Tag: United States Congress

Can “Justice and Truth Win Out?” A heckler yells at Obama. Here’s what happened next…

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Deportation, Heckler, Obama

A heckler yelled at Obama. Here’s what happened next…
US President Barack Obama arrives to speak on immigration reform in San Francisco, Nov. 25, 2013.
US President Barack Obama arrives to speak on immigration reform in San Francisco, Nov. 25, 2013. | JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

At some point Congress will wake up and do it’s job.  I suspect it won’t be until we vote out the slackers (from both parties) in 2014….

MSNBC

Arguing “there’s no reason we shouldn’t get immigration reform done right now,” President Obama demanded on Monday for the umpteenth time that Congress pass his top legislative priority already.

So you can understand if he was a bit annoyed when, towards the end of his speech in San Francisco’s Chinatown, pro-immigration activists started heckling.

“Mr. President, please use your executive order to halt deportations for all 11.5 million undocumented immigrants in this country right now!” one protester yelled. As Obama tried to respond, the shouting continued: “You have a power to stop deportation for all undocumented immigrants in this country!”

“Actually I don’t,” Obama replied. “And that’s why we’re here.”

A month earlier, Senator Ted Cruz was interrupted by anti-deportation activists, whom he nonsensically accused of being “President Obama’s paid political operatives,” during a speech to a conservative conference. Immigration protesters have shadowed administration officials for years, popping up at Congressional hearings to target Janet Napolitano, who was in the audience for today’s speech, and even occupying Obama’s campaign offices in 2012.

These protesters are confronting a fundamental contradiction in Obama’s record: he’s made immigration reform his top second-term priority even as his administration has presided over record deportations.

After Senate Republicans filibustered the DREAM Act, which would grant legal status to young undocumented immigrants, activists slowly convinced Obama to halt deportations for undocumented youth until Congress came around. Now they’re demanding he do the same for the broader unauthorized immigrant community, or at the very least, for their parents and siblings who still face the threat of removal every day. After all, if you’re fighting to get them on a path to citizenship, why would you want to kick them out? These arguments are likely to get louder if immigration reform dies in the House.

The president, however, has argued that such a sweeping move would require a change to the law. He repeated the claim on Monday.

“What you need to know, when I’m speaking as President of the United States and I come to this community, is that if, in fact, I could solve all these problems without passing laws in Congress, then I would do so,” he said Monday. “But we’re also a nation of laws. That’s part of our tradition.  And so the easy way out is to try to yell and pretend like I can do something by violating our laws.”

Politically, Republicans don’t have an obvious way to exploit these tensions, but they are trying.

“Democrats are facing credibility problems, whether it is from Obamacare failures or massive deportations, that’s why you see the president’s approval ratings suffer,” Izzy Santa, who handles Hispanic outreach for the Republican National Committee, told MSNBC. “The fact is that Republicans continue to work on immigration reform, which is more than Democrats ever did when they controlled the White House and Congress.”

The RNC, which has backed efforts to pass immigration reform, may be able to tweak Obama a little over deportations. But the vast majority of Republicans in Congress are on record demanding even more aggressive deportations. The only House vote Republican leaders have allowed on the topic this year was an amendment by anti-immigration firebrand Steve King calling on the White House to deport DREAMers. It passed with almost unanimous Republican support.

It’s true Democrats didn’t pass immigration reform in Obama’s first two years, when Democrats briefly had 60 votes in the Senate. But for most of that session they were stuck at 59 votes and the only Republican willing to negotiate with them, Senator Lindsey Graham, backed out in a procedural dispute. Mitt Romney tried the exact same “Where was Obama?” argument with Latino voters in 2012, even as he advocated “self-deportation” in debates. It didn’t work.

Obama is doing his best to convince protesters which party to blame if reform collapses once again.

“Right now it’s up to Republicans in the House to decide if we can move forward as a country on this bill,” Obama said. “If they don’t want to see it happen, they’ve got to explain why.”

