The Truth Be Told: 05/14/15

Thursday, May 14, 2015

The Daily Drift

Hey, wingnuts, yeah we're talking to you ...!

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Who was the first woman to run for president?

Most American women didn’t win the right to vote until the ratification of the 19th amendment in 1920, but the first female candidate for president came nearly 50 years earlier. In 1872, Ohio native Victoria Woodhull made history when she ran as the Equal Rights Party candidate against incumbent President Ulysses S. Grant. Her platform included such progressive reforms as an eight-hour workday, women’s suffrage and an end to the death penalty, and she rounded out the groundbreaking ticket by selecting abolitionist Frederick Douglass as her running mate (though apparently without his permission). Woodhull was something of a pioneer even before she launched her bid to shatter the political glass ceiling. She’d spoken before Congress regarding equal voting rights, and had opened the first woman-owned brokerage firm on Wall Street. Woodhull failed to score any electoral votes on Election Day, and there’s no record of how she fared in the popular vote. Even if she had won, she would have been barred from taking up residence in the White House—though not because of her gender. The Constitution requires that presidents be at least 35 years old upon their inauguration. Woodhull would have been just 34.
In the years since Woodhull’s trailblazing campaign, dozens of other women have made bids for the presidency. Despite not being able to vote for herself, suffragette Belva Ann Lockwood garnered 4,149 votes in 1884. Maine Senator Margaret Chase Smith later won 227,007 votes in the 1964 Republican primary, but fell short of the getting the nomination. Eight years later, Congresswoman Shirley Chisolm was the first woman—and the first African American—to seek the Democratic nomination. Lenora Fulani became the first woman to get on the ballot in all 50 states when she ran as a third party candidate in 1988, and Hillary Clinton later achieved the best ever showing by a woman in a primary in 2008. To date, the most successful female candidate in the general election is the Green Party’s Jill Stein, who netted over 450,000 votes in 2012.

Top 10 Ways Liberal Moms Make The World A Better Place

Liberal moms rock!
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Most Americans Are Now Socialist

Take That, Wingnuts! Screen Shot 2015-05-05 at 11.43.56 AM

by Tige Richardson

Vox reported recently on a new Gallup poll that says most Americans now prefer to spread wealth throughout our economy by mostly taxing the rich. What’s more intriguing is that the change in attitude has increased significantly in the past four or five years. Don’t believe me? Look at this graph:

See, told you. The study also found that many younger people favored taxing the rich by a much wider margin than older people. So not only does Grandpa not like you smoking pot, he also doesn’t like that you are a soft-hearted socialist.

Respondents ages 18 to 34 are supportive of redistributive taxation by a 59-38 margin, while those over 55 are much more skeptical — 47 percent say tax the rich, and 50 percent disagree. – Vox

The shift in attitude comes at a time when wealth and income inequality are central themes for both Republican and Democratic candidates. As many pundits dismiss Bernie Sanders as being too “radical” or “fringe” to win the nomination, much less the White House, this study suggests that Sen. Sanders is in fact on par with a majority of citizens when it comes to wealth distribution.
Check out the full Vox article here.

Reality Check

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JFK Perfectly Understood The Separation Of Cult And State

JFK Perfectly Understood The Separation Of Church And State (VIDEO)

This is a must see speech. It is, by far, the best explanation ever made.

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President Obama Is Getting Revenge On Fox News For Their Years Of Lies

After years of putting up with their attacks, President Obama is getting his revenge on Fox News by freezing them out of access and denying them exclusive interviews.

Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace went into full whine mode because the Obama White House refuses to send guests on to his show, “We wanted to ask Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson about the terror threat while the White House put him on another Sunday show. They declined to make him available to Fox viewers. The White House has made a number of guests available to other networks this year while excluding us and you. We did get to interview Chief of Staff Denis McDonough and DHS Secretary Johnson once this year, but only when they appeared on all five networks.”

Fox News nuked their bridges with the Obama administration a long time ago. Before the President first took office, Fox News was pushing racism and birtherism. Fox’s behavior has only gotten worse over the years. Fox News has openly tried to get this removed from office with their constant conspiracy theories and propagandizing.

President Obama’s White House would be rewarding bad behavior and inaccurate reporting if they allowed administration officials to appear exclusively on Fox News. The Obama administration is paying back Fox News for their years of biased and inaccurate reporting.

