President Obama Defeats ISIS; Orange Loser Takes Credit

Yes, of course we know he's lying.  The problem is that we're not his audience.  His mouth-breathing voters are.  And all they hear is what he says and how his Faux News cheerleaders repeat it.

This is how bad history gets written in stone.

Kevin Drum:

ISIS is hardly Barack Obama’s finest moment. He was late to understand what was happening and slow to do anything about it. But in the end he did do something about it, and he did the right thing: he kept the US footprint light; he avoided rules of engagement that would inflame the very people we were trying to liberate; and he understood that the only route to victory lay in a slow but steady campaign. It wasn’t sexy, but it worked.

In a few weeks or months, Donald Trump will announce that we’ve won the war against ISIS. Will he give Obama any recognition for this? Of course not. So that means the rest of us will have to do it for him.

Next Day:

Trump did nothing. The plan to take both Mosul and Raqqa was initiated under Obama, and Trump famously refused to approve a new plan for months because the military kept telling him that Obama’s approach was working. So he put them off and put them off until he finally approved a plan in August that was mostly the same as the plan we already had. And now he’s claiming that this new plan turned things around in eight weeks.

I know we don’t expect anything else from Trump. But he can always be even worse than you think, can’t he? Hell, he didn’t even give the military any credit, let alone Obama. What a jackass.

Myth of the Obama-Trump Voter Exploded

I've been saying it since November: There is no such thing as a person who voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 but voted for Trump in 2016.

No. Such. Thing.

Digby:

I know there are no more interesting or important people in the world than the vaunted Trump Voter, but I have long thought that the idea that there exists a substantial subset of Obama-Trump voters. My theory has always been that to the extent they existed, they were basically Republicans who may have voted for Obama because the world was going to hell in a hand-basket and they didn't like Sarah Palin or Mitt Romney for personal reasons.
Ed Kilgore catches up with the latest on this alleged phenomenon:

The defection of West Virginia Governor Jim Justice yesterday from the Democratic to the Republican Party will inevitably fuel tired rhetoric about Reagan Democrats, or white-working-class Americans, or “heartland voters,” leaving the Donkey Party in hordes in protest against its radical bicoastal liberalism. Democrats obviously need to pay attention to voters they’ve recently lost or failed to energize, all over the place, and in various demographic categories.
But the “Trump Democrat” phenomenon may have been a bit oversold. Justice obviously was never much of a Democrat to begin with. And the broader category of “Obama-Trump voters”—those who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 or 2012, and then for the mogul in 2016—may have been misunderstood as well. Or so reports the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank:
[N]ew data, and an analysis by AFL-CIO political director Michael Podhorzer that he shared with me, puts all this into question. The number of Obama-to-Trump voters turns out to be smaller than thought. And those Obama voters who did switch to Trump were largely Republican voters to start with. The aberration wasn’t their votes for Trump but their votes for Obama. 

One problem with the much-discussed idea that Obama-Trump voters swung the election is that voters notoriously over-report votes for the election winner after the election. So some Obama-Trump voter didn’t actually vote for Obama, and others didn’t actually vote for Trump. (Some may have even voted for everyone other than Obama and Trump). That reduces the magnitude of the “flip.”
To the extent that Obama-Trump voters were identified as those who voted for the 44th president in either 2008 or 2012, it is important to remember that Obama won pretty big the first time around: according to exit polls, he won 9 percent of self-identified Republicans and 20 percent of self-identified conservatives. He also won independents—a category that includes a lot of people who usually vote Republican—52/44.
But there’s more than incidental evidence that apparent Obama-Trump voters aren’t loyal Democrats who suddenly flipped because Trump was appealing to their material or cultural interests: they supported Republicans down-ballot, too:
The AFL-CIO’s Podhorzer analyzed raw data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, out in the spring, and found that Obama-Trump voters voted for Republican congressional candidates by a 31-point margin, Republican Senate candidates by a 15-point margin and Republican gubernatorial candidates by a 27-point margin. Their views on immigration and Obamacare also put them solidly in the GOP camp. 

If these voters have been “lost” by the Democratic Party, many of them are probably lost for good.
Milbank concludes: “The party would do better to go after disaffected Democrats who didn’t vote in 2016 or who voted for third parties.” A vote’s a vote, and in a competitive environment it makes no sense for Democrats to write anyone off. But the obsession with “Obama-Trump voters” may be myopic.

There are good philosophical and ideological reasons for figuring out how to address the economic woes of this group of voters. Even if you don't care much for the way they think, they have kids who need a decent chance at a better life. But the idea that they are the electoral holy grail has always seemed to me to be a convenient way to prove some prior assumptions about the 2016 election.

