Franklin County Democrats

The Obama campaign has marked the sixth anniversary of Romenycare with this video featuring John McDonough, who helped craft the health care reform law in Massachusetts, along with Jonathan Gruber, before heading to Washington to help President Obama pass a similar version — individual mandate and all.

The main differences between the two laws are, Romneycare covers abortion and includes a requirement that an advisory panel appoint one member from Planned Parenthood. It also increases access to healthcare for illegal immigrants. Obamacare doesn’t do any of those things.

This list of translations that State Rep. Donna Lichtenegger (R-Jackson) posted on her Facebook wall last week was meant as humor but it provides a disturbing glimpse into the warped authoritarian mindset that currently infests our state capitol. Sure, if confronted they’ll roll their eyes and tell you to, “lighten up,” and criticize you for not being able to take a joke. But what makes this list so funny for them is that they believe that it’s all true. That’s how comedy generally works. But the only way they can publicly express what they actually believe without exposing themselves as bigots, racists and goons, is to couch it within the safety of a joke.

California to Texas

• Arsenal of Weapons – Gun Collection
• Delicate Wetlands – Swamp
• Undocumented Worker – Illegal Alien
• Cruelty-Free Materials – Synthetic Fiber
• Assault and Battery – Attitude Adjustment
• Heavily Armed – Well Protected
• Narrow-Minded – Righteous
• Taxes or Your Fair Share – Coerced Theft
• Commonsense Gun Control – Gun Confiscation Plot
• Illegal Hazardous Explosives – Fireworks for Stump Removal
• Nonviable Tissue Mass – Unborn Baby
• Equal Access to Opportunity – Socialism
• Multicultural Community – High Crime Area
• Fairness or Social Progress – Marxism
• Upper Class or “The Rich” – Self-Employed
• Progressive, Change – Big Government Scheme
• Homeless or Disadvantaged – Bums or Welfare Leeches
• Sniper Rifle – Scoped Deer Rifle
• Investment For The Future – Higher Taxes
• Heathcare Reform – Socialized Medicine
• Truants – Homeschoolers
• Victim or Oppressed – Criminal or Lazy Do-For-Nothing
• High Capacity Magazine – Standard Capacity Magazine
• Religious Zealot – Church-Going
• Reintroduced Wolves – Sheep and Deer Killers
• Fair Trade Coffee – Overpriced Yuppie Coffee
• Exploiters or “The Rich” – Employed or Land Owner
• The Gun Lobby – NRA Members
• Assault Weapon Fiscal Stimulus – Semi-Auto (Grandpas’s M1 Carbine)
• Same Sex Marriage – Legalized Perversion
• Mandated Eco-Friendly Lighting – Chinese Mercury-Laden Light Bulbs

You have to say one thing for Republicans, they are nothing if not relentless. Not a week after Cole County Circuit Court Judge Patricia Joyce ruled unconstitutional a joint resolution passed by the Missouri Legislature that would require voters to present a photo ID card at polling places, Majority Floor Leader Tim Jones and Rep. Jason Smith, co-chairs of the corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in Missouri, are cosponsoring a new ballot measure in response to Judge Joyce’s ruling. They are that concerned about vote fraud in Missouri.

So how bad is the problem of voter fraud in our state? It’s almost nonexistent. The Brennan Center for Justice conducted case studies by state and could only confirm eight cases of ineligible votes cast in Missouri between 2000 and 2006 in municipal and statewide elections. To put that into perspective eight cases represent less than 0.0003% of all votes cast. And none of these cases would have been prevented by these voter ID laws, according to the study.

“This is just the latest in a national effort by regressive politicians to help their candidates in close elections,” said Sean Soendker Nicholson, Director of Progress Missouri. “Politicians like Shane Schoeller and Bill Stouffer who push these laws never acknowledge their real purpose, which is to turn away from the polls people who are more likely to support progressive candidates — particularly the young, the poor, the elderly and minorities.”

Last week Cole County Circuit Court Judge Patricia Joyce ruled unconstitutional a joint resolution passed by the Missouri Legislature in 2011 that would have placed Voter ID legislation on the November ballot. It’s more than a little ironic that an amendment that purports to prevent voter fraud is itself ruled a fraud. As this STLToday editorial rightly points out:

Republican primary voters know what you’re trying to accomplish, and they’re on board. You want to limit the number of African-Americans in St. Louis and Kansas City and college students in Columbia and elsewhere who might vote for President Barack Obama and other Democrats. And if in the process a few folks in wheelchairs, elderly nuns and legal immigrants who are naturalized U.S. citizens are denied the right to vote, even better.

Republicans aren’t fooling anyone. Their stated goal to suppress the vote has been well understood for decades. In 1980, in a rare moment of candor, conservative activist and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, Paul Weyrich, spilled the beans …

Now many of our Christians have what I call the goo-goo syndrome — good government. They want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people, they never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.

Here is a recap of the deadly Twitter spree Rep. Tim Jones from Eureka went on last week. As you read these keep in mind that A). Jones aspires to become the next Speaker of the Missouri State House, and B). He’s a grown man:

• Revenge best served cold. As it will be to left wing trolls who have so gleefully & fraudulently attacked me #bliss [tweet now deleted -- screencap here]
• Gleeful, fraudulent, Cheetos stained, basement dwelling, hateful, lonely left wing trolls: revenge is best served cold. #cheers [tweet now deleted -- screencap here]
• Nasty, lying, Cheetos stained, basement dwelling, lonely, spiteful, hateful, deceptive left wing trolls: It shall be served cold. #cheers! [tweet now deleted -- screencap here]
• It’s simply too easy to flush out the hysterical Left. Way too easy.
• Well, that was WAY too easy. It’s good to purge the ‘ol twitter account every once in awhile of the stalkers & harassers.
• So easy to flush them out. Just say something silly that offends THEIR thin skinned sensitivities & it’s like vultures on a bone.
• And that should bring a few more out. Then back to business.

