Last Call For Bob Dole, Bob Dole, Bob Dole

Cry not for Robert J. Dole, who says (correctly) that neither he nor Reagan would make it in today's TeaGOP, talking to FOX on Sunday.

WALLACE: What do you think of your party, the Republicans today?

DOLE: I think they ought to put a sign on the national committee doors that says “closed for repairs” until New Year’s Day next year — and spend that time going over ideas and positive agendas.

WALLACE: You describe the GOP of your generation as Eisenhower Republicans, moderate Republicans. Could people like you, even Ronald Reagan — could you make it in today’s Republican Party.

DOLE: I doubt it. Reagan couldn’t have made it. Certainly Nixon couldn’t have made it, cause he had ideas. We might have made it, but I doubt it.

As Steve M. reminds us, you can thank Bob Dole for the permanent GOP filibuster in the Senate.

It was on Election Night 1992, not very far into the evening, that the Senate minority leader, Bob Dole, hinted at the way his party planned to conduct itself in the months ahead: it would filibuster any significant legislation the new Democratic President proposed, forcing him to obtain 60 votes for Senate passage.

This was a form of scorched-earth partisan warfare unprecedented in modern political life. Congress is supposed to operate by majority vote. It is true that the filibuster has a long and disreputable Senate history and that, over the years, it has been used more by Democrats than by Republicans. But only after 1992 did it become the centerpiece of opposition conduct toward an elected President. What the Republicans did in the Senate in 1993 amounted to an unreported constitutional usurpation. It should have been denounced as such at the time, but it wasn't. The punditocracy chose not to notice.

In any case, it worked. Little that the President proposed became law in the two years that he operated with Democratic majorities. There was no health care reform, no economic stimulus package.

Sound familiar?   Bob Dole made the 60 vote threshold for Democrats permanent.  He's the reason why health care reform died 20 years ago and the reason we didn't get single-payer and the public option now.

So no, I don't feel like shedding a single tear for Bob Dole's lament.  He helped create the Tea Party beast that now slouches towards Washington.

Suffering From Moral Decay

The goalposts for President Obama got moved in a big way Sunday by Sen. Rand Paul, all but calling for Obama's resignation by claiming that POTUS is in danger of "losing the moral authority" to remain in office.

Paul, appearing on ABC’s “This Week,” said that the IRS and other recent controversies “really takes away from the president's moral authority to lead the nation.”

“Nobody questions his legal authority, but I think he's really losing the moral authority to lead this nation,” Paul added.

“And he really needs to put a stop to this. I don't care whether you're a Republican or a Democrat, nobody likes to see the opposite party punishing you for your political beliefs.”

And of course the arbiter of the President's moral authority is Rand Paul, as he spouts weasel words to suggest that maybe the President shouldn't be President anymore...

“I think there needs to be a speedy resolution to this,” Paul said. “And I think the president is in danger of losing his moral authority to lead the nation if we don't get to a resolution.”

Not an impeachable offense of course.  But he should resign anyway.  We'll see how many of Rand's cohorts in the Senate follow this message and hop in Rand Paul's quasi-"I'm not racist but..." clown car.

Winning The Battles, Losing The War

Liberalism and the Democrats are losing, folks.  You have to look no further than formerly "purple" state of North Carolina, my home for nearly 30 years, where I grew up, went to school and college, now that it has been completely taken over by the Republicans, the final Southern state to fall to the darkness.  Make no mistake:  the GOP plan in North Carolina is the GOP plan for America. The GOP has achieved complete victory in the Old North State:

Those victories were capped last year when Republican Pat McCrory was elected governor, giving the party control of all levers of state government for the first time since 1870.

The victories were aided by the strong financial support of Art Pope, a multimillionaire who spent heavily in support of the state’s GOP candidates. The Institute for Southern Studies, a North Carolina-based research organization, said Pope’s advocacy network spent $2.2 million on 22 legislative races, winning 18. Overall, conservative organizations largely supported by Pope accounted for three-fourths of the outside money spent in North Carolina legislative races in 2010, according to the institute.

One of McCrory’s first acts after being elected governor was to install Pope, a former legislator, as the state budget chief. (The governor’s office declined to make Pope available for an interview.) And now, GOP lawmakers are moving swiftly to enact a long list of legislation they say is largely aimed at limiting government debt and snapping the state’s economy out of a years-long malaise.

