Amanda Carpenter, an aide who once worked for Sen. Jim DeMint and has now joined with Senator Ted Cruz to spread lies and deceit about ObamaCare, experienced some rather low and unnecessary backlash from a high profile Democrat.
Amanda shared a heated exchange with Allan Brauer, the communications chair of the Democratic Party of Sacramento County. In one of her tweets, Amanda praised the work of Ted Cruz, saying “GOP beat gun control, changed Obama’s mind on Syria, is holding the line on amnesty. We can defund Obamacare, too!” To which, Allan Brauer responded, “May your children all die from debilitating, painful and incurable diseases.”
Following the tweet, Mr. Brauer experienced some backlash from others on twitter, causing him to issue the following tweet defending his stance – “being attacked on Twitter for wishing one of Ted Cruz’s pubic lice to experience the pain her boss is inflicting on Americans.”
I certainly disagree with Ted Cruz and all he stands for, so chances are my views align more with Allan Brauer. But I cannot understand or defend the unthinkable hate that came from Mr. Brauer in response to Mrs Carpenter’s tweet. No matter what we feel about the opposition, we must still realize that certain commentary cannot be accepted in a civilized society.
NEW YORK (Reuters) – George Soros, the 83-year-old billionaire investor, philanthropist and active supporter of liberal political causes, is set to marry health care and education consultant Tamiko Bolton on Saturday at his estate near New York City.
Three days of festivities will begin Friday with a dinner followed by a reception at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan for a preview of the new exhibition, “Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938” of works by Belgian painter Rene Magritte.
Soros and Bolton, 42, plan to exchange vows in a small ceremony on Saturday morning at the Bedford, New York estate, which Soros bought in 2003 from “Jurassic Park” author Michael Crichton. Kimba Wood, a federal judge, will perform the non-denominational ceremony, which will be attended by members of the couple’s families, including his five children, a source familiar with the arrangements told Reuters.
Paul Krugman writes: Early this year, Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana, made headlines by telling his fellow Republicans that they needed to stop being the “stupid party.” Unfortunately, Mr. Jindal failed to offer any constructive suggestions about how they might do that. And, in the months that followed, he himself proceeded to say and do a number of things that were, shall we say, not especially smart.
Nonetheless, Republicans did follow his advice. In recent months, the G.O.P. seems to have transitioned from being the stupid party to being the crazy party.
I know, I’m being shrill. But as it grows increasingly hard to see how, in the face of Republican hysteria over health reform, we can avoid a government shutdown — and maybe the even more frightening prospect of a debt default — the time for euphemism is past.
…..
True, there was the government shutdown of 1995. But this was widely recognized after the fact as both an outrage and a mistake. And that confrontation came just after a sweeping Republican victory in the midterm elections, allowing the G.O.P. to make the case that it had a popular mandate to challenge what it imagined to be a crippled, lame-duck president.
Today, by contrast, Republicans are coming off an election in which they failed to retake the presidency despite a weak economy, failed to retake the Senate even though far more Democratic than Republican seats were at risk, and held the House only through a combination of gerrymandering and the vagaries of districting. Democrats actually won the popular ballot for the House by 1.4 million votes. This is not a party that, by any conceivable standard of legitimacy, has the right to make extreme demands on the president.
Yet, at the moment, it seems highly likely that the Republican Party will refuse to fund the government, forcing a shutdown at the beginning of next month, unless President Obama dismantles the health reform that is the signature achievement of his presidency. Republican leaders realize that this is a bad idea, but, until recently, their notion of preaching moderation was to urge party radicals not to hold America hostage over the federal budget so they could wait a few weeks and hold it hostage over the debt ceiling instead. Now they’ve given up even on that delaying tactic. The latest news is that John Boehner, the speaker of the House, has abandoned his efforts to craft a face-saving climbdown on the budget, which means that we’re all set for shutdown, possibly followed by debt crisis.
How did we get here?
Some pundits insist, even now, that this is somehow Mr. Obama’s fault. Why can’t he sit down with Mr. Boehner the way Ronald Reagan used to sit down with Tip O’Neill? But O’Neill didn’t lead a party whose base demanded that he shut down the government unless Reagan revoked his tax cuts, and O’Neill didn’t face a caucus prepared to depose him as speaker at the first hint of compromise.
