What Liberal Media? Cable News Blames Public Unions For WI Budget Shortfall

What Liberal Media? Cable News Blames Public Unions For WI Budget Shortfall

In response to public worker protests in Wisconsin, Fox News has falsely blamed public unions for the state's budget shortfall. In fact, the deficit is reportedly due to other obligations.

Fox Blames Public Unions For WI Budget Shortfall

Kilmeade States That WI Faces Budget Shortfall Of "Over $100 Million" And That Walker Wants To "Close That Gap" By "Revisit[ing] The Public Employee Deals." On the February 18 edition of Fox & Friends, co-host Brian Kilmeade stated:

KILMEADE: Wisconsin is a state like many states in this country that has a bit of a budget deficit, the tune of over $100 million. So one way in which new Gov. Scott Walker wants to close that gap is to go revisit the public employee deals, government worker deals that have been cut between union workers and the state government. So, why not put that forward? Why not have them pay into their pensions? Why not have them pay into their retirement health care, because we, together, have to balance the budget, and the people have spoken out in November. They want Republicans to do the cutting. And that was the easy part. [Fox News' Fox & Friends, 2/18/11]

Killmeade: Walker "Can't Balance The Budget Unless He Gets These Contracts In Line." Later on Fox & Friends, Kilmeade asserted that Walker "can't balance the budget unless he gets these contracts in line." [Fox & Friends, 2/18/11]

O'Reilly: "Wisconsin Has A $3.6 Billion Shortfall Through 2013 And Simply Cannot Afford To Pay Its Bills ... And Public Workers Are The First Ones To Take The Hit." On the February 17 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, host Bill O'Reilly stated:

O'REILLY: Well, the state of Wisconsin has a $3.6 billion- short fall through 2013 and simply cannot afford to pay its bills. This is happening in many states and public workers are the first ones to take the hit. Obviously that's not going over well in Wisconsin.

[...]

O'REILLY: But if state workers will not give back some of their benefits, there is no solution to the fiscal crisis anywhere. You can't raise taxes anymore. The folks are tapped out, right?

Where I live on Long Island some elderly people are actually selling their homes because they can't sell the high property tax rate. The solution in bankrupt states is where these two agree to some kind of give back perhaps over a few years, that way they can look for other jobs in the private sector if they don't believe they are being compensated fairly in the public arena. I think that would be fair.

"Talking Points" believes that class warfare is about to break out in America. Union benefits are strangling not only state budgets but also the private economy.

Yes, workers do need protection. They need some kind of security in the marketplace. But, the cold truth is, that federal and state workers have reached the top of their earning pyramid. Bankruptcy looms in California and other states and give-backs are coming. The blow back to that will be nasty. [Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, 2/17/11, accessed via Nexis]

Hannity Says That "Wisconsin Taxpayers" Are "Picking Up The Slack" For State Workers. On the February 17 edition of his Fox News show, Sean Hannity stated that "Walker is asking that members of the unions do the following, put 5.8 percent of their wages towards their pensions. Most contribute almost nothing as things stand right now." He then stated, "Its Wisconsin taxpayers, they're the ones picking up the slack." [Fox News' Hannity, 2/17/11, accessed via Nexis]

Rove Notes Budget Shortfall And Calls Walker's Proposal "Fair" -- But Fails To Note That Walker's Tax Policies Helped Cause Shortfall. On the February 17 edition of Hannity, Fox News contributor Karl Rove stated that Wisconsin faces a "$137 million shortfall in this budget. They have a 3.6 billion shortfall in the coming -- they need to make tough decisions." [Hannity, 2/17/11, accessed via Nexis]
In Fact, The Shortfall Is Largely Due To Obligations Unreleated To Unions

AP: Wisconsin Faces Shortfall "Due Largely To Anticipated Medicaid Expenses And A Court-Ordered Repayment To A Fund That Was Raided Four Years Ago," And Walker's Tax Policies "Actually Make The State's Ongoing Budget Problem Worse." In a February 1 article, The Associated Press reported that "[a] new analysis released Monday showed that Wisconsin's budget could be between $79 million and $340 million short by June 30 due largely to anticipated Medicaid expenses and a court-ordered repayment to a fund that was raided four years ago." The AP further reported that tax cuts pushed through by Walker will "make the state's ongoing budget problem worse":

In Walker's first month in office he's pushed a number of tax cuts that actually make the state's ongoing budget problem worse. The Fiscal Bureau predicted the state will collect about $190 million less in taxes over the next two years than previously thought, with $117 million of that coming from Walker's tax cuts.

Walker argues the tax cuts will actually spur economic growth by making Wisconsin a more desirable place for businesses to locate. Democratic critics say the potential benefit to the tax breaks isn't significant enough given the cost. [The Associated Press, 2/1/11]

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Outlines Major Causes Of Wisconsin's Budget Shortfall, Which "Include Two Big Obligations" Unrelated To Unions That Total Almost $260M. In a February 1 article, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel noted causes of the state's budget shortfall and reported that Walker's tax policies accounted for "more than half" of an anticipated $203 million decline in tax revenues:

[T]he Legislature's budget office reported Monday that the budget shortfall for this fiscal year ending June 30 will total at least $78 million and could rise to as much as $336.5 million, depending on when the state pays up on two massive bills.

"Wisconsin, probably more than any other state in the country, is actively and aggressively moving to get people back to work," Walker said at the bill signing.

The state already faces a more than $3 billion shortfall in the 2011-'13 budget, so approving the tax incentive bills likely means Walker will have to find more spending cuts later.

The report Monday by the Legislative Fiscal Bureau found that over the next three fiscal years, the state will collect $203 million less in taxes than previously estimated. More than half of that drop in expected tax collections is because of tax-cut bills that Walker has signed or is poised to sign.

The report found that the state is projecting that spending on health care for the poor and related administrative costs, prisons and the state public defender's office will go nearly $200 million over budget this year.

In addition, the state has two big obligations looming: a $58.7 million payment to the State of Minnesota after the end of a tax-reciprocity agreement between Wisconsin and its neighbor; as well as an additional $200 million that the state is under court order to return to a medical malpractice fund after an illegal fund transfer in 2007 by lawmakers and Gov. Jim Doyle. The state has to pay all of that money, but not necessarily in this fiscal year. [Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 2/1/11]

Facts the media needs to get straight. The unions have agreed to pay and retirement benefits compromises. Walker has said that teachers and other union members must give up their bargaining rights forever, but has kept bargaining rights for police and firefighters. This is obviously not about money. It is about Walker using strong arm tactics to attack people and groups he does not like.

Disgraced Former Republican Tea Party Leader Calls On Right-Wing Activists To Pose As SEIU Organizers

But Tea Party Nation and Mark Williams, the disgraced former chairman of Tea Party Express, who was forced to resign after making offensive racial comments, are calling for a more radical approach. In an email alert to supporters sent last night, Tea Party Nation promotes Williams’ “great idea” to impersonate SEIU organizers at upcoming labor rallies in an attempt to embarrass and discredit the union.

Mohamed Hosni Mubarak Walker is to blame for Wisconsin's budget, not unions

Mohamed Hosni Mubarak Walker is to blame for Wisconsin's budget, not unions

Let's be clear: Whatever fiscal problems Wisconsin is -- or is not -- facing at the moment, they're not caused by labor unions. That's also true for New Jersey, for Ohio and for the other states. There was no sharp rise in collective bargaining in 2006 and 2007, no major reforms of the country's labor laws, no dramatic change in how unions organize. And yet, state budgets collapsed. Revenues plummeted. Taxes had to go up, and spending had to go down, all across the country.

Blame the banks. Blame global capital flows. Blame lax regulation of Wall Street. Blame home buyers, or home sellers. But don't blame the unions. Not for this recession.

Of course, the fact that public-employee pensions didn't cause a meltdown at Lehman Brothers doesn't mean they're not stressing state budgets, and that the pensions they've been promised don't exceed what state budgets seem able to bear. But the buildup of global capital that overheated the American housing sector and got packaged into seemingly riskless financial products that then brought down Wall Street, paralyzing the economy, throwing millions out of work, and destroying the revenues from state income and sales taxes even as state residents needed more social services? The answer to that is not to end collective bargaining for (some) public employees. A plus B plus C does not equal what Gov. Scott Walker is attempting in Wisconsin.

