Meanwhile, In Arkham Asylum...

The train wreck that is the Republican presidential primary campaign has now gone from "the inmates running the asylum" to "the inmates forming their own even crazier asylum, now with Taco Tuesday."

Republican presidential campaigns are planning to gather in Washington, D.C., on Sunday evening to plot how to alter their party’s messy debate process — and how to remove power from the hands of the Republican National Committee.

Not invited to the meeting: Anyone from the RNC, which many candidates have openly criticized in the hours since Wednesday’s CNBC debate in Boulder, Colorado — a chaotic, disorganized affair that was widely panned by political observers.

On Thursday, many of the campaigns told POLITICO that the RNC, which has taken a greater role in the 2016 debate process than in previous election cycles, had failed to take their concerns into account. It was time, top aides to at least half a dozen of the candidates agreed, to begin discussing among themselves how the next debates should be structured and not leave it up to the RNC and television networks.

The gathering is being organized by advisers to the campaigns of Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Bobby Jindal and Lindsey Graham, according to multiple sources involved in the planning. Others who are expected to attend, organizers say, are representatives for Carly Fiorina, Mike Huckabee, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio and Rick Santorum. The planners are also reaching out to other Republican candidates.

Spokespersons for the RNC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“I think the campaigns have a number of concerns and they have a right to talk about that amongst themselves,” said Christian Ferry, Graham’s campaign manager. The objective, Ferry said, was to “find out what works best for us as a group.”

Figuring that out could be contentious as each campaign has a number of different complaints about the process. Some — such as Bush and Paul — have griped about unequal speaking time. Others have complained bitterly about how polling is used to determine who qualifies for the prime-time and undercard debates. Some have insisted on giving opening and closing statements, despite the networks' desire to have the candidates spend as much time as possible clashing with each other on stage.

I imagine the meeting will go something like this.




Anyway, it will be interesting to see what these jokers come up with, as the next debate is less than two weeks away on CNBC's rival channel FOX Business.

And the best part?  It just simply hasn't occurred to any of the Dunning-Kruger Clown Posse that the fact that this debate was a screaming disaster was that the CNBC hosts were asking the candidates real questions about economics, and none of them have an economic plan that isn't entirely based in Laffer Curve tax cut fantasy and the ugly reality of trying to sell massive austerity for 90% of America in order to loot the country for the top 1%.

That next debate is also supposed to be about economics, so don't be surprised if it devolves into a mess too.

Pissed Christie's Last Ride

The NY Times has had enough of New Jersey GOP Gov. Chris Christie and is demanding that the Republican drop out of his "vanity" run for President and get back to dealing with all the problems awaiting him in Trenton.

Mr. Christie has been called a lot of things, but until Wednesday’s debate performance, “barely there” was not among them. In eight minutes of speaking time, Mr. Christie said little of substance. As for his parting pitch that he’s “deadly serious about changing this culture” of government, well, his constituents in New Jersey know better. 

This isn’t strictly about Mr. Christie’s fitness for the presidency. His role in New Jersey’s budget crisis, betrayal on affordable housingand the interlocking scandals on his watch, from Bridgegate to “the chairman’s flight,” say a great deal about that. 

The point is that New Jersey is in trouble, and the governor is off pursuing a presidential run that’s turned out to be nothing more than a vanity project. Mr. Christie’s numbers are in the basement, and he’s nearly out of campaign cash. This is his moment, all right: to go home and use the rest of his term to clean out the barn, as Speaker John Boehner would say. 

Mr. Christie emerged as a national politician because his constituents saw him as a leader who put New Jersey first. His state battered by Hurricane Sandy and his party riven by the Tea Party, he sought needed federal assistance, and if that meant embracing a Democratic president, so what. “So what?” was a positive Christie characteristic back then. One could disagree with his methods, but he managed to make his efforts on behalf of his state seem sincere. 

It must have been rough for those who re-elected him to see him hold forth Wednesday in a debate that centered on the national economy, when he’s been a net failure on the New Jersey economy. On his watch, one of the per-capita richest states in the nation has become one its biggest laggards in economic growth, its budget woes prompting an appalling series of credit downgrades. Mr. Christie’s promises, from fixing the state’s pensions shortfall to its infrastructure, have come to less than nothing. More galling still is that he was not the only such politician on the dais. Since when does shortchanging your home state — looking at you, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Bobby Jindal — qualify a public servant to be president?

