Right-wing Media Continues Assualt on Truth

Fox News Tea Party Guest: Racism Is Over. It’s Socialism We Need To Fear!

Fritsch, an African American, announced that it didn’t matter whether or not Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, also African American, had been spit on during the tea party protest the day the House of Representatives passed the health care reform bill. What Americans really need to worry about, according to Fritsch, is the threat of socialism! With video. (H/T Matthew P)

Fritsch dismissed a video showing a protester spitting on Cleaver by saying, “The bottom line is, whether or not (Cleaver) was spit on or not really doesn’t matter. Truly, Americans no longer need to fear racists and racism in this country. That’s secondary. The real threat to the good life in America right now is socialism and everything that’s in this health care bill that is sending us down a path of destruction.”

The health care reform bill which will give insurance and health care corporations more customers and profits is socialism? Do Republicans ever know what they're talking about.

From the Salem Witch Trials time machine - modern conservatives, Fox, WorldNetDaily add Berwick to witch hunt of Obama appointees

Former Bush officials rip Tea Parties: They’re ‘outrageous,’ based on ‘fear and hatred,’ bad for GOP

Last night on CNN, Larry King discussed the growth of the Tea Parties and their effect on the Republican Party. While Nancy Pfotenhauer, a Republican strategist who has worked in the past for David Koch, the oil billionaire funding the top groups organizing the Tea Parties, praised the development as “phenomenal,” other Republicans were doubtful. David Frum, a speech writer in the Bush White House, and Scott McClellan, the former press secretary to Bush, decried the Tea Parties for their extreme views, like seeking to abolish Social Security. McClellan explained that the Tea Parties have “limited appeal” because they are simply a “divisive protest movement” that “plays too much to people’s fears and hatred”

Exploiting people's fears and base emotions has been a staple of Republican propaganda since the 1950s. The tea bag crowd is just a rebranded version of the same old.

Conservative Reactions Resemble Mental Illness

If at First You Don’t Succeed, Hope for Activist Judges
Conservative State Attorneys Erroneously Claim Health Reform Is Unconstitutional

The ink on the recently enacted health legislation is barely even dry, but right-wing officials are already trying to wipe it away. Eleven conservative state attorneys general are claiming that the new law is unconstitutional in a series of lawsuits, some of which they promised to file immediately after President Barack Obama signed the bill into law. Their arguments, however, have no basis in the Constitution.

To understand why, one must first understand how the Constitution allocates power between Congress and the states. Congress’s authority is limited to an itemized list of powers contained in the text of the Constitution itself, whereas states have somewhat broader authority.

Even though Congress’s powers are not unlimited, they are still quite sweeping. One of Congress’s broadest powers, for example, is its power to spend money. Congress is free to spend money, so long as it does so to “provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States.” For this reason, the provisions of health reform that create new subsidies or otherwise spend federal dollars are clearly constitutional. There is no question that a program designed to ensure that every American has affordable health coverage—no matter what their income or employment status—provides for the “general welfare” of this country.

To their credit, the 11 attorneys general do not appear to question this obvious truth. Their suits focus instead on the new law’s provisions that require individuals to carry health insurance—whether provided by a public program or an employer, or purchased on their own (with help from subsidies for low- and middle-income individuals)—and that fine employers who do not provide health insurance to their employees. The attorneys general claim that both provisions fall outside of Congress’s enumerated powers.

But the attorneys general are wrong. Article I of the Constitution empowers Congress “[t]o regulate commerce . . . among the several states.” The language of this “Commerce Clause” of the Constitution contains two elements. Congress must attempt to regulate “commerce” in order to invoke its commerce power, and this commerce must be “among the several states,” for example, multistate in nature. A requirement to carry health insurance passes both of these tests.

The Supreme Court has not handed down a concise definition of just what qualifies as “commerce,” but even ultraconservative Justice Antonin Scalia acknowledged in a case called Gonzales v. Raich that Congress has sweeping authority to regulate “economic activity” under the Commerce Clause. There is a long line of cases holding that Congress has broad power to enact laws that substantially affect prices, marketplaces, and commercial transactions, which support Justice Scalia’s conclusion. A law requiring all Americans to hold health insurance does all of these things.

The very same Gonzales v. Raich case establishes that Congress can regulate even tiny insurance providers who serve only a handful of local residents because such local activity substantially affects a multistate market. Raich held that a federal ban on medical marijuana should apply even to small-time growers who give their product away to local residents. Because small-time growers compete in a marketplace with major interstate dealers of marijuana, a local grower’s decision to offer free cannabis to a few patients influences the price of marijuana in the interstate marketplace, and this effect on interstate prices is enough to bring a local grower’s actions within the Commerce Clause’s umbrella.

Most of the attorneys general's rhetoric has been heavy on political grandstanding and light on actual legal arguments, but proponents of the attorneys general's viewpoint do cite two cases where the Supreme Court struck down a law for exceeding Congress’s commerce power. In United States v. Lopez, the Court struck down a law banning the simple act of bringing a firearm into a school zone. Five years later, the Court in United States v. Morrison struck down a portion of the Violence Against Women Act.

What these cases have in common is that the laws at issue involved activity that was far less economic in nature than the purchase of health insurance. Neither carrying a gun nor committing an act of violence involves a sale, a market, or an exchange of something of value. No employer hires workers simply to carry a gun into a schoolhouse, and there is little marketplace for cowardly acts of violence. In other words, Lopez and Morrison stand for the proposition that Congress’s power over noneconomic matters is far more limited than its power to enact laws with an economic impact.

We here at the Field Guide encourage cons to spend as much of their time as possible with lawsuits, bizarre demonstrations and temper tantrums. As they say idle hands are the devil's work shop and cons seem to have an awful lot of idle time. Which goes hand in hand with their deranged priorities..

