"Today House Speaker John Boehner struck back with his plan to cut spending by demanding Obama come up with Boehner's plan to cut spending."
"The U.S. Census Bureau says that by the year 2043 white people will be in the minority in the United States. By that time, the country will be 15 percent black, 31 percent Hispanic, and 1 percent Republican."-- Jay Leno
Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association will forever now be known as America’s maddest gunman.
In style and substance, his performance Friday in delivering his organization’s response to the Newtown massacre revealed the obsessive, lunatic paranoia behind its worship of firearms.
A week after a gunman armed with an assault rifle murdered 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, and ever so shortly after the bells there tolled for the dead, LaPierre lashed out at everyone and everything but the weapons that were used to kill.
Still worse, in his arrogance and in his sense that terrible forces are out to get him, LaPierre was callous to the raw agony of the families of the slain. The hell with them — he made clear that he will fight to maintain the easy availability of assault weaponry of the kind that killed their kids.
1. "[O]ur society is populated by an unknown number of genuine monsters — people so deranged, so evil, so possessed by voices and driven by demons that no sane person can possibly ever comprehend them."
2. "How many more copycats are waiting in the wings for their moment of fame — from a national media machine that rewards them with the wall-to-wall attention and sense of identity that they crave."
3. "There exists in this country a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells, and sows, violence against its own people."
4. "Isn't fantasizing about killing people as away to get your kicks really the filthiest form of pornography?"
In a stinging setback for Republican House Speaker John Boehner, a lack of support from inside his own party for his “fiscal cliff” fall-back plan forced him late Thursday to cancel a much-trumpeted vote on the measure.
“The House did not take up the tax measure today because it did not have sufficient support from our members to pass,” Boehner said in a written statement released after an emergency meeting of House Republicans.The measure, dubbed “Plan B,” would have let Bush-era tax cuts expire on income above $1 million annually, while extending them for everyone else. It appeared that Boehner faced a rebellion from conservatives opposed to any tax hike, while House Democrats starved the bill of their support, making passage impossible.
Boehner’s dramatic defeat cast fresh doubt on efforts to avert the “fiscal cliff” and spare Americans across-the-board income tax hikes come Jan. 1. Those increases, coupled with deep automatic spending cuts scheduled to take effect the same day, could plunge the fragile economy into a new recession. Talks between the speaker and President Barack Obama were at a stalemate, according to aides on both sides.After the cancellation of the vote, Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor announced on Twitter the House "has concluded legislative business for the week. The House will return after the Christmas holiday when needed."
As a simple matter of arithmetic, if House Republicans aren't prepared to follow their own leadership and support a list of right-wing goodies, Boehner and the rest of the GOP leadership must realize that the road to 218 votes runs through the Democratic caucus -- if the Speaker can't pass a bill with his own side's support, he's going to need Nancy Pelosi's help.
Since Boehner has already deliberately blown up his talks with the White House, it will be very tough for the Speaker to give Obama a sheepish call, saying, "Maybe we can give this another shot?" The more likely scenario is that the president will have to quickly begin a very different set of discussions: finding a bill that can generate bipartisan support in the Senate, satisfies Pelosi and House Dems, and can generate the support of a couple dozen House Republicans.
All of this will have to happen, of course, over the course of about 10 days -- two of which are Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.
Last night, House GOP leaders also announced they're leaving town, possibly to return next week. After last night, there was no real point in them sticking around, anyway.
“I want my Republican brothers and sisters who have taken exception to some of the things I’ve said over the past year about us going in the wrong direction as a party — offending swing voters, offending the middle class — I want you to look at those numbers and just breathe them in,” Scarborough said. The party is in a “sorry state,” he added.
He then went on to hit Republican leaders for their “complete, utter silence” on key issues following the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. He asked: Is this the party of assault weapons or lower taxes? Contraception wars or balanced budgets?
“This party has painted itself into an extreme corner by going down all these various rabbit trails that have nothing to do with our core of who we are as a party of small government,” Scarborough argued. “I can’t think of any time the Republican Party, my Republican Party, has been in such disarray — since 1974 after Richard Nixon resigned.”
We've covered how President Obama needs the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to justify detention powers he has used for the past four years, but there's another reason he needs it: drones.
At the heart of both issues is the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), which gives the president authority "to use all necessary and appropriate force against those ... [who] aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001 or harbored such organizations or persons."
Congress stripped a provision Tuesday from a defense bill that aimed to shield Americans from the possibility of being imprisoned indefinitely without trial by the military. The provision was replaced with a passage that appears to give citizens little protection from indefinite detention.
The amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2013 was added by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), but there was no similar language in the version of the bill that passed the House, and it was dumped from the final bill released Tuesday after a conference committee from both chambers worked out a unified measure.
According to the new HuffPost/YouGov survey, only 25 percent of Americans said that torture of suspected terrorists who may know details about future attacks is never justified. Nineteen percent said it is always justified, 28 percent said it is sometimes justified, and 16 percent said it is rarely justified. The 41 percent of respondents who said torture is rarely or never justified are outnumbered by the 47 percent who said it is always or sometimes justified.
You might think that “spokesman for the National Rifle Association” is the toughest job in PR. You might be wrong. At least once a year, and several times in bad years, reporters reach out to the NRA’s Andrew Arulanandam and ask him whether the gun lobby has anything to say about the latest massacre. Arulanandam says basically the same thing, every time.
After the April 16, 2007, Virginia Tech shootings that killed 32 people: “The NRA joins the entire country in expressing our deepest condolences to the families of Virginia Tech University and everyone else affected by this horrible tragedy. Our thoughts and prayers are with the families.”
After the Feb. 14, 2008, shootings at Northern Illinois University that killed six: “We think it is poor form for a politician or a special interest group to try to push a legislative agenda on the back of any tragedy. Now is the time for the Northern Illinois University community to grieve and to heal. We believe there is adequate time down the road to debate policy and politics."
After the April 3, 2009, massacre at a Binghamton, N.Y., immigration center that killed 13: “Now is not the time to debate politics or discuss policy. It's time for the families and communities to grieve.”
After the Jan. 8, 2011, shooting spree that wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and killed six: “At this time, anything other than prayers for the victims and their families would be inappropriate.”
After the July 20, 2012, massacre at an Aurora, Colo., theater that left 12 dead and 58 wounded: “We believe that now is the time for families to grieve and for the community to heal. There will be an appropriate time down the road to engage in political and policy discussions.”
The “appropriate time” never arrives. It’s an ingenious communications strategy, one that removes the NRA from stories about the latest national outrages. When the outrage fades, the NRA returns in full flush. Just a week before the Newtown, Conn., shootings, Arulanandam told a reporter that the NRA was “planning for the worst” and had “told people to plan for gun bans and a Supreme Court stacked with anti-gun judges.”
When asked at Monday's press briefing about the gun lobby's influence on potential action, White House spokesman Jay Carney responded, without specifically mentioning that lobby, "I think we all recognize that this is a complex problem and there are obstacles to taking action coming from a variety of places. What the president hopes is that everyone steps back and looks at the situation that has to be addressed and thinks broadly and thoughtfully about how we can move forward."
Every twelve years, most Texas state agencies undergo a process called the sunset review, during which the public can weigh in on the performance of the agencies under review.The Texas agency tasked with pipeline oversight -- the Texas Railroad Commission -- is currently under review, and Tar Sands Blockade is calling upon the Sunset Advisory Commission to demand the 83rd Texas Legislature provide immediate relief to property owners who have been bullied and defrauded by TransCanada and other pipeline companies through the Railroad Commission’s nonexistent oversight.
Tar Sands Blockade is collecting signatories to our statement below regarding Eminent Domain Abuse and Tar Sands Fraud to deliver them in person to the Sunset Advisory Commission’s Public Testimony hearing on Wednesday, December 19 in Austin, TX.
Please sign on to the following statement by filling out the short form here.
A fourth potential candidate, Rodolfo "Rudy" Reyes, said he intends to announce his candidacy on Friday.
"If nominated, I am now convinced that the confirmation process would be lengthy, disruptive and costly—to you and to our most pressing national and international priorities," Rice wrote in a letter to President Barack Obama, NBC News first reported.
“No senator since Al Gore knows as much about the science and diplomacy of climate change as Kerry,” said David Goldwyn, an international energy consultant who served as Clinton’s special envoy and coordinator for international energy affairs. “He would not only put climate change in the top five issues he raises with every country, but he would probably rethink our entire diplomatic approach to the issue.”
Former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel has emerged as the leading candidate to become Obama’s next Secretary of Defense and may be nominated as soon as this month, according to two people familiar with the matter.
