After Arguing Against Medicare Cuts To Reform Health Care, Steele Says They’re Back ‘On The Table’
After Arguing Against Medicare Cuts To Reform Health Care, Steele Says They’re Back ‘On The Table’
During his run for the U.S. Senate in 2006, then-Lt. Gov. Michael Steele argued that in order to control federal spending, he would advocate cuts in other government programs, including Social Security, Medicare, and defense. “Everything has to be on the table, my friend,” Steele said to NBC’s Tim Russert.
Now as Republican National Committee chair, Steele is singing a different tune. In an effort to scare seniors, the RNC released a “Seniors Health Care Bill of Rights” last week, calling on the government to “protect Medicare and not cut it in the name of reform.”
But it appears that Steele has put Medicare cuts back “on the table.” On ABCNews.com’s Top Line today, host David Chalian asked Steele about his view on Medicare cuts. After meandering through a long non-answer, Steele finally said that they may be necessary to reform Medicare:
STEELE: Well yeah. I mean you’ve got to look at the Medicare system as a whole and see that it’s in financial trouble. So how do you correct that? [...]
CHALIAN: Part of correcting it is to keep the idea of cuts on the table, correct?
STEELE: Part of correcting …
CHALIAN: Part of correcting the financial stability of Medicare.
STEELE: Oh yeah. You’ve got to deal with those inefficiencies, absolutely.
Watch it:
Emblematic of his tenure as RNC chair, Steele’s performance during this summer’s health care debate has lacked credibility. Despite his pledge to “protect Medicare” with a Senior’s Health Care Bill of Rights,” Steele was out attacking Medicare, calling it “a very good example of what we should not have.”
And despite Steele’s claim that the GOP is not trying to “scare” people on health care reform, an RNC survey mailed out recently asked recipients if they feared “that GOP voters might be discriminated against for medical treatment in a Democrat-imposed health care rationing system.”
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McCain-McConnell Health Care Road Show Closed To The Public
McCain-McConnell Health Care Road Show Closed To The Public
Today, Republican Sens. Mitch McConnell (KY), John McCain (R-AZ), and Kit Bond (MO) held a “Health Care Reform Forum” at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, MO. However, the event was closed to the public. ThinkProgress spoke with Barbara Mueth, vice president of community relations at Children’s Mercy, who confirmed that the attendees had all been invited by either the hospital or the senators. At the event, McConnell said that it was time to “step back and start over” on health care.
McConnell and McCain will be continuing their health care road show this week. Both events will also be closed to the public:
– Charlotte, NC: McCain and McConnell will “join Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., in Charlotte on Tuesday for a ‘hospital forum’ at Carolinas Medical Center. With hospital employees and Burr’s invited guests attending, there will likely be little room for the public in an auditorium that holds fewer than 300 people, said Gail Rosenberg, spokeswoman for Carolinas HealthCare System.”
– Hialeah, FL: The event at Palmetto General will feature McCain, McConnell, and Sen. Mel Martinez (R-FL). “It will be open to the press, but closed to the public.”
Although McCain has held town hall meetings, McConnell has largely avoided them. His spokesman Robert Steurer said that he is instead “speaking to Rotary clubs, chambers of commerce and hospital groups.”
On Thursday on Kansas City radio station 980 KMBZ, Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) — who has faced several contentious town hall audiences — criticized the GOP senators for not opening up their events:
McCASKILL: I’m disappointed that the Republican leader of the Senate is coming to Kansas City on Monday and participating in a forum, but they’re not opening it up to the public. It’s invitation-only. I think it might be helpful for the leadership in the Republican Party to have some of the experiences I’ve had over the last week, where some of the meetings are wildly in favor of reform, and other meetings are wildly against it. I think having that pulse is important, and I think the Republican leader would benefit from that.
Elsewhere in Missouri today, McCaskill is holding a health care town hall meeting where organizers expected 1,100 people to show up. Listen to the interview here:
White House: Mike Enzi Has Shown He’s No Longer Interested In A Bipartisan Solution
White House: Mike Enzi Has Shown He’s No Longer Interested In A Bipartisan Solution
Earlier this month, when media outlets reported that top Democrats and White House officials seemed set to go it alone on health care reform due to “hardening Republican opposition,” White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs pushed back on the story by saying the he had “no reason to believe” that Sens. Charles Grassley (R-IA), Mike Enzi (R-WY), and Olympia Snow (R-ME) weren’t “working in good faith” to forge a bipartisan compromise.
