I expect Republicans in hillbilly **** states to condemn the AP American History Exam because it's not just a bible study course but a legislator in New Jersey introduced a non-binding resolution saying the exam is biased and negative and doesn't cover religion enough.
Republicans really are single-minded. Everything needs to falsely remind us that Jesus founded America. America was founded on capitalism. Money. Not Jesus.
@TheCobbler,
Thanks, I had forgotten about this asshole.
Right-to-work goes down in flames in Illinois House with zero yes votes
Source: chicago sun times
Gov. Bruce Rauner’s desires to have right-to-work in Illinois went down in flames in the House on Thursday, gaining zero yes votes in a fiery debate Democrats aimed squarely at the governor.
The vote tally was 0 yes votes, 72 no votes and 37 voting present, offering a blistering rebuke to Rauner’s anti-union agenda. A handful of Republicans went for a walk during the vote, not publicly falling on one side or another.
Republicans dismissed the vote as political theater even as Democrats pit workers’ rights against corporate greed and called Rauner “divisive” for touring the state and essentially asking local towns to kick unions out.
Read more:
http://chicago.suntimes.com/politics/7/71/607377/right-work-goes-down-flames-illinois-house-zero-yes-votes
How Fox News Is (Still) Hurting the Republicans
“There is something about watching Fox News that leads people to do worse on these [factual] questions than those who don’t watch any news at all.” A political scientist on what Roger Ailes has wrought, including the problems he is creating for his own GOP.
January 30, 1995, the beginning of modern media-political history: Rupert Murdoch (right) announcing that Roger Ailes will run the newly launched Fox News Peter Morgan / Reuters
James Fallows May 17, 2015
Let me recommend for your weekend reading, or for your weekday reading if you’re seeing it then, a detailed study by Bruce Bartlett called “How Fox News Changed American Media and Political Dynamics.” You can download the 18-page PDF from this site of the Social Science Research Network.
The idea that Fox News operates with different aims and by different norms from those of, say, the BBC is familiar. But this presentation is notable for two reasons.
The first is its source — for those who don’t know, Barlett is a veteran of the Reagan and Bush-41 administrations and was an influential early proponent of supply-side / tax-cut economics. He also worked for Ron Paul. Since then he’s harshly criticized the Bush-43 administration, but in no sense does he come at this as a Democratic party operative.
The second and more important reason is Bartlett’s accumulation of detail showing (a) that Fox’s core viewers are factually worse-informed than people who follow other sources, and even those who don’t follow news at all, and (b) that the mode of perpetual outrage that is Fox’s goal and effect has become a serious problem for the Republican party, in that it pushes its candidates to sound always-outraged themselves.
I recommend the whole thing, but here are a few samples. First, on misinformation, a quote from an academic study:
People who watch Fox News, the most popular of the 24-hour cable news networks, are 18-points less likely to know that Egyptians overthrew their government than those who watch no news at all (after controlling for other news sources, partisanship, education and other demographic factors). Fox News watchers are also 6-points less likely to know that Syrians have not yet overthrown their government than those who watch no news.
“Because of the controls for partisanship, we know these results are not just driven by Republicans or other groups being more likely to watch Fox News,” said Dan Cassino, a professor of political science at Fairleigh Dickinson and an analyst for the PublicMind Poll. “Rather, the results show us that there is something about watching Fox News that leads people to do worse on these questions than those who don’t watch any news at all.”
Also:
Another problem is that Republican voters get so much of their news from Fox, which cheerleads whatever their candidates are doing or saying, that they suffer from wishful thinking and fail to see that they may not be doing as well as they imagine, or that their ideas are not connecting outside the narrow party base. As a recent academic study found:
“Exposure to programs featured on Fox News, such as those hosted by Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, resulted in a greater wishful thinking effect by Romney supporters. In other words, while Romney supporters were substantially more likely to predict their candidate would win the 2012 presidential election, watching Fox News programming exacerbated this effect.”
It may be that some Republican Fox viewers became complacent and didn’t work as hard as they might if they had been more aware of how badly Romney was doing in the final days of the campaign.
On mood, Bartlett includes this quote after the 2012 election from Lincoln Mitchell, a political scientist at Columbia:
“Fox has now become a problem for the Republican Party because it keeps a far right base mobilized and angry, making it hard for the party to move to the center or increase its appeal, as it must do to remain electorally competitive....One of the reasons Mitt Romney was so unable to pivot back to the center was due to the drumbeat at Fox, which contributed to forcing him to the right during the primary season.”
None of this is “news” to people who have followed the evolution of the media. But it is put together in a lucid and cumulatively effective manner that gives the arguments new heft. Thanks to Josh Marshall for pointing it out.
This paper also refreshes the question many people discussed after the Karl Rove / Megyn Kelly dustup on election night 2012 (when Kelly was operating in atypical “let’s stop fooling ourselves” mode). When will Republicans who care about winning national elections, or actually governing, stop thinking of Fox as a help and start viewing it as a hindrance, and what will happen when they do?
The embarrassing flight of the three hawks
Jane Franklin • April 28, 2014
All three Cuban-American members of the U.S. Senate – Robert Menéndez, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz – wish they could say truthfully that their parents “fled Castro’s Cuba”. The embarrassing reality is that their parents left Cuba while General Fulgencio Batista was running the country after the 1952 coup that overthrew an elected government and canceled an election in which Fidel Castro was running for office.
All three Cuban-American members of the U.S. Senate – Robert Menéndez, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz – wish they could say truthfully that their parents “fled Castro’s Cuba”. The embarrassing reality is that their parents left Cuba while General Fulgencio Batista was running the country after the 1952 coup that overthrew an elected government and canceled an election in which Fidel Castro was running for office.
•Flees Castro
•Flees Castro’s Cuba
•Escapes the Castros
•Escapes Cuba’s communist government
•Flees communism for freedom on our shores.
His parents become the oppressed victims of “Castro’s Revolution” and Menéndez takes on the mantle of a son of immigrants who found freedom in the United States that he is defending against the villainous Castro his parents fled.
For decades he has profited politically from that identity, raising prodigious campaign funds among wealthy right-wing Cuban-Americans in both New Jersey and Florida. Now this Cuban-American hawk oversees U.S. policy toward Cuba from his perch as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
More:
http://progresoweekly.us/embarrassing-flight-three-hawks/
Scott Walker Dissolves Into Gibberish When Asked About His Foreign Policy Credentials
http://www.politicususa.com/2015/05/17/scott-walker-dissolves-gibberish-asked-foreign-policy-credentials.html
One sentence is all it took for Scott Walker to reveal himself as the next in a long line of failed Republicans.
Face The Nation’s Bob Schieffer asked Gov. Walker what his foreign policy credentials are, and the answer was revealing.
Walker said:
Well, I think as a governor, it’s really ultimately about leadership. To me, in my lifetime, one of the best presidents when it comes to foreign policy was a governor from California. My lifetime, one of the worst presidents when it comes to foreign policy, was a freshman senator from Illinois. So I think it’s not just about past experience. It’s about leadership. As a governor, you have to put a cabinet in place. Hopefully, you pick people who are as smart or smarter than you on any given topic.
I think that’s something that’s required of a successful president is putting people in place, be it Secretary of Defense, National Security Advisor, Secretary of State and others, and then having the good sense to listen to them and to others, chain of command in the military, consulting with the Congress. All of those sorts of things I think are important to the president, and I think a successful governors in either party have to do that every day.
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<snicker>
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OMG 1 cobbler is your god
my ass hole belongs to the middle class
@TheCobbler,
I am so sorry to read this.
The child is beautiful, the rape is rape.
