Daily Kos

Senate filibuster showdown will take time, says Reid's office

rss@dailykos.com (Joan McCarter) — Fri, 17 May 2013 17:52:25 UTC

Does he mean it this time?

The threats from Harry Reid to go nuclear on Senate rules reform have coalesced behind three nominations that he plans to bring to the floor next week, all of which will almost certainly be filibustered by Republicans: Richard Cordray at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Elizabeth McCarthy at the Environmental Protection Agency, and Thomas Perez at Labor. A senior aide to Reid tells Greg Sargent that "that he’s all but certain to take action if the Senate GOP blocks three upcoming key nominations," but not until July.

Reid has privately consulted with President Obama on the need to revisit filibuster reform, and the President has told the Majority Leader that he will support the exercising of the nuclear option if Reid opts for it, the aide says, adding that senior Democrats expect the President to publicly push for it as well. “If Senator Reid decides to do something on nominations, the president has said he’ll be there to support him,” the aide says. [...]
If Republicans block those three nominees, the aide tells me, “then our position will be very easy.”

[I]mmigration reform is looming as a wild card in Reid’s internal thinking about whether to revisit the filibuster. The aide says senior Democratic Senators have privately expressed worry to the Majority Leader that revisiting the rules could imperil the immigration push, and have asked him to delay it until after immigration reform is done (or is killed).

This is why July has emerged as the rough target date, the aide says. “The fear is that if he does this before immigration reform is done, then all of the Republicans are going to walk,” the aide tells me.

Because the Republican House hasn't already doomed immigration reform already? Reid apparently feels like he needs to have these three derailed votes to really convince those senior Democratic senators that there really is a problem. Or perhaps he's putting this story out there as a warning shot to Republicans to play nice on these nominees. As if warning that filibuster reform might really happen this time has ever stopped the Republicans from keeping the Senate from functioning before. The Republicans undoubtedly see Reid's threats as empty as the liberal base does.

Delaying this until July in the hopes that Republicans mean it when they say they'll cooperate in creating substantive immigration reform seems to be a fool's errand. But what the hell. If Reid needs support from Democratic senators to do this, and thinks he can't do it until July, let's get him those Democratic senators.

Use this link to send an email to your Democratic senators telling them to re-open filibuster reform and make the Senate function again.

This week in the world of progressive state blogs: No epidurals in Alabama, expanding Medicaid

rss@dailykos.com (Meteor Blades) — Sat, 18 May 2013 15:00:19 UTC

Each Saturday, this feature links and excerpts commentary and reporting from a dozen progressive state blogs in the past seven days around the nation. The idea is not only to spotlight specific issues but to give readers who may not know their state has a progressive blog or two a place to become regularly informed about doings in their back yard. Just as states with progressive lawmakers and activists have themselves initiated innovative programs over a wide range of issues, state-based progressive blogs have helped provide us with a point of view and inside information we don't get from the traditional media. Those blogs deserve a larger audience. Let me know via comments or Kosmail if you have a favorite you think I should know about. Standard disclaimer: Inclusion of a diary does not necessarily indicate my agreement or endorsement of its contents.

At Left in Alabama, DrAbston writes Your Epidural is Against the Law: What Alabama Women and Doctors Need to Know:

[O]ur beloved state Supreme Court has brought pregnancy and childbirth back to what they think God meant it to be—drug free. No epidurals. That can work well, especially if you have a midwife or a doctor skilled in normal unmedicated birth, but do women want to give up that option? How about no spinal blocks for c-sections? Girlfriends, better practice your breathing! Obstetricians, addiction specialists and anesthesiologists, do I have your attention?
Our story begins back in 2006, when Alabama passed a Chemical Endangerment statute meant to protect children from harm in meth houses. Although it said nothing whatsoever about pregnant women and was never intended to apply to women who become pregnant while addicted or who use a drug during pregnancy, that didn’t stop prosecutors from jumping right in.

At Rural and Progressive of Georgia Katherine Helms Cummings writes Disenchantment spreads to conservatives:

Governor Nathan Deal took his head out of the sand long enough to tell the Statesboro paper that, “We know that we don’t want anything that’s going to pollute our waterways. We don’t want anything that’s going to make our state a worse place from the standpoint of environmental degradation.”
Make our state worse from the standpoint of environmental degradation? We are competing for the bottom of the list.

At SquareState of Colorado, Zappatero gives a senator the eye-roll in the direction ofSen. Michael Bennet [who was] lionized by Maureen Dowd/NYT for wanting even more Cuts than the Sequester:

How could I have missed this?
Oh, wait, Maureen Dowd is irrelevant here in the heartland, but highly influential on the DC Cocktail Cicuit. And Michael Bennet's desire to impose Austerity at all costs caught her attention early this year:

Voting to let the country fall off the cliff was an audacious, even precocious, move by the Democratic golden boy and presidential pet—one that, oddly, put him on the side of Marco Rubio and Rand Paul rather than Obama and Joe Biden. "It is an interesting group," he deadpanned about the naysayers.
Rubio and Paul didn't have the chance to stake their careers on the Public Option. Bennet said he would, but demurred then, too, and let the Public Option die an unnatural, quiet death.

Obama focuses on middle-class concerns in weekly address

rss@dailykos.com (Susan Gardner) — Sat, 18 May 2013 14:00:18 UTC

Coming off a week of media-fed outrage over several "scandals" (IRS, Benghazi, AP), President Obama focused this morning's weekly address back on jobs, progress and the middle class—just as he did when he spoke yesterday in Baltimore. His focus:

There are three areas where we need to focus. One: making America a magnet for good jobs. Two: making sure our workers have the education and skills they need to do those jobs. And three: making sure your hard work leads to a decent living.

The president talked of his recent trips to get out of Washington, D.C., and talk to people in cities across the nation like Austin and Baltimore. It is, he made clear, an effort to get out of the D.C. bubble and experience what ordinary Americans care about.

That’s why I like getting out of the Washington echo chamber whenever I can – because too often, our politics aren’t focused on the same things you are. Working hard. Supporting your family and your community. Making sure your kids have every chance in life.

And as is almost always the message in his weekly addresses, there's been improvement, but there needs to be more—improvement in the housing market, job creation, income growth and deficit reduction. We must continue these positive trends, he said, even as the auto industry is recovering, and tech and energy sectors are booming. He's going to continue, he said, to hit the road, and to work in the capital for bipartisan solutions to ongoing problems:

In the coming weeks, I’m going to visit more cities like Baltimore, and Austin, Texas – where I was two weeks ago; places where Americans are coming together to strengthen their own communities and economies – and in the process, making this country better for all of us.
And I’m going to keep trying to work with both parties in Washington to make progress on your priorities. Because I know that if we come together around creating more jobs, educating more of our kids, and building new ladders of opportunity for everyone who’s willing to climb them – we’ll all prosper, together.

To read the transcript in full, check below the fold or visit the White House website.

This week in science: Common census

rss@dailykos.com (DarkSyde) — Sat, 18 May 2013 13:00:10 UTC

Climate Consensus image via Skeptical Science, click image for more data and details.

If you're old enough, you remember hearing about missile gaps that reportedly posed danger. Here's another perilous chasm: the Consensus Gap. There is virtually no scientific controversy over climate change anymore, but a lot of non-scientists think there is huge controversy in the climate research community itself. Greg Laden explains:

The point is, the gap between scientific consensus and public opinion is real, and very important. The consensus gap causes bad things to happen. ... Editorials in Main Stream Media that exploit the consensus gap could be compared to editorials at the New York Times or in the Scientific American or your local newspaper that demand more attention be given to the plight of Big Foot or the Loch Ness Monster. The degree of scientific consensus that those creatures do not exist is about the same as the degree of consensus that AGW is real, though the public “belief” in crypto-critters is less than the public “belief” that AGW is not real. Why? Because Main Stream Media has not taken Big Foot or the Loch Ness Monster seriously in quite some time.
Ten years from now it will be interesting to look back and see how Main Stream Media’s editorial writers who today are sticking with “the jury is still out” on AGW managed their reputations as they looked more and more like they belonged at the National Enquirer rather than a respected news outlet.

Tanzania offers another clue in the fascinating story of primate evolution.
Holy smokes, look at the line up of crazy to replace Saxby I-aint-gay Chambliss; no matter who wins, it will bear much science-blogging fruit in the years to come.
Via the Stephanie Miller Show, I posted a few hilarious excepts from Housekeeping Monthly 1955 AKA ~~The Good Wife's Guide~~ How to Lose a Woman in Five Minutes. Snopes says likely fabricated but still expresses many such sentiments common at that time.
What could go wrong with mind reading or thought control?
Sometimes knowing too much science can detract from a sci-fi movie ...
The sequester kills.
NASA plans to return a sample of an Apollo class asteroid called 101955 Bennu. The object is about half a km in diameter so no need for record-breaking rovers. One of the strange forces at work this mission will check out is called Yarkovsky Effect: a miniscule quantum force which orbital mechanics must take into account as, over time, it can change change the orbit of a small body enough that it misses the earth ... or hits us.

Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: New IRS charges by conservatives don't measure up

rss@dailykos.com (Greg Dworkin) — Sat, 18 May 2013 11:30:08 UTC

Peggy Noonan:

We are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate.

Um, no we are not. It's not even a scandal. It's a controversy. And, by the way, Benghazi isn't even that. But don't worry. That won't stop Republicans from overreaching.

Nate Silver:

“The second part of the scandal is the auditing of political activists who have opposed the administration,” the Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan wrote on Thursday, describing the I.R.S.’s actions as the “worst Washington scandal since Watergate.”
What evidence does Ms. Noonan present for this second allegation?

She cites four conservatives who were audited. Four cases out of 1.5 million. Please. This is "anything for a scandal" garbage and should be treated as such.

NY Times (news section, mind you):

Republican charges range from the clearly questionable to the seemingly specious, and they grow by the day. On Friday, lawmakers sought to tie the I.R.S. matter to the carrying out of President Obama’s health care law, which will rely heavily on the agency. Whether they succeed holds significant ramifications for Mr. Obama, who will soon know if he is dealing with a late spring thunderstorm that may soon blow over or a consuming squall that will leave lasting damage.

Watch over the next few weeks as Republican glee turns to frustration as the voters decidedly ignore the trumped-up charges.

More politics and policy below the fold.

Open thread for night owls: Stephen Lerner on breaking Wall Street's grip

rss@dailykos.com (Meteor Blades) — Sat, 18 May 2013 03:30:10 UTC

Greg Kauffman has, for a long time, been focused on poverty issues, a subject that rarely arouses much concern in the stenographic media but matters a great deal to tens of millions of Americans directly affected by it. What follows is the introduction and first question of an interview at The Nation with a long-time organizer whose activism is worth emulating and who ideas are worth spreading. You can read the other eight questions at the link. There is also an action you may wish to participate in here:

[T]o build a new anti-poverty movement will require the kind of organizing and actions that are as creative, visible and gripping as the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Enter Stephen Lerner.

Lerner is a labor and community organizer who has spent more than three decades organizing hundreds of thousands of janitors, farm workers, garment workers and other low-wage workers into unions. These efforts resulted in increased wages, first-time health benefits, paid sick days and other improvements on the job. The architect of the historic Justice for Janitors campaign, he is currently working with unions and community groups across the country to break Wall Street’s anti-democratic grip on our politics and our economy.

Lerner lays out a powerful case about the intersection between poverty and Wall Street accountability—and how a Wall Street accountability movement can transform an economy that offers so few pathways out of poverty, and so many ways to keep people impoverished.

Here is our conversation:

Greg Kaufmann: Why is the Wall Street accountability movement now the focus of your work, and what is the potential you see there?

Stephen Lerner: One of the challenges is that there are so many things wrong right now—that you can be involved in any of a thousand causes. The problem is if they are disconnected it doesn’t add up to anything. So, people who are opposed to poverty have a dozen different things they’d like to move on the Hill, none of which are likely to pass at this time.

Stephen Lerner

So the focus on Wall Street is: How do you connect all of these different battles? And, in fact, are there core things in common that drive them together?

If you look at some of the biggest issues of the day—whether it’s the loss of wealth in communities of color, the housing crisis, the student debt crisis, local and state governments cutting jobs and services because of debt—you can connect all of these issues to the original economic crisis of 2008, and the growing and continued dominance of the Wall Street big banks.

The majority of people in this country are either impacted by student debt, the ongoing housing crisis or the crisis of the public sector. And you can trace so much of it to Wall Street. This means instead of having twenty separate campaigns, you can have one campaign, that says how do we rebalance and reorganize the economy so that it benefits everybody—not just a teeny elite at the top.

Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2012—Mitt, you dunce, you have to remember your lies:

We all know that Romney is a major liar. We've seen it over and over during this campaign. The pile of his lies already has grown enormously and the general election campaign is barely under way.

