Right-wingers starve the IRS and then make up stories about why it can't collect taxes

Right-wingers like to make up stories about who's playing politics with the IRS. It's easier when you've bestowed upon yourself an unlimited license to lie.

by Ken

Throughout tax season we kept hearing horror stories about normal IRS help being unavailable to taxpayers, thanks to the ravages of right-wing budget-cutters. These are, of course, the liars and lunatics who spend their delusional waking hours railing against government waste. Tax collection, of course, isn't government waste. Properly funded, the IRS collects healthy multiples of the money it spends. And while none of us likes paying taxes, they're the price we pay for civilization -- and for the greatest country on earth these worthless slugs keep blithering about.

But are too cheap and thieving to pay for. As we know, they don't like taxes, and neither do the corporate overlords who put and keep them in office. So they make it impossible for the government to collect what it's owed, in order to keep functioning. Of course they don't like government either. Oh, many of the benefits they like fine, but even those they don't like paying for. So they concoct stories making Obamacare the villain. After all, to right-wingers the truth is the enemy. They believe Americans are entitled to the best lies money can buy.

Choose your image: the clowns taking over the circus, or the inmates taking over the asylum. Incredibly, brain-challenged voters have allowed these thieves, predators, and just plain morons not just a hand but a controlling hand in the running of our government. I say, they should all be indicted as part of the criminal conspiracy. I'm thinking death penalty.

Now we begin to get a proper reckoning of the job the scumbags did to cripple American society. The AP's Stephen Ohlemacher reports today, in "8 million phone calls to IRS went unanswered as agency diverted money from taxpayer services":

The IRS' overloaded phone system hung up on more than 8 million taxpayers this filing season as the agency cut millions of dollars from taxpayer services.

For those who weren't disconnected, only 40 percent actually got through to a person. Many of those people had to wait on hold for more than 30 minutes, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said Wednesday.

A new staff report by Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee says the IRS diverted millions from taxpayer services and other areas to pay for President Barack Obama's health law.

At a hearing Wednesday, Koskinen blamed budget cuts approved by Congress. The agency's budget has been cut by $1.2 billion since 2010.

"Customer service, both on the phone and in person has been much far worse than anyone would want," Koskinen told a Ways and Means subcommittee. "It's simply a matter of not having enough people to answer the phones and provide service at our walk-in sites as a result of cuts to our budget."

Koskinen said the agency is required by law to implement the health law, leaving him with few other places to cut. He said the agency requested a total of $600 million over the past two years for computer upgrades to implement the health law as well as a new law requiring foreign banks to report information about U.S. account holders.

"In both years the Congress gave us zero dollars so we had no choice but to look elsewhere," Koskinen said.

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Dementedly truth-free right-wingers double down on their bottom line: "We can't (or just don't wanna) handle the truth!"

This hilarious photo of Chairman Trey -- master of the House's select committee on Benghazi Made-Up Stuff -- was posted with Dana Milbank's column. It looks like the chairman is wearing the suit (and tie) his mommy bought for him the day he first went out selling snake oil.

"The Republican Party has finally admitted what has been fairly obvious for much of the past six years: It produces fake news. This is not an earth-shattering revelation to anybody who has been paying attention, but, still, it's an important step for the party to embrace the phoniness."

-- Dana Milbank, in his Washington Post column
"Republicans embrace their phoniness"

"Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.' "

-- Mary McCarthy, about Lillian Hellman

by Ken

I resurrect Mary McCarthy's famous, er, tribute to Lillian Hellman, made on The Dick Cavett Show in 1979, as a rebuke to prideful right-wingers, who would have us believe that that they invented and perfected the strategy -- nay, the lifestyle -- of lying all the time, with every word, every punctuation mark, every drawn breath.

It's so extreme and so utterly preposteours that it would be hilarious if it was the least bit funny.

What Dana Milbank has picked up on in this column of his called "Republicans embrace their phoniness" is a report by National Journal's Shane Goldmacher which begins:

The National Republican Congressional Committee, which came under fire earlier this year for a deceptive series of fake Democratic candidate websites that it later changed after public outcry, has launched a new set of deceptive websites, this time designed to look like local news sources.

The NRCC has created about two dozen of these new faux news sites targeting Democrats, both challengers and incumbents, and is promoting them across the country with localized Google search ads.

Citing the National Journal report about the new generation of NRCC website fakeries, Dana writes:

These two dozen sites, with names such as “North County Update” and “Central Valley Update” look like political fact-checking sites; the NRCC’s spokeswoman, Andrea Bozek, called it “a new and effective way to disseminate information.”

An NRCC official told me the sites are legal because, if you scroll all the way to the bottom, you’ll find, “Paid for by the National Republican Congressional Committee” in small print. “They’re not fake Web sites,” the official said. “These are real attack Web sites.”

Real attacks, but fake news: This is a fairly accurate summary of what the GOP’s scandalmongers have been purveying during the Obama years.

I guess maybe there has been progress in political hooliganism since Watergate after all. The Nixon crew was waist-deep in all manner of illegalities, and now the NRCC has a paid flack to assure us that this fraud they're perpetrating on the public is by God totally legal! Well, thank goodness and never mind.

Unless of course we remember that the Party of Impeachment actually impeached a president because of his lie about whether he had sex with an intern. Remember all those wacko scumbags wailing, "But he lied"?

DANA WALKS US THROUGH THE ALL-LIES-ALL-THE-TIME
ASSAULTS ON THE MAN THE RIGHT-WINGERS HATE . . .

. . . more even than they hated Bill Clinton, though you would have thought it would be impossible for anyone to hate anyone else more than the right-wingers hated Bill Clinton -- for no identifiable reason except perhaps that with every breath he drew, he reminded them of what polluted, worthless doody they are.

As we know, right-wing Obama hatred has come to make right-wing Bill Clinton hatred look like a bit of gentle ribbing. And so the always-operational Right-Wing Lie Machine has been operating at fever pace all through the present administration. Remember these great moments?

• "There was the assertion that the White House was covering up high-level involvement in Operation 'Fast and Furious,' a gun program under the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco Firearms and Explosives that went awry. No evidence was found."

• "There was the accusation that the Obama White House pushed through money for Solyndra to pay the president's political cronies even though officials knew the solar-energy firm was going bankrupt. Didn't happen that way."

• "Accusation: Obamacare would bring about the collapse of the American health-care system and replace it with socialized medicine and death panels. No such thing has occurred."

• "The IRS scandal, it was alleged, could be traced back to the White House, which targeted Obama’s enemies for political reasons. Nope."

BUT OF COURSE THE TRUTH DOESN'T MATTER

No, that's not what all this is about. Not even if right-wingers believed in truth, which they don't, having been taught since the hallowed ancient days of Elder Ronald of Reagan that reality is whatever makes you feel good to believe -- verification not only not required but frowned upon.

