Jon Chait notes that as the passage of healthcare reform nears, the right wing is going into freak-out mode even more than usual, which is saying something. Exhibit A: Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN):
"Mark my words, the American people aren't gonna take this lying down," Bachmann later said. "We aren't gonna play their game, we're not gonna pay their taxes. They want us to pay for this? Because we don't have to. We don't have to. We don't have to follow a bill that isn't law. That's not the American way, and that's not what we're going to do."
Bachmann continued. "Because it's one-party rule now in Washington, D.C. Their Chicago tactics, their Chicago friends, twisting Democrats' arms, threatening their own team members with ethics charges and a submission. This handful of people thinks (sic) they can enforce their will on 300 million Americans? They're not gonna do that. This is dictatorial, what they are doing. We are not compelled to follow a non-law just because Obama and Pelosi tells us we have to."
David Brooks gets all sentimental and weepy over the lack of comity in the Senate because the Democrats might use reconciliation to pass the healthcare bill.
Once partisan reconciliation is used for this bill, it will be used for everything, now and forever. The Senate will be the House. The remnants of person-to-person relationships, with their sympathy and sentiment, will be snuffed out. We will live amid the relationships of group versus group, party versus party, inhumanity versus inhumanity.
We have a political culture in which the word “reconciliation” has come to mean “bitter division.” With increasing effectiveness, the system bleaches out normal behavior and the normal instincts of human sympathy.
I suppose it would be pointless to remind Mr. Brooks that President Bush's tax cuts passed in the Senate in 2003 through reconciliation and then only by the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Cheney. And then last month we were treated to the spectacle of Senators Jim Bunning and Richard Shelby, both Republicans, bringing the Senate to a screeching halt because of their personal vendettas. I don't seem to recall that he used those as examples as the end of civilized discourse as we know it.
Being lectured about the loss of civility in Congress by a Republican is like getting a lesson in table manners from an alligator.
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J.D. Hayworth, former Congressman from Arizona, is trying to unseat John McCain in the GOP primary for Senate. One of his more novel approaches is to go after the horsey set.
Former Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-Ariz.) said Sunday that the expansion of state laws allowing gay marriage could lead to people marrying horses.
Hayworth, during an interview with an Orlando, Fla., radio station explained: "You see, the Massachusetts Supreme Court, when it started this move toward same-sex marriage, actually defined marriage — now get this — it defined marriage as simply, 'the establishment of intimacy.'"
"Now how dangerous is that?" asked Hayworth, who is challenging Sen. John McCain from the right in Arizona's GOP Senate primary.
"I mean, I don't mean to be absurd about it, but I guess I can make the point of absurdity with an absurd point," he continued. "I guess that would mean if you really had affection for your horse, I guess you could marry your horse."
He's right, since a horse is capable of reading, understanding, and signing a legally-binding contract.
Well, not just any horse, of course.
If there's a Mrs. Hayworth, can she be busted for marrying a horse's ass? Fetch more...
Virginia Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, has a tea party.
As Virginia Thomas tells it in her soft-spoken, Midwestern cadence, the story of her involvement in the "tea party" movement is the tale of an average citizen in action.
"I am an ordinary citizen from Omaha, Neb., who just may have the chance to preserve liberty along with you and other people like you," she said at a recent panel discussion with tea party leaders in Washington. Thomas went on to count herself among those energized into action by President Obama's "hard-left agenda."
But Thomas is no ordinary activist.
She is the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and she has launched a tea-party-linked group that could test the traditional notions of political impartiality for the court.
In January, Virginia Thomas created Liberty Central Inc., a nonprofit lobbying group whose website will organize activism around a set of conservative "core principles," she said.
The group plans to issue score cards for Congress members and be involved in the November election, although Thomas would not specify how. She said it would accept donations from various sources -- including corporations -- as allowed under campaign finance rules recently loosened by the Supreme Court.
