Tag Archives: Tea Party

April 1, 2011 · 6:42 pm

Florida Republicans upset Democrat said ‘uterus’ on state House floor | The Raw Story

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I’ll let this speak for itself…

For some Republican lawmakers in Florida, uterus is a dirty word.

During a debate over a bill that would prohibit governments from deducting union dues out of a worker’s paycheck last week, Florida state Rep. state Rep. Scott Randolph (D) argued that Republicans seem to only be against regulations when it comes to big business.

In his speech on the state House floor, Randolph even suggested that his wife could “incorporate her uterus” if it would stop the GOP from passing more restrictive abortion laws.

Republican leadership scolded the Democratic congressman, telling him that talk about body parts was unwelcome.

“The point was that Republicans are always talking about deregulation and big government,” Randolph told The St. Petersburg Times Thursday. “And I always say their philosophy is small government for the big guy and big government for the little guy. And so, if my wife’s uterus was incorporated or my friend’s bedroom was incorporated, maybe they (Republicans) would be talking about deregulating.”

“It’s not like I used slang,” he added.

He said Republicans told him they were concerned about young pages hearing the word.

“I think it’s a sad commentary about what we think about sex education in the state,” Randolph said.

via Florida Republicans upset Democrat said ‘uterus’ on state House floor | The Raw Story.

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March 31, 2011 · 8:09 pm

Suppose They Gave a Tea Party and No One Came…

Except mainly the press…

The Usual Suspects from Congress came and almost outnumbered the attendees….

Best news I’ve had all week…

This thing finally seems to be fading out- now if only the press will report that fact more…

This is a start.  From the Washington Post:

A sparse crowd of tea party activists gathered beneath the U.S. Capitol on Thursday to urge Congress to cut more spending from the current federal budget and to cheer on some of their favorite politicians, including Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), Mike Pence (R-Ind.) and Steve King (R-Iowa).

One organizer estimated that a couple of hundred protesters had gathered near the Robert A. Taft bell tower north of the Capitol at lunchtime Thursday. According to a media sign-in sheet, at least 50 of those present were journalists documenting the latest tea party rally in Washington.

via Tea party activists rally for deeper spending cuts at Capitol – The Washington Post.

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March 31, 2011 · 7:57 pm

USAID Administrator: GOP Budget Cuts Would Lead To The Deaths Of 70,000 Children Globally

Heartless…

From ThinkProgress.com:

As Foreign Policy’s Josh Rogin notes, one moment of the hearing provided a particularly startling fact about H.R. 1, the House Republicans’ bill for continuing appropriations to fund the government. USAID administrator Rajiv Shah explained to Rep. Charlie Dent (R-PA) that the agency was committed to its mission of battling global poverty, but that H.R. 1 would severely gut its ability to battle easily preventable deaths among children — and even lead to the deaths of as many as 70,000 kids globally. Dent, apparently unmoved by Shah’s testimony, immediately asked to change the subject:

SHAH: We estimate, and I believe these are very conservative estimates, that H.R. 1 would lead to 70,000 kids dying. Of that 70,000, 30,000 would come from malarian control programs that would have to be scaled back, specifically. The other 40,000 is broken out as 24,000 who would die because of a lack of support for immunizations and other investments, and 16,000 would be because of the lack of skilled attendants at birth. […] There’s a way to do this that doesn’t have to cost lives. […]

DENT: Can I just quickly change subjects?

via ThinkProgress » USAID Administrator: GOP Budget Cuts Would Lead To The Deaths Of 70,000 Children Globally.

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March 31, 2011 · 6:34 pm

Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%

This is one of the clearest explanations of the income and wealth disparity in American I have read.

It’s written by Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize Winner in Economics and former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors for Bill Clinton…

There is so much here I want to share that I think the best I can do is ask you to click the link at the bottom of this post and read it for yourself.

It’s really worth your time to read this entire article from Vanity Fair.  It’s not too long….

