President Obama appeared today at an event sponsored by Facebook.
In case you missed it, below is a portion of the President’s meeting.
It’s almost an unbelievable figure – 916. That’s the amount of legislation that Republicans introduced from January to April, trying to regulate a woman’s reproductive system. It’s absolutely stunning!
This information comes from a report by The Guttmacher Institute, and it finds that 49 states have contributed to this number with various bills geared towards regulating abortions and a woman’s right to choose. The report says that in 15 states, the following measures became law:
The report continues;
In addition to these laws, more than 120 other bills have been approved by at least one chamber of the legislature, and some interesting trends are emerging. As a whole, the proposals introduced this year are more hostile to abortion rights than in the past: 56% of the bills introduced so far this year seek to restrict abortion access, compared with 38% last year. Three topics—insurance coverage of abortion, restriction of abortion after a specific point in gestation and ultrasound requirements—are topping the agenda in several states. At the same time, legislators are proposing little in the way of proactive initiatives aimed at expanding access to reproductive health –related services; this stands in sharp contrast to recent years when a range of initiatives to promote comprehensive sex education, permit expedited STI treatment for patients’ partners and ensure insurance coverage of contraception were adopted.
Four months, 916 bills introduced. Sounds like a new record is about to be set. Whatever happened to Roe v. Wade? You know, the 1973 decision by the Supreme Court that gives women the right under the 14th amendment of the Constitution to have a choice? The law that has guided this issue for the last four decades.
Why is Roe v. Wade now a mute issue?
Michele Bachmann appeared on Good Morning America and was asked about Donald Trump and the whole Birther conspiracy. Mrs Bachmann answered that she thinks we should “move on, end of story.”
The Republican representative was responding to host George Stephanopoulos when he presented her with a copy of President Obama’s certificate. Mr. Stephanopoulous then went on to describe the document, saying;
It’s certified, it’s got a certification number, it’s got the registrar of the state, signed. It’s got a seal on it. And it says: ‘This copy serves as prima facie evidence of the fact of birth in any court proceeding.'”
“Well, then that should settle it,” said Bachmann. She added: “That’s what should settle it. I take the president at his word and I think — again I would have no problem and apparently the president wouldn’t, either. Introduce that, we’re done. Move on, end of story.”
So is Michele Bachmann a convert? Has she come over to the side of sanity? Of course not. Bachmann is going to use this Birther issue again in the future. She was presented with facts and placed on the spot, so she had no other choice but to admit the whole birther conspiracy was crazy, but wait… given the appropriate time, in front of the appropriate audience, Bachmann will flip.
The count is now up to four. That’s how many petitions have been filed to recall the Republican senators who supported Governor Walker’s decision to strip Wisconsin workers of their union rights. Democrats got the required 15,000 signatures needed to add the latest senators Luther Olsen and Sheila Harsdorf to the recall list.
Meanwhile, progressives still plan to file recall petitions against four other GOP state senators, and have until May 2 to do so. They plan to do the same against Walker once he is eligible for recall. And as FDL’s Dave Dyden notes, “While conservative activists have hinted that they have achieved enough signatures to recall Democratic members of the Senate, they have yet to file any petitions with the GAB.”
Governor Walker will be eligible for recall in January 2012.
We didn’t think she had it in her. But today, Jan Brewer vetoed a bill passed by both the Arizona Senate and House, and would have required all Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates to prove they are United States citizens.
The bill, which was sponsored in part and written to appease the Birther movement, would have appointed a person to determine the eligibility of presidential candidates, based on nothing else but their birth certificate and if that wasn’t available, their circumcision certificate (for males only, of course. Don’t ask what proof they’re asking of women).
“I do not support designating one person as the gatekeeper to the ballot for a candidate, which could lead to arbitrary or politically motivated decisions,” Ms Brewer said in a statement.
For some reason, and we’re not quite sure what that reason is – *wink wink* – birth certificates or questioning whether or not a president was born in this country, was never an issue with previous presidents. Something about President Obama – and we haven’t quite put our finger on it – has triggered an entire movement, now led by presidential hopeful Donald Trump, requesting this particular president comply with their demands.
“I never imagined being presented with a bill that could require candidates for president of the greatest and most powerful nation on earth to submit their ‘early baptismal circumcision certificates’ among other records to the Arizona secretary of state,” Ms Brewer said.