In fact, it particularly doesn't work for what Walker is attempting in Wisconsin. The Badger State was actually in pretty good shape. It was supposed to end this budget cycle with about $120 million in the bank. Instead, it's facing a deficit. Why? I'll let the state's official fiscal scorekeeper explain (pdf):

More than half of the lower estimate ($117.2 million) is due to the impact of Special Session Senate Bill 2 (health savings accounts), Assembly Bill 3 (tax deductions/credits for relocated businesses), and Assembly Bill 7 (tax exclusion for new employees).

In English: The governor called a special session of the legislature and signed two business tax breaks and a conservative health-care policy experiment that lowers overall tax revenues (among other things). The new legislation was not offset, and it helped turn a surplus into a deficit [see update at end of post]. As Brian Beutler writes, "public workers are being asked to pick up the tab for this agenda."

But even that's not the full story here. Public employees aren't being asked to make a one-time payment into the state's coffers. Rather, Walker is proposing to sharply curtail their right to bargain collectively. A cyclical downturn that isn't their fault, plus an unexpected reversal in Wisconsin's budget picture that wasn't their doing, is being used to permanently end their ability to sit across the table from their employer and negotiate what their health insurance should look like.

That's how you keep a crisis from going to waste: You take a complicated problem that requires the apparent need for bold action and use it to achieve a longtime ideological objective. In this case, permanently weakening public-employee unions, a group much-loathed by Republicans in general and by the Republican legislators who have to battle them in elections in particular. And note that not all public-employee unions are covered by Walker's proposal: the more conservative public-safety unions -- notably police and firefighters, many of whom endorsed Walker -- are exempt.

*The budget report is working with two time periods simultaneously: 2010-2011, and then 2011-13. The $130 million deficit now projected for 2011 isn't the fault of the tax breaks passed during Walker's special session, though his special session created about $120 million in deficit spending between 2011 and 2013 -- and perhaps more than that, if his policies are extended. That is to say, the deficit spending he created in his special session is about equal to the deficit Wisconsin faces this year, but it's not technically correct to say that Walker created 2011's deficit. Rather, he added $120 million to the 2011-2013 deficits, and perhaps more in the years after that.

Walker has said, along with some other recently elected right-wing nuts, they are going to create jobs. Now that's funny. Mohamed Hosni Mubarak Walker job creator,

The Department of Health Services last month signed a new contract with Deloitte Consulting for more maintenance and enhancement of the information system for SeniorCare and other income maintenance programs.

According to the public inspection copy of Deloitte’s technical proposal, the new, eight-year contract (known as CARES) increases the hourly billing rate from $92 to $104 and increases the fixed facilities rate from $1,320,000 to $2,040,000 a year. When multiplied by the 300,000 billable hours that DHS estimates will be available, this contract’s total annual cost is tens of millions of dollars.

DHS could scale back this contract by hiring information technology professionals and doing much of this work in-house for less money. That’s what the Department of Workforce Development did several years ago when they took over maintenance of the portions of the CARES system which deal with the W-2 and Child Care programs.

Why is DHS preparing to spend over $30 million a year on one information system when times are so tough? It won’t create jobs for Wisconsin residents since most of Deloitte’s workforce is subcontracted from India.

Maybe when Scott Walker promised during his gubernatorial campaign that he’d create 250,000 jobs, perhaps what he really meant was those jobs would be in India, not Wisconsin.

Why do Republicans hate America and American workers.

Wisconsin Gov. Walker Played Accounting Tricks To Show Budget Shortfall To Undercut Worker Rights

Wisconsin Gov. Walker Played Accounting Tricks To Show Budget Shortfall To Undercut Worker Rights

Wisconsin's new Republican governor has framed his assault on public worker's collective bargaining rights as a needed measure of fiscal austerity during tough times.

The reality is radically different. Unlike true austerity measures -- service rollbacks, furloughs, and other temporary measures that cause pain but save money -- rolling back worker's bargaining rights by itself saves almost nothing on its own. But Walker's doing it anyhow, to knock down a barrier and allow him to cut state employee benefits immediately.

Furthermore, this broadside comes less than a month after the state's fiscal bureau -- the Wisconsin equivalent of the Congressional Budget Office -- concluded that Wisconsin isn't even in need of austerity measures, and could conclude the fiscal year with a surplus. In fact, they say that the current budget shortfall is a direct result of tax cut policies Walker enacted in his first days in office.

"Walker was not forced into a budget repair bill by circumstances beyond he control," says Jack Norman, research director at the Institute for Wisconsin Future -- a public interest think tank. "He wanted a budget repair bill and forced it by pushing through tax cuts... so he could rush through these other changes."

[ ]...You can read the fiscal bureaus report here (PDF). It holds that "more than half" of the new shortfall comes from three of Walker's initiatives:

* $25 million for an economic development fund for job creation, which still holds $73 million because of anemic job growth.

* $48 million for private health savings accounts -- a perennial Republican favorite.

* $67 million for a tax incentive plan that benefits employers, but at levels too low to spur hiring.

In essence, public workers are being asked to pick up the tab for this agenda.

It is a well known chapter in the right-wing conservative playbook that if you cannot win the debate on facts, lie and lie some more. Sprinkle on some false accusations against your opponent and you have the gutter ideology of modern conservatism.

Stimulus raised GDP by up to 4.2 pct in Q1 2010 -CBO

The massive U.S. stimulus package put up to 2.8 million people to work and boosted GDP by up to 4.2 percent in the first three months of 2010, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said on Tuesday.

CBO's latest estimate does not differ significantly from its previous assessments of the impact of the $893 billion package, passed in 2009.

But it is sure to cheer congressional Democrats as they struggle to advance a smaller package of safety-net spending, tax cuts and other measures to boost the sluggish economy and bring down the 9.9 percent unemployment rate.

Vice President Joe Biden issued a statement saying the CBO report "is important validation that the action we took to rescue the economy last year has not only pulled us back from the brink, but put us on a firm path toward economic recovery."

Republicans have made their agenda crystal clear, Gov. Walker a good example, they do not care about jobs or the families that rely on those jobs.

Jamie Dimon's `Biggest Disaster' Is Waiting: Simon Johnson

Jamie Dimon, chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co., has harsh words for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They are “the biggest disasters of all time,” Dimon told the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission last fall, according to his just-released interview.

Along with others, Dimon greatly exaggerates the role Fannie and Freddie played in the financial crisis, a theme my MIT colleague, Daron Acemoglu, has written about with great clarity.

Too many bankers assert some version of the refrain: Fannie Mae made me do it. As the FCIC’s report makes clear, it was the private sector that led us into the financial crisis by making massive subprime bets and then using complex derivatives deals to magnify the downside risks.

Nevertheless, Dimon makes a good point in the sense that Fannie and Freddie became too powerful politically, had too little equity relative to their debt levels and took on reckless amounts of risk. They blew themselves up at great cost to taxpayers.

Who are the government sponsored enterprises today? Which entities are too big to fail, in the eyes of lawmakers and regulators, and therefore are receiving implicit, no-cost government guarantees?

The answer is our largest bank holding companies such as JPMorgan, the second-biggest U.S. bank in terms of assets behind Bank of America Corp. This point is made in the latest quarterly report from Neil Barofsky, the special inspector-general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program.
Flawed Metrics

The facts are relatively easy to research. Private banks made a lot of bad loans, and bets those loans would continue to increase in value (derivatives trading). Fannie and Freddie are not in the direct to homeowner lending business. Fannie and Freddie do not review loan applications or run credit checks on people - private banks are supposed to do their due diligence. Unknowingly Fannie and Freddie bought many of the bad loans banks made. That gave those banks more capital to make more loans. Now Wall St hustlers and Republicans are trying to pin the blame for the actions of private banks on Fannie and Freddie - the Freddie Made Us Do It school of deflecting responsibility.

Republican Budgets, Paul Ryan(WI) and The Big Lie

Republican Budgets, Paul Ryan(WI) and The Big Lie

Paul Ryan has been saying of President Obama's budget, "What we have is $1.6 trillion in new tax increases, $8.7 trillion in new spending. He's going to be adding $13 trillion to the debt over the course of his budget." Glenn Kessler figures out where these numbers come from. It's staggeringly dishonest:

The problematic figure in Ryan's statement is the claim that the president proposed $8.7 trillion in new spending. In response to a question about how this number was obtained, the Committee staff provided a chart that showed that outlays would be frozen every year for the next 10 years at the 2012 level of $3.729 trillion.

