Angus The King Maker

Me, on Charlie Cook's call for a GOP Senate wipeout of Dems back on March 6:

In other words, Cook is predicting the GOP getting 58 seats if everything breaks their way.  That would put them in range of 60, especially if such a crushing margin caused Maine Independent Angus King to flip from caucusing with the Dems.  That would be 59.

The Hill's Alexander Bolton, this morning:

Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), who caucuses with the Democrats, will decide after the midterm elections whether to switch sides and join the Republicans.

He is leaving open the possibility of aligning himself with the GOP if control of the upper chamber changes hands.“I’ll make my decision at the time based on what I think is best for Maine,” King told The Hill Wednesday after voting with Republicans to block the Paycheck Fairness Act, a measure at the center for the 2014 Democratic campaign agenda.

King’s remarks are a clear indication that congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle will have to woo the 70-year-old senator in order to recruit him to their side.

So Angus King is even more of an opportunist than I originally thought.  He will caucus with whichever party controls the Senate, so if the GOP does pick up six seats, he'll bolt to join them.

Then again, he did give that game away in 2012.

King said after the 2012 elections that being in the majority was important to him, when he announced his decision to caucus with Senate Democrats, giving them control of 55 seats.

“The outcome of last week’s election in some ways makes this decision relatively easy. In the situation where one party has a clear majority and effectiveness is an important criteria, affiliating with the majority makes the most sense,” King said at the time.

That will remain in play, apparently.  New tag: Angus "Flipper" King.

Another Milepost On The Road To Oblivion

Meanwhile, Pat Robertson wants God to take out Barack Obama.

Pat Robertson just wants this "crypto-Muslim" Obama nightmare to end, and he's hoping a little divine intervention will do the trick.

On Wednesday, the right-wing televangelist asked God to "deliver us" from Barack Obama's presidency.

"We need to do something to pray to be delivered from this president," he said on the 700 Club. "He is a disaster, an absolute disaster. I mean I don't know, Democrat, Republican or whatever, this country is into serious decline unless something dramatic is done about it."

Yeah, advocating for someone to somehow stop the Obama presidency isn't dangerous at all, folks.  "Won't someone rid me of this troublesome black president?"

StupidiNews!

• A sixteen-year old high school student faces multiple charges of aggravated assault and attempted murder after a stabbing rampage at a school in Pennsylvania.
• Former President Bill Clinton warned a Texas crowd that new voter ID laws "restrict the franchise" of voting and threaten to roll back 50 years of civil rights gains.
• Bank of America has made another settlement with federal regulators Wednesday, agreeing to pay $727 million in fines and restitution for deceptive credit card practices.
• Electric car company Tesla is coming to China this month with the first of the automaker's luxury sedans to be delivered by founder Elon Musk himself.
• A day after being named the Worst Company in America by Consumerist, Comcast's executive VP David Cohen admitted to Congress that the company is "deeply disappointed" with its service.

Last Call For Third Time's Not The Charm

In a shocker to precisely no one in America, Republicans killed the Paycheck Fairness Act in the Senate for the third time in a row today, and frankly they don't believe anyone will punish them for it.

Republicans working to improve their image among women aren’t worried about suffering a political backlash if they follow through with plans to block the Paycheck Fairness Act.

Most Senate Republicans are expected to unite on Wednesday to block the legislation, which would allow workers to compare salaries without the threat of retaliation, force companies to explain pay disparities between men and women and allow those discriminated against to seek punitive damages.

But Republicans don't care.

The GOP is hoping that voters know better than to fall for what Republicans call Democratic “show votes” in the pitched seven-month battle for control of the Senate. Minority Whip John Cornyn of Texas said he’s even privately chided Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) — who’s designed much of the Democrats’ election-year Fair Shot for Everyone agenda — over how transparently political Democrats have become in the past few weeks in laying out a Senate floor strategy heavy on legislation that has little chance of becoming law. 

“This whole thing is really backfiring on the administration and on our Democratic friends because people are seeing it for what it is: It’s a transparent political campaign. It isn’t actually about solving problems, because the law of the land is already paycheck equity,” Cornyn said in an interview.

Added Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the chamber’s No. 3 Republican: “They don’t care about the fix. All they care about is who pays at the ballot box.”

This coming from the party of "We have to make Democrats pay for Obamacare."  That's rich.  And yet the gender pay gap exists, especially for women of color.

