Mad In The Middle

Immigration Reform Creeping Forward

2013-05-21T20:35:00.001-04:00

Senate panel approves sweeping immigration bill | Reuters:

The Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday approved legislation that would bring about the biggest changes in U.S. immigration policy in a generation, setting up a spirited debate in the full Senate next month...

Evil Apple: Tax Dodging Edition

2013-05-20T23:24:00.001-04:00

Apple’s Web of Tax Shelters Saved It Billions, Panel Finds - NYTimes.com:

Even as Apple became the nation’s most profitable technology company, it avoided billions in taxes in the United States and around the world through a web of subsidiaries so complex it spanned continents and went beyond anything most experts had ever seen, Congressional investigators disclosed on Monday...

Will Men Report Prostate Problems?

2013-05-20T16:51:00.001-04:00

GOP attorney general candidate tried to force women to report miscarriages to police - Salon.com:

Virginia Republicans selected state Sen. Mark Obenshain as their candidate to succeed fellow right-winger Ken Cuccinelli as the state’s top prosecutor over the weekend, a move that has invited additional scrutiny of Obenshain’s track record by state Democrats and other progressive activists.

One of the first bits of legislative flotsam to resurface was a measure, introduced by Obenshain in 2009, to force women to report miscarriages to the police within 24 hours or face up to a year in jail...

Union Losses Part Of Econ Inequality

2013-05-20T16:21:00.001-04:00

The 1 Percent Are Only Half the Problem - NYTimes.com:

...The decline of labor unions is what connects the skills-based gap to the 1 percent-based gap. Although conservatives often insist that the 1 percent’s richesse doesn’t come out of the pockets of the 99 percent, that assertion ignores the fact that labor’s share of gross domestic product is shrinking while capital’s share is growing. Since 1979, except for a brief period during the tech boom of the late 1990s, labor’s share of corporate income has fallen. Pension funds have blurred somewhat the venerable distinction between capital and labor. But that’s easy to exaggerate, since only about one-sixth of all households own stocks whose value exceeds $7,000. According to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, the G.D.P. shift from labor to capital explains fully one-third of the 1 percent’s run-up in its share of national income. It couldn’t have happened if private-sector unionism had remained strong...

Hemp Coming?

2013-05-20T13:05:00.001-04:00

Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul Push For Hemp Legalization In Senate Fight:

Kentucky's two senators, Republicans Rand Paul and Mitch McConnell, have been working to include a provision that would legalize industrial hemp into the farm bill, according to Senate and Kentucky sources, an effort that is likely to result in a floor vote on the issue this week...

Mole At ABC

2013-05-20T12:45:00.001-04:00

Expect no less from the Kingdom of Mouse.

A Right-Wing Mole at ABC News — FAIR: Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting:

...Conservatives don’t just complain loudly, endlessly and inaccurately about liberal media bias. They also train right-leaning journalists to make their way into the supposedly hostile terrain of Beltway media. And one of the most famous alums of a conservative media training program is now a major star at a network news outlet: ABC’s senior political correspondent Jonathan Karl.

Backfiring Scandals

2013-05-20T12:17:00.001-04:00

Scandals Backfire on Republicans as Obama's Approval Ratings Go Up:

Despite the many attempts by Republicans to generate a scandal, a new CNN/ORC poll found that the president’s approval ratings have increased by two points...

Teh Stoopid Is Strong In This One

2013-05-20T11:31:00.001-04:00

This Is No Ordinary Scandal - WSJ.com:

We are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate. The reputation of the Obama White House has, among conservatives, gone from sketchy to sinister, and, among liberals, from unsatisfying to dangerous. No one likes what they're seeing. The Justice Department assault on the Associated Press and the ugly politicization of the Internal Revenue Service have left the administration's credibility deeply, probably irretrievably damaged. They don't look jerky now, they look dirty. The patina of high-mindedness the president enjoyed is gone...

Mouse Empire Investigates Line Cheating

2013-05-20T11:29:00.001-04:00

Disney World Scheme: Entitled Families Hire Disabled Guide to Bypass Lines, Says Report | Parenting - Yahoo! Shine:

...Instead, according to the New York Post, the moms pay $130 an hour to hire a disabled, “black-market” guide, who uses her position—sitting in a motorized scooter—to help entitled families gain special access to rides.