Two observations:  One, as I said years ago, Chris Christie would have to tilt too far to the right to be able to sell his record as a blue state Republican to 2016 GOP primary voters who hate him.  And two, given the record of the the Republican politicans who have wrecked their states: Perry, Walker, Christie, Jindal, Bush and Rubio, no wonder they are turning to Trump, Carson and Fiorina.  They haven't failed them yet.

Christie has run New Jersey into the ground and continues to face serious questions about using his office to damage his political opponents.  Of course he was never going to win, and he never had a chance.

Not that New Jersey is going to be glad to see him, but he owes the state his best effort to fix the problems he left behind when he ran for the White House.

StupidiNews!

• The Senate has passed the budget deal that the House passed earlier this week, locking in spending and debt ceiling levels through March 2017, President Obama will sign it today.
• Online payment service giant Paypal has resolved technical issues that knocked out transactions for millions of users and merchants worldwide late Thursday night.
• China is warning the US of a possible war in the South China Sea if Washington doesn't end "provocative acts" in disputed naval waters off the coast of the Spratly Archipelago.
• Starbucks Corp's quarterly forecast numbers missed estimates slightly on rising labor costs as the chain invests in video drive thru service and boosting wages for associates.
• The EU parliament has passed a non-binding vote to protect Edward Snowden from extradition to the US in a purely symbolic gesture as the whistle-blower remains in Moscow.

Last Call For Ay, Carly! Con't.

Carly Fiorina spoke the most in last night's GOP debate trainwreck into the sun on CNBC, but while much as been made on her misleading attacks on Hillary Clinton, very few people noticed what Ian Millhiser picked up last night: Fiorina is an even better example than Trump of the dire consequences of the false "government must be run like a business" mentality that Republican corporatists espouse.

The minimum wage and Social Security are both unconstitutional, according to Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina — a view that puts her at odds with both longstanding precedents and the text of the Constitution. 

Fiorina revealed her unusual understanding of the nation’s founding text during Wednesday night’s Republican presidential candidates’ debate. In response to a question on whether the federal government should help workers set up retirement plans, Fiorina offered two sweeping declarations about what the nation’s leaders can and cannot do. “There is no Constitutional role for the federal government in setting up retirement plans. There is no Constitutional role for the federal government to be setting minimum wages,” according to the former corporate CEO.

Now Fiorina is held up as some sort of great moderate hope for the GOP that will atract women back to the GOP, but the reality is she admits that she thinks both the minimum wage and Social Security are unconstitutional, and nobody bothered to call her on this.  It's even more depressing when you take a look at her entire response in context to CNBC's Sharon Epperson.

EPPERSON: So you wouldn't agree -- you wouldn't agree with a start for 401(k) for businesses or anything like that? 

FIORINA: I think it's a wonderful that that businesses start a 401(k). The point I'm making is this, the Federal Government should not be in a lot of things. 

There is no Constitutional role for the Federal Government in setting up -- retirement plans. There is no Constitutional role for the Federal Government to be setting minimum wages... 

EPPERSON: Thank you very much. 

FIORINA: ... The more the Government gets engaged in the economy, the slower the economy becomes. The more the Government gets engaged in the economy, it is demonstrably true... 

EPPERSON: Thank you, the rules say one minute. 

FIORINA: ... The more the big, the powerful, the wealthy and the well-connected are advantaged. 

EPPERSON: Thank you, Ms. Fiorina. We appreciate it. Thank you, thank you.

Understand that the Fiorina perspective is that it's government regulation that is causing income inequality in America and not corporate greed, which is a bit like saying firefighters (those dastardly government employees that they are and all) are responsible for arsonists.  In fact, the whole "Democrats are socialists" thing gets advanced here to the rampant corruption of Soviet era government officials who exist only to empower oligarchs.

This would be funny if it wasn't primarily Republican lawmakers actually doing this, but Fiorina is arguing that government itself only exists to make the rich richer, and that efforts to stop that only make it worse.

