Daily Archives: January 25, 2013

G.O.P. Seeks To Crib Obama’s Campaign Playbook

Alan Colmes’ Liberaland

The extent of the party’s 2012 failure has finally sunk in:

The Republican National Committee is reviewing the party’s deficiencies, particularly in technology and grass-roots organizing, that contributed to Mitt Romney’s sound defeat last year. The excuses and grievances that several top Republicans offered up after the election have been supplanted by pledges to strengthen the party.

“We need to get people organized and learn from what Obama did,” said Mike Duncan, a former national party chairman who now represents Kentucky on the committee. “ We’ve got to reverse engineer what they did and leapfrog to the next cycle.”building-obamacare.jpeg3-460x307

… Republican leaders acknowledged the urgent need to make the party more welcoming to a broader cross-section of Americans, particularly women, Hispanics and blacks.

The consensus is that this was a failure at the top of the Republican Party:

Republican officials from across the country said a new tone is needed, and they called on the party to take cues from its 30 governors rather than become consumed by Republicans’ differences in Washington.

But, as Joan Walsh points out in a new analysis at Salon, using LA Gov. Bobby Jindal as an example, this strategy reveals a new Achilles’ heel or two for the Party of Reagan:

The man hailed by the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza for his readiness to “speak truth to GOP power” in a tedious speech to the Republican National Committee Thursday night is anything but a rebel or renegade. One night before his big 2016 star turn, Jindal was forced by national outrage to reverse himself on what is one of the ugliest GOP policy decisions in an ugly decade: cutting Medicaid funding for hospice care. His health secretary actually announced the decision Wednesday night as hospice backers gathered for a mournful candlelight vigil.

Good timing; continued attention to Jindal’s hospice cruelty might have made it tough for him to be the new public face of what he hopes will be the diversity-friendly GOP.

Yet Jindal’s other cruel cuts are set to stand – cuts to battered women’s shelter programs, to higher education, preschool programs, anti-truancy efforts and a range of other efforts to make life better for low-income people. Meanwhile Jindal wants to replace the state’s income tax with more regressive sales taxes.

Meet the new GOP, just the same as the old GOP…

 

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Filed under Gov. Bobby Jindal, RNC

Ron v. John: The Benghazi Battle Continues

Reblogged from Swampland:

UPDATE: If you've got six minutes, check out this fascinating debate between Sen. Kerry and Sen. Rand Paul:

These guys need some time off...

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Filed under U.S. Politics

MSNBC: Senator Kerry’s most important Senate appearance was in 1971

MSNBC – The Last Word

The next chapter in Sen. John Kerry’s story began Thursday during his confirmation hearings for his nomination to be Secretary of State. MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell took a look back at John Kerry’s place in history when he testified on Capitol Hill before a panel nearly 40 years ago as a Vietnam War veteran and protester.

In his opening statement on Thursday, Kerry reminded himself of his own journey that began in 1971 when he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 22, 1971 and spoke about his  experience in war and as the leader of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

“Nearly 42 years ago, Chairman Fulbright first gave me the opportunity to testify before this committee during a difficult and divided time for our country,” Kerry said. “Today I can’t help but recognize that the world itself then was in many ways simpler, divided as it was along bi-polar, Cold War antagonism. Today’s world is more complicated than anything we have experienced.”

Speaking to the complex challenges the country is now facing, Kerry remained humble about the first time he set foot on Capitol Hill. “I’ll tell you, Mr. Chairman, when I first came to Washington to testify it was as a member of group who came to have their voices heard. That is what this place is all about.” Kerry was a former navy lieutenant in Vietnam, was wounded three times and awarded the silver star for heroism.

His well-received testimony received a standing ovation from peace demonstrators in the gallery; his speech also resonated with President Richard Nixon who ended the draft a year later.

O’Donnell praised Kerry as the ultimate war hero, saving countless of lives with his powerful testimony against the war.

“More than 2,000 Americans were killed in Vietnam after John Kerry’s testimony. That number was going to be higher, much higher. 5,000? 10,000? We’ll never know, but it was going to be higher if John Kerry hadn’t become the most “extremely effective” war protester in American history. The only war protester who the war President, Richard Nixon, thought was, in his words, ‘extremely effective.’”

O’Donnell thanked Kerry for his most valuable contribution to the country and the world.

There are men who are alive today in this country thanks to John Kerry. I have brothers who I believe are alive today, thanks to John Kerry. Some of you have brothers, fathers, uncles, who are alive today because of John Kerry. John Kerry didn’t play it safe when he testified against the war. He personally attacked by name President Johnson’s Defense Secretary–along with the other Democrats in the Johnson Administration who were the architects of that war… the so-called best and the brightest who failed the country and the world so miserably. On April 22, 1971, at the age of 27, John Kerry assured his position in American history, and that position is war hero…the most valuable kind of war hero, the hero who helps end the war.”

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Filed under MSNBC, Sen. John F. Kerry

Republican New Mexico Bill Would Make Criminals Of Rape Victims Who Have Abortions

Uh…that GOP moratorium on the word rape seems to have dissipated…

Alan Colmes’ Liberaland

The bill by Rep. Cathrynn Brown would require victims of rape to carry fetuses to term or be accused of tampering with evidence.

