Jack & Jill Politics

Murkowski Regrets Voting For Blunt’s ‘Religious Conscience’ Measure: ‘I Have Let These Women Down’
By Igor Volsky on Mar 6, 2012 at 8:30 am

Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski told a local newspaper yesterday that she regrets her vote for the so-called Blunt amendment, the GOP’s alternative to President Obama’s rule requiring employers to provide contraception coverage as part of their health care insurance plans. Under the amendment, which the Senate tabled with the help of just one Republican, employers would have been empowered to deny coverage of health services to their employees on the basis of personal moral objections.

“I have never had a vote I’ve taken where I have felt that I let down more people that believed in me,” Murkowski told the Anchorage Daily News’ Julia O’Malley, claiming that the amendment’s language went “overboard”:

“If you had it to do over again, having had the weekend that you had with women being upset about the vote, do you think you would have voted the same?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

Murkowski said she believes contraception should be covered and affordable, except when it comes to churches and religiously affiliated organizations, like some universities and hospitals. She sponsored a contraception coverage bill as a state legislator in 2002. That bill exempted “religious employers.” She said her position hasn’t changed.
“I have always said if you don’t like abortion the best way to deal with it is to not have unwanted pregnancies in the first place,” she said. “How do you do that? It’s through contraception.”

I pointed out that her support for birth control conflicts with the Catholic mandate against it. “You know, I don’t adhere to all of the tenets of my faith. I’m a Republican, I don’t adhere to all of the principles that come out of my party,” she said. “I’m also not hesitant to question when I think that my church, my religion, is not current.”

Murkowski called the Blunt Amendment a “messaging amendment” that “both sides know is not going to pass” and said “Republicans didn’t have enough sense to get off of it.” She also condemned Rush Limbaugh’s deragatory comments about a Georgetown law student testifying in favor of greater access to birth control. “I think women when they hear…mouthpieces like that say things like that they get concerned and they look to policymakers,” she said. “That’s where I feel like I have let these women down is that I have not helped to give these women the assurance they need that their health care rights are protected.”

Before the vote, ThinkProgress repeatedly called Murkowski’s office to ask how she would vote on the Blunt measure, but her office did not return our requests for comment. Retiring Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) was the only Republican to oppose the measure.

http://thinkprogress.org/health/2012/03/06/438394/murkowski-regrets-voting-for-blunts-religious-conscience-measure-i-have-let-these-women-down/

Posted at 11:08 AM ET, 03/06/2012
Blaming Obama can’t bail Limbaugh out this time
By Greg Sargent

His advertisers are defecting. He’s facing increasing criticism from his own side. And the evidence is mounting that his continued tirades against Sandra Fluke are damaging the GOP. So Rush Limbaugh is attempting a last ditch, but tried-and-true strategy to stop the bleeding: Blame Barack Obama for creating the whole mess.

“Obama is sorely hurting with women in preelect polls,” Rush is now claiming. “He wanted to turn this into an issue much as they used to use abortion. So the Democrats played the game.”

Limbaugh’s latest theory: He alleges that Dems sprang a trap by pushing Sandra Fluke as a witness for the House hearing on contraception and religious liberty. “They wanted to turn this from a committee hearing on Obama and his unconstitutional mandate to the issue of contraception so as to bring back to life page 1-A of the Democrat playbook: Republicans Hate Women,” Rush says.

No one denies that Democrats see political advantage in this fight or that they think this debate should be about contraception. But it’s hard to see how this has all flowed from a secret plot hatched by Obama himself. The chronology is straightforward: After Obama took a beating over the original Obamacare rule requiring religious institutions to cover contraception — which Joe Biden himself conceded was a screw-up — Obama unveiled a new compromise exempting those institutions. This compromise was supported by some Catholic groups and — according to some polls — a majority of Catholic voters.

House Republicans held a hearing on February 16th on Obama’s new rule. Dems wanted Sandra Fluke to testify, but Republicans said Dems had submitted her name too late. Later in the week, Dems held their own hearing featuring Fluke. That is what triggered Rush’s original tirade. Beyond this, the battles over Planned Parenthood and the Komen foundation — which Republicans happily joined, and which laid the groundwork for the current contraception fight — predate Fluke’s entry into the fray.

