The Tornado that destroyed an entire suburb in Oklahoma and killed hundreds of people might well have not happened if humans hadn’t been pumping insane amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. Or it still might have. We really don’t know for sure.

What we do know is that thousands of people have just experienced unimaginable horror and have been left with an apocalyptic wasteland that used to be their home town. Right now, the country should be focused on the victims in the suburb of Moore, and how they can be helped.

While there is an opportunity to bolster the argument for a strong federal government to help respond to the disaster, and an even better opportunity to promote action on global warming, liberals need to hold off and wait until the panic has calmed before making a point.

It’s not that the arguments are wrong; Disasters often highlight the need for a well functioning, well funded government, and extreme weather events help make the case that rising global temperatures really do have catastrophic effects on all of us.

It is the timing of it that matters.

Republicans will be itching to point fingers at reactionary Democrats (they are already busy smearing Rhode Island Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse for speaking out about it) in order to turn the public off of issues like global warming and funding the federal government. And it works. Republicans, in collusion with oil funded ‘research’, have managed to convince 30% of Americans that man made global warming is a hoax, and even more that government needs to shrink in size. They literally salivate over liberals doing what they do on a daily basis, as they get to look like grownups and swing public opinion in their favor.

So wait, liberals. You’re right about the federal government, and most likely right about the link between the tornado and global warming. Just keep it to yourselves for now if you want your message to actually affect anything.

To donate to the victims of the Oklahoma tornado, go to the Red Cross website here.

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Public Policy Polling asked a selection of Republicans and Democrats what they thought about the so called scandal in Benghazi and found some entertaining interesting results:

41 percent of Republicans say they consider this to be the “biggest political scandal in American history” compared to only 43 percent who disagree. Only 10 percent of Democrats and 20 percent of independents agreed.

Of the 41 percent of Republicans who consider Benghazi to be the worst political scandal in American history, 39 percent are unaware that Benghazi is located in Libya. 10 percent said it’s in Egypt, 9 percent in Iran, 6 percent in Cuba, 5 percent in Syria, 4 percent in Iraq, and 1 percent each in North Korea and Liberia, with 4 percent unwilling to venture a guess.

While this is quite funny, it should be remembered that America has developed a nasty habit of attacking a) the wrong country and b) places most of its citizens couldn’t find on a map.

So watch out Slovakia. Republicans are still pissed about Monica Lewinksy. Or was that in Sweden?

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If you lie to Congress, it is a crime.  It’s called perjury.  You may remember that when Roger Clemens did it, he barely escaped two counts of it.  And you should remember that the official reason President Bill Clinton was impeached was because of perjury (you know, it had nothing to do with the rabid hatred the GOP had of him, then Congressman Bob Barr, R-GA, asked aloud, If we can’t get rid of him with impeachment what else can we do?  Uh, win an election.)

So if it is illegal for citizens to lie TO Congress, why is is legal for them to lie to us?

First case of lying: Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA)

Issa has made some wild claims about Benghazi.  One that he has repeated is that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton personally signed a cable about Benghazi.  This has been refuted by all of the whistleblowers and a Washington Post fact checker called that assertion “a whopper” (from Congressman Elijah Cummings’, D-MD testimony at the hearing on the subject on May 8, 2013 — you can watch it online).  All State Department cables have the Secretary’s name.

Yet, Issa repeats this claim over and over and over.  The goal, of course, is to weaken Secretary Clinton because she is the front runner for the Democratic Party and is popular among Republicans.  The only thing they can find to hurt her is this.  Truthfully, that we had people in such a dangerous place left so far away from military support seems really upsetting.  I am torn from thinking this is Libya, this was September 11th, how could we leave our ambassador so unprotected? The Accountability Review Board (ARB) investigated and released this report.   They found that mistakes were made and offered suggestions to prevent this from happening ever again.  They were not wimpy as they have been called by some on the right. They were thorough and pretty scathing.  There is no question that this should not have happened.

What we know is that when the idea of increasing funding for diplomatic security came up, many of these Republicans who are so unhappy with what happened now, said “no.”

(Disclaimer: I worked for the Clinton Administration on and off for most of it.  I also worked for Secretary Clinton’s presidential campaign and support the idea of her running in 2016.)

Liar number 2: Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-NH)

Senator Ayotte has been questioned about her vote against the recent gun control bill.  Her response has been — more than once — that she opposed it because she doesn’t want there to be a national registry of gun owners.  I support gun control and I don’t want that either.  I voted against former DC Mayor Adrian Fenty because, at least partially, he almost went through with a policy to send DC police door-to-door to request residents turn over any guns they didn’t want in their home.  If said guns could be tied to a crime, the people who turned them over could be charged with that crime.  That is ridiculous.

