Last Call For Recess

George F. Will on President Obama's "unprecedented" recess appointments:

So the D.C. court said those three appointees were not rightfully in office. The NLRB said it “respectfully” disagreed with the court and went its merry way, without a quorum. Absent the perfunctory expression of respect, this was pretty much what George Wallace did 50 years ago this year when he stood in the door of Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama to prevent two young blacks from registering as students.

Yes, because the word "recess" is pretty similar to the word "racist" so this comparison is totally apt.  Even though every other President in the last several generations made recess appointments, suddenly for some unfathomable reason I can't put my finger on, when Barack Obama does it, it's "lawlessness".  Bonus verbatim derpage:

Courts defeated Wallace’s lawlessness. Presumably the Supreme Court will defeat Obama’s by telling the NLRB that the D.C. court was right about recess appointments. By such judicial vigilance against the excesses of elected officials, democracy is disciplined and progressivism’s agenda — unchecked executive power — is understood to be unconstitutional.

Yeah, and during the last administration you cheered on every iota of that executive power as not only necessary but vital to a functioning democracy, Georgie.  Bite me.

Tancredo Junction

Back in 2010, Tea Party nutjob and anti-immigrant racist Tom Tancredo ran for Colorado Governor as an independent, got some 35% of the vote, and handed a 20 point victory to Democrat John Hickenlooper.  Apparently for an encore, Tancredo's going to try again in 2014.

Former U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, known for his strong stances on immigration, said late Wednesday night he plans to formally announce a run for governor on a conservative talk radio show Thursday.

“This Dunlap thing is the last straw,” said Tancredo in a message.

Tancredo, a Republican, referred to Gov. John Hickenlooper’s decision on Wednesday to grant a temporary reprieve on the execution of death row inmate Nathan Dunlap. Dunlap was convicted of killing four people at an Aurora Chuck E. Cheese in 1993.

Several Republicans castigated Hickenlooper on Wednesday for the move that halts Dunlap’s date with death that was scheduled for August. 

Now granted, we knew Hickenlooper was going to take a lot of flak for passing gun control laws after the Aurora theater shooting.  But Tancredo is a loser of a candidate and if his plan to win is to run to the right of where he was in 2010, all of a sudden Hickenlooper's re-election seems rather assured.

We'll see if Tancredo will go for a GOP primary bid or another independent run, but either way I fully expect him to alienate the hell out of most of Colorado.  This is a guy who tested the waters for a 2008 White House run by putting up an ad in Iowa depicting a fictional terrorist attack as assured if we didn't immediately militarize the borders.

Given Colorado's growing Latino population, Tancredo's virulently anti-immigration stance (not to mention his outright anti-Latino racism) will make it even harder for him to win in 2014.   Hickenlooper must be cheering this announcement on and for good reason...

Obama's Steep Lerner Curve

Lois Lerner's Wednesday testimony (or non-testimony) as she pleaded the Fifth on a number of questions after an extensive opening statement where she denied any wrongdoing, the practical upshot being that GOP Rep. Darrel Issa believes that the statement voided her right to take the Fifth and will subpoena her again until she answers his questions, has prompted a number of normally calm pundits on the left to call for her immediate firing.

Greg Sargent:

The constant media obsession with when, exactly, the White House knew of the pending IG report is deeply silly. And as Steve Benen and Jeffrey Toobin both point out, the big picture here is that White House officials did the right thing in not informing the president about the IG’s investigation, because the last thing you want to do is expose the president to accusations of interference. That’s important, and it’s irritating as heck that normally savvy reporters keep pretending not to know this to be the case. Press coverage continues to scurry down process rabbit holes in an effort to bolster a larger “White House on defensive” narrative, rather than level with readers about how significant the new “revelations” about who knew what and when about the IG report actually are.

But this is still very much a legitimate scandal. We still don’t have a full accounting of what happened. We must have one, and we must have accountability. If Lerner won’t — or can’t — answer core questions about how exactly these groups were unfairly targeted, then her remaining in her position is inconsistent with that.

Josh Marshall:

In the current political climate, that may well be good legal advice. And she has every right to take it and may be wise to do so. But that’s a decision that simply is not consistent with her remaining in her job. Whether or not she should be fired for whatever she did in the scandal itself, deciding to take the fifth means she needs to be removed from her position.

