Last Call

Old and brokedown, GOP "savior" Sen. Marco Rubio.  New hotness, GOP "savior" Sen. Ted Cruz.

In an interview that aired Wednesday on Pat Robertson's 700 Club, CBN's David Brody told Cruz that the media had dubbed him "the Republican Barack Obama" and a "GOP rock star."

"I try to pay very little attention to the media," Cruz insisted. "It is, as you know, a fickle creature."
Instead, Brody said Cruz was focused on creating a "new Republican Party."

"I think President Obama is the most radical president we've ever seen, but I think an awful lot of Republicans failed to stand for principle and contributed to getting us into this mess," the senator explained.

During an appearance at a weapons manufacturer in Texas on Tuesday, Cruz accused both Democrats and Republicans of trying to "silence" him for using McCarthyism to smear Defense Secretary nominee Chuck Hagel with suggestions that the former Nebraska senator had taken $200,000 from North Korea.

"Washington has a long tradition of trying to hurl insults to silence those who they don't like what they're saying," Cruz told the crowd.

"A lot of media attention has been focused on the attacks leveled on me and I would encourage all of you if you want to write stories on that great, knock yourself out, but I would ask for every ten stories you write, attacking me, perhaps write one story on the substance of Chuck Hagel's record."

Yep, he sounds nothing like the old victim mentality, why is Obama so mean to us coupled with Obama Derangement Syndrome GOP at all.  Not a single friggin' bit.

(Bad) Food For Thought

Laugh all you want to at Europe's horse meat in the mix problem.  As Aviva Shen at Think Progress reminds us, the American meat supply and the regulatory safety system here is in far, far worse shape.

Food regulators recently uncovered horsemeat masquerading as beef in Burger Kings, school cafeterias, and hospitals across Europe and the UK, prompting multiple product recalls and widespread horror. The horsemeat scandal has not touched the US, and many experts and journalists have rushed to reassure Americans that their burgers are safe from horse contamination. But compared to the dangerous pathogens hiding in US-produced meat, Americans might want to consider replacing their beef patties with European horsemeat.

The debacle has exposed weaknesses in the EU’s food safety procedures. However, horsemeat poses a negligible health risk. There have been no reported deaths or illnesses caused by this contamination. Though a harmful horse painkiller called bute was found in 8 of the 206 horses, a human would have to eat more than 500 burgers made entirely of horsemeat to ingest a human dose.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the average American consumes roughly 270 pounds of meat per year, and it’s unlikely that horsemeat is in the mix. There is, however, plenty of evidence that many Americans are inadvertently eating a side of deadly bacteria like salmonella or e. coli with their burgers. According to Center for Disease Control estimates, 48 million Americans get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die from foodborne illnesses every year. In comparison, the entire European Union had roughly 45,000 illnesses and 32 deaths from contaminated food in 2008. That means foodborne illness strikes 15 percent of Americans each year, but only .00009 percent of Europeans.

Pay attention to that last part, kids.  You're over a thousand times more likely to get food poisoning from food here than in Europe.  Maybe socialism isn't so bad when foodborne illnesses kill 3,000 a year in this country and we're pretty much okay with that.

Strike that, Republicans aren't okay with that.  They say that number should be higher because we've got too much government regulation.  You know what's getting cut as part of the sequestration meat axe?  The guys inspecting meat axes.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and the White House have caused quite a stir in food and agriculture circles by warning that budget sequestration could lead to a two-week furlough of federal meat inspectors, which would effectively halt American meat and poultry processing.

The meat industry has responded by arguing that the U.S. Department of Agriculture is actually legally obligated to provide Food Safety and Inspection Service inspectors at meat plants — without an FSIS inspector plants are not allowed to operate — so USDA should instead furlough less important, or “non-essential” employees to meet the automatic cuts.

Sorry folks, Republicans are more than happy to let these cuts happen. These cuts will have consequences, and the GOP is hoping those consequences are "We block it and you'll blame Obama."

