StupidiNews!

• Senate majority leader Harry Reid and minority leader Mitch McConnell have come to an agreement to make minor changes to the filibuster rule.
• Missouri becomes the latest state to push intelligent design alongside evolution in teaching biology in schools.
• No Senate Republicans have signaled any support for California Democrat Sen. Dianne Feinstein's revival of the assault weapons ban she wrote 20 years ago.
• Sen John Kerry faced the Senate panel he chaired as nominee for Secretary of State, seeking confirmation and warning Iran on nuclear weapons.
• Star Trek reboot director J.J. Abrams will get a crack at the other big sci-fi franchise, named as the director of the 7th Star Wars film.

Last Call

Republicans are starting to get serious about stealing 2016's presidential race.






Pennsylvania, Michigan and Virginia Republicans are already working on bills that do this.  The Virginia bill would give the two Senate electoral votes to the winner of the most districts, not the winner of the state.  If all six of these states had adopted the Virginia GOP plan in 2012, it would have cost President Obama 78 electoral votes by my math...which would have made Mitt Romney President despite losing the popular election by 5 million votes, and losing the popular vote in every one of these states.

So yes, when I say the GOP is trying to steal the next Presidential election, I mean just that.

Shooting Fish In A Barrel

Republicans want Democrats to take the blame for the death of gun control legislation, that's assured.  The House will never vote on meaningful firearms legislation at all (just like they simply never took a vote on the American Jobs Act) but if nothing can pass the Senate, the Democrats get the blame. 

If this legislation dies in the Senate, it's Red State Dems like Joe Manchin in WV who will kill it.

Talk of stricter gun control has stirred up a lot of unease here, a place where hunters vie for top prize (a 26-inch LED television) in the Big Buck Photo Contest, and ads for a gun-simulator game ask, “Feel like shooting something today?”

But before Senator Joe Manchin III invited a group of 15 businessmen and community leaders to lunch last week to discuss the topic, he had only a vague idea of how anxious many of his supporters were. 

“How many of you all believe that there is a movement to take away the Second Amendment?” he asked. 

About half the hands in the room went up. 

Despite his best attempts to reassure them — “I see no movement, no talk, no bills, no nothing” — they remained skeptical. “We give up our rights one piece at a time,” a banker named Charlie Houck told the senator. 

If there is a path to new gun laws, it has to come through West Virginia and a dozen other states with Democratic senators like Mr. Manchin who are confronting galvanized constituencies that view any effort to tighten gun laws as an infringement. 

As Congress considers what, if any, laws to change, Mr. Manchin has become a barometer among his colleagues, testing just how far they might be able to go without angering voters. 

And the answer will be "nowhere."  We'll here how Joe Manchin tried of course, but in the end he has to go with what his constituents tell him.  And his constituents tell him that the Kenyan Usurper is coming for their guns, and that if Joe Manchin helps him, they'll come for Joe Manchin's head in the President's place.

Maybe Manchin will surprise me.  I wouldn't count on it however.

Bending That Cost Curve

Matthew Yglesias offers up this chart of Canadian health care spending versus the United States:

 This is the chart that I think ought to dominate the conversation about public-sector health care spending in the United States, and yet it is curiously ignored. The data show government health care spending per capita in the United States and Canada. The United States spends more. And that's not more per person who gets government health insurance, it's more per resident. And yet Canada covers all its citizens, and we don't. That should be considered shocking stuff, and yet I rarely hear it mentioned.

Matt goes on to make the point that Canada leverages the power of its health care system to get the lowest prices.  The United States basically refuses to, because Big Pharma and Big Insurance wants to make money.   Canada covers all of its citizens by spending about 25% less per person.  So why aren't we using the Canadian system?

Big Pharma, Big Insurance.

StupidiNews!

• North Korea says it will conduct more nuclear and long-range rocket tests as part of a deliberate confrontation with the United States.
• The UK's top medical adviser says the country should consider a possible pandemic of antibiotic-resistant diseases as a national emergency scenario comparable to a terrorist strike.
• With a 285-144 vote, House Republicans have passed a three month suspension of the debt ceiling, and the legislation is expected to go to the Senate.
• The Department of Transportation and the FAA will continue to ground the Boeing 787 Dreamliner until a cause of battery fires on the planes has been found.
• Google says that with standards from Congress stalled by partisan fighting, the company will choose to require a warrant to release information on its Gmail users.

Last Call

Add Virginia to the list of GOP-controlled states that voted for President Obama in 2012, with Republicans now looking to make sure they can steal the election in 2016.

A Republican-backed bill that would end Virginia’s winner-takes-all method of apportioning its 13 electoral votes in presidential elections cleared its first legislative hurdle Wednesday.

