Unreported

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President Obama has a new chief of staff named William Daley, and he and John Boehner (the new House majority leader) both have shady pasts. Also, a birther gets arrested on the first day of the Republican-controlled House, and don’t fret if you’re worried about the privatization of Social Security – you may be dead by then! Jamie shares a story about a recent audition disaster. Also, Allison and Jamie answer a bunch of your mail. Questions/comments this week concern the message board, veganism, and Julian Assange.

This, and all CR podcasts, are brought to you by the good folk at Vegan Essentials (http://veganessentials.com/). Buy cruelty-free products there and tell ‘em Citizen Radio sent you!

Listen to the new Citizen Radio and subscribe to the free podcast.

Time magazine editor-at-large, Belinda Luscombe’s, pitiful explanation of austerity, and CNN misses a golden opportunity to show citizens how austerity affects their lives with the NYC blizzard. Allison reads a list of unbelievable Republican quotes that showcase how the rich really feel about the poor and unemployed. In the process, Jamie coins an amazing new phrase.

This, and all CR podcasts, are brought to you by the good folk at Vegan Essentials (http://veganessentials.com/). Buy cruelty-free products there and tell ‘em Citizen Radio sent you!

Back during the healthcare debate, certain Republicans claimed we didn’t need reform because when the existing healthcare system failed, private charity organizations would magically step in to fill the void.

Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) told an uninsured woman with growing tumors that she should seek “existing government programs” or find charity.

CHURCHILL: I have a very close relative, a woman in her early forties, who did have a wonderful, high-paying job, owns her own home and is a real contributing member of society. She lost her job. Just a couple of weeks ago, she found out that she has tumors in her belly and that she needs an operation. Her doctors told her that they are growing and that she needs to get this operation quickly. She has no insurance. [...]

CANTOR: First of all I guess I would ask what the situation is in terms of income eligibility and the existing programs that are out there. Because if we look at the uninsured that are out there right now, there is probably 23, 24% of the uninsured that is already eligible for an existing government program[...] Beyond that, I know that there are programs, there are charitable organizations, there are hospitals here who do provide charity care if there’s an instance of indigency and the individual is not eligible for existing programs that there can be some cooperative effort. No one in this country, given who we are, should be sitting without an option to be addressed.

Frum Forum’s Andrew Pavelyev also advocated the private charity approach, though he acknowledged the “let them beg” model of handling sick people might lose the GOP some support.

This was how the right put a pleasant face on the movement to abandon sick people.  Yes, Cantor was just regurgitating the same “public, bad, private, good!” mantra dribbling from the Republicans since Reagan, but by tacking on “charity” to the end of his abandonment plan, Cantor was able to shield himself in a cloak of altruism…if only for a little while…at least until people noticed his plan was ultimately, “Hope a nice person takes pity upon you, and can heal tumors. Thanks for the tax money!”

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This really warms my heart. In the spirit of camaraderie, Billy Kristol has decided to sidestep the profound horror of sane Americans in the wake of Rand Paul’s terrible statements about the Civil Rights Act.

INTERVIEWER: Would you have voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964?

PAUL: I like the Civil Rights Act in the sense that it ended discrimination in all public domains, and I’m all in favor of that.

INTERVIEWER: But?

PAUL: You had to ask me the “but.” I don’t like the idea of telling private business owners — I abhor racism. I think it’s a bad business decision to exclude anybody from your restaurant — but, at the same time, I do believe in private ownership. But I absolutely think there should be no discrimination in anything that gets any public funding, and that’s most of what I think the Civil Rights Act was about in my mind.

This is usually when Libertarian ideology explodes in flames, and it becomes abundantly clear — outside of clambaking your friend’s Nissan in the high school parking lot — ideas about getting “The Man” our of your bidness and letting the market dictate everything are overly simplified, unworkable non-solutions to complex, real life problems.

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Opponents of a woman’s right to choose — let’s call them Stupakites — claim they scream at a clinic-bound, terrified teenage rape victim for the sake of her fertilized egg. They’re cellular sentinels, so to speak.

But if these embryo enthusiasts were really serious about saving the children, they should be the loudest cheerleaders for healthcare reform. The US is currently experiencing an uninsured and under-insured epidemic affecting millions of children.

Arizona:

struggling with a projected $2.6 billion budget shortfall, took the drastic step of scrapping its Children’s Health Insurance Program. That left nearly 47,000 low-income children with no coverage at all. Gov. Jan Brewer is also calling for an increase in the sales tax. She said, “Arizona is navigating its way through the largest state budget deficit in its long history.”

California:

One fourth of the adult and children population of California have no access to insurance.

[snip]

UCLA Researchers also found that among the population over 18 nearly one third had no insurance for part or whole of 2009. When all adults and children under the age of 65 were taken into consideration 24.3% were found to have no insurance or whole or art of 2009.

The trend continues in Pennsylvania, Oregon, and so on. These children are being left behind, and yet Republican obstructionists, and certain Catholic Democratic allies, couldn’t seem to care less about these grown-up fetuses.

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Gov. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.) hates Big Gubment. He hates it so much that he once rejected $700 million of stimulus funds, saying, “We simply cannot afford to base 10 percent of our state budget on money that will disappear in two years’ time.”

Translation: Thanks, but we’d rather just have a budget hole. The feds always rush in here, spendin’ cash like they’ve got the Argentine Elopin’ Fever. No, siree. Things are fine the way they are!