Somehow, that's a load of bull.  Or horse.

Moving Those Goalposts

Greg Sargent points out that the goalposts on deficit reduction in Very Serious Washington just got yanked hard to the right in the new revised Simpson-Bowles Punish The Proles Plan.  The amount of new revenues in the plan is drastically lower, and spending cuts, drastically higher.

In other words, the plan roughly represents the ideological midpoint between the Obama and Boehner fiscal cliff blueprints — which is why the plan is so heavily tilted towards cuts. As Kevin Drum notes, this is particularly odd, given that spending cuts have already been “75 percent of the deficit reduction we’ve done so far.” Drum adds: “this sure makes it hard to take Simpson-Bowles 2.0 seriously as a plan.”

That’s true, but it also provides a useful window into the arbitrariness of Beltway conceptions of what constitutes the ideological “center.” After all, the Boehner fiscal cliff plan raised taxes only on income over $1 million; the Obama offer raised taxes only on income over $400,000. Both of these are to the right of the balance Obama just won an election on: The expiration of the Bush tax cuts for income over $250,000. Yet these were designated the two ideological outer poles for the purposes of defining the debate.

Of course, there is actually a liberal position in this debate, and it isn’t the one held by Obama. As you may recall, House progressives recently released their own blueprint for Round 3 of deficit reduction; it proposed some $948 billion in new revenues, derived entirely from closing loopholes and deductions enjoyed by the rich. The result of this plan, if enacted, would be that overall, our short term fiscal problems would have been resolved through roughly equivalent spending cuts and tax hikes — which is to say, through roughly equivalent concessions by both sides.

But of course, such a notion of balance is so obviously a nonstarter in Washington that it doesn’t even factor into the discussion in any way, shape, or form. The left outer pole of the debate, then, is to the right of the position that helped decisively reelect Obama.

Punish The Proles 2.0 is about selling the Ryan Plan, plain and simple.  The little people have to be weaned off Medicare and Social Security, and more and more of our Village elders are moving past the "if it needs to happen" part to "when it needs to happen", and that's apparently going to be Obama's second term legacy, whether or not Obama actually wants to do it (which he's repeatedly said he won't.)

But the Simpson-Bowles plan is now calling for at least $5 trillion in deficit reduction, and basically all of the additional cuts from the $4 trillion or so plan from last time is coming from the social safety net.  Tinkering around the edges like Obama has already done will affect people down the road (and in some cases substantially), but the changes these guys are now demanding will turn the scalpel into an orbital particle cannon.

I'm hoping Obama can hold out.  I don't think the rest of Democrats in Congress will give him much of a choice.

StupidiNews!

• A Georgia inmate with an IQ of 70 has been granted a last-minute stay of execution as the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals reviews his case.
• An Italian website is reporting that Pope Benedict XVI is "nearly blind in one eye" and suffers from hypertension as medical reasons for his retirement from the station of Pope.
• While Congress is on yet another vacation this week, President Obama is pushing for legislators to come up with a plan to avoid "devastating" job cuts from sequestration by March 1.
• Former Swiss billionaire Thomas Straumann is selling a few things to get back above the billion mark, including his 1965 James Bond Aston Martin from the movie Thunderball.
• Embattled console-maker Sony is expected to reveal the new PlayStation 4 today, as the struggling company tries to keep up with Microsoft and Nintendo.

Last Call

Louisville Courier-Journal winger nutjob John David Dyche is calling it quits after the paper refused to publish his latest screed on how evilly liberal the Louisville Courier-Journal is.

Conservative columnist John David Dyche will no longer write for The Courier-Journal after the newspaper rejected a piece he'd written that suggested reforms to the editorial page and that the paper disclose political affiliations of editors and reporters.

On Monday, Courier-Journal Editorial Director Pam Platt told Dyche that his most recently submitted column would not be published. Platt explained that piece didn't reflect what he was supposed to be writing—a conservative take on the issues of the day, according to Dyche's transcript of a voicemail left by Platt.