“On one hand, you can say she’s a great entrepreneur,” disability activist Kleo King, of the National Spinal Cord Injury Association, told Yahoo! Shine. “On the other hand, she’s kind of pimping herself out. And it’s outrageous she would help people commit fraud...”

IRS To Kill Cons?

2013-05-19T22:20:00.001-04:00

Grasping For New Scandals, Fox Fearmongers That Obamacare Will Allow IRS To Deny Medical Treatment | Research | Media Matters for America:

Fox News' Steve Doocy Suggests The IRS Could Use Health Records To Interfere With Conservatives' Healthcare. Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy suggested that the IRS would be able to access Americans' private health information and meddle in specific health procedures:...

Karl Won't Admit Error

2013-05-19T13:53:00.001-04:00

Jon Karl makes things worse - Salon.com:

...CNN’s Howard Kurtz, who knows a little bit about being in the line of media fire for his own work, offered ABC News’s embattled Jon Karl the chance to defend himself on Reliable Sources Sunday. Karl, of course, is in hot water because his “scoop” revealing that the White House tampered with Benghazi talking points relied on doctored email leaked by House Republican sources...

Heritage Foundation Shoots Other Foot

2013-05-18T22:12:00.001-04:00

Heritage Foundation To GOP: Attack Obama, Don't Govern | Crooks and Liars:
...“To that end, we urge you to avoid bringing any legislation to the House Floor that could expose or highlight major schisms within the conference. Legislation such as the Internet sales tax or the FARRM Act which contains nearly $800 billion in food stamp spending, would give the press a reason to shift their attention away from the failures of the Obama administration to write another ‘circular firing squad’ article...”

IRS Outs Self

2013-05-18T18:49:00.001-04:00

Lawyer confirms she asked planted question that broke open IRS scandal | Fox News:

...The first revelation that the IRS was targeting Tea Party groups came in a planted question during a lawyers’ conference earlier this month, the attorney who asked the question confirmed Saturday with Fox News...

Koch Pile Grows

2013-05-18T18:47:00.001-04:00

Mountain of Petroleum Coke From Oil Sands Rises in Detroit - NYTimes.com:

...Detroit’s ever-growing black mountain is the unloved, unwanted and long overlooked byproduct of Canada’s oil sands boom...

Scandal In VA

2013-05-18T18:40:00.001-04:00

Virginia Governor and Attorney General Linked in Scandal - NYTimes.com:

... Virginia is in the grip of an old-fashioned, finger-licking political scandal linking all these figures. There are overlapping plot lines, a cameo by the governor’s wife and, in an offstage role portending a possible dark denouement, F.B.I. agents...

Whining About Winning

2013-05-18T12:52:00.001-04:00

Conservative Groups Granted Exemption Vastly Outspent Liberal Ones - OpenSecrets Blog:

...Conservative nonprofits that received tax-exempt status since the beginning of 2010 and also filed election spending reports with the Federal Election Commission overwhelmed liberal groups in terms of money spent on politics, an analysis of Internal Revenue Service and FEC records shows.

Of the 21 organizations that received rulings from the IRS after January 1, 2010, and filed FEC reports in 2010 or 2012, 13 were conservative. They outspent the liberal groups in that category by a factor of nearly 34-to-1, the Center for Responsive Politics analysis shows...

Scandals 101

2013-05-18T12:35:00.001-04:00

The scandals are falling apart:

...On Tuesday, it looked like we had three possible political scandals brewing. Two days later, with much more evidence available, it doesn’t look like any of them will pan out. There’ll be more hearings, and more bad press for the Obama administration, and more demands for documents. But — and this is a key qualification — absent more revelations, the scandals that could reach high don’t seem to include any real wrongdoing, whereas the ones that include real wrongdoing don’t reach high enough. Let’s go through them...

How To Screw Your Opponents

2013-05-17T17:46:00.001-04:00

Bob Cesca: 10 Examples of Bush and the Republicans Using Government Power to Target Critics:

They say two wrongs don't make a right, but ignoring one of those wrongs while vilifying the other is intellectually dishonest and violently hypocritical, among other things. And certainly that's the case surrounding news that the IRS targeted tea-party groups as a means of determining and verifying their tax-exempt status has resurrected a familiar debate about government overreach and abuse of power...

