Last Call

The big pull from the President's State of the Union, something I totally did not expect:  a call to raise the minimum wage to $9 an hour.  Yggy:

This is an issue people have been debating politically for a long time, and it's no coincidence that perhaps the leading pro minimum wage empirical study was co-authored by Alan Kruger who's currently chairman of Obama's Council of Economic Advisors. It's interesting to think about this idea in the context of an environment where the Federal Reserve says it will allow inflation to rise to 2.5 percent, but doesn't currently expect it to reach that level. In principle a bump in low-wage worker wages could lead to exactly the kind of tolerated-but-not-expected inflation that the Fed has talked about.

And even $9 is not a living wage, but it's certainly better than $7.25.

Going to be interesting watching the GOP that hard working Americans who have minimum wage jobs are making too much money.

And Don't Let Your Spurs Hit You In The Ass On The Way Out

Democrats moving to Wyoming to follow the American Dream?  Yeah, there's a problem with that.

Over the summer, the Reverend Audette Fulbright moved with her family to Cheyenne, Wyoming. where she preaches at the Unitarian Universalist church. When the state legislature began debating a bill to allow for the carrying of concealed weapons at schools and sporting events, Fulbright wrote to lawmakers to express her concerns about guns and about fracking. 

Seems like a reasonable, civic-minded plan of action.  So she wrote this:

My husband and I moved to Wyoming not too long ago. We believed it was a good place to raise children. With the recent and reactive expansion of gun laws and the profoundly serious dangers of fracking, we find we are seriously reconsidering our decision, which is wrenching to all of us. However, the safety of our family must come first. We are waiting to see what the legislature does this session. I know of other new-to-Wyoming families in similar contemplation. Your choices matter. It would be sad to see an exodus of educated, childrearing age adults from Wyoming as a result of poor lawmaking.

Again, a reasonable letter to her state representative...unless that Wyoming state lawmaker is Republican Hans Hunt.  Her GOP state representative's response?

I'll be blunt. If you don't like the political atmosphere of Wyoming, then by all means, leave. We, who have been here a very long time (I am proudly 4^th generation) are quite proud of our independent heritage. I don't expect a "mass exodus" from our state just because we're standing up for our rights. As to your comments on fracking, I would point out that you're basing your statement on "dangers" that have not been scientifically founded or proved as of yet.

It offends me to no end when liberal out-of-staters such as yourself move into Wyoming, trying to get away from where they came from, and then pompously demand that Wyoming conform to their way of thinking. We are, and will continue to be, a state which stands a head above the rest in terms of economic security. Our ability to do that is, in large part, to our "live and let live" mentality when it comes to allowing economic development, and limiting government oversight. So, to conclude, if you're so worried about what our legislature is working on, then go back home.

Big tent approach, right?  I mean, why should Republicans even bother listening to liberal constituents?  They're not going to be represented in any way, they don't donate to Republicans, they don't vote for Republicans, why should Republicans even bother to treat them as human beings, much less voting constituents?

I'm sure if I wrote to my state reps, I'd get much the same response.  Liberals aren't voters to convince, or constituents to win over, or citizens to represent, to Republicans.  We're "pompous" people who need to "go back home" to blue states where we belong.

Also, we're divisive.  Funny how that works.

Ring A Ding Dong, You Ding Dongs

The Wall Street Journal has found fraud, fraud I tell you!  Obama fraud!  Bigger than Solyndra!  Bigger than life!  "Obama fraud" that has been corrected, and was perpetrated by the nation's cell phone carriers to get free customers they profited from, but nobody cares about that because OBAMAPHONES.

The U.S. government spent about $2.2 billion last year to provide phones to low-income Americans, but a Wall Street Journal review of the program shows that a large number of those who received the phones haven't proved they are eligible to receive them.

The Lifeline program—begun in 1984 to ensure that poor people aren't cut off from jobs, families and emergency services—is funded by charges that appear on the monthly bills of every landline and wireless-phone customer. Payouts under the program have shot up from $819 million in 2008, as more wireless carriers have persuaded regulators to let them offer the service.

Suspecting that many of the new subscribers were ineligible, the Federal Communications Commission tightened the rules last year and required carriers to verify that existing subscribers were eligible. The agency estimated 15% of users would be weeded out, but far more were dropped.

A review of five top recipients of Lifeline support conducted by the FCC for the Journal showed that 41% of their more than six million subscribers either couldn't demonstrate their eligibility or didn't respond to requests for certification.

