July 29, 2014

Why does the GOP keep saying President Obama is not American? They have nothing else!

The question remains: why do Republicans come back, over and over, to this kind of thing, to peddling a cocktail of fear mixed with hate? They've got nothing else. They can't sell their right-wing policies as actually working because there's no data to back that up. They can't even sell their policies as logical because, well, they aren't.

So what can Republicans do? Get people afraid. Afraid of "them," the brown president and the brown hordes at the border. In reality the people at the border are refugees and children. To Republicans, that doesn't matter and it certainly doesn't inspire compassion. Steve King's anti-immigration ally Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) has been harping about the supposed "diseases" these children are carrying.

This is all about fear, about making people afraid of what America is becoming, of what America already is. Republicans are counting on the fact that fear makes people do stupid things. Like voting Republican.



http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/07/27/1316345/-Wanna-know-why-Republicans-can-t-give-up-calling-Obama-not-American-They-ve-got-nothing-else

July 17, 2014

Darrell Issa Abruptly Ends Hearing Before Witness Can Debunk His Attacks

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, seemed to catch everyone off guard Wednesday when he suddenly pulled the plug on his committee hearing before witnesses could even testify.

Issa read his opening statement for the hearing on potential abuses of taxpayer funds by the White House's new political office, and let his Democratic counterpart, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), read his statement before declaring the hearing over. Two witnesses who came prepared to testify were dismissed. A source who was in the hearing said one of Issa's witnesses, Carolyn Lerner, the director of the independent Office of Special Counsel, appeared to leave angrily.


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/16/darrell-issa-hearing_n_5592009.html

July 16, 2014

Sen. Elezabeth Warren hard at work trying to get the GOP to do what is fair

This Senator is Spot On.

July 15, 2014

Conservative Groups Move To Kill GOP's Highway Trust Fund Bill, But Republicans Aren't Nervous

WASHINGTON -- The last likely opportunity for Congress to avoid completely draining the nation’s highway budget will present itself on Tuesday afternoon.

Though a Republican proposal to temporarily extend the Highway Trust Fund gained notable opposition Monday from two powerful conservative groups, leaders from both parties expressed optimism that the extension would pass.


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/14/highway-trust-fund-dave-camp_n_5586360.html

July 15, 2014

Rock Star reception greets Elizabeth Warren

SHEPHERDSTOWN, W.Va. — Populist Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) got a rock-star reception during a standing-room-only campaign rally here Monday, as hundreds of liberal activists cheered her broadsides against corporate interests and voiced hopes that her presence might shift the political winds in an increasingly Republican state.

Snip.....

“Our job is to fight for the families of America,” Warren said, speaking to a packed ballroom at the Clarion Hotel in West Virginia’s eastern panhandle. “Stitch up the tax loopholes so that millionaires and billionaires pay at the same tax rate as the people in this room.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/progressives-turn-from-obama-to-embrace-warren/2014/07/14/e117aca2-0b62-11e4-b8e5-d0de80767fc2_story.html

July 12, 2014

GOP House Votes For Tax Breaks To Add $287 Billion More To Deficit

WASHINGTON -- The GOP-led House of Representatives embraced a former stimulus measure Friday, voting to make it and another related tax cut permanent, adding $287 billion to the deficit over the next 10 years.

The largest part of the cut, worth more than $263 billion, is making permanent so-called bonus depreciation, which allows businesses to write off the cost of capital investments and improvements much more quickly.


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/11/tax-breaks_n_5577957.html


More Tax Cuts for the Rich and corporations.

GOP Motto!

July 12, 2014

Justice Scalia has used his platform to mobilize GOP base

BILL MOYERS: You have covered the court, Linda, since 1978. In that context what do you make of the Roberts court?

LINDA GREENHOUSE: Ah, so I try to think generously about the court, you know. But I think it’s hard for anybody looking at this court objectively to come away not thinking that it’s a court in pursuit of an agenda. And I’m sorry to say, I think that agenda maps on pretty closely to a Republican Party platform in things that– in the hot button issues that many of us care the most about.

BILL MOYERS: And is that unique in the years you’ve covered the court?

LINDA GREENHOUSE: I have to say so, yes, in terms of a five-member coalition having coalesced for those results. Not that there haven’t been conservative versus liberal splits on the court always. And I covered the transition between the Burger court to the Rehnquist court. And certainly Chief Justice Rehnquist had an agenda, was kind of a states’ rights agenda that he was pretty successful in accomplishing.

But what we see now, I think, is a much broader effort across more areas on constitutional doctrine that really touch the lives of people, whether it’s religion, speech, politics and so on. So it’s something that I find quite concerning.

DAHLIA LITHWICK: I agree. I think that, you know, you need look no farther than the win record of places like the Chamber of Commerce, you know, big business at the court is having its winningest few seasons under the auspices of the John Roberts court. And these are, you know, business interests that used to win, you know, 50 percent of the time, 60 percent of the time. And in the last few years between 70 percent and 80 percent of the time, issues on which the Chamber of Commerce and other pro-business lobbies get involved in cases, we’re looking at huge win rates.