It’s no use pretending that what has obviously happened has not in fact happened. The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Their lot in life has improved considerably. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent. One response might be to celebrate the ingenuity and drive that brought good fortune to these people, and to contend that a rising tide lifts all boats. That response would be misguided. While the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall. For men with only high-school degrees, the decline has been precipitous—12 percent in the last quarter-century alone. All the growth in recent decades—and more—has gone to those at the top. In terms of income equality, America lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride. Among our closest counterparts are Russia with its oligarchs and Iran. While many of the old centers of inequality in Latin America, such as Brazil, have been striving in recent years, rather successfully, to improve the plight of the poor and reduce gaps in income, America has allowed inequality to grow.

via Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1% | Society | Vanity Fair.

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March 31, 2011 · 6:20 pm

Before Bachmann: The 5 craziest GOP candidates of the modern era – 2012 Elections – Salon.com

The GOP Presidential nominating process really is going to be a circus…

Or a freak show….

Your call…

Here is how Steve Kornacki at Salon.com calls it:

For respectable Republicans, the embarrassment potential may be at an all-time high. The party is a year away from picking its next presidential candidate and never in the modern era has it faced a vacuum like this.

Sure, the odds are still strong that the GOP will ultimately settle on a “harmless enough” general election candidate — someone sufficiently generic and inoffensive to ensure that the party doesn’t fall far below its natural level of support in the fall of 2012. But the road from here to the convention looks unusually — and, if you’re a Democrat, comically — rocky for Republicans.

The party’s base — which nominated several utterly unelectable candidates in several high-stakes Senate races last year — is in revolt, thirsting for purity and likely to accede to a Romney or Pawlenty nomination only with reluctance. Before then, it figures to be tempted by an atypically large collection of red meat-spouting long shots: Michele Bachman, Newt Gingrich, John Bolton, Rick Santorum, maybe even Sarah Palin or (why not?) Herman Cain — personally and politically polarizing extremists who validate a damaging stereotype of the Obama-era GOP. It’s not impossible that one of these ideologues will fare surprisingly well in one or more of the early nominating contests next year (most likely activist-dominated Iowa).

It is this possibility that makes 2012 potentially different from previous Republican contests, in which the party has generally — but not always — succeeded in keeping the embarrassments to a minimum. Here’s a look at the most embarrassing Republican candidates to be taken (at least somewhat) seriously by the media since 1980:

MORE:   Before Bachmann: The 5 craziest GOP candidates of the modern era – 2012 Elections – Salon.com.

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March 31, 2011 · 6:16 pm

GOP Presidential Candidates: An American Embarrassment

From Joe Klein at Time Magazine on the 2012 Republican Presidential Candidates:

This is my 10th presidential campaign, Lord help me. I have never before seen such a bunch of vile, desperate-to-please, shameless, embarrassing losers coagulated under a single party’s banner. They are the most compelling argument I’ve seen against American exceptionalism. Even Tim Pawlenty, a decent governor, can’t let a day go by without some bilious nonsense escaping his lizard brain. And, as Greg Sargent makes clear, Mitt Romney has wandered a long way from courage. There are those who say, cynically, if this is the dim-witted freak show the Republicans want to present in 2012, so be it. I disagree. One of them could get elected. You never know.

via American Embarrassment – Swampland – TIME.com.

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March 30, 2011 · 7:10 pm

Poll: Americans Cooling on Tea Party – POLITICO.com

I knew people would eventually get tire of these lunatics….

Now, if only the press will recognize and accurately report that they are just a fringe group of Republicans…

From Jennifer Epstein at Politico.com

 

The tea party might be running out of steam.

The approval rating for the 2-year-old movement fell to 32 percent in a CNN/Opinion Research corporation poll released Wednesday, the lowest it’s been since CNN first polled on the tea party in January 2010.

Forty-seven percent of Americans, meanwhile, said they have an unfavorable view of the movement, a higher negative percentage than ever. An additional 7 percent said they’d never heard of the movement, and 14 percent said they had no opinion.

In December, 37 percent of the sample surveyed by CNN said they view the tea party favorably, while 43 percent said they view it unfavorably. The group’s favorability rating hovered at36 percent to 38 percent throughout 2010.

