Joy Reid shuts down conservative guest who tries to trot our Clinton conspiracy theory in response to question about Trump's "sh*thole" comments.

Courtesy of Raw Story:  

During a panel discussion on Trump’s comments about Haiti and African nations being “sh*tholes,” the AMJoy host turned first to conservative commentator Stephanie Hamill. 

“Stephanie, I will start with you. when you heard what Donald Trump said about Haiti, about the African countries, really talking about El Salvador and any other countries that are nonwhite, how did you feel when you heard those comments?” Reid asked. 

“Joy, we didn’t actually hear him say those words,” Hamill began only to have Reid clarify, “When you read them.” 

“When I read them, yeah, and this is the biggest fake news story of the week,” Hamill replied. “It’s interesting to sit back and watch people are so angry about what that the president didn’t say, and they are more angry than they are at the Clinton’s for getting rich off the poor Haitians with the Clinton Foundation.” 

As the panel expressed shock at Hamill bringing up the Clinton’s, Hamill pressed on. 

“You can ask Klaus Eberwein, the former Haitian government official that has all the dirt on the Clinton Foundation– oh, wait, you can’t ask him because he mysteriously committed suicide the day he was supposed to testify,” Hamill blurted 

“What are you talking about?” asked conservative Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin. “This is nuts.” 

“Did you get talking points before you came here from the RNC or the White House?” host Reid cut in. “It’s interesting that yesterday Mark Burns, who was the surrogate we had on on the Trump side yesterday, tried to roll out the same Clinton stuff? Did you get talking points before you came here?” 

“Joy, I didn’t get talking points,” Hamill shot back, attempting to get back to her story. 

Host Reid then cut her off with a warning. 

“I don’t know you, Stephanie, but let me explain this to you: this is not Fox News and we are not going to play the game of rolling out crazy conspiracy theories in answers to my questions and take us off track,” Reid lectured. “So I am going to put you pause for the minute, I’m going to put you to the side because they are more familiar with the way that we do things here.”

Oh yeah, she definitely got some talking points.

Joy Reid is rapidly becoming one of my favorite hosts on MSNBC.

Not only is she always well informed on the issues she presents on her show, but she simply does not tolerate any Right Wing bullshit.

Pretty soon the trolls may have to move away from criticizing Rachel Maddow's hand gestures and focus on some mannerism of Joy Reid's instead.

Fusion GPS op-ed in the New York Times blows the Trump Administration talking points out of the water.

Glenn R. Simpson, founder of Fusion GPS.

Courtesy of the New York Times:  

Three congressional committees have heard over 21 hours of testimony from our firm, Fusion GPS. In those sessions, we toppled the far right’s conspiracy theories and explained how The Washington Free Beacon and the Clinton campaign — the Republican and Democratic funders of our Trump research — separately came to hire us in the first place. 

We walked investigators through our yearlong effort to decipher Mr. Trump’s complex business past, of which the Steele dossier is but one chapter. And we handed over our relevant bank records — while drawing the line at a fishing expedition for the records of companies we work for that have nothing to do with the Trump case. 

Republicans have refused to release full transcripts of our firm’s testimony, even as they selectively leak details to media outlets on the far right. It’s time to share what our company told investigators. 

We don’t believe the Steele dossier was the trigger for the F.B.I.’s investigation into Russian meddling. As we told the Senate Judiciary Committee in August, our sources said the dossier was taken so seriously because it corroborated reports the bureau had received from other sources, including one inside the Trump camp. 

The intelligence committees have known for months that credible allegations of collusion between the Trump camp and Russia were pouring in from independent sources during the campaign. Yet lawmakers in the thrall of the president continue to wage a cynical campaign to portray us as the unwitting victims of Kremlin disinformation.

"Our sources said the dossier was taken so seriously because it corroborated reports the bureau had received from other sources, including one inside the Trump camp."

I think that's the money quote right there.

Fusion GPS also says that they alerted investigators to look into Trump's dealings with  Deutsche Bank, and told Congress that there was widespread evidence of Russian money laundering.