For someone with his assets, you would think he would have hired himself a better coach of effective lying. He can certainly afford it given the gobs of cash he's sucked up by destroying jobs and being rewarded for it. But apparently he's been a cheapskate on that front. Because he just isn't very good at it despite all the practice.

Tweet of the Day:

GOP thought they could lie & lie about the Benghazi emails because they didn't think press/public would ever see them. WH said, Here. #oops
— @steveweinstein via web

On today's Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin on the dying embers of the "scandal" fires. Kevin Drum reports that news outlets got burned by Republican sources on those Benghazi emails, and Armando calls for Jonathan Karl's head. The bizarre story of a holocaust denier reinvented as a Hollywood conservative player. A brief #GunFAIL update. Doctor Who asks about Joan McCarter's post on Reid's plan to call for a vote on the Cordray nomination. Our thanks to show sponsor Audible! Be sure to get your free audio book, download here.

High Impact Posts. Top Comments.

Economics Daily Digest: It's Gatsby's world, they're just working in it

rss@dailykos.com (Roosevelt Institute) — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:08:28 UTC

By Tim Price, originally published on Next New Deal

Click here to receive the Daily Digest via e-mail.

Gatsby and the McJobs Rebellion (KC Star)

Roosevelt Institute Fellow Dorian Warren notes that the new adaptation of The Great Gatsby is timed nicely with fast food and retail workers' push for fairer wages. The story of unbridled greed keeps being retold, but this time they plan to write their own ending.

Millennials reject 'lazy, entitled' label: 'Who are they talking about?' (Today)

Roosevelt Institute | Pipeline Fellow Nona Willis Aronowitz writes that while pundits sneer at Millennials, members of the generation that came of age during the Great Recession are too busy working to improve the bad hand they've been dealt to have time for haters.

84 Percent of NYC Fast Food Workers Report Wage Theft in a New Survey (The Nation)

Josh Eidelson highlights a new report that finds many fast food restaurants are pulling a fast one on their workers, who are forced to work without pay or denied breaks and overtime. Even the Hamburglar himself would never have stooped to this kind of petty thievery.

That's a 'Depression': Europe's Double-Dip Is Officially Longer Than Its Great Recession (The Atlantic)

Matthew O'Brien notes that GDP data prove Europe's response to the recession has been worse than the recession itself, but polls still show widespread support for the euro and austerity, so the continent may just have an unusually large population of masochists.

Surprise! Inflation is too low almost everywhere on earth (WaPo)

Neil Irwin writes that in contrast to inflationistas' repeated warnings that quantitative easing would lead to a grim, dark future in which there is only Bitcoin, none of the leading central banks have even been able to hit the 2 percent inflation rate they were aiming for.

Foreclosure Crisis Cost U.S. $192.6 Billion in Lost Wealth Last Year, Study Finds (HuffPo)

Jillian Berman writes that even as the housing market rebounds, millions continue to lose their homes or struggle in vain to save them, with minority borrowers hit particularly hard. Is there no "moral hazard" in leaving enough people underwater to re-settle Atlantis?

The real IRS scandal: Targeting by class (Salon)

David Dayen points out that unfairly scrutinizing one group over another isn't new behavior for the IRS. That's why the working poor get audited while big corporations get away with just about anything as long as they employ a sufficiently intimidating number of lawyers.

Billionaires Unchained (TomDispatch)

Andy Kroll argues that you can't measure the impact of money in politics by simply chalking up big donors' wins and losses and calculating the score. The point is that something's off when one person can spend more in one election than most voters will ever make.

Tim Price is Editor of Next New Deal. Follow him on Twitter @txprice.

Conservative Monkey Seance Theater Roundup

rss@dailykos.com (Hunter) — Sat, 18 May 2013 02:20:09 UTC

Winning!

Oh, sure: Everybody else gets to write about the deep, substantive stuff that happened this week—like Benghazi!!!, and how many exclamation points Benghazi!!! requires on any given day. I get stuck with the crackpots. Welcome, then, to a brief roundup of the week's crackpots.

The Heritage Foundation co-author of their study deeming certain immigrants to be an irredeemable drain on society resigned this week, but still insisted his past arguments about the lower IQ of Hispanics and other non-whites were misunderstood.
We are governed by morons.
Pat Buchanan, who is apparently still alive, resurfaced to demand the Republican Party execute a new "Southern Strategy" to protect themselves against the electoral difficulties posed by "people of color." Nobody ever accused Pat of being subtle.
The American Family Association says that the AARP is turning our old people gay.
There's no limit to how badly you can screw up and still find success in the Republican Party. First Mark Sanford wanders back from the Appalachian Trail, now the person who came close to destroying the Komen Foundation in her anti-Planned Parenthood crusade is running for the Senate in Georgia. The only question is whether she can beat out equally far-far-right GOP Reps. Paul Broun, Jack Kingston and Phil Gingrey, or as Georgia calls it, the "batshit sampler."
Another case in point: Allen West is headed to Fox News. That is, if Florida Gov. Rick Scott passes up on appointing him Lt. Governor of Florida.
The right is still convinced that Planned Parenthood is one big abortionplex. That it might not be doesn't even enter their minds.
Peggy Noonan uses the IRS scandal as springboard for her new conspiracy that the administration is targeting conservatives for IRS audits as punishment for supporting Romney or saying bad things about ObamaCare. She bases this on a handful of conservatives who have said they've gotten audited in the last few years, and that couldn't possibly just be a coincidence that only a completely addled person could work themselves into a lather over. Everybody knows non-conservatives never get audited by the IRS, right?

These are the people who rule us. In the realm of people who don't rule us and never will, resident Fox "and Friend" Steve Doocy theorizes that the IRS is going to use ObamaCare to deny hip replacements to known conservatives. As a connoisseur of all things tin foil, even I'm impressed with that one. And talk about catering to the Fox News audience!

Republican efforts to skewer Obama and Holder over IRS and AP are blunted

rss@dailykos.com (Meteor Blades) — Fri, 17 May 2013 21:43:22 UTC

Republicans came out losers this week in efforts to undermine the Obama administration over the latest ginned-up scandals.

Not only did they lose the momentum of their eight-month-long Benghazi® caterwauling, the White House also weakened any leverage they might have gained by taking decisive action over the IRS's using of "inappropriate criteria" in reviewing organizations' applications for tax-exempt status. The president fired the IRS acting director and promised quick action on a report by the Treasury's inspector general for tax administration.

More than a few Democrats viewed the entire matter as less than a tempest in a teapot.

While IRS bureaucrats did use inappropriate criteria when choosing to go after "tea party" groups seeking tax exempt status, Republican outrage over the revelations was marked with the usual hypocrisy. It wasn't as if this was the first time the IRS had used its powers politically, having previously focused on the NAACP, just to note one example. And liberal groups received the same IRS letter asking questions as conservative groups received. Three of them had their applications denied.

At the root of the problem is the murkiness of IRS parameters for judging when a "social welfare" organization engages in too much political activity. The muddiness of the rules allowed, even encouraged, IRS employees well down the chain of command to exercise judgment that they shouldn't. In place of the murkiness ought to be very specific rules barring all political activity or defining it very narrowly. Everybody would be clear on what qualifies and disqualifies groups for tax-exempt status, and we could bring an end to exempting political groups masquerading as social welfare groups. More truthfulness and less hyperventilation would result.

The potshots taken over the IRS affair had their humorous, if predictable, moments. Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida demanded to know why President Obama wasn't calling for an investigation of the matter by the Department of Justice. Apparently in his efforts to needle the president for not getting a probe started, Rubio didn't notice that Attorney General Eric Holder had already launched one.

Meanwhile, Holder was summoned to Capitol Hill for a sworn tête-à-tête with 37 members of the House Judiciary Committee, where he was asked a vast array of questions that included a few on Benghazi, the IRS affair and the revelation that the Justice Department had obtained two months' worth of phone records of editors and reporters from the Associated Press in an effort to track down a leak from within the administration about anti-terrorist action in Yemen. The 20 phone lines that were affected included work, home and cell phones. Holder couldn't answer most questions on that matter because he has recused himself from the DOJ's investigation into it.

Unlike Benghazi and the IRS affair, the AP matter has received little attention from Republicans and generally subdued wait-and-see objections from Democrats. The AP itself called the seizure of the records a "massive and unprecedented intrusion." The ACLU called it "press intimidation" and an "unacceptable abuse of power." The Electronic Freedom Foundation said the taking of the records by the "DOJ has struck a terrible blow against the freedom of the press and the ability of reporters to investigate and report the news."

Executives at The New York Times and the Washington Post condemned the government's action. There was also some rumbling from a few Democrats, such as Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Some leftist critics had to suppress their general distaste for the stenographic media, which the Associated Press has come to epitomize, in raising their objections to government overreach and failure to follow its own guidelines in acquiring the AP phone records.

The best news to emerge so far in the AP matter is the administration's call for a federal shield law that would give reporters more protection in keeping the identity of confidential sources secret and quashing the subpoenaing of their phone records. Republicans killed such proposals in 2008 and 2010. The Obama administration backed a shield law in 2010, but attached numerous national security exemptions to it. The White House has asked Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York to introduce a new shield law. Any Republicans who have expressed reservations about the taking of the AP phone records will thus get a chance to put up or shut up.

Republicans keep making unreasonable demands of EPA nominee McCarthy

rss@dailykos.com (Meteor Blades) — Fri, 17 May 2013 19:10:20 UTC

Republicans will support Gina McCarthy if she changes
her middle name to "Yes, anything you say."

Last Thursday, all eight Republicans on the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee threw a tantrum and refused to show up to vote on the nomination of Gina McCarthy to head the Environmental Protection Agency. This Thursday, they showed up so they could vote against her. Along partisan lines, the committee cleared her 10-to-8 for consideration by the full Senate. Despite her bipartisan credentials, she could face trouble when the debate begins there. There's slim-to-nil chance she could get the needed 60 votes if Republicans try to filibuster her nomination.

That won't happen, according to the ranking Republican on the committee, Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana—who has been leading the charge against her—if she answers a few more questions satisfactorily. It's not a stretch to say she's been pummeled with questions, 1,079 of them altogether, and she's has answered them all.

But there remain three sticking points. Which is no surprise given that many Republicans would like to see the EPA dealt with the way the Romans dealt with Carthage, leaving not one of its bricks atop another and then salting the ground they stood on. If they can get her and the agency to say no on any of those questions, they'll have what they consider justification for blocking her confirmation.

Vitter and other Senate Republicans claim their remaining concerns about McCarthy have nothing to do with decisions she has made in her post as EPA assistant administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation but rather with agency transparency. Malarkey. The crux of the matter is ideology centered on what the likes of Mitch McConnell call "job-killing regulations." You can find out what the Republicans' ridiculous, industry-pushed complaints are below the fold.

This week in Benghazi

rss@dailykos.com (Jed Lewison) — Sat, 18 May 2013 00:20:08 UTC

According to a PPP survey released Monday, 39 percent of people who think Benghazi is the biggest scandal ever don't even know that it is in Libya, including 6 percent who think it's in Cuba.

We began Monday reeling from the news that the Benghazi talking points had been edited. Well, maybe not reeling, but Republicans assumed that we were, because they had finally gotten a reporter to print their fantasy of what the Benghazi talking points emails had been. We also learned that John Boehner was using Benghazi for political purposes, that Republicans were using it for fundraising, and that 39 percent of people who think Benghazi was the biggest scandal since ever don't even know it was in Libya (6 percent think it's in Cuba).
On Tuesday, Republicans launched their first anti-Hillary ad of 2016 campaign, focused on Benghazi. And we thus learned the definitive timeline of the whole mess. We also got the first glimpse of the real Benghazi talking point emails.
On Wednesday, the White House released the real Benghazi talking point emails, showing that Jon Karl had merely acted as a stenographer for someone feeding him a false account of the messages.
On Thursday, Fox News called out Obama's transparency with the email release for what it really was: a diabolical ploy to confuse Americans. Meanwhile, former Fox reporter Major Garrett, now with CBS and therefore legally allowed to speak his mind, reported what we all suspected but didn't explicitly know: Republicans were behind the false emails. Also on Thursday, the independent co-chairman of the State Department's Benghazi review blew the whistle on Darrell Issa for refusing to let them testify in public before his committee. Issa responded on Friday by issuing a subpoena to "participate in a voluntary transcribed interview prior to testifying publicly." What's he afraid of?
Also on Friday, Reince Priebus counseled Republicans to take their time before impeaching Obama: "Don't call for impeachment until you have evidence," he said. Not unless, but until. Because Reince knows the evidence is there. Somewhere, Anywhere. Just ask Bob Woodward, who on Friday said Benghazi was like Watergate—a perfectly stupid way to wrap up a perfectly stupid week in Washington.

