Who feels confident when a leader cries during times of National Duress and Emergency?

John Boehner's latest public crying episode has gotten Capitol Hill
talking, and some are speculating that there's a simple explanation
for the waterworks: He's drunk. "For years, political professionals
have quietly discussed Boehner's drinking," writes Matt Lewis of
Politics Daily. "Some have told me off the record that his mannerisms
remind them of that of an alcoholic."

Boehner's love of wine is well-documented. He rose to power in part by
throwing lavish parties, and is frequently spotted at Capitol Hill
night spots. A 2008 Washington Examiner profile described him as a
"heavy-smoking, hard-drinking former linebacker." There's even a
"Drunk Boehner" blog. So is the drinking to blame for the crying?
Politico once noted that Boehner "cries more often later in the day,"
and he often seems to slur his words right before such outbursts. Then
again, Lewis quips, "If the Terry Schiavo case taught us anything,
it's not to diagnose something via video."

http://www.politico.com/blogs/thecrypt/0507/Boehner_cries_again_getting_a_rep_as_a_weeper.html

http://www.newser.com/story/107425/john-boehner-on-60-minutes-im-an-emotional-guy.html

http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/12/15/john-boehners-crying-is-he-drinking-too-much/

http://washingtonexaminer.com/local/2008/11/fighting-right

http://boehnerbooze.wordpress.com/

Sarah Palin opposes collective blame for monstrous crimes, unless they're committed by Muslims.

Sarah Palin, Blood-Libel Hypocrite
Sarah Palin opposes collective blame for monstrous crimes, unless
they're committed by Muslims.

By William Saletan
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 12, 2011, at 11:55 AM ET

Sarah Palin is outraged. In a Facebook post this morning, she responds
to critics who have suggested that her target map of Democrats, which
put a crosshairs-like symbol over the district of Rep. Gabrielle
Giffords, D-Ariz., may have contributed to the Tucson shooting. Palin
writes:

After this shocking tragedy, I listened at first puzzled, then with
concern, and now with sadness, to the irresponsible statements from
people attempting to apportion blame for this terrible event.
President Reagan said, "We must reject the idea that every time a
law's broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time
to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable
for his actions." Acts of monstrous criminality stand on their own.
They begin and end with the criminals who commit them, not
collectively with all the citizens of a state, not with those who
listen to talk radio, not with maps of swing districts used by both
sides of the aisle, not with law-abiding citizens who respectfully
exercise their First Amendment rights at campaign rallies …
journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that
serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to
condemn. That is reprehensible.

That's what Palin believes. Each person is solely accountable for his
actions. Acts of monstrous criminality "begin and end with the
criminals who commit them." It's wrong to hold others of the same
nationality, ethnicity, or religion "collectively" responsible for
mass murders.

Unless, of course, you're talking about Muslims. In that case, Palin
is fine with collective blame. In fact, she's enthusiastic about it.
Palin was the first national politician to join the jihad against what
she called the "planned mosque at Ground Zero" (which wasn't a mosque
and wasn't at Ground Zero, but let's cut her some slack). In her
statement, issued six months ago on the same Facebook page where she
now denounces collective blame, she wrote this:

To build a mosque at Ground Zero is a stab in the heart of the
families of the innocent victims of those horrific attacks. … I agree
with the sister of one of the 9/11 victims (and a New York resident)
who said: "This is a place which is 600 feet from where almost 3,000
people were torn to pieces by Islamic extremists. I think that it is
incredibly insensitive and audacious really for them to build a
mosque, not only on that site, but to do it specifically so that they
could be in proximity to where that atrocity happened."

The last bit is a falsehood—proximity wasn't the motive for choosing
the site—but again, let's cut Palin some slack. They key phrase to
focus on is "a mosque." Palin used it twice—once in the quote, and
once in her own words—so it can't be passed off as inadvertent. Her
objection wasn't just to a specific imam or sect, much less to an
identifiable terrorist. It was to any Islamic house of worship near
Ground Zero.

