 |
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) – The following message was released today by the National Alliance of Funeral Directors:
This week, several Republican Supreme Court Justices have argued that the Affordable Care Act supported by the Obama Administration is unconstitutional. At the National Alliance of Funeral Directors, we couldn’t agree more.
It was Revolutionary War hero Patrick Henry who said, in 1775, “Give me liberty or give me death.” From that moment on, legal scholars have agreed that the Constitution guarantees every American the liberty to be dead. Here at the Alliance, we will fight for your right to be dead to the death.
Let’s take a look, if you will, at the Second Amendment of the Constitution, which protects every American’s right to shoot another American. It says nothing about giving the person who is shot health insurance to prevent him from dying. This cherished constitutional right to shoot people and make them dead is currently recognized in all fifty states, most recently Florida.
In commenting on the Affordable Care Act this week, Justice Samuel Alito compared the Obama healthcare plan to burial insurance. Coincidentally, burial insurance is the Republican healthcare plan, and one that we enthusiastically support. Under this plan, every American would be mandated to buy a coffin from one of our member-owned and operated funeral homes. May we recommend the Peaceful Valley Royale,™ a luxury mahogany casket with sienna satin interior and the finest imitation antique nickel handles ($2899).
As the organization representing America’s funeral directors, gravediggers, embalmers and cremators, we are confident that the Supreme Court will ultimately do the right thing and decide that healthcare flies in the face of every American’s constitutional right to the pursuit of deadness. And when they do, we’ll be waiting for you.
Sincerely,
The National Alliance of Funeral Directors
Dana Milbank/THE WASHINGTON POST - Z.Z. Milbank, a two-year-old Goldendoodle, bears a remarkable resemblance to Mitt Romney.
In Washington, even the dogs are pundits.
My dog, a 2-year-old golden retriever/poodle mix named Z.Z., had her cable news debut this week, on MSNBC’s “The Last Word.” Host Lawrence O’Donnell had us on to discuss Z.Z.’s membership in Dogs Against Romney.
Z.Z. lay quietly at my side, mugging for the camera, as I explained her objections to Mitt Romney driving a car with his dog tied to the roof. At the end of the segment, Z.Z. ate a treat off the anchor’s table.
“Z.Z., thank you very much for joining me tonight,” O’Donnell said. Noticing that the camera had moved back to him, O’Donnell instructed: “No, don’t shoot me. Take a shot of this down here under the desk. Z.Z. gets the last bite tonight. ‘The Ed Show’ is next.”
That would be Ed Schultz, not Mr. Ed.
As I watched video of Z.Z. obediently performing, however, I realized: Z.Z. isn’t a Dog Against Romney. Z.Z. is Mitt Romney.
The similarities are uncanny. Hold a treat in front of Z.Z., and she will go through her whole repertoire of tricks — sit, shake hands, lie down, roll over — until one of them works. So, too, does Romney adopt any number of positions until he finds one that satisfies.
Likewise, Z.Z. shows unstoppable determination in pursuit of a desired object, such as a ball or a squirrel. Giving chase, she will sometimes run smack into a tree or a soccer net, then charge ahead as though nothing had happened. So, too, does Romney pursue his desired object — the Republican nomination — with such doggedness that he ricochets without visible embarrassment from gaffe (“I like being able to fire people”) to blooper (“I have some great friends who are NASCAR team owners”).
Z.Z., hearing her name called in a reproachful tone, hangs her head and looks remorseful, even though she has no idea what she has done wrong. So, too, does Romney adapt his behavior to the perceived mood of his audience (“I’m learning to say ‘y’all’ and I like grits”).
The goldendoodle, Z.Z.’s breed, is playful, smart and gentle. But loyalty is not a strong point. Z.Z. has little concept of a master. She likes her human family well enough, but she probably would be just as happy going home with the UPS delivery guy if he offered her a treat. When a stranger comes to the door, she wags her tail so vigorously her hips twist; she picks up a toy and, forgetting her owners, brings it to her new friend.
To paraphrase Lord Palmerston, Z.Z. has no permanent friends, only permanent interests.
