StupidiNews!

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

Last Call

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We'll see.

Roe v. Wade Turns 40

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Senator Turtle Hides In His Shell

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


It's all they ever had, of course.

StupidiNews!

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

Last Call

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

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

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

And Chuck Pierce with the best reaction to it.

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

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

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

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

On The Next Night Court...

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

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

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

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

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

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

Funny how that works.

An Old Gun Fighter Speaks

Doug Mataconis makes the case that Democrats should at least heed Big Dog's advice and keep in mind that pissing off the bitter clingers isn't going to help get anything passed.

If there’s any Democrat in the United States who has experience in taking on America’s gun owners and the Second Amendment, it’s Bill Clinton. Mere weeks before the 1994 Presidential Election, the United States Congress passed, and Clinton signed, a controversial Assault Weapons Ban. Indeed, while the conventional wisdom continues to hold that the primary motivation behind the massive Republican victories in the 1994 Congressional Elections was due in large part to the President’s failed effort at health care reform, many political observers have contended for years that it was the Administration’s push on the Assault Weapons Ban, and the political backlash that it unleashed from the National Rifle Association and other groups, that played the most significant role in the tidal wave that handed control of both Houses of Congress to the Republican Party.

I'm going to have to say that I disagree with that.  I still think "HillaryCare" did it, not to mention the House Post Office scandal.  The Dems were headed to defeat long before the Violent Crime Control and Prevention Act passed.  Let's remember that the bill passed the House with a number of Republicans you might recognize:  John Kasich, Jon Kyl, Illena Ros-Lehtinen, Olympia Snowe, 46 of them in all.  In the Senate, seven Republican broke ranks, including Arlen Specter and Nancy Kessebaum, as well as Linc Chafee.  Too many Republicans signed up for the bill for it to be the reason why the Dems were wiped out.

As far as Clinton's advice goes, Doug's take:

Clinton injects a little bit of political reality into the post-Newtown gun control conversation. The “gun culture” of which many gun control activists so derisively speak isn’t just limited to the South. It’s a strong force in the Midwest, especially among hunters, and in the west. Indeed, even in California there area millions of people who own guns and who would resist any effort to take those guns away. We live in a nation were that are nearly as many firearms in the open market as there are people. That suggests the very simply idea that draconian gun control laws are, for the most part, not going to succeed in taking significant action to restrict Second Amendment rights because of the legislative power that the so-called “gun lobby” can bring to bear. Results will vary from state to state, of course, but nationally it seems fairly clear to me that America’s gun owners and those of us, such as myself, who still support the right of American citizens to exercise their Second Amendment rights, remain a force to be reckoned with. As Bill Clinton told his fellow Democrats, that’s something the advocates of further gun control ought to keep in mind.

Except for the fact that what President Obama has proposed isn't at all "significant action to restrict the Second Amendment."  It's being called that, and in fact has been called that for four years when President Obama was actually making it easier to obtain weapons, so much so that the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence rated him an across-the-board "F".   Much like "Obama is weak on immigration enforcement and national security" when the facts were completely the opposite, the notion that Obama is a gun grabber is complete nonsense.

If somebody can show me where President Obama is proposing to take guns away from people who already lawfully own them, that's different.  He has done nothing of the sort.

StupidiNews, MLK Day Edition!

• Police in Albuquerque, New Mexico have arrested a 15-year-old in connection with the "horrific" murders of five people on Sunday, the dead including three children.
• NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has discovered traces of carbonates and clay at the bottom of the red planet's McLaughlin crater, possibly formed by a body of water at some point.
• The final toll in this weekend's Algerian raid on terrorists holding hostages at a natural gas field includes 23 of 107 hostages dead, along with 32 terrorists.
• Spain's 4th quarter 2012 jobless numbers are expected to show 26 percent unemployment and six million out of work in a country of 47 million.
• A new method of making nanowires less than the thickness of light waves could dramatically boost efficiency in solar cell technology.

Last Call

Yes America, Republicans think you are this stupid.

Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) said Sunday that he does not believe President Obama’s gun-control proposals will be brought to the Senate floor for a vote.

Speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Barrasso said election worries among Democrats will sideline legislation that could restrict gun ownership.