Dyche wrote back to Platt and C-J Publisher Wes Jackson arguing that he'd never before been told what his column was supposed to be about and that a conservative take on issues includes "liberal media bias." Dyche told Platt that if the paper wouldn't change its mind, he'd sever their relationship. Platt wished him well on future endeavors.

"I never had a column censored or refused before," Dyche told WFPL on Friday. "I wrote about things that were interesting to readers and things that were public issues. I thought this was both. Media bias, the status of newspapers, et cetera. This seemed to me to be interesting, and the only problem apparently was that it was about The Courier-Journal itself. They just don't seem willing to subject themselves to the same scrutiny and demands that they routinely subject others to."

Platt responds via e-mail: "I believe my remarks about the reason I declined (the) column and my best wishes to him in the future have been posted."

Any newspaper editor will tell you that if you've got a problem with the paper's op-ed rules, formal or informal, writing a column for public consumption about your beef with them is the last thing you do.   No newspaper is going to want to make themselves the story, so Dyche did it for them.

If you can show me where in the Constitution it says that Dyche has the inalienable right to slag his employer in his column and that they must print it, go for it.  And let's remember, Dyche then tendered his resignation, he wasn't fired.

Good riddance.  His column was crap anyway.

Right Out Of Existence

The LIBERTY and FREEDOM guys apparently have no issue with using the power of government to regulate small businesses right out of existence, as long as those small businesses are women's clinics.

The Alabama House of Representatives is expected to take up abortion legislation Tuesday that supporters claim will protect patients in clinics and opponents claim will close down abortion providers.

The legislation, sponsored by Rep. Mary Sue McClurkin, R-Pelham, would require physicians at abortion clinics to have admitting privileges at local hospitals; require clinics to follow ambulatory clinic building codes and make it a felony — punishable by up to 10 years in prison — for a nurse, nurse practitioner or physician’s assistant to dispense abortion-inducing medications.


McClurkin and other supporters of the bill, known as HB 57, argue that the nature of abortion should require strict regulations, and claim that abortion clinics have a higher rate of regulatory violations than any other providers.


“When a physician removes a child from a woman, that is the largest organ in a body,” McClurkin said in an interview Thursday. “That’s a big thing. That’s a big surgery. You don’t have any other organs in your body that are bigger than that.”

So in one fell swoop, Alabama will all but close the last remaining few clinics in the state by making it impossible to meet the criteria, and to criminalize birth control drugs like Plan B.   Hell, depending on how they define "abortion-inducing medications" it could make prescribing any birth control a state felony.

But remember, small government, individual choice, freedom and liberty...unless it comes to your uterus.

Science, GOP Style

This Huffington Post article calls out the stupidity of Mary Sue McClurkin, who decides to change science to make her point.  As always, those pesky facts get in the way.

Alabama state Rep. Mary Sue McClurkin (R) is pushing legislation that would impose restrictions on abortion clinics -- a move that she argues is necessary because the procedure is a major surgery that removes the largest "organ" in a woman's body.

“When a physician removes a child from a woman, that is the largest organ in a body,” McClurkin told the Montgomery Advertiser on Thursday. “That’s a big thing. That’s a big surgery. You don’t have any other organs in your body that are bigger than that.”

Most junior high science classes could easily dissect this argument, and it is yet another embarrassment for a group already famous for being at odds with science.  She could at least use the correct word.  Oh wait, if she uses the correct word then her entire argument falls apart.  Very well, then.  Let the clown car skid into the courtroom once more.

Maybe this whole thing is just an argument for better elementary education in Alabama.

StupidiNews!