Palin has never retracted this position. Indeed, she has persisted in
her opposition to any mosque near Ground Zero. Her position is that
the act of monstrous criminality on 9/11 doesn't end with the
criminals who committed it. Its stigma extends to any mosque near the
site. All Muslims should yield to that stigma. All Muslims are
responsible.

"Blood libel," as defined by The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World
Religions, is historically targeted not at a country but at a
religion. Palin's campaign against any Muslim house of worship near
Ground Zero, based on group blame for terrorism, fits that definition
more closely than does any current accusation against the Tea Party.

It didn't matter to Palin that the imam behind the "mosque" (which was
actually an Islamic community center two blocks from Ground Zero) had
denounced terrorism. Shortly after 9/11, the imam, Faisal Abdul Rauf,
appeared on 60 Minutes and was asked this question:

Ed Bradley: What would you say to people in this country, who, looking
at what happens in the Middle East, would associate Islam with
fanaticism, with terrorism?

Abdul Rauf: Fanaticism and terrorism have no place in Islam. That's
just as absurd as associating Hitler with Christianity or David Koresh
with Christianity. There are always people who will do peculiar things
and think that they are doing things in the name of their religion.
But the Quran—you know, God says in the Quran that they think that
they're doing right, but they're doing wrong.

Palin ignored the imam's denunciation of violence. Now she repudiates
the massacre in Tucson and expresses outrage that anyone would
associate her with it.

In today's Facebook post, Palin writes: "Recall how the events of 9-11
challenged our values and we had to fight the tendency to trade our
freedoms for perceived security. And so it is today." Indeed. But when
the events of 9/11 challenged our values, Palin surrendered. A decade
later, she remains willing to trade freedom, not for security, but for
"sensitivity" to her supporters' anger at Muslims generally. She's
willing to issue blood libels and sacrifice people's freedoms. She
just doesn't want the same done to her.

We're Arizona shooting victims too, says Tea Party co-founder

Trent Humphries says killings fallout is evolving into conspiracy to
destroy Tea Party and silence criticism of government

Chris McGreal in Tucson
guardian.co.uk,  Tuesday 11 January 2011 19.30 GMT

A nine-year-old girl lies in the morgue. A member of Congress faces a
lifetime of struggle to recover from a bullet in the brain. A city is
bracing itself for a string of funerals as it tries to fathom the
carnage.

But Trent Humphries says there is another innocent victim left by
Jared Lee Loughner's killing of six people and wounding of 14 others
in his assassination attempt against Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.
It is his Tea Party movement and, more particularly, his family. The
killings, he says, are evolving into a conspiracy to destroy his
organisation and silence criticism of the government.

Humphries is the co-founder of Tucson's Tea Party, a movement besieged
by accusations that its use of the rhetoric of armed resistance
against political opponents played a role in the shootings.

The local sheriff, Clarence Dupnik, quickly pointed the finger at the
growing vitriol, hate and anger directed against the government on
talk radio and by Tea Party supporters in Arizona, where Democrats and
liberals from President Obama to Giffords are portrayed as enemies of
the people, un-American or Nazis.

Giffords herself warned that the Tea Party favourite, Sarah Palin, was
"firing people up" with a campaign poster that put the Democratic
party congresswoman in the crosshairs of a rifle.

Humphries is having none of it. "A lot have taken as gospel that the
sheriff says that this was caused by talk radio, by Tea Party
extremists, that that must be the case. I think it's done a lot of
damage. It's given people the idea that somebody like my wife and I
caused this murder. There's no evidence. And there's no evidence Sarah
Palin caused this murder," he said. "The Democrats are using this
opportunity to bludgeon their opponents. People don't want to hear
that it was just some stupid, evil act that had no bearing in
rationality. They want it to make sense."

There's no doubt that some people are blaming Humphries directly. He
accuses the sheriff of prompting a string of accusatory emails. One
said: "You people are responsible for the murder of a child, a judge
and seven other innocents today. May you rot in hell."

Another accuser wrote: "It's time to change your message of hate. If

not, get out of politics because the American people are not going to
take it any longer. We want our country back."

