Wasting Everybody's Time

Joe Kline wants to know why Republicans are wasting valuable time and resources on Benghazi...

Could it have been the Republicans who consistently voted against funds for increased embassy security? Hmmm…that makes their current carping seem awfully political, doesn’t it? Again, sins of politics are not mortal. But one does wonder why the Republicans tend to fix on issues like this, which are defined by their absence of substance. (I haven’t noticed the Republicans clamoring to spend more on embassy security–which would be a matter of substance, happily embraced by the Administration.But that would require a budget deal, which would give the President a win.)

...when everybody knows Republicans should really be spending time on the most important issue of the day:  purging the country of those undesirable Poors and Oldsters.

The sad thing here is that the Republicans are right, in part, about government spending. It is wasteful. There are far more efficient ways to do Medicare that would produce a better health care system for the elderly. Social Security disability is slouching toward scamdom. The Veterans Administration is a 19th century bureaucratic disaster. Unemployment benefits and food stamps should require some sort of return service from recipients. The list goes on…But rather than address the substance of those problems–problems that Democrats don’t seem very interested in solving–they obsess on the stupid: fixing on more-or-less budget debates, federal dictatorship fantasies and meaningless political ploys like Benghazi.

Joke Line doesn't say what those "more efficient" ways are, but I'm betting you'll find then in the annual Paul Ryan Austerity Budget.  Because after all, the most important thing imaginable right now is kicking anyone within two paychecks of homelessness square in the genitalia so that overpaid Village idiots can sleep better at night.

Awesome.

StupidiNews!

• An Arizona jury has found Jodi Arias guilty of first degree murder in the death of her ex-boyfriend, whose body was found stabbed, shot, and nearly decapitated.
• Rep. Michele Bachmann could be facing a lawsuit from a blogger over her characterization of a post in one of her speeches.
• While skeptics seriously doubt inventor Ronald Ace's claims that his "solar trap" panels could revolutionize energy the world over, the Department of Energy is still taking a look.
• US foreclosures are down to their pre-financial crisis levels as the number of new filings dropped to the lowest level in over six years.
• The FBI is claiming it has the right to search your e-mail without a warrant as possible Supreme Court rulings on the matter inch closer.

Last Call

If there's any wonky study on immigration reform that will ensure House Republicans will murder the legislation in its crib, this is it.

With the debate raging over whether immigration reform would gouge taxpayers, Senator Marco Rubio’s office has asked the Social Security Actuary to produce an analysis of the legislation. The findings will provide immigration reform advocates with a major boost.

You can see the findings in a letter from the Office of the Chief Actuary to Senator Rubio that is also accompanied by a table.

The most important finding, for the purposes of the debate, is that the Gang of Eight immigration reform proposal would create 3.22 million jobs by 2024, and boost GDP by 1.63 percent. “We estimate a significant increase in both the population and the number of workers paying taxes in the United States as a result of these changes in legal immigration limits,” the analysis says.

Can't have that!  Bill's dead now, and that's even if it makes it to the House.  Odds are really good now that Republicans will finish the job early by destroying the bill with hundreds of amendments.

The Senate Judiciary Committee will be taking its first crack at the bill Thursday. Republicans opposed to reform have now turned to a time honored tradition of oppositional behavior in the Senate: Offering a whole bunch of amendments to slow down the process and. If they're lucky, they'll be able to slip in a poison pill amendment—a change so noxious that it makes the entire bill harder to pass.

How many amendments? Well, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) is currently leading the pack with seventy-seven. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) has proposed 49, and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) is bringing up the rear with 24.

And every one will have to be voted on.  Awesome.  Good luck with that, guys...

The I-Word Is Coming

Those of us who lived through Clinton's second term know what's coming in Obama's second term, the only question is when House Republicans pull the impeachment lever and what excuse they'll use.  Perhaps it will be Dow 15,000, because that's impeachable, right?

[Monday] the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 15,056, an all-time record. For one conservative group, this can only mean one thing: it’s time to impeach President Obama.

That was the message Capitol Hill Daily, a conservative publication based out of Baltimore, sent to Citizen United’s listserv today. They accused President Obama of “wreck[ing] the stock market” and asked readers to take a poll about whether he should be impeached as a result.