So actually, that river of endless fraud story should be entitled "FCC Stops Wireless Companies From Defrauding Taxpayers, Saves Hundreds Of Millions" but this is  the Wall Street Hournal, so we get this instead:

He got your vote; now he wants his phone back.

To recap, the government fixed the loophole after they found out cell phone companies were signing up everyone they could fine for phones on the government dime, and then charging those folks "special rates".  Hell of a scam, yes?

Hell of a phone carrier scam, not an Obama scam.  Pay attention.  You know, like the way the big banks take billions in fees for issuing SNAP benefits cards, not to mention the billions companies like Wal-Mart get from taking SNAP business.

But that would be anti-corporate, huh?

StupidiNews!

• North Korea says it has conducted a significant underground nuclear test in defiance of international condemnation and sanctions.
• Conservative rocker and gun advocate Ted Nugent has been invited to tonight's State of the Union address by Texas Republican Steve Stockman, himself an advocate of impeachment of the President.
• New court documents indicate California manhunt subject Chris Dorner may have already fled to Mexico with the help on an accomplice.
• President Obama's nominee for Pentagon chief, Chuck Hagel, is expected to survive a vote in the Senate Armed Services Committee today, but faces an uncertain vote in the fill Senate.
• Rumors swirling around Microsoft's successor to the XBOX 360 indicate the console may require a Kinect to work, and current 360 controllers will not work at all with the system.

Last Call

Any questions about what Slugline BuzzFeed’s raison d’être is?




Gosh I’m shocked.  No sirens while you’re at it Ben?  Maybe that’s not in the budget.

President Obama’s enemies often accuse him, in the starkest political terms, of crudely acting to shift resources toward his political base: Green energy donors; single women; Latinos; African-Americans.

But the next 12 months are likely to reveal the opposite. Imminent elements of Obama’s grandest policy move, the health care overhaul known as ObamaCare, are calculated to screw his most passionate supporters and to transfer wealth to his worst enemies.

His worst enemies apparently being “BuzzFeed”, judging by the article.

The passionate supporters are the youth, who voted for him by a margin of 60% to 36%, according to exit poll samples of people 29 and under. His enemies are the elderly: Mitt Romney won 56% of the votes from people 65 and over. And while one of ObamaCare’s earliest provisions was a boon to the young, allowing them to stay on their parents’ insurance through the age of 26, what follows may come as an unpleasant surprise to many of the president’s supporters. The provisions required to make any sort of health insurance plan work — not just ObamaCare, but really any plan of its sort — require healthy young people to pay more in health insurance than they consume in services, while the elderly (saved by Sarah “Death Panels” Palin from any serious attempt to ration expensive and often futile end-of-life care) consume far more than they pay in. There is always a push and pull, however, and this year will be spent laying plans to shift the burden further toward the young.

Holy crap, Ben Smith has discovered ACTUARIAL SCIENCE.  Healthy people paying for premiums and not consuming health care pays for sick people who are consuming health care.  ALERT THE INTERNETS.

State and federal officials and the health care industry are currently preparing to implement two specific ObamaCare provisions taking effect on January 1, 2014, acting on this politically perverse principle of shifting resources from your supporters to your opponents. The first is the individual mandate, which aims to force the young, childless, and healthy — “Young Invincibles,” as they are said to think of themselves — to buy heath insurance, even if they think (and even perhaps make a rational, if risky, bet) that they don’t need it.

2010 Teabagger town halls are on the phone, Ben.  They want their crapass argument back.  Seriously man, are you just now figuring out how Obamacare works, bro?  Why the individual mandate was kind of key to the program?  You can’t possibly be this dense.

The second is a lesser-known policy to limit the practices of charging different premiums to different ages, known as age-rating. Many states currently set a limit on this difference, often mandating that an old person shouldn’t pay a premium more than five times a younger person’s, even if she’s expected to use more than five times as much health care. The ObamaCare provision kicking in next January 1 would reduce that ratio to three-to-one, essentially limiting what the elderly pay in part by forcing young people to carry a larger share of the total cost of national health care.

Once again, this BREAKING NEWS MUST CREDIT SLUGLINE BUZZFEED has been common knowledge to any of the policy wonks that have been involved in this discussion, the list of which apparently never included one Ben Smith.  Skip to the end already, son.

