The Myth that Google Searches are Biased Against "Conservatives"

What do you do when those with an education who are not detached from objective reality, who reject your Bronze Age religious beliefs, overt racism and overall embrace of ignorance, find your party and its agenda repugnant?  Blame your unpopularity on the news media which - excluding Fox News and right wing outlets that are the actual purveyors of fake news - are accused of reporting fake news and also blame the Internet search engines for being biased against "conservatives."  Truth be told, the majority of the nation's population are not buying what the GOP, white supremacists, and Christian extremists are peddling and, as a result, no one should be shocked that the search engines follow the majority's interests and outlook, framed in part by Internet searchers' search questions. Yet, one hears ad nausea from the right that they are victims and subject to discrimination, if not persecution, merely because ultimately the majority of Americans find the so-called conservative agenda anathema to their sense of morality and decency.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the deliberate and disingenuous claims of anti-conservative bias.  Here are column highlights: 

[O]n Tuesday, Republicans in the [GOP controlled] House summoned the company’s [Google] chief executive, Sundar Pichai, to Washington so he could answer the burning question of whether its search results are biased against conservatives:

In an unusual move, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy kicked off the hearing — despite not sitting on the committee — by cautioning the tech mogul against letting political bias color its services. The lawmaker, who’s been a leading voice among the prominent Republicans accusing top tech firms in Silicon Valley of censoring conservative speech, said he hoped Pichai could reassure the committee that “any political bias within Google’s workforce does not creep into its search products.”

Every public congressional hearing is a performance, and McCarthy was signaling something important by coming to this one to make this claim. He was applying an old technique to a new phantom problem, a technique sometimes referred to as “working the refs.” It has worked effectively for conservatives for decades in their confrontations with the news media, so why not try to use it against Internet companies, too?

It's pretty simple. Conservatives make unceasing, angry accusations of liberal bias, no matter what the content of news (or Google searches) actually is. . . . . the accusation never changes.

It serves two functions, which are best understood on the news media side. First, constantly attacking reporters for having liberal bias makes them bend over backward to show that they’re being objective, often by treating Democrats harshly.

The second target of the “liberal bias” attack is conservatives themselves. By convincing them that everything they read in the newspaper or see on the network news is a lie concocted by liberals to distort their view of the world, you not only drive them toward conservative media alternatives but also make them far more susceptible to your own propaganda. So when, say, the New York Times publishes an exhaustively documented investigation showing that Donald Trump and his family committed an absolutely epic degree of tax fraud worth hundreds of millions of dollars, it doesn’t penetrate the conservative bubble. Most rank-and-file conservatives won’t hear about it, and the ones who do will dismiss it out of hand, because it comes from the liberal media and therefore must be bogus.

Attacking Google (or Facebook or Twitter or any other Internet company) for supposed liberal bias serves the same two functions. For “evidence,” conservatives look to analyses such as this one from PJ Media, which shows that Google searches on things such as the president are more likely to produce results from supposedly liberal news organizations such as CNN or The Post than they are to feature sources such as the Daily Caller or World Net Daily. How could there possibly be any other explanation than liberal bias?

You might think that you'd have to be some kind of paranoid halfwit to actually believe that Google's search algorithm is intentionally built to make the right look bad, but some people do believe it. . . . .

Even if this kind of attack isn’t going to get Google to change its search algorithm, the second function of the charge is still being served. More than ever before, in the Trump era the right needs rank-and-file conservatives to distrust any information they receive from non-conservative sources, so they’ll believe whatever outlandish thing the president tells them. It’s also important to keep the GOP base feeling aggrieved and resentful, like they are society’s only true victims.

Even if on a personal basis most of the people who work for Google are indeed liberal, its broader goals — such as maximizing profits and avoiding antitrust regulation — usually aren’t. But that won’t stop conservatives from insisting that the company’s search results are biased against them. It’s a strategy that has yielded far too much to ever abandon.

