Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Headlines - Tuesday March 23

 
TEA PARTIERS FURIOUS ABOUT BEING FORCED TO HAVE HEALTH INSURANCE
Say they'll move to Canada.
 
Obama: Congress Must Act on Financial Reform
GOP warns any reform could mean end of free checking.
 
GOP: Health Bill Rammed Down Our Throats With No Debate
Unlike invasion of Iraq.
 
U.S. Senate Bill Threatens China Over Currency
If they don't revalue yuan, we'll stop borrowing money from them.
 
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Boehner Promises GOP Will Run On Repealing HCR: 'You Can Bet On It': http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8ASvQVk_h4&feature=player_embedded
 
It's going to be awesome to watch them stand up there and explain how they want to take away people's benefits. Who'll be killing Grandma then?
 
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MarketWatch: After less than half an hour of discussion, a Senate panel late Monday approved sweeping bank-reform legislation to rewrite the rules for capitalism and banking without any Republican support, after GOP lawmakers on the committee decided not to include any amendments to the measure.

Senators voted 13 to 10 to pass the underlying 1,336-page bill introduced last week by Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee.
 
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The Great Thing About the Health Care Law That Has Passed? It Will Save Republican Lives, Too
 
An Open Letter to Republicans - by Michael Moore
 
 
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Tbogg finds a great screenshot from the Carlsonington Post:

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Glenn Greenwald: The GOP's Newfound Defense of 'Consent of the Governed' 
 
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"America has just witnessed democracy in action,
which is an unconscionable abuse of power. President
Obama has betrayed his oath to the nation by using his
incumbent power as a President who won 53% of the vote
in the last election to justify the means of health care
reform by extolling the end of saving American lives.
This cannot be allowed to stand. The campaign to
end majority rule in this country begins today!"
 
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Please, call it "Obamacare"
 
Album cover - 'Ronald Reagan speaks out against socialized medicine'
Write those letters now. Call your friends, and tell them to write them. If you don't, this program I promise you will pass just as surely as the sun will come up tomorrow. And behind it will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country, until, one day... we will awake to find that we have so­cialism. And if you don't do this, and if I don't do it, one of these days, you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children's children, what it once was like in America when men were free.
-
Ronald Reagan, urging voters to act against the passage of Medicare
As Republicans rail against creeping socialism, it's apparently already too late -- about 45 years too late. According to conservative icon Ronald Reagan, the United States went fullblown Marxist when Medicare passed in 1965.
 
 
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Democrats shouldn't expect much cooperation from Republicans the rest of this year, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) warned Monday.
Terrifying prospect.
 
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Rep. Randy Neugebauer(R-TX) is apologizing for shouting "Baby killer!" (to rabid anti-abortion Democrat Bart Stupak):
"Last night was the climax of weeks and months of debate on a health care bill that my constituents fear and do not support," Neugebauer said in a news release. "In the heat and emotion of the debate, I exclaimed the phrase 'it's a baby killer' in reference to the agreement reached by the Democratic leadership. While I remain heartbroken over the passage of this bill and the tragic consequences it will have for the unborn, I deeply regret that my actions were mistakenly interpreted as a direct reference to Congressman Stupak himself." Neuegebauer's scream was only part of Sunday's mayhem in the Capitol. Tea party protesters screamed outside the Capitol, Republicans applauded when a man was carried out of the House gallery and then there was Neugebauer's scream.
Last year Neugebauer cosponored a failed bill that would have required presidential candidates to supply a copy of their birth certificate.
 
Joe Wilson Now Giving Serious Consideration to
Choosing Randy Neugebauer as His Presidential
Running Mate on the GOP Ticket in 2012
 
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The right wing is wasting no time in issuing an avalanche of lawsuits to overturn the health care reform bill. Here's another one, from the anti-gay Liberty Counsel, home to Matt Barber.
 
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I feel my friend Steve's pain. It was depressing to see the Democrats fight for a corporatist Republican bill.  But it was not surprising, that's politics in DC - not related to ideology and little more than a spectator blood sport.
 
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Doesn't she have kids to raise?
 
Bible Spice wants megabucks for new TV show Alaska's Biggest Attentionwhore

Average, bootstrappy hockey mom Sarah Palin is demanding $1 million per episode for her as-yet undeveloped reality show, Caribou Barbie in Cluelesstown.

According to Perez Hilton, there is speculation that many of the major networks, including the Discovery Channel, and even smaller ones like Dumbasses With Crossbows have passed on Palin's series…

Please.

 
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Stay classy, repukes

Rethugs torn between a) blaming teabaggers' racist comments to Democratic lawmakers on Dems, and b) saying racism is perfectly reasonable since repukes can't walk thru Harlem or Detroit without getting killed.

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), a leading voice in the tea party movement and a legendary mattress-soiling douchenozzle, said Sunday that protesters' recent use of racial and homophobic slurs toward Members of Congress was no big deal.

"I just don't think it's anything," King said, emphasizing that the incidents were isolated. "There are a lot of places in this country that I couldn't walk through. I wouldn't live to get to the other end of it."

King's remarks come a day after tea party protesters spat on Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) and shouted a racial slur at Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.); both are African-American. A protester also shouted a sexual slur at Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who is openly gay.

Another Republican lawmaker also brushed off the racial epithets and suggested they were prompted by Democrats dressing so provocatively the parliamentary maneuvers being used by Democrats to pass a health care bill.
No, really.

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Morford: Open wide and never stop gasping
 
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"Hey, Mom! Where in the Bible does it
say I have to be a symbol of the GOP?"
 
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Planned Parenthood: "We regret that a pro-choice president of a pro-choice nation was forced to sign an Executive Order that further codifies the proposed anti-choice language in the health care reform bill".