The bill Senator Ayotte voted against had no such provision.  Senators Pat Toomey (R-PA) and Joe Manchin (D-WV) put a provision in the bill making it a felony to keep information on people who had bought a gun past a certain amount of time.  No one wants to see such a registry.

I don’t know what her real reason was and would like to hear it because I feel like every other five minutes I hear someone on the right whining that “No one read the bill!”  Read the damn bill.  And if you have a real reason for going against this common sense bill, please share it.  I might even agree with the real reason, if I knew what it was.

And the liars that love them.

Could the right be happier about anything than Benghazi?  Were they this upset with President Bush for letting 9/11 happened? (Didn’t he get a report entitled Bin laden determined to attack the US within the US?  Did he not have intelligence that al Qaeda was looking at using airplanes?  Yes on both.  You may remember how I was jumping up and down begging for hearings?  Oh, you don’t?  This isn’t just because I am not a major TV network but because I am not a truther nor do I see politics in every event on earth).

Second problem I have with the right’s response is their comparison to Watergate.  They say “when Obama lied, people died.”  I have two problems with that statement.  The first issue I have is substantive.  President Obama has not lied.  This is not a cover-up.  This is a tragedy and shows some real holes in the way we do business that need to be fixed.  Secondly, it implies that these lies caused deaths.  Even if this was true, they happened after the event in question so any attempts at finding a causality are just ridiculous.

On the gun control thing, the National Rifle Association and American Future Fund have some to Senator Ayotte’s defense.  The latter has sponsored ads that compound her lie with one of their own.  They claim she has voted for increased background checks when she did the opposite.  Read that here (and see the ad).

One thing that gets under my skin more than many things is when people put up with politicians who lie because that’s just how it’s done.  We get the government we settle for, we need to expect better.

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Just when you thought Republican delusions had reached their limit, Dark Lord Dick Cheney re-emerges from the political wilderness to remind everyone how competent the Bush Administration was. Speaking to the Daily Mail, Cheney told the British paper that the non scandal in Benghazi would never had happened under his old boss:

‘When we were there, on our watch, we were always ready on 9/11, on the anniversary,’ he recalled. ‘We always anticipated they were coming for us, especially in that part of the world.’

‘I cannot understand why they weren’t ready to go,’ the former two-term vice president said of the Obama administration.

‘You’ve got units in the Defense Department that are superb. They practice for this contingency. And they didn’t have anybody in the area,’

It’s difficult not to get angry when reading this type of nonsense given the fact that 9/11 happened on their watch, and when Bush found out about it, he sat staring a ‘My Pet Goat’ FOR 7 MINUTES:

That’s real preparedness for you.

The politics being played with this are moving into unchartered territory in terms of delusion (for a thorough and completely unnecessary debunking of the garbage Republicans have been throwing at the President check out Kevin Drum’s piece in Mother Jones). What exactly would Cheney have the Obama Administration do? Attack Poland? Start a ‘War on Unpredictable Political Upheavals’?

Seriously.

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I got into a very lively debate on Thom Hartmann’s show on Friday night with Libertarian Marc Harrold and Republican Hughey Newsome.  Amongst other topics, we go into it on the Sequester, Miranda Rights and genetically modified food labeling. The debate kicks off almost immediately:

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George W. Bush was easily the least qualified person in U.S. history to hold the presidency. Other failed presidents occasionally have one element of their tenure that they can hail as a success, but George W. Bush ended his presidency with failure on both domestic and foreign policy.

By the time he mercifully left office on January 20, 2009, thousands of American soldiers were unnecessarily dead, thousands of Iraqis were dead, and millions of Americans were out of work. That doesn’t even account for global instability thanks to the vacuum of leadership in the Bush White House.

Yet somehow, my fellow liberals are too soft in assessing Bush’s failure.

They claim that he was a puppet, a tool of other, craftier forces. Most often Cheney is invoked as the man behind the curtain, who used Bush to achieve his evil goals.

Wrong.

Bush is responsible. Bush was the President. Bush was the man who made the ultimate decision to invade Iraq, to do so with an incompetent fool like Donald Rumseld in charge. Bush chose not to react to the memo that warned him about Bin Laden’s plan to attack on 9/11. Bush chose to take resources away from fighting Al Qaeda in order to invade Iraq. Bush chose to put industry cronies in key regulatory positions, including those who were supposed to be watching Wall Street. Bush chose to cut taxes for the super-rich without regard to its long-term effect on the U.S. economy. It was Bush who looked out of an airplane window with that same blank expression he always had, watching as New Orleans drowned.

At practically every critical juncture in his presidency, Bush made the decisions that lead to failure, death, and strife for Americans and people around the world. The buck stopped at his desk.

