Month: February 2010

GOP Demands White House Post Health Care Proposal Online, Then Attacks When WH Does

Posted on by TL

Three cheers to the Party of No! If Obama does anything, the GOP is against it, even if they specifically asked him to do it.

No matter what it is.

From Open Left:

On February 8th, Republican House leader John Beohner sent a letter to the White House, demanding that the White House post online any health care proposal it wished to discuss at the health care summit:

If the President intends to present any kind of legislative proposal at this discussion, will he make it available to members of Congress and the American people at least 72 hours beforehand?

So, four days later, the White House accepted this demand, and announced it would post a legislative proposal online more than 72 hours before the summit:

Since this meeting will be most productive if information is widely available before the meeting, we will post online the text of a proposed health insurance reform package.

Boehner’s response defies logic:

Boehner’s condemnation comes as the White House announced it would post comprehensive healthcare reform legislation online before the meeting. The Ohio Republican said it is now clear that Democrats intend to move ahead on their own course regardless of negotiations.

"A productive bipartisan discussion should begin with a clean sheet of paper," Boehner said in a statement. "We now know that instead of starting the ‘bipartisan’ health care ‘summit’ on Feb. 25 with a clean sheet of paper, the president and his party intend to arrive with a new bill written behind closed doors exclusively by Democrats– a backroom deal that will transform one-sixth of our nation’s economy and affect every family and small business in America."

Boehner’s request is not ancient history; it happened February 8 of this year.

There you have it, the Party of No. Impossible to work with at every turn.

Time for Reconciliation, to keep Democracy moving.

Nod to Americablog for this.

Gay-Rights Activists Stage Valentine’s Day Protest at Holy Name Cathedral

Posted on by TL

From the Chicago Tribune:

Attending Mass at Holy Name Cathedral was supposed to be one of the final Valentine’s Day weekend treats for Cindy White and her husband, who had traveled to Chicago from Hampshire, Ill., to celebrate the romantic holiday.

Instead, the couple found themselves wading through nearly 100 men and women who had gathered outside the cathedral Sunday morning to protest the Catholic Church’s opposition to gay marriage and other stances that they see as unjust to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

The protesters waved rainbow flags and shouted slogans like, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, homophobia has got to go!” and, “Holy Name, holy shame!”

According to the Tribune, last year, the Gay Liberation Network helped organize a march from the city building in which marriage licenses are issued to Holy Name to show support for gay marriage, said Andy Thayer, the group’s co-founder.

“We want to drag the church’s bigotry out of the closet,” said Thayer, 49.

The response from Church officials somewhat was less than Christian. Colleen Dolan, spokeswoman for the Chicago Archdiocese, called the protestors “misdirected.”

“They may not like it, but it’s the teaching of the church that marriage is between one man and one woman,” Dolan said. “Those of us in the church don’t get to choose what the teachings are.”

So who does the choosing? Who, exactly, are “those of us in the church?” The People of God, as the Church teaches? Dolan’s is an interesting, and ultimately shallow, response.

Let the colors fly with the stained glass at last.

More on this story at the Trib.

Senator Evan Bayh Expected to Announce Retirement

Posted on by TL

From our friends at ENEWSPF:

From CNN:

Sen. Evan Bayh is expected to announce Monday that he will not seek a third term in the Senate, a source close to the Indiana Democrat told CNN.

Political speculation from AmericaBlog:

Bayh may have really screwed the Democrats here. I just looked up the filing requirements for Senate primary candidates in Indiana. The CAN-4 form, which can be located here, titled, INDIANA PETITION FOR PRIMARY BALLOT PLACEMENT AS A CANDIDATE FOR UNITED STATES SENATOR, states:

INSTRUCTIONS: This petition is used to nominate candidates for placement on the May 4, 2010 Democratic or Republican Primary Election Ballot for the office of United States Senator. Petitioners are not required to provide precinct and congressional district information. The county voter registration office will complete this information after the petition is filed. Each candidate must also complete a Declaration of Candidacy for Primary Nomination form (CAN-2). This petition must be filed with the appropriate county voter registration office for processing beginning January 4, 2010, and no later than NOON, February 16, 2010.

