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Rachel Maddow started her MSNBC show last night with a pull quote from this article in The Hill newspaper — “Oh my God, it’s coming”:
The GOP continued its bloody walk into the Medicare buzzsaw on Wednesday, when 42 out of 47 Senate Republicans voted for the House GOP budget, and its plan to phase out and privatize the popular entitlement program.
The budget failed by a vote of 57-40. But the roll call illustrates that Medicare privatization — along with deep cuts to Medicaid and other social services — remains the consensus position of the GOP despite the growing political backlash against them.
Voting with all of the Democrats were Sens. Scott Brown (R-MA), Olympia Snowe (R-ME) — both 2012 incumbents — along with Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK). Rand Paul (R-KY) voted against it because it wasn’t radical enough.
List of the senators who voted to kill Medicare follows:
The Republican spin machine is in over-drive trying to redirect attention away from the real reason a Democrat, Kathy Hochul, defeated the GOP candidate in New York’s 26th congressional district yesterday. Hochul, who won with a 47-43 percent margin, becomes only the fourth Democrat to hold the seat since 1857. Republicans who have previously represented the 26th include Jack Kemp, Bill Paxon and, most recently, Chris “Shirtless” Lee.
The real reason Hochul won — besides the fact that she proved to be an extremely effective campaigner — is, of course, the Kill Medicare provision in the House Republican budget bill:
Illustrator Jon White couldn’t resist taking the colorfully written statement from Newt’s campaign following his rather public pillorying in the press and turning it into a graphic tale of violent sheep:
California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein unofficially launched her third reelection bid at the state Democratic Party Convention in Sacramento on April 30 with a fiery (for her) speech attacking congressional Republicans. Here’s a transcript of an excerpt from the video, starting at about minute 02:20:
This is almost certainly a historic moment: The first time a presidential candidate deliberately used a form of the word “fuck'” in a campaign speech.
If it had been a Democrat who’d coarsened American political rhetoric this way, this story would be leading every hour on cable news and topping the front pages of newspapers across the country.
But the degenerate who dropped the first deliberate F-bomb in American political history was a Republican, so you can rest assured the “liberal” media will paper over this incident, even though it may well prove to be the lowest moment of the 2012 campaign.
Transcript:
Pres. DONALD TRUMP channeling Tony Soprano: Did you see recently where — a couple of days ago — Saudi Arabia said, “Unh, let’s raise the price, let’s cut back production. Can you believe it? You’re gonna be payin’ five, six dollars a gallon for gasoline pretty soon. And they wanna — they wanna go in and raise the price of oil. Because we have nobody in Washington that sits back and says, “Ya not gonna raise that FUCKIN’ PRICE.”
Watch as the audience filled with Republicans — you know, the party of “family values” and high-minded morals — goes nuts, screaming and applauding.
Seeking to put an end to the “birther” conversation — and, incidentally, elevating Donald Trump on the day of his trip to New Hampshire — the White House says it has convinced the State of Hawaii to make an exception to state policy and release a copy of his long form birth certificate, the holy grail of obsessives.
It’s possible that Smith and some of his cohorts in the D.C. press corps actually believe that the White House was “seeking to end” the birther conspiracy, but it is highly unlikely that anyone in the White House political shop or the Obama 2012 campaign is that naive. For the sake of the future of our republic, let’s hope not.
A more realistic, albeit cynical, view is that the Obama campaign is using the controversy about the president’s birth certificate as a wedge issue — that the release of the document is intended to drive birthers batshit crazy, prompting them to escalate their conspiracy theorizing to new levels of absurdity — which in turn will force establishment Republican pols, including GOP presidential candidates, to take a position for or against a key segment of their wingnut base.
The Obama campaign is banking on the fact that the release of the long-form certificate will resolve any doubt about the president’s birth origins among level-headed swing voters. Settling the issue among independents, the constituency that will decide the presidential race in a close election, will put the eventual Republican nominee in an awkward position. He (or she) must have both the GOP’s wingnut base and sensible independents to win next year.
If you think the release of Obama’s birth certificate will put the controversy about his birth to rest, here are two words to consider: “grassy knoll.” Just take a gander at the comments on Ben Smith’s post at Politico. For every voice of reason from liberals, as shown in the first example, there are about two from birthers howling at the moon.
Just a week after the respected pollster Charlie Cook wrote a column spotlighting rising concern among establishment Republicans about their party’s collapsing support among swing voters, a new survey from Public Policy Polling finds a 28-point shift away from the GOP since November among independents :
The key to this strong movement back toward the Democrats right now is the same as the key to the strong movement away from the Democrats last year — fickle independents quickly growing unhappy with the party in power. Exit polls showed independents supporting the GOP by a 19 point margin last year at 56-37. Now only 30 percent of those voters think that the Republican controlled House is moving things in the right direction, compared to 44 percent who think things were better with the Democrats. Given those numbers it’s not much of a surprise that independents now say they’d vote Democratic for the House by a 42-33 margin if these was an election today, representing a 28 point reversal in a span of just five months.
The poll found no good news for the GOP:
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I like MoveOn.org, I really do. I agree with them in almost every area. But their idea for protesting corporate tax deadbeats, aka large employers, in local communities has to be one of the worst ideas they’ve ever had.
Mind you, there are plenty of reasons to hate, say, FedEx, not the least of which is that their poor drivers are “contract workers” who own their own trucks so the company can avoid maintenance costs, unions, and health care and retirement benefits. But going to the local FedEx office to protest the source of your neighbor’s livelihood seems like a photo op dreamed up by James O’Keefe himself.
Others on the target list are GE, Boeing, BP, Google, Citigroup, Amazon, Chase, Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobil, WellsFargo, and Bank of America.
Here’s the email I got from MoveOn, explaining the concept.
Dear MoveOn member,
Nobody knows the details of Friday night’s budget agreement to keep the government from shutting down.
But here’s one thing we can be pretty sure of: the pain will fall mainly on poor and middle-class Americans, while billions in tax breaks, loopholes, and handouts for corporations will remain untouched.
Those same billions could keep food in the mouths of hungry women and children, fund critical medical research, and do the actual work of reducing our deficit.
From Trump’s “stolen election” lies, we can’t get no relief,
He carps on about stolen votes, but he never names the thief.
Somebody needs to tell this guy
Americans aren’t buying his lies,
And that he’s turned us into the United States of Disbelief.