The Anxieties of the Republican Majority

Now that the Republican Party will hold a majority in both houses of Congress come January, the big challenge will be facing the reality that the GOP must govern and - the horror - come up with legislative proposals to address the nations problems.  This from the party that opposes anything and everything that Barack Obama and the Democrats propose but which has offered no real plan for alternatives to things ranging from the Affordable Health Care ct to how to deal with children born in this country to illegal immigrant parents.  Saying "no" and opposing everything is easy.  Now it's time to see concrete proposals and alternatives.  Not surprisingly many in the GOP (outside the Kool-Aid drinking party base) are anxious.  Here are highlights from a piece in Politico:

Outwardly, Republican rhetoric toward the president hasn’t softened much, especially since Obama’s speech Thursday night. The consistent meme is that he is behaving like an unconstitutional monarch.

What has changed is the underlying balance of power in the party and, perhaps, the terms of debate within the GOP over how to deal with the Democratic Party and its surprisingly aggressive leader. Obama might be behaving like a usurping monarch without a mandate, in the eyes of the newly powerful GOP, but no one is seriously threatening to impeach him — as Republicans have repeatedly done in past years. Nor, despite the angry rhetoric, does there seem to be a serious possibility of government shutdown.

Call it thoughtfulness — or call it confusion. All in all, the mild, somewhat subdued response to Obama’s immigration move is evidence that the uncompromising GOP insurgency that so paralyzed Washington in 2013 has lost some potency.

Even some of the House’s most conservative members have little appetite for a government shutdown, saying that while they’re determined to level sharp criticism against the president, they’re not thinking about going much further than that. According to the head of a national, GOP-aligned Republican group, party leaders strongly suspect that Obama is trying to goad conservatives into throwing a fit: “I think the president is counting on a Republican overreaction, where it really takes over the agenda of the new Congress. … I think this president is counting on an overreach.”

The immigration issue, of course, is also about the reckoning of 2016, which is a lot closer than it was during the shutdown crisis. With the race for the White House rapidly approaching, a growing number of Republicans are concerned about alienating Latinos, whom many in the GOP see as a natural constituency.

In 2014, Latino turnout was seen as low across many crucial races. But that’s likely not to be the case in a presidential election. In 2012, Obama amassed an astonishing 71 percent of the Hispanic vote to 27 percent for Mitt Romney, who had declared during the primaries that he would make it harder for the 11 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. to get jobs, leading them to “self-deport.” Party leaders legitimately fear a kind of demographic death for the GOP if it doesn’t find a way to appease the burgeoning Hispanic population, particularly since the 2010 census showed, for the first time, that white births are now a minority in the United States.

Some influential conservatives are outraged by what they see as the latest GOP retreat in Washington.

Tea Party Patriots, the conservative group that supported several challenges to Republican incumbents, has demanded that McConnell pledge to block every presidential nomination or appointment (save for the national security ones) in response to his executive action. The group has already blasted out fundraising appeals that hammer McConnell as soft on “amnesty.”

But it’s not just in Washington that the party seems more divided than ever on immigration. Speaking Wednesday in Boca Raton, Florida, at the Republican Governors Association meeting, Ohio Gov. John Kasich sounded to some like an apostate.

“My sense is: I don’t like the idea of citizenship when people jump the line, [but] we may have to do it,” he said. Maybe Kasich, like Nixon going to China, is that rare pol who’s confident that he — with his conservative pedigree dating to the Gingrich revolution — can move to the center on an issue that has much of the rest of the Republican Party in a barely contained uproar. But it’s also likely that Kasich, who is said to have presidential ambitions, is trying to look over the horizon to 2016, and prodding his still-confused party forward on immigration.

The GOP needs to show that it can govern.  Equally, it will need to decide between embracing objective reality or the lunacy of the Christofascists/Tea Party base.  The party leadership cannot have it both ways.

