Remember all the pearl-clutching over Obama going to visit his childhood home in Hawaii last year, calling it "elitist"? Or when visiting his dying grandmother in her Oahu home, Cokie Roberts complained that it made Obama appear "foreign" and "exotic" to choose to go to Hawaii, instead of say, Myrtle Beach.

Well, you silly liberals expecting consistency, that was then. This is now. And NOW, Hawaii is the perfect location for the Republican National Committee to hold their winter meeting:

Republicans delight in depicting President Obama as hopelessly out of touch with average Americans, but the decision by the Republican National Committee to hold its winter meeting at a tropical resort is turning the accusation on its head.

As the president gave his first State of the Union address Wednesday against the backdrop of the nation’s wheezing economy, the opposition party marked the event by convening a conference here – on an “island paradise.”

“Imagine lush tropical gardens, waterfalls, exotic wildlife and priceless artwork,” boasts the website of the Hilton Hawaiian Village Beach Resort & Spa. “This one-of-a-kind Honolulu Hawaii hotel resort is the only true resort property in Waikiki.”

Which is to say that it’s a long way from Baltimore, where the House GOP will have its retreat later this month in a pointed effort to demonstrate their sensitivity to the tough economic times.

Yet at a moment when millions are out of work and millions more struggling to get by, the party’s governing board will plot its comeback on the island of Oahu, sipping drinks poolside, catching rays on the beach that abuts the villa and raising questions about whether they’re as politically tone-deaf as they accuse the president of being.

Oh, but it's not all sunshine and pina coladas by the pool. No, no, no. RNC Chairman Michael Steele, resplendent in his Hawaiian shirt and lei, assures us this is no vacation.

"Relax," Steele said while sporting a Hawaiian shirt and a flower lei. "We're working hard here, trust me. This is not a vacation."

Steele said the the meetings will "expose Hawaii to the rest of America." He told KHON, a local TV station, that it was important for the RNC, "as a party," to be in Hawaii, the home state of President Obama.

You know, I hear a lot of people claim Obama is playing three-dimensional chess to the RNC's checkers, but in this particular case, I'm not even sure that the RNC isn't stuck playing Chutes & Ladders instead.

I was flipping the channels last night and I came across an ad for one of those Barbara Walters "10 Most Fascinating People" specials, and this year she included Glenn Beck on her list.

What is ABC thinking? They only feed into his lunacy and make him go more insane by the minute. His nuttiness does hurt America. When did being a lunatic become interesting, Barbara? Sure, Bill O'Reilly is jealous, but who cares?

This is why our media are so screwed up. They take a far right-black helicopter extremist and tell Americans that he's interesting, No, he's dangerous. Just check out his role in Richard Poplawski's deadly outburst.

Shame on Barbara and shame on ABC.

Via Huffington Post, the latest from Bart Stupak, clearly under the loving spiritual guidance of his C Street family:

Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) is warning fellow Democrats not to mess with his restrictive anti-abortion amendment.

Pro-choice outrage was sparked by the inclusion of a provision in the House health care bill making it harder for private insurers to cover abortion. President Obama himself suggested that the language disrupted the status quo and should be taken out of the final legislation. Abortion rights supporters in Congress requested a meeting with the president next week to discuss the issue.

Now Stupak is saying he won't go easily.

"We won because [the Democrats] need us," Stupak said. "If they are going to summarily dismiss us by taking the pen to that language, there will be hell to pay. I don't say it as a threat, but if they double-cross us, there will be 40 people who won't vote with them the next time they need us -- and that could be the final version of this bill."

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (1473)

PLAYS: (1231)

Yesterday, the Senate passed the Defense appropriations bill, and actually garnered some 28 "No" notes from Republicans who otherwise would normally be eager to jump on a defense-spending bill.

Their reason? Well, attached to the bill was the nation's first real federal hate-crime law. And that, it seems, was too much for them.