Art Pope bought my home state.  He is now in control of the budget for the 10th most populous state in the Union, and the state is growing fast, challenging Michigan for 9th and Georgia for 8th.   The goal is simple:  massive austerity and the race to the bottom.

Legislators have slashed jobless benefits. They have also repealed a tax credit that supplemented the wages of low-income people, while moving to eliminate the estate tax. They have voted against expanding Medicaid to comply with the 2010 federal health-care law. The expansion would have added 500,000 poor North Carolinians to the Medicaid rolls.

“Before considering Medicaid expansion, we must reform the current system to make sure people currently enrolled receive the services they need and more taxpayer dollars are not put at risk,” McCrory said in a written statement after signing a bill blocking the expansion.

Lawmakers are also considering proposals to reduce and flatten income tax rates while expanding the sales tax, perhaps to even include groceries and prescription drugs — which some advocates see as a first step toward eliminating the state income tax.

“North Carolina is a high-income-tax state, and we’re suffering the consequences,” said Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berge (R). “Our unemployment rate is the fifth worst in the country, and our high tax rates are hindering economic growth and pushing jobs to our neighbors.”

And so eliminating the state's estate, corporate, and income taxes will drop the burden on the poorest, those who spend their paychecks every two weeks to buy food, clothing, and shelter.  The plan is to crush them with consumption taxes until they demand relief -- and the GOP will provide it by getting rid of state programs for the poor.

The plan of course is to drive those poor to other states, as it always is with the GOP race to the bottom.  Not our problem if they leave, not our burden to support.  So get ready, North Carolina.  You voted them into power.

You're going to get what you deserve for a while.

Podcast: Been A Long TIme Coming

Bon and I are back for a Memorial Day weekend podcast as we cover scandals, Obamacare, collapsing bridges, crap-ass media and living in Tornado Country.

Listen to internet radio with Zandar Versus The Stupid on BlogTalkRadio

Give us a listen, as hopefully we'll be getting back into the podcast for you more regularly.

StupidiNews, Memorial Day Weekend Edition!

• At the commencement address at the Army's West Point, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel called sexual assault a "scourge that must be stamped out."
• A federal judge has ruled against Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, finding that his office has indeed committed racial profiling of suspects based on being Latino.
• An Israeli reassessment of the Syrian civil war finds that Bashar al-Assad will remain in power "for some time", a fact that observers believe could lead to an escalation of Israeli military action.
• A big land grab by billionaires to create a bison reserve in Montana has cattle ranchers across the state riled up.
• Ohio is going after internet cafes that offer sweepstakes and electronic slots, what the state is calling "unregulated" and untaxed gambling.

Last Call For The Gang Of Eight

Theory:  The GOP's relentless pursuit of "scandals" give them what they believe is perfect political cover to refuse to pass any more legislation whatsoever, including immigration reform.  Democrats can see this coming a mile away, so they're wisely calling them out now.

Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) said Friday that the “Gang of Eight” immigration bill doesn’t have enough votes to pass the Senate.

The bill won approval from the Senate Judiciary Committee in a 13-5 vote, but Menendez said it lacks the 60 votes necessary to clear the Senate — despite the bill's four Republican co-sponsors.

“We don’t currently have 60 votes identified in the Senate,” Menendez said in an interview with Univision. “We need to add more votes on the floor. That means that the community in your state, in every state, should be contacting your state’s two U.S. Senators saying that they want comprehensive immigration reform, that they are going to judge their political future based on this vote.”

Supporters of the bill are pushing for a strong bipartisan vote of 70 or more to put pressure on the House to take up the legislation.

70 votes is a pipe dream.  Tea Party Republicans are going to overplay their hand and murder this bill in the Senate.  The few smarter political heads may or may not be worried about Harry Reid's nuclear option as reprisal, but they are damn worried about Latino voters in 2014, just as they found out the hard way in 2006, 2008, and 2012.

If Republicans burn this bridge now, they're done and they know it.  And the Tea Party Hate Machine will make sure that bridge goes up in flames...and along with it the GOP in 2014 and 2016.