As Dana puts it:

The actual truth of the allegations doesn’t matter. Each one sullied President Obama’s name, and investigators’ failure to deliver the goods did little to remove the taint. That’s why fake news works: Falsehoods can drive a president’s approval rating into the cellar while the truth is still getting out of bed.

"And now," says Dana, "we have the Benghazi exoneration."

For nearly two years, Republicans have been alleging all manner of scandal involving the 2012 attacks on U.S. facilities in the Libyan city. That somebody — Hillary Clinton? — issued a stand-down order to prevent help from getting to American officials under fire; that Clinton rejected pleas for more diplomatic security in Libya; and that the Obama White House pushed false talking points to play down the terrorist attacks before the election.

The accusations have been roundly debunked, most recently in military officers’ testimony released by the GOP-controlled House Armed Services Committee.

Now there’s a bipartisan report, adopted unanimously by the GOP-controlled House Intelligence Committee on July 31, awaiting declassification by the administration. It throws yet another bucket of cold water on the conspiracy theories. In a statement, the top Democrat on the panel, Dutch Ruppersberger (Md.), said the report finds that:

“[T]here was no intelligence failure surrounding the Benghazi attacks.”

“[T]here was no ‘stand down order’ given to American personnel attempting to offer assistance that evening, and no American was left behind.”

“[T]he talking points reflected the conflicting intelligence assessments in the days immediately following the crisis.”

“[T]here was no illegal activity or illegal arms sales occurring at the U.S. facilities in Benghazi.”

“And there was absolutely no evidence, in documents or testimony, that the intelligence community’s assessments were politically motivated in any way.”

The report is not yet public, and Republican sources indicate that there is more disagreement in the report than Ruppersberger’s statement indicates and that the report is not as exculpatory as he implies. But there has been no challenge from the Republican side to the accuracy of the findings Ruppersberger detailed in his statement.

WELL, SO WHAT?

If there's one thing Elder Ronald taught his disciples, it's that the people are entitled to the lies that make them happy -- even if being happy means spending much of their existence frothing at the mouth like rabid animals. (Surely it's not our place to judge our fellow humans' choices of how they define "happiness.") So all that's really required in the case of the Benghazi "oops" is a technical adjustment.

Now that the truth is catching up to them, House Republicans will need to stay one step ahead. Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), chairman of the select committee on Benghazi, told CNN’s Deirdre Walsh last week that, despite what the Intelligence Committee found, “there is more work to be done and more to be investigated.”

Of course if you're a right-wing whackjob, there's always "more work to be done," if by "work" we understand collaborating with our fellow loonies on new lies and delusions to prevent our fellow Americans from ever being aware of, let alone actually trying to deal with, our real problems, and there's always "more to be investigated," if by "investigating" we mean poking around among liars and conmen with claimed "corroboration" of your lies and then just making stuff up.

As Dana concludes of Chairman Trey's call to battle: "Excellent. Maybe he can post his phony accusations on some fake news Web sites." Sure, what goes around comes around, or something like that.

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Ooh, that Hillary makes the doody-brainers so-o-o mad!!!

-- Christopher Weyant's New Yorker Daily Cartoon today

by Ken

"Whistleblower's yarn fails to tie Benghazi lapses to politics" is the head on the column the Washington Post's Dana Milbank offered regarding the much-ballyhooed "oversight" hearing promoted by House Republican master criminal Darrell Issa, starring Gregory Hicks, then our no. 2 diplomat in Libya, who who was going to blow the lid off the Obama White House's politicization of the awful night in Benghazi when Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed.

But despite Issa's incautious promise that the hearing's revelations would be "damaging" to Hillary Rodham Clinton, Hicks didn't lay a glove on the former secretary of state Wednesday. Rather, he held lawmakers from both parties rapt as he recounted the events of that terrifying night -- revealing a made-for-Hollywood plot with a slow, theatrical delivery and genuine emotion.

In Dana's retelling, Hicks's emerges as storytelling prowess was exceeded only by his apparently uncontrollable self-promotion.

Hicks, bald and with a white chin beard, said his "jaw dropped" when he heard U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice falsely claim on TV that there had been a protest at the Benghazi consulate, but he declined an invitation to challenge the veracity of the director of national intelligence, who said the statement reflected "our collective best judgment at the time."

Hicks said he thought a flyover by U.S. jets could have deterred the second of the two attacks that night, but he declined to question the judgment of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who has said there was no way to get the fighters there in time.

Hicks was of little use to Republicans in their efforts to connect the lapses in the Benghazi response to Clinton or to the Obama White House. He said that he spoke to Clinton by phone at 2 a.m. that night and that she supported his actions. He undermined one of Issa's claims -- that Clinton had rejected an increase in security for the Libya facilities -- when he agreed that the secretary of state's name appears on all cables, even if she doesn't write them.

Hicks did have some damning things to say about the State Department trying to block him from cooperating with Issa's committee. But that wasn't quite the evidence Issa had promised: that politics drove the administration's response to Benghazi.

Never mind that there probably isn't a Republican in the House who could find Libya on a map, or who has any idea who in the country believed in what or whom or what effect any of it had on U.S. interests. And never mind that the Republican chumps intent on proving the Obama administration's dastardly "politicizing" of events in Libya spent eight years as silent as rocks while the Chimpy Bush regime devoted every second of every day to doing precisely this. Never mind anything. Let's just jump ugly on the effing Hillary. Didn't Hillary-hating used to be a crowd-pleasing political platform?

This is what happens when you have a political movement built on ideological hysteria without any actual ideology or real beliefs, just blinding hate informed by Tales Blown Out of Rush Limbaugh's Rectum of Darkness.

Republicans Hold Hearings About Hillary Clinton's Poll Numbers

Posted by Andy Borowitz


WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) -- Republican lawmakers asked increasingly tough questions today as they held another day of hearings to investigate, in the words of Rep. Darrell Issa (R-California), "Hillary Clinton's suspiciously high poll numbers and what can be done to make them lower."

"With the help of Fox News, we have brutally attacked Hillary Clinton for months, and yet she remains more popular than ever," Rep. Issa said. "This committee needs to know how that happened, and how we can keep it from happening in the future."

Rep. Issa pointed to recent polls showing the former Secretary of State trouncing every potential G.O.P. Presidential candidate, "even a skinnier version of Chris Christie."

"We demand an answer to one simple question," he said. "What does Secretary Clinton know that none of us knows?"

In his boldest allegation of the day, Rep. Issa accused Secretary Clinton of "cynically using her post as Secretary of State to become wildly popular with the American people."

"I invite her to these hearings to answer those charges," he said.

