Ouch. Gibbs Bristles When Russian Journalist Suggests Gun Violence Is An American FreedomToo
January 16, 2011 1 Comment
Awkward! Outgoing WH Spokesperson Robert Gibbs had an uncomfortable moment when a Russian journalist suggested that gun violence is also an American freedom . Was the Arizona shooting rampage an inevitable byproduct of Americans having too much freedom? Andrei Sitov, a reporter for official Russia news agency ITAR-TASS, argued that the “quote-unquote freedom of the deranged mind to react violently: It is also America.” Gibbs told Sitov he “vehemently” disagreed. “That is not America,” Gibbs said Oh really? Far be it for me to go against the disinformation of the right wing noise machine and the NRA, but Sitov has a pretty apt point. The US leads by a huge margin the number of gun-related acts of violence among the industrialized nations. enlarge Sadly, sensible gun control seems to have replaced Social Security and Medicare as the untouchable “third rail” in politics today. I can’t believe that there is a credible argument for keeping extended magazines, allowing semi-automatic weapons 30 or more shots, or as Rachel Maddow showed on Friday, make automatic weapons a little less easy to get. So unfortunately, Mr. Gibbs, until we start having a truly honest discussion about gun control, the right for a deranged mind to act violently with guns IS an American freedom. The Legal Community Against Violence has published Ten Myths About Gun Violence (.pdf) for more information.
Continue reading …
In Case You Missed It of the Day: The fact that Miss Arkansas, AKA yodeling ventriloquist Alyse Eady, didn’t win the 2011 Miss America Pageant is the greatest travesty since the somewhat-terrifying Miss Nebraska, Teresa Scanlan, did. [ jmg .] Broadcasting platform : YouTube Source : The Daily What Discovery Date : 16/01/2011 05:23 Number of articles : 6
Continue reading …‘Moderate’ Republicans try to do outreach with Latinos. Lots of luck with that.
January 15, 2011 No Comment
Click here to view this media [Video courtesy of America's Voice: H/t Maria and Jackie] Establishment Republicans — the business-friendly wing of the party — have been trying to talk a good game when it comes to Latino voters — their ruling Neanderthal Nativist wing notwithstanding. Now they’re out hustling to convince Latinos that they really should vote Republican — kinda like the way all good chickens should go vote for Colonel Sanders. Jeb Bush and Newt Gingrich are out leading the charge, as it were: But Republicans overall still lost the Hispanic vote nationwide by about 2-1 — not much different than in 2008. Bush wants to change that. “The challenge, though, is that we have a situation right now where Republicans send out signals that Hispanics aren’t wanted in our party, not by policy so much as by tone,” he says. But it’s more than just the tone. It’s one issue in particular, says Alfonso Aguilar, the executive director of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles and a participant in Thursday’s conference in Miami. “Latinos are inherently conservative: They’re socially conservative; they are entrepreneurial; they’re pro-business. Immigration … is that one issue that prevents us from winning the support of Latino voters,” he says. Yeah, if only they didn’t have the people running the party right now out there demanding we alter the Constitution in order to deny Latino children their birthright citizenship. But in realituy, gingrich of course talks out of both sides of his mouth, defending Arizona’s SB1070 while trying to do Latino outreach . Similarly, Jeb is in denial about just how deeply in their thrall Republicans really are: Even though anti-immigrant voices seem to be getting louder inside the Republican Party, Jeb Bush is convinced that they do not speak for most on the right. “That view is in the minority even in the Republican Party,” he says. “But, I think if you got to the point where legitimate, emotional concerns about the lack of border security and the lack of rule of law, once those issues subsided, then you would find a great majority of people that would support some solution to the large number of people that are here illegally.” One of the Republicans speaking out and pushing them to abandon their delusions has been conservative Latino columnist Ruben Navarette: Columnist Ruben Navarrette, who is also speaking at the conference in Miami, says there is a new conversation going on beneath the surface in the GOP — particularly when it comes to the push by some Republicans to repeal the 14th Amendment in order to deny birthright citizenship to children born to undocumented parents. “They’re not fools — they realize that there are those places where they can overplay their hand, and I think the 