Extemely close and incredibly Max.
Chat about whatevs.
by Tim F| 23 Comments
This post is in: Dog Blogging, Open Threads
by Tim F| 51 Comments
This post is in: Republican Stupidity
Now it all makes sense.
[There] could be no grand bargain with Republicans to do the very serious work of forcing austerity on the nation because Obama hurt Paul Ryan’s fee-fees. If Jackie Calmes is to be believed, Republicans would have been there to strike that bargain, if only Obama hadn’t slighted Ryan. And the nation would be saved from the terrible deficit. Instead, we learn, Obama has abandoned the issue and has “emphasized job-creation spending and tax cuts more than deficit reduction.” Like that’s a bad thing.
I swear this sort of thing happens every time. Newt would have loved to work with Clinton on the budget, but he just couldn’t get over that time Clinton sat him in the back of the plane. GOP Senators could have worked with Obama on his healthcare law, but he accepted their invitation and embarrassed them at their own convention. Now we know that Paul Ryan wanted to compromise on the budget until Obama said some mean things about his plan in a speech. How many examples can you remember?
Some people might see this as transparent excuse-making by emotional three-year olds who understandably want to rewrite the record of their last destructive political tantrum. I can see how a person might think that, but if you give these guys the benefit of the doubt you’d see that the legendary bipartisan consensus could be here tomorrow if Democrats would just stop being rude. I bet we will hear about this tomorrow on FOX.
***update***
Thanks, Steve!
House Republicans blamed the failure of the $700 billion Wall Street rescue plan Monday on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.), saying that Pelosi had been too partisan in a floor speech prior to the vote.
by Imani Gandy (ABL)| 96 Comments
This post is in: Vagina Outrage
Pennsylvania is going all-in on the War on Women. Like Alabama, it requires your urgent attention. HB 1077 faces a full vote in mid-March. Call or email Governor Corbett. Sign this petition. (Pennsylvanianians, search for and call your representative.)
Yes, I mixed my metaphors, but do you really want me to make an “all-in/poker/vagina” joke? I didn’t think so. Let’s just cut right to the chase, shall we?
From Raw Story:
Even as the transvaginal ultrasound bill in Virginia was causing national outrage, Pennsylvania conservatives were quietly pushing a even more restrictive abortion bill. The legislation is designed with so many difficult and differing restrictions that long-time abortion policy analyst Elizabeth Nash at the Guttmacher Institute told Raw Story, “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
#WaronWomen: Pennsylvania State-Sanctioned Rape Law is Most Cruel YetPost + Comments (96)
by Betty Cracker| 104 Comments
This post is in: Gun nuts, Fucked-up-edness, General Stupidity
There was a school shooting in Ohio today. One seventeen-year-old kid is dead. Four students are in the hospital with gunshot wounds. One kid is in custody for the shooting. And about 1,100 more Americans now know that sick feeling of being trapped in a building with an armed crazy person bent on murder. That’s just the kids who were at the school. I’m not even talking about the helpless, nauseated feeling their parents must have endured.
I know a little something about how the uninjured kids at that school felt today. Many years ago, an angry nut case walked into an office building where I was working and opened fire, killing three and wounding two more. I know what it’s like to hunker down in your “safe place,” the minutes crawling by while police conduct a room-to-room search for a madman. You whisper nervously with your scared-shitless colleagues about who is missing, who might be dead. You contemplate pissing in a trashcan because you’re afraid to leave the locked room you’re in. You watch that locked door with your heart in your throat, hoping you don’t see the handle turning or, worse yet, bullets flying through the flimsy wooden barrier.
And you know what? That kind of experience is just not so rare anymore. I bet at least a couple of you could recount similar incidents.
by John Cole| 81 Comments
This post is in: Domestic Politics, Religion, General Stupidity
Via the Great Orange Satan, Cardinal Francis George has decided the Catholic church gets to dictate what happens to lady parts of they should just burn it all down:
What will happen if the HHS regulations are not rescinded? A Catholic institution, so far as I can see right now, will have one of four choices: 1) secularize itself, breaking its connection to the church, her moral and social teachings and the oversight of its ministry by the local bishop. This is a form of theft. It means the church will not be permitted to have an institutional voice in public life. 2) Pay exorbitant annual fines to avoid paying for insurance policies that cover abortifacient drugs, artificial contraception and sterilization. This is not economically sustainable. 3) Sell the institution to a non-Catholic group or to a local government. 4) Close down.
Actually, I quite like option #3. Sell it to a non-Catholic group, and use the proceeds to pay back the thousands upon thousands of the Church’s sexual abuse victims around the world.
This post is in: Open Threads, Republican Stupidity
The scent of GOP flopsweat permeates the pixels. Erick “Voice of the GOP Gated Community” Erickson, whinging about “The Elephant in the Room“:
He was the elephant in the room, so to speak, at the CNN Debate in Mesa, AZ. And this issue is why Campaign 2012 on the Republican side is so depressing.
