NJ Gov: Christie v. Corzine

Less than 24 hours from polls closing in New Jersey, the governors race has shaped up to be a referendum on the voters of New Jersey rather than the candidates themselves. Both candidates, the embattled incumbent Jon Corzine and the slovenly Bush lackey Chris Christie, are battling high unfavorables. Are the voters in NJ so desperate for change that they will hold their noses and vote for the foul-tempered, corrupt and completely devoid of policy ideas Republican? Or will they hold their noses and vote for the wildly unpopular former Goldman Sachs (two words which have joined the so-called “7 dirty words” in their vulgarity) Co-Chairman Democrat? With both of the major party candidates so disliked, could we see a big turnout for conservative 3rd party candidate Chris Dagget (endorsed by the state’s largest paper the Star Ledger, and currently polling at a robust and unsustainable 11%)?

Last November, in the wake of President Obama’s convincing march to victory, it would have been tough to imagine any Republican, especially a neo-con like Chris Christie, would be the favorite in a gubernatorial race in the Northeast. The fact that Christie is polling at about 40-45% instead of 30% comes down to a few things:

1. Incumbents face an uphill climb. With unemployment officially hovering around 9.8% (and more importantly U6 around 17%), any incumbent is going to face the pitchforks of the impatient local residents. Even 5 stump speeches by President Obama haven’t lifted Corzine’s numbers beyond 40-43%

2. Corzine’s Wall Street ties. Hating Wall Street is as en vogue in 2009 as hating Russians was a few decades ago. Right in the middle of the financial meltdown was Corzine’s former employer, Goldman Sachs.

3. New Jersey voters have never warmed to Corzine. Despite winning with 54% of the vote in 2005 (after the McGreevey debacle), Corzine’s favorability was at a paltry 35%.. After climbing to 50% in ’07, it plunged again as he (along with every other incumbent governor) had to make tough decisions to balance the state budget.

All things were looking good for a Republican takeover of the Governor’s mansion…..until they decided to nominate wingnut Chris Christie and his trail of corruption and long history of foul tempered antics. A more moderate Republican (like Jersey’s last Republican Governor, Christine Todd Whitman) would probably be a solid favorite heading into tomorrow’s election. Instead, the GOP has decided to embrace the far right and go with Christie. For awhile it looked as if Christie, despite his wingnuttiness, was going to win. And then voters got to know him. Predictably, they didn’t like what they found out…and his numbers tanked accordingly (of course his bizarre antics, daring Corzine to call him fat, didn’t help).

With just about every poll close (and a few outliers in each direction), chances are votes will be counted long into Tuesday night and early Wednesday. The deciding factor may well come down to which candidate can peel the most support from Independent Chris Daggett (the type of conservative that CAN win in New Jersey….thankfully the GOP doesn’t like sensible conservatives these days). Many pollsters, not all, seem to think that the Daggett voters are more likely to break for Corzine.

Also in Corzine’s favor is the fact that New Jersey has become fools’ gold of sorts for the GOP. In just about every election since 2000 the state has been a toss-up until the last minute. Democrats are hoping the Corzine can follow in the footsteps of Kerry, Menedez and Obama and pull off a comfortable victory come election day.

Anyone who has followed politics for a long time could tell you the possible ramifications of a Christie win tomorrow. When Whitman defeated Florio in 1993, the GOP was able to regain national momentum and the 1994 midterms reflected their new-found enthusiasm. Anytime the GOP can take down a “Northeast Liberal” who is supported quite visibly by President Obama, they will see a big spike in fund raising. Corzine epitomizes every aspect of the “Big Government, Family values destroying, big spending, tax hiking” Democrat the GOP brainwashes their ill-informed supporters into believing.

SC GOP a bunch of bigots (what else is new)

From the wonderful state that has recently been shamed by Congressman Joe Wilson’s outburst and Governor Mark Sanford’s prurient escapades and a Facebook comparison between Michelle Obama and a gorilla comes yet another “WTF are they thinking?!” moment. Two GOP county chairmen (Edwin O. Merwin Jr. and James S. Ulmer Jr.) came up with this statement in the op-ed in a local newspaper:

There is a saying that the Jews who are wealthy got that way not by watching dollars, but instead by taking care of the pennies and the dollars taking care of themselves. By not using earmarks to fund projects for South Carolina and instead using actual bills, DeMint is watching our nation’s pennies and trying to preserve our country’s wealth and our economy’s viability to give all an opportunity to succeed

Perpetuating stereotypes one idiotic op-ed at a time. I’m sure the SC GOP will rush to these two morons’ defense, but the reality is that anytime you invoke a very well known (and historically damaging) stereotype of any group you deserve to be labeled as a bigot.