It doesn't matter.  Obama Derangement is a full blown secotr of the economy now, if anything.  But at some point House Republicans will have to take a vote on impeachment, or the rabid tea party monster they've unleashed will turn on them instead.  That day of reckoning is coming soon...

 They'll find a reason.  If they can't find it, they'll manufacture it. 

Count on it.

Pick Your Poison, Name Your Price

We're to the point where we have articles about what the House GOP will try to extort from the President in exchange for not collapsing our government, our economy, and our country, and those articles are written as standard operating political procedure for congressional Republicans.

Conservatives in the GOP conference say they are evaluating debt-ceiling proposals against a deal they struck with Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and his lieutenants during the annual retreat in January. That deal says increases in the debt ceiling will only come about once debt-reducing laws are enacted, they said.

Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) has discussed developing a plan that would fast-track a rewrite of the tax code and tie it to raising the debt ceiling over multiple stages.

“That would be a real tough sell for me because that’s not the deal,” Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.) said. “It was tax reform would be tied to the debt ceiling. That doesn’t mean the House passes tax reform. It means we get tax reform.”

Republicans expect 100% of what they want and the economy suffers trillions in damage from supply-side idiocy and austerity hysteria, or else they force a default and...the economy suffers trillions in damage.

This is where we are right now, and this is apparently completely acceptable as the new political normal.  It's also Obama's fault for not being nice enough to Republicans who fully expect to not have to compromise, ever.

Amazing and depressing at the same time.  No wonder everything is broken.

StupidiNews!

• Aurora, Colorado theater shooting suspect James Holmes will plead not guilty by reason of insanity according to his defense team.
• House GOP budget point man Rep. Paul Ryan is rejecting any notion of a larger "grand bargain", saying the two parties are just too far apart.
• While Russia and Syria are reportedly on board with US negotiations, Syrian rebel groups may not be part of talks aimed at ending the civil war there.
• Banks are apparently very afraid of Wal-Mart offering financial services like prepaid cards, and want regulators to step in.
• Human facial recognition software still has a number of drawbacks, as evidenced by the manhunt for the Boston bombers.

Last Call: A Plate Of Crow For Thee

Yep, Mark Sanford not only won by 9 points, he A) won with 25% turnout, very high for a special election (which should have favored his opponent), B) he won despite having craploads of baggage (which definitely should have favored Elizabeth Colbert Busch), and C) he won despite the NRCC pulling campaign backing and money from the race.

I've got a lot of crow to eat.

The only explanation I've got is that the trespassing charge that Jenny Sanford made public last month, which should have cost him the race, instead was a massive, massive backfire.

Also, let's remember that this district is R+11.  "Because screw the Democrats" is always a viable campaign slogan, and tonight, the voters of SC-1 proved that you can pretty much be the most awful Republican ever, but Republicans will still vote for you to piss off liberals.

On the other hand, the first thing the newly elected Congressman Sanford has to do is go to court to deal with that trespassing charge as a sitting member of Congress.  Good luck with that, Mark.  I may have been wrong about this election -- staggeringly so, I admit -- but now things get interesting.

Chris Bag O' Insurance?

A lot of people see New Jersey GOP Gov. Chris Christie's news today that he recently had lap band surgery for weight loss as proof he's running for President in 2016. 

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie made a huge announcement to the The New York Post—but not the one everyone has been expecting. The paper reported on Tuesday that the famously rotund Christie underwent "lap-band" stomach surgery three months ago, in a desperate effort to lose weight. The procedure, which involves placing a restrictive tube around the top of the stomach to  limit the amount of food a person can take in at one sitting, is considered less risky than the more invasive gastric bypass surgery. Christie didn't reveal what his weight was before or after the surgery, but sources say he's already lost 40 pounds.

Naturally, the first instinct from political pundits is to assume that Christie's dramatic decision is about more than just getting fit. The obvious spin is that this is the first salvo of Christie's 2016 presidential campaign. (The second might be another announcement that he's co-hosting the Today show in a couple weeks.) It doesn't take a strategic genius like Karl Rove to tell you that being overweight would have been a huge liability in a national campaign, but if the summer of 2015 rolls around and he's suddenly looking fit and trim, he might look like a front runner.

Personally, I think that's less of the issue as it is his health.  He's got kids, and he wants to live to see them grow up, I'm sure.  Here's my real question, not why he did it, but did his insurance cover it?  Christie has signed on for Obamacare's Medicaid expansion, sure.  But does he think his surgery was medically necessary, and should insurance be required to help cover it when it is?