Humphries, who runs a computer company and once ran for a seat in the
state legislature but lost, is baffled. He says he too is grieving
after one of his neighbours, Dorwan Stoddard, was killed shielding his
wife from Loughner's bullets. She was wounded. But from the vigils
outside the Tucson hospital where Giffords is being treated to the
corridors of Congress, people are pointing the finger at the Tea
Party. In his own city, that attention has focused on Humphries, whose
organisation threw its support behind Giffords's opponent in
November's election, Jesse Kelly.

Kelly, a former marine who served in Iraq, published a controversial
campaign advert which included the lines: "Get on Target for Victory
in November. Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office. Shoot a fully
automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly." Asked if that wasn't a kind of
incitement, Humphries moves to his computer and finds a picture of
Giffords brandishing an AK-47 several years ago.

"Guns are a big thing in Arizona. It's a culture. Giffords owns guns,"
he said. "You have President Obama telling a rally that we punish our
enemies. You have him saying things like: if they bring a knife, we
bring a gun. This is not something limited to the Tea Party movement."

Pressed on whether he was concerned when he heard Giffords's warning
about Palin's use of gunsights and calls for supporters not to retreat
but "reload" in fighting Democrats, Humphries did not retreat. "It's
political gamesmanship. The real case is that she [Giffords] had no
security whatsoever at this event. So if she lived under a constant
fear of being targeted, if she lived under this constant fear of this
rhetoric and hatred that was seething, why would she attend an event
in full view of the public with no security whatsoever?" he said. "For
all the stuff they accuse her [Palin] of, that gun poster has not done
a tenth of the damage to the political discourse as what we're hearing
right now. There are people who are genuinely confused, scared, and I
understand it. But there are also people who are deliberately
manipulating this event and tragedy for political ends."

Whether the accusations against the Tea Party are fair or not,
Humphries acknowledges that the movement will feel the political
fallout. "Do I think there's going to be blowback and people who are
upset? Yes, in large part due to what the sheriff said. That's the
tragedy for my family and what we're trying to do politically," he
said. "There's a city election coming up next year and I'm sure
this'll be used as a club and a hammer at that point to say: well,
you're all just gun-crazy nuts and we can't listen to a word you say,
you killed Gabby Giffords."

Humphries says also that one consequence is likely to be fewer guns in
politics. "I'm pretty sure that for a little while yet you won't be
seeing any politician holding an AK-47 or an M16. I'm pretty sure
that's going to go away, and the last place that would go away is
Arizona," he said.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011

ANGLE'S 'SECOND AMENDMENT REMEDIES' Angle won't be able to run from this indefinitely.

ANGLE'S 'SECOND AMENDMENT REMEDIES'.... Of all the issues with Sharron
Angle, the extremist Republican Senate candidate in Nevada, perhaps
the most frightening is her willingness to talk about armed
insurrection against the United States government. Her policy
positions make her appear nutty, but this portion of her rhetorical
repertoire makes her appear dangerous.

Given that Angle has spoken publicly about the possibility more than
once, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, a conservative paper, asked the
Senate candidate to explain what she means when she talks about
"Second Amendment remedies" to political disputes. Angle seemed
annoyed by the question.

"I can't believe people are even asking that," Angle said in the brief
interview. "I'm very much a proponent of the Second Amendment and the
Constitution. But what we have to focus on here is a movement, a
movement that's about retiring Harry Reid" by voting him out of
office."

This vague and unhelpful answer came the same day Angle literally ran
away from a journalist asking the same question.

This won't do. A candidate for the U.S. Senate, who has already won
her party's nomination, has talked openly about the possibility of the
armed overthrow of the government. Asked to clarify, she either flees
from journalists, or gives a non-answer. It's incumbent on all
candidates to explain their beliefs to voters, but in this case,
Angle's extremism makes the responsibility all the more acute.

Jon Chait explained, "There's been a lot of wild, loose rhetoric on
the right since Obama took office -- wilder and more mainstream than
the equivalent on the left under George W. Bush -- but Angle is really
taking things dangerously far. The protection of the law is not enough
to ensure the survival of a democracy. Democracies rely upon certain
social and cultural norms in order to survive. An important one is a
basic respect for the democratic process and a refusal to hint about
the idea of actual armed rebellion. Angle did not quite advocate armed
rebellion, but she did clearly egg it on it in a way that melds
prediction with encouragement....The alarming thing is not so much
what Angle said but how relatively little a ripple it has made.... It
really seems like a dangerous milestone is the darkening mood of the
American right."