Health Care Reform FAQ

The bill costs nearly $1 trillion in the first 10 years. How exactly does it reduce the deficit?
First, it slows spending on Medicare and Medicaid by reducing the rates those programs pay for services such as hospital visits. (It also reduces the amounts paid out through the Medicare Advantage program.) Second, it introduces new taxes, including a 0.9 percent Medicare payroll tax hike for workers who make more than $200,000 a year (and couples who make more than $250,000 a year) and a 3.8 percent tax on unearned income for the same tax brackets. Both taxes will take effect in 2013. Lastly, the so-called "Cadillac" tax on relatively high-end employer-sponsored insurance plans will target individual plans that cost more than $10,200 every year and family plans that cost more than $27,500. (The "Cadillac" tax won't roll out until 2018.) The Congressional Budget Office estimates that, together, these measures will decrease spending and increase revenue enough to reduce the deficit by $143 billion over the first 10 years and more than $1 trillion in the second decade.

...What if I have federally subsidized insurance and need an abortion? Who pays for it?
You do. The compromise struck between the House and the Senate says that federal funds cannot be used to pay for abortions. So if the federal government fully subsidizes your plan, you have to pay out of pocket for abortions—except in cases of rape or incest. (This is the same arrangement for women covered by Medicaid.) Even if the government only partly subsidizes your insurance, you still have to pay for the portion of the insurance that covers abortion. Here's how it works: You write two separate checks to your insurance company every month—one to cover possible abortions, one for all other treatments and services. The federal government then contributes a third stream of money, which cannot be used to pay for abortions. Insurers that offer abortion coverage are required to keep those three pots of money separate. So any time someone gets an abortion, it's paid for from the account devoted exclusively to abortion coverage. (Pro-life advocates who claim that the health care bill subsidizes abortion argue that even if you keep the pots of money separate, the government is still contributing to plans that allow abortion.)

More answers to FAQs at link.

British inquiry into Iraq war turns toward Bush, officials: report

British inquiry into Iraq war turns toward Bush, officials: report

British inquiry into Iraq war turns toward Bush, officials: report Senior Bush administration officials, including former President George W. Bush himself, have been asked to give testimony before a British committee investigating the basis for the invasion of Iraq, according to a published report.

Other officials contacted by the panel include former Vice President Dick Cheney, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former Bush adviser Stephen Hadley, among others.

"Members of Sir John Chilcot's panel are believed to be willing to travel to the US to take evidence – almost certainly in private – on the administration's policies between the 2003 invasion of Iraq and 2009," The Telegraph reported on Sunday.

The paper's lead is based on statements made by unnamed sources in Washington, D.C., and the story notes that even while the Chilcot has succeeded in obtaining testimony from high-ranking British officials, it does not have subpoena power in the U.K. or U.S.

....When American officials were forced to state publicly that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction, they blamed the intelligence community and professed their personal honesty. A key British document called the "Downing Street Memo" later surfaced, detailing U.S. and British pre-war political strategy, noting that the decision to invade was made months before it was announced and that "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

There are still plenty of ordinary folks that believe every false word about WMD and Saddam somehow being connected to 9-11. Though there is a portion of right-wing Cons that know there were no WMD, connections to al Queda and 9-11. hey it was not their fault because the CIA and other intelligence agencies gave them poor information. Both schools of Conservative blame shifting have been proved wrong. Besides the Downing Street memos we have former CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar, Ex-CIA Official Faults Use of Data on Iraq
Intelligence 'Misused' to Justify War, He Says

The former CIA official who coordinated U.S. intelligence on the Middle East until last year has accused the Bush administration of "cherry-picking" intelligence on Iraq to justify a decision it had already reached to go to war, and of ignoring warnings that the country could easily fall into violence and chaos after an invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

Paul R. Pillar, who was the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, acknowledges the U.S. intelligence agencies' mistakes in concluding that Hussein's government possessed weapons of mass destruction. But he said those misjudgments did not drive the administration's decision to invade.

"Official intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs was flawed, but even with its flaws, it was not what led to the war," Pillar wrote in the upcoming issue of the journal Foreign Affairs. Instead, he asserted, the administration "went to war without requesting -- and evidently without being influenced by -- any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq."

Another Day Another Load of Republican Lies and Distortions

Republicans previously used 'self executing" rule to make it appear as though they were not passing a tax/fee increase, The Tax Debate Nobody Hears About

John Boehner (R-OH) Tells Bankers To Fight Financial Reform: ‘Don’t Let Those Little Punk Staffers Take Advantage Of You’ - gee who would Boehner the Cry Baby be acting as though bankers have a hand up his back pulling the strings,

Prior to Boehner’s speech, American Bankers Association President Edward Yingling urged delay in the financial reform effort, because “every day that passes gives more leverage to [Banking Committee Ranking Member Richard Shelby (R-AL)].” In his career, Boehner has received $3.4 million from the financial services industry, which is $1.2 million more than he’s received from any other industry.

Glenn Beck may start having another break down if he is forced to have an honest debate, Why is Fox “News” Channel Funding Research to Smear an American Pastor?

QUICK FACT: The Republican gossip rag and Moonie backed Washington Times falsely declared reconciliation and self-executing rule "rare procedural tools"

Say it isn't so. Republicans are lying about health care reform and what it will cost, CBO Highlights Republican Deficit Posturing

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates for the final health care bill are bringing smiles to Democratic faces. Over 10 years, the $940 billion package will cover 32 million more Americans while ending insurance abuses including rescission and the use of pre-existing conditions to deny coverage.

But the ersatz deficit hawks of the Republican Party should be happy, too. For less than half the cost of the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts, the CBO forecasts the final health care bill will trim the deficit by $130 billion over the first decade and $1.3 trillion over 20 years.

Why do conservatives hate America and its values.

Is It True That Republicans Have Used Deem and Pass More Than Democrats

The Slaughter Solution? Another name might be the Dreier Doctrine.

