Daily Kos

You would think that providing comprehensive health care—including, yes, abortion—to women in the military would be a no-brainer. After all, they're willing to die in service to their country; the least—the very least—we could do for them is make sure all of their health care needs are covered.

But that would make you a radical abortion-loving lefty feminist socialist. Or Colin Powell:

General Colin Powell, USA (Ret.), the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the 65th United States Secretary of State, joined a letter today with dozens of military leaders urging Congressional support for an amendment introduced by U.S. Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) that would allow the Department of Defense to cover the cost of abortions for servicewomen who are survivors of rape and incest. The letter was sent to the Chairman and Ranking Member in the Senate and House Armed Services Committees.

The Shaheen Amendment, as Meteor Blades explained, is "really a simple matter of fairness and justice." So of course the forced birthers in Congress have a problem with it, and have blocked all prior attempts in the name of the the holy fetus. So instead of fairness and justice:

Right now, military women who are victims of rape and become pregnant and choose to have an abortion must pay for it out of their own pockets. That's because their health plan doesn't cover it, which is the way the forced-birther crowd would love to keep things. Health insurance for civilian employees of the federal government and for Medicaid recipients covers abortion services when pregnancy is a consequence of rape. If you work for the State Department and are raped, you're covered. If you're in the Army, too bad for you.

That's why it's nice to see Powell and his fellow military leaders make it clear where they stand, and it's with women—not with the anti-woman activists in Congress who think our servicewomen don't deserve health care:

We were therefore greatly disappointed to learn that, by federal statute, the Department of Defense is barred from providing insurance coverage for abortion except where a pregnant woman’s life is endangered. Unlike other current federal restrictions on abortion coverage, the military ban provides no exception for cases of rape and incest. The current policy is unfair and must be changed. [...]

We stand ready to work with you, and other members of Congress, to ensure that the Shaheen Amendment becomes law this year. Our servicewomen deserve nothing less.

Our servicewomen deserve nothing less. Damn straight.

Email your member of the House of Representatives, telling him or her to pass the Stand With Servicewomen Act.

Scott Tranter, a Republican campaign consultant, apparently hasn't availed himself of the kind of media training that warns candidates and other public figures to keep their lips zipped about some things. On Monday, at a panel hosted by the Pew Center on the States, he was discussing ID laws and the long lines that afflicted many voters in Florida and other states in the November election:

"A lot of us are campaign officials—or campaign professionals—and we want to do everything we can to help our side. Sometimes we think that's voter ID, sometimes we think that's longer lines—whatever it may be," Tranter said with a laugh.

Michael McDonald, who heads up the George Mason University Election Project, was in the room. In an interview, he described the remarks:

I couldn't believe that they were said and similar sort of looks around the table that I was at and the guy next to me says, "Well, at least he's honest." And so then I tweeted it out. [...]Quite a comment."

Tranter owns Vlytics, which, in the primaries, received $3,000 from Mitt Romney's campaign for "data consulting." He has also consulted for Sen. John McCain. While he isn't a big fish in the GOP pond, his off-the-cuff comments reinforce those of former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist and former Florida GOP Chairman Jim Greer who recently told the Palm Beach Post that the Republicans in the Sunshine States curtailed early voting hours with the specific intention of decreasing Democratic voter turnout. One effect of the cutback in hours: much longer lines on election day.

Reposted from Daily Kos Labor by Laura Clawson Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder said in a press conference early Tuesday evening that he has signed into law the two anti-union bills, affecting public and private sector workers, passed by the state House earlier in the day. Though Snyder has touted the new laws as pro-worker, he signed them privately, an act more in keeping with the view he had repeatedly stated right up until the final weeks before he joined Republican legislators in rushing to pass them: so-called "right to work" laws are divisive.

The Michigan laws contain verbatim language from an ALEC model bill and were heavily pushed by the Koch brothers' Americans for Prosperity and Amway billionaire Dick DeVos.

"Gov. Snyder showed his true colors today," AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said in a statement. "He’s a puppet of extreme donors, and he is willing to ignore and lie to his constituents. His action will undoubtedly please the Koch Brothers and corporate CEOs, but it will diminish the voice of every working man and woman in Michigan."

Reposted from Comics by Tom Tomorrow

Despite all of House Speaker John Boehner's bluster on Tuesday, he's still at the table with Obama, and apparently made another offer, which might actually be essentially the same offer as last time: $800 billion in unspecified revenue.

The speaker's office isn't saying specifically what's in the offer, if there is anything specific in it this time around. Here are the questions they are refusing to answer.