In any case, it's worth wondering if Democrats should be so focused on this group of voters to the exclusion of some others who are at least equally important to mobilize for a 2018 victory. It's not a zero sum game, but it does require that these Trump voters not be elevated to the level of all-important "super-voters." Until the economy is completely falling apart as it was after the last GOP administration, they may not be gettable.

 All Democrats need to do is remove the barriers preventing their natural voters from voting: voter suppression, voter ID laws,  restrictive voting times and places, fiery hoops to jump through to register to vote and felon disenfranchisement.

Do that, dems, and every white voter in the country could go repug and Democrats would still win.

When everybody votes, Democrats win.

If Only Democrats Had Gotten Something Done

Some dumb twat twitted a stupid question, and Wonkette nailed the moron to the wall:

That is one excellent question! Why didn’t the Dems pursue a progressive agenda when they had the chance? Why, they could have come up with some kind of plan that would have resulted in the largest reduction in Americans without healthcare in history, for instance, and maybe passed a bill to ensure women could more easily sue after experiencing employment discrimination.

 

If Democrats had really wanted to be progressive during the Obama administration, they could have changed the way student loans worked, so they were issued by the government instead of private banks, with more options to repay based on students’ actual income, and maybe a rule that would forgive loans for students becoming doctors or teachers or social workers in under-served areas (of course, Trump will reverse that last one, so it doesn’t count). And maybe Obama could have cracked down on scammy for-profit colleges, if Dems had only cared about ordinary Americans getting ripped off.

You know, if Dems actually had wanted to push a Better Deal for ordinary Americans, maybe they would have put in place some kind of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that would have had the power to protect people from predatory lending practices and scammy credit card companies, and which — at least until Trump nixed it — was in the process of cracking down on ripoff payday and car-title lenders? Heck, maybe they could have instituted — even in the face of enormous obstruction and pushback — some kind of system to regulate big banks to prevent another economic collapse like the one in 2008.

For that matter, maybe if Democrats had had even the least scintilla of concern for everyday folks, from a progressive perspective, they might have passed some kind of stimulus to head off a second Great Depression, or they could have saved American auto manufacturers and tens of thousands of jobs, instead of letting them collapse like Republicans wanted.

And gosh, if Democrats wanted Americans to have better lives, maybe they would have taken some kind of action against racist police departments, or worked to reform mandatory minimum sentences and sentencing disparities. They might even have tried to protect the planet by committing to the Paris climate agreement or protect sensitive lands by declaring new national monuments.

Damn. That sure was a heck of a legitimate question. Why would anyone think Democrats might have a legitimate economic agenda anyway? They had so many chances but accomplished so little.

Doktor Zoom, fighting the lies.  What repug lie have you refuted today?

If You Vote Democratic, Repugs Are Going to Prevent You From Voting

I'm going to keep telling this story until Kentucky gets rid of voter-fucking-ID:  For decades in Kentucky, all you had to do to vote was show up, sign the voter book next to your signature from the last time you voted, and then vote. Done. No fraud, no question, no problem.

But that was back before repugs realized that letting everybody vote meant that repugs lost elections.

Zandar:

“The right to vote — what kind of political platform is that? Why would you make that a part of your agenda, preventing people from voting? How can you defend that?” Obama said. “This recent effort to restrict the vote has not been led by both parties. It’s being led by the Republican Party.”

That last paragraph there is the best case yet anyone in this administration has put forth as to what the true nature of the GOP voter ID effort really is:  voter suppression in order to lower turnout of traditionally Democratic voting groups.  For President Obama to publicly acknowledge this and then publicly rebuke the GOP for doing it (he later recounted the whole birther nonsense and had a good laugh along with the audience) was not only necessary but vital to our voting system.

Long-time readers will know that I harp on voting and voting rights weekly in this space.  There's a reason for that.  It's literally the last gasp of the current Republican party, the last weapon they have in order to stay in power.  They talk of "outreach" and "reconciliation" with minority groups, particularly black and Latino voters, and then make it harder for all voters to vote in a way that falls most on the shoulders of voters of color.

So to hear the President call the GOP out on this is nothing short of historic.  We need to make sure that we exercise that vote, so the people trying to take that right away do not gain more political power.

Here's the video of the speech:

The Real Drone Question

Today, Kentucky's own Senator Rand Paul started a marathon talking session in the Senate against the nomination of John Brennan for CIA chief. Brennan's an ass and Paul's a bigger one, but what's important is the reason Paul is doing it: to force President Obama to explain just what power he thinks he has to assassinate American citizens on American soil using drones.

