MOMocrats™

Army Lt. Col. Terrence Lakin: Birther, Oath Keeper, Newest Astroturfer

The noble-sounding but mysterious organization Safeguard Our Constitution has sent out a noble-sounding press release today launching a fund-raising effort for a defense fund for Lt. Col. Terrence Lakin. Evidently Lt. Col. Lakin is having difficulty living with his oath to uphold the Constitution because he claims President Obama has not sufficiently proven that he is a natural-born citizen.

Safeguard Our Constitution claims to be part of the American Patriot Foundation, a non-profit organization established in 2003. Other than the initial return, no other official filings have been made.

From the press release:

"I am today compelled to make the distasteful choice to invite my own court martial, in pursuit of the truth about the president's eligibility under the constitution to hold office", said active duty Army Lt. Col. Terrence Lakin. The American Patriot Foundation, a non-profit group incorporated in 2003 to foster appreciation and respect for the U.S. Constitution, immediately announced it has set up a legal defense fund and will provide Lt. Col. Lakin with a top-flight defense team.

I'm not going to address the birther aspects of this nonsense again. It's nothing more than an effort to de-legitimize the President and keep the ignorant masses stirred in frothy stupors. Nothing I say or show would convince a dedicated birther otherwise, or even an Oath Keeper.

Step into Karoli's HCR Complaint Department

Update: The following complaints actually come from Investors' Business Daily, the same organization that lied to everyone back in July before the disastrous town hall meetings.

While I expect wailing and gnashing of teeth from the right wingers, I do get frustrated with it from the left side of the fence, mostly because that's the side I sit on. I got a list of complaints tonight that reads like a list of right wing talking points, so I decided to open the complaint department for questions, answers and debunks. There were so many in one post it would take a small book to address them all, so I'll start with the ones that seem to be causing migraines in fellow liberals.

The Mandate

You are young and don’t want health insurance? You are starting up a small business and need to minimize expenses, and one way to do that is to forego health insurance? Tough. You have to pay $750 annually for the “privilege.” (Section 1501)

Here is a fact: The only way you have universal coverage is to require everyone to have coverage. The only reason this bill isn't universal? Republicans said undocumented workers did not have the right to purchase insurance with their own money through the exchange, and you get to opt out if you choose to pay a penalty instead.

Sorry, young 'un, but there is no such thing as health insurance, per se. There are "risk pools". Risk pools represent a group of people - healthy and unhealthy - who all throw money in the kitty and then take it out when they need it. Insurance companies turn a healthy profit by cherry-picking individual pools for the healthiest in the bunch and booting the rest out. That's how you end up with stories about people getting sick and being tossed off their policies (like I was) or simply being denied altogether.

This bill, above all else, says people in this country are equal, and deserve to have equal access to affordable health insurance. To that end, the bill has been set up so the guy just setting up his business gets a 50% tax credit in 2014 to offset the cost of buying health insurance. That's not so bad, for a number of reasons, not the least of which is this: It makes that guy's small business competitive with the bigger business down the street that offers health insurance benefits.

What exactly was it you expected from health insurance reform? Single payer? Here's a news flash: Single payer carries a mandate, too, and it would be substantially more than $750 per year to pay for it. For all the positives, a Medicare buy-in for older people was estimated to be around $600/month, as opposed to the $1200 or so a year that a low-income person will likely pay for family insurance.

So you say, the mandate sucks. I say, then don't opt out. Get something for your money. Hell, the government is covering part of the cost, and there are some serious cost controls built in. The opt-out is silly. You're betting against inevitability.

Ok, on to the next.

Meet Bart Stupak's replacement: Connie Saltonstall

I always get excited about strong, smart women who step up for a challenge. Meet Connie Saltonstall, progressive Democrat extraordinaire, who has stepped up and said she's willing to give Stupak a run for his money. Saltonstall appeared for a live chat on Crooks and Liars today to talk about her campaign, what she believes, and why she's running. After spending a few minutes on the chat, I'm convinced she's got what it takes to win in Stupak's district.

In her own words:

“Michigan and the First District are facing enormous challenges and we cannot afford to sacrifice solutions for individual agendas. Stupak is co-chair of the Pro-Life Caucus and is putting their interests above those of his district. No federal funds have been used for abortions since 1977, and that provision will stay in effect without his amendment. In my opinion, Bart Stupak has shown that he is willing to block important legislation to support his own agenda at the expense of those he was elected to represent.”

