Indiana Planned Parenthood

Some crazy from my home state. via [The Booman Tribune: Indiana Planned Parenthood]

Indiana Republicans have forced the closure of all 28 Planned Parenthood clinics in their state, even though only four of them provided any abortion services. Previously, Planned Parenthood in Indiana earned $1.3 million a year for its work with Medicaid recipients. Those low-income women will now find it much harder to get access to female contraception and basic health care. Many of them will, as a result of this hostility from Indiana Republicans, experience an unplanned pregnancy and will seek out abortions, or they will have less access to health care during their pregnancy, resulting in less healthy babies. I know it's hard to get inside the brains of Republicans, but the opposite of planned parenthood is unplanned parenthood. And it is only the latter that causes elective abortions to occur in the first place. No organization prevents more abortions than Planned Parenthood. Nice work, assholes.

And our great leader Mitch Daniels, who wanted the republican presidential candidates to back-off the moral issues and focus on the fiscal issues, signed this into law.

tnb

Michele Bachmann

It's scary to think that someone this far out there really could win the presidency.

[Michele Bachmann - Religious Nut]

tnb

Drug Testing Welfare Recipients

Here's Florida's Gov. Rick Scott (R) on Florida's new "drug test for welfare recipients" law.

"I want to make sure our taxpayers are not subsidizing drug addiction."
[Fla. Welfare Recipients Must Pass Drug Test]

I wonder what he thinks about the taxpayers subsidizing him.

From his present: Rick Scott owns a firm that does drug testing [GinAndTacos - Certain Rights for Certain People]

A friend of mine posted the following on Facebook recently:

After reading that Gov. Scott wants random drug tests for Government employees, and mandatory drug tests for welfare recipients, my cynical response was, "What, does he own a drug testing facility?"

Ha! Funny, but no. Of course he doesn't.

He transferred his $62 million stake in Solantic, a walk-in clinic chain that contracts with employers and government agencies to provide drug screening, to his wife – in a revocable trust, so the moment he leaves office he can regain control of the company. So you see, Rick Scott does not own a drug testing facility. He merely founded a chain of fast food-style walk-in clinics and transferred his ownership share to his wife. (This kind of "share shuffle" is prohibited by federal law and in most states wherein at least the pretense of preventing cronyism and conflicts of interest is maintained. But in Florida it's A-OK. Way to go, Shitshine State.)

And from his past: Rick Scott CEO of company that defrauds the government
Wikipedia - Rick Scott

He was forced to resign as Chief Executive of Columbia/HCA in 1997 amid a scandal over the company's business and Medicare billing practices; the company ultimately admitted to fourteen felonies and agreed to pay the federal government over $600 million.

... Columbia/HCA admitted systematically overcharging the government by claiming marketing costs as reimbursable, by striking illegal deals with home care agencies, and by filing false data about use of hospital space. They also admitted fraudulently billing Medicare and other health programs by inflating the seriousness of diagnoses and to giving doctors partnerships in company hospitals as a kickback for the doctors referring patients to HCA. They filed false cost reports, fraudulently billing Medicare for home health care workers, and paid kickbacks in the sale of home health agencies and to doctors to refer patients. In addition, they gave doctors "loans" never intending to be repaid, free rent, free office furniture, and free drugs from hospital pharmacies

Defrauding the government health care system a few years ago and now, as governor, passing laws that can feed money to you own company! Now that is being subsidized by the taxpayer. Hell, some might even call it stealing from the taxpayer.

This guy looks like one crooked bastard.

tnb

Corporats vs The Common People

[Robert Reich - Why Washington isn't doing squat about jobs and wages.]

But there’s a third reason for Washington’s inaction. It’s not being talked about — which is itself evidence of the problem.

The unemployed are politically invisible. They don’t make major campaign donations. They don’t lobby Congress. There’s no National Association of Unemployed People.

Their ranks are filled with women who had been public employees, single mothers, minorities, young people trying to enter the labor force, and middle-aged men who have been out of work for longer than six months. You couldn’t find a collection of people with less political clout.

The wealthy-corporate elite, the Corporat, is our only real political party. Democrats and Republicans are just the different wings of the Corporat party that we're allowed to choose from. Vote either way and the common people lose.

We need that "none of the above" choice on the ballot.

tnb

Welfare Drug Tests

From [GinAndTacos]

- Yes, Rick Scott is quite proud of his measure requiring drug testing for all welfare recipients as well as random drug testing for state employees.

