With the Supreme Court set to debate marriage equality this month, conventional wisdom inside the Beltway has it that the court will likely overturn both the Defense of Marriage Act and California’s Proposition 8 on grounds that both violate the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection clause. The vote, says CW, would likely come down to a 5-4 decision, with Justice Anthony Kennedy, a moderate from California, siding against his fellow Republicans by voting with the court’s liberal block.
Kennedy threw cold water on that assumption last week when he told reporters that he’s suddenly become concerned about the Supreme Court holding sway over issues best left to elected officials, which is to say voters:
Remember Kinsley’s rule: In Washington, a gaffe is when someone accidentally tells the truth:
Republican House Budget Committee Chairman PAUL RYAN: “This to us is something that we’re not going to give up on, because we’re not going to give up on destroying the health care system for the American people.”
The “new” Republican budget released by Ryan, the infamous zombie-eyed granny starver, is the same as the old budget he drafted — it voucherizes Medicare, repeals Obamacare and the rest. Why would Republicans phone in a new budget that’s the same as the budget that is unpopular in the polls and was rejected by Congress?
Deleted: Breitbart.com deleted this story after it was found to have been sourced to a satirical news site.A little over a month after the website once operated by the late racist provocateur Andrew Breitbart published a story falsely accusing then-nominee for Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel of receiving funding from a foreign group called Friends of Hamas, now Breitbart.comn has been snookered by a post from a satirical site that suggested Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman had filed for bankruptcy:
Breitbart.com ridiculed Paul Krugman for filing for Chapter 13 bankruptcy protection in a since-deleted post whose claims originated with a satire website. Just last month, Breitbart.com castigated a news outlet for running with a story from that same website.
In the March 11 post, Breitbart.com editor at large Larry O’Connor mocked the Nobel Prize winning economist and New York Times columnist for his alleged financial mismanagement. Unfortunately for O’Connor, the report that Krugman went bankrupt is clearly a joke and originated from the satirical website The Daily Currant. O’Connor has since deleted the post without explanation. (Update: O’Connor tweeted, saying he “trusted Boston.com as the source for that Krugman piece, but they were duped by Daily Currant, therefore, so was I!”)
In December, U.S. Justice Department officials announced that HSBC, Europe’s largest bank, would pay a $1.92 billion fine after laundering $881 million for drug cartels in Mexico and Colombia. At the time, the Justice Department disputed accusations that it views some banks as too big to prosecute.
The two regulators, Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David S. Cohen and Federal Reserve Governor Jerome H. Powell, deflected Warren’s questions, saying that criminal prosecutions are for the Justice Department to decide.
It’s nice that Google went to all the trouble to draw up a (kind of strange) Google doodle to represent International Women’s Day. But some critics are asking what happened to the Asian women, who don’t really jump out of the graphic. There are a couple of ladies in the image that might be someone’s idea of Asian; still, Google was fair in making all the women in the doodle look a little bizarre. What do you think?
Left: Rove address California GOP convention: ‘Get off your asses’; right: California Republican Assembly leader Celeste Greig, left, with Birth Queen Orly Taitz
The California Republican Party is bankrupt, both intellectually and financially. Its voter registration has dropped to just 30 percent of the electorate. And last year Republicans lost so many seats in the Legislature that Democrats achieved super-majority status in both houses.
“Granted, the percentage of pregnancies due to rape is small because it’s an act of violence, because the body is traumatized.” – CRA President Celeste Greig
But hope springs eternal, as they say, and party leaders had pinned their hopes for reenergizing the faithful at their convention in Sacramento over the weekend with a rousing keynote address by Turdblossom himself, Karl Rove.
Channeling House Speaker John Boehner, who had the Beltway media clutching its collective pearls last week when he railed ungrammatically at the Senate to “get off their ass” and pass an anti-Sequester plan — even though the House has no viable plan on the table either — Rove rallied the 500 or so conventioneers with similar language.
“My message is this: get off your ass,” Rove said, during his keynote speech. “Get back in the game and fight. Don’t give in to what the other side wants.”
The flaw in that message, of course, is that the policies the “other side wants” — like a balanced approached to deficit reduction, gun safety measures and the rest — are also what majorities of voters want.
