Tag Archives: National Organization for Marriage

Morning Bunker Report: Saturday 4.7.2012

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————————————-WHAT THE REPUBLICAN PARTY STANDS FOR TODAY

Cantor To Release Ad Touting ‘Small Business’ Tax Cut For Millionaires Like Oprah – House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), fresh off a legislative victory with his fraud-inducing JOBS Act, is pushing another bill aimed at helping small businesses. The legislation is supposed to give small businesses a tax cut but instead, it cuts taxes for millionaires, professional sports franchises, and businesses like Oprah Winfrey’s production company. While giving millionaire’s a $45,000 tax cut, many small businesses actually wouldn’t qualify for the tax cut Cantor proposed. Those facts, however, aren’t stopping him from running advertisements in his Richmond-area district touting the bill… [...] Once again, Republicans are betting that its single trick of cutting taxes for every millionaire (“small businesses” and “job creators,” to borrow from their parlance) will stimulate job growth. The problem is, there’s no evidence that it will.

National Review Writer Tops Racism With More Racism – Popular conservative columnist and National Review writer John Derbyshire topped all of his previous racist screeds (and sexist rants) today by posting a long breakdown of all of the important lessons he has taught his children about race — and he’s outdone his own racism with this one. [...] After spending a few minutes bemoaning imagethat he can’t say a racist slur (“What you must call ‘the ‘N’ word’ is used freely among blacks but is taboo to nonblacks”) and opining on the hostility he believes all black people feel toward white people like himself (though he says he isn’t white before calling himself white several times), he cuts to the heart of his lessons for his children: (10a) Avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally. (10b) Stay out of heavily black neighborhoods. (10c) If planning a trip to a beach or amusement park at some date, find out whether it is likely to be swamped with blacks on that date (neglect of that one got me the closest I have ever gotten to death by gunshot)…

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker Overturns Law To Help Prevent Pay Discrimination Against Women – The Equal Pay Enforcement Act, passed in 2009, gave employers more power to press charges against employers to challenge unfair pay practices, allowing people to plead their case in state courts, instead of the more costly federal court system. The state legislature passed the Republican-backed repeal bill on party-line votes last week, and Walker waited until almost the last possible minute before signing it. As the Huffington Post’s Amanda Terkel explains, the Equal Pay Enforcement Act could have helped women in the badger state: “Women earn 77 cents for every dollar that men make. In Wisconsin, it’s 75 cents, according to the Wisconsin Alliance for Women’s Health (WAWH), which also estimates that families in the state “lose more than $4,000 per year due to unequal pay.” …

imageMaryland Mormons want to repeal marriage equality — Members of the Mormon church are leading efforts to place a marriage equality referendum on the ballot in Maryland, according to an e-mail obtained by the Washington Blade. The e-mail states that several Maryland churches are working to gather signatures, and that 200,000 need to be collected by May, even though just over 55,000 signatures are needed for the referendum to reach the ballot. Two members of the Mormon community in Maryland are listed as organizers in the e-mail, which calls for more people to gather signatures “within the LDS community,” referring to the church’s formal name, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. An LDS spokesman said that the church is not involved in the effort. The Mormon Church was one of the primary backers of California’s Proposition 8 amendment, which prohibited same-sex marriage in the state.

NOM calls for federal investigation of LGBT group, IRS – According to the documents, Romney donated $10,000 to the controversial anti-gay organization in 2008, which has recently come under fire over racially divisive tactics revealed in court documents by the State of Maine. HRC says that NOM is notoriously cagey about revealing its donors. The revelation of Governor Romney and other donors’ names has the group calling for a federal probe of both HRC and the Internal Revenue Service. In a statement on its website, NOM’s President Brian Brown alleges that HRC could have only obtained the information by criminal means. “Either the HRC got NOM’s tax return from someone with the Internal Revenue Service, or they got it from a hacker who stole it. Either way, it appears that a federal crime may have been committed,” wrote Brown. The information was originally published on March 30 at Huffington Post. [image: DonkeyHotey]

