U.S. Senator-elect Cory Booker will spend his last days as mayor of Newark officiating at weddings of both gay and heterosexual couples

U.S. Senator-elect Cory Booker will spend his last days as mayor of Newark officiating at weddings of both gay and heterosexual couples now that New Jersey is allowing same-sex marriage.

New Jersey's highest court on Friday ruled unanimously to uphold an order that gay weddings must start Monday and to deny a delay sought by Republican Gov. Chris Christie.

“For more than seven years, Mayor Booker has refused all requests to officiate New Jersey marriages because gay couples have been denied that equal right,” spokesman James Allen said. “After today’s wonderful news, Mayor Booker is excited to marry both straight and gay couples in City Hall on Monday morning at 12:01 a.m.”

Booker, a Democrat, was elected to the Senate in a special election on Wednesday.

But the court said in its ruling that the state had "not shown a reasonable probability it will succeed on the merits." All seven judges on the court joined the opinion, strongly suggesting they are prepared to accept same-sex marriage permanently.

Hannity/Fox News lie machine

Sean Hannity has been following the Ted Cruz "Obamacare is ruining all our lives" on his Fox show, reinforcing the baseless belief in most Fox viewers that the law is somehow going to throw them to the health insurance wolves. That's despite the fact that the Fox demographic is pretty much all on Medicare. But Fox exists to reinforce Republican lies, so that's what they've been doing. Salon's Eric Stern happened to catch Hannity in the act, featuring four couples who swore they had been hurt by Obamacare, and decided to do a little fact checking. Debunking Hannity turned out to be "appallingly easy" for Stern when he conducted follow up interviews Hannity's guests.

First up was Paul Cox of Leicester, North Carolina, and his wife Michelle. They told Hannity that they have had to cut the hours of their employees in their construction business because they couldn't afford to insure them.

Obamacare has no effect on businesses with 49 employees or less. But in our brief conversation on the phone, Paul revealed that he has only four employees. Why the cutback on his workforce? “Well,” he said, “I haven’t been forced to do so, it’s just that I’ve chosen to do so. I have to deal with increased costs.” What costs? And how, I asked him, is any of it due to Obamacare? There was a long pause, after which he said he’d call me back. He never did.

Actually, Cox could be getting a tax credit under Obamacare to help provide insurance to his four employees. I think he probably doesn't care as much about his employees' well-being as he wanted the Fox audience to believe. The only requirement for Cox under the law is that he informs his employees of the existence of the new health insurance exchange.

Then there's Allison Denijs who told Hannity that she pays over $13,000 a year in premiums and just got a letter from Blue Cross saying that her current policy wasn't in compliance with the law, so it was being discontinued and replaced. She also has a daughter with a pre-existing condition who hasn't been covered. She's angry because Obama promised that we could keep our existing policies. Stern asked if she'd actually checked out the exchange. She hadn't. Stern found "that they would be able to get a plan for around $7,600, which would include coverage for their uninsured daughter. This would be about a 60 percent reduction from what they would have to pay on the pre-Obamacare market."

Not a bad deal. Likewise, Stern found a pretty good deal on the exchange for the final couple, Robbie and Tina Robison from Franklin, Tennessee. They're mad because their kids are grown, but they have to have a policy that covers things they don't want like maternity care, pediatric care, prenatal care and so forth. Welcome to health insurance, Robbie and Tina. They're also mad because their insurance agent told them they would have to pay 50-75 percent more for a plan compliant with the law.

Had they shopped on the exchange yet, I asked? No, Tina said, nor would they. They oppose Obamacare and want nothing to do with it. Fair enough, but they should know that I found a plan for them for, at most, $3,700 a year, a 63 percent less than their current bill.