No, this story is all about the G.O.P. First came the southern strategy, in which the Republican elite cynically exploited racial backlash to promote economic goals, mainly low taxes for rich people and deregulation. Over time, this gradually morphed into what we might call the crazy strategy, in which the elite turned to exploiting the paranoia that has always been a factor in American politics — Hillary killed Vince Foster! Obama was born in Kenya! Death panels! — to promote the same goals.
But now we’re in a third stage, where the elite has lost control of the Frankenstein-like monster it created.
So now we get to witness the hilarious spectacle of Karl Rove in The Wall Street Journal, pleading with Republicans to recognize the reality that Obamacare can’t be defunded. Why hilarious? Because Mr. Rove and his colleagues have spent decades trying to ensure that the Republican base lives in an alternate reality defined by Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. Can we say “hoist with their own petard”?
Of course, the coming confrontations are likely to damage America as a whole, not just the Republican brand. But, you know, this political moment of truth was going to happen sooner or later. We might as well have it now.
A California mom sparked an online firestorm when a picture of the bodybuilder lifting weights at 8 months pregnant were posted on Facebook.
Lea-Anne Ellison, 35, was just two weeks shy of her due date when a photo of her posing with a barbell over her head was posted to a group page on the social media site on Sunday.
“8 months pregnant with baby number 3 and CrossFit has been my sanity,” Ellison wrote in the caption. “I have been CrossFitting for 2 1/2 years and…strongly believe that pregnancy is not an illness, but a time to relish in your body’s capabilities to kick ass.”
But a slew of commenters posted angry greivances on the picture — which boasted more than 16,000 likes and almost 3,000 shares by Friday morning.
“This is actually sickening, I hope pregnant around the world do not do this kind of crap,” one woman wrote. “I am a crossfit enthusiast but I DO NOT recommend this at all.”
The person continued by claiming the image gives “people the wrong message that this is OKAY when it’s not!!!!”
Tunisian women have travelled to Syria to wage “sex jihad” by comforting Islamist fighters battling the regime there, Interior Minister Lotfi ben Jeddou has told MPs.
“They have sexual relations with 20, 30, 100” militants, the minister told members of the National Constituent Assembly on Thursday.
“After the sexual liaisons they have there in the name of ‘jihad al-nikah’ — (sexual holy war, in Arabic) — they come home pregnant,” Ben Jeddou told the MPs.
He did not elaborate on how many Tunisian women had returned to the country pregnant with the children of jihadist fighters.
Jihad al-nikah, permitting extramarital sexual relations with multiple partners, is considered by some hardline Sunni Muslim Salafists as a legitimate form of holy war.
The minister also did not say how many Tunisian women were thought to have gone to Syria for such a purpose, although media reports have said hundreds have done so.
Hundreds of Tunisian men have also gone to join the ranks of the jihadists fighting to bring down the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.
However, Ben Jeddou also said that since he assumed office in March, “six thousand of our young people have been prevented from going there” to Syria.
Sen. Rand Paul said Thursday that Republicans are like Charlie Sheen and are actually “winning” despite criticisms this week of party disarray over a budget strategy that would defund Obamacare, according to reports.
“Does anybody remember Charlie Sheen when he was kind of going crazy…And he was going around, jumping around saying ‘Winning, winning, we’re winning,’” Paul (R-Ky.) said, according to an MSNBC report. “Well I kind of feel like that, we are winning. And I’m not on any drugs.”
Paul’s comments, which were from an appearance before an audience of the Liberty Political Action Committee in Virginia, come after a week of Republicans sparring over whether to move ahead with a resolution proposal that would also seek to defund Obamacare. However, Paul ensures that the party has the public’s support on a variety of issues.
Progressives have been gushing over the new political ad by Massachusetts State Rep. Carl Sciortino, which features the openly gay Democrat “coming out” to his Tea Party father as a liberal.
Sciortino, who is running to replace Ed Markey in Massachusetts’ 5th District Congressional election, and his father both joined MSNBC’s Hardball to share insights into their multi-party family life. Carl Sciortino, Sr. joked that his son’s views took a left turn after he was “indoctrinated” as a student at Tufts University.
A proud Republican all his life (with a Republican father), Sciortino Sr. said he had only ever voted for one Democrat: John F. Kennedy. If his son advances into the general election, he conceded that he’d break his long conservative streak and cast his ballot for the younger Sciortino.
“Yes, I would,” he told Chris Matthews, with a laugh. “He is my son. That was a secret, though.”