Rove recently launched the Conservative Victory Project, a PAC intended to drive tea-party and birther candidates and their ilk out of primary races, so it was delightfully paradoxical that his message was overshadowed in media coverage by Celeste Greig, the leader of the California Republican Assembly — a haven for tea partyists and birthers — who reasserted the Republicans’ magical thinking about “legitimate rape” and pregnancies in an interview with a reporter:
Margin by which Asian-Americans are more likely to identify as or lean Democratic than Republican, according to Gallup. Sixty-one percent of 18- to 34-year-old Asian-Americans — who make up 56% of this demographic group — identify as or lean Democratic.
Number of concealed weapons permits Florida has handed out, as of Dec. 12, 2012, making it the number one gun-toting state — by far. The nearest contenders are Georgia, with 600,000 permits, Texas with 524,000, and Indiana with 420,000. Gun lobbyist Marion Hammer says the NRA and others will pressure the Florida legislature this session to pass “open carry” laws that will officially convert the state to the wild west by allowing the paranoid to walk around brandishing guns.
PR’s own Buck nominated Florida Sen. Marco Rubio (GOP/Tea) for the “Really Trying Way Too Hard” Hall of Fame after Rubio told the gossip site TMZ that his favorite songs of all-time are NWA’s “Straight Outta Compton,” Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” and Tupac’s “Killuminati.”
The likely 2016 Republican presidential candidate, recently dubbed by Time Magazine the “saviour” of the party, is also brandishing a reputation as the life of the party, and nothing says frat boy quite like this tweet, posted the day the economy-wrecking sequester took effect.
If I put #HarlemShake video 2gether in Senate who should be in it?Taking suggestions now. http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?utm_campaign=Fee
Rubio apparently didn’t spend the day trying to figure out how to keep from damaging the economy or how to save American jobs, but instead daydreaming about his own fantasy football-esque dance party. Here were some of the responses to his call for suggestions on his Twitter feed.*
@jbminn — @marcorubio I’d suggest you stop wasting time and money.
@haroldpollack — @marcorubio even I am too cool for the Harlem shake.
@devincf — I suggest you fix the sequester.
@Brian_Thill — LOL you are so hip!! OMG!!1! wheres my checkbook
Colbert highlights an overlooked but significant — possibly THE most significant — change in the public’s attitude toward guns going forward. When Pres. Obama signed an executive order freeing the Centers for Disease Control to count gun deaths and injuries for the first time in 17 years, he made it possible for us to know the impact of the continuing escalation of gun violence in America. This is information the NRA and Gun Owners of America need to keep hidden, because if we realized the extent of the problem, we might do sensible things about it.
The recent news out of Kentucky was just awful,
They found the senator unconscious and horizontal.
And since his hospitalization,
There’s been little news about his condition,
But now everybody’s having a 20-minute conversation with Mitch McConnell.
“We are done, Americans are done with endless conflict in the Middle East, spending trillions of dollars, American lives… this is insane and we have to call it for what it is.”
An Associated Press-NORC survey found that 44% of American Jews hold a favorable opinion of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, compared with 39% who view him unfavorably. By contrast, just 32% of respondents said they have a favorable opinion of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while 59% said they have a negative view.
“Their New Deal is socialism for the super-rich (and their own enrichment) even if it means increasing poverty, inequality, and illness at home and around the world. They also want to rewrite history to ignore and outright deny our past flaws while banning books that say otherwise from our libraries. And they select even our military leaders based on their version of political correctness over ability.”
— Former President Bill Clinton, quoted by Deadline, in his July 4th message.
President Donald Trump is asking for $1,500,000 million for the military for next year. That’s close to $600 billion (adjusted for inflation) more than we were spending on the military in fiscal year 2025, before Trump took office, Alternet reports. This increase is huge by any measure. It comes to around $4,600 per household. It is around 8% of the total budget.
A new Emerson College survey of likely 2026 voters finds the Democrats with an 11-point advantage over the Republicans on the generic congressional ballot, leading 53% to 42%. President Trump holds a 39% job approval rating, consistent with the past two months, whereas his disapproval increased another point, to 57%.
A new American Research Group poll finds just 30% of Americans say they approve of the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president and 67% say they disapprove.
Wall Street Journal: “Around 40% of voters in the 2024 election said the economy was their top issue, far outstripping any other matter. And those voters favored Donald Trump by 60% to 38%. Many say they were moved by his pledges to tame inflation, rebuild U.S. infrastructure, cut red tape and trim government waste. … About a year and a half later, more voters disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy than approve, 61% to 35%, an average of polls by the Cook Political Report found this month.”
A Reuters analysis of Trump’s public comments from June 23 through July 6 (13 days) — when a string of left-wing Democratic candidates won their party’s primaries in New York — found he invoked communism 81 times.
