When Did You Choose to Be Straight?
Travis Nuckolls and Chris Baker walk the streets of Colorado Springs asking strangers whether being gay is a choice; to those who say it is a choice, they answer, “When did you choose to be straight?”
Month: November 2010
One out of Five Californians Say They Would Never Vote for A Republican
1 out of 5
Number of Californians who said they would never vote for a Republican under any circumstances, according to a new Los Angeles Times/USC poll.
The TSA Tickle
Nine years ago, who woulda thunk
That airport security would be such bunk.
Well, let me give you the low-down,
When it comes to the pat-down —
Hey man, don’t touch my junk!
GOP AZ Gov Brewer, Legislature Kill Transplant Funding for Uninsured – Republicans’ ‘Death Panel’ Selects Who Will Die Based on Income
Faced with the need to cut government budgets, Republicans reflexively start with programs for the poor, the ill, the elderly and children. In Arizona last year, the state’s Republican governor, Jan Brewer — best remembered for pushing the state’s “papers please” anti-immigrant law and then getting caught lying when she asserted that the Arizona deserts were littered with headless bodies — and the GOP state legislature chose to cut a $5 million state program that provided transplants for uninsured Arizonans.
Arizona Gov. Brewer and the GOP legislature used $1.7 million in Stimulus money just last year to repair the roof of the Veterans Memorial Coliseum.
These Republicans could have covered the shortfall by directing funding from the Stimulus for this life-saving program, but chose instead to spend over $1 million in Stim money to repair the roof of a sports stadium. What’s worse, had they applied the Stim money to save the transplant program for the uninsured, the state would have been eligible for an additional $15 million in matching funds from the federal government.
During the debate over health care reform, insurance company lackeys like Betsy McCaughey and Sarah Palin floated the lie that a beneficial aspect of the legislation — its coverage of the costs of living wills and end-of-life counseling — was something evil: a “death panel” of bureaucrats who would decide whether patients were too ill or elderly to receive certain procedures, even if the procedures might save the patients’ lives.
The GOP’s Fox channel promoted the death panel allegation so heavily that a poll during the debate found that about three-quarters of Fox viewers believed the lie to be true. Faced with the outrage ginned up by the Republicans’ pernicious lying, Democrats removed coverage of end-of-life counseling from the law.
While this represented only a small victory for the giant private health-care corporations, whose multi-billion dollar annual profits were left untouched, it was a big defeat for middle-class and poor Americans who will continue to have to pay out of pocket for counseling during what it arguably the most difficult time in anyone’s life.
But the McCaughey-Palin-Fox death claim was a lie — those death panels were not real. What the Republicans in Arizona have done is real — and it is eerily the same thing they falsely accused Democrats of doing: letting government bureaucrats choose whom should live or die. And, tellingly, the criteria of the GOP death panels is typically Republican: Income level. People in need of transplants who are ineligible to buy private insurance or who can’t afford it, will not be covered.
Because of the GOP death panel law, about 100 people in need of transplants are facing death today in Arizona. In the video above, Keith Olbermann interviewed two of them, both fathers of young children.
Rough transcript from MSNBC, with some corrections:
Verbatim
You know what? He is known to cry. He cries sometimes when we’re having a debate on bills. If I cry, it’s about the personal loss of a friend or something like that. But when it comes to politics — no, I don’t cry. I would never think of crying about any loss of an office, because that’s always a possibility, and if you’re professional, then you deal with it professionally.
— House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), quoted by the New York Times Magazine, noting how House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) shed tears during an election night speech.
Charles, the Ethically Challenged
Now the ethics committee’s left Rangel
At the end of his rope there to dangle.
It gets really complicated
When your conscience gets sublimated,
And your ethics get all in a tangle.
Originally published March 4, 2010
Dear Tea Party: If You Stand for Anything, You Must Demand That Your New Members of Congress Refuse Their Govt Health Coverage
What the tea party wants, the tea party gets — at least for now.
On Monday, the tea party spooked one of the Senate’s biggest old bulls, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, into doing a full 180 on earmarks. He has agreed to stop Republican senators from tapping funds for roads, hospitals and other projects in their states, despite the risk that comes with failing to bring home the bacon when the next elections roll around.
Why is it okay with the tea party that the politicians they voted for on Nov. 2 based on their opposition to socialist health coverage will, in February, become recipients of the same socialist coverage they were elected to oppose?
Also on Monday, tea party leaders resorted to bullying their own newly elected members of Congress — not over earmarks or anything related to policy — but rather to force them to attend a tea-party indoctrination seminar in Washington that a tea party group had inadvertently scheduled to conflict with a long-established freshman orientation session hosted by the Claremont Institute. The tea party leadership did this by publishing the members’ personal contact info in an email blast to their followers, urging the tea bagger rank and file to call the new members and browbeat them into skipping the Claremont event in favor of the tea party seminar.
(As a tactic, unleashing the mobs on your own members over a scheduling snafu smacks of political amateurism — especially when it would have been arguably easier to apologize for the mistake and reschedule the event. For one thing, bombarding members of Congress with crank calls over such a trivial matter not only risks alienating them, it uses up precious political capital. What will tea party leaders do get the members’ attention when something more important than a seminar comes up — kidnap their dogs, send letter bombs?)
