Month: May 2013
NRA Building War Chest for Midterm Elections
$6,730,272
Amount of cash, as of April 30, that The National Rifle Association of America Political Victory Fund reported it has on hand. The NRA raised $1,290,539 during April and spent only $27,318, Political Moneyline reports.
Obama’s Popularity Remains Steady, Despite Controversies
51% to 44%
President Obama’s approval rating, which has remained steady “in the face of fresh disclosures about the IRS, the Benghazi attack and the Justice Department’s secret collection of telephone records of Associated Press journalists as part of a leak investigation,” a new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds.
Paul Defines ‘Inclusive’ in Republican Terms
We’re going to win when we look like America. We need to be white, we need to be brown, we need to be black, we need to with tattoos, without tattoos, with pony tails, without pony tails, with beards, without.
— Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), quoted by the Louisville Courier-Journal.
Stuff You Really Don’t Want to Be Right About
I hope NY and NJ senators tell Tom Coburn and Jim Inhofe to suck a donkey dick on disaster relief.
@rudepundit on Twitter, no doubt recalling that most Republicans, even those from the tornado-prone Midwest and prairie states, voted against providing disaster relief to the areas worst affected by super storm Sandy.
Federal Deficit Is Shrinking Even Faster Than Had Been Projected – But Fox Reports It As Bad News
There is good news about the economy — the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has reported that the federal budget deficit is reducing even more quickly than had been projected– so, naturally, it is being spun by Fox News as bad news:
Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade reacted to a new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report showing the 2013 deficit dropping by $200 billion by lamenting that the report might discourage further austerity measures…
Kilmeade reacted to this news with calls for increased austerity, lamenting that the “positive news” in the CBO report might lead away from a mindset of “fiscal discipline.” Kilmeade concluded, “I just hope we still feel the urgency to get our budget in order.”
Rachel Maddow’s report follows:
Finally, a Real Benghazi Scandal: Republicans Selectively Edited Talking-Points Emails to Impugn the White House, State Dept.
It hasn’t yet seeped into the political media’s central narrative about the Benghazi attacks yet — and if the past is a guide, it probably never will — but there has finally been a bona fide revelation of doctoring information about the attacks for political purposes, just as Republicans have claimed from the outset of the attack on September 11, 2012, in which Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others were killed at what is now being described as a CIA outpost.
The culprits who have been caught red-handed are not the administration officials Republicans have accused of spinning intel in order to make Pres. Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton look good, but rather the Republican accusers themselves.
The Case for the IRS Targeting the Tea Party
It seemed to come as a great shock when it was recently revealed that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) examines some taxpayers more closely than others.
Really? Because no one has ever objected to the IRS targeting some tax returns for audit. Among them:
- Millionaires (in fiscal 2011, the IRS audited 12.5% of them)
- People reporting more than $200,000 in income
- People claiming confusing tax breaks like the first-time homebuyer credit
- Home office workers
- Small business and self-employed people generally
- Very low income filers who claim the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)
I’m not saying the IRS should target according to ideology. I’m saying it should target according to likelihood that tax laws are being flouted and circumvented.
So why, in the wild west of the first election years since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling allowing political action groups, many with questionable funding, to mushroom and proliferate…why should anyone be surprised the IRS would exercise scrutiny on these here today, gone tomorrow groups? Why, in fact, would they not demand that the IRS do precisely that before granting tax-exempt status to whoever applies for it?
And why not specifically take a hard, cold look at tea party groups?
