Last Call For Blaming The Victim

Republicans are getting cute now over impeachment.  They realize the Tea Party demands it and will turn on them like a rabid animal if they don't...but the country as a whole is very much against impeachment and they know it.  So how long will the Village let them play both sides?

House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) on Sunday did not rule out impeaching President Obama after he was asked three times by "Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace.

When first asked whether he would consider impeaching Obama, Scalise dove into a response pinning impeachment talk on the White House.

“This might be the first White House in history that’s trying to start the narrative of impeaching their own president. Ultimately, what we want to do is see the President follow his own laws,” Scalise said. "The Supreme Court unanimously said 12 times the President overreached and did things he doesn’t have the authority to do."

Scalise gave a similar response the second time Wallace asked if impeachment was on the table.

"Well, the White House wants to talk about impeachment and they’re trying to fundraise off that, too," he said.

"I’m asking you, sir," Wallace quickly responded.

Scalise dodge the question for a third time. 

"The White House will do anything they can to change the topic away from the President’s failed agenda," he said. "The president isn’t solving the problems. We’re going to try to solve problems for everyday people. I would like to see the President engaged in that, too, that’s his job, but he wants to change the topic, talk about things like this."

Blaming the White House for impeachment talk.  Pretty much like blaming the victim in, oh, anything requiring abuse of power, persecution, and whatnot.  Get a pair, Scalise.  You don't get to blame the White House for impeachment talk, when Sarah Palin is making an ass of herself demanding you do it.

The GOP's own impeachment talk is now a distraction from the real issues?  I'm glad Scalise agrees with the fact he has a party full of morons.

Burrito-nomics

Seems the Millennials (and bordering Gen Xers like me) are willing to pay more for a good "fast casual" meal at a place like Chipotle, even if the prices have gone up in the last couple of years.

Chipotle is prospering even as it raises prices on burritos that are already expensive – about twice as much as those sold by Taco Bell (YUM.N). Besides its naturally-raised meats and organic ingredients such as beans and avocados, the company occupies the center of fast-casual dining - the booming "sweet spot of the restaurant industry," according to Hottovy - in which customers order at a counter but eat quality products inside a hip space. 

And Chipotle is still growing. The chain runs about 1,700 restaurants in the U.S., and analyst Stephen Anderson at Miller Tabak estimates that it could grow to 3,100, expanding in less populated areas beyond its urban strongholds. 

Chipotle hadn't raised menu prices for three years, but the higher cost of ingredients compelled it to roll out up to a 6.5 percent average increase in the second quarter. 

To be sure, the hike did not go unnoticed: some customers said goodbye to steak burritos because their price jumped on average 4 percentage points more than Chipotle's chicken-based dishes, the company said. 

Other fast food chains haven't fared as well. Dunkin' Brands Group Inc cut its outlook for the year on Thursday, while quarterly profit fell more than expected at McDonald's Corp.

The world's largest hamburger seller and other fast food chains have become "hooked" on discounting, Anderson said. While they built their reputations by delivering quick bites, new menu additions have often slowed their service, frustrating customers.

"What [McDonald's needs] to do is further simplify the menu. It is too operationally complex, and I think that leaves a lot of potential for errors," Anderson said.

There are times where a dollar burger will do, but the reason I keep going back to Chipotle and other fast casual places like Noodles & Co and Five Guys is the quality and consistency of the food.  Sure, you could get half a dozen Taco Bell tacos for the price of one Chipotle burrito, but they're nowhere near as good and who the hell knows what's in Taco Bell's "taco meat" anyway?

Quality does matter, and people will pay for it.  This is apparently "news".

Ryan Plan 3.0 Versus Reality

Mother Jones reporter Stephanie Mencimer calls out Rep. Paul Ryan's poverty plan for what it is: a massive scam that's impossible and prohibitively expensive to implement.

Consider, as a hypothetical, the food stamp program, which Ryan thinks should require people to work as a condition of receiving the benefit (ignoring, for the moment, that nearly 60 percent of working-age adults getting food stamps already work). More than 40 million Americans get food stamps. Providing all them with a hand-holding caseworker with whom, under Ryan's plan, they'd draft long-term plans and contracts outlining their responsibilities and goals before they'd be allowed to eat, would require a fleet of roughly more than 700,000 social workers, assuming a reasonable caseload of about 55 clients per caseworker. Social workers don't make much money, with a median salary of about $44,000 a year. Even so, 700,000 of them would cost more than $30 billion a year, not including benefits. That's nearly 40 percent of what the country currently spends on food stamps and nearly twice the entire federal welfare budget. By comparison, the current food stamp program delivers 92 percent of its funding directly to people in need; only 5 percent goes to administrative costs.

Somehow, I'm doubting that conservatives are going to be super excited to pay for 700,000 new government employees.  But wait, what if these are all private sector or non-profit organization hires? Surely somebody has tried the Ryan Plan 3.0 before, right?

Turns out the state of Nebraska did just that.

