Last Call: Randsplaining 101

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul!  Storied and famous traditionally black college Howard University!  What happens when you put the two together?

Randsplaining 101!  Benjy Sarlin documents the atrocities...

As Rand Paul told it, the biggest problem keeping African Americans from voting Republican is that they didn’t know Republicans have long been leaders on abolition and civil rights. As students at Howard University heard it, the problem was that Paul was condescending, misleading, and removed from the issues facing their community.


Paul devoted almost none of his speech Wednesday at the historically black college in Washington, D.C., to explaining the GOP’s thorny relationship with black voters over the last fifty years, and most of it arguing that “the Republican Party has always been the party of civil rights and voting rights.” His history lecture focused almost entirely on the period before 1964, when the GOP began to champion the states rights arguments of southern whites. Echoing a popular conservative talking point, Paul repeatedly reminded the audience that Democrats passed Jim Crow laws in the south and that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, as were the first black legislators and the founders of the NAACP.

“Would everyone know here they were all Republicans?” he said at one point, referring to the NAACP’s founders.

“Yes!” came the booming response from nearly the entire audience, who appeared offended Paul would even raise the question. 

And on it went from there, as Rand Paul discovered that a roomful of college students at one of the most prestigious universities in the country (historically black or otherwise) actually do know something about American history.  You know, more than Rand Paul did.

In a way, I'm hoping that this was a humbling experience for the Junior Senator from the Commonwealth, but the odds of that are miniscule at best.  Transcript of the speech is, of course, at Reason Magazine's website.  My fav paragraph:

I come to Howard today, not to preach, or prescribe some special formula for you but to say I want a government that leaves you alone, that encourages you to write the book that becomes your unique future.

Yeah, and on that book was "Died from neglect."

I'm Just A Bill, Just A Lonely Ol' Bill

But I want to become a law so badly I'll blackmail an Oklahoma state Senator in order to win, is that how the song goes?

A co-founder of the Sooner Tea Party was charged Tuesday with blackmail over an email that he admits sending to a state senator.

Al Gerhart, 54, of Oklahoma City, also was charged with violating the Oklahoma Computer Crimes Act.

Both counts are felonies.

Gerhart, a carpenter, denied any wrongdoing after coming under investigation last week. He had not been arrested yet Tuesday evening.

Gerhart sent the email March 26 to Sen. Cliff Branan, promising to make the senator a laughing stock unless the Senate Energy and Environment Committee passed a bill dealing with a United Nations plan.

Branan, R-Oklahoma City, is chairman of the committee. The senator turned the email over to the Oklahoma Highway Patrol.

Misspelling one word, Gerhart wrote: “Branan, Get that bill heard or I will make sure you regret not doing it. I will make you the laughing stock of the Senate if I don't hear that this bill will be heard and passed. We will dig into your past, yoru family, your associates and once we start on you there will be no end to it. This is a promise.”

Yeah, that's how the FREEDOM and LIBERTY party rolls, yo.  You do their bidding or they destroy you and move on to the next state lawmaker.  And hell, this guy was going to crush him over some tinfoil nonsense dealing with sustainability. 

We'll crush all dissent unless you stop this bill that might mean the end of our ability to dissent, if you squint at it just right!

Idiots...but dangerous.  And increasingly, they're running YOUR state government.

StupidiNews!

• South Korea continues to be on high alert as North Korean mobile missiles have been moved into a test launch position, according to US officials.
• A Georgia state GOP lawmaker who supported drug testing for welfare recipients in the state has been arrested and charged with his second DUI offense in 4 years.
• New inteligence information reveals the Obama administration has targeted lower-level Pakistani militants with drone strikes, and not just Al Qaeda operatives.
• President Obama's budget proposal released today will include new rules to protect taxpayers from identity theft through tax return information.
• Microsoft Windows XP enters its final year of extended support from Redmond, while 38% of internet users still use the OS.

Last Call

Maybe, just maybe, the Republicans in the Senate are going to lose this gun violence legislation battle after all, especially if somebody doesn't shut GOP Sen. James Inhofe up fast.

Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) said Tuesday that the gun control debate doesn't have anything to do with the families of the Newtown, Conn., shooting victims, and that the only reason those families think it does is because President Barack Obama told them it did.

Eleven family members of Newtown victims were in Washington on Tuesday, meeting privately with senators to urge them to support a forthcoming gun package that would impose tighter background checks, crack down on gun trafficking and enhance school safety measures. Speaking to a handful of reporters, Inhofe said he feels bad for those families because they're being used as pawns in a political fight.

"See, I think it's so unfair of the administration to hurt these families, to make them think this has something to do with them when, in fact, it doesn't," Inhofe said.

When it was suggested that the families of Newtown victims actually believe the gun debate pertains to them, Inhofe said, "Well, that's because they've been told that by the president."

My main argument Saturday was that Republicans weren't going to pay a political price for opposing background checks.  It's entirely conceivable that Inhofe's idiotic statement here may just have changed the calculus on that, big time.

To recap, a sitting US Senator just told the families of the victims of a bloody massacre of six-year-olds that they have nothing to do with the gun violence debate, and that they are nothing more than pawns.  Even if Inhofe believes this, to actually say something that unrelentingly cold to reporters is a pretty awful thing to do.

Suddenly, the villain in this kabuki play isn't the caricature of Tyrant Obama, but Inhofe's own words.  That's a pretty big shift, potentially.

Still virtually no chance of this getting through the House.  But the Senate, well...there's light at the end of that tunnel.

The Senate will hold a preliminary vote on gun control legislation to break the Republican filibuster on Thursday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced, after the Democrats pulled together enough votes from Republicans.

“We’re going to vote Thursday,” Reid said. “I’m going to file cloture on the bill tonight.”

Though Democrats do have the numbers to break the filibuster, they still might not have enough votes to overcome other procedural hurdles and hold an up-or-down vote.

They will after Inhofe's story gets wide play.  Cowardly Dems will have nowhere to hide on this one and neither will a number of Republicans.  If the point of President Obama's push on gun legislation was giving the GOP enough rope to hang themselves, Inhofe jumped at the chance to go first.

Ashley, Alison, And The Turtle, Part 5

MoJo's David Corn has yet another blockbuster tape, this time of a recording of Old-Age Mutant Nimrod Turtle's opposition research meeting on Ashley Judd.  It reveals that McConnell was going to spare no expense to go after Ashley Judd with brutal personal attacks.

On February 2, Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the US Senate, opened up his 2014 reelection campaign headquarters in Louisville, Kentucky, and in front of several dozen supporters vowed to "point out" the weaknesses of any opponent fielded by the Democrats. "They want to fight? We're ready," he declared. McConnell was serious: Later that day, he was huddling with aides in a private meeting to discuss how to attack his possible Democratic foes, including actor/activist Ashley Judd, who was then contemplating challenging the minority leader. During this strategy session—a recording of which was obtained by Mother Jones—McConnell and his aides considered assaulting Judd for her past struggles with depression and for her religious views.

The meeting was truly vile stuff.

For much of the Judd discussion, McConnell was silent as aides reviewed the initial oppo research they had collected on Judd and weighed all the ways they could pummel her. The recording was provided to Mother Jones last week by a source who requested anonymity. (The recording can be found here; a transcript is here.) McConnell's Senate office and his campaign office did not respond to requests for comment.

The aide who led the meeting began his presentation with a touch of glee: "I refer to [Judd] as sort of the oppo research situation where there's a haystack of needles, just because truly, there’s such a wealth of material." He ran through the obvious: Judd was a prominent supporter of President Barack Obama, Obamacare, abortion rights, gay marriage, and climate change action. He pointed out that she is "anti-coal."

But the McConnell gang explored going far beyond Judd's politics and policy preferences. This included her mental health.

And they were going to just paint her a hippie weirdo flake.  They were fully prepared to destroy her personally as well as politically and professionally.  And yet this career politician, who has used his office to enrich himself by tens of millions of dollars, is the good guy here.