So when liberals lay the blame on people like Cheney, or Rice, or any of the other goons that ran amok in the White House for eight years, they’re letting the ultimate bad actor off the hook.

Bush is responsible for what happened. We shouldn’t ever forget that.

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The fact that Jay Z and Beyonce went to Cuba on vacation apparently means that the celebrity couple endorse communism, dictatorship and all the abuses committed by the Castro government over the years. Republican lawmakers Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Mario Diaz-Balart sent a joint letter to the Treasury Department demanding to be told who approved the couple’s travel why they were allowed to go. They wrote:

“Despite the clear prohibition against tourism in Cuba, numerous press reports described the couple’s trip as tourism, and the Castro regime touted it as such in its propaganda….

The restrictions on tourism travel are common-sense measures meant to prevent US dollars from supporting a murderous regime that opposes US security interests at every turn and which ruthlessly suppresses the most basic liberties of speech, assembly and belief….We support the Cuban people by refusing to sustain their jailers.”

The Right is gleefully latching on to this as they get to inadvertently accuse President Obama of giving the couple permission to go because, er, Jay Z has donated to Obama’s Presidential campaigns, and Beyonce sang the national anthem at the President’s second inauguration (and because they are a black power couple). Yes, seriously.

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the Cuban born U.S. Representative for Florida’s 27th congressional district, is apparently so concerned about human rights that when she met one of the worst abusers, Former President of Colombia Alvaro Uribe, who according to Human Rights Watch was responsible for widespread illegal surveillance and wiretapping, “systematic” extrajudicial killings of civilians, anti-union violence (Colombia has the highest rate of killings of trade union members and leaders in the world), paramilitary targeted killings, and the forced displacement of civilians, she tweeted out the following statement and photo:

Fmr Prez of Colombia Alvaro Uribe remains a strong partner 4 freedom in Latin America http://t.co/a9DBAxSN

What is the lesson here? If you are a human rights abuser but friendly to the United States, you are called ‘a strong partner 4 freedom’, and if you’re not an ally to the United States, you get called a ‘murderous regime’. Or translated from Republican speak: Moral consistency.

Also, the notion that because you go on holiday somewhere, you are explicitly endorsing that country’s government is also quite a stretch. I live and work in America, but I don’t agree with many of the US government’s policies. I have visited China (Hong Kong), but wasn’t doing it to support the communist dictatorship there. I have friends who have been to Iran, Burma, and Saudi Arabia, and I’m sure none of them agree with their respective government’s atrocious human rights records.

Maybe Jay Z and Beyonce were visiting Cuba because of the island’s cultural vibrancy, its music, food, history and nightlife. Perhaps they wanted to go somewhere sunny and sit on the beach without the paparazzi following their every footstep. Maybe they don’t know too much about the Castro regime and simply wanted a nice vacation. Or maybe they do, and have sensibly moved on from the Cold War mentality that still permeates Washington and much of America.

After all, the Berlin wall fell almost 25 years ago and the rest of the Western world normalized relations with the island shortly after. Then again, Europeans are a bunch of Commie loving pinkos…

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Do you watch Morning Joe?  You should start.  Congressman Peter King (R-NY) just called out Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) big time for coming out against aid for Sandy victims.  He has done this before and has been rebuked by the GOP House leadership but he remains really, really, really pissed off.

King blasted Rubio specifically because of all the money Florida has received for hurricane relief — and then going to NY to raise money.  His exact words about the latter were “He should stay home.”  I cannot find that video but here is some of his complaining about the issue.  When I find the video I mean, I will post it.  Oh and this is older video but very well worth watching.

And if you want to know why people call Joe Scarborough a RINO (Republican in name only), this may show you why:

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After what seemed like a decade of 24/7 coverage of the Republican 2012 primary process, news has come out that there are still untold stories.  Apparently, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum negotiated to team up against Mitt Romney.  Ok, this doesn’t sound like a one meeting kind of thing.  It sounds like something that happened over a much longer period of time and something the political press, who are supposed to be “experts” would have picked up on. (And I am not talking about locals who may not cover politics all the time but the national reporters who do.)

Well, the nation was spared such a spectacularly awesome scary ticket because neither man would accept the veep slot. Phew, and the GOP thought the worst thing they had to fear last year was candidates who like to prattle on about “legitimate rape” and whatnot. (As a satire writer, I would have LOVED a GOP ticket with Newt & Santorum, LOVED IT.)