Well, there's the heart of it, right? Democrats signed onto the Democratic platform, and the Democratic platform clearly stated a commitment to a strong pro-choice stance. In fact, the exact words were "strong and unequivocal". Yet, just over a year later, Bart Stupak was willing to hold health care reform hostage while asking women to trade away their reproductive rights.

Gratitude

Just a brief interruption to say that we now have 600 Facebook fans! Oh, how you all do rock. Seriously...you make going to Facebook worth it (and if you've heard me rant about Facebook, you'll know how major an admission that really is...)

If you're not getting our newsletter, you can sign up for it on Facebook or on the right-hand sidebar right here on the blog.

The best moment I've had all day was seeing that Facebook fan box with the number 600 in it...It's been a week of my daughter having The Most Evil Flu Bug Known To Man for 8 days, daylight savings time, and restless political currents while waiting to move to the next square on health care reform.

Watch this space. Big happenings next week in the health care arena, starting tomorrow at 3pm EDT. In the meantime, a giant hug and much gratitude to you from all of us.

From the right or left, hypocrisy smells the same. Foul.

Can someone  -- anyone -- please explain to me why there seem to be these weird cycles of crazy right at the point where it's least welcome? Not that crazy is particularly unusual in the political sphere, but seriously...there's some whacked things going on lately.

Take, for example, the treatment of 11-year old Marcelas Owens. Marcelas is in the news because he lost his 27-year old mom to pulmonary hypertension last year. 27 years old. Let's talk about that for a minute, because the fact that she died for lack of access to health care isn't a function of her being poor, or a single mom.

She had no access to health insurance, and by extension, health care, because she was not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid, she was employed but had been let go because her health kept her from working the hours she was expected to work, and her health insurance went when her job went.

She could get insurance for her kids under the SCHIP program, presumably. She may even have been eligible for food stamps. But she could not get insurance for herself because she had the temerity to have worked for a living.

The political ad your children should never, ever see

It could be that none of us should ever see it, because it's just so, so wrong. But fear not, Carly Fiorina is here to save us all from the..........

DEMON SHEEP!

You can run, but you can't hide from the DEMON SHEEP. Your children will hide, scream, but reassure them, mommas...because the one thing none of us are? FCINOs^{® 1}.

Do watch the whole thing, but shield the children's eyes from this:

That's right. it's a rare Carlyfornia Demon Sheep! Part of me wants Carly to win this primary just so Barbara Boxer can show her how a real candidate runs for office. I can only imagine the fun we can have with future FCINO^® videos.

I think she may have just ruined California's filmmaking reputation for all time.

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¹Fiscal Conservative in Name Only

Headlines no one read this week

With all the buzz over the State of the Union address, the iPad launch (yes, Steve Jobs should run product name choices past his wife, at the very least), and President Obama's very wonderful, magical 90 minutes of debate at the GOP House of Representatives retreat, a few worthy news items were missed.

Justice for Dr. Tiller

Dr. George Tiller's murderer, Scott Roeder, was convicted of first-degree murder on Friday. The jury deliberated for a half hour before finding him guilty. Frankly, they would have had to have been asleep in order to arrive at any other verdict, given Roeder's testimony not only confessing, but bragging about it.  (More about Dr. Tiller here)

Nancy Pelosi, my heroine

Despite all the drubbings Speaker Pelosi has received over the years from liberals, I've got nothing but respect for her, which grew as I watched how she shepherded the House health care reform bill to that 220-215 vote. Yes, I hate the Stupak amendment, but she handled even that with considerable political savvy by forcing Representatives to declare for or against it while America watched. But to get a flavor of who Nancy Pelosi really is, read what she said after last night's SOTU address about health care reform:

...we will go through the gate. If the gate is closed, we will go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we will pole vault in. If that doesn’t work, we will parachute in. But we are going to get health care reform passed for the American people for their own personal health and economic security and for the important role that it will play in reducing the deficit.

Compare that to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's remarks:

"We are going to move forward on health care. We're going to do health care reform this year. The question at this stage is procedurally how do we need to get where we need to go."

Pelosi: We're gonna get this done if I have to snake it through the pipes myself.

Reid: Yeah, yeah, when we have the sun and moon aligned exactly right and the planets all bow to the God of 60, we'll see if we can't get something done.

I'm not one who thinks in terms of gender all the time, but Pelosi sounds like me, and my mom, and my grandma. She understands in very real terms what it means to be in need and not have time to sit around and wait. Reid, on the other hand, strikes me as someone who is so lackadaisical he'd invite the invaders to dinner before he figures out they're the enemy.

