GOP will TOTALLY pass immigration reform if they win the Senate -- cross their hearrts

The Hill: Senate Republicans say they'll try to pass immigration reform legislation in the next two years if they take back the Senate in November.  

The Republicans say winning back the Senate will allow them to pass a series of bills on their own terms that have a better chance of winning approval in the House.  

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a central member of the coalition that passed a comprehensive reform bill in the Senate last year, said he would craft a better legislative approach if Republicans control the upper chamber in 2015. 

That would give his party a chance to pass immigration legislation before the presidential election, when Hispanic voters will be crucial to winning the White House.

There's an obvious aspect of good cop/bad cop in this, with Senate Republicans using House Republicans as bad cops. But there's actually something much more familiar going on here; Republicans are returning to tried and true strategy. The problem is, they're trying to apply it to an entirely different group of voters and it's probably not going to work.

For years, Republicans have used bait and switch politics to trick voters into electing them. They promise they'll amend the Constitution to ban gay marriage and get a Balanced Budget Amendment. They promise they'll chase all those lazy "inner city" people off welfare. They're going to get you prayer in schools and make it a crime to burn the flag. They're going to turn the United States into Reagantopia.

But then they get elected and suddenly they're all about something else entirely. My favorite example is Bush getting reelected on the issue of gay marriage and then immediately getting to work on privatizing Medicare -- something he'd barely mentioned during the campaign. Republicans promise everything talk radio gets the chumps riled up about, then they pass laws that only really help the rich. Sure, they'll throw an abortion bone to the dopes occasionally, but for the most part its promise to fight the Homosexual Menace, then deliver a million dollar tax credit on private jet wax.

It works for the base because they're endlessly gullible and never remember how they got screwed over the last time. But it's also why Republicans can't expand their voter block -- people that credulous and dumb are thankfully a commodity in limited supply. This stuff works on pretty much all of the of people it's ever going to work on. It's not going to gain them immigration reform supporters now.

Obama offers radical argument that Abe Lincoln was human

CNN: President Barack Obama defended himself Thursday against critics who argued that his recent appearance on a Web-based comedy show [Zach Galifianakis’s scripted interview show “Between Two Ferns”] undermined the dignity of his office and would never have been done by one of his most famous predecessors – Abraham Lincoln.

Obama said in an interview with ESPN radio host Colin Cowherd that Lincoln “loved telling the occasional bawdy joke and, you know, being out among regular folks.”

"One of the hardest things about being President is being in this bubble that is artificial and, unless you make a conscious effort, you start sounding like some Washington stiff," Obama said.

"You have to consciously try to get out of that if you want remind yourself of the wonderful people you’re supposed to be serving who have a sense of humor and aren’t thinking every day about position papers."

The short version here is just because you’ve got a stick up your butt, it doesn’t mean everyone you’ve ever admired had a stick up their butt too. As Mozart’s character is the movie Amadeus” put it: “Come on now, be honest! Which one of you wouldn’t rather listen to his hairdresser than Hercules? Or Horatius, or Orpheus… people so lofty they sound as if they shit marble!” The first step in connecting with voters on a personal level is to be an actual person.

Republicans need to get over themselves. Or do we have to remind them of the solemn dignity of this guy?

[photo via Wikimedia Commons]

God helps those who help themselves

The Wire: Lakewood Church — the giant Houston headquarters of celebrity pastor Joel Osteen’s evangelical empire — alerted its congregants that as much as $600,000 in cash and checks were taken from the building over the weekend. Even more concerning: The stolen goods include envelopes on which congregants wrote down their credit card information.

According to an email from Lakewood,  the theft “is limited only to those funds contributed in the church services on Saturday, March 8 and Sunday, March 9, 2014,” and does not include donations made electronically. A church employee discovered the theft on Monday morning.

Pastors Joel and Victoria Osteen are well-known proponents of a modern version of the prosperity gospel — a theology that believes God blesses people with material success. Among evangelicals, it’s a theologically controversial, yet obviously appealing approach to Christianity…

Osteen’s “prosperity gospel” scam is almost beautiful in it’s simplicity. The marks are told that God rewards the righteous with money, so they should send the church money and then God will reward them. Those God favors most are therefore the richest, so obviously the wealthiest Christians are the most righteous and the obvious leaders. Shut up and do what rich people tell you to and you’ll get rich too. Coincidentally, Osteen — having collected all this money from the marks — is the richest guy in his church. So he says send him more money and lather, rinse, repeat. And, of course, the flock has to go out and spread the Gospel, which means Osteen gets even more of everyone’s money as time goes on.

