The Senate Intelligence Report on Benghazi

In today's once great Washington Post Bezos Bugle, David Ignatius writes about the recent Senate intelligence committee report on "Benghazi !":

The Senate intelligence committee made headlines this week by reporting that the 2012 attack in Benghazi was preventable. But frankly, we knew that. The deeper message of the bipartisan report was that Republicans in Congress wasted a year arguing about what turned out to be mostly phony issues.  [snip] 

The Republican tirades about Benghazi were unfortunate not just because they were based on erroneous speculation but also because they distracted policymakers from the real challenge of framing coherent policy in the Middle East. Sometimes, it seemed as if Benghazi finger-pointing was the only issue that leading Republicans cared about. 

In between the selected paragraphs above, Ignatius indicates how the (bi-partisan) Senate report refuted more than a year's worth of Republican witch-hunting and character assassination, led by the execrable Rep. Darrell "Grand Theft Auto" Issa (R-Arson).   What Ignatius omits is the "why," i.e., the real issue "leading Republicans cared about."   Let's fill in that blank for him in two words:  Hillary Clinton.

The minute Barack Obama became a lame duck President, Republicans shifted their strategic focus to roughing up the strongest Democratic contender for 2016:  Hillary Clinton.  It must have scared the bejezus out of Fox "News" (GOP-TV) that Clinton was leading every potential Republican contender by double digits, hence their drumbeat of "coverup!" that began the year-long obsession:

Driving the Republican jihad was a claim, first reported in October 2012 by Fox News, that CIA personnel had wanted to respond more quickly to the Benghazi attack but were ordered to “stand down,” perhaps by political higher-ups. Although this claim was promptly rebutted by CIA officials, it was repeated by Fox News at least 85 times, according to a review by the liberal advocacy group Media Matters. This barrage fueled Republican charges that the Democrats were engaging in a coverup.

They might need to manufacture a new diversion, though, because Hillary's lead over her closest Republican rival, once-Great White Whale Hope Gov. Chris "Krispykreme" Christie, is back to double digits.

Sunday Funnies

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The polluting company that caused the chemical spill in the water supply of Waste Virginia has declared bankruptcy.  So-called Freedom Industries has $3. 7 million in outstanding debt to creditors and (surprise!) owes the Federal Government nearly $2.5 million in unpaid taxes.

We'll see in the months and years ahead whether the good people of Waste Virginia will tolerate more deregulation for the purpose of attracting reckless polluters to their State in exchange for their health.

(cartoon:  Rob Rogers, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, via Gocomics.com)

Praise The Lord and Pass The Contraceptives

A headline in yesterday's HuffPo:

Nun Gives Birth To Baby Boy In Italy

She said, "I did not know I was pregnant" with the 9 pound baby boy.  (Whew!)  She did wonder if that priest at her church knew what he was doing when he gave her a pap test.  (ba-dom-dom)

She named the boy Francesco (Francis) in honor of the Pope, so quick thinking there.

Another Shoe Dropping in Christie's Fiefdom?

A lot of buzz about MSNBC "Up" host Steve Kornacki's interview today of Hoboken, NJ, mayor Dawn Zimmer, who alleges Gov. Chris "Krispykreme" Christie's goons strong-armed her during the Hurricane Sandy disaster:

Two senior members of Gov. Chris Christie’s administration warned a New Jersey mayor earlier this year that her town would be starved of hurricane relief money unless she approved a lucrative redevelopment plan favored by the governor, according to the mayor and emails and personal notes she shared with msnbc. 

The mayor, Dawn Zimmer, hasn’t approved the project, but she did request $127 million in hurricane relief for her city of Hoboken – 80% of which was underwater after Sandy hit in October 2012. What she got was $142,000 to defray the cost of a single back-up generator plus an additional $200,000 in recovery grants. 

Anyone noticing a pattern here?  This could be the opening that empowers other Jersey officials to come forward with their own accounts of other Krispykreme administration extortionist strong-arm tactics that have directly harmed the State's citizens.

