Last Call

Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein is crazy smart, and runs a good place over at Wonkblog.  But he’s always been one of those “high-INT/low-WIS” types who doesn’t always see the forest for the trees when it comes to Republicans.  This weekend however , he finally removes the scales from his eyes about the way the GOP operates, and to his credit, admits he’s been played:

My column this weekend is about the almost comically poor lines of communication between the White House and the Hill. The opening anecdote was drawn from a background briefing I attended with a respected Republican legislator who thought it would be a gamechanger for President Obama to say he’d be open to chained CPI — a policy that cuts Social Security benefits — as part of a budget deal.
The only problem? Obama has said he’s open to chained CPI as part of a budget deal. And this isn’t one of those times where the admission was in private, and we’re going off of news reports. It’s right there on his Web site. It’s literally in bold type. But key GOP legislators have no idea Obama’s made that concession.

Klein then investigates this further after Jon Chait points out the GOP is being cementheaded on purpose:

If Obama could get hold of Klein’s mystery legislator and inform him of his budget offer, it almost certainly wouldn’t make a difference. He would come up with something – the cuts aren’t real, or the taxes are awful, or they can’t trust Obama to carry them out, or something.

At  this point (as Booman notes), a Twitter exchange between NYT reporter John Harwood and GOP strategist Mike Murphy illuminates young Ezra.

And then GOP consultant Mike Murphy told Time magazine that Obama could get a deal if he uttered the six magic words, “Some beneficiaries pay more and chained CPI.”
When John Harwood noted on Twitter that Murphy seemed unaware that Obama had already offered both of those items, Murphy responded. At first, Murphy insisted that only means-testing had been offered. When corrected, he followed Chait’s prediction to a ‘T.’

1. (Chait: “the cuts aren’t real”) Murphy: “his CCPI offer is small beans gimmick.”
2. (Chait: “the taxes are awful”) Murphy: the CCPI offer is conditional on “big new revenue.”
3. (Chait: “they can’t trust Obama to carry them out”) Murphy retweets a Twitter comment from someone who was listening in to the conversation: “R’s also don’t trust him, and there’s a history to justify this mistrust.”

As Ezra points out, Mike Murphy is not a fire-breather. He’s very much a moderate Republican circa 1990.

No matter what Harwood said when pointing out President Obama is the one compromising here, and has publicly made the exact offers the GOP claims he refuses to make, Murphy rejected those offers as “unserious” or “untrustworthy.”  And it finally dawns on Ezra that all Republicans are behaving this way.

This had led to a lot of Republicans fanning out to explain what the president should be offering if he was serious about making a deal. Then, when it turns out that the president did offer those items, there’s more furious hand-waving about how no, actually, this is what the president needs to offer to make a deal. Then, when it turns out he’s offered most of that, too, the hand-waving stops and the truth comes out: Republicans won’t make a deal that includes further taxes, they just want to get the White House to implement their agenda in return for nothing. Luckily for them, most of the time, the conversation doesn’t get that far, and the initial comments that the president needs to “get serious” on entitlements is met with sage nods.

Congrats, Ezra.  You’ve discovered the fact you’re surrounded by Village Centrists.  Now how about helping America see through their “both sides do it” nonsense and lets pin the blame where it belongs, eh?

 

Keep up the good work.

A Useless, Barbaric Relic Of The Past

George F. Will is really sick and tired of minorities acting like there's still any need for Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, because frankly Republicans are busy trying to actively disenfranchise minority voters in all states, not just historically racist Southern ones.  Why single out them?  In the name of put-upon old rich white men, Will demands that you people let it go already and that the era for the need for Section 5 has passed.

Progressives are remarkably uninterested in progress. Social Security is 78 years old, and myriad social improvements have added 17 years to life expectancy since 1935, yet progressives insist the program remain frozen, like a fly in amber. Medicare is 48 years old, and the competence and role of medicine have been transformed since 1965, yet progressives cling to Medicare “as we know it.” And they say that the Voting Rights Act, another 48-year-old, must remain unchanged, despite dramatic improvements in race relations.