Obama has called on Congress to institute universal background checks for all gun sales as well as bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, among other items.

“I don’t think Sen. Harry Reid [D-Nev.] even brings it to the Senate floor because he has six Democrats up for election in two years in states where the president received fewer than 42 percent of the votes,” Barrasso said. “He doesn’t want his Democrats to have to choose between their own constituents and the president’s positions.”

Don't blame us when gun laws fail, blame Red State Blue Dog Dems!   Nice try, Tom.  But America knows who to blame for constant, near total opposition:  Republicans.

President Obama knows what he's doing here:  the will of the American people.

Have We Turned The Corner?

Bill McBride over at Calculated Risk argues that the economy will get better, or better enough anyway that President Obama will be able to take serious credit for reducing the deficit:

And another key graph on the US deficit. As we've been discussing, the US deficit as a percent of GDP has been declining, and will probably decline to around 3% in fiscal 2015.

This graph shows the actual (purple) budget deficit each year as a percent of GDP, and an estimate for the next three years based on current policy (Jan Hatzius at Goldman Sachs estimates the deficit will 3% of GDP in 2015).  Note: With 7.8% unemployment, there is a strong argument for less deficit reduction in the short term, but that doesn't seem to be getting any traction.

 

Now there are a lot of if's here.  And the big screaming question is "Why aren't we doing what we can to lower the unemployment rate?"  And of course, the big screaming answer is "Republicans refuse to allow anything to be done."

But President Obama is reducing the deficit.  It's dropping and continuing to drop.

Blaming The Victim Again

Ezra Klein comes up with a pretty good observation:  Moderate Republicans have A) accepted that the right wing of the party is increasingly awful, and B) it's all President Obama's fault.

The logic here is weirdly impeccable. The Republican Party’s dilemma is that House Republicans keeps taking all kinds of unreasonable and unpopular positions. If Obama weren’t president, the House Republicans wouldn’t be taking so many unreasonable and unpopular positions. But since Obama is president, and since he does need to work with House Republicans, he is highlighting their unreasonable and unpopular opinions in a bid to make them change their minds, which is making House Republicans look even worse. And so it’s ultimately Obama’s fault that House Republicans are, say, threatening to breach the debt ceiling if they don’t get their way on spending cuts. After all, if Mitt Romney had won the election, the debt ceiling wouldn’t even be a question!

My colleague Michael Gerson wrote one of the earliest versions of this column. As he put it, Obama “knows that Republicans are forced by the momentum of their ideology to take positions on spending that he can easily demagogue.” So he has, in a bid to “break his opponents,” decided to “force the GOP to surrender on the debt limit, with nothing in return” and to “require Republicans to accept new taxes in exchange for any real spending reductions.”

In other words, it's just not fair that President Obama is hitting home runs off such juicy hanging fastballs the GOP nutjobs keep tossing over the plate.  If President Obama really cared about bipartisanship, he'd surrender completely to the Republicans and stop making them look bad.  Sure.  And if college co-eds would stop wearing outfits like that...you get the picture.  This is outright victim blaming, period.

Jon Chait comes up with a similar observation on the latest idiocy from David Brooks.

What Obama should be doing in response, Brooks argues, is push for policies that provoke no opposition even from the craziest of the Republicans: “We could do some education reform, expand visa laws to admit more high-skill workers, encourage responsible drilling for natural gas, maybe establish an infrastructure bank.” Brooks argues that these issues would be uncontroversial enough to “erode partisan orthodoxies and get back into the habit of passing laws together.” Then, maybe we could pass some laws under a future president.

Note that solving actual problems is besides the point here. Brooks is almost explicit about this. He begins with the need for initiatives that he thinks will lead to happiness and comity between the parties in Washington, and then comes up with policies that might fit the bill...

Here's the reality.  Short of resigning from the Presidency along with Joe Biden and then putting John Boehner in the White House, there is nothing that President Obama can do that will make the Republicans like him.  And if the Republicans get their way, pretty much every law in the last four years gets thrown out.  "Just humor the lunatics" is not a viable governing strategy.  "Getting rid of the lunatics" is.

We need to remember that in 2014.

