Stories I didn't get too from January 2016

These are in no particular order, nor are they vetted in any way.  In other words they could be satire and I am unawares,,,

Obama just found out about the tampon tax, and he is not a fan

President Obama is a proponent for equality in the healthcare system, but up until Friday, he knew nothing about the luxury taxes that 40 states place on sanitary pads and tampons.

The Brutalism of Ted Cruz

Eventually, the mistake came to light and Haley tried to fix it. Ted Cruz was solicitor general of Texas at the time. Instead of just letting Haley go for time served, Cruz took the case to the Supreme Court to keep Haley in prison for the full 16 years.

NYT's 'Conservative' Brooks Rips Cruz's 'Pagan Brutalism.' Here's The REAL Reason He Hates Cruz

David Brooks’ all-out assault on Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) has reached unforeseen heights today with a column in which he labels Cruz “brutal” and un-Christian for his harsh rhetoric against the left. Here’s Brooks’ reprehensible, religiously bigoted attack,,,

How the Conservative Media Went Nuts When David Brooks and I Discussed Cruz's "Satanic" Tone

I don't know about Brooks, but I was besieged on Twitter by conservatives who hurled angry how-dare-you tweets at me. Some accused me of committing a hate crime (the victims: Christians). But this was yet another exercise of false right-wing outrage, and a demonstration of rather poor reading comprehension on the right.

Ted Cruz’s Faith Is Under Fire. Here’s The Story Behind His Religious Beliefs

When Texas Sen. Ted Cruz took the stage at Liberty University last March to launch his bid for the White House, both the location of his announcement and the first words of his campaign made his election strategy clear: he wants conservative religious votes.

Congressman Readies Ted Cruz Eligibility Lawsuit With Eye on Mom

Billionaire businessman Donald Trump suggested this week his nearest rival for the Republican presidential nomination may be ineligible for office and won a daylong echo across the political press, despite Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s attempt to brush off the commentary.

'Birther' Orly Taitz: Ted Cruz Has 'Basically the Same Issue as Obama'

"Clearly there is an issue of eligibility," crusading skeptic of President Barack Obama's birth certificate Orly Taitz told U.S. News. "It's basically the same issue as Obama has."

Proof that Ted Cruz did not become a US citizen at birth

According to the Canadian Citizenship Act of 1946, also referred to as the "Act of 1947" because of its effective date, Canada did not allow dual citizenship. This was the first citizenship act in Canada to create a new citizenship status separate from being considered British Subjects. With the pride of a nation first enacting the right to become Canadian Citizens, it would stand to reason why they also chose at the time to not allow dual citizenship. According to the Government of Canada's website, the heading "History of citizenship legislation" states the following,,,

Liberty and SOGI Laws: An Impossible and Unsustainable "Compromise"

Big Business and Big Law are using Big Government to impose their cultural values on small businesses and ordinary Americans. Indiana does not need to create new laws on sexual orientation or gender identity for people who identify as sexual minorities to be treated justly. The best way to protect all Hoosiers is for Indiana not to adopt a SOGI policy at all.

BarbWire: Leftists Are Using Our Former Columnist Ted Shoebat To Unfairly Smear All Christians

Infamous Brazilian anti-gay activist Julio Severo today published a BarbWire column [http://www.donotlink.com/i436] which denounces the leftists at Right Wing Watch for reporting on former BarbWire columnist Ted Shoebat’s incessant calls to execute all homosexuals. It’s so unfair! It not like Shoebat appears in a recent anti-LGBT documentary alongside leading evangelicals and GOP presidential candidates. Oh, wait. He writes,,,

Theodore Shoebat Wants Blasphemers Burned At The Stake To Prevent Cannibalism

"That stuff cannot be tolerated," he explained, "because as soon as you allow attacks on Christianity to be enabled and to thrive, then the Christian spirit begins to decay, it begins to decline and all sorts of moral evils take place like public acts of sodomy, public acts of desecration and degenerate behavior and murder. It just spirals and it goes on and on and pretty soon you have cannibalism, pretty soon you have bestiality and pedophilia."