Wrapping up for the day, Rep. Issa warned the former Secretary of State that he was just getting started: "Once we Republicans decide to investigate someone, we don't stop. If Secretary Clinton doesn't believe me, she should ask her husband."

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And if there happened to be an extra one of those $1 trillion platinum coins lying around, you could stick it in my account

from TPM

"Republicans go wild at this analogy, but it's unavoidable. This is exactly like someone walking into a crowded room, announcing that he has a bomb strapped to his chest, and threatening to set that bomb off unless his demands are met."

-- Paul Krugman, in his NYT column Coins Against Crazies

by Ken

"Mint that coin!" exclaims Paul Krugman at the end of his NYT column today, "Coins Against Crazies." so I guess that means we need to get up to speed on the subject.

Oh, probably you've already doped out this platinum-coin business -- trillion dollars the limit, or maybe not even, if we don't want it to be! However, I'm playing catch-up, so I'm grateful for this quick rundown PK provides today (more links onsite):

As it happens, an obscure legal clause grants the secretary of the Treasury the right to mint and issue platinum coins in any quantity or denomination he chooses. Such coins were, of course, intended to be collectors' items, struck to commemorate special occasions. But the law is the law -- and it offers a simple if strange way out of the crisis.

Here's how it would work: The Treasury would mint a platinum coin with a face value of $1 trillion (or many coins with smaller values; it doesn't really matter). This coin would immediately be deposited at the Federal Reserve, which would credit the sum to the government's account. And the government could then write checks against that account, continuing normal operations without issuing new debt.

In case you're wondering, no, this wouldn't be an inflationary exercise in printing money. Aside from the fact that printing money isn't inflationary under current conditions, the Fed could and would offset the Treasury's cash withdrawals by selling other assets or borrowing more from banks, so that in reality the U.S. government as a whole (which includes the Fed) would continue to engage in normal borrowing. Basically, this would just be an accounting trick, but that's a good thing. The debt ceiling is a case of accounting nonsense gone malignant; using an accounting trick to negate it is entirely appropriate.

PK acknowledges that yes, "the coin trick" would be "undignified" -- "but better to look slightly silly than to let a financial and Constitutional crisis explode." He has in fact already written about the platinum-coin scheme, in a blogpost a couple of days ago called "Rage Against the Coin." (That's the link embedded in the text above. I mention this because I wasted a NYT click on it, just to be able to embed the link. Now I'm already up to five clicks down, five to go, and it's only January 11.) As today's column makes clear, while he's serious about the Coin Trick, what he is more than anything is seething with rage about "the vile absurdity of the debt-ceiling confrontation."

Under the Constitution, fiscal decisions rest with Congress, which passes laws specifying tax rates and establishing spending programs. If the revenue brought in by those legally established tax rates falls short of the costs of those legally established programs, the Treasury Department normally borrows the difference.

Lately, revenue has fallen far short of spending, mainly because of the depressed state of the economy. If you don't like this, there's a simple remedy: demand that Congress raise taxes or cut back on spending. And if you're frustrated by Congress's failure to act, well, democracy means that you can't always get what you want.

Where does the debt ceiling fit into all this? Actually, it doesn't. Since Congress already determines revenue and spending, and hence the amount the Treasury needs to borrow, we shouldn't need another vote empowering that borrowing. But for historical reasons any increase in federal debt must be approved by yet another vote. And now Republicans in the House are threatening to deny that approval unless President Obama makes major policy concessions.

It's crucial to understand three things about this situation. First, raising the debt ceiling wouldn't grant the president any new powers; every dollar he spent would still have to be approved by Congress. Second, if the debt ceiling isn't raised, the president will be forced to break the law, one way or another; either he borrows funds in defiance of Congress, or he fails to spend money Congress has told him to spend.

Finally, just consider the vileness of that G.O.P. threat. If we were to hit the debt ceiling, the U.S. government would end up defaulting on many of its obligations. This would have disastrous effects on financial markets, the economy, and our standing in the world. Yet Republicans are threatening to trigger this disaster unless they get spending cuts that they weren't able to enact through normal, Constitutional means.

PK allows freely that "the platinum coin may not be the only option."

Maybe the president can simply declare that as he understands the Constitution, his duty to carry out Congressional mandates on taxes and spending takes priority over the debt ceiling. Or he might be able to finance government operations by issuing coupons that look like debt and act like debt but that, he insists, aren't debt and, therefore, don't count against the ceiling.

Or, best of all, there might be enough sane Republicans that the party will blink and stop making destructive threats.

Unless this last possibility materializes, however, it's the president's duty to do whatever it takes, no matter how offbeat or silly it may sound, to defuse this hostage situation. Mint that coin!

So there he is, once again -- as usual -- pulling his punches, refusing to tell us how he really feels about those Republicans.

In the title of this post I made my little joke about maybe having an "extra" one of those $1 trillion coins plunked into my bank account. Ha ha! Of course the vastly greater likelihood is that this will give rise to a new generation of online scams, whereby solicitations claiming to offer astonishingly legal transfers of all or part of the value of one of those coins to private citizens through a virtually unknown mechanism, which you can participate in by clicking through -- or, better, by supplyhing your bank routing number and account number.

Maybe this is the kind of economic program those Republicans can get behind.

Meanwhile, hold onto that "unavoidable" image of Republicans being "exactly like someone walking into a crowded room, announcing that he has a bomb strapped to his chest, and threatening to set that bomb off unless his demands are met." I know PK says that this analogy drives them wild. So I think we owe it to them to use it as often as possible.

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Sure, Todd "The Asshole" Akin is a lunatic and a monster, but not for the reason a lot of people seem to think

"[F]rom what I understand from doctors, [pregnancy from rape] is really rare. If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down."

-- MO Rep. Todd "The Asshole" Akin

by Ken

Even by the time you read this it's quite possible that the Missouri U.S. Senate campaign of newly minted national celebrity Rep. Todd Akin may be at an end. All day there was heavy pressure on the galoot -- not just from in-state but no doubt from Republicans nationally, to get out of the race to unseat highly vulnerable Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill. And see, for example, CBS News's "Pressure builds on Akin to leave Mo. Senate race" (from 6:54pm ET), or the WSJ's "Crucial Senate Race in Uproar" (from 8:36pm ET).

And the clock is ticking. Tomorrow at 5pm is the deadline for The Asshole to withdraw while allowing the state party to substitute some Missouri Republican life form less toxic, or less publicly toxic, than Representative Akin. And everyone understands how important the Missouri contest is to Republican hopes of wresting control of the Senate from Democrats. I'm not saying that Akin is now unelectable statewide, just that if he isn't, then Missouri ought to be formally redesignated from a state to a booby hatch. . It's not hard to understand that national R's, with control of the Senate so close they can feel it, this isn't the kind of candidate you'd want to be betting on -- one who has been plastered across the country's front pages as someone too ignorant or too crazy even for the Party of Ignorance and Craziness.

