Last Call For Huckleberry Hounding

Looks like Sen. Graham must have gotten a really dismal post-shutdown internal primary poll going into his 2014 race, because he's suddenly gone all Rand Paul on things.

Amid the sense of gridlock that has become the norm in the U.S. Senate, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is now threatening to block every single nomination from the Obama administration until he gets what he wants on Benghazi — again.

On Sunday evening, CBS’ 60 Minutes aired a new report on the attack in Benghazi, Libya that took place last year, examining the nature of the attack, which analysts are now calling pre-planned. This differs greatly from the early days and weeks after the attack, when members of the administration were still attempting to find out what went wrong and what led to the deaths of four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens.

And sensing the opportunity to earn points with the lunatics he'll need to win his primary, Graham is now throwing a complete tantrum.

"So I am calling for a joint select committee. But for God’s sake, let the House have a select committee where you get three or four committees together to look at this situation as one unit rather than stove piping. And where are the survivors? 14 months later, Steve, the survivors, the people who survived the attack in Benghazi, have not been made available to the U.S. congress for oversight purposes. I’m going to block every appointment in the United States Senate until the survivors are being made available to the Congress. I’m tired of hearing from people on TV and reading about stuff in books."

So apparently until we have even more Benghazi hearings on top of the Benghazi hearings we've already had over the last year, Republicans will simply stop the government from working.   Let us know how that works out for you guys.  The best part?

Graham’s threat comes just as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) prepares a new wave of Obama administration nominees to be brought before the Senate. Even before the threat to hold all of these nominees was issued, Senate Democrats have been mulling the so-called “nuclear option” of allowing for votes to proceed with a majority 51 votes, ending the threat of the filibuster on certain types of votes.

Ironically enough, Graham recently chastised his colleagues for blocking an up or down vote on the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, calling it the “wrong” thing to do.

Yeah, that was before Graham became one of the top targets of the tea party.

Marco Rubio, Los Lucha-Dorkus

GOP Sen. Marco Rubio has ripped off his mask and -- surprise! --  he's against his own immigration plan now!

The most prominent conservative supporter of sweeping immigration reform is calling on Congress to dial back the effort and instead focus on making incremental changes, delivering a significant blow to the prospects of reform.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) now opposes a bicameral conference committee to reach a final resolution to the Senate-passed bill, his spokesman said, which anxious pro-reform advocates believe is the only feasible way to salvage the comprehensive overhaul.

"The point is that at this time, the only approach that has a realistic chance of success is to focus on those aspects of reform on which there is consensus through a series of individual bills," Alex Conant, a top spokesman for Rubio, told TPM in an email. "Otherwise, this latest effort to make progress on immigration will meet the same fate as previous efforts: failure."

Rubio is desperately trying to throw everybody under the bus that he can find, so that he can say "Well, I fought the good fight in the ring for immigration reform, but we're going to have to take what we can get, or get nothing at all."

"[E]arlier this year, Senator Rubio put aside his personal preference for a piecemeal approach and reached across the aisle to craft a bipartisan solution in the Senate. And unlike many of the proponents of reform in the Democratic party, he did so despite strong opposition within his own party and at a significant and well documented political price," Conant said. "But sufficient support for that approach simply does not exist at this time. And in fact it has only eroded further as evidenced by the fact that virtually every House Republican working on a bipartisan comprehensive bill has since abandoned that effort."

The ambitious Florida senator saw his standing diminish among conservative voters after he supported the Senate bill. Opposing conference on the Senate bill leaves little, if any, room to pass reform through a divided Congress as the broad coalitions that hold together the Senate legislation would splinter if any major components are excluded. House Republicans have resisted President Barack Obama's repeated calls for reviving the stalled effort, and lack an internal consensus on how to proceed on an incremental basis.

So Rubio's plan is to blame everyone in Washington who isn't named Marco Rubio when immigration reform crashes and burns yet again.  He's playing the part of the weary warrior who has to regroup in order to fight the good fight another day, only what he's really doing is selling out Latino voters just in time to make a 2016 run.

Funny how that works.

This Week In Village Idiocy

Florida Blue Cross/Blue Shield CEO Patrick Gehaghty sets the record straight on the "300,000 Floridians lost their BC/BS health insurance under Obamacare!" idiocy.

We’re not cutting people,” Geraghty said. “We’re actually transitioning people. What we’ve been doing is informing folks that their plan doesn’t meet the test of the essential health benefits; therefore, they have a choice of many options that we make available through the exchange. And, in fact, with subsidy, many people will be getting better plans at a lesser cost. This really is a transition. In fact, the 300,000 figure is the entire year. So it’s really 40,000 people for January 1, and we’re walking them through that transition.”

Surprise. 300,000 people, the vast majority who are going to get better coverage at a lower premium.  How horrible, as Nicole Belle explains over at Crooks & Liars.

Now, it's absolutely true that there will be a fraction of people who find that their costs have gone up, the specific number and amount is still up for debate. And if they don't qualify for subsidies, that will mean a higher out-of-pocket cost, at least in the short term. However, short-term partisan gains notwithstanding, the program will factor in long-term the inclusion of healthy, young people on the exchanges, which will help mitigate the ailing people who rushed for the initial coverage. Specifically, the re-insurance tax is being levied for the first three years is intended to help smooth that transition to allow for the long-term sustainability of the program.

But why would NBC News be interested in actually informing their viewers of the realities of the program when they can have their newscasters "sell" a misleading partisan argument instead?

Considering Republicans are lying about Social Security and Medicare "being broke" decades after they became American staples in order to force austerity cuts, is anyone surprised they are lying about the Affordable Care Act?

StupidiNews!

• Rock superstar Lou Reed, former front man of the Velvet Underground, has passed at 71 after a liver transplant in May.
• San Francisco locals believe a massive floating structure made of barges and cargo containers off the coast of Treasure Island may in fact be Google's newest data center.
• Obama administration officials say the healthcare.gov website will be repaired by the end of November for "the vast majority of users".
• China's proposed land reforms to allow outside investors to buy rural land is drawing both praise and skepticism from international investors.
• A new study shows that for the most part, US broadband internet speeds are far slower and way more expensive than the rest of the world's largest international cities.