So attack Obama on whatever grounds you want, and accuse him if you like of rewarding his friends and punishing his enemies. But that charge, true to some degree of most politicians, may be less true of this one than any other in recent memory. The central question, as Mahar notes, is, “How do we choose between children and their grandparents?” In any normal political calculation, that answer would be clear: You choose the ones who voted for you.

This isn’t even effective firebagging, frankly.  It’s high school newspaper level nonsense.  In all seriousness, this information has been readily available for years now, and the whole point of doing all this is by invoking th mandate, overall health care costs are pushed downwards based on the other provisions in the law that Slugline BuzzFeed Ben conveniently forgets about.  If you’re just now sitting down to the table on ObamaCare, man, all the seats are taken.

Sit your ass down at the kid’s table with the rest of the cat GIF “journalists” and stop talking.

Tie The President Down, Boys, Tie The President Down

William "The Bloody" Kristol and Peter "Thinkless Tanker" Wehner take to the Wall Street Journal to equate Benghazi to everything bad in the universe.

No, seriously, that's the entire article.

We've both had the honor to work in the White House. We've seen presidents, vice presidents, chiefs of staff and national security advisers during moments of international crisis. We know that in these moments human beings make mistakes. There are failures of communication and errors of judgment. Perfection certainly isn't the standard to which policy makers should be held.

But there are standards. If Americans are under attack, presidential attention must be paid. Due diligence must be demonstrated. A president must take care that his administration does everything it can do. On Sept. 11, 2012, as Americans were under attack in Benghazi, Libya, President Obama failed in his basic responsibility as president and commander in chief. In a crisis, the president went AWOL.

Apparently the article then goes on at some length saying that this is the greatest failure in presidential history, entirely unlike Bush eleven years before on that date, brazenly calling it a "deception" and wanting to know if the President even cares.

All of this would be terribly important if Kristol wasn't one of the key media figures in leading us into a decade long war of choice based on complete lies.  He's about as qualified morally to call President Obama out here as Genghis Khan is to comment on pacifism.

The right at this point has nothing else but Benghazi.  It's a desperate attempt over the last five months now to try to create a "administration-ending scandal" over what was an attack on a us consulate, when under the previous President, our embassies and consulates were hit eleven times.  Not a word about Dubya being AWOL there.

It only applies to Obama, you see.  Funny how that happens to work out.

Pontiff Exit Maximus, Or, It Came With A Pope-Out Window

Pope Benedict "Papa Ratzi" XVI is resigning at the end of the month for health reasons.

Pope Benedict XVI will resign on February 28, his spokesman Father Federico Lombardi told CNN Monday.

The 85-year-old pope is resigning "because of advanced age," Benedict told the cardinals of the Catholic Church on Monday.

"Strength of mind and body are necessary, strength which in the last few months has deteriorated in me to the extent that I have had to recognize my incapacity to adequately fulfill the ministry entrusted to me," the pope told the cardinals, according to the Vatican.

The last pope to resign was Gregory XII in 1415. He did so to end a civil war within the church in which more than one man claimed to be pope.

There's no crying in baseball, there's no champagne in the green room, and there's no resigning from Pope.  Well, there is, but it's kind of rare, and always political.  Going to be interesting to see where the Catholic Church goes next, but judging by the Cardinals in America, I'm not holding out much hope for a guy who's going to be very progressive, if you catch my drift.

StupidiNews!

• The manhunt for ex-LAPD cop Chris Dorner continues into day five, with LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa offering a $1 million reward for information leading to his capture.
• President Obama will propose cutting the nation's nuclear stockpile by one-third in Tuesday's State of the Union address as part of an effort to cut nuclear weapons worldwide.
• A Chinese court has sentenced a Tibetan man to 13 years in prison for "inciting" a Tibetan monk to set himself on fire in protest of the government.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin is betting big on gold as Russia has purchased 570 tons of the precious metal in the last decade.
• Apple's next tech device may fit on your wrist as reports swirl around the company's coming "smartwatch" -- a wearable computer that connects to other devices wirelessly.

Last Call

Byron York at the DC Examiner would like to pretend Obama has done nothing for jobs.  Absolutely.  Nothing.

White House spinners are working furiously in the final 72 hours before President Obama’s State of the Union speech.  Their job: convince the recession-scarred American public that economic recovery is Obama’s top priority — after everything he has said and done to suggest otherwise.

