Friday, May 17, 2013

Getting The Band Back Together

The upside of the “scandals” of the last couple of weeks is that it’s bringing out the batshit brigade.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) on Thursday declared that efforts to repeal President Barack Obama’s health care reform law were “now revived” after the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) admitted that it had inappropriately targeted conservative groups to determine if they had abused their tax-exempt status.

And they tried for the 37th time to repeal Obamacare.

Meanwhile — just like I told you — the righties don’t think the 100 e-mail dump by the White House about the Benghazi! talking points is enough.

“Why not release all of the unclassified documents?” said Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. “The president has repeatedly said that when he gets new information, he’ll release it to the public. Why not release — instead of the hand-picked ones — why not release all the unclassified documents?”

A spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said Wednesday Republicans hoped “this limited release of documents is a sign of more cooperation to come,” while the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee pressed the Pentagon for more details about military orders around the time of the attack and what military aircraft were in the region.

So obviously Mr. Chaffetz knows there is much more to come. How does he know that?

And now they want to bring back the Special Prosecutor. Get Kenneth Star as the front man and this gig could open at the Hard Rock in a couple of weeks.

Full Frontal Stupid

Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-TX) goes full-tilt Islamophobic and splays out his monumental bigotry and stupidity for all to see in front of Attorney General Eric Holder and C-SPAN.

The attorney general made statements that what I said was not true, when actually, uh, the reverse is what happened. [...] He’s casting aspirations [sic] on my asparagus.

Do you want Hollandaise with that?

Baby You’re A Rich Man

If Mike Godwin had a dime for every time someone on Fox News invoked his law, he’d be a very rich man.

Wednesday, May 15, 2013

E-mail Recall

It looks like those e-mails that set off a lot of wingers on the Benghazi! “scandal” were edited to make the administration look like they were hiding things.

CNN has obtained an e-mail sent by a top aide to President Barack Obama about White House reaction to the deadly attack last September 11 on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, that apparently differs from how sources characterized it to two different media organizations.

The actual e-mail from then-Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes appears to show that whomever leaked it did so in a way that made it appear that the White House was primarily concerned with the State Department’s desire to remove references and warnings about specific terrorist groups so as to not bring criticism to the department.

So what started out as a hair-on-fire scandal about the White House hiding their shame for screwing up Benghazi! turns out to be a routine chain of e-mails that were edited to make the administration look bad.

[phfft]

But…but…Hillary!

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Kneejerk Reaction

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) is right on top of the story.

Sen. Marco Rubio has sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Jack Lew in which he says “I strongly urge that you and President Obama demand the IRS Commissioner’s resignation, effectively immediately.” It’s perhaps a sign of how interested in the details of this matter Rubio is that there in fact is no IRS commissioner at present. The last IRS commissioner, Douglas Shulman, was appointed by George W. Bush in March of 2008 and resigned in November. It seems unlikely that this Republican appointee was engineering an inquiry in Tea Party groups’ tax status for partisan reasons and even if Shulman is to blame he can’t resign because he’s … already resigned.

Apparently Mr. Rubio is so desperate to get out in front of the story that he shoots his mouth off before knowing all the facts. What a surprise.

Sunday, May 12, 2013

Another Obama Failure

We’ve already determined that Barack Obama is not very good at being a socialist, what with the stock market soaring to giddy heights, the unemployment rate falling, and corporate profits going through the roof. Now, according to Steve M, he’s not any good at being a tyrant.

The Obama “scandals” are: a pre-election “cover-up” of the truth about the Benghazi attack in which the administration acknowledged every fact said to have been covered up within less than two weeks after the attack (and more than a month and a half before the election); heightened scrutiny of the tax-exempt status of right-wing groups by the IRS that led to no revocations of tax-exempt status and happened while a Republican ran the agency; all of this following a “gun grab” that has led to exactly zero federal gun control because no bill could even pass the Democrat-controlled upper chamber of Congress; and a further “gun grab” said to be in the works in conjunction with the UN that involves a treaty that can’t possibly be ratified in the Senate, and wouldn’t do what the opponents say it does anyway, even if it did pass.

Can’t this guy do anything right?

Saturday, May 11, 2013

Meet The Prophet From Minnesota

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), among her other talents besides getting her eyes to spin counterclockwise and being a beard for her husband, is also a prophet of biblical proportions.