While this comment is offensive on its own, what is more troubling (but unsurprising at this point) is the continuing pattern of anti-semitic, xenophobic, racist, homophobic or sexist garbage being put into the media by the Party of Lincoln (who must be rolling in his proverbial grave at this nonsense).

None of this is particularly new. The GOP has long played up fears of the “other” using code words and images to gain and maintain power for a certain segment of society (Lee Atwater’s “Willie Horton ad” being perhaps the most famous and effective example). What IS different is the bluntness and/or stupidity of the modern Republican party when it comes to sensitive issues. They are already a white, Christian male dominated party. Rather than trying to be more inclusive, they are going full steam ahead to make their party more EXclusive.

The long national nightmare is over! More Snowe in the forcast?

It’s finally over. The Baucus bill was voted out of the Senate Finance Committee late this afternoon, passing by a vote of 14-9. Of course, most of the attention from the media and blogosphere alike has been on Republican Senator Olympia Snowe from Maine who bucked her party and voted for the bill. So what is the significance of Senator Snowe’s vote? What does it mean? And where do we head? Within minutes of the announcement of Snowe’s vote, writers, columnists and bloggers started filling pages upon pages with speculation. The Right seems unified in their response, as the leading Conservative blogs (RedState and FreeRepublic) have been littered with posts calling Snowe a “traitorous bitch” and that’s probably the nicest thing any of those folks had to say about it.

The left, however is a bit more diverse in reaction (shocking, right?). Some claim that this is great news for the reform efforts, others claim it is the beginning of the destruction of meaningful reform. The arguments are thus:

Snowe’s vote = Good! argument: We needed to get the bill out of the SFC. A Senate bill couldn’t go to the floor WITHOUT a SFC bill. Having the Baucus plan fail today would have at best stalled the process for a few months and at worst would have killed the reform efforts for the remainder of President Obama’s first term. Snowe’s vote was, in terms of passing the bill, irrelevant. The fact that she is willing to support some reform is a good sign, should the Democrats have problems getting their 60 votes for cloture (rumor has it somewhere between 52 and 57 Democrats would vote for cloture on a robust public option). If Sen. Snowe represents the “most conservative” that the bill will be, well that’s better than some conservaDem’s stances (Landrieu, Lincoln and the pair of Senator Nelsons). Her vote should be looked at as a way to get the bill out of committee, and to score points with her constituents (of which the vast majority favor a strong public option). As she said herself, her vote today is not indicative of her vote tomorrow.

Besides, we knew (at least those of us paying attention SHOULD have known) since June that whatever bill the SFC came up with would suck ass. The Baucus bill is awful – although perhaps less awful than some of us thought. The fact that the most conservative committee in Washington came up with the most conservative, piece of garbage bill, shouldn’t be a surprise. The important thing is that it’s out, it’s done and Max Baucus’ “gang of 6″ have much less power going forward

Snowe’s vote = Bad! argument:By voting for this bill, Sen. Snowe has given herself, and her preference for a triggered public option, a lot of sway in the bill-merging process. Obama and the White House seem to be hellbent on getting “bipartisanship” which means giving Snowe what she wants. A triggered public option is probably worse than no reform, so Snowe has severely undercut real reform

Ultimately, there is no way to tell right now how Snowe’s vote will influence the process going forward. The most realistic scenario is that she will either vote against the bill, but for cloture, or she will get some pork to help her vote for the bill. At this point, I’m not sure what she has to lose by voting for the final bill. Perhaps Snowe, representing the fairly blue Maine, could provide some cover for the conservaDems and Blue Dogs who don’t want to vote for any bill including a public plan.

So on we go to conference, where the long-finished HELP committee bill, written by Chris Dodd and the late, great Ted Kennedy, will be merged with the Baucus Bill. Responsible for coming up with the final Senate bill are Sen. Baucus, Senate Majority Leader Reid, Sen. Dodd and President Obama/Rahm Emanuel. What can we expect to happen from here?