14th Amendment change is a perfect example of a bridge too far,” Navarrette says. “It’s poison. You play with that, and I am never, ever going be able to go before a group of Hispanic women … and convince them that the Republican Party isn’t anything but a bunch of ogres.” Indeed. This weekend at the big shindig for GOP Hispanics he had the same message, as Frank Sharry blogged yesterday: Early in the day, Bush stated: It would be incredibly stupid [for the Republican Party] to ignore the burgeoning Hispanic vote. Given the anti-immigrant rhetoric that emanates from so many GOP leaders these days, however, it won’t be a simple matter to win these voters back. As a new America’s Voice memo makes clear, Republican leadership is stuck in a deep rut of denial and inflexibility when it comes to Latino outreach and their party’s position on immigration. They seem to think that taking up kinder, gentler “rhetoric” and reaching out on “common values”—instead of revisiting their party’s extreme immigration policies—will do the trick. One panelist at the conference, conservative syndicated columnist Ruben Navarrette, made this very point quite passionately at this afternoon’s panel on media and messaging. From a live blog of the conference: Update – 2:55 PM: Navarrette: “If you come away thinking that this is all about language and tone, you will miss the point… You are always going to be number 2… T he problem is not the tone. It is the message itself—it is offensive, racist. You’ve got to fix the product.” […] Commentator Alex Castellanos, Sr. disagrees. He appears to believe that a majority of Latinos agree with the Republican Party on immigration policy. Helen Aguirre disagrees with Castellanos: “Jeb Bush is the only one who challenged Tom Tancredo. If the [majority of the] Republican Party disagrees but keeps quiet…” Ruben Navarrette argued that the GOP has a track record on immigration that: 1. Deals with immigration dishonestly 2. Caters to that ugly element of racism — “nativism/racism is in the bloodstream” 3. Offers “solutions” that ignore the problem. Navarrette cites the fight to repeal the 14th Amendment and Arizona’s SB1070 as two examples of false solutions on immigration. Lotsa luck to these folks. They’re going to need it: The GOP in reality is in the deep thrall of the Tea Partiers, who are some of the most mouth-foaming and nasty nativists in the country.
Continue reading …
With intricate beading and down-home charm, 53 Miss America contestants strutted outside a Las Vegas Strip casino Friday to show off shoes decorated for their native states. (Jan. 14)
Continue reading …It was inevitable: New tea-partying Republican senator thinks child labor should be legal
January 15, 2011 No Comment
Click here to view this media Yes, we used to joke (or half-joke, anyway ) that hey, next thing you know, Republicans are going to start demanding a return legalized child labor. It’s not a joke anymore. As Ian Millhiser reports at Think Progress, Utah’s newly elected Republican Senator, Mike Lee — the Tea Partier who unseated Robert Bennett — posted a video of a lecture he gave last week on the Constitution. It was quite a lecture: Not only does Lee reveal himself to be a far-right “Tenther” — a conspiracist approach to the Constitution borne out of the Patriot/militia movement of the 1990s — but as someone who believes child-labor laws are unconstitutional, too: Congress decided it wanted to prohibit [child labor], so it passed a law—no more child labor. The Supreme Court heard a challenge to that and the Supreme Court decided a case in 1918 called Hammer v. Dagenhardt. In that case, the Supreme Court acknowledged something very interesting — that, as reprehensible as child labor is, and as much as it ought to be abandoned — that’s something that has to be done by state legislators, not by Members of Congress. This may sound harsh, but it was designed to be that way. It was designed to be a little bit harsh. Not because we like harshness for the sake of harshness, but because we like a clean division of power, so that everybody understands whose job it is to regulate what. Now, we got rid of child labor, notwithstanding this case. So the entire world did not implode as a result of that ruling. Millhiser explains just how misbegotten this argument is — particularly since the Supreme Court, in overturning the rulings that enabled child labor in the first place, was unanimous about the right of the federal government to be involved in these matters. But as Steve Benen adroitly observes, this whole episode is deeply emblematic of the important point that Paul Krugman made today — namely, that the Right’s embrace of this kind of ideology really reflects a significant divide in American politics, between people who simply