I was chatting with people yesterday who said that civil service protections may make this extremely difficult or even impossible. That’s something for the new interim director of the IRS to figure out. One way or another, under the present circumstances, someone who is taking the fifth can’t be in charge of the division at the center of this investigation. I hope the incoming interim chief gets that. 

Sarah Jones over at Politicus USA agrees, but for a different reason:  Lerner was a Dubya appointee and President Obama needs to clean house:

What I’ve taken from all of these scandals so far is that by Republicans refusing to allow Obama his own nominees, they’ve saddled him with their appointees, who may or may not have an agenda and may or may not be utterly incompetent. That’s a nifty game. So now Bush appointee Lois Lerner, who claims to be “nonpolitical” but yet donated the maximum amount to Romney if this Open Secrets note is the right Lois Lerner, is the Obama administration’s undoing according to Republicans.

I am only sorry Lois Lerner is pleading the fifth, because I’d really like someone to ask her why she “let this slip” at a Bar Association meeting, and upon what evidence she based this “slip”. 

My opinion is that Lerner's probably going to get canned for the reasons above.  We'll see.

StupidiNews!

• As part of a new strategy of transparency on terrorism, Attorney General Eric Holder announced yesterday that 4 US citizens have been killed in US drone strikes since 2009.
• A British solder was hacked to death by two machete-wielding men in an apparent murder-suicide by cop plan protesting the death of Muslims at the hands of the UK government.
• With no controversy evident in his Senate confirmation hearing, Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx appears to be cruising towards the post of US Transportation Secretary.
• With the Syrian Army advancing on positions across the war-torn country, analysts say the Assad regime can continue Syria's civil war for years, if not longer.
• Twitter is rolling out the option of two-factor identification this week in the wake of a number of high-profile accounts being hacked.

Last Call For Shelter

Apparently the folks in Moore, Oklahoma have basically the same problem as West, Texas does.

The Web site for the City of Moore, Okla., recommends “that every residence have a storm safe room or an underground cellar.” It says below-ground shelters are the best protection against tornadoes. 

But no local ordinance or building code requires such shelters, either in houses, schools or businesses, and only about 10 percent of homes in Moore have them. 

Nor does the rest of Oklahoma, one of the states in the storm belt called Tornado Alley, require them — despite the annual onslaught of deadly and destructive twisters like the one on Monday, which killed at least 24 people, injured hundreds and eliminated entire neighborhoods. 

This is a town that has seen two 200+ MPH tornadoes rip through it in 14 years, and a state that sees tornadoes every year.  But there's no building codes to include shelters because DON'T TREAD ON ME.

Construction standards in Moore have been studied extensively. In a 2002 study published in the journal of the American Meteorological Society, Timothy P. Marshal, an engineer in Dallas, suggested that “the quality of new home construction generally was no better than homes built prior to the tornado” in 1999. 

Few homes built in the town after the storm were secured to their foundations with bolted plates, which greatly increase resistance to storms; instead, most were secured with the same kinds of nails and pins that failed in 1999. Just 6 of 40 new homes had closet-size safe rooms. 

Mayor Glenn Lewis of Moore said that since then, the town had strengthened building codes, including a requirement that new homes incorporate hurricane braces. The city has also aggressively promoted the construction of safe rooms and other measures, with more than $12 million from state and federal emergency management funds to subsidize safe-room construction by offering a $2,000 rebate, said Albert Ashwood, the director of the Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management. Still, he said, it has been several years since Moore has received new financing for the program. 

I'm trying to figure out how a shelter makes a $200,000 home suddenly unaffordable.  Does the safe room double the cost of the house somehow?  You live in Tornado Alley in the era of climate change and super storms.  Guess what?  You have to adapt, folks.  Most of all, those federal taxes you pay actually go to something when disasters happen.

Because believe me, Moore will be hit by another tornado someday.  It's most likely going to not take 14 years for it to happen, either.

