for years, drawing heaps of both praise and scorn. Forbes magazine has alternately called Hanauer insane and ignorant. His TED University presentation calling for a $15-minimum wage was left off the organization’s website because it was deemed too “political.” That’s nothing next to Piketty’s detractors, who at their most extreme accused him of twisting his data.

Hanauer and Piketty inspire these broadsides because they are challenging, in a far more aggressive way than plutocrats and economists usually do, the conservative economic orthodoxy that has reigned since at least the 1980s. Under Ronald Reagan, we called it trickle-down economics, the idea that the men who can afford their own private jets—they’re usually men—deserve gobs of money because they provide some special entrepreneurial or innovative talent that drives the American economy.

That’s well known. Far less often discussed is the flipside of this belief: that helping the less well off will dampen the American money-generating engine—that it will hurt growth, because the only thing that inspires the “job creators” to work so hard is the promise of insanely vast financial rewards. Poverty is a necessary evil in this worldview, and helping the less well off creates a “culture of dependency,” which discourages work. “The United States thrives because of a culture of opportunity that encourages work and disdains relying on handouts,” Matthew Spalding of The Heritage Foundation wrote in 2012, neatly summing up the conservative ethos.

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/08/the-big-long-30-year-conservative-lie.html

August 8, 2014

Iraqi and Kurdish officials welcome US airdrops

Source: ASSOCIATED PRESS

BAGHDAD (AP) — Iraqi and Kurdish officials have welcomed the U.S. decision to authorize airdrops of humanitarian aid and airstrikes in northern Iraq to counter advancing Sunni radical militants.

A string of victories across the north of the country by the radical Islamic State group and their allies have sent Iraq’s minorities fleeing for their lives, exacerbating the country’s already-dire humanitarian crisis with another 200,000 displaced.

“We thank Barack Obama,” said Khalid Jamal Alber, of the Ministry of Religious Affairs for the Kurdish autonomous region of northern Iraq. “Kurdistan is the place for religious minorities.” Iraq’s Ministry of the Displaced also welcomed the aid drops.

The announcements by President Obama reflected the deepest American engagement in Iraq since U.S. troops withdrew in late 2011 after nearly a decade of war.

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Read more: http://www.salon.com/2014/08/08/iraqi_and_kurdish_officials_welcome_us_airdrops/

August 8, 2014

Victoria Jackson loses bid for Tenn. county seat

Source: ASSOCIATED PRESS

THOMPSON STATION, Tenn. (AP) — Former “Saturday Night Live” cast member Victoria Jackson has lost her bid as an independent candidate for a seat on a county commission in Tennessee.

Jackson, who calls herself a tea party conservative, moved to Thompson Station last year and said she filed as an independent to run for the Williamson County Commission because she’s “very disappointed with the Republican Party.”

The Tennessean (http://tnne.ws/1q001hp) reports Jackson received 632 votes. Two others received more votes: Judy Lynch Herbert with 1,422 and Betsy Hester with 1,380. The County Commission has two commissioners in each of its 12 districts.

Jackson had made appearances at multiple political events in Middle Tennessee since making her home there.

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Read more: http://www.salon.com/2014/08/08/victoria_jackson_loses_bid_for_tenn_county_seat/

August 7, 2014

Pentagon Denies NYT Report That U.S. Bombed ISIS Targets In Iraq

Source: TPM

By CAITLIN MACNEAL Published AUGUST 7, 2014, 5:43 PM EDT

Kurdish officials reported that he U.S. on Thursday night bombed ISIS targets in northern Iraq in an attempt to help free residents of two Kurdish towns seized by the insurgents, according to the New York Times.

Pentagon press secretary Rear Adm. John Kirby quickly denied the report.

According to the Times, Kurdish television reported the bombings Thursday night. ABC News reported that the U.S. is sending cargo planes with humanitarian supplies to drop to Iraqi citizens trapped in the towns seized by the insurgents.

The Pentagon also denied the reports of air drops.

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Read more: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/report-us-bomb-targets-iraq