++The P4 + I are still talking over the restrictions over Iran's nuclear program. There is talk about extending the negotiations for a few months to answer unanswered questions.
++Bibi denounced the deal or whatever is happening at the opening of the Knesset.
++The Washington Post bemoans the creation of an all-Arab military force as an indication that President Obama has withdrawn our military umbrella over the region.
++There are problems with such a force as witnessed by the attack by the Saudis on true UN refugee camp and the Houthi attack on the nearby hospital. The rules of war go out the window.
++Meanwhile Mike Pence is trying to ward off the national storm against his Religious Freedom bill. As Thom Hartman's show explained the photo of Pence signing the bill showed the authors who are well-known homophobes in the evangelical community. His protests that the bill isn't meant to legalize discrimination against gays is phony since his political reputation has gay-baiting in it.
++But he has solidarity among the Republicans running for President. Ted Cruz was the first out of the gate but Jeb soon followed. Rand Paul said something stunning for a libertarian. He would not protect gay rights. The reason--rights aren't given to a lifestyle--i.e. gay is something someone selects and is not born to.
++Ed Kilgore may have hit on why the same bill got killed in Georgia. Volvo wants to build a plant there and the Swedish company hates the anti-gay stuff.
++The Swedish foreign minister spoke to the Arab League's summit. They invited her because Sweden has recognized Palestine. Well, she spoke on the Arab countries need to recognize women's rights. The Saudis denounced her for her "offensive comments".
Showing posts with label Mike Pence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mike Pence. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 31, 2015
Friday, February 18, 2011
Government Shutdown Coming Right Up
Steve Benan of Washington Monthly claims there is a 70% chance of a government shutdown. I agree with him. Even Nancy Pelosi agrees. It's not coming because of some ideological stance by the GOP but from sheer incompetence. The House budget process, which has now zoomed to over 500 amendments,physically means the House will miss the early March deadline. There is not even enough time to reconcile the House and Senate since the two exist on different planets. I'm not even sure the House, even though it's been running to 4am, will have enough time to work through their own budget, let alone discuss a Senate version.
There are scads of things to write about in the House GOP budget. They intend to gut all government agencies that make the basic rules for the economy and even the IRS, which has to collect the limited tax dollars needed to keep the sinking ship afloat. Virtually every cut to a program offered by the GOP eliminates jobs. An early estimate of the GOP budget is that it will cost 1 million jobs.
Last night they cut all funding for the new Consumer Protection Agency. The budget goes far beyond just gutting anything that Barack Obama proposed over the last two years. It is a declaration of war on basically all government programs, with the exception of the military,which have been developed since the last Depression. A list of the cuts is mind-boogling. The fascinating point of the exercise is that the overall GOP House budget does not cut the annual deficit or the national debt. Top that off and it kills jobs and doesn't create any.
But the kicker for me was the orchestrated attack on Planned Parenthood, which received $363 million last year from the federal government. Rep. Mike Pence claimed that the elimination of federal funding for Planned Parenthood was a "victory for life". Planned Parenthood called the act "extreme and dangerous."
Mr. Anti-abortion Chris Smith from New Jersey described a abortion procedure during the second trimester in the graphic detail we haven't heard since Jesse Helms would describe pornographic acts on the Senate floor. Smith let a little cat out of the bag. He said Planned Parenthood performed 300,000 abortions per year. He claimed that was one-fifth of the abortions performed every year. So we have gone from 50 million per year to 1.5 million, closer to a statistical reality. But color me dubious still because we know from Planned Parenthood's own ads that they perform 300,000 screenings for breast cancer per year. So it's odd that the number is identical to Smith's assertions about abortions. But at least we can dispel the 50 million, Mao-purge like figures.
Men should really stop pontificating about women's health issues. Jackie Speier (D-California) immediately responded to Chris Smith and talked about having the very same procedure Smith described because of necessity and talked about losing the child. The American Taliban can't silence American women like they would want to.
