Month: June 2012

An Explanation That’s Worse Than No Explanation At All

Buck Banks

It wasn’t about body parts. It wasn’t about dissent. It wasn’t about anyone’s religious beliefs. It was that last comment that took it a step too far, and that’s what crossed the line about … The ‘no means no’ comment. That went a step too far. As I said to someone up north here, it’s like giving a kid a time out for a day, you know. Hey, time out.

— Michigan state Rep. Wayne Schmidt (R), explaining why state Rep. Lisa Brown (D) was barred from speaking on the House floor for saying the word “vagina.”

Pelosi Inadvertently Admits Her Second Greatest Missed Opportunity

Jon Ponder

I could have arrested Karl Rove on any given day. I’m not kidding. There’s a prison here in the Capitol … If we had spotted him in the Capitol, we could have arrested him.

— House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) reacting to Speaker John Boehner’s plan to call a vote on a contempt citation for Attorney General Eric Holder over charges related to the Republicans’ bogus Fast & Furious scandal, and inadvertently naming the second-greatest missed opportunity of of her tenure as House speaker — the first being her decision to take the impeachment of George W. Bush “off the table.”

Daft & Spurious: A Regular American’s Guide to the Tea Party’s Bogus Election-Year Scandal

Jon Ponder

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If you are as confused as other regular Americans about the “Fast & Furious” controversy that roiled the capitol yesterday, you should watch Rachel Maddow’s backgrounder from her MSNBC show last night — see above or click here.

“Very clearly, they made a crisis, and they’re using this crisis to somehow take away or limit people’s second amendment rights.”
— Rep. Darrell Issa of California, one-time arson and grand-theft auto suspect, now the Republican Party’s chairman of the House Oversight Committee.

Maddow points to the bogusness of this controversy as just the latest example of the divide in the country today between the vast majority of normal Americans who are not compulsive Fox News watchers and those whose are.

The conspiracy theory had been incubating on Fox and in right-wing media world for over a year, she says, until yesterday when Republicans “tried drag it out into the mainstream to see if it could survive in the mainstream — see if it could survive outside the right-wing world in which it was incubated.”

The Fast & Furious conspiracy originated in March 2010, Maddow said, which was not coincidentally the same time that the Affordable Care Act passed in Congress. The passage of Obamacare sent tea baggers into fits of rage. They were most enraged about the law’s central feature — and its most conservative, pro-business element — the individual mandate.

The mandate — which was invented by the Heritage Foundation, a thimk tank so right-wing that it is a sponsor of Rush Limbaugh’s show — would require every American to buy insurance, thereby delivering as many as 40 million new, paying customers to giant health insurance corporations.

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