A Senate Privileges and Elections subcommittee recommended Sen. Bill Carrico’s bill on a 3-3 party line vote Wednesday, advancing it to consideration by the GOP-dominated full committee next week. Republicans control the Senate and House in Virginia, and Gov. Bob McDonnell is a Republican.

The bill would apportion electors by congressional district to the candidate who wins each of the state’s 11 districts. The candidate who carries a majority of the districts would also win the two electors not tied to congressional districts.

Sen. Charles W. “Bill” Carrico, R-Grayson, said the change is necessary because Virginia’s populous, urbanized areas such as the Washington, D.C., suburbs and Hampton Roads can outvote rural regions such as his, rendering their will irrelevant.

Yes, it's so awful that we can't have Republican co-Presidents to represent the will of the people who lost a winner-take-all presidential election.  How terrible that in a democratic republic, a majority vote allows you to win.  We can't have that, so let's split the electoral vote specifically in a way that allows Republicans to win!

At some point this kind of nonsense has to end up in front of the Supreme Court, right?

Janie's Got A Gun, And A Rifle, And A Mortar, And...

Hello, Obama Second Term!  What have you for us today?  The Pentagon finally allowing women into combat, you say?

The U.S. military is ending its policy of excluding women from combat, and will open combat jobs and direct combat units to female troops, CNN has learned. Multiple officials confirm to CNN that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta will make the announcement tomorrow, and notify Congress of the planned change in policy.

"We will eliminate the policy of 'no women in units that are tasked with direct combat, a senior defense official says.

But the officials caution that "not every position will open all at once on Thursday."

Once the policy is changed, Department of Defense will enter what is being called an "assessment phase," in which each branch of service will examine all of its jobs and units not currently integrated and then produce a timetable in which it can. The Army and Marine Corps, especially, will be examining physical standards and gender-neutral accommodations within combat units. Every 90 days, the service chiefs will have to report back on how they're doing.

Well about damn time.  I know and work with several women who are veterans and have served this country admirably, and frankly it's the 21st Century anyway.   It's a volunteer military, and if you can meet the physical requirements and can do the job, then you deserve to be able to take your shot at it.

Good on you, Pentagon.

And It Continues In Earnest, Part 6

More county mounties are pledging to ignore the USURPER KENYAN REGIME of President Shabazz Guntaker X, this time near Bon's neck of the woods in Missouri.

As President Barack Obama continues to push gun control proposals in Washington D.C., Sheriff Charles M. Heiss, R-Johnson County is asking fellow law enforcers to sign and send this letter to the president.

The letter expresses concern with the Obama administration and the president’s gun control laws he laid out before Congress last week.

“It appears to me and many Americans that there is a genuine desire on the part of your administration to restrict the Second Amendment rights of law abiding American citizens in the interest of curbing gun violence in our nation,” Heiss wrote. “Any attempt to restrict these Second Amendment rights through executive order is unconstitutional and tantamount to an all-out assault on the United States Constitution.”

Gosh, I had no idea everyone was a Constitutional law scholar and Supreme Court Justice.   Trying to think when Clinton, Reagan, and Bush 41 proposed gun laws (and in Reagan and Clinton's case, passed them and signed them) if we had law enforcement officials say "Nope, screw you.  We refuse to enforce your laws."

I'm guessing no.  What's different about this President, I wonder...

Oh yeah, that's right.  He doesn't count anyway in the eyes of tens of millions, so it's okay.

StupidiNews!

• A 22-year-old suspect is being held in Tuesday's shooting and wounding of three students at a community college in Dallas.
• Benjamin Netanyahu won the narrowest of victories in Tuesday elections in Israel, considerably weakening his right-leaning coalition.
• The leader of US forces in Afghanistan, Gen. John Allen, has been cleared of any wrongdoing in the affair of former CIA director Gen. David Petraeus.
• British PM David Cameron is promising to bring up the question of the UK leaving the European Union in a referendum by 2017 if re-elected.
• The Federal Trade Commission has announced a lawsuit against a fake non-profit that reportedly scammed $70 million in fraudulent cell phone fees from thousands of victims.

Last Call

Laugh all you want to at Virginia's current GOP Attorney General and teabagger favorite for Governor in November, Ken Cuccinelli.  Yes, he's an ignorant fool, invoking the name of Dr. King in his war on birth control...

On Monday, MLK Day, Cuccinelli again made the comparison between his fight against the federal requirement that birth control be offered with no copay by insurance plans to King’s fight for equal rights for African Americans. Cuccinelli earned some headlines earlier this month when he told an Iowa show that opponents of the mandate need to be prepared to “go to jail” in protest of the law. (He later tried to walk that back a bit.)