"I adore all the new citizen patriots who are rising up across this country," Thomas, who goes by Ginni, said on the panel at the Conservative Political Action Conference. "I have felt called to the front lines with you, with my fellow citizens, to preserve what made America great."
Let's not fool ourselves, folks. If the husband of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had ever held a MoveOn.org meeting, there would be calls for her impeachment before the sun went down.
Jamison Foser from Media Matters looks at what the liberal media is up to.
For a few weeks last fall, editors and ombudsmen at The Washington Post and New York Times seemed obsessed with the idea that they should be paying more attention to right-wing media and websites. In the wake of some wildly hyperbolic claims about ACORN, the nation's leading news outlets apologized for being too slow to run chasing after every "scandal" ginned up by Andrew Breitbart, Glenn Beck, and their ilk.
[...]
The hand-wringing at the Post and the Times about being insufficiently attuned to conservative arguments should ring false to any fair-minded person who remembers the role those papers played in the relentless hyping of Clinton-era non-scandals, their heavily slanted coverage of the 2000 presidential campaign, or their disastrously inadequate coverage of the Bush administration's march to war. (Alexander and the Post editors have ducked requests that they reconcile the paper's coverage of those events with their statements that the Post needs to be more responsive to conservatives.)
But even worse than the myopic view of their treatment of conservatives over the years was the misguided premise that the media should pay attention to certain people simply because they are ideologically conservative -- as if a person's ideology, rather than the accuracy and honesty and importance of his claims, determines whether he should be taken seriously.
That's dangerously wrong. It's the kind of thinking that leads the media to grant equal weight to scientists who say the Earth is warming and politicians who respond by pointing out the continued existence of snow.
I realize that newspapers and TV chat shows feel that they have an obligation to present both sides of an argument, but they also have an obligation to call out obvious distortions and falsehoods, regardless of whether or not there's a blowback from the blowhards, and it tells you a great deal when the toughest interviewer on television today is Jon Stewart.
What the papers and the networks are doing isn't journalism; it's stenography.
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Okay, here's a first: a theatre in Key West turned down my play Can't Live Without You because, in their words, it's "too good." They want plays for development, and they said it was already fully developed. So that means if I write a crappy play they'll do it?
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Ross Douthat reviews the new film The Green Zone, an Iraqi war action movie starring Matt Damon about the search for non-existent WMD's. He wonders why Hollywood can't make movies that deal with "political complexities" -- meaning, in this case, that don't make the Bush administration look bad, and laments,
Our nation might be less divided, and our debates less poisonous, if more artists were capable of showing us the ironies, ambiguities and tragedies inherent in our politics — rather than comforting us with portraits of a world divided cleanly into good and evil.
I guess Mr. Douthat never saw any of John Wayne's war films like "Flying Leathernecks" or "The Fighting Seebees." They were just loaded with political complexities.
I wonder if Mr. Douthat understands the idea behind art. Portraying the world as divided between good and evil is what it does most of the time (ever read Shakespeare or Sophocles?). The last thing art is supposed to do is act as a remedy for our political differences; if anything, it succeeds when it emphasizes them.
Besides, the cherished demographic of a Hollywood action movie is men between the ages of 18 and 34. They're not going to the movies to see political complexities. They're going to see things get blown up.
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"None dare call it journalism" -- Howell Raines, former executive editor of The New York Times, takes on his fellow journalists.
Why has our profession, through its general silence -- or only spasmodic protest -- helped Fox legitimize a style of journalism that is dishonest in its intellectual process, untrustworthy in its conclusions and biased in its gestalt? The standard answer is economics, as represented by the collapse of print newspapers and of audience share at CBS, NBC and ABC. Some prominent print journalists are now cheering Rupert Murdoch, the head of News Corp. (which owns the Fox network) for his alleged commitment to print, as evidenced by his willingness to lose money on the New York Post and gamble the overall profitability of his company on the survival of the Wall Street Journal. This is like congratulating museums for preserving antique masterpieces while ignoring their predatory methods of collecting.