Given the obesity epidemic in the US -- and yes, I consider myself part of it -- I would like to hear Gov. Christie's thoughts on his procedure and if he thinks his New Jersey constituents should qualify for similar procedures.  That's the far more important question to me.

The BS Behind Benghazi

The right is predicting that the "Benghazi cover-up" scandal will be so bad that it will somehow force President Obama to resign and that it will be the end of Hillary Clinton's 2016 run before it starts.  There's only a couple of problems with this latest fantasy:  first of all, the new "facts" don't hold any water.  Jon Bernstein:

If you’re not inside the conservative information feedback loop, you might not be aware that within that loop the Benghazi “scandal” is still going at 100 percent strength. Months after the actual incident, which was back in September. Even though no one has ever made clear exactly what terrible secret was the subject of the supposed cover-up; even though a succession of “revelations” have all turned out to be nonsense (here’s one from just last week). Doesn’t matter; discredited accusations are just forgotten and new ones are substituted.

This week it’s a new round of claims that whistleblowers were suppressed. Over in the House, Darrell Issa’s committee is going to get a hearing out of it. No, there’s no particular reason that it makes any sense…there’s still no core story that this cover-up was (supposedly) covering up for. But there do appear to be plenty of Usual Suspect conservative movement lawyers and flacks involved.

And second, as Bernstein mentions, the lawyers that the whistleblowers have retained are direct from the GOP Dirty Tricks Department.  BooMan:

Joseph diGenova and Victoria Toensing run a law firm together. They are also married. They are also soldiers in the dirty wars we have between the two major parties. When Scooter Libby was indicted, diGenova and Toensing demanded a pardon. In fact, they had been brawling on Libby's side for years. Toensing even authored an amici curiae brief with the US Court of Appeals in Washington, seeking to overturn the ruling that forced Matthew Cooper and Judy Miller to testify in the Libby case.

Back in 1998, Howard Kurtz reported that diGenova and Toensing had made 300 television appearances in the month after news of the l'affaire Lewinsky broke on Drudge Report. That's an average of five appearances each, every day for a month. 

The fact that these two scuzzballs are involved is a dead giveaway that the Benghazi story is nothing more than maximum poutrage from the right, and the mission here is where there is no scandal, one must be created.  Darrel Issa has made it clear his target is Hillary Clinton, so prepare to hear the right shout BENGHAZI for the next several years, even as President Obama comes through this unscathed.

Not that it will do them any good, other than become the reason as to why they'll lose again and again.  But it will become the latest piece of Republican code-switching, just like ACORN was four years ago.

StupidiNews!

• Cleveland police have found three Ohio women kidnapped a decade ago as teenagers in a house near where they were taken, three suspects, all brothers, have been arrested.
• California Republicans have ousted the head of the state's largest GOP volunteer organization after her comments that sexual assault cannot cause pregnancy.
• Olympia, Washington could become the largest US city yet to install LED streetlights at a cost of $4 million, with expected savings over 20 years of twice that amount.
• All eyes are on Slovenia, the next Eurozone country that may need a bailout, with EU finance head Oli Rehn admitting it's too soon to know if Slovenia is safe or not.
• Microsoft is claiming Windows 8 has sold 100 million copies worldwide in the first six months of release, with 250 million Windows apps downloads.

Last Call: The Inmates Burning Down The Asylum

Ohio's tea party nut jobs have had it with John Kasich's calls for moderation, like wanting to expand Medicare and raise taxes on energy companies that are making a literal killing on fracking.  They are now engaged in a full-scale revolt to either turn the state from purple to red or burn the Ohio Republican party down trying.

Feeling betrayed by the Republican Party and its leaders, tea party groups in Ohio appear to be uniting and moving toward either a split from the GOP or action to punish Republican candidates who fail ideological purity tests.

A series of events, culminating with the April 26 election of Matt Borges as chairman of the Ohio Republican Party, spurred a flurry of meetings and conference calls among tea party leaders last week to plot a course of action heading into the 2014 statewide election.

Options being discussed, according to Seth Morgan, policy director for Americans for Prosperity, range from breaking off into “a third party, to an insurrection (within the Republican Party) and everything in between.”