He transferred his $62 million stake in Solantic, a walk-in clinic chain that contracts with employers and government agencies to provide drug screening, to his wife – in a revocable trust, so the moment he leaves office he can regain control of the company. So you see, Rick Scott does not own a drug testing facility. He merely founded a chain of fast food-style walk-in clinics and transferred his ownership share to his wife. (This kind of "share shuffle" is prohibited by federal law and in most states wherein at least the pretense of preventing cronyism and conflicts of interest is maintained. But in Florida it's A-OK. Way to go, Shitshine State.)

This move by Florida Gov. Rick Scott looks like political corruption at its finest. Own a chain of drug screening clinics, get elected governer, then pass legislation requiring all welfare recipients to get drug tests, rake in the cash.

I guess our media would be all over it if they didn't have more important stories to cover like [Palin-Revere] and [WeinerGate]

We're doomed.

tnb

The Debt

The Baseline Scenario sums it up.

When people hold certain ideological beliefs strongly enough, no amount of facts will get in their way. If you believe that the current deficit is the result of excessive government spending (passed by Democrats, even though they only controlled Congress and the White House for four out of the past thirty years*), no pile of charts will be big enough to convince you otherwise — just like if you believe that tax cuts increase tax revenues, that the deficit has produced high interest rates, or that Barack Obama was born on Mars, no amount of evidence will convince you otherwise.

This is just fine if you are my daughter, who is four years old — although, actually, she admits it when she makes a mess (and helps clean it up). But if you are a legislator in the most powerful country in the world –and the one whose debt is the definitionally risk-free asset against which the yield of every other financial asset in the entire world is measured — it’s not good enough.

tnb

Mitt Romney and the Conservative Crazy

[The Economist on Mitt Romney, Health care and rightward shift in conservative viewpoints]

It sounds like a wake-up call to conservative media and leadership to get their shit together and stop promoting the crazy.

tnb

Trump, Republicans and Fox News

Found here: Balkinization

Fox News has become the stable for Republican presidential candidates, who flock there to stay in the public eye while deciding whether to run. One effect of this retreat-to-the-media strategy, however, is that the lifestyle it offers is so good, and allows prospective candidates so many different ways of making an excellent living, that when the race actually begins a few of the horses don't want to leave the stable.

tnb

Jon Kyl Lies Twice

An update on this:[tnb: Jon Kyl Lies to Congress]

He originally said

"If you want an abortion you go to Planned Parenthood and that’s well over 90% of what Planned Parenthood does."

which was a lie, it's really about 3%, but the record now shows that he said this

"If you want an abortion you go to Planned Parenthood and that is what Planned Parenthood does."

Found here [Lie Erased 1] and here [Lie erased 2]

He should be fired

tnb

Never Better

The always good, Glenn Greenwald, at his best here. [Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com]. Including a great takedown of anyone who claims President Obama is anti-business.

Here's Glenn responding to the Kock's asertion that Obama is a "dedicated egalitarian" who has "internalized Marxist" ideas in the Kenyan socialist tradition.

Just compare that to actual facts. From The Huffington Post today:

Despite high unemployment and a largely languishing real estate market, U.S. businesses are more profitable than ever, according to federal figures released on Friday. U.S. corporate profits hit an all-time high at the end of 2010, with financial firms showing some of the biggest gains, data from the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis show.

Corporations reported an annualized $1.68 trillion in profit in the fourth quarter. The previous record, without being adjusted for inflation, was $1.65 trillion in the third quarter of 2006.

Many of the nation's preeminent companies have posted massive increases in profits this year. General Electric posted worldwide profits of $14.2 billion, while profits at JPMorgan Chase were up 47 percent to $4.8 billion.

Since Obama was inaugurated, the Dow Jones has increased more than 50% -- from 8,000 to more than 12,000; the wealthiest recieved a massive tax cut; the top marginal tax rate was three times less than during the Eisenhower years and substantially lower than during the Reagan years; income and wealth inequality are so vast and rising that it is easily at Third World levels; meanwhile, "the share of U.S. taxes paid by corporations has fallen from 30 percent of federal revenue in the 1950s to 6.6 percent in 2009." During this same time period, the unemployment rate has increased from 7.7% to 8.9%; millions of Americans have had their homes foreclosed; and the number of Americans living below the poverty line increased by many millions, the largest number since the statistic has been recorded. Can you smell Obama's radical egalitarianism and Marxist anti-business hatred yet?