The biggest drop in the tea party movement’s favorability came among people who make less than $50,000 a year. In October, 30 percent in that income group said they had unfavorable views of the tea party. Now, 45 percent say the same.

via Poll: Americans cooling on tea party – Jennifer Epstein – POLITICO.com.

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March 28, 2011 · 8:05 pm

GOP Puts AARP in its Sights

Now the GOP is going after the AARP…

This could be fun– and it could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for the Republicans….

The elderly are the most dedicated voters out there and have predominately supported Republican Candidates lately…

The elderly and southern white men are about the only base the GOP has outside of Religious Conservatives and the Rich…

I truly hope the Republicans stick to their guns and go after the AARP…

Whatever issues I may have with the AARP, they will not go down without a fight and they can really rally the older Americans against the GOP if the GOP pushes them too hard…

They aren’t Acorn….

They will fight back and they have the resources to do it….

Let’s just hope the GOP thoroughly pisses off the AARP Members….

They can’t win elections without them…

The Republican chairmen of the House Ways and Means Health and Oversight subcommittees have trained their sites on AARP, the nation’s largest advocacy group for older Americans.

Health Subcommittee Chairman Wally Herger, R-Calif., and Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Charles Boustany Jr., R-La., said they plan to press AARP over its insurance products, revenues, governance, and lobbying expenditures.

“This hearing is about getting to the bottom of how AARP’s financial interests affect their self-stated mission of enhancing seniors’ quality of life,” Herger said in a written statement. “It is important to better understand how AARP’s insurance business overlaps with its advocacy efforts and whether such overlap is appropriate.”

In 2010, AARP spent $22.05 million on lobbying efforts, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

The hearing, set for April 1, comes a little more than a year after the group helped Democrats pass the expansive health care reform legislation, and just weeks before Congress is expected to begin in earnest a debate over entitlement spending.

Over the years, the group has ticked off lawmakers from both sides of the aisle. In 2003, its support of then-President George W. Bush’s effort to create a drug benefit in the Medicare program angered some Democrats who were opposed to the structure. It was the Republicans’ turn in 2005, when AARP lobbied hard against efforts to privatize Social Security.

“AARP is committed to transparency, and the hearing will provide us yet another opportunity to answer any questions as we continue to be a champion for the wants and needs of Americans” older than 50, said AARP spokesman Drew Nannis.

via NationalJournal.com – GOP Puts AARP in its Sights – Friday, March 25, 2011.

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March 26, 2011 · 10:00 am

The Biggest Threat Facing the Country Today Is Fast Creeping Ignorance | | AlterNet

More on the theme of glorifying ignorance in America…

This acceptance and glorification of willful ignorance is really the greatest threat to our country…

There was a time we wanted the “best and the brightest” to run things…

Now we glorify mediocrities and dullards…

White people complain so much about Black people glorifying the Ghetto Culture of bling, profanity and baggy pants…

How can they talk when White folks glorify the willful ignorance of Glen Beck, Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann and Ann Coulter?

Both groups are glorifying the lowest common denominators of their culture.

If Whites argue ghetto culture brings down the Black race, they why can’t they accept the argument that willful ignorance does the same for the White race?

Both concepts glorify what used to be “negative” images that have become “positive” images in their societies…

Just my thoughts….

As a story from Alternet put it, “3/4ths of Senate GOP Doesn’t Believe in Science: The Tea Party and its allies had made it unacceptable to the GOP base to be anywhere except pandering to the anti-science crowd.” (Full Story)

The Right, which hated and feared commies and their (largely imaginary) infiltration into government, not only don’t seem to care about creeping ignorance in government, but have come to embrace this new breed of government infiltrators.

The explanation for this embrace is simple as the minds of the infiltrators: science, and for that matter any other factual analysis, tends to flatly contradict many of the Right’s most cherished fictions, such as:

The more you cut taxes the more tax revenue flows into federal coffers.

History proves America is a Christian nation.

Climate change is either not happening at all or, if it is happening, it has nothing to do with our use of fossil fuels. (“I personally believe that the solar flares are more responsible for climatic cycles than anything that human beings do. …” – Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, Wisconsin)

Slashing regulation of business and high finance is good for business, good for the nation and good for the American public.

