“Under President Obama, the rich have gotten richer, income inequality has gotten worse and there are more people in poverty than ever before,” Romney said. “Under this president, his policies have not worked. Their liberal policies are good every four years for a campaign, but they don’t get the job done.”… He added, “People want to see rising wages and they deserve them.”
By the time the debates begin, he’ll have blamed the Great Depression and ever other evil that Republican policies have brought about on the Democrats.
Looks like Gov. Fire Marshal Bill had no other use for his dog Reagan than as a prop.
Shortly after winning the GOP nomination in 2010, Rick Scott announced to the world through Facebook that his family had rescued a Labrador retriever.
And, with help from his Facebook friends, Scott gave it a name: Reagan.
…
Asked last week what had happened to the dog, Scott’s current and former communications directors refused to answer.
…
On Monday, the Times asked the governor to clear up the mystery.
“He was a rescue dog,” Scott said, “and he couldn’t be around anybody that was carrying anything, and so he wouldn’t get better.”
I guess prop is better than poop – but a lying scumbag is a lying scumbag, meaning that, even though that proffered excuse one that some people have had to give after a shelter pet proved to be more than they could handle (it does happen), if you believe Rick Scott then you probably also believed Mitt the Flip when he said that Seamus enjoyed being in his car-rooftop dog cage.
A Texas judge has rejected a request from prosecutors that she send a teenager to jail for driving drunk and causing a crash last year that killed four people and seriously wounded two others.
The case grabbed attention across the nation in December when the boy’s attorneys argued that the 16-year-old defendant suffered from “affluenza” — effectively, that he was coddled too much by his wealthy parents, who have never held him accountable for his actions.
District Judge Jean Boyd ruled then that the teen would get 10 years of probation for causing the deaths. It was conditioned on his getting long-term psychological and addiction treatment. If the terms of the probation are violated, the teen could be put in prison.
The boy’s parents agreed to send him to an undisclosed rehabilitation center in California that would reportedly cost them $450,000 a year — though there was no word on exactly how long he would likely be there.
No confirmation yet as to whether his $450K/year ‘treatment’ is actually an internship at Bain Capital.
I’ll never forget the day I sat next to a rich girl in my freshman year of college as she complained how people who shopped at Old Navy were “so trashy” while I wore a v-neck Old Navy t-shirt. Here I had been, thinking I was fairly trendy, as Old Navy had just come to my town a few years ago, and was very popular there. The shock, and the hurt were enormous.
And I grew up lower middle class, far from poor.
…
I’ll never forget the time in college when I mentioned eating at IHOP, and a dorm-mate started laughing at me. She thought it was a hilarious joke, because “only poor people in movies eat at IHOP.” She’d never even seen one, coming from a fancy town where there were no chain restaurants.
And Mitt the Flip and Marie AnnToinette still don’t understand why, even if there was no such thing as Obamacare, enough real people who have had it with the clueless monied elite would have still voted as they did so as to keep Marie AnnToinette’s top priority as being Rafalca, and not replacing all of the things in the White House that ‘those people’ used.
Provision for vote by corporate property owner. (1) Subject to subsection (2), if a firm, partnership, company, or corporation owns real property within the municipality, the president, vice president, secretary, or other designee of the entity is eligible to vote in a municipal election as provided in [section 1].
I won’t copy it here, but there’s nothing in that subsection 2 that would prohibit an ‘own one square inch of Florida’ or ‘buy a Scottish title’ scheme that would enable an infinite number of distinct corporations from magically coming into existence and, thereafter, each owning one square inch of “real property within the municipality” to, thereby, manufacture any number of votes necessary to erase any and all electoral influence by real people.
The bill does contain some limits on these new corporate voting rights. Most significantly, corporations would not be entitled to vote in “school elections,” and the bill only applies to municipal elections. So state and federal elections would remain beyond the reach of the new corporate voters.
For now.
In fairness to Lavin’s fellow lawmakers, this bill was tabled shortly after it came before a legislative committee, so it is unlikely to become law.