Thus, while in 2021 Obama proposes to spend $5.697 trillion, the Committee would still be spending $3.729 trillion, for a difference of almost $2 trillion. Add up the difference for every year, over 10 years, and it amounts to nearly $8.7 trillion, which the committee calls "new spending."

In other words, the Committee assumed the president needs to freeze all spending, without adjustments for inflation or population growth, for 10 years. Moreover, it makes this assumption for all spending, even mandatory programs such as Social Security and Medicare, which need to be changed by law.

Whatever bit of optimism or stretching you find in the administration's budget, nothing comes within an order of magnitude of this kind of dishonesty.

Ryan's reputation as an honest policy wonk is a curious thing. It must owe itself to the total dearth of elected Republicans who can even halfway plausibly bullshit their way through some numbers.

Ryan has killed and buried any credibility he has as an honest budget wonk. He has drink deeply of the conservative fun with numbers kool-aid, thus sold out his integrity. This is very much a prerequisite for being a modern conservative. If the truth has to be stabbed through the heart as part of the larger crusade for ever more power and creating a permanent plutocracy, than so be it.

Republicans really care about working class Americans - Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner: If Jobs Are Lost As A Result Of GOP Spending Cuts 'So Be It'

Authoritarian Pig Andrew Breitbart sued by Shirley Sherrod over damaging video

Authoritarian Pig Andrew Breitbart sued by Shirley Sherrod over damaging video

While most gathered at CPAC this past weekend were busy gobbling up buffet-sized servings of Republican rage, one outsized commentator was left eating a slice of humble pie.

Former USDA official Shirley Sherrod has filed a lawsuit against conservative firebrand and web entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart. The suit stems from the notorious video Breitbart posted online last year, showing an out-of-context excerpt from a speech Sherrod gave to the NAACP Freedom Fund in March 2010. The clip suggested she had used her position at the Department of Agriculture to discriminate against white farmers. The media devoured the Breitbart's version of story so voraciously that the NAACP denounced Sherrod and the Obama administration fired her. The charge was, in fact, entirely untrue.

Sherrod argues in the lawsuit that the clip "damaged her reputation and prevented her from continuing her work." Breitbart, meanwhile, denounced the suit, saying he "categorically rejects the transparent effort to chill his constitutionally protected free speech."

Breitbart's media machine is doing its best to reframe Sherrod's complaint in the most favorable terms possible. One of his websites, BigGovernment.com, posted an article, titled "New Media Entrepreneur declares that his voice will not be suppressed," shortly after Breitbart was served. The piece referred to the complaint as the "Pigford Lawsuit" -- a nod to Breitbart's newest "obsession" and would-be vehicle for dragging Sherrod's name through the mud. Not surprisingly, the meme does not appear to have caught on.

Breitbart's full statement:

I find it extremely telling that this lawsuit was brought almost seven months after the alleged incidents that caused a national media frenzy occurred. It is no coincidence that this lawsuit was filed one day after I held a press conference revealing audio proof of orchestrated and systemic Pigford fraud. I can promise you this: neither I, nor my journalistic websites, will or can be silenced by the institutional Left, which is obviously funding this lawsuit. I welcome the judicial discovery process, including finding out which groups are doing so.

Right-wing propagandist Andrew Breitbart has run up quite the record in lies and baseless smears, Sherrod Hoax Exposed, but Breitbart's ACORN Fraud Lives On

Breitbart's Pigford Report: Distortions And Shady Sourcing

Will Breitbart, O'Keefe, and Giles come clean about the ACORN pimp hoax?

US Chamber’s Lobbyists Solicited Hackers To Sabotage Unions and Smear Political Opponents

US Chamber’s Lobbyists Solicited Hackers To Sabotage Unions and Smear Political Opponents

ThinkProgress has learned that a law firm representing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the big business trade association representing ExxonMobil, AIG, and other major international corporations, is working with set of “private security” companies and lobbying firms to undermine their political opponents, including ThinkProgress, with a surreptitious sabotage campaign.

According to e-mails obtained by ThinkProgress, the Chamber hired the lobbying firm Hunton and Williams. Hunton And Williams’ attorney Richard Wyatt, who once represented Food Lion in its infamous lawsuit against ABC News, was hired by the Chamber in October of last year. To assist the Chamber, Wyatt and his associates, John Woods and Bob Quackenboss, solicited a set of private security firms — HBGary Federal, Palantir, and Berico Technologies (collectively called Team Themis) — to develop tactics for damaging progressive groups and labor unions, in particular ThinkProgress, the labor coalition called Change to Win, the SEIU, US Chamber Watch, and StopTheChamber.com.

According to one document prepared by Team Themis, the campaign included an entrapment project. The proposal called for first creating a “false document, perhaps highlighting periodical financial information,” to give to a progressive group opposing the Chamber, and then to subsequently expose the document as a fake to undermine the credibility of the Chamber’s opponents. In addition, the group proposed creating a “fake insider persona” to “generate communications” with Change to Win. View a screenshot below:

The security firms hoped to obtain $200,000 for initial background research, then charge up to $2 million for a larger disinformation campaign against progressives. We don’t know if the proposal was accepted after Phase 1 was completed.

The e-mails ThinkProgress acquired are available widely on the web. They were posted by members of “Anonymous,” the hactivist community responsible for taking down websites for oppressive regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, and American corporations that have censored WikiLeaks. Anonymous published the emails from HBGary Federal because an executive at the firm, Aaron Barr, was trying to take Anonymous down. Barr claimed that he had penetrated Anonymous and was hoping to sell the data to Bank of America and to federal authorities in the United States. In response, members of Anonymous hacked into Barr’s email and published some 40,000 company e-mails.

It is widely believed that Wikileaks has sensitive information about Bank of America, and plans to expose it later this year. This revelation prompted Bank of America to hire the law/lobbying firm Hunton and Williams, which in turn, according to the e-mails posted online by Anonymous, hired HBGary Federal and other firms to go after Anonymous and supporters of Wikileaks. For instance, one proposal from HBGary Federal and its associates proposed targeting Salon reporter and Wikileaks-supporter Glenn Greenwald with “actions to sabotage or discredit” him.

ThinkProgress has published a series of articles investigating the Chamber and its activities. We exposed the Chamber’s efforts to coordinate a lobbying campaign on behalf of large banks, including JP Morgan, to kill significant portions of financial reform. In October, we published a series looking into the Chamber’s efforts to solicit donations from foreign corporations for the same account the Chamber used to run partisan attack ads during the midterm campaign, as well as the Chamber’s participation in secret fundraising meetings convened by the billionaire plutocrats David and Charles Koch.

Conservative pundits frequently call all unions and their members thugs. If unions are thugs what does that make the people who would engage in unlawful and immoral behavior to destroy them.

Florida Governor Rick Scott, Redistributionist

The pious claim of many Tea Party and other conservative movement activists and apologists is that they simply want to rein in runaway government spending and reduce disastrous levels of public debt. In practice, of course, they don't care about debt if it's created by corporate or high-end tax cuts, and they are often less interested in reducing government spending than in redirecting it to their favored constituencies.

A very good example of this phenomenon is coming to light in Florida, where newly elected governor Rick Scott, the famously controversial (that's putting it nicely) health industry executive who bought himself the Republican nomination last year and then won a very close general election, has rolled out his budget proposals for the economically battered and nearly dysfunctional Sunshine State.

Yes, Scott is proposing $5 billion in state spending reductions (in absolute terms, not reductions from some sort of current-services budget). Many of these cuts seemed to be ideologically driven, such as the decimation of the state Department of Community Affairs, which runs growth-management programs hated by developers; and a (roughly) ten percent cut in K-12 education, part and parcel of the state GOP's war with teachers and other state employees.

But the size of the cuts wouldn't be nearly so high if Scott were not also insisting on major tax cuts, notably in corporate taxes (due to be phased out entirely in a few years) and in state-controlled property taxes that support public schools.

Moreoever, nestled in his budget proposal are spending increases that are designed to redistribute resources according to conservative ideological prescriptions. Most remarkable is his request for $800 million (over two years) for "economic development incentives," which almost certainly means a gubernatorially-controlled slush fund to be used to bribe companies to relocate to Florida through tax abatements, free government services, and other subsidies.