But since then, Enzi and Grassley have taken actions that have called their commitment to bipartisan reform into serious question. On Saturday, while delivering the weekly Republican address, Enzi attacked Democratic reform plans using misleading and false talking points such as claiming that “the bills would expand comparative effectiveness research that would be used to limit or deny care based on age or disability of patients.” Grassley, for his part, sent out a fundraising letter saying he was trying “defeat ‘Obama-care.’”
At the White House press briefing today, Gibbs said he hadn’t seen Grassley’s letter yet, but declared that Enzi’s address meant that he had “clearly turned over his cards on bipartisanship”:
GIBBS: The president is firmly committed to working with Democrats, Republicans, independents, anybody who wants to see progress on health care reform. I will say this. I haven’t seen the contents of that letter. Certainly, I think the radio address over the weekend by Sen. Enzi repeating many of the generic Republican talking points — that Republicans are using that have bragged about being opposed to health care — are tremendously unfortunate, but in some ways illuminating. It appears that at least in Sen. Enzi’s case he doesn’t believe there’s a pathway to get bipartisan support and the president thinks that’s wrong. I think Sen. Enzi’s clearly turned over his cards on bipartisanship and decided that it’s time to walk away from the table.
“It doesn’t help to have Republicans who say they’re for bipartisanship and say they’re at the table to try to find a solution repeating Republican party talking points about what they know is not true in the bill,” said Gibbs. “It’s bad for this town, but it’s much worse for this country.” Watch it:
Grassley spokesperson Jill Kozeny tells Greg Sargent that the senator’s fundraising letter only “describes the government-run plan in the House and HELP committee bills that President Obama supports and Senator Grassley opposes.” But the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein, who uncovered the fundraising letter, writes that Grassley “is creating a campaign premised on his role in stopping Obama’s health-care reform effort” and is “not leaving himself political room to compromise on health care.”
Additionally, both Enzi and Grassley have advocated for an unrealistic standard for bipartisan reform, saying that a bill needs 75 or 80 senators supporting it for it to be bipartisan. Considering that Republicans believe that “the No. 1 assignment in 2009 is to kill Obamacare,” it’s hard to believe that the two senators are continuing to negotiate in “good faith.”
Gingrich And Boehner Argue Stimulus Is A ‘Failure’ That Hasn’t Created ‘A Single Job’
Gingrich And Boehner Argue Stimulus Is A ‘Failure’ That Hasn’t Created ‘A Single Job’
House Republican Leader Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) has been one of the most vocal opponents of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. After rallying every single member of his caucus to vote against it earlier this year, Boehner has stubbornly refused to acknowledge the existence of the projects it has funded. In July, Boehner claimed there hadn’t been any stimulus related infrastructure contracts signed in all of Ohio. In reality, there had been 52 at the time of Boehner’s statement.
Last Friday, Boehner continued to press his case that the stimulus has been an utter failure. On Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, Boehner claimed the stimulus “didn’t create any jobs”:
BOEHNER: Well, I think it’s the American people who are winning this debate. They’ve looked up at this program, this giant government bureaucracy that the Democrats want to create in Washington, and said enough is enough. And while most of this is about health care, it’s really about a much bigger issue, and that is just the growth and size of government. You know, after the $1 trillion dollars stimulus bill that didn’t create any jobs, and the trillion dollars deficits for as far as the eye can see [...]
Listen here:
Echoing Boehner’s sentiment, Newt Gingrich blasted out a fundraising appeal for the right-wing group Citizens for the Republic today, attacking the stimulus as a “failure” that “hasn’t created a single job.” View it below:
Revisiting infrastructure, Boehner’s preferred type of stimulus spending, there have been 1,138 Ohio highway construction jobs in July alone fueled by the Recovery Act. And if Boehner continues to ignore Ohio officials on jobs figures, he could simply ask his own press secretary. In a little-noticed statement, Boehner’s press office praised the Obama administration for going forward with using stimulus dollars to fund “shovel-ready projects that will create much-needed jobs.”