Drones, Gitmo, And Goalposts

President Obama's speech on Guantanamo and the use of drones on Thursday was folded into a larger and much more vital larger picture:  the end of Warren Terrah.  Greg Sargent:

In the national security speech Obama delivered this afternoon, the President himself defined the challenge we face as this: How do we balance the need to do all we can to protect our citizens with the need to adhere to our values and ideals as a free society? The speech was the most ambitious and detailed effort to answer this question that he has yet attempted.

His answer to the question was that, at a time when the nature of the terror threat is changing — over a decade after the 9/11 attacks led to a massive buildup of our national security apparatus that strayed into massive overreach – we must acknowledge the cost of all of that excess, and give more priority to American values and the rule of law than we have been giving. However, in policy terms, he offered mainly incremental, though welcome, moves in that direction.

Indeed, the upshot of the speech is that Obama defined his own role — that of commander in chief — as one that requires him to ultimately compromise core values and principles if he deems it necessary to maintain security. While the speech did offer some steps that civil libertarians will welcome, it also fell short of the wholesale commitment to rule of law they had hoped for — indeed, forthrightly so.

And that bolded point is the most important.  There are times where national security issues arise, where the loud purity pundits are not going to have all the information.  President Obama admits that this will always be true.

“The president is clearly aware that his current policies are falling short of the mark constitutionally,” Anthony Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, told me. “While these are important and welcome steps, they are incremental changes that pale in the face of the constitutional questions confronting the administration.”

Obama might agree to some degree with that assessment, with a qualifier. Indeed, the speech seemed quite forthright in defining the role of commander in chief as one that requires him to ultimately prioritize security over strict rule of law where he deems it necessary — even as he implicitly asked us to trust that he’s doing his best to get the balance as close to right as he can.

So now, we've moved the goalposts again, from "You need to explain yourself" to "This is unconstitutional!"  That's a pretty nice excuse, because now we've moved responsibility from the legislative and executive to the judicial.  There's literally nothing POTUS can do to satisfy the purity patrol because what's constitutional or not cannot be determined by the executive, only the judicial.

Conveniently, this goalpost shuffling extends the argument against Obama infinitely, so the cottage industry of fundraising while attacking Obama from the left can keep going in perpetuity.  How convenient...

More Of The Steep Lerner Curve

A day after her bizarre combination of opening statement and pleading the Fifth on everything else, IRS director Lois Lerner has been put on "administrative leave" after she was asked to resign and refused to do so.

Lois Lerner, the IRS staffer who is under fire for her role in the agency’s targeting of conservative groups, has been placed on administrative leave, according to congressional aides.

She will still be paid while on leave, a congressional aide said, as required under civil service rules.

Lerner, who heads an IRS division that oversees tax-exempt groups, first disclosed the extra scrutiny the agency gave to Tea Party groups almost two weeks ago when answering a planted question at a Washington legal conference.

Since then, lawmakers from across the political spectrum have said that they believe Lerner misled them and called for her dismissal.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (Iowa), a senior Republican on the Finance Committee, said in a Thursday statement that the new acting IRS commissioner, Danny Werfel, had asked Lerner to resign – and that Lerner was only placed on leave after she declined that request. Aides on Capitol Hill confirmed that Lerner had refused to resign.

Now civil service rules do prevent people getting fired willy nilly.  It's to prevent, you know, a massive purge every time a new administration comes to power (not that the Bushies didn't try their hardest, especially in the DoJ).  But I predicted yesterday morning that Lerner would be canned, and I was right.

We'll see what happens from here on out, but the one guarantee I can make now is that Lerner's departure and replacement will not satisfy Republicans, who will not stop until Lerner somehow implicates every member of the Obama family, including Bo, and the IRS is shut down.

StupidiNews!

• The Boy Scouts of America will allow gay scouts but not gay leaders in its ranks in a move that disappointed LGBTQ activists and infuriated conservative groups.
• The Senate unanimously approved Sri Srinivasan to the DC Court of Appeals, making him the first federal judge of South Asian descent and a leading SCOTUS candidate.
• A section of the Interstate 5 bridge over the Skagit River in western Washington State has collapsed after a truck hit the bridge, sending several people to the hospital.
• Congress finds that dozens of power companies remain vulnerable to cyber-attack, but industry groups counter that standards would be obsolete by the time Congress passed them.
• Doctors have used a custom 3-D printed plastic device to save a baby's life by using the tube to the child's airway open after his trachea collapsed.

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?