AP – Across the country, they are known as the conservative lawmakers who are taking illegal immigration into their own hands.
AP – President Barack Obama has accelerated the search for his next Supreme Court nominee by interviewing candidates, including federal judges Merrick Garland and Sidney Thomas, according to a person with knowledge of the conversations.
Sue Lowden, desperate to save her candidacy, ever having advocated barter in an op-ed published by Politico:
Bartering, chickens and goats: these three words have put me at the epicenter of talk shows, late night TV and political commentary. I want to set the record straight, clarify my position and shed light on the real motives behind this attack.
The comment I made about bartering was not, and was never intended to be, a policy proposal. It was an example of how struggling families are working to pay for medical care in any way they can during these tough times.
Apparently, Politico doesn’t fact check op-eds (which is great news for candidates who don’t have to bother with being challenged by reporters with their pesky questions), so let me state for the record that Sue Lowden did in embrace barter as a realistic way to bring down medical costs for families without insurance. Moreover, she didn’t do it just once, she did it twice – and both times, she was on video.
“I think that bartering is really good,” Lowden earlier this month. “Those doctors who you pay cash, you can barter, and that would get prices down in a hurry.” If you don’t have health insurance, it’s no big deal, because you can just “pay cash for whatever your medical needs are.” What happens if you don’t have enough cash? No problem! Just “go ahead and barter with your doctor.” Bring a chicken or something. “I’m telling you, this works,” Lowden said a week . “Doctors are very sympathetic people. I’m not backing down from that system.”
Now, the same Sue Lowden who said she’s “not backing down” from barter, who said barter “is really good,” and who said barter “would get prices down in a hurry,” that very same Sue Lowden now says she never meant to propose barter and that she was merely giving “an example of how struggling families are working to pay for medical care in any way they can during these tough times.”
Uh, no. Clearly, Sue Lowden embraced barter. She was enthusiastic about it! She said she wasn’t backing off of it. And now, nearly three weeks later, her idea of damage control is to claim she never said it in the first place.
A federal judge in Chicago has refused to issue a subpoena for President Barack Obama to testify at former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s political corruption trial.
Politico – Obama’s domestic policy battles offer important clues to how he may win big on the foreign policy front.
AP – The Obama administration says 5,000 deaths could be prevented each year under new rules announced Friday to limit the amount of mercury and other harmful pollutants released by industrial boilers and solid waste incinerators.
Politico – Opinion: A bean-counter attacked by each of the last two W.H.s must be on to something.
Rush’s conspiracy theory: “Environmentalist whackos” may have blown up oil rig to “head off more oil drilling”
Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you’re only going to hurt yourselves. What’s going to happen when we can’t find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We’re going to take yours. We get up at 5am & work till 10pm or later. We’re used to not getting up to pee when we have a position. We don’t take an hour or more for a lunch break. We don’t demand a union. We don’t retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we’ll eat that.
For years teachers and other unionized labor have had us fooled. We were too busy working to notice. Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3rd graders and doing landscaping? We’re going to take your cushy jobs with tenure and 4 months off a year and whine just like you that we are so-o-o-o underpaid for building the youth of America. Say goodbye to your overtime and double time and a half. I’ll be hitting grounders to the high school baseball team for k extra a summer, thank you very much.
Wonkette:
In other words, all that talk about how corporate CEOs and Wall Street execs need sky-high compensation in order to entice them to work so hard is utter bullshit. Apparently there is a class who is just genetically predisposed to working with insane intensity for 18 hours at a stretch, and will do so whether it’s lucrative or not. We need to capture these people and harness them to solve our energy problems, possibly by making them run in giant hamster wheels.
Take it from Republican state Sen. Kevin Eltife. Or, even better, from Larry Temple, executive director of the Texas Workforce Commission.
Temple acknowledged Thursday to the Senate Committee on Economic Development that Texas’ decision not to take 6 million in unemployment stimulus dollars directly led to higher taxes for business owners and more borrowing from the federal government to replenish the state’s broke unemployment trust fund.
As you’ll recall, Gov. Rick Perry refused to accept a half a billion in federal unemployment stimulus dollars, saying there were too many strings attached, even though he knew the state’s unemployment fund was projected to go broke within months.
Temple testified Thursday that the commission has had to double the tax rate for businesses in order to replenish the unemployment fund. And he conceded under intense questioning from Eltife that the hike wouldn’t have been as high if we’d taken the half a billion.
Let Texans see that Republican policies cost them and their businesses money.
I hope those hundreds of millions it cost Texas were worth Gov. Rick Perry’s grandstanding. He really stuck it to Obama, didn’t he!
Between the ages of 20 and 29, one black man in nine is behind bars. For black women of the same age, the figure is about one in 150. For obvious reasons, convicts are excluded from the dating pool. And many women also steer clear of ex-cons, which makes a big difference when one young black man in three can expect to be locked up at some point.
Removing so many men from the marriage market has profound consequences. As incarceration rates exploded between 1970 and 2007, the proportion of US-born black women aged 30-44 who were married plunged from 62% to 33%.
Note to Republicans: if the Affordable Care Act is an evil assault on America, moms, and apple pie, which will end the world as we know it, and which you fight until your last breath to destroy, you don’t get to take credit for its provisions, especially when you didn’t really come up with them in the first place.
Also note that Boehner believes the law sets up “the infrastructure” for a government-takeover of the health care system. What an interesting way to put it. I guess the Democrats’ system isn’t a government-takeover, but has the capacity to be a government-takeover at some point in the future, maybe.
President Barack Obama has accelerated the search for his next Supreme Court nominee by interviewing candidates, including federal judges Merrick Garland and Sidney Thomas, according to a person with knowledge of the conversations.
Four-term Republican Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite of Florida said in a surprise announcement Friday that she won’t seek re-election to Congress, citing health concerns.