This one won’t be polite.
Are you kidding me? Are you freaking out of your mind nuts kidding me?
There is a conservative politician *so* full of anger at the policies and the person of the black man in the White House that he decided to introduce a bill allowing employers to deny any preventive health service they object to.
I’m hoping the thing will get, say three cosponsors and die a deserved death but you never know….
If you want to be a friend to large corporations, making sure they attract valuable employees, you can’t run around writing bills that could technically deny:
Mammograms
Cancer screenings of all kinds for either sex.
Diabetes education (!)
Stress tests for heart disease.
All of these fall under the ‘preventative’ tag.
Come on, you say, no one would be that nuts…
Write a bill as a dog whistle and it could come back to bite you.
Because of course this is a dog whistle: an annoyed response to the move by President Obama today to alter the HHS rules regarding requiring employers with conscience objections to contraception to provide preventative services including contraception.
President Obama’s change today, simply wrote a requirement that means the insurance company, instead of the employer, would be the one required to provide such preventative care (contraception).
Of course there are conservative opponents of the original requirement [for example the author of the above completely dumb bill] that won’t let go, not because this isn’t a rational solution to the problem, but because they hate the policies and the person of the black man in the White House.
One of the president’s most severe critics Cardinal designee Dolan, admitted this is a step in the right direction…and moderate or liberal Catholic organizations are happy with the change, as are Catholic Democrats such as Tim Kaine who had raised objections to the original requirement.
The danger of writing crazy legislation as an annoyed response to a thoughtful compromise by the President…
Is that the crazy legislation could actually pass.
Ask the President a question.
Like him hate him, hate his policies, neutral or anywhere else on the spectrum he’s having a virtual town hall.
Ask at this link. video not required
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/01/27/deadline-saturday-submit-your-questions-president-obama
Disrespected Presidents
A break from my own drama for a moment.
OMG Jan Brewer. OMFG Jan Brewer. Who do you think you are, besides the unfortunately elected governor of Arizona?
I want to fly to Arizona and finger wag at *you*!
Finger wagging at the President whilst meeting him at the airport.
Now, in her book she spins that her cell phone was “confiscated” when she visited the White House and that she felt disrespected. While the latter is clearly subjective and therefore possible, it is, per a two second Google search, and a June 4 2011 article, standard operating procedure not to allow any guests to use cell phones at the White House.
Even Jan Brewer.
Which leads my wandering head into a discussion that I’ve had with a Republican. A kind of “can you top this” examination of which President, Mr. Obama or Mr. Bush, has been disrespected more.
Now, if we are going with quantity instead of breaking it down by type, or egregiousness…I have to admit President Bush got slammed more.
More protests, more cable pundit hammering, more written and spoken words against him. The top three categories? Process that was seen by his opponents as dictatorial abuse of power, his creation and prosecution of the war in Iraq, and his um “handling” of Katrina.
I think the scariest criticism for President Bush was the decision that if he traveled to certain foreign nations he’d be tried for war crimes. Would’ve scared *me* out of making certain travel plans.
The personal one that I held onto, and frankly disturbed a lot of my Republican and independent friends with this, was my continued contention that President Bush was never actually elected to his first term and had no right to call himself president. I was called out for disrespecting the office, and that I needed to start calling him President after 2004. I disagreed with them, but I eventually changed my language, because I do agree that the office itself has to be given a certain minimal level of respect.
But IMO, and I’m trying to take my own leftward bias out of here as much as possible: When we get to the *level* and *type* of disrespect…
I’ve just finished watching all of Mr. Bush’s state of the Unions.
No Supreme Court justice talked back to him during the address, in front of the American people, as they did to President Obama last year.
No Congressperson also called him a liar right in the middle of the State of the Union as Joe Wilson did to President Obama last year.
They protested President Bush in the street, and the media and almost *never* from his own party.
They disrespect President Obama to his face.
He does share a category with President Bush, which I will copy and paste from above.
Process that was seen by his opponents as dictatorial abuse of power, (sic) I’m leaving it grammatically inconsistent to prove the copy/paste.)