Here are some numbers that aren't hypothetical: As part of its welfare reform overhaul, the state of Nebraska for several years attempted to do what Ryan seems to be proposing. Masters degree-level social workers, with tiny caseloads, delivered intensive personalized services, including home visits, to a group of welfare recipients, including a batch of extremely hard to employ single mothers. They attempted to get the women into the workforce and self-sufficient for the long haul. 

The program produced better results than any such program ever had. Almost half of the study participants went to work for at least a year, double the rate of the group without the individualized attention, and their earnings increased significantly. The clients who got the individual casework were less depressed, less likely to lose custody of a child, and more likely to receive child support. But they still faced food and housing hardship; they were still poor, if working poor. And again, only half the study participants went to work. 

So the program was a success.  But how much did it cost for all this specialized, attentive service?

Providing all those individualized services cost the state $8,300 per client—so much that researchers who evaluated the program concluded that the "benefits to society did not outweigh its costs during the study." The researchers speculated that if the successful program participants stayed employed for another two years, the effort might pay off, but individually helping these folks cost about $5,000 more than what those clients earned by entering the workforce.

The families might have been ended up in a slightly better place, at least for a while, but the state of Nebraska would have been better off writing them a $5,000 check and calling it a day.

So again, we come down to investing more money in the safety net instead of what Ryan wants to do: somehow getting states to give all these tailored, direct services by hiring private sector contractors, but to do all this with less money in a block grant.  It's impossible, and to do it right would be more expensive than it is now.

Which is precisely why the safety net today really doesn't deliver the kind of customized service that Ryan thinks it should. It's just too expensive, too hard to provide on a large scale, and in the end, not all that more effective than simply giving people money they need to keep the lights on until they can get back on their feet on their own. Is Ryan, whose budgets have proposed deep cuts to the food stamp and other poverty programs, really going to advocate spending billions to help all the nation's low-income people identify their "opportunities for growth" and craft long-term goals as a condition of getting federal aid? It seems unlikely.

Which is the point.  Ryan knows his plan is impossible to implement correctly.  When it doesn't work, the problem will be that government isn't capable of helping anyone, and that we'll of course need to make cuts to eliminate the waste.

When you design a government program to fail, it fails.  Ryan's trick is that he's programming in a catastrophic failure while making it look like it's a good idea.

Last Call For Working Class Blues

Molly Ball at The Atlantic wades through election data and comes up with the fact that Democrats have recently done very well when they win the working class vote big.  When they win it by a smaller margin, Republicans are able to make up the difference with wealthier voters.

Republicans consistently win voters making $50,000 or more, approximately the U.S. median income. The margin doesn't vary too much: In 2012, Mitt Romney got 53 percent of this group's vote; in 2010, Republican House candidates got 55 percent. And Democrats consistently win voters making less than the median—but the margin varies widely. In fact, whether Democrats win these voters by a 10-point or a 20-point margin tells you who won every national election for the past decade.

In 2004, Democrats won the working-class vote by 11 points; George W. Bush was reelected. In 2006, Democrats won the working-class vote by 22 points and took the House and Senate. In 2008, Democrats won by 22 points again, and President Obama was elected. In 2010, the margin narrowed to 11 points, and Republicans took the House back. In 2012, Obama was reelected—on the strength of another 22-point margin among voters making under $50,000.

So what does 2014 portend under this theory?  Not good news.

The Pew report didn't include a breakdown based on the $50,000 threshold, so I asked Pew to crunch the numbers for me. The result: 51 percent of voters making less than $50,000 plan to vote for Democrats, while 40 percent plan to vote Republican. (The rest are undecided, and the GOP wins the more-than-$50,000 vote 49-44.) That's exactly the same 11-point margin that has meant Democratic doom in every election since 2004.

If we stay home again like in 2004 and 2010, the Republicans will win.  If we vote like we did in 2006, 2008, and 2012, we'll win.

Really is that simple.

One Wonderful Nut At The Movies

Republicans.  Law that mandates you buy health insurance, worth burning the country down over.  Law mandating students watch a documentary on how evil liberalism and Barack Obama are, 100% small government freedom of speech approved.

Conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza may be getting an influx of new viewers of his documentary film ‘America’ after a Republican state senator from Florida said he plans on introducing a bill to make the movie mandatory in public schools. 

Republican Alan Hays, inspired after seeing the movie in theaters, said he now plans on introducing a one-page bill in November which would require all 1,700 Florida high schools and middle schools to show the movie to their students, unless their parents choose to opt them out. The documentary film is a conservative-spin on American history focusing on elevating the “essential goodness of America” while discrediting criticisms about American’s checkered history with civil rights and social justice. It’s not completely inconceivable for the bill to pass the Republican-controlled Florida legislature and be signed into law by Republican Gov. Rick Scott.

“I saw the movie and walked out of the theater and said, ‘Wow, our students need to see this.’ And it’s my plan to show it to my colleagues in the legislature, too, before they’re asked to vote on the bill,” Hays said.

To recap, teaching kids about climate change is "liberal political indoctrination" and we can't have that. Teaching kids about having safe sex, also "liberal political indoctrination.".  Teaching kids about evolution, insidious "liberal political indoctrination."