Now the McConnell campaign is demanding a full FBI investigation, claiming President Obama authorized "Watergate style tactics" of bugging the meeting, and promising anyone involved will be fully prosecuted...when of course McConnell ran into that ugly incident where his campaign left a recording device at the debate podium of opponent Bruce Lunsford in 2008.

The GOP is accusing Mother Jones and David Corn of bugging the meeting.

Mitch has got to go, folks. 

Bobby's World Is Falling Apart

No state was willing to go the route of full-blown GOP austerity for the 99% like Bobby Jindal's Louisiana.  His tax plan was the logical endpoint of Grover Norquist's wet dreams: the elimination of the state's income and corporate taxes, replaced by a massive hike in the state's sales tax.  And that would of course mean huge additional budget cuts in a state that had already made deep and damaging cuts to education through a voucher scheme to privatize schools and even shutting down a number of parish libraries.

But the people of Louisiana have finally had enough.  His tax plan to put the burden of the state's revenues on the poorest souls in a scheme that would almost certainly require even steeper sales tax hikes or more likely, massive new health care and education cuts in a state where both have been slashed by hundreds of millions of dollars already, all to give the state's richest a $25,000 tax cut each?

Dead on arrival.

Governor Bobby Jindal (R-LA), considered a leading presidential contender in 2016, is suffering a political meltdown in his home state. His approval rating plummeted to 38 percent in a poll last week by the non-partisan Southern Media Opinion & Research, down from 60 percent just a year ago. In an ominous sign for national Republicans, the immediate cause is a sweeping economic agenda with strong parallels to the House GOP’s latest budget.

On Monday, Jindal scrapped his own proposal to eliminate the state’s income and corporate taxes and replace them with a statewide tax on sales and business services. His retreat was a concession to the reality that the proposal was headed towards a humiliating defeat — and taking Jindal down with it along the way. Jindal said in a speech to lawmakers that the backlash against his plan “certainly wasn’t the reaction I was hoping to hear,” but that he would respect the public’s wishes and start again. 

Those ideas are now opposed by a majority of  Louisiana Republicans, because the math is brutal.  Jacking up the state sales tax from 4 to 7% on everything, including "business services" was going to take a huge chunk out of the hides of small businesses, and big corporations didn't have loopholes to hide behind anymore.  Meanwhile, the poorest Louisianans would have seen their taxes jump by hundreds of dollars, and the middle-class would have seen an even bigger tax hike.  Meanwhile, the richest state citizens could simply avoid paying any state taxes altogether by buying over the border in Texas, Arkansas, or Mississippi.  The resulting tax gap would have left the state short by billions, meaning more cuts or more hikes.

The left, right, and middle have revolted as a result, and Bobby Jindal's political career is, for the moment, as dead as his tax scam.

StupidiNews!

• Original Mouseketeer and film star Annette Funicello died Monday at the age of 70 after complications due to multiple sclerosis.
• Maryland will become the 20th US state to legalize medical marijuana after a bill passed the state Senate with an overwhelming 42-4 vote and Gov. Martin O'Malley will sign it.
• Secretary of State John Kerry has confirmed a new effort to restart stalled Mideast peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.
• Louisville men's basketball coach Rick Pitino becomes the first coach to win titles at two different schools as the Cardinals defeated Michigan in last night's championship game, 82-76.
• Wall Street pegs the cost of Google Fiber's rollout nationally at a staggering $11 billion, that would only capture 15% of the nation's broadband market.

Last Call

Look guys, I know this is rapidly turning into the "Stupid Crap The Rand Paul Says That Should Disqualify Him From Ever Being President" blog, but the guy is my Senator, so I feel compelled to document the atrocities.  Regardless, I gotta live with him representing me now.

Anyway, the documenting part, right.  Here's part of that CBN interview he did last week, getting some much-needed attention.