Self-executing rules began innocently enough in the 1970s as a way of making technical corrections to bills. But, as the House became more partisan in the 1980s, the majority leadership was empowered by its caucus to take all necessary steps to pass the party's bills. This included a Rules Committee that was used more creatively to devise procedures to all but guarantee policy success. The self-executing rule was one such device to make substantive changes in legislation while ensuring majority passage.

When Republicans were in the minority, they railed against self-executing rules as being anti-deliberative because they undermined and perverted the work of committees and also prevented the House from having a separate debate and vote on the majority's preferred changes. From the 95th to 98th Congresses (1977-84), there were only eight self-executing rules making up just 1 percent of the 857 total rules granted. However, in Speaker Tip O'Neill's (D-Mass.) final term in the 99th Congress, there were 20 self-executing rules (12 percent). In Rep. Jim Wright's (D-Texas) only full term as Speaker, in the 100th Congress, there were 18 self-executing rules (17 percent). They reached a high point of 30 under Speaker Tom Foley (D-Wash.) during the final Democratic Congress, the 103rd, for 22 percent of all rules.

When Republicans took power in 1995, they soon lost their aversion to self-executing rules and proceeded to set new records under Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.). There were 38 and 52 self-executing rules in the 104th and 105th Congresses (1995-1998), making up 25 percent and 35 percent of all rules, respectively. Under Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) there were 40, 42 and 30 self-executing rules in the 106th, 107th and 108th Congresses (22 percent, 37 percent and 22 percent, respectively). Thus far in the 109th Congress, self-executing rules make up about 16 percent of all rules.

Deem and pass is just like using reconciliation. Republicans set new records for reconciliation, then whined when Democrats even thought of using. Conservatives have claimed in the past year that reconciliation and 'deem and pass' are both un-Constitutional, but conservatives have set records for the use of both procedures. Want to get Washington D.C. working for the people instead of playing games - vote out Republicans until they grow up.

The Texas Education Massacre. State Motto to be Changed to Do Not Mess With the Morons

Texas Board of Education cuts Thomas Jefferson out of its textbooks.

The Texas Board of Education has been meeting this week to revise its social studies curriculum. During the past three days, “the board’s far-right faction wielded their power to shape lessons on the civil rights movement, the U.S. free enterprise system and hundreds of other topics”:

– To avoid exposing students to “transvestites, transsexuals and who knows what else,” the Board struck the curriculum’s reference to “sex and gender as social constructs.”

– The Board removed Thomas Jefferson from the Texas curriculum, “replacing him with religious right icon John Calvin.”

– The Board refused to require that “students learn that the Constitution prevents the U.S. government from promoting one religion over all others.”

– The Board struck the word “democratic” from the description of the U.S. government, instead terming it a “constitutional republic.”

As the nation’s second-largest textbook market, Texas has enormous leverage over publishers, who often “craft their standard textbooks based on the specs of the biggest buyers.” Indeed, as The Washington Monthly has reported, “when it comes to textbooks, what happens in Texas rarely stays in Texas.”

Text books for every state from Maine to Illinois to Hawaii have been influenced by anti-Enlightenment/anti-democratic ideals for years - courtesy the state of Texas and conservatives that would like to rewrite history to their weird version of it. Thus the reason history texts tend to be watered down airy tales and so many Americans ignorant of our history. More here from the Texas Freedom Network,

Board member Cynthia Dunbar wants to change a standard having students study the impact of Enlightenment ideas on political revolutions from 1750 to the present. She wants to drop the reference to Enlightenment ideas (replacing with “the writings of”) and to Thomas Jefferson. She adds Thomas Aquinas and others. Jefferson’s ideas, she argues, were based on other political philosophers listed in the standards. We don’t buy her argument at all. Board member Bob Craig of Lubbock points out that the curriculum writers clearly wanted to students to study Enlightenment ideas and Jefferson. Could Dunbar’s problem be that Jefferson was a Deist? The board approves the amendment, taking Thomas Jefferson OUT of the world history standards.

Texas Conservatives Win Curriculum Change - or Mentally and emotionally disturbed nitwits get their way,

Efforts by Hispanic board members to include more Latino figures as role models for the state’s large Hispanic population were consistently defeated, prompting one member, Mary Helen Berlanga, to storm out of a meeting late Thursday night, saying, “They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist.”

“They are going overboard, they are not experts, they are not historians,” she said. “They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world.”

....Mavis B. Knight, a Democrat from Dallas, introduced an amendment requiring that students study the reasons “the founding fathers protected religious freedom in America by barring the government from promoting or disfavoring any particular religion above all others.”

It was defeated on a party-line vote.

After the vote, Ms. Knight said, “The social conservatives have perverted accurate history to fulfill their own agenda.”

In economics, the revisions add Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, two champions of free-market economic theory, among the usual list of economists to be studied, like Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. They also replaced the word “capitalism” throughout their texts with the “free-enterprise system.”

“Let’s face it, capitalism does have a negative connotation,” said one conservative member, Terri Leo. “You know, ‘capitalist pig!’ ”

"The clergy...believe that any portion of power confided to me [as President] will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly: for I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. But this is all they have to fear from me: and enough, too, in their opinion." --Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Rush, 1800. ME 10:173

Far Right Republicans Advocate Abolishing Basic Rules of Law

Marc Thiessen and Andrew McCarthy Think America Should be More Like Nazi Germany or Communist China

Consider McCarthy’s basic argument that lawyers who represented detainees “aided the enemy in wartime,” and should normally be guilty of treason. If that’s true, isn’t the federal judiciary, and aren’t the Justices of the Supreme Court, also guilty of treason? In fact, aren’t the judges the kingpins of this treasonous plot to “hurt the war effort”? After all, lawyers only make arguments to judges. It doesn’t actually help detainees to make argument courts reject. It’s up to the judges to rule one way or the other. If the lawyers are aiding the enemy, they’re only minor players: It’s the judges, and especially the Justices, who are the real guilty parties, as they’re the ones that actually help the detainees by ruling in their favor. Does McCarthy think the Justices of the Supreme Court are guilty of aiding the enemy, and that (if we treat them like everybody else) they should be “indicted for coming to the enemy’s aid during wartime”?

