Headlines - Thursday September 20

 

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Senate Republicans kill veterans jobs bill

 

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Jesus refers to "My wife..." on a 4th Century fragment of papyrus Coptic written in Coptic. Among Christian scholars, it has added fuel to an old debate about whether Jesus was married. Oops.

 

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Darrell Issa haz a sad

 

A long-awaited report on the U.S. government's controversial gun-trafficking operation known as "Fast and Furious" released Wednesday found no evidence that Attorney General Eric Holder knew of the botched effort to trace the flow of guns to Mexico's drug cartels prior to its public unraveling in January 2011.

Read the complete story.

 

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Seriously...She's. Not. Helping. There are two things wrong with Plastic Annie whining about her poor Mittens being taken out of context. The first is that we've heard the entire tape now, and the context makes it worse, not better. The other thing is that he has built a campaign out of taking Obama quotes out of context -- early he blatantly misused a 2008 quote of Obama talking about John McCain and made it sound like Obama talking about losing to Mitt if the race was about the economy -- and when he was called on it he just said "So?" and kept running it anyway. Then the GOP built their whole frickin' convention around the "You didn't build that" out-of-context quote. You don't get to whine like an entitled little bitch when you get hoist on your owen petard.

 

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Pat Buchanan goes there. On Fox, so there will be no reprisals, the former Nixon crony attacked President Obama as a "drug dealer of welfare" and repeated the by-now well-established lie that President Obama has repealed the work requirement for welfare and thanked Mitt Romney for "opening up the debate." The dogwhistle he was blowing hit all the notes and made it sound like every black person in America is getting a free welfare check as slavery reparations. It was so vile and reprehensible that it couldn't have sounded uglier of he had been speaking German.

 

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Wait....is this the same John McCain who said the middle east is justifiably angry with us for ENDING the war in Iraq and bringing everyine home? Now he's saying that we should withdraw from Afghanistan SOONER rather than later? He's making my head hurt...Oh never mind...he is couching it in terms of "Obama has mismanaged what was a perfectly good war and now we may as well pack it in." You knew he didn't see the light and stop warmongering. You may have been born at night, but it wasn't last night.

 

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Orrin Hatch attacks fact-checkers for calling out GOP lies over welfare waivers. I keep suggesting that if they want to avoid being called liars by factcheck organizations, all they have to do is stop lying, but they don't listen to a word I say...

 

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Rick Perry is walking right up to the line of advocating violence when he talks about "spiritual warriors" and beseeches "Christian soldiers" to "stand their ground" against "President Obama and his cronies in Washington" who, according to Perry are trying to "remove any trace of religion from American life." President Obama and Satan are apparently acting in concert, the separation of church and state "is false on it's face" and telling these nutjobs that they have a duty to "defend life" (other than the inmates Perry signs death warrants for, of course). We have already had Christianist terror attacks against Americans, and this sort of rhetoric fans the flames. These crazies are trying to start a religious war and turn us into a Christian version of Iran. They must be opposed and they must be stopped. American freedom depends on it.

 

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Sponsor Of Pennsylvania Voter ID Law Defends Romney, Says 'Lazy' People Also Shouldn't Vote

 

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Margaret & Helen: 53% of Americans no longer have dinner seated at an ironing board. Some still eat tuna fish.

 

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Four years ago yesterday, John McCain and Sarah Palin were 1.9 percentage points behind then-Senator Barack Obama in the RCP poll-of-polls. Today, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are 2.8 percentage points behind President Obama in the RCP poll-of-polls. Romney is currently doing worse than McCain's ill-fated attempt at the presidency.And there's nothing on the horizon that could really change the dismal course of events in Romney's favor, shy of a major presidential gaffe or an out-of-the-blue scandal of some sort. (Though I hasten to warn: this thing is far from over and any number of factors could dramatically shift the outcome of the election.)

So knowing all of this, it's astonishing to me that Mitt Romney would rewind back to the failed McCain/Palin campaign and, specifically, its big bad red-scare "redistributionist" attack against Obama. It's not surprising given how Romney has an impulsive habit saying whatever pops into his bulbous head — anything to get him through the day, anything that might work. Why not resurrect McCain's failed attack, too? In fact, why not indiscriminately leap onto something that right-wing propagandist Matt Drudge posted on his site: a 14-year-old piece of video in which the president said, "I actually believe in redistribution at least at a certain level…"

Shock horror! Continue reading here…

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Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid took no prisoners while speaking on the floor of the Senate today.

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Digby: Trust him, he cares

 

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The racists are getting restless. It's beginning to dawn on them that Romney is going down

 

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David Frum's two part essay on why Mitt Romney is 100% wrong on the 47% is a must read.

The background to so much of the politics of the past four years is the mood of apocalyptic terror that has gripped so much of the American upper class.

Hucksters of all kinds have battened on this terror. They tell them that free enterprise is under attack; that Obama is a socialist, a Marxist, a fascist, an anti-colonialist. Only by donating to my think tank, buying my book, watching my network, going to my movie, can you – can we – stop him before he seizes everything to give to his base of "bums," as Charles Murray memorably called them.

And what makes it all both so heart-rending and so outrageous is that all this is occurring at a time when economically disadvantaged Americans have never been so demoralized and passive, never exerted less political clout. No Coxey's army is marching on Washington, no sit-down strikes are paralyzing factories, no squatters are moving onto farmer's fields. Occupy Wall Street immediately fizzled, there is no protest party of the political left.

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From the greatest crisis of capitalism since the 1930s, the rights and perquisites of wealth have emerged undiminished – and the central issue in this election is whether those rights and perquisites shall be enhanced still more, or whether they should be allowed to slip back to the level that prevailed during the dot.com boom.

Yet even so, the rich and the old are scared witless! Watch the trailer of Dinesh D'Souza's new movie to glimpse into their mental universe: chanting swarthy mobs, churches and banks under attack, angry black people grabbing at other people's houses.

It's all a scam, but it's a spectacularly effective scam. Mitt Romney tried to make use of the scam, and now instead has fallen victim to it himself.

And these two assessments of the inner Romney are bang on.

Andrew Sullivan.

So there are two possibilities: this is the real Romney, a callous cynic with contempt for half the country, the weaker part; or that Romney is a man so empty of human qualities he even has to fake cynicism.

Matt Taibbi.

I think he really genuinely believes that the only reason that his particular message isn't resonating is that people want something for free and he's not offering it to them.

And let's remember that Romney's words are simply a reflection of the bigger Republican message. The pain that Republicans are experiencing over the release of the Romney video has nothing to do with what Romney actually said about the 47 percent, as inaccurate as it all was. No, the real pain the right is feeling is having their disdain for the poor and middle class expressed so openly and candidly.

Republicans prefer their true intent on most issues muddied up and camouflaged in layers of BS and lies. So when one of their people gets caught stating the party's true intent, it's like kryptonite to them for it's essential that the little people never know how deep and hard Koch and friends are screwing them.

 

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