If the rich are allowed to keep more of their earnings they will share it with everyone else, (trickle down.)

School science classes should be “fair and balanced,” like Fox News, when teaching the origins of life on earth by teaching the biblically-inspired “creationist” version alongside Darwin’s scientific theory of evolution.

President Obama “may not have been born in America” as he claims.

President Obama is “a secret Muslim.”

And the list of Creeping Ignorance goes on and on, growing longer with each passing month. Michelle Bachmann believes that the founding fathers “didn’t rest until the put an need to slavery.”  She also believes the first shot “heard around the world” that started our war of independence was fired in New Hampshire. It wasn’t. Did she care? Nope. Pointing out that it was fired in Massachusetts was, to her and her kind, just further proof of how the mainstream media picks on conservatives.

via The Biggest Threat Facing the Country Today Is Fast Creeping Ignorance | | AlterNet.

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March 25, 2011 · 10:40 pm

How television created and then killed Sarah Palin’s political prospects – The Globe and Mail

Great Article from the Globe and Mail…

I’ve been saying for weeks, the media is finally tired of Sarah Palin…

Her 15 Minutes of fame are, hopefully, finally over…

God knows, she’s milked it for every dime she could..

Now the media is already foaming at the mouth over Michelle Bachmann as her successor…

And she’ll be twice as crazy and therefore twice as much fun…

It was television that destroyed Sarah Palin, just as it made her. I’ve said before and I’ll say it again – the arrival of Palin as a major political figure in 2008 was an emanation of the reality-TV culture, anchored in the belief that ordinary or “everyday” people, inarticulate though they may be, and with all the baggage of messy personal lives, are truly compelling public figures. Palin was the political equivalent. A figure who refracts national identity as it is shaped by the culture’s most powerful medium. Authentic, populist and dismissive of sophistication in thought and action.

Then, television duly destroyed the Palin authenticity. The arc of her national political career began with a defining speech at the Republican National Convention in September, 2008, and ended in November, 2010, a few episodes into Sarah Palin’s Alaska. The show, a cringingly inevitable reality-TV series, gave her a huge platform and she blew it. If her exposure on TV in 2008 brought out the authenticity, the show brought out Palin’s inner princess. She talked about being a mom 87 times an episode (I’m exaggerating , but only a little) and made dubious attempts to make political parables linking her family, the outdoors and wildlife. It was ego unbounded. And this after quitting her job as governor of Alaska.

The series had many memorable moments and scenes, but what lingered – and obviously had an impact on Republicans – was the unsubtle undermining of Palin’s assertion that she and her family are “normal, average Americans.” A salmon-fishing trip for the kids involved using a private bush plane to fly to a remote wilderness lake. Palin asserted that such a trip is “an everyday thing” in Alaska, yet any fool watching at home knew the cost had to be in the many thousands. A mountain-climbing trip to Mount McKinley was presented as a trip in the family RV, yet viewers were gobsmacked to find that the vehicle was more like those giant, luxury tour buses used by rock bands.

Television is not kind to blatant hubris and hypocrisy and the series amounted to an epic failure to enhance Palin’s status as the genuine voice of authentic America. Television is flow, not content, and in politics, TV is not a problem to be managed but an instrument to be played. (Marshall McLuhan told us so and it is true.) The flow of Sarah Palin’s Alaska amounted to a river of platitudes and patently insincere assertions. Palin failed to play television as an instrument.

The medium that gave her exposure and heft as a figure representing everyday reality, and ordinary people’s views, finally diminished her fatally. After succumbing to the temptations of a reality-TV series, Palin was exposed as overexposed. The other week, while on Fox News attacking Kathy Griffin, she had all the political heft of some batty lady calling into the phone-in radio show from remote Alaska and braying about things that made sense only in her own head. The presence, the charisma were gone.

Palin arrived as a creature of TV and the medium has eaten her up. Never mind the primaries and U.S. presidential election in 2012. The political obituary can be written now.

via How television created and then killed Sarah Palin’s political prospects – The Globe and Mail.

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