What Could Go Wrong? – According to a report from the Miami New Times, corroborated by the leader of the group, a Neo-Nazi white nationalist group is now patrolling the streets of Sanford, Florida in the event that a race riot breaks out. Neo-Nazis are currently conducting heavily armed patrols in and around Sanford, Florida and are “prepared” for violence in the case of a race riot. The patrols are to protect “white citizens in the area who are concerned for their safety” in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting last month, says Commander Jeff Schoep of the National Socialist Movement. “We are not advocating any type of violence or attacks on anybody, but we are prepared for it,” he says. “We are not the type of white people who are going to be walked all over.” [...] Only in America does a white man shoot a black man [kid], and then somehow it’s white people who end up concerned about their safety.

—————————————————————————————–THE ALTERNATIVE

“I think the meanness of the GOP was a big part of it. The outing people on the internet, the religious fanatics, the attempts to get people fired, the absolute unwillingness to ever admit error, the smearing of the Schiavo’s husband, the gay-bashing, etc. Even if I bought into wingnut bullshit, I never thought of myself as a hater. [...] And while Republicans may very well have been crazy for decades, the outright ugliness, I think, has escalated beyond measure. The hideous treatment of Graeme Frost was the final straw, I guess. It was just the last, final, “WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?” moment. You see the same thing from the same folks as they viciously attack Trayvon Martin for his horrible sin of being gunned down in cold blood. I will never know why it took so long. It’s not easy looking at everything you thought you knew and saying “Wow, was I ever full of shit.” But eventually, if you have two remaining brain cells bouncing around your thick noggin, the amount of evidence becomes unavoidable and undeniable. Even for someone who voted for Bush twice,” – John Cole, Republican apostate  

04/06/2012: President Obama Speaks at the White House Forum on Women and the Economy: WATCH

…
Some of President Obama’s remarks: Right now, women are a growing number of breadwinners in the household.  But they’re still earning just 77 cents for every dollar a man does — even less if you’re an African American or Latina woman.  Overall, a woman with a college degree doing the same work as a man will earn hundreds of thousands of dollars less over the course of her career. So closing this pay gap — ending pay discrimination — is about far more than simple fairness.  [...] Because of the health reform law that we passed, women finally have more power to make their choices about their health care. Last year, more than 20 million women received expanded access to preventive services like mammograms and cervical cancer screenings at no additional cost.  Nearly 2 million women enrolled in Medicare received a 50-percent discount on the medicine that they need.  Over 1 million more young women are insured because they can now stay on their parent’s plan.  And later this year, women will receive new access to recommended preventive care like domestic violence screening and contraception at no additional cost. And soon, insurance companies will no longer be able to deny coverage based on preexisting conditions like breast cancer, or charge women more just because they’re women… [image: Rachel Maddow]

Al Franken may be a Senator now but he’s still very funny: People In Stock Photos For Al Franken – “And whether you’re a Tattooed Guitar Player, a Guy Wearing Hard Hat, or an Elderly Couple Sitting At Kitchen Table, there’s no better way to show your support than by making a contribution today.”

LINK: Related: “Al Franken, Email Master”

 

Mitt Romney: poised to be the GOP’s top shithead

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Mitt Romney poised for Tuesday sweep – If Mitt Romney is able to win with these kinds of margins—big double-digits in Romney-friendly states, high single-digits to low double-digits in states where Rick Santorum originally had a chance—there’s no question that he’ll win enough delegates to hit the magic number while primaries are still ongoing. So I guess Republicans have the shortest memory in the world. After spending three years yelling about President Obama, health care reform, and high taxes … they are about to nominate the guy who invented Obamacare and who raised taxes while governor of Massachusetts. Of course, he denies all that, and apparently Republicans are willing to believe him. But things are going to get interesting when Romney tries to move into Etch-A-Sketch mode, trying to erase the things he said during the Republican primary in order to appeal to swing voters. And assuming tomorrow goes as PPP’s polling suggest it will, that day is coming soon.