One has to wonder how many times the teabaggers are going to be able to get away with this.  The simple answer is they're going to split from the GOP eventually, and when they do, the Dems will be right there to win back a number of states.  The Ohio teabaggers seem to be rather serious about this.

Tom Zawistowski, executive director of the Portage County Tea Party who lost his bid for the Ohio GOP chairmanship by a 48-7 vote of the party’s state central committee, met on Saturday with Don Shrader, chairman of the Constitution Party of Ohio, to explore uniting in a party committed more to principles than winning elections.

After the chairmanship vote, Zawistowski said he made it clear that if the state GOP did not focus on enacting conservative policies, “we would either find a political party to join or we would start one of our own,” saying his meeting with Shrader “is the first step in that process.”

Let me get the popcorn.  This is going to be fun.

A Shot In The Dark

Living here in Kentucky, I found the tragic and awful story of Caroline Sparks, the two-year old Burkesville girl who was shot and killed by her five-year old brother Kristian, to be especially disturbing.  I grew up in small-town North Carolina and while nobody in my family had guns, I grew up with kids whose families did, and the people of Burkesville feel like they've been singled out as what's wrong in America, like they're awful parents who are being trashed nationally for the crime of living in rural Kentucky.  Trip Gabriel's story in the NY Times features this paragraph:

“I think it’s nobody else’s business but our town’s,” said a woman leaving a store, who like many people here declined to be interviewed. A woman who answered the phone at the office of John A. Phelps Jr., the chief executive of Cumberland County, whose seat is Burkesville, said, “No, I’m sorry — no more statements,” and hung up.

Nobody else's business but our town's.  Having grown up in and around towns like Burkesville, I've seen my share of tragedies.  The problem is when something like this happens, and happens because a rifle specifically manufactured and marketed to parents to be a "child's first firearm" was in the house, you don't get to make that claim that it's not anyone else's business.

The Crickett rifle fired in the fatal shooting is all of our business, all of America's.  We have to ask ourselves if rural culture in the US is being used as a convenient excuse to avoid the responsibility of the gun culture marketing and selling pink and blue .22 caliber rifles to kids.  That's not the fault of the people of Cumberland County, Kentucky.  That's the fault of the gun manufacturers and their nearly unbeatable lobby creating a situation where it's permissible to make real working firearms for kids who should be playing with squirt guns and aren't old enough to know the difference between the two.

I don't blame the people of Burkesville for being horrified and defensive while burning in the national spotlight, but frankly this should have never happened in the first place.  The NRA exists to sell firearms, and they've gotten so powerful now we have gender-coded rifles for your little hunters.  This was apparently going on without too much issue, either.  The company that sold Crickett Rifles made a pretty penny over the years, because it was a popular product.

The issue of course is why it was popular.  I'm betting it still is, hell the NRA is telling parents for safety they need to keep a gun in your kid's room, because that's where you're going to barricade yourself in when the inevitable jackbooted thugs come for you.  I can't think of an outfit that has successfully leveraged the paranoid style better than the NRA, and in rural America, that means there's no way we're going to make any headway with gun control.  Not unless the culture changes, and that's going to take another generation or two.

It's a shot in the dark at best.

Don't Call It A Comeback

He's been here for years.  Looks like I may very well have to eat my words on Mark Sanford losing tomorrow.

PPP's final poll of the special election in South Carolina's 1st Congressional District finds a race that's too close to call, with Republican Mark Sanford leading Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch 47-46. The 1 point lead for Sanford represents a 10 point reversal from PPP's poll of the race two weeks ago, when Colbert Busch led by 9 points at 50-41.

Sanford has gotten back into the race by nationalizing it and painting Colbert Busch as a liberal. A plurality of voters in the district- 47%- say they think Colbert Busch is a liberal compared to 43% who characterize her as ideologically 'about right.' Colbert Busch's favorability rating has dropped a net 19 points compared to 2 weeks ago, from +25 then at 56/31 to +6 now at 50/44.

While Colbert Busch is seen as too liberal, 48% of voters think that Sanford's views are 'about right' on the issues compared to just 38% who see him as too conservative. Sanford's also seen some repair to his image over the course of the campaign. Although he's still unpopular, sporting a -11 net favorability rating at 43/54, that's up a net 13 points from our first poll in March when he was at 34/58.

