Month: November 2014

Breitbart.com Confuses Attorney General Nominee Loretta Lynch with Country Star Loretta Lynn

Jon Ponder
Left, Attorney General nominee with Pres. Obama; right: country star Loretta Lynn
Left, Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch with Pres. Obama; right: country star Loretta Lynn

In the world of the late racist provocateur Andrew Breitbart, facts did not matter. As spreaders of lies and smears targeting liberals and progressive organizations, Breitbart, along with his federally convicted Mini-Me, James O’Keefe, deserve a great deal of credit for poisoning the well of American politics.

The beauty part about operating in a fact-free world is that fact-checking does not matter, either. In that regard, Breitbart may be dead but his spirit lives at his website, which continues to publish the same sort of right-wing smears, lies and provocations that comprises Breitbart’s legacy.

The mistake published by Breitbart.com this week, however, was a real doozy: In a story criticizing Pres. Obama’s choice for attorney general, the editors confused Obama’s nominee, Loretta Lynch, the 55-year-old U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, with 82-year-old country star Loretta Lynn.

Given that fact-checking is not a thing in the fact-free right-wing media universe, the mistake is understandable The names are very similar.

[…]

Too Soon? Obama Comes Out Swinging After Midterm Elections

Trish

SwingingHow “not mopey” is Pres. Obama? Not mopey enough to send an email blast less than a week after the 2014 midterm elections that leads respondents to the screen shot shown.

Hertzberg: ‘Elections are decided by low-information voters, people who cannot be troubled to figure out whether they are Democrats or Republicans’

Republicans were already complaining that Obama wasn’t contrite enough about the recent Democratic election losses. They, of course, took the results as a mandate for their issues, like repealing the Affordable Care Act, building more fences along the border with Mexico, and keeping women from carrying out their reproductive lives in private.

Obama heard a different signal.

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SCOTUS Ruling in Favor of GOP Lawsuit Would Revoke Health Insurance of Millions of Americans

Jon Ponder
chart-red-stater-insurance-subsidies
The vast majority of Americans whose insurance would be revoked by the GOP lawsuit live in states controlled by Republicans

The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to hear a lawsuit on the Affordable Care Act, King v. Burwell, brought by Republicans seeking to revoke the health-insurance of 7.3 million Americans whose premiums are paid by government subsidies under the ACA. The lawsuit is based on a snippet of poorly constructed language in the law that suggests subsidies can only be granted to people who live in states that operate their own insurance exchanges.

After the law passed, Republican governors in more than 30 states opted not to build exchanges, thus requiring the federal government to step in and build the websites. Opting out was a cynical political tactic that put the governors’ desire to hobble the president’s reform law over the interests of millions of their uninsured constituents. Now, if the Supreme Court rules in Republicans’ favor on King v. Burwell, the vast majority of people whose subsidized insurance is at risk are residents of states where Republican governors forced the feds to step in and build exchanges.

What a neat trick.

[…]

Poll Finds 64% Tea Party Support for Impeaching Pres. Obama

Jon Ponder

graph-gop-ready-to-impeach

A poll from Democracy Corps found that the Republican base supports impeaching Pres. Obama by a two-to-one margin. The poll did not ask what high crime or misdemeanor tea partyists believe the president is guilty of, but presumably it is “presidenting while black.”

Congressional tea party boss Ted Cruz routinely bullied House Speaker John Boehner, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and other GOP leaders in the 113th Congress into pursuing unpopular actions, chiefly including shutting down the government. Polls like this one suggest that it’s more likely than not that Boehner, McConnell, now the incoming majority leader in the Senate, and the rest will be cowed by Cruz — whose extremist caucus will have at least six new members in the Senate — into proceeding with impeachment in the 114th Congress.

Watch Rachel Maddow’s interview with the pollster, Stan Greenberg, HERE.