Theodore Shoebat Says That Gays Routinely Rape And Murder Young Boys During 'Southern Decadence'

As Shoebat explained, a fellow anti-gay activist "went out to preach against the sodomites in New Orleans" and was told by locals "about how the sodomites in the French Quarter go out and hunt for little boys, they steal little boys and then bring them to the gay bars and they rape them and they murder them in the bars."

Shoebat says that he asked for evidence of this but was told by his friend that this was simply what he had heard from the locals, so Shoebat did his own investigation and claimed to have discovered that there are thousands of reports of young boys being routinely raped by gay men while the police in New Orleans simply look the other way.

When Exemption is the Rule: The Religious Freedom Strategy of the Christian Right

The evangelical Protestant Christian Right and U.S. Roman Catholic bishops are intensifying their campaign to carve out arenas of public life where religious institutions, individuals, and even businesses may evade civil rights and labor laws in the name of religious liberty. By creating zones of legal exemption, the Christian Right seeks to shrink the public sphere and the arenas within which the government has legitimacy to defend people’s rights, including reproductive, labor, and LGBTQ rights. In this, it is often aligned with the antigovernment strategy of free market libertarians and some business interests, who for a variety of reasons also seek to restrict arenas where government can legally act.

This conservative Christian alliance is challenging a century or more of social advances and many of the premises of the Enlightenment underlying the very definition of religious liberty in the United States. Its long-range goal is to impose a conservative Christian social order inspired by religious law, in part by eroding pillars of undergirding religious pluralism that are integral to our constitutional democracy.

Since Political Research Associates’ March 2013 report, Redefining Religious Liberty: The Covert Campaign Against Civil Rights,^* a remarkable string of cultural, legislative, and legal victories by the LGBTQ community have further animated the Right’s defensive strategy aimed at exempting conservative Christians from having to accept certain advances in human and civil rights. However, the Christian Right’s religious freedom strategy is part of its long-game and is not merely an anti-LGBTQ tactic.

What the Koch brothers don't want you to know about the family money

Maybe this is what's behind the Koch brothers' mission to destroy the U.S. government as we know it—the government started it way back in 1944 when U.S. bombers destroyed an oil refinery built by their father, Fred Koch, in Nazi Germany. Yes, Koch money came in part from Nazi Germany, and that's not all. All of this is detailed in a new book from investigative reporter Jane Mayer, and examined more deeply by Gawker,,,

Concentration Camp Inmates Had To Rebuild A Nazi Refinery The Koch Brothers' Dad Helped Construct

Bombshell Reveals Nazi Connection To the Koch Brothers

ADDENDUM::Exposing the Koch Brothers' Stunning Hypocrisy on Criminal Justice Reform | Alternet

Back in January we had this:

Ten years ago, he began giving money to support efforts by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers to help train defense lawyers and reverse what some see as a national trend to get tough on crime, which has resulted in the tripling of the incarceration rate since the 1980s and has stripped the poor of their rights to a legal defense.

He’s going to give more to that effort, he said.

“Over the next year, we are going to be pushing the issues key to this, which need a lot of work in this country,” Koch said. “And that would be freedom of speech, cronyism and how that relates to opportunities for the disadvantaged.”

Which at the time sounded great.

Now we have this,

A new report traces the exceptional hypocrisy of the Koch brothers’ recent high-profile interest in criminal justice reform.

"The Koch Brothers’ Criminal Justice Pump-Fake," by American Bridge 21st Century, a watchdog group “committed to holding Republicans accountable,” traces how the Kochs became interested in criminal justice reform after losing a years-long battle with federal environmental regulators that began in the late 1990s. The study details how the Kochs have long supported candidates and elected officials whose tough-on-crime policies have created the criminal justice crisis they now insist must be reformed—by imposing harsher sentences, building prisons and narrowing probation and parole. The report notes how their efforts to partner with left-leaning groups like the ACLU have led to a public relations bonanza eclipsing their deeper record of supporting politicans who have delivered—and stand by—their draconian crime policies.