It’s a tremendous perversion of everything taught in the Sermon on the Mount, but since when have evangelists given a damn what Jesus actually said?

But seems that someone in Osteen’s congregation decided that God was getting a little slow in the rewarding department. That person is now more than a half-million dollars more blessed and Osteen’s church is now out that money — with the very real possibility of further loss. By the rules of his own con, Osteen’s righteousness and fitness to lead has take a pretty decent hit and some unknown prophet/thief is now a half-million dollars closer to the Almighty.

The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.

Cheney's unwanted advice

When it comes to criticisms of foreign policy, neocons get to STFU.

Bob Englehart, Hartford Courant.

John McCain demands Ted Cruz apologize to Sen. McCain… I mean, to Bob Dole

Houston Chronicle: Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) called on Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz to apologize Friday for a joke Cruz made about retired senator Bob Dole of Kansas at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday.

“All of us remember President Dole, and President McCain and President Romney,” Cruz said. “Now, look, those are good men, they’re decent men, but when you don’t stand and draw a clear distinction, when you don’t stand for principle, Democrats celebrate.”

Cruz’s speech encouraged CPAC attendees to “stand with principle.”  Dole, McCain, and Romney, all of whom had unsuccessful presidential bids, were the butt of Cruz’s joke that was intended to exemplify Republicans who did not draw a clear distinction between them and their Democratic opposition.

In an interview Friday morning with Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC, McCain, a close friend of the 90-year-old Dole, criticized Cruz, saying that any joke about an injured veteran not having principle was in poor taste and that he needs to issue an apology.

“…When he throws Bob Dole in there, I wonder if he thinks that Bob Dole stood for principle on that hilltop in Italy when he was so gravely wounded and left part of his body there fighting for our country,” McCain said. “Bob Dole is such a man of honor and integrity and principle. I hope that Ted Cruz will apologize to Bob Dole because that’s — that has crossed a line that to me that leaves the realm of the politics and discourse that we should have in America.”

Let’s be honest here; McCain’s not talking about the “Pres. Dole” crack, he’s upset about “Pres. McCain.” McCain — being McCain — is butthurt that Cruz made an example of him as a bad candidate who lost because he was a RiNO. He just thinks it looks better to demand an apology on behalf of someone else, rather than himself. What he’s clearly hoping for are words to the effect of “I apologize for a joke I told at CPAC.”

But how stupid was Cruz’s statement in the first place? The candidates who ran in all those election were chosen by Republican voters. The sort of candidate that Ted Cruz argues is able to win presidential elections can’t even win Republican primaries. If they could, the names he’d be referencing would be names like Santorum, Brownback, and Gramm. It’s a silly argument and McCain would make a much better case against it by pointing out the gaping logical hole in it.

Instead, McCain makes it personal. This leaves the weakest part of the argument standing, in order to play a cheap victim card. It’s an argument that the Republican Party would do well to kill — and the Arizona senator is in a position to help do just that — but everything is all about John McCain and his intense desire that Ted Cruz get off his lawn.

[photo by Gage Skidmore]

After censure threat, Issa apologizes for silencing dem colleague Cummings

San Diego Union-Tribune: A chastened Rep. Darrell Issa says he has apologized to a fellow senior lawmaker for abruptly cutting off his microphone during a hearing Wednesday before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Issa, R-Vista, said he made a personal apology on Thursday to the man he silenced, Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md.

“Mr. Cummings is a member of Congress who works very hard for his constituents,” he said.
Issa’s remarks came during a telephonic conversation with U-T San Diego after a House condemnation resolution pressed by Democrats earlier in the day failed to pass.

The resolution called for sanctioning Issa for “the offensive and disrespectful manner” in which he conducted the hearing on Capitol Hill. The resolution failed on a vote of 211-186 as House Republicans refused to back it.

Video of the incident is above.

Seems Issa was worried that his own shameful and disrespectful actions were getting more press than his kangaroo court of a committee and his heroic efforts to flog this dead IRS horse. But it’s hard to see how he’s going to get any traction with this anywhere but on Fox News, since his witchhunt is so lousy at turning up witches that even he’s getting irritated by it. You don’t literally shut down debate when your argument is a slam dunk, after all.

