The recent ruling regarding the rightwing nutters of Westboro Baptist Church and a dead soldiers father, Albert Snyder, has once again brought up the issue of hate speech being protected as free speech.

Personally, I have always held that hate speech should not be protected under the first amendment. I realize the horrific job of determining what is free speech and what is hate speech is a daunting, overwhelming one...but with today's technology, hate speech can be widely disseminated to anyone...including those who aren't playing with a full deck mentally.

Hate speech can and always has incited violence. If I have to give an example, Hitler, three letters: KKK, and the SPLC has plenty of cases to choose from.

I must acknowledge Bill O'Reilly...as impossible as that might seem m'dear reader. Bill-O has volunteered to pay the entire $16K court-ordered ruling recently handed down by the 4th Circuit Court in the Snyder/Westboro case. Thank You Bill-O, and I really mean it.

What that tells me is that this issue spans the political spectrum..and we all can't be fucking wrong!   This bullshit needs to be fixed whether that comes from a SCOTUS ruling or a bill in Congress..fix it you fucks!

From RawStory:

Caroline Hunter, a Bush-appointed Federal Election Commissioner who remains in office, provided misleading statements under oath in an effort to conceal Republican National Committee involvement in vote suppression activities during the 2004 presidential election, a Raw Story investigation has found.

Legal experts say Hunter's submission of misleading statements under oath is a serious ethical and professional breach which could warrant a bar review and potential disbarment. At the time, Hunter was serving as deputy counsel to the Republican National Committee.

The post below this one contains the ravings of two nutters from the extreme right. They really went off the deep end and it was comical to say the least. Don't feed/respond to them as it will only encourage them to spew more skewed horseshit all over my humble little blog.

But let's allow them their justifications/delusions...onward and upward! Rachel's piece on the Rethugs who loved the mandate before they hated it:



The mandate is nothing more than corporate welfare for the insurance corporations. Oh, the Steve King video below is priceless! A blurb from the C&L piece:

Things aren't looking too good for the Republican Party's messaging machine when a Republican law maker is having to run away from Dana Bash of all people and even former Rudy Giuliani staffer and Wingnut false equivalency king John Avalon is admitting Sarah Palin is inciting violence given the real threats to members of Congress this week.

It's almost mind-boggling how ignorant the extreme rightwing nutters are. 

I said almost. All these fuckwits have to fall back on is threatening violence and hurling racial and/or homophobic or gender-based epithets. How friggin pathetic is that?

I hope to hell the intelligent, centrist voter has had enough of this horseshit. It's only going to get worse and the corporate media will continue to keep it in the news...this is a good thing of course.  Keep these fucking idiots front and center until November. Rachel's take below:



The FBI is going to be very busy, if they aren't already. These homegrown fuckwits have a very itchy, collective trigger finger. The violence has begun with the bricks through the windows of elected officials. The calls to violence are ringing loud with the help of Palin, Limpballs and Beck.

Politico has the 411 from the CBO, regarding the so-called health care reform bill:

1. CUTS THE DEFICIT Cuts the deficit by $130 billion in the first ten years (2010 – 2019). Cuts the deficit by $1.2 trillion in the second ten years. 2. REINS IN WASTEFUL MEDICARE COSTS AND EXTENDS THE SOLVENCY OF MEDICARE; CLOSES THE PRESCRIPTION DRUG DONUT HOLE Reduces annual growth in Medicare expenditures by 1.4 percentage points per year—while improving benefits and lowering costs for seniors. Extends Medicare’s solvency by at least 9 years. 3. EXPANDS AND IMPROVES HEALTH COVERAGE FOR MIDDLE CLASS FAMILIES Expands health insurance coverage to 32 million Americans Helps guarantee that 95 percent of Americans will be covered. 4. IS FULLY PAID FOR Is fully paid for – costs $940 billion over a decade. (Americans spend nearly $2.5 trillion each year on health care now and nearly two-thirds of the bill’s cost is paid for by reducing health care costs.

From C&L's video site:

 Even by Tea Party standards this one seems pretty low. Report by Dave Harding at Progress Ohio.

Video shot by the Columbus Dispatch from today's Honk and Wave in Support of Health Care at Congresswoman Mary Jo Kilroy's district office contains a segment wherein the teabaggers mock and scorn an apparent Parkinsen's victim telling him "he's in the wrong end of town to ask for handouts", calling him a communist and throwing money at him to "pay for his health care".
The segment starts at 51 seconds into the video.