 Wisconsin, Where the Romney Pushback Begins – So, suddenly, with women running away from the Republican party and its putative nominee as though he’s gone radioactive, we get a story that tells us that the White House “fears” the power of “rock star” Ann Romney, the woman with several Cadillacs? As near as I can tell from that Politico story, the main sources of Ann Romney’s “power” are that she’s Mitt’s only first wife, and that he’s a little bit less of an animatronic foof when she’s around. She’s his “link” to “the base” simply because they’ve stayed married to each other. [...] The work of humanizing the Romneybot — recreating him as a “moderate,” so that we can actually have the horse-race that people want so badly come the fall — is going to continue and accelerate. His campaign has been stunningly adequate throughout, just about up to the task of spending a quintillion quatloos to crush a field of lightweights and rodeo clowns. He’s outspending Santorum 55-to-one in Wisconsin and has built up a virtual monopoly on television advertising, and his lead is still only in single digits. And he’s being stunningly adequate in a state that is in a merry chaos of superheated politics. For the first time since Fighting Bob LaFollette was in there swinging, Wisconsin is the red-hot core of American politics.

Animatronic foof!! That’s exactly why I read Charles P. Pierce, who in my mind is a national treasure. #WIN

Here are some things the Romneybot has done / said recently, all of which TeamRomney will now attempt to either “soften” for moderate voters (the majority of folks who aren’t likely to think Jesus would have voted for more tax cuts for the wealthy), or will just straight up amend, change, or lie about in the future. We need to keep score:

Mitt Romney’s top 5 assaults to women’s health

1. He’s going to ‘get rid of’ Planned Parenthood.

2. Romney supports the Blunt Ammendment which would allow employers to deny health insurance coverage on the basis of moral objections.

3. Romney is fighting a covert battle against contraception, even if he is doing his best not to call it that.

4. Romney failed to condemn Rush Limbaugh’s characterization of Sandra Fluke as a “slut.”

5. Romney supports restricting access to abortions. He has called Roe v. Wade “one of the darkest moments in Supreme Court history.”

More details at Think Progress

Side note:


via: lycanpedia

One of NOM’s Top Secret Donors Revealed: Mitt Romney – We often talk about how hard NOM works to hide their donors – even if it means circumventing the law – but now, we’ve learned the identity of one of their high-profile financial supporters: Mitt Romney. Financial documents obtained by HRC reveal that Mitt Romney donated $10,000 to the National Organization for Marriage in 2008 – essentially funding NOM’s strategy of using racial division and unfounded scare tactics to attack LGBT equality, at the same time that NOM was fighting for Prop 8 in California. via: sarahlee310

Tax Cuts in GOP Budget Would Give Millionaires $265,000 on Top of Bush Tax Cuts; Would Cut Top Rate to Lowest Level Since Hoover Administration – “I’m very supportive of the Ryan budget plan. It’s a bold and exciting effort on [Ryan’s] part and on the part of the Republicans.”— Mitt Romney [source]

Ad War Update – Romney’s online ad strategy is to tell people what they want to hear, literally: In the past campaign speeches often tried to include one line or two to satisfy each type of voter. But increasingly campaigns are figuring out exactly what people like you would need to hear to vote for them, and then giving exactly that message to people exactly like you. Another group of people will hear another message directed explicitly at their concerns.

Mitt Romney Keeps Lying – Mitt Romney is not only lying more often as the primary draws to close, he’s also telling bigger lies. “We know that under Barack Obama, 800,000 jobs have been lost. We know that under Barack Obama, 2.3 million homes have been foreclosed upon. We know that under this president, chronic unemployment is the worst it’s been in American history.” No, it is not the worst it’s been in American history. I expect the general election will be filled with one lie after another, because there is no credible way for Romney and the Republicans to attack the president without lying…

Romney (and the rest of the GOP) can’t ever make a point without acting like they’re in a junior high lunch room:  “Our president doesn’t have the same feelings about American exceptionalism that we do,” Romney told a conservative crowd. Obama rebuffs Romney on ‘exceptional’ America – “It’s still primary season for the Republican Party,” [Obama] said, but then took aim at Romney’s central argument. “It’s worth noting that I first arrived on the national stage with a speech at the Democratic Convention that was entirely about American exceptionalism and that my entire career has been a testimony to American exceptionalism. But, you know, I will cut folks some slack for now because they’re still trying to get their nomination.”