You do it when you know you’ve got nothing.

Fox News — pro-criminal about more than just guns

Raw Story: Fox News host Jon Scott on Wednesday advised former IRS official Lois Lerner that she should give up her constitutional rights and testify before Congress if she wanted death against her life to stop.

During a House Oversight Hearing on Wednesday, Lerner invoked her right under the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution, and refused to answer Chairman Darrell Issa’s (R-CA) questions about the IRS targeting Tea Party and other conservative groups that applied for tax-exempt status.

Lerner’s attorney had previously asked the committee not to call her to testify, citing numerous death threats.

After an commentator mentioned the death threats, Scott went on to say that Lerner should give in to them. “I can see why if you’re getting death threats, why you wouldn’t want to open yourself up to more scrutiny,” he said. “But at the same time, it would seem that answering some of the questions might cause some of these people who are so angry to ease up.”

And if you give bank robbers a million dollars and a helicopter like they demand, they’ll let the hostages go, fly away, and stop bothering everyone. Sure, Scott frames his question as advice, but he’s pretty clearly trying to play good cop to Fox audience goon squad’s bad cop. And this whole IRS thing has fallen apart anyway, so the goon squad only exists because Fox keeps beating this dead horse and getting their gullible and mentally unstable base all riled up about it. Sure, Darrell Issa’s trying to do CPR on his cooked up “scandal,” but heroic measures aren’t going to revive this corpse. As the Dr. McCoy says on the teevee, “He’s dead, Jim.”

So, since there’s no there there, Fox’ Jon Scott urges (in abject desperation) that Lois Lerner give the terrorists what they want. Because what they want is what Fox wants — and if it takes a few death threats to create the story they want to cover, then that’s just Fox’s brand of “journalism.”

American media in a nutshell

Matt Bors.

O’Reilly distills conservative cluelessness about race down to one perfect moment of stupid

Talking Points Memo: Fox News host Bill O’Reilly on Thursday advised Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett to get “gangsta rappers” like Jay Z and Kanye West to say their behavior is wrong if the White House really wants to improve minority communities.

President Barack Obama had invited O’Reilly to the launch of his new initiative called “My Brother’s Keeper” earlier Thursday. The program aims to create opportunities and improve conditions for young minority men, but O’Reilly said he doesn’t believe the White House sees the “urgency” of the situation in the streets.

"You have to attack the fundamental disease if you want to cure it," O’Reilly told Jarrett. "Now I submit to you that you’re gonna have to get people like Jay Z, Kanye West, all these gangsta rappers to knock it off."

"They idolize these guys with the hats on backwards, and the terrible rap lyrics and the drug and all of that," he continued, adding that high-profile figures need to hammer young people with that message to "reverse the peer pressure."

O’Reilly also challenged First Lady Michelle Obama to come on “The Factor” and tell teenage girls “You stop having sex. You stop getting pregnant. This is wrong.”

In O’Reilly’s world the biggest stumbling block for African-Americans is other African-Americans, with whites mere observers to some sort of cultural self-destruction they have absolutely nothing at all to do with. It’s a view that seems to be shared by your average conservative — racism is over and any problems that black people may face are now the fault of black people. “I’m not racist,” a typical rightwinger might say, “but black people are all the same.”

Worse, minority attempts to improve situation are always attacked as “reverse racism” or some sort of plot to steal money and power from white people (see ACORN). Income inequality isn’t a thing. Institutional racism in the criminal justice system isn’t a thing. Ongoing discrimination in hiring and pay isn’t a thing.

But kids listening to “guys with the hats on backward” — now that’s a thing. And O’Reilly is so damned smugly proud of himself for spouting this marshmallow fluff inanity that he practically craps himself with joy.

"[I]t’s yet another demonstration of the rules both prominent and ordinary black people have to live with," writes Paul Waldman. “Unlike white Americans, they are subject to an entirely different and far more wide-ranging kind of responsibility. A black senator has to answer for the remarks of every black activist, black musicians are responsible for the actions of every wayward teenager, and black people everywhere carry with them a thousand sins committed by others. That burden isn’t just psychological; as we’ve seen in cases like those of Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis, it can be deadly.”

It’s no wonder Bill O’Reilly has such a masterful grasp of the conservative mindset when it comes to race. Who better than a simpleminded clown to embody such a simpleminded understanding of America?