Okay, the photo was taken in 2011 just beyond the right field fence during a Quad Cities River Bandits game at Modern Woodmen Park in Davenport, Iowa, but it really, really, really applies more to 2012, Mitt, Ann, Tagg, et. al.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia told an audience at Princeton University on Monday that comparing same sex coupling to bestiality and murder is politically “effective.” According to the Associated Press (AP), Scalia was explaining to a question by a gay student, Duncan Hosie, who asked the conservative judge why he considers it necessary to draw parallels between laws banning LGBT sex and laws banning bestiality and murder.
“I don’t think it’s necessary, but I think it’s effective,” Scalia replied, adding that he believes legislative bodies are within their purview to ban acts that they believe are immoral.
Fine…
Catholic Church?
You are ooutttttaaaaa here!!!!!!!!!!!!
Seventh Circuit judge and University of Chicago lecturer Richard A. Posner criticized Reading Law in The New Republic, saying Scalia’s judicial philosophy was “incoherent” and ideologically blinkered.
Posner also pointed out that Scalia’s book and his judicial rulings cite cases that never actually established the things that Scalia and his co-author Bryan A. Garner claim they established.
A Republican con artist? Who’da thunk it?
(And, yes, before anyone says it: I know that Posner was also appointed by Reagan – but, if you noitice, no Republican has been intellectually honest enough to elevate him to the DC 9.)
“How many readers of Scalia and Garner’s massive tome,” [Posner] wondered, “will do what I have done — read the opinions cited in their footnotes and discover that in discussing the opinions they give distorted impressions of how judges actually interpret legal texts?”
What was the honest phrase that was attributed to Mitt Romney even though he was never honest enough to say it? Oh yeh: ‘I can lie faster than you can fact check.’
Advantage Judge Posner (though I suspect that Posner’s critique will be banned at the law schools at Ave Maria, Liberty and Regent Universities.)
We all know (yes we do) that ENDA – any version of it – ceased being anything approaching a major priority for the Rhode Island Avenue Cesspool as soon as the caviar-addled champagne-swillers who make up HRC’s actual constituency secured anti-discrimination rights in their home states (well, the caviar-addled champagne-swillers who weren’t rich enough in the first instance to have never had that as a priority at any level and feel that America of the 1890s would be fine-n-dandy so long as same-sex sex was legal), saw laws against fucking tossed by the DC9 and began to smell legal marriage and all of the estate and tax-avoidance chicanery that can accompany it.
At a post-election wrap-up panel on LGBT issues organized by UCLA’s Williams Institute on Nov. 14, [] Freedom to Work’s Tico Almeida asked HRC president Chad Griffin why he hadn’t mentioned getting a floor vote in the Senate on the workplace bill, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, as a priority for 2013.
“Why not push for that as well?” Almeida, a former House staff counsel who worked on ENDA, asked. “Wouldn’t we do important public education and build momentum by getting that vote, even if we get to 57, 58, 59 votes? Let them filibuster, let them out themselves as on the wrong side of history.” A filibuster would require the bill’s supporters to secure 60 votes to move forward.
Griffin responded by urging caution.
“All of these things take work,” he told Almeida. “And it’s very easy to say, ‘Let’s just move forward and get a vote on this or that.’ I’m for doing it where we know we have a plan to win and we have the votes to win. And if that’s today, then let’s move forward. But, I do think we have to be smart. … I’m not looking to set up ourselves for losses.”
When Tico Almeida is the moral compass in a discussion in whether or not to have ENDA as any priority at all, the game is over and we’ve moved on to the ‘all gay marriage, all the time’ round of the gay rights millionaire circlejerk playoffs. Remember, Almeida is the clown who bleated:
The truth is that the steps we take toward one goal also bring us closer to the other goal. Equality begets equality.
On the surface, that seems consistent with what he said to Griffin – but, then again, it was essentially a rationalization for diverting resources away from ENDA and toward gay marriage, a rationalization that I observd reeked of the “the steps we take toward one goal also bring us closer to the other goal. Equality begets equality” nonsense that so often is used to justify funneling trans issues to the outhouse while the caviar-addled champagne-swillers who pay Chad Griffin’s (and Pee Wee Solmonses’s before that, and Cheryl Jacques’s before that and Queen Elizabeth III’s before that) undeserved salary and who pull his strings have their wants addressed by the White House.
