Stuff worth reading —

Chris Hayes: Bring on the upper-middle-class revolution!

Morality study finds conservatives show a ‘general insensitivity to consequences’

6 Mind-Blowing Stats on How 1 Percent of the 1 Percent Now Dominate Our Elections

I had heard that the Senate was about to vote on the immigration reform bill, but I’m watching C-Span, and Sen. Jeff Sessions (Neanderthal-Alabama) is speaking against cloture. So I don’t know what’s going on with that. Word is that the bill will pass reasonably easily in the Senate but most likely will die in the House.

Senate Republicans are getting on board because the bill includes $4.5 billion in new border-security technology spending, a provision that Sen. Patrick Leahy calls “a Christmas wish list for Halliburton.” Well, it’s not like we need money for anything else.

Greg Sargent says the bill could pass in the House, but only if speaker Boehner allows it to come to a vote, knowing that more Dems than Republicans will vote for it.

The Republican-dominated House is looking more ridiculous than ever, if that’s even possible. The latest debacle is the defeat of a farm bill that included deep cuts to food stamps. Most House Dems voted against it, and so did 62 House Republicans. The Dems objected because it cut food stamps too much. The Republicans, however, appeared to think it didn’t cut food stamps enough.

Anyhoo, having failed to move its extremist wing to pass something that might actually, you know, become law, the leadership of the House Republicans blamed Democrats.

Greg Sargent:

The leadership of the House GOP — which, last time I checked, controls the Lower Chamber – is blaming Democrats for failing to deliver enough votes to make passage possible. A spokesman for Eric Cantor claimed it shows Dems “are not able to govern.”

Charles Pierce:

The Republicans, and noted soprano-singing House Speaker John Boehner, who last saw his balls in October of 2010, have decided that the blame really lies in a reluctance by Democrats to be properly complicit in making poor children hungry enough to pull themselves up by their bootstraps rather than eating them.

Jim Newell:

Then the Republican leadership blames Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi for only bringing 24 Democratic “aye” votes to the table. Jesus. We’re not sure that Nancy Pelosi got 24 votes from the Republican Party on all major bills combined in the years 2009 and 2010. Also, there’s a reason that most Democrats didn’t vote for this farm bill, and that’s because they hate it, because it assaults the social safety net. But yeah, anyway, sure, this is Nancy Pelosi’s fault, boo, she’s evil and wears a lot of makeup, boo.

Newell also writes,

Now then, what’s the problem? Oh right, it’s the House of Representatives, which is terrible at everything, and offers no indication of being any other way until at least 2023. Let’s give some credit: They’re adept at passing go-nowhere bills to repeal Obamacare or ban abortion or tattoo the words “Under God” to every baby’s forehead. Great work there from the House Republican Party. On issues that might appeal to an even slightly broader cross-section of the country, though, they’ve got nothing. You know this. You’ve seen the same routine in nearly every important vote since 2009. Remember that time the government considered arbitrarily defaulting on the public debt and destroying the global economy forever? That was a head-scratcher for the House; took some real “working out” before they concluded it would best be averted, for now.

It always works out the same way, at the 11th hour. A Senate-originated compromise, after much pouting, is taken up by the House after several defeats of their own insane legislation. Maybe a tweak or two is offered. The House passes it. Conservatives serve up uncreative epithets for John Boehner for exercising the only decent option available to him. The next big piece of legislation comes up. And, at least as of yesterday’s farm bill flop, they begin this same fatal cycle of time wasting again.

This pretty much means that the only way real legislation can be passed in the House is with a substantial number of Dem votes, because the Clown Caucus won’t pass anything that resembles actual governance.

Charles Pierce explains the implications for an immigration reform bill:

Mind you, Boehner couldn’t whip enough votes out of his caucus to pass this mess, which included enough hometown pork to bring Dan Rostenkowski back from the dead. Keep that in mind when you consider that he is the guy who’s supposed to get a reasonable immigration bill through this monkeyhouse. I keep hearing that they want the “Gang of 8” proposal to get 70 votes in the Senate. This, allegedly, will “put pressure” on the House to pass a decent immigration reform bill. This is completely absurd. Pressure from whom? Boehner? Marco Rubio, who got booed in front of the Capitol yesterday? One half of the national legislature is utterly in the hands of the inmates of Bedlam. What possible reason is there to believe that anything will get done? Hell, Steve King is even nuttier on immigration than he is on poor kids.

Josh Marshall agrees, saying in effect that Boehner’s only real choice is to give the House a relatively “moderate” (by Washington standards) immigration bill that Dems will vote for, and then get out of the way. No bill will be approved by the House extremists that would be acceptable to anyone else.

See also Elise Foley, “Farm Bill Failure Shows John Boehner’s Tight Spot on Immigration.”

Update: Details on what happened — in short, the House Republican Crazies loaded the bill up with amendments to make it toxic to Dems, and then complained the Dems “sandbagged” them by not voting for the bill — see Roll Call and Politico.

As near as I can tell from vaguely worded news stories, the bill passed by the House yesterday would ban abortions after 20 weeks’ gestation, or 22 weeks from the last menstrual period. The bill has no chance of being passed in the Senate, and even if it did, the President would veto it. But the bill tells us a lot about Republicans’ inability to respect women.

For example, originally the House Judiciary Committee rejected exemptions for rape and incest. A rape exemption eventually was added, but only if the rape was reported to police within 48 hours after it happened. Otherwise, they say, women will just lie and say they were raped when they weren’t really. Those gestating women can’t be trusted.
Oh, and women hardly ever get pregnant from rape, anyway.

BTW, when the rape exemption was added, one of the bill’s sponsors took his name off the bill. Paul C. Broun (R-Ga.) said he was “extremely disappointed that House Republican leadership chose to include language to subject some unborn children to needless pain and suffering.”

According to one article, minors who are incest victims also are required to have reported the incest before they can get an exemption, which would pretty much mean incest victims can’t get an exemption, even if they’re 12 years old. There is a “life of the mother” exemption, but I don’t know what criteria have to be met for a dying woman to qualify.

I haven’t seen any mention of exemptions for when the fetus is severely malformed and probably won’t live anyway. Some kinds of birth defects usually are only detected around the 20th week of gestation.

(Some background the news stories all leave out: Roe v. Wade guidelines allows states to ban elective abortions after 23 weeks gestation (or 25 weeks from the last menstrual period), because that’s the generally accepted threshold of viability for a human fetus. I understand a handful of babies have been born a little earlier and survived, but medical science has no record of an infant surviving after only 20 weeks of gestation. Also, according to Alan Guttmacher, in the U.S. only 1.5 percent of abortions occur after 20 weeks gestation. Also, too, in the U.S. nobody is keeping a comprehensive record of why abortions are performed, so there is no way to know how many of that 1.5 percent are rape and incest victims.)

Elsewhere — Get this —

The Wall Street Journal‘s James Taranto dismissed the epidemic of sexual assault in the military, claiming that efforts to address the growing problem contributed to a “war on men” and an “effort to criminalize male sexuality.”

That’s right, folks. Assaulting women is just standard male sexuality. See also “Five Easy Steps for Becoming a Rape Apologist.”

Republicans apparently think that abortions restrictions will help them in the 2016 2014 midterms. I don’t see how. See also “GOP has learned absolutely nothing from 2012.”

James O’Keefe has a new video out purporting to show that Welfare Recipients of Color are selling their “Obamaphones” to buy drugs. And the usual gullible twits who believe everything they see on Drudge are breathlessly passing this along. The Dumbest Man on the Internet thinks they are buying Louis Vuittons also.

It seems O’Keefe’s video doesn’t actually show anyone selling his phone to buy drugs, just some actor-recipients saying that’s what they’ll do, and a sales clerk saying, in effect, he doesn’t give a bleep what they do with the phones. Obviously the sales clerk is taking direction directly from the Oval Office. (/sarcasm)

But we’re not talking iPhones or Androids here. These appear to be bare-bones cell phones that just make phone calls and which come with less than $10 a month in calling time. No doubt they are locked to particular phone providers and accounts, so someone not registered to the account probably couldn’t use them without unlocking them. And the buyer would have to know how to do that, because the service providers aren’t doing it any more, I don’t think.

So the phones are hardly worth the price of a Louis Vuitton. They may not be worth the price of a luggage tag.

And the free cell phone program began during the Bush Administration, so logically they ought to be called “Dubya phones.” But neither Dubya nor the current POTUS was actually involved with setting up the program, which is not subsidized with tax dollars but by phone companies, which are also making money from this somehow. The video explains:

[Apologies; video has disappeared.]

See also Annenberg Fact Check and Gawker. People are paying a surcharge on their phone bills to help pay for the program, but the same surcharge also helps to subsidize phone service in rural areas. So some of the yahoos who might be complaining about the surcharge also are benefiting from it.

The bigger wonder, though, is how so many on the Right are so completely void of critical thinking skills that they don’t question how a cheapie phone would be worth enough money to buy drugs. They quote a clerk on the video saying to take the phone to a pawn shop to see what they are worth, but you don’t see O’Keefe actually doing that. My bet is that pawnbrokers won’t take them.

Five Revelations From The Edward Snowden Live Chat. Note the distinction between technical capability and policy. Of course, whatever is a technical capability will be done, somewhere, by someone. See also a voice of sanity — “Put the Spies Back Under One Roof.”