January 29, 2014

Ted Cruz Kicks Off the Obama-As-Dictator Movement

PHILIP BUMP

It wasn't President Obama's State of the Union call for "opportunity for all" or new tools to help the unemployed that's gotten Republicans riled up: it was his declaration that he would "take steps without legislation" to solve the problems he thinks the country faces. That, according to Sen. Ted Cruz and others, is all but a declaration of dictatorship.

Cruz didn't wait to hear what Obama said during his speech on Tuesday night to draft his rebuttal, which ran in The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday morning. Pivoting off the president's declaration that he had "a pen and … a phone" with which to take action even when blocked by Congress, Cruz declared that the "president's persistent pattern of lawlessness" and push to work around Congress "should concern every citizen."

Most of Cruz's argument, as might have been predicted, centers on Obamacare, the fight that made Cruz's career. But he also isolates Obama's announcement that he would unilaterally raise minimum wages for federal workers, which Cruz mistakenly says happened on Monday. An "imperial presidency threatens the liberty of every citizen," Cruz writes in conclusion, "because when a president can pick and choose which laws to follow and which to ignore, he is no longer a president."

Cruz doesn't specifically call Obama a dictator, opting instead for a sort of "I'm not saying he's a dictator, but" route. National Review's Victor Davis Hanson doesn't do the same tip-toeing. "If Obama used to sigh to supporters that he was not a dictator who could just implement progressive agendas by fiat," Hanson writes, "he now seems to have done away with the pretense of regret." Hanson, who writes about the dictators of ancient history when he's not opining on modern politics, points out Obama's decision to emphasize children. "Note as well that Obama says he will bypass Congress for 'our kids.' Politicians usually cite the 'kids' when promoting something that is either illegal or unethical." Or when running for office or basically doing anything.

more
http://www.thewire.com/politics/2014/01/ted-cruz-kicks-obama-dictator-movement/357489/

January 29, 2014

Researchers Exhume 55 Bodies at Notorious Reform School

Source: The Wire

BRIAN FELDMAN

Researchers in Florida exhumed 55 bodies from the campus of the Dozier School for Boys, a reform school notorious for its brutal treatment of students that closed in 2011. That bodies were buried on campus is no surprise, but the specific numbers are significantly off from what records indicated. A 2009 investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement stated that 31 bodies were buried on school ground—24 fewer than were actually discovered (the FDLE survey relied on incomplete school records).

The University of South Florida research team described the burials as haphazard and unceremonious. Graves were at varying depths in the ground, and modern debris suggested that parts of the property were being used as a dump. Only 13 bodies were found in an area marked off as a cemetery on the school's grounds, and other remains were found under a road, beneath a tree, and in the forest that surrounds the grounds.

The Dozier School has gained a notorious reputation for allegations of abusive treatment by administrators. Many of the deaths at the school have their cause listed as "Unknown," and relatives believe administrators covered up terrible treatment. For example, according to NPR:

They're called the White House Boys — a group of men, many now in their 60s and 70s — who were sent to the Dozier school when they were children. They take the name from a small white building on the school grounds where boys were beaten. Jerry Cooper was sent to the school in 1961. He says guards beat the boys using a leather strap.

Read more: http://www.thewire.com/national/2014/01/researchers-exhume-55-bodies-notorious-reform-school/357483/

January 29, 2014

Indiana Advances Gay-Marriage Ban

The Indiana House of Representatives voted Tuesday to send a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage to its state senate. If approved, Hoosiers would vote on the measure in 2016. Indiana law already bans same-sex marriage, but supporters want that to be enshrined in the state's constitution. In a very small victory for gay-rights activists, several Republicans bucked party leadership to remove language that would have also banned civil unions.

Read it at The Indianapolis Star
January 28, 2014 3:25 PM

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2014/01/28/indiana-advances-gay-marriage-ban.html

January 29, 2014

Joe Manchin backs Clinton 2016

Source: Politico

By LUCY MCCALMONT | 1/29/14 9:49 AM EST

Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin says he wants Hillary Clinton to run in 2016.

"I don’t know if there’s anyone more qualified. I've seen it all, " Manchin said Wednesday at POLITICO's post State of the Union event at the Capital Hilton Hotel in Washington.

"Experience, basically. It’s hard to replace that," he added.

He cited her experience and said Clinton has "seen it from the front lines" including her time as first lady in both the White House and in Arkansas when Bill Clinton served as governor.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/blogs/politico-live/2014/01/joe-manchin-backs-clinton-182216.html?hp=l9

January 29, 2014

GOP ready to surrender on debt ceiling

By JAKE SHERMAN and JOHN BRESNAHAN | 1/28/14 7:49 PM EST Updated: 1/29/14 1:33 AM EST

House Republicans are getting ready to surrender: There will be no serious fight over the debt limit.