Cuccinelli was asked Monday about the controversy on The John Fredericks Show, a conservative talk show in Virginia. He was shocked Democrats would raise the issue, casting the battle as a struggle for rights rather than an attack on contraception.

“Whenever I talk about religious liberty, you know they turn it around. All they talk about -they don’t talk about denying religious liberty. They talk about contraception. And I’m not talking about contraception. Government doesn’t have a role in contraception,” Cuccinelli told the radio show. “Government does have a role in protecting your civil rights especially today on MLK Day. The man who really came up with the American non-violent protest theory of civil disobedience. It’s pretty egregious that they can’t get any higher than contraception when we’re talking about protecting people’s religious liberty.”

...but even in a three way race he could very well win.

Republican State Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli and Democrat Terry McAuliffe are in a dead heat in their race to be Virginia's next governor, even if Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling runs as an independent, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today.

McAuliffe, the former Democratic National Committee chairman, gets 40 percent to 39 percent for Cuccinelli, with one in five voters saying they are undecided. That compares to McAuliffe's 41 - 37 percent margin in a November 14 matchup by the independent Quinnipiac University poll.

If Republican Bolling were to run as an independent, McAuliffe and Cuccinelli would get 34 percent each and Bolling would garner 13 percent. The three-way choice was not offered in November. 

We'll see.

Roe v. Wade Turns 40

The Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion in America was handed down 40 years ago today, and a new poll on the subject of abortion finds that there's a growing backlash against Republicans legislating clinics out of business at the state level.

According to the poll, 54 percent of adults say that abortion should be legal either always or most of the time, while a combined 44 percent said it should be illegal – either with or without exceptions.

That’s the first time since this poll question was first asked in 2003 that a majority maintained that abortion should be legal. Previously (with just one exception in 2008), majorities said abortion should be illegal.

In addition, a whopping 70 percent of Americans oppose the Roe v. Wade decision being overturned, including 57 percent who feel strongly about this.

That’s up from the 58 percent who said the decision shouldn’t be overturned in 1989; the 60 percent who said this in 2002; and the 66 percent who said this in 2005.

By comparison, just 24 percent now want the Roe v. Wade decision overturned, including 21 percent who feel strongly about this position.

Much of this change, the NBC/WSJ pollsters say, is coming from African Americans, Latinos and women without college degrees -- all of whom increasingly oppose the Supreme Court decision being overturned.

The GOP War on Women has profoundly affected the debate, mainly by reminding everyone that reproductive choice rights can and will be taken from all women if left up to Republicans.  No longer are Americans taking those rights and access to clinics for granted.  The winger side is making this a battle every step of the way, and that's galvanized the pro-choice side into actually fighting back...and winning.

Mostly, it's the passage of time.  Many women (and men!) though birth control and reproductive choice was a done issue.  Nobody's making that mistake now.

Senator Turtle Hides In His Shell

My senator, Mitch McConnell, wants you to fear the President...and maybe even do something based on that irrational fear.

In an email sent to his supporters on Sunday night, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) warned that the President and his Democratic allies were planning to take Americans’ guns away.

“You and I are literally surrounded,” McConnell’s campaign manager Jesse Benton wrote. “The gun-grabbers in the Senate are about to launch an all-out-assault on the Second Amendment.”

The email falsely claimed President Barack Obama planned to issue 23 executive orders “to get your guns.” Obama plans to nominate a director for the ATF and direct the Centers for Disease Control to research the causes of gun violence, among other executive actions. None of the executive orders he outlined last week involve anything remotely like gun confiscation.

“The gun-grabbers are in full battle mode,” Benton continued. “And they are serious. What’s at stake? There are almost too many schemes to list.”

It doesn't matter that President Obama is not taking guns away from anyone.  But why would Mitch tell the truth about the President's proposals?  He's running for re-election in 2014. And apparently, the only platform he feels he can run on is fear, paranoia, and rancor.


In other words, he's a Republican.  News flash, right?  If there's one thing that President Obama's second term truly means, it's four more years of unhinged Republicans deep into the paranoid style, pitching Obama Derangement Syndrome.


It's all they ever had, of course.

StupidiNews!

• Britain's Prince Harry has acknowledged that as a helicopter co-pilot gunner in the British Army, he and his crew have killed Taliban militants in Helmand province.
• The Library of Congress will take on the job of archiving and collecting America's Twitter feeds.
• North Carolina's Attorney General office says that undocumented immigrants under the President's two-year program should get driver's licenses.
• EU leaders have approved the latest payment to Greece's government, signaling confidence in the government of PM Antonis Samaras to trim the budget even further.
• A 20-year old Canadian computer science student has been expelled for probing and revealing a major security flaw in Quebec's student information system.