Conservative Anti-Women Zealots 'Forcible Rape' Language Remains In Bill To Restrict Abortion Funding

'Forcible Rape' Language Remains In Bill To Restrict Abortion Funding

After significant public blowback, House Republicans last week promised to drop a controversial provision in their high-priority No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act that would redefine rape. But almost a week later, that language is still in the bill.

Last week, a spokesman for the bill's principal sponsor, Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), said, "The word forcible will be replaced with the original language from the Hyde Amendment." The Hyde Amendment bans taxpayer dollars from being used for abortions, except in cases of incest and rape -- not just "forcible rape," as the Smith bill, H.R. 3, would have it.

But as The New York Times first noted on Wednesday, the "forcible rape" language remains. Ilan Kayatsky, a spokesman for New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler, the top-ranking Democrat on the House judiciary subcommittee focusing on constitutional issues, told The Huffington Post that while Nadler hopes the bill will soon be changed, they have been treating it as it's written.

"So the fact remains: more than 150 Republicans lent their name to this bill, as drafted, which includes the forcible-rape provision," the Nadler spokesman said. Several conservative Democrats also signed on as cosponsors of Smith's bill.

Smith's spokesman did not respond to requests for comment.

There are several ways to change the language in legislation. It could be amended during the committee markup process, which has not yet been scheduled for H.R. 3. The bill could also be reintroduced, but a congressional staffer pointed out that the legislation's high-priority status likely inclines House leaders to keep the bill number already assigned, rather than renumbering it with a fresh introduction.

Another piece of legislation restricting abortion access, H.R. 358, also initially included the forcible-rape language, but Rep. Joe Pitts (R-Pa.) has reintroduced that bill without it. Now, however, it includes a provision that would allow hospitals to refuse to perform an abortion on a woman, even if that refusal threatens her life.

Republicans have been chanting like wild eyed zealots for years that government needs to get out of the lives of citizens. All as they expanded government power and intrusion on civil liberties. Now they want the government to use all its power to force women to suffer, even to the point of death, because they have decided rape is not always rape and child molesting is not always child molesting.

Five myths about Ronald Reagan's legacy

5. Reagan was a conservative culture warrior.

Reagan's contributions to the culture wars of the 1980s were largely rhetorical and symbolic. Although he published a book in 1983 about his staunch opposition to abortion (overlooking the fact that he had legalized abortion in California as governor in the late 1960s), he never sought a constitutional ban on abortion. In fact, Reagan began the odd practice of speaking to anti-abortion rallies by phone instead of in person - a custom continued by subsequent Republican presidents. He also advocated prayer in public schools in speeches, but never in legislation.

In 1981, Reagan unintentionally did more than any other president to prevent the Roe v. Wade abortion ruling from being overturned when he appointed Sandra Day O'Connor to the Supreme Court. O'Connor mostly upheld abortion rights during her 25 years as a justice.

No wonder that home-schooling advocate Michael Ferris was one of many right-wing activists complaining about Reagan by the end of his presidency, writing that his White House "offered us a bunch of political trinkets."

The 29 Most Loathsome People in America Are Republicans

The 29 Most Loathsome People in America Are Republicans

The following is a selection from the Buffalo Beast's 50 Most Loathsome People of the Year:

--David & Charles Koch
Charges: In a land filthy with noxious liars, these two are the filthiest. Their dad founded the ridiculous John Birch Society which claimed fluoridated tap water was a Communist mind-control plot—while his company built oil refineries for Stalin. And they’ve not fallen far from the despicable hypocrite tree. Koch Industries, the second biggest privately-held company in the country, generates its annual $98 billion in profits from coal mining, stealing oil from Indian reservations, refining and piping Canadian tar sands oil, and every other clear-cut, mountaintop-removing environmental abomination under the sun. How they make money is dirty; how they spend it is dirtier. From free-market-humping think tanks CATO and Heartland to Tea Party-backing Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Works, they invest vulgar amounts of money in misappropriating populist rage and misinforming the ignorant masses on climate change, tax reform, environmental policy, health care, and any other issue that could cut into their fat bottom line.
Aggravating factor: In a philanthropy-meets-disinformation masterstroke, the Smithsonian’s new $15 million David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins is a climate change whitewash, which teaches that destroying our environment is no big deal because we can just adapt and evolve.

--Justices Alito, Kennedy, Roberts, Scalia and Thomas
Charges: Their majority opinion in Citizens United v. FEC was the worst decision since Scalia instituted SCOTUS Hot Pants Fridays. In lifting a century-long restriction on corporate campaign spending, the Justices flouted a firmly-ingrained precedent and finally provided examples of the nefarious and mythical “Activist Judge.” The original case dealt with the very narrow issue of whether Citizen’s hit-piece/documentary Hillary: The Movie was “electioneering communication” under McCain-Feingold. A district court panel ruled that it was and, hence, could be regulated. Citizens appealed, and the Roberts court took it upon itself to hear the case and inexplicably broaden its scope into a corporate free-speech issue. This is the very definition of “legislating from the bench” and ensures our elections will be dominated by well-funded Swift Boating for the foreseeable future. If democracy was an experiment, this case blew up the lab.
Aggravating factor: “I will remember that it’s my job to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat.” -Chief Justice Roberts

--Jan Brewer
Charges: Gila Monster eugenics gone horrible awry. Killed two people, and another ninety-six languish, unable to afford the life-saving transplants for which she slashed state funding. Cut health care for kids too. Hates health care. Horny for the NRA; signed law nixing concealed carry permits, which had no ill effects in 2010. None. Don’t worry about it. Not a problem. Seriously. It’s totally cool. Attempted to justify the draconian racial profiling law SB 1070 by repeatedly citing fictional desert decapitations. Lambasted as the Himmler of the Southwest, she protested, saying her father died fighting the Nazis. He was never in the military. He died in ‘51. From lung cancer.
Aggravating factor: “God has placed me in this powerful position as Arizona’s governor.”

-- John McCain
Charges: If you were in a coma during the ‘o8 election or too young to remember McCain’s role in the Keating Five/Savings and Loan scandal, his stance against MLK Day or his betrayal of the dinosaurs, you may have been under the false impression that he was one of the few Republicans to not be a pandering piece of shit. 2010 fully erased that unfounded myth, as he flip-flopped like beached salmon on immigration reform, the border fence, climate change and the repeal of DADT in a race to the bottom against his Tea Party opponent J.D. Hayworth. Ultimately responsible for raising Sarah Palin to national consciousness.
Aggravating factor: “Today [the day DADT was repealed] is a very sad day.”
Sentence: McCainLemonParty.gov. (I am so sorry for putting that image in your head.)

-- James O’Keefe III
Charges: Like Sacha Baron Cohen mixed with G. Gordon Liddy’s fetid stool. Embodies every sniveling, Docker-clad College Republican to ever overlook the 9th fairway and obtusely bemoan lower class entitlements. A Breitbart disciple, he sparked the ruin of ACORN, an honorable advocacy group for the poor, by dressing like a pimp and editing like Leni Riefenstahl. In college, he decried learning about foreign cultures because he considered it an affront to American values. Those same values went unperturbed by the white supremacist meetings he’s attended. This year, he got busted trying to mess with Senator Landrieu’s office phones and attempting to “seduce” CNN’s Abbie Boudreau on a boat with fuzzy handcuffs and porn. Lately he’s been stalking a New Jersey special ed provider in order eliminate any remaining doubt about what an asshole he is.
Aggravating factor: “It is time, as Hannah said as we walked out of the ACORN facility, for conservative activists to ‘create chaos for glory.’”
Sentence: Sold into Bacha Bazi.

-- Haley Barbour
Charges: Looks like William Shatner if William Shatner ate a racist butter sculpture of William Shatner. As the oil and death washed ashore in the Gulf, the Mississippi Gov wooed tourists to “[c]ome on down” and “enjoy the beach.” The man was a tobacco lobbyist. He thinks the White Citizens Council is an upstanding organization. He doesn’t give a shit about you or anyone you know.
Aggravating factor: “I just don’t remember [overt racism] as being that bad.”
Sentence: Denied service at his favorite restaurant, blasted with fire hose, attacked by police dogs.