believe people should want to return to the “good old days” before FDR and the New Deal, and people who believe that the incredible economic and cultural powerhouse that era produced was the product of a desirable balancing act between governmental power and individual rights. As Krugman puts it : There’s no middle ground between these views. One side saw health reform, with its subsidized extension of coverage to the uninsured, as fulfilling a moral imperative: wealthy nations, it believed, have an obligation to provide all their citizens with essential care. The other side saw the same reform as a moral outrage, an assault on the right of Americans to spend their money as they choose. This deep divide in American political morality — for that’s what it amounts to — is a relatively recent development. Commentators who pine for the days of civility and bipartisanship are, whether they realize it or not, pining for the days when the Republican Party accepted the legitimacy of the welfare state, and was even willing to contemplate expanding it. As many analysts have noted, the Obama health reform — whose passage was met with vandalism and death threats against members of Congress — was modeled on Republican plans from the 1990s. But that was then. Today’s G.O.P. sees much of what the modern federal government does as illegitimate; today’s Democratic Party does not. When people talk about partisan differences, they often seem to be implying that these differences are petty, matters that could be resolved with a bit of good will. But what we’re talking about here is a fundamental disagreement about the proper role of government. Indeed, as we’ve pointed out several times, this desire to turn back the clock is a fundamental aspect of the GlennBeckian worldview that’s become the foundation for Tea Party movement conservatism. Digby pointed this out awhile back, citing an essay by Ryan Grim and Arthur Delaney about just what kind of society Beck and the Tea Partying Right want to “take us back” to — one like this: As I explained back then : These are child laborers from the early part of the last century. They were common fixtures on the American landscape. Possibly some of Beck’s ancestors were among them. ( Here’s a gallery of pictures of them. ) … The United States has always been an essentially capitalist economic system. However, we have experienced periods in our history where this system has seriously malfunctioned, and we’ve made adjustments accordingly that have largely worked well making things better. One of those dysfunctional periods came at about the turn of the last century, when McKinley was president, corrupt robber barons ran Congress, and the latter-day version of “strict constructionists” ruled the courts. “Laissez faire” capitalism ruled, and America was functionally an oligarchy. Squeezed out were the working people: the average workweek was 80 hours, there were no weekends, no vacation, only a few holidays, and the barest minimum of pay. Benefits and health care were unheard of. Child labor was the rule. What happened between then and now? “Progressives” began agitating for better working conditions, and began organizing as labor unions. After a long period of violent repression, these reforms gradually became government policy — especially in the 1930s under FDR. Americans began getting 40-hour work weeks with weekends off, paid vacations and benefits. Probably the most significant and lasting legacy of this period of “progressive” innovation was the progressive tax code. It has been a feature of the income tax since its institution in 1913. Who was one of its original champions? Theodore Roosevelt. The fact is that the United States — like nearly every single Western capitalist democracy — is a variable blend of socialism and capitalism, free-enterprise economies with regulatory restraints and modest income redistribution. The result of those “progressive” reforms from 1900-1940 was the birth of the great American middle class and the quality of life we have enjoyed so long we’ve forgotten what it was like not to have it. People like Glenn Beck seem never even to have learned. Indeed, when right-wingers like Beck and Goldberg attack “evil progressivism,” it sounds a lot like they want us to return to the bad old days under McKinley, when American workers were indentured servants to the wealthy. Of course, maybe now that they’re both wealthy men, there’s a simple explanation for that. Lee, of course, comes from a comfortable moneyed background too: His father was dean of the BYU law school, and Lee himself is a high-powered attorney. Funny how that works. The reality is that these people don’t want to “restore America” to its “constitutional” roots — they want to remake it into an oligarchy.