That means Democrats might only have until tomorrow at noon to get a candidate on the ballot. I’m going to check further on this.

Some more political speculation from ABC News:

The decision blows a sizeable hole in the Democrats’ 2010 lineup, in a state that Republicans have long eyed as a prime pick-up opportunity. The retirement is likely to intensify chatter about the GOP’s chances to take over the Senate this year.

"After all these years, my passion for service to my fellow citizens is undiminished, but my desire to do so by serving in Congress has waned," Bayh plans to say, according to excerpts obtained by The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza.

Republicans recently coaxed former Sen. Dan Coats, R-Ind., into running for Bayh’s seat, which he held before Bayh was elected to two terms. Coats’ candidacy got off to a slow start, with questions about his lobbying clients and his residency, though Bayh’s exit makes this a much easier race for any Republican.

The Democrats need to get overthemselves and turn to reconciliation to start passing positive and much-needed legislation. The Republicans used reconciliation to force the Bush tax cuts through Congress and there was barely a whimper from the press or the public. The Democrats were perceived at the time as weak. Republicans were perceived as "savvy" and "cunning."

Now the Democrats are worried about making the Republicans "angry." And that’s too bad.

Time for the Democrats to grow a pair, as Howard Dean said. Now.

This could turn into quite the

Joe the Plumber Says He’s Done with John McCain and Sarah Palin

Posted on by TL

Joe the Plumber

Joe "the Plumber" Wurzelbacher lashed out at Senator John McCain Saturday at a campaign rally Saturday in Pennsylvania for long shot gubernatorial candidate Sam Rohrer.

From CNN:

"John McCain is no public servant," Wurzelbacher said at a campaign rally Saturday in Pennsylvania for long shot gubernatorial candidate Sam Rohrer. Later, in an interview with Pennsylvania Public Radio, he dismissed the suggestion that he owes his fame to McCain.

"I don’t owe him s-," Wurzelbacher said. "He really screwed my life up, is how I look at it."

"McCain was trying to use me," he said. "I happened to be the face of middle Americans. It was a ploy."

Wurzelbacher is apparently finished with Sarah Palin as well since she is backing John McCain’s re-election bid in Arizona.

Apparently the Democrats aren’t the only ones turning on each other. The G.O.P. circular firing squad is in place.

Perhaps Wurzelbacher is trying to put together his own reactionary, right-wing, ultra-Libertarian campaign for some office somewhere? What party would have him?

Frank Rich: Sarah Palin Is No Cunning Linguist

Posted on by TL

New York Times columnist Frank Rich makes it clear in today’s column that Sarah Palin has not set a trap for liberals all over the world when she wrote crib notes on the palm of her hand last week to carry her through speeches and interviews at a Tea Party convention. Calling Palin "nothing if not cunning," Rich first asks us to consider if Palin, by playing stupid, is actually engaged in a brilliant scheme to cement "her cred with the third of the country that is her base. Her hand hieroglyphics may not have been speaking aids but bait."

Is Sarah Palin a brilliant, master baiter? Not at all.

More from Frank Rich, who is almost even-handed in his criticisms of Repbulicans and Democrats, for now, at least, beginning with a poke at President Obama:

Instead of praising bailed-out bankers, the president might have more profitably instructed his press secretary to drop the lame Palin jokes and dismantle the disinformation campaign her speech delivered to a national audience. Palin, unlike Obama, put herself on the side of the angels, railing against Wall Street’s bonuses and bailout, even though she and John McCain had supported TARP during the campaign. Palin also bragged that she had “joined with other conservative governors” in “rejecting some” stimulus dollars when in reality she rejected only a symbolic 3 percent of those dollars — soon to be overruled by the Alaskan Legislature, which took every last buck.