Wednesday morning’s 4 marginally interesting things

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1) ROMNEY THE RICH RUSSIAN ADVERSARY

Mitt Romney’s 4-car fantasy home — At Mitt Romney’s proposed California beach house, the cars will have their own separate elevator. There’s also a planned outdoor shower and a 3,600-square foot basement — a room with more floor space than the existing home’s entire living quarters. A project this ambitious comes with another feature you don’t always find with the typical fixer-upper: its own lobbyist, hired by Romney to push the plan through the approval process. […] But it may not help Romney — whose wealth has caused him trouble connecting with average folks — to be seen building a split-level, four-vehicle garage that comes with a “car lift” to transport automobiles between floors, according to 2008 schematic plans for the renovation obtained by POLITICO that are on file with the city of San Diego.

  • Car Elevators In Action — Mitt Romney is getting one, and they’re kind of awesome.
  • Mitt Romney: Silly voters, elevators are for cars, not people! — His appreciation of elevators in his capacity as a private citizen didn’t show up, however, when he was Governor of Massachusetts. In particular, Romney — like many Republicans — was hostile to requirements for elevators imposed by the Americans Disabilities Act (ADA). [...] On June 26, 2006 Romney vetoed an improvement project with the price tag of $40,000 with his line item veto. The project would have allocated the money to Woburn Development Authority for improvements to an elevator to meet the standards set in the ADA. The whole state of Massachusetts couldn’t come up with $40,000 to refurbish an elevator so that people with disabilities could use it. By contrast, when Mitt Romney wanted to convince the city of La Jolla, California that his beachfront mansion needed its own private car elevator, he spent $21,000 just on the lobbyist he hired to help make that happen.
  • Mitt Romney’s Many Homes – Republican Presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney drew more attention today for ill-timed plans to triple the size of his La Jolla, Calif. home and add a car elevator. It’s not his only property, however, and here’s a look at his other lodging.

Not Ready to Lead — Mitt Romney thinks the president doesn’t need to be an expert on foreign policy; he’ll just call his lawyers to figure out what to do.


…

LOL ROMNEY: Making Friends All Over the Place — Russian President Dmitry Medvedev tweaked Mitt Romney for his characterization of Russia as the “No. 1 geopolitical foe” of the United States, saying the comments did not reflect the current relationship between the two countries. “It is very reminiscent of Hollywood and also of a certain phase in Russian-U.S. relations,” Medvedev said at the end of the nuclear security summit in South Korea Tuesday. […] Medvedev urged Romney to take the current climate into account if he hopes to win the presidential election. “My first advice is to listen to reason when they formulate their positions. Reason never harmed a presidential candidate,” Medvedev said. “My other advice is to check their watches from time to time: it is 2012, not the mid-1970s.”

2) ‘COLOSSAL DICK’ SANTORUM  

Santorum loses lead at home to Romney — Santorum, who represented the state in Congress for 16 years until he was defeated in a Senate election in 2006, saw his lead over Romney evaporate from 29 points to 2 points in the past month, according to the Franklin and Marshall College poll conducted from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania’s primary election takes place on April 24, along with liberal northeastern states like New York and Connecticut which Romney is favored to win. If Santorum loses or scrapes by with a narrow win in Pennsylvania, he will come under pressure from senior Republicans to pull out of the race.

Santorum, Gingrich open to VP slot — Rick Santorum sat down with radical TV preacher Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network, which asked the former senator if he would consider an invitation to join Mitt Romney’s Republican ticket. “Of course,” Santorum said… Also yesterday, Newt Gingrich was asked on Fox News about a possible V.P. nomination. Though the former Speaker said an invitation is unlikely, he added, “I wouldn’t say no.” At least on the surface, Santorum and Gingrich scoff at the very idea of ending their presidential bids, and in public, continue to tell voters that they remain viable candidates. But when they both sit down for televised interviews, and both signal a willingness to accept roles on the ticket, Santorum and Gingrich are signaling a level of resignation and defeat neither has made up until now. As one GOP strategist told TPM, “Rick Santorum saying he would be open to being Romney’s vice president undermines the logic of his delegate campaign. To win his delegate race, he has to demonize Romney. He has now cut that path off.”