Fox doesn’t get to have it both ways. They can’t be baselessly accusing the President of illegal behavior on a regular basis and expect to be rewarded with exclusive interviews.

The problem with Fox News isn’t that they are critical of President Obama. The problem with Fox News is that they are deeply partisan, and ignore facts and reality. Fox News doesn’t practice journalism. They practice partisan warfare disguised as journalism. For this reason, they should not be surprised that the White House has no interest in sending officials to appear on their network.

Fox News needs access to White House officials. The White House does not need Fox News for anything.

President Obama is getting his revenge by freezing out Fox News.

As Wingnuts Lose the Culture War, ‘Their Rhetoric…Is Absolutely Awash In Delusional Nostalgia’

by Tom Johnson

Edmund Burke wrote that “a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.” To American Prospect blogger Paul Waldman, “change” for conservatives means living to fight another day by conceding battle after battle to liberals.
“Much of the history of the United States,” wrote Waldman in a Friday post, “is a slow but inexorable movement in a progressive direction, as one issue after another is eventually settled in favor of the position liberals had been advocating, from slavery to women's suffrage to Jim Crow to the legalization of contraception to sex discrimination and up to gay rights today. You can find exceptions…but the fundamental trend in social relations moves in only one direction.”
Waldman stated that right-wing “rhetoric…is absolutely awash in nostalgia” but added that some conservatives seem to be making their peace with an America no longer ruled by older men of northern European ancestry. For example, the Marco Rubio presidential boomlet: “To some Republicans, [Rubio is] attractive not so much because he's what they would want in a president in their perfect world, but because they think he might be attractive to other people. It's an acknowledgement of and accommodation to the fact that America has indeed changed, and their party needs to change in response. And if the conservative Republican with the best chance of winning the White House is a 43-year-old Latino, well so be it.”
From Waldman’s post (bolding added):

If you take a broad view, much of the history of the United States is a slow but inexorable movement in a progressive direction, as one issue after another is eventually settled in favor of the position liberals had been advocating, from slavery to women's suffrage to Jim Crow to the legalization of contraception to sex discrimination and up to gay rights today. You can find exceptions, some of which are extremely consequential, but the fundamental trend in social relations moves in only one direction…
As long as society is changing—i.e., forever—conservatism will find its purpose in resisting that change, because that's what it means to be a conservative. Conservatism seeks to conserve, and in many cases return to a previous order. And like liberalism, it adapts. For instance, conservatives lost the argument on most of the things that made up the culture war of the 1960s and 1970s—Vietnam, the sexual revolution, the principle (if not the reality) of equality for women—so they approached those issues in ways that accommodated the new reality, or moved on to other issues entirely. The culture war is infinitely renewable…
…[L]iberals were so excited about Barack Obama in [2008] because he embodied a certain kind of cultural change. He was the person they wanted to be, or at least be friends with: multiracial, educated, cosmopolitan, urban, and urbane. Conservatives' rage against Obama comes from the same place: he represents a change in American society that they find intolerable.
If you spend any time listening to conservatives, you quickly realize that their rhetoric, whether it's coming from politicians or media figures like Bill O'Reilly, is absolutely awash in nostalgia, a yearning for the supposedly simpler time of their youth, when, among other things, everything they saw was theirs. It was their kind of people who ran things, their kind of music that came from the radio, their priorities and values that were accepted as right and true. They look around now and see so much of American culture shifting away from them, and it's profoundly unsettling, few things more so than the fact that the president of the United States is a liberal black guy with a foreign-sounding name.
But what about Marco Rubio? I think that to some Republicans, he's attractive not so much because he's what they would want in a president in their perfect world, but because they think he might be attractive to other people. It's an acknowledgement of and accommodation to the fact that America has indeed changed, and their party needs to change in response. And if the conservative Republican with the best chance of winning the White House is a 43-year-old Latino, well so be it.
This could be a fascinating dynamic within the primaries, the tension between voters like…the older white guy who grudgingly acknowledges that "the day of the older white guy is kind of out," and the many other Republicans who want to stand athwart history, yelling 'Stop.'

