Republican Florida Secretary of State Rick Detzner Has No Regrets, Won’t Say He’s Sorry For Massive Voting Lines

Republican Florida Secretary of State Rick Detzner Has No Regrets, Won’t Say He’s Sorry For Massive Voting Lines

In an interview with CNN’s Ashleigh Banfield earlier today, Florida’s Republican Secretary of State Rick Detzner tried to defend his states dysfunctional election process, which led voters waiting up to six hours in line just to cast their vote. Indeed, as Banfield told Detzner, she spoke to many voters who “tried twice to vote early,” but had to abandon those attempts due to long lines, only to wait another three hours to vote on election day. Yet Detzner appeared completely without remorse for the widespread barriers to voting he presided over.

In what was perhaps the most significant exchange, Banfield asked whether Detzner regrets a Florida law rolling back the number of days when voters could cast an early ballot. Detzner was unremorseful:

    BANFIELD: Look, you all decided, with a Republican legislature to cut the early voting days from 14 to 8. For whatever reason you did that, do you regret making that choice, so that all of those people who didn’t get to the polls early stuck themselves in line and wound up waiting so long that many people walked away and were disenfranchised?

    DETZNER: Well, let me point out that, while the days were cut, the number of hours were not. We still maintained 96 hours of voting, and it created greater flexibility for the supervisors. Uh, for the first time ever voters could vote during the day for 12 hours during the day, and I can tell you I heard feedback from voters going into election day that they liked the opportunity to vote either in the morning before work or after work. And frankly, I think the turnout is a good representation of the fact that people liked the voting hours and the flexibility that the supervisors had.

Watch it:

There is something truly absurd about Detzner’s claim that the fact that people did not decide to give up their most fundamental right somehow reflects their satisfaction with a massive failure of governance. It should go without saying that when someone has to wait six hours to cast a ballot, their government failed them, and no amount of spin can defend a decision not to make more opportunities to vote available. As Florida’s former Republican Gov. Charlie Crist said last Sunday, Gov. Rick Scott’s (R-FL) refusal to extend early voting is “unconscionable” and “the only thing that makes any sense as to why this is happening and being done is voter suppression.”

Crist is almost undoubtedly correct. The Obama campaign made early voting a key prong of their turnout strategy, and many low-income voters who tend to vote Democratic are disenfranchised without early voting because they lack the job flexibility to cast a ballot on election day.

Republicans try to prevent average working Americans from voting. They see that as a value. When called to explain, they take the point of view of an elitist European plutocrat. They smile, proud to call that having values. Conservatives clearly do not care if the letter or spirit of the law is carried out. They are proud to call that point of view American values. It seems that conservatives have been confused being malevolent with having values.

Anti-American Fox News caster Brian Kilmeade On Voters Approving Of Obama's Response To Sandy: America Is "The Shallowest Country In The History Of Man". Brian makes a nice 6 figure a year salary for doing nothing but hating America for a living. No wonder he supports conservatism and it's twisted concept of patriotism.

The Depravity of Rep. Todd Akin(R-MO) Is Shared By Paul Ryan (R-WI) And Other Conservatives

The Depravity of Rep. Todd Akin(R-MO) Is Shared By Paul Ryan (R-WI) And Other Conservatives

Republicans have been getting in trouble for asserting this since at least 1988 -- but anti-abortion politicians keep hauling out this old idea for a reason.

Here we go again. Trotting out the contemporary equivalent of the early American belief that only witches float, Rep. Todd Akin, the Republican challenger to Democratic U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill, told a local Missouri station in an interview that "legitimate rape" does not lead to pregnancy.

"First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare," Akin said in an interview with KTVI-TV that caused a furor online Sunday afternoon after being posted on TPM. "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down."
....The thing is, his comments were hardly some kind never-before-heard gaffe. Arguments like his have cropped up again and again on the right over the past quarter century and the idea that trauma is a form of birth control continues to be promulgated by anti-abortion forces that seek to outlaw all abortions, even in cases of rape or incest. The push for a no-exceptions anti-abortion policy has for decades gone hand in hand with efforts to downplay the frequency with which rape- or incest-related pregnancies occur, and even to deny that they happen, at all. In other words, it's not just Akin singing this tune.

Take Christian Life Resources, an educational site, for example. It reprints an 1999 article on the topic that seeks to make the same distinction between categories of rape as did Akin, and for the same reason. Wrote John C. Willke -- a physician who in the 1980s and early 1990s was president of the National Right to Life Committee -- in the piece, originally published in Life Issues Connector:

    When pro-lifers speak of rape pregnancies, we should commonly use the phrase "forcible rape" or "assault rape," for that specifies what we're talking about. Rape can also be statutory. Depending upon your state law, statutory rape can be consensual, but we're not addressing that here .... Assault rape pregnancies are extremely rare.