The unemployment rate is 7.9 percent — one tenth of a point higher than it was when Obama took office in January 2009.  But the true toll of joblessness is far higher.  The Labor Department’s so-called U-6 rate, which includes people who want a job but have become so discouraged they have quit looking, is 14.4 percent.  And a new study, by Rutgers University scholars, shows that 23 percent of those surveyed have lost a job sometime in the last four years, while another 11 percent have seen someone in their household lose a job.  That is one-third of the American people who have experienced unemployment during Obama’s time in office, along with many more who have experienced other hardships of the economic downturn.

He's done, nothing, nothing at all, not a...what's that, Elon Green?

I refer, of course, to the American Jobs Act, which was introduced in September 2011 and died on the table, thanks to Republicans, a month later. The failure to pass this $450 billion bill was of massive consequence to the economy in general and jobs in particular. Here’s a taste of what was in the White House bill, via Brother Benen, who wrote about it here:

* Payroll tax breaks for workers and employers * Tax credit for hiring unemployed veterans
* Modernizing 35,000 schools (FAST Act)
* Sizable infrastructure investments in roads, rail, airports and waterways
* Extended unemployment benefits and new approaches to unemployment insurance, including work-sharing and “Bridge to Work”

You will notice that nowhere in York’s column do the words ‘American Jobs Act’ appear. Let’s give him enough credit to assume the omission is intentional. The man knows his audience; they surely do not have any interest in the conclusion of the Economic Policy Institute, that with the passage of the American Jobs Act “real GDP growth for 2012 would have been 1.4 percentage points higher, bringing growth to 3.4 percent relative to the Congressional Budget Office’s baseline forecast.”

You mean the same American Jobs Act that was blocked by Senate Republicans and didn't even get a vote in the GOP-controlled House after Eric Cantor cut the $450 billion employment bill to $11 billion?  The same American Jobs Act that President Obama went around the country to promote, including a stop right here in Cincy?  The same $450 American Jobs Act that was going to pay itself off through growth and tax revenue in ten years, as an investment in America's economy?

Sure Byron, President Obama had no plans whatsoever to do anything about America's unemployment problem, and you obviously believe your readers are pretty stupid people who didn't experience politics in September and October 2011.

But that's his job, remember?  It sure isn't journalism.

The Blockhead Returns

This is getting pretty stale, guys.  Sen. Lindsey Graham goes on the Sunday shows and says he'll block President Obama's national security team nominees (CIA Director, Secretary of Defense) until he gets the "truth about Benghazi".  Only problem is he did this last month, got his hearings, and Hillary Clinton made him look like the buffoon he is.

So now he's taking it out on the President again.

BOB SCHIEFFER (HOST): I’m not sure I understand. What do you plan to do if they don’t give you an answer? Are you going to put a hold on these nominations?

GRAHAM: Yes…How could Susan Rice come on to your show and say there’s flow evidence of a terrorist attack when the Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs said they knew that night? I think that was a misleading narrative three weeks before our application.

SCHIEFFER: Let me just make sure, because you’re about to make some news mere, I think. Are you saying that you are going to block the nominations — you’re going to block them from coming to a vote until you get an answer to this? John McCain has already said he doesn’t think the Republicans ought to filibuster this. What will you do? You’re just going to put a hold on it? [...]

GRAHAM: I want to know who changed the talking points. Who took the references to Al Qaeda out of the talking points given to Susan Rice? We still don’t know…. I want to know what our president did. What did he do as commander in chief? Did he ever pick up the phone and call anybody? I think this is the stuff the country needs to know.

At this point we've heard from Hillary Clinton, Leon Panetta, and General Martin Dempsey.  Graham won't give up his broken record idiocy because he wants to...you know I'm not sure at this point.  Graham seems to be sure that the President committed an impeachable act, and he's going to continue to scream like a baby until he's satisfied.

That won't happen until the President is on trial before the full Senate.  And we may not have a CIA Director or Defense Secretary for months, if not years.

Droning On And On

Joan Walsh on droooooooones and wrestling with her unbearable guilt of being Joan Walsh:

There are (at least) two issues here: The use of drones generally, and their use to kill American citizens. Some values should apply to both. No doubt drone warfare is sometimes preferable to traditional combat – but can’t we debate when, and why? Isn’t it possible that removing the risk of losing American lives by using unmanned predators will make it easier for decision-makers to risk the lives of those who aren’t Americans? Shouldn’t we know more about when and why drone strikes are launched, as well as who’s been killed, at the cost of how much collateral damage, most important, the number of “non-combatants” — innocent people – who are killed?