They also said this:

Yes, we hired Mr. Steele, a highly respected Russia expert. But we did so without informing him whom we were working for and gave him no specific marching orders beyond this basic question: Why did Mr. Trump repeatedly seek to do deals in a notoriously corrupt police state that most serious investors shun? 

What came back shocked us. Mr. Steele’s sources in Russia (who were not paid) reported on an extensive — and now confirmed — effort by the Kremlin to help elect Mr. Trump president. Mr. Steele saw this as a crime in progress and decided he needed to report it to the F.B.I.

So to sum up the Russian sources were not paid, Christopher Steele was not working with a political agenda, his dossier was not the impetus for the FBI investigation, and what he uncovered indicated to him that Trump was involved in criminal behaviors, and that is why he notified the authorities in America.

Well that certainly crushes the life out of a number of Right Wing conspiracy theories. 

James Murdoch criticizes Donald Trump's talking points, but he seems to get most of them from Fox News.

Fox News CEO James Murdoch slammed Trump's response to Charlottesville but much of what Trump said came straight from Fox News: pic.twitter.com/nFm3q3391O

— Media Matters (@mmfa) August 18, 2017

Let's face it Donald Trump is essentially taking the crap bloviated about on Fox News and making it a reality.

That is like giving life to the imaginary monsters that lived under our beds when we were children.

Terrifying.

If Murdock REALLY wanted to stop Donald Trump from tearing this country apart he would shut down his network, take his billions of dollars, and simply walk away from politics and cable news forever.

That would be so heroic that somebody might even put up a statue to honor his sacrifice.

Bill Maher interviews GOP pollster and "public relations guru" Frank Luntz on last night's Real Time. You might as well start grinding your teeth now.

I usually like to share the New Rules segment with all of you the day after Real Time is on, but last night I found myself fixated on his interview, which came right after the monologue, and thinking about it for the remainder of the show.

Now let me just warn you that this is rage inducing if you are even remotely liberal.

However it is also quite informative as it relates to what is happening within the Republican party regarding the damage control they are utilizing in the wake of Trump's nomination.

Notice that essentially right out of the box Luntz starts pandering to the Sanders supporters and pretending to commiserate with them over the fact that the "better" candidate did not win the nomination.

He then suggests that Sanders should have run as a third party candidate knowing full well that would have helped his Republican party candidate in the general election.

He then dramatically exaggerates the FBI's e-mail server investigation and virtually accuses FBI Director Comey of letting Hillary off because that's what the President wanted him to do.

When Bill sticks a pin in his arguments, Luntz changes the narrative and starts throwing out one straw man argument after the other, essentially trying to bury Maher in mounds of bullshit Republican talking points.

My favorite part (And by that I mean the part that I found the most irritating.) is when he attempts to paint Maher as an elitist and actually tries to smear him in the eyes of his own camera crew and employees on the show.

Luntz is a poorly bewigged, corpulent, toad-like POS (Think of Dakota Meyer in about fifteen years.) but he is very good at what he does, and watching him do it should serve as an abject lesson for those of us calling out the Republicans are their bullshit.

Because I can tell you right now that this is the guy who gives master classes in the dissemination of that bullshit.

Rush Limbaugh's ratings still plummeting.

Courtesy of Media Matters:  

The syndicated talker, who for two decades has been universally regarded as the most popular and powerful AM talker in the country, continues to wallow in obscurity in the nation's second largest radio market. According to recently released ratings from Nielsen Audio, Limbaugh's California flagship station, KEIB, now ranks 39th in the Los Angeles market, attracting an anemic .5 ratings share. (A ratings share represents the percent of those listening to radio in the market who are tuned into a particular station.) 

The tumble to 39th place represents yet another downward lurch -- in March the station logged in at 37th place. Note that there are a total of 45 rated stations in the Los Angeles market, which means Limbaugh's KEIB station (the call letters mirror Limbaugh's motto, "Excellence in Broadcasting") has nearly reached the ratings basement. 

And yes, Limbaugh's syndicator, Clear Channel-owned Premier Networks, pays the talker $50 million a year. 