This disingenuousness is old hat for Palin, who hired lobbyists to pursue $27 million in earmarks while serving as mayor of the town of Wasilla (pop. 6,700) and loudly defended her state’s “bridge to nowhere” until her politically opportunistic flip-flop. What’s new is the extent to which her test-marketed dishonesty has now become the template for her peers in the G.O.P. “populist” putsch. Adopting her example — while unencumbered by her political baggage — the party is exploiting the Tea Party movement to rebrand itself as un-Washington while quietly conducting business as usual in the capital.

There’s “no difference” between G.O.P. and Tea Party beliefs, claims the House Republican leader, John Boehner. Not exactly. The three senators named “porkers of the month” for December by the nonpartisan Citizens Against Government Waste were all Republicans: Richard Shelby of Alabama, Susan Collins of Maine and Thad Cochran of Mississippi. Shelby is so unashamedly addicted to earmarks that he used a senatorial “hold” to halt confirmation votes on 70 Obama administration appointees until his costly shopping list of Alabama pork projects was granted. Or so he did until his over-the-top theatrics earned him unwelcome attention and threatened to derail his party’s pious antispending posturing.

While more brazen than his peers, Shelby is otherwise typical of them. Jonathan Karl of ABC News last week unearthed photographs of various G.O.P. congressmen posing in their districts with stimulus checks that they had publicly opposed. The Washington Times uncovered more than a dozen other Republican lawmakers who privately solicited stimulus money from the Department of Agriculture while denouncing the stimulus to their constituents and the news media, often angrily.

Even the G.O.P./Tea Party heartthrob of the hour, Scott Brown, is not the barn-coat-wearing populist he purports to be. In her speech, Palin saluted him as “just a guy with a truck” who was doing “his part to put our government back on the side of the people.” In reality Brown’s Massachusetts Senate campaign benefited from a last-minute flood of contributions from financial industry donors — with 80 percent of the haul coming from outside the state. It says all you need to know about our politics that his Democratic opponent, Martha Coakley, matched him by holding a fund-raiser largely sponsored by lobbyists for the health care and pharmaceutical industries.

According to Rich, Palin’s only substantive suggestion last week was that we should seek "divine intervention" to help us face our problems:

So it went with Palin last weekend. Her only concrete program for dealing with America’s pressing problems came in the question-and-answer session. “It would be wise of us to start seeking some divine intervention again in this country,” she said, “so that we can be safe and secure and prosperous again.” That pretty much sums up her party’s economic program, at least: divine intervention will achieve what government intervention cannot. That the G.O.P. may actually be winning this argument is less an indictment of Palin than of Washington Democrats too busy reading the writing on her hand to see or respond to the ominous political writing on the wall.

And here I am, once again, blogging about Sarah Palin, the GOP’s Talk-Head-In-Chief.

Sarah Palin's hand

Wash. Post Says Obama Favors Targeted Killings of Terrorists Over Captures

Posted on by TL

From the Washington Post:

When a window of opportunity opened to strike the leader of al-Qaeda in East Africa last September, U.S. Special Operations forces prepared several options. They could obliterate his vehicle with an airstrike as he drove through southern Somalia. Or they could fire from helicopters that could land at the scene to confirm the kill. Or they could try to take him alive.

The White House authorized the second option. On the morning of Sept. 14, helicopters flying from a U.S. ship off the Somali coast blew up a car carrying Saleh Ali Nabhan. While several hovered overhead, one set down long enough for troops to scoop up enough of the remains for DNA verification. Moments later, the helicopters were headed back to the ship.

The strike was considered a major success, according to senior administration and military officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the classified operation and other sensitive matters. But the opportunity to interrogate one of the most wanted U.S. terrorism targets was gone forever.

I’m not sure what to make of this. If this report had come out under the Bush Administration, no doubt I would have been critical, but I still would have tried to understand. This certainly shifts the debate on which party is tougher on terrorism. According to the report, "The Obama administration has authorized such attacks more frequently than the George W. Bush administration did in its final years, including in countries where U.S. ground operations are officially unwelcome or especially dangerous." Republicans charge that the administration has been too reluctant to risk an international incident or a domestic lawsuit to capture senior terrorism figures alive and imprison them, according to the Post.