-- Andrew Breitbart
Charges: Partly responsible for the abysmal online apothecary known as The Huffington Post and the career of James O’Keefe, whom he taught everything he doesn’t know. His Drudge-inspired bullshit finally hit the fan in July when he posted an out of context video excerpt of USDA employee Shirley Sherrod that implied she was a racist. But like the implication of Brietbart’s hetero marriage, the truth of the matter was the exact opposite.
Aggravating factor: “You [Max Blumenthal] destroy people. Because you try to destroy people’s lives through innuendo. Innuendo!”
Sentence: Outed by Matt Drudge.


--Tucker Carlson
Charges: A consummate dildo, liar and CATO Institute lackey who has the annoying habit of telling real reporters, “I will destroy you!” Canned by every cable news channel, he slithered over to his own internet crap-fest the Daily Caller, where he had the sour grapes to smear Ezra Klein’s innocuous Journolist as a liberal media conspiracy—after he’d been rejected from joining the listserve himself. Sued for the rights for TuckerCarlson.com, then registered KeithOlbermann.com and used it to send fraudulent emails to a reporter in Philly, using Olbermann’s voice to snipe at his old MSNBC boss Phil Griffin. He’s the kind of guy who ties sweaters around his shoulders and snorts when he laughs. And he’s definitely not gay!
Aggravating factor:
Dan ABRAMS: Tucker, what did you do, by the way? What did you do when [some guy propositioned him in a public bathroom]? We got to know.
CARLSON: I went back with someone I knew and grabbed the guy by the—you know, and grabbed him, and—and—
ABRAMS: And did what?
CARLSON: Hit him against the stall with his head, actually!

--Mitch McConnell
Charges: Yet another example of the direct proportionality of evil to jowl size. In pronouncing that his most important job as Senate Minority Leader is to limit Obama to one term, McConnell accentuated the craven political discourse in which we now wallow. With two wars going and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the opposition leader might think that, but he’s not supposed to say it. But the gaffe of the Senate’s most pandering shill barely registered in the era of “Don’t retreat! Reload!”
Aggravating factor: “I mean, let’s be honest. Who wants to hang out with guys like Paul Krugman and Robert Reich, when you can be with Rush Limbaugh!”

--David Brooks
Charges: The Bernie Madoff of American letters, every tortured construct and inaccurate assumption ever set to print by this annoyingly self-described “Bourgeoisie Bohemian” is a fraudulent attempt to justify why his house is more expensive than yours. Brooks couldn’t even wait for the bodies to cool after the Haiti earthquake before writing about how useless it is to send money because those voodoo-lovin’ savages simply can’t be helped.
Aggravating factor: “It’s time to find self-confident local leaders who will create No Excuses countercultures in places like Haiti, surrounding people—maybe just in a neighborhood or a school—with middle-class assumptions, an achievement ethos and tough, measurable demands.”

--Sharron Angle
Charges: Imagine the most viscerally repugnant, deeply moronic and pathologically regressive position one could hold on any given issue. Good. Now imagine Sharron Angle cackling maniacally at whatever comparatively feeble hippie shit you came up with. This hyper-religious thing once crusaded against a high school football jersey because she thinks black is a wicked color. Whatever the issue—gay rights, women’s rights, human rights, Social Security, Scientology, science, Latino v. Asian, etc. ad infinitum—Sharron Angle’s backward position would embarrass most medieval peasants.
Aggravating factor: “Well it’s to defend ourselves. And you know, I’m hoping that we’re not getting to Second Amendment remedies. I hope the vote will be the cure for the Harry Reid problems.”

--Mark Zuckerberg
Charges: In the backhanded tradition of tech dickery, Zuckerburg brazenly pilfered the idea which allows you to neurotically tend that asshole from high school’s virtual farm while not getting any work done. The Facebook founder’s fortune comes in part from selling your information to third parties via default privacy settings. After vowing to donate half of his some $7 billion to charity, as transparent PR in the wake of The Social Network, he got into bed with the execrable Goldman Sachs and a Russian investment firm run by a convicted extortionist to recoup the loss. Invented “poking.” And he’s actually trying to trademark the word “face.”
Aggravating factor (from his business card): “i’m CEO … bitch.”

--Rand Paul
Charges: Nicknamed and molded after a writer whose sheer intellectual repugnance spawned an entire generation of thinly-veiled Social Darwinists. He tried to equate racial discrimination with “free speech,” saying that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was tantamount to big government regulation. Cried, “Medicare is socialized medicine!” while hypocritically deriving half of his ophthalmology income from Medicaid and Medicare. Portrayed criticism of BP’s little “accident” as an “un-American” symptom of our “blame-game society.” And then there was that befuddling college prank where he and another secret-frat dildo tied up a girl, blindfolded her, made her do bong hits, dragged her to a creek bed and forced her to swear allegiance to “Aqua Buddha.” Way to go, Kentucky, he’s your Senator. You embarrass us all, you curb-stomping apes, for so many reasons, Ark-related and not.
Aggravating factor: “Well, the thing is, we’re all interconnected. There are no rich. There are no middle class. There are no poor.”

--John Boehner
Charges: Cries so often he embarrasses Glenn Beck’s family. An incorrigibly lazy corporate puppet who owes his emotional instability to legendary Merlot consumption and his radioactive Naugahyde complexion to innumerable special interest golf junkets. His first notable act in Congress was to hand out tobacco lobby checks on the House floor before a vote on anti-smoking legislation; his PAC received $30K from Abramoff-affiliated tribes; he lived in an apartment owned by lobbyist John Milne; he knew about Mark Foley’s page perversion and sat on it. More recently, he compared the financial crisis to an ant and the weak Dodd-Frank bill to a nuke—while concurrently trying to block unemployment benefits. And the most egregious aspect of his drunken weeping on “60 Minutes,” about kids having the same education opportunities he did, is that he’s scored hundreds of thousands from for-profit schools and the student loan industry—even sponsoring legislation that would slash public loan funding and redirect it to his golf buddy’s company Sallie Mae. He’s the kind of amoral opportunist who would campaign for Nazi reenactor Rich Iott in secret, not because there is any chance in hell of winning, but because Iott’s stinking rich and bound to repay the favor.
Aggravating factor: “The only way we’re going to get our economy going again and solve our budget problems is to get the economy moving.”

--Pamela Geller
Charges: The Woodward to Orly Taitz’s Bernstein, publisher of the mendacious blog Atlas Shrugs and co-founder of the hate group Stop Islamization of America. She was the bigoted fountainhead of hysteria over the “Ground Zero Mosque,” which is neither a mosque, nor located at Ground Zero, but rather a former, and totally sacred, Burlington Coat Factory. Her pathological falsehoods include, but are not limited to, the claims that the Bosnian Genocide was actually a clever Muslim mass-suicide/sympathy campaign, Obama—the undercover Muslim—is the love child of Malcolm X, his mom was a porno worker, and that Jewish Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan is a Nazi. This lunatic makes Ann Coulter seem the very model of civility, reason and grace.
Aggravating factor: “I don’t know where it is in America that you can’t make jokes or make fun.”

-- Mel Gibson
Charges: Once again, he said something so reprehensible that we were forced to hear about Mel Gibson. Drunk, stupid, dumb, misogynist, racist, drunk, raised-by-a-Nazi, anti-Semitic, drunk, persecution complex, fan of torture, narcissistic, moronic, drunk, Uber-Catholic, stem cell Neo-Luddite, inconsequential, drunk Mel Fucking Gibson. We’re tired of hearing about Mel Gibson.
Aggravating factor (to Baby-momma McFakeboobs): “You look like a fucking bitch in heat, and if you get raped by a pack of niggers it’ll be your fault. All right?”
Sentence: Thunderdome.

-- Eddie Long
Charges: The Ted Haggard of the Dirty South, he used his position as Baptist mega-preacher to coerce at least four young men into having sex with him, lavishing gifts, money and weird biblical justifications on them for even weirder DL quasi-marriages. Embezzled $3 million from his own charity. Recipient of a Bush-era $1 million faith-based initiative grant for his hypocritical quest to “cure” homosexuality, which is the modern-day equivalent of skin bleaching and marks the ignominious end of the civil rights movement. Looks tight in a spandex onesie.
Aggravating factor: “Men can look attractive when they are dirty. We see sweating, dirty, hardworking men on television all the time and we say to one another, ‘There’s a macho guy.’”
Sentence: Huge lawsuit settlement; sex with wife.

