Did you hear of the latest Obama scandal? Apparently the President had two marines hold umbrellas over his and the PM of Turkey’s head at a press conference….

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This just goes to show how utterly asinine both the GOP and the military is in this country. Apparently it is prohibited under the Marine Corps Uniform Regulations for a male Marine to hold an umbrella during inclement weather; however, a female Marine is allowed to hold an umbrella, provided she do so only with her left hand.

So the scandal here, according to the GOP, is that Obama let a male Marine rather than a female Marine hold an umbrella over his head …

America, you so dumb.

The GOP claims to be adamantly against using Medicaid dollars to help poor women obtain an abortion because of their deep commitment to the “sanctity of life.” Yet this is the same party which pushed a bill through the House of Representatives in 1995 to enable Medicaid recipients to obtain physician-assisted suicide services as a “cost-saving” measure … As one conservative advocate put it at the time, “Sick people are expensive. The dead are a burden on no one.”

How to OWN Your Republican Congressperson at a Town Hall (by SamSeder)

Background Checks at the Womb

The Boston Marathon bombings have prompted Republican calls to delay immigration reform and tighten the border. But self-radicalized Muslims can be born here. The solution: conduct background checks at the womb.

Wait. Is the entire Oklahoma legislature actually laughing at a straight-up, unabashed, unambiguous anti-Semitic insult?! These fuckers are so insulated from reality by their own bigotry that it really is nearly unbelievable … 

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The Republican Co-Majority Leader of the Oklahoma House of Representatives casually apologized yesterday for casually using an antisemitic slur during a debate on a bill to repeal an old law prohibiting retailers from selling their items at a loss.

The bill in question — SB 550 — overturns a 70-year-old ban on selling products at less than 6% above cost which was aimed at preventing big-box retailers from putting smaller competitors out of business with so-called “loss-leaders.”

In defending the bill, Rep. Dennis Johnson (R-Duncan), who is a small business owner himself, asserted that service will always win over price.

“[Customers] might try to Jew me down on the price,” Johnson added. “That’s fine. You know what? That’s free market as well.”

After it was pointed out to him that the phrase “to Jew down” might be considered offensive by, say, Jewish people, Johnson half-heartedly apologized.

“I apologize to the Jews,” he said, to laughter from his colleagues in the House. “They’re good small business men as well.”

It’s worth noting that there isn’t a single Jewish member in either house of the Oklahoma Legislature.

If one thing has been proven, viz., the horrific explosion of the West, Texas, fertilizer plant — which had been fined in 2006 by the EPA for lax environmental safety measures — is that the GOP is right: clearly there are far too many meddlesome health and safety regulations placed upon corporations in this country … SMH …

that seems fair.

Poor people are too wealthy, claims the Congressman who spent over $400,000 on his 2012 campaign and was worth $500,000 in 2011. Because of course. Meanwhile, many large corporations and financial capitalists pay close to zero dollars in taxes, after various loopholes and tax breaks … 

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 … Included in Woodall and Romney’s broad dismissal of 47 percent of the electorate are millions of retired seniors who no longer have an income and millions more low-income families and individuals who do not meet the $20,000 liability threshold for federal income taxes. And all of these people still pay into government programs through sales taxes and, in many cases, payroll taxes.

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Superintendent John White takes his marching orders directly from Bobby Jindal, who recently had to abandon eliminating the state’s hospice program and an ill-conceived reverse robin hood tax scheme that increased the taxes on the poorest citizens of our state so as to eliminate taxes for the wealthiest citizens and corporations.  This follows on successful Jindal campaigns to eliminate the office of elderly affairs, over the objection of the head of this agency – whom Jindal fired immediately after she voiced her assessment under oath that eliminating this agency would lead to a decrease in support for our state’s aging citizens. Jindal has also closed most of the state’s mental hospitals, eliminated the state’s charity hospital system, rejected a largely free expansion of Medicaid that would have provided life-saving benefits to Louisiana’s poorest citizens, and slashed funding for state university’s by more than half - with more cuts on the way. Jindal, a “theoretical” devout Catholic, also executes inmates as often as possible, refusing even to delay them by one day despite objections from his own Bishops to postpone one until at least after Ash Wednesday. Obviously Jindal is not exactly trying to win any awards for devout Christian, or nicest human (or even for someone with a shred of any humanity) so it should be no surprise that he has decided conduct experiments on Louisiana’s Special Education students in the name of fiscal responsibility and accountability.

Democratic strategist Zerlina Maxwell on Monday said she would not be silenced by vulgar insults and threats of violence, and would continue speaking out against rape.

“I’m certainly taking steps to protect my emotional health, but I will not be quiet because I refuse to be bullied into silence,” she said on MSNBC.

During a segment on Fox News’ Hannity, Maxwell suggested that the onus of preventing rape should be on men rather than women. She warned that suggesting women should carry guns to prevent themselves from being raped could easily devolve into a victim-blaming mentality.

Conservatives who viewed Maxwell’s remarks as hostile to gun rights took to social media websites to express their outrage, with some even saying she deserved to be gang raped and killed.

“I think women should not have to go out and get a gun,” she explained on MSNBC. “Women should not have to not wear skirts or heels, and they should not have to do anything to prevent rape from happening from them. I think we need to be refocusing like a laser on the perpetrators of the rapes.”

Maxwell, who is herself a survivor of sexual assault, said the situation proved her point.

“I’m saying that there is a rape culture and attacks on women, and then I’m attacked. I think it illustrates that we do have a problem.”

So the upshot - Obama handily wins the popular vote & the electoral vote; gay marriage, anti-war on drugs, & anti-corporate personhood ballot measures pass in numerous states; openly misogynist & rape apologist politicians suffer an absolute drubbing; all while Obama has presided over a painfully weak economy & incurring an unceasing barrage of accusations of being a socialist Marxist over the past 4 years.

Basically, people fucking hate the GOP, are not really all that afraid of socialism, and are clearly well to the left of the centrist leadership of the Democratic Party.

This is a hugely opportune moment for genuine progressives and socialists to make serious headway at the grassroots level among much wider swathes of the public, and build the kinds of struggles from below that can really bring some change around war, poverty, inequality, and oppression in the U.S.

Wouldn’t it be great if this were the moment where the GOP goes the way of the Whigs? Of course, then the U.S. would turn into a one party state, but that would really only serve to clarify things, anyway …

John Nichols: Major Obama Victory Not Just a Mandate for the President, but for Progressives | Democracy Now!

With Obama scoring a decisive re-election and progressive-backed ballot measures and candidates faring generally well nationwide, journalist John Nichols argues that the 2012 election provided not just a mandate for the Obama and the Democrats, but for progressive policies. A political writer for The Nation magazine, Nichols’ latest article is “For Obama, a Bigger Win Than for Kennedy, Nixon, Carter or Bush.”

 … By and large, Obama’s instincts are the instincts of a moderate Republican. His policies are the policies of a moderate Republican. He stands where the GOP used to stand and will someday stand again.

Yes, Obama began his presidency with bailouts, stimulus, and borrowing. You know who started the bailouts? George W. Bush. Bush knew that under these exceptionally dire circumstances, bailouts had to be done. Stimulus had to be done, too, since the economy had frozen up. A third of the stimulus was tax cuts. Once the economy began to revive, Obama offered a $4-trillion debt reduction framework that would have cut $3 to $6 of spending for every $1 in tax hikes. That’s a higher ratio of cuts to hikes than Republican voters, in a Gallup poll, said they preferred. It’s way more conservative than the ratio George H. W. Bush accepted in 1990. In last year’s debt-ceiling talks, Obama offered cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid in exchange for revenue that didn’t even come from higher tax rates. Now he’s proposing to lower corporate tax rates, and Republicans are whining that he hacked $716 billion out of Medicare. Some socialist.

Yes, Obama imposed an individual mandate to buy health insurance. You know who else did that? Romney. You know where the idea came from? The Heritage Foundation. Personal responsibility—insisting that people carry private insurance so we don’t have to bail them out in emergency rooms and hospitals—was a Republican idea. Same with Wall Street reform: There’s nothing conservative about letting financial institutions gamble with other people’s money in ways that would force us to bail them out again. Even Obama’s cap-and-trade proposal echoed the market-based emissions-control policies of the 1990 Bush administration and the 2008 McCain campaign. And last year, when the EPA proposed a new air-pollution limit, Obama ticked off environmentalists by killing it on the grounds that it might jeopardize the recovery.