3) THE OTHER TWO

Gingrich, Strapped for Cash, Lays Off Third of Staff — Gingrich, insists that he is still a viable candidate despite a third-place rank in the delegate count. He has hinged his entire strategy on hoping Mitt Romney is incapable of securing the 1,144 delegates needed to become the nominee, resulting in a contested GOP convention this summer. Earlier Tuesday in Annapolis, Md., Gingrich told reporters “the money is very tight obviously” and suggested his communications staff would soon announce a series of layoffs. Gingrich significantly cut back the number of scheduled campaign events he holds. Currently on his schedule, he only has one event a day for the next three days.

We call this one “Ron Paul with Sad Meat.”More where that came from.Where is Ron Paul? — Two things Ron Paul isn’t doing: He’s not winning — he has yet to place first in a primary or a caucus, either this cycle or last. And he isn’t making a lot of appearances on the campaign trail — over the past week, he has held only three campaign events, while his rivals’ events have numbered in the dozens. Four things Paul is doing: He’s appearing on late-night TV; he’s having a town hall at the University of Maryland in College Park on Wednesday; he’s holding what his campaign describes as a “giant” rally on Thursday at the University of Wisconsin in Madison; and he’s airing TV ads criticizing his rivals over last week’s Etch a Sketch incident. [image: ccindecision]

4) TEABAGISTAN

Arizona lawmakers push to take over federal land – Another “sagebrush rebellion” is spreading through legislatures in Arizona and other Western states with a series of formal demands that the federal government hand over title to tens of millions of acres of forests, ranges and other public lands. […] Legal experts say the movement is based on a misreading of federal law and the U.S. Constitution and will almost certainly fail to survive court challenges…”In an era of apparent fiscal responsibility, why would the state seek billions of dollars of liability and management responsibility to assume ownership over the (25 million) acres or so of parks, forests and public lands in Arizona?” said Matt Skroch, executive director of the Arizona Wilderness Coalition. “It is ill-conceived, it is irresponsible and it makes absolutely no sense.”

‘Obamacare’ and the Right’s Own Private Universe — It is a small miracle of mass communication that complete and total bullshit is so quickly and easily converted into incontrovertible fact out of which can be created a world of public events completely real, but completely divorced from what the rest of us recognize as reality. Take poor Sandra Fluke. It is now an article of faith on the Right that she asked all of us to pay for “her” birth control. “Real women pay for their own birth control,” the crowd on the steps chanted today, and there were more than a couple of signs warning her not to expect “our” money to pay for her obviously overindulgent sexytime. Of course, Fluke did nothing of the sort. … Also, today, folks told me that Obamacare “finances abortions.” (It doesn’t.) I heard that it will mandate “euthanasia.” (It won’t.) Even the death panels got a workout again. We have half the country living in its own universe of belief, with its own history, its own politics, and its own physical laws. It’s like running elections against the anti-gravity party. It is not healthy for any of us. [image: phroyd]

Worst Persons in the World — The Daily Caller released a series of Trayvon Martin’s tweets yesterday, and once again the far-right is attacking and attempting to discredit an innocent child — and this time, the child happens to be dead. So classy, these people. Limbaugh and Beck attacked Malia Obama, Malkin stalked Graeme Frost and others — there are literally dozens of examples of the Fox News / AM radio crowd attacking children and noncombatants like Sandra Fluke. Why? Because they’re bullies and scavengers who can only prey upon easy targets.

Divide and Conquer For Jesus — Stay classy, homophobes: The leading opponents of same-sex marriage [National Organization for Marriage - NOM] planned to defeat campaigns for gay marriage by “fanning the hostility” between black voters from gay voters and by casting President Obama as a radical foe of marriage, according to confidential documents made public in a Maine court today.

