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Justice

Liberal Super PAC Sends Racist Tweet About Mitch McConnell’s Chinese Wife

By Scott Keyes on Feb 26, 2013 at 2:52 pm

A liberal super PAC in Kentucky is on the defensive after recently sending a racist tweet attacking Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) wife for being Chinese.

McConnell, running for reelection in 2014, is married to former Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, who was born in Taiwan after her family fled mainland China during the Chinese Civil War. One super PAC dedicated to defeating McConnell, Progress Kentucky, has spent months relentlessly hammering the Republican on outsourcing.

However, on February 14, they took the matter a step further and sent the following tweet impugning McConnell’s wife’s heritage as an explanation for why Kentucky jobs have been outsourced:


Progress Kentucky spokesman Curtis Morrison issued the following statement to WFPL on the matter: “It’s not an official statement. It’s a Tweet. And we will remove it if it’s wrong.” Nearly two weeks later, though, the offending tweet has not been deleted.

There are a number of reasons why jobs in the United States have been outsourced, from inevitable globalization forces to corporate tax breaks that reward shipping jobs overseas. McConnell’s wife’s ancestry is not one of them. There are also legitimate reasons to criticize Chao’s tenure as Labor Secretary; her heritage has nothing to do with them.

Unfortunately, xenophobic anti-Chinese messages have become a staple in modern campaigns. The last two election cycles alone have featured racist ads from Republicans, Democrats, and anti-spending front groups. Perhaps the most egregious was an ad from Rep. Mark Amodei (R-NV) in a 2011 special election depicting a heavily-accented Chinese news anchor in the near-future reporting on how American debt led to Chinese army marching in front of the U.S. Capitol as it flies the Chinese flag.

Update

Ignoring the maxim of holes and digging, Progress Kentucky just released a second statement standing by its tweet and denying that it was racist in nature: “Senator Mitch McConnell has a conflict of interest that many are afraid to talk about, and Progress Kentucky is not,” the group said.

Update

Progress Kentucky finally apologizes. The offending tweet has also been deleted.

Health

McConnell: Obamacare Should Be Part Of Fiscal Cliff Talks

By Igor Volsky on Nov 27, 2012 at 10:29 am

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is following the lead of his Republican counterparts in the House and calling on Democrats to cut Obamacare as part of the fiscal cliff negotiations, despite the law’s ability to reduce the deficit and lower the rate of growth in health care spending.

Speaking on the Senate floor on Tuesday morning, McConnell said Democrats must embrace changes to entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid and insisted that the Affordable Care Act should also be on the table:

McCONNELL: And as Congress looks for savings, we need to look at the new health care entitlements too. While Democrats and Republicans may disagree on Obamacare, it’s ridiculous to suggest that we make changes to Medicare and Medicaid, while leaving $1.6 trillion in Obamacare spending untouched.

But repealing or significantly scaling back Obamacare doesn’t make any sense: the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the law reduces the deficit by billions in the next decade and by over $1 trillion in the decade after that. Its cost control mechanisms — the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), the excise tax on high-cost plans, and savings to Medicare — are also projected to lower health care spending.

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