Just the same, it seems to me important to understand what The Asshole actually said about rape, and what he didn't, because what he actually meant is far sicker and more disturbing than the widespread assumption that what he said is that there is such a thing as "legitimate" rapes.

Naturally Noah got it right, writing about here this "knuckle-dragging fool" earlier today ("The Republican Party's Latest Entrant In Their Endless Parade Of Freaks"). But from what I'm hearing, an awful lot of people seem to think that what our Todd said was that there's a category of rapes that he considers "legitimate." But really, this is only possible for people who are too lazy, stupid, and/or uncaring about the truth to miss the clear sense of what he was saying when he, er, said, "If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” Beyond the fact that The Asshole used the phrase "legitimate rape," I don't see how it's possible for anyone to imagine that he was arguing that the kind of rapes he was referring to are legal or acceptable.

It's inescapably obvious, in fact, he meant the exact opposite. The kind of rape he was referring to here is the kind he's against, which is to say what he considers real or actual rapes -- i.e., where a woman is the victim of violent sexual assault by a stranger -- almost certainly, though he of course didn't actually say this, a stranger of the "big black man" persuasion, the kind now invariably fingered to authorities by white men and women who are found to have had one or more of their family members butchered. (All over the country, authorities have slowly come to the realization that these "big black men" are imaginary, existing nowhere outside the debased imaginations of the persons trying to lie their way out of responsibility for the family murders they've committed.)

So no, clearly Akin wasn't suggesting that these rapes are "legitimate" in he sense of "OK." He was just distinguishing them from all the other rapes alleged by women, the kinds that are basically "illegitimate" in the sense that they're merely allegations by filthy bitches who were probably, you know, really asking for it -- including, notably, the kinds so often committed by friends, acquaintances, and even family members of the lying sluts who try to mask their sluttitude by crying "rape!"

So while it might be a bit of a stretch to say that Akin is in favor of some kinds of rape, I don't think it's much of a stretch at all to say that he doesn't believe any of those other kinds are rape, at least not of the, er, legitimate kind. And just for that the man should be reviled and shunned by every man and woman with even the slightest concern for human decency. Just that makes him a lunatic and a monster. Anyone who would contemplate voting for him for anything or any purpose has self-judged him/herself (my God, could any woman actually imagine voting for him?) an enemy of decency.

But that's only part of what Akin told us about himself. The other part is the pseudo-scientific blather, claiming that in the case of these traumatic "real" rapes the female body itself fights off pregnancy. Now I don't have any familiarity with the actual scientific literature, and I can't rule out the possibility that some actual scientific observation has been wrenched out of some mostly unrelated context and tortured into a meaning that suits the biases and bigotries of people whose entire brain function is governed by biases and bigotries, and whose hatred for science is an obvious offshoot of their hatred, from the very depths of their beings, for truth.

My guess is that actual medical researchers will be able to demonstrate that the right-wing passion for anti-science is once again at work here. What I didn't know until now is that this crap pseudo-science has become an article of faith for the faith-based cretins of the Religious Right. Here's the start of a post today by Right Wing Watch's Brian Tashman (links onsite):

Todd Akin Wasn't 'Misspeaking' but Speaking for a Movement

Submitted by Brian Tashman on Mon, 08/20/2012 - 11:45am

Missouri Republican senate candidate and congressman Todd Akin is trying to run away from his claims that “legitimate rape” rarely leads to pregnancy, insisting that he “misspoke” while making “off-the-cuff remarks,” even though they were in an interview with a local reporter. Akin made a similar half-apology following his claim that “at the heart of liberalism really is the hatred for God,” with his spokesman arguing that his claim during a radio interview were “off-the-cuff.”

Akin is a beloved figure of the Religious Right, and his campaign advertises endorsements from Concerned Women for America activists and activists like Mike Huckabee, Phyllis Schlafly, Michele Bachmann and David Barton. Barton, who recorded campaign ads calling Akin a “true Christian leader,” has compared Akin to John Witherspoon and other founding fathers. American Family Association spokesman Bryan Fischer, who hosted Akin on his radio show the day after the congressman’s primary victory, said people need to “lighten up” about his rape comments:

Previously, Akin said he wants to ban the morning after pill, worried marital rape laws will be used as “a legal weapon to beat up on the husband” and sought to narrow the definition of “rape” in legislation. Akin also prominently advertises his endorsement from Schlafly, who has said women cannot be raped by their husbands.

Sarah Posner in Religion Dispatches notes that Akin, who has a masters in divinity, received his degree at a denomination which teaches that rape seldom leads to pregnancy and should not be relevant to laws on abortion rights, and as Kate Sheppard of Mother Jones pointed out, anti-choice luminary John Willke asserts that hormones make pregnancies resulting from rape “extremely rare” and Physicians for Life believes “the rate of pregnancy is actually very rare” because the stress from the rape “alter[s] bodily functions, the menstrual cycle included.”

Those opinions are commonplace among anti-choice activists. . . .

So no, Bryan, while I understand perfectly well that The Asshole wasn't saying there's such a thing as "legitimate rape," I don't plan to lighten up. I don't know whether you're too stupid or too dishonest to understand what he was saying, but you know, just now I don't care.


UPDATE: I SHOULD HAVE MENTIONED THAT THE
THUGS AT THE FRC "FULLY SUPPORT" THE ASSHOLE

Noah in fact had passed along a link to our colleague David Badash's post at the New Civil Rights Movement, "Family Research Council: 'We Support Todd Akin Fully And Completely.' "

You know, it's possible that those "asswipes" (Noah's handy designation for the FRC crowd) really are really so stupid, or so insane, that they don't understand how their cretinous, lying, incendiary ravings earned them recognition from the Southern Poverty Law Center as the hate group they are. As I pointed out last night, though ("This crazy notion that the Family Research Council is NOT a hate group -- it's some kind of nutty joke, right?"), given the extent and pattern of the FRC's monumental fabrications over the whole course of its existence, which have been pointed out repeatedly, as documented most recently in John Aravosis's important America Blog post, "Why the Family Research Council is a hate group"), it's kind of hard to believe that they could be functioning in good faith.

Again, though, I'm not sure it matters. The blatant reality is that there really isn't any point at which the FRC goons are in contact with reality or truth.

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The Republican campaign to disenfranchise voters it doesn't like is showing results

Is it already too late to protect the
right of American citizens to vote?

"Mitchell, who was delivered by a midwife in Alabama in 1918, has never had a birth certificate. But when she told that to a drivers’ license clerk, he suggested she might be an illegal immigrant."