But it's all a trick, you see.  No woman actually makes less than what a man earns for the same job, so we don't need laws preventing it.  Just like we don't need laws preventing voter suppression, racism, gay-bashing or misogyny.

Most of all, Republicans are convinced you'll stay home and won't vote in 2014.

Medicaid Expansion Is Not An Exercise In Statistics

Real people are affected by Republicans' refusal to expand Medicaid in 25 states, leaving millions in the Obamacare coverage gap where they have no insurance and should be covered by federal government funds. But Republicans hate Obama more than they care about poor unisured people, so they get screwed.

And sometimes, as a direct result of lack of coverage, they die.

Charlene Dill, a 32-year-old mother of three, collapsed and died on a stranger’s floor at the end of March. She was at an appointment to try to sell a vacuum cleaner, one of the three part-time jobs that she worked to try to make ends meet for her family. Her death was a result of a documented heart condition — and it could have been prevented.

Dill was uninsured, and she went years without the care she needed to address her chronic conditions because she couldn’t afford it.
Under the health reform law, which seeks to expand coverage to millions of low-income Americans, Dill wasn’t supposed to lack insurance. She was supposed to have access to a public health plan through the law’s expansion of the Medicaid program. But Dill, a Florida resident, is one of the millions of Americans living in a state that has refused to accept Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion after the Supreme Court ruled this provision to be optional. Those low-income people have been left in a coverage gap, making too much income to qualify for a public Medicaid plan but too little income to qualify for the federal subsidies to buy a plan on Obamacare’s private exchanges.

Florida has one of the highest uninsurance rates in the nation, and is home to a disproportionately large number of residents who struggle to afford health services. Nonetheless, lawmakers have continued to resist accepting generous federal funds to expand Medicaid to an estimated 750,000 low-income Floridians like Dill.

So she could have gotten help.  She babysat, she sold vacuum cleaners, she cleaned houses to try to earn enough for her and her three kids.  Friends tried to raise money for her heart meds, now instead they are raising money for her funeral.  Now those three kids don't have a mother because Republicans in Florida hate Obama.

Think about that for a while.

We Can't Impeach Him, He's Black!

The thought processes of far-right conservatives baffle me.  We're talking about people who are more afraid of being perceived as racists than the reality of what people might think of them actually destroying the country.  Take Iowa GOP Senate candidate Sam Clovis, for instance.

In an interview with The Daily Times Herald of Iowa, Senate Candidate Sam Clovis said the reason Obama hasn't been impeached yet is a "practical matter."

"I don't think so and I'll tell you why. It's not that what he has done would not rise to the level where it might be impeachable," Clovis said. "I don't think it's a practical, pragmatic issue and simply because I don't think the nation is ready for it. You know, within this generation we just went through an impeachment of a president and it didn't end well and now we have a situation where race is thrown into the card as well. And whether we like it or not, race is an issue."

The Daily Times Herald asked Clovis if he thought Congress wasn't trying to impeach Obama because of his skin color.

"Not knowing, I haven't talked to anybody [sic]," Clovis said. "But I would say there are people in the House of Representatives right now that would very much like to take the opportunity to start the process and I think the reason that they're not is because they're concerned about the media."

Clovis was then asked if he members of Congress are worried about what it would look like in news coverage to impeach the president because he's black. Clovis simply responded "yes."

So to recap, Clovis believes there's a case against Obama to impeach, he can't explain what it is, but the only reason it hasn't happened yet is because the media will call them racist if they do.

That's the only reason why Barack Obama is still President, because Republicans are scared of the media.

These guys baffle the hell out of me.

StupidiNews!

• A research team at the University of Louisville say they've made major progress applying electrical impulses directly to the spinal cord in order to stimulate movement in paralyzed patients.
• The US Navy's new railgun will be test mounted for sea trials in 2016, with the ability to use magnetic forces to propel a 23-pound projectile at seven times the speed of sound.
• Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel's visit to China included tough questions from Chinese media in a joint press conference with Chinese Defense Minister Chang Wanquan.
• Five-time Australian Olympic gold medalist Ian Thorpe's career is over as an infection contracted after shoulder surgery has put him in intensive care.
• Consumerist's Worst Company in America 2014 competition has found cable giant Comcast edging out agriculture giant Monsanto for the dubious honor.