Since the House Republicans want to defund Richard Nixon's creation the Environmental Protection Agency,why should we be surprised that they defunded another one of his creations--Title X Programs? Title X was created in 1970 to provide comprehensive family planning services, including all preventable health services for women. This is the program that provides Planned Parenthood with its funding. By eliminating the program,you essentially close down 4,500 community-based clinics. These clinics provide breast and cervical cancer screenings, HIV preventative education, pregnancy diagnosis and counseling. Of course, this program primarily supports lower income families. Over 1.2 million youth and adults participated in these programs last year.
Now if you are truly interested in lowering the number of abortions in America, wouldn't you support family planning programs and contraception? We know from Bristol Palin that abstinence programs don't work.
Nancy Pelosi said that the whole night's debate--several hours on Planned Parenthood--was surreal but that it posed serious risks to women's health. She called out Republicans on their clear position against family planning and urged them to go openly on the record against the idea. Jackie Speier wondered aloud what the whole Planned Parenthood debate had to do with creating jobs.
You could go batty just writing about Republican lunacy at both the federal and state level. A Republican legislator in Montana has entered a bill to declare global warming "natural" and "beneficial". After two years of marriage equality in New Hampshire,Republicans want to repeal the same sex marriage law because "it might encourage the development of sharia law."
I leave it to a leftwing blogger who parodied these efforts by writing a brief post that "Arizona has outlawed Karma."
There are scads of things to write about in the House GOP budget. They intend to gut all government agencies that make the basic rules for the economy and even the IRS, which has to collect the limited tax dollars needed to keep the sinking ship afloat. Virtually every cut to a program offered by the GOP eliminates jobs. An early estimate of the GOP budget is that it will cost 1 million jobs.
Last night they cut all funding for the new Consumer Protection Agency. The budget goes far beyond just gutting anything that Barack Obama proposed over the last two years. It is a declaration of war on basically all government programs, with the exception of the military,which have been developed since the last Depression. A list of the cuts is mind-boogling. The fascinating point of the exercise is that the overall GOP House budget does not cut the annual deficit or the national debt. Top that off and it kills jobs and doesn't create any.
But the kicker for me was the orchestrated attack on Planned Parenthood, which received $363 million last year from the federal government. Rep. Mike Pence claimed that the elimination of federal funding for Planned Parenthood was a "victory for life". Planned Parenthood called the act "extreme and dangerous."
Mr. Anti-abortion Chris Smith from New Jersey described a abortion procedure during the second trimester in the graphic detail we haven't heard since Jesse Helms would describe pornographic acts on the Senate floor. Smith let a little cat out of the bag. He said Planned Parenthood performed 300,000 abortions per year. He claimed that was one-fifth of the abortions performed every year. So we have gone from 50 million per year to 1.5 million, closer to a statistical reality. But color me dubious still because we know from Planned Parenthood's own ads that they perform 300,000 screenings for breast cancer per year. So it's odd that the number is identical to Smith's assertions about abortions. But at least we can dispel the 50 million, Mao-purge like figures.
Men should really stop pontificating about women's health issues. Jackie Speier (D-California) immediately responded to Chris Smith and talked about having the very same procedure Smith described because of necessity and talked about losing the child. The American Taliban can't silence American women like they would want to.
Since the House Republicans want to defund Richard Nixon's creation the Environmental Protection Agency,why should we be surprised that they defunded another one of his creations--Title X Programs? Title X was created in 1970 to provide comprehensive family planning services, including all preventable health services for women. This is the program that provides Planned Parenthood with its funding. By eliminating the program,you essentially close down 4,500 community-based clinics. These clinics provide breast and cervical cancer screenings, HIV preventative education, pregnancy diagnosis and counseling. Of course, this program primarily supports lower income families. Over 1.2 million youth and adults participated in these programs last year.
Now if you are truly interested in lowering the number of abortions in America, wouldn't you support family planning programs and contraception? We know from Bristol Palin that abstinence programs don't work.
Nancy Pelosi said that the whole night's debate--several hours on Planned Parenthood--was surreal but that it posed serious risks to women's health. She called out Republicans on their clear position against family planning and urged them to go openly on the record against the idea. Jackie Speier wondered aloud what the whole Planned Parenthood debate had to do with creating jobs.