Second, McCarthy’s claims about the right to counsel strike me as just wrong. The Bush Administration had initially taken the view that Yaser Hamdi, detained as an enemy combatant, did not have a right to counsel. The Administration caved when the case got to the Supreme Court, though, and the Supreme Court had this to say about Hamdi’s right to counsel:

Hamdi asks us to hold that the Fourth Circuit also erred by denying him immediate access to counsel upon his detention and by disposing of the case without permitting him to meet with an attorney. Brief for Petitioners 19. Since our grant of certiorari in this case, Hamdi has been appointed counsel, with whom he has met for consultation purposes on several occasions, and with whom he is now being granted unmonitored meetings. He unquestionably has the right to access to counsel in connection with the proceedings on remand. No further consideration of this issue is necessary at this stage of the case.

Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 542 U.S. 507 (2004) (emphasis added). Hamdi was a U.S. citizen, but lower courts have concluded that Gitmo detainees who are citizens of other countries also have the right to counsel. See, e.g., Al-Joudi v. Bush, 406 F.Supp.2d 13 (D.D.C. 2005) (ordering the government to inform detainee counsel about information relating to Guantanamo detainees in light of the detainees “right to counsel, which requires that counsel be able to communicate with them”).

A False Analogy: Detainee Lawyers and Torture Lawyers

One op-ed, by former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, supports both sets of lawyers, and denounces the Liz Cheney "Keep America Safe" conspiracy theories about them. The other, by Washington Post columnist and torture cheerleader Marc Thiessen, enthusiastically backs Cheney's character assassinations. For Mukasey, criticizing either set of lawyers "is all of a piece, and what it is a piece of is something both shoddy and dangerous" -- criticizing lawyers for the arguments they make on behalf of clients. Thiessen, rejecting the charge that Cheney's group are McCarthyites, asks "Where was the moral outrage when fine lawyers like John Yoo, Jay Bybee, David Addington, Jim Haynes, Steve Bradbury, and others came under vicious personal attack?" Thiessen has no use for moral equivalence: for him, torture lawyers are good and detainee lawyers are the equivalent of mob lawyers. But, like Mukasey, he sees a parallel between the two sets of criticisms, and agrees that those who criticize the torture lawyers but not the detainee lawyers are using a double standard, probably for illicit political reasons.

That would include me, since I called the Cheney attacks McCarthyism and have criticized the torture lawyers for years.

But in fact, the parallel is completely bogus. What makes the Cheney attacks McCarthyism is guilt by association, wrapped in innuendo, and cynically appealing to paranoia: Because you represented a detainee, you very likely sympathize with Al Qaeda, and we need to smoke you out.

Thiessen’s Inconsistency Undermines Claim That Detainee Lawyers Can’t Be Compared To John Adams

Despite the backlash from prominent conservative lawyers against Liz Cheney and Keep America Safe’s “al Qaeda 7? ad that questions the loyalty of Justice Department lawyers who worked on behalf of detainees, some on the right have risen to Cheney’s defense. On Monday, torture advocate Marc Thiessen dedicated his new Washington Post column to defending the ad, saying that Cheney asked “legitimate questions about Obama administration lawyers who defended America’s terrorist enemies.” Keep America Safe subsequently referred reporters to Thiessen’s column when asked to comment on the conservative criticism.

Today, Thiessen is up with another defense of the Cheney-led attacks, writing on the Washington Post’s PostPartisan blog that defenders of the Justice Department lawyers are wrong to invoke John Adams’ defense of British soldiers after the Boston massacre:

Defenders of the habeas lawyers representing al-Qaeda terrorists have invoked the iconic name of John Adams to justify their actions, claiming these lawyers are only doing the same thing Adams did when he defended British soldiers accused in the Boston Massacre. The analogy is clever, but wholly inaccurate.

For starters, Adams was a British subject at the time he took up their representation. The Declaration of Independence had not yet been signed, and there was no United States of America. The British soldiers were Adams’ fellow countrymen — not foreign enemies of the state at war with his country.

Thiessen’s argument that Adams was defending “fellow countrymen” and “not foreign enemies” is clever, but it’s undermined by the fact that some of the lawyers Thiessen and the ad impugn did work on behalf of American citizens. In a National Review blog post promoting his PostPartisan column, Thiessen directly attacks a lawyer who advocated on behalf of a detained American citizen:

Eric Holder vs. John Adams [Marc Thiessen]

I have a piece up for the Washington Post explaining why the al-Qaeda lawyers are wrong to wrap themselves in the mantle of John Adams. Thanks to the spade work of Bill Burck and Dana Perino, we now know why Holder was stonewalling on the identities of the “Al Qaeda 7” — he was one of them! If Holder and co. are simply carrying on the traditions of John Adams, why were they hiding their roles in seeking the release of enemy combatants? If they are proud of their work, why don’t they stand up and say so?

Yesterday, Perino and Burck published an article on National Review Online detailing how Holder contributed to, but neglected to tell the Senate about, an amicus brief to the Supreme Court supporting Jose Padilla, an American citizen who was held as an enemy combatant. Another one of the lawyers smeared by the ad, Joseph Guerra, now Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General, worked on a brief urging that the Supreme Court hear Padilla’s case. Another DoJ lawyer, Assistant Attorney General Tony West, worked on the case of “American Taliban” Johh Walker Lindh, an American citizen.