But then, that's par for the course for the modern Republican Party, which ever since the days of Nixon has come to represent the knuckle-dragging bloc of American culture, which resists efforts to expand and protect the civil rights of all Americans tooth and claw every step of the way -- mainly by appealing to people's irrational fears that granting civil rights to others erodes their own rights ... and usually conflating rights with privileges along the way.

With President Obama having promised to sign the bill into law, however, all this sound and fury has finally come to naught. And for that, it's worth standing back and appreciating what a historic moment it actually is.

The passage of the Matthew Shepard-James Byrd Hate Crimes Prevention Act really is a momentous occasion: It marks the first time in history that Americans have collectively taken an effective stand against the thugs and bullies who have used violence through the course of our history to threaten and oppress whole populations of minorities.

Here's Brian Levin's summary at HuffPo:

The United States Senate passed landmark legislation today that expands the coverage and protection of federal hate crime laws to now include sexual orientation, gender, gender identity and disability. While a 1994 federal law technically covered gays, the scope of the law was so narrow that it was hardly ever used. Today’s legislation is expected to be signed by President Obama soon. It marks the first practical expansion of the most broadly applicable criminal civil rights law since 1968.

Moreover, as Joe Solomonese at the Human Rights Campaign observed, this law marks "our nation's first major piece of civil rights legislation for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people."

It has been a long and arduous -- not to mention frustrating -- effort. I have been observing hate-crimes laws since their beginnings: my home state, Idaho, passed one of the nation's first bias-crime statutes in 1981, largely in response to the onset of crime associated with the Aryan Nations setting up shop in the Panhandle. (To the state's lasting shame, both of its senators voted against this bill.) My second book was an examination of the phenomenon of bias crimes and the enforcement of the laws dealing with them -- and all along, it has been clear that Congress needed to act.

What kept them, of course, was a Republican Party fully in the thrall of the Religious Right, which has fought any expansion of a federal bias-crime bill generally, while doing so under the rubric of opposing the "homosexual agenda." This bill had actually passed both houses of Congress three times previously, and was derailed each time by Republican machinations.

But that's only a small part of a much bigger picture. Passage of a federal bias-crime statute finally means that we have overcome our many previous failures to stand up to the perpetrators of terroristic crimes. Remember, if you will, how the Senate back in 2005 apologized for its failures to ever pass an anti-lynching statute back in the 1920 and 1930s, when lynching was a national problem -- even as it continued to fail to enact a law to combat the modern descendant of the lynch mob, namely, the multiple perpetrators of bias crimes.

Continue reading »

The Poor Man Institute: Subverting the meritocracy?

pandagon: Michael Barone offends (and impresses) liars with his commitment to dishonesty.

attytood: A death in Kentucky

David Cay Johnston: GOP favors public option for property, not people

Infrastructurist: Demolished: 11 Beautiful train stations that fell to the wrecking ball

Dennis Perrin: Fan Baste

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (105)

PLAYS: (322)

Wendell Potter repeated to Ed Schultz what he said in his testimony before the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee, that Max Baucus' bill is a joke.

Wendell Potter warned that if Congress "fails to create a public insurance option to compete with private insurers, the bill it sends to the president might as well be called the Insurance Industry Profit Protection and Enhancement Act."

Here is some of the hearing today. Potter on the Baucus "Insurance Industry Profit Protection and Enhancement Act".

Potter on co-ops and why they won't work.

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (2285)

PLAYS: (38882)

It really must take a special level of Teh Stoopids to be Glenn Beck.

You all may remember this video from a couple of weeks ago, back when Beck was just warming up on his favorite subject -- the Threat of Evil Negroes Like Van Jones. (Presumably, the basis of this threat has something to do with black people being Sons of Ham or something like that.)

Well, Matt Osborne at HuffPo did some digging around to determine the nature of the second group of Scary Negroes featured in Beck's rant. And it turns out that they are very, very scary members of a black dance troupe:

Dated October 9th, 2008, here's a YouTube description from Christiv3:

A typical step show on college campuses throughout the country. The young kids from the "Obama Junior Fraternity" are emulating a historically black fraternity that is found on college campuses throughout the nation. Their teacher was probably a member.