HRC hiring Chad ‘gay marriage, gay marriage, gay marriage, gay marriage – oh, and did I mention gay marriage?’ Griffin and expecting people whose priority in life might not be gay marriage not to notice that his pedigree says ‘gay marriage, gay marriage, gay marriage, gay marriage and nothing but gay marriage’ is like the Republican Party in 2012 nominating for president a creature who looks like he was a product (granted, Herman to John Sununu’s Johann) of Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory – if Dr. Frankenstein was, in addition to being a reanimator, a Wall Street fraudster – and being shocked that the electorate was able to muster up enough brainpower to draw a line between what Republican candidate Romney represents (figuratively and as direct agent) and the three decades of obscene economic policy that served as the lightning which brought Romney – and the thousands of other worthles husks exactly like him who think that what the non-utilitarian manipulation of the financial system that they spend their lives ingaging in solely for personal profit isn’t immoral – to life.
Anyone who thinks that HRC is devoting even an ounce of verifiable substance to the goal of ENDA – any version of it – from this point forward is probably the same type of person who believes that HRC (and its thirty-two year history of existence with two visible trans employees, only one of whom came in with any experience which bore any relevance to actual civil rights policy matters but whom, at that, was there for a barely-two-year tenure which ended over a decade ago) ever actually did any ‘education’ whatsoever anywhere on the issue of trans inclusion in ENDA.
So is it any wonder why Mitt the Flip and his handlers had a problem with fact-checkers?
Only THREE PERCENT of the very rich are entrepreneurs.
According to both Marketwatch and economist Edward Wolff, over 90 percent of the assets owned by millionaires are held in a combination of low-risk investments (bonds and cash), personal business accounts, the stock market, and real estate. Only 3.6 percent of taxpayers in the top .1% were classified as entrepreneurs based on 2004 tax returns.
We now know that Democrats cannot count on New York’s supposedly Democratic governor as an ally and every Democratic primary voter in the country should know that too.
– Chris Hayes
It seems as though Cuomo the Younger may well prove to be just the Democrats’ Mitt Romney – a quasi clone of an older model who, for one reason or another, didn’t get a clear shot at the presidency, a quasi clone who will sell out whatever core beliefs he may or may not have ever had in order to go were daddy wasn’t able to.
I wonder if Mario is still standing at a podium somewhere, teasing a cobweb-encrusted now-former press corps about whether or not he’ll hop on his – now thoroughly as imaginary as John McCain’s credibility and Karl Rove’s election night numbers – campaign plane, but I digress. Hayes, meanwhile is imploring peoople to:
be wary of Cuomo, who he believes is putting his personal ambitions above his constituents wishes. The strange case of Simcha Felder, elected to the New York Senate as a Democrat but who recently announced he would caucus with Republicans instead, is for Hayes more damning evidence.
Despite the fact that he’s the leader of the Democratic Party in the state, and wishes someday to be the Democratic nominee for President, Cuomo has refused to intervene with Felder, saying he won’t insert himself into the controversy. Watching all this unfold, one can’t help but suspect Andrew Cuomo actually does not want a Democratic majority in the State Senate because a Republican majority gives him more of an opportunity to burnish his bipartisan compromiser bona fides before launching his presidential campaign. And much, much, much more insidiously, we suspect he doesn’t want a Democratic majority because said majority stands ready to pass a whole raft of incredibly important, ground-breaking progressive legislation, including public financing for elections, marijuana decriminalization and a minimum wage hike, among others. The governor says he favors all those policies, but in this case, he sure is not acting like it. We’re almost entirely sure that very soon Andrew Cuomo will be coming before many of the people watching this show, asking for your support in a Democratic primary race to be the next president. You should remember this remarkably cynical display when he does.
To be fair to Cuomo the Younger, he’s not the only problem. Gay City News addresses the matter in the context of the now thoroughly as imaginary as John McCain’s credibility and Karl Rove’s election night numbers GENDA:
Democrats in the New York State Senate looked to have won a surprise majority on Election Day, overcoming a huge financial disadvantage, Republican gerrymandering, and no help from Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo. But that prospective majority has been put in jeopardy –– and, along with it, the fate of much progressive legislation, including a long-stalled transgender rights bill, the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act (GENDA) –– as Democratic senators defect or threaten to in the fight over who will become the majority leader.
…
[O]ne newly elected Democrat, social conservative Simcha Felder of Brooklyn, has already bolted, saying he will caucus with the Republicans to re-elect Long Island’s Dean Skelos as majority leader.