Today's Cartoons and Read - The Republican Poverty and Deprivation Agenda

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(Dan Wasserman, Boston Globe)

(Mike Luckovich, Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

We know Republicans are engaged in a (futile) effort to send the message "We care!" about the jobless and the poor, while "deep-six-ing" programs that would alleviate their misery.  Meanwhile, Ezra Klein says "Follow the money" if you want to gauge the seriousness of Republican concern:

Follow the trail in the party’s recent budgets and what you find, hidden between appendix tables, are deep cuts to programs for the poor. That’s the inevitable consequence of Republican commitments to favored constituencies. The party promised its anti-tax wing no tax increases and lower tax rates. It promised older voters that Medicare and Social Security would not change for those over age 55. It promised defense hawks that sequestration cuts to military spending would be reversed. And it promised its tea party allies that it would cut trillions from government spending and balance the federal budget. 

The only way to square all those promises is through draconian cuts to programs for the poor. The liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that programs for lower-income Americans would account for two-thirds of proposed Republican budget savings. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that as many as 37 million Americans would lose access to Medicaid, which was targeted for hundreds of billions in cuts. 

That’s an agenda that would result in more poverty and deprivation, not less. Yet all the Republicans now talking about poverty -- Sens. Marco Rubio, Mike Lee and Rand Paul and Rep. Paul Ryan -- either voted for or, in Ryan’s case, authored these cuts.

The rest of Klein's post is worth the read.

Though none of the above comes as a shock to anyone who's followed politics in the last 40 years, it's always worth highlighting the fact that the overriding concern of the Republican/ New Confederate/ Stupid Party is, and for over a century has been, the welfare of the job creators  makers  wealthy 1 percent, a fact that eludes many of the knuckledraggers who vote their fears and prejudices rather than their economic interests.

Wanker of the Week

What an ignorant bigot:

Putin met with a group of volunteers in the Olympic mountain venue at Krasnaya Polyana on Friday to wish them success at the Games. During a question-and-answer session, one volunteer asked him about Russia’s attitudes toward gays, a subject that has provoked worldwide controversy, and Putin offered what was apparently meant to be a reassuring answer for visitors to the Olympics. 

"One can feel calm and at ease," he said. "Just leave the kids alone, please."

UPDATE:  Here's your runner-up.

Weekend Song

As we mentioned last Friday, we're building up to an event in rock 'n' roll history (all right, you probably figured it out by now) involving the Beatles.  So today we're featuring this Lennon/McCartney song from "Hard Days Night" sung by George Harrison.  Enjoy the weekend.

Letters We Wish We'd Written - Dark Money Edition

As we noted a while back, "dark money" (untraceable political contributions) has been exposed for the anti-democratic cancer that it is (again, thanks Roberts Court!).  To its credit the once great Washington Post Bezos Bugle had an editorial on January 13 (following up on reporting by Matea Gold) on the extraordinary lengths to which far right-wing plutocrats =cough=Koch brothers=cough= go to hide the obscene amounts of money sloshing around the world of right-wing politics.  Here's a letter on the subject which appeared in today's paper:

The Post’s Jan. 13 editorial “Dark money labyrinth” asked of the conservative groups flooding our electoral process with hundreds of millions of dollars: “What do they fear from disclosure of their political investments?” It may be that these groups and other Republicans favor secrecy because most Americans do not agree with their positions.

Even most Republicans favor raising the minimum wage and extending unemployment benefits. Most Americans favor a balanced approach to the deficit, rejected by Republicans, that includes new revenue from tax reform.

Those backing such groups also probably don’t want to advertise their support for a party that considers protecting the wealthy’s privileged tax breaks as its primary priority and that relegates the plight of the unemployed and the slow economic recovery to secondary status. From minimum wage to immigrationto extending unemployment insurance to voter suppression to assaults on union workers and women’s rights, Republicans have fixed their sights on regular, hard-working Americans. If I were supporting that party and those efforts, I would want secrecy, too.   [our emphasis]

Bill Conrad, Alexandria

Money is not free speech, and corporations aren't people, no matter what the plutocrats and their toadies would have us believe.  Not only does it have the potential to subvert the democratic process, it's (yes, Justice Kennedy) corrupting.  More light needs to be shed on the problem by the media, followed by heat from the electorate.