The question concerning which the Supreme Court heard oral arguments Wednesday was whether Section 5 of the act is still constitutional, given the disappearance of the conditions that once made it acceptable as a temporary and emergency truncation of states’ sovereignty under federalism. In 2008, two years after the fourth renewal of the act, Barack Obama won a higher percentage of the white vote than did Al Gore and John Kerry in 2000 and 2004, respectively. Today Mississippi has more black elected officials — not more per capita, more — than any other state. Yet defenders of the continuing necessity of Section 5 merely shrug about the fact that race is no longer a barrier to either the nation’s highest office or to state and local offices in what once was the state most emblematic of resistance to racial equality.

And there we have it.  "How can there be disenfranchisement when we have a black President and black people getting elected in Mississippi?"   Gosh, I dunno.  Maybe the part where we make voter ID laws a de facto poll tax?  Maybe the part where Republicans actually opposed efforts to register more voters, or any effort to increase the number of voters in the US at all, because minorities who traditionally have been barred from voting by dint of long lines at urban polling stations, elimination of early and weekend voting, and faulty voting equipment are assumed to all be criminals anyway?

Will plows on, regardless.

Section 5 was enacted as a temporary response to many measures employed, primarily in the South, to disenfranchise minorities. It requires nine states and some jurisdictions in others to get federal permission — “pre-clearance” — for even minor changes in voting procedures. It has been extended four times, most recently in 2006 for 25 years. The 2006 House vote was 390 to 33, the Senate vote was 98 to 0; obviously, the political class’s piety about the act has extinguished thought about its necessity. But one reason for judicial review — for active judicial engagement in the protection of constitutional rights and arrangements — is that the political class, with its majoritarian temptations, cannot be trusted to do so.

Hey, that's Wario Scalia's argument.   Will buys it wholesale.  After decades of bitching about Congress not being able to agree on anything and not being able to come together for overwhelming bipartisan support, when they came together to renew the Voting Rights Act with overwhelming bipartisan support , that just proves that overwhelming bipartisan support is awful and that you can't trust it.  Why trust legislation to legislators?  (Also see George F. Will on why you can't trust the executive to execute, which is to say any of his columns on our "imperial President" over the last four years.)  But hey, let's just have the Supreme Court make endless 5-4 decisions on turning America into a right-wing utopia, that's a real governance system, dammit.

In 1982, Section 2 of the act was amended to say that the measure is violated whenever nomination and election processes “are not equally open to participation” by minority voters. And equality of participation is said to be denied whenever minority voters “have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to . . . elect representatives of their choice.” And representatives “of their choice” has been construed to mean representatives who are members of the same minority. This expresses two tenets of progressivism’s racialism. One is identity politics: Your race is your political identity. The other is categorical representation: Members of a race can be understood and represented only by members of this race. By this reasoning the Voting Rights Act has become an instrument for what Roberts has hitherto called “a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.” 

Section 5 is racism because African-Americans voting for African-Americans is racism, and liberals are racist for allowing it to continue.  As usual, the rich white guy has now made the call that racism is over, and that anyone who still believes this "racist remedy" is necessary is a racist.  Because George F. Will says so!

Seriously, at this point the barbarous ancient relic in this article is George F. Will, not Section 5.

Last Call

It's no secret that African-Americans are the most vocal supporters of gun control laws in the country and for good reason:  black men are six times more likely than white men to be victims of a gun-related crime, and eight times more likely to be the perpetrator.  As a black man, I find both statistics horrifying.

Little wonder then that the NRA in 2013 is depending on minority outreach to black neighborhoods.  The effort is lead by activists like Colion Noir, who makes this argument:



He basically saying that if there's any group that needs the protection of the Second Amendment and should be arming themselves, it's guys who look like me.  And yes, for hundreds of years, black folk have been victimized.  If this sounds familiar, it's because Noir is making a variation of NRA knucklehead Larry Ward's argument that "If slaves had owned guns, there wouldn't have been slavery". 

But the twist here is that Noir's bad guy is the federal government.  Throw that into the mix and you have the bog standard boilerplate of the GOP's outreach to black folk:  the government is enslaving you, it can't protect you, it has abandoned you, so you you rely on yourself.  This would have more impact if the actions of the GOP weren't to actively remove the government's ability to protect people by cutting law enforcement, cutting programs to assist the poor, cutting education dollars and teachers and school equipment, and slashing voting rights and gerrymandering the House.