This week in austerity: Furloughing defense workers and making unemployment harsher

rss@dailykos.com (Laura Clawson) — Fri, 17 May 2013 19:11:12 UTC

Cutcutcutcutcut

The effects of austerity are all around us—at this point, it's defining and dragging down our economy—but a lot of the time, the news doesn't report on austerity's effects on working people. Pundits and politicians scream most loudly about the deficit, not about the need to invest in jobs and infrastructure. And with sequestration being the major austerity policy debate happening now, we still hear most about how it's affecting those at the top. This week was a case in point.

Defense furloughs were the week's big sequester story, as Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced that the furloughs, which were initially expected to be for as much as 22 days and then had been cut to 14 days, would be cut again, to 11 days, with more civilian defense workers exempted than had been expected. The good news in this story is that that means a lot of civilian defense workers won't be taking as big a hit to their pay. The bad news is that 11 days without pay is still a big hit, and the defense furloughs bring the number of federal workers losing days of pay to 820,000. And the fact that the DoD got the opportunity to make changes and reduce planned furloughs, while many other agencies hit by the sequester didn't, points out how unevenly applied austerity is.
The uneven application of austerity came even more into focus with this round of whining from the CEO of Lockheed Martin about how she doesn't know how much of a hit her company's billions of dollars in profits will take because of sequestration. To be fair, lower profits for defense contractors could mean layoffs—but that does not exactly come across as the CEO's chief concern. Surprising, I know.
Speaking of layoffs, unemployed people keep facing bad news above and beyond the simple fact of being jobless. Nationally, Meteor Blades tells us, less than 40 percent of unemployed people are getting benefits, and federal benefits have been hit by cuts thanks to sequestration. Republican state legislators seem never to stop looking for ways to make joblessness more miserable, too. Mark E Andersen highlights a proposal in Wisconsin to double the job searching people have to do to qualify for unemployment benefits, as if looking harder will help when the jobs aren't being created.
Unemployment also isn't helped by situations like this: Only one in six kids eligible for childcare subsidies actually get those subsidies, thanks to chronic underfunding of the program. With so many more people trying to get into the program than are covered, the low-income, unemployed, or student parents whose kids should qualify for subsidized childcare have to jump through endless hoops to get and keep the aid, often being forced to miss work in order to get the childcare support that makes it possible for them to go to work at all. Republicans say they want people to work, but when it comes to making it possible for them to do so, somehow the response is always more austerity. And, yes, the sequester has cut Head Start programs as well.
Since these cuts and underfunded programs come because Republicans refuse to raise revenue, let's close with a little reframing of the whole tax vs. spending debate:

Cheers and Jeers: Rum and Coke FRIDAY!

rss@dailykos.com (Bill in Portland Maine) — Fri, 17 May 2013 23:15:20 UTC

From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…

All I Need to Know About Life I learned from Star Trek

With the new Trek flick out today in the U.S. (it's getting boffo reviews and you can count mine among them), it seems like a good time to review:

And when driving the Enterprise, remember
Rule #1: Grind it 'til ya find it.

• Seek out new life and civilizations.
• Non-interference is the Prime Directive.
• Keep your phaser set on stun.
• Humans are highly illogical.
• There's no such thing as a Vulcan death grip.
• Live long and prosper.
• Having is not so pleasing as wanting; it is not logical but it is often true.
• Infinite diversity in infinite combinations (IDIC).
• Tribbles hate Klingons (and Klingons hate Tribbles).
• Enemies are often invisible -- like Romulans, they can be cloaked.
• Don't put all your ranking officers in one shuttlecraft.
• When your logic fails, trust a hunch.
• Insufficient data does not compute.
• If it can't be fixed, just ask Scotty.
• Even in our own world, sometimes we are aliens.
• When going out into the Universe, remember, "Boldly go where no one has gone before!"

Also: don’t fuck around with the transporter---it's not a toy.

Your west coast-friendly edition of Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]

Gabriel Gomez's bad week

rss@dailykos.com (Joan McCarter) — Fri, 17 May 2013 19:25:27 UTC

Why is this man still smiling?

Massachusetts Senate candidate and political neophyte Gabriel Gomez is learning the hard way that politics ain't beanbag, proving himself not ready for a run for U.S. Senate.

Last week's tax scam scandal continued to dog Gomez. As a refresher, back in 2005, Gomez granted an easement on his $2+ million home, agreeing to not make changes to the facade of the historic house and getting an income tax deduction of more than $280,000 for the "donation." But local bylaws prevent him from making those changes anyway—he got a very hefty deduction for giving up absolutely nothing. He's steadfastly refused to answer any questions about this deduction, which has just led to more questions, and the news that he stiffed a guy he hired to do an appraisal on the house in order to obtain that deduction. The guy's appraisal wasn't rich enough for Gomez, so he refused to accept it, and refused to pay the $1,000 fee for the appraisal. All of which makes it very hard for this private-equity millionaire guy to assume the aw-shucks Scott Brown regular-guy mantle he's going to need to win over independents.
Gomez isn't going to be making any political gains with women voters, after his disastrous interview this week with the Boston Globe. The Globe asked for the interview, which was specifically about women's issues, because Gomez had been so vague on the campaign trail on where he stood on women's health issues and on the War on Women in general. In the interview, Gomez proved himself to be uninterested, uneducated, and uninformed on every issue. He seemingly didn't even bother to prepare for the interview, and told the Globe that "he hardly expects such issues to consume him at a time when he is focused on jobs, the economy, education, and veterans." Got that, women? He doesn't have time to worry about you. He's got manly things to focus on.
Then there was this, Gomez's histrionic meltdown over a Markey ad that used video of Gomez himself declaring his opposition to an assault weapons ban or a ban on high-capacity magazines. In a combination of misplaced grandiosity and desperation, Gomez tried to say that Markey was blaming Gomez for the Newtown shootings. As if an as-of-yet political nobody's (albeit a really rich one) views on gun safety had anything to do with Newtown, and as if Markey's ad said that at all. Which it didn't.
His really big problem, though, after some polls had shown him closing in on Markey, is that he's now becoming better known to Massachusetts voters. And they're liking him less.

Gomez's net favorability has dropped 6 points in last 2 weeks from +14 to now +8 at 42/34. From 33/32 to 20/52 w/D's: http://t.co/...
— @ppppolls via web

Let's keep Gomez's week a bad one. Please pitch in $3 to Ed Markey.

4:22 PM PT: Here's one I missed before, another person he hired to do a job at his house getting stiffed: in 2008, his plumber had to take him to small claims court to get his bill for fixing a toilet the year before paid. Yeah, Gomez is a real man of the people.

Open thread: Jeff Flake and keeping your word

rss@dailykos.com (Barbara Morrill) — Fri, 17 May 2013 22:00:08 UTC

Peggy Noonan takes a turn in the conspiracy theory funhouse

rss@dailykos.com (Hunter) — Fri, 17 May 2013 20:28:24 UTC

Leave it to Peggy Noonan to chew the scenery on this one. She'd like you to know that the president is "not unconnected" to IRS mismanagement and the FBI fetching AP phone records because of leadership osmosis. She also is fairly certain that the IRS business is some sort of Orwellian scheme to oppress conservatives, which would be fine and all if that's what happened. This is how desperately old-time Republican hands are aching for a good old fashioned White House scandal:

The president, as usual, acts as if all of this is totally unconnected to him. He's shocked, it's unacceptable, he'll get to the bottom of it. He read about it in the papers, just like you. […]
A president sets a mood, a tone. He establishes an atmosphere. If he is arrogant, arrogance spreads. If he is too partisan, too disrespecting of political adversaries, that spreads too. Presidents always undo themselves and then blame it on the third guy in the last row in the sleepy agency across town.

It was the third guy in the last row of the sleepy agency across town that did it, though. Nobody is seriously suggesting the White House had anything to do with it—and even firing the acting agency head is a bit scapegoatish, since it's not clear he had any awareness of the process either, until the IRS investigated itself and figured out what was going on. It requires quite the rhetorical bank shot to presume the president sets the "tone" for what civil servants he's never even heard of before have done wrong, while dismissing the "tone" set by the president specifically denouncing it and canning people.

The real problem, though, arises when Peggy Noonan adopts the now-stereotypical pose of the conspiracy theorist. It's all a plot, you see. It's intended to "suppress" the administration's opponents. Not the AP business, because even Peggy Noonan can't get worked up about that, she just had to toss it in there because that's what expected. No, what the IRS scandal shows is that from now on, all conservatives who get in trouble with the IRS for dodgy dealings will have done so because the mean president and his cruel government functionaries are have it in for them. That not-even-remotely-original conspiracy theory is exactly what Peggy Noonan is going with, below the fold:

Elizabeth Warren wants answers on bank settlements

rss@dailykos.com (Joan McCarter) — Fri, 17 May 2013 18:49:36 UTC

Warren grills regulators, with a smile.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren is not letting up in her efforts to find justice for American families who have been victimized by banks who have essentially stolen their homes through foreclosure fraud. Back in February, at her first Banking Committee hearing, Warren demanded of federal regulators: "What I'd like to know is, tell me a little bit about the last few times you've taken the biggest financial institutions on Wall Street all the way to a trial."

She didn't get a good answer then, and hasn't gotten an answer since. Instead, the government has continued to accept financial settlements from criminal bankers. So she's ratcheting up the pressure. In a letter sent to Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke, Attorney General Eric Holder, and Chairman of the Securities & Exchange Commission Mary Jo White, Warren is asking for any evidence they might have to explain why these settlements, a slap on the wrist to the huge financial institutions, is better policy than prosecuting them. From her letter [pdf]:

There is no question that settlements, fines, consent orders, and cease and desist orders are important enforcement tools, and that trials are expensive. [...] But I believe strongly that if a regulator reveals itself to be unwilling to take large financial institutions all the way to trial—either because it is too timid or because it lacks resources the regulator has a lot less leverage in settlement negotiations and will be forced to settle on terms that are much more favorable to the wrongdoer. [...] If large financial institutions can break the law and accumulate million in profits, and if they get caught, settle by paying out of those profits, they do not have much incentive to follow the law.

Those government agencies have now been put on notice: There's a real watchdog out there now, and one who can get a lot of attention. The big banks aren't changing their practices, and maybe it's about time the regulators start taking their jobs more seriously.

House Republicans prepare plan to raise debt ceiling

rss@dailykos.com (Jed Lewison) — Fri, 17 May 2013 17:47:04 UTC

They'll demand a ransom, but the mere fact that they are already talking
about the need to raise the debt limit just proves that they are bluffing.

Jake Sherman:

The House Republican leadership is considering releasing its debt ceiling plan before the August recess so lawmakers can actively sell it to their constituents.
The idea gained traction in a closed meeting of the House Republican Conference this week, where the main topic was how the party should craft a plan to raise the nation’s debt cap.

As you might expect, the preliminary outlines of the GOP debt limit plan still contains ransom demands, but the focus of the effort appears to be around building support on the right for raising the debt limit—not for creating another hostage crisis.

In that sense, it's a tacit admission that the "Pay China First" that Republicans passed earlier in the month is a political loser. The idea behind that legislation was to make not raising the debt limit a palatable scenario, but if they had any confidence it would work, Republicans wouldn't be trying to figure out how to sell a debt limit hike months before they need to raise it. (According to the latest Congressional Budget Office estimates, November or December is the likely timeframe.)

I'm sure Republicans will spend a good chunk of the rest of the year pretending that they are serious about their ransom demands, but the fact that they are dropping "Pay China First" as the centerpiece of their strategy effectively calls their own bluff. In order to sell their ransom demands, they also need to sell their base on the need to raise the debt limit—and once they take the position that the debt limit must be raised, it means they can't hold it hostage without committing political suicide, because doing so would be a self-admitted act of economic terrorism.

In 2011, Republicans got away with holding the debt limit hostage because President Obama didn't adopt a clean "no negotiations" position. Republicans were definitely the prime driver behind the hostage crisis, but Obama tried to use the debt limit as leverage as well. Everybody had dirty hands. But now that the president has said he won't negotiate, the only way Republicans could survive blocking a debt limit increase is if they were to convince the public that blocking a debt limit increase was a good idea. And they aren't trying to do that.

Sure, they'll spend months pretending that their serious about their ransom demands, but there's no reason to take them seriously. At the end of the day, Republicans will support a clean debt limit increase—or at the very least, they'll allow Boehner to break the Hastert rule so that Democrats can carry out the responsibilities that the GOP was unwilling to perform.

Senate filibuster showdown brewing

rss@dailykos.com (Joan McCarter) — Fri, 17 May 2013 16:12:34 UTC

Earlier this week, Harry Reid hinted that he might use the Richard Cordray nomination to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a nomination over which Republicans have maintained a filibuster spanning two Congresses, to test his caucus's appetite for real reform. Now two more nominations have made it out of committee and the tipping point might just be in reach. In addition to Cordray, EPA nominee Gina McCarthy and Labor Secretary Thomas Perez are ready for floor votes.