I’m not ready to render judgment — need to keep reading, see if there really has been a shift in policy, or if this article represents the armchair conclusions of a pair of journalists.

At least we don’t have to worry about charges of waterboarding under President Obama.

Police Say Woman Ran Over Cop After Chase and Crash

Posted on by TL

Ouch.

From the Sun-Times:

A Back of the Yards neighborhood woman has been charged with three felonies, two misdemeanors and issued six traffic tickets after she allegedly struck an officer with a vehicle following a chase and crash early Saturday on the Southwest Side.

Police fired shots at the woman, but she was not struck by the police gunfire. She was hospitalized after being Tasered following the crash. The officer struck by the vehicle was also injured, police said.

Rosa Gutierrez, 31, of the 5000 block of South Hoyne Avenue, was charged Saturday one count each of felony aggravated battery to a police officer, felony possession of a controlled substance, felony aggravated fleeing an accident with bodily injury, misdemeanor driving under the influence and misdemeanor resisting/obstructing a peace officer, according to a police statement.

Officers responded about midnight to a report of shots fired near South Kedzie Avenue and West 60th Street and saw a vehicle matching the description of a dispatch report fleeing the scene, police News Affairs Sgt. Antoinette Ursitti said.

The officers activated their emergency equipment and attempted to curb the vehicle, but the motorist — identified in the statement as Gutierrez — refused to stop and committed multiple traffic violations in an attempt to elude police, Ursitti said.

The vehicle eventually crashed into a residential garage in the 4100 block of West Marquette Avenue at 12:07 p.m., police said. When officers approached, Gutierrez allegedly reversed the vehicle into an officer, prompting another officer to fire shots at Gutierrez, police said.

The officer was taken to a local hospital, treated, and released.

Kudos to Dahr Jamail; Army to Discharge Single Mom Rather Than Court-Martial Her

Posted on by TL
Alexis Hutchinson

Army Spc. Alexis Hutchinson with son Kamani Hutchinson. (Photo: Alexis Hutchinson)

This is wonderful news for Army Spc. Alexis Hutchinson, and really wonderful news for her son Kamani.

Mom will not be court martialed. Kamani has his mother with him. Every day.

That’s absolutely awesome.

And thank the Army. Technically, Army Spc. Hutchinson violated the law, but she did so for the right reasons. Answering the call to serve in Afghanistan would have left her son, literally, an orphan. So, instead of facing court martial, Army Spc. Hutchinson will be granted an administrative discharge from the Army.

Mom and the United States Army all come out looking good in this one. Thanks to Dahr Jamail and Truthout for breaking the story.

From ENEWSPF:

On Thursday, February 11, Army Specialist Alexis Hutchinson, a single mother of an infant son, was informed she would be granted an administrative discharge from the Army.

Last fall, Hutchinson was ordered to prepare to deploy to Afghanistan. On November 5, 2009, after her childcare plans fell through, Hutchinson was faced with the dilemma of having no one to take care of her son when she deployed to a war zone.

She chose not to show up for the plane to Afghanistan and missed her deployment. When she reported for duty the following day the Army arrested her and took away her son, who was allegedly placed in an Army day care. His grandmother, Angelique Hughes of Oakland, California, picked him up a few days later. Alexis was granted leave to go home for the holidays in December, and returned to Georgia with her baby, Kamani, in early January.

After Hutchinson returned to Georgia in January, the Army filed court-martial charges against her and refused to discharge her under the Army regulations that clearly allow for discharges for reasons of parenthood responsibility. Truthout broke the story on January 14.

Makes you want to cry. Really. Then stand up, salute the flag, and maybe cry some more. Or say the Pledge of Allegiance.

Every once in a while, it’s nice to see a story end well.