High praise: Republican Senator calls Harry Reid an 'absolute asshole'

Report: Tom Coburn called Harry Reid an 'absolute a--hole'

Sen. Tom Coburn was clear Monday about certain Democrats he doesn’t get along with, calling Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid an “absoulte a—hole,” according to a report.

“I have great relationships with Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). I don’t say that in Oklahoma,” Coburn (R-Okla.) said at a gala at the New York Young Republican Club, the New York Daily News reported.

“There’s no comity with Harry Reid (D-Nev.). I think he’s an absolute a—hole,” he said.

The name-calling came after Coburn was asked about working across party lines. The Oklahoma senator reportedly listed a few other Democrats in addition to Schumer that he works well with.



Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/10/tom-coburn-harry-reid-99009.html#ixzz2j7XzadHj
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/10/29/1251465/-High-praise-Republican-Senator-calls-Harry-Reid-an-absolute-asshole

Yeah! "All Hail Unregulated Poultry"

GOP, after closing down War Memorials in Shutdown now kick 170,000 vets off of food stamps

Jeff Gauvin
?@JeffersonObama
Republican House bill kicks 170,000 American veterans off of food stamps. Sickening. Happy Thankgiving. pic.twitter.com/YcTjdNdRRA

Senator Bernie Sanders: "We cannot balance the budget on backs of people who have virtually nothing"

For a Budget That Is Both Morally and Economically Sound
by Senator Bernie Sanders


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Where do we go from here? How do we now draft a federal budget which creates jobs, makes our country more productive, protects working families and lowers the deficit?

For a start, we have to understand that, from both a moral and economic perspective, we cannot impose more austerity on the people of our country who are already suffering. The time is now for the wealthy and multi-national corporations who are doing phenomenally well to help us rebuild America and lower our deficit.

At a time when the richest 1 percent own 38 percent of the financial wealth of America, while the bottom 60 percent own a mere 2.3 percent -- we cannot balance the budget on the backs of people who have virtually nothing. When 95 percent of all new income during 2009 through 2012 went to the top 1 percent, while tens of millions of working Americans saw a decline in their income, we cannot cut programs that these workers depend upon.

Instead of talking about cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, we must end the absurdity of one out of four corporations in America not paying a nickel in federal income taxes. At a time when multi-national corporations and the wealthy are avoiding more than $100 billion a year in taxes by stashing money in tax havens like the Cayman Islands and Bermuda, we need to make them pay taxes just like middle-class Americans. The truth of the matter is that according to the most recent information available profitable corporations are only paying 13 percent of their income in federal taxes which is near a 40-year low.

the rest:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/10/28/1251355/-For-a-Budget-That-Is-Both-Morally-and-Economically-Sound

"No Women, No Drive" (Saudi Arabian Satire)

Pennies From Heaven-Giving no-strings-attached $ to world's poorest produces remarkably good results

What Happens When You Just Give Money To Poor People?

The idea behind this is simple. Poor people know what they need, and if you give them money they can buy it.



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The results from the study are encouraging, says Johannes Haushofer, an economist at MIT's Poverty Action Lab who was one of the study's co-authors.

"We don't see people spending money on alcohol and tobacco," he says. "Instead we see them investing in their kids' education, we see them investing in health care. They buy more and better food."

People used the money to buy cows and start businesses. Their kids went hungry less often.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/10/25/240590433/what-happens-when-you-just-give-money-to-poor-people

"The wrong problem is the deficit. The right problem is sluggish growth and persistent unemployment.

E.J. Dionne:

Here's the mistake made by President Obama and the Democrats that nobody is talking about:

They have been too fearful of confronting our country's three-year obsession with the wrong problem.

And here is the tea party's greatest victory: It has made the wrong problem the center of policymaking.

The wrong problem is the deficit. The right problem is sluggish growth and persistent unemployment.

Cheney's Dream Come True?

"Rule & Ruin"

PARTY CRASHERS
BY STEVE COLL

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Like a guerrilla army, the Tea Party is learning how to influence public opinion even when it loses a conventional battle. The budget caps that Obama conceded in 2011 have already enshrined in law a portion of the movement’s draconian fiscal agenda. And although Cruz and his allies in the House won no additional cuts this time, they managed to spread magical thinking among their followers about a possible future debt default. (The next debt-ceiling deadline arrives early next year.) Cruz and the others systematically promoted the idea—the fantasy—that, if the Treasury Department were prohibited from issuing any new debt to finance interest payments and government operations, the country would do just fine. The global economy, this story goes, far from collapsing into crisis, would prove resilient, and, while some nonessential federal departments might wither for lack of funds, that would only demonstrate how Americans could get by with a much smaller government.

This campaign has been dismissed by some Wall Street analysts as just a form of coercive bargaining. Washington is a grand opera of phony crises. Congress has raised the debt ceiling more than seventy times since 1960 without forcing an actual default. It’s tempting to believe that even a diva like Cruz, who, after all, holds a law degree from Harvard and evidently aspires to higher office, would never countenance a final default. Yet history is rife with political radicals who have shocked the world by doing just what they always said they would: Confederate secessionists, for example, who seem to inspire so many Tea Partiers today.

The Tea Party’s anti-intellectualism reflects a longer, deeper decline in the Republican Party’s ability to tolerate a diversity of ideas and public-policy strategies, and to adapt to American multiculturalism. Mitt Romney’s poor showing among Latino voters in 2012 helped insure Barack Obama’s reëlection. Republican leaders, chastened and without any other obvious way to increase their vote base before 2016, pledged earlier this year to revive a comprehensive immigration-reform bill. Yet party leaders, in part because they have been tied down since July by the debt confrontation, haven’t found a way to move legislation past the nativist caucus in the House.

As recently as 2007, when the Bush Administration almost passed a similar bill, it still seemed possible that a modernizing Republican Party might build a formidable political coalition of Latinos, evangelicals, disaffected Catholic Democrats, high-tech entrepreneurs, libertarians, social and educational reformers, and eclectic independents. Instead, as Geoffrey Kabaservice puts it in his history of the Republican decline, “Rule and Ruin,” movement conservatives have “succeeded in silencing, co-opting, repelling, or expelling nearly every competing strain of Republicanism from the party.” Political purges have no logical end point; each newly drawn inner circle of orthodoxy leaves a former respected acolyte suddenly on the outside. That a Tea Party-influenced purification drive now threatens such a loyal opportunist and boardroom favorite as Mitch McConnell seems a marker of the times.

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more:
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2013/11/04/131104taco_talk_coll

Syrian Electronic Army Claims To Hack Obama's Twitter