Kevin Drum tries to get to the issue:

But that still leaves open the question most of us really want answered. The problem is that it's hard to phrase it precisely. What we want to know is whether the president can specifically target a particular American citizen (or group of citizens) for assassination on American soil even when there's not some kind of hot, real-time incitement (such as an invasion or a standoff). The issue of drones is immaterial here. What we're interested in is a situation where, say, the president gets information that some sort of bad guy is holed up in a cave in Idaho. Can he order up lethal force? Or is he required to go after him in a way that at least theoretically allows the possibility of surrender?

We still don't know the answer to that question, and even if I haven't phrased it quite correctly, I'm pretty sure it's the question most of us want answered.

No, Kevin: that's not the question.  The question is whether the constitution gives American citizens the power to stop President Rubio from ordering up a secret drone strike on a nest of peaceful but politically annoying anti-embargo protesters.

 

And whether we'll have a country left when he does.

 

Digby:

This is not a tough question, it really isn't. If the president has the power to order the assassination of people on American soil the constitution does not say what we've always thought it said. The country is awash in militarized law enforcement with every known technology. There is little reason to worry that they couldn't get an arrest warrant for a real threat. The idea that the president should have the power to override these guarantees basically says that they no longer acknowledge one of the fundamental rationales for the constitution.

"[The purpose of a written constitution is] to bind up the several branches of government by certain laws, which, when they transgress, their acts shall become nullities; to render unnecessary an appeal to the people, or in other words a rebellion, on every infraction of their rights, on the peril that their acquiescence shall be construed into an intention to surrender those rights." --Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia, 1782.

That's not really working out is it?

If Big Coal Hates Her, She Might Be OK

No, I'm not talking about Ashley Judd, although the same rule applies.

From the Washington Monthly:

Gina McCarthy, currently assistant EPA administrator for Air and Radiation, nominated to lead EPA. Coal interests really don’t like her, but other businesses seem reasonably supportive.

That "other businesses seem reasonably supportive" is a bad sign, but at least she's not a Wall Street shill or a filthy billionaire, like most of Obama's nominees.

It'll Never Happen, But Sign the Petition Anyway

Besides which, the damage to infrastructure caused by the massive liberal orgasm in response would be incalculable.

From Just Foreign Policy, MoveOn and actor Danny Glover :

Press reports say President Obama will soon nominate a new Treasury Secretary. Press speculation has centered on candidates likely to support the Wall Street agenda of cuts to Social Security and Medicare benefits and other domestic spending rather than government policies to create jobs.  

We want President Obama to nominate Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, who opposes austerity and wants the government to focus on creating jobs.

That's why I created a petition on SignOn.org to President Barack Obama, which says:

We urge you to nominate Paul Krugman for Treasury Secretary. Krugman will protect Social Security and Medicare from benefit cuts, promote policies to create jobs, and help defeat the austerity dogma in Washington and around the world.

Click here to add your name to this petition, and then pass it along to your friends.

Thanks!

–Danny Glover

Back in Reality World, my money's on Jamie Dimon. The White House and the Senate Dems love that miserable piece of shit.

Rand Paul Even Dumber on Foreign Policy Than Romney

My guess would be that the State Department employees "most responsible" for the death of Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens - to the extent that any State Department employees are responsible at all - are the ones who died in the consulate at Benghazi.

Joe Gerth at the Courier:

Sen. Rand Paul said Thursday that someone in the U.S. State Department needs to lose his or her job over the Sept. 11 attack on the American Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that led to the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens.

“If someone made a decision that may have cost the ambassador his life, they need to be reassigned at the very least,” the Kentucky Republican said after speaking to the Rotary Club of Louisville. “They need to lose their ability to make those decisions again.”


The Obama administration has been under fire because of its response to the attack and its refusal before the attack to assign more security personnel to the consulate in a part of Libya where al-Qaida has established a foothold. On Aug. 2, more than a month before the attack that killed Stevens, embassy security personnel asked for more bodyguards, saying “the security situation in Libya remains unpredictable, volatile and violent.”

SNIP

“I think there are some important questions that have to be asked,” Paul said in an interview. “Why were there no Marines guarding the ambassador, why was the security detail denied, and why was the plane denied.

 Let's see if I can explain this in the slow, one-syllable way Aynrandy seems to require:

A) The extra security was requested for the EMBASSY, which is in TRIPOLI, hundreds of miles away from the consulate in BENGHAZI, where Ambassador Stevens died.

B) Marines at U.S. Embassies have one job and one job only: protecting the paperwork and electronic information. They will protect that information even if everybody in the Embassy dies.

C) Ambassador Stevens made security and transport decisions; is the dishonorable gentleman from Kentucky blaming the Ambassador for his own death?