ABC Carrying GOP Water Again

2013-05-17T14:54:00.001-04:00

ABC’s Benghazi problem festers - Salon.com:

What did they know and when they did they know it? That question has been posed to the White House a lot this week — but it should also be put to ABC News, which has been caught reporting as fact emails about the Benghazi controversy that, it turns out, were doctored by Republican aides. There’s no indication that ABC and its reporter, Jonathan Karl, knew the emails were manipulated before reporting them, of course. But the network may run into trouble for overplaying its hand in claiming it had “obtained” emails that, we learn today from CBS News, were actually notes taken by GOP aides being briefed on the emails.

That might be less of a problem if the characterization of the emails was accurate. It was not...

Crazy In NC: Saving Guns Edition

2013-05-17T12:09:00.001-04:00

NC House passes 'Save the Gun' bill :: WRAL.com: "State House lawmakers voted Wednesday to forbid law enforcement officers from destroying fully-operating firearms, even if they were used in a crime..."

Lest We Forget: The Boot Licking Press

2013-05-17T11:45:00.001-04:00

Things In Politico That Make Me Want To Guzzle Antifreeze, Part The Infinity - Esquire:

...Selling missiles to the people who sponsored the slaughter of U.S. Marines is nothing that can't be smoothed over between the soup and fish. That's the way the country should operate. These people should live in a terrarium.

In case you've forgotten, this terrorist incident killed fifty (50) times more Americans than died at Benghazi but I don't remember a single Congressional inquiry, let alone an investigation and a special $70 million prosecutor.

GOPers Do A Ben Bad

2013-05-16T23:19:00.001-04:00

Republicans Altered Benghazi Emails, CBS News Report Claims:

One day after The White House released 100 pages of Benghazi emails, a report has surfaced alleging that Republicans released a set with altered text...

He Ain't Tricky O

2013-05-16T19:47:00.001-04:00

Obama may be facing scandals, but he’s no Richard Nixon - The Washington Post:

STANDING BEFORE reporters Thursday, President Obama declined an invitation to compare the recent scandals weighing down his administration with those that forced President Nixon to resign in 1973. So allow us to do the work for him: There is no comparison.

Nixon, in a series of crimes that collectively came to be known as Watergate, directed from the White House and Justice Department a concerted campaign against those he perceived as political enemies, in the process subverting the FBI, the IRS, other government agencies and the electoral process to his nefarious purposes. Mr. Obama has done nothing of the kind. Nor is there much to support a lesser “unifying theory” of this week’s scandals, which is that together they prove Mr. Obama guilty of a grand overreach of federal power...

Who Gets Audited?

2013-05-16T14:20:00.001-04:00

The Truth Behind our IRS Audit | Greenpeace:

Last September, Greenpeace welcomed a new addition to our national headquarters in Washington, D.C. - an IRS auditor. After a three month-long investigation, we passed the audit and maintained our tax-exempt status. As the Wall Street Journal reported on March 21, the real story is what prompted the audit - a recommendation from Public Interest Watch (PIW) - a self-proclaimed "watchdog of non-profit groups" funded by non-other than ExxonMobil...

Update: The Salon link has a very good summary of the alleged scandal, noting that no actual scandal has been uncovered.

Salon--Where's the IRS "misconduct"?

...The IG’s report offers evidence of much confusion, poor training, unclear directives and what seems to be pretty lousy, or, at least, extremely ineffective management at the department of the IRS tasked with approving or rejecting tax-exempt status for 501(c)(3) “charitable groups” and 501(c)(4) “social welfare organizations”. Members of Congress, as well as government watchdog groups have long argued that many of those tax-payer subsidized organizations have abused the privilege and violated the legal restrictions on political activity by such groups. The abuse has been particularly widespread, they argue, in the wake of the Citizens United decision and the flood of largely unrestricted, often completely anonymous money funneled to those types of groups for often purely-political purposes...

New Union Blood

2013-05-16T13:25:00.001-04:00

White-collar workers are turning to labor unions - latimes.com:

The next wave of union protesters isn't blue collar.

It's lawyers, paralegals, secretaries, helicopter pilots, judges, insurance agents and podiatrists.

These white-collar workers are not exactly the picture of the labor movement, but they are becoming a more essential part of it as they turn to unions for help in a tough economy as bosses try to squeeze out more profits...