Archive for July, 2013
Late Night Video — What the GOP’s War on Women Might Look Like
Featuring an imagined doctor’s visit to get some basic birth control. Funny and scary. Scary because the GOP probably thinks that this is just what they want. About 4 minutes long.
The Open Thread for Saturday, July 27, 2013
It’s a quiet Saturday, the weather is nice, and I’m not finding any political news this morning that is new and interesting. So it’s your turn. And in the meantime here is some audio tapes of our Presidents in some more candid moments.
Kennedy
Johnson & Truman
More inside…
The Daily Delawhere for Saturday, July 27, 2013
From Governor Markell’s Flickr feed, here is the Governor and Miss Delaware 2013 Rebecca Jackson in a watermelon eating contest at the State Fair in Harrington.
The Open Thread for Friday, July 26, 2013
Washington Post’s Jonathan Bernstein:
Do Republicans believe that Obamacare is a disaster in the making? Or is it such an appealing program that they have to take extraordinary steps to undermine it? Reuters reports today that conservative groups are taking their campaign to undermine the law to ever new heights. As the Tea Party group FreedomWorks puts it: “We’re trying to make it socially acceptable to skip the exchange.” […]
At the same time they’re trying to undermine it, Republicans are loudly insisting that the program just won’t work — it will “collapse under its own weight,” as the talking point has it. For example, see the apparent attempt by Republican state governments to hype “rate shock” well beyond any reality. As Sarah Kliff argues today, Republicans have set expectations for the program so low that “if Godzilla doesn’t march in on Oct. 1 and gobble up our health insurance coverage and legions of IRS agents fail to microchip the masses, that could plausibly look like a success.”If they really believe that the Affordable Care Act will collapse on its own — that premiums will skyrocket, that people will lose what they have now, or whatever other horrors they’ve been asserting — then there’s no reason at all for any campaign to spread misinformation about the law or to encourage anyone to “skip the exchange.” Consumers would do that on their own. But Republicans apparently think they can’t take the risk that Obamacare will work out just fine.
It is an article of faith if you are a conservative or a Republican: ObamaCare is going to be a disaster, a trainwreck, a total mess. So if you are a Republican, and you want the Dems and Obama to be blamed for the mess that is Obama, why would you not just allow it to go into effect with full funding and sit back and watch the disaster? No, they have to sabotage it for it to be a trainwreck, for if Obamacare goes into affect fully funded and fully implemented, then the people will love on the level of Medicare and Social Security.
Meanwhile, there is something for everyone in this new ABC/Washington Post poll on abortion….
Around the Horn for July 19-25, 2013
It’s back! Our weekly trip around the Delaware Blogosphere was one of our best features here at Delaware Liberal some years ago. And then the Delaware Blogosphere shrank, what with Dave Burris leaving DP or First State Politics and Mike Matthews leaving Down With Absolutes, and Dana Garrett leaving his blog. But the work of Kilroy, Kavips and Nancy Willing, among others, needs to be highlighted and shared among us more, especially on the education issue and county government.
The below links are not necessarily from last week, but from the last month, long tagged in my RSS Reader to follow up on. Going forward, starting next week, the links provided here will be from that week. And I want all of you to post in the comments blog posts and stories that I and we have missed, and Delaware blogs that we should start reading.
To start off, Nancy Willing shows us who among our current and former state and federal legislators have ties or are members of the right wing state legislation mill, ALEC…..
Late Night Video — Get The Dough Out of Politics
Courtesy of Ben & Jerry’s and the folks at Get the Dough Out — a lesson is why corporations should not be treated as people (approx. 1 minute):
The Open Thread for Thursday, July 25, 2013
Kudos to former President George H.W. Bush, pictured above with the 2 year old son of one of his security detail. Bush, and his entire security detail, shaved their heads in support of the child, who is going through chemotherapy treatment for leukemia. This is a kind and classy move.
Meanwhile, from Jonathan Chait: “The Republican Party has spent 30 years careering ever more deeply into ideological extremism, but one of the novel developments of the Obama years is its embrace of procedural extremism. The Republican fringe has evolved from being politically shrewd proponents of radical policy changes to a gang of saboteurs who would rather stop government from functioning at all. In this sense, their historical precedents are not so much the Gingrich revolutionaries, or even their tea-party selves of a few years ago; the movement is more like the radical left of the sixties, had it occupied a position of power in Congress. And so the terms we traditionally use to scold bad Congresses–partisanship, obstruction, gridlock–don’t come close to describing this situation. The hard right’s extremism has bent back upon itself, leaving an inscrutable void of paranoia and formless rage and twisting the Republican Party into a band of anarchists.”
Carney Votes Against Limits on Spying
Flea-bitten Hound Bites Man: http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2013/roll412.xml Of course, the conspiracy theorists among us could, um, theorize that Carney cast his vote to make the Homeland Security job more attractive to Tom Carper, thus creating more political flexibility for John Carney. Me? Naah, it’s just yet another bad vote by an undistinguished, and flea-ridden, congress creature.
An elective class? Yeah, I am not sure I have a problem with that.
So tonight the Cape Henlopen School Board will vote on a proposal to offer a secular and elective high school class examining the Bible’s role in society and history. And if the class is elective, and it is taught from a historical and secular perspective rather than religious or spiritual, I have no problem personally or constitutionally with that, and the Board should go ahead and vote for the class. Indeed, as suggested in the News Journal article on this issue today, they should also offer a comparitive religions class that looks at more religions than just Christianity.
And I must say, I am impressed by the quotes and the considerations of the board members quoted in the News Journal article. Looks like a part of Sussex County has grown up when it comes to church and state and schools.
The Lottery and Gaming Study Commission = The Fix Is In to Bail Out Casinos
This study commission — created when the GA and the Governor decided to help improve the balance sheets of our local casinos who are being hurt by rising costs (who isn’t, really?) and by a failed competitive stance in a market where we are surrounded by a glut of gaming options. This Commission met for the first time on Tuesday — and tell me if you can spot why I think the fix is in:
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