Video and report from the Columbus Dispatch. Here's a sampling of Teabagger "logic":

"I don't see anyone laying in the street dying. We provide care for everyone," said Janet Popa, 61, of Upper Arlington.

"No one is turned away," said her friend, Ruth Phelps, 50, of Upper Arlington.

The women and others noted that hospitals cannot deny care to those who show up at emergency rooms.

Supporters dismissed concerns about cost and expanding the role of government.

"If we can find the money to kill people in wars, we can pay for this," said a Republican business owner from Westerville who declined to give her name.

"We are paying anyway (with charity care for the uninsured)."

The title is tongue in cheek of course, we all know why the mercenaries are in Iraq and Afghanistan. But this piece in the NYT really lays it all out. From the writeup:

After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.

*snip*

In recent years, board members have been locked in an ideological battle between a bloc of conservatives who question Darwin’s theory of evolution and believe the Founding Fathers were guided by Christian principles, and a handful of Democrats and moderate Republicans who have fought to preserve the teaching of Darwinism and the separation of church and state.

Since January, Republicans on the board have passed more than 100 amendments to the 120-page curriculum standards affecting history, sociology and economics courses from elementary to high school. The standards were proposed by a panel of teachers.

“We are adding balance,” said Dr. Don McLeroy, the leader of the conservative faction on the board, after the vote. “History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left.” 

Efforts by Hispanic board members to include more Latino figures as role models for the state’s large Hispanic population were consistently defeated, prompting one member, Mary Helen Berlanga, to storm out of a meeting late Thursday night, saying, “They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist.”

“They are going overboard, they are not experts, they are not historians,” she said. “They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world.” 

They also included a plank to ensure that students learn about “the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association.”

He blows me away. You go dude! The Corporate Media is worthless when it comes to speaking truth to power.

The rightwing nutters, Beck and Limpbaugh, really were hoping this fuckwit would break a corruption story..god, they got hard just thinking about it I bet....

But Massa gave them nothing. Below is Lawrence O'Donnell on Countdown, showing Becky's pathetic attempt today.



I love it! Adio's Massa...you fucking douche nozzle.

This nasty skank really takes the cake. She has the audacity to go after the lawyers who upheld their oath and provided the best representation they could for their clients.  She is a lawyer and therefore very familiar with the oath. The following video from Friday's Countdown show, hosted by Lawrence O'Donnell, highlights military minds from the Bush administration that believe this skank is so full of shit...her damn eyes better be brown.


Folks on the right are also duly pissed about the video produced by Lizard Cheney's website, Keep America Safe. One of the Powerline bloggers Paul Mirengoff wrote a piece about this heinous horseshit, although he did detract some of what he wrote later. John Bellinger III, legal advisor to Condi Rice has also weighed in on this fuckery:

I am tired of seeing Bart Stupak's dumb ass on the telly. This sumbitch wants to make health reform all about abortion. Well, Rachel is willing to give this homophobic fuckwit an additional 15 minutes of fame. She is going after him and his connection to the C Street group known as The Family. Slap him around a bit woman...he fucking deserves it. Worthless fuck would take down the entire health reform bill just to make sure he gets his horseshit language regarding abortion into the bill. This isn't about abortion, that federal fuckery was settled long ago.




If Stupak wants to push his anti-choice agenda the sumbitch needs to introduce a bill….so the majority of the Democrats can laugh at him and bury the damn thing. From ThinkProgress, some truth about Stupak and his anti-choice agenda:

While much of the attention on the health care debate in recent days has focused on the Senate, the House will have to vote to pass a reform bill as well, and Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) is threatening to torpedo the whole effort if his unreasonable demands on abortion restrictions are not met. To reconcile the differences between the House and Senate bills, Democratic leaders will likely have the House pass the Senate bill, then use the budget reconciliation process to “fix” the Senate bill, before sending it President Obama later this month. But due to two resignations, a death, and a likely vote switch by the only Republican who voted for health care reform the first time around, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has lost at least four votes, bringing the whip count to 216 — a majority of 217 is needed. But Stupak — who led a charge last November to insert a draconian abortion amendment to the House bill — is threatening to sink the effort again. Stupak claims there are “at least 12” House members who voted for the first bill that will switch their votes if the final bill includes the Senate’s abortion language. Stupak, his pro-life allies, and a leading group of Catholic bishops who have been deeply involved in the health care fight, falsely claim that the Senate bill will allow the use of taxpayer dollars for abortion and are demanding that the final bill include Stupak’s provision. Republicans have made similar accusations, but since they are unwilling to even consider voting for health care reform, it is Stupak’s bloc that would be responsible for killing health care reform, should it die in the House. Stupak’s amendment failed in a Senate vote, but the upper house included its own strict prohibition on public funding for abortions. Abortion language cannot be altered through the budget reconciliation process, meaning the final bill will look more like the Senate’s. The Catholic bishops “signaled” yesterday that they are willing to negotiate, saying “that if agreement is reached with House leaders on anti-abortion language, the church would work to get the votes needed to protect the provisions in the Senate,” even if it would require 60 votes. “Whether it would be enough to get to 60 votes, I can’t predict. We would certainly try,” Richard Doerflinger, an associate director of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told Politico. But Stupak is still not satisfied. “In the present form, the Senate health care bill is going nowhere in the House of Representatives,” Stupak threatened yesterday on the Fox Business Channel.