Robbie and Tina need a new insurance agent. The thing for these people who are so mad that their current insurance policies are being discontinued is that they're being replaced with insurance plans that actually cover stuff. That's going to mean bigger premiums for some people, but what Hannity and all right-wing pundits and politicians leave out is that the majority of these people won't have to pay the full bill for those premiums. What Hannity-types are also not admitting is that this is a pretty tiny group of Americans, those who buy their insurance in the individual market and who were already insured. So is Obamacare hurting all Americans? Of course not, just the teeny-tiny bunch of die-hard conservatives who will refuse to be helped.

ORIGINALLY POSTED TO JOAN MCCARTER ON FRI OCT 18, 2013 AT 12:04 PM PDT.

ALSO REPUBLISHED BY DAILY KOS.

House Stenographer:AKA Teaparty lunitic Goes Crazy During House Vote

Towards the tail end of the House vote on ending the government shutdown, a stenographer snapped and started ranting mindlessly on the House floor and had to be escorted out of the room. Very little is known about her thus far, but there is audio of her rant, and needless to say it is quite something.

She grabbed the House microphone and proceeded to shout, “He will not be mocked!” She repeated that a number of times and then said, “The greatest deception here is this is not one nation under God! It never was!”

She also, for some bizarre reason, went on about Freemasons writing the Constitution, and cried, “You cannot serve two masters!” as she was escorted away
The woman has been identified at Diane Reidy, and she was interviewed by Capitol Police before being sent to a hospital for a mental health evaluation

.Audio Below

update Teabagger nut job, runs to Fox News To Tell Her Story Dianne Reidy, the teabagger stenographer who went on a strange rant on the House floor Wednesday night, has now made a public comment, in an e-mail sent to Fox News producer Chad Pergram to explain why she was screaming about God while House members were on the floor

Ronan Farrow is joining MSNBC

Ronan Farrow is joining MSNBC where he will host a new Monday-Friday program for the network. Farrow is a writer and lawyer, and son of actress/humanitarian Mia Farrow and, most likely,film director/actor Woody Allen. , though Farrow admitted in a recent interview that he could "possibly" have been fathered by Frank Sinatra. 

“Ronan has established himself as a provocative, independent journalist capable of challenging people’s assumptions and empowering audiences,” said MSNBC president Phil Griffin in his announcement. “His show will be a game changer for MSNBC, representing a fresh approach to how we deliver news.”

“This is a new generation of news show for a new, more engaged generation of viewers,” says Farrow. “It’s a show about why the news matters to you – and what you can do to be a part of the story.”

He adds, “I’m excited to shake up people’s expectations for cable news. And to get a ton of Twitter followers.” He’s currently slacking with just 133,000 followers.

Farrow is a member of the New York bar, he has written about human rights and foreign policy for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal, he was a foreign policy official in the first Obama administration, and has been a spokesperson for UNICEF.

“Ronan has packed more experience into his 25 years of life than most people have in a lifetime,” added Griffin.

Farrow’s one-hour show does not yet have a name, time period or launch date.

News of talks between Farrow and MSNBC was first reported by The Hollywood Reporter earlier this month.

Comedian Greg Proops lampooned Antonin Scalia

Comedian Greg Proops lampooned Antonin Scalia , making fun of the Supreme Court justice for completely refusing to read “liberal” newspapers and believing in the Devil. 

During an appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, Proops noted that Scalia had told New York magazine that he “couldn’t handle” reading The Washington Post and the New York Times because of their alleged liberal bias. 

“Ok, look, I’m a comedian,” Proops said. “I have no responsibility to the public. I’m not holding a sinecured [sic] position where I am adjudicating of f*cking matters of grave national importance every day of my life and writing opinions and being a deciding vote on a f*cking panel of nine people who were hand chosen by psychopaths — and yet I have the catholicity of taste to f*cking watch Fox News every once and awhile, and I don’t go, ‘Oh my god!’" 




Much more here: 

http://www.rawstory.co...