President Obama on Thursday said he will nominate Goldman Sachs banker Bruce Heyman, a top bundler to his 2012 campaign, to be his ambassador to Canada.
Heyman is the managing director of Private Wealth Management at Goldman Sachs & Co. and one of the few executives at the financial services giant to openly support Obama.
He and his wife, Vicki, hosted a fundraiser for Obama at their Chicago home back in 2007 — when Hillary Clinton was still the Democratic front-runner — and have jointly bundled $1.7 million for the president, according to records obtained by The New York Times.
Use-by dates are contributing to millions of pounds of wasted food each year.
A new report from the Natural Resources Defense Council and Harvard Law School’s Food Law and Policy Clinic says Americans are prematurely throwing out food, largely because of confusion over what expiration dates actually mean.
Most consumers mistakenly believe that expiration dates on food indicate how safe the food is to consume, when these dates actually aren’t related to the risk of food poisoning or foodborne illness.
Food dating emerged in the 1970s, prompted by consumer demand as Americans produced less of their own food but still demanded information about how it was made. The dates solely indicate freshness, and are used by manufacturers to convey when the product is at its peak. That means the food does not expire in the sense of becoming inedible.
For un-refrigerated foods, there may be no difference in taste or quality, and expired foods won’t necessarily make people sick.
But according to the new analysis, words like “use by” and “sell by” are used so inconsistently that they contribute to widespread misinterpretation — and waste — by consumers. More than 90% of Americans throw out food prematurely, and 40% of the U.S. food supply is tossed–unused–every year because of food dating.
Eggs, for example, can be consumed three to five weeks after purchase, even though the “use by” date is much earlier. A box of mac-and-cheese stamped with a “use by” date of March 2013 can still be enjoyed on March 2014, most likely with no noticeable changes in quality.
“We are fine with there being quality or freshness dates as long as it is clearly communicated to consumers, and they are educated about what that means,” says study co- author Emily Broad Leib, the director of Harvard Food Law & Policy Clinic. “There should be a standard date and wording that is used. This is about quality, not safety. You can make your own decision about whether a food still has an edible quality that’s acceptable to you.”
Thirteen people, including a 3-year-old boy who suffered a gunshot wound to the head, were shot at a Chicago park in the Back of the Yards neighborhood Thursday night, authorities said.
Ten adults and the 3-year-old were transported by Fire Department ambulances after the attack in the 1800 block of West 51st Street in the Back of the Yards neighborhood, said Fire Department Deputy District Chief James Mungovan at the scene. A 12th victim was believed to have driven himself to Little Company of Mary Hospital in Evergreen Park, a source said, citing preliminary information.
Police said later a total of 13 people were shot, the boy, two teens, and 10 adults, with the boy the most seriously wounded. The boy suffered a gunshot wound to the head at an ear that exited through his mouth, and was in critical condition at Mount Sinai Hospital, police said.
The attack took place about 10:15 p.m. and fire officials called an Emergency Medical Services Plan II, sending at least 10 ambulances to the scene.
Chicago police were making no information about what happened public, except to say that the shooting appeared to be gang-related. The shootings took place on a basketball court on the 51st Street side of Cornell Square Park near Wood Street.
A witness at the scene said three police officers carried the child to an ambulance.
“I didn’t hear no sounds,” from the child, he said.
Family members identified the boy as Deonta’ Howard, whose uncle was shot to death on Labor Day, Sept. 2.
Republican Strategist John Feehery and Howard Fineman went on Hardball Thursday to discuss the possibility of a government shutdown being pushed by Congressional Republicans. Republicans are prepared to shutdown the government if funding for the Obamacare law is allowed.
Hardball host Chris Matthews asked Fineman if any conservative congressperson would lose their seat in the House if Republicans succeed and the government comes to a screeching halt.
Fineman toed the timid line, saying yes, the possibility was there for some Republicans to lose, but the words of the Republican strategist John Feehery stood out.
If there is a default, we lose the House of Representatives. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that.
They think no one is paying attention, but on Wednesday, President Obama spoke what the American people have been saying all along. This Republican party is not about doing what the people want, it is about extortion to get what the Teaparty demands.
You have never seen in the history of the United States the debt ceiling, or the threat of not raising the debt ceiling, being used to extort a president or a governing party, and try to force issues that have nothing to do with the budget and that have nothing to do with the debt!
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