    .... What is certainly one of the most important reasons why a rape victim rarely gets pregnant, and that's physical trauma. Every woman is aware that stress and emotional factors can alter her menstrual cycle. To get and stay pregnant a woman's body must produce a very sophisticated mix of hormones. Hormone production is controlled by a part of the brain that is easily influenced by emotions. There's no greater emotional trauma that can be experienced by a woman than an assault rape. This can radically upset her possibility of ovulation, fertilization, implantation and even nurturing of a pregnancy. So what further percentage reduction in pregnancy will this cause? No one knows, but this factor certainly cuts this last figure by at least 50 percent and probably more.

An edited version of Willke's article appears on the website of Physicians for Life group under the headline, "Assault Rape Pregnancies Are Rare." The most medically ignorant paragraphs have been excised from this version of the story, though the headline has been strengthened to make the point plain.

The canard had been floating around the right long before Willke wrote his piece. In 1995, 71-year-old North Carolina state Rep. Henry Aldridge gained national notoriety after telling the N.C. House Appropriations Committee, "The facts show that people who are raped -- who are truly raped -- the juices don't flow, the body functions don't work and they don't get pregnant. Medical authorities agree that this is a rarity, if ever."

The Romney-Ryan campaign has issued a statement saying they do not agree with  Akin. The problem for Ryan is that he and Adkin have a documented history of thinking alike.

Ryan and Akin ... were co-sponsors of H.R. 3, the 2011 bill that would have limited the federal abortion coverage exemption only to victims of "forcible rape" and women whose physical health was in danger from her pregnancy, closing a supposed loophole in health-of-the-mother exemptions conservatives have been crowing about for years.

After massive vocal protest from women’s rights advocates, the sponsors dropped the "forcible rape" language from the bill, giving up their quest to redefine rape in the federal code with little explanation.

This is not about another conservative gaffe, another "rare' extremist" in the Republican ranks, this is the kind of evil deeply imbedded in the conservative movement.

Per the graphic at top, "We Haven't Run The Numbers:" A Startling Ryan Admission That's Getting Little Attention

New Romney Welfare Ad Cites Newspaper That Says Its Welfare Reform Claims Have ‘Been Debunked’

Undeterred by his own support for the welfare reform waivers he is now criticizing, Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney has released another ad slamming the Obama administration’s decision to give states greater latitude in how they administer the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program.

The ad cites a Richmond Times-Dispatch editorial to make the case that Obama’s welfare reform waivers are “nuts,” because, “If you want to get more people to work, you don’t loosen the requirement — you tighten them.” The newspaper’s editorial board did, indeed, pen that sentence in an August 15 editorial that defended the Romney campaign’s earlier ads and agreed with him that the work requirement had indeed been “gutted.” Now, though, the Times-Dispatch is admitting that its own claims — which are central to the Romney ad — have been “debunked“:

    The 30-second ad doubles down on the Romney campaign’s claim that Obama ended welfare’s work requirement “gutting welfare reform,” a charge that has been debunked by multiple independent fact-checkers.

Had they done their own reporting instead of relying on the Romney campaign’s advertisements, the Times-Dispatch’s editors wouldn’t have had to wait for three independent fact-checkers to realize that GOP claims that welfare reform had been “gutted” were a blatant lie. The directive outlining the waivers makes it clear that work requirements will remain in place, though states will have more leeway in determining how to get welfare recipients out of the program and into jobs.

The decision to issue waivers was made at the request of multiple Republican governors — Romney himself supported even farther-reaching waivers in 2005 — and is meant to address the program’s struggles. While the Romney ad cites a 1998 Washington Post piece calling TANF an “unprecedented success,” that too has been debunked: the 1996 welfare reform law has failed to help America’s neediest families, and the reduction in the number of people receiving welfare has come largely from kicking people off the rolls, not by getting them jobs.

Amazing that Romney is running the sleaziest most dishonest political campaign of the last 100 years and the media has not noticed or does not care.

Sleaze Bag Liar Mitt Romney Is At It Again, Deceptively Edits Video To Put Words In President's Mouth About Bailing Out Every Industry

Sleaze Bag Liar Mitt Romney Is At It Again, Deceptively Edits Video To Put Words In President's Mouth About Bailing Out Every Industry

The Romney campaign, which has apparently exhausted the selectively edited clip of President Obama saying “you didn’t build that,” has seized on a new soundbite to distort. The campaign sent an email blast Thursday afternoon featuring a video of an Obama rally in Colorado from earlier that day and falsely claimed that he wants the government to bail out every industry. “I Want To Do The Same Thing With Manufacturing Jobs … In Every Industry,” it read.