The discrepancy between Thiessen’s Post Partisan argument and the facts is indicative of his arguments in general. In discussing another one of Thiessen’s inconsistent arguments, Time’s Michael Scherer — who considers Thiessen’s vocal crusade to defend the Bush administration’s torture policies “a good thing” — remarked that he was “disappointed with the quality of Thiessen’s arguments, which seem to be designed more for cable news soundbites than for serious discussion.”

The Thiessen/Cheney/McCarthy argument in a nutshell: If you're accused of something you're guilty, let the hangings began upon arrest. There is nothing American about their point of view. Perhaps they would be happier living in Iran, China or sent back in time to fight on the side of the Third Reich - all of these regimes believed the same thing about justice as the right-wing conservatives behind "Keep America Safe".

Republicans Unable to Develop a Coherent Message on Health-Care

Drug Addict and Conservative God Rush Limbaugh unwittingly praises socialized medicine, again

Limbaugh unwittingly praises socialized medicine, againRight-wing radio talker Rush Limbaugh must be confused.

During a recent broadcast, he vowed to "go to Costa Rica" if President Obama is successful in passing his health reform legislation. Most assumed he meant the statement in the vein of his promise to leave New York City over its tax rates, which he did. Now Limbaugh is saying he will not leave the U.S., as in, move away. Instead, Limbaugh claims that he will simply "go to Costa Rica" for his medical care.

Interestingly enough, even as the Republican icon has made many a dollar damning proposals for public health care in the United States, his future hospital bed in Costa Rica will be watched over by the same "socialists" he's so known for deriding.

Costa Rica, you see, has socialized health care operated by a government insurance monopoly, which provides a remarkably high quality of service for a fraction of the costs routinely seen in the United States.

"Costa Rica’s public health insurance system, commonly known as the Caja, is available country-wide to all citizens and legal residents," the Costa Rican government's Web site explains. "There are ten major public hospitals – four in San Jose, including the Children’s Hospital – affiliated with the Caja. For non-emergencies and everyday medical care, small clinics, known as EBAIS (pronounced ay-vy-ice), are located in almost every community."
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Prior to the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), all health care in Costa Rica was paid for under a single payer system and the country developed a global reputation as a prime destination for medical tourism due to the high quality of care at very low costs. After CAFTA, Costa Rica began accepting international private insurer's policies, though they are made available through a government-operated insurance monopoly.

"Most plans cover dental work, optometry, and cosmetic surgery in the case of an accident, and neither pre-existing conditions nor annual check-ups are included," the Costa Rican government claims. "Prescription drugs, certain medical exams, sick visits and hospitalization are covered at 70% cost, and surgeon and aesthetician costs are covered at full cost. Currently, private medical insurance costs about $50-$100/month per person, depending on age, gender and other factors."

"I did not say I'm going to Costa Rica," Limbaugh claimed, even though the audio of him saying exactly that is readily available. "The stupid people in the media who cannot trouble themselves to read my transcripts or listen to this program, listen to out of context stuff. I was asked yesterday where will I go for health care if Obama's health care passes, and I said if doctors here are not permitted to form private practice little clinics with individuals paying a fee, a retainer, and for services, then I'll go to Costa Rica to get major medical health care. I didn't say I would move there."

This is the second time Limbaugh has unwittingly praised the very type of health care system he claims to despise.

After experiencing chest pains while vacationing in Hawaii, Limbaugh was rushed to a hospital and checked out by doctors, who pronounced him healthy. Once discharged, the right-wing jock praised Hawaii's health care by lumping it in with health services all over America: "the best health care in the world," he said.

However, Hawaii's system is the closest thing the United States has to a socialized health program, where all workers are provided with a "generous" health policy by their employer and nurses are unionized. One reporter further noted that many components of Hawaii's health system are now embedded in President Obama's reforms.

34 Of 41 Senate Republicans Supported Passing Major Domestic Policy Legislation Through Reconciliation

As the outlook on passage of health reform improves, Republicans have shifted to a new obstructionist strategy: attacking the process of reconciliation. Republicans claim that reconciliation was only intended to be used for bills dealing closely with the budget. In fact, when Republicans were in power, GOP lawmakers used reconciliation numerous times to pass major domestic policy legislation, including the Bush tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 and important changes to health care policy. In fact, 34 of the 41 Senate Republicans have used reconciliation in the past to pass major pieces of domestic policy.

The health-care debate or any other public policy debate has never been about the truth or honor for Republicans. How could it be. The modern conservative/right-wing/semi-fascist movement has always been been about spite, malice, racism, misogyny, ruining the environment, undermining our core values as a country and destroying the middle-class ( America had no real middle class until progressive taxation).

Conservatives have a Compulsion to Lash Out at Common Decency

THE GOP STILL JUST DOESN'T LIKE THE UNEMPLOYED.

It's astounding, but in the midst of an unemployment crisis, prominent Republicans continue to castigate those struggling to find jobs.

Yesterday, for example, disgraced former Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) argued that unemployment benefits are a bad idea, because, as he sees it, they discourage people from entering the work force.

"You know," DeLay said, "there is an argument to be made that these extensions of these unemployment benefits keeps people from going and finding jobs." When CNN's Candy Crowley described his argument as "a hard sell" to the public, DeLay replied, "It's the truth."

Crowley followed up, asking, "People are unemployed because they want to be?" DeLay again said, "Well, it is the truth."

Most most Conservatives former Speaker of the House Delay(R-TX) holds working class Americans in contempt. This idea there is lazy class of Americans is true - only it applies to people who have amassed millions in unearned wealth and cons like Delay want to make sure they do not pay their share of taxes.

Liz Cheney's Impeccable Timing

It's nice to see that even conservatives are disgusted with Liz Cheney's latest attack on Eric Holder. As you've no doubt heard, Cheney is miffed that there are attorneys in the Department of Justice who, in the past, have defended people accused of nasty crimes. Of course, that's what defense lawyers are supposed to do, but that doesn't stop Liz Cheney from sponsoring scary videos insinuating that defending someone swept up by US forces and accused of terrorism is just fundamentally worse than defending an ordinary serial murderer, rapist or corporate swindler.