Actual political indoctrination through a law whose sole purpose is to expose kids to a specific political viewpoint favoring one political party?  Now that's completely legal and awesome, because FREEDOM and EAGLE and stuff.

This is what abusing the power of the government actually looks like, people.

More GOP Minority Outreach, Rand Paul Edition

This weekend is the National Urban League's annual conference here in Cincinnati, and of course this close to Kentucky, GOP Sen. Rand Paul just couldn't resist showing up to Randsplain to us black folk why Republicans are the bomb diggety.  Or something.  Very few people wanted to hear what he had to say.

So when Republicans ask blacks to give their party a second look, they have a hard time finding an audience. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky confronted this on Friday when he appeared at a highly publicized speech to the National Urban League Conference to see row after row of empty chairs. The space did not look much fuller after one of the organizers urged people seated near the back to fill in the front rows.

He pushed forward, quoting Malcolm X: “Nobody can give you equality or justice. If you’re a man, you take it.” And he sounded empathetic as he described the arrests of three young black men as they waited for a bus. Their apparent crime, he said, was “waiting while black.” And he delicately acknowledged what was perhaps the biggest cloud hanging over his visit: hiscomments in 2010 in which he suggested that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 encroached on individual liberties. He told the crowd he supported the law unequivocally.

The speech in Cincinnati was his latest before a mostly black crowd, and it was a demonstration of how Mr. Paul — however improbably — has become the only major figure in his party who seems eager to keep going back to African-Americans to appeal for support even if his approach unsettles some fellow Republicans.

That Malcom X quote rings pretty hollow when Paul has attacked President Obama and Attorney General Holder for "overstepping their Constitutional authority".  It rings even more hollow given the fact that Paul has voted against Democratic jobs bills, immigration bills, climate change legislation, the Paycheck Fairness Act and efforts to increase the minimum wage, all things that would help African-Americans...and all Americans for that matter.  It's great that he wants to do something about sentencing laws for drugs, but even if he actually had a change of heart on the Civil Rights Act, he's still publicly come out against the Voting Rights Act.

He wants to court the black vote.  He just doesn't want too many of us to be able to vote.

Rand Paul isn't interested in justice or equality.  Rand Paul is interested in Rand Paul.

So no, I have zero interest in what he wants to say or do.  I don't trust him, and as my senator, he's never given me reason to trust him, and I will work to see he is no longer my senator in 2016.

Take your Rand Paul "well actually" baloney elsewhere.  I'm the one who has to live with him representing me, and he most certainly does not.  He's still a conservative Republican, end of story.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• Israel has agreed to a UN request for a 12-hour cease fire Saturday to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza, but the fighting is expected to escalate rapidly afterwards.
• Tensions between the US and Russia grew as Moscow is accusing Washington of a "smear campaign" over Russian involvement in the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.
• Poor weather conditions are being blamed for the crash earlier this week of an Air Algerie flight in Mali, claiming the lives of all 118 aboard.
• Further EU sanctions against Russia over Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 are running into the reality of Dutch trade with Moscow.
• The House has passed a Senate bill that will make it legal to unlock your cell phone in order to switch providers, and President Obama is expected to sign the legislation.

Last Call For Our Brand New Idiot

Remember Trey Radel, the former Florida Tea Party darling of a congressman who was such a moron that he demanded SNAP recipients get drug tested before they could get food stamps, and was himself busted for cocaine and resigned in disgrace in January?

Meet Radel's equally stupid replacement, GOP Rep. Curt Clawson.

Rookie Florida Rep. Curt Clawson appears to have made a major faux pas at a Foreign Affairs hearing, mistaking two U.S. government officials for Indian government representatives.

Foreign Policy called it "intensely awkward." From the FP blog:

The two officials, Nisha Biswal and Arun Kumar, are Americans who hold senior positions at the State Department and Commerce Department, respectively. Although both Biswal and Kumar were introduced as U.S. officials by the chairman of the Asia and Pacific subcommittee, Clawson repeatedly asked them questions about "your country" and "your government," in reference to the state of India.

"I'm familiar with your country; I love your country," the Florida Republican said. "Anything I can do to make the relationship with India better, I'm willing and enthusiastic about doing so."

Apparently confused by their Indian surnames and skin color, Clawson also asked if "their" government could loosen restrictions on U.S. capital investments in India.

He thought they were officials from India.  Because of course, they couldn't possibly be Americans.  Nor would Rep. Clawson give enough of a damn about his job to know who he was actually dealing with, because after all, he's a Congressman, dammit.

This, by the way, is what a real "out-of-touch politician", "arrogant princeling", and "empty suit neophyte" looks like.  Notice his name is not Barack Obama.

Yes, The White House Sees It Coming

Here's a clever play by White House staffer Dan Pfieffer, who fully expects Orange Julius to play the impeachment card after the 2014 midterms and lets everyone know it.

Dan Pfeiffer, a senior aide who has been with the administration since Obama first took office, told reporters that he anticipated that a lawsuit filed by House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) over executive actions taken by the president on health care would ultimately not be enough to satisfy some of the more vocal conservatives in Congress. 