The Council of Economic Advisers, in a report released earlier this month, called the Recovery Act the “boldest countercyclical fiscal stimulus in American history” and concluded that the stimulus added nearly 500,000 jobs to the economy in the second quarter of 2009 that would not have been there without it. Unfortunately, people like Boehner and Gingrich are more interested in stoking opposition to Obama rather than grounding their arguments in the truth.
Gibbs responds: Why is anyone still listening to Dick Cheney?
Gibbs responds: Why is anyone still listening to Dick Cheney?
In an interview with Fox News Sunday yesterday, Vice President Cheney aggressively attacked Attorney General Eric Holder for opening preliminary investigation into CIA interrogation abuses. He called it an “outrageous political act,” “intensely partisan,” and “politicized.” He said that the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques were directly responsible for keeping the country safe and by abandoning them, the Obama administration was putting Americans at risk. Today, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs responded to these accusations, wondering whether it’s really useful to listen to anything Cheney has to say on foreign policy:
I’m not entirely sure that Dick Cheney’s predictions on foreign policy have borne a whole lot of fruit over the last eight years in a way that have been either positive or, to the best of my recollection, very correct.
Watch it:
Rep. Joe Barton: If GOP takes back the House, ‘we’ll repeal’ health care reform.
Rep. Joe Barton: If GOP takes back the House, ‘we’ll repeal’ health care reform.
Politico reports that some polling experts are predicting House Democrats to lose many seats in the 2010 midterm elections. FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver said the GOP has a one-quarter to one-third chance of taking back the House. Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) is giddy at the thought of regaining his chairmanship in the event the Republicans take over. This weekend on Fox News, Barton revealed that his agenda would be to repeal health care reform, if it passes before 2010:
BARTON: If they [Democrats] somehow manage to get the votes and get enough Democrats to walk the plank and commit political suicide, in the next Congress, I’ll be Chairman Joe Barton of the Energy and Commerce Committee, and we’ll repeal it.
If Obama attempts to “muscle through” health reform, Barton predicted he would end up leading the Democrats into the “political wilderness.” Watch it:
Missouri school district bans t-shirts for acknowledging evolution.
Missouri school district bans t-shirts for acknowledging evolution.
T-shirts worn by members of the Smith-Cotton High School band have been recalled by the school district because they contained images of evolution. The t-shirts featured an image of a monkey holding a brass instrument and progressing through various stages of evolution until eventually becoming a human. “I was disappointed with the image on the shirt,” said Sherry Melby, a band parent who teaches in the district. “I don’t think evolution should be associated with our school.” Assistant superintendent Brad Pollitt explained that the t-shirts were banned because they were imposing on religious views:
Though the shirts don’t violate the school’s dress code, Pollitt noted that the district is required by law to remain neutral on religion.
“If the shirts had said ‘Brass Resurrections’ and had a picture of Jesus on the cross, we would have done the same thing,” Pollitt said.
Law professor Jonathan Turley notes, “Evolution is not a religious issue. Extremists want to make evolution into a religious question, but it is not.”
Al Gore: ‘We have a moral duty to pass health care reform.’
Al Gore: ‘We have a moral duty to pass health care reform.’
Former Vice President Al Gore, who endorsed universal health care well before most other elected Democrats in 2002, told a meeting of Tennessee Democrats Sunday that the country has “a moral duty to pass health care reform this year.” Gore implore activists to mobilize to “give President Obama the victory our country needs”:
“We have a lot of talk about liberal and conservative, and left and right, but when there are tens of millions of people in our country who can’t get access to health care, we need to pass health care reform this year. Build support for it. Let’s give President Obama the victory our country needs,” he said to a standing ovation.
Gore was also joined by former President Bill Clinton, who noted that the U.S. pays nearly $900 billion dollars more in health care costs every year than most other industrialized nations. “That 800 to 900 billion is going somewhere. And the ‘somewhere’ doesn’t want to give it up,” he said. Watch a compilation of local news clips:
Texas Secessionist To Health Care Reform Advocates: ‘Go Back To The U.S. Where You Belong’
Texas Secessionist To Health Care Reform Advocates: ‘Go Back To The U.S. Where You Belong’
On Friday, ThinkProgress reported that “tenthers” in Texas were set to hold a pro-secession rally in Austin this weekend. According to the Texas Observer, upwards of 200 people attended the rally, where one speaker declared, “We hate the United States!”