I guess knowing what the presidential candidate’s penis looked like was not an appealing thought for Mrs. Brewer. Too bad her fellow Republicans felt otherwise in the vetoed bill.
Crazy is crazy, no matter where it comes from. It is, and will always be, crazy! But if you ask some conservative Republicans, their crazy is their crazy, and they want the world to know it.
With that said, using someone’s crazy without attributing it to them, is in itself, crazy… and plagiarism. And according to these conservatives, Glenn Beck has been tried and is found guilty of this crime. The Daily Caller elaborates;
By any standard, Beck seems unusually reliant on the work of others, and unusually reluctant to credit it. In an interview with TheDC, Roger L. Simon, CEO of Pajamas Media, suggested that Beck has committed the journalistic equivalent of a notorious crime. “It is not a question of just doing it right the majority of the time. It is a question of doing it right always,” Simon said. “Doris Kearns Goodwin is forever a fraud in my estimation because she has been caught plagiarizing once. If you rob a bank once, you still robbed a bank.”
A remarkably large number of conservative writers say they feel robbed. During the March 18 airing of his television program, for example, Beck ran a portion of video created by a Chicago-based blogger who calls himself Rebel Pundit. The blogger, who does not publicly reveal his name, says he was initially pleased to see Beck running his video, which featured left-wing protesters demanding amnesty for illegal immigrants. He was soon shocked, however, to see that Beck’s staff had obscured the watermark logo of his website, RebelPundit.com, from the tape.
“I put my website name on there for a reason – to bring people from the movement to my website so they can see the other stuff that I’ve done,” the man behind Rebel Pundit told TheDC. “You’ve got pretty much the biggest guy in the movement take your stuff and actually have his editors spend the time to scrub my name off of it.”
It seems that when it rains, it really pours. Who would have thought a few short months ago, that conservatives would turn on the anointed one this way? They have accused him of going cuckoo on air and bringing down the Republican party in the process to the point where even Fox so-called News has turned their backs on him. Now this?
Seems Glenn Beck “has fallen, and he can’t get up!” (< == taken from a Medical Alert commercial. Not plagiarism on my part! LOL!)
After President Obama presented his speech on reducing the federal debt, Republicans went on a crying spree, accusing the President of not playing fair, and “making a partisan speech.” All of a sudden, the very same Republicans who have stood in the way of every single piece of legislation the Obama administration has put forth, are now questioning why, as they see it, President Obama is not working with them and agreeing on the Paul Ryan budget.
So to make sure Republicans heard him the first time around, President Obama used his weekly address to put emphasis on his original points – that all, including the rich, must contribute their share to America’s future, and that Paul Ryan’s plan is not worth the paper it is written on.
The President:
Now, one plan put forward by some Republicans in the House of Representatives aims to reduce our deficit by $4 trillion over the next ten years. But while I think their goal is worthy, I believe their vision is wrong for America. It’s a vision that says, at a time when other nations are hustling to out-compete us for the jobs and businesses of tomorrow, we have to make drastic cuts in education, infrastructure, and clean energy – the very investments we need to win that competition and get those jobs.
It’s a vision that says that in order to reduce the deficit, we have to end Medicare as we know it, and make cuts to Medicaid that would leave millions of seniors, poor children, and Americans with disabilities without the care they need.
But even as this plan proposes these drastic cuts, it would also give $1 trillion in tax breaks to the wealthiest 2% of Americans–an extra $200,000 for every millionaire and billionaire in the country.
I don’t think that’s right. I don’t think it’s right to ask seniors to pay thousands more for health care, or ask students to postpone college, just so we don’t have to ask those who have prospered so much in this land of opportunity to give back a little more.
You will have to check a calendar to believe the year is 2011, because if you simply rely on the stink that’s emitting from the Republican party today, you will swear that we’ve traveled back in time to the 1800’s.
Orange County in California is slowly becoming the epicenter of the racist element of the Republican party. Back in 2009, when the rest of America and the world for that matter, celebrated the inauguration of the first black president, Orange County was busy preparing an email showing the lawn of the White House covered in watermelons.
And now Marilyn Davenport, a Southern California Tea Party activist and member of the Central Committee of the Orange County Republican Party, has decided it was time to show her true nature, or rather, the nature she associates with the President. She forwarded an email depicting President Obama as the son of an apparent ape family, with the title of the email saying, “Now you know why theres no birth certificate.”