The April ratings come in the wake of a disastrous winter for Limbaugh in key California markets. As Media Matters recently noted, Clear Channel moved Limbaugh off his longtime Los Angeles home, KFI, and made him the centerpiece of an all-conservative talk radio lineup on KEIB, where Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck are also heard. 

As of April, KEIB not only ranks 39th in the Los Angeles market, but it trails 12 non-English stations and four college outlets. Meanwhile, 10th-rated KFI's ratings remain strong in the wake of Limbaugh's departure from the station. In the past, stations that lost Rush from their lineup often saw steep declines in listenership. He served as the programming tent pole. No more. 

I think the only other person that I want to sink into the quagmire of obscurity as much as Sarah Palin is this guy.

And in some ways he is even worse because conservatives actually listen to HIM.

Well, at least they used to.

Study finds that cancelled health care plans had virtually NOTHING to do with Obamacare.

Courtesy of CBS News:  

President Obama took some serious heat last year when insurers started dropping millions of Americans from health plans that were no longer Obamacare-compliant, seemingly breaking his promise, "If you have insurance that you like, then you will be able to keep that insurance." 

A new study, however, backs up the administration's claims that the cancellations were part of the normal churn of the individual health market. 

After analyzing patterns in the nongroup health coverage market from 2008 to 2011, Harvard professor Benjamin Sommers found that the market was characterized by high turnover before the Affordable Care Act was implemented. Additionally, Summers found that most people who left the nongroup market acquired other insurance within, suggesting that the cancellations attributed to Obamacare are unlikely to have a significant impact on overall coverage rates.

And another GOP talking point bites the dust. 

Just have to keep spreading this information around before November.

If enough people are educated about the truth concerning the Affordable Care Act it will be that muhc harder for the Republicans to beat up the Democrats with it during the campaigns.

Healthcare.gov meets deadline. Republicans meet square one.

Courtesy of USA Today:  

The White House announced Sunday it has met its goal to make the Healthcare.gov website operate smoothly for most users by Nov. 30. 

"The bottom line is health care.gov on December first is night and day from where it was October first," said Jeffrey Zients, the president's appointee to fix the website's problems. "The site is now stable and operating at its intended capacity at greatly improved performance." 

When the site -- which allows people to compare private plan benefits and costs before buying an insurance policy -- launched Oct. 1, millions of people were disappointed by slow or frozen pages, an inability to log in, and incorrect or missing information. The White House tapped Zients to lead a team to fix the site. 

At the beginning of November, Zients said the site had an "up time" of just 43%. As of Nov. 30, the site's up time was 95%. 

"We have a much more stable system that's reliably open for business," he said in a Sunday conference call with reporters. 

After hardware updates and bug fixes that continued through the weekend, the federal health exchange site now has the capacity to serve 50,000 people at a time, for a total of 800,000 people a day, according to a report issued Sunday by the Department of Health and Human Services. 

That figure is "conservative," Zients said, because they figured it using an eight-hour day, rather than a 24-hour day. 

According to the administration, Zients' repair team has so far: 

• Made hundreds of software fixes, upgraded hardware, and monitored the system to make improvements; 
• Stabilized the site at its original intended capacity; and 
• Improved overall metrics, which means the site is working well for most users. 

A new hardware upgrade made Friday quadrupled the registration capacity, Zients said, and response times are under one second with an error rate below 1%. 

Over the holiday weekend, "Traffic has been significantly higher than a typical weekend," Zients said, but the website has handled the traffic smoothly.

Okay well, using Right Wing logic, if the fact that the website was NOT working effectively before meant that Obamacare was an abject failure, then doesn't the fact that it IS working now mean......

Now let the Republican scramble for new talking points begin!

Darrell Issa's appearance on Meet the Press to attack Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration over Benghazi was full of lies and half truths. Raise your hand if that surprises you in the least.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

This from Think Progress: 

Issa claimed that the administration leaned heavily on the CIA to change its draft of the now infamous set of unclassified talking points on what happened in Benghazi to better fit a political narrative and hiding the true nature of the attack from the American people:

ISSA: The fact is, we want the facts, we’re entitled to the facts. The American people were effectively lied to for a period of about a month. That’s important to get right. And – 

GREGORY: I just want to be clear here what you believe the lie was. 