You see what he did there? After realizing he’d made a complete fool of himself he deletes the evidence then claims he was just trying to get a reaction from the “hysterical left” who he ironically accuses of “lying.” You see, he outsmarted everyone. He really got us. Uh, huh. But even if that’s the case how is it any better? It still exhibits the emotional maturity level of a petulant 5th grader. What kind of an adult behaves this way?

Let the cries of the persecuted Christians begin …

Franklin County Presiding Commissioner John Griesheimer said he is putting a temporary pause on beginning the commission’s weekly meetings with a prayer after receiving a letter dated March 21 from the American Civil Liberties Union of Eastern Missouri.

In the letter, the organization’s legal director, Anthony Rothert, said the ACLU received a complaint “about repeated instances of sectarian prayer offered at meetings.”

Each Tuesday for more than a year, Griesheimer has begun the meetings with a reciting of the pledge of allegiance and a prayer to God and Jesus Christ.

The prayers have varied from thanking God for the weather and the World Series Championship of the St. Louis Cardinals to asking for protection for servicemen and – women.

Rothert said sectarian prayers — in this instance, Christian — at county commission meetings are unconstitutional.

Griesheimer said addressing the situation isn’t easy.

“I don’t back down from a fight, but what we’re dealing with is (potentially) taxpayer money,” he said, noting that the county could incur costs if faced with a legal challenge.

“I think temporarily we’ll go to a moment of silence,” Griesheimer said.

Greisheimer makes it sound like this is a minor legal snafu and once County Council Mark Vincent works his magic Sleepy John can go back to singing the praises of Jesus before each official government meeting. But it will be no more Constitutional in six months than it as been all along.

He’s right about one thing, county taxpayers will be the ones to incur the legal costs of fighting this if Greisheimer persists, and it will all be for naught because the county does not have a legal leg to stand on.

Competition is the guiding principle behind the school reform legislation popping up in State Houses across the country. The idea is that if teachers are placed in a competitive environment the best ones will rise to the top and those producing lower student test scores will naturally be pruned from the system. It all sounds good in theory. There’s just one problem: people cheat.

Some educators might take offense to that, after all, these are professionals we are talking about. But so was Mark McGwire. So was Bernard Madoff. So were a multitude of politicians throughout the ages who ended their careers in disgrace. Being a professional does not preclude one from cheating, especially when the stakes are high. So the results of this Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation should give the school reform crowd pause. It found that “educators — principals, teachers and other staff — took part in widespread test-tampering.”

In nine districts, scores careened so unpredictably that the odds of such dramatic shifts occurring without an intervention such as tampering were worse than one in 10 billion.

In Houston, for instance, test results for entire grades of students jumped two, three or more times the amount expected in one year, the analysis shows. When children moved to a new grade the next year, their scores plummeted — a finding that suggests the gains were not due to learning.

Overall, 196 of the nation’s 3,125 largest school districts had enough suspect tests that the odds of the results occurring by chance alone were worse than one in 1,000.

For 33 of those districts, the odds were worse than one in a million.

Americans place a high premium on winning. It’s part of our DNA. But the more competitive the situation the more temptation there is to place one’s thumbs on the scales. This is the basic flaw in the school reformists’ logic. Competition doesn’t always produce a better outcome. That’s one of the great myths we’ve been taught about capitalism. Sometimes it just motivates people to do whatever it takes to win.

Rep. Lyle Rowland’s (R-Ozark) HB 1046 is on the House informal calender. The constituent who inspired Rowland to bring it to committee believes there was “no certification of residency or birth certificate” for President Obama and “none was ever produced.” If Majority Leader Tim Jones (R-Eureka) — himself a birther — brings this up for debate, it will be yet another waste of time and pander to the extreme right when we have real problems to address.

HB1512 could also come up for debate soon in the House. This anti-Sharia Law nonsense is sponsored by Rep. Paul Curtman (R-Pacific) — and cosponsored by the Majority Leader — but comes directly from model legislation drafted by radical lawyer and white supremacist, David Yerushalmi. So in addition to Curtman being an Islamophope, he’s also unoriginal.

If you think about it, the genesis of almost all legislative ideas advanced by today’s radicalized movement conservatives are born out of some combination of fear, paranoia or delusional conspiracy theory. Rare do we see bills introduced that speak to the needs of the people or that intend to make the government work more effectively. It’s very sad that these are the kinds of ideologues Missourians keep sending back to the state capitol. But as long as voters do, this is the kind of frivolous legislation our tax dollars will be funding.

From rightwingwatch.org comes this disturbing little sermon by Pastor Dennis Terry of the Greenwell Springs Baptist Church, in Louisiana, at which Rick Santorum not only attended, but was seen giving a standing ovation …

It’s all pretty radical stuff but I just wanted to highlight this little quote from around the 1:35 mark:

As long as they continue to kill little babies in our mother’s wombs …

See what Terry did there? “They” (liberals presumably) are killing little babies in “our” mother’s wombs? You see, in Terry’s world, those unsavory lady parts only belong to the mother during inconvenient menstrual cycles. That’s her problem. The rest of the time, they’re “ours.”

And is always the case when authoritarians get caught saying what they really think, Terry responded to critics per usual by claiming that “people are misquoting” what he said and “twisted and edited” his words because all he meant was that “I love America.” Ah, well, it’s all good then.