Angle won't be able to literally run from this indefinitely.

Gabrielle Giffords' Prophetic Remarks on Palin's Crosshairs

Tucson Tea Party Founder Blames Giffords For Getting Shot: ‘The Real Case Is That She Had No Security’

In March 2010, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) warned that the rhetoric
from the tea parties and Sarah Palin was potentially dangerous. "I can
say that in the years that some of my colleagues have served — 20, 30
years — they've never seen it like this…when people do that, they've
gotta realize there's consequences to that action," she said on MSNBC.
Tuscon Tea Party co-founder Trent Humphries called Giffords' previous
concerns about violent rhetoric "political gamesmenship," claiming
that if Giffords was so concerned, then she is to blame for Saturday's
shootings because she "had no security whatsoever":

"It's political gamesmanship. The real case is that she [Giffords] had
no security whatsoever at this event. So if she lived under a constant
fear of being targeted, if she lived under this constant fear of this
rhetoric and hatred that was seething, why would she attend an event
in full view of the public with no security whatsoever?" he said. "For
all the stuff they accuse her [Palin] of, that gun poster has not done
a tenth of the damage to the political discourse as what we're hearing
right now."

Catherine Crabill, VA GOP Candidate We May Have To Resort To The Bullet Box (VIDEO)

Republicans' New Deficit-Cutting Rules Include a Long List of Exemptions

Republicans' New Deficit-Cutting Rules Include a Long List of
Exemptions

January 4, 2011 - by Donny Shaw

The new House operating rules being proposed by the incoming
Republican majority would generally require all bills that add to the
federal deficit to be offset with new spending cuts. But they have
written in a pretty substantial loophole for themselves. Under the
rule, the "budgetary effects" of a whole slate of Republican
legislative priorities would be exempt from the new offsetting rule,
including their bill to repeal the deficit-reducing Affordable Care
Act.

Here, straight form the rule itself, is the actual legislative
language of all the budgeting exemptions the Republicans are giving
themselves.

(h) EXEMPTIONS.—Until the adoption of the concurrent resolution on the
budget for fiscal year 2012, during the One Hundred Twelfth Congress,
an estimate under clause 4 of rule XXIX may—

(1) exempt the budgetary effects of legislation extending the Economic
Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001;

(2) exempt the budgetary effects of legislation extending the Jobs and
Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003;

(3) exempt the budgetary effects of legislation repealing the Patient
Protection and Affordable Care Act and the Health Care and Education
Affordability Reconciliation Act of 2010; or for deficit-neutral
legislation that solely reforms the Patient Protection and Affordable
Care Act and the Health Care and Education Affordability
Reconciliation Act of 2010 and the payment rates and related
parameters in accordance with subsections (d) and (f) of section 1848
of the Social Security Act (as scheduled on December 31, 2009, to be
in effect);

(4) exempt the budgetary effects of preventing a larger number of
taxpayers from becoming subject to the Alternative Minimum Tax as
compared with tax year 2008;

(5) Exempt the budgetary effects of extending the estate, gift, and
generation-skipping transfer tax provisions of title III of the Tax
Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act
of 2010;

(6) exempt the budgetary effects of legislation providing a 20 percent
deduction in gross income to small businesses; and

(7) exempt the budgetary effects of legislation implementing trade
agreements.

…In sum, the exemptions are for extending the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax
cuts, repealing Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. "Obamacare"), patching the
alternative minimum tax, extending the Bush-level estate tax rate,
cutting taxes for small businesses, and establishing foreign trade
deals.
Under the rule, these exemptions would apply until a legitimate budget
resolution has been agreed to. That means the Republicans will
probably have several months to hold votes on these issues without
having to consider spending-cut offsets or acknowledge that they are
being financed by adding to the deficit.