ISSA: This was a terrorist attack from the get-go. The attack succeeded extremely quickly, because in no small part because the consulate or the diplomatic facility in Benghazi was not given the support it needed or quite frankly the decision to leave which might have been just as good. Either way, they were in fact covering up an easy attack that succeeded that was from the get-go about a terrorist attack. It was never about a video. 

Counter to Issa’s claim, however, the evidence shows that while the administration acted cautiously in what it put forward, it ultimately told the public just what it knew to be fact about the attack. President Obama himself referred to the assault in Libya as an “act of terror” at least twice within 48 hours. 

U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice delivered the final draft of the talking points on Sept. 16, 2012, appearing on all five Sunday news shows. Rice gave what was at the time the administrations’ best knowledge about what caused the attacks, saying that it was the result of a demonstration that mutated into a coordinated attack. Those appearances lead to her being the target of a Republican smear campaign in the weeks and months ahead. 

From the CIA’s original draft of the talking points, however, the intelligence community believed that what occurred in Benghazi was “spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo.” The Cairo protests were, in fact, spurred on by an anti-Islamic video as Rice ultimately wound up referencing in her appearances. In another draft, before the document was provided to the rest of the government for input, the word “attack” became “demonstrations,” showing that the very claim that Republicans have accused the White House of lying about came from the CIA itself. The view that the video had at least some part to play in the attack’s genesis has been borne out in later reporting.

Ambassador Thomas Pickering was also a guest on MTP and he refuted virtually all that Issa claimed as well. What's more is that Pickering has essentially absolved Hillary Clinton, who is clearly the target of this GOP smear campaign, from any culpability for the decisions made the night of the Begnhazi attack.

Chris Matthews, Andrea Mitchell, and Michael O'Hanlon provide the best breakdown of the just released Benghazi inquiry report that I have seen so far.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Apparently this report is rather convoluted but essentially it dispels the notion that the Ambassador's request for additional security measures was ignored, refutes that there was more that could have been done after the attack began to protect him, and lays most of the responsibility for the “grossly inadequate” security arrangements solely at the feet of the State Department. Which has resulted in the resignation of three officials.

I am sure that the Right Wing will do their utmost to find something damning to use against the President and Hillary Clinton in the report but as of right now it appears their talking points lack credibility and will ultimately fall on deaf ears.

Rachel Maddow puts her finger on the REAL reason for the constant GOP attacks on Ambassador Susan Rice.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I had already been convinced that this desire to get their hands on John Kerry's Senate seat had to be the underlying reason for this bizarre fake outrage over the talking points that Susan Rice shared on those Sunday morning news shows right after the Benghazi attacks.

Yesterday Rachel only confirmed that theory for me.

And then today Susan Rice met with Republican Senator Susan Collins, who then brought up a whole new set of reasons for NOT supporting Rice's appointment as Secretary of State: 

Collins also noted that Rice was working at the State Department in 1998 — and was the assistant secretary for African Affairs — when U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed. Requests for additional security at both outposts had been denied and Collins said she asked Rice on Wednesday whether she had been involved in those decisions. 

“She [Rice] said she would have to refresh her memory, but that she was not directly involved in turning down the request,” Collins said. But the senator said Rice must have been aware of the requests.

So to be clear, now that they are losing traction with the Benghazi excuse for questioning Susan Rice's qualifications, they are now going ALL the way back to 1998 to find a reason.

Seriously?

And if that were not enough of a tell, then Collins followed that statement up with this:

"I think John Kerry would be an excellent appointment and will be easily confirmed by his colleagues."

And there you have it. The argument now is that Susan Rice is a deeply flawed candidate, for a number of evolving hard to define reasons, but damn that John Kerry, who the Republicans have NEVER supported for ANYTHING, sure makes a fine choice for Secretary of State. And what a coinky dink, his appointment also opens up a very valuable Senate seat.