You could go batty just writing about Republican lunacy at both the federal and state level. A Republican legislator in Montana has entered a bill to declare global warming "natural" and "beneficial". After two years of marriage equality in New Hampshire,Republicans want to repeal the same sex marriage law because "it might encourage the development of sharia law."
I leave it to a leftwing blogger who parodied these efforts by writing a brief post that "Arizona has outlawed Karma."
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Sunday Grab Bag
I may have to cave and become a Yankees' fan. A lifelong Dodger fan, I got a kick out of the World Series and seeing the Yankees this past year at Camden Yards. But now that Nick Johnson is going to be the DH, I may have to go all in. For years, I always picked an obscure player to root for. When I was a kid, this person was Ron Fairly, the short first baseman for the Dodgers. A fairly solid hitter, my bet was always on whether Ron would bat .300. I think he did once. I have been following Nick Johnson since his days as an Expo and then when he was here in D.C. with the Senators. The interest has always been that Johnson has never played a whole season while healthy. A natural .300 hitter and potential gold glover, I've always wanted to see him play a whole season to see what his real numbers would look like. Whenever I've watched him, he always has gotten a hit and made great plays. So now with Nick and my hero Mariano Rivera, the Yankees may be my team. It also looks like the Yankees have about two years before they will have to clean house again.
Will I have to invoke the Doug Payne principle now with Henning Mankell? This principle affects all cutting-edge writers when they finally get reviewed by the New York Times Sunday Book Review. I remember Doug would turn off on a series of writers we both loved--J.G. Ballard, Tom McQuane, Don DeLillo, Elmore Leonard, and James Ellroy. Once they were accepted by the Times their day was done as far as Doug was concerned. I thought this was a mistake. As a consequence, he missed out on DeLillo's Underworld and James Ellroy's political trilogy. J.G. Ballard retained his glory but his later novels went unread. Now with Henning Mankell I may be forced with the same dilemma. People are now supposed to "talk" about The Man From Beijing. I hoped to keep him as my own secret. I feel the same thing is happening with Ian Rankin.
Yesterday Barack Obama adopted the McColm solution to Social Security--tax higher levels of income. In his remarks, he said Social Security has only 20 years left at the current expenditures. That means that the Bush Adminisration actually ran through 17 years in the last year and a half to cover the deficit.
At least we are now free of the CPAC madness. Christopher Buckley ,writing in the Daily Beast, slams his first cousin Brent Bozell for a lackluster job on the Mount Vernon Declaration,comparing the prose of the Sharon Statement written by Bill Buckley and Brent's father with the boilerplate drudge of the contemporary conservatives. Conservative Mickey Edwards wrote that not only would he not go to CPAC but neither would Ronald Reagan--ouch. But at least we have a new form of conservativism--Conservative Constitutionalism. After the last administration shredded the constitution, conservatives have rediscovered the document now that a black man is President.
One of the interesting sidebars to CPAC was the the issue of gays. Liberty University threatened to boycott the conference if a gay GOP group attended. The group did and Liberty University pulled out. The one speaker who went gay-bashing was booed from the floor. Liz Cheney after a stint cheerleading for torture voiced support for dropping Don't Ask, Don't Tell. I found this all somewhat puzzling but understandable. Libertarians dominated the conference as Ron Paul's triumph in the straw vote showed and the younger generation of conservatives like their liberal counterparts could care less about gays. But it also marked the diminished power of social conservatives, a subject I will get to in another post.
Tim Pawlenty introduced a series of new principles for conservatives. The only one I remember is that God is in charge. Over the last two years, Pawlenty has increasingly been courting the fundamentalist vote. He now is a creationist, while in his entire previous life he wasn't. Perhaps he picked this up hanging around John McCain, who blurted out in the 2008 campaign that America was "a Christian nation", even though John never believed that either his entire life. With Glenn Beck about to resurrect the Christian revisionists, we should hear more about this. One question I would have for Tim is that if all our civil liberties come from God,what does the recent Supreme Court case on corporate donations to campaigns say about God's views about corporations?
For the record, the last real Christian Republican I knew was former Senator Danforth of Missouri. But that didn't do us much good since we got Clarence Thomas from him.
This week is the Health Care Summit--which should be a non-starter. Republicans have virtually no interest in health care reform or anything else the President wants. If some form of health care passes in the next two months, look to the 2010 elections being less of a Republican victory as has been advertised by our corporate media.