Why can't American journalists steeped in the traditional values of their profession be loud and candid about the fact that Murdoch does not belong to our team? His importation of the loose rules of British tabloid journalism, including blatant political alliances, started our slide to quasi-news. His British papers famously promoted Margaret Thatcher's political career, with the expectation that she would open the nation's airwaves to Murdoch's cable channels. Ed Koch once told me he could not have been elected mayor of New York without the boosterism of the New York Post.
As for Fox's campaign against the Obama administration, perhaps the only traditional network star to put Ailes on the spot, at least a little, has been his friend, the venerable Barbara Walters, who was hosting This Week, ABC's Sunday morning talk show. More accurately, she allowed another guest, Arianna Huffington, to belabor Ailes recently about his biased coverage of Obama. Ailes countered that he should be judged as a producer of ratings rather than a journalist -- audience is his only yardstick. While true as far as it goes, this hair-splitting defense purports to absolve Ailes of responsibility for creating a news department whose raison d'etre is to dictate the outcome of our nation's political discourse.
THE opening salvo, fired on Fox News during Thanksgiving week, aroused little notice: Dana Perino, the former White House press secretary, declared that “we did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term.” Rudy Giuliani upped the ante on ABC’s “Good Morning America” in January. “We had no domestic attacks under Bush,” he said. “We’ve had one under Obama.” (He apparently meant the Fort Hood shootings.)
Now the revisionist floodgates have opened with the simultaneous arrival of Karl Rove’s memoir and Keep America Safe, a new right-wing noise machine invented by Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz and the inevitable William Kristol. This gang’s rewriting of history knows few bounds. To hear them tell it, 9/11 was so completely Bill Clinton’s fault that it retroactively happened while he was still in office. The Bush White House is equally blameless for the post-9/11 resurgence of the Taliban, Al Qaeda and Iran. Instead it’s President Obama who is endangering America by coddling terrorists and stopping torture.
Could any of this non-reality-based shtick stick? So far the answer is No. Rove’s book and Keep America Safe could be the best political news for the White House in some time. This new eruption of misinformation and rancor vividly reminds Americans why they couldn’t wait for Bush and Cheney to leave Washington.
But the old regime’s attack squads are relentless and shameless. The Obama administration, which put the brakes on any new investigations into Bush-Cheney national security malfeasance upon taking office, will sooner or later have to strike back. Once the Bush-Cheney failures in Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran again come home to roost, as they undoubtedly and explosively will, someone will have to remind our amnesia-prone nation who really enabled America’s enemies in the run-up to 9/11 and in its aftermath.
[...]
If we are really to keep America safe, it’s essential we remember exactly which American politicians empowered Iran, Al Qaeda and the Taliban from 2001 to 2008, and why. History will be repeated not only if we forget it, but also if we let it be rewritten by those whose ideological zealotry and boneheaded decisions have made America less safe to this day.
Colorblind -- Leonard Pitts, Jr. on proving that looks are deceiving.
Evil is not a color.
It has no particular religion with Middle Eastern accents and exotic head gear, they said, and leave the rest of us alone.
Jihad Jane is the reason that's a dumb idea. She is, according to published reports and photos, 4'11'' tall, 105 pounds and 46 years of age, with pale skin, blonde hair and blue eyes. She is, literally, a citizen of Main Street, USA, having made her home on that thoroughfare in the Philadelphia suburb of Pennsburg where she was a caretaker for her boyfriend's father. Until, that is, she disappeared, along with her boyfriend's passport, which she allegedly intended to give to her terrorist fiance.
There are several good arguments against profiling. It's morally wrong. It's an abridgement of civil liberties.
But the most compelling of them is embodied by Jihad Jane. Put aside squishy appeals to conscience and principle and deal instead with hard pragmatism. Pragmatism will tell you that to concentrate solely on swarthy Middle Eastern men is to turn a blind eye to everyone else. But as demonstrated by LaRose, by convicted terrorists Richard Reid, Jose Padilla, and John Walker Lindh, and any number of others here and abroad, terror comes in both genders and all cultures and shades.