Well This Really Blows

When I say President Barack Obama faces unprecedented criticism from his opponents, this is exactly what I mean.  Bob Cesca catches this:

Did you know the government has “weather weapons” capable of not only creating tornadoes but moving them around? It’s also possible that these so-called weapons were used in Oklahoma to deliberately murder dozens of citizens — you know, with a tornado. If the government wanted to annihilate a population of citizens, there are easier and more subtle ways to do it than literally creating a massive tornado. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

This is what Alex Jones said on his radio show yesterday when a caller asked him whether the tornado was “artificial” and “man-made” due to “technology.” Just as this caller, who’s obviously suffering from severe paranoid delusions, ended her rant, Jones launched into a paranoid rant of his own which included, as it always does, a random string of official names of organizations potentially involved. Bill Gates Weather Modification, Geo-Engineering, AP, Reuters, Department of Energy. (Other frequently blurted names include IBM, Raytheon, Bechtel, FEMA and The Illuminati.) Then, totally unrelated to the tornado, he tossed in a bit about the U.S. Code relating to biological and chemical warfare, and the apparent ability of the government to kill us with chemicals agents under the guise of experiments and law enforcement. In fact, he named a U.S. Code title by number, chapter number, subsection number — all the way down to the paragraph letter. Because it sounds official and therefore authentic. 

I like how President Obama is supposedly naive, aloof, trapped in the Beltway bubble, incapable of getting his White House advisers under control, not that bright, lazy, arrogant, angry, leading from behind, etc. and at the very same exact time, he's a ruthless, cold, emotionless, too smart for his own good evil genius mastermind of a James Bond villain, killing people with tornado machines.

To recap, Obama can create tornadoes, but the notion that man-made global warming exists is a massive hoax.  It's all ridiculous and I still don't know how he copes with the blind hatred.

We Always Get The Government We Deserve

Gosh, hoocuddanode that Southern red states overwhelming support Medicaid expansion, health insurance exchanges, and subsidies to help pay for health care, all things rejected by the Republicans those states elected?

 

But the five states in the poll, all led by Republican governors, have decided not to participate. Ironically, Mississippi and Louisiana rank dead last among all states in the overall health of their residents, according to America’s Health Ranking, an annual report by the United Health Foundation, a nonprofit arm of the insurer UnitedHealth Group. The other three states in the poll – South Carolina, Alabama and Georgia – rank 46th, 45th and 36th, respectively.

Not surprisingly, the law’s least popular provision is the federal tax penalty that will be levied, beginning next year, against people who don’t have coverage. Nearly two-thirds of poll respondents, or 64.5 percent, disliked the penalty, while just 31 percent viewed it favorably.

Well now.  How did you think this was going to be paid for, folks?   And the unhealthiest states in the union just might need the help.  I'm betting once the stories start coming in about how Obamacare is working, these states will be made to join in.

Count on it.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/05/21/191889/public-in-deep-south-supports.html#storylink=cpy

StupidiNews!

• The death toll in Monday's deadly tornado in Moore, Oklahoma has been revised downward to 24, but the storm itself was confirmed a powerful EF5 with winds well over 200 MPH.
• Controversy continues to surround the life of composer Richard Wagner as the 200th anniversary of his birth is celebrated this week in Germany.
• Alaska Republicans are pitching more drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, but Senate observers say the plan is going nowhere.
• Apple's not the only country playing tax avoidance games as offshore tax shelters are costing the US and EU as much as $100 billion a year in lost revenue.
• NASA is very interested in 3-D printed food for astronauts as the "perfect" source of nutrition in space.

Last Call For Voting Irregularities

Two very different stories about the 2012 election, both from the indispensable Taegan Goddard's Political Wire.  First, a majority of Republicans don't believe the 2012 elections were fair in any way because after all, Democrats won:

Going into the 2012 election, both Democrats and Republicans expressed concerns about the fairness of the election. Only 15 percent of Republicans and 19 percent of Democrats were very confident that the election would be decided fairly.

After the election, fears about voter fraud abated among Democrats but skyrocketed among Republicans, with 58 percent of Republicans not confident at all about the fairness of the election.

Republicans are particularly concerned about voter fraud and intimidation in big urban areas, with 32 percent of them believing that it had a big impact on the election, 49 percent believing it had some impact, and only 19 percent believing it had no impact.