• Olympic runner Oscar Pistorious faced his first court date in South Africa with the defense arguing he shout and killed his girlfriend because he thought she was a burglar.
• CBS News reports that the motive for alleged Newtown shooter Adma Lanza was to "beat" the death toll of 77 gunned down by Norwegian Anders Brevik in 2011.
• Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez made a surprise trip home to Caracas on Monday after his ongoing cancer treatment in Cuba.
• Legendary LA Lakers owner Jerry Buss has died at the age of 80, his teams took a record 10 NBA titles in the space of 34 seasons.
• Google continues to bet big on its Project Glass wearable computer glasses, recent Glass Foundry events produced 8 teams to develop code for the devices.

The Right's Hagel Finagle

Jen Rubin is a meta-hack, but she's a pretty reliable barometer of the winger zeitgeist, and the wingers are pretty pissed off that senators like John McCain and Lindsey Graham seem to be crumbling on Chuck Hagel.

In any event, McCain and Graham shouldn’t fold when the going gets tough. If this nominee is as bad as they say, they should, and indeed must, filibuster him if the White House (unlike the Bush White House) and the Democrats (unlike the GOP senators of yesteryear) won’t do the right thing.

Here's the thing, when Susan Rice was floated for Secretary of State, Republicans readily had John Kerry's name at hand because they wanted a shot at his seat.  But have you heard Republicans mention a possible replacement for Chuck Hagel?

Not to my knowledge.  We hear how awful, incompetent, and even anti-Semitic Chuck Hagel supposedly is, but nobody seems to have a name of somebody who would be an acceptable replacement.

Funny how that works.

Criss Cross Crash

For the first time in recorded history, Mickey Kaus may actually be right about something when it comes to the leaked draft of the President's immigration bill that may end up on the table in case Senators can't come up with anything.

So what’s the purpose of this hollow threat? The only explanation I come up with is that it’s a Double Kabuki play: 1) The President gets to posture as the tough guy demanding a deal (or else he’ll unleash his draft!). Meanwhile the Hispanic caucus and the amnesty lobby can gnaw on all the pro-illegal statutory tweaks they would like to see in the “path to citizenship,” etc.  But more important 2) Republicans like Rubio and Paul Ryan get to posture by denouncing the President’s draft (Rubio: “Dead on Arrival” Ryan: “the wrong direction”) thereby earning themselves seeming-tough-on-illegals street cred that might serve them well when they sell out by endorsing an instant-legalization compromise  (as, in fact, Rubio has already done).

That would not only explain why the plan exists but why it was leaked by “an Obama administration official” to USA Today. Obama wants to give Rubio and Ryan the opportunity to look like they are fighting him. But it’s a fake fight.

Got a better explanation?

Actually I think Kaus is correct in his own paranoid way.  I agree that the plan was leaked to USA Today in order to give Republicans something to publicly beat up on for a while, but the reality is immigration has to pass, or the GOP will take the blame for killing it, and that means the Dems will continue to get the vast majority of the growing Latino vote forever.  Dubya may have been a meathead, but even he was smart enough to listen to Rove and Cheney on this.  The problem is that he underestimated the bigoted monster he helped to create, and it turned on him.

That monster still rampages around the Republican countryside, and the last few Republicans left to be motivated by enlightened self-interest are trying to slay it.

I think it will fail.  The Republican Party is a hate group in 2013, period.  They will have to be reconstituted at some point in the future, but they are effectively done right now.

StupidiNews!

• Country music star Mindy McCready is dead at the age of 37, found at her Arkansas home on Sunday with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
• Journalists at the BBC are on a 24-hour strike in protest of "compulsory redundancy" measures used to terminate 30 employees.
• Members of the Lumbee Indian tribe of North Carolina say they will continue to use eagle feathers in tribal ceremonies even if the tribe is not federally recognized to be able to do so.
• Danica Patrick is the first woman to qualify for a pole position in a NASCAR Sprint Cup race, putting in the fastest time for next week's Daytona 500.
• A laser intended for measuring carbon samples on Mars is being used by the EU to detect counterfeit honey smuggled from China.

Last Call

The siren song of false equivalence is just too strong for Thomas Friedman as he is presented the majestic vistas of President Obama's SOTU speech, and he cannot contain himself from smearing crap all over the walls in the most Friedman-tastic column ever disgorged from the Augustus Gloop-like depths of his banality.

