Conservative Cowards and Hypocrites - DeMint and Hoekstra

For GOP, Short Memories on Terror Plots and Presidential Vacations

For example, on Sunday Senator Jim Demint (R-SC) blasted the administration for not "connecting dots" despite having placed a hold on President Obama's TSA nominee and joining other Republicans in blocking new TSA funding. That came after Michigan Rep. Pete Hoekstra similarly suggested the Obama White House did not "connect the dots" to Yemen, an assertion that flies both in the face of the aggressive U.S. military efforts there and Al Qaeda's boast Monday that the Detroit plot was launched in response to them. Meanwhile, Mary Matalin defied both logic and the calendar in wrongly claiming the Bush administration "inherited a recession" and the 9/11 attacks...

No wonder the 'war on terror" made Bin Laden into a national joke - Osama Been Forgotten by the likes of DeMint, Hoekstra and Matalin. Conservatives were the ones to sell America the idea that Iraq was the "front in the war on terror", not pursuing Bin Laden. Can we say - criminally negligent. Hoeskstra is now running for government. Like the typical Republican he thinks he should be rewarded for failure. More here, Another Day of Frightened Conservative Bed Wetters

And - Remember Bush's response to 2001 Shoe Bomber Attack?

No? Well there's a good reason for that. There wasn't any.

During that life or death struggle with forces so evil they were beyond human comprehension Bush set a record for number of days taken off for vacation.

2010 and Still Searching for the Liberal Media

Farewell to another decade of "liberal media bias"

It might seem futile to try to select just two quotes from the previous decade and single them out as bookends to illustrate how the political press so often malfunctioned over the last 10 years. But if pressed, I know which duo I'd nominate in hopes of highlighting the absurdity behind the never-ending right-wing claim about supposed "liberal media bias."

Y'know, the same "liberal media" that over the previous decade unleashed its venom on Al Gore, morphed into George Bush's lapdog cheerleaders, and created unfair double standards for covering the new Democratic president, Barack Obama.

The first quote I'd nominate actually comes from very late 1999, but the implication was pure 2000 and the decade that followed. The passage appeared in a Time report about the unfolding Democratic primary battle and came just as the Beltway press was unveiling its unapologetic War on Gore, as The Daily Howler might put it.

The orgy of resentment that erupted toward Gore during the 2000 campaign season was likely unprecedented in American politics, as media elites did very little to hide their disdain for Gore. For years, they mocked him, bad-mouthed him, and made up nasty stories about him. (Hint: Inventing the Internet.) Acting as a conduit for the RNC, the press actively tried to delegitimize the Democratic Party nominee for president. And the chronically caustic and unfair press coverage cost Gore the election in the historically close 2000 campaign.

Which brings me to Quote of the Decade No. 1, courtesy Time's Eric Pooley and his New Hampshire primary dispatch: [emphasis added]:

[T]he 300 media types watching in the press room at Dartmouth were, to use the appropriate technical term, totally grossed out by it. Whenever Gore came on too strong, the room erupted in a collective jeer, like a gang of 15-year-old Heathers cutting down some hapless nerd.

If readers needed confirmation regarding the open contempt for Gore, blogger Mickey Kaus soon traveled to New Hampshire and announced the consensus among journalists: "They hate Gore. They really do think he's a liar. And a phony."

My second Quote of the Decade nominee arrived 110 months later and via NBC's Chuck Todd. It was uncorked inside the new Obama White House press room, on January 23, 2009. The topic on the table was the administration's proposed economic stimulus package and whether the White House, which was hoping for a bipartisan effort on the legislation, would be disappointed if the bill passed with little or no Republican support. And that's when Todd asked Robert Gibbs the following:

Would [the President] veto a bill if it didn't have Republican support?

That's right. Just days into the new presidency, Todd wanted to know if Obama would go ahead and take the unprecedented action of vetoing his own legislation designed to immediately jump-start the faltering economy because not enough members of the opposition party supported the stimulus bill.

If nothing else, Todd's absurd query highlighted the unheard-of double standard the press constructed for the new Democratic president. Namely, when addressing the issue of bipartisanship (i.e. "involving cooperation, agreement, and compromise between two major political parties") the press decided to hold only one of the political parties accountable: the Democrats. Bipartisanship was now something Democrats had to bring to fruition.

Sad Holidays for Conservatives. Wars to be Less Profitable

Pentagon sees big savings in replacing contractors with federal employees

The Defense Department estimates it will save an average of $44,000 a year for every contractor it replaces with full-time federal personnel to perform critical defense jobs, according to the House-Senate conference report on the fiscal 2010 defense appropriation bill.

The measure, which passed Congress on Saturday, contains $5 billion to hire replacements for contractors currently performing what have been termed "inherently government functions" both at home and abroad. Those functions include a wide range of activities, from supervising other contractors who provide guard services at forward operating bases, to providing oversight of aid projects overseas.