The most senior figures in the House Republican Conference are privately acknowledging that they will almost certainly have to pass what’s called a clean debt ceiling increase in the next few months, abandoning the central fight that has defined their three-year majority.

The reason for the shift in dynamics in this fight is clear. Congress has raised the debt limit twice in a row without drastic policy concessions from President Barack Obama and Senate Democrats, essentially ceding ground to Democrats. Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) are again ruling out negotiations over the nation’s borrowing limit, which would leave Republicans fighting against a unified Democratic front. It’s a tricky situation for the GOP in an election year: They would have to pass a clean debt limit bill or risk default.

The vast majority of Democrats will vote against everything except a clean debt ceiling increase, so if Republicans try to tack extraneous policy onto a debt ceiling measure, they’ll have to pass it on their own. At least a dozen Republican aides and lawmakers are highly skeptical they will be able to craft something that will attract the support of 217 GOP lawmakers. In short, Republicans have few options and even less time: The Obama administration says the debt limit must be raised by the end of February. Republicans, though, are skeptical of that date.


Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/01/debt-ceiling-republicans-102759.html#ixzz2ro1HNmPn

January 29, 2014

Lesbian Heiress Rejects Millions

In a letter to her tycoon father, Gigi Chao rejected his offer of $65 million to find a husband. Chao wrote that her father should accept her partner, Sean Eav, and “treat her like a normal, dignified human being.” Demonstrating a good sense of humor about the situation, Chao apologized to her father, saying, “I’m sorry to mislead you to think I was only in a lesbian relationship because there was a shortage of good, suitable men in Hong Kong.” Cecil Chao, her father, has himself never married.

Read it at BBC
January 29, 2014 7:07 AM

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2014/01/29/lesbian-heiress-rejects-millions.html

January 29, 2014

Is Snowden Putin's Puppet?

By Garry Kasparov

Garry Kasparov is the chairman of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation.

Snowden’s Revelations Shouldn’t Distract from Putin’s Brutal Rule

Whistleblower, traitor, hero, villain, Snowden may be many things at once but his apologies for the brutal record of Putin and the Russian state are inexcusable.

It is human nature to want to put a face on our stories, whether or not it really fits. Like a footballer making or missing a penalty in the final seconds of a game, one individual often gets credit or blame when he is mostly just a diversion from more important stories. Heroes and villains make for good narratives and this is especially true when someone can play both roles at the same time. That is the case of Edward Snowden, a traitor and spy to some and a whistleblower and hero to others. I have no special knowledge about his actions or his leaks, but I would surely feel differently about him had he not taken refuge in Russia, where his asylum request tacitly endorsed the dictatorial regime of his gracious host, Vladimir Putin.

My reaction is not only due to Snowden’s first statement from Russia, while he was still in legal limbo at the Sheremetyevo airport, in which he included Putin’s Russia—a police state and patron of despotism worldwide—on his list of nations that “stand against human rights violations carried out by the powerful rather than the powerless.” Putin’s many political prisoners would disagree quite strongly, and Snowden could have been more respectful of the many injured and dead among journalists and his fellow whistleblowers in Russia.

One note on Snowden’s NSA revelations, however, speaking as someone who grew up under the all-seeing eye of the KGB and who is fighting its modern rebirth under Putin. It is exasperating to hear blithe comparisons between the NSA, and other western spy organizations, and the vicious internal security regimes of the USSR and East Germany. The NSA is to the Stasi what a bad hotel is to a prison. It is not what a government does with data that defines it, it is what it does to human beings.

Any encroachment on the personal freedoms and rights of individuals by a government should be protested and debated, absolutely. The mechanisms to protest such abuses must be exercised regularly or they will be lost. But citizens behind the Iron Curtain were not terrified of the intelligence services because of data collection. We lived in fear because we knew what would happen to us if we gave any hint of dissent against the regime. As often as not, no data at all was required to persecute, disappear, torture, and murder potential enemies. If a court actually was involved, and evidence desired, it could simply be fabricated. And no, to take on the next argument I often hear, brutal totalitarianism does not begin with surveillance by a liberal democratic state. It begins with terror, it begins with violence, it begins with the knowledge that your thoughts and words can end your career or your life.

more
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/01/29/snowden-s-revelations-shouldn-t-distract-from-putin-s-brutal-rule.html

Note: The headline "Is Snowden Putin's Puppet?" originates on the front page of TDB: http://www.thedailybeast.com/

The remaining headlines, in Boldface on this page, appear over the article as it appears in the first link at "more:" above.