-- Kim Kardashian
Charges: Not content with tacitly rooking half-bright teens by endorsing any weight-loss scam and junk food joint to cross her path, 2010 marks the year she entered the world of outright usury. Her and her sisters’ short-lived, pre-paid Kardashian Kard—because alliteration is a sound reason to enter the kredit industry—was rife with what the Connecticut Attorney General called “pernicious and predatory fees.” Inexplicably famous; no redeeming skills. Her “reality” show is poorly written.
Aggravating factor: “I know people think we drive around in these nice cars and we do whatever we want and our parents will pay our credit cards, but that’s not the case. Sure, my parents were generous. I got a nice car at 16, but at 18 I was cut off. I’ve worked really hard.”
Sentence: Sex tape with DJ Jazzy Jeff; one year in a coal mine.

--Joe Barton (R-TX)
Charges: A former oil company consultant, “Smokey” Joe is a potent combination of corrupt and cretinous. As former Chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, he commissioned the widely debunked climate change skeptic Wegman Report, feeding the authors spurious data. He was a driving force in shaping the fossil fuel industry boondoggle known as the ‘05 House Energy Policy Act. He can’t fathom the concept of continental drift. And he thinks wind power will increase global warming because wind is “God’s way of balancing heat.”
Aggravating factor: “I think it is a tragedy of the first proportion that a private corporation [BP] can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown.”

--Roger Ailes
Charges: His entire life is an object lesson in pernicious mendacity. Before being named Fox News President/Rupert Murdoch henchman, he was a consultant for Nixon, Reagan, Elder Bush and Rudy Giuliani. Party to News Corp.’s $1 million donation to the Republican Governors Association; ultimately responsible for Fox News Washington managing editor Bill Sammon’s fiendish email, which ordered Fox employees to use the term “government option” in place of “public option,” and more recently, responsible for Sammon’s missive requiring staff to challenge the “veracity of climate change data.” In granting the Tea Party media saturation, and employing demagogues like Beck, O’Reilly and Hannity, Ailes has absolutely destroyed the impartiality of the fourth estate and made a large segment of the population ever more stupider.
Aggravating factor: “They [NPR] are, of course, Nazis. They have a kind of Nazi attitude. They are the left wing of Nazism. These guys don’t want any other point of view.”


--Glenn Beck
Charges: Cries so often he’d embarrass himself—if he could feel embarrassed or ashamed about anything. In his early radio career he made an on-air call to mock a man over his wife’s miscarriage. And he’s gotten progressively more vile. This year, he besmirched the antiwar legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. with his contemptible military worshiping “Restoring Honor” white power religious rally. But it was OK, he demurred, because he didn’t stand on the same exact step of the Lincoln Memorial. His dyslexic game of “Pin the Paranoid Delusion on the George Soros” directly inspired at least three would-be assassins (in 2010). A Latter Day, Romper Room Father Coughlin who screams “eugenic” as frequently as sane people say “hello.”
Aggravating factor: ”You’re going to have to shoot [democrats] in the head.”

--Sarah Palin
Charges: An ideologically abhorrent dunce whose answer to everything—caribou, wolves, Julian Assange, feminism, science, decency, accountability, the English language, Democratic incumbents—is to shoot it dead. From conspiring to advance her ham-legged, clopping daughter on “Dancing with the Stars” to successfully endorsing a slew of faux-revolutionary Tea Party imbeciles, she’s a persistent, violent rash on the entire body politic.
Aggravating factor: “But obviously, we’ve got to stand with our North Korean allies.”

--Don Blankenship
Charges: A coal baron of such cartoon villainy, he makes Lex Luthor seem an incompetent hack. As CEO of Massey Energy, it’s Don’s legal obligation to cut every corner and maximize profits—profits he then uses to bankroll his own candidates, slander incumbent judges as pedo-lovers, and throw nightmarish mountaintop removal parties featuring Ted Nugent. The death of 29 at the Upper Big Branch mine explosion in April left Blankenship less remorseful than combative, as Massey actually blamed the Mine Safety & Health Administration’s new ventilation requirements. This is despite the fact that Blankenship once sent out a company memo that read, “If any of you have been asked by your group presidents, your supervisors, engineers or anyone else to do anything other than run coal (i.e., build overcasts, do construction jobs, or whatever) you need to ignore them and run coal.” But in a way it is the MSHA’s fault; it’s simply cheaper for corporate criminals like Massey to pay the occasional million dollar fine than it is to ensure the safety of its workers. It’s just smart business.
Aggravating factor: “Most people wouldn’t believe that coal is the most important thing to the environment.”


--David J. Lesar – Halliburton CEO
Charges: Although his company’s moved its HQ to Dubai, he’s the kind of capitalist malefactor only America could tolerate. Halliburton charges U.S. taxpayers $45 for a six-pack of Coke in Iraq and $100 for a load of laundry, and its subsidiary KBR’s shoddy shower wiring has electrocuted soldiers to death. Like some crooked home contractor writ enormous, Halliburton knowingly provided cheap, faulty cement for the Deep Water Horizon and just hoped no one would notice. We noticed, asshole.
Aggravating factor: “Will things go wrong? Sure they will; it’s a war zone. But when they do, we’ll fix it. We always have. … We’re serving our troops because of what we know, not who we know.”

I'm not sure what if any political affiliations Kim Kardashian has. Since she seemed totally fixated on money and devotes all her time to be famous for no other reason than being famous, she has a conservative persona. She could be both enjoying her money and helping people but sadly has not figured out how to do both at once. What is really sad is that Republican goddess Sarah Palin is even more shallow than Kim and Glenn beck seems to suffer from more mental breakdowns..

Bush-Appointed Federal Judge Tosses Out Challenge To Health Reform

Bush-Appointed Federal Judge Tosses Out Challenge To Health Reform

Judge Roger Vinson’s error-filled opinion was one of the biggest news stories this week, at times even overshadowing the revolution underway in Egypt. Yet another opinion signed by George W. Bush-appointed Judge Keith Starrett highlights just how much of an extreme outlier Vinson is — and how wrong it was for so many observers to overreact to Vinson’s tea partying opinion.

The Constitution requires a plaintiff to show that they will actually be injured by a law before they can challenge it in court, a requirement known as “standing.” Judge Starrett concluded that the plaintiffs in this suit did not demonstrate that the act’s minimum coverage provision — which requires most uninsured Americans to pay slightly more income taxes — would actually cause them to pay more taxes when the law goes into effect in 2014:

Plaintiffs’ First Amended Petition contains insufficient allegations to establish that they will certainly be “applicable individuals” who must comply with the minimum coverage provision.

For example, Plaintiffs did not allege any facts which, if true, would certainly establish that they would not be subject to the provision’s religious exemptions. Plaintiffs simply alleged that they will be subject to the minimum essential coverage provision – a bare legal conclusion which the Court may not accept as true.

Furthermore, it is not certain from Plaintiffs’ allegations that, in the event they were considered “applicable individuals,” they would incur the tax penalty for non-compliance. Their First Amended Petition contains insufficient allegations to establish that they will not be subject to one of the exemptions to the penalty.

For all of the reasons stated above, the Court finds that the ten primary Plaintiffs have not plead sufficient facts to establish that they have standing to challenge the Constitutionality of the minimum essential coverage provision of the PPACA.

In tossing out this lawsuit, Starrett joins the overwhelming majority of judges who have heard health care challenges. At least 14 lawsuits have been tossed on procedural grounds such as standing; only four judges have reached the merits of an Affordable Care Act challenge, and two of those suits upheld the law.

It’s worth noting, as well, that the absence-of-standing argument is likely to resonate with conservatives on the Supreme Court. The most important decision limiting access to federal courts under the standing doctrine — Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife — was written by Justice Scalia and litigated by Chief Justice Roberts. If just one of the conservative justices decide that the anti-health reform plaintiffs lack standing, they will provide the fifth vote necessary to prevent the Act from being struck down until after the minimum coverage provision goes into effect in 2014

And if they do force the health care challengers to start over again in 2014, that will mean the issue will not reach the justices again until after the Act has been fully operational for at least a year. By that point, 32 million Americans will have received health insurance because of the Affordable Care Act. It is exceedingly unlikely that the justices will test their own legitimacy by trying to take that insurance away.
Update It's worth noting that Judge Starett gave the plaintiffs 30 days to fix their complaint to explain how they are presently being harmed by the minimum coverage provision,

While it has traditionally been the emperor that has no clothes in the case of right-wing conservatives, it is the Republican zealots who have no clothes. They have no constitutional grounds to stop legislation duly passed by Congress. their only real reason for doing so is because, like Medicare, health care reform ( The Affordable Care Act or ObamaCare) is another victory for working Americans and another progressive legacy of Thomas Jefferson's party, the Democratic Party of the USA.