It takes a brave man to reject federal stimulus money, especially when one considers South Carolina has the fourth highest unemployment rate in the country (No. 1 in the south). Side-note: according to the Children’s Defense Fund, those poor residents include 190,000 children (h/t BC), or as anti-gubment Conservatives call children, “Those Who Have Not Gotten A Job And Remain Leaches On The State.”

The extremist teabaggers, who are now the majority of the Republican Party, have a very specific attitude about poor people that can best be described as: “fuck ‘em.” They should pull themselves up by their bootstraps. See: SC Lt. Governor Andre Bauer, the man running for the Republican nomination for governor, who recently compared public assistance to feeding stray animals.

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It looks like that great moralist of the south, David Vitter, could very well win his re-election bid according to the latest Rasmussen polls, which show Vitter holding an 18-point lead over his likeliest Democratic opponent, Congressman Charlie Melancon. (h/t Marc McDonald)

What’s so awesomely hilarious about this is that Vitter is still trumpeting “family values” as the foundation of his campaign. This is the same Vitter who suffered an epically embarrassing scandal when it was revealed the Senator enjoys being dressed in diapers by prostitutes. Vitter was so desperate to avoid public ridicule, including the attention of understandably quizzical reporters, that he rammed his car into a stop sign while trying to flee a press conference:

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As tends to happen in the game of national politics, poll wonks and strategists have been trying to glean some kind of understanding about shifts in attitudes toward the Democratic and Republican parties in the wake of the House healthcare bill’s passage.

Some things can easily be determined by merely observing events (Democrats aren’t happy with the Stupak amendment passing,) while other discussions remain pure speculation (which Dems will lose which seats in 2010, or if sun-kissed Prairie man, John Thune, will run for president.) However, there is clearly an overall message resonating from the public: Democratic and Republican politicians should all be very afraid.

Fivethirtyeight reports that a Gallup poll released yesterday shows the Republicans with a 4-point lead on the House generic ballot — a reversal from October, when the Democrats had maintained a 2-point lead. Additionally, Rasmussen gives the Republicans a 6-point lead in their generic ballot using their likely voter model. Of course, Pew and YouGov have the Democrats leading the Republicans. The understanding Nate Silver, poll guru, takes from this muddle is that Dems are in trouble.

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The cause du jour for the Republican Party is to make as many rapid-fire comparisons between the Democrats and the Nazis as humanly possible. There’re the posters altered to make the President look like Hitler, Glenn Beck’s use of Nazi imagery, and the GOP’s tendency to parade around pliant Holocaust survivors, who are willing to lie and convince hapless boobs that they’re seconds away from being loaded onto the trains headed to New Auschwitz, located… somewhere — probably in those FEMA camps Beck has been trying to warn us about.

Crazy, crazy stuff. Insulting and dangerous, too. Such propaganda is insulting to Holocaust survivors, some of whom are rightfully upset by the Obama-Hitler contrasting. “I saw Hitler’s soldiers. I saw swastikas every day. To call Obama stupid, even criminal — OK, that’s politics. But Hitler? It’s hurting to anyone no matter who is president,” a Holocaust survivor told Times of the Internet.

Beyond being insulting, the comparisons are also dangerous. The Washington Independent‘s David Wiegel reports on this rising fear of fascism as demonstrated at the “How to Take Back America” conference in St. Louis that took place this past weekend. I highly recommend taking the whole bizarre journey yourself, but here are a few choice nuggets to wet your appetite for lunacy.

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I finally understood this week that my wife was right–that the Blackberry is the tool of Satan. It is Shiva, Destroyer of Worlds. The way I came to understand this was itself a sign of the sickness that this instrument brings.

Please ponder the case of one Malcolm Smith, who until a few days ago was the majority leader of the New York State Senate. Smith received a visit from a New York billionaire named Tom Golisano, who has spent a good chunk of his fortune in recent years running quixotic campaigns for governor, bankrolling some of Bill Clinton’s activities and otherwise trying to let the world know that a man named Tom Golisano once strode the earth. He had bankrolled Smith and other Democrats to help them take control of the state senate in January for the first time in 43 years.

via Jonathan Alter: The Blackberry: Destroyer of Worlds — And the New York Senate.

Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter argues that it was Malcolm Smith’s incessant typing on his Blackberry — and not Tom Golisano’s decision to pursade two Democrats to throw their support behind Republicans — that caused the recent New York Senate coup.

It should be fairly easy to see why this argument is silly and wrong. Golisano has been pissed at the New York Senate ever since they passed a watered-down version of the so-called Millionaire’s Tax. Golisano was so distressed that he would have to pay an extra 2% in taxes, he fled New York and took refuge in his $13 million waterfront mansion in Naples, Florida where he plotted against the Democrats who had betrayed him.

So when Golisano met with Smith, he wasn’t annoyed at Smith’s typing on his Blackberry. He was annoyed that Smith wasn’t obeying his orders to nix the Millionaire’s Tax that the Working Families Party had been fighting to include in the budget as an alternative to measures that would have hurt working people as proposed by Governor Paterson.

Golisano left the meeting feeling Smith wasn’t going to play ball, and so he threw his support behind one of the most corrupt men in New York and a homophobic politician — both Democrats — with the caveat that they switch their support to the Republican Party. Pedro Espada has, in Alter’s words, been “fined for flagrant campaign spending abuses,” and Hiram Monserrate so values the sanctity of love between one man and one woman that he once slashed his girlfriend in the face with a broken glass. Somehow, Golisano convinced these two morally upright men to switch political allegiances.

The real story here has nothing to do with Smith’s Crackberry and everything to do with the fact that one billionaire essentially bought the state Senate majority and successfully subverted the democratic will of New Yorkers.