Then there are those whom Obama has empowered. His first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, is a business-revering corporatist who made close to $20 million in 3 short years as an investment banker, while his second, Bill Daley, served for years as JP Morgan's Midwest Chairman. His Treasury Secretary is undoubtedly the most loyal and dedicated servant Wall Street has ever had in that position, while Goldman Sachs officials occupy so many key positions in his administration that a former IMF and Salomon Brothers executive condemned what he called "Goldman Sachs's seeming lock on high-level U.S. Treasury jobs." Obama's former OMB Director recently left to take a multi-million-dollar position with Citigroup. From the start, Obama's economic policies were shaped by the Wall Street-revering neo-liberal Rubinites who did so much to serve corporate America during the Clinton years. Meanwhile, the President's choice to head his Council on Jobs and Competitiveness -- General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt -- heads a corporation that "despite $14.2 billion in worldwide profits - including more than $5 billion from U.S. operations - [] did not owe taxes in 2010": an appointment the White House still defends.

Some of these trends pre-date Obama, but few have been retarded during his presidency, while many have accelerated. Whether one finds this state of affairs desirable or not, no rational person can describe them as the by-product of a Marxist, business-hating egalitarian. Quite the opposite. The political power of America's richest has never been greater, and the level of their responsibility and collective burden has never been less. Meanwhile, for ordinary Americans, the remaining remnants of their financial security and middle class comforts rapidly erodes. It's true that the U.S. Government has little regard for the free market: they intervene constantly in the free market on behalf of the nation's wealthiest and most powerful business interests; it's crony capitalism, corporatism: government run by corporations (or, as Dick Durbin said of the Congress in which he serves: "the banks own the place").

Sort of leaves you out of breath, eh? Glenn nailed it. Be sure to read the whole thing.

tnb

Pin the Crazy on the Tea Party

From [Bruce Bartlett - GOP is blowing it by pandering to the Tea Party]

The main reason is that so many of its members simply don’t know what they are talking about; they seem to think that strong opinions are a substitute for facts, research and analysis. Consequently, many Tea Party members hold views on various topics that are, frankly, nuts, and these views have been embraced by some Republican voters as well.

For example, a March 15, 2011, poll by Public Policy Polling found that 25 percent of Republicans expect that a group called ACORN is going to steal the election for Obama next year and 31 percent aren’t sure; only 43 percent of Republicans believe this is false. In point of fact, ACORN no longer even exists, and it’s doubtful that it could have stolen a local election for dog catcher even if it wanted to.

An August 27, 2010, poll by Princeton Survey Research Associates International found that 52 percent of Republicans believe that Obama sympathizes with Islamic fundamentalists and favors imposing Islamic law around the world; only 7 percent thought this was definitely untrue.

A March 24, 2010, Harris poll found that 67 percent of Republicans believe that Obama is a socialist, 61 percent think he wants to take away the right to own guns, 57 percent believe he is a Muslim, 45 percent say he was not born in the U.S. and has no right to be president, and 41 percent think he is just looking for an excuse to seize dictatorial power.

As a consequence, even solid conservatives like Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) are considered dangerous liberals. And slightly less conservative Republicans such as former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman are treated as dangerous radicals. In a March 14 New York Times report, Utah Tea Party leader Jacqueline Smith said of Huntsman, “On a good day, he’s a socialist. On a bad day, he’s a communist.”

This sort of rhetoric serves no useful purpose and is at best distracting. It also elevates minor differences on policy or strategy among Republicans into deep disagreements over principle. This has made it impossible for Congress to finish work on the 2011 budget, which should have been done last summer. Hard line Tea Party members keep insisting on impossibly large budget cuts despite the fact that the vast bulk of the budget is effectively off limits.

I mostly agree. The Tea-Party has some generally stupid beliefs and they will hurt the Republicans eventually but I don't think they can separated from the GOP as easily as this article believes. The Republican Party started the stupid and I'm afraid they're going to have to live with it.

Just a few years ago I considered myself a Republican. Hell, I voted for Bush Jr. the first time, but they, the Republican party, scared me away with the crap they've pulled over the last three years. Republican crap, not Tea-party crap. The key screw-ups were, Sarah Palin for VP, The lies of the campaign, and the post-election, Fox News-fed hissy-fit. Again, these were Republican actions that drove me, and I assume others, away.

I was excited about Palin at first but after listening to her a while, it was pretty obvious she's just not that sharp. The Republican leadership knew she wasn't that sharp yet they spent most of a year trying to convince the country she was qualified. They were willing to lie to the voters and put dizzy Sarah Palin that close to the controls of the country to win the election. That's about as responsible as a parent giving their sixteen year old kid a case of beer, a bag of dope, and a loaded gun, then handing them the keys to the car and telling him to go have some fun. Absolutely irresponsible. Where were the adults? And,.... they think I'm dumb enough not to see through it. They took me for a fool.