Republican Nutjobs Reported To FBI By Planned Parenthood Turned Out To Be Hoaxers

Republican Nutjobs Reported To FBI By Planned Parenthood Turned Out To Be Hoaxers

Last week, it was revealed that several Planned Parenthood offices had been visited by persons who willingly identified themselves as being the head of an "interstate sex trafficking ring that involves minors and illegal immigrants." Those offices coordinated their information with Planned Parenthood's national organization, who reported the activity to the FBI, despite the lingering notion that they were actually being set up for a James O'Keefe-style "sting."

As it turns out, their instincts were right, right down to the identity of the hoaxers: Lila Rose's Live Action, who on Tuesday posted their heavily-edited video encounter with a Planned Parenthood staffer.

Over at TPM Muckraker, Rachel Slajda runs down the ins and outs:

In a statement, Planned Parenthood said Live Action visited two Central New Jersey clinics on Jan. 13, including the one in the video. A spokesman for Planned Parenthood said that, immediately after the visits, clinic employees told their managers and called local law enforcement. It was not immediately clear, however, whether the woman in the video notified management or police.

The statement says "appropriate action is being taken" into the woman's actions.

"Planned Parenthood insists on the highest standards of care, and safeguards the trusted relationship we have with patients, families and communities. What appears on edited tapes made public today is not consistent with Planned Parenthood's practices, and is under review. Phyllis Kinsler, CEO of Planned Parenthood of Central New Jersey (PPCNJ), has stated that, 'the behavior of our employee, as portrayed on the video, if accurate, violates PPCNJ policies, as well as our core values of protecting the welfare of minors and complying with the law, and appropriate action is being taken.'"

[...]

After eight clinics reported the same strange visit within five days, Planned Parenthood reached out to the FBI, via a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, calling for an investigation into a potential sex trafficking ring. In the letter, Planned Parenthood notes that the visits had all the earmarks of a hoax.

So there you have it. Planned Parenthood may have a single staffer whose actions need to be called into question. And so, that staffer is being called to accounts. Other than that, Planned Parenthood is an organization that, if it catches a whiff of some illegal activity, gets the FBI involved as quickly as possible, even when they suspect that they are being subjected to a hoax.

One thing that conservative agitprop activists have taught me about the world of prostitution rings and human trafficking is that the actual ringleaders of actual prostitution rings never walk into places like Planned Parenthood and willingly offer, "Hey, I run this prostitution ring of minors and undocumented immigrants, and I was wondering what services are available to me!" That is only something that people who are pretending to be the ringleaders of a pretend prostitution ring do. It's too bad that the opposite isn't true, because it would be much easier to run actual prostitution rings to ground.

But running an actual prostitution ring to ground isn't something these activists genuinely want to do. And, insofar as the FBI and the Department of Justice actually had to expend resources investigating a hoax, their efforts actually make the running-to-ground of actual prostitution rings much harder. But whatever! Like I said before, if you're visited by someone claiming to be the ringleader of a prostitution ring, call the authorities!

All of Andrew Breitbart's sites are running with and promoting the hoax as fact. Since Breitbart runs a brothel of right-wing sleaze that is predictable. More here, Sex Ring Was A Hoax; Live Action Posts Video Targeting Planned Parenthood and here, Who is the sleazy right-wing Lila Rose Who Earned Her Video Sting Stripes With Convicted Republican James O'Keefe At UCLA

House Republicans Plan to Redefine Rape Drugged, Raped, and Pregnant? Too bad

House Republicans Plan to Redefine Rape
Drugged, Raped, and Pregnant? Too bad

Drugged, raped, and pregnant? Too bad. Republicans are pushing to limit rape and incest cases eligible for government abortion funding. Rape is only really rape if it involves force. So says the new House Republican majority as it now moves to change abortion law.

For years, federal laws restricting the use of government funds to pay for abortions have included exemptions for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest, with another exemption covering pregnancies that could endanger the life of the mother.

But the "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act," contains a provision that would rewrite the rules to drastically limit the definition of rape and incest in these cases. The bill, with 173 mostly Republican co-sponsors, has been dubbed a top priority in the new Congress by House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio).

With this legislation, which was introduced last week by Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), Republicans propose that the rape exemption be limited to "forcible rape." This would rule out federal assistance for abortions in many rape cases, including instances of statutory rape, many of which are non-forcible.

For example, if a 13-year-old girl is impregnated by a 24-year-old adult, she would no longer qualify to have Medicaid pay for an abortion. Rep. Smith's spokesman did not respond to a call and an email requesting comment.

Given that the bill would also forbid the use of tax benefits to pay for abortions, that 13-year-old's parents would also not be allowed to use money from a tax-exempt health savings account (HSA) to pay for the procedure. They also wouldn't be able to deduct the cost of the abortion or the cost of any insurance that paid for it as a medical expense.

There used to be a quasi-truce between the pro and anti-choice forces on the issue of federal funding for abortion. Since 1976, federal law has prohibited the use of taxpayer dollars to pay for abortions except in the cases of rape, incest, and when the pregnancy endangers the life of the woman.

There's your conservative values or tea bagger assclown values at work. They take the side of rapists against children.

Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) is Owned by Banking Interests. His Reward? Republicans Put Anti-Investor and Anti-Consumer Toomey On Banking Committee

Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) is Owned and Operated by Banking Interests. His Reward? Republicans Put Anti-Investor and Anti-Consumer Toomey On Banking Committee

ThinkProgress’ Ian Milhiser noted yesterday that Senate Republicans put Sen. Mike “noun, verb, unconstitutional” Lee (R-UT) on the Judiciary Committee, despite his radical ignorance regarding constitutional matters. But that wasn’t the only committee assignment for which the GOP decided that fealty to ideology was more important that acknowledging reality.

Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) was one of the financial industry’s biggest apologists during November’s campaign, opposing the Dodd-Frank financial reform law while claiming that derivative deals were “non-risky,” even as they cost schools and cities all across the country (including many in Pennsylvania) millions of dollars. And Toomey has been totally unrepentant about his personal role in deregulating the financial industry.

In 2000, former Sen. Phil “mental recession” Gramm (R-TX) attached the Commodity Futures Modernization Act to an unrelated, 11,000 appropriations bill. The CFMA ensured that the growing market in over-the-counter derivatives, including credit default swaps, stayed entirely unregulated. Toomey — then a member of the House of Representatives — voted for that bill, and said that he would do it again, inaccurately claiming that the legislation “did absolutely nothing to cause the financial crisis.”

So, naturally, Republicans have seen fit to name Toomey to the Senate Banking Committee, which has oversight of the nation’s financial regulatory laws. The committee was instrumental in crafting Dodd-Frank.

Here’s what the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission — which released its final report yesterday — had to say about the bill Toomey claims did nothing to bring about the financial crisis:

The CFMA effectively shielded OTC derivatives from virtually all regulation or oversight. Subsequently, other laws enabled the expansion of the market…The OTC derivatives market boomed. At year-end 2000, when the CFMA was passed, the notional amount of OTC derivatives outstanding globally was $95.2 trillion, and the gross market value was $3.2 trillion. In the seven and a half years from then until June 2008, when the market peaked, outstanding OTC derivatives increased more than sevenfold to a notional amount of $672.6 trillion; their gross market value was $20.3 trillion.

Ultimately, the FCIC concluded, derivatives “were at the center of the storm.” And yet, Republicans put someone on the Banking Committee who has said that he would go back and deregulate those instruments all over again if he could.

In the course of his career, Toomey’s collected almost $2.5 million from the finance industry. He was also the the president of the Wall Street front group Club for Growth from 2005-2009.

The only thing the Republican Culture of Corruption learned from the Bush era seems to be to double down on the corruption. They're not even changing the propaganda. They claim bought and paid for criminals such as Toomey are guardians of capitalism. Beware Republican doublespeak.