January 29, 2014

GOP is melting down: The real SOTU story

The president's speech was a conciliatory, modest affair. But with enemies like these, it's hard not to be a winner

JOAN WALSH

President Obama’s staff hyped his State of the Union address as promising a bold new reliance on executive action, and really, who could blame the guy? Tuesday came the bizarre news that there were going to be four – four — different GOP replies to the State of the Union address. To work with Republicans Obama would need actual Republican leaders, and instead he’s dealing with hundreds of freelance potentates and kooks.

The GOP is splintering in real time, and that’s a bigger story than anything the president said in his 70-minute address. Sen. Rand Paul even gave what was billed as “the Rand Paul response” — as though he’s his own political party, and maybe he is — in which he billed African-American GOP columnist Star Parker as the answer to poverty. (More on that in a second.) Meanwhile, waiting for the president on the floor, Rep. Joe “You lie” Wilson snapped pictures of Duck Dynasty’s Willie Robertson, who also frolicked with Rep. Paul Ryan.

Still, there was a strange disconnect between what the president’s advance people advanced, and what he actually said. Obama did announce one bold decision that will actually change lives: an executive order to increase the minimum wage for federal contract workers. But for a speech that was promoted by staff as a bold take-charge moment for a president tired of being thwarted by the GOP, and derided in advance as the equivalent of a martial law declaration by the right, it was unexpectedly conciliatory and short on concrete action.

Apart from the minimum wage order, Obama mostly outlined a bully-pulpit approach to the next year: He’s “pulling together” all sorts of “new partnerships” and “summits” and “calling on Congress” and “cutting red tape” and proposing a new federally backed type of IRA called, yes, myRa. Obama may have talked toughest to his fellow Democrats in the Senate when he promised, appropriately, to veto a bill that would tighten sanctions on Iran.

more
http://www.salon.com/2014/01/29/gop_is_melting_down_the_real_sotu_story/

January 29, 2014

The right’s agenda is reviled: The lesson from Obama’s confident State of the Union

Intentional or not, the president's speech was a reminder to Democrats that their goals are the ones Americans back

BRIAN BEUTLER



Over the past four months, the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, and its impact on President Obama’s approval rating have overtaken most of the common arguments about 2014 politics. And as shallow as that analysis seems to people who take a longer view of the law’s prospects, I get it. The last three months of 2013 were genuinely rough going, and there’s just no denying that if Obama’s public standing doesn’t improve, Democrats will be in for a very rough cycle.

I don’t know if that means Obama should’ve dwelled on the health care law more than he did in his State of the Union address or not. You could argue it either way. He mocked the GOP’s now-faltering repeal obsession and encouraged people to help their friends and family members enroll. But it was just one small piece of a speech about a lot of different issues.

Some of these were small bore issues and others were fanciful, given how logjammed American politics is today. But when it was over, what actually struck me was how many of them were enduring, feasible liberal goals.

Intentionally or otherwise, Obama’s speech was a reminder to Democrats that the storm clouds of Obamacare implementation have obscured their view of the popular platform the party ran on so confidently in 2012. That there are a series of issues that animate Democratic constituencies on the docket, both ahead of 2014 and beyond, and all of them are political and substantive winners for the party.

Here are some of the big ones, from Obama’s prepared remarks:

more
http://www.salon.com/2014/01/29/the_rights_agenda_is_reviled_the_lesson_from_obamas_confident_state_of_the_union/

January 29, 2014

Joe Scarborough: Attacks On Wendy Davis Are 'Nonsense'

CATHERINE THOMPSON – JANUARY 29, 2014, 9:01 AM EST

"Morning Joe" host Joe Scarborough wondered aloud Wednesday why Republicans seem to care so much about the details of Texas state Sen. Wendy Davis' (D) background.

"So these Republicans in Texas have been saying some really crappy things about Wendy Davis, saying she's a lousy mom -- just really personal crap. It's really the reason why people hate politics," he said. "You know what? The empire didn't strike back. Her daughters did. And, man, what a strong defense they gave for Wendy Davis, basically saying, we had great parents, thank you very much. Stop lying about it. I thought it was great."

Davis' campaign released two open letters written by her daughters, Amber and Dru, on Tuesday. The women disputed conservatives' characterization of Davis as an ambitious woman who abandoned her children for a Harvard education and political career, instead painting a picture of a mother who made real sacrifices for her daughters.

Scarborough added that it was "overreach" when Republicans began to spin a Dallas Morning News report clarifying some details about Davis' biography, including the details of her family situation while she attended Harvard Law School, into charges that she abandoned her kids.

more
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/scarborough_defends_wendy_davis

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But Hillary Clinton cannot speak about the GOP war on women because of her husband's antics? Oh, okay Joe, thanks for the info, please continue Mr Former Congressman.