-- from the ordeal of 93-year-old Thelma Mitchell,
who won't be voting for the first time in decades

by Ken

So, the system works! I mean, the new right-wing system of preventing people they don't approve of from voting. (This came up in yesterday's installment of the Noah Diaries 2011, with a clip of Paul Weyrich saying straight-out that he doesn't want everyone to vote.) This report from Think Progress via Nation of Change was obviously designed to be inflammatory, and subject to any possible corrective information, it's sure got me inflamed.

Aren't there laws on the books barring interfering with a citizen's right to vote? Isn't it about time the governors and legislators who have passed these laws designed to do exactly that had their fascist criminal carcasses thrown in the slammer and left to rot? Preferably till it's time to cart them off to a crematorium for permanent disposal? For starters, how about that clerk who told Thelma Mitchell, who's never had a birth certificate, that she might be an illegal immigrant.

93-Year-Old Tennessee Woman Who Cleaned State Capitol for 30 Years Denied Voter ID


MARIE DIAMOND
Think Progress / News Report
Published: Tuesday 27 December 2011

A 93-year-old Tennessee woman who cleaned the state Capitol for 30 years, including the governor’s office, says she won’t be able to vote for the first time in decades after being told this week that her old state ID failed to meet new voter ID regulations.

Thelma Mitchell was even accused of being an undocumented immigrant because she couldn’t produce a birth certificate:

Mitchell, who was delivered by a midwife in Alabama in 1918, has never had a birth certificate. But when she told that to a drivers’ license clerk, he suggested she might be an illegal immigrant.

Thelma Mitchell told WSMV-TV that she went to a state drivers’ license center last week after being told that her old state ID from her cleaning job would not meet new regulations for voter identification.

A spokesman for the House Republican Caucus insisted that Mitchell was given bad information and should’ve been allowed to vote, even with an expired state ID. But even if that’s the case, her ordeal illustrates the inevitable disenfranchisements that result when confusing voting laws enable state officials to apply the law inconsistently.

The incident is the just latest in a series of reports of senior citizens being denied their constitutional right to vote under restrictive new voter ID laws pushed by Republican governors and legislatures. These laws are a transparent attempt to target Democrat constituencies who are less likely to have photo ID’s, and disproportionately affect seniors, college students, the poor and minorities.

As ThinkProgress reported, one 96-year-old Tennessee woman was denied a voter ID because she didn’t have her marriage license. Another senior citizen in Tennessee, 91-year-old Virginia Lasater, couldn’t get the ID she needed to vote because she wasn’t able to stand in a long line at the DMV. A Tennessee agency even told a 86-year-old World War II veteran that he had to pay an unconstitutional poll tax if he wanted to obtain an ID.

Hey, it's not as if the Republicans have been subtle about their campaign of mass disenfranchisement. For them, assaults on democracy continue to be a winning strategy.

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How far are we from the ideal of "living in truth"? Just listen to right-wingers on the environment

Plus Václav Havel on capitalism and socialism


"With everything else that has been going on in U.S. politics recently, the G.O.P.'s radical anti-environmental turn hasn't gotten the attention it deserves. But something remarkable has happened on this front. Only a few years ago, it seemed possible to be both a Republican in good standing and a serious environmentalist; during the 2008 campaign John McCain warned of the dangers of global warming and proposed a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions. Today, however, the party line is that we must not only avoid any new environmental regulations but roll back the protection we already have."

-- Paul Krugman, in his NYT column today, "Springtime for Toxics"

by Ken

The other day Howie wrote at length ("Mercury Poisoning -- A Thing Of The (Republican) Past?") about the surprising but welcome new mercury-pollution and related regulatory standards proposed by what I think we may safely call the beleaguered Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), whose kindest fate the next time we have Republicans in control of both houses of Congress and the White House appears to be mere elimination. As Howie pointed out, it was only to be expected that the pro-pollution screamers of the Right would quickly be on the warpath. I don't think any points can be awarded for that safe a prediction.

As Paul Krugman points out in his column today, after sketching the hard-to-deny health peril of the kind of mercury levels we're seeing in our air, ground, and water:

The new rules would also have the effect of reducing fine particle pollution, which is a known source of many health problems, from asthma to heart attacks. In fact, the benefits of reduced fine particle pollution account for most of the quantifiable gains from the new rules. The key word here is "quantifiable": E.P.A.'s cost-benefit analysis only considers one benefit of mercury regulation, the reduced loss in future wages for children whose I.Q.'s are damaged by eating fish caught by freshwater anglers. There are without doubt many other benefits to cutting mercury emissions, but at this point the agency doesn't know how to put a dollar figure on those benefits.

Even so, the payoff to the new rules is huge: up to $90 billion a year in benefits compared with around $10 billion a year of costs in the form of slightly higher electricity prices. This is, as David Roberts of Grist says, a very big deal.

And it's a deal Republicans very much want to kill.

Krugman notes that even the supposedly "different" Jon Huntsman, who "did indeed once say: 'Conservation is conservative. I'm not ashamed to be a conservationist,' "

has been assimilated by the anti-environmental Borg, denouncing the E.P.A.'s "regulatory reign of terror," and predicting that the new rules will cause blackouts by next summer, which would be a neat trick considering that the rules won't even have taken effect yet.

In this case, Krugman points out, the corporate-tool lying liars of the Right trot out all their favoriteslies about government regulation, for example that it's "job-killing." There are only two ways a lie like this can be uttered: by people who are too ignorant to know that it's a lie and don't care about their ignorance, or by people who know it's a lie and have no compunctions about lying. Here's Krugman again:

[W]henever you hear dire predictions about the effects of pollution regulation, you should know that special interests always make such predictions, and are always wrong. For example, power companies claimed that rules on acid rain would disrupt electricity supply and lead to soaring rates; none of that happened, and the acid rain program has become a shining example of how environmentalism and economic growth can go hand in hand.

But again, never mind: mindless opposition to "job killing" regulations is now part of what it means to be a Republican. And I have to admit that this puts something of a damper on my mood: the E.P.A. has just done a very good thing, but if a Republican -- any Republican -- wins next year's election, he or she will surely try to undo this good work.

It's hard to express just how many layers of lies every pol is now buried under. It's been ages since we were talking about the occasional counter-to-truth position. As I keep pointing out, it's necessary to assume that every word out of the mouth of every right-winger is a lie, but in fact as Krugman is suggesting here, it's gone way beyond that. As a society we're officially divorced from reality, totally off the truth standard.

Which brings me back to the inspiration of Václav Havel, with particular reference to that phrase "living in truth" we heard so much about the other day ("The ennobling spiritual and moral as well as political legacy of Václav Havel -- to the West as well as the East") from Columbia economics professor Jeffrey D. Sachs in his tribute to Havel, "The Power of Living in Truth." "Let us pause," he wrote, "to express gratitude to Václav Havel, who died this month, for enabling a generation to gain the chance to live in truth."