Quote of the Day

"What an asshole." -- This pithy quote courtesy of Weeper of the House John "Mr. Tangerine Man" Boehner, referring to uber-wingnut and flaming bigot Rep. Steve King and his comparison of young undocumented Latino immigrants to drug mules with calves like cantaloupes.  Sadly for the Weeper, his caucus is overflowing with assholes.

Fire, Aim, Ready

Last July 4, a Virginia man active in the "patriot" libertarian movement, Adam "Needs An Eve" Kokesh, stood on Pennsylvania Avenue's Freedom Plaza (two blocks from the White House) with a shotgun and proceeded to load it, while ranting about the tyrannical gummint.  The stunt, which was videotaped, resulted in him being arrested on several weapons charges, and later, on drug charges when the home that he shares with several other losers men was raided and police found marijuana and psychedelic mushrooms.  After serving four months in D.C. jail, he was released today on two years' probation, after facing as much as seven years in prison for the charges against him.

Unwittingly, this 'shroom head, who proclaims himself to be a gun rights advocate, undercut his cause by his over-the-top stunt (imagine tourists with families seeing this idiot in downtown D.C.)  A newly contrite Adam Needs An Eve admitted his poor judgement at sentencing, and promised not to carry out any more stunts like that -- at least while he's on probation.  If there's a next time, throw the book at him.

(photo:  About to shoot himself in the foot)

The Rethuglican War on Women, Cont'd.

House Rethuglicans are pushing a bill, HR 7, that would open the door to IRS audits of rape and incest victims having legal abortions, among other outrages.  Think Progress gets to the heart of the offensive provision:

 "...HR 7 eliminates medical-expense deductions for abortion care, essentially raising taxes on the women who opt to have an abortion. Like many abortion restrictions, this provision includes an exemption for victims of rape and incest, as well as women who encounter life-threatening complications from their pregnancies. But in order to enforce those exceptions, the IRS would have to verify that the women who are claiming a medical-expense deduction for an abortion fall into one of those three categories, to ensure they’re not committing tax fraud." (emphasis added)

The bill is being pushed through the House's Judiciary Committee, headed by Neanderthal teahadist Rep. Bob Goodlatte, who said just yesterday that restricting abortion rights would be a way of creating jobs, when research points to the opposite.  Actually, the best jobs program would be to replace obstructionist wingnuts like Goodlatte with people whose minds aren't stuck in the 19th century.

The Toxic Kool-Aid MCHM Test*

(click to enlarge cartoon)

Jim Morin, via GoComics.com

Then there's the CEO of polluting chemical company Freedom Industries enjoying his bottled water while West Virginians go without theirs, after 7,500 gallons of toxic MCHM spilled into the Elk River.  Drink up!
(*Apologies to Tom Wolfe)

North Carolina Republicans Open A Front In The Class War

From Think Progress, here's what you get when you elect a reverse-Robin Hood Republican Governor and legislature:

The 900,000 poorest working families in North Carolina just got another tax hike from the conservatives who swept state legislature elections in 2010.

The change took effect at the beginning of 2014, meaning that the taxes those families file this spring will be the last to feature the state’s tax break for the working poor. The provision, known as the Earned Income Tax Credit or EITC, will also be 10 percent less generous in its final year. State-level EITCs work by tacking on an additional benefit to the federal EITC, and the law repealing North Carolina’s EITC for 2014 also cut the credit from 5 percent to 4.5 percent of the federal benefit.  [snip] 

Along with the disappearance of the EITC, low-income North Carolinians will be paying higher taxes in order to pay for a tax cut for the richest people in the state. Republicans moved from a two-tiered, progressive income tax system to a flat tax rate of 5.8 percent. A person who earns a million dollars per year will get a roughly $10,000 tax cut thanks to that move, but the bottom 80 percent of the income distribution will see their taxes rise. That means that four out of five taxpayers in the state were going to pay more next year even before the EITC repeal.  [our emphasis]

Class warfare?  What class warfare?!