Cheney and her small but highly vocal group Keep America Safe know how to prey on people's worst fears and prejudices. So I'm not all that surprised by their attack on lawyers like Neal Katyal, a Georgetown law professor, now Principal Deputy Solicitor General, who previously argued that the Bush administration's military commissions were unconstitutional -- and convinced a conservative U.S. Supreme Court that he was right.

But there's another reason Cheney's latest attack should not have come as a surprise. Consider the timing: late on Friday, February 18, the Department of Justice released a long-delayed report that set out the details of how two Justice Department lawyers, in close contact with the Vice President's office, wrote a series of legal memos that grossly perverted existing law and longstanding legal precedent to justify some of the most heinous acts of torture and institutionalized abuse of U.S. prisoners in American history. Although a career official at the Justice Department ultimately decided that the department's internal ethics rules were too unclear to recommend sanctions, the facts of the underlying report remain a damning indictment of attorneys John Yoo and Jay Bybee, among others, who gave the legal green light to criminal and immoral conduct.

What better time for Liz Cheney to change the subject?

Just as Delay hates working class Americans, Liz and her father hate justice. If she has to lie and be a blithering liar and hypocrite to obscure the fact of her contempt she and the other America haters at "Keep America Safe" fell that is a small price to pay. She needs to stop reading the works of Italian fascist and start reading Madison and Jefferson.

Its hard to believe that Glenn Reynolds is a law professor. Where did he get his law degree, the people's Republic of China? Further Annals of Illiteracy

The knee-jerk analysis of Instapundit is generally so slipshod as to merit no notice, but this op-ed is remarkable by even his own low standards. Glenn Reynolds argues that whereas the vast majority of Americans think the federal government lacks the consent of the governed, nearly two-thirds of our political rulers imagine that they do have this consent. And the other third who don’t “presumably, are comfortable being tyrants.” He construes a revolutionary scenario from this alleged chasm in perceptions (which somehow he likens to Schlitz beer), though Reynolds holds out hope that America can be “transformed” now without violence.

Signs of Mental Illness - Conservatives and Reconciliation for Health-care Reform

Seven arguments Republicans should not be making against using reconciliation for health-care reform

1. Legislation needs 60 votes to pass the Senate.
On Fox News earlier this week, anchor Megyn Kelly provided viewers with a novel interpretation of reconciliation. "It means," she said, "that the bill will be pushed through the senate with 50 votes instead of the usual 60." Unfortunately, the Constitution implies that a simple majority (51 votes) is all it takes for legislation to pass the Senate. The number 60 refers to the supermajority required to break a filibuster, i.e., the extraconstitutional procedure that allows a single senator to delay whatever legislation he or she chooses. It's true that there have been more GOP filibusters (154) since Obama took office than there were between 1963 and 1983, and that this tactic has effectively created a situation where 60 votes are required to pass routine proposals as well as major programs. But that doesn't mean 60 votes are "usually" necessary. The current gridlock is a historical anomaly—the exception rather than the rule.

2. Democrats are threatening to use reconciliation to pass health-care reform.
In a Feb. 23 USA Today op-ed, Hatch wrote that the dastardly Dems were planning to use "special rules to circumvent bipartisan Senate opposition" and "jam this bill through Congress." But that's not true, and Hatch knows it. Why? Because he was actually in the Senate on Dec. 24 when Obama's bill passed. Here’s the CNN story to prove it. See? Sixty yea votes, 39 nay—which is nine votes more than the Dems needed, at least according to the U.S. Constitution. (A few weeks earlier, the House passed its own version of the bill, 220–215.) Furthermore, the opposition in the Senate was hardly bipartisan: every one of the 39 senators who voted against the bill was a Republican, and every one of the 60 senators who voted for it was a Democrat.

So Obama doesn't need to resort to reconciliation to pass health-care reform. He's already passed it. What he does need it for, however, is passing the revisions necessary to get the House and the Senate to agree on a single version of the legislation. This means that after the House passes the Senate version of the bill, the Senate will approve what's known as a "sidecar"—a small package of budget-related tweaks designed to make the House happy. These revisions represent the only part of health-care reform that Senate Democrats are seeking to pass through reconciliation, i.e., with a simple majority rather than a supermajority. This is less ambitious than the usual reconciliation process, which typically applies to entire bills, not more.

Glenn Beck, Andrew Breitbart and right-wing media grossly distort Reid's jobs comments. How? Beck, Fox and Breitbart must be reading up on their lessons on how to be good little anti-American fascist propagandists. Just like they did with ACORN, the right-wing media has edited the video tape.

Karl Rove and Andrew McCarthy Still Unrepentant Liars

Rove Book: No Pushback on Iraq WMD My Bad

As the AP described it, Rove's tall tale can be summarized as "if lying about WMD is wrong, I don't want to be right":

The former White House political adviser blames himself for not pushing back against claims that President George W. Bush had taken the country to war under false pretenses, calling it one of the worst mistakes he made during the Bush presidency. The president, he adds, did not knowingly mislead the American public about the existence of such weapons.

Of course, it's hard to imagine how the Bush administration could have pushed back any harder against charges that the President misled the nation into war. When Ambassador Joseph Wilson revealed the fraud that was Bush's 16-word claim about Iraq seeking uranium in Niger, the retribution included the outing of his wife Valerie Plame, covert CIA operative. The White House initially opposed the creation of the independent Silberman-Robb commission, later agreeing only on the conditions that its report be released after the 2004 elections and exclude any investigation of the uses of pre-war intelligence.

The New McCarthyism or Just the Same Old McCarthyism The Anti-American Right has Always Stood For.

