Last Call For The Painful Turtle

The Lexington Herald-Leader editorial board is not happy with Sen. Mitch McConnell pledging allegiance to the Koch brothers and not to Kentuckians in need, and they unleashed a blistering editorial this week against the incumbent GOP Senate majority leader.

The Republican leader assured the Kochs and their friends that he would use budget riders to stymie protections for consumers and the economy enacted to avoid a repeat of the financial meltdown. And he expressed contempt for policies that would help the middle class regain its economic footing, such as a minimum-wage increase, extended unemployment benefits and relief from student-loan debt. 

"We're not going to be debating all these gosh-darn proposals," McConnell promised if Republicans gain control of the Senate and he becomes its leader. 

The recession ended five years ago. Wall Street is setting record highs, yet too many people say they are economically insecure. 

Kentucky needs an additional 80,800 jobs to make up for losses in the recession and keep up with the state's 4 percent population growth, according to the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy. 

A branch of the Kochs' political organization, Americans for Prosperity, recently opened in Kentucky, with the spouse of a McConnell field rep as its director. 

On the recently disclosed tape, McConnell is heard thanking the Koch brothers "for the important work you're doing. I don't know where we'd be without you." 

What Kentucky voters should think about is where we'd be with them pulling the strings of the U.S. Senate.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2014/09/02/3408649_mcconnell-promising-pain-serving.html?rh=1#storylink=cpy

Ouch.

The pundits still have McConnell easily rolling to re-election in November.  I simply don't think that's the case anymore.  The Koch tape and the sudden resignation of McConnell's campaign director over a bribery scandal is going to start having an effect on the polls.

McConnell knows this.

When StupidiNews Breaks...

...Zandar fixes it.

All kinds of breaking news right now:

1) The jury has come back in the Bob McDonnell corruption trial, and the verdict is in:  Bob McDonnell guilty on 11 corruption charges, his wife Maureen guilty on 9 charges, some of which she shared with her husband. Sentencing January 6.  They're going away for a long, long time, kids.

And another corrupt Republican goes down in flames.

2) The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals has found Indiana and Wisconsin's respective state bans on same-sex marriage to be unconstitutional.  That's three appellate courts now that have reached the same conclusion. Little doubt in my mind now that SCOTUS will move on this sooner rather than later.

3) Legendary actress and comedienne Joan Rivers has passed at age 81.   Her daughter Melissa, a CNN anchor, announced the news to the world this afternoon.  Here's to you Joan, you were fearlessly funny.

Hell of a news day for Thursday, yes?

BREAKING: A Halbig Friggin Deal

Think Progress is reporting that the DC Circuit Court of Appeals decision where two of three judges found that Obamacare subsidies were illegal in states that had federal exchanges has been withdrawn pending a full DC Circuit Court review.  Ian Millhiser explains what this means:

The reason why this matters is because the plaintiffs in this lawsuit, known as Halbig v. Burwell, are hustling to try to convince the GOP-dominated Supreme Court to hear this case, where they no doubt believe that they have a greater chance of succeeding than in the DC Circuit, as a majority of the active judges in the DC Circuit are Democrats. The Supreme Court takes only a tiny fraction of the cases brought to their attention by parties who lost in a lower court — a study of the Court’s 2005 term, for example, found that the justices granted a full argument to only 78 of the 8,517 petitions seeking the high Court’s review that term. The justices, however, are particularly likely to hear cases where two federal appeals courts disagree about the same question of law. 

Two hours after the divided DC Circuit panel released its opinion attempted to defund Obamacare, a unanimous panel of the Fourth Circuit upheld the health subsidies that are at issue in Halbig. Thus, so long as both decisions remained in effect, Supreme Court review was very likely. Now that the full DC Circuit has vacated the two Republican judges’ July judgement, Supreme Court review is much less likely.

In other words, if the full DC Circuit Court rules in favor of the government as expected, there's nothing that the Supreme Court needs to decide, and by choosing to not take the case up, the decisions will stand to allow the Affordable Care Act to work as intended.

We'll see.

GOP Minority Outreach, Rafael Cruz Edition

Don't tell me Ted Cruz's father Rafael doesn't speak for the Republican Party, because that's exactly what he's going around the country doing.  His latest stop was in Williamson County, Texas, where he spoke to Republicans about "the blacks".

The father of Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said black people “need to be educated” about Democrats, so that they will vote Republican. Cruz, who made the comments at the Western Williamson Republican Club August meeting, added “the average black does not” understand that the minimum wage is bad.

The Aug. 21 meeting advertised that Cruz would “speak passionately on what can be done to return our nation to the principles that made America exceptional.” During the speech, Cruz spoke at length about a recent conversation he said he had with a black pastor in Bakersfield, California.

“I said, as a matter of fact, ‘Did you know that Civil Rights legislation was passed by Republicans? It was passed by a Republican Senate under the threat of a filibuster by the Democrats,’” Cruz said. “‘Oh, I didn’t know that.’ And then I said, ‘Did you know that every member of the Ku Klux Klan were Democrats from the South?’ ‘Oh I didn’t know that.’ You know, they need to be educated.”

It's funny, because the civil rights legislation that "Republicans" passed is no longer necessary according to Republicans of today, because racism doesn't exist.  Certainly not racism like Rafael Cruz throws it around, am I right?

Cruz cited a book Please Stop Helping Us by Jason Riley, a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board.

“I am going to try to encourage everybody I can to buy a book written by a black journalist. His name is Jason Riley. He wrote a book called Please Stop Helping Us, talking about how all the handouts to blacks have kept blacks in the poorhouse. And I’ll tell you what, I am going to make it my task to buy 15 to 20 copies of that book and hand it out to some black leaders to read.”

“Jason Riley said in an interview, Did you know before we had minimum wage laws black unemployment and white unemployment were the same? If we increase the minimum wage, black unemployment will skyrocket. See, he understands it, but the average black does not.”

Did you know that before minimum wage laws, blacks were slaves?  It's amazing his slective reading of history.  And frankly, Cruz wants to get rid of minimum wage so he can effective reinstate slavery.  The magical notion that corporations will magically hire more Americans and pay them more without a government mandated minimum wage is ridiculous.  After all, we'd have zero unemployment if wages were zero, right?

And finally, nothing says "I want to improve the Republican Party's standing with African-American voters" quite like "black people are too goddamn stupid to realize Democrats are using them."

StupidiNews!

• The Department of Justice will open a civil rights investigation into the entire Ferguson, Missouri police department after the shooting death of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown by police.
• A federal judge in Louisiana has ruled to uphold the state's same-sex marriage ban, the first such ruling since last year's historic Windsor decision.
• President Obama and other NATO leaders will meet today in Wales to discuss the group's response to Russian aggression in Ukraine and Islamic State terrorists in Iraq and Syria.
• Al-Qaeda head Ayman al-Zawahiri has announced the formation of a new wing of the terrorist organization in the Indian subcontinent.
• Mobile carrier Verizon will pay a record $7.4 million fine for violating the privacy rights of customers over the last seven years.