Odds & Ends

This is pretty much what I've been saying. Certainly explains why the right wing hates the census so much:

Read the census data that have been coming out over the past couple weeks and you're compelled to a stark conclusion: Either the Republican Party changes totally, or it has a rendezvous with extinction.

What the census shows is that America's racial minorities, aggregated together, are on track to become its majority. The Republican Party's response to this epochal demographic change has been to do everything in its power to keep America (particularly its electorate) as white as can be. Republicans have obstructed minorities from voting; required Latinos to present papers if the police ask for them; opposed the Dream Act, which would have conferred citizenship on young immigrants who served in our armed forces or went to college; and called for denying the constitutional right to citizenship to American-born children of undocumented immigrants.

If the Republicans have a long-term strategic plan, it seems to derive from King Canute, who commanded the tide to stop.

Related:

In the first month of the new legislative season, they have introduced a dizzying number of measures on hot-button issues in statehouses around the country as part of what amounts to a full-throttle mission to repeal, restrict and repress.

It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.

As Reuters pointed out this week, in the midterms, “Republicans gained nearly 700 state legislative seats and now have their largest numbers since the Great Depression, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.”

...

As MSNBC and Telemundo reported recently, at least 15 state legislatures are considering Arizona-style immigration legislation. If passed, four of the five states with the largest Hispanic populations — California, Texas, Florida and Arizona — would also be the most inhospitable to them.

Also related:

Tucson — The leader of an anti-illegal-immigrant group was convicted Monday in a home invasion robbery that left a 9-year-old girl and her father dead in what prosecutors said was an attempt to steal drug money to fund the group's operations.

A Tucson jury found Shawna Forde, 42, guilty of murder in the May 2009 killings of Raul Flores, 29, and his daughter Brisenia at their home in Arivaca, a desert community 10 miles north of Mexico.

See, civilian trials of terrorists work just fine.

Meanwhile, back in Texas:

The Senate measure generally would restrict college financial aid to students already receiving it, just like the House. The Senate version holds out hope for some additional financial aid funding.

The Senate draft would put more money into public education than the House but still fall $9.3 billion short of current school funding formulas that pay for items, such as projected student enrollment growth and projected decreases in school district property values. It would include some funding for other education programs slashed in the House draft.
...
The measure would not cover the number of people expected to enroll in Medicaid through the next two years, and it would slash Medicaid reimbursement rates to health care providers.

The bill filed by Ogden would cut public safety and criminal justice, including community supervision and parole programs, though less than the House proposal.

But at least Slick Rick has his priorities right.

"This is business as usual for Rick Perry instead of focusing on the real emergency, our state's budget crisis, he is trying to distract us with divisive partisan issues," explained Kirsten Gray, communication director for the Texas Democratic Party. "It is obvious that Rick Perry is only concerned with becoming a GOP celebrity than with working for every day Texans."

Some in attendance at Saturday's rally agree with Gray like San Francisco transplant Peace Washington Costanzo, who dressed up as the Statue of Liberty and stood on the steps of the Capitol.

"I don't understand why we have to waste time with such issues as this," said Costanzo. "There are so many more pressing issues, closing schools."

Costanzo said she feels a woman has a right to choose what happens medically with her body also told KXAN she loves life.

Bills similar to this one have been introduced in the past by Senator Dan Patrick.

What makes this bill different is that Perry has now deemed it emergency legislation meaning the bill must be dealt with by state legislators in the first 60 days of the new session.

I wonder who gets to pay for the sonograms?

No, Both Sides Don't Do It.

This:

In fact, there is no balance—none whatsoever. Only one side has made the rhetoric of armed revolt against an oppressive tyranny the guiding spirit of its grassroots movement and its midterm campaign. Only one side routinely invokes the Second Amendment as a form of swagger and intimidation, not-so-coyly conflating rights with threats. Only one side’s activists bring guns to democratic political gatherings. Only one side has a popular national TV host who uses his platform to indoctrinate viewers in the conviction that the President is an alien, totalitarian menace to the country. Only one side fills the AM waves with rage and incendiary falsehoods. Only one side has an iconic leader, with a devoted grassroots following, who can’t stop using violent imagery and dividing her countrymen into us and them, real and fake. Any sentient American knows which side that is; to argue otherwise is disingenuous.