Then the lies started. I think there were more crazy lies in the last election than any other in my lifetime, the Obama is a socialist, Muslim, pals around with terrorists, no birth certificate crap. Lies that were so easy to see through that you'd have to be a complete idiot to believe them. There's just no way can I vote for someone who thinks I'm stupid enough to believe that crap. The bullshit was too deep. This was during the campaign, pre-Tea Party, so again was Republican BS not Tea-Party BS.

After the election, the Fox News fed hissy-fit started and the Tea Party was born. I've never seen so much whining from a political group in my life. The Republicans refused to give up control and threw everything they could at Obama. They put up a helluva fight. They saved their party and gave birth to the Tea Party with a propaganda-fed, scare campaign that this country hadn't seen in my lifetime. For two years, every day, 24/7, there were the Fox News talking heads, in the background, like Orwell's big-brother, creating and blasting out their "truth", just to scare people, to tear down a legitimately elected administration, to make it impossible for them to govern. It's like the Steelers, after losing the Super Bowl, went to Green Bay and beat the hell out of the Packers, took their trophy and rings just because they thought THEY should have won. I can't support anyone who refuses to play by the rules and plays this dirty.

Now they're blaming the crazy on the Tea Party when in reality the Republicans themselves were responsible. They knew Palin was an idiot. They knew Obama wasn't a socialist, Marxist, terrorist Kenyan. They could have been good sports and played by the rules. They could have been good losers, took their defeat in stride and started working on a new platform with some fresh ideas. They didn't. Instead, they threw a two year tantrum that helped create the very Tea Party that they're now trying to distance themselves from.

The Republican party is responsible. They started the crazy but it got away from them. Fox news took it way out there and created the Tea-Party which helped them in the last election but now that crazy is beginning to scare them. If it continues, it could cost them the more-sane, middle-ground voter in the next election, or even split the party, so,... they're trying to pin the crazy on the Tea-baggers and present themselves as a separate, sane group. The problem is, at this time they're not. There's about this much (hold thumb and index finger about 1/8 inch apart) difference between the Republican party and the Tea-Party. America has to take them together as a package deal.

I suppose distancing themselves from the Tea-Party could work. I'd have never guessed that voters would believe all the stupid crap of the last two years but they did. Maybe, with some crappy media on the left and the full support of Fox News, the voters will believe this crap too. The Republicans won't get my vote next time but I've learned that you can't under-estimate the stupidity of the American voter.

tnb

More on Mitch

No More Mister Nice Blog thinks Mitch isn't crazy enough to win the Republican nomination.

I think he's plenty crazy but is just acting sane. [Mitch]

tnb

Bachmann lands slot on Intel panel

Bachmann lands slot on Intel panel - Jonathan Allen - POLITICO.com

This might be the first time the words "Rep. Michele Bachmann" and "intelligence" have been used in the same sentence. Well, at least without the words "lack of" also being included.

tnb

They first came for the Communists

A current take on the "They came first for....." statment of Nazi Germany fame, from the always good GinAndTacos ginandtacos.com - Turntables

Here's a reworking of the original by tnb.

First The Original, found here: First they came ...

"They came first for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for me
and by that time no one was left to speak up."

Updated for US for today (by tnb, inspired by the GinandTacos link above)....

"They came first for the Welfare Queens because they were destoying the country and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Welfare Queen.

Then they came for the unions members because they were destroying the country and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a union member.

Then they came for the poor and the immigrants because they were destroying the country and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a poor or an immigrant.

Then they came for "Civil servants. Teachers. Middle management and Anyone with a pension or benefits" becasue these things were destroying the country and by that time no one was left to speak up for me."

tnb

Treason Anyone?

ThinkProgress » In An ‘Unusual’ Meeting, Cantor Tells Netanyahu The GOP Majority ‘Will Serve As A Check’ On Obama’s Israel Policy

When was the last time you heard a powerfull US politician supporting a foreign government over the sitting US president?

More on this from Glenn Greenwald

Tea Party

A good rant on how "Real'Mericun's' think from the Smirking Chimp:

How Do You Take Your Tea? With Heaping Spoonfuls of Irony, Of Course The Smirking Chimp

A good summary below from Political Irony:

http://politicalirony.com/2010/10/22/the-seven-ironies-of-the-tea-party/

It’s ironic, to begin with, that the ones who are bitching loudest today are precisely the people who created the mess we’re in.

The astonishing irony here is that they’ve had their way with economic policy in this country for thirty years running. And, excuse me, but now they’re pissed off at the results?