Pfeiffer added that coming executive actions surrounding immigration reform would only stoke the impeachment flames. 

"I think a lot of people in this town laugh that off," said Pfeiffer. "I would not discount that possibility. I think that Speaker Boehner, by going down this path of this lawsuit, has opened the door to Republicans possibly considering impeachment at some point in the future."

Pfeiffer wouldn't bother responding to such speculation unless the goal was to egg the wackos in the GOP on to try to force Boehner to pull the trigger, and one loudmouth wacko is playing right into it:
 

Speaking at the Christian Science Monitor breakfast, Pfeiffer based his prediction on several factors. The first was former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) calling for articles of impeachment to be drawn over the president's executive action allowing certain young undocumented immigrants to stay in the country. The second was a CNN poll released Friday morning showing that while just 33 percent of the country supported impeachment, a full 57 percent of Republicans were in favor of it. 

"I think impeachment is a very serious thing that has been bandied about by the recent Republican vice presidential nominee and others in a very unserious way," said Pfeiffer. "And no one has even made any allegation of anything that would be within six universes from what is generally considered in that space."

Looks like somebody's found an actual use for Moose Lady after all. Who knew, right?

We'll see if the "unserious" charge sticks.  Villagers do love that imaginary word and if they start piling on, the anger factor in the GOP will certainly ignite something stupid, dangerous, and detrimental.

Maybe even before the midterms.  Wouldn't that be something...

Ford, The Border, And The Turtle

Last night was the annual Kentucky Democratic Party's Wendell Ford dinner, honoring the legendary 89-year old former senator and governor who is battling lung cancer.  Wendell's grandson Clay was in attendance, along with Gov. Dinosaur Steve and Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes, and the main course was fried turtle with a side of crow.

After the event, Grimes took a few questions from the press and was asked again if she supported President Barack Obama's request for $3.7 billion in emergency supplemental funds to deal with the influx of Central American children across the nation's border with Mexico.

When asked earlier this month, Grimes four times declined to take a position, referring instead to the immigration bill that passed the U.S. Senate in 2013. On Thursday night, Grimes said, "My response remains the same."

"It's an example of Washington not working right now," Grimes said. "A year ago, we had the opportunity to pass comprehensive immigration reform, and Mitch McConnell stood in the way.

McConnell voted against the proposal, but it did pass the U.S Senate.

"Had we passed comprehensive immigration reform, we might not be here today," Grimes said. "My hope is that we can make sure to return these children safely and make sure we are securing our borders. Comprehensive immigration reform is a way to do that."

Grimes did say she was not in favor of "giving the president a blank check."

It's a good answer on immigration reform, but the non-answer on the current proposal to help the Border Patrol seems like another unforced error on Grimes's part.  At some point you're going to have to take a stand on this bill, Alison. 

On the other hand, Mitch McConnell's non-response on the issue is saving Grimes from having to really come up with one right now, so there's that.  Republicans seems to be backing a plan from Rep. Kay Granger of Texas.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2014/07/24/3350863/democrats-gather-to-cheer-ford.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter#storylink=cpy

The House plan would treat Central American children the same as Mexican children - which means Border Patrol agents could decide to send them back right away. Republican House Speaker John Boehner told reporters that the president needs to come out publicly in favor of changes to the law.

“Without trying to fix the problem, I don’t know how we are actually in a position to give the president any more money,” said Boehner.

There's room here for Grimes to make a statement along the lines of "Republicans are trying to force us to do what they want before they'll lift a finger to help" if she is so inclined.

StupidiNews!

• The remains of Air Algerie Flight 5017 have been found in northern Mali, carrying 116 people when it crashed, according to French President Francoise Hollande.
• The president of the Navajo Nation is calling the beating deaths of two homeless Navajo men in New Mexico a hate crime, and wants federal investigators on the case.
• The Russian response to increasing US and EU sanctions appears to involve going after Russian McDonald's food as "inappropriate".
• Israel and Hamas are looking at a US-backed cease fire as the death toll in Gaza has now exceeded 700.
• Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, has apparently lost control of a research satellite containing among other things, five live geckos doing microgravity sex experiments.

Last Call For The Ryan Plan 3.0

Not content with his goal to turn Medicare and Medicaid into block grants that states will then use for purposes other than healthcare, Rep. Paul Ryan now turns his austerity machine upon those awful poor people in an attempt to block grant them out of existence.

Ryan, known as the Republican Party’s budget guru and a former vice presidential nominee, argued that disparate federal aid programs should be consolidated into “Opportunity Grants” to states, which would have the freedom to experiment with more flexible programs administered by certified providers like non-profit or community groups. No state would be required to participate in the program, which Ryan says would be budget neutral. The Wisconsin lawmaker and possible 2016 presidential hopeful, laid out the plan in a USA Today op-ed Thursday. 