The only reason Democrats won?  OBAMA'S THUG LYFE X ARMY.  Oh, and the birther thing:

Despite releasing his long-form birth certificate in 2011, these rumors have persisted.  In particular, between 40 and 70 percent of Republicans still believe that President Obama may have been born outside of the U.S.

Furthermore, most of those who question President Obama’s place of birth are not just expressing negative views toward him without considering the implications.  When asked in a follow-up question about whether they thought being born outside of the U.S. would make Barack Obama “ineligible under the U.S. Constitution to be president,” 72 percent of those who thought the President might have been born outside of the U.S. believed that he would be ineligible to be president.

So you're looking at anywhere from 29% to 50% of Republicans who think President Obama is not even legally the President.   Split the difference and call it 40%, and that's still tens of millions of people who do not recognize Barack Obama as President.  No wonder the GOP is talking impeachment.

And speaking of actual voting unfairness...

A new Harvard study contacted over 7,000 election administrators in 28 states and found they provide different information about voter ID requirements to voters of different ethnicities.

And those differences are pretty stark and brutal.  Latino-sounding names got far fewer responses from election officials in the experiment.

The finding holds up when you drop certain regions, when you drop small towns, and when you control for whether officials are elected or appointed. What’s more, they find that there are actually statistically significant differences in the quality of response from officials, depending on what kind of name is used. Responses to Latino voters were likelier to be non-informative, less likely to be “absolutely accurate” (that is, giving complete and accurate information about the relevant topic), and even less likely to take a friendly tone.

It's depressing stuff all the way around.  Don't expect Republicans to lift a finger to try to improve either of these two situations, too.

Twistered Political Logic

While we're still waiting for the results of search and rescue and in many cases, far more sober recovery efforts in Moore, Oklahoma and the surrounding area today, it's important to note that we're all in this together when it comes to American disasters.  Some Republicans absolutely understand the need for a strong federal government during times of trial and tribulation.

Oklahoma GOP Congressman Tom Cole does.  He voted for Sandy relief, one of the 41 Republicans who did in the House, because he remembers the F5 tornado that ripped through Moore 14 years ago on May 3, 1999.  Another Democratic President came to the state's rescue then, when Cole himself was Oklahoma's Secretary of State.  He knew just how awful and real the damage to his state was and has said many times that he was grateful for the help.

Oklahoma GOP Sen. Tom Coburn on the other hand is already demanding budget cut offsets to pay for the cleanup in his own state, and is one of the 36 senators who voted against Sandy aid because it didn't do that.  This means Coburn is fully prepared to vote against disaster aid for his own constituents, and most likely will.  Coburn, as a Congressman, voted against tornado relief for his own state in 1999.  It's not like it ruined his political career, either.

And so it goes in Sooner Country.

Please Proceed, Rep. Chaffetz

GOP Rep. Jason Chaffetz goes there on the "i-word" as the GOP starts floating trial balloons.

House Speaker John Boehner has urged patience on the issue of Benghazi, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, the Utah Republican says in a new report.

“Now, the speaker has more patience than I do,” Chaffetz (R-Utah) told National Review in a story posted on Monday. “He has told me to be patient, that the truth will eventually surface. But I’m not a patient person, and if this administration makes us do this the hard way, that’s what we’ll do.”

Chaffetz has long been a vocal critic of how President Barack Obama’s administration handled the deadly Sept. 11 attacks on a U.S. outpost in Benghazi, Libya, and has said that impeachment should be on the table.

“This is an administration embroiled in a scandal that they created,” Chaffetz said in the piece. “It’s a cover-up. I’m not saying impeachment is the end game, but it’s a possibility, especially if they keep doing little to help us learn more.”

Considering there's nothing the President can do to actually satisfy Chaffetz and his crew of Tea Party maniacs, I foresee impeachment happening sooner rather than later.  The FOX News monster will demand investigations and eventually the only way to feed the beast will be to go down this ugly road.

It's only a question of how soon:  before or after the 2014 elections?

StupidiNews!