And this is what makes her so much like Romney. Consider Romney’s response when asked about his aide’s claim that the general election would be like an Etch a Sketch, erasing conservative positions he took in the primaries. “I’m running as a conservative Republican,” the candidate told a group of reporters Wednesday after his town-hall event in suburban Baltimore. He didn’t say he is a conservative Republican; he said he’s running as one. As if this is a persona for this particular campaign.
Conservatives are justifiably worried about his loyalty. He obeys the commands of conservatives now because they are the ones feeding him during the primary season. But in the general election, who’s to say he won’t trot after soccer moms as breezily as Z.Z. follows the UPS guy?
An apocryphal Harry Truman quote has it that “if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.” He probably should have specified a breed, such as a collie or a German shepherd. Z.Z., by contrast, was described to me by one of her trainers as a prostitute (the trainer used a different word): She places her loyalty with whoever is making her the best offer. In a town of lobbyists, this is all too familiar.
Don’t get me wrong: I love the dog. I feed her the choicest foods, send her to canine camp and doggy day care, and chase her around the house like Inspector Clouseau and Cato.
But neither can I deny that Z.Z. has a great deal in common with a certain Republican front-runner — and not just because she is good-looking and well-trained. Mostly, it’s that unsettling absence of loyalty. One recent morning, my family and I were puzzling over Z.Z.’s whereabouts because she hadn’t been seen all night. Then we found out why: She had jumped in bed with our houseguest.
This is just what conservatives fear Romney will do in the fall.
Sometimes, in a dumbfounded moment, the only response to the news is to rub your eyes in disbelief. Both of mine are quite irritated today at the audacity of corporate broadcasters as reported in a story online at the Washington Post. The headline sums it up: "Broadcasters Fight Plan to Post Names of Political Ad Buyers on Web."
That's right: The mega-media giants CBS and News Corp. (Rupert Murdoch's minions), enriched beyond the imagination of Midas by money pouring into their local stations from political advertising in an election year, are stamping their feet like spoiled children and shouting: "No! We will not!"
They are defying the Federal Communication Commission's request that they post on the Web the names of billionaires and front organizations -- many of them super PACs -- paying for those ads. That's all: Give citizens access online to find out who's buying our elections. Advocates of transparency in politics say that this is the most efficient way voters can know "the true interests" behind all that money pouring into elections. Reasonable, no? Good for democracy, yes? And why shouldn't CBS and NewsCorp oblige such a modest request, given the tremendous wealth they accumulated from their privileged use of airwaves that belong to all of us?
They should, but won't, because they don't have to as long as we let them get away with it. What to do?
First, read the story.
Second, sign up for email updates from the Campaign Legal Center, Common Cause, Free Press and the Media Access Project, some of the public interest groups fighting for the FCC proposal.
Then be in touch with Flackcheck.org to follow up on our conversation with Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg Public Policy Center. She's asking citizens to challenge the negative and deceptive political ads running on commercial stations where you live. (Watch Jamieson make her case below).
Let stations know that the poison they're pouring into our political bloodstream has to stop, and so does their obstinate refusal to keep us from knowing who's paying for it.
20 March 12
epublicans are desperate. They can't attack Obama on jobs because the jobs picture is improving.
Their attack on the Administration's rule requiring insurers to cover contraception has backfired, raising hackles even among many Republican women.
Their attack on Obama for raising gas prices has elicited scorn from economists of all persuasions who know oil prices are set in global markets and that demand in the United States has actually fallen.
Their presidential ambitions are being trampled in a furious fraternal war among Republican candidates.
Their Tea Party wing wants to reopen the budget deal forged with Democrats after Republicans got bloodied by threatening to block an increase in the debt limit.
So what are Republicans to do now? What they always do when they have nothing else to say.
Call for a tax cut, of course.
It doesn't matter that their new "tax reform" plan (leaked to the Wall Street Journal late Monday, to be released Tuesday morning) has as much chance of being enacted as Herman Cain has of being elected president.