We know Sen. Dodd, the point man for the HELP committee will push hard for a robust public plan. For all his shortcomings with the financial meltdown which have left him extremely vulnerable in the 2010 midterms, Dodd is fairly reliable for the progressives. In fact, his political future and reelection probably relies upon getting a strong public option into the final bill. Regardless of his motivations, he stopped by DailyKos to write a diary on his involvement in the process:

[W]e have come too far, and worked too hard, to settle for “pretty good.” And that’s why I plan to take a stand.

First, and let me be very clear about this: I am going to fight for a strong public option. The simple, undeniable fact is that a public option will save money – and it will introduce more choice and competition into an industry that badly needs both. It is the single best way to keep costs low for middle class families – and keep the insurance companies honest. And I am by no means ready to back down on making that argument.

Senator Reid, also vulnerable in the 2010 election, has said he favors a public option but is open to a trigger:

“‘My first choice is a public option, because I think it will create competition and make the insurance companies more honest,’ Reid said Thursday. ‘My No. 2 choice is the trigger that Snowe talked about.’ Reid said that he preferred the trigger, ‘which is a pretty doggone good idea,’ to the proposed co-operative model some moderate Democrats support.

We know where Baucus stands, unfortunately. So that leaves us with the White House. What will President Obama and Rahm Emanuel push for? Obama supports the public option, but has repeatedly said he is open to other ideas (co-ops, triggers). However, he must be smart enough to realize that a weak public plan, or no public plan will be political suicide for the Democrats. According to Sen. Rockefeller on the Ed Schultz show today, Obama is prepared to push strongly for the PO (Rocky seemed quite confident, in fact).

So one nightmare is over, the next has begun. The final Senate bill should be crafted within the month (so they say) and hopefully the merging of the House and Senate bills can commence (and finish?) by Thanksgiving.

Bob Dole: “Hey GOP! get on board with Health Care Reform”

On and on the health care reform debate goes. The teabag protests came and went in August, as millions hundreds of thou… a bunch of misguided conservatives with hate in their often confused and wild eyes took to the streets armed with their ignorance, racist signs and placards and cheesy slogans. The ever-so-patriotic teabaggers threw their American Flags on the ground and in the trash (literally
) and went home. As anyone who has followed the debate closely knows, the 6 weeks since the teabagging outbursts have been full of frustration and setbacks. But then a curious thing started happening….progress was being made. At a pace which makes continental drift look quick, Democrats in the Senate seemed to finally realize that they need to get on board with health care reform. Well most of them anyway (Sen. Nelson and Landrieu….what are you waiting for?).

Of course, the last couple of weeks have been spent focusing nearly entirely on the maddeningly frustrating Senate Finance Committee and Sen. Max Baucus’ pile of shit bill. We had Republican Sen. Jon Kyl work himself into a lather about not caring about maternity leave being covered by health insurance. We had this doozie from Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe supporting Republican Jim Bunning’s amendment to delay the process by 2 weeks

“I don’t know what’s happening that this has to be put on a fast track”

backdropped by a recent study showing that 45,000 Americans will die this year due to lack of health care. That works out to be about 1730 in those 2 weeks Sens. Snowe and Bunning. Yeah but, no rush. Seriously, take your time as hundreds and thousands of Americans die off, succumbing to treatable illnesses. It’s not like we haven’t been trying to fix this problem for nearly a century. It was the forefather of “Conservatism” (when that actually meant conserving our natural resources and finances), the great Teddy Roosevelt who first mentioned that we need universal health care. That was 94 years ago.

As it stands, the SFC’s garbage bill will hopefully come to a vote this week. Ironically, it is two Democrats – health care reform hero Jay Rockefeller and the disgruntled Ron Wyden – who may stall the process due to concerns over the bill. Assuming that is just posturing, or Baucus can wrangle some support from the moderates on the Right side of the aisle (i.e. Snowe), the bill will get out of committee and we can start fretting over what the SFC bill will look like when merged with the Senate HELP bill.

That brings us to the news, that retired Republican Senator, and one time Presidential hopeful, Bob Dole had some choice words for the health care reform obstructionists:

“Sometimes people fight you just to fight you…They don’t want Reagan to get it, they don’t want Obama to get it, so we’ve got to kill it…Health care is one of those things. Now we’ve got to do something.”