Four other Democratic senators, led by Jeff Klein of the Bronx, have been calling themselves the Independent Democratic Caucus (IDC) and will not declare themselves in the leadership fight. Klein’s IDC colleagues are Diane Savino of Staten Island, who is also his longtime partner, David Valesky of Syracuse, and David Carlucci of Rockland County. The four all have pro-gay voting records, but since they are not talking, it is unclear whether any deal they would make to join with the Republicans to run the Senate would include assurances about the passage of GENDA or anything else of concern to the LGBT community.
Savino, if you recal, gave one of the most ferocious speeches imaginable in favor of a gay marriage bill in New York back in 2009:
Transphobes – particularly gay ones (and particularly radphlegms who pretend to be gay men – Hi Vic!) – defamatorily claim that I’m against gay marriage.
No.
I’m against the genocidal prioritization of it.
Savino can give a speech like that for marriage, but now its okay for her to play games that will ensure that all of the people upon whom she and her colleagues ultimately conferred marital rights still maintain the special right to discriminate against trans people that they’ve had for almost a decade now???
Cuomo the Younger isn’t the only allegedly-Democratic New York mouthpiece whose word is looking to be worth even less than Romney the Younger’s.
Unlike his predecessors Eliot Spitzer and David Paterson, Cuomo –– who is supposed to be the leader of his party in New York –– did not work for a Democratic majority in the Senate, is widely seen to be more comfortable with the business-oriented conservative Republican majority, endorsed some Republicans, and has said he expects “a coalition” to be in charge of the Senate in January.
As this story has unfolded, still more Democrats are rumored to be looking to make deals with the Republicans, including former Democratic Majority Leader Malcolm Smith of Queens and right-wing Bronx Senator Ruben Diaz, Sr., whose son, Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr., just condemned his predecessor, Adolfo Carrión, for becoming a Republican to run for mayor next year. Diaz, Sr., is the Senate’s most vocally implacable foe of the LGBT community.
Despite the threat to GENDA from this leadership fight, the Empire State Pride Agenda’s new executive director, Nathan Schaefer, whose group calls the bill its top priority, said in an email, “We are not involved in the deliberations regarding Senate leadership. Our strategy has not changed one iota. We continue to work with legislators on both sides of the aisle, all across the state, to build support for priorities such as a transgender nondiscrimination law and funding for LGBT health and human services.”
Whoopdeephuck!
Top priority?
Top priority now that all of the gay millionaires on Wall Street have what they want: marriage.
And what of all of the gay millionaires who work in D.C. but live in Maryland and who now have what they want: marriage?
Heather Mizeur, a lesbian member of the Maryland House of Delegates, said she’s seriously considering a run for governor in an exclusive interview with the Washington Blade this week.
“I’m taking a very serious look at it,” Mizeur said. “I can’t say for sure what 2014 is going to bring but … I know that I would make a good chief executive. I have good ideas for keeping Maryland moving forward.”
A run by Mizeur would mark another key milestone in the LGBT rights movement.
A milestone like gays and lesbians who have had the special right to discriminate against trans people for over eleven years now being able to be married while discriminating against trans people?
Mizeur declined to say when she expects to make a final decision on the race, noting that right now she’s dedicated to preparing for the upcoming legislative session in Annapolis. But to be competitive, she would likely need to make a final decision by early spring, just after the session ends.
“We have a robust slate of issues to address next year, including fracking, paid sick days for employees and job creation efforts,” she said.
Rectification of the state’s 2001 political hate crime against trans people?
“My entire public schedule was [marriage referendum]-related for months.”
With that fight over, she said the next job for the state’s LGBT advocates is to push for non-discrimination protections based on gender identity and to work on causes important to those who joined the coalition for marriage equality.
Very good.
“It’s important for our community to be seen as coming together to work on issues that are outside LGBT priorities,” she said.
Very dogwhistle-y.
Very wait-y.
Very more-of-the-last-eleven-years-y.
New York’s governor has his eyes on the White House.
One of Maryland’s LGB( ) legislators has her eyes on the state’s governor’s mansion.
Trans people had best not blind our eyes to the reality that in both states, now that the gay want of marriage is in the bank, the basic economic needs of trans people are off the table – forever.