The organizer of the event, Daniel Miller, a leader of the Texas Nationalist Movement who has appeared on Glenn Beck’s Fox News show, said that he and his fellow secessionists were disappointed that Texas Gov. Rick Perry didn’t attend the rally because they were heartened by his pro-secession comments earlier this year:
Daniel Miller, the leader of the Texas Nationalist Movement and the only speaker who had the slightest ability to make secession sound like anything other than just complete lunacy, recounted the April 15 tea party rally in Austin and what it meant to the secessionist movement.
“When [Perry] was giving a speech and the crowd began to shout what? – Secede! Secede! Secede! – that’s what they chanted. So they asked him afterward, What do you think? He said, Well we reserve that right; if things get so bad we reserve the right to leave. And I gotta tell you it’s the first solid thing he’s done in his administration that I can agree with in many, many years.”
Watch a video of the rally from the Texas Observer:
One speaker at the event, gubernatorial candidate Debra Medina, explained that the people at the rally were aware of the consequences of pushing for secession. “We are aware that stepping off into secession may in fact be a bloody war,” said Medina. “We are aware that the tree of freedom is occasionally watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots.” When some secessionist began arguing with pro-health care reform activists, another speaker, Larry Kilgore, was heard telling them, “Go back to the U.S. where you belong.”
Radical Arizona preacher hopes ‘God strikes Obama with brain cancer so he can die like Ted Kennedy.’
Radical Arizona preacher hopes ‘God strikes Obama with brain cancer so he can die like Ted Kennedy.’
Arizona Pastor Steven Anderson has received national attention for dedicating an entire sermon to “Why I hate Barack Obama,” and for having a parishioner who brought an AR-15 to a protest outside a speech delivered by President Obama. Calling Obama a “socialist devil” and a “murderer,” Anderson declared, “I’m not gonna pray for his good. I’m going to pray that he dies and goes to hell.” A CNN analyst said last week Secret Service agents had likely visited Anderson because of the content of his sermons. In the face of all the controversy, Anderson decided not to apologize or retract his remarks, but rather, he escalated his rhetoric yesterday:
I hope that God strikes Obama with brain cancer so he can die like Ted Kennedy. You know, and I hope it happens today.
Watch it:
Town hall attendees boo GOP lawmaker for claiming public option would have prevented child’s birth.
Town hall attendees boo GOP lawmaker for claiming public option would have prevented child’s birth.
During a recent town hall meeting, Rep. Pete Olson (R-TX) told the story of a woman who was repeatedly denied care for her unborn child’s heart defect. After “hunting down specialists,” the woman “found one guy in Detroit who said, ‘I think we can get it done,’” Olson said. Seventeen days after the woman’s son was born, the child received the heart transplant. Olson then said that a public option would have prevented the woman from finding someone to help her unborn son. Many in the crowd promptly booed Olson:
OLSON: Britney is convinced that her son would not have been born if there was a public option. She wouldn’t have had the choices to be able to go find a doctor she wants. […] For those of you who say it’s not true, don’t talk to me, talk to Britney.
ATTENDEE 1: That’s not true!
ATTENDEE 2: The insurance company turned her down, not the government! The private insurance turned her down, not the government! My gosh! … That’s not the government!
OLSON: Texans, I want to thank you all for coming.
Watch it:
(HT: Crooks & Liars)
ThinkFast: August 31, 2009
ThinkFast: August 31, 2009
Labor Department records show that “more than $3.1 billion in stimulus money for state unemployment insurance programs is sitting in a federal trust fund because 23 states haven’t expanded their jobless benefits.” Eleven states have declined to change their systems to qualify “for about $1.7 billion in stimulus funding.” Roughly 350,000 Americans won’t receive benefits because of inaction.