The Huffington Post posed several questions to the speaker's office: Did you give the White House a menu of cuts you'd accept and ask them to pick from among those? Or are you still asking the White House to propose the cuts? What if the White House doesn't want any cuts beyond what it has proposed?

"We will not provide further information," Steel said.

There we are. Where that is, who knows. But it kind of makes a liar out of Boehner, again, since he just said hours before that the president was "slow-walking" the process and nothing was moving in the talks.

Reposted from Daily Kos Labor by Laura Clawson Predictably enough, the Fox News-Breitbart crowd is trying to make it look like Tuesday's protests in Michigan were wildly violent. But despite the fact that there are hundreds of police and reporters on the scene, reports of violence from police and non-Fox-Breitbart reporters are minimal to non-existent.

An Americans for Prosperity tent was knocked or torn down, with no injuries. That is the single example of protester "violence" being reported beyond your basic jostling that happens in a big crowd, and there were no injuries credibly reported in the tent incident. Americans for Prosperity is trying to turn it into a big story, of course, but, as Marcy Wheeler writes, AFP's claims come:

in spite of the fact that witnesses say the Americans for Prosperity people were trying to provoke union members to violence, and witnesses reportedly saw AFP people loosening the ropes on the tents so they would come down. And in spite of the fact the place was crawling with cops (shipped in from around the state) who didn’t do see anything amiss.

Eclectablog similarly cites witnesses who saw Americans for Prosperity people weakening their own tent.

Fox News contributor Steven Crowder is working overtime on the effort to create a violence narrative, claiming to have been punched repeatedly and promoting a video spliced and edited to the point of hilarity—you're not supposed to figure out that in between the obvious cuts, Crowder is provoking people into yelling at him. Oh, and Crowder claims to have been punched repeatedly in an area filled with police and to have it on video, yet he hasn't pressed charges, police don't seem to have witnessed the supposed violence, and Crowder's face looks just fine. Even the pictures on Breitbart intended to illustrate the damage show a "minor cut" on his forehead that looks like he may have popped a pimple at some point in the day.

This is a big, heated protest. There's been jostling and shouting in the crowd, for sure. But so far, there are no credible reports of real, harmful, malicious violence among the protesters. (Emphasis on credible.) By far the most pain has been inflicted, it would seem, by police using pepper spray.

1:31 PM PT: TPM:

“While of course we do not condone the actions taken by a small group of people, the disciples of James O’Keefe were attempting to instigate the crowd all day,” [AFL-CIO spokesman Eddie] Vale said, referring to the right-wing, video-camera-wielding provocateur. “As soon as the incident happened our marshals worked with the police to move the AFP people through the crowd to safety with no injuries.”

After House Speaker John Boehner's brief floor speech Tuesday, during which he asserted that President Obama has come to the fiscal cliff curb negotiations with nothing but a demand for higher taxes, Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi took the floor to set the record straight.

Pelosi said the biggest challenge in the fiscal cliff talks is to ensure the middle class is not hurt by tax increases or cuts to needed government services. But she said Republicans have focused only on spending cuts, and have ignored the idea of higher taxes.

"Where are the revenues?" she asked on the floor. "Regardless of the cuts… more is demanded in terms of what seniors would have to pay into Medicare and what age that would happen, while the Republicans refuse to touch one hair on the head of the wealthiest people in our country." [...]

"What stands in the way is an act on the part of Republican majority to bring a middle class tax cut to the floor of the House," Pelosi said.

There have been no specific offers on revenues from Republicans, beyond vague talk of closing loopholes and lots of mumbling from a handful of supposedly brave Republicans about the need to recognize something, something, revenue.

It's absolutely true that they can do one thing, right now. They can vote on the already passed Senate bill to give certainty to the middle class, to extend just those tax cuts. All that they have to do is sign the Democrats' discharge petition to bring the bill to the floor.

Tell your representative to sign the discharge petition and take the vote. If they've already signed, you can thank them here.

Reposted from Daily Kos Labor by Laura Clawson The Michigan House passed a second anti-union bill, this one affecting private sector workers, by a 58 to 52 vote Tuesday afternoon. Republicans quickly asked for reconsideration, forestalling Democrats in making the same move so that Republicans would have more control moving forward.

Protesters thronged the capitol area, with police estimating 15,000 people protesting. Some engaged in peaceful civil disobedience outside Gov. Rick Snyder's office; some were planning to spend the night. At least two protesters have been arrested and police say at least one protester has been pepper sprayed. Since former Rep. Mark Schauer has been pepper sprayed, and says he wasn't alone in that. Since it's unlikely that there was just one guy pepper sprayed, he happened to be a former member of the United State House, and he lied about other people being sprayed, it seems police aren't yet admitting to the extent of force they're using.

According to Schauer,

I think this rally speaks for itself. People are here to scream and holler and speak and make noise, trying to get the attention of Governor Snyder and the Republican legislature. Nothing else has worked. This is a peaceful demonstration where people are exercising their first amendment rights. No one was contacting the building, touching the building, endangering the building in any way. It's unfortunate that some of us were pepper sprayed. It was not necessary.

With passage of the second bill by the House, the focus of the protest has shifted to Snyder, who has said he will sign the bills quickly.

11:19 AM PT: It's not generally good news when police don't want photographers on hand to document things:

And:

When the Obama administration stopped defending the one-man-one-woman-only Defense of Marriage Act in court, Republicans on the House Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group decided to spend taxpayer money to take over that task. By mid-October, as Democrats in the group made known, BLAG had maxed out the $1.5 million cap Speaker John Boehner had placed on such spending. The money had paid for attorney Paul Clement to lose five DOMA cases in a row.

But now that the Supreme Court has decided to review DOMA and California's anti-marriage equality Proposition 8, the House Republican leadership is oddly silent:

The timing is most uncomfortable for House Republicans, who are playing a key role in one of the cases the court agreed to hear.

In June, the House of Representatives told the Supreme Court that the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act “is an issue of great national importance” that urgently requires the justices’ attention. The 1996 law denies federal benefits to same-sex married couples.

But when the court agreed on Friday to hear one of the DOMA cases early next year, the Republican leadership had nothing to say about it.

Anti-equality advocates in the National Organization for Marriage and Family Research Council expressed disappointment when interviewed by Josh Gerstein about the silence. His effort to get the leadership or rank-and-file members of Congress to comment on the Supreme Court's decision to take on DOMA by reviewing Windsor v. United States turned up just one representative willing to say anything on the record. That someone was not exactly high on the national recognition charts: Kansan Tim Huelskamp, an ultraconservative who is just finishing his first term in Congress. Boehner recently purged him from his Budget and Agriculture committee assignments.

Perhaps we're hearing the crickets on the Supreme Court's decision to review because the GOP leadership isn't keen on honing the reputation the party has for extremism after the drubbing it just got from key cohorts of the population, like, for instance, voters aged 18-29, a demographic cohort that favors marriage equality by a 2-1 margin. Perhaps they also don't want to remind youthful and other voters that among the justices on the Supreme Court who will be ruling in the DOMA case is Antonin Scalia, a Republican appointee who has made invidious comparisons between laws banning sodomy and banning murder. Kind of hard to convince people you're not extremists when you've got that besmirchment on your record.

 

House Speaker John Boehner spoke briefly on the House floor Tuesday, reiterating the same talking points and staking the same ground he's been on in fiscal cliff curb negotiations since the election: no tax hikes and all spending cuts. What he said wasn't necessarily unexpected, but the fact that he picked right now, and a fairly high profile way of doing it, raises questions about whether there's been any progress at all in negotiations.

The intensity of negotiations between the White House and Congressional Republicans has increased in recent days. Boehner and Obama met Sunday at the White House in a session the speaker described as “a nice meeting, a cordial meeting.” He said he’s “hopeful” for an agreement.

“But we’re still waiting for the White House to identify what spending cuts the president is willing to make as part of the ‘balanced approach’ he promised the American people,” Boehner said.

The speech is not a promising sign: If Boehner felt compelled to go to the House floor to publicly address negotiations, it means that talks aren’t progressing well behind the scenes.

To which White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer responded with a tweet: "The irony of this is that the White House offer had very specific cuts, the GOP counteroffer had almost none."

Boehner could be trying his hand at upping the pressure on the president, after the White House unleashed its most powerful tool by asking supporters to flood Republican phone lines. Judging by the White House response, that didn't work.

Or Boehner could be putting up a front, telling his restive caucus that he's still standing firm against tax hikes on the wealthy. Or it could really be that talks are at a standstill. But what is certain is that if Boehner doesn't come up with some tax rate increases that his caucus can live with, taxes on the middle class and the wealthy go up next month. And that'll be on his head.

11:58 AM PT: Sen. Harry Reid basically tells Boehner to pound sand.

• Today's comic is The climate cliff by Matt Bors:
  
• This is a great problem to have.
• Good luck with that, crazy lady:
  

  Orly Taitz, the California dentist and attorney best known for challenging President Barack Obama's citizenship, is asking the 80,000 people who have watched her YouTube video to join her for a protest in Washington.