At any rate, Rush’s latest effort to blame Obama for his whole mess doesn’t appear to be working. Since he made this case, five more advertisers have deserted his show, bringing the total to 20.

Meanwhile, a new Washington Times poll finds that a full 30 percent of Republican primary voters think this battle is about women’s health, and not about religious liberty. As pollster John Zogby puts it: “Drop this baby right now. Drop it. This is not a winner.”

Rush is discovering that not even blaming Obama can change this. It must be a pretty disorienting discovery.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/blaming-obama-cant-bail-limbaugh-out-this-time/2012/03/06/gIQAksgouR_blog.html

Omigod!!!!! They Found the Whitey Tape!!!!!

by SteveM

No, not that whitey tape. This is another whitey tape! (Or maybe it’s even worse than a whitey tape!) And it hasn’t been located, exactly—but, as Ben Shapiro tells us over at World O’ Breitbart, or whatever it is they’re calling the site these days, the tape has been identified….

Sources inform Breitbart.com today that Pam Dickler, director of the 1998 production of The Love Song of Saul Alinsky in Chicago that included a panel discussion featuring then-State Sen. Barack Obama, has a video tape of the play.

And she won’t release it.

“There is only one archive tape of the play and I have it,” Dickler informed our source. “It is not in Chicago.”

Dickler told our source that she doesn’t believe she’s ever watched the tape, and she doesn’t know if it “can be viewed.” But she added: “No one is going to see the tape.”

She said she felt “very protective over it … due to all of the interest from conservatives recently.”…

Oh, this is going to keep a large crew of wingnut-welfare cases occupied for months—years, maybe. But really, who knows—does the damn thing even exist? Or is Dickler just messing with Young Ben’s head? And if it does exist, is it just of the play or of the discussion as well?

If the discussion was taped, it’s really hard to imagine that Obama said much—according to the previous story about this, the discussion panel included nineteeen different boldface names, most of whom, unlike the then-little-known “Sen. Baraka Obama,” were locally prominent enough to have their names spelled correctly on the theater’s press release. And those nineteen promised play-discussers were “among many others.” (Click to enlarge:)

Have you ever been to a discussion like this? I know Ben Shapiro and the other Breitbartniks would never have had such an experience, because it’s too commie-liberal for them, but really, if you’ve got that many participants, a lot of them aren’t going to say very much. I’m sure Shapiro thinks this would have been like some Party Congress that went on for hours and hours after the play, with everyone smoking Russian cigarettes, but people get bored after a while, especially if they just sat through a play, so my guess is that it broke up after an hour or so at most, and Obama’s contribution mostly consisted of nodding in agreement. (Though if the tape is ever found, that’s going to be the source of another Breitbart EXCLUSIVE!—“Look! Studs Terkel says, ‘It’s a class issue,’ and Obama nods in agreement! IT’S NOD-GATE!” Or some brief remark by Obama, barely audible over the inevitable feedback whine-note and lost in the theater’s echo, will be misinterpreted: he’ll have said, “How can we raise their standard of living?” and the Breitbartettes will say, “ARGH! ARGH! HE SAID, ‘HONKY, RAISE THEIR STANDARD OF LIVING’!”)

If the tape exists, will it ever be found? My guess is that it fell into the hands of some member of the troupe who subsequently unloaded it after a move to Vancouver or Brooklyn, and now it’s gathering dust in some junk shop, cryptically labeled and wedged in between an Alf lunchbox and a stack of Gino Vannelli LPs. But that’s not going to stop some right-wing plutocrat from doling out several million dollars in expense money to a bunch of pasty-faced College Republicans to try to find it. Wow, that will be money and time well spent.

http://www.balloon-juice.com/2012/03/06/omigod-they-found-the-whitey-tape/

The Latino Polling Bombshell

Currently, according to a big poll conducted by Fox News, Obama is leading Romney among Latino voters by 70 – 14 percent. Last time, Obama beat McCain by 67 – 31. Money quote:

While the poll indicates that four of five Latinos who voted for Obama in 2008 would vote for him later this year, Latinos who voted for Republican Arizona Sen. John McCain four years ago are now divided between voting for Obama and the Republican candidates. Forty percent said that they favored Obama while 38 percent said they would vote for Romney. Obama also leads Santorum 38 percent to 34, and Gingrich 40 percent to 38.