And I think that if you look at the architecture of unraveling the sort of Warren court revolution, what the court stood for, you cannot look at the Roberts court and say that they’ve done anything other than systemically unravel voting rights, women’s rights, worker’s rights, environmental progress. It’s a pretty palpable and I think unequivocal trend.

BILL MOYERS: I think you’ve also written that the right on the court is further right than mainstream conservatives.

DAHLIA LITHWICK: Well, I think that there’s two things. One is that it’s absolutely clear (and I think this is empirically proven), that for the last few decades everybody who retires on the court is replaced by someone either slightly to their right or significantly to their right. So the court has not kept apace with, you know, mainstream legal thought. The court has torqued more and more to the right.

And I do think that on some of these issues, notably birth control, which we saw kind of I guess somewhat illuminated in the Hobby Lobby discussion, this is a view of birth control that is not at all in step, I think, with where the American public is on birth control. And so I think in that sense the court isn’t simply to the right of sort of mainstream legal thought but dramatically to the right of the rest of the country.

LINDA GREENHOUSE: So you had Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas way out there and you had Chief Justice Roberts I think misinterpreted by many people as steering a moderate middle course. What he was doing was, as he’s been doing all along, steering a strategic course to tee up the court to ultimately be in a place where he’d like it to be, but he doesn’t need it to be there all at once.


http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/07/11/court-watchers-tell-bill-moyers-justice-scalia-has-used-his-platform-to-mobilize-gop-base/

July 11, 2014

Alex Jones sinks to a new low, calling Michelle Obama ‘the First Tranny’

Right-wing radio host Alex Jones posted a report online today in which he urged listeners to seriously consider the truth behind Joan Rivers’ statement that Barack Obama is the first gay president because his wife, Michelle, is a “tranny.”

“Well, Joan Rivers talked about it the other day, and now it’s an international news story,” he said. “The question is, ‘Who is Michelle Obama? Is she really a woman? Is she a man?’”

“Now, I’m not drawing any conclusions here,” Jones continued, “but I know this — it’s fair to question anything and everything this administration says. I can’t think of an administration in history that’s been caught with such a perfect record of everything they say and do being a lie or a fraud.”

“These people are the authors of such tyranny that they shouldn’t whine and complain when the public doesn’t believe anything they’re saying — especially when every time I look at ‘Michelle’ or ‘Michael’ Obama, the First Lady, or First Tranny, something doesn’t look right.”

“She doesn’t look like any black woman I’ve ever known,” Jones said. “She’s got shoulders that are wider than a man’s, which physiologically doesn’t happen. You can put three heads on a man’s shoulders, and two heads on a woman’s shoulders — that’s a known anatomy.”


http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/07/10/alex-jones-sinks-to-a-new-low-calling-michelle-obama-the-first-tranny/



They really do hate President Obama. They hate him with every breath they take.

July 10, 2014

Obamacare Surprise! Republicans love it!

Republicans Who Signed Up For Obamacare This Year Are Pretty Happy


Republicans who signed up for Obamacare this year are liking their new insurance coverage, according to a new survey.

A poll of Obamacare enrollees published Thursday by the Commonwealth Fund found that 74 percent of newly insured Republicans are happy with the plans they bought. Overall, 77 percent of people who had insurance prior to the rollout of the Affordable Care Act said they are pleased with the new coverage they obtained in the last year.

The survey revealed the current uninsured rate among working-age adults in the U.S. has dropped to 15 percent, down from 20 percent in July-September 2013 -- meaning an estimated 9.5 million people have gained coverage since then.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/10/republicans-health-insurance_n_5574079.html

July 10, 2014

Report: $6.6 trillion lost on Bush tax cuts actually cost Americans $6.6 trillion in personal income

Report: $6.6 trillion lost on Bush tax cuts could pay all student loans, car loans, credit cards


A new report argues that the Bush tax cuts actually cost Americans $6.6 trillion in personal income — more than enough to pay for every student loan, car loan and credit card debt in the U.S.

In an Al Jazeera America column on Wednesday, investigative reporter David Cay Johnston calculated the average income of Americans between 2001 and 2012 — the years President George W. Bush’s tax cuts were in effect. After adjusting for inflation he compared that income with the average income in 2000, and determined that $6.6 trillion was missing.

“Consider what $48,000 of additional income over those 12 years would have meant to you,” Johnston wrote. “It is the equivalent of $11 appearing in your wallet every morning from the start of 2001 through the end of 2012.”

“Had that $6.6 trillion shortfall been realized as income, it would have been enough to pay off all the student loans in United States ($1.26 trillion), all the automobile loans ($892 billion) and all the credit card debt ($827 billion),” he noted. “After paying all that debt off and taking taxes into account, Americans still would have more than $2.4 trillion left in their pockets and bank accounts.”



http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/07/10/report-6-6-trillion-lost-on-bush-tax-cuts-could-pay-all-student-loans-car-loans-credit-cards/