The Congressional GOP: The Face of Unreason and Hypocrisy

As a former Republican I continue to be dismayed by how low the GOP has sunk and how a party that once valued reason and logic has become a sectarian insane asylum.  Even once rational people within the party act as if they had undergone either a lobotomy or a "Stepford Wife" transformation - yes, Karen,I do mean you - that has them parroting the most idiotic catch phrases of the Tea Party.  Moreover, the party acts as if it suffers from a massive case of bi-polar disorder.  How else to explain the House GOP which wants to sue Barack Obama for use of executive orders yet now wants to throw the "border crisis" into Obama's lap to deal with via executive order.  A column in the Washington Post looks at this batshitery and hypocrisy.  Here are excerpts:

After conservatives on Thursday brought down House Speaker John Boehner’s bill to address the border crisis, the new House Republican leadership team issued a joint statement declaring that President Obama should fix the problem himself.

“There are numerous steps the president can and should be taking right now, without the need for congressional action,” the leadership quartet proclaimed, “to secure our borders and ensure these children are returned swiftly and safely to their countries.”

Just the day before, House Republicans had voted to sue Obama for using his executive authority. They called him lawless, a usurper, a monarch, a tyrant — all for postponing deadlines in the implementation of Obamacare. Now they were begging him to take executive action to compensate for their own inability to act — even though, in this case, accelerating the deportation of thousands of unaccompanied children coming from Central America would likely require Obama to ignore a 2008 law. 

This was not a momentary lapse but a wholesale upending of reason.

Apparently, if Obama is using his executive authority to advance a policy House Republicans support, it’s a meritorious exercise of presidential authority; if he uses that same authority to aid a policy they oppose, it’s time to write up articles of impeachment.

In another action this week, Republicans acknowledged, at least tacitly, that Obama has the executive authority to postpone deportations. The House majority drafted, and scheduled a vote on, legislation that would forbid the executive branch from anything that would “expand the number of aliens eligible for deferred action.”

But in proposing such legislation (which was pulled from the floor along with the border bill), Republicans implicitly acknowledged that Obama has such power now. Therefore, until both chambers of Congress can pass such a law by veto-proof margins, Obama retains the power. This is probably why House Republicans, just two weeks earlier, scoffed at the suggestion that they pass this sort of legislation when the idea came up before the Rules Committee.

If the GOP position sounds contradictory, that’s because it’s less about the Constitution than cleavages within the party.   . . . . . The planned lawsuit was a bone thrown to conservatives to quiet their impeachment talk. The legislation restricting Obama’s executive authority on immigration was a similar effort to buy off conservatives who had been encouraged to rebel by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.).

But the efforts to placate conservatives aren’t working. 

Until the Christofascists and Tea Party are driven from the GOP we can only expect more insanity and lots of hypocrisy.

New Poll: 70% of Americans Support Allowing Undocumented Children to Remain in USA

Proving once again that they care more about prostituting themselves to foul Christofascists/Tea Party lunatics than about the views of the majority of Americans, Congressional Republicans continue their attacks on those who want to give succor to the thousands of undocumented children from Central America.  Indeed, on may far right sites, these children are depicted as disease ridden vermin to be exterminated deported, proving yet again that no one has more disdain for the true gospel message than the self-congratulatory "godly Christian" crowd.  As Politico reports, a new poll found that 70% of Americans believe that these children should be allowed to remain in America - heartening news that the less godly folk have a sense of compassion  absent from those who wrap themselves in the American flag as they clutch their bibles.  Here are excerpts from Politico:

Nearly 70 percent of Americans believe the undocumented Central American children entering along the U.S.-Mexico border should be treated as refugees, a new poll shows.

According to a poll released Tuesday by the Public Religion Research Institute, 69 percent of those surveyed believe U.S. authorities should treat the children as refugees and allow them to stay in the country if it is determined it is not safe for them to return to their home country. Twenty-seven percent of Americans say the children should be treated as illegal immigrants and should be deported.

Seventy-one percent also say they mostly or completely agree that the U.S. should provide refuge and protection for all people who come to the U.S. if they are fleeing serious danger in their home country, the poll found. But 59 percent of Americans say they mostly or completely agree with the statement that the allowing the children to stay will increase illegal immigration.

The findings come as the Obama administration and Congress debate how to respond to the influx of more than 50,000 undocumented children that have arrived at the border since October. Congressional Republicans are largely pushing for a change to a 2008 law that would expedite the deportation process for the children, while Democrats have resisted a change in the law.

Billionaires to GOP: Break the Immigration Impassee

Today's GOP has no real policy agenda other than blocking whatever the White House and Democrats.  Worse yet, today's Congressional Republicans care nothing about the lives of average Americans that they harm through their stance as the "Party of No" be it sabotaging economic stimulus, refusing to repair the nation's crumbling infrastructure, destroying the social safety net, or blocking any meaningful immigration reform because the nasty GOP base sees anyone who is not white and evangelical Christian as some form of subhuman life form.  An in some ways unlikely trio of billionaires let loose on Congress, but most of the finger pointing belongs with the GOP.  Here are highlights from a New York Times op-ed they wrote:

AMERICAN citizens are paying 535 people to take care of the legislative needs of the country. We are getting shortchanged. Here’s an example: On June 10, an incumbent congressman in Virginia lost a primary election in which his opponent garnered only 36,105 votes. Immediately, many Washington legislators threw up their hands and declared that this one event would produce paralysis in the United States Congress for at least five months. In particular, they are telling us that immigration reform — long overdue — is now hopeless. 

Americans deserve better than this.

The three of us vary in our politics and would differ also in our preferences about the details of an immigration reform bill. But we could without doubt come together to draft a bill acceptable to each of us. We hope that fact holds a lesson: You don’t have to agree on everything in order to cooperate on matters about which you are reasonably close to agreement. It’s time that this brand of thinking finds its way to Washington.

Most Americans believe that our country has a clear and present interest in enacting immigration legislation that is both humane to immigrants living here and a contribution to the well-being of our citizens. Reaching these goals is possible. Our present policy, however, fails badly on both counts.

We believe it borders on insanity to train intelligent and motivated people in our universities — often subsidizing their education — and then to deport them when they graduate. Many of these people, of course, want to return to their home country — and that’s fine. But for those who wish to stay and work in computer science or technology, fields badly in need of their services, let’s roll out the welcome mat.

A “talented graduate” reform was included in a bill that the Senate approved last year by a 68-to-32 vote. It would remove the worldwide cap on the number of visas that could be awarded to legal immigrants who had earned a graduate degree in science, technology, engineering or mathematics from an accredited institution of higher education in the United States, provided they had an offer of employment. The bill also included a sensible plan that would have allowed illegal residents to obtain citizenship, though only after they had earned the right to do so. 

Whatever the precise provisions of a law, it’s time for the House to draft and pass a bill that reflects both our country’s humanity and its self-interest. Differences with the Senate should be hammered out by members of a conference committee, committed to a deal.

A Congress that does nothing about these problems is extending an irrational policy by default; that is, if lawmakers don’t act to change it, it stays the way it is, irrational. The current stalemate — in which greater pride is attached to thwarting the opposition than to advancing the nation’s interests — is depressing to most Americans and virtually all of its business managers. The impasse certainly depresses the three of us.

Signs of a more productive attitude in Washington — which passage of a well-designed immigration bill would provide — might well lift spirits and thereby stimulate the economy. It’s time for 535 of America’s citizens to remember what they owe to the 318 million who employ them.

Will Congressional Republicans get the message?  Probably not.  They care more about pandering to the ignorance and bigotry of the racists and religious extremists of the party base than they care about the welfare of the country.  It is nothing short of sickening.

 

The Idiocy of the GOP/Architects of the Iraq War Continues

The saying goes that those who do not know history are deemed to repeat it.  Typically, the time line involved in the statement spans back for many years.   In the case of far too many in today's Republican Party and in particular among the minions of Bush/Cheney who lied to drag America into war in Iraq, their memories do not extend back even a decade ago.  It is frightening that we are hearing the same justifications for renewed military action in Iraq that led to the fiasco in the first place.  One can only think that these individuals are insane, or in the case of Dick Cheney, they want Halliburton to reap more billions in U.S. tax dollars.  A column in the New York Times puts the idiocy of the position of these people and the costs to date of their past fool's errand in perspective.  One can only wonder why anyone in the legitimate news media - which, of course does not  include Fox News - gives these people a moment of air time or news print.  Here are column highlights:

I’m flinching at a painful sense of déjà vu as we hear calls for military intervention in Iraq, as President Obama himself — taunted by critics who contend he’s weak — is said to be considering drone strikes there.

Our 2003 invasion of Iraq should be a warning that military force sometimes transforms a genuine problem into something worse. The war claimed 4,500 American lives and, according to a mortality study published in a peer-reviewed American journal, 500,000 Iraqi lives. Linda Bilmes, a Harvard expert in public finance, tells me that her latest estimate is that the total cost to the United States of the Iraq war will be $4 trillion.

That’s a $35,000 tax on the average American household. The total would be enough to ensure that all children could attend preschool in the United States, that most people with AIDS worldwide could receive treatment, and that every child worldwide could attend school — for the next 83 years. Instead, we financed a futile war that was like a Mobius strip, bringing us right back to an echo of where we started.

We might have learned some humility. Yes, the military toolbox is handy and often useful. But one of the most basic lessons of international relations is a frustrating one: There are more problems than solutions. Governments, like doctors, should weigh the principle, “First, do no harm.”

Yet Paul Bremer, the former American envoy in Iraq, argues for airstrikes and even a few boots on the ground. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, likewise, favors military intervention.

Perhaps more surprisingly, so does Senator Dianne Feinstein of California . . . .

The least surprising hawk is Dick Cheney, who in a Wall Street Journal op-ed article with his daughter Liz preserves an almost perfect record of being wrong. From the vice president who himself obtained every possible deferment to avoid Vietnam, who asserted “with absolute certainty” in 2002 that Saddam was making nuclear weapons, and insisted in 2005 that the Iraqi insurgency was in its “last throes,” we now have a blast at President Obama for failing to extinguish the continuing throes.

Many Sunnis in Iraq dislike ISIS, but they have learned to loathe and distrust Maliki even more. The way out of the mess in Iraq is for the government to share power with Sunnis and Kurds, accept decentralization and empower moderate Sunni tribes.

If all that happens, it may be reasonable for the United States to back a united Iraqi government by authorizing airstrikes against ISIS fighters. Without that, we simply become an accomplice to Maliki’s intransigence, assisting one party in a civil war.

Unfortunately, it looks as if Maliki is doubling down, revving up his Shiite base rather building a common front. The Iraqi government should be releasing Sunni prisoners as a good-will gesture. Instead, prisoners have been executed by police.

[T]he $4 trillion lesson from the Iraq war is that while our military capabilities are dazzling and sometimes intoxicating, they cannot be the solution to every problem.

Amen!!  As for Feinstein, I can only surmise that the woman has gone senile or is suffering from temporary insanity!

Health Insurers Plan To Debunk GOP's 'Rigged' Obamacare Study

I just finished my May, 2014, column for VEER Magazine which looks at the issue of Medicaid expansion in Virginia.  Much of the column looks at the lies and disinformation that is now the norm in terms of GOP talking points and "studies."   Rather than met countervailing arguments with facts and objective evidence, the GOP has a new standard modus operandi: lie and/or cook study results just like Mark Regnerus in his infamous anti-gay parenting farce.  The truth simply doesn't matter in today's GOP.  As Talking Points Memo notes, a number of health insurance companies seem poised to expose the lie in a new GOP "study" that sought to discredit enrollments under the Affordable health Care Act.  Here are highlights:

Insurance companies plan to effectively debunk the House GOP's much-derided Obamacare survey at a Wednesday hearing.

The hearing is a follow-up to last week's report from the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and is hosted by one of its subcommittees, that found only 67 percent of Obamacare enrollees had paid their premiums as of April 15. An industry source described the survey to TPM as "incredibly rigged" because it excluded any premium payments that were due April 30 or later.

Roughly 3 million of Obamacare's 8 million enrollees would have had payments due after April 15 because they signed up March 15 or later.

A follow-up letter sent to insurers by the committee seemed to indicate that companies had raised that issue. Testimony prepared for Wednesday's hearing, and which was first reported by Bloomberg, is another direct contradiction of the Republicans' methodology.

Dennis Matheis, a vice president at WellPoint, one of the nation's largest insurers, plans to point out the payment percentage is much higher if you count only the payments that have actually come due, up to 90 percent:

The percentage of applicants that have paid a premium will differ depending on whether the percentage is calculated based on the total number of applications and premium payments received during this entire time period (roughly 70 percent) or is calculated based on the total number of applications and premium payments received for policies whose premium deadline has passed (ranging up to 90 percent depending on the state).

Paul Wingle, an executive at Aetna, plans to make the same point, estimating his company's customers are paying at better-than-80-percent clip:

For those who had reached their payment due date, the payment rate, though dynamic, has been in the low- to mid-80 percent range.

A third industry witness, J. Darren Rodgers of Health Care Services Corp., plans to stress that the last segment of payment data "is not yet complete given that deadlines for all of those policies may not yet have passed."

I once was proud to be a Republican.  Now I find myself embarrassed to have ever been involved in the GOP.  Truth, logic, honesty, reason,  have all gone out the window and I remain convinced that the decline of those values directly correlates to the rise of the Christofascists in the GOP base.  To be a GOP elected official requires that one be little more than a pathologically lying whore.

The GOP Descent Into Utter Insanity Continues

If one wants to see the face of GOP insanity - something that is sadly now the norm - look no farther than Susanne Atanus (pictured above) who just won the GOP primary for the 9th U.S. Congressional district in Cook County, Illinois.  Atanus is so insane that even the Illinois Republican Party tried to distance itself from her and encouraged her to drop out of the primary race.  Atanus claims that God is angry with America because of abortion and gay rights and has, therefore, unleashed tornadoes and natural disasters on America and inflicted Americans with dementia.  Once upon a time anyone as certifiably insane as Atanus would never have been allowed to enter a GOP primary much less win the primary.    Yet, given the swamp fever and proud embrace of ignorance and bigotry that typify the GOP base, Atanus won the primary.  One can only assume that her Democrat opponent is rejoicing and waiting with bated breath for Atanus' next batshitery eruption that will make for a great campaign ad clip.  Here are details from the Huffington Post:

A Republican candidate who believes that God dictates weather patterns and that tornadoes, autism and dementia are God's punishments for marriage equality and abortion access won the GOP nomination to challenge Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) in the Chicago-area 9th Congressional District.

Susanne Atanus, of Niles, Ill., garnered 54 percent of the vote in her Tuesday win over David Earl Williams III.

"I am not in favor of abortions, I am not in favor of gay rights," Atanus told the Daily Herald, a suburban Chicago newspaper, in January.

She blamed natural disasters and mental disorders on recent advances in LGBT equality and legal abortions. 

"God is angry. We are provoking him with abortions and same-sex marriage and civil unions," she said. "Same-sex activity is going to increase AIDS. If it's in our military, it will weaken our military. We need to respect God."

Jack Dorgan, chairman of the Illinois Republican Party, and Adam Robinson, chairman of the Chicago Republican Party, both condemned Atanus' comments and distanced the party from her candidacy. 

I would argue that if anyone has been stricken with dementia it is Atanus and the lunatics who voted for her.  My Republican ancestors must be spinning like tops in their graves!!

Is the GOP Bi-Polar on the Issue of "Activist Judges"?

Hypocrisy is among the main hallmarks of today's GOP - along with racism, homophobia, the embrace of ignorance and an obsession with controlling women's "lady parts."  One place where the hypocrisy is most evident is the constant GOP cries and rants over "activist judges."  Under the GOP's definition, judges are liberal activists when they rule against the GOP's agenda or strike down legalized bigotry as is currently happening as one GOP backed state constitutional amendment denying gays civil marriage rights is struck down after another.  But when a judge upholds a pet GOP law, then they are deemed to be wonderfully doing their job and performing their constitutional duty.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at this bi-polar- and highly hypocritical - behavior.  Here are excerpts:

There was a time not too long ago when Republicans decried “activist judges.” Now they’re lamenting that judges are not being activist enough.

“Unfortunately, the courts have been reluctant to exercise their constitutionally conferred power,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) proclaimed at a hearing Wednesday. He called on the courts “to check the president’s overreach,” and he complained that “the federal courts have read their own powers much more narrowly” than they should.

This new found love of activist judges is the latest manifestation of what has been called Obama Derangement Syndrome: The president’s opponents are so determined to thwart him that they will reverse long-held views if they believe that doing so will weaken his stature.

Republicans have, for example, long deplored the filing of “frivolous lawsuits.” But at Wednesday’s hearings, they were contemplating legislation that would authorize either chamber of Congress to file lawsuits against President Obama — even though legal experts, including one of the Republican committee members’ own witnesses, have said the efforts would fail.

After law professor Elizabeth Price Foley presented the panel with “a road map of how the House can establish standing to sue the president,” the committee’s ranking Democrat, John Conyers (D-Mich.), pointed out that earlier this month she penned an article for the Daily Caller titled, “Why not even Congress can sue the administration over unconstitutional executive actions.”

She wrote: “Congress probably can’t sue the president, either. The Supreme Court has severely restricted so-called ‘congressional standing,’ creating a presumption against allowing members of Congress to sue the president merely because he fails to faithfully execute its laws.”

[S]uing the president isn’t any more practical because the courts have long refused to settle such disputes between the elected branches. This means the proposed bills, and Wednesday’s hearing, were really about the GOP effort to delegitimize Obama.

There are legitimate questions to be asked about the long-term shift of power from the legislature to the executive, but it’s suspicious that Republicans are alarmed about abuses of power by Obama that are relatively minor compared to those undertaken by George W. Bush.

 

The GOP's Health Care Horror Story Lies

The ads and mailings being run and/or disseminated by Republicans, the Tea Party and Koch brothers fronts all seem to have a few things in common: (i) they are angry and strident and (ii) they contain outrageous lies that do not even attempt to be truthful.  Their targets? The ignorant and uninformed who they suspect/hope will be easily duped by the inflammatory claims and not take the time to verify whether or not the claims are even remotely true. But what is equally shocking is the bogus nature of many of the supposed horror stories that are being paraded around as arguments against healthcare reform.  A column in the New York Times looks at these false and deceptive ads and mailers.  Here are some excerpts:

Remember the “death tax”? The estate tax is quite literally a millionaire’s tax — a tax that affects only a tiny minority of the population, and is mostly paid by a handful of very wealthy heirs. Nonetheless, right-wingers have successfully convinced many voters that the tax is a cruel burden on ordinary Americans — that all across the nation small businesses and family farms are being broken up to pay crushing estate tax liabilities.

You might think that such heart-wrenching cases are actually quite rare, but you’d be wrong: they aren’t rare; they’re nonexistent. In particular, nobody has ever come up with a real modern example of a family farm sold to meet estate taxes. The whole “death tax” campaign has rested on eliciting human sympathy for purely imaginary victims.

And now they’re trying a similar campaign against health reform.

I’m not sure whether conservatives realize yet that their Plan A on health reform — wait for Obamacare’s inevitable collapse, and reap the political rewards — isn’t working. But it isn’t. Enrollments have recovered strongly from the law’s disastrous start-up . . . .

And conservatives don’t really have a Plan B — in their world, nobody even dares mention the possibility that health reform might actually prove workable. Still, you can already see some on the right groping toward a new strategy, one that relies on highlighting examples of the terrible harm Obamacare does. There’s only one problem: they haven’t managed to come up with any real examples. Consider several recent ventures on the right:

■ In the official G.O.P. response to the State of the Union address, Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers alluded to the case of “Bette in Spokane,” who supposedly lost her good health insurance coverage and was forced to pay nearly $700 more a month in premiums. Local reporters located the real Bette, and found that the story was completely misleading: her original policy provided very little protection, and she could get a much better plan for much less than the claimed cost.

■ In Louisiana, the AstroTurf (fake grass-roots) group Americans for Prosperity — the group appears to be largely financed and controlled by the Koch brothers and other wealthy donors — has been running ads targeting Senator Mary Landrieu. In these ads, we see what appear to be ordinary Louisiana residents receiving notices telling them that their insurance policies have been canceled because of Obamacare. But the people in the ads are, in fact, paid actors, and the scenes they play aren’t re-enactments of real events — they’re “emblematic,” says a spokesman for the group.

■ In Michigan, Americans for Prosperity is running an ad that does feature a real person. But is she telling a real story? In the ad, Julia Boonstra, who is suffering from leukemia, declares that her insurance has been canceled, that the new policy will have unaffordable out-of-pocket costs, and that “If I do not receive my medication, I will die.” But Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post tried to check the facts, and learned that thanks to lower premiums she will almost surely save nearly as much if not more than she will be paying in higher out-of-pocket costs.

Even supporters of health reform are somewhat surprised by the right’s apparent inability to come up with real cases of hardship.

The most likely answer is that the true losers from Obamacare generally aren’t very sympathetic. For the most part, they’re either very affluent people affected by the special taxes that help finance reform, or at least moderately well-off young men in very good health who can no longer buy cheap, minimalist plans. Neither group would play well in tear-jerker ads.

No, what the right wants are struggling average Americans, preferably women, facing financial devastation from health reform. So those are the tales they’re telling, even though they haven’t been able to come up with any real examples.

Immigration Groups Done Playing Nice with House Republicans

As noted a number of times on this blog, the base of the Republican party has increasingly controlled by racists and white supremacists (many of whom are Christofascists as well for good measure) and as a result Congressional Republicans simply lack the spine to enact any of the much needed reforms to America's broken immigration system.  Belatedly, immigration reform groups have finally realized that paying nice with cowards and bigots doesn't get one very far.  As a result, as Politico is reporting, this groups are going to stop playing nice, especially with House Republicans.  It is noteworthy that even the typically morally bankrupt Conference of Catholic Bishops is demanding that Republicans embrace immigration reform. Here are some story highlights:

Immigration reform advocates are done playing nice with House Republicans. After holding their fire for years at the urging of the Obama administration, several immigration reform groups now plan to unleash their anger at the right.

A new, more aggressive campaign kicks off Tuesday, when these groups say they will begin confronting Republican lawmakers at public appearances, congressional hearings and events back in home districts. The goal: Shame Republicans in swing districts into taking up the issue — or make them pay at the ballot box in November.

It’s unclear if the strategy will truly damage Republicans with their constituents. Or worse, whether it might backfire and oust some of the movement’s best potential allies across the aisle.

Still, the groups believe it’s time to try something new. The movement embraced a distinctly positive message when Barack Obama took office in 2009 and stuck with it publicly even until last month, when the groups applauded House Republican leaders for releasing a set of immigration reform principles at a GOP winter retreat.

But things changed last week when Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) dashed hopes that a major immigration overhaul could happen this year — leaving immigration groups to say enough is enough.

The groups also plan to target House Republicans in swing districts with a wide section of Latino voters — even if they’ve expressed support for immigration reform before. That means that lawmakers such as Rep. Jeff Denham (R-Calif.), who has gone as far as to sign onto a Democratic-backed comprehensive bill, aren’t safe from the wrath of the pro-reform groups.

“We’re not going to go away,” added Kevin Appleby, director of migration policy for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. “The speaker’s comments were a reality check that we have to redouble our efforts. We need to translate the overwhelming support of the American public for this into public power, and I think it would be a mistake to let Congress — and especially the House — off the hook.”