Where marriage is adjudicated, whether it’s at the federal level or at the state level, we’ve always had marriage certificates and we’ve had them at the state level. If we keep it that way, maybe we can still have the discussion go on without make the decision go all the way one way or all the way the other way.

I think right now if we say we’re only going to have a federally mandated one-man, one-woman marriage, we’re going to lose that battle because the country is going the other way right now. If we were to say each state can decide, I think a good 25, 30 states still do believe in traditional marriage, and maybe we allow that debate to go on for another couple of decades and see if we can still win back the hearts and minds of people.

Substitute "slavery" for "traditional marriage" in that sentence (and 15 for the number of states backing it) and this asshole would fit in perfectly in proto-Confederate 1853 South.  It's the same damn argument, and used for the same damn purposes it was used for 160 years ago.

Same damn party it seems, too.

A Pimm's Cup For Posterity

Former British PM (and Baroness) Margaret Thatcher died this morning after suffering a stroke, and as with Reagan, the hagiography has already begun.  It's good then to remind everyone that today's GOP would have thrown The Iron Lady out of the party, and that she would have been attacked as a BIG GUBMENT Socialist.

She supported socialized medicine. The modern-day GOP is so obsessed with trying to repeal Obamacare that they’ve held nearly 40 votes to do so. But Obamacare is actually a much more conservative health care policy than the socialized National Health Service, which Thatcher lauded as an accomplishment of the United Kingdom. “I believed that the NHS was a service of which we could genuinely be proud,” she wrote in her book, “It delivered a high quality of care — especially when it came to acute illnesses — and at a reasonably modest unit cost, at least compared with some insurance-based systems.”

She increased taxes. Spending actually rose during Thatcher’s first seven years in office, as the New York Times reports, and taxes took up a larger percentage as share of gross domestic product. Indeed, even by the end of her time in office taxes were still a higher percentage of GDP than they were when she arrived:

Thatcher also increased the Value Added Tax (VAT), which Newt Gingrich described as “European socialism” during the 2012 election cycle.

She believed in climate change. Thatcher was an early adherent to climate science, and once warned, “The danger of global warming is as yet unseen but real enough for us to make changes and sacrifices so that we do not live at the expense of future generations.”

She recognized that gun laws can limit gun violence. After a deadly shooting rampage in England, Thatcher said, “If [gun laws] need to be tightened up, or if we think that it could prevent anything more like this, then of course that will be considered.” A year later, the government passed the Firearms (Amendment) Act 1988, which outlawed semi-automatic weapons, changed requirements on registering guns, allowed police to refuse a weapon to anyone they saw unfit, and allowed the Home Secretary to add other guns to the list of banned firearms.

So no, Maggie Thatcher would have, much like Reagan, been thrown out of today's ultra-conservative GOP.  Something to keep in mind. 

Rand Paul And The Dudebro Vote

The Austerity Bombermen have so far had decent success in starving out the 99%, other than what awesome victories the Democrats handed them on sequestration and whatnot.  Still, let’s be honest about the reason for the “recent GOP soul-searching” here, it’s cold political calculus on how to inflict maximum austerity and move the remaining 20% of the country’s wealth into the hands of the elite.  “Austerity Because God Said So” hasn’t worked, in fact it’s backfired into that whole “care about the poor” thing.  “Austerity Because The Math Demands It” has worked a bit better, but not as well as it could have, the Math got us the bank disaster and people actually have noticed (mainly because all-new people got to join the ranks of the poor).

That brings us to Austerity revision 3.0:  Austerity Because Don’t Tread On Me.  Enter Sen. Rand Paul, the new poster child of the VSP complete with feature article from WIN THE MORNING.

Led by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), libertarians hope to become a dominant wing of the GOP by tapping into a potent mix of war weariness, economic anxiety and frustration with federal overreach in the fifth year of Barack Obama’s presidency.

The country’s continuing fixation on fiscal issues, especially spending and debt, allows them to emphasize areas of agreement with conservative allies who are looking for ways to connect with Republicans who aren’t passionate about abortion or same-sex marriage. A Democratic administration ensures consensus on the right that states should get as much power as possible.