Aside from the fact that Dole was one of the key figures in killing then-President Clinton’s health care reform bill in 1994, he is making some sense. Or is he merely reflecting the mood of the country? The Public Option remains at 65-75% support nationwide. The CBO, which is getting far too much consideration in this matter, projects even the shitty Baucus bill will CUT the federal deficit by $81B. Although, as is pointed out in the Salon.com article:

“The point of health care reform is not to reduce the deficit,” says Jacki Schechner, a spokeswoman for Health Care for America Now, a labor-backed organization that wants reform to include a public insurance option and lower costs more. “It’s to make health care more affordable for America’s families and businesses. Every penny of the $81 billion should be used to help correct the fact that families still won’t be able to afford premiums and out-of-pocket costs under the Senate Finance bill as it stands now. The bill leaves health care much too expensive.”

The fact that health care reform is getting semi-serious traction as a way to reduce the enormous Republican-created deficit (although all us progressives have known this for awhile) makes it tough for the GOP to sell their talking points lies that reform will bankrupt America. Perhaps more importantly, the push to emphasize the fiscal logic of a reform bill will give cover to the spineless and corrupt jellyfish Blue Dog Democrats. Not that that crowd NEEDS cover, as the Public Option polls extremely well in the vast majority of states represented by Blue Dogs.

But it gets even better. Dole wasn’t through making a pitch for the GOP to come to their senses:

“This is one of the most important measures members of Congress will vote on in their lifetimes,” the former Republican Senate majority leader and presidential candidate told an audience in Kansas City today. “If we don’t do it this year I don’t know when we’re gonna do it.

Chances are the Right will ignore Dole. They have a tendency to cannibalize their own when they stray from the party-line. We’ll hear “Conservatives” far and wide renounce former Sen. Dole and claim he was “too weak” and “out of touch” and “never any good anyway” and whatnot.

However, as the health care reform debate marches on, it is becoming increasingly difficult for anyone with a shred of common sense to oppose some sort of meaningful reform.

Obama: Small, power-mad French guy?

The dog days of summer are upon us and still the battle for health care rages on. The GOP, becoming increasingly desperate, would like us to believe that they are playing the part of the Seventh Coalition to President Obama’s Napoleon Bonaparte. It was the predictably loathsome Republican South Carolina Senator Jim Demint who decided that the new GOP strategy was to draw comparisons between health care and the famous Battle of Waterloo:

“If we’re able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.”

Side note for Sen. DeMint: The French have the best health care system in the world by most metrics. Using anything related to France as an anti-health care talking point seems quite shortsighted.

The implication, of course, is that by preventing a health care bill from being passed, the Republicans can effectively neuter Obama’s administration just 6 months in. Far fetched? Not so much. It was 15 years ago when the GOP managed to pull off a “victory” in similar style. President Clinton’s ambitious agenda never really came to fruition due in large part to the Republican smackdown of “Hillary Care”. How many innocent Americans have died in the last 15 years because they couldn’t afford health care? And what have the Republicans offered us to fix this mess? Nothing. Well, they have given us more hilarious talking points. This time however, it looks like the Left has a chance. President Obama fired back early this week, in some of the strongest statements he has made on health care:

“I know that there are those in this town who openly declare their intention to block reform. It’s a familiar Washington script that we’ve seen many times before. These opponents of reform would rather score political points than offer relief to Americans who’ve seen premiums double and costs grow three times faster than wages.”

Furthermore, a direct shot at DeMint (watch the video at ThinkProgress if you missed it):

ust the other day, one Republican Senator said, and I’m quoting him now, “if we’re able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.” Think about that. This isn’t about me. This isn’t about politics. It is about a health care system that is breaking American families, breaking America’s businesses and breaking America’s economy.

The somewhat amusing story that most people are ignoring, is that DeMint isn’t coming up with anything new here (shocking, right?). It was Dick Morris, the tax-cheating, prostitute-soliciting, former Beltway insider turned Faux-News talking head, who originally came up with the Health care/Waterloo comparison in his aptly titled column (published in June) in The Hill “Healthcare: Obama’s Waterloo?”:

Of course, the prudent thing to do is postpone healthcare changes until the economy generates some revenues and trims the deficit. But the socialist in the White House can’t do that. He’s got to strike while his congressional majority is hot. So he is forcing his administration and his party to choose among unpalatable choices to finance his program. His demand may be a bridge too far, endangering his popularity with the American people.