WHAT THE BILL SAYS: It is clear that the final health care bill will not use taxpayer dollars to fund abortions. Neither the House nor Senate bills included outright public funding for abortion, but Stupak and other pro-life Democrats feared that taxpayer money would indirectly fund abortions, especially through government subsidies for low-income people to buy health insurance. Stupak’s amendment would have prohibited insurance plans that accept subsidies in the new exchanges from providing abortion services, except under the most extreme circumstances, even if women used only private money to pay for their abortion coverage. The Senate bill includes a deal orchestrated by Sen. Bill Nelson (D-NE) that does allow private health plans in the exchanges to offer abortion coverage, but only if their customers write two checks each month — one for the share of their premium that’s allocated for abortion services and one for all other health care coverage. Both checks would come from the customers’ personal funds, not government coffers. The Nelson provision also included language that encourages states to pass their own version of the Stupak Amendment, prohibiting insurers from offering plans with abortion coverage through the new state exchanges. The White House’s plan for health reform maintains Nelson’s approach in its entirety and is consistent with existing abortion restrictions, creating “a firewall between publicly- and privately-funded premiums and only allow[ing] private money to cover abortion costs.”

MOVING THE GOAL POSTS:  Stupak has consistently invented new demands when his old ones are met. Last year, Stupak first demanded that public funding for abortion be removed. It was. Then he demanded an up-or-down vote on his onerous amendment. It passed the House, but failed in the Senate. Still, Nelson’s provision was crafted with Stupak’s objections in mind, and it won the support of every pro-life Democrat in the Senate. Now, in order to keep up his crusade, ”Stupak has relied on a fundamentally dishonest interpretation of the Senate bill to argue that it would allow for public funding of abortion,” as the Wonk Room’s Igor Volsky noted. Stupak appeared on MSNBC yesterday to argue his case, claiming, “In the Senate bill, it says ‘you must offer insurance policies that will be paid for by the federal government that covers abortion.’” In an interview with ABC’s Good Morning America the next day, Stupak cited pages 2069-2078 of the Senate bill, claiming, “You will find in there that the federal government would directly subsidize abortions.” But those pages do the exact opposite, and clearly prohibit federal funding for abortions. In yesterday’s ABC interview, Stupak also objected to a provision that supposedly mandates that “every enrollee must pay one dollar per month into a fund to help fund abortions.” While it’s true that people who choose to purchase insurance with abortion coverage through the exchanges will pay the nominal fee, one can simply choose to purchase a plan that doesn’t cover abortion, and thus not pay the fee. Moreover, the $1 provision was included to allay the fears of pro-life lawmakers in order to make sure only private money is spent on abortion. The $1 comes from private premiums payments — not public dollars — and is a way of ensuring that carriers have sufficient funds to cover the services they offer. As Slate’s Timothy Noah observes, Stupak’s claims are “empirical, not ideological. And Stupak happens to be wrong.” There are a number of ways Stupak could try to get the results he wants in later legislation, and his stonewalling here shows that he cares more about his agenda than health care reform. But even if Democrats decide to change the Senate’s abortion language through a separate non-reconciliation measure, it’s still unclear that Stupak would vote for reform. On Monday, he told the Wall Street Journal that “abortion isn’t the only issue that will keep him from voting for the Senate bill if Speaker Nancy Pelosi brings it to the House floor.” “It’d be very hard to vote for this bill even if they fixed the abortion language,” he said. Asked whether there was any way he would vote for the current package, he had one word : “Nope.”