Last Call For Minding The Gap

It wasn't lost on Democrats that today is Equal Pay Day, the day the average woman has to work to in 2014 on top of working all through 2013 in order to earn equal pay to the average man who worked in 2013.  While Republicans keep trying to disprove the 77 cents on the dollar pay gap, President Obama signed measures today to actually do something to erase it.

President Obama on Tuesday signed two executive measures intended to help close longstanding pay disparities between men and women as Democrats seek to capitalize on their gender-gap advantage at the ballot box in a midterm election year.

Mr. Obama, standing in front of a platform of women in a picture-ready ceremony in the East Room of the White House, said his actions would make it easier for women to learn whether they had been cheated by employers. He called on Congress to pass legislation that would take more significant steps.

Remember, President Obama's first legislative priority when he took office was the Lily Ledbetter Paycheck Fairness Act, which was blocked by Senate Republicans in 2010 and then again in 2012.  Another vote on the act will come tomorrow, where it is expected to be blocked a third time.  Real change will take Congress, but the President can do some things, and he chose to do them today.

Neither of the actions Mr. Obama took on Tuesday would affect the broad American work force. The executive order he signed bars federal contractors from retaliating against employees who discuss their salaries and an executive memorandum he issued instructs the Labor Department to collect statistics on pay for men and women from such contractors.

But the White House staged a ceremony with the sort of profile usually reserved for a major bill signing. Aides arranged for Mr. Obama to be introduced by Lilly M. Ledbetter, who has become a symbol of the pay gap issue since the Supreme Court ruled that her discrimination case had been filed after the expiration of a statute of limitations. Congress passed a measure named for her changing the deadlines for filing such suits and Mr. Obama made it the first bill he signed after taking office.

Ms. Ledbetter said the executive order signed by Mr. Obama would have made a difference in her case. “I didn’t know I was being paid unfairly and I had no way to find out. I was told in no uncertain terms that Goodyear, then and still a government contractor, fired employees who shared their salary information. It was against company policy.”

Meanwhile, Republicans will all vote against this tomorrow and then tell women that they are stupid and being fooled by evil Democrats.

The Unkindest Cuts Reversed

The Obama Administration has quickly decided to reverse February's decision to make cuts to Medicare Advantage plans as Republicans have spent the last six weeks running ads in states like Florida saying how Democrats are the ones really cutting Medicare (pay no attention to Paul Ryan scrapping the program and replacing it with subsidies.)

In a move with big election-year implications, the Obama administration announced Monday that it would reverse a proposed cut to private Medicare Advantage plans. The decision undercuts one of the GOP's favorite lines of attack on Obamacare and on Democrats in general.

The change announced by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services transformed what was a projected 1.9 percent payment cut in 2015 that had been proposed in February into a projected 0.4 percent payment increase.
Medicare Advantage plans are alternatives to Medicare offered by private insurers where recipients share some of the cost of the generally more generous plans. Insurance companies, alongside congressional members from both parties, had urged a stop to the proposed cuts. In total, Obamacare is supposed to cut $150 million from the program over 10 years.

America's Health Insurance Plans, the industry's top lobbying group, called its blitz to stop the cuts its "largest-ever mobilization." Monday's announcement is a big win for the industry -- though it means more red ink for the federal budget. Independent analysts said insurers could still face cuts, though they should be smaller than originally expected.

For Republicans, though, it might be unwelcome news. Attacking the cuts, authorized under Obamacare, had become a favorite criticism of the health care reform law -- especially as other critiques dwindled. And they quickly sought to portray Monday's change as political opportunism by the Democrats.

Which is funny, coming from Republicans over the last 20 years.  Meanwhile, it seems the Obama administration is willing to make compromises to satisfy both seniors and the insurance companies that provide gap coverage for them (and that my friends is a big, big business.)

The Return Of The Entusiasm Gap

Republicans are motivated more than ever to vote in order to "punish" President Obama, Democrats, and the people who voted for them over six years of perceived slights (and Obamacare working).  Democrats, not so much...

There's a number in the new Associated Press-GFK national poll that should put a scare into Democrats on the ballot this November.