Ryan, whose previous budget plans have been excoriated by Democrats in national ad campaigns as heartless slashes to crucial safety net programs, tried to strike a compassionate tone in his remarks Thursday, saying that he’s visited poor communities during the last year seeking solutions. “When I went to Milwaukee or Denver or Indianapolis, nobody asked me what party I belonged to,” he said. “They welcomed anybody who was willing to listen and learn. That should be our approach in Washington.”

Let's take a look at Operation Opportunity Grants, shall we?

Here's how the program would work: Each state that wanted to participate would submit a plan to the federal government. That plan would lay out in detail the state's proposed alternative. If everything passed muster, the federal government would give the green light. And the state would get more flexibility to combine things such as food stamps, housing subsidies, child care assistance and cash welfare. This simpler Opportunity Grant would include the same money as current law. 

Plans would be approved on four conditions: The state would have to spend all funding on people in need. Second, the state would have to hold people accountable through work requirements and time limits for every able-bodied recipient just as there are for cash welfare today. 

Third, the state would have to offer at least two service providers. The state welfare agency couldn't be the only game in town. And fourth, the state would have to measure progress through a neutral third party to keep track of key metrics.

So privatize the system first of all, giving billions in dollars meant to help the needy to corporations whose goal is to wring as much profit out of this as possible.  And of course we would need to have multiple corporations doing this to encourage competition.  You know, just like your cable company.  And then we'd have to of course hire more corporations to make sure the other corporations are doing their jobs. Yeah, that'll solve the problem with inefficiency and fraud.

Second, let's make getting poverty programs even harder to get into than getting good-paying jobs that don't exist, and then slap arbitrary limits on these programs so that people will magically find jobs or face starvation, eviction, or worse.  Because misery and shame creates good workers and magically produces jobs, or something.

If approved, the state could use that money to expand state programs and to partner with local service providers. Families in need would have a choice. There wouldn't just be a state agency. Instead, they could choose from approved non-profits, for-profits or even community groups unique to their neighborhood. These groups could provide a more personalized form of aid through case management.

It's cute that Ryan thinks that state leaders, particularly in red states, will give block grant cash to non-profits instead of lining their pockets the same way they have by privatizing schools and prisons.

In short, we would re-conceive the federal government's role in the fight against poverty. Instead of trying to supplant local communities, the federal government would support them. Communities have to lead this effort, and Washington should follow.

In short, Republicans are going to raid and profitize welfare at the expense of taxpayers and the needy, won't it?  And the best part is red state governments will be able to throw as many ridiculous requirements as possible.  Nobody will meet the criteria to actually benefit from the programs, and the corporations will pocket the difference.

If you think about it, there's no other possible "poverty program reforms" that Ryan could have arrived at. The three basic tenets of Republicanism in 2014 are:

1. The only person keeping you from being a millionaire is you.
2. Taxation is theft, but shame costs nothing.
3. If it will piss liberals off, we'll do it. 

Put those three together and poof!  Classic Paul Ryanism.

Oh, but it gets even more awesome with the integrated shame component:

The "discussion draft" submitted by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) to the House Budget Committee on potential solutions to poverty in America includes the proposal that low-income Americans would have to sign "contracts" in order to remain eligible for social safety net benefits, such as food stamps, or SNAP. The contract would include: benchmarks, such as finding a job, enrolling in employment training, or even meeting "new acquaintances outside circle of poverty"; a "timeline" in which individuals are contractually-obligated to meet those benchmarks; bonuses for meeting benchmarks early; and "sanctions for breaking the terms of the contract"

We're subjecting the poor to contracts and sanctions now.  That's compassionate conservatism from today's GOP!

Walsh-ed Out Of The Service

That loud sucking sound you're hearing coming from the direction of Montana is actually not Brian Schweitzer's career going down the tubes, but that of his former Lt. Governor and appointed senator replacing Max Baucus, John Walsh.  Walsh it seems is a military man, only his 2007 master's thesis for the US Army War College appears to be massively plagiarized.

Democrats were thrilled when John Walsh of Montana was appointed to the United States Senate in February. A decorated veteran of the Iraq war and former adjutant general of his state’s National Guard, Mr. Walsh offered the Democratic Party something it frequently lacks: a seasoned military man. 

On the campaign trail this year, Mr. Walsh, 53, has made his military service a main selling point. Still wearing his hair close-cropped, he notes he was targeted for killing by Iraqi militants and says his time in uniform informs his views on a range of issues. 

But one of the highest-profile credentials of Mr. Walsh’s 33-year military career appears to have been improperly attained. An examination of the final paper required for Mr. Walsh’s master’s degree from the United States Army War College indicates the senator appropriated at least a quarter of his thesis on American Middle East policy from other authors’ works, with no attribution.

Oh, it gets worse.

Mr. Walsh completed the paper, what the War College calls a “strategy research project,” to earn his degree in 2007, when he was 46. The sources of the material he presents as his own include academic papers, policy journal essays and books that are almost all available online. 

Most strikingly, each of the six recommendations Mr. Walsh laid out at the conclusion of his 14-page paper, titled “The Case for Democracy as a Long Term National Strategy,” is taken nearly word-for-word without attribution from a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace document on the same topic. 