Equally despicable, is Ms. Davenport’s refusal to see any harm in her racist attempt at humor as witnessed by her unapologetic response to the incident. And oh yea, the “I have friends who are black” statement was included in her response. That alone, made everything all right! Ms. Davenport goes on to say;
“Oh, come on! Everybody who knows me knows that I am not a racist. It was a joke. I have friends who are black. Besides, I only sent it to a few people–mostly people I didn’t think would be upset by it.”
Calling the person who reported the email to The Weekly a “coward”, Davenport is also blaming the media for making a “big deal” out of the incident.
I just checked. It is 2011, but evidently some people wish for the “good ole days…!”
More on this story here.
No one with common sense takes Donald Trump seriously, but being the noisiest wheel that he is, Trump has forced one of the web’s most respected organizations to check into his Birther accusations. The Donald and the Birthers believe the president was born in Kenya, and is therefore not a legitimate president.
Enter FactCheck.org – the group that originally debunked the birther conspiracy – is checking into the wild claims and accusations of Trump, and FactCheck finds that Trump is crazier than we think.
FactCheck found the following:
Recent polls have Trump leading in the field of misfits running for the Republican presidential nomination. Given that his entire campaign has so far been based on lies, it stands to reason that for Republicans, Teabaggers and Birthers, dealing in truth and reality disqualifies you from being their presidential candidate.
Sarah Palin, in a weak attempt to get back into the spotlight again, rushed into Madison Wisconsin to deliver a “unions-bad-people-bad-corporations-good” message. But according to Wisconsin police and those in the audience, the message fell on deaf ears as a majority of the 6500 in attendance were there to protest the once beloved Sarah.
Sarah Palin rolled into Madison, Wisconsin today using a Tea Party rally as an excuse to attack union members, but the wheels promptly fell off of her bandwagon as only 6,500 people showed up for the rally, and reports on the scene say that many of those in attendance were there to protest Palin. Not even the Koch Brothers and their magic buses could draw a crowd for Palin.
The Koch Brothers threw their front group Americans For Prosperity into the effort to hold an anti-union rally in Madison headlined by Sarah Palin. All the resources were deployed, Palin fans were begged to attend, Americans For Prosperity had no less than 13 buses lined up, and despite all of this, the crowd never came.
Some people just don’t know when to give it up! Palin has been losing support from the most ardent Teaparty Republicans, but she still tries to capture the limelight with her folksy and meaningless slangs. Someone should tell The Palin that her message is no longer relevant.
Maybe she should take a page from The Donald’s play-book, and pander to the Birthers.
Back when all American presidents were automatically considered “American” because… they just were, and no one questioned whether birth certificates were authentic, Donald Trump made his first run for the White House. The year was 1999, and he ran as a Republican. After losing, The Donald saw a way to make some cash and wrote a book called, “The America We Deserve.” In it, The Trump took some very interesting positions. Here’s some of them;
Back then, those were the more popular positions to have so naturally, the opportunistic Donald took advantage. Today, however, he’s jumped on a different bandwagon that puts him in total opposition to his stance in ’99… one he considers fashionably popular – Birtherism.
Look out for Trump’s next book, coming in 2013!
Something we already knew, but now the record proves it. Republican presidents run up debts, while Democratic presidents try to reduce it.
This is in stark contrast to the ideology constantly being drilled into our heads by the media and the Republican party, that conservatives are for fiscal discipline. If this is true, the conservatives who become president must leave their ‘discipline’ at the door of the White House.
According to the report,
Economist Mike Kimel notes that the last five Democratic Presidents (Clinton, Carter, LBJ, JFK, and Truman) all reduced public debt as a share of GDP, while the last four Republican Presidents (GW Bush, GHW Bush, Reagan, and Ford) all oversaw an increase in the country’s indebtedness.
Similarly, Republican David Stockman, director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan, as op-ed contributor to the New York Times blamed the “ideological tax-cutters” of the Reagan administration for the increase of national debt during the 1980s.
Looking back, this trend was not always the case. Yesteryear’s Republican Presidents once had focused on bringing down the national debt, but something changed right around the time Reagan got into office. See the chart below;
So next time these conservatives talk about “deficit reduction” and “cutting the budget,” maybe they should consider whose policies increased the national debt to where it is today. They should also consider educating their next presidential candidate, and beg that candidate to maintain their so-called “conservatism” if they manage to cross the threshold of the White House.