Give me a fucking break!  This could not be more obvious if they had "We want John Kerry's Senate seat!" tattooed on their foreheads.

John McCain misses White House briefing on Benghazi so that he can hold press conference attacking the administration over the lack of information about Benghazi.

Courtesy of CNN:  

Most of the Republican members of a Senate committee investigating the terrorist attack at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, skipped an classified briefing by administration officials on the incident Wednesday, CNN has learned. 

The missing lawmakers included Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who at the time of the top-secret briefing held a press conference in the Capitol to call for the creation of a Watergate-type special Congressional committee to investigate how and why the attack took place. McCain, who has accused President Barack Obama of not telling the truth about the Benghazi attack, said that even though there are several committees involved in the probe, only a select committee could streamline the information flow and resolve the "many unanswered questions" about the tragedy. 

When CNN approached McCain in a Capitol hallway Thursday morning, the senator refused to comment about why he missed the briefing, which was conducted by top diplomatic, military and counter-terrorism officials. Instead, McCain got testy when pressed to say why he wasn't there. 

"I have no comment about my schedule and I'm not going to comment on how I spend my time to the media," McCain said. 

Asked why he wouldn't comment, McCain grew agitated: "Because I have the right as a senator to have no comment and who the hell are you to tell me I can or not?”

This is John McCain in a nutshell: "If the administration does not know everything about this incident they are unqualified idiots.What? I missed a briefing where the administration was going to tell me everything they know about this incident? Well you are an idiot for asking me why I did not attend! Now get those damn kids off my lawn!"

Jesus if my dog were as temperamental and irrational as John McCain I would have it put to sleep.

You know it is VERY telling that  MOST of the Republican members of the Senate committee investigating the attacks did not show up for the briefing.  It is almost like they don't want to learn the actual facts of exactly how the Obama administration handled the situation.

After all learning REAL information might screw up their ability to declare to the Fox News viewers that the administration behaved incompetently.  Couldn't have that, now could we?

Jonathon Capehart damns Paul Ryan with faint praise. Hey, at least he's better than Sarah Palin.

Courtesy of the Washington Post:  

Ryan actually has the policy heft that Palin pretended to have. Sure, like Palin, Ryan has no foreign policy experience. But I certainly don’t expect Ryan to be as disastrous in international relations. Not because Palin set the bar so low that I felt more qualified to run for vice president just by being able to answer the questions posed to her. But because Ryan is a hard worker who will study actual policy rather memorize lines to get through a debate or interview. 

Palin was a statewide elected official before she quit her office halfway through her first term as governor. Ryan is a seven-term congressman who has never run statewide, let alone nationally. Thanks to his “Roadmap” and subsequent budget plans, Ryan has spent more than two years under the hot lights of national scrutiny. Yet, the lights of a presidential campaign burn with the heat of a thousand suns. We’ll soon see whether Ryan can handle that. But this much I know: He won’t wilt. 

Finally, here’s the biggest and most important difference between Ryan and Palin. With his selection, the 42-year-old Ryan is the bona fide leader with the necessary policy chops that conservatives hoped Palin would be. She was poised to be the leader of the Republican Party after her 2008 defeat, but she squandered her future potential on reality TV shows and point-scoring from her perch at Fox News. That Palin won’t be speaking at the convention in Tampa is proof that her Republican reign mercifully may be over. 

I really don't think I will EVER tire of watching pundits use Palin as a measuring tool for how bad a political candidate COULD be. It just warms the cockles of my heart.

However many in the GOP are still in a relative panic over Mitt's choice for VP. Enough so that they sent out a memo with talking points directing them on how to spin the Ryan budget and the predicted blowback concerning his views on Medicare.

Some, like Dick Morris, are even saying that this might have doomed the Romney campaign. (Yeah like it WASN'T doomed already!)

By the way speaking of blowback, I hear that Palin will be on with Greta tonight. This will be her first interview since being kicked to the curb by the Romney campaign, and told she will have NO role at the convention.

I will certainly have MY bowl of popcorn at the ready. Could be HIGHLY entertaining.