In his third recommendation, for example, Mr. Walsh writes: “Democracy promoters need to engage as much as possible in a dialogue with a wide cross section of influential elites: mainstream academics, journalists, moderate Islamists, and members of the professional associations who play a political role in some Arab countries, rather than only the narrow world of westernized democracy and human rights advocates.” 

The same exact sentence appears on the sixth page of a 2002 Carnegie paper written by four scholars at the research institute. In all, Mr. Walsh’s recommendations section runs to more than 800 words, nearly all of it taken verbatim from the Carnegie paper, without any footnote or reference to it. In addition, significant portions of the language in Mr. Walsh’s paper can be found in a 1998 essay by a scholar at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, a research institute at Harvard.

So, yeah.  Walsh was in trouble, trailing Republican Steve Daines for Baucus's seat by around 12 points, he had even narrowed it to 7 points in the latest PPP poll out Monday, and as Talking Points Memo reminds us:

Senator Walsh released every single evaluation that he received during his 33-year military career, which shows an honorable and stellar record of service to protecting Montana and serving this country in Iraq.

Where this goes now is up to the people of Montana.

GOP Minority Outreach, Con't

Republicans keep happily reminding people exactly how they feel about "illegal immigrants" and by that term I mean "anybody darker than Orange Julius".

Anti-immigrant activist William Gheen this month said that the increase of undocumented immigrants crossing the border into the U.S. is more dangerous than an al Qaeda attack. 

In an interview on the Tea Party News Network, host Larry Altman asked Gheen how many undocumented immigrants might be "affiliated with Al Qaeda."

Gheen, president of the Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, which has been designated ahate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, launched into an answer about how immigrants will destroy America. 

"Well, what the illegals that are coming — and especially the ones that are coming from China — are going to do to America are much more powerful and lasting impacts than anything Al Qaeda could blow up, short of a nuclear detonation," he began.

Hello, my Asian friends.  You're the new Latino, which is apparently like being the new black folks, only that people resent you for being smarter than them rather than the other way around.

"And how do you put a price tag on a family, let’s say that’s been in the United States for 300 years, and four or five different members of that family have gone off to World War II and Korea and maybe World War I to fight for the American way of life, and then finally they get to their grandson that’s alive in the year 2020 who doesn’t get to go to the college of their choice because invaders have been brought in the country and put in those seats ahead of him," Gheen said. 

"That child’s life, that negatively impacts that child’s ability to self-actualize, to be all they can be, impacted because the future has been stolen by this usurpation, this treason, this treachery from the highest levels of our own government right here in the United States of America," he continued.

Some of our families have been "in this country" for more than 300 years.  Some of them were here already when your peeps showed up, man.  Some of them were brought here in chains.

You ever notice that with these guys it's always "You should hate group X that's different from you because they took your Y"?  I mean, there's a long an ugly history of that here in America and around the world for that matter, but apparently the classics never go out of style.

StupidiNews!

• Witnesses at the execution of Arizona death row inmate Joseph Wood believe that the state's new combination of lethal injection drugs took nearly 2 hours to kill.
• Colorado is the latest state to have its ban on same-sex marriage overturned as unconstitutional by a federal judge, the ruling stayed pending appeal by the state.
• The FAA has lifted its temporary measure banning US flights into Tel Aviv, Israel as the death toll in Gaza has now exceeded 700.
• Norway's $890 billion sovereign wealth fund, the world's largest, is reconsidering its $8 billion in holdings in Russia in light of EU sanctions from last week's downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17.
• Apple has filed patents for a smartwatch, raising speculation that the company will release a competitor to the Google Gear this fall amid slumping tablet sales.

Last Call For More Help Less Republicans

Like myself, Steve M is somewhat uneasy about the blase' attitude of liberal pundits towards the Halbig decision earlier this week.  Somehow it's going to end up at the Supreme Court, and there's no guarantee that the government would prevail.

But Republican governors, especially from the tea party class of 2010, have been harming large numbers of people quite openly -- depriving unionized workers of collective bargaining rights, curtailing voting rights, dismantling democratically elected local governments in Michigan, curbing reproductive rights ... and, apart from Pennsylvania's Tom Corbett, they all have a shot at reelection. Voters who aren't specifically targeted by these governors sure don't seem to be displaying much empathy for those who are.

The prevailing sentiment is that somehow, there's a bridge too far that the GOP will cross, and when that happens, voters will punish them resoundingly.

Empirical evidence so far doesn't show that we've reached that point.

A lot of the people harmed by a Supreme Court evisceration of Obamacare will be Democratic voters who wouldn't have voted GOP anyway. Others will be the same people who were subjects of the early Obamacare scare stories -- people who had pre-Obamacare insurance and didn't have their policies renewed. If they replaced those old policies with subsidized Obamacare policies and now can't afford those policies, who are they going to blame, over and over and over again in the right-wing media? They're going to blame Obama, accusing him of tyrannically taking away their old policies in the first place and thus being the guy who left them uninsured.