Sad, really.  But that's the plan:  since white guys aren't selling guns to the shrinking black middle class, maybe black NRA spokesmen like Noir can.

You're just a customer, after all.

My Advice For The GOP

It's really simple.

Stop talking about rape.  Ever.  You only make it worse.

In criticizing controversial comments made by former Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin, a California GOP leader ceded Friday that pregnancies by rape are rare "because it's an act of violence, because the body is traumatized."

"That was an insensitive remark," Celeste Greig told the Daily Democrat. "I'm sure he regretted it. He should have come back and apologized."

Greig is president of the conservative California Republican Assembly, a GOP volunteer organization that Ronald Reagan coincidentally once called "the conscience of the Republican Party."

However, in shades of Akin, Greig then added: "Granted, the percentage of pregnancies due to rape is small because it's an act of violence, because the body is traumatized. I don't know what percentage of pregnancies are due to the violence of rape. Because of the trauma the body goes through, I don't know what percentage of pregnancy results from the act."

Granted, Ms, Greig, your ignorance of science, biology, and law makes you disturbingly unqualified to head pretty much any other organization other than a group of conservative Republican morons.

Republicans everywhere:  when you feel the need to give a "scientific" explanation for your staggeringly stupid, uninformed, and completely wrong beliefs in order to give yourselves more credibility, choose instead to keep your damn mouths shut.  You'll get more votes.

Here's another piece of advice:  rape is rape.  It's a horrific, destructive act.  Getting pregnant from rape is not a cool bonus prize from God, and the traumatic experience of rape does not cause a woman to not get pregnant.  Get those two things through your rebarred concrete skulls and your party might even survive another 10 years.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• Venezuela's Vice President says that President Hugo Chavez's health has taken a significant turn for the worse, and that he is "fighting for his life" following cancer treatment.
• President Obama blasted Congressional Republicans in his weekly address, saying that the current sequestration cuts now in effect must be replaced by "smart" cuts and balanced reforms.
• House Republicans reportedly will introduce an immigration bill next week that will grant citizenship to undocumented immigrants only if they go to the back of the line through existing channels.
• The US State Department's initial report on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline indicates initial approval of the project as environmentally acceptable.
• A federal judge has cut Samsung's billion-dollar patent award to Apple nearly in half, and is ordering a new damages trial on appeal.

Last Call

Matt Yglesias on sequestration:

Long story short, if you're a defense dove like me and have a nonutopian view of the domestic discretionary budget, then this looks like we're mostly talking about harmless spending cuts. It is very true that the current moment is not an optimal time to cut wasteful government spending. Given the high unemployment rate, the low and stable inflation rate, the low cost of federal borrowing, and the weird dynamics of "Evans Rule" monetary policy, I would say that 2013 is an excellent time for the federal government to waste some money on make-work military contracting gigs. But in the grand scheme of things, wasting resources on low-value programs is not a great idea, and there's more to life than timing.

Spoken like a man halfway to David Brooks' View From Nowhere.  Steve M. rips into Yggy and rightfully so:

Maybe there's more to life than timing for you, Matt, a fast-track journalist who's skipped effortlessly from excellent career-building job to excellent career-building job in the past decade, but for the ordinary schmucks who've waited years for a genuine ray of hope in their economy, the one that seems to have permanently high rates of unemployment, timing is everything -- as in, these people need a break now.

What Yglesias says in the lead-up to that statement is absolutely correct: we should be doing far more to put money in ordinary people's pockets. I don't care what it is: I'd take "make-work military contracting gigs" or a huge infrastructure repair program or any other way you could make it happen. Whatever will inspire people go to the mall next weekend. Whatever will flow money through the rest of the economy.

If military contractors are laying people off, retailers in regions where military items are made will suffer. If federal workers are experiencing one-day-a-week furloughs, their ability to spend drops 20%. And on and on. And, of course, this happens in an economy where most people barely have an economic cushion -- I bet Yglesias has one -- so how far will some of these people sink, even if the cuts are temporary?

Excellent point. Real people are going to get hurt here, and it's important to remember that.