The Bush administration widely expanded the use of contractors following the invasion of Iraq. At the time, officials argued that the Pentagon and other agencies had to staff up quickly; the war was seen as a limited operation that would end quickly, without the need to either increase the size of the military or the ranks of civilian employees.

The aim was also to save money, but last year Congress reported that contract employees were each costing the government an average of $250,000 annually, an amount far in excess of what federal employees or military personnel were paid.

A recent Congressional Research Service study acknowledged that contractors played an important role in Iraq, but also indicated that they make up more than half of the Pentagon's personnel in Afghanistan. With the number of U.S. troops expected to increase by 30,000 in Afghanistan in the coming months, CRS estimated that the number of contractors there will also increase -- by up to 56,000.

Although the fiscal 2010 defense appropriation bill provides $5 billion to allow defense personnel, rather than contractors, to perform critical department functions, there was no estimate available Wednesday on how many new defense employees will be hired with that money.

The bill includes a number of other important provisions:

It provides $288 million for the Pentagon's inspector general to hire additional investigators for oversight of acquisition and contracting. Congress added about $16 million to the administration request to enable the hiring of additional investigators.

It also reduces contracted advisory and assistance services by $51 million, and includes general provisions to stop further conversions by the Department of Defense from government functions to contractors.

In other words death merchants like Blackwater(Xe) might soon be out of business.

Public Knowledge of Current Affairs Little Changed by News and Information Revolutions

On average, today's citizens are about as able to name their leaders, and are about as aware of major news events, as was the public nearly 20 years ago. The new survey includes nine questions that are either identical or roughly comparable to questions asked in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 2007, somewhat fewer were able to name their governor, the vice president, and the president of Russia, but more respondents than in the earlier era gave correct answers to questions pertaining to national politics.

In 1989, for example, 74% could come up with Dan Quayle's name when asked who the vice president is. Today, somewhat fewer (69%) are able to recall Dick Cheney. However, more Americans now know that the chief justice of the Supreme Court is generally considered a conservative and that Democrats control Congress than knew these things in 1989. Some of the largest knowledge differences between the two time periods may reflect differences in the amount of press coverage of a particular issue or public figure at the time the surveys were taken. But taken as a whole the findings suggest little change in overall levels of public knowledge.

FigureThe survey provides further evidence that changing news formats are not having a great deal of impact on how much the public knows about national and international affairs. The polling does find the expected correlation between how much citizens know and how avidly they watch, read, or listen to news reports. The most knowledgeable third of the public is four times more likely than the least knowledgeable third to say they enjoy keeping up with the news "a lot."

There are substantial differences in the knowledge levels of the audiences for different news outlets. However, there is no clear connection between news formats and what audiences know. Well-informed audiences come from cable (Daily Show/Colbert Report, O'Reilly Factor), the internet (especially major newspaper websites), broadcast TV (NewsHour with Jim Lehrer) and radio (NPR, Rush Limbaugh's program). The less informed audiences also frequent a mix of formats: broadcast television (network morning news shows, local news), cable (Fox News Channel), and the internet (online blogs where people discuss news events).

Listeners and watchers of strictly conservative media tend to be the ones ( tea baggers and conservatives in general) walking around in an ignorant daze in between ranting about death panels that do not exist and complaining about public policies about which they have no knowledge. So its little wonder that tea baggers have no solutions except blame America first. Even the intellectual leaders of the right-wing movement have no real principles.

Conservatisn is a Mental Condition Motivated Primarily by Fear and Insecurity

Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition

A meta-analysis (88 samples, 12 countries, 22,818 cases) confirms that several psychological variables predict political conservatism: death anxiety (weighted mean r .50); system instability (.47); dogmatism–intolerance of ambiguity (.34); openness to experience (–.32); uncertainty tolerance (–.27); needs for order, structure, and closure (.26); integrative complexity (–.20); fear of threat and loss (.18); and self-esteem (–.09). The core ideology of conservatism stresses resistance to change and justification of inequality and is motivated by needs that vary situationally and dispositionally to manage uncertainty and threat.

Michele Bachmann: Welfare Queen
Michele Bachmann has become well known for her anti-government tea-bagger antics, protesting health care reform and every other government “handout” as socialism. What her followers probably don’t know is that Rep. Bachmann is, to use that anti-government slur, something of a welfare queen. That’s right, the anti-government insurrectionist has taken more than a quarter-million dollars in government handouts thanks to corrupt farming subsidies she has been collecting for at least a decade.

And she’s not the only one who has been padding her bank account with taxpayer money.

Bachmann, of Minnesota, has spent much of this year agitating against health care reform, whipping up the so-called tea-baggers with stories of death panels and rationed health care. She has called for a revolution against what she sees as Barack Obama’s attempted socialist takeover of America, saying presidential policy is “reaching down the throat and ripping the guts out of freedom.”