It's real easy, from the comfortable confines of the Rotary Club of Louisville, to criticize American diplomats who risk their lives every day in the service of their country.

The Tribble-Toupeed One wouldn't last five minutes in that job, much less in President Obama's. Shut the fuck up, moron.

Anti-Obamacare Stupidity in Kentucky

No surprise: all the state house members are up for re-election, but Beshear is not, so all the morons are running against That Ni**er in the White House.

Jack Brammer at the Herald:

Gov. Steve Beshear signed an executive order Tuesday to create an online marketplace offering health insurance plans for Kentuckians, as called for in the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Shortly afterward, the Kentucky General Assembly's Capital Projects and Bond Oversight Committee rejected, on a 4-3 partisan vote, a proposal by the Cabinet for Health and Family Services to spend $294,540 for rental space to accommodate 210 employees associated with the health insurance exchange.

Despite the vote, Finance Secretary Lori Flanery has the authority to override the oversight committee's decision and let the rental project proceed. Beshear said late Tuesday that Flanery will sign the lease "in order to make sure that we don't fall behind on implementation and run the risk of a federal takeover of our health benefits exchange."

Sen. Bob Leeper, an independent from Paducah who usually sides with Republicans, said he could not support the rental lease because he was reluctant to put his name on anything related to "Obamacare."

Kudos to Beshear for doing the right thing for Kentuckians. Fortunately for Kentuckians, it didn't require much political courage. 

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2012/07/17/2261526/beshear-creates-health-benefit.html#storylink=cpy

The Real Job Creator

Remember the Tom Tomorrow cartoon from around 2006 in which Bush and Cheney were actually hippie radicals who plotted back in the '60s to destroy conservatism once and for all by getting elected as republicans and then implementing policies so outrageous that the American people would rise up in disgust and reject conservatism forever?

Only no matter what they tried - blowing a trillion-dollar surplus, letting al Qaeda attack the towers, invading Iraq to steal its oil, torturing innocent detainees, refusing to rescue New Orleans - Americans just kept cheering.

Sometimes the Romney campaign sounds just that ludicrous.

Igor Volsky at Think Progress:

During an appearance on Fox News on Tuesday morning, Mitt Romney surrogate and former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu (R) argued that President Obama did not have the requisite business experience to create jobs because he was “smoking something” in Hawaii:

To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, send a kilo of whatever Obama was smoking to every Democratic politician in D.C.

Or as Austin Ligon, co-founder of CarMax, wrote to the Washington Monthly in the May/June issue:

An even bigger accomplishment in the auto restructuring, and one on which the administration is even more unwilling to focus, for obvious reasons, was the action the president took once he realized (correctly) that that both the management and boards of GM and Chrysler were incompetent and unworthy of investment. Obama, through car czar Steve Rattner, did what a truly great CEO or private-equity guy would do ... he fired them, and brought in new guys from outside Detroit. That was a huge risk, undertaken at lightning speed, which all of the traditionalists in the industry thought was crazy.

But in one fell swoop, he fixed fifty years of Detroit incompetence at the highest levels.

SNIP

To put it another way, Obama has done two private-equity deals in his life. They were bigger than the sum total of everything Mitt Romney has ever done, and they worked better and faster ... and all the benefit accrued to the nation at large, no skim-off required.

That level of direct involvement and decision-making, like his direct decision to "go" on Osama bin Laden, shows that Obama actually has great courage and decisiveness when the chips are down and a big decision must be made.

Contrast that with Bloomberg's description of how Romney operated:

What’s clear from a review of the public record during his management of the private-equity firm Bain Capital from 1985 to 1999 is that Romney was fabulously successful in generating high returns for its investors. He did so, in large part, through heavy use of tax-deductible debt, usually to finance outsized dividends for the firm’s partners and investors. When some of the investments went bad, workers and creditors felt most of the pain. Romney privatized the gains and socialized the losses.

What’s less clear is how his skills are relevant to the job of overseeing the U.S. economy, strengthening competitiveness and looking out for the welfare of the general public, especially the middle class.

Read the whole thing.

Bloomberg calls Romney's business "casino capitalism;" I call it stealing from the American taxpayers. Romney shouldn't be running for president; he should be in prison.

This Picture Kills Lies

Send this picture, with Stephanie's story, to everyone you know.

karoli at Cooks and Liars:

Obama supporter and Ohio voter Stephanie Miller appeared on Al Sharpton's show Friday to tell her story about why the Affordable Care Act means so much to her. Stephanie's sister died on July 4, 2008 from colon cancer. She was uninsured, because she made too much money to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to be able to afford health insurance. Despite Republican lies about how health care is soooo accessible via emergency rooms (a bald-faced lie), Stephanie's sister died, far too young.