Repealing health-care reform would cost hundreds of billions of dollars -- and Eric Cantor knows it

Repealing health-care reform would cost hundreds of billions of
dollars -- and Eric Cantor knows it

By Ezra Klein

House Republicans are in a pickle: One of their new rules says that
new legislation must be paid for. But the health-care bill reduces the
federal deficit by more than $100 billion over the next 10 years.
Luckily, they've figured out an answer to their problem: They've
decided to simply exempt the repeal bill from the rules. That means
they're beginning the 112th Congress by lifting their own rules in
order to take a vote that will increase the deficit. Change we can
believe in, and all that.

Republicans are aware that this looks, well, horrible. So they're
trying to explain why their decision to lift the rule requiring fiscal
responsibility is actually fiscally responsible. Majority Leader Eric
Cantor got asked about this, and he returned the reporter's serve with
a volley of nonsense. "About the budget implications, I think most
people understand that the CBO did the job it was asked to do by the
then-Democrat majority, and it was really comparing apples to
oranges," Cantor said. "It talked about 10 years' worth of tax hikes
and six years' worth of benefits. Everyone knows beyond the 10-year
window, this bill has the potential to bankrupt this federal
government as well as the states."

That's all well and good -- but it's not true. Take Cantor's core
point: The health-care reform bill includes "10 years' worth of tax
hikes and six years' worth of benefits." There's nothing philosophical
about this statement. It can be checked with a simple look at the
spending tables the Congressional Budget Office published in their
analysis of the bill. And when you look at those tables, Cantor's
statement falls apart:

Roughly speaking, new spending is what counts as "benefits." Those are
the lines shooting up. New taxes are the lighter blue part of bars
pointing down. In years one, two, and three, new benefits are larger
than or matched with new taxes. In year four, that's not true, but the
difference is fairly small. And in the six years after that, even
Cantor admits the benefits match or overwhelm the taxes.

So as an empirical matter, what Cantor is saying just isn't true. But
just for the record, it's also wrong as a theoretical matter:
Comparing 10 years of saving and working with six years of spending is
not comparing apples to oranges. Parents will routinely work harder
(revenue increases) and save more (spending cuts) for decades in order
to help their children pay for college. That's 18 years of raising
revenues and cutting costs in return for four years of spending on
benefits. An accountant wouldn't look at that and say he couldn't
assess the wisdom of the decision because it's apples-to-oranges. An
accountant would happily note that that's how you pay for things when
you're being responsible. Cantor's party might be out of practice on
that, given the way they paid -- or, to be more specific, didn't pay
-- for the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit, but it doesn't make it
any less true.

As for the period "beyond the 10-year window," the Congressional
Budget Office -- which is now comparing "apples to apples," as the law
is delivering full benefits for all 10 of the next 10 years -- says
the law saves vastly more money in its second decade: "The legislation
will reduce federal deficits during the decade beyond the 10-year
budget window relative to those projected under current law—with a
total effect in a broad range around one-half percent of GDP." That's
in the neighborhood of a trillion dollars.

What's important about Cantor's argument is not that he's wrong. It's
why he's saying something he knows to be wrong. There are plenty of
reasons to oppose the health-care reform bill. You might not want to
spend that money insuring people, or you might not think the
legislation goes far enough in reforming the system. But as a matter
of arithmetic, using the math that Congress always uses, the bill
saves money. It cuts enough spending and raises enough taxes to more
than pay for itself, both in the first 10 years and in the second 10
years. In fact, Democrats added that second metric, which is not
typically a hoop that legislation has to jump through, in order to
specifically allay concerns that the legislation would backload its
costs. Instead, as CBO said, it ramps up its savings.

But Cantor and the GOP know full well that the bill is unpopular
largely because people think it increases the deficit. Polls have
shown that only 15 percent of Americans know that CBO said it will
reduce the deficit. If, in the repeal fight, it becomes widely
understood that the bill reduces the deficit, it will become more
popular. So it's crucial, as the repeal effort goes forward, for
Republicans to become much more brazen in falsely asserting that the
bill doesn't really reduce the deficit, and that even if the CBO does
say it reduces the deficit, that they're saying that because they've
been tricked somehow. But CBO wasn't tricked. If it were, Cantor, who
has a staff dedicated to figuring these things out, would have a
better argument than the one he's offering