On CNN yesterday, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) said that she “would tend not to” support a health care reform bill with a public insurance option. She also said “it would be very difficult” for her to support a bill that allowed taxpayer-funded abortions, though she acknowledged that “general insurance policies now – subsidized through the government by the tax code – allow women to make those choices right now.”
In an interview with ABC, former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge asserted that, though he was worried that politics may have been influencing the raising of terror alert levels, he did not believe that it happened. He added that he agrees with former Vice President Dick Cheney that there should be no investigation into possible criminal conduct by the CIA, saying that it would be “criminal” to do so.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney said he pushed for a military strike against Iran in the waning days of the Bush administration. “I was probably a bigger advocate of military action than any of my colleagues,” Cheney told Fox News Sunday.
Wall Street banks are fighting to protect one of their “richest fiefdoms, the $592 trillion over-the-counter derivatives market.” The five biggest banks stand to make more than $35 billion this year trading unregulated derivatives contracts. “At stake is how much of that business they and other dealers will be able to keep.”
Pentagon terminates controversial contract with The Rendon Group.
Pentagon terminates controversial contract with The Rendon Group.
Last week, Stars and Stripes revealed that the Pentagon had contracted The Rendon Group to screen journalists seeking to embed with U.S. forces. Rendon was rating whether reporters were giving the military “positive” coverage. Journalism groups immediately criticized the arrangement, calling it “alarming.” One week later, the Pentagon has announced that it is canceling the contract with Rendon:
“The decision to terminate the Rendon contract was mine and mine alone. As the senior U.S. communicator in Afghanistan, it was clear that the issue of Rendon’s support to US forces in Afghanistan had become a distraction from our main mission,” said Rear Adm. Gregory J. Smith, in an e-mail sent Sunday to Stars and Stripes.
“I have been here since early June and at no time has anyone who worked for me ever conducted themselves in a manner as your newspaper alleged. I cannot and will not speculate on the past, although I have found no systemic issues with fairness or equity in the way U.S. forces have run their media embed program.”
Although military officials denied using Rendon’s work to reject reporters wishing to embed with U.S. troops, a public affairs officer with the 101st Airborne Division said that “when his unit was in Afghanistan and in charge of the Rendon contract, he had used the conclusions contained in Rendon profiles in part to reject at least two journalists’ applications for embeds.”
Kerry: Holder is ‘not pursuing a political agenda’; he’s ‘doing what he believes the law requires him to do.’
Kerry: Holder is ‘not pursuing a political agenda’; he’s ‘doing what he believes the law requires him to do.’
Today on Fox News Sunday, Vice President Cheney attacked Attorney General Eric Holder for opening a “preliminary investigation into whether some CIA operatives broke the law in their coercive interrogations of suspected terrorists.” Cheney called it an “outrageous political act,” “intensely partisan,” and “politicized.” But on ABC’s This Week, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) pointed out that President Obama has been a bit more reluctant to open an investigation. Holder’s decision to nevertheless move forward is actually a welcome break from the days of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who made all his decisions based on political guidance from the White House:
KERRY: I think there is a little bit of a tension between the White House itself and the lawyers in the Justice Department as they see the law and as what their obligation is. In a sense, that’s good. That’s appropriate, because it shows that we have an attorney general who is not pursuing a political agenda, but who is doing what he believes the law requires him to do. And we have an administration, on the other hand, that is balancing some of those other issues.
Watch it:
The only reason Cheney thinks the investigation is partisan is because he disagrees with it. Holder is doing what an attorney general is supposed to do — following the law, not political considerations.
Wallace defends torture, snidely says it’s ‘purely coincidental’ U.S. hasn’t been attacked since 9/11.
Wallace defends torture, snidely says it’s ‘purely coincidental’ U.S. hasn’t been attacked since 9/11.
In an interview with Fox News’s Chris Wallace that aired on Fox News Sunday this morning, Vice President Cheney adamantly defended the Bush administration’s torture policies. “The thing I keep coming back to, time and time again Chris, is the fact that we’ve gone for eight years without another attack,” Cheney argued. During the panel discussion later in the program, NPR’s Juan Williams ridiculed the entire debate. “In a democracy, you don’t torture people. It’s against the law! We’re having this discussion here, like, ‘Oh well you know if it works, it’s ok.’ No! It’s not ok! You don’t torture people!” Williams said. Seeming to take Cheney’s side on the issue, Wallace then looked straight into the camera and responded sarcastically:
WALLACE: Alirght, we have to take a break here but I just want to point out to the audience that it is purely coincidental that this country has not been attacked since 9/11.