(Image:  Where's Robin Hood when you need him?)

Today's Dispatches From The Stupid Party - Meet The Candidates Edition

There's a fair amount of Stupid in the Stupid Party today (and every day, for that matter).  Let's take a look at some of the folks the establishment wing of the Republican /New Confederate /Stupid Party would like you to not notice, starting with this goober running for Congress:

After taking a drubbing in last year's state elections, Virginia Republicans are debating whether their party has come to be defined by its extremists. But in a congressional district in Northern Virginia, one of the state's main instigators of culture warfare, state Sen. Richard H. "Dick" Black, is running in the Republican primary to replace longtime GOP moderate Rep. Frank Wolf, who is retiring. And he's guaranteed to ignite wedge-issue passion. Exhibit A: As a state legislator, Black opposed making spousal rape a crime, citing the impossibility of convicting a husband accused of raping his wife "when they're living together, sleeping in the same bed, she's in a nightie, and so forth."

Black, Dick, has more to share on his view on "Army rape," slavery (of course) and contraception (of course).  He's quite a spokesperson for the values of the Stupid Party, to say the least (and we are).

Looking away to the land of cotton (brains) - Mississippi - we have this specimen running to the right of ultra-conservative Sen. Thad Cochran in the Stupid Party primary:

Down in Mississippi, state Sen. Chris McDaniels is going to be one to watch. He's the one mounting a primary challenge against Republican Sen. Thad Cochran for being insufficiently conservative, where insufficiently conservative now includes anyone who believes in gravity or a round earth, and since Mr. McDaniels, like all sufficiently conservative conservatives, once had his own sufficiently conservative talk radio show he is proving to be a rich source of sufficiently conservative quotes. 

He was the one who blamed "hip-hop" music for Canadian gun violence, remember? It turns out he also knew what's-what about these darn Muslims and how Hollywood has been coddling them by not showing how they're all just terrahists and the like.

Hoo boy.  He'd be a great addition to the gravitas of Senate deliberations... We just aren't sure the rules would allow him to wear his tinfoil hat on the floor of the Senate.

Staying in the Stupid Party's regional base, another cotton head  wants to provide a steady diet of wingnut word salad to the people of North Carolina:

Greg Brannon, the North Carolina Republican Senate candidate endorsed by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), likened being on food stamps to slavery. 

"The answer is the Department of Agriculture should go away at the federal level," Brannon said in an interview with the North Carolina Tea Party highlighted by Mother Jones on Tuesday. "And now 80% of the farm bill is food stamps. That enslaves people. What you want to do — it's crazy but it's true — is teach people to fish so they can fish. When you're at the behest of someone else, you are actually a slavery to them [sic]."

Brain sore... losing IQ points... must end reading of dispatches... 'til next time.

Waste Virginia's Bidness Problem

Now that last week's chemical spill in West Virginia is seemingly contained, environmental activists are asking questions about the lack of regulatory oversight of the ironically-named Freedom Industries plant producing the toxic MCHM chemical.  It appears that the last inspection of the plant near Charleston, WV was in 1991, and no one seemed to be concerned that the plant was on the banks of the Elk River, upstream from a water plant serving hundreds of thousands of people.

Charles P. Pierce's take is that the State's anything-goes bidness-friendly environment led to an abdication of responsibility on the part of State regulators to the citizens, who were on the losing end of the State's "economic development" deals to entice corporate predators to set up shop in the State.

UPDATE:  Weeper of the House and man-with-the-suspicious-orange-glow John "Mr. Tangerine Man" Boehner thinks we have enough regulations.  Tell that to your constituents in the Cincinnati area, who may be affected by the upstream spill.