When a president signs an executive order that codifies anti-choice language, maybe it's time to stop referring to him as a pro-choice president.
 
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Mario Piperni: what starts twisted, ends twisted
.
Mitt Romney is quickly becoming the biggest douchebag hypocrite in a Republican party which already has the largest concentration of douchebag hypocrites ever assembled in a single organization.  (I know 'cause I checked it out on Google.)

Here's what Romney had to say in the aftermath of the House passing the Senate health care bill.

America has just witnessed an unconscionable abuse of power. President Obama has betrayed his oath to the nation — rather than bringing us together, ushering in a new kind of politics, and rising above raw partisanship, he has succumbed to the lowest denominator of incumbent power: justifying the means by extolling the ends. He promised better; we deserved better.

He calls his accomplishment "historic" — in this he is correct, although not for the reason he intends. Rather, it is an historic usurpation of the legislative process — he unleashed the nuclear option, enlisted not a single Republican vote in either chamber, bribed reluctant members of his own party, paid-off his union backers, scapegoated insurers, and justified his act with patently fraudulent accounting. What Barack Obama has ushered into the American political landscape is not good for our country; in the words of an ancient maxim, "what starts twisted, ends twisted."

His health-care bill is unhealthy for America. It raises taxes, slashes the more private side of Medicare, installs price controls, and puts a new federal bureaucracy in charge of health care. It will create a new entitlement even as the ones we already have are bankrupt. For these reasons and more, the act should be repealed. That campaign begins today.

Where to begin? The statement is littered with lies and baseless talking points. That's expected. Romney's a Republican hack hoping to get the presidential nomination in 2012.  Repealing the law? It won't happen.  Aside from the fact they'd have to own both houses of Congress as well as the White House, which political party would ever attempt to tell Americans that a return to the time of pre-existing conditions and sky-rocketing insurance premiums is a good thing.

That aside, the most ridiculous part of the Romney statement is this

Romney is now pledged to running against his own record. This is an unusual strategy but one forced upon him by a) his actual record and b) the temper of the Republican party and conservative movement. All this trouble over one tiny bill he signed when Governor of Massachusetts! Because Obamacre is, in the view of plenty of sensible observers, merely a souped-up version of the Romneycare Mitt signed into law in Boston – and that he boasted about during the 2008 campaign. Back then it was a case of "I can fix health care because I've done it in the Bay State". How times change.

Now, of course, he must disavow this and pretend it never happened. …Candidate Romney must disavow his own past.

How did that "ancient maxim" go? Oh yes…what starts twisted, ends twisted.

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Agreed in 1982, and introduced in 1986, the whaling moratorium was brought in after a prolonged and intense campaign by green pressure groups

Whaling: the great betrayal - Outrage as secret deal set to sweep away international moratorium. Go USA!

Is it really any worse than this?

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Why would they choose a logo that looks like a dick wrapped in a flag?

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David Frum

No illusions please: This bill will not be repealed. Even if Republicans scored a 1994 style landslide in November, how many votes could we muster to re-open the "doughnut hole" and charge seniors more for prescription drugs? How many votes to re-allow insurers to rescind policies when they discover a pre-existing condition? How many votes to banish 25 year olds from their parents' insurance coverage? And even if the votes were there – would President Obama sign such a repeal?

We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat. [...]

So today's defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their listeners and viewers will now be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio. For them, it's mission accomplished. For the cause they purport to represent, it's Waterloo all right: ours.


For once, Frummie, I hope you're right.

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Here's the note that was attached to the brick that was thrown through Congresswoman Louise Slaughter's office:

 

Now local TV station 13-WHAM reports that Slaughter received a death threat: "Assassinate is the word they used…toward the children of lawmakers who voted yes."

The morans who threw the brick are responding to posts on a teabagger blog called "Sipsey Street Irregulars". The guy who runs the blog is on Social Security disability, of course, and he's really a peacemaker:

Now I did not call for the vandalization of the windows of congresscritters, only local Demoncrat party HQs. But I can certainly understand why someone would.

I am trying to prevent civil war and communal killing, not start it, by warning those who do not understand the unintended consequences of THEIR actions.

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Wear this outfit and you can be ready for
teabagging anytime the moment is right.
 
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There is no more denying that the Republican Party is the Party of Hate: http://brilliantatbreakfast.blogspot.com/2010/03/there-is-no-more-denying-that.html
 
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They won't take my photoshop or my laptop though, right? Do I have any rights left?
 
Secret Service warns public that they could confiscate any cameras used to take pictures of first family
 
 
This story on the First Lady taking the kids to a Broadway show in New York has an interesting element: a warning by the Secret Service that anyone taking their picture would have their cameras confiscated. Perhaps the Secret Service General Counsel could point us to where in the Constitution and federal law the Secret Service has the authority to ban photographs by the public and the confiscation of cellphones and pictures to enforce the ban.
 
Michelle Obama – with Sasha, 8, and Malia, 11, and about a dozen other people in tow – attended the matinee performance of "Memphis" Sunday. After the block was cordoned off, the large group entered the theater. Secret Service members did not like all of the pictures being taken that issued the warning. If the First Family wishes to avoid pictures, they may want to watch the play on video rather than confiscating cellphones and cameras of citizens. I find it outrageous that the Secret Service would consider it within its authority to confiscate phones to avoid annoyance to the First Family. The Secret Service at times seems to view itself as a Praetorian Guard rather than a public law enforcement agency.
 
For the full story, click here.

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What has this cat seen? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVrXHOmM56s&feature=player_embedded

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Right wing reacts with rage: health care will "do more damage than 9/11," "freedom has been assaulted."

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Teabaggers will get 1 million Facebook Twitter sugnatures to repeal NobamaKKKare with your help!