MD Police Chief cites fake story to support continued marijuana prohibition

California Cheeseburger by qpwo1029

ThinkProgress: Testifying against bills that would legalize or decriminalize marijuana, the police chief for Annapolis, Md., cited a fake news story that reported 37 people died on the first day Colorado’s recreational marijuana law went into effect.

“The first day of legalization, that’s when Colorado experienced 37 deaths that day from overdose on marijuana,” Annapolis Police Chief Michael Pristoop said Tuesday at a committee hearing, according to the Capital Gazette. “I remember the first day it was decriminalized there were 37 deaths.”

Maryland Sen. Jamie Raskin (D) immediately corrected Pristoop and pointed out that he seemed to be citing a fake story by the satirical news site, The Daily Currant, the Gazette reported.

“Unless you have some other source for this, I’m afraid I’ve got to spoil the party here,” Raskin said.

But Pristoop wasn’t ready to back down, saying, “If it was a misquote, then I’ll stand behind the mistake. But I’m holding on to information I was provided.”

He later conceded to the Gazette that he had made a mistake, saying, “I’m guilty of being a human being. I tried really hard to present verified facts.” He nonetheless stood by his position that kids aren’t fully informed about how dangerous marijuana is, and it should therefore remain illegal.

Of course, it's pretty much impossible to overdose on marijuana -- as evidenced by the fact that no one ever has. In terms of danger from overdose, this makes weed literally safer than water.

Walker’s reassurances less than reassuring

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Gov. Scott Walker said in an interview Monday that there is no private email system in the governor’s office similar to the one that existed in his office when he was Milwaukee County executive.

He also said that as governor he has complied with laws that restrict public servants from mingling their official duties with campaign activity.

Walker once again refused to say whether as county executive he knew of or used a secret email system set up in his office to avoid public scrutiny.

On Monday he called it a “slippery slope” to answer specifics about the more than 27,000 records released last week, because “once you start on one thing, then there’s hundreds of questions on each of those.”

OK, so first off he said he didn’t know about the first router. So how can he say with such certaintly there is no router now? There could be a bunch of blinking LEDs above the ceiling tiles right now and apparently clueless Scooter would have no idea that the modem is there. Which take are we supposed to believe here: that you’re too dumb to know what’s going on in your own office or that you have a complete understanding of everything going on in your office? Because there’s sort of a logical conflict going on there.

Second, you probably don’t want to use the “slippery slope” argument in this situation, because now we’re all wondering what new questions it is that you’re trying to avoid being asked. Walker’s not making this all go away with this dodge, he’s actually making it seem even more likely that he’s covering something up. “If I start talking about the secret email system, then I’ll have to answer questions about the contact list and — hoo-boy — do I ever want to avoid explaining that, let me tell you!”

Walker’s “lie low and hope everything blows over” strategy is failing spectacularly — not in the least because Walker himself keeps wandering out of “no comment” territory and stirring everything up again.

What Scott Walker has in common with a certain recently deposed Ukrainian criminal

If you ever come across a “gee, but Scott Walker is swell!” comment under a news story, blog post, or Reddit comment thread, assume it’s paid propaganda and call the commenter out for it — not because the odds show it’s likely to be true, but because actions like this deserve profoundly negative consequences:

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: In the heat of the 2010 governor’s race, Scott Walker urged both county employees and campaign aides to go to news websites and post comments promoting him and his record, newly unsealed documents show.

It was just such anonymous posts by a county worker on campaign issues that prompted prosecutors to expand a secret “John Doe” investigation — launched to probe into missing money in a veterans fund — to also examine whether taxpayer dollars were being used illegally to finance political operations.

In one instance in May 2010, for example, a close ally posted online a portion of a Walker email almost verbatim on a Journal Sentinel story just minutes after receiving the directive. Walker had sent the note to an inner circle that included county administrators as well as campaign operatives.

Tapping out a message on his campaign Blackberry on the afternoon of May 4, 2010, Walker urged county aides, campaign staffers and other trusted volunteers to go to an online Journal Sentinel business story and respond to critics of his plan to privatize the airport in the comments section below the story.

The legitimacy of pro-Walker statements online need to be challenged, because this sort of activity is the very definition of state-sponsored propaganda. It’s also just a hair short of sock puppetry, making it extremely dishonest. If the people who pull this sort of thing wind up worse off because of it, then they’ll stop doing it. So, when an online comment goes something like, “Yah but Walker is so awesome, too!” then just go ahead and assumed they’re on the guv’s payroll.