Bachmann: It’s no secret that our nation may very well be experiencing the hand of judgment. It’s no secret that we all are concerned that our nation may be in a time of decline. If that is in fact so, what is the answer? The answer is what we are doing here today: humbling ourselves before an almighty God, crying out to an almighty God, saying not of ourselves but you, would you save us oh God? We repent of our sins, we turn away from them, we seek you, we seek your ways. That’s something that we’re doing today, that we did on the National Day of Prayer, it’s something that we have chosen to do as well on another landmark day later this year on September 11. Our nation has seen judgment not once but twice on September 11. That’s why we’re going to have ‘9/11 Pray’ on that day. Is there anything better that we can do on that day rather than to humble ourselves and to pray to an almighty God?

So we learn a couple of things here. First, an attack on a consulate in Libya that killed four Americans is the equivalent of an attack on New York and Washington that killed over 3,000 people. Second, God is a real asshole who has it in for us because those attacks were launched by Muslim radicals and that was his judgment on us for being America with our rap music and gay marriage.

That god has a real wicked sense of humor.

Friday, May 10, 2013

Doing the Reich Thing

Adding to the Heritage Foundation’s whack-job creds:

The Heritage Foundation’s Jason Richwine, who co-authored the think tank’s study claiming immigration reform will cost trillions of dollars, contributed two articles to a “nationalist” website about Hispanic incarceration rates, Yahoo News reported Thursday.

Richwine came under fire after the Washington Post reported Wednesday that his Harvard dissertation argued Hispanics have lower IQs than Caucasians and that the United States should screen immigrants based on their IQ scores.

According to Yahoo News, Richwine wrote two articles on “crime rates among Hispanics in the United States” for the site AlternativeRight.com, a website run by Richard Spencer, “a self-described ‘nationalist’ who writes frequently about race and against ‘the abstract notion of human equality.’”

Ach du lieber.

But Who’s Counting?

When your crazy uncle who watches Fox News and e-mails you updates from World Net Daily tells you that Benghazi was worse than Watergate and Iran-Contra and Barack Obama will be impeached, pull out this list by Bob Cesca at the Daily Banter and ask him where the outrage was from Fox News and Lindsey Graham when they happened during a Republican presidency.

January 22, 2002. Calcutta, India. Gunmen associated with Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami attack the U.S. Consulate. Five people are killed.

June 14, 2002. Karachi, Pakistan. Suicide bomber connected with al-Qaida attacks the U.S. Consulate, killing 12 and injuring 51.

October 12, 2002. Denpasar, Indonesia. U.S. diplomatic offices bombed as part of a string of “Bali Bombings.” No fatalities.

February 28, 2003. Islamabad, Pakistan. Several gunmen fire upon the U.S. Embassy. Two people are killed.

May 12, 2003. Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Armed al-Qaida terrorists storm the diplomatic compound killing 36 people including nine Americans. The assailants committed suicide by detonating a truck bomb.

July 30, 2004. Tashkent, Uzbekistan. A suicide bomber from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan attacks the U.S. Embassy, killing two people.

December 6, 2004. Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Al-Qaida terrorists storm the U.S. Consulate and occupy the perimeter wall. Nine people are killed.

March 2, 2006. Karachi, Pakistan again. Suicide bomber attacks the U.S. Consulate killing four people, including U.S. diplomat David Foy who was directly targeted by the attackers. (I wonder if Lindsey Graham or Fox News would even recognize the name “David Foy.” This is the third Karachi terrorist attack in four years on what’s considered American soil.)

September 12, 2006. Damascus, Syria. Four armed gunmen shouting “Allahu akbar” storm the U.S. Embassy using grenades, automatic weapons, a car bomb and a truck bomb. Four people are killed, 13 are wounded.

January 12, 2007. Athens, Greece. Members of a Greek terrorist group called the Revolutionary Struggle fire a rocket-propelled grenade at the U.S. Embassy. No fatalities.

March 18, 2008. Sana’a, Yemen. Members of the al-Qaida-linked Islamic Jihad of Yemen fire a mortar at the U.S. Embassy. The shot misses the embassy, but hits nearby school killing two.

July 9, 2008. Istanbul, Turkey. Four armed terrorists attack the U.S. Consulate. Six people are killed.