Mitt Romney, and other Republican spokespeople, take President Obama's words completely out of context in order to provide raw meat to their base.

If image does not enlarge sufficiently click here.

Courtesy of TPM:

Mitt Romney and an array of surrogates are mocking President Obama for remarks he made defending public investments in infrastructure, accusing him of arrogantly claiming credit for small businesses’ hard work and risk-taking. But it takes an Olympic-level gymnastic leap to make the attack work as advertised. 

The Romney campaign is seizing on a specific line the president said at a campaign event in Virginia on Friday: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” Or, as a Romney press release blared: “OBAMA, TO BUSINESS OWNERS: ‘YOU DIDN’T BUILD THAT.’” 

Sounds pretty bad — and it is, if you leave out the sentences directly before and after, which make it crystal clear Obama wasn’t talking about building businesses at all. The “that” in “you didn’t build that” referred to roads, bridges, infrastructure, education, emergency services and law and order — all services that protect and enable business owners along the way toward creating a successful operation. Here’s the full passage: 

“If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. 

The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires. 

So we say to ourselves, ever since the founding of this country, you know what, there are some things we do better together. That’s how we funded the GI Bill. That’s how we created the middle class. That’s how we built the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hoover Dam. That’s how we invented the Internet. That’s how we sent a man to the moon. We rise or fall together as one nation and as one people, and that’s the reason I’m running for president — because I still believe in that idea. You’re not on your own, we’re in this together.”

Okay here is the thing that I believe separates the liberals from this current crop of conservatives.

Those of us on the Left pride ourselves on our intelligence and our ability to see through the bullshit, while the Right prides themselves on their faith and ability to stick to their guns regardless of what facts might be introduced which demonstrate that they are incorrect in their point of view.

Therefore in order to reach out to the new GOP teabagging base, Romney (Who I think we can all agree actually does know better) and the Republican surrogates, takes something like this completely out of context knowing FULL WELL that not only will the Republican base NOT research to see if it is true or not, but will even avoid any possibility of accidentally learning that it is in fact bullshit!

We have seen this same scenario play out time and time again with the Palin supporters, who like the brain eating zombies of cinema, seem to have spread their intelligence devouring disease among the rest of the Republicans in this country.

The GOP faithful are essentially demanding that they be lied to so that they can continue hating the President with impunity, even though his  policies will actually greatly benefit the vast majority of them.

At this point I don't believe there is really much hope left for the Republican party.  Though a rousing loss in 2012 might serve as a wake up call for the few intellectuals currently hiding their gray matter behind insipid talking points and dull vacant stares.

Five myths cleared up concerning the Affordable Care Act.

Courtesy of the New York Times:

OBAMACARE IS A JOB-KILLER. 

Some of the job-killer scare stories are based on a deliberate misreading of a Congressional Budget Office report that estimated the law would “reduce the amount of labor used in the economy” by about 800,000 jobs. Sounds like a job-killer, right? Not if you read what the C.B.O. actually wrote. While some low-wage jobs might be lost, the C.B.O. number mainly refers to workers who — being no longer so dependent on employers for their health-care safety net — may choose to retire earlier or work part time. Those jobs would then be open for others who need them. 

Ultimately the Affordable Care Act could be a tonic for the economy. It aims to slow the raging growth of health care costs by, among other things, using the government’s Medicare leverage to move doctors away from exorbitant fee-for-service medicine, with its incentive to pile on unnecessary procedures. 

OBAMACARE IS A FEDERAL TAKEOVER OF HEALTH INSURANCE. 

Let’s be blunt. The word for that is “lie.” The main thing the law does is deliver 30 million new customers to the private insurance industry. Indeed, a significant portion of the unhappiness with Obamacare comes from liberals who believe it is not nearly federal enough: that the menu of insurance choices should have included a robust public option, or that Medicare should have been expanded into a form of universal coverage. 

THE UNFETTERED MARKETPLACE IS A BETTER SOLUTION. 

