Month: October 2013

Boehner Defiantly Rationalizes GOP Madness, as Stephanopoulos Presses for Shutdown End Game Strategy (video)

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by Pamela Powers Hannley

A week ago, Republican grandstanding in the House of Representatives shutdown the US government. Saying they want to "save the American people from the threat of Obamacare" Tea Party anarchists are risking the health and welfare of millions of Americans, our standing as a world leader, and our financial health as a nation, as they stall budget negotiations. This is beyond unconscionable. It is traitorous.

Bankrolled by the Koch Brothers and a handful of capitalists bent on denying affordable health care to millions of Americans, Republicans in the House of Representatives continue to use double speak lie to cloud the issues and deflect blame for this dangerous brinksmanship away from themselves.

From Esquire…

We have elected a national legislature in which the true power resides in a cabal of vandals, a nihilistic brigade that believes that its opposition to a bill directing millions of new customers to the nation's insurance companies is the equivalent of standing up to the Nazis in 1938, to the bravery of the passengers on Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, and to Mel Gibson's account of the Scottish Wars of Independence in the 13th Century. We have elected a national legislature that looks into the mirror and sees itself already cast in marble.

We did this. We looked at our great legacy of self-government and we handed ourselves over to the reign of morons. 

[Video after the jump.]

Time Magazine cover gets it right

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie: Time Magazine is still in business? Who knew. In any event, Time has the perfect cover this week on newsstands. So-called GOP "moderates" are held hostage by their radical extremist Tea Party captors, and in a classic case of Stockholm syndrome, are empathetic and sympathetic towards their captors to the point of … Read more

South Carolina and another nullification crisis

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The Washington Post's Colbert King got it exactly right in The rise of the New Confederacy.

Confederale SoldiersSouth Carolina, the state that gave us the Nullification Crisis with the South Carolina Ordinance of Nullification in 1832, until Congress in 1833 passed a Force Bill, authorizing President Andrew Jackson to use military force against South Carolina ended the crisis.

South Carolina, the home of Senator John C. Calhoun, the intellectual force behind states' rights and nullification, under which states could declare null and void federal laws which they viewed as unconstitutional, and who was an inspiration to the secessionists of 1860–61.

South Carolina, the first state to secede from the United States with the Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.

South Carolina, whose Confederate militia batteries opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, the first shots of the American Civil War in 1861.

South Carolina, which has refused to accept its defeat in the Civil War or to accept the post-Civil War Amendments, in particular the 14th Amendment, which forever ended any debate over Sen. Calhoun's theories of nullification and secession.

Sunday Morning Bobblehead Fail (please, just make it stop!)

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

I stopped watching the Sunday Morning bobbleheads years ago. Why should I ruin a perfectly good Sunday morning watching incompetent infotainment actors pretending to be journalists? But I have relatives staying with me this weekend, and they insisted.

After sitting through the interminable torture of the Sunday Morning bobbleheads and their repetition of GOPropaganda talking points like the loyal little stenographers they are, all I can say is: "New Rule: cancel all the Sunday Morning bobblehead shows" — please, just make it stop!

I swear, American's I.Q. will increase a good 10 points after the first couple of weeks in the absence of these preening infotainment actors pretending to be journalists.

Who set me off in particular was Savannah Guthrie, who was sitting in as host of NBC's Meet The Press Gregory this week. I remember Savannah from when she was a TV news reporter for KVOA here in Tucson. I didn't think much of her then, and I think even less of her now. This morning she was the perfect little parrot for the GOPropanda talking point, "Why won't the president just sit down and negotiate with the Republicans?" (squawk!)

It's not just Savannah. I have heard the insufferable Wolf Blitzer and Candy Crowley at CNN parrot the same GOPropanda talking point all week.

Do you know who is the only infotainment actor pretending to be a journalist who answered this GOPropaganda talking point correctly? CNN's Fareed Zakaria.

Triangulation: The coward’s political platform

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By Craig McDermott, cross-posted from Random Musings

 

From Taegan Goddard's Political Dictionary –

triangulation

The act of a political candidate presenting his or her views as being
above and between the left and right sides of the political spectrum.
It’s sometimes called the “third way.”

In
practice, it has come to cover the situation where electeds establish a
voting and issue position pattern that is so disorganized that they can
present it as meaning whatever they think that a given audience will
like best.

And when the audience changes, so does the way that the electeds present their records.

Some observers, being more cynical than me (which is saying something 🙂 ) call it "practical".

I call it "cowardly".

 

In
the last week or so, during the federal government shutdown crisis
manufactured the Republicans in the US House of Representatives, we've
seen a couple of the Democratic members of AZ's Congressional delegation
go down this path in the most brazen way possible.

Reps.
Kyrsten Sinema (D-CD9) and Ron Barber (D-CD2) have tried to look
"reasonable" by siding with the tea party types in Congress by voting to
weaken
the Affordable Care Act.  They have also supported a number of bills
that are intended to cloak the Rs in an aura of "puppy dogs and fluffy
white clouds" (funding PR-friendly agencies and operations like cancer
research, etc.).