September 17, 2008. Sana’a, Yemen. Terrorists dressed as military officials attack the U.S. Embassy with an arsenal of weapons including RPGs and detonate two car bombs. Sixteen people are killed, including an American student and her husband (they had been married for three weeks when the attack occurred). This is the second attack on this embassy in seven months.

It’s okay if you’re a Republican.

Thursday, May 9, 2013

Benghazi! Um…

So, what did we learn from yesterday’s blockbuster hearings on Benghazi? Did the truth actually come out? Is President Obama going to resign because of the shocking cover-up?

[crickets]

Meanwhile, Jodi Arias has been found guilty. I have no idea who that is, but it was apparently big enough news to get the cable networks to break away from their coverage of the hearings to cover the verdict live from Phoenix.

More Minority Outreach

The Heritage Foundation, a formerly conservative but now right-wing fringe think tank, has been looking into the immigration issue and come to some interesting conclusions.

First, they claimed that immigration reform would add $5.3 trillion to the deficit, which got even the hard right to blink and question the conclusion. Then it turns out that in 2009 one of the authors of the study, Jason Richwine (I know; a name straight out of Dickens), suggested that we bar Hispanics from immigrating because they have a lower IQ.

Richwine’s dissertation asserts that there are deep-set differentials in intelligence between races. While it’s clear he thinks it is partly due to genetics — “the totality of the evidence suggests a genetic component to group differences in IQ” — he argues the most important thing is that the differences in group IQs are persistent, for whatever reason. He writes, “No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.”

Toward the end of the thesis, Richwine writes that though he believes racial differences in IQ to be real and persistent, one need not agree with that to accept his case for basing immigration on IQ. Rather than excluding what he judges to be low-IQ races, we can just test each individual’s IQ and exclude those with low scores. “I believe there is a strong case for IQ selection,” he writes, “since it is theoretically a win-win for the U.S. and potential immigrants.” He does caution against referring to it as IQ-based selection, saying that using the term “skill-based” would “blunt the negative reaction.”

The Heritage Foundation is saying that they have nothing to do with the 2009 study and that they’re not racists or anything.

How very reassuring.

Wednesday, May 8, 2013

Benghazi Again

Republicans never run out of dead horses to whip.

Republican lawmakers, who have spent months seeking to tie President Obama to last year’s deadly attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, are increasingly focusing their probe on a new target: former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The GOP-led investigation of the Sept. 11, 2012, assaults that killed U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three others now centers heavily on the State Department and whether officials there deliberately misled the public about the nature of the assault.

Three State Department officials are scheduled to testify before a House committee on Wednesday about the Benghazi attack and its aftermath.

“I think the dam is about to break on Benghazi,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) wrote on his Facebook page Tuesday . “. . . We’re going to find people asleep at the switch when it comes to the State Department, including Hillary Clinton.”

On Monday, a Fox News anchor asked Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) how damaging the issue is for Clinton. “I think it’s damaging because it happened under her watch,” replied Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which is holding Wednesday’s hearing.

It’s pretty obvious that this is a preemptive attack on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, and the Republicans are going all in on it; Mike Huckabee said this will be worse than Watergate. (Note: Watergate is the Godwin’s Law of scandals: the longer the discussion goes on, the chances that someone will compare a scandal to Watergate increase to a factor of dead certainty.)

It was terrible that people were killed in the attack in Libya last September. But it’s worse that the Republicans are exploiting it for no other reason than politics, and their crocodile tears over the death of Ambassador Stevens wouldn’t seem so craven if they had bothered to look into the lies and deceptions that killed and wounded several thousand American soldiers in Iraq.

Tuesday, May 7, 2013

Just Asking For It

A group of pro-gun folk are planning a march on Washington on the Fourth of July to basically dare the police to arrest them for carrying weapons into the city where open carrying is illegal.

Adam Kokesh, 31, is planning a July 4 rally of pro-gun activists openly carrying rifles from Virginia to Washington as an act of “civil disobedience.” The plan, according to his Facebook event page, is to march across Memorial Bridge with rifles loaded and slung across the back “to put the government on notice that we will not be intimidated [and] cower in submission to tyranny.”

The invite continues, stating, ” … This will be a non-violent event, unless the government chooses to make it violent.”

Kokesh writes that if 10,000 attendees RSVP by June 1st, “we have the critical mass necessary to pull this off.” He said he wants to have at least 1,000 actually marching in the event, and as of this writing, more than 1,400 have said they were going.

