abaldwin360:

The following link will take you to the Republican State Leadership Committee’s website, where the article describes how Democratic candidates for the U.S. House won 1.1 million more votes than Republican candidates, yet republicans still control the house.

Basically, this entire article is a boast about how gerrymandering has paid off for the GOP.

Yet, I’m willing to bet something important to me - like my first cup of coffee tomorrow morning, that republican voters will simply dismiss this by saying that “the other side does it too.”

No matter the fact that here we have the Republican State Leadership Committee gleefully boasting that they are subverting the will of the people.

Here’s the article. 

(via skepticalavenger)

skepticalavenger:

abaldwin360:

One of the jokes I have often made about so-called personhood amendments is that if you give a fertilized egg full rights as a person, you should get to claim them on your taxes, too.

Suddenly, that joke is a lot less funny.

Michigan Republicans are now pushing a bill that would grant a tax credit to any fetus proven to be at least 12 weeks along by December 31st. Calling it an “advance” on the actual tax break the family would receive the next calendar year, the GOP frames the financial help as a chance to offset expenses with pregnancy.

MLive reports:

“You’re recognizing the fact that people have additional expenses, another person to take care of,” [bill sponsor Rep. Jud] Gilbert said of the rationale behind allowing fetuses to be claimed as income tax exemptions. “Money saved there could be contributed to doctor’s bills and all kinds of things.”

The bill, if it passed, would provide about $160 per family and would cost the state $5 million to $10 million per year, according to the report. Hospital costs associated with a pregnancy tend to range in the thousands to tens of thousands of dollars, especially for women without health insurance. In the meantime, the state has continued to fight against the implementation of the Affordable Care Act and the state insurance exchange.

The lack of financial impact the tax credit would offer families make it clear that this move isn’t about family support, but about reproductive rights. Zach Pohl, Executive Director of Progress Michigan, calls the move for exactly what it is — redefining “personhood” via the tax code. He said in a press release:

“This is really a backdoor way of passing extreme personhood legislation, which has been rejected by voters in states across the country. Even worse, this would create a special new tax credit for unborn fetuses, after Lansing Republicans eliminated the tax credit for living, breathing children last year. It’s time for our elected leaders to get their priorities straight and start working together to create good jobs and improve education.”

Provide extra support for a fetus while cutting off aid to those who are born? Anti-choice politicking at its best.

source

Well, look here, more proof that they care about fetuses more than actual children. Surprise, surprise

So this would provide negligible help to a pregnant mother, but provides a foot in the door to declare a fetus a “person”.  The wording declares the true intent of the  credit.

I’m all in favor of a tax credit for expectant mothers, not for unborn fetuses.  Probably some minor changes in wording here would make for something desirable. Or would it?  Would bigoted conservatives really be in favor of giving a tax break to “unmarried whores who got themselves knocked up due to their own irresponsibility”?   No?  But it would accomplish the exact same thing financially.  It just wouldn’t allow you to use this credit as an excuse for a fucking person-hood bill later on.

skepticalavenger:

abaldwin360:

U.S. District Judge Marbley finds that Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted violated provisional voters’ substantive due process and equal-protection rights, violated a federal Consent Decree, and violated state law by–at the eleventh-hour, the Friday night before the election–shifting from poll workers to voters the statutory responsibility of recording identification information, and then directing elections boards to disenfranchise voters where the information was incomplete or missing.

[Among the judge’s findings:]

“Counsel for the Secretary unambiguously assured this Court that the Secretary understood the recording of ‘identifying information’ to be a duty ‘imposed upon the poll worker’ and that the failure to do so would not ‘invalidate ballots.’ The Court relied on this statement to the Plaintiff’s detriment. Nine days after making that representation to the Court, the Secretary ordered that no provisional ballots be counted if the identification information was improperly recorded, without [e]ngaging in fact-finding to support the change.” (PAGE 13)

“The surreptitious manner in which the Secretary went about implementing this last minute change to the election rule casts serious doubts on his protestations of good faith.” (PAGE 13)

“Herethe Secretary’s eleventh hour Directive, which disenfranchises an unknown but potentially large number of Ohio voters and violates state law, is one of the ‘rare, but serious’ violations of state election law” that violate substantive due process. (PAGE 14)

“The poor drafting of Form 12-B which, by design or by accident, purports to shift the poll worker’s statutory duty to record the form of identification to the provisional voter, did not provide occasion for the Plaintiffs to seek injunctive relief until the Secretary issue Directive 2012-54 at 7:00 pm on November 2…” (PAGE 9)

“Ohio voters reasonably expect that the Secretary of Ohio will abide by the General Assembly’s laws in administering a federal election. For an executive official of the state to [flout] state law in arbitrarily reassigning a poll worker’s statutory duty to a voter, with the result being disenfranchisement of the voter, is ‘fundamentally unfair and constitutionally impermissible.’” (PAGE 15)

read more (including a copy of  the judge’s order)

I am really hoping that charges are filed here. A message needs to be sent that this type of behavior will not be tolerated.

This is probably technically not treason, but it sure tastes like it.  :-\

religiousragings:

thisoneandonlylife:

Regardless which candidate wins the US presidential election on Tuesday, neither of them has been honest to the American people about the scale of the problems facing the country. But Americans have only themselves to blame. They prefer to be lied to rather than to face the truth.

Greying and weighed down by his first term in office, Barack Obama is barely recognizable as the beacon of hope he was in 2008. Back then he was the youthful symbol of change, and his words were full of promise. A year into his term, he still had that aura. In a television interview on Jan. 25, 2010, shortly after he won the Nobel Peace Prize, he said he didn’t want to be a “small” president, which is how he saw even Democratic idol Bill Clinton, who at one point saw fit to fight for new school uniforms. Obama, by contrast, wanted to fundamentally change the country.

“I’d rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president,” he declared on that January day.

He still sounded like the president who had proclaimed in his inaugural address, that “the time has come to set aside childish things. … Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted — for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame.”

Since then this courageous man has become more disheartened by the day. And his reforming spirit won’t return even if he wins a second term. The man on whom millions pinned their hopes has waged one of the least hopeful election campaigns in history. He has stooped to the “childish things” he had promised to eschew, by running bitterly negative spots about Mitt Romney’s wealth and shortcomings. He recently resorted to calling the Republican candidate a “bullshitter” — a decidedly unpresidential term.

The man who rescued America from George W. Bush has even adopted the tactics of the former president, who in 2004 won re-election by demonizing his challenger John Kerry rather than talking about his own controversial record. And Obama too has started avoiding the hard realities that America must face.

Sad Evolution

It doesn’t make things any better that the Democrat is up against an unprincipled rival who has deserved much of the criticism levelled at him. One can blame Barack Obama for this sad evolution. But one can also blame the American people. It may sound harsh, but they want to be lied to. A politician who doesn’t lie simply won’t be elected.

Imagine for a moment if Obama had begun his re-election campaign this way: “Listen, our schools are no longer considered to be among the top 10 worldwide, one out of every four of our bridges is wobbly, more of our kids are dying and our old people are dying sooner even though we spend twice as much on our health care system as Germany. We were so ill prepared for a hurricane that millions of New Yorkers had to sit in the dark for days. And our ‘high-speed’ trains move barely faster than local trains in China. We must start over.”

In short, he would have said that America is no longer in every respect the best country on the planet, but rather, like every other nation, a ‘work in progress.’

A president dared to do this once — Jimmy Carter. In 1979, the Democrat tried to persuade Americans to change their energy consumption. Americans didn’t want to hear it. They mocked his defeatism and voted him out of office.

Ever since then, hardly any US politician has risked calling on people to make sacrifices. Obama tried it briefly. He said America had lost some of its dynamism. On foreign visits he showed that America should at times be big enough to apologize for its actions.

Shrinking Vision

He was soon labelled as the “Apologetic President” who wasn’t proud of his country. The attacks came from the right but America’s left too rejected his criticism of stubborn teachers’ unions or all-powerful doctors’ lobby groups. Their mantra is always that America has the most committed teachers and doctors in the world — even though statistics contradict that.

So Obama mutated from a political messiah into a typical US politician. His vision shrank with every passing day. It’s true that he passed his healthcare reform, a historic achievement, but he barely touched on the problem of exploding costs. He hasn’t reduced the crippling budget deficit and he no longer even talks about climate change.

He hasn’t initiated a serious debate about social inequality and he has said even less about the ludicrous creed that America’s taxes shouldn’t rise. And he failed to market his stimulus package of almost $900 billion as a fundamental economic overhaul.

It almost made sense that he fell silent about his plans for a second term. He had probably resigned himself to the mistrust with which the Americans greeted every government initiative. It’s sadly ironic how quickly the Republicans were calling for state help after hurricane Sandy.

Obama will probably win a second term with these tactics. But he’s discarded the historic opportunity to prepare the nation for a new era. That would have required getting Americans used to the truth instead of lulling them into complacency with the phrase “greatest nation on Earth.”

Needless to say, politicians everywhere fear telling the truth. Former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl preferred to talk about “blossoming landscapes” in eastern Germany and safe pensions for all, statements that flew in the face of reality. All across Europe, leaders who spoke truthfully about the euro crisis have been voted out of office.

But America, this great country, always wanted to be more, to be a nation founded on a wonderful idea. America’s founding fathers pledged that governing would be dictated by common sense. Today, citizens mercilessly punish every politician who tries to push through pragmatic yet unpopular policies. Even worse, it’s enough if a candidate even mentions anything unpopular. Such as the truth, for example.

A bitter glimpse at reality.  THIS is the reality that is the United States.

(via skepticalavenger)

neyruto:

the republicans on neopets are freaking the fuck out 

(via harshwhimsies)