But data compiled from federal records by Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit watchdog that tracks the recipients of agricultural subsidies in the United States, shows that Bachmann has an inner Marxist that is perfectly at ease with profiting from taxpayer largesse. According to the organization’s records, Bachmann’s family farm received $251,973 in federal subsidies between 1995 and 2006. The farm had been managed by Bachmann’s recently deceased father-in-law and took in roughly $20,000 in 2006 and $28,000 in 2005, with the bulk of the subsidies going to dairy and corn. Both dairy and corn are heavily subsidized—or “socialized”—businesses in America (in 2005 alone, Washington spent $4.8 billion propping up corn prices) and are subject to strict government price controls. These subsidies are at the heart of America’s bizarre planned agricultural economy and as far away from Michele Bachmann’s free-market dream world as Cuba’s free medical system. If American farms such as hers were forced to compete in the global free market, they would collapse.

U.S. Senator Tom Coburn, M.D. (R-OK) Prays for the Death of 45,000 Americans a Year

U.S. Senator Tom Coburn, M.D. (R-OK) Prays More Americans Die

Via Think Progress, we learn about the very Christian values Tom Coburn put on display yesterday when he was discussing the upcoming cloture vote on the health care reform bill:

"What the American people ought to pray is that somebody can’t make the vote tonight. That’s what they ought to pray." ( Coburn on the vote for health care reform)

Coburn in other words is a member of the Conservative Culture of Death, New study finds 45,000 deaths annually linked to lack of health coverage

Inhofe is the new synonym for wacko

In the future anyway, anyone observed behaving crazy or wacky will be described as having gone Inhofe, After ‘Truth Squad’ Fizzles, Der Spiegel Reporter Tells Inhofe: ‘You’re Ridiculous’

Back in September, godfather of global warming deniers Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) announced that he would be going to the U.N.’s climate change summit in Copenhagen this week to present “another view.” “I think somebody has to be there — a one-man truth squad,” he said. His “truth squad” later expanded to three, with Sens. John Barrasso (R-WY) and Roger Wicker (R-MS) joining in.

But MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow noted last night that Inhofe’s mission of wreaking havoc on the summit fell flat:

MADDOW: When Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton and all the bigwigs arrived in Denmark, the Inhofe truth squad was nowhere to be found.

We confirmed with the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works that truth squad, denialist, congressional delegation with Senators Barrasso and Wicker – that has ended up getting canceled.

Inhofe did travel to Copenhagen however — with a single staffer and when he got there, all he could muster was an “impromptu” press conference and spent a grand total of two hours in the Danish capital. But even during the press conference, few reporters showed up and the Oklahoma senator wasn’t very well received by the ones who did:

A reporter asked: “If there’s a hoax, then who’s putting on this hoax, and what’s the motive?”

“It started in the United Nations,” Inhofe said, “and the ones in the United States who really grab ahold of this is the Hollywood elite.”

One reporter asked Inhofe if he was referring to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Another reporter — this one from Der Spiegel — told the senator: “You’re ridiculous.”

Of course Inhofe has never read and will never bother to read the consensus of the world's foremost scientists that global warming is a fact, Seven Answers to Climate Contrarian Nonsense
Evidence for human interference with Earth's climate continues to accumulate

Conservative Misogynists Against Health Care Reform

Conservatives Misogynists Against Health Care Reform

On Feb. 23, Public Policy Polling released a survey showing that only 37 percent of women held a favorable opinion of hate radio host Rush Limbaugh, compared to 56 percent of men. Limbaugh was baffled by these results and decided to hold a “female summit” to find out why women hate him. Maybe, Limbaugh should just listen to his own show. Today, for example, Limbaugh griped that health insurance premiums will be going up if reform legislation is passed, in large part because private insurers will have to provide “women’s issues coverage”:

LIMBAUGH: About the premiums going up, and my brilliant dissertation on why prices will go up in the private sector, even if the public option is not there, and even if the Medicare buy-in is not there. It’s not just preconditions that are mandated to be covered in the health care bills in either the House or the Senate.

There was a recent amendment that was mandating private insurers to provide mammogram and other women’s issues coverage, including spousal abuse! Insurance for spousal abuse! And mammograms! Even though the mammogram age has been raised to the age of 50. You think of all the mandates that will be added onto private insurance, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.


Right now, many insurers treat domestic violence as a pre-existing condition and deny women health insurance coverage if they have been a victim. Women are also denied coverage — or face significantly higher premiums — if they are pregnant or have had a C-Section pregnancy in the past; the health care reform legislation would ban this discrimination. Additionally, an amendment by Sen. Barbara Milkulski’s (D-MD) amendment would make sure that insurers often women free mammograms and other preventive services

.