It doesn't matter that the plan doesn't detail how they plan to pay for the tax cuts. Or whether an even bigger whack would have to be taken out of Medicare than Paul Ryan's original voucher plan - which would drowned many elderly under rising medical costs.
It doesn't even matter that the plan would probably raise taxes on many lower-income Americans,
All that matters is the headlines.
"House Republican Budget to Propose Lower Income Tax Rates," says Bloomberg Businessweek. "Republican Budget Plan Seeks to Play Up Tax Reform," says Reuters. "GOP's Budget Targets Taxes," blares the Wall Street Journal.
Presto. Republicans have gotten what they wanted on the basis of saying absolutely nothing.
 |
Great column about Romney by Maureen Dowd of the NY Times
On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported on the new fashion to look low-key on the outside while digging deep for opulence — carving out subterranean spaces for Turkish baths, Italianate spas, movie theaters, skateboarding ramps, squash courts, discos and golf-simulation centers.
The Journal reported that Romney has filed an application to replace his single-story 3,000-square-foot beach house in La Jolla, Calif., with a 7,400-square-foot home featuring an additional 3,600 square feet of finished underground space.
It’s a metaphor alert, reinforcing the two image problems Romney has: that he’s an out-of-touch plutocrat and that his true nature is buried where we can’t see it.
His two-year missionary stint in France taught Mitt to steel himself against rejection. Still, he must feel awful heading into Illinois (where Joseph Smith, the Mormon Church founder, was running for president when he was killed by a mob), spending so much money to buy so little affection.
There’s a certain pathos to Romney. His manner is so inauthentic, you can’t find him anywhere. Is he the guy he was on Wednesday or the guy he was on Thursday?
He has the same problem that diminished the equally animatronic Al Gore. Gore kept mum on the one thing that made him come alive, the environment, fearing he’d be cast, as W. liked to say, as “a green, green lima bean.”
Romney also feels he must hide an essential part of who he is: a pillar of the Mormon Church. He fears he would turn off voters by talking too much about a faith that many evangelicals dismiss as a cult and not a true Christian religion.
Rick Santorum is drawn to the extreme and ascetic Opus Dei and sometimes sounds more Catholic than the pope — like his promise on his Web site to banish hard-core porn if he’s elected president. Yet he has successfully crowded Romney with a fraction of his money by wearing his religion and his immigrant, blue-collar roots on his sleeve.
Mitt works overtime pretending he’s a Nascar, cheesy-grits guy and masking his pride in his bank account and faith.
When he talked about his beliefs in his last presidential run, it sometimes provoked confusion, like this explanation to an Iowa radio host about the second coming of Christ: that Jesus would first appear in Jerusalem and then, “over the thousand years that follow, the millennium, he will reign from two places, the law will come from Missouri, and the other will be from Jerusalem.”
Just as Romney did not step up immediately after Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke “a slut,” he has yet to step up as the cases have mounted of Jews posthumously and coercively baptized by Mormons, including hundreds of thousands of Holocaust victims; the parents of the death camp survivor and Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal; and Daniel Pearl, the Jewish Wall Street Journal reporter murdered by Al Qaeda in Pakistan. (His widow, Mariane, told CNN she was “shocked.”)
Believing that only Mormons can get into the highest level of heaven, the Celestial Kingdom, and that others will be limited to the Terrestrial and Telestial Kingdoms, they have baptized anyone and everyone, including Anne Frank, Gandhi, Hitler, Marilyn Monroe, Charlie Chaplin and Elvis.
Asked by Newsweek in 2007 if he had done baptisms for the dead, which involve white garb and immersion in water, a startled Romney replied, “I have in my life, but I haven’t recently.”
Mormon feminists got upset this winter when they found that young women in some temples had not been allowed to do proxy baptisms while they were menstruating.
Church leaders have lately stepped up efforts to stop such baptisms, reminding church members that their “pre-eminent obligation” is not to celebrities and Holocaust victims but to their own ancestors. (Ann Romney’s Welsh dad, who disdained organized religion, was baptized.)