It's arguably the nastiest arrow in the "GOP making sure government oversight can never work" quiver and it's the heart of her campaign.  But understand what Fiorina wants is a world where corporations rule the planet with her at the helm.

Dirty Deeds Done Relatively Expensively

In 2014, Republican Thom Tillis beat Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan in North Carolina, helped in no small part by a flood of super-PAC commercials championing Tillis's leadership in the NC state Senate.  Now we find out that one single super-PAC donor gave $4.7 million dollars to help buy Tillis his seat, and we'll never know who that wealthy donor is who used that PAC to get around campaign finance limits.

A recent tax filing by Carolina Rising, a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization, shows that in 2014 the group spent $4.7 million on ads that had one thing in common: touting the legislative accomplishments of Thom Tillis, who was then North Carolina’s speaker of the House. That year, Mr. Tillis also happened to be trying to unseat Kay Hagan, the incumbent Democratic senator. 

Carolina Rising spent the money in a three-month blitz leading up to Election Day, but we may never learn where these millions came from. The partial disclosure required of 501(c)(4) outfits means that while we do know that 98.7 percent of the group’s revenue came from a single donor and that virtually every penny of it was used to further the cause of Mr. Tillis’s campaign, we don’t know who Carolina Rising’s secret benefactor was. 

John Koskinen, the I.R.S. commissioner, is scheduled to testify today before the Senate Finance Committee at yet another hearing on the agency’s heightened scrutiny of certain politically active 501(c)(4) groups in 2010-12. But what we should really be paying attention to is the increasing use of dark money to influence our elections, and the rising number of groups that devote themselves to a single candidate (including several, already, in this cycle’s presidential campaign). Before the 2014 campaign, nonprofits like that didn’t exist.

This is what a post-Citizens United America means: a single donor can give unlimited money anonymously in order to influence elections, and we have to call it Constitutionally-protected free speech.

Still, groups like these are obliged to follow some basic rules: 501(c)(4) organizations are not supposed to spend a majority of their resources on political activity, a requirement that leads to impressive accounting and definitional acrobatics. More important, these groups are not supposed to function for the private benefit of an individual or a select group. 

Carolina Rising appears to have broken both rules. Within five months of being formed, and just three months before the general election, Carolina Rising kicked off an onslaught of television ads applauding Mr. Tillis for his work on education and health care in North Carolina. The ads never asked viewers to vote for Mr. Tillis. 

Perhaps this framing was meant to allow the group to claim that it was talking about issues, rather than supporting the candidate outright. But the firm buying the ads on behalf of Carolina Rising, Crossroads Media, repeatedly described the “issue” in its ads as some variation of being pro-Thom Tillis. In at least one contract, the stated issue was “supporting Thom Tillis, senatorial candidate for N.C. (R) - election on 11/4/14.” 

Dallas Woodhouse, the Republican consultant who ran Carolina Rising, did away with any further pretense when he was interviewed live by a local news channel at the Tillis campaign’s election-night victory celebration. Sporting a Thom Tillis hat, Mr. Woodhouse, who was named executive director of the state’s Republican Party last month, was asked about his group’s spending “a whole lot of money to get this man elected.” 

Mr. Woodhouse responded, “$4.7 million. We did it.” 

Yet less than a year later, when it came time for Carolina Rising to report its activities to the I.R.S., it said it had not engaged in “direct or indirect political campaign activities on behalf of or in opposition to candidates for public office.”

And this is why I have little hope about winning the House back anytime soon, and I'm very worried about retaking the Senate.  Republicans have billions to spend on congressional and state elections next year through these dark money groups that Democrats simply can't compete with, and the GOP will certainly continue to attack the IRS for doing its job to try to prevent these abuses.

Once the primaries for the states are settled, you can bet we'll see the full onslaught of the billions in dark money on the airwaves heading for November 2016, and I'm not at all sure if the Dems can weather the tide, or if we'll be drowned by it.

Should the GOP get full control of our government, it's over.

Stopped Clock Is Right Alert

Hey look, even Chuckles Krauthammer can be correct once in a century or so.