Yeah, pretty much.

As predictable as night following day

Timeline of violent rhetoric & action over the last 2+ years. Tell me again how "both sides do it"?

Read the whole list if your stomach can take it. They know exactly what they're doing. That Pilate brand hand soap won't work any better now than it did 2000 years ago.

8 Years and No Conservative Mentions Him

Funny how quickly that conservatives erased the name "George W. Bush" from their vocabularies. How quickly he went from God's Warrior to the invisible man. But then again, I guess it's hard to lecture people on the constitution when you supported a man who violated American's 4th amendment right to be free from illegal search and seizure and whose administration was successfully sued for violating the first amendment rights of citizens:

The Ranks, who wanted to attend the President's Fourth of July address without being mistaken for supporters of his policies, wore homemade t-shirts bearing the international "no" symbol (a circle with a diagonal line across it) superimposed over the word "Bush." One t-shirt said "Love America, Hate Bush" on the back and the other said "Regime Change Starts At Home." Event staff and law enforcement ordered them either to leave the event or remove or cover their shirts. The couple responded by insisting they had a First Amendment right to remain and express their views. The two were arrested for trespassing, handcuffed, and hauled away in a police van. The charges against them were later dismissed and the City of Charleston, not a defendant in the case, apologized for the incident.

Another great example of the conservative's "free speech for me, but not for thee" attitude. I guess their mistake was not showing up with guns strapped to their legs.

I'm also guessing that it also could put a crimp in your "Obama is Hitler" meme if you start counting the unprovoked wars he's started compared to Bush (0-1), or if you start talking about Bush's refusal to comply with the Geneva Conventions prohibiting torture.

But the main reason why they have erased him from view is his legacy:

Bush's record on poverty is equally bleak. When Clinton left office in 2000, the Census counted almost 31.6 million Americans living in poverty. When Bush left office in 2008, the number of poor Americans had jumped to 39.8 million (the largest number in absolute terms since 1960.) Under Bush, the number of people in poverty increased by over 8.2 million, or 26.1 per cent. Over two-thirds of that increase occurred before the economic collapse of 2008.


The trends were comparably daunting for children in poverty. When Clinton left office nearly 11.6 million children lived in poverty, according to the Census. When Bush left office that number had swelled to just under 14.1 million, an increase of more than 21 per cent.

That's what the healthcare fight (and more fights to come) is really about, the fact that Americans are suffering tangibly from Republican policies. If healthcare reform and other "liberal" policies are successful, it will be a huge blow to conservative ideology in the eyes of non-partisan americans. It's telling that the conservatives are fighting so desparately to prevent people from ever seeing those policies in action.

They're so desparate that they are willing to incite the simple-minded in their ranks to violence, while trying to maintain plausible deniability ("I had no idea you would interpret my calling the President a 'grandmother killer who must be stopped at all costs while we still have our guns' as a call to violence".) It's working, and it's dispicable.

Before the Birthers Out Me...

"The Movement"

A great article. Take the time to click on the link and read the full post.

The Movement may speak in normal political talking points from ‘Republican’ institutions. Yet is is not committed to Dahl-esque pluralistic politics. It has has never sought compromise or ‘moderation’. That’s because for the Movement, politics is existential warfare. Compromise is defeat.

Because Krugman et al. fail to grasp the fundamental difference between the Movement, the former Republican Party and the Democratic Party, talking heads refer to the Movement as the ‘Republican base’. As if somehow the Movement and its Manichean zero-sum nihilism is the same as the Democratic base. Say the the Sierra Club or unions. How one can be a professional political analyst and assume a base is a base is a base. Well, we live in truly decadent (technically defined) times.
...
As a sign of their increased power, the Movement’s rage, paranoia, and conspiracy fever in 1993 seemed novel. By 1994 and certainly 2000. the Movement had completed its subversion of the Republican Party.

Wonder why after Obama the ferocity is turned up to 11? The answer is intrinsic to the Movement as functional social, cultural and political creature. It governed for 6 years and hung on for 2 more. Its Counter-Enlightenment, racial, authoritarian /hierarchical impulse was the official American government. With Obama’s victory its rejection is not only personal but for the first time, in 2006 and 2008, it as dominant political force (not as a minor coalition partner within the Republican Party) was rejected.