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The he is George W. Bush. And the issue is that Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney spent most of the debate campaigning against George W. Bush without using his name…
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And that is what is so awful about this election season for so many conservatives. Santorum, Romney, and Gingrich are campaigning against major accomplishments of the Bush Administration that they, at the time, supported, and now have the audacity to lie to us — yes they are lying — and have us believe they would never have supported such big government programs…
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Here’s the long and the short of it — Super Tuesday approaches. I live in Georgia. And I am pretty sure I am voting for either Herman Cain or Rick Perry because I am just not sold on the final four.
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Doghouse Riley mocks “the GOP’s Great and Small White Hopes“:
To me the twin mysteries of the 2012 Republican sweepstakes are these: 1) when did Republicans become so anti-Republican? and 2) why do people keep going to Mitch Daniels for quotes?…
Christie, appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” twice said he does not want to enter the contest. “I’m with Governor Romney,” he said. “And one of the things people know about me is that when I make up my mind, it pretty much stays made.”
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Daniels reiterated his long-standing position that he will not run. “I haven’t played any games with anybody,” he said in an interview. “Nothing has changed.”
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Still, he acknowledged that the nomination battle has kept the possibility of a late entrant alive.“The fact that no one has sewn it up like previous cycles means it’s a relevant question,” said Daniels, who is neutral about the race. “It wouldn’t have been a relevant question in previous cycles. This one’s different in so many ways.”Yeah. Because your party’s had it in so many ways. Just not in any ways which causes any of you shills, mouthpieces, and privateers to admit that something’s seriously wrong. And not in ways that prevent you from having a 50% chance of getting power, and a 100% chance that whoever does get power will help you stay in the game. By god, I hate to admit it, but it was the people suckered by your “grassroots” Teabagger routine who came closer to changing our politics than anyone since the ’68 Democratic convention. Found a shallow grave, didn’t they?
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Cast that Giant Brain around for a minute, Mitchkin. Climb down from the Ego Train (wait till the Redcap shows up with the kiddie steps) and look. They’re talking about you and Chris Christie as the party’s saviors. And you presume to lecture the rest of us with apocalyptic nightmares?
Even the Media Village’s premier Mean Girl, exquisitely sensitive to every faint change in the DC winds (or windbags) curls her lip at the Ghastly Outdated Party:
Republicans have a growing panic at the thought of going down the drain with a loser, missing their chance at capturing the Senate and giving back all those House seats won in 2010. More and more, they openly yearn for a fresh candidate, including Jeb Bush, who does, after all, have experience at shoplifting presidential victories at the last minute.
Schadenfreude! It may not make a nourishing meal, but it sure is a tasty condiment. What other dainties are on the table this evening?
Monday Evening Open Thread: That’ll Leave A MarkPost + Comments (29)
by E.D. Kain| 29 Comments
This post is in: Politics
According to a new Gallup poll Americans are pretty much split evenly on whether or not we should repeal the new healthcare law. But as with any other government program, Americans are only against it in the abstract. Americans hate the mandate, largely because it’s called a mandate, but love parts of the bill that end pre-existing condition clauses. Of course, you can’t really have a system of private insurance that allows anybody to get a plan at any time without a mandate, so we’re stuck with the good and the bad.
The healthcare law is a mixed bag. It doesn’t go as far as many wanted it to go – something like single payer, preferably. It changes rather than expands the role of government in providing access to healthcare. It’s inefficient in some ways; in other ways it improves upon the status quo. One thing that sort of irks me about it is how politics forces us to make do with something as ad hoc as all of this. We have Medicaid – administered by the states – and Medicare – administered by the federal government – and now the ACA – administered by the states – and rather than just save tons of money and increase efficiencies enormously by combining all these programs into one federal healthcare program, we have to leave this expensive patchwork in place and then just build upon it (and the patchwork is much worse once you think about how the private insurance system is designed, and the entrenched inefficiencies baked into healthcare writ large including hideously opaque prices…)
In any case, take away the parts that people dislike about the bill and of course people suddenly love it. Talk about it being struck down, and most Americans still imagine that their favorite parts will remain.
If you took away all the fearmongering surrounding the bill, they’d probably be fine with it also. But a steady diet of death panels and threats about tax-hikes has everyone much more frightened than they would otherwise be about a bill that basically just opens up non-employer-based insurance exchanges so that people have just a tiny bit more access to reliable healthcare than they did before. It’s neither a panacea or a government take over. It’s just sort of a step in the right direction and a step in the wrong direction all at the same time, and better – certainly – than doing nothing.
The ACA hurts Obama in swing states, even if people like the bill in pieces; but as James Joyner notes, if Romney gets the GOP nod it may be a moot point anyways.