Month: March 2010

Help Send Rush to Costa Rica

Trish

rush copyNobody would accuse Rush Limbaugh of being an honorable man of his word, but a web site we wish we’d thought of is trying to help convert him. ATicketForRush.com is collecting $1 donations to send the big guy packing for Costa Rica, where he said he would go when lobbying against health care reform on his radio show.

Even though he now denies it, Rush promised that if the health care bill made it out of Congress, he would leave the country. He even said he’d go to Costa Rica, which, as Jon pointed out, has universal health care. Rush let his mouth run away with his judgment, as usual, but the passage of the bill puts the ball back in his court.

As you can imagine, this has made a number of people very excited. We are among that number. We want to make sure that Rush is able to make good on his promise, and so we’ve made this website.

So who’s behind the microsite?

We are Mike and Patrick. We are two dudes living in Brooklyn. We don’t have health insurance.

But, they continue, they have set up a PayPal account to accept the $1 donations through April 30, all of which will be donated to Planned Parenthood if Rush turns it down. Mike and Patrick plan to videotape themselves offering the plane fare to Rush and post it. There’s a PayPal donation button right on the site, so take a minute now and support a great cause: a ticket for Rush.

It Was Rep. Neugebauer (R-Tex.) Who Yelled ‘Baby Killer’ at Stupak

Jon Ponder

HuffPo:

Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R-Tex.) officially joins Rep. Joe “You Lie” Wilson (R-S.C.) in the Republicans’ Lost Boys Caucus. Too bad their mothers never taught them how to behave in public.

Neugebauer outed himself as the knucklehead who shouted “baby killer” during Rep. Bart Stupak’s (D-Mich.) speech during the House health-care debate. However, he denies he yelled the epithet at Stupak, insisting instead that he cried out “it’s a baby killer” in reference to the bill — which does not and never did provide federal funding for abortions.

Was Boehner Drunk During His ‘No We Can’t’ Speech Before Health Care Vote?

Jon Ponder

Watching House Minority Leader John Boehner’s awful speech before the vote on health care reform last night at my house, it struck the two of us that Boehner must have fortified himself a bit too much before taking the podium. Interestingly, when MSNBC’s coverage went back to the anchor desk, the first thing anyone said corroborated our take. Conservative-ish reporter Bob Franken, formerly of CNN, said something like it appeared Boehner had had an extra drink before the speech.

There is precedence for Boehner showing up in his cups for a big national address. Flashback to May 2007, when an obviously intoxicated Boehner took to the floor and began weeping because he was afraid the now Democratic-controlled House would not approve borrowing another $100 billion to fund George W. Bush’s occupation of Iraq:

(The funding was approved.)

In its coverage of Boehner’s weeping over war funding, ThinkProgres suggested he should “channel his bottled up emotions towards a more worthy end — changing the course in Iraq rather than defending the status quo.” (Emphasis added.)

Right-leaning Politico reported then, too, that a GOP colleague of Boehner “noted that Boehner cries more often later in the day.”

So what do you think? Democratic Underground has a poll on Boehner’s state of mind that asks was Boehner A) “pissed drunk,” B) “just his usual assclown self” or C) All of the above. (As of this writing, C is winning.)

We Are the Borg So Resistance is Futile: Republican Representatives Drone On Against Caring for the Sick

Trish

Where is Seven of Nine when you need her? Republican representatives voting against legislation that would allow sick people to more easily access medical care proved unable to buck the collective and express their own thoughts about why this was a bad idea. Instead, they fell back on a party line: the bill is “flawed.” As if any bill ever written in the history of the world wasn’t. Republicans, seriously. Is this all you got?

Deja Vu All Over Again: Republicans at a Loss to Understand How Tea Baggers Got Belligerent

Trish

mob2

Remember during the 2008 campaign, when Sarah Palin flicked her Bic under the gas-soaked rags wrapped around the clubs held by the mobs at her rallies but then claimed she had no idea how the fires started? The reaction from Republicans to the escalation of teabagger anger exhibited toward health care reform is eerily familiar.

House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, called the incidents “reprehensible” but said on NBC’s Meet the Press “let’s not let a few isolated incidents get in the way of the fact that millions of Americans are scared to death, and millions of Americans want no part of this growing size of government.”

Yes, let’s not let “isolated incidents” (is there any other kind?) keep us from directing our disgust where it belongs: on elected representatives who are trying to help American companies compete with companies from nations that do not tie one arm behind them by expecting them to provide health insurance; or who want to keep people from being vulnerable to the number one cause of bankruptcy in this country, medical bills; or who simply recognize that the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Commission on Taxation are right when their studies predict our government will go broke if the health care and insurance systems are not reformed. Because, you know, Democratic (and the few decent Republican) legislators are real the problem.

Or not.

Unfortunately, Boehner isn’t the only one minimizing the tea bagger belligerence Republicans have stirred up.