The Massive Malay Melee

The kids over at WIN THE MORNING, JR. do some actual journalism for once, and have caught conservative bloggers and columnists behaving rather badly, taking a buck or three (or hundreds of thousands) writing stories about Malaysia...stories which are actually propaganda press releases from the country's government.  At the center: former Guardian columnist Josh Trevino.

The payments to conservative American opinion writers — whose work appeared in outlets from the Huffington Post and San Francisco Examiner to the Washington Times to National Review and RedState — emerged in a filing this week to the Department of Justice. The filing under the Foreign Agent Registration Act outlines a campaign spanning May 2008 to April 2011 and led by Joshua Trevino, a conservative pundit, who received $389,724.70 under the contract and paid smaller sums to a series of conservative writers.

Trevino lost his column at the Guardian last year after allegations that his relationship with Malaysian business interests wasn't being disclosed in columns dealing with Malaysia. Trevino told Politico in 2011 that "I was never on any 'Malaysian entity's payroll,' and I resent your assumption that I was."
According to Trevino's belated federal filing, the interests paying Trevino were in fact the government of Malaysia, "its ruling party, or interests closely aligned with either." The Malaysian government has been accused of multiple human rights abuses and restricting the press and personal freedoms. Anwar, the opposition leader, has faced prosecution for sodomy, a prosecution widely denounced in the West which Trevino defended as more "nuanced" than American observers realized. The government for which Trevino worked also attacked Anwar for saying positive things about Israel; Trevino has argued that Anwar is not the pro-democracy figure he appears.

The federal filing specified that Trevino was engaged through the lobbying firm APCO Worldwide and the David All Group, an American online consulting firm. The contract also involved a firm called FBC (short for Fact-Based Communications), whose involvement in covert propaganda prompted a related scandal and forced an executive at The Atlantic to resign from its board.

The problem is that Trevino has run afoul of many sites for failure to disclose taking money from a foreign government along this lines...and he contracted these columns out to his wingnut welfare buddies.

Trevino's subcontractors included conservative writer Ben Domenech, who made $36,000 from the arrangement, and Rachel Ehrenfeld, the director of the American Center for Democracy, who made $30,000. Seth Mandel, an editor at Commentary, made $5,500 (his byline is attached to the National Review item linked to above). Brad Jackson, writing at the time for RedState, made $24,700. Overall, 10 writers were part of the arrangement. 

So yeah, HuffPo has already pulled all Trevino's pieces, and I'm expecting more will follow.

Oh, and didn't conservative columnists and bloggers make a huge stink about how unethical it was that Chuck Hagel reportedly took money from "Friends of Hamas" (which never existed) to speak their "propaganda"?

Funny how that works.

The Beginning Of The End Of Same-Sex Marriage Bans

The Obama Justice Department released a brief backing the end of California's Prop 8, which overturned the state's law allowing same-sex marriage.  The argument that the Justice Department makes here, backed by the President himself, is the end of same-sex marriage bans.

It goes something like this:

1. Hi, we're the Executive Branch.  Maybe you've heard of us.
2. California's Prop 8 basically allows taking rights away from a specific class of people.
3. We think that warrants "heightened scrutiny."
4. This means California has to have an ironclad, 100% bulletproof reason for doing this.
5. Here are the reasons California laid out for doing this.  We list them.
6. None of these reasons come anywhere close to the ironclad, 100% bulletproof level. 
7. That leaves discrimination for its own sake.  That's unconstitutional.
8. Junk Prop 8 and let people marry in any state with legalized same-sex marriage.
9. Oh, and by the way, the logical endpoint of our argument, hint hint...
10. ...Is for you guys to say "Hey, we can't come up with an ironclad, 100% bulletproof reason either...
11. ...And if you then hold all same-sex marriage bans in states to heightened scrutiny...
12. ...None of them would pass muster, period.  They'd have to go too."
13. Voila!  End of same-sex marriage bans.

Now, will SCOTUS actually get to 13 there?  Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSBlog says no, and argues the DoJ stops at 8, where 9-13 are simply implied.  That's true to a point, but the implication is strong.