The distortion comes from Obama’s speech in Pueblo, Colorado, touting his administration’s successful revival of the auto industry, which came back from the brink of collapse to add thousands of jobs and is now poised for its strongest sales since 2007. Obama said he wanted to help other flagging industries experience the same kind of success. Conservatives, however, are using the clip to make it sound like Obama wants to bail out every industry.

Here is what he actually said:

    OBAMA: I said I believe in American workers, I believe in this American industry, and now the American auto industry has come roaring back and GM is number one again. So now I want to do the same thing with manufacturing jobs not just in the auto industry, but in every industry. I don’t want those jobs taking root in places like China. I want them taking root in places like Pueblo.

Just a few months ago, Romney tried to “take a lot of credit” for the auto industry’s rescue. Now, his campaign is warning against boosting similar prosperity in other industries that have suffered in the economic downturn.

The Drudge Report also featured a huge front and center link to a disparaging Politico story, which has since been “updated to reflect the president’s intent to express his support for manufacturing success. An earlier version was unclear about his intent.”

Deliberate misinterpretation is now a standard tactic from the Romney campaign playbook, starting with Romney’s very first ad, which ran a clip of Barack Obama saying, “If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.” Obama was in fact using the quote to criticize his 2008 presidential opponent, John McCain on his refusal to discuss the economic crisis.

For those who have not heard of Matt Drudge, he is an Anti-American proto-fascist who acts as a propaganda outlet for the disinformation put out by conservatives. 

This election cycle has seen quite a bit of deceptively edited video by people who claim they have values and claim to be patriots. Romney video deceptively edits Obama speech to make it sound anti-business. So much for having good values and real patriotism. Would a patriot act like the propaganda minister for a right-wing regime.

New Groundwater Study Exposes Deep Folly of Fracking

Republicans don't hate women, they just want to treat them like plantation slaves, Rep. Todd Akin, the Republican nominee for Senate in Missouri: Ban The Morning-After Pill

Romney Care is Working. Which Means Obama's Health Care Reform - Which is based on Romney Care, Will Work Too

Romney Care is Working. Which Means Obama's Health Care Reform - Which is based on Romney Care, Will Work Too

Fred Bauer has poured over the new health care data in John F. Cogan’s, R. Glenn Hubbard’s, and Daniel P. Kessler’s “The Effect of Massachusetts’ Health Reform on Employer-Sponsored Insurance Premiums” report and points out that health care premiums in the Bay State have grown at a lower rate since the passage of Massachusetts’ signature health care law in 2006.

Relying on data “for average health-insurance premiums from the federally sponsored Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), this report suggested that, up until 2008, these reforms led to a relative increase in health-insurance premiums.” But new numbers through 2010 shows that “Massachusetts’ health-insurance premium growth declined relative to the nation as a whole in the years since Romneycare has been enacted“:

    Increase in employer-sponsored family premiums 2002-2006: MA: 40%; US: 34.50%
    Increase in employer-sponsored family premiums 2006-2010: MA: 19%; US: 22%

    Increase in individual premiums 2002-2006: MA: 32.70%; US: 29.10%
    Increase in individual premiums 2006-2010: MA: 21.70%; US: 20%



While it’s difficult to know how much of the decrease can be attributed to the Massachusetts law — which focused on expanding access rather than controlling costs — (versus decline in utilization as a result of the recession and other factors), the very fact that the law did not meet the doomsday scenario of critics and cause premiums to skyrocket is significant. (In fact, Massachusetts had the third-lowest average family premiums in New England by 2010, Bauer notes).

Ezra Klein notes that we may already be seeing a very similar trend with the Affordable Care Act, which grew out of the Massachusetts experience. The latest spending projections found a “$275 billion (5.6 percent) reduction [in health care spending] for 2020, compared with pre-reform estimates. Moreover, that projection represents a cumulative reduction of $1.7 trillion over the 10 years from 2011 to 2020.” The numbers suggest that providers may be becoming more efficient in preparation for the ACA’s reductions in Medicare reimbursements and updates.

Just think, conservatives may vote for a presidential candidate that passed the same health care reform as President Obama, but conservatives do not call Romney satan or a socialist. That is probably because modern conservatives are not about doing what is right for America, they are not honest, they are all about demonizing progress for average Americans. Kind of historic, a political movement - conservatism - running against progress and the common good.