At a rally in Ohio, Stephanie was up near the front of the rope line, where she was able to get President Obama's attention long enough to thank him for sticking to his guns and getting the Affordable Care Act through. He asked for her sister's name, telling Stephanie he was going to keep her in his thoughts every day during the campaign.

I believe him, and I am also grateful that he saw it through to the end.

As for the cynical, selfish Republicans, I'm in total agreement with Joan McCarter:

That's the status quo Republicans are fighting tooth and nail to return to: needless, premature, painful death for people who aren't lucky enough to have won in the health insurance lottery.

Share this picture with people and tell them that weeping woman right there doesn't deserve to be victimized twice. Evidently the right wing lies about the Affordable Care Act are actually taking hold thanks to the liars over at Fox News. If a picture is worth 1,000 words, then this one ought to cover 1,000 lies.

Photo by Reuters

Watch video here.

Repugs Already Stealing This Victory

Chief Justice Shithead found a way to avoid upholding the Commerce Clause while making the Wall Street Court look reasonable and convicting Democrats of the Biggest Tax Increase in History - all at the same time.

The repugs are already three scores up in this fight. So listen to the coach, then get out there and fight back!




Full transcript here.

Sic the Secret Service on These Motherfuckers

Don't know how I missed this, but Zandar caught it:

Meanwhile, to let you know what kind of state Kentucky here is where I live, the two UK students who hung President Obama in effigy last fall got precisely zero indictments from a grand jury, because there's not a grand jury that can be empaneled in the Commonwealth here that would ever see any reason to charge anyone with hanging a black President in effigy for anything.

The grand jury dismissed charges of second-degree burglary, theft by unlawful taking and disorderly conduct against Hunter Bush, 21, and Joe Fischer, 22, a UK senior, lawyer Fred Peters said Tuesday.

University of Kentucky police found the effigy on the Wednesday before Election Day hanging from a tree on the Lexington, Ky., campus.

UK President Lee Todd immediately called a news conference to denounce the incident, calling the act "deplorable" and "abominal." "We've done many, many things to increase diversity," Todd said. "I know this is not a reflection of this institution."

Bush and Todd were arrested the next day. UK police said the two men told them the act was in response to news reports that an effigy of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin had been hung in California.

Material used to make the effigy, including clothes, was stolen from a fraternity house, leading to the burglary and theft charges. Neither man was a member of the fraternity.

The disorderly conduct charge was for the actual hanging of the effigy. Peters said the charge clearly violated the First Amendment.

So yeah, nothing to see here, no trial necessary, was just a prank, the real racists are the folks trying to criminalize this clearly first amendment "protected vile speech", yadda yadda amen. Hey, let's have everyone in America do this, then we can all join in the fun of yelling FIRST AMENDMENT, BITCHEZ while we have a good laugh.

Try to burn the American flag or a Bible in this country however, well our conservative friends (and more than a few Democrats) had no problem wanting to criminalize that by changing the Constitution or by law.

Moving on.

Politically, Lexington is a strongly liberal downtown core surrounded by repug freakazoid suburbs. The criminal justice system in town, however, is a throwback, with a chief prosecutor who thinks he's Wyatt Earp. If a grand jury doesn't indict you, it's because Ray Larson doesn't want you indicted.

I share Zandar's dismay, but in addition to widespread racism there's some individual blame to be laid here.

And of course the free speech argument is bullshit. If someone had hanged Smirky/Darth in effigy in Boston Common in 2003, the good liberal courts there would ship the motherfucker to Guantanamo themselves.

Creative Idea of the Week

Teddy Partridge at Firedoglake:

Our government has a “No-Fly” list and a “Do-Not-Call” list — and now some unknown enterprising citizens have asked the White House to create a “Do-Not-Kill” list.

It's one thing if they ignore the request or refuse it. But what if they set up a "Do-Not-Kill" list and then refuse to put you on it?

Frustration and Disappointment Are No Excuse for Stupidity

I try to avoid criticizing other bloggers, even superb liberal ones. We've got too many real enemies to waste time sniping at each other, and family fights are just fucking boring.

I love Down with Tyranny. But this is suicidal bullshit.

In 2008 Tennessee attorney John Wolfe voted for Obama. I did too. But that isn't all we have in common. He's dissatisfied with Obama's first term-- but he doesn't want to go backwards into the Republican nightmare that is at the root of all the country's problems. His beef with Obama is that he campaigned as a populist and them governed as a corporatist. “What he did," says Wolfe, "was he brought in people who caused the crisis and made them his closest advisers: Rahm Emanuel, Bill Daley, Jack Lew. He basically institutionalized failure... He has such eloquence, intelligence, charisma, we can only emulate that. I would never even approach it, but he should have used that to rally people around an idea and push for something more. Instead, he just played it safe."