MOVING FORWARD: Americans are not interested in getting bogged down in an abortion debate on health care reform. A recent poll found that a large plurality — 47 percent — agreed that “[p]olitical differences on abortion should not prevent us from moving forward on an otherwise good health care reform plan.” Pelosi, Obama, and other leaders want to move forward as well. “Let me say this: This is not about abortion! This is a bill about providing quality, affordable health care for all Americans,” Pelosi said yesterday. “Let me say it clearly…there is no federal funding for abortion. That is the law of the land. It is not changed in this bill.” Indeed, independent observers agree. Timothy Jost, a law professor at Washington & Lee University, and an independent “leading expert on health policy and law” recently released the findings of a “a thorough examination” of the Senate abortion language. While he found “significant differences between the House and Senate” bills in general, “the provisions governing abortion (Sec. 1303 of the Senate bill, pp. 2069-2078) are not among them. Both bills prohibit federal funding of abortions.” In other words, the Senate language is as effective as the House language, which Stupak wrote and voted for. Indeed, even the Catholic Hospital Association endorsed the Senate abortion language. The association, which represents hundreds of Catholic hospitals across the country, said in a statement in late December that it was “encouraged” and “increasingly confident” that the abortion compromise in the Senate health care bill “can achieve the objective of no federal funding for abortion.” Despite his unreasonable stand, House Democrats are still trying to court Stupak. After meeting with Stupak yesterday, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) told TPMDC that “[s]eparate pieces of legislation could be passed” outside the reconciliation process to appease Stupak. “That’s a possibility,” said Hoyer. “I talked to Mr. Stupak today, and I’m going to be talking to him next week and he indicated he wanted to have some discussions with people. And I will do that.”

Jon Swift’s mother broke the news to us in the only way she knew how to: Buried deeply in the comments section of her son’s last, tragically brief post on the death of another friend. In it, she said,

 I don’t know how else to tell you all who love this blog. I am Jon Swift’s Mom and I guess I’m going to OUT him. He was Al Weisel, my beloved son. Al was on his way to his father’s funeral in VA when he suffered 2 aortic aneurysms, a leaky aortic valve and an aortic artery dissection from his heart to his pelvis. He had 3 major surgeries within 24 hours and sometime during those surgeries also suffered a severe stroke. We, his 2 sisters, his brother, his partner and his best friend since he was 9 years old were with him as he took his last breath. We have all lost a shining start who warmed our hearts, tormented us and made us laugh as he giggled at our pulling something over on us. He passed away on February 27, 2010. My beloved child will live on in so many hearts. I miss him more than I can say. If you are on Facebook, go to organizations and join "Friends of Al Weisel, Unite!" It will give you just a taste of how special he was. Farewell, Jon (Al)

Bunning was able to block the bill because Democratic and Republican leaders in the Senate had signed off on passing it without a floor vote, instead asking that it be approved by unanimous consent - consent that Bunning withheld.

The federal Transportation Department said it was temporarily laying off 2,000 employees without pay starting yesterday and would begin suspending construction projects nationwide because a highway funding program ran out of money. That could be alleviated in days if the Senate acts or if the House passes another bill that extends the program.

While most Republicans distanced themselves from Bunning's action, Democrats on the Hill painted the GOP as obstructionist and used the occasion to marshal public support for using a controversial tactic - budget reconciliation - to pass a health-care overhaul bill later this month.

"Bunning's done more in the past few days to call attention to Republican procedural abuses in the Senate than anything we've seen before," said Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D., Md.).

The blocked bill also would have kept Medicare reimbursement rates at current levels.

As the result of the hold, the government yesterday began paying 21 percent less than before to doctors who see Medicare patients. Hoping the Senate would act soon to stave off the cuts, the Obama administration directed Medicare billing contractors to hold off processing claims for 10 business days. Medicare normally takes 14 days to pay doctors, so there would be no cuts in reimbursement if lawmakers move quickly.

The American Medical Association issued a blistering statement saying the Senate had made senior citizens "collateral damage to their procedural games." (emphasis mine)

 Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona, the Republican whip, argued that unemployment benefits dissuade people from job-hunting "because people are being paid even though they're not working."

Unemployment insurance "doesn't create new jobs. In fact, if anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work," Kyl said during debate over whether unemployment insurance and other benefits that expired amid GOP objections Sunday should be extended.

"I'm sure most of them would like work and probably have tried to seek it, but you can't argue that it's a job enhancer. If anything, as I said, it's a disincentive. And the same thing with the COBRA extension and the other extensions here," said Kyl.