Frustrated by their inability to win the national popular vote, Republicans are again exploring ways to re-write the rules.
By monkeying with the electoral college in blue states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Wisconsin, they could elect a Tea Party President in 2016 with no more votes than Mitt Romney got in 2012.
#teaparty #gop #electionfraud #election2016 #electoralcollege #vote
Now that the 2014 elections are over and the issue is no longer worth exploiting, the GOP-controlled House Select Intelligence Committee has released its final report on the 2012 attacks on the U.S. Mission in Benghazi, Libya, which admits there was no scandal, after all.
Ever since the Benghazi attacks, which occurred from Sept. 11-12, 2012, Republicans have been trying to blame the Obama White House or the State Department under Hillary Clinton for the deaths of four Americans who were killed there. But it was all a manufactured, faux news non-scandal. Shame on them.
#Benghazi #FauxNews #Scamdal
How would President Mitt Romney respond to the global Ebola threat? Or President Ted Cruz? Dropping the hypotheticals, what about House Speaker John Boehner, who is not just the current highest-ranking Republican in the U.S. government, but second in the line of presidential succession?
All three GOP leaders and many other Republicans are parroting Rush Limbaugh and Donald Trump's call for the United States to fight Ebola by banning incoming flights from West Africa. This ill-thought out, half-baked idea would encourage people who might be infected with the deadly disease to circumvent the ban by traveling to other countries first. Just as Thomas Eric Duncan, the first patient diagnosed with Ebola in the U.S., traveled from Liberia to Belgium before flying into Dallas two weeks prior to his death.
Potentially infected travelers could then enter the United States without being properly screened or quarantined at domestic airports. Which in turn could exponentially increase the number of U.S. Ebola cases.
This preference for demagoguery over common sense is one of the many reasons American voters rejected Republican presidential nominees in 2008 and 2012. And why a Republican takeover of the Senate in this year's midterms could make it harder for the U.S. to contain the current Ebola outbreak.
Campaigning for Republican U.S. Senate candidate Scott Brown in New Hampshire this week, Mitt Romney said, "I haven't been briefed on all the reasons not to close down the flights, but my own reaction is we probably ought to close down the border with nations that have extensive Ebola spreading and that means not bringing flights in from that part of Africa." Maybe Romney skipped the briefing and instead read Trump's recent tweet on the subject, when he called President Obama either "stupid" or "arrogant" for not instituting a ban. Which was only Trump's latest idiotic pronouncement on Ebola.
Unless travel was banned from every country that has not itself banned travel from Ebola-affected countries, a West African travel ban would encourage people who are potentially infected with Ebola and trying to reach the U.S. to do so via connecting flights.
Unfortunately, public health officials haven't stressed this point enough. When CDC Director Tom Frieden was questioned on October 2 about the government's Ebola response, he primarily talked about how a travel ban would affect the flow of health workers travelling from the U.S. to help stop the outbreak. "The approach of isolating a country is going to make it harder to get help into that country," Frieden said. "It's going to make it harder to get people to respond because they're not going to want to come out. They're not going to be able to come out if they go in."
This reasoning makes perfect sense, yet doesn't drive home how a travel ban wouldn't work and could actually lead to increased U.S. Ebola cases if infected travelers arrive in the U.S. from other countries. When summoned before a House panel earlier this week, on October 16, Frieden finally made the argument clear. "We won't be able to check (individuals) for fever when they arrive. When they arrive, we wouldn't be able to impose quarantine," he said.
But his words fell on deaf ears. Top Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee responded with a letter to President Obama calling for...no surprise...a travel ban. "We have listened with interest to the arguments articulated by officials within the Administration in opposition to a ban on travel from affected countries," said committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., and border subcommittee head Trey Gowdy, R-S.C. "Unfortunately, such arguments seem to have little, if any, merit."
In their haste to exploit public fears over Ebola and whip up anti-Obama sentiment for the midterms, right-wing Republicans and commentators have been competing to see who can come up with the craziest theory to explain why the Obama Administration hasn't yet followed their brilliant travel ban advice.
