rise and shine

****

They Gave Us A Republic: ….…I admit to watching, dumbfounded, as contraception became, in the immortal words of the Vice President, “a big fucking deal” over the last week or so…. I had a busy week, and just left it up to Obama…..

What he was up to, it looks to me like, was positioning his pieces to call “checkmate” in one of those games of eleventh dimensional chess that I am starting to believe might actually exist.

He must have been laughing his ass off when the Bishops and their GOP allies picked this fight… Some pro-choice republicans were aghast, and pleaded with the leadership not to, but they charged ahead, like a two-ton bull, right through the doors of the china shop. And Barack Obama smiled and stood aside, holding them open.

…. Obama wasn’t boxed in. Not at all. But now the Bishops are. So far, they have been silent after thunderously declaring that nothing short of total repeal of the mandate would suit them. And as they lost the healthcare reform battle, they are going to lose this one, too. Because they are wrong and their time is past. And by their silence, I think they are telling us all that they realize they’ve been had.

Full post here

****

****

Deaniac (The People’s View): Nontroversy resolved. Another stroke of genius by Obama.

… now the President has stripped off all the cover for the GOP’s anti-women agenda, and they are still not smart enough to hide it. Now women know for sure that this fight is about birth control and not about religious liberty. Now women also know who stands in their corner to protect birth control and which party wants to take this very basic health care right away from them.

Full post here

****

****

Smartypants: In The Atlantic, James Fallows has written one of the most interesting analyses of the Obama administration that I’ve seen.

…. if you’re like me, you won’t agree with some of the things he says. But what I appreciated about it is that he doesn’t seem to have an ax to grind from either side. He’s not trying to defend Obama or take him down. I’ll admit that its rare to see an analysis these days that doesn’t at least seem to have one or the other agenda – no matter how deep people try to bury it.

More here

****

TPM – thanks Loriah

****

Addictinginfo: The Republican Party is tearing itself apart and many conservative voters are considering abandoning the sinking ship to vote for none other than President Obama in 2012.

According to a poll conducted by Wenzel Strategies on behalf of conservative publication World Net Daily, 1 in 5 Republicans will vote for or are leaning towards voting for President Obama in the upcoming Presidential Election in November.

Full post here

****

Otrainofthought

****

****

Steve Benen: Chronicling Mitt’s mendacity

Several weeks ago, I launched a new Friday afternoon feature, highlighting the most blatant Mitt Romney falsehoods of the week. It moved to Maddow Blog last week, and here’s this week’s installment. (It does not include mendacity from Romney’s CPAC speech this afternoon.)

More here

****

Toons

Bob Cesca

****

Maddow Blog

****

Eclectablog

****

Morning everyone 😉

ah, gopolitico….

Steve Benen: …. it was another unpleasant day on Wall Street yesterday, with all of the major indexes falling. From a political perspective, consider how some news outlets covered the story – and connected the drop to President Obama …. Politico’s front-page headline told readers: “Markets plunge after Obama speech.”

In fairness, the Politico article was slightly better than its ridiculous headline, but the larger point is the same: these outlets tried to draw a connection between the president’s jobs speech and the one-day drop on Wall Street. After all, Obama spoke on Thursday night, and stocks slipped on Friday morning, ergo, one caused the other.

The problem, of course, is that this isn’t even close to being accurate. We know why the major indexes fell yesterday: “The stock market tumbled again Friday as doubts about the ability of European leaders to address a spiraling debt crisis on the continent overshadowed President Obama’s new proposal to spur U.S. job creation….”.

To suggest to U.S. news consumers that markets were reacting to the president’s jobs speech is absurd, even for conservative media outlets…..

More here

Zachary Karabell (Daily Beast): It’s easy to blame the president’s speech for the turmoil in economic markets at home and abroad – it’s also wrong.

… Most major news outlets ascribed the drop to a negative market referendum on President Obama’s jobs speech last night.

… The weakness of U.S. financial markets this week has almost nothing to do with what is going on in the United States economically or politically. It has everything to do with the endlessly unfolding drama in the European Union over the fate of Greek debt, peripheral countries, and the euro.

…  we have one easy but false narrative – the markets don’t like Obama’s plan – that trumps a more complicated but true story – the markets are roiling from the fear of what is happening in Europe ….

Most financial cognoscenti know that the current issue is Europe, as do many who write and speak about such things. But the American desire to be the center of all things makes the story of markets selling in reaction to Obama too tempting. The problem isn’t just that it’s the wrong twist….

More here

rino?

Steve Benen: ….I can appreciate all of the reasons to take Jon Huntsman seriously as a candidate ….. but Huntsman is a moderate in an era when Republicans don’t like moderates.

Huntsman believes “health care is a right” …. He believes climate change is real and endorsed a cap-and-trade plan to address is …. He supported an individual mandate as part of health care reform … Republicans are on the opposite side of all of these issues. .. Oh, and he’s also a former member of the Obama administration who called President Obama a “remarkable leader.”

The Republican base has gone to great lengths to target so-called RINOs (Republicans in Name Only) … We’re to believe this same base will tolerate a moderate as their presidential nominee? Sure, Huntsman will start engaging in Romney-like flip-flops and try to reinvent himself. And sure, the media’s sycophantic adulation will give the guy a boost his rivals probably won’t enjoy.

But when push comes to shove, what are the chances Republican voters will nominate a former member of Obama’s team who doesn’t even want to describe himself as conservative? Strange things happen, but I’m hard pressed to imagine how anything this strange happens.

More here

****

According to GOPolitico, Fox News was the first to cut away from Huntsman’s ‘big’ announcement today – half way through his speech. So, they’ll treat him with as much as respect during his campaign as they do the President.

****

Thanks Ladyhawke

****

More on Huntsman at The Reid Report

****

Loriah just alerted me to Huntsman’s Google (Images) problem:

😆

this is the creature huffy post signed up. seriously.

At 12:00 Breitbart again expresses his admiration for shit-photoshopper Jack Cashill …. err, see here

At 12:25 Breitbart claims that Bill Ayers admitted writing the President’s first book … err, see here  … it’s surprising, I know, but Breitbart doesn’t get it ….. Ayers was ‘taking the piss’, as they say in Ireland 😆

See a post on the interview at politicususa – here

‘take that, tea party!’

Andrew Leonard (Salon): Call it the miracle of Wisconsin … With 100 percent of precincts reporting, the liberal candidate for state Supreme Court justice, JoAnne Kloppenburg, boasts a whopping 204 vote lead over the longtime incumbent and conservative Wisconsin fixture David Prosser…

…That there will be a recount appears inevitable … but this is a fairly amazing result. In February, Kloppenburg managed to get only 25 percent of the vote in a primary contested by four parties. Prosser was considered a shoo-in …  just six months later, the Tea Party tide, at least in Wisconsin, has been matched by a wave in the opposite direction.

Adding fuel to liberal euphoria, a Democrat also won election to the county executive seat in Milwaukee vacated by Gov. Scott Walker …and Kloppenburg decisively trounced Prosser in the district currently represented by Republican state Sen. Dan Kapanke, the first legislator for whom Democrats have accumulated enough signatures to force a recall vote….

The best evidence of what was at stake in this election, ironically, comes from the Walker camp. The night before the election, Walker’s chief counsel, Brian Hagedorn, sent out an email outlining the dire consequences of a Kloppenburg victory. “If Justice Prosser loses:

* The Supreme Court will shift from a 4-3 conservative majority to a 4-3 liberal majority.
* Governor Walker’s agenda could be stopped in its tracks by this new activist majority.
* Union bosses and their allies will be emboldened and further push to recall the brave Senators who voted for Governor Walker’s budget repair bill.
* (Chief Justice) Shirley Abrahamson and her allies will continue to drag down the reputation of the Court, with an additional vote to further push through their radical agenda.”

One could argue about who really has the “radical” agenda in Wisconsin, but the gist of Hagedorn’s email shouldn’t be in dispute. Walker’s opponents will be emboldened. And so will anyone else looking for evidence of what can happen when enough people get out and vote.

Full article here

arianna’s little brother?

President Barack Obama hugs Lilly Ledbetter after signing the ‘Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, January 29, 2009

So, Cenk Uygur (Young Turks), darling of the Professional Left, was, apparently, ranting again today about the President – I don’t know what he was hyperventilating about this time, I only watch him now when I’m in need of a cure for insomnia.

I used to like the guy, always watched his YouTube stuff, but I remembered today the point when we parted company:

This video (you can see it all here) was made just a year in to Barack Obama’s presidency – but by then Uygur had already concluded that the President had failed him and his fellow ‘progressives’.

Okay, that was all a bit predictable from a professional leftie, but what was most incredible about this video was this supposed progressive’s sneering comments about the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act:

“Eventually the Democrats had a 60 seat majority in the Senate, they were unstoppable. And what did we get? Lilly Ledbetter. If you don’t know, that’s a minor bill that passed in the beginning of the administration … it’s a good bill, that’s why I bring it up … about women being entitled to equal pay. God bless. Incredibly easy victory.”

A “minor” bill?

A 2009 bill that amended the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was an incredibly easy victory?

A 2009 bill that finally gave legal support to Lilly Ledbetter’s 1998 equal-pay lawsuit regarding pay discrimination was “minor”?

A lawsuit that the Supreme Court ruled against in 2007, by a 5-4 majority

“The case had never received much attention before going to the Supreme Court, but the Court’s ruling ignited legal groups on the left and Democrats that took action to transform the Ledbetter case into a rallying issue for the left, having activists seen in the figure of the complainant an ideal standard-bearer in their attempt to persuade the public that the Supreme Court was moving too far to the right.”

The Supreme Court’s ruling was applauded by the US Chamber of Commerce who called it a “fair decision” that “eliminates a potential wind-fall against employers by employees trying to dredge up stale pay claims.”

….The bill was re-introduced in the 111th Congress in January 2009. It passed in the House of Representatives with 247 votes in support and 171 against. The vote was nearly perfectly split along party lines…. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act passed the Senate, 61-36, on January 22, 2009.

As president, Obama actively supported the bill. The official White House blog said:

President Obama has long championed this bill and Lilly Ledbetter’s cause, and by signing it into law, he will ensure that women like Ms. Ledbetter and other victims of pay discrimination can effectively challenge unequal pay.

On January 29, Obama signed the bill into law. It was the first act he signed as president, and it fulfilled his campaign pledge to nullify Ledbetter v. Goodyear.

Here’s the video of the signing of the “minor” bill – see how little it meant to all those who attended:

So, did Cenk sneer at the successful conclusion to the long struggle for equal pay for women because he regards equal pay for women as “minor”, or because it was President Obama who signed the bill? Maybe both? Dunno.

I remember thinking, only a Republican could regard equal pay for women as a “minor” achievement. Oh, wait:

(See the full video here, from YearlyKos ‘o7, where he tries to convince progressives that not only he is no longer “so conservative judicially I went to Federalist Society meetings”, he is now a fully fledged progressive!)

So, from being a Ronald Reagan fan (which he was) and a Federalist Society supporter (wow!) and a critic of “excessive regulation” (good grief), to being a fully fledged Professional Left ‘progressive’ in no time at all …. that’s, um, change we can believe in!

Of course leopards can change their political spots, and it’s very lovely when they shift the spots from right to left, but is there not a touch of the Arianna Huffingtons about this guy? The political shift has paid off beautifully, he’s now a media star! (But still not big in to equal pay for women).

PS Isn’t it kind of curious that three of the highest profile media/internet ‘progressives’ are ex-Republicans, Arianna Huffington, Markos Zuniga (Daily Kos) and Cenk Uygur (Young Turks). And all three now host sites or personally express views that are ceaselessly anti-President Obama? Are their hearts truly in the Democrat/liberal cause? Just asking.

“….the basic right to form free trade unions & to strike”?! communist!

reagan: a conservative icon. err…..

Brian Goldsmith (The Atlantic): …. As governor of California, Ronald Reagan signed the law that legalized abortion in California, that allowed no-fault divorce for the first time, and he championed and approved the largest tax increase in state history…

He raised sales, corporate, inheritance, liquor and cigarette taxes, and the top income tax rate …. Under Governor Reagan, the California Air Resources Board (so-called “command and control” environmental regulation) was founded, and real spending increased almost 13 percent – more than under his Democratic successor, Jerry Brown. Reagan even signed the Mulford Act, “prohibiting the carrying of firearms on one’s person or in a vehicle, in any public place or on any public street.”

As president, Reagan raised taxes at least seven times. In 1982 alone, he raised taxes twice, including the largest peacetime tax increase in American history … he also raised spending by nearly a quarter in real terms – more than double the increase under President Clinton. In all, Reagan grew the federal civilian workforce by about 200,000; Clinton cut it by about 200,000. The national debt skyrocketed from $700 billion to nearly $3 trillion…

…he also negotiated sweeping arms control deals with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. He even signed the United Nations Convention Against Torture that banned harsh interrogation techniques even under “exceptional circumstances.” (Today’s GOP leaders attack the UN and oppose relatively modest arms control treaties like New START.)

On social issues, Reagan’s record was even less conservative. He spoke about prayer in schools and ending abortion rights – but did little about either. He appointed the pro-choice Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court. He even granted amnesty – yes, amnesty – to nearly three million illegal immigrants.

In a 1984 campaign debate, Reagan said, “I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and lived here, even though sometime back they may have entered illegally.” Here’s a thought: some reporter should tell Palin a Democrat had just spoken those words. Somehow it seems doubtful her response would be, “How Reaganesque”.

Read the full article here – and pass it on to your Reagan-worshiping conservative friends 😉

ah, yet more lies

Greg Sargent (Washington Post): A lot of people have already jumped on Kathleen Parker for her column yesterday faulting Obama for not using the actual phrase “American exceptionalism” in his State of the Union speech. But to me the funniest part of her column is that way down in the seventeenth paragraph, she actually admitted that one of the primary pieces of evidence allegedly proving that Obama doesn’t believe in “American exceptionalism” is total nonsense.

Conservatives often deride Obama over remarks he made at a presser in April of 2009, in which he said that he believes in American exceptionalism “just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” But as Parker apparently felt compelled to acknowledge, that’s not all he said:

…”What Obama added was that “we have a core set of values that are enshrined in our Constitution, in our body of law, in our democratic practices, in our belief in free speech and equality, that, though imperfect, are exceptional.”

…Obama also said at that presser that he is “enormously proud of my country and its role and history in the world.” And he hailed America’s “continued extraordinary role in leading the world towards peace and prosperity.” Parker didn’t tell you about those two quotes.

…That this admission comes in a column faulting Obama for not using the phrase in his speech last week, of course, tells you all you need to know about how absurd and self-parodic this ongoing attack has become.

Full article here

ah, more lies

No, President Obama’s trip to Asia is not going to cost $200 million a day

USA Today: That figure — first thrown out by a single Indian media outlet and now viral on conservative talk radio — is wildly, wildly off the mark.

The problem is that the costs for these trips are impossible to determine, for many of the president’s expenses would be incurred whether he was visiting India or Atlanta or simply hanging around the White House….

….. “The numbers reported in this article have no basis in reality,” said White House spokesman Tommy Vietor. “Due to security concerns, we are unable to outline details associated with security procedures and costs, but it’s safe to say these numbers are wildly inflated.”

To be sure, these trips do cost millions of dollars per day. Whenever a president travels, he or she takes a mini-White House with them, from bulletproof limousines to gaggles of aides. This can come in awfully handy when trouble happens, such as the terrorist attacks on 9/11 when George W. Bush was in Florida. Ronald Reagan was traveling in Asia when the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Russia blew up in 1986.

Foreign trips are expensive but are a staple of presidential duties. India is a rising economy power. It is next to — and has an intense rivalry with — one of the world’s most dangerous countries, Pakistan. It can be a counterweight to threats from China. Any president is going to deal with India.

There’s no evidence that Obama’s team is spending any more money than its predecessors….Yes, these gigs will cost money. But $200 million a day? Not even close.

One other thing to keep in mind: The Secret Service is not going to let anything happen to a president overseas if they can help it. They’re going to do — and spend — whatever it takes. That’s just a fact of life.

Full article

A man walks his camel past a sand sculpture of President Barack Obama on a beach in Puri in the eastern Indian state of Bhubaneswar November 4

Full schedule for the President’s trip to Asia here