The "Gitmo Nine" aren't terrorists. They weren't captured fighting for the Taliban. They've made no attempts to kill Americans. They haven't declared war on the United States, nor have they joined any group that has. The "Gitmo Nine" are lawyers working in the Department of Justice who fought the Bush administration's treatment of suspected terrorists as unconstitutional. Now, conservatives are portraying them as agents of the enemy.

In the aftermath of September 11, the Bush administration tried to set up a military-commissions system to try suspected terrorists. The commissions offered few due process rights, denied the accused access to the evidence against them, and allowed the admission of hearsay -- and even evidence gained through coercion or abuse. The Bush administration also sought to prevent detainees from challenging their detention in court. Conservatives argued that the nature of the war on terrorism justified the assertion of greater executive power. In case after case, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the administration's critics.

"These lawyers were advocating on behalf of our Constitution and our laws. The detention policies of the Bush administration were unconstitutional and illegal, and no higher a legal authority than the Supreme Court of the United States agreed," says Ken Gude, a human-rights expert with the Center for American Progress, of the recent assault on the Justice Department. "The disgusting logic of these attacks is that the Supreme Court is in league with al-Qaeda."

The attorneys who challenged the Bush administration's national-security policies saw themselves as fulfilling their legal obligations by fighting an unconstitutional power grab. At heart, this was a disagreement over process: Should people accused of terrorism be afforded the same human rights and due process protections as anyone else in American custody? But rather than portray the dispute as a conflict over what is and isn't within constitutional bounds, conservatives argue that anyone who opposed the Bush administration's policies is a traitor set to undermine America's safety from within the Justice Department.

"Terrorist sympathizers," wrote National Review's Andrew McCarthy in September, "have assumed positions throughout the Obama administration."

Since Obama took office, the question of detention procedure has been reintroduced and more deeply politicized. The Bush-era military commissions turned out to be woefully ineffectual and were widely seen as skewed against the defendants. Yet they produced only three convictions during the entire administration, in part because the U.S. Supreme Court kept knocking them down for failing to meet minimal due process standards. Meanwhile, civilian courts tried more than a hundred terrorism cases. But much to the disappointment of human-rights advocates, the Obama administration, while choosing to try the alleged September 11 plotters in civilian court, has opted to continue many Bush-era policies, including reformed military commissions.

Nevertheless, McCarthy, a former assistant U.S. attorney, blamed the "al-Qaeda bar" -- the attorneys who secured due process rights for detainees -- for Bush-era setbacks. "The principal reason there were so few military trials is the tireless campaign conducted by leftist lawyers to derail military tribunals by challenging them in the courts," McCarthy wrote in November. "Many of those lawyers are now working for the Obama Justice Department." In December, an unsigned National Review editorial referred to the series of "pro-terrorist" rulings by the courts that affirmed rights for individuals accused of terrorism.

Justice Department lawyers aren't the only ones who have represented accused terrorists. American military personnel have as well, often successfully. Major Eric Montalvo (retired), who acted as a defense counsel in the Guantanamo Bay military commissions, said that the accusation that lawyers who fought the Bush administration's policies were "terrorist sympathizers" was absurd. "That's not sympathy for a terrorist -- that's sympathy for the rule of law, the American way of doing business."

Lt. Col. David Frakt, who has represented detainees both in military and civilian courts, said that the lawyers who secured due process rights for detainees were ultimately vindicated. "There is an assumption there that has proven to be a fallacy, which is that everyone at Guantanamo was a terrorist," Frakt says, pointing to the fact that the government has lost three-quarters of the habeas petitions filed by detainees at Guantanamo. "What we have seen over and over and over is that the vast majority of detainees at Guantanamo are innocent."

Even former military prosecutors have expressed views similar to those of the "Gitmo Nine." Col. Morris Davis (retired) served as the former chief prosecutor for the Guantanamo Bay military commissions and has since argued that they should be abandoned. But initially, when the commissions were formed, he volunteered to be chief defense counsel. "I thought for the good of our system, they needed zealous representation," says Davis. He dismissed the charge that having represented a detainee indicated "sympathy" for terrorist goals. "I don't think that anyone, because they signed up to represent a detainee means they've signed up with al-Qaeda."

"[McCarthy] was a prosecutor for a number of years, so he knows better than that," Davis adds. "I think he's just saying it for the shock value of it."

McCarthy is no stranger to shock value -- he entertains a number of fringe beliefs, including the possibility that Barack Obama was not born in the United States and that former Weather Underground member William Ayers wrote the president's autobiography. Nonetheless, because of his experience as a prosecutor in the trial of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the mastermind behind the first World Trade Center bombing, McCarthy wields a great deal of influence in conservative circles on national-security matters. When Attorney General Eric Holder testified in front of the Senate regarding his decision to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed and the other alleged 9/11 conspirators in civilian courts, Sen. John Kyl read aloud from an op-ed McCarthy had published just the day before, in which McCarthy alleges that "leftist lawyers" actively sought to aid "America's enemies."

Holder shrugged off the op-ed's insinuations: "I'm not worried about McCarthy."

In the same hearing, Sen. Chuck Grassley demanded that Holder identify the number of attorneys in the Justice Department who had litigated on behalf of suspected terrorist detainees, or at least offer a list of the recusals. He argued that "this prior representation creates a conflict-of-interest problem for these individuals." Holder said he would consider Grassley's request and assured him that "we're very sensitive to that concern and mindful of it, and people who should not participate in certain decisions do not do so." Holder added that he had already recused himself because his former law firm, Covington and Burling, had been involved in detainee cases. Grassley subsequently formalized his request in a letter to Holder, and separately, the rest of the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee wrote a joint letter to the Justice Department demanding that Holder identify the attorneys by name.