Those of us who are born here rarely get a chance to see what it's like to become a naturalized citizen of the United States. It takes dedication, money, and a lot of time, and you've got to want it to get it. That is a form of patriotism that goes far beyond the flag-waving at a parade on the Fourth of July and the chest-thumping of "We're Number One!" at a hockey game. (And I wonder how many of us could pass the test.)
The promise that this country and its citizens offers to people who come here is based on the understanding that they will keep up their end of the contract: they will contribute to the betterment of each of us. Citizenship is not a free ride, nor is it a parade, and when someone from Scotland or Namibia or Canada or South Korea or Cuba or Mexico or China or the Netherlands or Portugal or St. Kitts spends the time and treasure to join us, it enriches us all.
The Texas School Board textbook committee has banished Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence and the third President of the United States, has been swept onto the ashheap of history and replaced by a housewife from Alton, Illinois as a prominent figure in American history.
Battles over what to put in science and history books have taken place for years in the 20 states where state boards must adopt textbooks, most notably in California and Texas. But rarely in recent history has a group of conservative board members left such a mark on a social studies curriculum.
Efforts by Hispanic board members to include more Latino figures as role models for the state’s large Hispanic population were consistently defeated, prompting one member, Mary Helen Berlanga, to storm out of a meeting late Thursday night, saying, “They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist.”
“They are going overboard, they are not experts, they are not historians,” she said. “They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world.”
The curriculum standards will now be published in a state register, opening them up for 30 days of public comment. A final vote will be taken in May, but given the Republican dominance of the board, it is unlikely that many changes will be made.
[...]
The conservative members maintain that they are trying to correct what they see as a liberal bias among the teachers who proposed the curriculum. To that end, they made dozens of minor changes aimed at calling into question, among other things, concepts like the separation of church and state and the secular nature of the American Revolution.
“I reject the notion by the left of a constitutional separation of church and state,” said David Bradley, a conservative from Beaumont who works in real estate. “I have $1,000 for the charity of your choice if you can find it in the Constitution.”
They also included a plank to ensure that students learn about “the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association.”
[...]
Even the course on world history did not escape the board’s scalpel.
Cynthia Dunbar, a lawyer from Richmond who is a strict constitutionalist and thinks the nation was founded on Christian beliefs, managed to cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. (Jefferson is not well liked among conservatives on the board because he coined the term “separation between church and state.”)
“The Enlightenment was not the only philosophy on which these revolutions were based,” Ms. Dunbar said.
Separation of church and state: Out. Contract with America: In. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.: Out. Jerry Falwell: In.
What is stunningly ironic is that this committee, in their attempt to fight the perceived liberal bias of history and remove any taint of "political correctness," is doing exactly what they accuse the academics of having done: re-writing history with an undeniable slant to serve their political point of view. It also demonstrates a deep level of insecurity in their own beliefs. Any true historian or scientist would have no problem whatsoever with allowing students to read about all of history, warts and all, and, in the words of Jefferson, "let Facts be submitted to a candid world."
1. To render a public school education all but worthless by teaching blatant lies and distortions, thereby advancing the long-desired rightwing meme is, in fact, worthless and should be eliminated.
2. As long as there must be a public education system, indoctrinate children to in [sic] the lie that rightwing/christianist authoritorianism is a core American value and not, in fact, the very antithesis of the Americanism the Founders intended.
The one saving grace is that in my career as a teacher, I know that when it comes down to what goes on in the classroom, any teacher worth his or her dedication to learning will not only use the approved texts but go far beyond it and point out that what the Texas Board of Education lays out as their standards is only a starting point in the classroom. And when it comes down to using the book itself, they will find that it makes a really good doorstop.
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Marco Rubio, who's running as a fiscal conservative, doesn't have a problem spending other peoples' money. The Miami Herald has the story.