Congress Tells Court That Congress Can’t Be Investigated for Insider Trading

by Lee Fang

In a little-noticed brief filed last summer, lawyers for the House of Representatives claimed that an SEC investigation of congressional insider trading should be blocked on principle, because lawmakers and their staff are constitutionally protected from such inquiries given the nature of their work.
The legal team led by Kerry W. Kircher, who was appointed House General Counsel by Speaker John Boehner in 2011, claimed that the insider trading probe violated the separation of powers between the legislative and executive branch.
In 2012, members of Congress patted themselves on the back for passing the STOCK Act, a bill meant to curb insider trading for lawmakers and their staff. “We all know that Washington is broken and today members of both parties took a big step forward to fix it,” said Rep. Bill Johnson, R-Ohio, upon passage of the law.
But as the Securities and Exchange Commission made news with the first major investigation of political insider trading, Congress moved to block the inquiry.
The SEC investigation focused on how Brian Sutter, then a staffer for the House Ways and Means Committee, allegedly passed along information about an upcoming Medicare decision to a lobbyist, who then shared the tip with other firms. Leading hedge funds used the insider tip to trade on health insurance stocks that were affected by the soon-to-be announced Medicare decision.
Calling the SEC’s inquiry a “remarkable fishing expedition for congressional records,” Kircher and his team claimed that the SEC had no business issuing a subpoena to Sutter. “Communications with lobbyists, of course, are a normal and routine part of Committee information-gathering,” the brief continued, arguing that there “is no room for the SEC to inquire into the Committee’s or Mr. Sutter’s purpose or motives.”
Wall Street investors routinely hire specialized “political intelligence” lobbyists in Washington to get insider knowledge of major government decisions so that they may make trades using the information. But little is known about the mechanics of political intelligence lobbying, which falls outside the scope of traditional lobbying law, and therefore does not show up in mandatory lobbying disclosure reports.
There are occasional hints, though.
Personal finance forms reveal that from July of 2011 through May of 2013, David Berteau served as a consultant to Height Analytics, the political intelligence firm at the center of the SEC’s current probe. At the time of his work for Height Analytics, Berteau simultaneously worked as a vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a prominent think tank in Washington. Berteau is now the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Logistics and Materiel Readiness.
Congressional travel forms show that on December 12, 2012, Emily Porter, at the time an employee of Boehner’s office, traveled to New York on a sponsored trip to meet with JNK Securities for a group lunch with business clients. According to the Wall Street Journal, JNK “has emerged as one of the most aggressive” political intelligence firms on Capitol Hill.
This is hardly the first time Congress has moved to undermine its own ethics rules. In 2011, congressional Republicans quickly abandoned their promise to post the text of bills online “for at least three days” before voting on them.

Muck Wallow

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NC wingnut republican Commissioner: Non-christian Prayers Forbidden At County Meetings

In a case of the exact opposite being true ...

by Manny Schewitz

To hear people like North Carolina’s Lincoln County Board of Commissioners chairman Carrol Mitchem tell it, wingnut christians are a persecuted class here in the United States. It’s as if they can’t come together to worship jesus in a house of prayer without police there to protect their service from armed gunmen coming to attack them.
(Oh wait, that was notorious anti-muslim bigot Pamela Geller and her convention of fellow idiots gathering to celebrate inflammatory rhetoric against the equally stupid idea that you cannot draw a picture of the prophet mohammed, because that’s hateful and disrespectful to a religion started by a guy who married a six-year-old girl.)
“Oh no, we’re persecuted by those liberals and dogless atheists who want to cram their beliefs down our throats!” That’s the rhetoric of hundreds of religio-wingnuts and their politicians who have done things like add “In dog We Trust” to displays in city halls, which was just approved here in Lafayette, Louisiana. It’s silly, it’s petty, and it goes a long way politically when you’ve got a whole bunch of people convinced that there’s a war going on against your religion.
You know, if you want to put “In dog We Trust” in your city council chambers, it really doesn’t bother me that much – and I’m an atheist. However, it’s still a violation of cult and state – and then you have people like Carrol Mitchem who really just want their specific brand of delusion to be endorsed, and nobody else’s.
If you want proof of this, just read the following story from Lincoln County, North Carolina and their Board of Commissioners which had a fit over the fact that a neighboring county was ordered to stop having prayers before their meetings.
In response to a question concerning Rowan County, which was recently ordered by a federal court judge to cease its pre-meeting prayers, Lincoln County Board of Commissioners chairman Carrol Mitchem said that not only will invocations remain in Lincoln County, but that he would see to it that no non-christian prayers are delivered on his watch.
“A muslim? He comes in here to say a prayer, I’m going to tell him to leave,” Mitchem said. “I have no use for (those) people. They don’t need to be here praying to allah or whoever the hell they pray to. I’m not going to listen to (a) muslim pray.”
In a ruling filed on Monday, Judge James A. Beaty ruled that Rowan County violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution. According to the court document, commissioners there started each meeting with phrases such as “let us pray” or “please pray with me” before delivering the prayer. Those prayers normally included references to “jesus” and “the savior.”
Religion has no place in government, and folks like Carrol Mitchem prove why.
It would be nice if people in government made decisions that benefited the poor, the elderly and the sick in the way that most religious teachings direct them to, but that’s not what’s going on here. Carrol Mitchem and others of his ilk are using their warped interpretation of christianity and their political power to further hatred and exclusion of others, rather than promote the common good.
Wingnut christians aren’t being persecuted, they’re simply being forced to give up centuries of control over government, which they were using to force their beliefs on the rest of us. Besides, does it really make a difference if you can’t say a prayer specifically invoking your version of a dog before having a county commission meeting? Is it really that big of a threat for someone who is muslim or wiccan or anything else to say their own prayer, especially if your dog is supposed to be the most powerful one of all and the other religions are false?
Send Carrol Mitchem an email, and politely let him know that freedom of religion applies to all religions, not just his.