House Republican leaders have offered a variety of excuses lately as to why they haven’t come up with an immigration plan of their own. The schedule’s too tight, or they’re mad at the White House over health care, or Obama is secretly trying to kill immigration reform with unrealistic demands so Democrats win Latino voters.

The president’s goal this month has been to box them in by saying “yes” to their demands whenever possible. Speaker John Boehner doesn’t like the Senate’s bill? Fine, you can pass a bunch of smaller bills instead. They say I’m demonizing Republicans to scare them away from a bill? Well, I think the Speaker is just swell!

“The good news is, just this past week Speaker Boehner said that he is ‘hopeful we can make progress’ on immigration reform,” Obama said. “And that is good news. I believe the Speaker is sincere.  I think he genuinely wants to get it done.  And that’s something we should be thankful for this week.”

While Obama faces his own pressures, his refusal to back away from talks puts the onus on Boehner to prove his party can deal with the deportation issue at all. And right now there’s no consensus within the party as to whether the country should let any  undocumented immigrants remain, let alone get on a path to citizenship. Until they can start naming some demands, they’re for self-deportation by default.

Watch Obama and the hecklers:

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Republican Doomsday Cult

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Doomsday Cult, Republican Crazies, Republicans, Republicans Regressive

Republican Doomsday Cult

Sure, it seems extreme, but extreme times call for extreme cartoons.  When you have the Republican Speaker of the House threatening a national default, food stamps being slashed while farm subsidies are increased and an attempt to defund a program that has been in existence for four years, things have gone to crazy-land.
Of course, Senator Ted Cruz has gotten all of the attention because he is the most, well, annoying, and he is disliked by Democrats and Republicans in true bipartisan fashion.  Rest assured, though, there are plenty of other loopy annoying guys in Congress.  Senator Cruz wasn’t the only one who voted to take $40 billion from food stamps while shoveling money over to farm subsidies.
And don’t worry, I spend plenty of time going after Democrats like that mean ol’ commie pinko Obama, it’s just that when a political party gets taken over by extremists who are ready to hit the doomsday switch, I’ve got to cartoon a little louder.  Let me know what you think, and be sure to comment, share and nail the cartoon to your nearest telephone pole.

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Reliving The Crazy: Michele Bachmann’s Greatest Hits

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Michele Bachmann, Reliving The Crazy

Reliving The Crazy: Michele Bachmann’s Greatest Hits

by Sahil Kapur
Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) announced Tuesday her tenure in Congress will come to an end in 2014. First elected in 2006, the Minnesota congresswoman rose to fame — and notoriety — around the 2008 election, after which there was a cushy place in the GOP for her brand of apocalyptic hysteria and zealous social conservatism.
Here are some of her greatest hits.

1) Barack Obama Has ‘Anti-American Views’

One MSNBC appearance in October 2008 all but sealed Bachmann’s reputation — as a paranoid wacko to liberals and a fearless hero to the tea party crowd.

“Absolutely. I’m very concerned that he may have anti-American views,” she said of candidate Barack Obama. “That’s what the American people are concerned about.”

And members of Congress should be investigated for having anti-American views, she added. “I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out, are they pro-America or anti-America?”

2) Obamacare Allows Abortion Field Trips For 13-Year-Olds

Referring to patient privacy protections in the Affordable Care Act, Bachmann wondered if young teenagers could go get abortions during school days.

“Does that mean that someone’s 13-year-old daughter could walk into a sex clinic, have a pregnancy test done, be taken away to the local Planned Parenthood abortion clinic, have their abortion, be back and go home on the school bus that night?” she said on the House floor. “Mom and Dad are never the wiser.”

3) Census Data Can Put You In Internment Camps

In a June 2009 Fox News interview, Bachmann linked the census to Japanese internment camps.