It’s not just socially moderate Republicans (i.e. the non-batshit crazy bigots) Paul is trying to pick up, but the disaffected younger Obama voters who have gotten around to realizing that governance is kinda hard, and that the Obama coalition is composed of folks other than young white guys.  Peeling off minorities isn’t working too well, not with the GOP reminding us daily just how much they hate us.  Same goes for women, who if anything have been pushed further into the Obama camp with gun control issues after the Newtown and Aurora massacres.

But Dudebros, well…there’s an untapped electoral gold (weed end the Fed) mine there if Rand can motivate enough of them to break away from Left.  As long as Paul can frame the current administration in zero-sum terms where the advancement of women and minorities must come at the expense of white guys, there’s a chance that the guy may be able to convert that into votes going forward.  Dudebros gotta dudebro, after all.  Rand Paul’s their guy.  If they get to keep the privilege while getting credit for “moderating” the GOP, it’s total bonus time.

Thinking Rand Paul was a sick joke meant he ended up Senator when Democrats refused to back Jack Conway enough to shut the guy down in 2010.  Now he’s going to be unleashed upon the entire country unless we start admitting the forces promoting this guy as the future of the GOP are a problem that needs to be taken seriously.

StupidiNews!

• Five Americans, including a 25-year old US diplomatic officer, were killed over the weekend by an Afghan suicide bomber who struck their convoy as they were delivering books to schools.
• Activists in Arkansas have posted video evidence that last month's residential tar sands pipeline oil spill in Mayflower has reached nearby Lake Conway and protected wetlands.
• Israeli government websites have come under attack by pro-Palestinian hackers in a coordinated move on Sunday.
• Tea Party state legislation to legalize gold and silver bullion as legal tender is gaining popularity in red states, with proponents claiming the dollar will soon be worthless.
• A new National Highway Traffic Safety Association poll reveals that laws banning texting while driving hasn't reduced mobile device use while behind the wheel.

Thrown Under The Longships

As Steve M details, Republican NYC councilman Dan Halloran was one of the named co-conspirators in Monday's goofy plot where disaffected Democrat Malcolm Smith was trying to apparently bribe his way onto the NYC mayor's ticket as a Republican.  Halloran, being a FOX News contributor, of course had to be jettisoned from the organization rather permanently, so we see the New York Post with Halloran's secret on the front page today.

Halloran, you may recall, was the guy most responsible for spreading the story -- ultimately debunked -- that union snow-removal workers deliberately engaged in a work slowdown after a Christmas-week blizzard hit New York City in 2010. Halloran has also been a frequent guest on Fox News, opining on everything from Mike Bloomberg's large-soda ban to the Obama administration's Middle East policy.

Now we learn (hat tip: Gawker) that Halloran is a pagan, a member of a polytheistic pre-Christian church whose tenets at one point required him to be flogged.

So we are told by the New York Post (apparently Murdoch's media empire no longer has any use for Halloran).

The religion, Theodism, is definitely of a pagan branch.  Hey folks, I know pagans, they're fine people.  Nothing wrong with that.  What's wrong with it is then pretending to be Christian to attack Islam as a false religion and hanging out with bigots like Pam Geller.

In a video made by "Stop Islamization for America," you can see Halloran seated on a dais near Pamela Geller before speaking at an event called "The Ground Zero Mosque: The Second Wave of the 9/11 Attacks."

... "Let me apologize on behalf of the cowards in politics, who choose to stand up for special interests instead of doing what is right," Halloran begins his speech.

Being right, in this case, involved demonizing all Muslims for 9/11. Halloran then proceeds to align himself with his Irish, Roman Catholic, and cop roots, pandering in the crudest possible way to the audience's fears.

Yeah, this guy's a piece of work, huh.

Debt Dolt Derp Doom

Via Booman, the House GOP response to the specter of sequestration looming over the economy in Friday's depressing jobs reports, and the President's budget offer of again putting chained CPI on the table?