About $600,000 in contributions was stowed in two inconspicuous political committees controlled by Rubio, now the Republican front-runner for the U.S. Senate, and his wife. A Miami Herald/St. Petersburg Times analysis of the expenses found:
• Rubio failed to disclose $34,000 in expenses -- including $7,000 he paid himself -- for one of the committees in 2003 and 2004, as required by state law.
• One committee paid relatives nearly $14,000 for what was incorrectly described to the IRS as ''courier fees'' and listed a nonexistent address for one of them. Another committee paid $5,700 to his wife, who was listed as the treasurer, much of it for ''gas and meals.''
• Rubio billed more than $51,000 in unidentified ''travel expenses'' to three different credit cards -- nearly one-quarter of the committee's entire haul. Charges are not required to be itemized, but other lawmakers detailed almost all of their committee expenses.
Rubio's spending continued in 2005 when the Republican Party of Florida handed him a credit card to use at his own discretion. While serving as House speaker in 2007 and 2008, he charged thousands of dollars in restaurant tabs to the state party at the same time taxpayers were subsidizing his meals in Tallahassee.
Of course his campaign came out with a defense.
''Every single thing Marco Rubio did was in accordance with both the letter and spirit, not only of Florida law, but of the policies and practices of the Republican Party of Florida,'' said Rubio campaign advisor Todd Harris, though he admitted the $34,000 in expenses should have been reported. ''While every penny was accounted for, not all of the bureaucratic paperwork was filed and we will take whatever steps are appropriate to make sure that gets done.''
He added, ''This is not taxpayer money we're talking about.''
Oh, that pesky paperwork; it's such a pain. Whether or not it was taxpayer money, it sure makes Mr. Rubio look like a big old hypocrite as some kind of fiscal conservative. He's like any other rock star who suddenly had people throwing money at him: he loves the attention and the benefits. How do you like him now, teabaggers?
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Watch out, America: Barack Obama is going after your fishing tackle.
In a March 9, post titled, "Obama's war on fishing?!?!?!" Michelle Malkin posted the ESPN column's claim that "[t]he Obama administration will accept no more public input for a federal strategy that could prohibit U.S. citizens from fishing the nation's oceans, coastal areas, Great Lakes, and even inland waters." Malkin added, "Longtime readers know I love to fish and have been at war with the anti-fishing nuts at PETA for years."
What I want to know is why Michelle Malkin isn't writing for The Onion.
There's been some buzz that Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) was a real up-and-comer in the GOP and even got some qualified praise from President Obama for his attempts to reach across the aisle with his budget proposals that would cut the deficit, cut taxes, and bring about economic recovery. It sounded all very nice and bipartisan.
Well, give the guy credit for trying, but according to a non-partisan group that gave his budget plans a thorough going-over, it is fantasy.
According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, "the Ryan plan would result in very large revenue losses relative to current policies."
[The Tax Policy Center] estimates that even with its middle-class tax increases, the plan would reduce federal revenues to 16 percent of GDP in 2014. Because the tax cuts for the wealthy would dwarf the tax increases for the middle class, the Ryan plan would allow the federal debt to continue growing for a number of decades to come, despite its steep cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.
The result, they conclude, is ballooning, unsustainable deficits--a quirky feature for a plan touted far and wide for its potential to right the country's fiscal course.
But the rich would still get their tax cuts, so it's all good.
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Not that it really matters in the larger scheme of things, but the exit of Dr. James Dobson from Focus on the Family, the ironically-named religious-right lobby that he founded, was not without some in-fighting and rancor.
Just goes to show you that when you spend your time minding everybody else's business and telling them what to do, you neglect your own. Or, as the bumper sticker says, "Focus on your own family."
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First, thanks for all the nice responses to yesterday's QotD. It's interesting to see where people come from -- especially from sites I didn't know had heard of this little blog -- and why they stick around. So that leads -- sorta -- to this:
How many blogs do you read on average daily? (And feel free to recommend some for the BBWW blogroll.)