On the question of targeting U.S. citizens: I’m proud of the extraordinary rights we enjoy as Americans, and I don’t know why so many people shrug at the notion that the president can abrogate those rights if he decides, based on evidence (which he doesn’t have to share) that you’re a terrorist. When it comes to Anwar al-Awlaki, who renounced his citizenship and made many public commitments to al-Qaida, those questions don’t keep me awake at night. But don’t we want assurances that the evidence against every citizen who winds up on that list is just as clear? Don’t we want more oversight, even after the fact?

Did I miss the part where American military action only started killing non-combatants on January 21, 2009?  Did I also miss the part where IEDs keep blowing off arms and legs and shearing off chunks of our soldiers' skulls, creating a huge number of folks coming back home with truly awful injuries?  We've had this debate about people being killed in military action since this whole American experiment began, folks.  Here's the thing, if we're going to be over there doing this kind of thing, and right now that's the policy, I'd rather see drones than boots on the ground.  You can go on and on about targeted killings of US citizens at a coldly impersonal distance without due process, and yet we've got 300 million devices in the country called "firearms" that quite often end up doing just that.  Due process is not always exercised in those situations either, guys.  People where you live can get killed guns without warning.  Maybe there's an investigation, maybe there's even a trial.  But there are plenty of times where who pulled the trigger is never found, and the killer never brought to justice.

Where's your outrage over that?  Did I miss the part where Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was the only US teenager ever killed for bullshit reasons?  You know what else is a "targeted killing of American citizen?"  Any cops who draw their weapon on someone and pull the trigger, and guess what, they don't always shoot the right person.  There's oversight in those situations, but not always.  I'm a hell of a lot more worried about that than I am what's going on in Waziristan, people.  If you're going to perpetually scream "DROOOOOOOOONES YOU OBOT" at me, go to the nearest large metropolitan police department and make sure you personally solve every homicide that comes in the door.

Otherwise, have a darkened Superdome full of seats.

It is not endemic to the Obama administration, or Obama foreign policy.  Steve M. nails it:

But if you're especially outraged at targeted killings of American citizens, if you think they're more horrifying than everything else that's been done in the wars we've fought, that strikes me as a sense of non-combatant privilege. Many of us -- maybe only many white Americans? -- not only assume we're entitled to due process, we expect never to be on a battlefield. In other words, we expect never to be in a situation in which due process doesn't apply.

To me that's a sense of privilege. So I see what's wrong with the drone program, but it's a subset of what's wrong with war. Some Americans expect to be shielded from this sort of suffering at all times, and are shocked that a few Americans aren't.

War is hell.  The Pentagon is in the business of conducting said warfare in the most casualty-efficient way possible that still achieves the goal of ending the metabolic processes of The Bad Guys.  The problem isn't drones, the problem is the perpetual war machine that's predated this President for a very, very long time.  We're screaming about al-Awlaki's kid when My Lai, the bombing of Dresden, and Nagasaki and Hiroshima happened.  Let's face it, for America, that's effing progress.  We still need to move forward and I'd like to see drones not have to be used at all (because we weren't in Af-Pak at all anymore) but let's not pretend that President Obama somehow has the most blood on his hands of a US President, either, shall we?

Thanks.  Sorry to ruin your Sunday.

GOP Still In It To Win It

Just a friendly reminder from Steve M. that the damage from ceding control of a majority of states in 2010 to the Tea Party GOP will continue for at least the rest of President Obama's term, and most likely the next President's term as well.

Katrina? Hey, displacement plus the demonization of the Democratic mayor of New Orleans helped make a somewhat purple state much redder. What's for Republicans to dislike?

And meanwhile, Republicans control a majority of states, which gives them the wherewithal to gerrymander, disenfranchise, bust unions, make taxation regressive, and severely restrict reproductive rights.

Why on earth would Republicans think they're failing? Things are looking pretty damn good for them.

Not to mention, as Steve points out, that the wars Bush started are still dominating Obama's foreign policy...as are a lot of Bush policies still in place under Obama.

Katrina has made Louisiana a blood red state for good, more or less.  From Texas all the way around the coast to Virginia, the GOP controls it all in the South now, and throw in the central Midwest, mountain West, Indiana, Missouri, and more...including complete control over Ohio and Pennsylvania and Florida at the state level.

In other words, right now Democrats are the regional party of NY/NE,  Illinois/Minnesota, and the West Coast.  The GOP runs everything else, and they will for a very, very long time.