I cannot see how the GOP has a future with this kind of gap.

http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/

Strange Things At The CATO Institute, Ctd

Pareene sticks up for Cato:

[Y]ou should wish for an independent Cato Institute even if — maybe especially if — you’re a socialist statist tool (like me). Cato is mostly antiwar, decidedly anti-drug war, and sponsors a lot of good work on civil liberties. That … is basically what the Kochs don’t like about them, because white papers on decriminalization don’t help Republicans get elected. As Jonah Goldberg complains in a post that otherwise resolutely refuses to come to a conclusion or have a point, Cato has an annoying habit of not always seeing itself as a natural member of the glorious Republican coalition. (Current Cato headline: “It’s Not Obama’s Fault That Crude Oil Prices Have Increased.” Oh, man, don’t tell Americans for Prosperity that!)

Julian Sanchez, a Cato employee, will resign should the Kochs take control. Jane Mayer sees the takeover as part of a trend:

As Bruce Bartlett, a conservative economist who was drummed out of the National Center for Policy Analysis for criticizing President Bush, told me yesterday, “This is not all together surprising. It happened at the American Enterprise Institute to David Frum. Staying on the good side of the Republican Party was more important than maintaining its integrity. The conservative right-wing Republicans who fund all these places now see they can serve their own agenda of paying no taxes, and screwing the hell out of the poor. They’ve drunk their own Kool-Aid on Obama. They see the guillotine around the corner, and they want to do anything they can to stop it.”

Weigel has useful background on the legal battle over the think tank.

http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/03/strange-things-at-the-cato-institute-ctd.html

Political AnimalBlogMarch 06, 2012 12:49 PM Underwater By Ed Kilgore
We have a new data point today on the impact of the GOP nominating contest on the general electorate, and if I were a Republican, I’d be worried, per ABC pollster Gary Langer:
All four Republican contenders remain underwater in overall favorability in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll, marking the difficulties the survivor may face against Barack Obama. More Americans hold negative than positive views of Romney by a 10-point margin, Rick Santorum by 8 points, Ron Paul by 9 points and Newt Gingrich by a whopping 33 points.
Among customarily swing-voting independents, moreover, all but Paul is seen more unfavorably than favorably in this poll, produced for ABC by Langer Research Associates. And Paul’s got trouble, as does Gingrich, within the GOP itself.

Mitt Romney, responding to immediate market pressures like any good corporate consultant would do, has managed to boost his ratings among conservatives without improving his overall general election standing:

Romney has improved among both “very” and “somewhat” conservative Americans, as well as among conservative Republicans in particular – up by 12, 10 and 11 points in these groups, respectively, versus a week ago. His gain among very conservatives comes from the ranks of the undecided in this group; among somewhat conservatives, by contrast, negative views moved to positive ones.
Indeed Romney, after falling to new lows among conservatives before the Michigan and Arizona contests, has moved back to parity with Santorum among some conservative groups, notably conservative Republicans. In this group, 67 percent now see Romney favorably; Santorum, 68 percent.

As has been increasingly apparent throughout the contest, Ron Paul has been firmly rejected by actual Republicans:

He’s at 38-35 percent among independents, better than his rivals; but, at 38-44 percent among Republicans, numerically the worst of the lot within the GOP.

And Newt, as might well have been predicted, has spent an awful lot of Sheldon Adelson’s money in order to achieve pretty much the same national pariah status he earned in the mid-to-late 1990s:

Deepest into the sea is Gingrich – 23 percent of Americans see him favorably, a new low this election cycle; 56 percent unfavorably, a new high. Republicans essentially divide on Gingrich, but independents see him negatively by a vast 58-21 percent.
Democrats, of course, deeply regret that Newt’s return to his familiar public standing didn’t occur much later—say, after he won the GOP nomination. But donkeys hold out hope that Mitt Romney will succumb to the same force of gravity—and the same tradeoff of “swing” for “base” voters—that’s already evident in the numbers.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2012_03/underwater035856.php

comment from TOD about POTUS and the jackals of the press:

dotster3

March 6, 2012 at 3:14 pm

Bashir just excellent again, saying the WH press—-and Repub candidates— were exposed as children today with their casual questions and promotion of war. Guest David Corn is always good too—-saying it was like a Clint Eastwood moment——and noting that President Obama always thinks long term. Bashir and Corn noted that this may not always be good politically—-not reacting impulsively to the cause du jour—-but it is good when you consider the possibility of World Peace. They noted what we did—that President Obama is always 1000 rungs above all the shallow riff raff below.

he really can’t help himself

Uppity Niggers….Uppity Women..

he can’t help himself.

me? pass me the Reeses mini-cups.

………………………………………………….

Limbaugh Bemoans Uppity ‘Overeducated’ Single Women |

Rush Limbaugh refrained from directly attacking Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke today, spending most of the first hour of his show warning about a coming liberal war on food. But he still apparently couldn’t resist throwing a jab at women. In lengthy screed against a new book on the American food system by author Tracie McMillan, asking rhetorically, “What is it with all of these young, single, white women, overeducated — doesn’t mean intelligent.” Listen here:

http://thinkprogress.org/media/2012/03/06/438946/limbaugh-overeducated-women/

Slate is like Kos in that one must select posts to cite with care, to prevent the top of one’s own head from exploding. Yglesias has a good find here, Media Matters on gas prices (video compilation).

In 2008, Fox News Explained—Accurately!—That Presidents Can’t Lower The Price of Gasoline

By Matthew Yglesias | Posted Monday, March 5, 2012, at 10:02 PM ET

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/03/05/in_2008_fox_news_explained_accurately_that_presidents_can_t_lower_the_price_of_gasoline.html

Driving Latino voters to Obama

By Steve Benen -  Tue Mar 6, 2012 12:32 PM EST.

We talked a couple of weeks ago about the ways in which Republican presidential candidates, most notably Mitt Romney, have alienated Latino voters. A new national Fox News Latino poll helps quantify matters a bit.

In a head-to-head match-up against [President Obama], none of the Republican candidates polled higher than 14 percent among Latinos.

Additionally, 73 percent said they approved of the job the president has been doing, well above Gallup’s national average of 45 percent. Fifty-eight percent said they approved of the president’s handling of the economy, which polls show voters rank as the most important issue in the 2012 election.

Here’s the kicker: among Latino voters who supported John McCain in 2008, a plurality of those voters now prefer Obama to whomever the Republican nominate.

I put together a chart to help drive the point home. On the left, those columns show Obama’s edge over the GOP nominee in 2008, when exit polls showed McCain losing this constituency by 36 points. On the right, those columns show Obama’s advantage over Romney based on the Fox News poll.

What’s more, there’s no great mystery here. Romney is an inflexible opponent of the DREAM Act; he’s palling around with Pete Wilson and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach; he endorses a “self-deportation” agenda; he’s critical of bilingualism; and his casual dismissals of “amnesty” and “illegals” are a staple of his campaign rhetoric.
Of course he’s struggling badly with these voters.

The conventional wisdom suggests Romney can narrow the gap by naming New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez or Florida Sen. Marco Rubio to the 2012 ticket. And while the Fox News poll found Latino voters more willing to support the GOP if Martinez or Rubio is the running mate, Obama still trounces those tickets in either case.

This is, in other words, a problem that is not easily fixed.

.
http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/03/06/10592683-driving-latino-voters-to-obama

We were picking on Disney yesterday for a bad case of “not getting it” with princesses, watermelon insinuations, etc. We need more Disney like this video mashup.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=2tT7I3Brm_s

At the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, PAFA there is a Henry Ossawa Tanner. It runs from Jan 28 to Apr 15. It is free to the public on Sunday otherwise $15.
The highlight is not Tanner. There is an exhibit called After Tanner:AA Artists Since 1940. This link is to an article on that exhibit.

By Brad Friedman on 3/6/2012 11:48am 

Former U.S. Marine Turned Away From TN Poll For Refusing to Present Photo ID Under New GOP Law

‘I took the oath to prevent these kinds of laws’…

55-year old former U.S. Marine Tim Thompson was turned away from the polls today, Super Tuesday 2012, in the state of Tennessee, after refusing to present a photo ID before voting, as required by a new law recently passed by Republicans.

Thompson was documented by videographers attempting to cast his vote under the new polling place Photo ID restrictions instituted by TN’s Republican-majority legislature and signed into law last year by the state’s Republican Gov. Bill Haslam.

The former Lance Corporal, who left the service in 1978, has lived in Nashville since 2004 when he first cast his vote at the same precinct where he was turned away today. In an act of protest, planned in advance and video-taped by a number of media outlets, Thompson refused to show any more than the voter registration card he has previously used for voting in the state.

Video of the confrontation that ensued is posted below.

“This is my voter registration card,” Thompson said as he challenged the poll supervisor. “I’ve used this for 37 years. This was good enough for my father. This was good enough for my grandfather, and I refuse to show you a picture ID”…

After refusing to vote on a provisional ballot, which may or may not be counted after an election, Thompson tells the supervisor, “I’m objecting to the law that they implemented on my right to vote.”

“I served my country. I served my country so you can vote. I’ve earned my right to vote. This is my ID,” he is seen explaining angrily in the video, as he points to the U.S. Marine insignia on his jacket.

“I’ll be damned if I’ll stand here and allow you to not let me vote because some governor of this state decided he wanted to eliminate my right to vote — and put conditions on it — that I fought for.”

“I took an oath in 1974 that stated I want to defend and protect American citizens on their rights to vote — their basic right to vote in an open and free election. But I guess he [Gov. Haslam] forgot about his, his oath. He did forget about his oath, because he’s not protecting our rights. And it’s a slap in our face,” Thompson says during the confrontation.

The former Marine turned chef in Nashville is just the latest of those to confront and/or be confronted by new draconian restrictions on voting rights this year, as passed by Republicans in more than a dozen states in the wake of their 2010 electoral victories. In TN today, for the first time, those without state-issued Photo ID (a U.S. passport, a federal photo ID, a U.S. military ID or a gun permit card with photo) must receive a state-issued Photo ID prior to casting a vote at the polling place, from a Department of Safety and Homeland Security facility at one of 48 Driver Service Centers across the state, according to the Department’s website.

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9162

the evangelicals are NOT going for the Mormon south of the Mason/Dixon

March 06, 2012

The Scarborough-Schmidt smackdown

Joe Scarborough and Steve Schmidt just appeared on “Hardball” and together they delivered a eulogy for Mitt Romney. It was brutal. In effect, they said Romney’s got nothin’ — nothin’ at all to work with.

Scarborough called him “an incredibly flawed candidate” for whom it is “going to be hard to put this party back together.” By that he meant, what GOP faction does Romney rule? He hasn’t the libertarians (see RomneyCare) or the social conservatives (see Mormonism, although Scarborough didn’t say that, since he didn’t need to); then Schmidt graced the show by declaring that candidates like Romney need “more circumspection” when it comes to foreign policy — in other words, neoconservatism (Romney’s latest personification) should shut the hell up. Ouch.

So there you have it. All three major factions standing in some form of alienation from Establishment opinion — which Romney represents. Thus Romney is actually alienated from his own shrinking and marginalized faction. It’s one thumper of a paradox.

The Scarborough-Schmidt duo gave quite a performance. Here were two lifetime, professionally partisan Republicans essentially saying what I wrote this morning: that “There are no absolutes, therefore anything is possible, even a President Mitt Romney. But, seriously …”

http://pmcarpenter.blogs.com/p_m_carpenters_commentary/2012/03/the-scarborough-schmidt-smackdown.html

Here’s the video for you:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036697/#46646624

we’re at 72%, and Little Ricky’s still leading :)

Lamh. Me thinks you’re right. Lawrence just called how I see it. Romney can thank Sheldon for keeping Newt in the game. Take him out and Ohio is a blowout. Santorum sweeps the south.
Sheldon in it to make sure Romney wins. Then the billionare money goes to Romney. Thank you Citizens United.