Previously Wolfe, who's running a "word-of-mouth campaign," won 3 parishes in the Louisiana primary. Tuesday "Uncommitted," the only alternative to Obama, won 41.2% in the Kentucky Democratic primary. And in Arkansas Wolfe managed to get 67,491 votes (42%) to Obama's 94,852 (58%). Wolfe did better than Ron Paul, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich combined (just over 47,000 votes).

Wolfe wasn't attacking Obama from the right-- the way corporate whores like Cory Booker, Lanny Davis, Harold Ford and Ed Rendell have. He's going after the corporatist gestalt that has more and more made the Democratic and Republican parties almost indistinguishable on everything but divisive social issues. The Weekly Standard isn't someplace to go for news but it's worth taking a look at their celebration of Wolfe and the hope that he would embarrass the president.

Some have dismissed Obama’s troubles in red states like Arkansas and West Virginia as inconsequential, but the previous Democratic president, Arkansas native Bill Clinton, won both states twice. Both states currently have Democratic governors, and Democrats have won several elections in these states in recent years. Wolfe says his underdog candidacy is the manifestation of a large number of Democrats’ frustration with Obama.

“Now the people have a choice,” Wolfe says. “I think that the people think Obama isn’t listening to them.” He cites the doubletalk by Obama and national Democrats regarding private equity and Wall Street bankers.

“He criticizes Wall Street during the day, and at night he goes into these luxurious soirees with the bankers,” Wolfe says. “He leaves those meetings with millions.”

Wolfe argues that if the government can get health care costs under control and institute stricter banking regulations, many of the country’s remaining fiscal and economic problems can solve themselves. He says he supports restoring the Glass-Steagall banking act of 1933 and opening up the credit default markets, as well as a single-payer health care system that he says would alleviate the costs by getting rid of the expensive, high-risk pools.

Next week Wolfe will be on the primary ballot in Texas. I wish he was running in California as well... in November.

Really? You want Mitt Romney to win? You want Grover Norquist, Paul Ryan and Pat Robertson running the country? You want to live in a feudal theocracy that would make Afghanistan look like Sweden?

No, of course you don't. You just want Daddy to notice that you're pouting and force him to make some gesture of appeasement. Coming out in favor of gay marriage wasn't enough for you?

I'm as pissed at Obama as anybody, and my posts prove it. But liberals who play this I'm-holding-my-breath-until-Obama-admits-the-left-is-correct-about-everything game are as bad as the Wall Street motherfuckers who are throwing a hissy fit because obscenely monstrous profits aren't enough; they want to be adored and worshipped for fucking over the rest of us.

Or maybe Down with Tyranny really does want Romney to win. Maybe he wants to bob his head in smug satisfaction while the nation goes down in flames, sneering "I told you Obama betrayed us."

Grow the fuck up. Conservadem Obama is the only thing standing between us and the end of liberal Democracy in America.

After we re-elect him, then we work on taking him out back and beating the metaphorical shit out of him.

In Which I Test Kentucky's Voter ID Law, and Receive a Racist Ballot

So I walked up to the same precinct officers who have been working my polling place for the last 12 years and I handed them my Social Security card.

The one with a signature and no picture. The one the Kentucky Secretary of State's office claims the law allows to be used as voter identification at the polls.

The precinct officer accepted it immediately, but mentioned that was the first time someone had presented a Social Security card as ID at that polling station. Kudos to my county clerk for superb training.

It went downhill from there.

The precinct officer continued by scoffing at my poor, flimsy, half-century-old Social Security card and commenting that she didn't think they should accept Social Security cards because it wasn't "real" identification to her (although she accepted it.)

Strike One.

Then she handed me my paper ballot. Kentucky has been using optical scan machines for several years now, although you can choose to use the old touch-screen machines if you want.

The paper ballot was for Democratic voters only - there was a separate one for repugs. My ballot had two two-person races on it. The second race was for the Democratic candidate in the open Fourth District Congressional race.

The first race was for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States.

And this was a problem.

There were two choices in that race. No, there was no convicted felon running against Barack Obama. Running against Barack Obama was some motherfucker named "UNCOMMITTED."

Strike Two.

I voted in Kentucky's 1996 presidential primary election, the last time there was an incumbent Democratic president on the ballot. I know for a fact there was no "UNCOMMITTED" challenging William Jefferson Clinton for the nomination.

The precinct officer admitted that the "UNCOMMITTED" line was new and unusual. She did not actually say it was appropriate because a ni**er was the only other candidate.