Eric Cantor is promising another brutal debt ceiling battle to force hundreds of billions more in austerity cuts and hurt our credit rating.

On the debt ceiling, Cantor said the House will consider the Full Faith and Credit Act, H.R. 807. This bill, from Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.), would require the government to prioritize interest payments on government debt if the debt ceiling is hit. "I expect the House to consider legislation in this area in the near future," he wrote.

The government has the potential to bump up against the ceiling in May. Earlier this year, Congress passed the No Budget, No Pay Act, which suspended the debt ceiling limit through May 18.

On May 19, the debt ceiling will be equal to the level of debt accumulated by that date, which means Congress will be under pressure to act before then to increase the ceiling again.

But House Republicans have already said they would be looking for a deal to cut a dollar of spending for every dollar increase in the debt ceiling. That sets up a fight with Democrats, who will likely push for a clean extension that does not require spending cuts.

So this will put us right back where we were in 2011.  Even worse, Booman is 100% right on what prioritizing our payments will mean to international markets and credit ratings agencies:  we will be forced to default.

Our credit rating is based on the likelihood that we will pay all our bills on time. Even the suggestion that we might "prioritize" our payments is an invitation to downgrade our credit rating. The last time the House Republicans played around with the debt ceiling our credit rating was downgraded even though we never had a late payment. It was downgraded because it was evident that the House Republicans are insane and might "prioritize" our debt payments in the future, which is exactly what is being discussed now. 

 

So yes, House Republicans are planning on destroying our economy through wrecking our sovereign credit rating.  They hope you will blame Obama for it when they do.  

 

That's the Republican plan for "growth".  Punish Americans until we get rid of the Democrats.

Firearms Bills On Borrowed Time

The number of Senate Republicans vowing to block any and all gun safety legislation is now up to an appropriate 13.

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul’s threat to filibuster any new gun restrictions is gathering steam, as a dozen of his Republican colleagues have now signed onto his plan.

The Kentucky Republican and Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) first wrote to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid late last month to warn him of their intention to try to tie up the Senate if, as planned, Reid moved forward with legislation that would expand background checks and attempt to crack down on interstate gun trafficking.

There's a very simple reason as to why:  the gun lobby has bought a baker's dozen of senators.

The Gun Owners of America, a small group that has risen in influence because of its strict adherence to a pro-gun line, has pressured senators and the National Rifle Association to back Paul, Cruz and Lee.

“If, you are an NRA member, contact them,” GOA wrote in an action alert sent to its own members, some of whom are also in the NRA, on April 1. “Urge them to join with us in supporting the Paul-Cruz-Lee filibuster. That means they should tell senators to oppose the motion to proceed to any gun control vehicle, and to oppose cloture on the motion to proceed to any gun control vehicle.”

In addition to Paul, Lee, Cruz, Rubio and Moran, the Republican who have signed the second letter are Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, Richard Burr of North Carolina, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Mike Enzi of Wyoming, Jim Risch and Mike Crapo of Idaho, Dan Coats of Indiana and Pat Roberts of Kansas.

“We will oppose the motion to proceed on any legislation that will serve as a vehicle for any additional gun restrictions,” they write.

So no, even with ridiculous 90%+ of Americans wanting universal background checks, this bill will never pass, and these Senators that will kill it will have a equally ridiculously high chance of re-election in 2014, 2016, and 2018.

That is, unless you plan to vote.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• North Korea is warning that safety of diplomats in Pyongyang is not guaranteed as tensions rise with South Korea as Seoul deployed naval destroyers in defense.
• The parents of slain teenager Trayvon Martin have reached a wrongful death settlement worth $1 million with the homeowners' association of where he was killed.
• Yemen is asking the US to release cleared Gitmo detainees that continue to be held even after the US has determined that they are no longer a threat.
• Continued six-party negotiations with Iran have ended in another stalemate as both sides are "far apart" on nuclear enrichment.
• After success in Kansas City, Google Fiber's next rollout will reportedly be in Austin, Texas as the internet giant continues to test residential and commercial gigabit internet.