Taxes today are a mere hint of what they used to be, just as the right has insisted must be the case. For the rich especially, top marginal income taxes have come down from 91 percent to 35 percent. But, of course, even that doesn’t include earnings on capital gains, a giant portion of their income, which is now at 15 percent. Nor does it include the estate tax, which has now disappeared entirely.

On trade, previously existing barriers and protections for domestic industries have been eviscerated almost completely, so that for much of the world today, it’s a single market for products and capital. Labor? Not so much. What a shock, then, that America’s good jobs – especially in manufacturing – are now all located in Mexico. Or at least they were, until even those became too expensive and got moved to China and India and Vietnam.

The story is the same in the domain of labor relations, where the playing field has been slanted massively in the direction of capital, starting with Reagan’s firing of the air traffic controllers. The upshot of these rule changes and enforcement laxity has been that the portion of union-protected jobs in America has shrunk from about 35 percent to about 7 percent, with precisely the results for workers that you’d expect.

With deregulation, too, we’ve seen massive changes as well over the same period, across industries far and wide, not least of which includes the repealing of Glass-Steagal and the unleashing of Wall Street. The right insisted – and still does – that this is great news for the economy. History begs to differ.

The result, of course, has been economic devastation far and wide. The rich have gotten massively richer, the rest of us are sinking, the federal debt has skyrocketed, our jobs have been exported to China and India, Wall Street has plunged the global economy into the toilet, corporations like BP do whatever they want without fear of consequence, and the United States is imploding as a great power. These are not coincidences, either. And now here comes the great irony: the same people who have been getting their way on the economy for thirty years now are just absolutely livid about what they themselves have created! They’re just completely enraged at the product of their own politics.

A second great irony is the extent to which the tea party bozos are being manipulated by elites like the Koch Brothers, Rupert Murdoch and the likes of Dick Armey. The very people who created the public’s economic insecurity in order to get rich off of it, are now channeling the resulting rage into support for more of the same.

Another pretty serious irony is that the tea partiers are likely about to gain some substantial power, but have no solutions to the problems they perceive. … Unless, of course, they’re prepared to slash Social Security and Medicare spending. Which they’re not. When the New York Times ran a poll on tea partiers back in April, it found that they tend to favor the generic idea of cutting government programs. Just not the only ones that really matter. Some were unable to reconcile the competing concepts: “‘That’s a conundrum, isn’t it?’ asked Jodine White, 62, of Rocklin, Calif. ‘I don’t know what to say. Maybe I don’t want smaller government. I guess I want smaller government and my Social Security.’ She added, ‘I didn’t look at it from the perspective of losing things I need. I think I’ve changed my mind.’”

The only way to balance the budget by 2020, while simultaneously (a) making the Bush tax cuts permanent and (b) protecting all the programs Republicans say they won’t cut, is to completely abolish the rest of the federal government: ‘No more national parks, no more Small Business Administration loans, no more export subsidies, no more N.I.H. No more Medicaid (one-third of its budget pays for long-term care for our parents and others with disabilities). No more child health or child nutrition programs. No more highway construction. No more homeland security. Oh, and no more Congress.’”

I notice that nobody running for Congress this year is specifying just how they’d kill the deficit. They want to cut spending, and they say they can, but they can’t see any rush in specifying how they’ll do it. That can wait til after the election. Republican duplicity and hypocrisy.

What would it look like if Obama didn’t have to pay for Bush’s wars based on lies, didn’t have to pay for Bush’s prescription drug plan, didn’t have to pay for Bush’s tax cuts, didn’t have to pay for stimulus funds to rescue the country from Bush’s Great Recession, and didn’t have to pay interest (one of the biggest items in the federal budget) on the money that Bush and Reagan borrowed previously? Most likely, it would look like it did on January 20, 2001, the day that Bush came to office, and the United States was running the greatest surplus ever in its history.

So here we stand. The people who created endless disaster as far as the eye can see are now completely beside themselves in outrage that someone is spending a few dollars to clean up the mess these same folks have made by convincing America to follow their policies over the last thirty years. They want big changes, right now, even though they can’t quite specify what they want – other than changes that won’t hurt them, personally – and even though these changes would do absolutely nothing to solve the current problems facing the country, and would in fact probably exacerbate those.

If we weren't so damn stupid.

tnb

Tea-Baggers

Well Said

I would never vote for most Democrats either but with only two choices R or D, what else can you do.

A Reminder

Who bailed out the banks? Who was in charge when the financial crisis hit. Who was in when the recession started.

US vs Pakistan

Remember, "They hate us for our freedoms".

As Pakistan-US Tensions Mount, Tankers Burn and Obama Administration Suggests Coup | The Seminal