On the repug ballot, the candidates for president are Romney, Gingrich, Santorum, Paul and "UNCOMMITTED."

Here's what I think happened: somebody in the Secretary of State's office got wind of that little trick in West Virginia that put a criminal - but white! - on the ballot next to Barack Obama, thus depriving our duly elected and sworn President of the United States of 40 percent of the Democratic vote. It was too late to troll through the inmates at Eddyville to find a likely ringer, so they just substituted "UNCOMMITTED." They added "UNCOMMITTED" to the repug presidential candidates only because the current Secretary of State is nominally a Democratic office-holder and either would object to the obvious ni**er-bashing or be held accountable by national Democrats.

Kentucky's registered Democratic voters outnumber repugs almost two to one, but in national races (President, U.S. Senators, most U.S. Representatives) Kentucky almost always votes repug.

Yes, there are a lot of nominal "Democrats" who always vote repug, but I think that repugs win because many real Democratic voters stay home on election day, uninspired by the pathetic and cowardly worms like Steve Beshear and Ben Chandler who run for office on the Democratic ticket.

Secretary of State Allison Lundergan Grimes is predicting 10 - 12 percent turnout for today's primary. I think we'll be lucky to crack double digits.

The question is who will constitute that nine percent - real Democratic voters who will give Barack Obama an overwhelming victory, or repug-voting fake dems who will delight in sticking it to that ni**er in the White House by voting for "UNCOMMITTED?"

If the latter, then Strike Three.

UPDATE: Yep, Strike Three.

If the NDAA Is So Essential, Then Use It Right

Barack Obama is the most grown-up president we've had since Eisenhower. Yet even he cannot turn down unconstitutional power handed to him on a platter.

Adam Serwer at Mother Jones:

... there's a bipartisan group of Senators who want to protect the president's authority to imprison American citizens without proving they're guilty of anything at all. Barack Obama, for his part, hasn't weighed in on either side—but given that the president has promised never to attempt to use this power, it's a mystery why he wouldn't vocally oppose it. If Obama and his advisers believe this kind of indefinite detention is an anathema to due process, why not support a bipartisan effort to ensure that Americans' constitutional rights aren't dependent on the whim of whichever president is in office?

At least the battle lines here are clearly drawn in a way they weren't over last year's defense bill. One group of legislators thinks Americans can be deprived of their liberty in their own home country without a trial. The other thinks the government has to actually prove you're guilty of something first.

Or as Wonkette commenter Wile E. Quixote put it:

It's too bad that President Obama doesn't have my finely developed sense of irony. If Wile E. Quixote were in the Oval Office and was handed an Enabling Act like the NDAA by a bunch of teabaggers and craven Democratic dipshits like Carl Levin the first thing that President Quixote would do with his shiny new NDAA powers would be to declare everyone who voted for the NDAA a terrorist and have them sent to Gitmo. Just to be sure he'd also find all of the people who contirbuted to their campaigns, and everyone at Fox News, and send them there as well. Think of how much fun that would be.

Making Sure Obama Loses Even After He Wins

From Zandar, who always sees through the mothefuckers:

So in the world of Big Moron, Obama game a speech to an "empty arena". There's no downside to the lie, of course. It's not like our liberal media will call them on it. In fact, it's more likely they will repeat the lie until it becomes fact, then a trend consisting of facts, then a President locked in a tight race for his political survival (when the opposite its true.) It may demoralize voters. It will give observers the illusion of a close race, and of course the opinion-makers of the Village must be heeded in a situation like that. A boring, lop-sided competition becomes a razor-thin slugfest. You know, just like 2008 wasn't.

When he wins, it will be "How could he possibly have won when he gave campaign" rallies at empty arenas? He couldn't possibly have won without his Chicago thuggery! It must be VOTER FRAUD ON AN UNPRECEDENTED SCALE! IMPEACH! IMPEEEEEEEACH!"

And let's be honest: The next six months of this aren't really about helping Romney win. He can't and they know it. It's all about pre-emptively delegitimizing Obama's second term now. The plan really is simple. Six months of "empty arenas" and "unspectacular attendance" will prove that the polls showing the President ahead are all "suspect". When he wins, it will be "hard for the country to accept how it happened when nobody came to the President's rallies".

And that of course, Republican in Congress will have to investigate because the "people will be clamoring to know". The people lied to by Breitbart, and FOX, and Drudge, and the rest.

Really is that simple. How well it will work? For tens of millions who only get their info from FOX and still believe the President's birth certificate isn't real? For tens of millions more who get their news from the Villagers who insist only they have the power to see the future of this race that's "too close to call"?