I’m sure that they are hoping for a confrontation with the cops so that they can claim that they’re being oppressed by tyranny. (It’s always the same thing with some people. Can’t get an extra order of fries with your Happy Meal? TYRANNY!)

Ed Kilgore’s take on this is that it’s an attempt to intimidate the people they think are intimidating them.

But even if no violence ensues, this exercise is actually typical of an awful lot of the stockpiling-guns-to-resist-tyranny talk on the Right (and on rare occasions, the Left) these days. It’s actually the inverse of what Kokesh says: it’s an effort to intimidate political opponents with the threat, if not the immediate actuality, of violence. Otherwise, what’s the point of carrying guns to your nonviolent protest? The point, it seems clear, is to make extraconstitutional claims for the legitimacy of the “constitutional” protests against Big Government.

Or, as Dr. Freud would put it, “Nice gun. Sorry about your small dick.”

The best thing the DC police could do would be to ignore them. You want to march? Fine. Don’t block traffic and don’t litter. Yawn.

Monday, May 6, 2013

Defeat Is Victory

Greg Sargent had a piece up the other day about Sen. Marco Rubio’s plan to frame the immigration reform debate in purely win/lose-for-the-GOP terms.

So how can Republicans who want immigration reform get conservatives to accept it, given that Obama also wants it?

Republicans pushing for reform have come up with a strategic answer to that question, one that isn’t really acknowledged openly. They are subtly making the case to their base that a defeat for immigration reform is actually a hidden victory for Obama, and that passing the Senate compromise is actually worse for the President than the alternative, i.e. doing nothing.

In other words, putting the immigration bill in terms that the Republicans can understand — what can we do today to destroy Barack Obama? — they make it an easy proposition. So pass the Gang of Eight proposal that the president backs and we’ve actually made things worse for him. That’s all that matters anyway.

It’s like the country is being run by eighth-graders.

That Will Be Fun

With all the chatter about Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) running for president in 2016, I wonder how the birthers will explain that being born in Canada to a mother who was a U.S. citizen makes you a natural-born citizen, whereas being born in Hawai’i to a mother who was a U.S. citizen makes you ineligible to hold the office.

I’m sure they’ll come up with something.

HT to rubber hose.

Shot to Hell

One of the bright ideas to emerge from the recently-concluded NRA convention in Houston was for parents to store their guns in their kids’ room.

The course was taught by Rob Pincus, who owns the popular firearm instruction company I.C.E. Training. Pincus argued that, in the event of a home invasion, parents would instinctually run to their children’s room anyway, they might as well have a gun stored there to kill two birds with one stone.

“Kill” being not the best choice of words here.

A 2-year-old Kentucky girl was accidentally killed by her 5-year-old brother who fired a rifle he had been given as a gift, officials said Wednesday.

Cumberland County Coroner Gary L. White said an autopsy of Caroline Starks showed the toddler had died from a single shot from the .22-caliber rifle. The death has been ruled accidental and no charges will be filed, he said in a telephone interview with the Los Angeles Times.

“Most everybody in town is pretty devastated by this,” White said. “Nobody wants to take anyone’s guns away, but you’ve got to keep them out of harm’s way for the kids. It’s a safety issue.”

The girl, Caroline Starks, was in her Burkesville, Ky., home when her brother fired the rifle he had been given as a birthday present about 1 p.m. Tuesday. The mother had just stepped outside the house for a moment, White said. The child was pronounced dead at Cumberland County Hospital.

The rifle used in the accident is a Crickett designed for children and sold under the slogan “My First Rifle,” according to the company’s website. It is a smaller weapon designed for children and comes with a shoulder stock in child-like colors including pink and swirls.

Marketing real guns for kids is along the same lines as putting Jack Daniel’s in a sippy cup so that kids can learn early on the joys of drinking and that just a little snort every so often — if done in moderation — is actually going to teach them how not to get shitfaced. Because kids know all there is to know about self-control.

My guess is that these people who are in favor of storing guns in their kids’ bedrooms are violently opposed to giving away condoms to high school kids or allowing 15-year-olds to get the morning-after pill because that will only teach them to have sex. Just a hunch.

By the way, if anyone thought the NRA might back off from its reactionary and wingnutsery stands after Newtown and the fact that 9 out of 10 people in the country are in favor of universal background checks and restrictions on gun clips, they are proceeding from a false assumption. The new president of the NRA, Jim Porter of Birmingham, Alabama, is an unreconstructed gun nut who claims that Barack Obama is a “fake president” and that the Civil War was really “The War of Northern Aggression,” a term used mainly by the Klan.

