Motley Moose – Archive

(Proudly cross-posted at C4O Democrats)

This frightens me. I’m sorry, but I just can’t ignore it any longer. I need to ask this question. Is President Obama considering privatizing Social Security and/or Medicare?

Ours was a bit like the the Obama’s. Ani works on Saturday, and even though it was a bit of a rush, we had a wonderful evening. Oh, and lots and lots of chocolate was exchanged, but no buildings were actually scaled.

Love is a scary thing sometimes. How do we know when it really is love? Jib Jab has a couple of peas explain.

Hi all, John Allen brought out some points (below) on the 1000th Diary thread this week – about the site's direction. I had seen some news about Soapblox going down a while back, which was about the time I discovered The Moose.  Over at MyDD, some threads started by Shai Sachs about a creating a Drupal solution for collaborative blogging:

• Soapbox Meltdown and Drupal
• A Drupal-based DailyKos
• Roadmap for a Drupal-based progressive community blog platform 
• First release of Drupal progressive blogging platform
• Blog-based project groups and Drupal

We reject, as a nation, the notion that we must mortgage off our futures and our standard of living simply to ensure the health of our loved ones.

Let’s examine a hypothetical, here: say Uncle Sam pays for the medical schooling of every doctor and health specialist in America, so that said doctors and specialists arrive to their first duty station free of any college debts. Would health care costs go down?

It has been a year since Ed Markey pushed this:

Now it’s time to see where we are today.

Well, for one thing, Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (My Senator from West Virginia) last week established a subcommittee on Communications & Technology, which would have a transparent, neutral net as its goal. Best of all, he made Sen. John Kerry (D – MA) the Chairman. Kerry has no love for the attempts by Comcast, AT&T and other corporate media giants in taking over the Internet.

This from Broadcasting & Cable:

Kerry is on the record as critical of the demise of the FCC’s fairness doctrine, calling that demise one of the “most profound changes in the balance of the media,” in a 2007 radio interview, adding that conservatives have been able to “squeeze down and squeeze out opinion of opposing views. I think it has been a very important transition in the imbalance of our public dialog.”

He also has been critical of media consolidation and pushed the FCC to allow unlicensed devices in TV white spaces, something broadcasters fought hard against.

Kerry teamed with then-Senator Barack Obama to try and block the FCC’s relaxation of the newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership ban.

Kerry is also a fan of codifying network neutrality principles, something cable and phone networks would prefer evolved along with their industry.

We’ll all be watching to see what happens.

Under The LobsterScope

So only 3 Republicans voted for the Stimulus in Congress. That doesn’t mean they don’t want money from it sent to their states.

Here is Specter on the passage of the Stimulus Bill:

“When I came back to the cloak room after coming to the agreement a week ago today, one of my colleagues said, ‘Arlen, I’m proud of you.’ My Republican colleague said, ‘Arlen, I’m proud of you.’ I said, ‘Are you going to vote with me?’ And he said, ‘No, I might have a primary.’ And I said, ‘Well, you know very well I’m going to have a primary.’

…

“I think there are a lot of people in the Republican caucus who are glad to see this action taken without their fingerprints, without their participation.

…

(When asked how many of his Republican colleagues really supported the bill:)

“I think a sizable number. I think a good part of the caucus agrees with the person I quoted, but I wouldn’t want to begin to speculate on numbers.”

Hmmmm.

Sooner or later they’ll either get bipartisan or be gone altogether.

Under The LobsterScope

I’m still trying to figure out how I missed this last week.

For those of us who had allowed the unfortunate continued existence of hatemonger Fred Phelps, Pastor of Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, to momentarily sink below our radar, his “organization” made itself all too visible on February 5, 2009 when anti-gay protesters descended upon Shawnee Mission East High School in Prairie Village, Kansas. The school was targeted because it has formed what it refers to as a “Gay and Straight Alliance,” and because the students elected an openly gay homecoming king in 2007. But this time, when Phelps’ dozen or so protesters appeared to shout and harass the public, they were not met by the Patriot Guard. They were confronted instead by hundreds of students, parents, and school staff who gathered outside the school to counter-protest.

Photo Credit: Tammy Ljungblad/The Kansas City Star 

The topic below was originally posted on my blog, the Intrepid Liberal Journal.

In the grown up world, honorable and reasonable people may initially disagree but eventually compromise upon a collective review of empirical evidence. It was in this spirit, that the nascent Obama administration reached out to Republicans with respect to their proposed American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which finally passed both houses of congress yesterday.

The Senate has voted to approve the stimulus bill and it is on it’s way to President Obama’s (doesn’t it feel great saying those words) desk.

But something about this really stinks.

A small sampling of current Republican lies talking points spin lies.

One of the most frustrating things about being a progressive in America is that we not only have to fight to get a fair hearing in the media we also have to battle the disinformation pushed by the Right.

Politics would be a lot more useful to the citizens of this country if there was a legitimate discussion about the pros and cons of policy proposals. Unfortunately, the Right doesn’t seem to want that discussion. I can’t really blame them since their policies have been shown to be faulty. All they seem to be left with are lies about the proposals offered by the Democrats.

The debate over the stimulus bill offers several examples of those Republican lies. Here are three outright lies that have been pushed by Republicans in the last few days.