And this credibility problem is what Scott Walker has in common with a certain corrupt Ukrainian politician, currently on the run from his own people.

Buzzfeed: Several conservative bloggers repeated talking points given to them by a proxy group for the Ukrainian government — and at least one writer was paid by a representative of the Ukrainian group, according to documents and emails obtained by BuzzFeed.

The Ukrainian campaign began in the run-up to high-stakes Ukrainian parliamentary elections last year, and sought to convince skeptical American conservatives that the pro-Russian Party of Regions, led by President Viktor Yanukovych, deserved American support. During that period, articles echoing Ukrainian government talking points appeared on leading conservative online outlets, including RedState, Breitbart, and Pajamas Media.

The emails and documents, which include prepackaged quotes from election officials and talking points that some writers copied nearly word-for-word, offer a glimpse into how foreign governments dodge tight Justice Department regulations on foreign propaganda to covertly lobby in the United States: The payments were routed through a front group in Belgium to an American consultant, who has urged writers not to cooperate with a reporter investigating the campaign.

The model resembles a recent stealth campaign in which bloggers were paid by the Malaysian government to write favorable stories, though the Ukraine campaign appears to have involved smaller sums of money.

So there’s the common thread: American conservatives on the turd-polishing payroll. At this point, there’s ample evidence that a lot of opinion-making on the right is paid propaganda BS — so really, if you take any of it without a massive grain of salt, you’re literally a grade-A, first-class chump. But take a look at the company Wisconsin’s embattled governor keeps on this one: gangsters and dictators.

I wouldn’t trust this guy. And that advice comes unbought, by the way.

[photo via Wikimedia Commons]

Second Amendment hero fighting tyranny leaves 4 dead, 2 injured

Associated Press: An eviction hearing at an American Indian headquarters in Northern California turned deadly as a woman who once served as a tribal leader allegedly opened fire, killing four people and critically wounding two others in a gun and knife attack, authorities said.

Cherie Lash Rhoades, a former chairwoman of Cedarville Rancheria, was taken into custody after the bloody attack at the tribal office Thursday afternoon, Alturas police chief Ken Barnes said in area media reports.

Barnes said in a story carried by KRCR-TV that the four dead include a 19-year-old woman, a 30-year-old man, a 45-year-old woman and a 50-year-old man. The police chief said one victim is the tribe’s leader.

Police said tribal members were meeting about evicting Rhoades and her son from her home at the Rancheria which, according to its website, is a federally recognized tribe with 35 members.

The station’s report said that Rhoades allegedly pulled out a gun and shot four people in the Cedarville Rancheria Tribal Office and a fifth person who tried to flee. After running out of bullets, authorities said, Rhoades grabbed a butcher knife and stabbed a person.

This is what it looks like when some nutjob takes up arms against their government. This or some clown holed up in a house in a police standoff. This is what the gun nuts will tell you the Second Amendment is for.

They seem to believe that the Second Amendment is a license to kill people in government. Somehow, I doubt a jury will agree.

[photo via Wikimedia Commons]

'Porn addiction' just another harmful lie told by religious fanatics

A new study shows that so-called “porn addiction” doesn’t actually exist. In fact, behavioral health expert David Ley, PhD, Executive Director of New Mexico Solutions in Albuquerque says that viewing porn is actually healthy and can be beneficial. “Ley and his team believe that the positive benefits attached to viewing such images do not make it problematic de facto,” the report tells us. “It can improve attitudes towards sexuality, increase the quality of life and variety of sexual behaviors and increase pleasure in long-term relationships. It provides a legal outlet for illegal sexual behaviors or desires, and its consumption or availability has been associated with a decrease in sex offenses, especially child molestation.”

And here’s where things get interesting. People who complain about having a “porn addiction” aren’t concerned about their interest in porn per se, but rather the type of porn that keeps bringing them back for more.

Clinicians should be aware that people reporting “addiction” are likely to be male, have a non-heterosexual orientation, have a high libido, tend towards sensation seeking and have religious values that conflict with their sexual behavior and desires. They may be using visually stimulating images to cope with negative emotional states or decreased life satisfaction.

“We need better methods to help people who struggle with the high frequency use of visual sexual stimuli, without pathologizing them or their use thereof,” writes Ley, who is critical about the pseudoscientific yet lucrative practices surrounding the treatment of so-called porn addiction. “Rather than helping patients who may struggle to control viewing images of a sexual nature, the ‘porn addiction’ concept instead seems to feed an industry with secondary gain from the acceptance of the idea.