Matthew Bowman, who wrote “The Mormon People,” says Mormons “have a hard time understanding why people from other religions find this so offensive. Mormons don’t think of these people as being made Mormon unless their spirit accepts the Gospel. They just think they’ve given them an opportunity. Mormonism is wildly optimistic.”
Mormons had designated Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust survivor, as “ready” for a posthumous proxy burial, even though he is very much alive at 83 and still teaching at Boston University and in Florida.
Wiesel calls “the whole process very strange,” and faults Romney, a Mormon stake president: “After all, Romney is not simply a Mormon. He’s been a bishop of the Mormon Church. He could have called and told me he wanted me to know that he spoke to the elders and told them to stop it. Silence doesn’t help truth.”
He added: “They have baptized over 600,000 Holocaust victims. There is nothing positive in what they are doing. It’s an insult. You cannot ask the dead their opinion.
“Poor Anne Frank. As if she didn’t suffer enough.”
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/stephen-pizzo/42016/just-close-your-mind
JUST CLOSE YOUR MIND
By Stephen Pizzo
I'm not into beating dead horses. But this horse ain't dead. Not even close. It's alive and well and trying to drag American women back a century or two.
Of all the things I feared religious conservatives would pull, I never dreamt they'd try to return the nation's contraceptive laws to where they were in the late 1800s. But that's exactly what they are up to.
Do we need any further proof that Afghanistan's Taliban have their equal in American evangelical Christians? Both groups have, shall we say, "issues" -- big ones -- with all things woman and all things sexual.
Both the Taliban and American evangelicals dream of the day when they return their world to the way it was when great-grandpa called the shots and great-grandma did what she was told -- or else. Back when grown women were considered part household appliance and part puppy-mill. Ah, those were the days. When men were MEN and women were -- well, not men.
The "Grand Old Party," -- GOP -- now stands for Gynecologically Obsessed Patriarchs -- who are -- apparently way off their meds and on the loose.
Women beware. These Brooks Brother Mullahs are drawing up search warrants, and it's not your home they want to search. No. They know where sluts hide stuff from fellas ... you know, "up there." And, dammit, they want a look. (Can Egyptian-style virginity checks be far behind?)
Anyway, here is more on this. Have a nice weekend. Oh, and ladies, keep your legs crossed tightly if should you run into a GOP candidate out there on the stump. He's interested in you.. but not in a good way.
OH BOY, DO I AGREE WITH THAT!!! I'll bet a lot of Republicans do, too -- at least, the thinking ones.
A majority of Americans say that conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh should be off the air after he called a Georgetown University law student a “slut” and a “prostitute” over her support for contraception, according to a recently released poll. An even larger majority said that birth control should not be part of the national political debate at all.
In a survey of likely voters, Bloomberg found that 53 percent — including 56 percent of women and 49 percent of men — thought Limbaugh should be fired. Nearly one-third of Republicans believed it was time for the conservative icon to step down.
In a statement on his website early this month, Limbaugh said he “sincerely” apologized to Sandra Fluke, who he disparaged after she testified before Congress about the need for contraception coverage at colleges and universities, even if they are owned by religious institutions.The U.S. Army is among 141 advertisers that have pulled out of Limbaugh’s radio show since the controversy began.
A majority of likely voters told Bloomberg that the issue of contraception was about women’s health instead of religious liberty. Women, at 68 percent, were 11 points more likely than men to view the issue that way.
Overall, 77 percent — regardless of their view on the issue — said contraception should not even be a part of the national dialog.
The survey also found that President Barack Obama holds a slight four point lead over Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney among women. Obama’s lead grew to nine points when compared with GOP hopeful Rick Santorum.
Democrats were seen favorably by 49 percent of female voters, while only 44 percent held a favorable view of Republicans.
A Washington Post survey released on Monday found that Democrats were perceived as caring more about issues that are important to women by 25 points, 55 percent to 30 percent.
The reason Politicians try so hard to get reelected is that they would 'hate' to have to make a living under the laws they've passed. --- Socratex I think Congressmen should wear uniforms, you know, like NASCAR drivers, so we could identify their corporate sponsors. --- Socratex
Posts
All Comments