Continue reading …Calls for unity are welcome, but it’s time we face facts: America is a country “deeply divided” by “fundamental disagreement about the proper role of government,” writes Paul Krugman in the New York Times . The left believes the wealthy should be taxed to help the poor; the right believes taxing…
Continue reading …
Joe Scarborough did invite folks to “rub it in my face if I'm wrong,” and there will surely be many who would like nothing better than to oblige him
Continue reading …ABC’s George Stephanopoulos Knocks Rush Limbaugh for His ‘Man Crush’ on Chris Christie
January 13, 2011 No Comment
According to Good Morning America's George Stephanopoulos, conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh has ” a man-crush ” on New Jersey's Chris Christie. The GMA host interviewed the governor on Thursday and hit the Republican on not cutting unemployment fast enough and on his handling of December's blizzard. Regarding the state of New Jersey's turnaround, Stephanopoulos touted the talking points of the state's Democrats: “But some of your critics, some of the top Democrats in the state, say that your priorities are misplaced. One counted the number of the times you used jobs in the speech. Said it was four.” After being told by Christie that the level had come down almost a full point (from ten to 9.2) since taking office, the former Democratic operative turned journalist reminded, “Still above nine percent.” The host followed-up with his remark about Rush Limbaugh. As a back-door way of discussing 2012, Stephanopoulos joked, “Finally, Rush Limbaugh has something of a man-crush on you. He and many others are trying to get you into the presidential race.” Adopting a standard political cliche, he reminded, “Tip O'Neill said all politics is local. You came in for some criticism after the post-Christmas blizzard, including from former mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani.” Christie was then forced to watch a clip of Giuliani critiquing him. Finally, the anchor continued the journalistic attack on Sarah Palin and her use of the word blood libel. “You think she knew what she was getting into with that,” Stephanopoulos wondered, A transcript of the January 13 segment, which aired at 7:43am EST, follows: GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Will the tragedy in Tucson usher in the era of civility President Obama called for last night? How will both parties get back to the business of facing our common challenges? Here to take on those questions this morning, one of the rising stars of the Republican Party, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. Thanks for coming in this morning. CHRIS CHRISTIE: Thank you, George. STEPHANOPOULOS: So, did the President strike the right cords last night? CHRISTIE: Yes. He did. STEPHANOPOULOS: What did you think of his speech? CHRISTIE: I thought it was excellent. I thought he did exactly what you want a leader to do at a moment like this, which is to remind us of the things that we have in common. Remind us of the things that unite us rather than divide us. And try not to play politics at all. The President hit all those things last night. So, I was really happy to see what he did. STEPHANOPOULOS: You're out there all the time with your constituents. I know you're doing another town hall meeting. Is this something that you expected- Does it feel like this is a moment for the entire country? CHRISTIE: Yeah. I think, listen, I think we have to be reflective. I think we should be having this kind of reflection on a daily basis. This is not an unusual period of vitriol in our country. In politics, you look back, we can say almost every presidential campaign that you've seen, high levels of vitriol and anger and things that people probably didn't deserve to have being said about them. I think we have to constantly be examining ourselves for ourselves how we act as a civilize society. Doesn't mean we can't disagree. Of course we can disagree, but we should be looking at this all the time. Not just have a tragedy spur us to do it. We need to treat each other with some level of civility, even when we disagree with each other. STEPHANOPOULOS: Meanwhile, Sarah Palin coming for some criticism today after using that term blood libel. You think she knew what she was getting into with that? CHRISTIE: I don't know. I have no idea. But, what I would say is I I don't think anybody really believes that Governor Palin was trying to make someone get hurt or bring violence on. And I think she should have said that and left it at that. STEPHANOPOULOS: Let's move on to your own State of the State. You were giving a big speech this week, as well. In your speech, you took credit for turning New Jersey around from being a basket case. But some of your critics, some of the top Democrats in the state, say that your priorities are misplaced. One counted the number of the times you used jobs in the speech. Said it was four. Your response? CHRISTIE: Because we're creating jobs, not talking about it. When I came into office, unemployment was ten percent in New Jersey. We're still too high. We're at 9.2 percent, but we're down almost a full point in a year and we're below the national average now. Last month in November, one- STEPHANOPOULOS: Still above nine percent . CHRISTIE: Yeah, I said- I said, we're not good enough. And I didn't say we turned it around. What I said in the speech is, State of the State is improving. Getting better every day. And last month, in November, the last month we have for jobs in New Jersey, one of every five private-sector jobs created in America was created in New Jersey. So, our policies are helping to create jobs where the private sector wants to grow again. You can talk all you want about jobs. It's about creating them and putting people back to work. STEPHANOPOULOS: One of our big issues is education reform. The former chancellor of the D.C. schools, Michelle Rhee was in the audience, watching your speech. The President has also hit those themes of educational reform a lot. Is this an issue, where Republicans and Democrats can find common ground? CHRISTIE: Absolutely. Absolutely. Michelle Rhee is a Democrat. I had Mayor Cory Booker of Newark in the audience, as well. We're working on reforming the Newark public schools, together, with Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook and the challenge grant he's given to the city of Newark. And I've said from the time of the campaign when I running in 2009 that President Obama and I agree on this issue. Agree much more than he did with my predecessor on the issues of real education reform. This is the transformational issue that can also bring both parties together, if we just rise above the interests, the special interests that want to protect the failed status quo. STEPHANOPOULOS: Tip O'Neill said all politics is local. You came in for some criticism after the post-Christmas blizzard, including from former mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani. RUDY GIULIANI: If he asked me my advice? I would have said, “They elected you governor, they got in an emergency. They expect you to be there. You have to be there if you're a governor, a mayor or even a president, if it's important enough.” STEPHANOPOULOS: He said you shouldn't have been at Disney World. CHRISTIE: Listen, I know you find it shocking that two, strong-willed Italian guys from the north east will disagree on something. I have great respect for the mayor. We disagree on this one. But, we agree on so many more issues that Mayor Giuliani and I, two former U.S. attorneys will disagree on things at times on things. This is one that we do. STEPHANOPOULOS: Finally, Rush Limbaugh has something of a man-crush on you. [Christie laughs.] He and many others are trying to get you into the Presidential race. You've said time and time again you're not running. I take you at your word. But try to encapsulate what you think the Republican Party needs, who they need to nominate, what kind of a person in 2012. CHRISTIE: We need to nominate someone who the american people believe walk the walk, not just talk the talk, on reducing the size of government and bringing our tax structure and our spending, most importantly, under control. And that person has to prove they're willing to do the difficult things, not just talk about them. Because they've heard plenty of talk, especially from our party. I said this fall, we were campaigning for Republican candidates around the country. This is the Republican Party's last chance. It's put up or shut up time for us now that we won the House. We better do what we said we were going to do, or we're going to be sent into the wilderness without a compass for a long time and we're going to deserve it. Because we've talked about it, now let's do it. — Scott Whitlock is a news analyst for the Media Research Center. Click here to follow him on Twitter .
Continue reading …
[Video Link]. “It’s like OUR Law & Order—just more British.” Created for BBC America by Joe Sabia, whose work we’ve featured on Boing Boing, and on Boing Boing Video’s Virgin America in-flight channel…. Broadcasting platform : YouTube Source : Boing Boing Discovery Date : 13/01/2011 19:35 Number of articles : 6
Continue reading …
This post originally appeared at Campaign for America’s Future (CAF) at their Blog for OurFuture. I am a Fellow with CAF. Watch as GOP Rep…. Broadcasting platform : YouTube Source : The Huffington Post Discovery Date : 13/01/2011 17:50 Number of articles : 6
Continue reading …