The number is 14. That's the percentage point difference between those who say they favor a Republican-controlled Congress (51 percent) and those who want Democratic-controlled one, among people who say they are strongly interested in politics. (Among the broader electorate, the Republican lead is far less consequential on this so-called "generic ballot" question with 37 percent choosing a GOP-controlled Congress while 36 percent opt for a Democratic one.) According to AP's Jennifer Agiesta "in January, this group was about evenly split, with 42 percent preferring Democrats and 45 percent the Republicans."

Guess who votes in midterms -- and particularly the second midterm of a president's tenure? Yup -- people who are "strongly interested" in politics. And therein lies the Democrats' problem.

And, it's not just the AP-GFK poll that shows a disparity of intensity between Democrats and Republicans. A GW Battleground poll showed that 64 percent of Republicans are "extremely likely" to vote while 57 percent of Democrats said the same. In a CBS News-New York Times poll 81 percent of Republican registered voters said they would "definitely" vote in November versus 68 percent of Democrats.

If this remains true in November, then there's going to be serious problems for us.  Unless you think the solution to whatever problem you have with President Obama and the Democrats is "more Republicans in Congress" then we need to vote in November.

And yes, I'm going to keep harping on this for the next 7 months.

StupidiNews!

• Seventh seeded Connecticut has knocked off Kentucky 60-54 to become the lowest seeded NCAA men's basketball tournament winner since #8 Villanova in 1985.
• Louisiana House Republican Vance McAllister has apparently been caught on tape making out with one of his campaign staffers.
• An auto watchdog group is asking the Obama administration to consider more recalls on embattled automaker General Motors' Chevy Impalas, citing possible airbag defects.
• A Louisiana jury has ordered Japanese drugmaker Takeda Pharmaceutical and its US partner Eli Lilly & Co. to pay $9 billion in combined damages over hiding the cancer risks in the diabetes drug, Actos.
• 50 years ago this week, IBM introduced the world to System/360, the mainframe family that NASA used to send the Apollo astronauts to the moon.

Last Call For The End Of The Bridge

And the other shoe drops:  if you want to know why Chris Christie is facing a grand jury over Bridgegate and why US attorneys are moving forward, it's because the aide behind the Port Authority scandal is now talking to the Feds.

The former Port Authority of New York and New Jersey executive who orchestrated the George Washington Bridge lane closures is cooperating with federal prosecutors investigating the scandal, Esquire reported on Monday.

According to Esquire's Scott Raab, sources close to the investigation say that David Wildstein has been cooperating with Paul Fishman, the U.S. attorney in New Jersey. Raab also reported that Fishman has increased the number of investigators working the case, and has been presenting evidence and witnesses to a grand jury. (On Friday, ABC News reported that Michael Drewniak, press secretary to Gov. Chris Christie (R), testified before the grand jury.)

Esquire isn't the only outlet to get word of Wildstein's interactions with prosecutors. On Sunday night, the website Main Justice reported that Wildstein “was camped at the U.S. Attorney’s office” in Newark last week meeting with prosecutors. In January, Wildstein's attorney, Alan Zegas, said that his client would talk if given "immunity from the relevant entities."

Main Justice also reported that Charlie McKenna, former chief counsel to Christie, met with federal investigators in mid-January. Christie announced on Dec. 19 that McKenna was leaving the chief counsel position to become CEO of the New Jersey Schools Development Authority (SDA), a position he was officially elected to by the SDA board of directors on Jan. 2. McKenna could not immediately be reached for comment by TPM on Monday.

So at this point multiple people are cooperating with the Feds to build a case to bring Christie down.  This has gone beyond the theoretical exercise of "what if" for 2016 and its associated punditry and into criminal proceedings against a sitting governor.

Chris Christie is in serious trouble, and he knows it.

The Sum Of All Derp

The Telegraph columnist Charles Moore declares "the game is up for climate change believers" as he reviews a new book trashing climate science as the sum of all eeeeeevil liberalism.

Most of us pay some attention to the weather forecast. If it says it will rain in your area tomorrow, it probably will. But if it says the same for a month, let alone a year, later, it is much less likely to be right. There are too many imponderables.

The theory of global warming is a gigantic weather forecast for a century or more. However interesting the scientific inquiries involved, therefore, it can have almost no value as a prediction. Yet it is as a prediction that global warming (or, as we are now ordered to call it in the face of a stubbornly parky 21st century, “global weirding”) has captured the political and bureaucratic elites. All the action plans, taxes, green levies, protocols and carbon-emitting flights to massive summit meetings, after all, are not because of what its supporters call “The Science”. Proper science studies what is – which is, in principle, knowable – and is consequently very cautious about the future – which isn’t. No, they are the result of a belief that something big and bad is going to hit us one of these days.