No matter what happens, no matter what he accomplishes, Barack Obama will always be "that ni**er in the White House" to a certain segment of the population. The question is whether the rest of us will fight to keep the polite version of that from becoming conventional wisdom.

Words versus Actions

That President Obama has announced he is personally in favor of marriage equality means far less to me than the actual, concrete actions he has taken to alleviate discrimination against LGBT Americans: ending DADT, extending domestic partner rights to federal employees, refusing to defend DOMA.

But far too many of this administration's actions are sickeningly cowardly - and cowardly in a way that harms the nation far more than the president's personal support of gay marriage helps it.

George Zornick at The Nation:

WHO’S AFRAID OF REGULATION? In April, Senator James Inhofe released an old tape of EPA administrator Al Armendariz describing how the Romans once invaded villages and crucified people at random to make an example of them. “That town was really easy to manage for the next few years,” he quipped. Right-wing pundits and industry allies had a field day, suggesting that Armendariz was calling to “crucify” oil companies and selectively quoting him without further context. “Find people who are not compliant with the law,” Armendariz had continued, “and you hit them as hard as you can and you make examples out of them, and there is a deterrent effect there.” This is the definition of how regulatory action works.

Yet almost immediately, the Obama administration threw Armendariz under the bus. Press secretary Jay Carney called his comments “inaccurate as a representation of…the way that the EPA has operated under President Obama.” On April 29, Armendariz submitted his resignation letter, which was immediately accepted.

The administration may have wanted to avoid a distraction as it heads into the election, but in failing to defend Armendariz it failed to defend the basic principles of regulation. All he was saying was that without vigorous enforcement, regulation becomes an empty gesture. But it’s the sort of mistake Democrats love to make: prematurely bowing in the face of a manufactured mini-firestorm simply to take the talking point off the table. And it is symptomatic of an administration that has been consistently afraid of its own shadow when it comes to regulation.

Yes, words have power and consequences, but more so when they reinforce rather than contradict actions.

Obama Administration Spending: The Opposite of What Repugs Say It Is

Bless those repugs' hearts. Even after being called out time and time again on how they are wrong about everything, they're not discouraged. They keep on proving themselves even yet more wrong than ever before.

Determined little motherfuckers.

Blue Texan at Crooks and Liars:

Jonah Goldberg went on Piers Morgan Monday night to promote his latest "nanny-boo-boo liberals!" book, and belched up a favorite right-wing canard.

SNIP

But Jonah is, of course, totally, hilariously, absolutely wrong about this supposed spending binge under Obama.

First, as of 2011, Bush's policies had cost the country over $5T, compared to Obama's $1T.

You want to look at growth in government spending? Obama's lower than George W. Bush and Reagan.

What about government purchases of goods and services? Yep, they've collapsed under Obama.

Government employees? A record decline under Obama.

"Obama's record spending spree is bankrupting the nation" is yet another Big Lie right-wingers like Goldberg -- who incidentally was a cheerleader for Bush/Cheney while they were turning record surpluses into record deficits -- are telling about Obama. It's a lie Mitt Romney will tell during the campaign.

And it's a lie that the media will probably them get away with.

It's actually even wronger than that.

Adam Peck at ThinkProgress:

Republicans have continually decried the Obama Administration’s “runaway spending” since he took office, blaming him for growing deficits and a mounting national debt. But a quick glance at the facts show that, compared to George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, Obama is actually embracing fiscal conservatism more than any other president in recent history, with the exception of fellow Democrat Bill Clinton.

The Atlantic crunches the numbers:

For all the talk you hear about Obama’s historic spree, government spending actually hasn’t increased so dramatically under this president. The stimulus was big, but it’s over. It’s been replaced by, if not austerity (which has struck our states and cities) then a hard correction to the center.

Evidence of the cost-cutting measures employed by Obama can be found in the last several jobs reports. While the overall number of jobs created has steadily increased for the last several months, those advances have all come entirely in the private sector. Public sector jobs have actually been on the decline for much of the last year as government spending on some agencies and programs have been cut.

Economics Professor Mark Thoma provides a helpful chart on his blog that puts President Obama’s per capita spending into context, comparing it with the spending of every president in the last 40 years.



That’s likely a hard pill to swallow for Obama’s critics, who have spent years hammering his administration for record spending and fiscal irresponsibility. The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson put it best: “Going by federal expenditures…it would seem that if Obama’s a socialist, Ronald Reagan is Karl Marx with an ICBM.”

The irony, of course, is that our economy is still stuck in a depression because President Obama has not spent trillions of dollars on massive infrastructure projects that put Americans back to work.

If the president is going to campaign on his low spending, he'd be better off pitching it as a catastrophe for which the repugs are to blame.