Democrats say that Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, in recent days has been trying to gauge whether there is sufficient support among Democrats to force a rule change that would limit the filibuster on presidential nominees. [...]
“The showdown is coming,” said Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, who has been working with Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico on efforts to overhaul filibuster rules.

“And the leadership is very engaged in preparing how to deal with this and how to change this so advise and consent does not become an instrument of destruction.”

To implement a rule change with a simple majority, Democrats like Mr. Merkley and Mr. Reid would have to overcome deep skepticism from many within their own ranks, particularly more senior senators who worry about the precedent such a move would set.

“You think you’ve got gridlock now?” said Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan. “You think you’ve got problems now? You will have a huge, huge outpouring of real anger.”

The question for Sen. Levin is what could possibly be worse if the Republicans are angry? They'll be angry obstructionists instead of just obstructionists? Levin was among those standing in the way of real rules reform at the beginning of this session, and his balking was one of the reasons why the reform that was enacted has been so toothless. If anything, Republicans have ratcheted up their obstruction, with stunts like boycotting committee votes on nominees. (They successfully blocked the McCarthy committee vote last week by not showing up, knowing that with an ailing Sen. Frank Lautenberg absent, the committee couldn't proceed because it didn't have quorum. The vote passed this week because the ill Lautenberg was forced to attend and vote.) Compromising with the Republicans on "reforms" in January only seems to have emboldened them to escalate their stalling tactics.

Democrats have a responsibility in this mess, too, a responsibility to their constituents to make the Senate work again. It's time to move beyond the finger-pointing and blaming Republicans for gridlock. It's time to move beyond the threats. It's time for Democrats to do what's in their power to do.

Please use this link to send an email to your Democratic senators telling them to re-open filibuster reform and make the Senate function again.

Midday open thread

rss@dailykos.com (Barbara Morrill) — Fri, 17 May 2013 19:00:10 UTC

Today's comic by Mark Fiore is Freedom of Snuggly:
What's coming up on Sunday Kos ...
- Big-thinking Cato Institute: 400ppm haz got what plants crave, by Hunter
- The next biggest scandal ever, until the next one, by Hunter
- Republican outreach report card: graded "F" for Fail, by Denise Oliver Velez
- Climate change isn't AN issue, it's THE issue, by Laurence Lewis
- Welcome to the Darrell Issa Hall of Shame, by Jon Perr
- The Hard Lessons of the Post Partisan Unity Schtick, by Armando
- The most vulnerable House members in 2014, in two charts, by David Jarman
- An array of present day activities to an ancient life in the canopy, by DarkSyde
Boy, never saw this one coming:

Allen West is joining @FoxNews. Thanks, Fox. That was really a voice that was missing from the national conversation.
— @WillMcAvoyACN via web
I suppose this could be called the lamest excuse ever:

A South Carolina state representative's lawyer said a rock in his shoe explains why Rep. Ted Vick was walking funny, catching the attention of an officer who eventually arrested him for DUI, his second such charge in less than a year. [...]
A Bureau of Protective Services officer saw Vick stumbling as he walked into a parking garage on the State House grounds in Columbia. Vick got into his car and hit a cone before the officer could catch up and ask him to stop.

Vick smelled like alcohol and refused field sobriety tests, according to an incident report. The officer called for backup, and Vick was eventually placed into handcuffs and taken to the Richland County jail, authorities said.

But Vick's lawyer, fellow Rep. Todd Rutherford, said Vick was not impaired. Vick was walking funny because he had a rock in his shoe, said Rutherford, D-Columbia.
Just admit it: You've always wanted to do this:

A frustrated New York theater critic smashed up a woman's cellphone because she kept surfing the web during a musical.
Water, water, everywhere:

Scientists have discovered water that has been trapped in rock for more than a billion years. The water might contain microbes that evolved independently from the surface world, and it's a finding that gives new hope to the search for life on other planets.
The water samples came from holes drilled by gold miners near the small town of Timmins, Ontario, about 350 miles north of Toronto. Deep in the Canadian bedrock, miners drill holes and collect samples. Sometimes they hit pay dirt; sometimes they hit water, which seeps out from tiny crevices in the rock. [...]

As Holland announced this week in the journal Nature, this is the oldest cache of water ever found.
On today's Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin on the dying embers of the "scandal" fires. Kevin Drum reports that news outlets got burned by Republican sources on those Benghazi emails, and Armando calls for Jonathan Karl's head. The bizarre story of a holocaust denier reinvented as a Hollywood conservative player. A brief #GunFAIL update. Doctor Who asks about Joan McCarter's post on Reid's plan to call for a vote on the Cordray nomination. Our thanks to show sponsor Audible! Be sure to get your free audio book download at audiblepodcast.com/kagro.

Gomez has a gun problem

rss@dailykos.com (Joan McCarter) — Fri, 17 May 2013 16:09:40 UTC

Massachusetts Senate candidate Gabriel Gomez is in full freakout mode.

BOSTON, MA. – Gabriel Gomez, Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in the Massachusetts open seat special election, today issued the following statement on Congressman Ed Markey’s latest attacks:
“First, Congressman Markey slandered me by comparing me to Osama bin Laden. Now in his most recent TV ad, Markey blames me for the horrific Newtown shooting,” Gomez said.

“I guess after 37 years in Congress you lose your sense of decency. Exploiting a tragedy for political gain is sick.”

Wow, that would be a really low blow, saying that Gabriel Gomez was responsible for Newtown. If that's what Ed Markey's ad really says. Which, of course, it doesn't.

Narrator: "Gomez is against banning assault weapons."
Gomez: "I don't believe we need to do an assault weapon ban."
Narrator: "Gomez is against banning high-capacity magazines, like the ones used in the Newtown school shooting."
Gomez: "I don't believe you should have a limit on the high-capacity magazines."

Pathetic, Mr. Gomez. Just pathetic. You're on the wrong side of this debate for your state, and you know it. It might have worked to win a Republican primary, but now that you're in the general election, you're trying to run away from your opposition to common sense gun regulations. And it's not going to work.

Here's your first lesson in how running for election works. You say something on camera, it's there forever. False outrage won't make it go away.

Please donate $3 to Ed Markey.

And in other news, Bob Woodward compares Benghazi to Watergate

rss@dailykos.com (Jed Lewison) — Fri, 17 May 2013 17:48:23 UTC

Oh, Bob:

If you read through all these emails, you see that everyone in the government is saying "Oh, let's not tell the public that terrorists were involved, people connected to al Qaeda. Let's not tell the public that there were warnings." And I hate to show [holds up document] — this is one of the documents with the editing that one of the people in the State Department said oh let's not let these things out — and I have to go back 40 years to Watergate when Nixon put out his edited transcripts of the conversations. And he personally went through them and said "Let's not tell this, let's not show this." I would not dismiss Benghazi. It's a very serious issue.

When I saw the headline, I thought maybe Woodward was making an interesting point about how Republicans planting stories based on false email quotes shows that the era of GOP dirty tricks isn't over. But then I watched the video and realized he was actually talking about the emails that had been released in full by the Obama administration.

To compare transcripts of secret tape recordings personally edited by the president in middle of a scandal to the editing process for talking points being written for a Democratic congressman and a cabinet official about to go on a Sunday talk show is just completely insane. There is no comparison. It's not even close.

Woodward's comparison is even loopier when you consider the fact that his whole argument depends on the claim that the government was trying to hide the potential involvement of al Qaeda or terrorists from the public. Remember, these talking points weren't what went those Sunday talk shows—Susan Rice was. And while Rice did inaccurately repeat the claim that the attack began as a spontaneous reaction to the video, she also said extremists—potentially including al Qaeda militants—were responsible for escalating the violence.

I think it's clear that there were extremist elements that joined in and escalated the violence. Whether they were al Qaeda affiliates, whether they were Libyan-based extremists or al Qaeda itself I think is one of the things we'll have to determine.

If you want to criticize Rice—and the administration—for incorrectly linking the video that had sparked protests in Egypt to Benghazi, that's fair. If you're upset she called the attackers "extremists" instead of "terrorists," then have a blast. But if you say the Benghazi talking points are like Watergate because it proved the government was trying to cover up the involvement of terrorists or al Qaeda in the attack, you're living in a fantasy and ignoring the facts sitting right under your nose.

Rosalyn Dance has to pledge to stop taking GOP money, otherwise she would

rss@dailykos.com (kos) — Fri, 17 May 2013 17:12:28 UTC

Evandra Thompson

Yesterday I introduced Air Force vet Evandra Thompson, who is challenging Liebermanesque Virginia state delegate Rosalyn Dance in their Richmond-area district. Despite her youth (30 years old) and political inexperience, Thompson is busy consolidating local establishment support, a rare occurrence in electoral politics. Incumbents always stick together. So why the defections?

Perhaps it's headlines like these:

In Democratic primary feud, Dance pledges to reject Republican campaign donations

Huh, what? In the 11 years I've been doing this, I don't recall ever seeing a Democratic primary candidate have to promise to stop taking Republican money. But she didn't take just any Republican's money:

In 2001, then-Del. Bob McDonnell contributed $500 to her unsuccessful House bid as an independent.

This is the same Bob McDonnell who is now governor, who signed the forced ultrasound bill among other atrocities. And of course, she was running as an independent, before deciding she had better odds of victory pretending to be a Democrat.

Thompson has put Dance on the spot:

“My question to you is: Will you pledge not to accept Republican money, directly or indirectly, during the primary campaign? I hope that you agree to make this simple pledge because I believe that this primary should be decided only by real Democrats,” Thompson wrote.

Dance's colleagues in the state house of delegates are certainly sick and tired of her party disloyalty.

Led by Del. Joseph D. Morrissey, D-Henrico, Dance’s opponents have accused her of voting against her own party line too many times. “For eight years, Rosalyn has masqueraded as a Democrat who then turned around and voted Republican,” Morrissey said in an interview.

Yesterday, over 250 of you gave over $6,500 to a previously unknown candidate for a state House seat, far exceeding any expectations I or anyone on the Daily Kos elections team had. For a candidate that had about $2,000 cash on hand, this is game changing. Just like in the IL-02 special election, the Daily Kos community has reshaped a race.

So let's keep the momentum going by chipping in $3. Let's get rid of a Lieberdem, let's build our bench in a state that is trending our way, and let's make sure we help our Virginia friends have a legislature that can stop the worst abuses of their crazed governor and his House majority.

American Family Association accuses AARP of promoting 'homosexual agenda.' Wait, what?

rss@dailykos.com (Hunter) — Fri, 17 May 2013 16:10:09 UTC

Absolute. Loons.

The American Family Association has accused the American Association of Retired Persons of being a fringe organization that promotes a “homosexual agenda” that does not represent older American’s “values and standards.”
Why? Because, in addition to coupons for Outback Steakhouse and discounts on prescription refills, the retiree organization’s website has a page to provide “resources, news, and other topics of interest to older lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, their family and friends.”

Being pro-family means you're not even allowed to acknowledge the presence of gay people? Really, do we think the AARP is engaging in some big conspiracy here, a plot to turn senior citizens gay? What, for the valuable coupons?

I remember back when these people were actually taken seriously—or, at least, more seriously than they're treated now. I remember the whole "moral majority" nonsense, for that matter, an entire movement built around a new implied segregation, right-wing Christianity versus everyone else, with the demands that the right-wing position be enshrined into all the laws and everyone else was supposed to shut up and wait patiently to be converted. What I can't decide is whether or not it's actually worse now than it was then or if it just seems that way. Has the movement gotten actively dumber? Surely, I think, it must have—but then we have to remember that back then, we had Dan Quayle, an actual sitting Vice President, locked in battle with a goddamn fictional television character about her abominable single-motherhood. That wasn't exactly a shining moment of glory for conservative familah-values Republicanism either, that one.

It feels like there's a doctoral thesis to be had in all this, some hypothesis to be looked into as to whether the rise of Fox News has made abject stupidity more popular than ever, or whether the unwillingness of society to keep discriminated-against groups discriminated-against has sent the whole subculture of far-right conservatism into a mental woodchopper, or whether there's been no actual increase in the American Family Association stupidity index at all, we just think there has been because we've blocked all the earlier crap these groups have worked themselves into a frothy mixture over in past decades. I wonder.

Anti-Planned Parenthood crusader Karen Handel enters Georgia Senate race

rss@dailykos.com (Laura Clawson) — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:56:04 UTC

Karen Handel

The already crowded Republican primary to replace retiring Georgia Sen. Saxby Chambliss just got a little more crowded and ... well, maybe it couldn't get much more crazy, but the newest addition didn't make it any less crazy. That new addition is Karen Handel, a former Georgia secretary of state and, most notoriously, senior vice president of public policy at Susan G. Komen for the Cure at the time Komen defunded cancer screening and prevention programs at Planned Parenthood.