(3/22) Thursday morning’s partially interesting things

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1) PRESIDENT OBAMA / DEMOCRATS

  • Obama: Romney Is ‘Pretending He Came Up With Something Different’ Than The Individual Mandate - During an interview with American Public Media’s Marketplace, President Obama defended the individual health insurance mandate and reiterated that likely GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney enacted a very similar policy as governor of Massachusetts. “[W]e designed a program that actually previously had support of Republicans,” Obama told host Kai Ryssdal, “including the person who may end up being the Republican standard bearer and is now pretending like he came up with something different.” Obama also predicted that the Supreme Court — which is scheduled to hear oral arguments on the constitutionality of reform on Monday — will uphold the law and that “it will be very hard for any governor to explain why it is that they’re not giving people…an opportunity to get cheaper health insurance, better deal, more protections because of some ideological argument that they’re having with the president.” “And when people see that in fact it works, it makes sense — as it’s, by the way, working in Massachusetts — then I think a whole bunch of folks will say ‘Why aren’t we trying it as well?’”

2) MITT ROMNEY

  • Maddow chronicles the lies of ‘sketchy’ Mitt Romney - “This is hard to talk about in the day to day news context, because there are such low expectations for politicians being truthful and because the word ‘lie’ is both under-used and over-used to the point where everybody is a little touchy about it. But the degree to which Mr. Romney lies, all the time, about all sorts of stuff, and doesn’t seem to care when he gets caught is maybe the single most notable thing about his campaign… He lies all the time, really easily. He says things that are not true with unnerving frequency.” Watch video [image: wilwheaton]
  • Romney econ adviser posts “deport seniors” joke on blog  - Greg Mankiw, the Harvard professor who serves as one of Mitt Romney’s top economic advisers, has managed to take a shot at two key constituencies – Hispanics and seniors – in a single linked post on his popular economics blog. Under the header “A Fiscal Solution,” Mankiw, who served as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under George W. Bush, posted an uploaded photo of an unidentified newspaper clip, a joke, that read: “Budget Cuts: The Immigration Department will start deporting seniors (instead of illegals) in order to lower Social Security and Medicare costs. Older people are easier to catch and less likely to remember how to get home.” [...] Mankiw offered no comment other than “Thanks to the reader who sent this along” – but he clearly thought it was funny.
  • “I’m very supportive of the Ryan budget plan. It’s a bold and exciting effort on his part and on the part of the Republicans and it’s very much consistent with what I put out earlier…. I applaud it. It’s an excellent piece of work and very much needed.” — Mitt Romney, 3/20/12 in Chicago

3) RICK SANTORUM

  • Rick Santorum On GOP Budget: ACCELERATE the Spending Cuts - Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum says he supports a House Republican budget proposal, but adds that the spending cuts included in it should be accelerated. Santorum says he would be more aggressive in achieving budget savings, including by doing away with cost-of-living increases in federal grants to states for Medicaid and food stamps. He also said that while some of the deficit cutting measures proposed by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin would be phased in, he believes they should be imposed more quickly. [image: paxamericana]

4) REPUBLICAN WAR ON WOMEN

  • Supreme Court Conservatives Void Part of Family Leave Act - So let me see if I have this straight: first, conservatives want to make sure you get pregnant by limiting access to birth control, then force you to have the baby by limiting access to abortions, then if you get fired for taking time off to have the baby, you have no right to recourse for being fired. Great. All these things that have been litigated decades ago and established as basic rights have been inverted. The very notion upset Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg enough for her to make an unusual step: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, on behalf of Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, took the rare step of reading her dissent aloud in court. She called the result “regrettable” and observed that the Kennedy opinion “pays scant attention to the overarching aim” of the law, which was “to make it feasible for women to work while sustaining family life.” Ginsburg said that the law was a reasonable effort by congress to ensure the equal protection guaranteed by the 14th amendment for public employees facing discrimination. [image: pricklylegs]
  • Cathy McMorris-Rodgers Thinks Democrats Are Scaring Women - This woman is out of her fucking skull. How DARE she? Democrats are scaring women to drum up votes? Is she serious? Let’s take a little walk down GOP Fuckery Lane, shall we? Republicans are trying to shove foreign objects into our vaginas. Republicans are comparing us to fucking farm animals. Republicans are trying to force us to carry DEAD FETUSES in our wombs because hey—pigs and cows do it! Continued…