Last Call

The speech was amazing.  On Martin Luther King Day, the nation's first African-American president made the progressive case for government.

We, the people, still believe that every citizen deserves a basic measure of security and dignity.  We must make the hard choices to reduce the cost of health care and the size of our deficit.  But we reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future.  For we remember the lessons of our past, when twilight years were spent in poverty, and parents of a child with a disability had nowhere to turn.  We do not believe that in this country, freedom is reserved for the lucky, or happiness for the few.  We recognize that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, any one of us, at any time, may face a job loss, or a sudden illness, or a home swept away in a terrible storm. The commitments we make to each other - through Medicare, and Medicaid, and Social Security - these things do not sap our initiative; they strengthen us.  They do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great.

We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity.  We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.  Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms.  The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult.  But America cannot resist this transition; we must lead it.  We cannot cede to other nations the technology that will power new jobs and new industries - we must claim its promise.  That is how we will maintain our economic vitality and our national treasure - our forests and waterways; our croplands and snowcapped peaks.  That is how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God.  That's what will lend meaning to the creed our fathers once declared.

And Chuck Pierce with the best reaction to it.

The speech was a bold refutation of almost everything the Republican party has stood for over the past 40 years. It was a loud — and, for this president, damned near derisive — denouncement of all the mindless, reactionary bunkum that the Republicans have come to stand for in 2013; you could hear the sound of the punch he landed on the subject of global warming halfway to Annapolis. But the meat of the speech was a brave assertion of the power of government, not as an alien entity, but as an instrument of the collective will and desires of a self-governing people. 

We are not free because we are individuals, the president told them, daring them to hold two ideas in their heads at a time without their brains leaking out of their ears. We are free because, as individuals we work together in the creative act of self-government to produce a viable political commonwealth in which that freedom can thrive and prosper, and the primary instrument of that commonwealth is the government we devise out of it. That government must be allowed to function. That government must be allowed to operate for this freedom to be generally achieved.

We will wait and see, of course, what happens once the scaffolding and the bunting comes down, bearing in mind always the scriptural caution about faith without works being dead. But, for an afternoon, anyway, a Democratic president reclaimed the language of freedom from those for whom it means merely lower taxes and more guns. He reclaimed government as a manifestation of a country's aspirations, and not as an anchor on its progress. And he refuted, with precision and neatly camouflaged contempt, many of the most destructive ideas that have poisoned out politics for nearly four decades now. He did nothing less than redefine patriotism in a progressive way. That is already bothering  all of the right people. This, I tell you, is what gives me hope.

Amen to all of that.  Game is on now.  The President dropped a huge marker here.  He won.  And he's acting like it.

On The Next Night Court...

It's funny how in the blink of an eye, law-and-order minded wingers have gone from screaming about the need for mandatory sentencing, three strikes laws, and giving prosecutors the power to actually deal with those who break the law, to now that firearm legislation is the question of the day, yelling that America's various district attorneys and prosecutors are power-hungry pocket dictators.  Col. Mustard references Instadoofus:

Though extensive due process protections apply to the investigation of crimes, and to criminal trials, perhaps the most important part of the criminal process — the decision whether to charge a defendant, and with what — is almost entirely discretionary. Given the plethora of criminal laws and regulations in today’s society, this due process gap allows prosecutors to charge almost anyone they take a deep interest in. This Essay discusses the problem in the context of recent prosecutorial controversies involving the cases of Aaron Swartz and David Gregory, and offers some suggested remedies, along with a call for further discussion.

What follows is six pages of somnolent paranoia (itself quite a feat) that boils down to "Gubment is going to use prosecutors to steal your soul" followed by "let's do everything we can to make sure the broken criminal justice system is shattered to pieces so we can blame liberals and government, and then privatize the whole deal."

The whole thing is an exercise in Reynolds's usual glibertarian nonsense, where because government cannot be perfect, we have to scrap it in favor of free market everything.  Please note that most prosecutors are government employees, and trial lawyers are of course hired guns, so of course prosecutors are now the epitome of evil, with lots of hand-wringing over Jason Swartz and David Gregory.

Reynolds actually uses the words "skin in the game" and "loser pays" in his kit bag of snake oil remedies, which tells you just how much thought he's put into it.  We've gotten to the point where "Prosecutors should only bring cases they are sure to win or they'll be wasting taxpayer dollars!" as the solution to criminalization.

Where were these guys when New Jack City era drug laws in the 90's thought every black guy in the system was Nino Brown and the mass incarceration of minorities began in earnest?  Prosecutorial discretion was never a problem until the issue of actually enforcing gun regulations on the books became an issue, and especially wasn't an issue until President Obama proposed background checks and enforcing them.

Funny how that works.