Gee whiz! What a surprise THIS is!
Former Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) believes women have no place in elite military units, he said Tuesday in a Facebook post accusing President Barack Obama and the Defense Department of enacting a policy change that does not take combat roles seriously enough.
“Being in close quarters special operations combat units is not a social gathering,” he said, reacting to news that women will be able to start training as Army Rangers and Navy SEALs starting in the next few years. “There is no equality in close combat. The goal is simple: you physically ...
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THIS is going to confuse the hell out of some wingnuts:
Bill Ayers [above] believes President Obama should be put on trial for war crimes at The Hague, the Weather Underground co-founder told Real Clear Politics in an interview posted Tuesday.
Ayers told the website he “absolutely” believed the president was engaged in terrorism for his use of drone strikes in fighting the war on terror.
“Absolutely. Every president in this century should be put on trial, every one of them,” Ayers said. “For war crimes. Absolutely.”
Ayers also said he would give the president a “failing” grade, while admitting ...
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The U.S. Constitution requires supermajority votes in the Senate only in very limited circumstances — mainly to approve treaties and override presidential vetoes.
The Founding Fathers had no intention that a supermajority would be required for Senate approval of ordinary legislation or confirmation of presidential appointees. There’s nothing in the Constitution about Senate filibusters.
But we have reached the point in recent years where almost nothing gets approved without the votes of 60 senators — especially in light of the Senate minority leader’s solemn vow to block anything and everything supported by President Obama.
Which bring us to THIS SITUATION...
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The leaflet above was circulated in the Dallas area a few weeks before John Kennedy was assassinated there 50 years ago.
Need I say more?...
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Steve Benen NAILS IT:
When opponents of a bill are reduced to talking about the literal, physical size of the legislation, they’ve completely given up on the pretense that public policy matters. If opponents of immigration reform want to debate the merits of the proposal, great. But focusing on pages and pounds is the absolute worst form of debate.
This came up quite a big during the fight over health care reform — it was easier for the right to count the number of pages in the Affordable Care Act than debate it on the merits — so let’s ...
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You may have heard or read today that there was a rash of shootings in Chicago over the weekend, and at least seven people were killed (HERE).
But you probably have not heard something Chicago Police spokesman Adam Collins SAID this morning:
While we’ve had fewer murders to date this year than any year since the mid-1960s, there’s more work to be done and we won’t rest until everyone in Chicago enjoys the same sense of safety.
Did you get that? Fewer murders to date this year than any year since the mid-1960s.
How can that be? How ...
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And guess who wrote the majority opinion in THIS CASE:
In an opinion by conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, a 7-2 Supreme Court held this morning that an Arizona law requiring voting officials to reject voter registration forms that are “not accompanied by concrete evidence of citizenship” conflicts with a federal law requiring states to use a uniform voter registration form for federal elections. Scalia once justified an anti-immigrant opinion with a reference to laws exclusing “freed blacks” from Southern states, and he called the Voting Rights Act a “perpetuation of racial entitlement. So his authorship of this opinion is ...
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HERE‘s another chapter in the ongoing drama we call “Demography Is Destiny”:
Sen. Lindsey Graham [above] — one of the Republican co-sponsors of an immigration reform bill that would provide a pathway to citizenship for the nation’s 11.1 million undocumented immigrations — told fellow Republicans that the GOP will fail to exist if reform does not become law.
“If we don’t pass immigration reform , if we don’t get it off the table in a reasonable, practical way, it doesn’t matter who you run in 2016,” Graham warned during on appearance Sunday on NBC’s Meet The Press. “We’re in
...
Back in 2006, when George W. Bush was president and Republicans controlled both houses of Congress, legislation known as the Warning, Alert and Response Network Act — or the WARN Act, for short — was passed and signed into law.
Under terms of the act, AMBER and Emergency alerts are automatically sent to your phone unless you switch them off via settings. But “presidential alerts,” which are issued only in the most dire of national emergencies, cannot be blocked.
Well, of course, that was all well and good before Barack Obama became president. But now it’s cause for wingnuts to ...
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Sarah Palin, political guru to the brainless, said this the other day in arguing against American military intervention in Syria:
“Let Allah sort it out.”