I WAS struck by one particular moment during President Obama’s State of the Union address. The president proposed a $1 billion investment to build a new National Network for Manufacturing Innovation to spur high-tech manufacturing in America. I’m sure that would be helpful, and I’m sure the president will have to beg to get any such funding out of Congress. Yet sitting up there in the balcony listening to the president’s speech was the chief executive of Apple, Tim Cook. Apple is currently sitting on $137 billion of cash in the bank. There are many reasons Apple has not spent its cash hoard, but I’ll bet anything that one of them is the uncertain economic and tax environment in this country. Think about how much better we’d all be if Apple, and the many other companies sitting on cash, felt confident enough in the future to spend it. These are the most dynamic companies in the world. They don’t need any government help to innovate. 

From this demon seed, we can extrapolate the entire rest of the column.  Friedman wants his GRAND AUSTERITY BARGAIN and he wants it now.  The GOP will totally stop hating the President if he just gives the Republicans everything they want:  massive cuts to Social Security and Medicare for future retirees, plus cuts to education across the board.  If everyone currently under 50 suffers needlessly, then, and only then, will our corporate masters choose to invest in the government's place, ostensibly so that they get a say in how the country is run.  That makes the cooling fluid in Friedman's cyborg technocrat heart pump race just a few percentage points faster.

But what makes Friedman's column this weekend so completely awesome this time around is this line here at the end:

After the whipping the G.O.P. took in the election, I believe there is now a group of Republican politicians and C.E.O.’s who would meet Obama in the middle, if the president showed he was ready to take on some of his base as well. If the president tries, and I am wrong, well, he’ll have a few bad weeks. If I am right and enough Republicans meet Obama on a Grand Bargain, it would both split the G.O.P. between the sane conservatives and the certifiable crazies and give the president a real foundation for a truly significant second term. 

This is the Ultimate Friedman Fantasy put to words, a manifesto of moron, the epitome of Friedman's empty core.  "If only President Obama will stop acting as though he won, the Republicans will come around!"  You know, the same Republican party that has called the President a socialist, fascist, Kenyan usurper anti-Christ, the guys whose only goal was to make sure the President lost in November, and they lost huge.

Sure, they'll come around.  All the President has to do is smack his base around, the dirty stupid hippies who voted for him, and then we can all enjoy a happy Grand Bargain where everyone not making a quarter mil a year gets fed to the grinder, but Friedman's sure that companies like Apple will step up and invest their billions in schools and roads and health care or something and save us all if only he would give the Republicans what they wanted...

So my only possible analysis at this point is Friedman's memory card is full, and someone needs to rip it out of his skull.  Preferably with Ripley's cargo loader from Aliens.

He's learned nothing from the last four years.  Zero.  Zilch.  Nada. 

It makes my head hurt.

Hubristric Tendencies

I'm definitely looking forward to the Monday night premiere of "Hubris: Selling The Iraq War" at 9 PM EST on MSNBC.  Rachel Maddow will be hosting the special, based on the book by David Corn and Michael Isikoff.  Corn himself gives us a preview:

One chilling moment in the film comes in an interview with retired General Anthony Zinni, a former commander in chief of US Central Command. In August 2002, the Bush-Cheney administration opened its propaganda campaign for war with a Cheney speech at the annual Veterans of Foreign Wars convention. The veep made a stark declaration: "There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us." No doubt, he proclaimed, Saddam was arming himself with WMD in preparation for attacking the United States.

Zinni was sitting on the stage during the speech, and in the documentary he recalls his reaction:

It was a shock. It was a total shock. I couldn't believe the vice president was saying this, you know? In doing work with the CIA on Iraq WMD, through all the briefings I heard at Langley, I never saw one piece of credible evidence that there was an ongoing program. And that's when I began to believe they're getting serious about this. They wanna go into Iraq.