“Between 1942 and 1947,” she said, “the data that was collected by the Census Bureau was handed over to the FBI and other organizations at the request of President Roosevelt, and that’s how the Japanese were rounded up and put into internment camps. I’m not saying that that’s what the administration is planning to do. But I am saying that private personal information that was given to the Census Bureau in the 1940s was used against them to round them up in violation of their constitutional rights.”

4) Iraq Should Reimburse America For Being Liberated

During a debate while running for the Republican nomination for president, Bachmann said Iraq and Libya should reimburse the United States for being liberated.

“Cutting back on foreign aid is one thing. Being reimbursed by nations that we have liberated is another,” she said. “We should look to Iraq, and Libya, to reimburse us for part of what we have done to liberate these nations.”

5) Founding Fathers ‘Worked Tirelessly’ To End Slavery

In a Jan. 2011 speech, Bachmann credited the Founders with ending slavery, even though it was abolished generations after they died.

“We know there was slavery that was still tolerated when the nation began,” she said. “We know that was an evil and it was scourge and a blot and a stain upon our history. But we also know that the very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States.”

6) HPV Vaccine Leads To ‘Mental Retardation’

While running for president, Bachmann said she has reason to believe the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine has “dangerous consequences” such as mental retardation.

“There’s a woman who came up crying to me tonight after the debate. She said her daughter was given that vaccine,” she told on Fox News. “She told me her daughter suffered mental retardation as a result. There are very dangerous consequences.”

7) People Keep Urging Me To Impeach Obama

Just this month, Bachmann floated the possibility of impeaching President Obama.

“As I have been home in my district, in the 6th District of Minnesota,” she said on Capitol Hill, “there isn’t a weekend that hasn’t gone by that someone says to me, ‘Michele, what in the world are you all waiting for in Congress? Why aren’t you impeaching the president? He’s been making unconstitutional actions since he came into office.'”

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House of Turds

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Government Shutdown, House of Turds

Today’s NYDN Front Page Sums Up What 74 Percent of Voters Are Thinking

By Josh Voorhees
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You can take a full tour of today’s shutdown-themed front pages over at the Newseum, but trust me, it doesn’t get any better than this one from the New York Daily News.

A new Quinnipiac poll out this morning highlights just how unpopular the House strategy has been: By a 72-22 margin, voters opposed Congress shutting down the federal government to block the implementation of Obamacare. Even though Americans were divided on the merits of the healthcare law itself—with 45 percent in favor and 47 percent opposed—they were against the idea of Congress cutting off funding for the law, 58 percent to 34 percent.

Self-identified Republican voters backed the shutdown by a narrow 49-44 margin, but that’s where the support ended. Democrats (90-6 oppose) and independents (74-19) overwhelmingly were against the shutdown. And while Obama receives a negative 45-49 job approval rating in the poll, those figures look like a standing ovation compared to the 74 percent of respondents who said they disapproved of the job Republicans are doing in Congress. More poll results here.

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American Taliban | Christian Fascist Calls For Extermination of Heretics

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in American Taliban, Christian Fascism, Religious Genocide

NC Pastor: Pen In ‘All The Lesbians And Queers’ With An Electrified Fence, Wait For Them To ‘Die Out’

The Pastor’s leper colony-esque proposal came in response to the president’s endorsement of same-sex marriage, which he said ‘anybody with any sense’ would be against. Worley explained that the idea of two men kissing makes him ‘pukin’ sick,’ so he developed a proposal to ‘get rid of all the lesbians and queers’:

WORLEY: I figured a way out — a way to get rid of all the lesbians and queers. But I couldn’t get it passed through Congress. Build a great big large fence, 150 or 100 miles long. Put all the lesbians in there. Fly over and drop some food. Do the same thing with the queers and the homosexuals. Have that fence electrified so they can’t get out. Feed ‘em, and– And you know what? In a few years they’ll die out. You know why? They can’t reproduce.

Updated: Video clip of the comments

He claims to be a man of God, but I have serious questions about which God.

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