Writing in the tycoon-funded Fiscal Times, Fox News columnist Liz Peek (whose CEO husband's firm received $2.3 billion in taxpayer bailout funds through the TARP program in 2009) blamed Obama's supposed "ambition to be a hero to Africa" and alleged jealousy over George W. Bush's approval ratings on that continent for why there was no ban in place.
Louisiana Governor and probable 2016 GOP presidential candidate Bobby Jindal was one of the first GOP officials to call for a ban. In an October 3 statement, he pontificated, "The Obama administration keeps saying they won't shut down flights. They instead say we should listen to 'the experts.' In fact, they said it would be counterproductive to stop these flights. That statement defies logic. How exactly would stopping the entry of people potentially carrying the Ebola virus be counterproductive?"
Rush Limbaugh, as always, outdid them all, by claiming it was either "political correctness" on the part of the Administration, or that Administration officials secretly want Ebola to spread in the United States, as payback for America's involvement in slavery.
How despicable. Limbaugh commands an immense public platform, able to reach more than ten million listeners directly through his national radio show. Donald Trump is a celebrity, a public figure whose pronouncements are reported by media around the country. And yet, at a time when our world faces a global health crisis like the current Ebola outbreak, instead of helping disseminate vital facts to the public, right-wing idiots like these spread lies and disinformation.
To President Obama's credit, he has sent U.S. military personnel to lead the international effort to contain the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. A similar military-led disaster response effort was mobilized in the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti Earthquake. But according to the right-wing echo chamber, this is all part of Obama's plan to infect our troops with Ebola. The reality, as National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins recently stated, is that an Ebola vaccine would likely have already been developed if not for the past decade's worth of largely GOP-imposed budget cuts.
We might still be able to shut this outbreak down more quickly if conservative pundits and GOP officials would devote even a fraction of the time they've spent spreading Ebola panic to letting people know they can do something immediately to help. Modeled after this year's enormously successful ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, one of the players on Sierra Leone's national soccer team, Michael Lahoud, has created the Kick Ebola In The Butt Challenge. It's an innovative way to encourage donations to groups like Doctors Without Borders who are sending badly needed medical professionals to West Africa, in order to deal with the crisis at its source. This is the kind of response that could harness social media to direct charitable resources where they can help the most.
If the Administration caves into the nonsensical GOP demands for a travel ban, the blood of future U.S. Ebola casualties will be on the hands of all the Republicans and their right-wing media enablers who have whipped up Ebola hysteria in a blatant attempt to influence the midterm elections. Shame on them.
Twelve years after 9/11, Americans are sick of war. In poll after poll, majorities say the war in Iraq was a mistake and our troops should come home as soon as possible from Afghanistan. According to a CNN poll released yesterday, seven out of 10 said "they didn't see how a strike on Syria would serve the national interest," and three-quarters said the U.S. shouldn't be the world's police force.
Gallup polling conducted Sept. 3-4 found only 36% of Americans supported U.S. military action against Syria, far lower than the 59% who favored war with Iraq in February, 2003, or the 82% who rallied behind invading Afghanistan in October, 2001. In Gallup pollster Andrew Dugan's words, "currently...much of the nation would rather sit this one out."
President Obama's ill-conceived push for an immediate military response to Syria's use of chemical weapons (in its brazen August 21 attack on opposition-controlled areas that the U.S. determined killed as many as 1,429 civilians) ran up against this buzzsaw of public opinion. And he found few allies abroad who were willing to go along with the plan. When the British Parliament rejected Prime Minister David Cameron's proposal to join the United States in military action, Obama was forced to slow down.
Seeking political cover, but also recognizing the public's growing anti-war sentiment, the President announced he would ask for Congressional approval authorizing a "limited, proportional" use of force. He explicitly ruled out putting American "boots on the ground." The initial resolution that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved stated this "does not authorize the use of the United States Armed Forces on the ground in Syria for the purpose of combat operations." Even Sen. John McCain, a fervent supporter of bombing Syria, said Obama would be impeached if he deployed troops there.