5) REPUBLICAN WAR ON THE 99% / PROTECTING THE ONE PERCENT

  • Paul Krugman: Flim-Flam Fever - Way back in 2010 I declared that Paul Ryan — who was rapidly becoming the darling of the “fiscal responsibility” crowd — was a fraud, a flim-flam man. [...] His latest budget proposal has received some harsh critiques. It calls for huge tax cuts, supposedly offset by closing loopholes and ending tax expenditures — except that in a long report he fails to name a single tax expenditure that he would cut. It assumes drastic cuts in discretionary spending, basically eliminating everything except defense. And over the medium term, of course, it’s a plan to savage the poor while giving big tax breaks to the rich. So actually two questions: are people finally willing to concede that Ryan is not now and has never been remotely serious? And — I know this is probably far too much to ask — are they going to do a bit of soul-searching over how they got snookered by this obvious charlatan? [image: liberalsarecool]
  • The House Budget Committee last night approved Chairman Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) budget by one vote, with two Republicans voting against it. [The Hill]
  • AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka issued a statement condemning the extreme right-wing budget proposed by House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan (R-WI) — “Just as Republican governors and state legislators are assaulting the rights of working Americans under the guise of budget crises, Rep. Ryan and Republican leaders in Congress are using the federal budget to further their own political agendas. Their credo is that tax giveaways to the super rich and Wall Street should be paid for on the backs of working people. They are holding the federal government hostage, along with hundreds of thousands of jobs and the services millions rely on, while simultaneously proposing irresponsible budget cuts. It is clear that they are not concerned with fiscal responsibility, but rather undermining their political opponents. This is simply further evidence of their determination to protect their friends on Wall Street at the expense of American jobs, seniors, our children and our future. As we recover from the worst economic crisis of our time, cuts to essential programs threaten to push us back into recession, or even depression. Shame on those Republicans more worried about the politics of their choices than the economic consequences.” 
  • Randon thought - I know whenever I, for example, notice a 60+ year old woman cleaning my hotel room, my first thought is “best raise the Social Security age to 70. Also, too, cut the benefits.”

6) MISC

  • NOM Launches Petty Boycott Of Starbucks Over Marriage Equality - A convenient excuse to cover up its crushing loss in New Hampshire yesterday, the National Organization for Marriage has launched a “Dump Starbucks” campaign in protest of the company’s support for marriage equality. The boycott’s website launched shortly after Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz rebuffed NOM’s complaints at a shareholders’ meeting yesterday: SCHULTZ: I think Starbucks has many constituents, and from time to time we are going to make a decision that we think is consistent with the heritage and the tradition of the company that is perhaps maybe inconsistent with one group’s view of the world… We made that decision through the lens of humanity and being the kind of company that embraces diversity.
  • Report Proves Health Reform Is Here To Stay: 49 States Have Already Taken Action Supporting Its Implementation - According to a new survey from the Commonwealth Fund, “49 states and the District of Columbia have already taken action supporting the law’s implementation, such as passing legislation, issuing regulations or other guidance, or actively reviewing insurer filings.” Between January 1, 2010, and January 1, 2012, “23 states and the District of Columbia had taken new legislative or regulatory action on at least one of these reforms” — which include changes like expanding dependent coverage for young adults up to age 26, prohibiting lifetime limits on health benefits, and phasing out annual dollar limits on health benefits — and an additional 26 states had “taken other action to promote compliance with the reforms, such as issuing bulletins to insurers.”

The Gingrich Legacy: Ashleymadison.com & NOM

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Pro-Adultery Website Endorses Gingrich | ThinkProgress

Ashleymadison.com, a website that promotes adultery, has endorsed Newt Gingrich for president, and even erected a giant billboard in Pennsylvania to announce it.

via: ihatepeacocks

It’s very fitting that Newt is the common denominator linking Ashleymadison.com and NOM. Protect ‘heterosexual’ marriage: marriage, adultery, divorce, marriage, adultery, divorce (repeat as often as you like).