Fox News contributor Charles Krauthammer on Tuesday dismissed House Republicans resolution to begin impeachment proceedings for IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, noting that none of the Republican investigations into the Obama administration have been successful. 

"This is not going to end well," he said on Fox's "Special Report." "Republicans in the Congress have shown that they have no ability to conduct successful investigations of this administration. Everything they have touched has failed or backfired, even Benghazi."

Krauthammer said that even though he thinks that House Republicans found "prima facie evidence" showing that Hillary Clinton made misleading statements about what sparked the attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, the latest House hearing with Clinton was unsuccessful. 

"If you can't score on that, you're not going to score on this," he said. "This is a waste of energy."

I have to agree with Chuck on both points:  House Republicans have failed time and time again to score any real damage on the Democrats since 2010, because they're a bunch of morons. (We keep electing them though, so what does that say about us?)

Still, unless Koskinen is even more incompetent than the House GOP, he'll be fine, and after Benghazi, and with Planned Parenthood hearings coming next year, it's impossible for the House GOP to shake charges of political witch hunts heading into the 2016 elections.

Hell's bells, they actually might make a hero out of the damned IRS chief.  Imagine that.

StupidiNews!

• As expected, the GOP-led House has easily approved a budget and debt ceiling bill that now goes to the Senate, where GOP candidates for president have vowed to try to stop it.
• Health care advocates in California are trying to get a referendum on the state negotiating prescription drug prices on the November 2016 ballot.
• A NORAD surveillance blimp escaped its moorings in Maryland and drifted into Pennsylvania, dragging a mile of cable in its wake that damaged power lines for thousands of people.
• Germany's Deutsche Bank is cutting 26,000 jobs over the next two years and will pull operations out of ten countries entirely, including Mexico and Norway, as the bank restructures.
• California delivery drivers for Amazon's Prime Now service are the latest group in the state to sue a tech company over being illegally classified under state laws as independent contractors.

Last Call For The First Meets The Second Meets The Tenth

Religious freedom meets the right to bear arms in a Pennsylvania case that could have big unintended consequences for states with religious freedom laws and states with background checks for firearms.

Lately, Americans have argued both about their right to bear arms and whether the free exercise of religion allows businesses and state officials to claim exemptions from requirements that conflict with their religious beliefs. It’s not everyday, however, that the two issues, guns and religion, wind up together in a single case.

In a suit that brings together the Second Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), an Amish man filed a federal lawsuit in Pennsylvania last week because he wants to buy a gun without the required photo ID — and because getting that photo ID would violate his religious beliefs.

Andrew Hertzler, according to the suit, is from Lancaster County, Pa., and is an “active and practicing” member of the community; his “parents, grandparents, and siblings are all active and practicing Amish”; and he “has a sincerely held religious belief that prevents him from knowingly and willingly having his photograph taken and stored.”

“The Amish faith prohibits an individual from having his/her photograph taken,” the suit read. “This belief stems from the Biblical passage Exodus 20:4, which mandates that ‘You shall not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth,’ as well as the Christian belief in humility.”

But Hertzler’s humility caused a problem when, in June, he tried to buy a gun from a Pennsylvania dealer “using a non-photo, state-issued identification.” This wasn’t enough, according to the dealer — Hertzler was told he needed a picture ID.

This case would almost have to go to the Supreme Court, and what the Roberts Court could decide may have very big consequences for states that require photo IDs for firearms background checks (and voting), the limits of religious freedoms, and states being able to set their own laws and which one takes precedence.

The First vs the Second vs the Tenth?  Yeah, this one's heading for SCOTUS for sure over the next several years.

Worst Kasich Scenario, Con't

John Kasich's clock is almost up on his presidential aspirations, so he's trying to break through ahead of tonight's debate by playing the angry dad in the room full of children.

"Do you know how crazy this election is?" he shouted during a pre-debate rally in Ohio on Tuesday. "Let me tell you something. I've about had it with these people. Let me tell you why. We got one candidate that says we ought to abolish Medicaid and Medicare. You ever heard anything so crazy as that, telling our people in this country who are seniors or about to be seniors that we're going to abolish Medicaid or Medicare," Kasich continued, referencing Ben Carson who has changed his opinion on the matter seemingly overnight.