Watch it:
Wallace said last week that on the issue of waterboarding, “I’m with Jack Bauer on this.”
Cheney Endorses CIA Interrogators Going ‘Beyond The Specific Legal Authorization’
Cheney Endorses CIA Interrogators Going ‘Beyond The Specific Legal Authorization’
The recently released 2004 CIA Inspector General’s report on the Bush administration’s interrogation policies revealed a program that was poorly supervised and resulted in “unauthorized, improvised, inhumane and undocumented” tactics. This unauthorized coercion included menacing “a detainee with a handgun and a power drill,” staging a mock execution, saying that they were “going to kill your children,” and aggressive waterboarding.
Today on Fox News Sunday, Cheney said that he had no problem with these interrogation tactics — even though they went “beyond the specific legal authorization.” In fact, Cheney said these tactics were “absolutely essential” to keeping the United States safe:
WALLACE: Do you think what they did, now that you’ve heard about it, do you think what they did was wrong?
CHENEY: Chris, my sort of overwhelming view is that the enhanced interrogation techniques were absolutely essential in saving thousands of American lives, in preventing further attacks against the United States, in giving us the intelligence we needed to go find al Qaeda, to find their camps, to find out how they were being financed. … It was good policy. It was properly carried out. it worked very, very well.
WALLACE: So even these cases where they went beyond the specific legal authorization, you’re okay with it.
CHENEY: I am.
Watch it:
There have been no documents supporting Cheney’s claim that torture was essential to saving American lives. Even CIA memos from 2004 and 2005, which Cheney claimed would back him up, have been released and have no evidence linking torture to valuable intelligence. In fact, these memos show that “non-abusive techniques actually helped elicit some of the most important information.”
Transcript: More »
Pawlenty Smears Stimulus While His Top Economic Adviser Tours Minnesota Touting Its Success
Pawlenty Smears Stimulus While His Top Economic Adviser Tours Minnesota Touting Its Success
In an interview yesterday with Bloomberg, Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-MN) gave a blistering speech attacking President Obama, slamming the the stimulus and efforts to reform health care. Pawlenty declared it would be “ludicrous” to think that the Recovery Act is “what pivoted” the economy back to stability. He also said any “fair critique” of Democratic health care legislation includes the argument that “death panels” would make life-or-death treatment decisions.
But as Bloomberg later reported, Pawlenty’s criticisms of the stimulus are at odds with both economists and the statements of Pawlenty’s own economic development director, Dan McElroy. McElroy, Pawlenty’s “point man on jobs and economic development,” leads the Department of Employment and Economic Development. He recently went on a 10 city road show titled “Advancing Economic Prosperity” touting the benefits of the stimulus. Speaking about the positive effects of the stimulus, McElroy said:
“Our goal was to put this money to work as quickly as possible. Communities and job-seekers throughout Minnesota are seeing tangible results from this funding.“
A longtime adviser to the governor, Pawlenty has praised McElroy as, “one of the smartest, most hard-working change-oriented leaders that has come to state government in modern history.” And McElroy isn’t the only Pawlenty official heaping praise upon the stimulus. Pawlenty’s top financial advisor, Tom Hanson, told Minnesota legislators that stimulus funds used to plug the state’s massive budget shortfall would make “all of our lives just a little bit easier.” He added, “The federal money will give us the opportunity to accept federal assistance and push it out into our state, to help as many people as possible.”
Not only is Pawlenty hitching his wagon to the outrageous “death panel” lie being propagated by Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin, but he’s also joining the long line of hypocritical Republicans who try to score political points by knocking the stimulus while claiming credit for its success at home.