Pretty good, considering national Republicans walked away from the guy.  SC-1 remains a R+11 district according to the Cook Political Report, meaning that Colbert Busch's 9 point lead was not going to last.  It didn't.  The liberal card still works, folks....and SC Republicans set up the district to make sure that card could be played.

So now we have a tight race that Sanford can definitely pull off, and the election is tomorrow.  We'll see if Colbert Busch can get out the vote, but even if she wins, next November she'll be among the top targets for the GOP to take back in 2014, and the reality is thanks to gerrymandering, it will be a lot easier for them to do so with any candidate who isn't as flawed as Sanford, as Nate Silver points out.

Since 1997 (which is as far back as records of special elections go on history.house.gov), candidates who won a special election in a district carried by the opposing political party in the preceding presidential election have had fleeting tenures in Congress.

There have been 59 special elections since 1997, and just 14 candidates have carried districts that leaned away from their political party (a Republican representing a Democratic-leaning seat or vice versa). Of those 14, 13 no longer hold those seats.1 The lone exception is Representative Ron Barber, who won a full term in Arizona’s Eighth Congressional District in 2012 after winning a special election to replace former Representative Gabrielle Giffords.

Here's a guy who should be losing by 10...in a district where the Republican has an 11 point advantage.  Voila, a one point lead.  Any nominally competent Republican would win this by double digits, and even if she does pull it off tomorrow, odds a really good that November of next year this goes back to the GOP.

This is the political reality of gerrymandering, folks:  flipping partisan House districts long-term is nearly impossible.

StupidiNews!

• The Senate is expected to vote today and pass legislation to collect state sales taxes from all internet purchases and send the bill to the House.
• Police in Springfield, Mass. are turning to community-building counter-insurgency tactics seen in Iraq and Afghanistan to deal with gang violence.
• Former Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Giffords has received the 2013 Profile In Courage award from the Kennedy Presidential Library.
• French Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici has declared an "end to the dogma of austerity" in the Eurozone as Germany moves to relax financial requirements.
• New research shows bees that feed on high fructose corn syrup instead of nectar are more susceptible to colony collapse.

Last Call: A Case Of Syria's Misjudgment

Meanwhile, our GOOD FRIEND ISRAEL is bombing the crap out of suspected Syrian chemical weapon convoys, and Syria is treating it as an act of outright war.

A series of massive explosions illuminated the dark sky over Damascus early Sunday, igniting renewed claims that Israel has launched attacks into the war-torn country.

Syria's government said the explosions were the second Israeli airstrike in three days. The latest target, officials said, was a military research facility outside the Syrian capital.

A top Syrian official told CNN in an exclusive interview that the attack was a "declaration of war" by Israel.

Syrian authorities vowed to retaliate against Israel but did not specify what action they would take.

The Israeli military would not confirm or deny the Syrian claim that Israel fired rockets that hit the Jamraya research center in the Damascus suburbs.

Syria is apparently giving Hezbollah the green light to attack from Syrian territory and as a result, we've got all but open war about to kick off in the Middle East.  The problems are much bigger however, as it looks like we may have been lied into another war yet again.

U.N. human rights investigators have gathered testimony from casualties of Syria's civil war and medical staff indicating that rebel forces have used the nerve agent sarin, one of the lead investigators said on Sunday.

The United Nations independent commission of inquiry on Syria has not yet seen evidence of government forces having used chemical weapons, which are banned under international law, said commission member Carla Del Ponte.

"Our investigators have been in neighboring countries interviewing victims, doctors and field hospitals and, according to their report of last week which I have seen, there are strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof of the use of sarin gas, from the way the victims were treated," Del Ponte said in an interview with Swiss-Italian television.

"This was use on the part of the opposition, the rebels, not by the government authorities," she added, speaking in Italian.

I keep telling people that the Syrian rebels are not exactly the sunshine and flowers committee, and I keep telling people we can't get involved in the Syrian civil war because there are no good guys.  Now the UN is saying that one of the rebel groups, not the Asaad regime, that used sarin.  That's exactly what the rebels would want to do in order to draw Israel and the US into a wider international conflict, and Israel has happily obliged them.

Now we've got a shooting war on our hands unless some kinds of miracle happens.  Enjoy, folks.  Syria's going to get turned into a parking lot, and Israel will have all the excuse it needs to take Syrian land.

It's going to be an ugly week, folks.  Stay turned.