Mr. Porter is also an attorney who has spent a lot of time defending gun manufacturers from lawsuits, so any pretense that the NRA is just a group of gun enthusiasts and isn’t a cover for the arms dealers is pretty well shot to hell, so to speak.

Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Squish

Jennifer Rubin, the right-wing columnist for the Washington Post, is peeved at Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) for not playing nice with other Republicans and calling those who supported background checks for guns “squishes.”

For starters, it’s just not smart to annoy colleagues whose cooperation and support you’ll need in the future. Second, as a conservative he should understand humility and grace are not incompatible with “standing on principle”; the absence of these qualities doesn’t make him more principled or more effective. Third, for a guy who lacks manners (see his condescending questioning of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) he comes across as whiny. They yelled at me! Boo hoo, senator.

When liberals go after each other, it’s like watching Quakers argue: “Friend, I have a concern,” and you can practically hear the sorrowful sighs. Not so with conservatives. They can really get into it.

In Ms. Rubin’s case, it’s not surprising that she’d be put out. She just got herself pilloried by just about everyone for the puff piece she wrote last week about how wonderful George W. Bush was and how history will treat the gentle fool with kindness. Then in comes this new senator from Texas like he was Godzilla and Washington was a Japanese fishing village. Squish. There goes the compassionate-conservative rehab.

What’s interesting is that it’s not like they didn’t know what they were getting when he ran. He campaigned as a whack-job, he won the primary against the hand-picked Republican establishment candidate, and he won as a whack-job. Unlike Democrats — or anyone with prefrontal development beyond the age of 14 — he never learned that once you get into office you pretty much have to learn that to do much more than get your 15 minutes on CSPAN, you have to work together. Your constituency is slightly larger than the Tea Party rally in the parking lot of Family Dollar in Buzzard Gulch.

Don’t Mince Words

A resident of Boston does not cotton to the conspiracy theorists’ claim that the FBI set the bombs at the Marathon.

Most assuredly NSFW.

A rough transcript:

Dear Sir, you are without any doubt, a rogue, a rascal, a villain, a thief, a scoundrel, and a mean, dirty, stinking, sniveling, sneaking, pimping, pocket-picking, thrice double-damned no-good son of a bitch.

My, that felt good.

HT to John Cole.

Monday, April 29, 2013

Terrorist Watch List

John Yoo is one of those people who will go down in history as one of those benignly evil people who don’t actually do terrible things like commit torture or genocide themselves but enable those who do and defend them.

“Apparently the FBI interrogated the younger Tsarnaev for 16 hours,” wrote torture memo author John Yoo at National Review. “And then, for reasons that are still unknown, the government read him his rights.”

Yoo has never met a right he didn’t want to ball up like a piece of paper and toss into a trash can in the name of national security. But despite being an attorney and professor at the prestigious University of California Berkeley School of Law, Yoo is either misleading his readers about why Tsarnaev was read his rights or unaware of a basic legal rule.

The judge appeared at the hospital because the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure state that suspects have to be brought before “a magistrate judge, or before a state or local judicial officer” and it must be done “without unnecessary delay.” The Supreme Court has held that, absent exigent circumstances or the suspect waiving the right to go before a judge—as wannabe Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad reportedly did—a suspect has to appear before a judge within 48 hours of being apprehended. This is usually referred to in legal shorthand as “presentment,” as in, “presentment before a judge.”

He is also one of those people who tell us that our rights and the Constitution don’t really matter if you’re dead, and that the Founding Fathers certainly didn’t intend to protect the rights of people who were indoctrinated by foreigners to blow us up. And he does it all without getting that faraway stare in his eyes or wearing a hat with teabags dangling from it.

He’s the one who should be on the terrorist watch list.

Speaking of Assclowns

Sarah Palin — remember her? — was miffed that she didn’t get invited to the White House Correspondents Dinner Saturday night.

Yeah, she really works her ass off ripping off gullible wingnuts who still thinks that John McCain screwed the country by not unleashing the real Sarah Palin in 2008. She’s such a hard worker she had to quit her job just to tell everyone how hard she was working.

By the way, she sang a different tune when she was at the dinner in 2011.

HT to JMG.