In essence, the position of the federal government would simultaneously give some support to marriage equality while showing some respect for the rights of states to regulate that institution.  What the brief endorsed is what has been called the “eight-state solution” — that is, if a state already recognizes for same-sex couples all the privileges and benefits that married couples have (as in the eight states that do so through “civil unions”) those states must go the final step and allow those couples to get married.  The argument is that it violates the Constitution’s guarantee of legal equality when both same-sex and opposite-sex couples are entitled to the same marital benefits, but only the opposite-sex couples can get married.

“The Court can resolve this case,” the new brief said, “by focusing on the particular circumstances presented by California law and the recognition it gives to committed same-sex relationships, rather than addressing the equal protection issue under circumstances not present here.”   That final phrase was the brief’s strongest indication that the administration is not yet ready to take a firm position on whether the “fundamental right to marry” that the Court has recognized repeatedly is a right that should be open also to same-sex couples.

The eight states that apparently would be covered by the argument the Solicitor General has now made are California, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Nevada, New Jersey, Oregon, and Rhode Island.

Some believe the brief is woefully inadequate, mostly those who have always found the President lacking in some way.  Marcy Wheeler goes as far to call the President a liar and a coward:

Mr. Obama has consistently lied about his dedication to civil liberties, privacy and the Fourth Amendment, I guess it should not be shocking that he would lie about his dedication to civil rights for all, across all the states, in the form of marriage equality. And that is exactly what he has done. And as Denniston’s article makes clear, this decision bore the active participation and decision making of Obama personally. The cowardice is his to bear personally. Thanks for the fish Mr. Obama. 

Which is odd, because Allahpundit at Hotair suggests the President is a liar precisely because the brief effectively is the full-throated defense of the equal protection of same-sex marriage rights that Wheeler was looking for.

The news also isn’t that O’s revealing himself once again to have been a liar on this issue. When he ran in 2008, he pretended to be against gay marriage to parry Republican claims that he was a devout liberal rather than the centrist “post-partisan pragmatist” his campaign touted him as. He finally dropped the facade last year — it’s politically safe now to support gay marriage, even in the GOP (sort of) — but he’s continued to insist that this issue should be left to the states because … I’m not sure why. Literally no one believes he sincerely feels that way, and since he’d already taken the plunge by endorsing legal gay marriage, he had little to gain politically from his phony federalism. The best I can do by way of a theory is to guess that O, instinctively, likes to posture as a “moderate” even when he’s pushing reliably liberal positions. (E.g., “the balanced approach.”) It’s good for his brand as the “reasonable” adult in the room in Washington, a vestigial version of the pragmatic independence he feigned in summer ’08. Plus, I suppose he might have thought that posing as a federalist on SSM would cushion the blow for opponents once he revealed his support for legalization. It’s not as big of a deal to find out that the president thinks gays should be allowed to marry if he’s qualifying that by saying you should get decide to your home state’s rules. But that was nonsense, as the DOJ’s brief confirms, and anyone who didn’t see through it instantly is a fool.

But Greg Sargent believes the goal is step 13 there, and that the argument that the DoJ gives means 9-13 must be implied (and basically says "look, the time is right to do this.")  I agree with this analysis:

Because Supreme Court justices give weight to the opinion of solicitors general, this makes it more likely — though it certainly doesn’t assure this — that the Court will adopt an equally sweeping ruling. It sets forth a legal view that comports with Obama’s view that “the love we commit to one another” should be equal before the law. It sends a strong signal that the administration believes the culture is ready for full equality for gay and lesbian Americans. If the Court responds in kind, it will give gay advocates a powerful weapon to challenge other state laws around the country banning gay marriage, and they’d likely be toppled as unconstitutional — one by one. This could truly help put this persistent relic of legalized discrimination on the road to extinction.

Now the question is again, will SCOTUS get all the way to 13, or stop at 8?  If it does get to 13, then as Greg mentions, the precedent means that same-sex marriage bans will be struck down time and time again as states simply can't come up with any good legal reason to ban it.

That would leave a huge vacuum across the country, which you could then make the argument that the vacuum had to be filled with a national legalized same-sex marriage law.

We'll get there.  The question is how long it will take.

StupidiNews!