“Tampering with evidence shall include procuring or facilitating an abortion, or compelling or coercing another to obtain an abortion, of a fetus that is the result of criminal sexual penetration or incest with the intent to destroy evidence of the crime,” the bill says.

Third-degree felonies in New Mexico carry a sentence of up to three years in prison.

Pat Davis of ProgressNow New Mexico, a progressive nonprofit opposing the bill, called it “blatantly unconstitutional” on Thursday.

“The bill turns victims of rape and incest into felons and forces them to become incubators of evidence for the state,” he said. “According to Republican philosophy, victims who are ‘legitimately raped’ will now have to carry the fetus to term in order to prove their case.“

 

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Filed under GOP Folly, GOP Hubris

[Has] Fascism Taken Up Residence In the Republican Party?

fas·cism

Noun
  1. An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization.
  2. (in general use) Extreme right-wing, authoritarian, or intolerant views or practice.

The original title of this article makes a declarative statement.  I’m not sure I want to place the “fascist” label on the GOP just yet, but it looks pretty close.

Here’s an opinion worth reading…

PoliticusUSA

Most scholars agree that a fascist regime is foremost an authoritarian form of government, and as a political ideology, it referred to a political movement linked to Corporatism that existed in and ruled a single country (Italy) for less than 30 years. Early influences of fascist ideology date back to ancient Greece in the city state of Sparta that emphasized rule by a minority of elites and racial purity that was admired and embraced by the Nazis, and to preserve power in the hands of a few, it was necessary to deny equal rights to the population. According to most scholars of fascism, once in power, it historically attacked parliamentary liberalism, and attracted support primarily from the “far right” or “extreme right,” and in America fascism is the Republican Party.

When President Obama delivered his Inauguration speech on Monday, his message of equality for every citizen characterized America and the original intent of the Founding Fathers. Equality for all cannot be attributed to, or claimed as unique by, any particular political ideology, and it should be universally embraced by all Americans regardless their political or religious inclinations if they are indeed Americans. It is prescient then, that Republicans immediately assailed the President’s Inaugural Address for laying out a “liberal agenda,” and it informs that their perpetual war against liberalism is really a war against the Constitution and equal rights for all Americans. Even though Republicans portrayed the President’s inaugural speech as “far left” and out of the mainstream, the truth is the President was expressing the will of a majority of the American people who affirmed his American agenda in the last election that Republicans refuse to accept and will use any means to reverse.

A pair of polls revealed that Americans agree with the President that, intrinsically related to equality for all, taking care of the infirm, elderly, the poor, and victims of severe weather, and protecting the rights of gays, immigrants, and Americans exercising their right to vote is the agenda they expect as Americans. Republicans, however, oppose those basic rights as a matter of course and, regardless they are in the minority, to impose their Fascist agenda on the people, including attacking equal rights, they will rig elections and attempt to sway public opinion in their favor by attacking the President’s American agenda by labeling it “far left”  and extremist. It is the first time in memory that a political party has openly assailed equal rights as extremist, even though Republicans have spent decades opposing equal rights for all but white Christians and the wealthy, and to continue the practice, they will subvert the election process.

The news that Virginia Republicans secretly passed measures to rig elections in favor of Republican candidates for state and federal offices is a typically fascist ploy to seize power, but the practice is being repeated in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Florida; all Republican-controlled states that went Democratic in 2012. As Americans increasingly view the Republican Party negatively, and with even Republicans holding a dim view of Republicans in Congress, the GOP is attempting to take control of the government through any means necessary to implement their corporatist agenda and perpetuate the inequality Americans overwhelmingly reject as un-American.

To say the Republican Party is out of touch with the American people’s wishes, or are deliberately preventing equality for all Americans, is an understatement of epic proportion. They are against gay rights, women’s right to choose, maintaining worker-funded retirement and healthcare programs, and assistance for Veterans, the poor, elderly, and children that is contrary to the will of the voters and what it means to be American. Since they cannot legislate inequality from the halls of Congress and White House, they have enlisted the assistance of religious extremists and gun-fanatics with fear-mongering and claims President Obama is “shredding the Constitution” and give more than tacit approval to calls for a revolution.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said that in giving the Inaugural Address, President Obama acted like America is a far left, liberal population instead of center-right leaning, but when in America’s history was the idea of equality ever a far left ideal? McConnell, and other Republicans, revealed that in their John Birch libertarian mindset, equality is anathema to what it means to be American and to seize power to impose their brand of fascism on the nation, they will rig elections, provoke outrage against the legally elected President, and enlist malcontents through fear-mongering to enact corporatist policies regardless the will of the voters.

Republicans have fallen out of favor with the electorate because of their preference for the wealthy and their far-right extremist positions on issues meant to deprive every American of their constitutionally guaranteed equal rights. As they continue losing support from the people and become irrelevant as a political party, they are becoming more extreme and not unlike a dictator losing power striking out at their enemies and the population. Yesterday Speaker of the House John Boehner told an audience the President wants to “annihilate” the Republican Party, but the Republican Party is annihilating itself with one extremist position after another and none as despicable as rigging elections and working to prevent every American from “most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal,” because part and parcel of fascism is reserving equality for a privileged few elite; a particularly fascist Republican tenet of authoritarian rule.

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Filed under GOP Extremism, GOP Gerrymandering, GOP Hate-Mongering