The Year of the (Anti) Woman?

You NEED to watch this video, but be warned. It’s disturbing and shocking, and not at all appropriate for children:

Republican Linda McMahon is running for the United States Senate, and she’s funding her race with the millions she earned peddling the "entertainment" you just watched to kids. Outrageous violence. Explicit sexual content. Extremely misogynistic story lines. One has to wonder, did more graphic, more anti-woman programming lead to higher profits for Linda McMahon and her “entertainment” enterprise?

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Bartering is Back!

Get those roosters ready. Bartering is back!

Senate candidate Sue Lowden’s suggestion that assorted farm animals might be an important part of health care reform gave Nevada Republicans enough pause that they instead chose Sharron Angle as their nominee. But it seems that Lowden isn’t the only fan of trading cows for CAT scans.

Enter Kentucky Republican Rand Paul. Paul’s been in the news plenty for his abhorrent views on the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and his criticism of President Obama’s treatment of British Petroleum. But a 2002 interview suggests that Paul also supports trading chickens for checkups.

“We need to get insurance of out of the way and let the consumer interact with their doctor the way they did basically before World War II,” Paul said.

This is the exact same argument voiced by ...  Read more »

Sen. Vitter, R-BP

It’s one of the largest man-made disasters ever, and Sen. David Vitter, R-LA, is worried about protection. Not protecting the oceans. Not protecting the beaches. Not protecting the small business owners in his state.

Nope. Vitter is concerned about protecting British Petroleum – a foreign corporation.

Vitter wants the United States Senate to pass a liability cap. His legislation would limit BP’s liability to the equivalent of BP’s last four quarters of profit, because making a corporation pay to fully clean up its mess just seems so … unfair. Or something.

Luckily, Charlie Melancon, who’s running to replace Vitter in the Senate, is fighting for Louisianans, not oil corporations. Melancon supports lifting the liability cap on oil companies that cause spills, and he’s been highly critical of BP since the spill began. “It doesn’t appear they have been honest with us from the start,” Melancon told a local TV station.

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First Chickengate, Now Busgate

Sue Lowden sure knows how to keep herself in the headlines – but not in a good way.
 
First, the Nevada Republican Senate candidate suggested that the cure for our ailing health care system is bartering with your doctor. Such as: I’ll give you three chickens if you give me a checkup, Doc. Not surprisingly, Democrats – and Lowden’s main Republican competitor, Danny Tarkanian – seized upon this tidbit, and made Lowden a national laughingstock.
 
That was Chickengate. Now, here comes Busgate. It appears that Lowden may have broken campaign finance laws by taking a supporter’s luxury RV to tool around Nevada in comfort and style.
 
“A campaign contributor is ‘leasing’ Lowden the luxury RV she is using as her campaign bus, according to the Lowden campaign. But her name is on the title with the supporter, Carl Guiduci, which would indicate they co-own the bus,” the Las Vegas Sun reported.
 
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics ...  Read more »

GOP Scalded by Tea

Republicans soon might wish the Tea Party had never started.

On Saturday, three-term Republican Sen. Bob Bennett failed to get enough votes to compete in the Utah GOP primary on June 22. Why? He just wasn’t conservative enough for a party increasingly driven by the fringe right.

“He’s a moderate, and I don't want a moderate,” delegate Pam Wilson told Politico. “I don’t want somebody on the fence. I want someone completely on the right. I get the rhetoric in Washington that he’s a conservative. I don’t care. I want a conservative who I think is a conservative.”

Utah’s Republican primary voters will choose between Tim Bridgewater and Mike Lee. Both advocate revoking citizenship rights for children of undocumented workers born in the United States, shutting down the Department of Education and moving to a highly regressive “flat tax” or "fair tax."

Utah isn’t the only state where the Republican Party is being ...  Read more »