Probably twenty or thirty with great regularity, mostly as a lurker. I know that's not a lot, but I have a full-time job that precludes browsing during working hours, and when I get home at night, I'm not really inclined to read much on-line. Fetch more...
I've noted this before, but it's a good point and John Cole does it very succinctly.
When did the Republicans become such whiners? Was it always this way, because right now the entire party seems to be based on a perpetual whine. The elitists don't like us. The media is unfair. The Democrats aren't being bi-partisan. They want to force gay cocks down our throats. They want to raise my taxes. Jon Stewart was mean to Marc Thiessen. Katie Couric asked mean questions.
On and on and on and on. Nothing but grievance after grievance building into one long sustained whine....
He was speaking specifically about Chief Justice John Roberts and his petulant tantrum about being criticized in public by President Obama. The answer to John's point is that this is what they do. And as Steve M notes, it works.
It works because it solves a problem in modern politics, one that affects both parties: what do you do to sustain the loyalty of a large number of ordinary American voters when you either can't improve their lives (because your fat-cat donors won't let you) or won't improve their lives (because you actually agree with the notion that helping fat cats is the proper way to govern)?
Well, if you're not going to make voters happy by doing anything for them, you can at least show them you feel their pain. Democrats do it by campaigning on some variant on New Deal-ism -- which they then abandon as soon as they're in office. Republicans? They show they feel voters' pain by whining about political and cultural insults -- which is just what their base voters do. And that's something they can do every day, even as they're failing to improve the lives of the people who voted for them. Their voters love them for it. And Democrats don't have anything like it.
It is the easiest thing in the world to do, too. They're not responsible for the terrible state of the world; someone else is, and boy, they'd better do something about it. So you win an election, get into office, run the country into the ground to the point that they throw you out, then spend the next cycle whining about how crappy things got -- for which you bear full responsibility -- and demanding that someone else fix it. What could be simpler? They don't even have to work hard to find the people to blame: The Gays, the brown people, the immigrants, the women with their uncontrollable uterus; they're all out there conspiring against them. Then once they get back into office, they don't do anything about what they were complaining about in the first place. But that was never the idea, anyway; they just want to win the election.
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Jon Stewart did an extensive interview with Marc Thiessen, the former speechwriter for George W. Bush, Washington Post columnist, torture enabler, and defender of witch-hunting. It's in three parts, and it's a scary insight into the bland and blase mindset of the people who ran this country for eight years and didn't really seem to think that screwing over the rule of law and the Constitution was all that bad.
Frankly I admire Jon Stewart for keeping his cool and not climbing over the desk and showing him his own version of enhanced interrogation. And I also wonder why such a good interviewer is working on Comedy Central while the Village People like David Gregory are doing Meet the Press. Oh, that liberal media.
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Marco Rubio has a two-to-one lead over Gov. Charlie Crist in the Florida Republican primary for the Senate.
The numbers: Rubio 60%, Crist 26%. This is nearly identical to yesterday's survey from Public Policy Polling (D), which put Rubio ahead by 60%-28%. The TPM Poll Average puts Rubio ahead by 56.2%-28.9%.
InsiderAdvantage CEO Matt Towery told the Florida Times-Union: "I can tell you that I'm in shock because I was convinced that other pollsters were using some sort of system to strain for ultra-Republicans or something that was skewing the polls to the conservative side."
I’ve been a military lawyer for almost 30 years, I represented people as a defense attorney in the military that were charged with some pretty horrific acts, and I gave them my all. This system of justice that we’re so proud of in America requires the unpopular to have an advocate and every time a defense lawyer fights to make the government do their job, that defense lawyer has made us all safer.
Some readers at the Washington Post were upset to see a picture of two men kissing in celebration of the beginning of marriage equality in the District of Columbia.