We can't even get the weather forecast for next week right, so climate science is really a cult.  A LIBERAL CULT OF WARMISM.

The origins of warmism lie in a cocktail of ideas which includes anti-industrial nature worship, post-colonial guilt, a post-Enlightenment belief in scientists as a new priesthood of the truth, a hatred of population growth, a revulsion against the widespread increase in wealth and a belief in world government. It involves a fondness for predicting that energy supplies won’t last much longer (as early as 1909, the US National Conservation Commission reported to Congress that America’s natural gas would be gone in 25 years and its oil by the middle of the century), protest movements which involve dressing up and disappearing into woods (the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, the Mosleyite Blackshirts who believed in reafforestation) and a dislike of the human race (The Club of Rome’s work Mankind at the Turning-Point said: “The world has cancer and the cancer is man.”).

If anything, both the book and the column explain the seething hatred wingers have for the notion that climate change even exists.  To them, it's the sum of everything they believe liberalism is, a vast conspiracy of "low-information" dunces who worship scientists as rock stars, grubby parasites who dare to bite the hand of the wealthy who own the businesses and pay the taxes to sustain the programs that feed and clothe them.  The argument is that by throwing off the shackles and becoming "educated" about this, you'll at least be rooting for the team that's going to win in the end.

Thus the gigantic effort to prove climate change as a myth, and reinforcing the notion that it's a myth by saying things like "Well if it really was as bad as you say, why aren't governments acting?" while ignoring that the multinationals own the world governments.

Amazing stuff really, but if you ever wondered why the wingers despise climate change so much, apparently if they disprove it, they disprove liberalism forever and we can all live in harmony as serfs with SUVs we can't afford because 'Murica.

Jeb Bush Will Never Be President

Mainly because Jeb Bush will never survive a GOP primary.  Not after consecutive losses by McCain and Romney, and certainly not with his record on immigration.

Former Florida governor Jeb Bush said Sunday that many who illegally come to the United States do so out of an "act of love" for their families and should be treated differently than people who illegally cross U.S. borders or overstay visas.

This right here has ended his 2016 prospects before they ever began.

Asked about immigration, Bush started by saying that a bipartisan bill passed by the Senate last year made "a good effort" at proposing ways to ensure that people overstaying visas leave the country.

"A great country ought to know where those folks are and politely ask them to leave," he said, adding later that properly targeting people who overstay visas "would restore people's confidence" in the nation's immigration system.

"There are means by which we can control our border better than we have. And there should be penalties for breaking the law," he added. "But the way I look at this -- and I'm going to say this, and it'll be on tape and so be it. The way I look at this is someone who comes to our country because they couldn’t come legally, they come to our country because their families -- the dad who loved their children -- was worried that their children didn’t have food on the table. And they wanted to make sure their family was intact, and they crossed the border because they had no other means to work to be able to provide for their family. Yes, they broke the law, but it’s not a felony. It’s an act of love. It’s an act of commitment to your family. I honestly think that that is a different kind of crime that there should be a price paid, but it shouldn’t rile people up that people are actually coming to this country to provide for their families."

Let me explain this another way:  Chris Christie has a better shot now at 2016 than Jeb Bush does.  The Wingers will never accept his position on immigration.  They will savage him and they will nominate Rand Paul or Marco Rubio and lose in a landslide anyway.

It'll be glorious.

Well, it would be if we still have a country after 2014.  Better vote then first.

StupidiNews!

• US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel says that the US Navy will send two additional missile defense destroyers to the Sea of Japan in 2017 to protect against North Korean threats.
• Nigeria has passed South Africa to become the continent's largest economy at $453 billion, making it the 26th largest economy in the world.
• Pro-Russian protestors have stormed and captured state buildings in at least three eastern Ukrainian cities over the weekend, with the government in Kiev blaming Russian President Vladimir Putin.
• Humans are taking over for robots in Toyota's Japanese plants as the company looks to efficiency over growth.
• Microsoft has gotten permission from New Mexico state officials to dig up the infamous burial site of millions of unsold 80's-era Atari 2600 console games as part of a documentary.