Radical ‘Birther’ Kreep Launches DefendGlenn.Com
Radical ‘Birther’ Kreep Launches DefendGlenn.Com
After Fox News star Glenn Beck accused President Obama of being a “racist” with a “deep-seated hatred for white people,” a drive by Color Of Change has convinced 46 companies to cancel their advertisements on his show. In response, Beck and FoxNews have launched increasingly vicious attacks on White House official Van Jones, who co-founded Color Of Change in 2005 following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.
Now radical right-winger Gary Kreep, head of the United States Justice Foundation, is leaping to Beck’s assistance. He has established DefendGlenn.com, not to justify Beck’s indefensible hate speech, but to spread smears about Color Of Change and Van Jones. On the website, Kreep instructs Glenn Beck fans to tell advertisers that Van Jones “went to prison for inciting the 1992 Rodney King riots in L.A.”:
Tell them CoC’s founder went to prison for inciting the 1992 L.A. Riots, and accused President Bush of giving troops orders to shoot black people after Hurricane Katrina.
In reality, Van Jones was a legal observer in San Francisco, not Los Angeles, during a non-violent rally that took place after, not before the riots. Jones and hundreds of others were seized in a mass arrest. He was released within a few hours, all charges were dropped, and “the City of San Francisco ultimately compensated him financially for his unjust arrest.”
Jones also has never “accused President Bush of giving troops orders to shoot black people after Hurricane Katrina,” as the DefendGlenn site claims. Kreep’s inflammatory lie has no factual basis whatsoever.
Kreep’s unhinged attacks come as no surprise, however. He is one of the leaders of the “birther” movement, claiming that President Obama is not a citizen of the United States.
Sen. Reid indicates support for a public option that is privately-run.
Sen. Reid indicates support for a public option that is privately-run.
“We have a problem in America and it’s called the private insurance industry,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said in a private meeting with health care providers this week. While Reid recognizes the problem, he isn’t fully supportive of the solution President Obama, the Senate HELP Committee, and the House are pushing — which is, a public health insurance option that competes with private insurers and keeps them honest. The Nevada Senator said he “doesn’t think the public option ought to be a government run program like Medicare,” but instead favors a “private entity that has direction from the federal government“:
“I’ve told people, whoever will listen, that I am in favor of the public option,” Reid said, adding he thinks it’s essential in order to provide competition for private insurance companies that are exempt from anti-trust laws. “We’re working now to try to come up with a program that would allow that to take place.”
Reid went on to say that most people “misunderstand” a public option as “some government run program.”
“But there are many ways we can do it,” he said. “One would be to have an entity like Medicare. I really don’t favor that. I think what we should have is a private entity that has direction from the federal government.”
Reid did not elaborate further on what that would look like.
A Reid spokesman explained to TalkingPointsMemo that Reid is expressing his support for a co-op, an idea proposed by Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND) that is finding support in the Senate Finance Committee. Reid “is willing to consider a co-op if he is shown it works to make insurers honest,” spokesman Jim Manley said.
Texas ‘tenthers’ plan pro-secession rally tomorrow.
Texas ‘tenthers’ plan pro-secession rally tomorrow.
An organization calling itself the “Texas Nationalist Movement” plans to march on the Texas capitol tomorrow to demand “Sovereignty or Secession”:
Texans will converge on Austin to deliver a petition to Restore America by Demanding our Sovereignty or we will be forced to call a vote for Secession.
This is straight out of the Declaration of Independence and our right to “alter or abolish” our government if it has, “after a long train of abuses” refused to protect the rights of the people.
At present, the Texas Nationalist Movement has a petition with 1 Million signatures directly calling for a vote of secession.
We are calling for an orderly process that will allow our federal government to fall back in line with the Constitution. We are reclaiming our states rights and our individual rights. [...]
We must stand up and be counted or we will find ourselves in another government. Either we restore America, we will live in a Marxist dictatorship, or we will secede and start over again.
The organization’s petition echoes language used by other “tenther” activists who believe that everything from Social Security to Medicare to the federal highway system violates the Tenth Amendment. According to the petition, Texas officials must either “immediately move for the restoration of the complete and unadulterated Sovereignty of Texas, explicitly adhering to the 10th Amendment wording of the U.S. Constitution,” or “move immediately for complete Secession from the United States of America.” In light of Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s recent expression of support for Texas secession, the petition could receive a friendly hearing.
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