Democrats seek to cement Baldwin’s status as favorite

Associated Press:

Former President Bill Clinton voiced his support for Democratic Senate candidate Tammy Baldwin in an ad released Tuesday, the same day that her challenger Tommy Thompson campaigned with Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan.

Baldwin spent Tuesday in the Fox Valley, an important swing area in the state that leans Republican but where there are enough independent voters for Democrats to make headway. Thompson was originally scheduled to be in nearby Green Bay, but those plans got scuttled at the last minute so he could instead campaign with Ryan in western Wisconsin, where they were meeting with supporters and filling hurricane relief packages.

[…]

In the new Clinton spot, the former president praises Baldwin’s support of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul law, noting that young adults under age 26 will still be covered under their parents’ plan. Clinton was scheduled to appear in Wisconsin later in the week to campaign for Obama.

Baldwin is currently about the 4-in-5 favorite to win the race — 83% chance of winning at FiveThirtyEight and 76.3% at PredictWise. Clinton’s ad is clearly to lock in a win that will protect the democratic majority in the senate.

News Roundup for 3/22/12

Rove makes an appearance on The Colbert Report

-Headline of the Day-
"Karl Rove: Bin Laden killing was no biggie."

Republicans just can't let President Obama have nice things. If Obama does something, then it's automatically terrible -- unless you can't possibly spin it that way. In that case, it's trivial.

Karl Rove proved that today in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal. In it, Rove uses a 17-minute Obama campaign web movie to point out that the president is just God awful -- unlike that fella Karl served under.

Anyway, Karl's biggest challenge was making the death of Osama bin Laden seem like one of those not-automatically-terrible-so-it-must-be-trivial things and he hit kind of a dead end. There's no way he could do it. Scratch that; there's no way he could do it honestly. This is Karl Rove here, so he quickly overcame this problem.

"As for the killing of Osama bin Laden, Mr. Obama did what virtually any commander in chief would have done in the same situation," Karl writes. "Even President Bill Clinton says in the film 'that’s the call I would have made.' For this to be portrayed as the epic achievement of the first term tells you how bare the White House cupboards are."

Tiny little bit of a problem here: that's not exactly what Clinton said. What Bill said was, "He took the harder and the more honorable path. When I saw what had happened, I thought to myself, 'I hope that’s the call I would have made.'" Contrary to what Karl wants you to believe, Bill's not saying it was an easy decision anyone would've made, he's saying it was a hard decision.

And would Karl's boss have made that call? Here's GWB on the subject: "I truly am not that concerned about [Osama bin Laden]. I am deeply concerned about Iraq... I really just don’t spend that much time on him, to be honest with you."

So I'm going to go out on a limb and say no. (Plum Line)


-The Distracto DeVille Deluxe-



"Guess it's back to calling women sluts, then." (McClatchy)


-Bonus HotD-
"Ann Coulter Says It Is Now Time To ‘Go After’ The Obama Children."

Ann who?

Oh yeah... She's that one woman who used to say deliberately offensive things for a living. The troll lady... You know...

Man, I thought she'd be insane and homeless by now. I guess I was half right. (Wonkette)

Stories to Watch: 9/22/11

It's cool and dark and it looks like it's going to rain, but I'm jonesing for brats, so I'm firing up the grill. I dare the weather to turn on me. Now here's the news...


Rick Perry is caught on film being a secret Muslim terr'ist from Kenya plotting to overthrow the United States though communism. You wonder if that'll hurt him in the big debate tonight.


Bill Clinton speaks about the Troy Davis execution. Encapsulated, if you're in such a hurry to execute that you can't even be bothered to look a DNA evidence, you're doing it wrong. It's kind of important to be absolutely certain you've got the right guy.


John Boehner pretends that people in his caucus listen to him.


More evidence that Rick Perry's "Texas miracle" hurts more than helps; the vast, vast majority of all those jobs created in Texas went to undocumented immigrants.


Letting the conservative victim card cool off for a moment, Republican Rep. Joe Walsh plays the race card instead.


Rick Perry's Florida campaign co-chair thinks gays cause tornadoes. Remember, human-caused global warming is a ridiculous notion, but crazy-assed BS like this is serious thinking.