• With Congress effectively on vacation again without taking any action, the steep cuts known as sequestration will go into effect today. 
• Kansas Democrats were able to force an amendment to a bill that would test all lawmakers for drugs as well as all welfare recipients.
• Chrysler says it will add 1,250 jobs at its transmission manufacturing plants in Indiana, spending nearly $400 million to upgrade capacity.
• After losing more than $700 million over the last three years, Groupon has fired co-founder Andrew Mason as CEO.
• The FCC apparently disagrees with the government's decision to use the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to prevent unlocking of cell phones to take to a different carrier.

Last Call

Sen. Tom Harkin will see President Obama's $9 a hour minimum wage, and do it one better.  Or in this case, do it one and ten cents better.

The White House is coming under pressure from liberal Democrats in the House and Senate to press for a minimum wage hike as high as $10.10.

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) argues President Obama “missed the mark” in calling to raise the minimum wage to $9 in his State of the Union address, and his staff met with White House staff last week to argue for a higher number.

The veteran senator, who will retire at the end of this Congress, is working with Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) on legislation that would raise the minimum wage to $10.10 over three years and then index future increases to inflation.

“Well, we’re going to introduce our own bill on it,” Harkin told The Hill on Tuesday. “I’m going to be in discussions with them because I think they missed the mark, but people make mistakes.”

Besides Harkin and Miller — a confidant of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) — Democrats backing a higher minimum wage hike include Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.) and Rep. Charles Rangel (N.Y.).

Hey, can't wait to see Republicans shoot this down because the real problem is that "minimum wage workers are making too much" in our economy.

You can take that argument to the bank.  Cause, $20k a year is too much, right?

Doing The Right Thing By Force Of Outrage, Apparently

It's the only way to get Republicans to actually do anything that doesn't involve being privileged misogynist dipsticks.  As I noted yesterday, the House was likely going to pass the Senate's version of VAWA...because they didn't have the votes to pass their own version of it.  Today, they did just that.

On Thursday, by a vote of 286 to 138, the House passed the bipartisan Senate-approved version of the bill — one that includes added protections for LGBT, Native American, and undocumented victims of domestic violence.

A watered down Republican version of the bill, which was offered as a substitute amendment, failed to garner enough votes to slow the process. It was struck down by a vote of 257 to 166. Sixty Republicans voted against their own party’s replacement measure.

During the last session of Congress, the GOP-led House approved their watered-down VAWA, while the Senate included expanded provisions in the version it passed. The two were never reconciled, and Congress failed to renew the 18-year-old domestic violence law by the time it disbanded at the end of 2012. 

PS:  All 138 no votes?  Republicans.  What war on women, right?

The provisions included protections for Native American women, allowing them to seek justice with tribal courts when the assailant is non-Native, protections for LGBT Americans, and the provisions of the SAFER act, which will reduce the untested backlog of rape kits in America's police custody.  This is a solid win for Democrats, President Obama and all Americans here.

And it's about damn time.

We Come Not To Praise Progress Kentucky...

...but to bury them.  Joe Sonka has the epitaph after Tuesday's nasty little race-baiting incident involving Mitch the Turtle's wife, former Bush 43 Labor Secretary Elaine Chao.

And this is why Democrats who want to defeat McConnell have a great sense of relief right now, because Progress Kentucky is effectively dead, and they’ll soon be replaced by a new group of seasoned professionals who know how to mess with a powerful political candidate on the ropes and know how to raise a hell of a lot of money to further that cause.

In fact, if I was McConnell, I’d seriously consider finding an obscenely wealthy supporter who is willing to write Progress Kentucky a ginormous check that could keep them operational, as Progress Kentucky has been the only thing helping McConnell’s re-election campaign over the past four months. His campaign and national Republican organizations were celebrating yesterday, but in four months they’ll be wishing Progress Kentucky was the independent expenditure group they were battling, and not the hardened pros who are bludgeoning McConnell with focused messaging that has loads of money behind it.

But until that time, Democrats in Kentucky and across the country – liberals, moderates and conservatives – have a loud and unified message for Progress Kentucky: Pack up your stuff and go away.

The fact is these guys managed to raise all of a couple thousand dollars in four months.  They're about as super a PAC as I am a professional jazz flautist, and getting these guys off the stage so that the Dems can really lay into McConnell for the depleted-uranium albatross of a record around his neck is a pretty good thing.