Looking at the ballot for the CPAC presidential preferences I noticed a lot of House members and a couple Senators on the ballot. You can forget anyone like Mike Pence or John Thune. No Republican member of Congress has a chance in 2012. First, because they will have virtually no record of achievement since they are the Party of "No" and you can't very well argue how good your ideas are if you never offer them up as legislation. The other reason is that 2008 was as rare an election as 1960 when a sitting Senator or member of Congress was elected. It won't happen again for quite sometime.
Will I have to invoke the Doug Payne principle now with Henning Mankell? This principle affects all cutting-edge writers when they finally get reviewed by the New York Times Sunday Book Review. I remember Doug would turn off on a series of writers we both loved--J.G. Ballard, Tom McQuane, Don DeLillo, Elmore Leonard, and James Ellroy. Once they were accepted by the Times their day was done as far as Doug was concerned. I thought this was a mistake. As a consequence, he missed out on DeLillo's Underworld and James Ellroy's political trilogy. J.G. Ballard retained his glory but his later novels went unread. Now with Henning Mankell I may be forced with the same dilemma. People are now supposed to "talk" about The Man From Beijing. I hoped to keep him as my own secret. I feel the same thing is happening with Ian Rankin.
Yesterday Barack Obama adopted the McColm solution to Social Security--tax higher levels of income. In his remarks, he said Social Security has only 20 years left at the current expenditures. That means that the Bush Adminisration actually ran through 17 years in the last year and a half to cover the deficit.
At least we are now free of the CPAC madness. Christopher Buckley ,writing in the Daily Beast, slams his first cousin Brent Bozell for a lackluster job on the Mount Vernon Declaration,comparing the prose of the Sharon Statement written by Bill Buckley and Brent's father with the boilerplate drudge of the contemporary conservatives. Conservative Mickey Edwards wrote that not only would he not go to CPAC but neither would Ronald Reagan--ouch. But at least we have a new form of conservativism--Conservative Constitutionalism. After the last administration shredded the constitution, conservatives have rediscovered the document now that a black man is President.
One of the interesting sidebars to CPAC was the the issue of gays. Liberty University threatened to boycott the conference if a gay GOP group attended. The group did and Liberty University pulled out. The one speaker who went gay-bashing was booed from the floor. Liz Cheney after a stint cheerleading for torture voiced support for dropping Don't Ask, Don't Tell. I found this all somewhat puzzling but understandable. Libertarians dominated the conference as Ron Paul's triumph in the straw vote showed and the younger generation of conservatives like their liberal counterparts could care less about gays. But it also marked the diminished power of social conservatives, a subject I will get to in another post.
Tim Pawlenty introduced a series of new principles for conservatives. The only one I remember is that God is in charge. Over the last two years, Pawlenty has increasingly been courting the fundamentalist vote. He now is a creationist, while in his entire previous life he wasn't. Perhaps he picked this up hanging around John McCain, who blurted out in the 2008 campaign that America was "a Christian nation", even though John never believed that either his entire life. With Glenn Beck about to resurrect the Christian revisionists, we should hear more about this. One question I would have for Tim is that if all our civil liberties come from God,what does the recent Supreme Court case on corporate donations to campaigns say about God's views about corporations?
For the record, the last real Christian Republican I knew was former Senator Danforth of Missouri. But that didn't do us much good since we got Clarence Thomas from him.
This week is the Health Care Summit--which should be a non-starter. Republicans have virtually no interest in health care reform or anything else the President wants. If some form of health care passes in the next two months, look to the 2010 elections being less of a Republican victory as has been advertised by our corporate media.
Looking at the ballot for the CPAC presidential preferences I noticed a lot of House members and a couple Senators on the ballot. You can forget anyone like Mike Pence or John Thune. No Republican member of Congress has a chance in 2012. First, because they will have virtually no record of achievement since they are the Party of "No" and you can't very well argue how good your ideas are if you never offer them up as legislation. The other reason is that 2008 was as rare an election as 1960 when a sitting Senator or member of Congress was elected. It won't happen again for quite sometime.
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