What Are The Extortionist GOP Asking For

For shutting down the government and threatening to default on our full faith and credit and thereby violate the Constitution, Republicans in the House are offering to:

1) Take more power away from the President by removing executive agencies ability to allocate funds during sequestration (which should be a big clue that they have no plan to end their sequestration and also gives them incentive not to—neither of which is a good plan for the country), which they can do in the Senate bill.

2) Remove the Treasury’s ability to take extraordinary measures to delay hitting the debt limit in the future. Are you kidding me? With this group of radical nihilists that are currently holding the country hostage? That’s like saying “Hey, this is a stick up. Give me everything in your wallet, including all of your weapons and keep your doors open in the future so when I need some money I can roll on in and terrify you at will.” Thanks but no thanks.

3) Drop the delay in the reinsurance tax which was the Democratic GET in the Senate bill. In other words, there’s no enticement here, nothing from the Democratic agenda except the should be shared goal of not destroying the country.

4) The medical device tax would be suspended for two years. (Thus, a change to ObamaCare so Republicans can save face.)

5) The Vitter amendment would apply to Congress, President, VP, and Cabinet but not Congressional staff. (Another ObamaCare change to appeal to the base.)

Why Is The Media Selling America Down The River

News coverage of the government shutdown and the looming debt ceiling crisis has prompted widespread criticism about how Beltway journalists unnecessarily include Democrats when assigning blame for a shutdown strategy that has been methodically plotted by extremist Republicans for months; a strategy built around making unprecedented demands on the president in exchange for Republican votes for a policy they say they already support.

Eager to maintain a political symmetry in which both sides are responsible for sparking conflict, the press effectively gives Republicans a pass for adopting truly outside-the-norm behavior, such as when senators suggest the United States defaulting on its debt is not cause for concern.

But both-sides-to-blame reporting is really just the public symptom of a larger media malady; the refusal to acknowledge the proud extremism of today's Republican Party. Both-sides-to-blame analysis is a fallback position. It's a soft landing spot for journalists who aren't confident enough to accurately report what's unfolding politically.  

The signs of radical change are everywhere inside the Republican Party. The change is being driven by a group of hardcore members and their attempt to grind Obama's presidency, and the federal government, to a halt by refusing to not only compromise with Democrats, but refusing to even speak to them about the federal budget. They include members with an almost evangelical fervor for defaulting on the debt ceiling and whodescribe it as their defining "Braveheart" moment; their chance to do something "big."  They're extremists trying to make governing impossible via procedural sabotage.

Yet many reporters and pundits remain blind to the obvious GOP transformation, or are too timid to spell out the details for news consumers.

As irresponsible Republicans in the House detonate one blockbuster crisis after another, it's becoming clear that the press doesn't know how to deal with this; that it doesn't have the right tools for the job. Most journalists have never seen anything quite like the purposeful dysfunction and chaos that Republicans have plotted, and therefore remain timid and unsure about acknowledging what's really happening.  

So instead of clarity, we get the endless regurgitation about how the nation's capital has been paralyzed by a "partisan logjam" (Wall Street Journal), and suffering from "an inability to come together" (NPR contributor Cokie Roberts). See? Both sides are to blame.

The media's laser-like focus on the process of the shutdown drama (who's up and who's down) creates "the distinct possibility that readers aren't grasping just how extreme a position the House Republicans are taking here in the first place," noted Dan Froomkin at the Huffington Post. He's right, because the press isn't explaining how truly extreme House Republicans have become.

Describing truthfully and accurately what's happening while covering the news is perhaps the most important role journalists play in a democracy. New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan stressed that point last year. "Particularly in this intensely political season, readers and media critics are calling for journalists to take more responsibility for what is true and what is not," she wrote.

Sullivan added, "Journalists need to make every effort to get beyond the spin and help readers know what to believe, to help them make their way through complicated and contentious subjects."

But as reckless Republicans engineer one possible calamity after another in an effort to short circuit Obama's second term while the press labors to blame both sides, it's clear that journalists aren't following that advice. They're not spelling out what's true and not true. Specifically, they're not telling the truth about the GOP.