Of course, the other news that probably won’t actually come out (sorry, I cannot think of a better way to put that right now) is that Senator Rob Portman (R-OH) was NOT asked to take the veep slot for Romney because his son is gay.  Portman was a Romney surrogate and the two men spent a lot of time together. The irony is he had a better shot of picking up a state with Portman than Paul Ryan. I have a hard time seeing Romney ever getting Wisconsin.  Yes, I know people don’t base their pick on the VP candidate.  I guess someone if picked Ted Bundy after he was convicted of being a serial killer it would have turned more than a few people off…  Can you imagine the tagline for that campaign?  Smith/Bundy — because no one knows  more about preventing crime than a convicted serial killer!  (Ps.  I am sure some people were also turned off from John McCain because of Sarah Palin but not enough to swing a state or the election.  Note to any GOP readers:  I am NOT implying any Republican would pick Bundy for anything, ever.)

But I digress.

The GOP has been in overdrive trying to “rebrand” themselves.  I was especially impressed with their chairman, Reince Priebus, this morning.  He was asked if they planned to cut Portman’s national funding off now that he has endorsed same sex marriage.  “Of course not!” Priebus said with a fair amount of moral indignation because of course his decision to not defund Portman is the right thing to do based on current polling numbers that show increasing support for marriage equality.

At the Conservative Union conference last weekend, better known as CPAC, there was a session entitled “How do we look less racist?”  My response to the question was “How about you just BE less racist?”  My advice to the GOP is that superficial changes to messaging materials isn’t enough to convince people you care about their issues.  Priebus deserves some credit for starting to reach out to groups that have not either always or recently been the GOP base.

Getting people to believe you care about the things that matters to them requires you understand what those things are.  Reaching out to talk to them may not get you all the way there but it is a start.  Let’s hope the change Priebus is pushing is part of a long term approach and not a policy du jour.

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Here’s the beauty of Paul Ryan’s new budget, the one saving grace amongst all the horrific awfulness it promises for the country: nobody gives a shit about it.

If you’ve been plugged into the political wing of the internet at all over the past couple of days, you wouldn’t be blamed for thinking it was 2012 — or even 2011 — all over again. That’s because Paul Ryan has rolled out the new GOP budget for this year and it looks suspiciously like every other budget he’s rolled out since the Republicans put him in charge of such things and the beltway media inexplicably decided that he deserves to be taken seriously rather than laughed out of town. At this point, Ryan budgets — all middle-class-screwing austerity in the name of tax breaks for the rich and attempts to gut America’s social safety net — drop with the regularity of a beloved series of Hollywood epics filmed back-to-back. It’s like the GOP is Peter Jackson and the Ryan budget is The Lord of the Rings — if The Lord of the Rings sucked.

What’s interesting about the new Ryan budget, which is, again, the old Ryan budget, is what it says about the way the GOP thinks in general. There’s been a lot of talk in the wake of the budget release that points to the fact that the Republicans are behaving as if they never lost the election, as if the ideas they ferociously campaigned on weren’t summarily shot down by a large portion of the American public. The truth is, the Republican mindset post-election should surprise no one because it’s pretty much par for the course when you look at the overall GOP philosophy of the past few decades. It’s like this: the Republicans are intransigent in their ideas because they consider any ideas not theirs — any legislative or electoral victory for their opponents — to be illegitimate and not what the American people really want. If the Republicans fail, it’s because of bad messaging or a bad candidate — not because their policy notions are shit.

It’s easy to see this when you consider the number of losses the conservative movement has suffered over the past fifty years that it’s not letting go of, that it’s continuing to fight and refight no matter how many times it gets smacked down. It boggles the mind to think that the GOP is still trying to whittle away at Roe v. Wade. And the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And women’s rights. And gay rights. And Social Security. And so on and so on. These are things that were ostensibly decided decades ago but as far as conservatives are concerned, the defeats they endured were only temporary setbacks. They’ll never just walk away and accept that they lost and that most voters like the abortion laws the way they are; they want Social Security and the social safety net to remain in place; they think all Americans deserve equal treatment and protection under the law. The very thought of this is anathema to conservatives and the party that represents them.

The truth is that the battle to see America remade in their image will never end. We’ll be fighting this culture war forever because, barring some Saul-on-the-Road-To-Damascus-style conversion that’ll make conservatives wake up and realize that this country is about compromise, that not every political battle can be fought and won, and that their way isn’t the only legitimate way, they’ll simply never give up.

The new Ryan budget not only offers the same ideas that were soundly rejected by the voters back in November, it also assumes, with near-comical arrogance, that President Obama’s Affordable Care Act will be repealed. Why this presupposition? Because Ryan knows what many conservative political adversaries don’t seem to grasp: the Republicans will never stop fighting to make it so. The battle over “Obamacare” will be going on 40 years from now. You can count on it. It’s the way it always has been and likely always will be.

The best we can hope for is, as with the new Ryan budget, nobody will care because we’ll have heard the same tune played many times before.

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