In other words, it's a damn good thing these guys crashed and burned early.  To take down Mitch McConnell is going to take a crapload of hard work, and the sooner we got these guys out of the way, the better off Kentucky Dems were going to be.

I'm glad I never got around to donating to these guys, either.

StupidiNews!

• After the loud and vocal battle over Chuck Hagel's nomination as Defense Secretary, the Senate has quietly confirmed Jack Lew as Treasury Secretary by a 71-27 vote.
• A British NHS study finds that a massive increase in the intake of processed sugar is responsible for the epidemic of type 2 diabetes in the UK.
• GOP leaders will meet with the White House on Friday to discuss the sequestration budget cuts, but at this point they can't even agree on exactly when the cuts would go into effect.
• Barclays Bank is taking the 450 million pound fine for its involvement in the Libor scandal directly out of banker bonuses for the year.
• France continues its tough "three strikes" policy on internet copyright violations, now saying that monitoring streaming sites like Youtube in real time is necessary.

Last Call

It looks like the House GOP has figured out that actively legislating discrimination about which women deserve protections under the Violence Against Women Act is not only unrelentingly awful, but political hemlock as well.

House Republican leaders signaled Tuesday night that they are ready to let their VAWA bill die and clear the way for a broader, bipartisan Senate bill. The Senate legislation includes new protections missing from the House bill for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT), Native American and immigrant victims of domestic violence.

Here’s the House GOP plan procedurally, based on House Rules Committee actions Tuesday night: The House is expected to hold two VAWA votes on Thursday. The first will be to strip out the language of the Senate VAWA bill and replace it with the House GOP language. Since that isn’t expected to pass, lawmakers will then vote on the Senate VAWA bill itself. A GOP source involved in negotiations conceded that there is greater support for the Senate bill, and that the Senate version is likely the one to pass. That means VAWA could land on President Barack Obama’s desk by the end of this week — the version sought by the White House and Democrats.

Pretty much total surrender here on the issue as House Republicans have the approval ratings of somewhere between ebola in a nursery school and National Chewing On Tinfoil Month.

That House Republican leaders are allowing the Senate bill to get a floor vote is significant because they refused to let that happen in the last Congress, even though lawmakers in both parties believed it would pass. The move also signals that GOP leaders are ready to stop fighting over an issue that has damaged them politically. Congress failed to reauthorize VAWA in 2011 due in large part to House Republican resistance to the new protections in the Senate bill, and Democrats clobbered them over it throughout the 2012 election season.

People forget in what was supposed to be a big year for the GOP in 2012, not only did they lose Senate seats, but House seats as well.   Letting VAWA die for a year now looks like a fatal mistake for the GOP, one they’re now scrambling to correct after badmouthing the Senate version as recently as last week.  What’s behind the change in heart?  Perhaps correctly assuming he would personally shoulder the blame should the bill die, Eric Cantor has now relented.

It’s not a victory yet for the good guys, but things look a lot better than just last Friday, when the house version was passed.  Suddenly, this same House version doesn’t have the votes to survive the reconciliation process with the Senate bill. 

Funny how that works.

Re-Birther Of The Uncool, Part Eleventy Squared

Oh racist Republican jackass birthers, don’t ever stop reminding the American people just which party is full of bigots and crackpots whose awful views aren’t just tolerated but are openly welcomed.  Via Taegan Goddard:

Michigan state Sen. Tom Casperson (R) told a radio show he’s not sure where Obama was born, according to Deadline Detroit.

Said Casperson: “I don’t know because it seems like that issue was dropped immediately as far as the major media went. My gut tells me if it had been a different president, say George W. Bush, they’d have been digging into like there was no tomorrow and trying to get to the bottom of, which they never really tried to get to the bottom of.”

That’s because there’s nothing to get to the bottom of, you moron.  The President was born in Hawaii, period.  Anyone who tells you otherwise is a racist clown, point blank.  Stop it.  It’s the guy’s second term already.  If you’re still questioning his birthplace at this point after five years, there’s really nothing left but good ol’ racism to explain it.  End of line.

Ain’t nobody got time for this, as they say.