Given the trenchancy of Havel's critique of the systems of power and social organization developed under what was passed off in the Soviet bloc as socialism, I think there's a tendency among smug Westerners to think that we're off the hook. Not hardly. Here's what he had to say in 1986, before the Velvet Revolution by which Czechoslovakia was liberated, in Disturbing the Peace, after outlining the problems of the Soviet-bred systems (page 14):

All this is notoriously familiar. At the same time, I don't believe that we can wave a magic wand and dispose of these problems by a change of ownership, or that all we need to do to remedy the situation is bring back capitalism. The point is that capitalism, albeit on another level and not in such trivial forms, is struggling with the same problems (alienation, after all, was first described under capitalism): it is well known, for instance, that enormous private multinational corporations are curiously like socialist states: with industrialization, centralization, specialization, monopolization, and finally with automation and computerization, the elements of depersonalization and the loss of meaning in work become more and more profound everywhere.

Along with that goes the general manipulation of people's lives by the system (no matter how inconspicuous such manipulation may be, compared with that of the totalitarian state). IBM certainly works better than the Škoda plant, but that doesn't alter the fact that both companies have long since lost their human dimension and have turned man into a little cog in their machinery, utterly separated from what, and for whom, that machinery is working, and what the impact of its product is on the world.

I would even say that, from a certain point of view, IBM is worse than Škoda. Whereas Škoda merely grinds out the occasional obsolete nuclear reactor to meet the needs of backward COMECON members, IBM is flooding the world with ever more advanced computers, while its employees have no influence over what their product does to the human soul and to human society. They have no say in whether it enslaves or liberates mankind, whether it will save us from the apocalypse or simply bring the apocalypse closer.

Such "megamachinery" is not constructed to the measure of man, and the fact that IBM is capitalist, profit-oriented, and efficient, while Škoda is socialist, money-losing, and inefficient, seems secondary to me.

"Living in truth" is an almost unimaginably different standard from living under the illusions, or more often delusions, fostered by limitlessly greedy economic and political predators who believe they're entitled to any piled-on rewards, economic or personal, it's within their power to grab hold of, by whatever means they can muster.

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I voted for Obama and all I got was . . .

by Noah

. . . and all I got was this T-shirt. (If I cough up a mere $30, that is.)

Like many of you, I get a lot of mass e-mails asking me for money. Many of them come from politically progressive groups that can and do make good use of the money. Environmental groups? OK. Moveon.org? No problem. ActBlue? You bet.

Today’s e-mail, however, came from Juliana Smoot of the White House. It included an offer of a T-shirt in return for a contribution of $30 or more to President Obama’s 2012 campaign. Not that it’s a bad T-shirt or anything, but I expect more.

Forget the T-shirt! How about a president that doesn’t roll over for the Repugs and Wall Street, and tells his party not to roll over too? How about a president leading a Democratic Party that realizes they are dealing with absolute fascists that could make Mussolini rise from the dead with pride. Instead we have a party of Neville Chamberlain weenies. They are either naïve or in cahoots. I’m convinced, of course, that it’s the latter and no amount of money that I can afford to give the status quo politicians of the burgeoning New World Order is going to offset the bribery setup that is standard operating procedure in D.C.

I also get almost daily appeals from Blue Dog Dem stealth-Republican groups such as the DSCC and the DCCC who feel that I should contribute money for the reelection of fetid balls of slime with names like Ben Nelson, Heath Shuler, and Mary Landrieu just so they can have Democratic majorities that end up rubber-stamping the dark desires of Republicans anyway. Anyone remember Senator Schumer kissing John Roberts’s butt at his Supreme Court confirmation hearings. All that did was fast-track Citizens United. Thanks, Chuckie!

Apparently, the bribes from K Street and Wall Street just aren’t enough. Last I looked, no banksters or hedge-fund scum have been hauled into court. Can’t imagine why! Can’t jeopardize the status quo now, can we? Gotta keep those good middle-class jobs moving out of the country while Congress vacuums up all that nice green cash from the K Street Bribery Battalions! Nudge nudge wink wink. Ain’t NAFTA grand? Screw the people! But ask them for their money first.

You know, I happen to think that I and millions of other middle-class voters might have more to give these people if they would first do something about the massive wealth distribution upward that Washington has been engineering for decades; more specifically, our wealth. While the wealth of the top 1% has gone through the roof and productivity has climbed impressively, middle-class wages have stagnated for 30 years. And we all know that a dollar isn’t what it was back then! It’s obviously social engineering Washington can believe in. When it comes to Washington, money can buy a lot of belief. All you have to do is be amoral and fool enough voters into thinking that you are a respectable humanoid of good character.

Instead of a T-shirt, I, like so many people, think repealing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy should be a good start. Stopping the war on the middle class in its tracks would work for me! Oh, and stopping some other wars might be good too. We seem to be spending more on building roads and schools in Afghanistan than we do here.

Afghanistan is reportedly costing us $2 billion a week -- $2 billion a week for schools where young girls aren’t welcome and roads that only serve to get Afghanistan’s drugs to world markets at a faster, more profitable pace. That $2 billion could go a long way here, including paying for some teachers at some new schools! Just tonight (as I write this), President Obama announced that he’s bringing home 10,000 troops. It was the least he could do, and he did it.

If people like Juliana Smoot could tell me that House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer had changed his mind and now says that Medicare should be off the table instead of on it, that would work for me too. If she could tell me that her boss had decided to tell Alan Simpson to shove his Cat Food anti-Social Security Commission up his sagging fat white-haired 90-year-old ass, that would also work for me. If all of these things were done, we middle-class suckers and pawns might even actually have enough money to spread around, even to politicians.

So, Washington, why ask me for money when you are not doing enough things that will help me save money or earn money? A dollar doesn’t even get me a quart of milk or half a dozen eggs anymore. Are there suddenly less cows and chickens? Now I have to think long and hard about buying some eggs to hurl at your limos!

To be fair, saving the auto industry and the 3 million related industry jobs along with it was damn good. Some minor improvements in the health care system may help, but no, it’s not enough, and I don’t buy that it’s the best you could do. Some of the improvements won’t even kick in until 2014, and that’s gonna be up in the air for awhile anyway.

What’s going on is that Washington is trying to get away with doing just enough to keep the wolf (us) from the door. That’s the system that's in place. Buying voters off with the offer of a T-shirt is very symbolic. It’s symbolic of the paltry amount of respect Washington has for those who live outside the Beltway. Sure, I’ll never have enough money to stay out of jail if I foul up an ocean with crude oil while 11 employees lose their lives like Tony Hayward did, but that’s not what we’re asking for.