Deranged hobo Sarah Palin asks people if they have any spare change.


Finally, Mittens takes to twitter to prove he eats sandwiches. You think I'm kidding. I'm not.

Related articles

• Romney Dominates In New Hampshire, As Perry Fails To Appeal To Moderate Republicans (businessinsider.com)
• GOP presidential debate in Orlando: Mitt Romney versus Rick Perry (guardian.co.uk)
• IL-14: Joe Walsh says media will protect Obama because he's black (dailykos.com)
• Should Troy Davis's Execution Revive the Death Penalty Debate? (usnews.com)

Griper Blade: Welfare Reform's Failure

In 1996, Bill Clinton signed a bill ending Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and replaced it with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). "Today, we are ending welfare as we know it," Clinton said. "But I hope this day will be remembered not for what it ended, but for what it began."

What this began was a change in the way the United States looked at welfare and the poor. Recipients were capped at five years in the program. After that, you couldn't collect anymore benefits, no matter what your situation. There was a "welfare to work" requirement, which put people into job training programs -- regardless of what education they already had. TANF would be funded through block grants, which states would administer and spend as they saw fit.

What had happened was that Clinton caved to pressure created by decades of Republican propaganda. Welfare recipients were lazy, Republicans said, they had kids just to get benefits, they made a lifestyle of AFDC. When it came to slinging BS about welfare and the poor, then-presidential candidate Ronald Reagan set the standard in his stump speech:

There’s a woman in Chicago. She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veterans benefits on four nonexisting deceased husbands. And she’s collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income alone is over $150,000.

Reagan called this woman a "welfare queen" and claimed she -- along with many like her -- were draining America's resources at public expense. Of course, it wasn't true. There was no woman in Chicago. It was all lies... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Griper Blade: A Ban in Search of a Reason for Being

In March 2007, Stephen Benjamin was discharged from the Navy. An Arabic language translator, Benjamin fell prey to Bill Clinton's absurd 1993 compromise policy of "don't ask, don't tell." Under that rule, gays are allowed to serve in the military, but only so long as it's a big secret. If you tell anyone about your sexual orientation, for any reason, you're out. In Benjamin's case, it was text messages -- intercepted by military censors -- that made it clear that he and a former roommate stationed in Iraq were gay. They were fired.

"My supervisors did not want to lose me," he wrote in the New York Times in June of that same year. "Most of my peers knew I was gay, and that didn’t bother them. I was always accepted as a member of the team. And my experience was not anomalous: polls of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan show an overwhelming majority are comfortable with gays. Many were aware of at least one gay person in their unit and had no problem with it."

Despite a "desperate shortage of linguists," the Navy thought it was more important that intercepted intelligence pile up untranslated than to let some gay guy translate them. This is supposed to serve our national interests, because allowing gays to serve would somehow harm "unit cohesion." Seems to me that breaking up units to preserve their "cohesion" is astonishingly ludicrous -- it's like arguing you have to get divorced to save your marriage... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Griper Blade: Pro-Lifers Discover Reality

The right has been stringing their voters along for decades with the wedge issue of abortion. Few Republican candidates get their campaigns off the ground without taking a position as close to the right pole of the issue as they can get away with. Even John McCain, who didn't seem comfortable with the issue, described himself as "proudly pro-life" and expressed a desire to overturn Roe v. Wade. In the final presidential debate, McCain treated the question of a woman's health as an excuse to get an abortion. "That's the extreme pro-abortion position, quote, 'health,'" McCain said, making air quotes with his fingers.

But the thing is, Republican candidates have talked a good game on abortion. While Bush claimed to want to foster a "culture of life" in America, he got right to work creating a culture of death. We absolutely needed go to war and kill people and, if you wanted to stop killing people, it would be an insult to those who had died. If we quit after it became clear the Iraq war was pointless, Bush argued, the dead would have "died in vain." Not only did we have to spread death and misery around the world, but we then had to worship that portion of the dead who were American. The glorious culture of life was only mentioned when throwing a bone to the anti-abortion folks, mostly through actions that wouldn't reduce the number of abortions performed in any way -- a ban on funding embryonic stem cell research, for example. The ban didn't stop a single fetus from being aborted. Not one...

[CLICK TO READ FULL POST]