Republican objections effectively neutered a bill to care for military war dogs

by Mark E Andersen U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Mark Bush, 386th Expeditionary Security Forces Squadron military working dog handler, gets affectionately licked by his dog, Xarius, June 3, 2014 at an undisclosed location in Southwest Asia.

U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Mark Bush, 386th Expeditionary Security Forces Squadron military working dog handler, gets affectionately licked by his dog, Xarius, June 3, 2014 at an undisclosed location in Southwest Asia. Two years ago when I attended a reunion of my old Desert Storm-era Army unit, Co. B 326th Engineer Battalion, 101st Airborne Division, we were looking at where our old barracks once stood. The old cockroach-infested buildings had been torn down to make way for the new buildings now under construction. One of my fellow veterans who worked in construction on post told us the story that did not leave a dry eye amongst us, even with our hardened veteran hearts. The story goes like this: The day demolition was to start, the military police (MPs) received a man at the front gate. He was in tears, and he had driven all night to get to Ft. Campbell before demolition of the 326th barracks began. He had to find the remains of the dog he went to Vietnam with, came home with, and buried at Ft. Campbell, before the demolition began. The MPs got him to the site of the barracks, the civilian construction workers stopped working, and they searched the battalion area for the remains of his dog. They never did find the remains—either his memory was faulty about where the remains were or too much earth had already been moved during construction.

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Every last Republican primary candidate: Vote for me, because I hate the government

by Hunter

U.S. Republican presidential candidates gather before the start of their debate in Ames, Iowa August 11, 2011. They are (from L to R) Rick Santorum, Herman Cain, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann, Tim Pawlenty, Jon Huntsman and Newt Gingrich. REUTER

2012 will look like Candy Mountain compared to 2016 primary rhetoric

This really will be the dynamic of the entire Republican primary season: Elect me, because I hate the government. Vote for me, because the government I am a very prominent member of has veered into new depths of incompetence since you last voted for me.

Mr. Cruz’s diagnosis can vary slightly: Sometimes Washington is “profoundly broken”; other times it is “fundamentally broken.” Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky prefers “horribly broken.” But he does not stop there. His campaign slogan for president is “Defeat the Washington Machine.”

Rand Paul is, of course, neck-deep in the Washington machine. Whatever bad thing you might say about the Washington Machine, from nepotism to substanceless, pandering rhetoric to obsessive fundraising to a truly profound inability to accomplish anything, Rand Paul is a poster child for all of it. Ted Cruz came to Washington with the official mission to break it, has spent nearly all of his time encouraging ridiculous plots in his party to break it (see: the shutdown, the single most incompetently planned and pointlessly premised act of legislative sabotage in a generation), and remains stumped as to why nothing is getting done.

Mr. Paul even recently cleansed his Twitter handle: What was @SenRandPaul is now just @RandPaul.

You know what would really distance yourself from the Senate? Not running for the damn Senate again. Since Kentucky doesn't allow you to run for Senate and president both, it would be a far simpler solution than the current churning (again, almost self-parodyingly Machine-like) efforts to change your state's laws to insert the required "except Rand Paul, who is awesome" clause. But they're far from the only candidates running as inside-the-system "outsiders." You know who else is doing it? Every last one of them. Below the fold we go.

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