• Nerd bait.
• As digby says:
  

  Here's the thing, once again: all of this is unnecessary. The deficit caused by Bush's tax cuts, wars and recession will be largely mitigated by reinstatement of the upper income taxes, drawdown of the wars, growth(duh!) and, most importantly, controlling health care costs, the best method for which would have been expanding Medicare to cover everyone. We don't need to make this "clever" accounting change that will result in elderly and disabled people suffering. We can get serious about a rational national security policy, controlling health care costs, and espurring conomic growth and stop listening to the disaster capitalists who are intent upon using this window of opportunity to cut the programs they hate, whether the economy is good or bad. (Hell, we could even raise the top income tax rate above the Clinton levels, at least for those making a million dollars a year. These people have been making out like bandits and surely won't miss the money.)

• So yeah. Amelia Earhart's prenup was all kinds of awesome:
  

  On our life together I want you to understand I shall not hold you to any midaevil code of faithfulness to me nor shall I consider myself bound to you similarly. If we can be honest I think the difficulties which arise may be best avoided should you or I become interested deeply (or in passing) in anyone else.

  Please let us not interfere with the others' work or play, not let the world see our private joys or disagreements. [...]

  I must exact a cruel promise and that is you will let me go in a year if we find no happiness together.

• Just ... ugh:
  
  Inbox: Joe Lieberman received the National Intelligence Distinguished Public Service Medal today
  — @ZekeJMiller via TweetDeck
• Here's a great idea for a holiday gift, to yourself or your favorite travel companion. Netroots Nation is offering a special holiday rollback rate to attend the 2013 convention in San Jose, June 20-23. But you only have until Thursday, Dec. 13, at midnight Pacific time to get this special rate, $245. If you've been to previous conventions, you know what a great deal this is. If you've been sitting at home or work during previous conventions, jealously watching the livestreams and the diaries from your friends who are there, now's your chance to join in at a great price. Register now at the special holiday price.
• On today's Kagro in the Morning show, a shout-out to #saveMI, Greg Dworkin on polls suggesting difficulties finding solutions to the Fiscal Thingy, besides taxes on the wealthy, where Americans agree even as the Gop in Congress might not. A fight over Boehner's Speakership? Well, not if the plotters don't pay closer attention to procedure. Then, filibuster reform and the myth of the "Gang of 14". Finally, what passes for "bold" solutions to the Fiscal Thingy and other problems, and the "bungling" of "the Single Biggest Story of the 2012 Campaign."

Reposted from Daily Kos Elections by David Nir While all eyes are on GOP Gov. Nikki Haley as she chooses a replacement for resigning Sen. Jim DeMint, don't forget that she has a re-election battle of her own to deal with in two years' time. As is their wont, PPP has the first numbers of the cycle pitting Haley against the man she narrowly edged by just four points two years ago, Democratic state Sen. Vincent Sheheen. Now Sheheen's on top, 46-44, in a potential rematch, even though more than half of all voters don't even have an opinion of him. That's quite worrisome for Haley, who sports a weak 42-49 job approval rating herself.

And it also looks like the GOP will be stuck with her: By a 53-37 margin, Republicans want her as their nominee once more. Moreover, in hypothetical primary matchups against Lt. Gov. Glenn McConnell and state Treasurer Curtis Loftis, Haley absolutely crushes (58-26 and 66-18, respectively). I don't know if anyone's talked seriously about taking her out in a primary, but numbers like these aren't very encouraging. That's probably good news for Sheheen: He beats Loftis 46-37 and McConnell 44-41, suggesting he has a pretty high natural floor against Haley but might fare worse against a less damaged opponent.

Meanwhile, South Carolina's other senator, Lindsey Graham, also has to worry about his own re-election fight. Yet while Graham might at one point have looked like the Republican most vulnerable to a primary challenge, PPP's new numbers suggest that title may now belong to Georgia's Saxby Chambliss. Among Republican primary voters, Graham earns a healthy 66-26 job approval rating, and against Republican Jesus (aka "somebody more conservative"), Graham actually leads 51-40—up from 37-52 in January of 2011. And he does even better against real human beings:

You have to wonder if Graham (who has lately turned himself into an utter jerkass over the U.S. embassy attack in Libya) will manage to re-invent himself the way Utah's Orrin Hatch did. Unlikely Dick Lugar, Graham seems to understand that the most important way to make yourself appreciated by conservative primary voters is to vocally express your disgust and hatred for Democrats all the live-long day. That may well be enough to rehabilitate his image and ward off a serious challenge from the right—we'll just have to see.

P.S. You may recall last week's poll from Winthrop University that gave Obama a hard-to-believe 48-41 approval rating in South Carolina. PPP finds him with a much more down-to-earth score of 44-53.