Good to see that the talking points haven’t really changed. My question is, where the fuck were Morris and his merry band of fiscal hawks when the Bush administration handed out trillions of dollars for their misadventures in the Middle East? You can throw the ConservaDem Senators like Ben Nelson into that grouping as well. Here we are, with a healthcare system which is worse than some third-world countries and yet costs TWICE as much as any other industrialized country, and fixing it is “too expensive” for the Conservative do-nothings in Congress. Never mind that much of the financing for healthcare will come from reallocating money already in the system. Never mind that President Obama has laid out a pretty cut and dry method of paying for it. Never mind that President Obama has repeated that he wants any reform to be deficit neutral. All of those things matter not to the Conservatives in the nations capital.

The stakes are high for all of us. The healthcare industry is crippling this country economically and killing tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of Americans every year. That’s what’s at stake for you and I. For the Republicans, they know that if they lose here, and I tend to think that they will eventually, they will become utterly irrelevant politically for a few cycles. Imagine a world in which the Democrats are known as the party which “Brought you affordable health care”. Even shitty Democrats like Nelson, Bayh, Landrieu et al could win on that platform. Which is why the GOP is fighting so hard. It has nothing, NOTHING to do with fiscal conservatism. It has NOTHING to do with having better or different ideas. The GOP has, for all intents and purposes, admitted they don’t have anything new to offer. It has NOTHING to do with saving (and improving the quality of) American lives and stabilizing the economy. It has everything to do with the GOP realizing that their proverbial goose is cooked if they lose on healthcare. The reality is that if the GOP wins on healthcare reform, we all lose.

The GOP’s week worth of racism (and it’s only Tuesday)

These guys (and gals) make it too easy, don’t they? The party of old white men is back at it. Despite it only being Tuesday, there have now been three new cases of racism within the GOP this week.

First, and perhaps most egregiously, the Young Republicans elected the utterly despicable Audra Shay to be their national chairman. As The Huffington Post reported:

After an effigy of Sarah Palin was hung, she said “What no ‘Obama in a noose? … I am wondering if the guys with the Palin noose would care if we had a bunch of homosexuals in a noose.”

John Avlon, over at the Daily Beast originally broke the story that one of Shay’s Facebook friends had posted the following:

“Obama Bin Lauden [sic] is the new terrorist… Muslim is on there side [sic]… need to take this country back from all of these mad coons… and illegals.”

As Avlon reports:

Eight minutes after that, at 2:02, Shay weighed in on Piker’s comments: “You tell em Eric! lol.”

Sounds an awful lot like Ms. Shay is supporting her friend’s position that the “mad coons” (The Obama family, one would assume) have taken over the country.

The second case of GOP racism came from an unlikely (sort of) source: Michael Steele. The RNC Chair, nothing more than a token minority given a leadership position as a response to the election of President Obama, has quickly become famous for his outlandish and absurd comments. Remember this one?:

We want to convey that the modern-day GOP looks like the conservative party that stands on principles. But we want to apply them to urban-surburban hip-hop settings.”

But, he elaborated with a laugh, “we need to uptick our image with everyone, including one-armed midgets.”

Now obviously Steele recognizes the plight of the GOP with minorities. Right now, only 5% of Black voters identify themselves as Republicans. (And this has been the case since well before President Obama arrived on the scene). Since 2004, the GOP has lost huge ground with Latino voters. Ben Smith points out:

[McCain] got 31 percent of the Latino vote to the 44 percent that George W. Bush took in 2004, according to exit polls

Well, today, the dunce-like Steele was back at it; this time reinforcing stereotypes of African-Americans. His idea for the Republicans to gain ground with Black voters?

“fried chicken and potato salad.”

It’s stupefying, really it is. Steele, of all people, should understand the idiocy of reinforcing racial stereotypes.

The third incident comes from an unsurprising source – the noted racist Republican Senator Jeff Sessions. A quick recap of Sessions’ racist past:

During a 1981 murder investigation involving the Ku Klux Klan, Sessions was heard by several colleagues commenting that he “used to think they [the Klan] were OK” until he found out some of them were “pot smokers.”

Just one in a long line of racist anecdotes about Sessions. Another doozy:

J. Gerald Hebert, a career Justice Department lawyer, testified that Sessions had once called the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union “un-American” and “Communist-inspired.” He said that they “forced civil rights down the throats of people.”….Hebert also testified that Sessions had called a white civil rights lawyer a “disgrace to his race” for litigating voting rights cases.

Check out Rachel Maddow commenting on Sessions here

Which brings us to today’s comments from Session at Supreme Court Nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearing:

(Thanks to ThinkProgress for posting the video so quickly)

You voted not to reconsider the prior case. You voted to stay with the decision of the circuit, and in fact, your vote was the key vote. Had you voted with Judge Cabranes, himself of Puerto Rican ancestry, had you voted with him, you could have changed that case. So in truth you weren’t bound by that case.

As I listened to this live, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. What does Judge Cabranes’ ethnicity have to do with the court ruling question? Sessions, rather blatantly, is showing that he thinks Puerto Rican’s are monolithic in their interpretations of the law. It’s no different than saying “Well they all look alike” about a particular racial group.

In a party already struggling to overcome the label of being an exclusionary party, embracing racists like Shay and Sessions confirms what we already know: The GOP isn’t interested in a “Big Tent” philosophy. They know that they can’t win with minorities, because their core principles are against minorities’ best interests. Whether it is the continued neglect of the urban poor, the ignored realities of gender discrimination in the workplace, the anti-gay rhetoric dressed up in the guise of religion or the anti-Mexican, anti-Muslim xenophobia and paranoia, the GOP time and time again shows itself to be an antiquated, loathsome dinosaur of a political party.

Brownback: Mermaids more important than Americans

Anyone who has followed the health care debate in the slightest knows that one of the Republicans’ biggest talking points against health care reform is that we, as a country, have “too much on our plate” and reforming health care is “too ambitious” and President Obama needs to “focus on our current problems” (like the economy which the GOP broke and those pesky illegal wars the GOP started….). This argument shouldn’t come as surprise, as it’s the same tired refrain that Conservatives have used for more than 60 years,

Back in 1947, President Truman introduced the idea of a universal health care plan. Conservatives shot it down, criticizing it for being too ambitious. We had just gotten out of WW2 and were quickly heading into Korea. Conservatives argued it just wasn’t the right time.

56 years later, President Clinton introduced a health care bill which acquired the nickname “Hillary Care” due to then First Lady Hillary Clinton’s strong advocacy. Again, the Conservatives in Congress, led by House Speaker Newt Gingrich defeated the bill. It was too ambitious they said. We had too many other problems to deal with first.

16 years later, many Republicans are still pushing this meme. I guess their idea is to continue kicking the ball down the road, while millions more Americans die unnecessary deaths and our economy continues to crumble. Not that I don’t understand their logic. The GOP damn well knows that a successful health care reform bill will all but cripple their already floundering chances for national political relevancy.

The independent Commonwealth Fund recently released some grim numbers. Their research indicates that

The United States places last among 19 countries when it
comes to deaths that could have been prevented by access to timely and effective health care….If the U.S. had performed as well as the top
three countries out of the 19 industrialized countries in the study there would have been 101,000 fewer deaths in the U.S. per year by the end of the study period.

So 101,000 Americans dying unnecessary deaths, hundreds of thousands more (one every 30 seconds) declaring bankruptcy due to medical costs, health premiums rising between 15-30% a year, America falling behind even some third-world countries in terms of infant mortality rates, life expectancy and mortality of pregnant women, a total boat anchor weighing down our economy…….dealing with this is just “too much”. We don’t have time for this, the Republicans claim.

So what DO we have time for? Well, according to Republican Senator Sam Brownback, we have plenty of time to ensure that mermaids are never a reality. Yes, mermaids:

Now, a quick refresher on Sen. Brownback. He is one of the staunchest anti-gay crusaders in a party full of them. He represents the Fundamentalist Evangelical Christian core of the post-Bush GOP. His new piece of legislation that he has, apparently, been working on quite diligently is titled the Human-Animal Hybrid Prohibition Act of 2009. Brownback’s statement:

This legislation works to ensure that our society recognizes the dignity and sacredness of human life…Creating human-animal hybrids, which permanently alter the genetic makeup of an organism, will challenge the very definition of what it means to be human and is a violation of human dignity and a grave injustice

Emphasis added by me to illustrate the perverse and hypocritical nature that oozes off of every press release a Republican makes these day. The GOP doesn’t give a DAMN about the dignity of life once you’re outside of the womb.

Just to recap:

- 101,000 Americans will die this year due to lack of affordable health care

- Preventing these deaths is an issue that President Obama and Congress doesn’t have time for

- Banning mermaids is essential to ensuring the quality of American’s lives

- Republicans still clueless hypocrites