"We got one guy that says we ought to take 10 or 11 million people and pick them up, where the—I don't know where, we're going to go in their homes, their apartments. We're going to pick them up and we're going to take them to the border and scream at them to get out of our country," Kasich said in an obvious dig at frontrunner Donald Trump. "Well that's just crazy. That is just crazy." 

"We got one candidate that claimed, one candidate that actually said that the reason why we signed an agreement with Ford to bring jobs back from Mexico is because he's been yelling for the last week ok," Kasich said again referencing Trump to uproarious laughter. "That was like something out of a Back to the Future movie."

Kasich's communications director Chris Schrimpf told The Daily Beast "Part of being President is speaking the truth to the American people. That's what Governor Kasich did today."

Kasich is trying to play to the sane Republicans, and while there are sane voters left in the GOP ranks, let's not be fooled for a second by Kasich pretending to be a nice guy here.  Maybe he doesn't want to get rid of Medicare or Medicaid like Carson, and he doesn't want to forcibly deport 11 million like Trump, but he does want to end abortion (and has already closed two-thirds of Ohio abortion clinics with TRAP laws) and is still gunning for a federal balanced budget amendment, which would require massive austerity cuts across the board.

Let's not forget either that Kasich was the guy behind the Contract With America budget, as Digby points out.

In April 1995, Budget Committee chairman John Kasich (R-Ohio) muscled through the House of Representatives the Contract with America budget plan. It was a towering achievement by Washington standards. Three cabinet departments--Commerce, Education, and Energy--were to be eliminated. Hundreds of small government programs and several large ones--from the National Endowment for the Arts, to mass transit grants, to the federal helium reserve, to the peanut subsidy program--were to be canceled. In short, it would have dramatically halted the government's fiscal expansion of the past 40 years.

The only difference between Kasich and the Trump/Carson wing of the GOP is that Kasich has the benefit of experience and is hiding his massive austerity cuts under the "balanced budget amendment" farce.

In a lot of way, he'd be worse than Carson or Trump ever would be as President, because unlike those two, Kasich knows how the game is played.

Marco Thinks You're A Rube-io, Con't

The Orlando Sun-Sentinel editorial board did not take kindly to this week's story on GOP Sen. Marco Rubio hating his job and is now openly calling for Rubio's resignation from the Senate.

Rubio has missed more votes than any other senator this year. His seat is regularly empty for floor votes, committee meetings and intelligence briefings. He says he's MIA from his J-O-B because he finds it frustrating and wants to be president, instead. 

"I'm not missing votes because I'm on vacation," he told CNN on Sunday. "I'm running for president so that the votes they take in the Senate are actually meaningful again." 

Sorry, senator, but Floridians sent you to Washington to do a job. We've got serious problems with clogged highways, eroding beaches, flat Social Security checks and people who want to shut down the government.

If you hate your job, senator, follow the honorable lead of House Speaker John Boehner and resign it. 

Let us elect someone who wants to be there and earn an honest dollar for an honest day's work. Don't leave us without one of our two representatives in the Senate for the next 15 months or so. 

You are paid $174,000 per year to represent us, to fight for us, to solve our problems. Plus you take a $10,000 federal subsidy — declined by some in the Senate — to participate in one of the Obamacare health plans, though you are a big critic of Obamacare. 

You are ripping us off, senator.

Ouch.

Doesn't get much worse for Rubio at this point, does it?

Well, except when he drops out of the race and fades into obscurity.  I'm sure he'll be back at some point to plague the state again as Governor or something, but man, his 2016 presidential aspirations are kinda done.

StupidiNews!

• A South Carolina school resource officer who was recorded throwing a female black student to the floor has been suspended without pay and could face other consequences.
• Los Angeles will now require firearm owners to keep handguns under lock and key when not in use or being cleaned, joining similar ordinances in San Francisco and other California cities.
• Pentagon chief Ash Carter says that the US is considering special operations troops in Syria and helicopters in Iraq as options to deal with ISIS.
• Defense contractor Northrup Grumman has received an $80 billion contract to build the Air Force's next superplane, the Long Range Strike Bomber.
• A commercial drone knocked out power to hundreds in Hollywood when it crashed into power lines, LA County Sheriffs are looking for a suspect.

Last Call For It's About Game Journalism

Reminder: you are not allowed to publicly discuss harassment culture in the gaming community.  At all.  Ever. The consequences are brutal.

SXSW Interactive, the annual technology event in Austin, Tex., decided on Monday to cancel two panel discussions on game culture that prompted threats of violence against the conference. 

In a blog post, Hugh Forrest, director of SXSW Interactive, said that the event organizers made the decision to cancel the two sessions after receiving “numerous threats of on-site violence related to this programming” in the week since the panels were announced. 

The panels that were scheduled for the conference, which is being held next March, were titled “SavePoint: A Discussion on the Gaming Community” and “Level Up: Overcoming Harassment in Games.” Both appear to have been dedicated to exploring different sides of an issue that has polarized the gaming community since last year, when an online movement known by the Twitter hashtag #GamerGate first formed. 

GamerGate supporters have railed against what they view as politically correct critics of games and their allies in the press. Some people who have attacked games for sexism, including Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist culture critic, have been the targets of online harassment and have had to cancel speaking engagements because of threats at the events. 

Neither of the listings for the panels at SXSW explicitly mention GamerGate. The description for the “Level Up” panel said that it would include “experts on online harassment in gaming and geek culture, how to combat it, how to design against it, and how to create online communities that are moving away from harassment.” 

The “SavePoint” panel, meanwhile, was to “focus heavily on discussions regarding the current social/political landscape in the gaming community, the journalistic integrity of gaming’s journalists, and the ever-changing gaming community, video game development, and their future.”

Seems like a great time to mention that BuzzFeed has pulled out of SXSW in response to the event giving in to GamerGate.  But that's the point, of course, to make ever questioning the supremacy of male gamers on the internet so unendingly toxic that anyone who deviates from the "hot games, hot guns and hot girls" script gets crushed.

Close Your Eyes, Marion!

Well, as if I needed yet another reason never to set foot in a Hobby Lobby store, there's this story from the Daily Beast.

In 2011, a shipment of somewhere between 200 to 300 small clay tablets on their way to Oklahoma City from Israel was seized by U.S. Customs agents in Memphis. The tablets were inscribed in cuneiform—the script of ancient Assyria and Babylonia, present-day Iraq—and were thousands of years old. Their destination was the compound of the Hobby Lobby corporation, which became famous last year for winning a landmark Supreme Court case on religious freedom and government mandates. A senior law enforcement source with extensive knowledge of antiquities smuggling confirmed that these ancient artifacts had been purchased and were being imported by the deeply-religious owners of the crafting giant, the Green family of Oklahoma City. For the last four years, law enforcement sources tell The Daily Beast, the Greens have been under federal investigation for the illicit importation of cultural heritage from Iraq. 

These tablets, like the other 40,000 or so ancient artifacts owned by the Green family, were destined for the Museum of the Bible, the giant new museum funded by the Greens, slated to open in Washington, D.C., in 2017. Both the seizure of the cuneiform tablets and the subsequent federal investigation were confirmed to us by Cary Summers, the president of the Museum of the Bible. 

From its founding in 1970, the Greens’ Hobby Lobby chain has been more than simply a suite of craft stores. The Greens have used it as a model of a business run on Christian values. Stores are closed on Sundays in order to give employees time to attend church. The company employs four chaplains, and offered a free health clinic to staff at its headquarters long before free health care came into political vogue. The Greens have also used the Hobby Lobby platform to spread their Christian message far and wide: The company annually places full-page ads celebrating—in their words— “the real meaning of Christmas, Easter, and Independence Day” in newspapers across the country. 

But the Greens went from evangelical players to bona fide Christian celebrities in June of 2014 when they won a Supreme Court case, Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. It granted them exemption from the Obamacare mandate to provide certain forms of contraception to their employees; forcing the company to do so, the Supreme Court ruled, would have violated the Greens’ deeply-held Christian beliefs. 