You can count on this happening, followed by "both sides are responsible" and then "It's President Obama's job to fix this" when it would be Congress's job to fix it, and they won't.  Voters have completely forgotten the fact that the GOP shut down the government, remember?  Of course it'll be Obama's fault.  It always is.

Maybe the Court's Republicans are going to game this out and conclude that a ruling against the law will be too much for the GOP and conservative movement to handle. But I wouldn't bet the rent money on that.

But a lot of Americans are betting the rent money on that, about six million of them, in fact.  There will not be "tremendous pressure for Congress to fix it" any more than there was Congress to fix anything in the last six years.  The result is the GOP now controls the House for the foreseeable future and has a clear shot at getting the Senate in November.

At some point voters may punish the GOP.  Will that number exceed the voters who want to punish Obama in November?

We'll see shortly.  If you haven't noticed, the voters haven't exactly been punishing the GOP so far.

Somebody Else's Problem Field In Action

People going without health care because red states rejected funding for Medicaid expansion is a perfect example of the "Somebody Else's Problem" effect.  But the ugly truth underneath the GOP's efforts to make sure Obamacare doesn't work in their states is that without that funding, hospitals are closing, putting the population of those states at risk.

Reports out in the last week indicate the gap between those with health care coverage is widening between states that agreed to go along with the health law’s Medicaid expansion and those generally led by Republican legislatures and GOP governors that are balking at the expansion. 

The moves against expansion are “beginning to hurt hospitals in states that opted out,” a report last week from Fitch Ratings said. The U.S. Department of Health and Human services has said Medicaid enrollment in the 26 states and the District of Columbia that agreed to go along with and implemented the expansion by the end of May “rose by 17 percent, while states that have not expanded reported only a 3 percent increase,” HHS said in an enrollment update for the Medicaid program. 

“We expect providers in states that have chosen not to participate in expanded Medicaid eligibility to face increasing financial challenges in 2014 and beyond,”Fitch said in its July 16 report. “Nonprofit hospitals and healthcare systems in states that have expanded their Medicaid coverage under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act have begun to realize the benefit from increased insurance coverage.” 

Already, the financial ratings agency said it has downgraded 10 health care entities so far this year and five of those were in states that have not gone along with the Medicaid expansion. Fitch didn’t specify the entities that have been hurt financially. 

“Several of those downgrades were driven by operating performance declines related to funding and reimbursement pressures, which may have been lessened by Medicaid expansion,” the Fitch report said. “Conversely, of the nine upgrades since Jan. 1, eight were hospitals in states that have expanded Medicaid.”

So yes, this is starting to affect the bottom lines of many hospital systems. That in turn affects availability of health care, and of course the economic well being of hospital employees.  If it seems like Republican governors are doing billions of dollars in damage to their own economies in order to get red state voters to blame Obama for the resulting mess, that's because this is exactly what's going on.

A report last week from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Urban Institute described the coverage difference as a “gulf in percentage of people without health insurance” that is growing larger between states that expanded Medicaid and those that did not. 

As of June, the report said 60 percent of the nation’s uninsured residents live in states that did not expand Medicaid. That figure was up from 49.7 percent in September of last year. 

Analysts expect that gap to only worsen. Unlike private coverage under the health law that is generally purchased during a specified open enrollment period, Americans can sign up for Medicaid at anytime.

“In states that expanded Medicaid, an estimated 71 percent of the uninsured likely qualify for some type of financial assistance for health insurance, compared with 44 percent of the uninsured in the states that did not expand Medicaid,” the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Urban Institute report said.

So these are the states that are going to have higher taxpayer costs dealing with uninsured Americans, and Republicans, instead of taking responsibility for their direct actions to keep people uninsured,  are just going to blame Obama.

And in most cases, that'll work just fine.

Hope you don't live in a red state.

Republicans Help Less Over Obamacare

Greg Sargent makes this catch on CNN's latest Obamacare poll:

With the political world still pondering what yesterday’s court rulings mean for the future of Obamacare, CNN has published a fascinating new poll that asks a question I haven’t seen before. It asks whether the law has personally helped respondents, but then follows up and asks whether respondents think the law has helped others. 

And guess what: A huge majority of Republicans and conservatives don’t think the law has helped anybody in this country. 

Among all Americans, the poll finds that 18 percent say the law has made them and their families better off. But another 35 percent say the law has made other families better off, for a total of 54 percent who say they or others are being helped. Meanwhile, 44 percent say the law hasn’t helped anybody — a lot, but still a minority. 

Crucially, an astonishing 72 percent of Republicans, and 64 percent of conservatives, say the law hasn’t helped anyone. (Only one percent of Republicans say the law has helped them!) By contrast, 57 percent of moderates say the law has helped them or others. Independents are evenly divided.

This makes complete sense in terms of the pathology of the Republican mind:  if Obamacare has helped Americans in any way, then repealing it would hurt Americans.  Since roughly 3 out of 4 Republicans believe that nobody has been helped by Obamacare, repealing it will only help everyone.  What Republicans really mean when they say that "nobody" has been helped by Obamacare is that no Republicans have been helped by Obamacare.