One can imagine that more than a few Islamophobes chortled like crazy at that clever remark.
But a question arises: Was Palin, in effect, mocking God?
There’s always been a lot of hair-splitting on the matter of whether Muslims, Jews and Christians all believe in the same God. But one basic fact remains: Islam, Judaism and Christianity are all monotheistic faiths rooted in Abrahamism. They all stem from the God of Abraham.
Then, too, there’s ...
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The following is adapted from a blog post I wrote two years ago yesterday:
–The oldest teens at the dawn of the rock ‘n’ roll era are now turning 77 years of age.
–The youngest voters when Ronald Reagan was first elected president will turn 51 this year.
–My paternal grandfather was born during the presidency of Abraham Lincoln.
–Does anyone who doesn’t work in local television call the Rockford area “the stateline”?
–Wouldn’t you love to see a debate between Harvard Law School graduates Barack Obama and Ted Cruz (with no interruptions allowed)?
–The TV networks are run by ...
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As I see it, the most offensive thing about this clip is that the lunatic Beck is wearing a Chicago Blackhawks hat.
This one’s for all you dads out there:
Emily Bazelon TRACES the roots of a myth:
At a congressional hearing Wednesday, Rep. Trent Franks [above, right], a Republican from Arizona, argued against an exception for rape and incest victims from a ban on abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. He said, “…[T]he incidence of rape resulting in pregnancy are very low.” He is of course following in the footsteps of former Rep. Todd Akin [above, left] of Missouri, who said that women can stave off pregnancy after a “legitimate rape.”
These claims are false, of course, or as the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists puts it, “medically ...
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As the chart above makes clear, lots of rank-and-file Republicans and Democrats have changed their minds about National Security Agency surveillance over the past seven years.
Seth Masket argues HERE that such flip-flopping is defensible:
In my view, it’s hard for poll respondents to evaluate NSA surveillance, or any powerful government tool, without considering who’s in charge of it.
When people are asked what they think about the government having this power, they’re implicitly being asked what they think about President Obama having this power. Is it really hackish for people to be more comfortable with a governmental power if ...
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Here’s an example of the worst — and best — kinds of Americans MAKING THEMSELVES HEARD:
When Darius Rucker canceled plans to sing the national anthem ahead of Game 3 of the NBA Finals, the San Antonio Spurs asked Sebastien De La Cruz to do the honors. De La Cruz, an 11-year-old Mexican-American, is a San Antonio resident who appeared as a singer on America’s Got Talent last year, and he didn’t disappoint.
That the Spurs chose a Latino boy in a mariachi suit quickly became a controversy, with social media users asking why an “illegal alien” was singing ...
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I doubt that this message will do much good, but it’s worth saying anyway.
Of all the candidates for the Republican presidential nomination last year — Romney, Gingrich, Perry, Bachmann, et al — the most sanctimonious was Rick Santorum.
As such, the former senator from Pennsylvania frequently was grist for this snarky blogger’s mill (see HERE).
And now Santorum, by way of offering HIS ANALYSIS of Mitt Romney’s loss to Barack Obama, is sounding like a candidate for the GOP nomination in 2016:
Santorum did not mention Romney, whom he challenged in the primaries, by name during a 21-minute speech in a dim ballroom at the Marriott (a company on whose board Romney ...
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Every time President Obama does anything even remotely resembling leisure, the right-wing noise machine spews high dudgeon — as if to suggest, of course, that the uppity black dude is characteristically lazy.
The truth is that Obama will never come close to George W. Bush as a presidential vacation-taker. Indeed, Bush spent one-third of his eight-year presidency on vacation, as we see HERE:
Calls to several Presidential libraries reveal that President Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, was on vacation more — 1,020 days — than any U.S. President since Herbert Hoover and possibly more than any other President in ...
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As an inveterate court-watcher, I find THIS STORY especially interesting:
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts on Wednesday took the rare step of ordering a review of a powerful federal judge accused of making denigrating statements against minorities and people with mental disabilities.
Roberts formally ordered the District of Columbia circuit court to review the complaints against Judge Edith Jones [above] of Houston, who sits on the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.
The complaint, filed by a group of civil rights organizations, legal ethics experts, and law professors, alleges that Jones made a number of inappropriate remarks at a ...
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