Komen officially insisted the defunding decision wasn't political even as Handel was running around retweeting things that made it clear she saw Planned Parenthood in terms of abortion and only abortion; it turned out that Handel had pushed Komen to defund Planned Parenthood against the recommendation of the foundation's staff and a board subcommittee. After leaving Komen, she made it her mission to whine about and smear Planned Parenthood at every opportunity. She's also on the record opposing gay adoption and saying "I do not think that gay relationships are—they are not what God intended."

Handel is the only woman and the only person not already in Congress thus far in a Senate primary that includes Rep. Paul Broun, who thinks Paul Ryan's budget isn't harsh enough and voted against not only the bipartisan Violence Against Women Act but against the crappy Republican version as well; Rep. Jack Kingston, who thought the National Guard should "take a pass" on guarding events like the Boston Marathon; and Rep. Phil Gingrey, an OB/GYN who, until he was running for Senate, thought Todd Akin was "partially right" about his "legitimate rape" comments. So Handel's in good company there.

The Georgia Senate race is a serious long shot for Democrats, but not a total impossibility if Democrats land a good candidate and Republican primary voters choose someone whose extremism is a little too close to the surface.

Reince Priebus to GOP: 'Don't call for impeachment until you have evidence'

rss@dailykos.com (Jed Lewison) — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:46:45 UTC

According to Politico's Mike Allen and Jim VanDehei, senior Republicans are worried that their party is in the cusp of blowing the "political gift" they've been given of an Obama administration swirling in controversy:

Why the GOP thinks it could blow it
Republicans are worried one thing could screw up the political gift of three Obama administration controversies at once: fellow Republicans.

Top GOP leaders are privately warning members to put a sock in it when it comes to silly calls for impeachment or over-the-top comparisons to Watergate. They want members to focus on months of fact-finding investigations — not rhetorical fury.

First of all, note that the underlying assumption here is that Republicans are on the cusp of some sort of major victory thanks to Benghazi, IRS, and AP—as long as they don't screw it up. The reality, however, is that it's May of 2013, the next election isn't for 18 months, and none of these are turning out to be nearly as big as Republicans may have hoped.

The only thing new about Benghazi is that Republicans made up some emails to push their coverup narrative. Unless the IRS probe turns up something to link it to the White House (which does not appear likely), it's going to turn out to be a nothingburger. And while the AP phone records subpoena is a big deal, it's something that Republicans really don't care that much about anyway.

The point is, I'm not convinced that there is anything there for Republicans to blow. But let's assume for the sake of argument that VandeHei and Allen are right, and that there is something to blow. Here's their prime piece of evidence (my emphasis):

“We have to be persistent but patient,” Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus told us. “I think where there’s smoke, there’s fire. If we present ourselves to the American people as intelligent, we’re going to be in a great place as far as showing that this administration is not transparent, is obsessed with power and hates dissent. But you don’t call for impeachment until you have evidence.”

Uh, those aren't the words of a guy whose worried about the GOP going too far—those are the words of a guy who wants the GOP to take their time before they impeach the president. Reince didn't say "you don't call for impeachment unless you have evidence" he said "until you have evidence."

Reince was counseling patience, not skepticism. He didn't express the slightest hint of a doubt that the evidence exists for impeachment—he just said Republicans need to wait until they get it. But he made it clear that he thinks the evidence is out there to be gotten. In his words: "Where there's smoke, there's fire." The GOP debate isn't about whether to impeach Obama: It's about when to do it—and for what reason.

Freedom of Snuggly

rss@dailykos.com (Mark Fiore) — Fri, 17 May 2013 13:50:08 UTC

Remember to follow @DailyKosComics !

CBS: Republicans were source of inaccurate Benghazi emails

rss@dailykos.com (Jed Lewison) — Fri, 17 May 2013 13:35:04 UTC

From a logical standpoint, it was pretty obvious that Republicans were the source of the inaccurate Benghazi talking point emails reported last Friday by ABC News White House correspondent Jon Karl, but when the actual emails surfaced, Karl did not acknowledge who his sources were.

Now, thanks to Major Garrett of CBS News, we have explicit confirmation that Republicans were behind the false leaks. Garrett reports (my emphasis):

Republicans have charged that the State Department under Hillary Clinton was trying to protect itself from criticism. The White House released the real emails late Wednesday. Here's what we found when we compared them to the quotes that had been provided by Republicans.

Garrett highlights emails by White House Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes and State Department Spokeswoman Victoria Nuland. According to Republicans, the emails showed that the White House had executed a coverup not just of the fact that terrorists had conducted the Benghazi attack, but also that the CIA had warned the State Department that al Qaeda was planning the attack.

The reality is that even if the Republicans transcript of the emails had been accurate, it wouldn't have been a smoking gun to prove their claim that Benghazi is a bona fide scandal. Ironically, now that we know Republicans fabricated the emails, there actually is a scandal worth pursuing: the story of how Republicans dishonestly exploited a national security tragedy to score political points.

Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest: Markey's lead grows, per PPP, and Gomez goes on the air

rss@dailykos.com (David Nir) — Fri, 17 May 2013 12:00:13 UTC

Want the scoop on hot races around the country? Get the digest emailed to you each weekday morning. Sign up here.

Leading Off:

• MA-Sen: PPP's new Massachusetts Senate poll (commissioned by the League of Conservation Voters) shows Dem Rep. Ed Markey improving his position over Republican businessman Gabriel Gomez. There was some consternation a couple of weeks ago, when PPP's initial survey put Markey up just 44-40, but now he's legged out to a wider 48-41 lead—and, importantly, is a lot closer to 50 percent. Markey's favorability has improved a touch, from 44-41 to 48-40, and as PPP's polling memo notes, he's doing much better with self-identified Democrats (77-12 versus 68-21 initially). That suggests that slightly miffed Stephen Lynch supporters are coming home after the primary.

Gomez, meanwhile, has seen his favorables move down, from 41-27 to 42-34, probably as people learn that yeah, he really is a Republican. He's taken a nosedive with Democrats in particular, though independents seem to like him more now. But as long as Markey consolidates Democratic support and keeps Gomez from getting much in the way of crossover voters, then the math simply isn't there for Gomez.

Meanwhile, Gomez is going up with his first TV ad of the special election, for a buy of "at least $200,000," according to the National Journal. That's a pretty limp sum for a state that includes the expensive Boston media market, and the spot itself isn't exactly awesome. Gomez tries to emphasize both his family's immigrant roots (he himself was born in Los Angeles) by speaking a bit of Spanish, as well as his military background. In the second half, he insists that "if you come to America, you should commit to the idea of America"—and then awkwardly recites a portion of the Pledge of Allegiance.

Daily Kos Radio is LIVE at 9am ET!

rss@dailykos.com (David Waldman) — Fri, 17 May 2013 12:30:09 UTC

Daily Kos Radio's Kagro in the Morning show podcasts are now available through iTunes.

Oh, we'll have plenty to talk about, for sure. Greg will come by, and so will Armando. The so-called "scandals" are still brewing, sort of, though they're beginning to fall apart. And it's the end of another spectacular week of #GunFAIL. So we'll be busy.

Looks like I'm pushing the big news for the show until next Friday. But hey, now it's a cliffhanger!

UPDATE: Ah, screw it! Let's go today!

The big news for fans of the show today, and for those who haven't yet found the time to become fans of the show, but who generally approve of the concept, I have this:

Daily Kos Radio has its first advertising sponsor: Audible!

It ain't gonna make anybody a millionaire, but it's nice to know that maybe we've got something here, and we can keep the lights on for a while longer.

And if you want to help convince them to keep doing it, download today's show when the podcast goes up this afternoon at the Daily Kos Radio page, and be sure to visit audiblepodcast.com/kagro, where you can sign up for Audible and get a free audio book download for your troubles!

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Miss the last show? You can catch it here:

Need more info on how to listen? Find it below the fold.

Abbreviated pundit roundup: The GOP's scandal machine

rss@dailykos.com (Georgia Logothetis) — Fri, 17 May 2013 11:39:51 UTC

The Los Angeles Times editorial board:

On Monday, an exasperated Obama, referring to the emails, said: "There's no 'there' there." The same is true of the allegation of a broader Benghazi coverup. And now that we know, let's move on.

The New York Times editorial board looks at how each day reveals facts that deflate the GOP's wild conspiracy and cover-up theories:

[T]he details of the troubles swirling around the White House this week are bluntly contradicting Republicans who want to combine them into a seamless narrative of tyrannical government on the rampage. [...]
Whatever cranky point Republicans had been making against President Obama for the last five years — dishonesty, socialism, jackbooted tyranny — they somehow found that these incidents were exactly the proof they had been seeking, no matter how inflated or distorted. [...] when bound together and loudly denounced on cable television and in hearings, they serve to obscure the real damage that Republicans continue to do to the economy and the workings of government. [...]

For those who are wondering whether this week’s political windstorms will hinder Mr. Obama’s second-term agenda, here’s a bulletin: That agenda was long ago imperiled by the obstruction of Republicans. (See Guns. Jobs. Education. And, very possibly, Immigration.)

Scot Lehigh at The Boston Globe:

Watergate? Nixonian? Impeachment?
Please. Someone get the smelling salts. [...]

[C]harges of a Benghazi coverup don’t pass the evidence test. Comparisons to Nixon are idiotic. And it’s the height of partisan absurdity to suggest that anything we’ve seen in these so-called scandals could justify impeachment.

Head below the fold for more debunking of the GOP's spin machine.

Open thread for night owls: Excerpts from the Harper's Index

rss@dailykos.com (Meteor Blades) — Fri, 17 May 2013 03:30:09 UTC

Excerpts from the Harper's Index for June:

• Percentage of U.S. college graduates who are women: 51.1

• Of Fortune 500 CEOs who are: 4.2

• Amount North Dakota’s attorney general requested the state to budget for legal challenges to its new abortion laws: $400,000

• Percentage of state-owned land in the West Bank allocated by the Israeli government for Palestinians: 0.7

• For Israeli settlers: 51

• Percentage change since Obama took office in the number of veterans waiting more than a year for federal benefits: +2,231

• Percentage of known human genes that are patented: 100

• Portion of those caught in possession of drugs by the U.S. Border Patrol who are U.S. citizens: 3/4

Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2008—McCain's Campaign Led by Tainted Lobbyists:

John McCain talks straight, but he acts crooked. Mr. Reform strays from the straight path by following crooked lobbyists for their money, money that comes from corporations and brutal foreign governments.

McCain's been embarrassed several times the last few weeks by lobbyists connected to his campaign. Last week he was forced to fire two lobbyists who had worked for the brutal military junta in Burma/Myanmar, the oppressive goons who are killing people through their refusal to let aid workers in to the country and help the millions of Burmese affected by the cyclone.

This morning we learned about a lobbyist working for McCain who also worked for the governments of Serbia and Qatar.

McCain also had to dismiss one of his top operatives in Virginia, Craig Shirley. Shirley's has long been involved in shady dealings on behalf of the GOP, including hyping the orchestrated "rescue" of US soldier Jessica Lynch from a hospital in Iraq, and the scurrilous Willie Horton ad used against Michael Dukakis in 1988.

Shirley was simultaneously an official with McCain's campaign and involved in an independent campaign against Democrats. The McCain campaign is spinning his dismissal as a matter of principle, when in fact Shirley was breaking the law by being on both sides of what should be a divide, the candidate campaign, and an independent operation that is legally prohibited from coordinating its activities with the campaign.

Tweet of the Day:

"Right now climate advocates bring not even a knife, but a feather, to the political gunfight." @SenWhitehouse #climate #deniers
— @climatebrad via TweetDeck

On today's Kagro in the Morning show, during Greg Dworkin's roundup, we wondered if the big casualty of the week was Benghazi. IRS talk included entries from FiveThirtyEight, an old LA Times article on IRS targeting of a liberal church, the Nixon tapes on political use of the IRS, Rick Perlstein's "Washington Misses the Point on the Tea Party and the IRS," Mark Sumner's "The IRS 'scandal'—all smoke, no fire," and David Cay Johnston's "The other IRS scandal." Armando chimed in from the road on these stories. Finally, the ridiculous "wish we'd had some AR-15s up in Boston" talking point, and a short catch-up on new filibuster reform talk.

High Impact Posts. Top Comments.

Economics Daily Digest: Thirty-seventh time's the charm

rss@dailykos.com (Roosevelt Institute) — Thu, 16 May 2013 14:05:24 UTC

By Tim Price, originally published on Next New Deal

Click here to receive the Daily Digest via e-mail.

Four Better Ways to Spend the $55 Million Wasted on Votes to Repeal the Affordable Care Act (Think Progress)

House Republicans will vote to repeal Obamacare for the 37th time today because they still haven't found a genie to grant their wish, but Bryce Covert and Adam Peck write that instead of paying them to pretend to work, we could pay for things we actually need.