He gets it from the right *and* left. There’s plenty on the far left both here and abroad who take to the streets against him, who don’t see President Obama as any different that the previous administration, call him “O-bomber,” in derision over his continuation of the military policy of the previous administration, or his corporate-friendly compromises, and the non-closure of Gitmo.
(I’ll never be a perfect lefty, since my outrage isn’t ratcheted up over most of that.)
From the far right there’s the racism, the pictures of the watermelon field on the White House lawn, the monkey/ape editorial cartoons, the legislator who declined to attend the State of the Union after previously saying that negotiating with President Obama was like touching a “tar baby.”
And it’s funny. Serial adulterer Newt Gingrich’s journey to repentance, to being a ‘better’ person, his conversion to Roman Catholicism, is never questioned, and his outrage about being called out over past sins won him South Carolina. Newt’s allowed to be outraged, and also have been in favor of impeachment of a President over just such shenanigans, but whatever.
President Obama cannot be a true Christian though. His journey through that faith is dismissed and discounted, because of a Youtube of Jeremiah Wright.
Cool, collected Barack Obama couldn’t be a more different person than Wright.
Wright oogied me out, still does, but that doesn’t mean our President’s faith is not genuine.
I’ve sat in a pew many a time, listening to a sermon or homily of my longtime pastor and thought
“Sigh, not really dude, no. My radio for listening to God is telling me something quite different.”
In addition President Obama’s birth status, controversy long disproven by his long form birth certificate is *still* being called into question as his version of “he is not legally allowed to be president,” Oh, yes. Mr. Obama’s mother and grandparents participated in this grand conspiracy the moment they discovered she had committed the cardinal sin of procreation.
“See, in a really improbable election year, my son will end up President, so I have to make sure to wear a t-shirt for the rest of my life that states that Hawaii became a state in 1959, so no one can question his legitimacy. And I’ll jump in our time machine right now, and have him meet with a former radical, Bill Ayers, when he’s an adult, so he can never be accused of being a fully formed sixties revolutionary as a child. (Meeting Bill Ayers) Won’t that be great?”
But the worst form of disrespect?
Assassination threats have gone up more than 30 percent since the beginning of the Obama *campaign* in 2007.
The number and volume of these completely surpasses any previous president.
So, in the level of egregiousness, the ultimate disrespect of the person of the President and the office itself.
President Obama has had to put up with much more troubling opposition.
I am unsurprised, but angry
Evidently, if the R’s fare well in the November elections…Darrell Issa wants to go Ken Starr on the Obama White House.
Now, this will be different IMO. Former President Clinton’s private life wasn’t, so it didn’t take much digging to come up with Monica.
If they find something specific to the President, [for the record I think this highly unlikely…I don’t think there’s anything of the sort ] it will have to do with money, or lobbyists, or other things easy to perceive as influence peddling.
And, I’d bet money that President Obama won’t be sitting at some table saying “I don’t recall.” He’ll own up.
And if it’s a member of his staff, he’ll regretfully accept a resignation and move the **** on.
But the worst scenario of all?
Come on now. What are they best at, these Republicans. Fearmongering, and making stuff up.
That’s right. I wouldn’t put it past Issa and his cadre of attorneys to make something up out of whole cloth that, on it’s face, would reach the level of impeachment.
Pie Fight or: Fox news might start a war on dessert
Apparently per Axelrod’s interview w Leno, our President likes pie.
Step into the Fox newsrooms with me and see what they’re responses will be:
Glenn Beck: “I’m not SAYING it’s just another aspect of his socialist white people hating agenda…but you know…Pies come from tarts, and tarts taste a little bit like Baklava, a Middle Eastern Dessert! And then there are PITAS!!! Another Mediteranian delicacy! Barack Hussein Obama doesn’t really like American Pies! He’s just masking a taste for Middle. Eastern. FOOD!”
“Billo: “I heard the President likes Middle Eastern Food… I like pita’s and felafel as much as the next guy, but this seems dangerous to me.”
Hannity (getting Beck’s message all garbled): “He’ll be sending Palestinian terrorists a buncha pie soon! Those Middle Easterners, they like our pie!”
H/t to Kos for link.
Midlife And Treachery 