House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, R – Virginia on ABC’s “This Week” [said] “There were 30,000 people here in Washington yesterday. And, yes, there were some very awful things said.”

Cantor appeared with House Democratic Caucus chairman John Larson, D-Connecticut, who said the incidents show “everybody ought to ratchet back just a little bit.”

But Cantor disagreed.

Cantor said “you know what it is time for? It’s time to listen to the American people, and that is the stunning thing about this.”

No the stunning thing is that Republicans have been yelling and screaming about socialism, tyranny, totalitarianism, illegitimate power, etc. and now they express surprise that the true concerns of their intellectually challenged followers appear to be racism and homophobia. Who’da thunk?

But don’t let that inconvenient fact cause you to dismiss tea bagger views. At least, not if you’re a Republican who needs to keep these folks mobilized for your own cynical ends. Rep. David Nunes (R-Calif.), I’m looking at you.

When was asked about the slurs hurled at Reps. Lewis and Frank, Nunes said, “Yeah, well I think that when you use totalitarian tactics, people, you know, begin to act crazy. I think, you know, there’s people that have every right to say what they want. If they want to smear someone, they can do it. It’s not appropriate. And I think I would stop short of characterizing the 20,000 people protesting, that all of them were doing that –Of course. I think the left loves to play a couple of incidents here or there.”

To recap the Republican response to supporters spitting at and yelling the n-word and the f-word at elected officials: “It’s not that bad, it’s only a few of the 20,000/30,000/1.6 million members of the mob gathered, and it’s all Obama’s fault anyway.”

Tea Baggers Show True Colors at Capitol – Called Civil Rights Heroes ‘Niggers,’ Rep. Frank a ‘Faggot,’ Spat on Rep. Cleaver, an African-American Minister

Jon Ponder

photo-tea-bagger-signGrowing increasingly desperate as the House vote on a reconciliation measure in the health-care reform bill approaches, Republican House members addressed a group of tea baggers on Capitol Hill yesterday, stoking their fears about reform with lies and distortions and then unleashing the mob which had become so enraged that they stopped bothering to conceal the true intentions of their “movement”:

A staffer for Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) told reporters that Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) had been spat on by a protester. Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), a hero of the civil rights movement, was called a ‘nigger.’ And Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) was called a “faggot,” as protesters shouted at him with deliberately lisp-y screams. Frank, approached in the halls after the president’s speech, shrugged off the incident.

But Clyburn was downright incredulous, saying he had not witnessed such treatment since he was leading civil rights protests in South Carolina in the 1960s.

“It was absolutely shocking to me,” Clyburn said, in response to a question from the Huffington Post. “Last Monday, this past Monday, I stayed home to meet on the campus of Claflin University where fifty years ago as of last Monday… I led the first demonstrations in South Carolina, the sit ins… And quite frankly I heard some things today I have not heard since that day. I heard people saying things that I have not heard since March 15, 1960 when I was marching to try and get off the back of the bus.”

“It doesn’t make me nervous as all,” the congressman said, when asked how the mob-like atmosphere made him feel. “In fact, as I said to one heckler, I am the hardest person in the world to intimidate, so they better go somewhere else.”

Asked if he wanted an apology from the group of Republican lawmakers who had addressed the crowd and, in many ways, played on their worst fears of health care legislation, the Democratic Party, and the president, Clyburn replied:

“A lot of us have been saying for a long time that much of this, much of this is not about health care a all. And I think a lot of those people today demonstrated that this is not about health care… it is about trying to extend a basic fundamental right to people who are less powerful.”

Here’s another take, via Talking Points Memo:

Civil rights hero Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) and fellow Congressional Black Caucus member Andre Carson (D-IN) related a particularly jarring encounter with a large crowd of protesters screaming “kill the bill”… and punctuating their chants with the word “nigger.”

Standing next to Lewis, emerging from a Democratic caucus meeting with President Obama, Carson said people in the crowd yelled, “kill the bill and then the N-word” several times, while he and Lewis were exiting the Cannon House office building.

“People have been just downright mean,” Lewis added.

And that wasn’t an isolated incident. Early this afternoon, standing outside a Democratic whip meeting in the Longworth House office building, I watched Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) make his way out the door, en route to the neighboring Rayburn building. As he rounded the corner toward the exit, wading through a huge crowd of tea partiers and other health care protesters, an elderly white man screamed “Barney, you faggot”–a line that caused dozens of his confederates to erupt in laughter…

Shortly thereafter, the same group of people surrounded Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) as he entered a first-floor elevator. Above the cacophony, I heard one man call Waxman a “crook” and a “liar.”

The spitting incident involved Rep. Cleaver, who is also a Methodist minister and who was active in the civil rights movement. The congressman was escorted to safety by the U.S. Capitol Police, who, according to early reports, also arrested the tea bagger. Later, the New York Times reported that no arrest had been made.

Last night, someone threw a brick through the window of the district office of Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.), chair of the House Rules Committee.