Why Does Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) Hate America and Rely On Iran as an Authoritative News Source

Why Does Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) Hate America and Rely On Iran as an Authoritative News Source

This morning, during an appearance on Fox News Sunday, Republican Senator and rising party star Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) cited Iranian propaganda in explaining her opposition to President Obama’s nomination of Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense.

“I have not made up my mind,” Ayotte began, before warning that Hagel has not expressed sufficient commitment to using military force against Iran if it develops nuclear weapons. She then pointed to Iranian propaganda, noting that the country “reacted favorably” to his nomination:

    AYOTTE: Iran, this week, kind of reacted favorably somewhat. There were statements that were favorable to his nomination, in fact, they said they were hopeful that with his nomination, they hoped that we would change our policies. What I want to make sure is that Iran is actually not hopeful, but they are fearful as a result of our nominee from a Secretary of Defense perspective, because I think that will cause them to stop marching toward acquiring a nuclear weapon, not hope that we’ll change our policies, they need to change their policies.

On Tuesday, the Iranians responded to the Hagel nomination and used it to take a backhanded slap at the United States, saying, “We hope there will be practical changes in American foreign policy and that Washington becomes respectful of the rights of nations.” Unfortunately, neo-conservatives — desperate to derail Hagel — jumped on the propaganda from Iran’s foreign ministry to make their case.

Hagel has warned against the consequences of war with Iran, but has stated that his position is “fully consistent with the policy of presidents for more than a decade of keeping all options on the table, including the use of military force, thereby increasing pressure on Iran while working toward a political solution.” As a senator, Hagel also voted in favor of several rounds of targeted sanctions against Iran including packages in 1998, 2000, and 2006.

It might be time to impeach Ayotte (R_NH) is her opinion is guided by what Iranian radical think instead of decorated veterans like Chuck Hagel. If Ayotte likes Iranian opinion so much her impeachment would allow her to leave for Iran where she could live happily with her ideological cousins.

Fox News' Bogus Hunt For Pork In Sandy Bill Continues

Republicans learned Nothing From The 2012 Election, They Continue The War on Women. The Republicans Party and the conservative movement seems to have a lot in common with Iranian fundamentalists.

Probable Neo-Nazi Tactical Response CEO James Yeager Threatens to 'Start Killing People' Over Sensible Gun Safety Laws

Probable Neo-Nazi Tactical Response CEO James Yeager Threatens to 'Start Killing People' Over Sensible Gun Safety Laws

The CEO of a Tennessee company that specializes in weapons and tactical training is threatening to "start killing people" if President Barack Obama moves forward with gun control measures.

In a video posted to YouTube and Facebook on Wednesday, Tactical Response CEO James Yeager went ballistic over reports that the president could take executive action with minor gun control measures after the mass shooting of 20 school children in Connecticut last month.

After the Drudge Report likened Obama to Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin on Wednesday, pro-gun conservatives expressed outrage over the idea that the White House could act without Congress.

"Vice President [Joe] Biden is asking the president to bypass Congress and use executive privilege, executive order to ban assault rifles and to impose stricter gun control," Yeager explained in his video message. "Fuck that."

"I'm telling you that if that happens, it's going to spark a civil war, and I'll be glad to fire the first shot. I'm not putting up with it. You shouldn't put up with it. And I need all you patriots to start thinking about what you're going to do, load your damn mags, make sure your rifle's clean, pack a backpack with some food in it and get ready to fight."

The CEO concluded: "I'm not fucking putting up with this. I'm not letting my country be ruled by a dictator. I'm not letting anybody take my guns! If it goes one inch further, I'm going to start killing people."

As The Atlantic noted on Wednesday, gun advocates can stop "freaking out" because Obama cannot ban assault weapons or close the gun show loophole without Congress.

Yeager has threatened to kill anyone that calls him a coward as well. He and Drudge are obviously just that, cowards. The only measures being proposed are a matter of gun safety. President Obama cannot and has no plans to act contrary to the Constitution or Congress. Yeager and Drudge are afraid to deal with some simple facts, some relatively minor changes that might make the USA a little safer while also preserving people's rights to own a gun for sport and self defense. Only a coward would make arguments against policies that are a complete figment of their sick imaginations.

Scientists, Democrats Shut Out Of Sunday Show Discussions On Climate Change

Scientists, Democrats Shut Out Of Sunday Show Discussions On Climate Change

A Media Matters analysis finds that news coverage of climate change on ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX remained low in 2012 despite record temperatures and a series of extreme weather events in the U.S. When the Sunday shows did discuss climate change, scientists were shut out of the debate while Republican politicians were given a platform to question the science.