Young men in this fraternity DO go on to become teachers, doctors, lawyers, architects and engineers. Not a bad way to achieve these goals..

These kids want to go to college so they can be like the men in this video who are in college and are pursueing their dreams.

Other members of this fraternity include Bill Cosby, Jesse Jackson, Langston Hughes, Count Basie and Michael Jordan.

Cosby, Basie, and Jordan? Commies, all of 'em.

The kids in Beck's video are students at the Urban Community Leadership Academy in Kansas City, Missouri. How did I learn this? Why, from going to the original "Negro army" YouTube video post ...

Yup, that's purty durn scary there, pilgrim.

And if you really want to make Beck pee his pants, dig up some breakdancing video.

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (104)

PLAYS: (333)

David Sirota on CNN's American Morning explaining why the White House throwing Van Jones under the bus was such a terrible idea. They've done nothing but show the right wing that they will cave if they decide to attack a progressive working in the White House.

ROBERTS: The president hired Van Jones to find more green jobs, putting more Americans back to work and helping the environment. Now, Jones is looking for a job himself. He has been under fire for some pointed comments about Republicans and a petition that he signed back in 2004 questioning what the Bush White House knew about 9/11. He has now resigned.

To talk more about that, let's bring in syndicated columnist David Sirota and David Frum, the editor of newmajority.com and former speech writer for the Bush White House.

David Sirota, let's start with you, because you wrote quite a scathing column that appeared on the newleft.org and as well on the huffingtonpost.com, saying you're absolutely outraged by the way the White House handled this.

SIROTA: Van Jones is a national hero for his work on green jobs. He's known as an expert on energy policy, on economic policy. He's somebody who made a mistake, who acknowledged that he made a mistake a long time ago, and he was tossed out by this White House.

And I think what we can learn from what happened is what this White House values and what this White House doesn't value. The White House stuck by Tim Geithner as Tim Geithner was involved, the treasury secretary, in a tax scandal. He's accepted gifts from the banking industry. The White House stood by him.

The White House has stood by other people, like Ben Bernanke, who has really been at the heart of our economic problems. And they're basically putting Van Jones out to pasture because of something Van Jones said was a mistake.

And I think what's going on here is that the White House is listening to the white right wing's political terrorists, people like Glenn Beck, people like conservative activists who have targeted Van Jones because Van Jones is an African-American with a progressive movement background working on behalf of social justice.

That's something, unfortunately, that is apparently, according to the right wing, not allowed in this country.

Continue reading »

First I want to say that I had an incredible time at Netroots Nation. What a treat to see so many in the liberal blogosphere gather to discuss health care and virtually every other issue we face. Kudos to all the politicians who showed up to represent their positions as well.

Anyway, a huge topic that was raging through the weekend was the state of the 'public option.' Since the Baucus Dogs haven't finished their bill we still don't have the goods to really make any sense of what the House of Lords is going to put forth. We do have the Senate HELP committee bill, but the Baucus Dogs are trying to muck up the works by stalling the process and trying to empower the teabaggers. Any member of Congress that is affected by the lunatic fringe appearing at these events should resign immediately.

I was talking to Digby at length about it over the weekend and she said she had a meeting with Mike Lux and he laid out a possible scenario to her that could come to pass even if Grassley, Bayh, Conrad, Baucus, Nelson and the rest of the paid off shills of the health insurance industry come out with a bill that doesn't have a 'public option.'

He later wrote about it in his piece: The News of Its Death Is Greatly Exaggerated

Here are a couple of possibilities for getting a bill passed:

A. The first is that conservative Senators are given a fig leaf compromise on the public option, so that they can say to people they forced a compromise, and then are brought over with all kinds of other incentives that make them more comfortable with the bigger bill.

B. The second is that the conference committee simply breaks the bill in half, one half being the less controversial part that everyone agrees upon, the other being the public option and the financing, both of which can go through the reconciliation process. Then Obama and Reid muscle the 50 votes they need for support.