“I am 65 years old and I realize that the world is changing rapidly – much more rapidly than I would like it to,” she e-mailed. “While I realize that the Post must report on these changes – even the ones with which I do not agree – I feel that the picture on Thursday morning was an affront to the majority of your readership. It is not something that I want coming into my home. I believe that even your editors know that it would have been better placed in the Metro section and that it would have mitigated its impact to do so.”
Wrote Lee Miller of Columbia: “I would appreciate it if your cover pictures would not be so disturbing where my kids can see it easily on the kitchen table… please don’t shove this “Gay” business in our face. This is something that should have shown up on an inside page or two (without the picture).”
And I find it disturbing that someone is upset about two people celebrating their love in public. As for shoving "this 'Gay' business in [their] face," how about all those straight people walking hand-in-hand down the street or -- GASP! -- pushing a stroller with baby in it: we all know where babies come from.
I wonder if these people also write in to protest when the Post puts pictures of earthquake or torture victims on the front page and demand that they shield their children from them. Somehow I doubt it.
Chief Justice John Roberts is upset that President Obama criticized the Supreme Court during the State of the Union speech.
Speaking to a law school class today in Alabama, Roberts said while anyone is free to criticize the court, the sight of a president dressing down the justices in front of Congress was "very troubling."
Roberts said he wonders if justices should attend State of the Union addresses anymore.
Put a robe on a guy and all of a sudden he becomes a pissy queen.
To quote Oliver Willis, "It’s as if President Obama thinks that the Court and the Presidency are co-equal branches of government, when everyone knows that the Supreme Court rules above us all."
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There was a march in Washington yesterday by folks protesting Big Insurance.
The bodies of dozens of “insurance victims” are splayed down a stretch of 22nd Street near a Ritz-Carlton hotel in Washington’s DuPont Circle, where demonstrators gathered earlier left them as a sign of the frustration against the insurance industry’s opposition to an overhaul of the nation’s health care system.
The bodies, pastel-colored stencils in the asphalt representing the estimated 45,000 people who die each year without health insurance, had eulogies describing how “big insurance” killed them. Inside the hotel, the industry lobby America’s Health Insurance Plans, was holding a legislative conference.
Former Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont and Richard Trumka, the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. labor federation, appeared in front of the dense crowd, which filled 22nd Street between New Hampshire Avenue and M Street.
But since no one carried a picture of an insurance company president with a Hitler mustache, Fox News didn't cover it live.
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Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI), who is threatening to take down the entire healthcare bill over a question about abortion that has already been answered, has drawn a primary challenger.
Connie Saltonstall of Charlevoix said today she plans to run against Stupak for the Democratic nomination of Michigan’s First Congressional District, citing Stupak’s efforts to stop health care reform if it doesn’t ban use of government money for abortions. Stupak, a former state trooper from Menominee, has held the seat since 1993.
This year and last, Stupak has made a name for himself as a thorn in the side of some congressional Democrats pushing legislation for health care reform. While largely supportive of those efforts, he successfully attached an amendment last fall to ban use of federal funds to help pay for abortions.
“I believe that he has a right to his personal, religious views, but to deprive his constituents of needed health care reform because of those views is reprehensible,” Saltonstall said in a statement.
I used to live in Mr. Stupak's district and while it is not a flaming hotbed of progressivism, the people of that part of Michigan are also pretty tolerant of the idea of live and let live. Mr. Stupak's fixation with a single issue may endear him with the anti-abortion crowd, but there are enough people in that part of the state -- which includes the entire Upper Peninsula -- who are struggling with healthcare and economic problems that they wonder about who he's really fighting for.
I think the only question left after former Rep. Eric Massa's media blip of the last few days is who will play him in the inevitable episode of Law & Order?
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The opinions expressed in the postings on this site are, unless otherwise noted, solely those of the author (me). I take no responsibility for the opinions or contents expressed in referenced links or websites. The opinions expressed in the Comments section are solely those of their author and are subject to editing or deletion for offensive content.
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Stop That Noise!