Sequestration Cuts Taking Money Out of People's Unemployment Checks (HuffPo)

Arthur Delaney notes that 2 million long-term unemployed are seeing their benefits cut as a consequence of the sequester. Now that money can be put toward reducing the already rapidly shrinking federal deficit instead of being wasted on, say, a family's dinner.

The global epidemic of underemployed youth (Reuters)

Shane Ferro highlights a report from the International Labor Organization that finds fewer than 20 percent of young people in high- or low-income countries are fully employed, with the rest either hustling, studying, or just waiting around and wondering when life starts.

IRS Fallout: The Real Scandal Is Secret Money Influencing US Elections (The Nation)

While some critics are mad that the IRS dared to question the legitimacy of a bunch of guys in Thomas Jefferson costumes, Ari Berman argues the bigger problem is that they didn't even bother to question what the guys in the expensive suits and ties were up to.

Europe's endless recession, in one chart (WaPo)

Brad Plumer notes that the euro zone economy has now contracted for the sixth consecutive quarter, making it the longest recession the euro zone has ever experienced and, based on how its members are souring on the project, quite possibly the last.

The Fed's Credibility Problem (ProPublica)

Jesse Eisinger argues that while it might be fun to point and laugh at the hedge funders who have been complaining that the Fed doesn't know what it's doing, they kind of have a point, even if it's by accident: the central bank's track record is pretty abysmal.

Why Won't the SEC Rein in the Firms That Tanked America's Economy? (MoJo)

Erika Eichelberger writes that a handful of credit rating agencies helped blow up the economy by telling banks for a fee that the piles of toxic junk they were selling smelled like roses, but the SEC still isn't sure it sees anything wrong with that scenario.

Guerrillas in the Boardroom (TNR)

David Dayen writes that shareholder activists are learning to work the system, winning 66 percent of proposal votes this year and engineering the ouster of a Fortune 500 CEO. Now they're on the verge of making Jamie Dimon take his ball and go home.

Tim Price is Editor of Next New Deal. Follow him on Twitter @txprice.

First-time jobless claims soar to 360,000

rss@dailykos.com (Meteor Blades) — Thu, 16 May 2013 14:08:06 UTC

First-time claims for unemployment benefits took an unexpected leap for the week ending May 11, rising to a seasonally adjusted 360,000, the Department of Labor reported. That's 32,000 above the previous week's revised figure of 328,000, originally reported as 323,000. It was the biggest climb since the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy boosted the number of layoffs in November. For the comparable week of 2012, first-time claims were 373,000.

The four-week running average, a better measure that flattens volatility in the weekly numbers, rose slightly to 339,250.

It will take another few weeks' worth of reports to determine whether this is just a one-week fluke in numbers that have been mostly trending down this year or the first indications that the federal budget sequester is starting to have the impact many experts have predicted. The Congressional Budget Office has calculated a possible loss from the sequester of 750,000 jobs this year. Other analysts say more like 300,000. Labor Department analysts say they could find no links to the sequester associated with the increase in claims.

During the best 12 months of the Clinton administration, first-time claims averaged about 280,000 a week.

Total claims in both state and federally funded unemployment benefits continued their downward slide, dropping for the week ending April 27 to 4,843,806, a decrease of 30,720 from the previous week. For the comparable week of 2012, there were 6,273,508 persons claiming benefits in all programs. That drop reflects the number of people getting jobs as well as the number who have exhausted their benefits.

As I wrote last week:

Less than 40 percent of the unemployed are now receiving benefits compared with around 70 percent when the impact of the Great Recession was at its worst. Some 1.77 million Americans are receiving federally funded benefits under the Emergency Unemployment Compensation provisions put in place because of the recession. Those receiving EUC benefits are seeing their checks slashed at least 10 percent because of the sequester. In California, the cut is 17.5 percent. The cuts don't affect those receiving state benefits, which is the category that all the approved first-time applicants fall into. But the sequester is also reducing the amount of administrative assistance state employment programs provide.

Unemployment claims are just one metric of the health of the labor market. Others—the quality and pay levels of jobs being added to the economy, for instance—rarely make the news. For instance, the headlines never point out that the monthly jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics—which showed a seasonally adjusted gain of 165,000 jobs for April—counts both full- and part-timers in its tally of new hires. Get a 10-hour a week position at minimum wage and that is counting in the headline total the same as a 40-hour a week position with full benefits and a livable income.

501(c)(3)s, 501(c)(4)s, and the rest. A primer.

rss@dailykos.com (Adam B) — Thu, 16 May 2013 18:54:07 UTC

Let me try to answer all of this in one place, because it's getting asked a lot.

First off: review this chart prepared by the Alliance for Justice. Learn it, memorize it, love it. It breaks down the entities by what kinds of advocacy each can do.

Short version: a 501(c)(3) is a non-profit for religious, charitable, or educational purposes. They are limited in terms of the amount of lobbying and advocacy they can do, and cannot touch elections. But donations are tax-deductible. This category includes institutions like the Red Cross, but also includes entities like The Heritage Foundation—which focuses on research and education on public policies, but doesn't do any lobbying on behalf of particular legislation and does no work to elect people to enact said policies. (It has an affiliated 501(c)(4), Heritage Action for America, for its lobbying work.)

A 501(c)(4) is a "social welfare" organization. It can do more than a (c)(3) in terms of advocacy, but donations to them are not tax-deductible. However, as with (c)(3)s, individual donors are not publicly disclosed. The current IRS scandal regards 501(c)(4) organizations. As they explain, their definition of "social welfare" is broader than yours:

To be operated exclusively to promote social welfare, an organization must operate primarily to further the common good and general welfare of the people of the community (such as by bringing about civic betterment and social improvements). For example, an organization that restricts the use of its facilities to employees of selected corporations and their guests is primarily benefiting a private group rather than the community and, therefore, does not qualify as a section 501(c)(4) organization. Similarly, an organization formed to represent member-tenants of an apartment complex does not qualify, because its activities benefit the member-tenants and not all tenants in the community, while an organization formed to promote the legal rights of all tenants in a particular community may qualify under section 501(c)(4) as a social welfare organization. An organization is not operated primarily for the promotion of social welfare if its primary activity is operating a social club for the benefit, pleasure or recreation of its members, or is carrying on a business with the general public in a manner similar to organizations operated for profit link].
Seeking legislation germane to the organization's programs is a permissible means of attaining social welfare purposes. Thus, a section 501(c)(4) social welfare organization may further its exempt purposes through lobbying as its primary activity without jeopardizing its exempt status. An organization that has lost its section 501(c)(3) status due to substantial attempts to influence legislation may not thereafter qualify as a section 501(c)(4) organization. In addition, a section 501(c)(4) organization that engages in lobbying may be required to either provide notice to its members regarding the percentage of dues paid that are applicable to lobbying activities or pay a proxy tax. For more information, see Lobbying Issues.

The promotion of social welfare does not include direct or indirect participation or intervention in political campaigns on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office. However, a section 501(c)(4) social welfare organization may engage in some political activities, so long as that is not its primary activity. However, any expenditure it makes for political activities may be subject to tax under section 527(f). For further information regarding political and lobbying activities of section 501(c) organizations, see Election Year Issues, Political Campaign and Lobbying Activities of IRC 501(c)(4), (c)(5), and (c)(6) Organizations, and Revenue Ruling 2004-6.

Follow below the fold for a breakdown of all that.

Reid: Cordray nomination will get vote next week

rss@dailykos.com (Joan McCarter) — Wed, 15 May 2013 21:52:31 UTC

Just do it, Harry.

Does Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid mean it this time? Is he really setting the stage for doing filibuster reform mid-session? We've heard the threats plenty of times before, but he seems to be pushing a tiny bit more this time, by scheduling a vote on Richard Cordray's nomination to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for next week. This could be interpreted as his effort to make the case for going nuclear to his caucus.

“I’m going to make sure he’s going to have a vote next week, and then we’ll see what happens after that,” Reid told a small group of reporters in his Capitol Hill suite Wednesday morning. [...]
“I’m not going to do anything now, precipitously,” he said. “But I’m looking at this very closely…. We’re going to fill that job. Cordray is there now. He’s going to get a vote.”

Reid wasn’t able to explain why he believes (or claims to believe) Cordray will ultimately be confirmed. But he alluded to the possibility that he may pursue a rules change mid-session.

“Whether it’s Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton that’s the next president, I don’t think they should have to go through what we’ve gone through here,” Reid said. “People better watch.”

The Cordray nomination is a good one to use if Reid wants to make a point. It's the most high-profile and public and egregious of Republican filibusters. The vast majority of the GOP caucus, 43 senators, signed a letter to President Obama declaring that they would oppose any nominee he might put forward for the job because they don't think the agency should exist. With this filibuster, they are in essence nullifying a chunk of Dodd-Frank that they disagree with, that is nonetheless the law of the land.

That's a big deal, a very big deal. It should be enough to make 51 Democrats in the Senate say "enough," and convince them to finally act.

Please send an email to your Democratic senator(s) telling them to re-open filibuster reform so that we can have a functioning Senate and government.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott: Allen West would be a 'great' lieutenant governor

rss@dailykos.com (Hunter) — Tue, 14 May 2013 19:09:07 UTC

Florida Republican dream team

I swear these people are doing this as performance art. They've got to be. Florida Gov. Rick Scott, himself a monument to Republican crackpottery (and a bit of a crook, but I repeat myself) hasn't decided who he's going to pick for his new lieutenant governor, but he has some ideas. Like, say, ex-Rep. Allen West?

On AM Tampa Bay, the governor responded to a question by saying West "is a great American and a great patriot... he'd be a great Lieutenant Governor."

Alternatively, Gov. Rick Scott is blowing smoke up his fellow tea partiers' asses because even he's not crazy enough to think former America's Dumbest Congressman would make a good replacement for his now-resigned second in command. (Yes, that was another scandal. Wow, what are the odds.) For starters, making Allen West his lieutenant governor would require working with the guy, as in seeing him around a lot and listening to him talk. Possibly every day. I don't care how much of a wingnut you are, that would be a tough daily meal to swallow.

Again, we're faced with an existential question here. Do we hope for this? On one hand, there's the hilarity factor: Giving Allen West some actual power again, however small, would likely fill our days with fun stories on what Allen West is up to lately. I give it a week before he's deputized alligators or declared war on one of the Orlando theme parks; I give it a month before he gets the secession bug in his head and goes up to the panhandle with a hacksaw, intending to cut the whole state loose and set it adrift.

On the other hand, Florida has suffered enough at this point. I think. Maybe. I can't decide—these people do keep getting elected, after all. And once you've elected a Medicare crook as your governor, God help you, there's really not much further you can sink.

Obamacare back in the courts, too

rss@dailykos.com (Joan McCarter) — Thu, 16 May 2013 19:07:31 UTC

House Republicans aren't the only dead-enders still fighting a battle that the Supreme Court already put away on Obamacare. Liberty University is still litigating over it, and trying to expand their original filing. The Fourth Circuit will take up the case this month.

Liberty’s lawsuit now has several points: that the employer mandate violates the Commerce Clause; that the individual and employer mandates violate the First Amendment’s religious protections as well as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act; and that since the individual mandate’s penalty was ruled a tax by the Supreme Court, the bill should have started in the House—not the Senate.
The aspect of Liberty’s case that’s gotten the most attention from other plaintiffs may be its contraceptives claim. The school says that the law is violating its right to religious freedom by requiring it to cover, through its employee health plans, birth control and drugs that it says can cause abortions. More than 50 other lawsuits have been filed throughout the country, challenging the same provision. And the issue is likely to reach the Supreme Court. [...]

[T]he Obama administration’s lawyers say that Liberty didn’t file that charge back in 2010—the contraceptive coverage rules hadn’t come out yet—so it can’t add that to its lawsuit now.

That won't stop them from trying. Back in September, 2011, the Fourth Circuit tossed Liberty's case on jurisdictional grounds. Liberty appealed, and the Supreme Court sent it back, after asking the Justice Department to respond to the challenge. The DoJ wants to have this rehearing, probably because the Fourth Circuit is among the more liberal courts.

So, anyway, here we go again. Back on the floor of the House, and back in the courts.

Tesla at war with sleazy auto dealers

rss@dailykos.com (kos) — Wed, 15 May 2013 17:45:48 UTC

Tesla Model S

My next car will be a Tesla. It'll be a while. They're really expensive, though a lower-cost mass-market sedan is in the company's longer-term plans. But who wouldn't want a car that dispenses with messy fossil fuels (especially if recharged with solar, as I would), cleaned up all the major 2012 automobile awards (Motor Trend, Automobile, Yahoo), and got a near-perfect rating (99 out of 100) by Consumer Reports. Actually, the car should've gotten a 110 out of 100 rating, except the magazine automatically subtracts 10 percent from electric cars because of range concerns. It was simply the best car they've ever evaluated.