Broadcast Networks Continued To Overlook Climate Change In 2012

Even In Record-Breaking Year, Broadcast Climate Coverage Remained Minimal. In 2012, the U.S. experienced record-breaking heat, a historic drought, massive wildfires in the West, and Hurricane Sandy. Meanwhile, Arctic sea ice extent shattered the previous record low and the Greenland ice sheet saw the greatest melt in recorded history. According to the National Climatic Data Center, 2012 was the warmest year in recorded history for the contiguous U.S. Yet despite these illustrations of climate change, the broadcast news outlets devoted very little time to climate change in 2012, following a downward trend since 2009:

Sunday Show Coverage Continued To Decline. Since 2009, climate coverage on the Sunday shows has declined every year. In 2012, the Sunday shows spent less than 8 minutes on climate change, down from 9 minutes in 2011, 21 minutes in 2010, and over an hour in 2009. The vast majority of coverage -- 89 percent -- was driven by politics, and none was driven by scientific findings.

    ABC's This Week covered it the most, at just over 5 minutes.
    NBC's Meet the Press covered it the least, in just one 6 second mention.

Nightly News Coverage Increased Slightly From 2011, Driven By Extreme Weather. The nightly news shows devoted just under an hour to climate change in 2012, up from 38 minutes in 2011 but significantly less than in 2009. Coverage was largely driven -- 69 percent -- by the extreme weather the U.S. experienced this year; 17 percent of coverage was driven by scientific findings and 12 percent was driven by political stories related to climate change.

    CBS Evening News covered climate change the most for a total of 22 minutes -- a reversal from 2011, when the show covered climate change far less than ABC or NBC. [Media Matters, 4/16/12]
    NBC Nightly News covered climate change the least at 17 minutes.

Scientists, Democrats Shut Out Of Sunday Show Discussions On Climate Change

Sunday Shows Quoted No Democratic Politicians On Climate Change.  In 2012, the Sunday shows did not quote a single Democratic politician on climate change. Most of the politicians quoted were Republican presidential candidates, including Rick Santorum, who went unchallenged when he called global warming "junk science" on ABC's This Week. More than half of climate mentions on the Sunday shows were Republicans criticizing those who support efforts to address climate change. This imbalance was also present, though less dramatic, on the nightly news programs, which quoted 60 percent Republicans and 40 percent Democrats on climate change.

In Four Years, Sunday Shows Have Not Quoted A Single Scientist On Climate Change. Of those who were asked about climate change on the Sunday shows, 54 percent were media figures, 31 percent were politicians and not one was a scientist or climate expert. This is consistent with a previous Media Matters analysis which found that none of the Sunday shows quoted any scientists on climate change between 2009 and 2011. By contrast, two-thirds of those interviewed or quoted on the nightly news programs in 2012 were scientists. [Media Matters, 4/16/12]

Kind of tough to have an honest debate about something when the corporate media excludes dissenting opinions and experts.

Florida's Criminal Governor Rick Scott (R) Inflates Cost Of Medicaid Expansion By 2,500% To Avoid Implementing Obamacare

Republicans learned Nothing From The 2012 Election, They Continue The War on Women

Republicans learned Nothing From The 2012 Election, They Continue The War on Women

Interstate 5 runs down the middle of California’s San Joaquin Valley for hundreds of miles. On either side are dusty rows of almond, peach and orange trees. In the summer, the ground is tan and dry. Telephone poles measure out the time for passing cars, their sagging power lines scalloping out to a vanishing point on the horizon. Somewhere almost halfway from San Francisco to Los Angeles is a town called Huron.

This is where Carla (not her real name) used to work, shaking almonds from the trees at harvest time for $8 an hour. This is also where she was raped by her foreman. But as a Mexican immigrant with no papers, she was afraid to tell anyone.

It’s a common tale. Some 630,000 of the 3 million migrant farm laborers in the United States are women, and at least 60 percent are undocumented. Most are subject to sexual abuse but fear deportation if they speak up. The reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), which expired almost a year and a half ago, would have helped change that. But after being held hostage by House Republicans who wanted fewer protections for women, it died in the 112th Congress. The next class of legislators will have to start from scratch on a new bill. Meanwhile, women are waiting.

A 2010 survey by Irma Morales Waugh of the University of California, Santa Cruz, reported that 80 percent of female farmworkers interviewed had been subject to sexual assault or harassment. A recent Human Rights Watch report found that sexual abuse of female farmworkers is so common that many see it as “an unavoidable condition of agricultural work.” And a mid-1990s study by the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission concluded that among California crop workers, “hundreds, if not thousands, of women had to have sex with supervisors to get or keep jobs and/or put up with a constant barrage of grabbing and touching and propositions for sex.” The female laborers, or campesinas, called one company’s crops the “field of panties,” since so many women had been raped there by their overseers.

The women are stuck, because even though the same labor laws that forbid workplace harassment for legal residents also technically cover undocumented workers, enforcement is spotty and laborers seldom know their rights. Female crop workers make an average of $11,250 a year. “They don’t want to lose their job,” said Amparo Yebra, a senior caseworker at Westside Family Preservation Services Network, a community group in Huron that provides social services to migrant laborers.

The Senate passed a version of VAWA in April that would have expanded escape routes for these women. The bill would have increased the number of special U-visas, which give temporary legal status to undocumented immigrants who are victims of sexual assault or domestic violence, and who are willing to cooperate with an investigation.

* * *

When the foreman drove Carla home for the first time, it was raining. She piled into his truck with other workers. He stopped at a gas station to drop everyone else off, but told Carla he’d give her a lift all the way back to her place. Instead, he took her out into a field and raped her.

There’s so much space out there in the flat fields, sounds don’t travel much. Sometimes there’s a background noise: an unseen bird chirping, or power lines buzzing, or a giant eighteen-wheeler groaning by, mud flaps beating.

Over the next couple of months, he raped her five or six more times, and she became pregnant. She was 22. When she started to show, the women working alongside her asked who the father was, and told her to go to the Westside community group. Carla went because they gave out free food. At Westside, her caseworker Yebra, who knew all about U-visas, called the police and helped Carla through the ensuing investigation, which concluded with the arrest and deportation of her assailant back to Mexico. About eight months later, in 2010, Carla got a temporary work permit.

* * *

In 2012, the number of U-visas issued by the Department of Homeland Security hit its annual 10,000 limit a month before the end of the fiscal year—for the third year in a row. The Senate version of VAWA would have made up to 5,000 rollover visas from previous years available annually to undocumented women. The bill included additional safeguards for immigrants, and new provisions for Native American women and LGBT victims of sexual abuse as well.

But in the version of the bill that passed the House in May, Republicans stripped out the new protections for these three vulnerable groups, slamming them as politically driven. They also scaled back the law’s existing protections for women—for example, removing the chance for immigrants with U-visas to become eligible for permanent residency after their temporary visas expire. The House bill would also have required a stricter standard of proof for asylum, and would have broken with current confidentiality laws to allow the government to interview the abuser about the applicant.

The conservative movement's message is that they're happy for you to be a silent wage slave, but do not expect basic human rights protection just because you pride cheap labor for greedy industrial farms.

“Tenth of December”: Bard of the wage slaves.
George Saunders' new book offers savagely satirical tales from the viewpoint of the downtrodden

Conservative Nutter Peggy Noonan Lives in Her Own Fiscal Cliff Fantasy World

Mythbusting: Israel and Switzerland are not gun-toting utopias

Will The Lazy Media Let Republicans Spin The Debt Ceiling

Will The Lazy Media Let Republicans Spin The Debt Ceiling

The papers are filled with articles reporting in a matter-of-fact way that Republicans plan to use the debt ceiling fight to extract major spending cuts from the White House and Democrats. Mitch McConnell is out there this morning calling for a quick resolution to the standoff — one that exchanges a debt limit hike for deep cuts.

The early returns, based on the coverage of this looming battle so far, suggest Republicans are successfully defining the terms of this debate — they are defining it as a standard Washington standoff, in which each side will demand concessions from the other. Indeed, you can read through reams of the coverage without learning three basic facts about this fight:

1) Republican leaders will ultimately agree to raise the debt ceiling, and they know it, because they themselves have previously admitted that not doing so will badly damage the economy.

2) Because of the above, a hike in the debt ceiling is not something that Democratic leaders want and that Republican leaders don’t. In other words, it is not a typical bargaining chip in negotiations, in the way spending cuts (which Republicans want and Dems don’t) or tax hikes (which Dems want and Republicans don’t) are.

3) And so, if and when Republicans do agree to raise the debt ceiling, it will not constitute any kind of concession on their part — even though they will continue to portray it as such to demand concessions in return. It will only constitute Republicans agreeing not to damage the whole country, which does not constitute (one hopes) them making a sacrifice.

Without these facts, it is simply impossible for readers and viewers to understand the basic situation that’s unfolding here. Indeed, you can read through much of the coverage and come away with the sense that this is a typical negotiation: Democrats want a rise in the debt ceiling; Republicans want spending cuts; therefore, the two sides are squaring off for a game of chicken to see who can extract more from the other. That’s not what’s happening at all, and any accounts that portray it as such present a deeply unbalanced picture.

The corporate media wants it to be a stand-off type negotiation because the drama gets viewers and readers. The only drama here is whether Republicans will go batsh*t insane and trash the economy because of their freaky ideology. Trying to use "deficits" as a wedge is just as hateful and stupid as any other reason, Washington's Deficit Obsession Is Insane

Smiley Faced Proto-Fascist Fox's Neil Cavuto Falsely Claims Tax Deal Would Increase Government Spending By $4 Trillion

Smiley Faced Proto-Fascist Fox's Neil Cavuto Falsely Claims Tax Deal Would Increase Government Spending By $4 Trillion

Fox News' Neil Cavuto claimed that the recent deal to avoid ending tax cuts for all Americans adds "4 trillion in new spending." But the $4 trillion estimate is not new spending; rather, it's lost revenue in comparison to what would have been collected if all the Bush tax cuts expired.

Discussing the January 1 tax deal on Your World, Cavuto claimed that the deal expands government spending "to the tune of $4 trillion over the next ten years."

An on-screen graphic also claimed the deal would add $4 trillion in spending over ten years:


But the $4 trillion estimate, which was published by the Congressional Budget Office, is lost revenue in comparison to what would have been collected if all the Bush tax cuts expired. Politico reported that the CBO's estimates "attribute most of the cost to lost revenues or payments on refundable tax credits." The Hill also pointed out that nearly all of the deficit increase would be due to an extension of the Bush-era tax cuts:
    The Senate deal to avoid the "fiscal cliff" will add roughly $4 trillion to the deficit when compared to current law, according to new numbers from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

    [...]

    The extension of lower tax rates for the bulk of the nation's taxpayers and the addition of a patch to the Alternative Minimum Tax would add roughly $3.6 trillion to the deficit over the next decade, the CBO said. Other individual, business and energy tax extenders would add another $76 billion. The extension of unemployment benefits would cost roughly $30 billion, and the so-called "doc fix" would tally another $25 billion through fiscal 2022.

In addition, according to Politico, "CBO begins its analysis from its March current law baseline that assumes all of Bush-era tax cuts would expire at New Year's Day, and therefore gives no deficit-reduction credit for the fact that the deal begins to raise rates for the wealthiest Americans." Politico continued:

    Yet since last spring the CBO itself has warned that if nothing were done, the so-called "fiscal cliff" combination of tax increases and automatic spending cuts could throw the country back into recession. In the same way, critics would argue that the deficit estimates now don't give enough credit to the improved economic growth that could result from the tax cuts.

 Neil Cavuto has been playiing the look at me I'm a nice harmless guy who would never lie game for years. he is a conman in a two-thousand dollar suit who gives America the shaft everyday with a constant stream of lies and spin. Neil is not an American, he is a Puppet of international radical Rupert Murdoch.

Thanks To Gerrymandering, Democrats Would Need To Win The Popular Vote By Over 7 Percent To Take Back The House

Texas Conservatives Pushing Health Care For Women Back to the Dark Ages

Texas Conservatives Pushing Health Care For Women Back to the Dark Ages

For most of 2012, Texas officials have been working hard to strip funding from the Planned Parenthood clinics in their state. Those officials advanced their anti-choice agenda on Monday, when a visiting judge ruled that Texas may deny funding from Planned Parenthood affiliates in the new year simply because the organization advocates for abortion rights.

Planned Parenthood has been embroiled in a complicated legal battle with the state of Texas as Republican officials attempt to exclude the organization from the state’s Women’s Health Program, which uses federal and state money to fund preventive care for low-income women. The organization sued to block Texas from discriminating against abortion providers, but Visiting Judge Gary Harger ruled that Texas may design a state-run Women’s Health Program that excludes qualified providers like Planned Parenthood — despite the fact that, on a federal level, states aren’t allowed to block qualified health providers from receiving Medicaid funds.

The new Women’s Health Program launches on Tuesday, and Monday’s ruling ensures that Planned Parenthood won’t be part of it. Before Texas Republicans began their crusade against Planned Parenthood, the organization provided preventative cancer screenings, contraceptive services, and family planning assistance to nearly half of the state’s 130,000 low-income women in the Medicaid program.

Texas’ insistence on defunding Planned Parenthood has already had far-reaching consequences. Some health clinics in the state have been forced to close — including at least 50 that weren’t even affiliated with Planned Parenthood’s national organization — leading thousands of low-income women to forgo the preventative care they need. Monday’s decision will almost certainly cause additional health clinics to close their doors in January, the lawyer representing Planned Parenthood pointed out.

Since the Hyde Amendment already prevents Medicaid programs from covering abortion services, the Planned Parenthood affiliates in Texas don’t actually perform abortions for any of their patients in the Women’s Health Program.

If Texas conservatives want to treat women like they treated freed African-Americans under old Jim Crow laws they should be brave enough to confess their agenda. Either that are Texas conservatives should pack up and go create their own country that believes in government tyranny. 

Fox News had quite the year with it's radical anti-American agenda, 12 Unbelievably Awful Things Fox News Did This Year