Obstruct at every turn and question their IQs.

I was reading an article over at my favorite website for politics today, and I saw where republicans, once again, blocked one of the president's nominations. This one was for the Secretary of Labor, and Tom Perez was their latest victim. This latest move by republicans in Washington represents what has been a consistent pattern by republicans since the Obama presidency: block and obstruct at every turn.

The article by Lauren Victoria Burke was interesting and insightful as it outlined not only this latest obstruction but many others which might have been over looked because of the mundane nature of these types of things.

As Burke writes:  "There are currently 82 vacancies for federal judges around the U.S.  By using the secret “hold,” Republican Senators don’t have to reveal they are blocking a nominee.

Some in the media, such as veteran journalists Ron Fournier to E.J. Dionne, have written that it’s President Obama that must adjust to Congress or in some way adjust his strategy. But clearly the strategy of obstruction President Obama has faced during the 112th and 113th Congresses is historic.

With compromise disappearing and Congress getting close to nothing done, members are leaving.  The Senate has had a 40% turnover in the last five years.  Many say the culture in the Senate driven by unwillingness to compromise with President Obama have led to the historic obstruction."

Go figure. But what is driving this new attitude towards the American President? Ideology? 

"Of course it's ideology, Field; the man is a Socialist. What else could it be?"

I will give you one guess.

On that note I will segue to another article I read over at Politic365,today.

This one shed some light on one of the darlings of the conservative movement.

"In a recently released video from an American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation analyst Jason Richwine asserts that Latinos, as well as Native Americans, and blacks have demonstrated that they are incapable of “assimilating” and adjusting their IQs to be on par with whites, Jews and Asians.


Here Richwine explains the differences between European and non-European immigrants. Specifically that non-European immigrants should be treated differently than European immigrants so that “we can get assimilation to work.”

In this video Richwine states that the U.S. should find smart, uneducated people from other countries and allow them to enter the country:

This week Richwine’s dissertation from Harvard University was revealed to contain a passage in which he questions whether Latinos’ IQs could ever be on par with whites:

“No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.”

Folks, in case you didn't know, the Heritage Foundation who this clown represents is leading the charge against immigration reform on behalf of conservatives here in America. This is where Jim DeMint took his wheelbarrow and unloaded the Brinks truck full of money that was offered to him.

"We believe that every person is created equal and that everyone should have equal opportunity to reach the ladder of success and climb as high as they can dream," Heritage said in a statement released by spokesman Mike Gonzalez.

Richwine was not at Heritage when he wrote the paper. In the acknowledgments section of his dissertation, he thanked the American Enterprise Institute, another conservative think tank in Washington, "for its generous support, without which this dissertation could not have been completed."

No Jason, thank you! We always like when the true feelings of ignorant people are exposed, no matter how hard they try to hide their intentions behind the cover of fancy think tanks and political organizations. 

*Pic courtesy of Politic365

Straight Talk About "Mr. Straight Talk".

You gotta love this article from David Faris which he wrote for "The City Paper", a weekly rag here in my hometown of Philadelphia.

This political season I am soaking up everything I can read about these candidates. I would suggest that you all do the same thing. ---Yes Obamaholics, even you---

"Republican voters delivered a strong rebuke to their party's conservative base by vaulting John McCain past the animated and disingenuous corpse of Mitt Romney on Super Tuesday. The trouble with this decision is that the so-called "maverick" McCain has staked his candidacy on President Bush's Iraq War and the chimerical success of the Surge. And it will be his undoing.


Baghdad's recent horrific market bombings underscored the continuing lack of basic security in Iraq, and in January, U.S. troop deaths crept up once again. Contrary to the popular notion of decadent liberals celebrating each dead American soldier with a pomegranate martini and some casual sex, no one is happy about this ongoing tragedy. But that doesn't mean we can't hold people accountable.

John McCain is as responsible as anyone for our multitrillion-dollar experience in Southwest Asian adventure tourism. His vote for the war enabled the man who slimed him in the 2000 South Carolina primary to launch a preventive war, without pretext or justification. And he has done absolutely nothing since Mission Accomplished to get us out of Iraq before the dawn of the next millennium, or to expose the crony capitalism that has turned our 51st state into a dysfunctional wasteland.

While McCain is polling well now against both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, he has the advantage of a fawning media that hasn't realized the Surge has only succeeded in renting Iraq for several more bloody years. And the financial scandals emerging from the country's "reconstruction" are just starting to creep out and may make the Saddam-era oil-for-food corruption seem like a soccer mom fiddling with PTA walking-around money.

One of the big questions about McCain is whether he can keep the conservative deckhands on board the HMS Straight Talk. Will they string up Sen. McQueeg by either staying home on Election Day or voting for James Dobson? Most people in the snake-handling, tent-revival crowd will almost certainly get on board with McCain, after he is repackaged as some sort of a God-fearing evangelical. I personally can't wait to hear about his personal relationship with Jesus.

[I love this part] But the real John McCain is an ideological chameleon whose long stint in a Vietnamese prison imbued him with a lasting creepiness. You think values voters were repulsed by Bill Clinton? In McCain we're talking about a guy who came home from his captivity and proceeded to run around on and eventually dump his crippled wife, who had waited for him the whole time. These are the kinds of things you don't hear from the media — which spent eight years digging up every trivial detail and outrageous accusation about Bill Clinton's sexcapades.

And aside from his few departures from Heritage Foundation cult ideology, his policies mostly consist of outmoded, supply-side claptrap that he should be embarrassed peddling after the two-recession economic record of the Bush administration. His campaign literature refers to Roe v. Wade as "a flawed decision that must be overturned." And his health-care plan consists of a bewildering array of changes that, as some intern scribbled on his Web site, would end up " putting more decisions and responsibility" on the shoulders of individual Americans. Translation: You'll be paying for it yourself.

Don't let anyone tell you McCain is some kind of post-partisan savior. He's just as bad any wild-eyed 700 Club true believer, and he's even worse on Iraq, where a President McCain would keep us for generations. "

***OUCH***