Our so-called representatives get tens and ten- times-tens of thousands of dollars stuffed into their pockets every day, and the White House offers me a T-shirt. That’s rich. Pun intended. Hell, the T-shirt doesn’t even have a pocket. No pocket for me! Look. I know that Obama is better than any Republican and a Democratic Congress is marginally better than a Republican one, but that’s like saying Americans have a choice of two parties and it's a choice that one can equate with being given a choice of "what kind of cancer would you like?"

The Republicans will kill you and the whole damn country and smile about it as long as they get enough cash out of the deal. They are a disease. The Democrats, on the other hand, might keep you alive but it looks like the most they want to do is just enough to keep you in the state of misery you’re in. Put a kinder, gentler way: The Dems will give you a T-shirt for a cold day. The Repugs will rip the one you have off your back on the coldest day of the year while they give money that should go to your family to the top 1% instead, and they'll get the Dems to go along with it.

Some freedom of choice that is. Keep the T-shirt, Juliana, you can use it to wipe the eggs off the White House windows. Blue America isn't offering any fancy t-shirts in exchange for contributions... just actual real life progressives who will stand up to the right, like Eric Griego, Norman Solomon, and Nick Ruiz. Please take a look... and give them a hand.

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Meet Tom Tomorrow's "MiddleMan," who may never understand why the famous "enthusiasm gap" just keeps growing

[You know the drill: Click to enlarge.]

"Recovery begins with realism, and there is nothing to be gained by kidding ourselves. On the topics that I know most about, the administration is beyond being a disappointment. It’s beyond inept, unprepared, weak, and ineffective."

-- James K. Galbraith, in a speech at the Post-Election
Conference of Americans for Democratic Action's Education
Fund, at Harvard's Kennedy School, November 20

by Ken

Well, here we are again with all the messes left for the dying hours of the 111th Congress being poked at. The chiefest mess, of course, is what to do about the expiring Bush tax cuts.
as Digby explained to us, with groundwork laid by Profs. Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson in their book Off Center: The Republican Revolution & the Erosion of American Democracy, was a complex trap laid by Republican strategizers to play out in a series of "Heads we win, tails you lose" strategic moves, after the administration missed the one chance it had to take control of the issue at the height of its powers early in 2009.

People who do not get that the Republicans planned this --- and are thrilled to keep it going for another two years --- are failing to understand the political reality.

But more depressing than anything, the Democrats are now actively doing their dirty work for them and are on the verge of doing the same thing with the payroll tax. . . .

Once that window shut, thanks to the deadly combination of the economic meltdown left behind by the Bush regime and the inept Rahmist political maneuvering of the new administration, it was essentially beyond the administration's power to steer the fate of the sunsetted tax cuts to a more sensible outcome -- more sensible humanly, economically, and politically. What has been consistently astonishing is the political obtuseness of the Rahmists, who have seemed utterly clueless about how their "canny" political strategizing has been playing out in the real world outside the Beltway. When you get right down to it, about the only political strategy they have is jumping ugly on everyone to the left of their well-right-of-center cave.

Worse still, from their standpoint, though they give no sign of having noticed, is that the corporate masters they've served so faithfully, who were only too happy to accept all the gifts they offered. never for a second contemplated any long-term commitment to their benefactors. And why should they when they can buy pols who really believe in their "cause"? Of course giving away the store, and then some, without getting anything in return has has from the start been the Obama administration's secret negotiating trick.

Why, for example, should the predators of the financial-services industry -- who don't understand that they always need someone to save themselves from their own insatiable greed, and that when they don't get it, we get meltdown -- have to put up with the ever-so-modest limitations put on them by the Dems' compromise reform package when utterly shameless whores like John Boehner and Eric Cantor credibly assure them that they can have anything and everything they want?

I'm less optimistic that the administration strategizers will ever understand that, on the other hand, there really is a political price to be paid for spitting on the people whose earnestness and enthusiasm put Barack Obama in the White House, the people whose hopes and dreams were so powerfully and movingly on display on Inauguration Day. And what have they gotten in exchange for all their enthusiasm and effort? Contempt and abuse. (Hmm, come to think of it, does this behavior not ring a bell? Can you think of anyplace where the corporate stooges of the Obama administration might have picked it up?

And so, while I know I should be keeping track of the hour-by-hour developments in the frantic efforts to salvage the "compromise" tax package, but the sad fact is that we on the outside will have little or no effect on the outcome, which is going to be resolved -- or not -- in a back room somewhere. The overriding factor is that neither Dems nor R's want to risk the wrath of Americans if the tax cuts expire and they discover come January 1 that their paychecks have shrunk. So if they can work out a deal, they will. Of course it's likely to be even worse than the current one.

Whatever reason "Creepy Chucky" Krauthammer may have for making believe that "Barack Obama won the great tax-cut showdown of 2010" ("Swindle of the year"), even he can't really be that stupid, can he? On the other hand, I don't entirely dismiss Gene Robinson's argument that "Democrats have no choice but to accept an irresponsible tax deal." The way the whole thing has been rigged to play out, we may well be in the same position we were in with the final health care "reform" package -- just possibly not doing it is even worse than doing it. Robinson:

As much as I sympathize with the progressives who are ready to man the barricades, let's be real. Killing the deal now would mean a middle-class tax increase, no extended unemployment benefits and no payroll tax holiday. Voters would surely feel they had been robbed - and Democrats, perhaps unfairly, would get the blame.

We knew the White House's response to the impending 2010 electoral disaster was going to be bad. I don't know, though, that we knew it was going to be this bad, with the administration trying to out-neanderthal the neanderthals (cf. "E.P.A. Delays Tougher Rules on Emissions"). Meanwhile, the famous "enthusiasm gap" continues growing.

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As DC Tax-Cut Theater plays to unruly houses, the underlying truth is that the R's always planned it to play out this way

by Ken

The plot thickens. Even as the White House has been staging a media event to herald the support of every two-bit pol, dog-walker, and drifter who announces support for the "compromise" tax plan, and the world's teensiest-brained legislator, Sen. Jim DeMoron, announces he'll filibuster the thing (too expensive!), House Democrats voted today not to consider the package as negotiated. (And remember, "Mother Mitch" McConnell insists that "as negotiated" is the only way the package can be considered. It apparently represents the earthly pinnacle of negotiated-legislation perfection.) Says Chris Van Hollen:

This message today is very simple: that in the form that it was negotiated, it is not acceptable to the House Democratic caucus. It's as simple as that. We will continue to try and work with the White House and our Republican colleagues to try and make sure we do something right for the economy and right for jobs, and a balanced package as we go forward.