Who's your state senator and representative?  Do you even know?  Odds are real damn good it's a Republican.  There's lots of love for Ohio's state Senator from Cleveland, Nina Turner.  You know what?  The GOP in Ohio's state senate outnumber the Dems 23-10.  It's 59-40 in the General Assembly.  Ohio Republicans can pass whatever the hell they want to now.

Gov. John Kasich for example has a new budget proposal out, and while it would expand Ohio Medicare to thousands of people, it would also add sales taxes to services that aren't taxed at all now, raising taxes on all Ohioans.

At the same time, the wealthiest Ohioans would get ten times that tax hike on sales taxes in savings from a 20% income tax cut.  The 1% would see about a $750 rise in sales taxes...and save $10,000 in income taxes per year.  Meanwhile, everyone else in the state would get hit with the sales tax increase of hundreds of dollars a year.

So yeah, Republicans are getting what they want.  Sure, they're pissed about the White House, but so what?  They control, what, 35 states?  They've gerrymandered the House through 2020?  We're just now beginning to see the damage they are doing, and will keep doing for the next decade.

The Great North Carolina Regulator Purge Of '13

Back home where the Zandarparents live, Republicans in the state legislature are now leading a complete purge of the state's regulatory commissions and boards in order to replace all of them with Republicans loyal to recently elected GOP Gov. Pat McCrory.  Gosh, that doesn't sound like political hackery or anything fascist.

The North Carolina state senate has approved a bill to fire all the members of the states' regulatory bodies, including all the members of the Utilities Commission, the Coastal Resources Commission, the Environmental Management Commission, and the Wildlife Resources Commission.

The bill, which would affect 131 regulators, will now be considered in the state house. Dumping all the current members of the commissions would allow the newly instated Republican governor, Pat McCrory, to replace them. The Charlotte Observer has more on the plan.

And of course the goal is to replace all the members (or in some cases, hire back) regulators who see their job as lobbyists for the companies they are supposed to regulate, not as oversight.

The new "administration may see fit to have the people on boards and commissions that, let's say, are more like minded and who are willing to carry out the desires, if you will, or the philosophy of the new administration," [Sen. Bill] Rabon told committee members.

Sure does.  What better way to give the companies that bankrolled the GOP takeover of North Carolina's legislature everything they want from the state than to fire everyone making those decisions and hire on cronies, rubber-stamped by the same GOP state senate?

But remember, it's Obama and the Democrats who are fascist, un-American thugs with no respect for rule of law, right?  Republicans would never do such a thing...

...Unless they can get away with it without anyone to stop them.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• More than half a million in New England are without power as Boston to Bangor, Maine has been clobbered with more than two feet of snow.
• The KKK is promising the "largest Klan rally in Memphis history" to protest the renaming of three parks with Confederate era monikers.
• White House officials are proposing to cut the nation's nuclear stockpile by one-third, saying it will not harm the country's national security and will save billions yearly.
• Venezuela has devalued its currency, the bolivar, by nearly one-third, the fifth such move in nine years.
• After taking out its human competition in Jeopardy! in 2011, IBM supercomputer Watson is taking on a new foe:  curing cancer.

Last Call

Yo dawg, Rand Paul heard you like rebuttals, so he's giving a rebuttal to Marco Rubio's rebuttal to President Obama's State of the Union address.

Tea party leaders are turning to Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, to deliver their message following President Barack Obama's State of the Union address, a speech that will compete with the official Republican response.

Paul will make his remarks soon after Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, wraps up the GOP response Tuesday night, a Paul spokeswoman confirms to CNN.

"We are giving a voice to the tea party movement when the mainstream media and the Republican establishment wants to write us off as dead," said Amy Kremer, chairman of the Tea Party Express. This is the third year in a row that Kremer's organization has sponsored the tea party response.

The dueling GOP speeches come at a time when a very public rift is developing between the Republican establishment and conservative activists over the direction of the party. Some grassroots activists are specifically angry at Karl Rove and other Republicans for stating that they will choose sides in upcoming Republican primaries and only financially help candidates who have a chance of winning in the general election.

In Paul, tea party leaders have chosen a nationally known senator, who is identified more for his embrace of a libertarian ideology than aligning himself with his own political party's leaders.

The back-to-back addresses Tuesday night also features two young stars in the GOP, each of whom are expected to seriously consider running for the White House in 2016. 

Yes, let America get a good look at the "rising stars" of the GOP right now: a pandering poster Latino that his own party despises, and a quasi-racist hypocrite who wants states to be free to discriminate.  Sure.  Good luck against Hillary, boys.