• A massive EF4 tornado carved a path 11 miles long and up to a half-a-mile wide through suburban Oklahoma City, the death toll is at 91 and rising, including 20 children.
• A federal judge has found probable cause that FOX News reporter James Rosen helped to leak classified data on a UN report on North Korea in 2009.
• Vermont becomes the fourth state to allow end-of-life procedures for terminally ill patients as Gov. Peter Shumlin has signed the state's "death with dignity" law.
• An EU oil price-fixing probe gains momentum as oil traders are providing information to EU regulators.
• A Senate report claims Apple dodged billions in taxes by parking $44 billion in income offshore.

Last Call For A Mystery

Joy Reid does some detective work on which Republican leaked the bad Benghazi email to ABC's Jonathan Karl.  Her most likely suspect probably won't surprise you:

A very trusted source of mine gave me a cryptic piece of advice yesterday, which was to take a look at the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs. I didn’t know quite what to make of it at the time, but tonight it occurred to me: could someone on that committee also have been on the Select Committee on Intelligence, which is the one that got the email briefing in February?

Well, it turns out there's one and only one Republican senator on both Senate committees:

Oklahoma's Tom Coburn.

Now, what makes Coburn interesting?

On May 9th — literally the day before Jonathan Karl’s “bombshell” report went live, Coburn appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, with his old pal and fellow House of Representatives class of 1994 alumnus (and my work colleague) Joe Scarborough (Coburn left the House in 2000, per a term limits pledge, and then ran successfully for the Senate in 2004. He announced this year that he would be retiring when his term ends in 2016.) Coburn talked about his failed “tote your gun on federal land” amendment to an unrelated bill, and about Benghazi, among other topics. And and what he had to say on Benghazi was interesting indeed (per the conservative Washington Times):

Hmm.  Coburn promised something new "will come out" the day before Karl's article hit the papers.  Over the weekend, Karl then stood by the "fundamentals" of his original story.  As Joy puts it:

The original story does not in fact, stand. Because the “news” in the original story was that Ben Rhodes, who works for the White House, weighed in, on behalf of said White House, to support a State Department spin on the Benghazi talking points. That was all that was newsworthy in Karl’s report. But since Ben Rhodes never mentioned the State Department in his email — that was the entirely made up part of the “email” Karl claimed in his reporting to have “obtained” and that his news organization supposedly “reviewed” — the guts of the Karl story were false. Like, totally false. And worse, they were either deliberately planted falsehoods fed to Karl by his source … or Karl totally misinterpreted what he was told, in a way that created news where there was one. If Karl is absolving his source, and saying essentially that HE put that “state department” bit into Rhodes’ emailhimself, through his own error, then he has no business covering this story. He probably has no business working in news.

Joy has much more in the story at the link above, but it makes sense that somebody in Coburn's staff did this, which means Sen. Coburn either knew or he has a rogue staffer.  Either way, it's a huge problem for the GOP right now, as well as our "liberal" media.

More Derangement For The Morehouse Man

President Obama gave the commencement speech to the Class of 2013 at Morehouse College over the weekend, and the right has once again gone insane because Obama said WORDS or something.

President Obama on Sunday summoned the graduates of historically black Morehouse College to “transform the way we think about manhood,” urging the young men to avoid the temptation to make excuses and to take responsibility for their families and their communities.

Delivering a commencement address at the all-male private liberal arts college in Atlanta, Obama spoke in deeply personal terms about the “special obligation” he feels as a black man to help those left behind.

“There but for the grace of God, I might be in their shoes,” Obama said. “I might have been in prison. I might have been unemployed. I might not have been able to support a family — and that motivates me.”

The president also reflected on the absence of his father growing up, noting that he was raised by a “heroic single mother,” and urged the young graduates not to shrink from their family responsibilities.

“My whole life, I’ve tried to be for Michelle and my girls what my father wasn’t for my mother and me,” Obama said. “I want to break that cycle — where a father’s not at home, where a father’s not helping to raise that son and daughter. I want to be a better father, a better husband, a better man.”

It was a personal and moving speech.  The response from the wingers?  Exactly what you would expect:






Of course, he never actually said that, but who cares.  Get the woo-woo siren alarms, it's a Code Uppity!

How the President keeps his cool over this crap every day for the last five years, I will never know.