Of course, sources tell me that in the past week, Reid is still thinking he can find a 60th vote to pass a conference committee report rather than use reconciliation.  Yeah, that would be right after the unicorns take off from Ronald Reagan National Airport, right?

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James O'Keefe, Fox News-Breitbart hero, ACORN stomper, arrested for plot to wiretap Landrieu's office

Fox News is quite beside themselves over it, beseeching everyone to wait for context. Because surely there must be some reasonable explanation for O'Keefe to be in Senator Mary Landrieu's office poised with his finger on the phone video button while two 'workmen' (one of whom is the son of Acting US Attorney Bill Flanagan) paid a visit to the phone system under the pretense of 'repairing' it.

Here's some context: James O'Keefe was the architect of the much-ballyhooed ACORN sting back in September. That was the sting that caught a couple of ACORN employees engaging in some pretty bad judgment calls, did irreparable harm to the ACORN brand, causing Congress to defund them only to have the Supreme Court call that defunding unconstitutional. That James O'Keefe. The young real-time wired darling of Fox News and Andrew Breitbart. (I thought about linking you to the story but I know how Uncle Rupert feels about the whole linky thing, so you should probably just Google it if you don't remember.)

Anyway, according to reports, here's what happened:

O'Keefe, 25, was already in Landrieu's New Orleans office Monday when Robert Flanagan and Joseph Basel, both 24, showed up claiming to be telephone repairmen, according to U.S. Attorney Jim Letten's office. Letten says O'Keefe recorded the two with his cell phone.

Once inside the reception area, Flanagan, the son of acting U.S. Attorney Bill Flanagan in Shreveport, and Basel asked for access to the main phone at the reception desk.

After handling the phone, "Flanagan and Basel next requested access to the telephone closet because they needed to perform work on the main telephone system," Letten's office said.

The men were directed to another office in the building, they're accused of again misrepresenting themselves as telephone repairmen. They were arrested later by the U.S. Marshal's Service. Details of the arrest were not available. A fourth man, Stan Dai, 24, was also arrested, but Letten's office said only that he assisted the others in planning, coordinating and preparing the operation.

Well, this is quite a development. It certainly sounds like O'Keefe was pulling a page right out of the Nixon playbook with this one, because I guess resigning in disgrace is somehow a badge of honor in Republican-land?

Snark aside, assuming these allegations are true, they point to just how low the right wingers will sink to disenfranchise voters. The choice to try to disenfranchise voters in Louisiana and hopefully somehow catch Landrieu in an act at the same time is just more evidence of their cynical sliminess.

I'll wait to see how things unfold because I actually believe in the presumption of innocence and the Constitution, but right now, things are looking like they could be ugly.  According to the FBI press release, they're looking at some hard time:

If convicted, FLANAGAN, BASEL, O’KEEFE, and DAI each face a maximum term of 10 years in prison, a fine of $250,000, and three (3) years of supervised release following any term of imprisonment.

FBI Affidavit at Gawker

FBI Press Release

UPDATE: I was curious about Stan Dai, started doing a bit of searching and came across some of the same information this person found. If this is the same Stan Dai, he has a weird idea about what "defending democracy" is all about.

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(AP Photo/Patrick Semansky) via Democratic Underground

Harold Ford, get your Blue Dog self out

Image by Bearman2007 via Flickr

While it's true that Democrats are a 'big tent' party, and we don't have purity tests like the Republicans, Harold Ford's comments in yesterday's New York Times are so blatantly out of step with Democrats' values and so wildly in lockstep with the Republicans that it leaves me wondering whether he's really a stealth candidate for the GOP.

In one single column, he calls for tax cuts, some vague call for job creation (which is really just his way of saying he has no idea what to do but we should really do something), a scaled-down brand-new health care reform program that includes tort reform , and immigration reform but only immigration reform for those undocumented workers who actually attend and graduate from universities.

Funny, where have I heard similar talking points? Oh yeah, that's right.  Charles Krauthammer, champion of Sarah Palin and George W. Bush. 

Somewhere, there's got to be a line, and Ford has crossed it. If he hasn't figured out that the unrest and dissatisfaction has to do with an electorate who feels the President hasn't gone far enough left instead of right, he's unfit to even step into Hillary Clinton's old district, much less run for office there. Read PunditMom's post for more reasons.

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