It's screaming denial that ignores millions, if not tens of millions of Americans seeing a change for the better in affordable health care, but all of those people are probably Democrats anyway, so why not hurt them?  As far as they're concerned, Obamacare is taking fro hard-working, patriotic Republicans to give to awful, parasitic Democrats.  Of course nobody that counts is being helped by it.

So yes, only one percent of Republicans say Obamacare has personally helped them.  That's ludicrous, but then again, we're talking about completely ridiculous Republican voters.  It helps Democrats, and especially those people, so the law has to go.

StupidiNews!

• Former Dollar General and Reebok CEO David Perdue has edged out GOP Rep. Jack Kingston in last night's Georgia Republican Senate primary runoff, 51% to 49%.
• The San Diego suburb of Escondido has rejected a plan to open a temporary shelter to house children caught crossing the US-Mexico border.
• US Secretary of State John Kerry continues his Middle East visit in an attempt to broker a cease fire between Israel and Hamas.
• Fighting continues over the Ukrainian city of Donetsk as clashes between pro-Russian separatists and Ukranian forces have forced 40% of the city's residents to flee.
• Last month's Supreme Court decision that all but killed re-broadcast service Aereo only affected 80,000 subscribers, according to new documents filed by the company.

Last Call For Derp Of The Planet Of The Derps

Professional climate change crap thrower Steven Moore takes to the National Review to compare environmentalists to apes, and figures we'll be in the Stone Age after a couple more Democratic presidents.

This weekend I went to the see the blockbuster movie Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and an Investor’s Business Daily editorial this week got me thinking about a bleak scenario. Our future won’t have ape rulers, but, IBD points out, a world without energy might well look similar.

So, second graph in, we're straight to "a world without energy" because CLOWARD-PIVEN GREEN FASCISM.  We're approaching zero Kelvin!

In the movie, bands of humans are resisting a global government of super-intelligent monkeys, gorillas and the like. The humans lack access to electricity, making their struggle — let along the normal life we know today — nearly impossible.

Yeah, let the message of that sink in for a bit.  Government of "gorillas and the like".

They are rendered powerless — literally. The simian despots understand that depriving the humans of access to electricity will keep them underfoot. (The climax of the movie, as IBD explains, has humans in San Francisco — of all places — heroically reopening a power plant and bringing electricity back to the whole city.)

You starting to get the picture that maybe Caesar and his monkeys are being equated to President Obama just a bit here?

I wonder how many Americans got the subtle message here: Energy is the master resource. Without it, we return to a Stone Age existence. Life in its absence is nasty, brutish and short.

Your message is about as subtle as the wet splatter of tossed feces on a white silk dress, Steve.  Also, about as relevant.  Look, this guy is openly comparing climate change scientists and the governments that believe those scientists to science fiction monkeys.  This is his argument.  Forget the actual science here, talking monkeys with guns!

Obama will take your guns, your freedom, your electricity, any day now.

Is that where the radical Greens, one of the most influential political forces in America today, would take us? If we continue to follow their advice, electric power and fuel will become more expensive (as President Obama has admitted). TheInvestor’s Business Daily editorial noted, “as the Sierra Club, billionaire Tom Steyer and the Obama administration rage war against coal and other fossil fuel,” we could end up seeing “rolling brownouts and even blackouts in the years ahead.”

Yes, because the massive, massive preponderance of scientific evidence predicting that we're going to screw the ecosystem over with greenhouse gases is actually just the fevered product of "radical greens".  Wanting to not have your grandkids roasting while the world is fighting over potable water is "radical".

If these clowns are right, then power outages.  If the scientists are right, then underwater coastal cities.  The latter just may be worse than power outages.

The greens say, no problem, we will shift to renewable energy. But it’s not so simple, as IBD points out: States with onerous renewable-energy standards such as Colorado and California are still relying heavily on coal to fill in the gaps during bad weather or periods of high demand.

Sure.  We're not at 100% renewable energy sources yet.  But that would be a nuance for people that don't go straight to "a world without energy" in the second paragraph.

Sorry, for the foreseeable future, we aren’t going to get our power for our $18 trillion economy from wind turbines and solar panels. And if we begin to try, prices are going to skyrocket.

Except for the part where solar technology has advanced to the point where new solar plants can turn out energy for less money per kilowatt than coal.

Last summer our suburban home in northern Virginia lost power for two days during a storm. No lights, no computers, no air conditioning, no TV, no iPods or iPhones. To my three sons, this was like hell on earth. How did people live without electricity? They wondered. Very poorly, I told them.

I wonder how many young people will be so excited about “green energy” when such outages are commonplace and they come to the realization that life without those “dirty” sources of power won’t be so wonderful.

You know, Moore seems pretty concerned about the state of our electrical power infrastructure.  Perhaps we should take steps now to make sure America's power transmission lines stay in good shape rather than cutting funding.  Better still, investing in home solar seems like a good idea.

We don’t need apes to destroy our planet. The green humans seems to be doing a fine job of it all on their own.

This coming from the folks that will happily bring you the destruction of the planet's ecosystem in order to "roll coal".  That's an hysterical bit of monkey business.