Suddenly, the GOP loves the economy. The best proof that the jobs market is improving? Republicans want to take credit for it

The Republican argument, as explained by Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl, is that the election results combined with the tax cut deal injected a new sense of "certainty" into the economy, which immediately translated into job creation. How you evaluate that thesis depends in part on whether you think companies make their hiring plans according to their future expectation of what taxes will be like or on the much more pressing question of whether they need more workers to satisfy current demand. But a closer look at the numbers also undermines the GOP thesis. In 2010, new jobless claims benefits peaked in August, and then started a more or less steady decline, long before the election or any tax deal. A score of other economic indicators started flashing the green light around the same time. It all came too late to help Democrats in the midterm elections, but the change was there to see nonetheless.

Looking for integrity and honor in the conservative movement, you'll need lots of time and a magnifying glass.

Ari Fleischer Still Rewriting History and Kissing Bush's Ass

The former White House press secretary attempts to praise the economic record of his boss. It's a big mistake

In the middle of a mildly heated post-State of the Union exchange between David Gergen and Ari Fleischer on CNN Wednesday night, the former press secretary for George W. Bush attempted to rule discussion of the Bush economic record out of bounds.

"We are no longer litigating the Bush administration," said Fleischer, who then promptly backtracked with a bold declaration that the Bush economy should be remembered as a time of steady growth.

"He came in with a recession, he left with a recession," said Fleischer, "but there was 52 months of job growth in between."

Gergen looked stunned, and well he should. First of all, Republicans are still litigating the New Deal, so the notion of declaring the Bush economy out of bounds for debate is as hypocritical as it is ridiculous. But it's entirely understandable why Fleischer would rather not go there. By pretty much any standard, the eight years of George W. Bush mark one of the worst periods of U.S. economic growth of any postwar president. And that's even if you subtract the disastrous effects of the financial crisis that closed the Bush presidency with such an enormously destructive exclamation point.

The Washington Post conducted a brutal wrap-up of the Bush legacy in January 2009. Here's the key paragraph.

The number of jobs in the nation increased by about 2 percent during Bush's tenure, the most tepid growth over any eight-year span since data collection began seven decades ago. Gross domestic product, a broad measure of economic output, grew at the slowest pace for a period of that length since the Truman administration. And Americans' incomes grew more slowly than in any presidency since the 1960s, other than that of Bush's father.

Yes, there were 52 months of "growth" in between the two recessions. But as we all know now, the bulk of that growth was generated by a consumer spending binge that itself resulted from an unsustainable and fraudulent housing boom that ultimately ended up completely wrecking the global economy. And even if we don't count 2008, gross domestic product rose at an annual rate of only 2.1 percent for the first seven years of the Bush presidency.

By comparison, annual GDP growth for the entire eight years of Bill Clinton's presidency was 3.5 percent. Here's a juicy little observation picked up from a Forbes magazine appraisal of the Clinton record, published in 2004.

The public's confidence in the economy hit an all-time high in the summer of 2000, near the end of Clinton's second term, according to Gallup. In the summer of 1992, before he was elected, it was at an all-time low.

And where was it at the end of Bush's term in office?

The context for Fleischer and Gergen's dispute came in terms of whether or not to support Obama's call for more investment in education. And here's where the conversation goes irreversibly through the looking glass. Fleischer, smiling as if he's the wise mentor counseling the irresponsible grasshopper, tells Gergen that "we can no longer keep paying for the things we like, that's what got us into this deep hole."

Well, yes, if the president you are referring to is George W. Bush! As Joseph Stiglitz pointed out in a devastating piece in Vanity Fair, "The Economic Consequences of Mr. Bush" (published in December 2007, well before the full extent of the financial crisis became clear), Bush set a new standard for fiscal irresponsibility.

A budget surplus of 2.4 percent of gross domestic product, which greeted Bush as he took office, turned into a deficit of 3.6 percent in the space of four years. The United States had not experienced a turnaround of this magnitude since the global crisis of World War II.

Now, of course, the equivalent number is 10.64 percent. And that's not good. But there's a big difference between running up a deficit in an effort to counteract the effects of the worst recession since the Great Depression, bequeathed to you by your predecessor, and the conscious destruction of a surplus via decisions to cut taxes, boost drug benefits, and engage in multiple wars without making any attempt whatsoever to pay for those priorities.

Liberals and conservatives will probably never stop "litigating" the Bush era. But just as the general public for decades afterward remembered FDR as the president who led the United States out of the Great Depression, George W. Bush will be recalled as the president who took the U.S. out of the black and into the red, and left his country completely defenseless when confronted with a major economic disaster.

Ari Fleischer and his conservative comrades are lie and hedge all they like. The years 2000 to 2008 - and counting because we're still paying the price - are proof that conservatism as a governing philosophy is a complete failure on the most massive scale.

Despite Republican Complaints About Socialism, America Has Become the Coporate Plutocracy of Their Dreams

Feingold: ‘We Need To Regenerate Progressivism’ To Battle This ‘Gilded Age On Steroids’

As a part of the Republican victory in Congress following November’s election, a number of long-time Democratic Party lawmakers lost their seats, the victims of a national wave of discontent fed by a struggling economy. One of those who lost was Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI), who served four terms in the U.S. Senate before losing to Oshkosh businessman Ron Johnson.

Feingold, who will teaching law at Wisconsin’s Marquette University this Spring, sat down with The Nation’s John Nichols for a wide-ranging interview that covered the former senator’s thoughts on his time in the Senate and what he plans to do in the future. At one point, Feingold told Nichols that, while he lost his recent election, the “broader struggle” for social justice has to continue. Nichols followed up by asking Feingold what he meant by the “broader struggle” and what progressives should do now. The senator replied that progressives must confront the fact that “this entire society is being dominated by corporate power” and that progressive must mobilize against what he calls “the Gilded Age on steroids”:

NICHOLS: What do you mean when you refer to “the broader struggle”? What should progressives do now?

FEINGOLD: I don’t know how it could be more stark or clear: this entire society is being dominated by corporate power in a way that may exceed what happened in the late nineteenth century, early twentieth century. The incredible power these institutions now have over the average person is just overwhelming: the way they can make these trade deals to ship people’s jobs overseas, the way consumers are just brutalized and consumer protection laws are marginalized, the way this town here—Washington—has become a corporate playground. Since I’ve been here, this place has gone from a government town to a giant corporate headquarters. To me, the whole face of the country—whether it be the government, the media, agriculture, what happens on Main Street—has become so corporatized that the progressive movement is as relevant as it was one hundred years ago, maybe more so. It’s the same issues. It’s just that [corporate] power, because of money, international arrangements and communications, is so overwhelming that the average person is nearly helpless unless we develop a movement that can counter that power. I know we’ve all tried over the years, but this is a critical moment. We need to regenerate progressivism and make it relevant to what’s happening right now. But there’s no lack of historical comparison to a hundred years ago. It’s so similar; the only real difference is that corporate power is even more extended. It’s the Gilded Age on steroids.

Feingold is not exaggerating in his comparisons between modern day America and the Gilded Age. The top 0.1 percent of income earners in America were in 2008 earning 8 percent of the country’s total income, “the same share as during the Gilded Era of the 1920s.” A University of California-Berkeley study released in 2009 found that income inequality in 2007 was the highest it had ever been in recorded history, with the “the top 1 percent incomes [capturing] half of the overall economic growth over the period 1993-2007.”

Later in the interview, Nichols asked Feingold if he thinks that Obama understands the level of inequality in the country and the policies that are needed to reverse it. Feingold replied that “he does at some level, yes,” referring to Obama criticizing the Citizens United decision during last year’s State Of The Union address. He continued, “In other areas, I’m concerned. I don’t think he gets it on trade agreements. I really wish he saw the connection between these agreements and what they do to working families and communities. It’s devastating. Voters recognize the connection; we saw that in the election. I’m hoping that [Obama] makes the connection in a more direct way. He hasn’t yet, and that worries me on many levels.”

Yes, hard to believe, but America is not becoming the statist or socialistic empire the wing-nut conservatives would like everyone to believe. In socialist states corporations do not write the legislation that regulates them. No one wants a socialist state, what most Americans want is a fair and humane capitalism.