To the extent there is a profound difference of principle anywhere in this debate, it lies here. Conservatives contend that if you give consumers a voucher or a tax credit and set them loose in the marketplace they will do a better job than government at finding the services — schools, retirement portfolios, or in this case health insurance policies — that fit their needs. 

“Ten percent of the population accounts for 60 percent of the health outlays,” said (Health economist Karen) Davis. “They are the very sick, and they are not really in a position to make cost-conscious choices.” 

American entrepreneur, Nick Hanauer, dismantles the GOP talking point that raising taxes on the top 1% negatively impacts job creation.

This is one of the BEST explanations for why this idea is ridiculous, and why Republicans should be called out over it, that I have ever heard. 

Save this and the next time you hear some Right Wing zombie spouting this nonsense strap them to a chair and make them watch it. More than once if necessary.

President Obama's greatest achievement? Ending the Iraq War.

Courtesy of Electa blog:

But he gets almost no credit for this. On the right, they say he was just following Bush’s timeline and we should still have troops there to prevent a civil war. On the left, they say he was just following Bush’s timeline and we still have thousands of contractors in a giant embassy. 

Both sides forget history. As Barack Obama was winning the 2008 election on the issue of the Iraq War, he changed the debate and forced the timeline that Bush adopted. 

From July 18, 2008: 

"In a stunning diplomatic breakthrough for Barack Obama, Iraq’s prime minister yesterday endorsed the Democratic candidate’s 16-month timeline for withdrawing combat troops from Iraq." 

The timeline Bush adopted was never Bush’s timeline. It was Obama’s. (That’s why he won the Nobel Peace Prize, in case you’re wondering.) The privatization of the military as described in Rachel Maddow’s Drift made getting out a bit easier. But ending this war was a mission this man adopted as a State Senator and achieved as President. Denying that only reveals your bias.

You know what pisses me off? That even I had started to adopt the talking point that all Obama did was to follow Bush's timeline.

It just goes to show how insidious the Republican talking points can be, and how quickly they become ingrained in out political discourse.

I should have remembered this fact, but I didn't.  Did you?

We have to do a better job my friends.  Not only are the facts sometimes elusive, but apparently the Republicans are attempting to coat them in some kind of political KY Jelly.

Is creating a Federal Mandate to buy health insurance unconstitutional? Not according to the Founding Fathers!

"Don't worry Barry. I've got your back."

Courtesy of The New Republic:  

In making the legal case against Obamacare’s individual mandate, challengers have argued that the framers of our Constitution would certainly have found such a measure to be unconstitutional. Nevermind that nothing in the text or history of the Constitution’s Commerce Clause indicates that Congress cannot mandate commercial purchases. The framers, challengers have claimed, thought a constitutional ban on purchase mandates was too “obvious” to mention. Their core basis for this claim is that purchase mandates are unprecedented, which they say would not be the case if it was understood this power existed.

But there’s a major problem with this line of argument: It just isn’t true. The founding fathers, it turns out, passed several mandates of their own. In 1790, the very first Congress—which incidentally included 20 framers—passed a law that included a mandate: namely, a requirement that ship owners buy medical insurance for their seamen. This law was then signed by another framer: President George Washington. That’s right, the father of our country had no difficulty imposing a health insurance mandate. 

That’s not all. In 1792, a Congress with 17 framers passed another statute that required all able-bodied men to buy firearms. Yes, we used to have not only a right to bear arms, but a federal duty to buy them. Four framers voted against this bill, but the others did not, and it was also signed by Washington. Some tried to repeal this gun purchase mandate on the grounds it was too onerous, but only one framer voted to repeal it. 

Six years later, in 1798, Congress addressed the problem that the employer mandate to buy medical insurance for seamen covered drugs and physician services but not hospital stays. And you know what this Congress, with five framers serving in it, did? It enacted a federal law requiring the seamen to buy hospital insurance for themselves. That’s right, Congress enacted an individual mandate requiring the purchase of health insurance. And this act was signed by another founder, President John Adams.

I swear there is NOTHING I enjoy more than using facts to smack down a GOP talking point.

(H/T to Andrew Sullivan.)