And then, members of Congress got slammed with a tsunami of citizens saying "Hell, No" to any new war adventure in Syria. From red states to blue states, conservatives and liberals found common cause in opposition to a military strike. "Ninety-five percent of my constituents have indicated to me in emails and phone calls that they do not want to see the United States getting involved in a bloody and complicated civil war in Syria - and that certainly has some influence on me," said Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT). "My phone calls, emails, and faxes are running 96% no," said Rep. John Culberson (R-Texas). "I've never encountered an issue where you had 96% agreement...our phones are ringing off the wall." Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) claimed calls to his office opposing an attack on Syria outnumbered those supporting it by 753-10.
From the beginning, it was highly probable that the President would lose a vote on Syria in the Republican-controlled House. This week, it became clear he could also lose the Senate. So it was a lucky break for Obama, and all of us, that an off-the-cuff comment by Secretary of State Kerry was seized on by the Russians as a potential way to defuse the crisis. Is Russia acting in its own self-interest by trying to head off an attack on its ally, trading partner and weapons client? Without a doubt. Is Syria prepared to willingly hand over all its chemical weapons stocks to international inspectors? Probably not. But the Global War on Terror (brought to us by Bush & Co.) has consumed more than enough U.S. blood and treasure in the past twelve years for every American to welcome any delay in the march towards more war.
In recent days, some commentators like Washington Post syndicated columnist Robert J. Samuelson have pooh-poohed the concept of war weariness. He reminds us that according to the Congressional Budget Office, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost a combined $1.4 trillion from 2001-2012, but rationalizes that this sum "pales next to all federal spending," $33.3 trillion during the same period.
How many schools could we have built in the U.S. for $1.4 trillion? How many affordable housing developments? How many vacant factories could have been rehabbed and repurposed into start-up incubators for small businesses? What kinds of public transportation projects could we have invested those resources towards? Our nation's infrastructure has been crumbling for decades, and instead of fixing it we've been shoveling cash into the furnaces of the war machine.
To those who would slam Obama for bowing to public pressure on Syria, it's worth remembering that when George W. Bush was in the White House, public opinion didn't count for squat. Our entire nation was strapped into a car with a drunk driver at the wheel, convinced The Decider knew best. And if John McCain, Mitt Romney, or God forbid, President Palin were currently residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., the chances of any of them slowing down a rush to war would be pretty slim.
America never saw the peace dividend that was supposed to come with the end of the Cold War. Instead, George H.W. Bush sent us back to war for oil, and we spent the next decade propping up desert dictatorships to keep the black gold flowing. These policies allowed the military-industrial complex to stay humming, stoked anti-American sentiments in the Middle East, and created fertile ground for extremists like Osama bin Laden to recruit a generation of jihadists to fight us. Which led to another decade of conflict. We can be thankful that twelve years after the horrific events of 9/11, the American public has grown tired of endless war, and is finally daring to imagine a different world.
Last week, Salon.com cross-posted a story by independent investigative journalist and blogger Brad Friedman detailing the arrest of a 23-year old Republican operative named Colin Small on charges of destroying voter registration forms in Virginia.
"He was first hired...by Strategic Allied Consulting, the firm owned by the disgraced GOP operative and paid Mitt Romney political consultant Nathan Sproul. Even before this year’s registration fraud scandal, which began with Strategic in Florida, Sproul’s companies have long been accused of, though never charged with, destroying Democratic voter registrations in election after election and state after state, going back to at least 2004. Despite that, Sproul was hired by the Bush/Cheney campaign in 2004, by the McCain/Palin Campaign in 2008, and by Romney during the Republican Primary cycle. Strategic Allied Consulting...was hired by the RNC in August for more than $3 million, reportedly as its sole voter registration company this cycle. His company was said to have been fired by the RNC and five different battleground state Republican parties several weeks ago, after fraudulent voter registrations began to emerge across Florida."
Nathan Sproul's consulting firms have been paid $21.2 million by Republicans since 2003 to register voters and engage in GOTV work, turning out Republicans at the polls. Looks like the voter fraud GOP elected officials have been tripping over themselves trying to pass Voter ID laws to stop is real after all...it's just being perpetrated by operatives on GOP payrolls, designed to block the Democratic vote.