Of course, conservatives hate anything that helps the environment, even if it's good despite the fact it helps the environment. So naturally, they hate Tesla. Especially since it received government loans. But the company is now profitable, and supply is so constrained that the waiting list to receive a car is about eight months.

But Tesla is fascinating for another reason—it is a disruptive technology, and we know how the fossil-fuel and auto industry have worked hard to squelch any challenge to their dominance. And there is certainly an entire national infrastructure in place that is dependent on dirty, gas-guzzling vehicles. And that infrastructure is a definite barrier to change, as we'll see below the fold.

Planned Parenthood, abortions and Naziism: The fever dreams of the far right

rss@dailykos.com (Hunter) — Thu, 16 May 2013 17:37:35 UTC

What Planned Parenthood does.

The proximate cause of this anti-abortion site's outrage is an online Planned Parenthood ad with the text, "Your baby will thank you." What it shows, however, is that the right has demonized Planned Parenthood to the point of fever. The hatred of the group is based on the certain knowledge that Planned Parenthood does absolutely nothing but abortions, and late-term abortions at that, and late-term abortions in particular. That the group is focused primarily on women's health care—things like STD testing, cancer screenings and yes, scary-scary contraception—is not allowed to enter their minds. These are the people who honestly believe the faux-stories about "abortionplexes."

The thought process must go something like this:
Truth: Babies suffer during abortions./Babies are ripped apart during abortions./Babies are deprived of life during abortions.

Planned Parenthood: Babies enjoy suffering./Babies enjoy getting ripped apart./Babies enjoy being deprived of life. (Just like we all would, right?!)

Loons. Absolute loons. There's a reason convicted clinic bombers can still hold high-profile jobs in anti-abortion organizations, and why people who shoot doctors on the doorsteps of their churches can generate fawning interviews with anti-choice activists wondering if the replacement doctors need to be shot as well. You take one little step and you've gone from there into the realms of the Rick Perrys and Jan Brewers and that particular scab on Texas' ass, Rep. Steve Stockman, looking to defund the group by name, even if its absence in their states will harm the women of their states directly. It's a religious war, and in a religious war you're allowed to bomb things, you're allowed to kill people, and you're allowed to inflict as many unnecessary casualties as possible to get your point across. You're certainly allowed to write laws that punish specific groups for not adhering to your own religious beliefs, too. We don't call them the American Taliban for nothing.

Planned Parenthood is forever talking about how it provides birth control. Right. A baby who was never born because her mother was on birth control is definitely going to thank Mom for that.
In some insane jump of non-logic, Planned Parenthood is attempting to convince women that their babies will “thank them” for visiting their local clinic. This is no better than Nazis posting signs of happy Jews, thanking the SS officers for the death camps – and the gas chambers in particular.

Absolute. Loons.

Your baby will thank you when you don't transmit an easily treated STD to them because you had it treated at one of the few local clinics that existed and that you could afford. Your baby will thank you when you don't die from breast cancer that could have been caught early enough to save your life. Your baby will thank you when you don't die in a hospital bed on their first birthday because some goddamn crank has decided that the dead, decaying corpse of a ex-fetus has to stay inside you no matter what because God wills it. This isn't hard, unless your religious opinions are so extreme that you warp all of reality around your own addled noggin.

Again, though, and this is hardly a new phenomenon: the far-right position is based on a fever dream. Reality is not allowed to intrude on the happy conspiracy theories that make the practitioners feel oppressed, or feel righteous, or feel like freedom fighters in service of a cause that nobody else can even parse out. That was always the case, but now Republican governors, senators, congressmen and other party leaders have embraced the fever dreams as governing strategy, and are holding hearings based on the fever dreams, and are passing laws based entirely on the premises of the fever dreams. Government by conspiracy theory.

Skeptical Science flattens deniers: 97% of peer-reviewed papers say humans causing climate change

rss@dailykos.com (Meteor Blades) — Thu, 16 May 2013 12:42:31 UTC

Nowadays, television news shows and newspaper and magazine articles that mention global warming rarely resort to outright lies like this grotesque piece of propaganda from Forbes. Instead, you'll likely catch a reportorial "balancing" act that purports to show "both sides." Scientists, you'll be told, don't all agree that humans are causing the earth's climate to change, the implication being that an intellectual wrestling match is going on among experts in the know.

In fact, not all scientists do agree that humans are causing global warming. As researchers under the guidance of John Cook at Skeptical Science discovered in a "citizen science" survey of 11,944 peer-reviewed articles, 1.6 percent of the authors expressing an opinion on the subject rejected or were uncertain about the consensus that the earth is undergoing anthropogenic (human-generated) global warming (AGW). And 97.1 percent of the nearly 4,000 articles in which the author(s) took a position endorsed the AGW consensus. (The survey was published May 15 in Environmental Research Letters as an open access article.)

The survey will not, of course, persuade the professional deniers, several of whom have already weighed in with attacks on the credibility of Cook and Skeptical Science itself. What optimists might hope for, however, is that the media will finally get the message and stop implying that some significant proportion of scientists dispute the anthropogenic nature of global warming. If only we could get the number of warming rejectionists in Congress down to 1.6 percent.

Cook's team of volunteers, recruited from the Skeptical Science website's readers in eight countries, expanded on an original survey conducted in 2004 by Naomi Oreskes. That survey found 928 peer-reviewed articles in the scientific literature from 1993-2004. Here's how the Skeptical Science team did its work:

We performed a keyword search of peer-reviewed scientific journal publications (in the ISI Web of Science) for the terms 'global warming' and "global climate change" between the years 1991 and 2011, which returned over 12,000 papers. John Cook created a web-based system that would randomly display a paper's abstract (summary). We agreed upon definitions of possible categories: explicit or implicit endorsement of human-caused global warming, no position, and implicit or explicit rejection (or minimization of the human influence). [...]
We took a conservative approach in our ratings. For example, a study which takes it for granted that global warming will continue for the foreseeable future could easily be put into the implicit endorsement category; there is no reason to expect global warming to continue indefinitely unless humans are causing it. However, unless an abstract included (either implicit or explicit) language about the cause of the warming, we categorized it as "no position."

The reviewers also asked the authors of some 2,100 articles to rate their own views about AGW. In this short video, Cook explains some of the details:

Please continue reading below the fold for more on the survey.

Daily Kos endorsement: Evandra Thompson, a better Democrat for Virginia

rss@dailykos.com (kos) — Thu, 16 May 2013 18:15:16 UTC

Evandra Thompson, Daily Kos-endorsed candidate for Virginia General Assembly

As President Barack Obama was being inaugurated in DC this past January, Virginia Senate Republicans took advantage of the absence of one of their members, civil rights veteran Henry Marsh, who was attending the festivities in the nation's capital, and attempted a disgusting heist. David Nir has the gory details:

With Marsh gone, Republicans had a momentary 20-19 edge, and they used it to full effect, ramming through a bill to redistrict the Senate's own lines for the second time in less than two years. Legislators had already passed a revised map following the decennial census in 2011, but Republicans wanted a brand new map to consolidate their power. Their plan would increase the number of seats they were likely to win and shrink those the opposition would have had a chance of capturing.

State House Republicans and the Republican governor eventually killed the plan, but not before two House Democrats expressed their willingness to support the plan. You read that right—two Democrats were ready to back a GOP scheme so egregious that it was killed by Republicans themselves.

One of those Democrats was Rosalyn Dance, and it wasn't the first (or last) time she gave Republicans cover despite representing an overwhelmingly Democratic district. I'll talk more about Dance in future posts—for now I want to focus on her challenger, Evandra Thompson.

Thirty-year-old Evandra spent five years as an Air Force medic, and was at the Pentagon the day it was hit in the 9-11 terrorist attacks. Her actions as a first responder earned her this medal.

After her military stint, the single mother went to college and grad school, and graduated just this past September. Now, despite her youth and political inexperience, she suddenly finds herself facing the most bizarre of primary battles—being cheered on by much of the area party establishment as she takes on the incumbent.

Del. Joseph D. Morrissey, D-Henrico, and the former mayors of Petersburg and Hopewell announced Monday that they will pitch their support to political newcomer Evandra Thompson, who is running against Dance.
Morrissey said in an interview that he expects many of Virginia’s top Democrats to follow suit in the coming weeks and endorse Thompson in what he calls a move to oust an incumbent accused of voting against her own party line too many times.

We haven't often engaged in state-level legislative races, but we have a fantastic opportunity here: get rid of a turncoat Lieberman-esque Democrat who has done way too much to empower her state's reactionary Republicans, while also building our bench with a potential future star.

And given that both candidates currently have just $2,000 cash-on-hand, your dollars will have far more direct impact here than pretty much anywhere else.

The election is June 11, so it'll be a sprint to the end. Since we don't have a state-level questionnaire, we created this one-off, touching on the issues where federal and state issues intersect: same-sex marriage, choice, and Medicaid expansion. She's golden on all of those, and of course she also opposes the redistricting plan that Dance was ready to support.

So contribute $3 to Evandra Thompson. With 100 of us doing that, we'd raise the equivalent of 15 percent of her cash-on-hand. That's some serious bang for your buck! So let's deal a blow against GOP-enabling Democrats, helping our progressive friends in the Commonwealth of Virginia stave off The Crazy.

11:54 AM PT: Damn, nearly $1,500 in 40 minutes. At this pace, we'll be doubling her cash-on-hand in about an hour!

3:31 PM PT (Hunter): Bumped! Amazing—we've already topped 150 people and over $4000 in donations to Thompson. Can we keep it going?

Teach a person to fish and they'll feed themselves for a lifetime. Let a corporation fish and...

rss@dailykos.com (MattWuerker) — Thu, 16 May 2013 21:50:08 UTC

(Click for larger image)

Gomez's rich-guy tax problem still dogging campaign

rss@dailykos.com (Joan McCarter) — Thu, 16 May 2013 17:31:04 UTC

The better voters in Massachusetts get to know Gabriel Gomez, the less they like him.

Gomez's net favorability has dropped 6 points in last 2 weeks from +14 to now +8 at 42/34. From 33/32 to 20/52 w/D's: http://t.co/...
— @ppppolls via web

That could have something to do with the revelation that he lives in a house worth more than $2 million and benefited from a big tax scam on that house to get a $281,500 income tax deduction for not making changes to his house that local bylaws already prevented him from doing. It could also have something to do with the fact that Gomez continues to refuse to explain that deduction. He might not be able to avoid talking about it for much longer, though, because it keeps making news.

The lastest comes from a small claims complaint filed by the original appraiser that Gomez hired to estimate the amount he could deduct from his taxes on the house. The appraiser says that Gomez refused his estimate, saying it was too low, and also refused to pay the $1,000 fee for the appraisal. The appraiser let it slide until now, when the news broke of the $281,500 deduction he got. At the time, he didn't know that Gomez was getting another appraisal, and that he ended up getting the deduction. This appraiser said the changes would only be worth $245,640. Gomez apparently really wanted that extra $35,860 in deductions.

For now, Gomez is still unwilling to address the tax scam with the media, refusing to answer any questions. A spokesman does say that Gomez is reaching out to the appraiser to resolve the issue, though the candidate is supposedly "not aware" of having stiffed the guy for his fee. Which really sounds like a typical rich asshole who can't be bothered with thinking about the people he hires to do stuff for him.

With this, and his disastrous, dismissive performance on women's health issues, Gomez isn't likely to gain many new supporters. Let's help Ed Markey capitalize on his opponent's mounting weaknesses, and put this race away.

Please donate $3 to Ed Markey.

House GOP leadership wastes some more time on repeal

rss@dailykos.com (Joan McCarter) — Thu, 16 May 2013 21:00:13 UTC

Since the House was already wasting $1.45 million today repealing Obamcare (that's for a grand total of $54 million on 37 votes), apparently Rep. Darrell Issa decided to waste some time on Twitter, too. So he posted the above tweet.

You can probably guess what happened next.

#obamacareinthreewords Even covers car-thieves. @darrellissa
— @RL_Miller via TweetDeck

Still not repealed RT @DarrellIssa: Hey folks, #ObamaCareInThreeWords -- go!
— @SimonMaloy via web

#ObamaCareinThreeWords Preexisting conditions covered?
— @nycsouthpaw via web

#ObamaCareInThreeWords Lower cost prescriptions
— @jonhartmannjazz via web

perverse GOP obsession #ObamaCareInThreeWords
— @lizzwinstead via TweetDeck

Mitt Romney's plan. #ObamaCareInThreeWords
— @jamescdownie via web

Because four words is too complex for republicans #obamacareinthreewords
— @runnermatt via Twitter for iPhone

Weepy Orange Drunk #JohnBoehnerInThreeWords
— @Thers via web

Then there was this one:

It's. The. Law. #ObamaCareInThreeWords, http://t.co/...
— @whitehouse via web

And, finally, some good advice.