Consider it a relative of “the more you hate gays, the more likely you are to be gay" scenario. This is also why homophobes often argue that homosexuality is a choice. Many are deep in denial and they’re hoping like hell that it is a choice — so they can choose not to be. And it doesn’t take much looking to find people who claim to be straight looking for help to “cure” them of their “gay porn addiction.”

That’s what Ley and team seem to mean by an “industry with secondary gain from the acceptance of the idea”; the homophobia industry, the ex-gay scam, and religious right in general. It’s just another way that rightwing anti-science isn’t just pointing people in the wrong direction, but is actively harming people by telling them their healthy desires are a disorder that needs a cure. When it turns out that there is no “cure,” people get depressed and hopeless — and tragedy is the predictable consequence.

These people have no interest in helping anyone. In fact, to a large degree, they’re the ones with an unhealthy obsession. They’re obsessed with eliminating their own homosexual desires — and they don’t care who they hurt with their mad scientist experiments and quack pursuit of a “cure.”

[photo via Wikimedia Commons]

Creationist offers bad reason to deny reality

Raw Story: Creationist author Terry Mortenson doesn’t understand how an atheist like Bill Nye “the Science Guy” can find joy in scientific discoveries.

Following the debate between Nye and Creation Museum founder Ken Ham on Tuesday night, Mortenson sat down with Creation Today co-hosts Eric Hovind and Paul Taylor to discuss the event.

“I was kind of intrigued by one of Bill’s last comments about the joy of discovery, but I thought, what is the joy of realizing that I came from pond scum as a result of an explosion and that eventually I’m going to die and I won’t be here, I won’t remember that I ever lived, nobody else will ever remember,” Mortenson said. “What is the joy of that? It is purposeless, as Richard Dawkins and William Provine and others have said.”

“There is no purpose,” he continued. “There is no morality. All you have in evolution in is what is is. It’s the survival of the fittest and if I’m stronger than you and I’m a lion and you’re a gazelle, sorry, you’re my lunch. And if I’m Hitler and you’re a Jew, sorry, you’re lunch. And if I am outside the body and you’re in the mother’s womb, and I don’t want you, sorry, you’re lunch.”

“There is no basis of morality or purpose, and Bill is stealing from the Christian worldview to find joy in discovery when there is no purpose or meaning to it.”

We can dismiss a lot of this as non-argument. Just because I’m aware of my mortality doesn’t mean I’m incapable of joy. And how does the knowledge that you’re descended from less complex life forms somehow give you free reign to abandon morality and eat babies? It makes no logical sense.

But put aside all the hyperbole and consider the actual, underlying argument: that Mortensen finds evolution unsettling, so he chooses not to believe it. Further, since evolutionary theory is so disturbing, Mortensen argues that it cannot be true. I find the existence of things like Two and a Half Men and Lite Beer a nightmarish indictment of American tastes — but that doesn’t mean it’s logical to conclude that they don’t exist. It just means that there are facts out there that I’d rather not be true. Sucks to be me, but I have to accept it.

And this comes up so often that we can easily say it’s a cornerstone of the creationist pseudo-science; “I find it too disturbing, therefore it can’t exist.” This isn’t logic, this is wishful thinking. In fact, this is the very definition of wishful thinking. The fact that they think this is a compelling argument shows that logic is a completely foreign concept to creationists.

When your reasoning is this flawed, the odds that your argument is solid are slim to none.

Does a CBO report really say Obamacare means 2 million will lose their jobs? In a word, no

Or at least, only if you misunderstand it —which, sadly, is easy to do when major news outlets are misreporting the story. The right is, of course, running wild with the story and it seems no one has actually bothered to sit down and read the damned thing. There’s a rampant misunderstanding of how jobs are measured in the Congressional Budget Office’s report and this is resulting in confusion — which the right and Republicans are running in to exploit. TPM’s Dylan Scott has the skinny (emphasis mine):

What the CBO really found was that the numbers of hours worked would decrease under Obamacare, by roughly 1.5 percent to 2 percent between 2017 and 2024. The report then translated those lost hours into the equivalent of 2.5 million jobs. But that doesn’t mean 2.5 million jobs are going to disappear from the U.S. economy.

The CBO report, in fact, specifically undermines that claim.

Those lost hours will “almost entirely” be the result of people choosing to work fewer hours because of Obamacare — not because they lost their jobs or can’t find a full-time job.

"The report explicitly says that Obamacare isn’t going to force businesses to cut jobs on any grand scale," Scott reports. "What it is going to do is change how much Americans work." Obamacare will actually free people to work less, since insurance coverage won’t be dependent on full-time hours. 35 hours a week is better fit for your family? Great. Knock yourself out. It’s not like you’ll lose your health coverage or anything.

No wonder the GOP is eager to spin this thing right out of the gate; if Americans find out what it really means, they’re not going to be interested in messing with Obamacare at all, much less repealing it.

Today’s ridiculous spin from Politico

Or “Trashy, sensationalist story is trashy, sensationalist.”

Politico: President Barack Obama is counting on Senate Democrats to help approve his legislative agenda during his final years in office. And though they are his staunchest allies on most economic issues, many Democratic senators are breaking with him on key issues in very public ways.

From trade to Iran sanctions, the Keystone XL pipeline, Obamacare, the National Security Agency and energy policy, Senate Democrats seem unusually comfortable criticizing the president, with only minimal concerns about repercussions from the White House.

Even Obama’s steadfast ally, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, didn’t mince words last week when he rejected a bill to fast-track trade deals that is strongly backed by the White House, working against Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus of Montana, a Senate colleague who has been tapped to be the president’s ambassador to China.

Even some Republicans are noticing.

Old and tired: GOP Civil War. Fresh and exciting: Democratic Civil War. Pretty snazzy, huh?

Well, it would be if it didn’t also happen to be horsecrap.

Ed Kilgore: Splits from the majority Democratic position by Members of Congress from energy-producing areas is about as new a development as the electric guitar. Of course Mary Landrieu and Joe Manchin are going to complain about utility regulations and fracking restrictions. Indeed, until Republicans abandoned their own environmentalist tradition, a Member of Congress’ region or home-state was far and away the most reliable indicator of their position on energy and environmental issues. And it will, of course, be most visible in the Senate where every energy-producing state has two representatives.

Harry Reid’s rejection of fast-track trade negotiating authority is also un-newsy to anyone remembering similar Democratic hostility to fast-track during the Clinton administration. Yes, there is underlying tension within the Democratic coalition (and also within the Republican coalition, though to a lesser extent) over trade policy, but again, it goes back at least to the 1970s.

The Democratic “revolt” on Iran policy is yesterday’s news in a somewhat different respect: it has been largely quelled as Democratic cosponsors of the Menendez-Kirk sanctions legislation mostly line up in favor of letting Harry Reid keep the bill off the Senate floor until the administration’s negotiations with Iran run their course.

There’s more, but you get the idea. The bare bones of Politico’s hackfest here is that Democrats aren’t of a hivemind — like the lockstep thinking that’s usually a hallmark of the GOP — and that means everything’s in disarray and the party’s falling apart and the White House’s legislative agenda is in shambles and isn’t it all so wonderfully chaotic and newsworthy that you just have to read you some Politico?

But none of this is anything new. It’s become cliché to say that getting Democrats on the same page is like herding cats. and that’s because people have been repeating the analogy for years. None of this is new. Democrats tend to be more independent-minded and willing to go their own way than the more authoritarian and doctrinaire Republicans — Republicans who, ironically, claim to value individualism.

Stories like this are less about Washington and more about Politico’s market strategy. They seek to be the most important journalistic voice in DC by being the one that “drives the conversation.” So if you’re not reading Politico, you’re out of the loop. And you drive the conversation not by being accurate, apparently, but by twisting facts in order to “find” stories that no one else is reporting on. This isn’t so much actually “driving the conversation” as it is “being a hack.”

And it’s not so much journalism as it is writing Washington insider fan fiction.

Giuliani slowly begins to accept reality

Just days ago, he thought the case against Christie was “clearly a partisan witch hunt,” now there's a "fifty-fifty" chance the governor was involved. At this rate, Christie will be giving a tearful confession in handcuffs and Rudy will say, “You know, there’s a distinct possibility that the governor might actually be guilty. I could be convinced.”

He seems to be that far behind everyone else.

Republicans try to tamp down latest unhinged candidate outbreak

Maybe they shouldn’t have abandoned that whole rebranding thing after all.

Raw Story: A Republican congressional candidate from Illinois refused to honor her party’s call for her to abandon the race despite her sudden infamy, the Chicago Daily Herald reported on Thursday.

“I’m not withdrawing from the race,” Susanne Atanus told the Herald. “I don’t know why they are not standing behind me. They should talk to me personally. I will not back out of the race.”

Atanus’ candidacy gained the wrong kind of national spotlight on Wednesday after she expressed her belief that God created autism and dementia and extreme weather conditions to punish the U.S. on account of legalized abortion and the increasing support nationwide for marriage equality.

“God is angry,” she told the Herald. “We are provoking him with abortions and same-sex marriage and civil unions. Same-sex activity is going to increase AIDS. If it’s in our military it will weaken our military. We need to respect God.”

Atanus is running against David Earl Williams III for the right to represent the GOP against incumbent Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL). However, Republican leaders at both the local and state level released a statement on Thursday disavowing her completely.

This is the GOP’s recurring nightmare heading toward November; that some out-there, bigoted, ignorant ‘bagger candidate will become the face of the Republican Party. Mike Huckabee (although not a candidate, definitely a Tea Party type) ran that scenario yesterday and of course there are others, like the Florida candidate who won’t step back from his fervent belief that Pres. Obama must die.

But the bigger concern isn’t exactly that people will assume that candidates like Atanus speak for the GOP, but rather that they’ll prove that many in the party believe this horsecrap. One of the more important bits of fallout from Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” fiasco was that there was no shortage of people — either in the media or in the party itself — who thought that Akin was absolutely right. The idea that rape rarely results in pregnancy because women have some sort of auto-contraceptive system that kicks when they’re sexually assaulted is such a common lie among anti-choice zealots that nearly everyone in the GOP base actually believes it. To them, Akin was only saying what they thought was common knowledge and defended him as they would the truth.

And Atanus doesn’t sound any different from any random Tea Party activist or columnist for WorldNetDaily. People go on Fox News and say things like this without any pushback at all, because this is the sort of mumbo-jumbo that so many of them believe is absolute Gospel. So the base, like Susanne Atanus herself, has to be wondering what the big deal is. Hell, this sort of thing is just an average day on talk radio or wingnut blogs. Why’s everyone freaking out about it now?

What Republicans are afraid of isn’t what Atanus said, but that what she and other candidates and pundits like her say may become an intraparty debate. They don’t want to shut her down before liberals notice and start to attack, they want to shut her down before conservatives notice and rush to defend.

I believe MLK spoke for all Republicans when he said...

Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children. ~ May 1965 speech to the Negro American Labor Council.

Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in healthcare is the most shocking and inhumane. ~ Speech to the Second National Convention of the Medical Committee for Human Rights, Chicago, March 25, 1966.

In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, such as ‘right to work.’ It is a law to rob us of our civil rights and job rights. ~ Speaking on right-to-work laws in 1961.

You can’t talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can’t talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You’re really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry…. Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong… with capitalism…. There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism. ~ Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Frogmore, S.C. November 14, 1966.

History is a great teacher. Now everyone knows that the labor movement did not diminish the strength of the nation but enlarged it. By raising the living standards of millions, labor miraculously created a market for industry and lifted the whole nation to undreamed of levels of production. Those who attack labor forget these simple truths, but history remembers them. ~ Speaking to the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL–CIO) on Dec. 11, 1961

There are certain things in our nation and in the world which I am proud to be maladjusted and which I hope all men of good-will will be maladjusted until the good societies realize — I say very honestly that I never intend to become adjusted to — segregation and discrimination. I never intend to become adjusted to religious bigotry. ~ Address at the Herman W. Read Fieldhouse, Western Michigan University, 18 December 1963.

I endorse it. I think it was correct. Contrary to what many have said, it sought to outlaw neither prayer nor belief in god. In a pluralistic society such as ours, who is to determine what prayer shall be spoken and by whom? Legally, constitutionally or otherwise, the state certainly has no such right. ~ King sharing his thoughts on the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to ban organized school prayer, in a 1965 interview with Playboy magazine.

We know of no more crucial civil rights issue facing Congress today than the need to increase the federal minimum wage and extend its coverage. ~ Statement on minimum wage legislation, March 18, 1966.

Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon. Indeed, it is a weapon unique in history, which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it. ~ The Quest for Peace and Justice speech, 1964.

[photo by Ron Cogswell]