That Zinni quote should almost end the debate on whether the Bush-Cheney administration purposefully guided the nation into war with misinformation and disinformation.

But there's more. So much more. The film highlights a Pentagon document declassified two years ago. This memo notes that in November 2001—shortly after the 9/11 attacks—Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld met with General Tommy Franks to review plans for the "decapitation" of the Iraqi government. The two men reviewed how a war against Saddam could be triggered; that list included a "dispute over WMD inspections." It's evidence that the administration was seeking a pretense for war.

All this and more on Monday night.   Hopefully MSNBC will make it available online, too.  We'll continue to pay for the idiocy of the Iraq War for a generation, economically, morally, and politically.  Bush needs to be in a gated prison, not a gated community in Texas.

Tune in.

Your Stopped Clock Is Right Twice A Day Alert

Even Rand Paul and Mitch The Turtle have to mathematically be right on something once every couple of years, and their open support of bringing hemp farming to Kentucky appears to be that magical moment of pure enlightened greed.

While most Republican members of Congress have been lukewarm at best to the prospect of legalizing marijuana, senators introduced a bipartisan measure this week to legalize industrial hemp. Riding on the passage of a recent Kentucky Senate bills to ease hemp growing, the state’s Republican senators, Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul joined Oregon Democratic Senators Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden in introducing a bill to legalize production of the strain of cannabis used in the production of goods.

Hemp is a plant in the cannabis family with significantly lower levels of the psychoactive component, THC, than most varieties that are smoked or consumed. It is used to make textiles, paper, paints, clothing, plastics, cosmetics, foodstuffs, insulation, animal feed and other products, according to NORML. Hemp is nonetheless lumped in with all other cannabis products, which are classified as Schedule I under the Controlled Substances Act, the most restrictive of the five schedules designated for those substances considered dangerous with no currently accepted medical value.

The federal bill would classify hemp as a regular plant as long as the THC content was low enough, and Kentucky seems to be pretty eager to be among the first states to cash in on hemp, along with Oregon.  Now, for Mitch the Turtle to go along with it, there's got to be some ridiculous profit in it for him, and bringing hemp-based industries to the state at least would be the first thing Mitch has done in years to actually create jobs instead of shipping them to Ohio, Indiana, or China.

We'll see where this all goes.

Last Call

Now, I've talked about Jeb Bush's mad education privatizing schemes involving replacing schools with "internet learning centers" run by the for-profit education corporations, but that hasn't stopped him from dropping hints about 2016:

Jeb Bush wouldn’t say Wednesday night whether or not he’s likely to run for president in 2016, but at Saint Leo University he did suggest a surprising role model for the sort of president he’d strive to be: Lyndon Johnson.

No, the conservative former Florida governor didn’t hail Johnson’s Great Society initiatives. Instead, he hailed Johnson’s forceful, hands-on leadership that among other things produced a 25 percent across-the-board income tax cut.

“He went and he cajoled, he begged, he threatened, he loved, he hugged, he did what leaders do, which is they personally get engaged to make something happen,’’ said Bush, who recently read Robert Caro’s latest Johnson biography.

Bush’s homage to Johnson before several hundred people at the Pasco County campus was one of his only shots at President Barack Obama, who has earned a reputation for avoiding hands-on negotiating with congressional leaders.

“I saw an unnamed person in the White House about a month ago say, 'You know, Lincoln would have had a hard time in the climate we’re in today, with the Republicans being so intractable,’ ” Bush said. “Really? You’re comparing what we have today to a civil war? Really?”

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/02/14/3234145/former-gov-jeb-bush-talks-immigration.html#storylink=misearch#storylink=cpy#storylink=cpy

Here's the funny part about ol Jebbie here, who doesn't believe there's a civil war in the GOP right now.:  the wingers don't want any part of the guy. 



Good luck, dude.  You're gonna need it.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/02/14/3234145/former-gov-jeb-bush-talks-immigration.html#storylink=misearch#storylink=cpy#storylink=cpy