Ha ha! Don't write hashtag checks your ass can't cash.
— @KagroX via Twitter for iPhone

3:29 PM PT: In case you've been on pins and needles awaiting the outcome of the 37th Obamacare repeal vote, it passed 229-195. Only two Dem defections. We're weeding the blue dog bastards out.

3:39 PM PT: The defecting Dems: McIntyre (NC) & Matheson (UT)

Somebody needs to tell the NRCC that the mayor of Medellín is not a Democratic congressman

rss@dailykos.com (Jed Lewison) — Thu, 16 May 2013 20:30:14 UTC

Look, I know Luis Gutierrez (the congressman from Illinois) has a similar name to Luis Pérez Gutiérrez (the mayor of Medellín, Colombia), but if the National Republican Campaign Committee wants to be serious about taking on congressional Democrats, is it too much to ask that they learn to tell them apart?

An attempt by the National Republican Congressional Committee to embarrass Democrats went awry on Thursday, when the group published a blog post riddled with errors.

Among the errors: Misspelling the name of George W. Bush-appointed IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman, claiming that Gary Ackerman and Bob Filner are both Democratic members of Congress when both have actually left the House, and this:

The list of Democrats also included Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.). While he remains in office, the man pictured was not the congressman; it's the former mayor of Medellín, Colombia -- Luis Pérez Gutiérrez.

The NRCC's defense?

NRCC spokesman Daniel Scarpinato told The Huffington Post, "This was an early draft that was not meant to be posted publicly because it had not yet been edited."

Good one, guys. Maybe Darrell Issa should investigate, hmm?

Fox uncovers Obama's devious transparency scheme: 'Just a strategy to confuse Americans'

rss@dailykos.com (Jed Lewison) — Thu, 16 May 2013 20:00:12 UTC

Yesterday, the White House released 100 pages of emails about the Benghazi talking points and announced the resignation of the acting IRS Commissioner, but our friend ~~Margaret~~Gretchen Carlson from Fox News wasn't fooled by Obama's clever transparency strategy:

GRETCHEN CARLSON: Let's talk a little about what happened yesterday, because a lot happened yesterday. The president made an announcement that he was going to be coming out just after six o'clock to talk about the IRS scandal and that situation and then right before then, 15 minutes before that, they released 100 pages of emails having to do with the Benghazi talking points but what was in those emails and was this just a strategy to try and potentially confuse Americans out there about these three scandals going on right now, to sort of put a whole bunch of information out there and see which one ends up the headline.

As Carlson is right to argue, the only reasonable conclusion to draw from the fact that Obama fired the IRS's top official and released newly-declassified documents that Republicans have been demanding ... is that he was trying to cover up his scandals. What other possible explanation could there be for firing the IRS chief and releasing emails that Republicans had been lying about?

I have to say, this is really good stuff from Carlson—it really makes you appreciate the national treasure that is Fox News. What would we do without them? And when will they finally get the recognition they deserve?

1:23 PM PT: OMG, I wrote Margaret Carlson instead of Gretchen Carlson. What an embarrassing slip-up. In my defense, I was too busy being bamboozled by the bright lights of 'Bama's document dump.

Why no questions for Eric Holder about the status of the kitchen sink at Wednesday's hearings?

rss@dailykos.com (Meteor Blades) — Thu, 16 May 2013 17:49:31 UTC

Darrell Issa just before Eric Holder called his conduct "shameful."

It was billed in the media ahead of time as a hearing to question Attorney General Eric Holder on revelations about IRS targeting of conservative groups and the Department of Justice's seizure of two months' of Associated Press phone records. And, to be sure, many questions on those topics were asked.

But by the time the 37 members of the House Judiciary Committee were done, Holder had spent most of his time fielding inquiries about Benghazi®, hate crimes, marijuana law enforcement, abortion, Department of Labor nominee Tom Perez, the Boston Marathon bombing, prosecuting big banks, the prisoners still at Guantánamo, early releases of felons in North Carolina, releases of prisoners under the new law reducing cocaine sentencing disparities, religious discrimination, racial profiling, the Anti-Lobbying Act as it applies to Health and Human Services, counterfeit and stolen goods sold over the internet, human trafficking, press shield laws, use of personal email accounts for public business, the imprisonment of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, moving prisoners from Afghanistan to the U.S., financial settlements with black and American Indian farmers under the Pigford case, the right to counsel of juveniles in the criminal justice system, "Fast and Furious," the investigation of General David Petraeus, immigration, sequestration, the timing and announcement of recusals, prosecutions under existing gun statutes, government transparency, and the length of prison sentences.

Oh. Also Holder's alleged contempt for those who voted to charge him with contempt.

Not that most of these matters didn't deserve to be discussed, perhaps even get their own hearing before the committee. But five minutes per member is not enough time to get to the root of any issues and yet plenty of time to turn the hearing into what seemed like a festival of interruptions with Holder as the piñata. Whatever one thinks of Eric Holder and his tenure as attorney general—and I've got more than five minutes of questions he didn't get asked of my own—it was deeply satisfying to see him call out the overbearing Darrell Issa, the self-anointed king of investigations, although not of the Judiciary Committee. Said Holder after some sparring:

• "It is inappropriate and too consistent with the way in which you conduct yourself as a member of Congress. It is unacceptable. And it's shameful."

Some moments of levity, eye-rolling and struck bullseyes:

• Republican Rep. Howard Coble of North Carolina: "Now I am having a senior moment. I forgot what I was going to ask you. It will come back to me in due time. ... Well, maybe it won't."

• Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen of Tennessee: "The Pew Research Group shows that 52 percent of Americans think marijuana should not be illegal, and yet there are people in jail, and your Justice Department continues to put people in jail, for sale and use, on occasion, of marijuana. That's something the American public has finally caught up with. It was a cultural lag and it's been an injustice for 40 years in this country, to take people's liberty for something that was similar to alcohol."

• Republican Rep. Trent Franks of Arizona: "Well, you know, I guess I hear the mantra so often that, you know that, somehow this is choice. But to stand by in silence while the most helpless of all children are tortuously and agonizingly dismembered, day after day after day, year after year, Mr. General, is a—quite honestly a heartless disgrace
that really can't be described by the vocabulary of man."

• Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York: "I have no doubt, and we've already been hearing much hue and cry about the Department of Justice probe of AP records. But I think we should put this in context, and remember that less than a year ago this committee's Republican leadership demanded aggressive investigation of press leaks, accusing the administration itself of orchestrating those leaks. Then, members of this committee wanted the reporters subpoenaed, put in front of grand juries and potentially jailed for contempt. Now, of course, it is convenient to attack the attorney general for being too aggressive or the Justice Department for being too aggressive."

Midday open thread

rss@dailykos.com (Meteor Blades) — Thu, 16 May 2013 19:00:10 UTC

Today's comic by Ruben Bolling is Super-Fun-Pak Comix - Caveman Robot and more:
No pregnant teen bellies allowed in Michigan high school yearbook photos.
Brad DeLong dismembers Michael Kinsley's attacks on Krugman:
But most fascinating thing, for me, is that Kinsley's claim that "Austerians don’t get off on other people’s suffering" comes in the middle of a passage in which… well, Michael Kinsley gets off on other people's suffering:

Krugman also is on to something when he talks about paying a price for past sins. I don’t think suffering is good, but I do believe that we have to pay a price for past sins, and the longer we put it off, the higher the price will be…. The problem is the great, deluded middle class--subsidized by government and coddled by politicians. In other words, they are you and me. If you make less than $250,000 a year, Obama has assured us, you are officially entitled to feel put-upon and resentful. And to be immune from further imposition…. Austerians deserve credit: They at least are talking about the spinach, while the Krugmanites are only talking about dessert.
If writing that the "great, deluded middle class--subsidized by the government and coddled by politicians" needs to experience a decade-long siege of high unemployment isn't "get[ting] off on other people's suffering", I don't know what "getting off on other people's suffering" could possibly mean.
Boston bomb suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev left note in boat where he was captured:
The note—scrawled with a marker on the interior wall of the cabin—said the bombings were retribution for U.S. military action in Afghanistan and Iraq, and called the Boston victims "collateral damage" in the same way Muslims have been in the American-led wars. "When you attack one Muslim, you attack all Muslims," Tsarnaev wrote.
Dzhokar said he didn't mourn older brother Tamerlan, the other suspect in the bombings, writing that by that point, Tamerlan was a martyr in paradise—and that he expected to join him there soon.
"10 to 20" More Years of War Against al-Qaida:
Asked at a Senate hearing today how long the war on terrorism will last, Michael Sheehan, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, answered, “At least 10 to 20 years.”
Maryland Gov. O'Malley signs assault weapons ban:
Governor Martin O'Malley signed the sweeping gun control measure Thursday. Under the new legislation, which the governor helped push through the General Assembly, anyone buying a handgun will have to submit fingerprints to obtain a license. The bill also bans 45 types of assault weapons, but those who own the weapons before the law goes into effect will be allowed to keep them.
Gun magazines will be limited to 10 bullets, gun ownership by people who have been involuntarily committed to a mental health facility will be banned, and Maryland State Police will be able to suspend the licenses of gun dealers who fail to comply with recordkeeping obligations.
Study: munchies or no, pot smokers are skinnier:
Marijuana use is associated with an acute increase in caloric intake," goes the clinical jargon for popular lore. Still despite eating more while high (by some measures, over 600 extra calories per day), marijuana users' extra intake doesn't seem to be reflected in increased [Body Mass Index]. Indeed, studies have identified a reduced prevalence of obesity in the pot smoking community.
Classic Renaissance paintings redone as modern celebs:
Worth1000 ran a “Modern Renaissance” photo effects contest this past February that challenged their community members to recreate classic paintings using the faces of modern celebrities from movies and television shows. There were some really hilarious and impressive entries. You can view all of digitally manipulated images at Worth1000.
On today's Kagro in the Morning show, during Greg Dworkin's roundup, we wondered if the big casualty of the week was Benghazi. IRS talk included entries from FiveThirtyEight, an old LA Times article on IRS targeting of a liberal church, the Nixon tapes on political use of the IRS, Rick Perlstein's "Washington Misses the Point on the Tea Party and the IRS," Mark Sumner's "The IRS 'scandal'—all smoke, no fire," and David Cay Johnston's "The other IRS scandal." Armando chimed in from the road on these stories. Finally, the ridiculous "wish we'd had some AR-15s up in Boston" talking point, and a short catch-up on new filibuster reform talk.

House GOP uses Holder hearing to do the Senate GOP's work

rss@dailykos.com (Laura Clawson) — Thu, 16 May 2013 14:28:20 UTC

Thomas Perez

Republicans are rolling out quite the campaign against Thomas Perez, President Obama's nominee for labor secretary. In the Senate, where they actually vote on nominations, Republicans delayed a committee hearing set for last week; today, miracle of miracles, Perez got a committee vote and his nomination is headed to the full Senate. Meanwhile, in the House, which doesn't even vote on nominations, Republicans took the opportunity of Wednesday's Judiciary Committee hearing with Attorney General Eric Holder to blast Perez repeatedly.

Committee Chair Bob Goodlatte lashed into Perez in his opening statement, claiming that "investigators from this committee and the Oversight and Government Reform Committee have uncovered conclusive evidence that Assistant Attorney General Tom Perez against the strong recommendations of career attorneys struck a secret deal with the city of Saint Paul in order to block the Supreme Court." This is a funny claim since Perez actually consulted with everyone and their mother on that case, and the senior career attorney with the most expertise on the subject had participated in overruling the lower-level career attorneys whose recommendations Goodlatte refers to. (Democratic Rep. Jerrold Nadler made this point later in the hearing.)

Then Rep. Darrell Issa got going on the same subject, in typical Issa fashion:

Mislead, mischaracterize, mislead some more, attack. By framing his questions in a way that did not allow for a simple yes or no answer—at least not a truthful yes or no—Issa worked to make Holder look evasive for attempting to answer truthfully. But amidst all of Issa's "OMG the case didn't go to the Supreme Court," Holder had this to say:

We do not become involved in qui tam cases 80 percent of the time.

But, you know, SCANDAL. Anything to make an Obama nominee—and not just any Obama nominee, but one tasked with guarding the rights of working people—seem scary. Republicans might want to watch themselves, though, because other people are:

“The Hispanic community is watching this closely, and it will be noted if there is an effort to block Tom’s nomination,” said National Council of La Raza President and CEO Janet Murguia. “It’s just not helpful for Republicans to be seen as taking down what is seen as a qualified candidate.”

Yeah, well, Republicans do a lot of things that aren't helpful. To their image with Latino voters or to the country. But their base loves it.