I don't know that anybody knows where any of this stands at the moment, or what's going to happen next. On the one hand, the White House is undoubtedly surprised that so many Democrats are unwilling to join him in his party switch. On the other hand, the extent of opposition from the Right seems to me to make it altogether possible that a further-negotiated package could wind up being worse, especially considering these bozos' pathetic negotiating skills.

OK, TO UNDERSTAND THE TAX-CUT FOLLIES
WE TURN TO DIGBY: THE GOP PLANNED IT ALL

But enough political theater. We can parse the specifics of the tax follies, though they always seem to come down to the same thing: What can the Republicans' and "centrist Dems'" oligarchical masters slip into the deal while they're in the process of giving away not much? I do believe that Digby hit the rock-bottom issue in a great post yesterday. With an assist from Profs. Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson by way of our friend Rick Perlstein, she put the issue of the sunsetting of the Bush tax cuts into something like definitive perspective:

[T]he Democrats and Obama could have extended the middle class tax cuts during the worst of the recession as part of the stimulus back in 09, which was probably the only time they could have done it with any good chance of passage. (I'll leave it up to others to figure out their motivations for waiting until this fall to deal with it.)

I wrote the other day that this was baked into the cake years ago, and Rick Perlstein wrote in with this reminder:

From Hacker and Pierson's "Off Center" (2006):

Until 2001, sunsets...were a relatively minor feature of the tax code, and their usually routine extension posed a quite minor cost. After 2001 that changed.....this policy design reduced the estimated cost of the tax cuts. Yet, just as important, it means that future politicians will face a fundamental political quandary: Should they allow enacted provisions of the tax code to expire...? Or should they extend these provisions, incurring the $4 trillion in lost revenue and additional debt service that the sunset provisions of the tax cuts represent? The sunsets, in short, create an unprecedented new political environment--one that is highly favorable to tax-cutters' core goals.

None of this is accidental. Republicans reasonably predict that the pressure to extend the tax cuts will be intense, not least because well-off folks who receive the big tax provisions that take effect just before the sunsets kick in will be unusually well poised to make their voices heard....

The story is stark. To respond to their base, Republicans misled most Americans. On an unprecedented scale, phase-ins, sunsets, and time bombs were used to give the tax cuts of 2001 the most attractive public face possible while systematically stacking the deck in favor of Republicans' long-term aims. From top to bottom, Republicans larded the tax cut with features that made sense only for the purposes of political manipulation....

The success of this strategy is already [in 2006] apparent. In 2004, despite a deficit of almost half a trillion dollars, provisions of the 2001 bill scheduled to expire were instead extended, by votes of 339-65 in the House and 92-3 in the Senate. It is not coincidental that these provisions--the least skewed toward the rich of the 2001 and 2003 cuts--were set to expire right before the hotly contested election....

and the package, H & P note elsewhere, was set to expire in another election year, whereupon Democrats voting to end it could be framed as "tax hikers"....

People who do not get that the Republicans planned this --- and are thrilled to keep it going for another two years --- are failing to understand the political reality.

But more depressing than anything, the Democrats are now actively doing their dirty work for them and are on the verge of doing the same thing with the payroll tax, which pretty much destroys the whole concept of the Social Security trust fund -- and further opens the door to cuts in the program. It will not be any easier to restore that tax than the tax cuts for millionaires. Indeed, it will be more difficult.

At some point you either have to question whether they are simply working for the oligarchs too. Not that it matters because whether it's out of ineptitude or complicity, the end result is the same.


Update: Jonathan Alter just said that Russ Feingold went to the White House and begged them not to bring it up before the election because his constituents didn't want tax hikes. I have no idea if it's true. We do know that the Blue Dogs in the House id this, so it's not hard to believe.

But it didn't take a genius to see this coming --- Hacker and Pierson spelled it out in 2006. The Democrats had a rare --- and probably unique --- opportunity in 2009 to defuse this landmine and they didn't take it.

OF COURSE! IT'S ALL RUSS FEINGOLD'S FAULT!

With regard to this idea apparently now being sold by the inner scum of the White House that it's all Russ Feingold's fault for pressuring them into postponing the vote on the tax cuts till after the election, a waggish friend points out that the White House was for sure regularly in the habit of doing Senator Feingold's bidding -- right!

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Andrew Jackson Was Sorry He Didn't Hang Calhoun For Treason-- Obama Will Be Sorry He Didn't Hang DeMint For The Same Reason

First they're working on weekends-- two in a row so far-- and now they're voting at 1:01 AM! Last night/early this morning, the Senate beat down a craven Republican filibuster against a Pentagon appropriations bill, 63-33. Four Republicans miss the late night session-- Bond, Bunning, Chambliss and Cornyn-- and all 33 voting against cloture were Republicans. But, ashamed of their party's blatant and dangerous hypocrisy and willingness to put national security in jeopardy three Republican women broken with the obstructionist core to vote with the Democrats: Snowe, Collins and Hutchinson. As today's Washington Post points out, "after years of criticizing Democrats for not supporting the troops, just three Republicans supported the military funding."

Smelling blood in the water-- Obama's-- congressional Republicans will do anything, even putting fighting men and women serving in battle zones in danger, to stop healthcare reform. Conservatives are as passionately opposed to anything approaching universal healthcare as they were opposed to voting rights for the middle class, for women and for ex-slaves. Conservatives are as adamant about defeating healthcare as they were about defeating the minimum wage, Social Security, Medicare and the abolition of slavery. And it should come as no surprise that, once again the charge is being led largely by southern reactionaries like Jim DeMint (R-SC), Richard Burr (R-NC), Johnny Isakson (R-GA), Tom Coburn (R-OK), Jim Inhofe (R-OK), Miss McConnell (R-KY), David Diapers Vitter (R-LA), plus the 6 goofballs from Tennessee, Mississippi and Alabama.

Republicans have provided the backbone of support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and many have praised Obama's troop increase in Afghanistan. When the House considered the same legislation Wednesday, 164 of the 175 Republicans present voted for it, so the Senate GOP plan to oppose defense spending Friday morning put them in an unusual position.

...Because of the narrow timeline on health care, Democrats decided to schedule votes on the defense spending bill shortly after 1 a.m. so that, under parliamentary rules, that legislation can be finished by breakfast-time Saturday. That is a preemptive move to allow extra floor time for other potential delay tactics by Republicans on health care.

Democrats were furious at the filibuster attempt on Pentagon funds. "They are prepared to jeopardize funding for troops at war," Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) said Thursday evening. "If Democrats did that, there would be cries of treason."

The Democrats are too polite for that, part of the reason Americans are already sick of them and getting ready to deal them a devastating electoral blow in the midterm elections.


UPDATE: Dems went part-way there. If they're serious, though, they'll customize this ad for state races in South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, and Iowa where it might do some good: