Ezra has some sensible things to say here, but you have to separate them from his “on the other hand”-ism and inside-the-Beltway conventional thinking, and I can’t be bothered.
Category: Scary Crazy Wingnuts
Bright spot
Looks like Gov. Scott Walker might be the target of a federal investigation. Woo hoo!
Madison – About a dozen law enforcement officers, including FBI agents, raided the home of a former top aide to Gov. Scott Walker on Wednesday as part of a growing John Doe investigation.
The home on Dunning St. on Madison’s east side is owned by Cynthia A. Archer, who was until recently deputy administration secretary to the Republican governor. Archer, 52, now holds a different state job but is on paid sick leave, records show.
“We’re doing a law enforcement action,” one of the FBI agents told a reporter.
He didn’t identify himself or provide further comment but confirmed that he and three others were with the FBI and that a Dane County sheriff’s deputy was present.
The raid on Archer’s home coincides with a John Doe investigation in Milwaukee County.
That probe was started last year after the Journal Sentinel reported that another Walker staffer who was being paid by Milwaukee County taxpayers to help citizens with county services was instead using her work time to post anonymous comments supporting candidate Walker on websites and blogs. As part of the investigation, authorities earlier seized the work computers of two former Walker staffers and executed a search warrant of one of their homes.
Archer, who also held the top staff position under Walker while he served as Milwaukee County executive, said as recently as Friday in an email to the Journal Sentinel that she was “not involved in any way in the John Doe investigation.”
PA
Fuckwad Rand Paul
Census data revealed today that a record 46.2 million Americans were living in poverty in 2010. But in an aptly-timed hearing entitled “Is Poverty A Death Sentence,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) flat out rejected the idea that poverty in the U.S is worrisome. As the Ranking Member of the Senate Health subcommittee, Paul offered a dissertation-length statement on how the correlation between poverty and death is only found in the Third World and to claim such a connection within the U.S. is nothing more than “socialism” and “tyranny.”
Stating that “poor children today are healthier than middle-class adults a generation ago,” he even blamed the poor for their own health problems, suggesting “behavioral factors” like a higher incidence of smoking, obesity, or weak family support structures as the only correlation between poverty and health.
Citing the deficit as a primary priority, Paul questioned whether federal low-income programs are “creating unnecessary and unhealthy dependence on government.” He unequivocally declared that “poverty is not a state of permanence” and that “the rich are getting richer, but the poor are getting richer even faster.”
PAUL: We also need to understand that poverty is not a state of permanence. When you look at people in the bottom 5th of the economic ladder — those at the bottom — only 5 percent are there after 16 years. People move up, the American dream does exist…The rich are getting richer, but the poor are getting richer even faster.
‘That was my brother’
“Whose death you were cheering, you assholes.” A Daily Kos diary.
PA power grab
Oddly enough, this isn’t one of the pieces of legislation pushed by our friendly corporate interests at ALEC – in fact, they’re on the record opposing elections by popular vote. But it’s not outside the realm of possibility that they dreamed up this twisted variation on what they oppose, since they do get control of redistricting:
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that Gov. Tom Corbett and state Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi are proposing that the state divide up its Electoral College votes according to which candidates carried each Congressional district, plus two votes for the statewide winner. The system is used by Maine — which, despite the system, has never actually split its four electoral votes — and by Nebraska, which gave one of its five votes to Barack Obama in 2008.
Pennsylvania, however, will have 20 electoral votes in the 2012 election. What’s more, the measure would give even greater meaning to the state’s redistricting for the House of Representatives, giving it a powerful effect over the presidency in addition to the House.
Pennsylvania has voted Democratic in every presidential election since 1992, and voted for Barack Obama by 55%-44% in 2008. Indeed, over the past 50 years it has only voted Republican in presidential landslides for the GOP: 1972, 1980, 1984, and finally 1988. While the results have sometimes been narrow for the Dems, it is a state that can be expected to vote Democratic for president in the context of a close national campaign, such as its votes for Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004.
Had this proposed system been in place in 2008, when Obama won the state by a ten-point margin, he in fact would have only taken 11 out of the state’s 21 electoral votes at the time — due to a combination of past Republican-led redistricting efforts to maximize their district strength, and Obama’s votes being especially concentrated within urban areas.
As can be expected, the Post-Gazette reports that Democrats are attacking the proposal as a partisan power-grab, while Republicans are standing by it as a reform that would focus attention on districts throughout the state:
Blasting the idea as “a disturbing effort to put their self interests and party interests ahead of the people,” Senate Minority Leader Jay Costa, D-Forest Hills, said the plan would dangerously link the presidential vote to redistricting. In a written statement, Mr. Costa asked: “Will we now be looking at state gerrymandering that serves a larger, national agenda?”
Mr. Pileggi and others disagreed, saying congressional districts that are more competitive would receive more attention and would not be overshadowed when the state leans one way or another politically.
Ron Paul
You heard his “let them die” speech from the other night, right? Turns out he practices what he preaches. Ron’s 49-year-old former campaign manager died of pneumonia, penniless and uninsured. Ron didn’t lift a finger to help him, and the guy’s mother was stuck with the $400,000 bill. Freedom!
Deep Thought
Taste and compare:
If you take the Tea Party at their word, people without insurance should be left to die, but the government should nonetheless be prevented from helping individuals access health insurance, because those people might be subjected to death panels, and left to die.
I have no doubt that in fact many Tea Partiers were the same people insisting that we “save Terri Schiavo!”
No one with any real platform will point this out, not at the NY Times, not at the Washington Post, and certainly not on TV. But these are deeply twisted, crazy people we are dealing with.
The real threat to Social Security
At the end of August, Nebraska senator Ben Nelson, a Democrat up for reelection next year, told members of the Lincoln Rotary Club that it didn’t look like he would support an extension of the payroll tax holiday the president negotiated with Republicans last Christmas. “I wish I could (support it),” he said. “But all you’re doing is taking money that otherwise would help Medicare and Social Security.” There’s nothing remarkable about politicians talking to Rotarians, but it was remarkable for a conservative Democrat to say he didn’t think extending the Obama payroll tax cuts was such a hot idea. On Friday, Texas GOP congressman Pete Sessions, who chairs an organization to re-elect House Republicans, did likewise by calling the payroll tax cut “a horrible idea.” Instead of delving into why a conservative Democrat and a diehard Republican are pooh-pooing the president’s plan for bringing less revenue into the Social Security system, the media of late have fixated on the disparaging comments presidential candidates, in particular Rick Perry, have made about Social Security. At the Republican candidates’ debate last week, Perry once again called Social Security a Ponzi scheme and a monstrous lie. Said Perry:
I think the Republican candidates are talking about ways to transition this program. And it is a monstrous lie. It is a Ponzi scheme to tell our kids that are twenty-five or thirty years today: ‘You’re paying into a program that’s not going to be there.’ Anybody that’s for the status quo with Social Security today is involved with a monstrous lie to our kids, and it’s not right.
Perry was basically repeating what he had said before in Iowa, and it looks like he will stay on message as long as he remains a candidate. It will be up to the media to explain the difference between Social Security, which is social insurance where people pay taxes and accumulate credits and then receive a pension backed by substantial political commitment and trillions of dollars in financial reserves, and a Ponzi scheme, which is a criminal fraud backed by nothing, as Brookings Senior Fellow Henry Aaron puts it.
What’s missing are stories explaining, as Nelson tried to do, that there could be long-term consequences tied to reducing the payroll tax. “The Ponzi scheme is a sideshow. It’s an outrageous claim designed to undermine confidence in the program,” says Nancy Altman, co-director of Strengthen Social Security, a progressive group trying to save the program. Altman knows her onions when it comes to Social Security, having assisted Alan Greenspan, who headed a bipartisan commission in 1983 that put Social Security on a sound financing footing. Altman wasn’t keen on the payroll tax holiday agreed to last December, telling NPR that this “could eventually lead to the unraveling of Social Security.” If Republicans make this permanent, it could spell real trouble for Social Security, she said.
Continue reading “The real threat to Social Security”
Zygote personhood
Don’t kid yourself that this is “just” Mississippi. The Christian right is going after birth control in every state:
Mississippi voters will be allowed to decide on a ballot measure that defines “personhood” from the moment of fertilization, the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled last week. The measure could potentially outlaw abortions, birth control, in vitro fertilization and stem cell research across the state.
Measure 26, which will bypass the legislature and go straight to a popular ballot vote, redefines the term “person” as it appears throughout Mississippi’s Bill of Rights to include “all human beings from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof.” The American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi, Planned Parenthood and the Center for Reproductive Rights filed a lawsuit against the proposal earlier this year, not based on its content or constitutionality, but because Mississippi state law says a ballot initiative cannot be used to change the Bill of Rights.
The Mississippi Supreme Court rejected the lawsuit in a 7-2 ruling, saying that it had no power to review any ballot initiative before the actual vote takes place.
Let’s look at some of the interesting legal ramifications. If you go through in-vitro fertilization, and it doesn’t work, you’d have to report that as a death. (Same thing would go for very early miscarriages. How do we know you didn’t try to abort your pregnancy? Women would have to prove they didn’t murder their blastocyst/ zygote/ embryo/ fetus.)
Your blastocyst/ zygote/ embryo/ fetus would have the right to inherit, naturally, so if you have a miscarriage, that could certainly tie up some estates — not to mention that Social Security would be paying survivors benefit if you’re pregnant and your spouse dies. Could be a little more costly!
And if people get illegal abortions, as people will when you make them impossible to get, that means the woman and her doctor can be charged with homicide. Of course, having a drink or a smoke during pregnancy is contributing to the delinquency of a minor. (Geeze, I just thought of something else — if you have sex while you’re pregnant, is that child sexual abuse?)
The mind reels at the possibilities!
And remember, kids: It’s not about abortion, it’s about sex.