If the investigation ends with a decision to prosecute, on either criminal or civil charges, the Greens may be forced to forfeit the tablets to the government. There may also be a fine involved. The Green family, who successfully forced the federal government to legally recognize their personal moral standards, now find themselves on the other side of the docket, under suspicion of having attempted to contravene U.S. laws.

The abhorrent practice of looting antiquities aside (and all the Raiders of the Lost Ark jokes too) should the FBI actually go after the Green family, the Republican party will go absolutely bonkers over this.  The outrage may in fact melt through the floor and destroy the inner core of the Earth. Drudge will have "Obama's jackbooted thugs persecute Christians over Obamacare" headlines daily through the November 2016 election.  I actually expect the GOP Congress to convene hearings in order to interfere with an ongoing FBI case.

So yeah, close your eyes on this one, or you might end up like the bad guys in Raiders.

Orange Julius Plays Let's Make A Deal

The Tea Party loses again when it comes to the tentative budget deal worked out over the weekend, and it looks like Orange Julius is giving President Obama everything he wanted as he exists, stage left.

GOP leaders from both ends of the Capitol met privately with their rank-and-file Monday evening to outline the general contours of the emerging agreement between Congress and the White House. It would boost defense and domestic spending over the next two years, and lift the nation’s debt limit through March 2017 — thereby eliminating the twin threats of a government shutdown and a debt default until after the November 2016 elections.

But conservative lawmakers, eager to keep the strict spending caps from a 2011 budget agreement intact, were very skeptical of the deal after they emerged from close-door briefings with their leaders on Monday night.

Asked about the tentative agreement after the briefing, Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions replied: “My knees quiver at the sound.”

In an interview, Sessions expressed frustration that outgoing Speaker John Boehner was hammering out the deal just days before he plans to give up the gavel for good. “What does Boehner got to do with it?” said an exasperated Sessions, the former top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee. “I’m worried about how fast it’s moving. I see no reason for that. Based on what I know now, it appears the president got whatever he wanted.”

Suckers.  You lose again.  And you always will...and it prevents major cuts to Social Security in the future.

Not only will the increased spending levels make for heartburn with conservatives, but many of the offsets touch on political hot buttons.

Those pay-fors include a repeal of a piece of Obamacare, according to congressional sources. It would repeal Obamacare’s requirement that large employers automatically enroll employees in their health plans. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that a different bill to repeal that provision would save the federal government $7.9 billion over a decade.

The plan would also prevent a 20 percent across-the-board benefit cut to the Social Security Disability Insurance program, resulting in $168 billion in long-term savings. The tentative deal would also be paid for by extending the Medicare sequester that was approved in the Budget Control Act for another year and setting up additional cuts to hospitals.

The tentative agreement would also impose policy changes to disability insurance, tax compliance, crop insurance, spectrum and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Lawmakers and aides cautioned that the negotiations were not completed, and some details could change before details are made public — likely by later Monday night.

Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn of Texas dryly acknowledged: “I don’t think you’ll hear anybody popping any champagne corks.”

Indeed, conservatives across the country have been watching for months to see how GOP leaders handle the spending caps that many on the right view as a major victory. Many conservatives are likely to interpret the budget deal, even with some new spending paid for with cuts and new revenues, as a retreat from the blunt spending restrictions of the Budget Control Act that was enacted into law in 2011.

So yes, a big reversal of sequestration cuts that have been hurting the economy for years now.  No wonder the Republicans are furious.

Will the deal pass?  We'll find out.

StupidiNews!

• A viral video showing a white school resource officer in South Carolina pulling a black student out of her chair and throwing her several feet has sparked outrage on social media.
• A yearly conference of police chiefs from around the country has called for universal background checks for firearms purchases, citing overwhelming public support.
• Leaders in Congress have reached a tentative two-year budget agreement with the White House, but GOP rank-and-file members are already denouncing the deal as unacceptable.
• China is warning that a US destroyer sailing within 12 nautical miles of disputed islands that it claims is a "threat to regional peace", Beijing will take "all necessary measures" to stop it.
• US regulators have issued the first nuclear plant operating license in nearly 20 years as the Tennessee Valley Authority has finished the Watts Bar 2 reactor after restarting in 2007.