Last Call

So, how did those Gun Appreciation Day rallies across the country go, anyway?

If the gun advocates behind this year’s inaugural Gun Appreciation Day had hoped to use the day’s festivities to build support for their anti-regulation platform, they are going to have to wait another year.

Emergency personnel had to be called to the scene of the Dixie Gun and Knife Show in Raleigh, North Carolina after a gun accidentally discharged and shot two people at the show’s safety check-in booth just after 1 pm. Both victims were transported to an area hospital, and the Raleigh Fire Department announced that the show would be closed for the rest of the day.

Responsible!

Two similar incidents occurred at entirely separate gun shows in the Midwest, one in the Cleveland suburb of Medina, Ohio and the other at the state fairgrounds in Indianapolis, Indiana. In Ohio, the local ABC affiliate reports that one individual was brought to a hospital by EMS, and in Indiana Channel 8 WISH says that an individual shot himself in the hand while trying to reload his gun in the show parking lot. That brings the tally to 4 victims of gun violence so far at three different gun shows during the country’s first Gun Appreciation Day.  

Super responsible!

CNN is reporting that three people were injured at the gun show in Raleigh, not two as originally reported. All were victims of a shotgun that fired while the owner was removing it from a case.

You get the picture.  So at least five people were injured at three separate WOOHOO GUNS ARE AWESOME rallies.  And let's remember, these were organized specifically to counter that awful, heartless National Day of Service for Dr. King's birthday that wingers despise so much.

Go figure.

The Kroog Versus Humble Pie

Given the complete surrender on the debt ceiling by the House GOP this weekend (via Greg Sargent)...

Big news. Eric Cantor has just made it official: The GOP leadership is prepared to agree to a three month debt ceiling hike. This is a major de-escalation of the crazy and effectively means Republicans have all but taken the threat of default off the table completely.

First, the key bit from Cantor’s statement:

We must pay our bills and responsibly budget for our future. Next week, we will authorize a three month temporary debt limit increase to give the Senate and House time to pass a budget. Furthermore, if the Senate or House fails to pass a budget in that time, Members of Congress will not be paid by the American people for failing to do their job. No budget, no pay.

Here’s why this matters: This increases the debt ceiling to authorize borrowing to pay the country’s bills well into April. That punts the debt limit deadline until after the deadline for funding for the government to run out, which is on March 27th. In other words, Republicans will now use the threat of a government shutdown along with the coming expiration of the sequester to extract the spending cuts it wants. Presuming this all gets resolved by then, or soon after, it means the threat of default is no longer a factor. This will all but certainly get resolved in advance of this three month deadline, and a long term debt limit hike will get attached to that agreement.

It's good to know that Paul Krugman will admit when he was wrong about the President.

When you’re wrong, you’re wrong. I thought that by ruling out any way to bypass the debt limit, the White House was setting itself up, at least potentially, for an ignominious cave-in. But it appears that the strategy has worked, and it’s the Republicans giving up. I’m happy to concede that the president and team called this one right.

Yeah, well, us amateur pundits kinda knew this was going to happen.

The key point to remember here is that Obama achieves his main goals simply by surviving. Above all, health reform gets implemented, and probably becomes irreversible.

That's been the case for two years now, Kroog.  Pay attention.

StupidiNews, Inauguration Weekend Edition!

• UK and Norway officials confirm the special forces assault by Algerian troops to rescue dozens of hostages is over, but seven hostages and 11 terrorists are listed as dead.
• The charity Oxfam has issued a scathing report stating the combined $240 billion fortunes of the 100 richest billionaires on earth could end poverty on the planet four times over.
• House GOP leaders say they will pass a three month extension on the debt ceiling limit in order to force Senate Democrats to pass a budget or forfeit Congressional salaries.
• The Dow hit a five-year high on news of the GOP deal, and stronger than expected housing start and employment numbers this week.
• The Texas high school student who refused an RFID badge as "the mark of the beast" has been kicked out of the state magnet school and is headed for home.

Also, sorry for the lack of posts last night.  I had to replace a hard drive that melted down and restore data from my weekly backups.  That took most of last night and this morning.  I'm back now, and I'm sure you're all just thrilled.