Continue reading »

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (643)

PLAYS: (1471)

This is a speech by Tim Ryan back in 2005. It was pretty powerful and I had some dealings with him after this because he spoke up against the war and highlighted the insane amounts of money we were pouring into it. Billions of dollars a month. That was then and this is now.

I'm sure most of us have been amazed at how disingenuous pro-life groups are when it comes to contraception. They scream "life" is sacred, but then try to prevent all ways that are available to our society when it comes to pregnancy prevention. We've seen insane protests against the Plan B pill which would actually prevent unwanted pregnancies. What many pro-lifers really want to do is control the sex lives of every American. I know it's hard to picture, it creeps me out just thinking about it, but the James Dobsons and Richard Lands of the religious right just want to decide when and how people can have sex.

There's a Democratic group devoted to the pro-life movement that's called Democrats For Life of America and Rep. Tim Ryan learned why they are so full of shit and can never be taken seriously.

U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) has been, in his words, "booted" from the national advisory board of Democrats For Life of America. The group's mission is to elect and support pro-life Democrats; Ryan served on the board for four years but the relationship had recently soured when he co-sponsored the "Preventing Unintended Pregnancies, Reducing the Need for Abortion and Supporting Parents Act":

Ryan said he tried to convince officials with Democrats For Life of America, which he referred to Monday as a "fringe group," that the use of contraception is needed as part of any plan to reduce unintended pregnancies but that failed.

Kristen Day, Democrats For Life's executive director, was ready to move on. "DFLA gave Congressman Ryan ample opportunities to prove he's committed to protecting life, but he has turned his back on the community at every turn."

Ryan insists he's still a strong pro-life advocate. The proposed bill includes funding for comprehensive "teen pregnancy prevention" sex education and expanded coverage of "family planning" for low-income women. "We're working in Congress with groups that agree with preventative options while [the DFLA] is getting left behind," Ryan said. "I can't figure out for the life of me how to stop pregnancies without contraception. Don't be mad at me for wanting to solve the problem."

Say goodbye, Mr. Ryan. No sex for you.
Digby linked to this article in the NY Times from 2006 and it spells out their views on contraception. We must never forget what they really believe.

Many Christians who are active in the evolving anti-birth-control arena state frankly that what links their efforts is a religious commitment to altering the moral landscape of the country. In particular, and not to put too fine a point on it, they want to change the way Americans have sex. Dr. Stanford, the F.D.A. adviser on reproductive-health drugs, proclaimed himself "fully committed to promoting an understanding of human sexuality and procreation radically at odds with the prevailing views and practices of our contemporary culture." Focus on the Family posts a kind of contraceptive warning label on its Web site: "Modern contraceptive inventions have given many an exaggerated sense of safety and prompted more people than ever before to move sexual expression outside the marriage boundary." Contraception, by this logic, encourages sexual promiscuity, sexual deviance (like homosexuality) and a preoccupation with sex that is unhealthful even within marriage.

This is why the "common ground" movement is such crap. The social conservatives don't care about "life" they care about sex. In fact, they are the ones who are obsessed with it. And until they can establish social and legal sanctions against other people having unapproved sex, they will not stop. That is what moves them.

Tim Ryan says that he can't think of a way to stop unwanted pregnancies without contraception. But that's because he knows that human have sex regardless of whether it's sanctioned by some busy bodies down at the corner mega-church. These social conservatives do not accept that. They think that sex must be controlled and that they should be the ones to control it. Perhaps they think they need this in order to control themselves.

I'll never forget that freak of nature Bill Frist, who embarrassed himself on THIS WEEK when he didn't know how HIV was transmitted and that condoms fail 15% of the time. He's a man who backed the phony abstinence programs that was being taught to our kids. then he self diagnosed Terri Schiavo from a video tape. He embodies the "social conservative" sex movement. Yuck.

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (80)

PLAYS: (371)

July 09, 2009 CNN