“For all their professed concerns about reforming the criminal justice system, the Kochs don’t really care— not about the impacted families and individuals, anyway— their only concern is their bottom line,” the authors said. “The Kochs’ criminal justice charade is just that — a public relations scam.”

Exposing the Koch Brothers' Stunning Hypocrisy on Criminal Justice Reform | Alternet

Charles Koch’s views on criminal justice system just may surprise you | The Wichita Eagle

Holden said Charles Koch wondered afterward “how the little guy who doesn’t have Koch’s resources deals with prosecutions like that.”
,,,
Ten years ago, he began giving money to support efforts by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers to help train defense lawyers and reverse what some see as a national trend to get tough on crime, which has resulted in the tripling of the incarceration rate since the 1980s and has stripped the poor of their rights to a legal defense.

He’s going to give more to that effort, he said.

“Over the next year, we are going to be pushing the issues key to this, which need a lot of work in this country,” Koch said. “And that would be freedom of speech, cronyism and how that relates to opportunities for the disadvantaged.”

The nation’s criminal justice system needs reform, “especially for the disadvantaged,” Koch said, “making it fair and making (criminal) sentences more appropriate to the crime that has been committed.”

Holden said legislators in recent decades drifted into a habit of adding more laws every year and taking stands to show themselves as “getting tough on crime.” It has gone too far, Holden said.

The weight has fallen most heavily on minorities, Holden said.

Charles Koch’s views on criminal justice system just may surprise you | The Wichita Eagle

Exposing the Koch Brothers’ 2014 Plan: Focus On 13 States and Campaign on Social Media | Alternet

The libertarian industrialist brothers David and Charles Koch spent more on 2012 elections than previously believed—$400-plus million, new investigations have found. Buried in that reporting is an even more intriguing detail: where and how their political cartel will campaign in 2014.

If you look at the websites of the Koch-backed non-profits identified by the Center for Responsive Politics and mapped even more elaborately by the Washington Post, telling tidbits sketch out the frontline strategy of the Koch-backed wing of the GOP. Thirteen states are priorities, and social media will be used for its propagandizing.

The Center for Shared Services is a job placement agency for the dozen politicized non-profits funded by the Kochs. Besides the Washington beltway, they are looking for nuts-and-bolts campaign staff in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas and Virginia. They even have a Twitter page for hiring, at FreeMarketRecruiting.

Exposing the Koch Brothers’ 2014 Plan: Focus On 13 States and Campaign on Social Media | Alternet

Rachel Maddow's Epic Koch Brothers Smackdown | Crooks and Liars

This right here (the video,,,a must watch) is why I love Rachel Maddow. I truly hope that one of the Koch brothers takes her up on her offer, as she WILL dissect either of them point by point. They will then cease to be, and you can kiss ALEC goodbye. One could only hope!

So David and Charles Koch want Rachel Maddow to read their prepared script on the air admitting her "error" and apologizing for it?

Excuse me while I clean the spewed coffee off my screen.

Here's how this whole thing started. In late December, Rachel did a segment on how the Kochs buy their economic studies reinforcing conservative ideas. They do this by donating huge sums to universities and demanding the right to hire faculty who think like they do. That report is here.

Apparently the Kochs didn't appreciate her reporting, because for some bizarre reason they don't mind throwing billions around the political universe but shy away from receiving credit for it. So they had their lawyers send Rachel a letter, and boy was it a doozy, as you'll see in the segment. It included a demand that she read a prepared script by the lawyers retracting her report and apologizing for it.

She did not apologize. I believe her exact words were "I will not renounce or retract reporting that is true, even if the subjects of that reporting don't like it." As for the script, she let them know she does "not read scripts provided to me by anyone else. I don't do requests."

Rachel Maddow's Epic Koch Brothers Smackdown | Crooks and Liars