On Feb. 18, Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weisch responded to Grassley's inquiries, saying, "Only five of the lawyers who serve as political appointees in those components represented detainees, and four others either contributed to amicus briefs in detainee-related cases or were otherwise involved in advocacy on behalf of detainees." Weisch said that some lawyers had recused themselves from specific cases. But he added that it was common for lawyers in the Justice Department, who go in and out of public practice, to "make legal arguments on behalf of the United States that are contrary to legal arguments they made previously on behalf of a prior client in private practice." Prosecutors become defense lawyers, and vise-versa.

But it was too late for reasoning. By this point the rest of the conservative media had begun taking up the cause, referring to the lawyers Weisch had mentioned as "The Gitmo Nine." At the Washington Examiner, Byron York accused Holder of "stonewalling" Congress. "Who are the Gitmo 9?" McCarthy demanded to know from his perch at National Review. Then, last Friday, Republicans responded to Weisch, accusing the Justice Department of being "at best nonresponsive and, at worst, intentionally evasive." The Washington Times followed up, echoing McCarthy's demand for the identities of the so-called Gitmo Nine. By that point, two Justice Department lawyers, Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal and Human Rights Watch former senior counsel Jennifer Daskal, had already been identified. Unlike the Republican senators, whose concerns were centered around "potential conflicts of interest," the Times editorial argued that "the public has a right to know if past work for terrorist detainees has biased too many of Mr. Holder's top advisers." It was a delicate way of suggesting that lawyers who were holding the government to its constitutional obligations were in fact, if not agents of, sympathetic to al-Qaeda.

On Tuesday, all attempts at subtlety were abandoned. Keep America Safe, the conservative advocacy group which was founded by Liz Cheney to defend torture and oppose civilian trials for suspected terrorists and which has close ties to McCarthy, turned the "Gitmo Nine" into the "al-Qaeda Seven." The group put out a Web video demanding that Holder name the other Justice Department lawyers who had previously represented terrorist detainees or worked on similar issues for groups that opposed the Bush administration's near-limitless assumption of executive power. "Whose values do they share?" a voice asks ominously. "Americans have a right to know the identity of the al-Qaeda Seven." The ad echoed McCarthy's references to the "al-Qaeda bar" from months earlier.

"This is exactly what Joe McCarthy did," said Gude. "Not kind of like McCarthyism; this is exactly McCarthyism."

The attorneys who secured greater due process rights for detainees weren't attempting to prevent terrorists from being punished -- they were attempting to prevent the government from assuming limitless power to imprison people indefinitely based on mere suspicion. Not all of those fighting the Bush administration's policies even believed that terrorists should be tried in civilian courts. Katyal, who litigated the 2006 Hamdan v. Rumsfeld case in which the Supreme Court decided in the detainees' favor, advocated for using military courts martial -- and later, authored an op-ed for The New York Times alongside former Bush lawyer Jack Goldsmith arguing for a new "national security court" to try terrorists. Still, Katyal held that Bush's general policy for trying terrorists "closely resemble those of King George III."

And related to thesee wacky allegations by the foaming at the mouth McCarthyites, Will Liz Cheney Attack Rudy Giuliani's Firm For Representing 'Terrorist Detainees'?

Republicans Accuse American Workers of Being Lazy Thieves

The “Threat of an Arrogant Laboring Class, ...a Threat to the Foundation not Merely of Wealth but of Existence Itself”

This Is Getting Good, by Joe Klein: Jim Bunning is doing all of us a favor. As this comment from the Number 2 Senate Republican, Jon Kyl of Arizona, makes clear, the Republicans are turning toward a form of reactionary radicalism that is well to the right not only of traditional conservatism, but also of post-Victorian concepts of government and--not to put too fine a point on it--of common decency as well:

Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona, the Republican whip, argued that unemployment benefits dissuade people from job-hunting "because people are being paid even though they're not working." Unemployment insurance "doesn't create new jobs. In fact, if anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work,"

The idea that those who have lost their jobs in this Wall Street/mortgage-scam recession are simply deadbeats, choosing to stay on unemployment rather than look for work, seems more appropriate to Scrooge's London than the 21st century. But Kyl has spoken his version of the truth, and we should be grateful for that: this is what the Republican Party is now all about. ...

Let's call the roll. Let's see how many allies Jim Bunning and Jon Kyl have. Let's find out their names and remember them. This is so important that we should stop all other business: Let them filibuster...and spend hours telling us exactly what else they would abolish.

The conservative senators seem completely unhinged from reality. Unemployment benefits are usually a small percentage of your previous job's salary - and barely enough to survive. So there is no incentive to stay on unemeployment


Who really gets hurt when GOP's Bunning blocks this bill?

The Department of Transportation furloughed nearly 2,000 employees without pay Monday as the government began to feel the impact of Republican Sen. Jim Bunning's one-man blockage of legislation that would keep a host of federal programs operating.

Bunning's "hold" also affects jobless benefits for thousands of unemployed workers, rural television customers, doctors receiving Medicare payments and others.

Bunning wants the $10 billion price of extending the programs offset by reductions in spending elsewhere in the budget to not drive up the deficit.

Absent that, his objections to proceed with the legislation deny the Senate the "unanimous consent" that Senate rules require for going forward under expedited procedure. The Senate can overcome his objection if 60 of its 100 members vote to do so. So far they haven't, and doing that would take at least four days under Senate rules.

"As American families are struggling in tough economic times, I am keenly disappointed that political games are putting a stop to important construction projects around the country," Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said in a statement. "This means that construction workers will be sent home from job sites because federal inspectors must be furloughed."

Federal projects shut down include more than $38 million in project funding for Idaho's Nez Perce National Forest and Fernan Lakes Idaho Panhandle National Forest and $86 million for bridge replacements in the Washington, D.C., area. Bunning's home state of Kentucky has no projects affected by his action.

However, nearly 1.2 million unemployed workers, including 14,000 in Kentucky, would lose federal jobless benefits this month if Congress doesn't extend them, according to the National Employment Law Project, a liberal-leaning research group. The U.S. Labor Department estimates that about a third will lose benefits in the first two weeks of the month.