And if they're not being honest about Republicans, the press is no longer in a position to referee the shutdown fight.

Why don't journalists tell the truth about Republicans? One reason is there's a professional price to pay. Just ask Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein. Described by the Washington Post as two of the "most respected, committed scholars -- and defenders -- of the U.S. Congress," last year the two wrote a book about he radical streak that ran through the new, Tea Party-influenced Republican Party. With nearly half-a-century of scholarship between them, this was their conclusion one year before Republicans moved to shut down the government and threatened to default on the nation's debt [emphasis added]:

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country's challenges.

But what happened when the two presented their prescient, unobstructed view of the GOP and its purposeful intransigence? The duo was suddenly shunned by Beltway media outlets that had welcomed them in the past.

Mann and Ornstein stepped forward to accurately describe what was happening to the Republican Party and detailed the calamitous effect it had on governance and democracy, and the mainstream media turned away. The duo seemed to have crossed a Beltway line when they called out Republicans as radicals.

But that's just truth telling. And that's good journalism.

Source: MediaMatters.org

Republicans Paying the Price

The latest national survey by Democracy Corps and Women's Voices Women Vote Action Fund shows that Republicans are paying a big price with the public and are now bleeding seriously in their congressional vote.  Up until now, they have had peaks of voter disapproval, but this spike is the highest.  This is the first time we have seen voters' disapproval really translate into the vote -- a named ballot where we identify incumbents by name, not a generic vote.   Americans are not buying Republicans’ shutdown politics, and Republicans are likely to pay the price. For the first time we asked voters who they prefer to control Congress after the 2014 elections, and by 4 points likely voters say Democrats. And when asked if shutting down the government over defunding Obamacare will make them more or less likely to vote for their named Republican incumbents, nearly half (47 percent) of 2014 likely voters say less likely, with over one-third (35 percent) saying much less likely. The Republican Party brand has continued to fall since July, with fully half of voters now viewing the party negatively. Importantly, the party's strong negatives have grown 8 points since July, and now more than a third (36 percent) say they are strongly unfavorable to the Republican Party. The Democratic Party, meanwhile, has maintained their standing from July, even showing an increase in those who are strongly favorable to the party (21 percent strongly favorable, compared to 18 percent in July).  Republicans in Congress are now at one of the lowest points we have ever recorded, with 51 percent viewing them negatively -- a 5-point increase since March. Voters remain disdainful of how they are handling their job in charge of Congress, with over two-thirds (69 percent) saying they disapprove; furthermore almost half (48 percent) now strongly disapprove, an increase of 6 points since July. Democrats in Congress now have an 8-point lead in favorability over their Republican colleagues, with 37 percent of voters viewing Democrats in Congress positively, compared to 29 percent viewing Republicans in Congress favorably.         John Boehner has also suffered from the shutdown. Half of voters are giving him negative ratings, making him the most negatively viewed politician in the country. See the topline questionnaire.

Craig Smith, CEO of Swiss America, one of those companies that sells gold to morons on conservative media outlets assures Fox News' Neil Cavuto viewers that debt default should turn out just fine

Craig Smith, CEO of Swiss America, one of those companies that sells gold to morons on conservative media outlets assures Fox News' Neil Cavuto viewers that debt default should turn out just fine. Watch.

President Obama: "Call A Vote Right Now"

On Monday, President Obama met with FEMA officials at the National Response Coordinating Center, where he thanked them for their dedicated service during the shutdown in light of the arrival of Tropical Storm Karen and other potential natural disasters. The President repeated his call for Congress to pass a continuing resolution to reopen the government and to raise the debt limit. The President noted that about 86% of FEMA employees are currently furloughed.

He concluded:

I think the American people simply want government to work. And there’s no reason that there has to be a shutdown in order for the kinds of negotiations Speaker Boehner says he wants to proceed. Hold a vote. Call a vote right now.

Watch the full remarks here or you can read them here: