The Day in a Picture

The Republican ‘War On Women’ – A ‘Conservative’ vision for America – ‘GOP adds ‘conscience clause’ to spending bill’

 

America. Where politicians and employers decide what health care you get based on their moral or religious values.

Now THAT’S American exceptionalism!!

Keep voting teabagger Republican…..Let’s clean up America!!
Washington (CNN) – ‘House Republicans have added a measure aimed at limiting contraceptive coverage to the spending bill coming up for a vote Saturday night, a spokesman for Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Kansas, told CNN’.

A senior House leadership aide confirmed that development’.

‘The so-called “conscience clause” would allow employers and insurers to opt out of preventative care for women which they find objectionable on moral or religious grounds. That prominently includes birth control, which most insurers are required to provide for free under current Obamacare rules’.
From : http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/09/28/gop-to-add-conscience-clause-to-spending-bill/

Blog Running – ‘If John Boehner Knows What’s Good For Him, He’ll Shut Down the Government’

 

Speaker Boehner is the actual ‘dog; in the ‘tail wagging the dog’.

‘What the hell is John Boehner thinking? I don’t mean that strictly in a rhetorical sense, though it’s hard not to slap your head when you see the most powerful Republican in the country lurching from one cockamamie strategy to another’.

‘The conventional wisdom is that Boehner cares most about avoiding a government shutdown, since he knows how damaging it would be to the Republican Party, which would take the overwhelming share of the blame’.

‘But while it’s certainly the case that Boehner thinks a shutdown would be terrible for the party, and that he’d prefer to avoid one, it’s not at all clear it’s in his interest to do so’.

‘Why’?

‘Because there are two things Boehner presumably cares about more than avoiding a shutdown’:

‘not being ousted as Speaker’,

‘and raising the debt ceiling by mid-to-late October so as to avoid a debt default’.

‘The latter would be far more damaging to the economy than a shutdown, and therefore more devastating to the Republican brand’

‘Unfortunately for Boehner, the only plausible way to both keep his job and avoid a debt default is … to shut down the government when the fiscal year ends next week’.

‘Here’s why’:

‘Tea Party conservatives in the House, following the lead the distinguished non-filibusterer from Texas, are all keyed up for a confrontation with Obama in which they refuse to fund the government unless they can simultaneously defund (or rather, “defund”) Obmacare’.

‘The Democratic Senate and the president obviously aren’t going along with this. So the only way to avoid a shutdown is for Boehner to walk it back, which conservatives will regard as a humiliating retreat’.

‘Suppose Boehner surrenders in this way and avoids a shutdown’.

‘The only way he’s likely to keep his job in the face of the inevitable conservative backlash is to promise a for-real-this-time confrontation a few weeks later, in which the House insists on a year-long delay for the individual mandate, the linchpin of Obamcare, in exchange for raising the debt ceiling’.

‘Problem is, Obama has absolutely refused to negotiate over the debt limit in any way’.

‘He’s been remarkably consistent on this point, going so far as to call Boehner on Friday night for no other reason than to inform him he still wasn’t negotiating’.

‘ (It was about as close as you get as president to calling up a high office-holder and telling him to go f*** himself. I admired it greatly.)’

‘Which means one of two things is probably going to happen if we avoid a shutdown’:

‘Either John Boehner is going to turn around and appease irate conservatives by insisting on delaying Obamacare in exchange for raising the debt limit, thereby sending the government into default (since Obama isn’t negotiating)’.

‘Or he’s going to back down and allow the debt ceiling to be raised with a minority of House Republicans and a majority of House Democrats, thereby further infuriating conservatives and almost certainly costing himself his job’.

‘(Recall that conservatives got more than halfway to the number of defections they needed to oust Boehner back in January, after he’d merely allowed a vote on a small tax increase when a much bigger one was kicking in automatically.)’

‘That is, either Boehner gets it or the global economy gets it, both of which Boehner would like to avoid even more than he’d like to avoid a shutdown’.
From : http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114857/john-boehner-needs-government-shutdown-avoid-debt-default

Stories From The Fringe – ‘Kansas Christians Sue To Stop Science In Schools’

“We Want A Dark Age”
“We Want A Dark Age”
“We Want A Dark Age”
‘Such is the case with a most curious pair of lawsuits that are being filed by various Christian groups in Kansas’.

‘The groups have filed two lawsuits against the state Board of Education in Kansas, which recently decided to implement a set of science standards in all public schools across the state’.

‘The groups are angry because they feel that their beliefs should be given some consideration in science classes’.

‘One group, the Pacific Justice Institute, says that the teaching of science in all schools would “create a hostile learning environment for those of faith.”

‘The second group, Citizens for Objective Public Education (COPE, Inc.), filed its lawsuit on Sept. 26th, accused that the state’s new standards “will have the effect of causing Kansas public schools to establish and endorse a non-theistic religious worldview” in violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments’.

‘Perhaps the most laughable part of all of this is what Pacific Justice Institute’s Brad Dachus said’.

‘He actually believes that it is a violation of a child’s rights to teach that creationism isn’t true’.

‘Dachus said’:

“(I)t’s an egregious violation of the rights of Americans to subject students — as young as five — to an authoritative figure such as a teacher who essentially tells them that their faith is wrong”.

‘Nobody teaches that anyone’s faith is wrong, Mr. Dachus’.

‘They simply teach scientific fact, something you obviously know nothing about’.

‘Further, if you want your beliefs given credence in science classrooms, that means Islam, Paganism, and all the rest have to be given equal credence’.

‘If you wish to use the Constitution in this battle, remember that it applies to everyone’s faiths, not just yours’.
From : http://www.addictinginfo.org/2013/09/27/kansas-christians-sue-stop-science-schools/

 

I come to praise government, not to bury it!.

“We must get back to the basics of government and let the federal government do what it has always done best, put people to work rebuilding our infrastructure”.

Okie Progressive

It never ceases to amaze me that we somehow keep electing people to public office that hate our government and all that it stands for. They seem to know almost nothing about the history of our nation, our founders or how we came to be. Their main focus is on destroying our democratic republic that was founded to – as the preamble of the constitution put it, ‘form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,….’
How is it possible to form a more perfect union if your only intention is to destroy all that it stands for and wreck every institution of government that carries out what our nation was founded to do?

The principles of government as laid out by our founders is clear, simple…

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A ‘Conservative’ vision for America – ‘WHERE THE G.O.P.’S SUICIDE CAUCUS LIVES’

‘Representative Government’.

A small minority of mostly white men have the power to tell America how it will be governed.

This is the tea party. Republican extremism. And it is how we will be governed because the mainstream Republican Party is afraid of the tea party.

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‘Seventy-six of the members who signed the Meadows letter are male. Seventy-nine of them are white’.

‘These eighty members represent just eighteen per cent of the House and just a third of the two hundred and thirty-three House Republicans’.

‘They were elected with fourteen and a half million of the hundred and eighteen million votes cast in House elections last November, or twelve per cent of the total’.

 

‘In all, they represent fifty-eight million constituents. That may sound like a lot, but it’s just eighteen per cent of the population’.

‘Obama defeated Romney by four points nationally. But in the eighty suicide-caucus districts, Obama lost to Romney by an average of twenty-three points. The Republican members themselves did even better. In these eighty districts, the average margin of victory for the Republican candidate was thirty-four points’.

‘On August 21st, Congressman Mark Meadows sent a letter to John Boehner. Meadows is a former restaurant owner and Sunday-school Bible teacher from North Carolina. He’s been in Congress for eight months. Boehner, who has served in Congress for twenty-two years, is the Speaker of the House and second in the line of succession if anything happened to the President’.

‘Meadows was not pleased with how Boehner and his fellow Republican leaders in the House were approaching the September fight over spending. The annual appropriations to fund the government were scheduled to run out on October 1st, and much of it would stop operating unless Congress passed a new law. Meadows wanted Boehner to use the threat of a government shutdown to defund Obamacare, a course Boehner had publicly ruled out’.

“Since most of the citizens we represent believe that ObamaCare should never go into effect,” the letter said, “we urge you to affirmatively de-fund the implementation and enforcement of ObamaCare in any relevant appropriations bill brought to the House floor in the 113th Congress, including any continuing appropriations bill.”

‘They ended the letter with a stirring reference to Madison:

‘James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 58 that the “power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon … for obtaining a redress of every grievance…” We look forward to collaborating to defund one of the largest grievances in our time and to restore patient-centered healthcare in America.
Not everyone thought it was a terrific idea or one worthy of comparison to the brilliance of the Founders’.

‘Noting the strategic ineptness of threatening a government shutdown over a policy that neither the Democratically controlled Senate nor the President himself would ever support, Karl Rove railed against the idea in the Wall Street Journal. The conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer dubbed the eighty Republicans the “suicide caucus.”
From : http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/09/meadows-boehner-defund-obamacare-suicide-caucus-geography.html?currentPage=all
‘And yet, a few weeks later, Boehner adopted the course demanded by Meadows and his colleagues’.

‘The ability of eighty members of the House of Representatives to push the Republican Party into a strategic course that is condemned by the party’s top strategists is a historical oddity’. It’s

‘It’s specially strange when you consider some of the numbers behind the suicide caucus. As we approach a likely government shutdown this month and then a more perilous fight over raising the debt ceiling in October, it’s worth considering the demographics and geography of the eighty districts whose members have steered national policy over the past few weeks.

‘House GOP Just Showed Why Obama Can’t Compromise on the Debt Ceiling’

 

Here we go again……
2 years later – holding America hostage – again!

‘The reason is that Republicans are essentially asking for an end to constitutional government in the United States and its replacement by a wholly novel system’.

‘From Jonathan Strong’s report at NRO, what Republicans want in exchange for agreeing to not default on the national debt is’ :

• ‘a one year delay of Obamacare’,
• ‘Paul Ryan’s tax reform’,
• ‘the Keystone XL pipeline’,
• ‘partial repeal of the Clean Air Act’,
• ‘partial repeal of bank regulation legislation’,
• ‘Medicare cuts’,
• ‘cuts in several anti-poverty programs’,
• ‘making it harder to launch medical malpractice lawsuits’,
• ‘more drilling on federal land’,
• ‘blocking net neutrality’,

‘and a suite of changes designed to make it harder for regulatory agencies to crack the whip’.
From : http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/09/26/house_debt_ceiling_bill_shows_why_compromise_is_unthinkable.html

A ‘Conservative’ vision for America – ‘Nearly Four In Ten American Workers Are Living Paycheck To Paycheck Each Week’

 

THIS is what the Republicans should be ‘demanding’ in raising the debt…..Help for the middle class.

But no.

Instead they want to ‘help’ big oil, ‘help’ wall street and cut social services  grants that help fund ‘Meals on Wheels’.

Thank you Republicans for doing ‘the people’s work’.

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‘More than four years since the economy shifted from recession to recovery, 36 percent of U.S. workers always or usually live paycheck to paycheck according to a survey released Wednesday by CareerBuilder.com. Another 40 percent say they sometimes do’.

But the great news is ‘While workers have not yet bounced back from the financial crisis, bosses and corporations have’.

‘The ratio of CEO pay to worker pay hit 273-to-1 in the most recent figures’.

‘Bank profits are back to record highs five years on from the Wall Street collapse’.

‘Taxpayers continue to subsidize executive compensation, and executive compensation continues to be disconnected from actual executive performance’.
From : http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/09/26/2686691/nearly-four-in-ten-americans-are-living-paycheck-to-paycheck-each-week/

Turn Texas Blue – ‘Wendy Davis tells Democrats she’s in’

 

‘Texas state Sen. Wendy Davis and her advisers have begun informing influential Democrats that she intends to run for governor in 2014, according to multiple sources familiar with Davis’s conversations’.

‘The Fort Worth legislator made a national name for herself in June when she mounted a filibuster against new proposed abortion clinic regulations’.

‘Texas Republicans ultimately passed those restrictions into law in a special session called by outgoing Republican Gov. Rick Perry’.

‘Davis advisers declined to confirm that she will enter the governor’s race, but Davis consultant Hector Nieto said the senator has made up her mind about 2014 and will unveil her plans next week’.

“Sen. Davis has decided what she will do and she looks forward to making that announcement with her grass-roots supporters on Oct. 3,” Nieto said’.
From : http://www.politico.com/story/2013/09/wendy-davis-texas-2014-97410.html

 

One Man’s Trash – teabagger Alert!! – ‘Second Northern California County Votes To Secede’

 

They ‘want their Country back’ and found out most of us actually like America so the teabaggers have decided to take just the parts where they live.

‘A second county might join a northern California county’s bid to secede and form a new state of “Jefferson.” As other northern California and southern Oregon counties consider the remote possibility, the Modoc County Board of Supervisors voted 4-0 Tuesday in favor of seceding’.

From : http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/09/26/2688621/second-northern-california-county-votes-to-consider-secession/