For the Record: Token? What Token?

 

They also seem to have forgotten to notify Donalds how serious they were about nominating him, since he voted for McCarthy in the first two rounds. Photo via Yahoo News.

From the "Black Democrats are the real racists" department, Heritage Foundation offered this specimen on Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO), who was mean to Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) after insurgent Republicans offered his name in nomination in the first 12 rounds of the Great Speakership Battle

Pundits inevitably made an issue of Donalds’s race and of the fact that the lawmaker the Democrats proposed, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), is also black. “It was the first time two black candidates for speaker of the House … were nominated simultaneously,” averred Fox News.

It was at that point that Bush channeled her inner mean girl and tweeted, “FWIW [For What It’s Worth], @ByronDonalds is not a historic candidate for Speaker. He is a prop. Despite being Black, he supports a policy agenda intent on upholding and perpetuating white supremacy. His name being in the mix is not progress—it’s pathetic.”

Actually, as Fox News noted, it was Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) who made an issue of the races of Rep. Donalds and Leader Jeffries in that way, followed by nominators Matt Rosendale and Scott Perry, who also took care to mention it

While praising Donalds, Roy also tipped his hat to Jeffries, the Democratic minority's choice for Speaker.

"And for the first time in history, there have been two Black Americans placed into the nomination for speaker of the House," Roy said.

Even as Roy also complimented Donalds for "moving past diversity", from inevitably fatherless Black kid to "Christian man", diversity being generally populated, as we all know, by bastards and unbelievers and people with bad character content in general, with the requisite quotation of the only words known to have been uttered by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his entire life:

"We do not seek to judge people by the color of their skin, but rather the content of their character," Roy said. "Byron Donalds is a good man — raised by a single mom, moved past diversity, became a Christian man at the age of 21, and has devoted his life to advancing the cause for his family and this country. And he has done it admirably."

or, as Fox News put it,

emphasized his belief that race itself was never a consideration in nominating Donalds.

Sure, Chip, you've made that totally clear, except:

What she said here was correct. Nomination of Byron Donalds was pure theater, no Republicans had any intention of making him speaker, and rebels quickly stopped "nominating" him. You claim he has policy ideas, but can't even be bothered to specify any. That's because...

— Beep Beep Yer Yas (@Yastreblyansky) January 21, 2023

... as you used poor brain-damaged Herschel Walker, as a beard while you reinforced the white supremacy. And already dropped him. Looks like he had to give up his spot on Oversight to make room for Gosar and Boebert and he hasn't got a committee at all yet. pic.twitter.com/Th7T3b2li7

— Beep Beep Yer Yas (@Yastreblyansky) January 21, 2023

As of today, January 24, Donalds's website still can't tell us what committees McCarthy has given him.

Frenzy in the Times (spoiler: there isn't much)

Speaking of narratives about regnant white supremacy and misogyny among the Right, this year's White House interns. Via DiversityInc.

Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute welcomes the Heritage Foundation's naming of a new president, Kay Coles James, after the turmoil ending the reign of Jim DeMint:

If the new Heritage president had been a white male, the Times would likely have gone into bean-counting frenzy, tallying up all the other conservative think tanks headed by white males. But not only is James female, she is black. The Times [article here] buries this fact in its ninth paragraph, after characterizing James as a “safe choice.” A conservative organization opting for a black female as its “safety” candidate does not fit the Times’ narrative about regnant white supremacy and misogyny among the Right.

I'd like to point out that when DeMint was named to head the foundation in December 2012 the Times did not mention his race or gender at all. They did mention that DeMint was one of the least wealthy members of the Senate and could look forward to a significant boost in his standard of living. The only reference to race in the story was in mentioning that Governor Nikki Haley might pick South Carolina's first black congressman since Reconstruction, Tim Scott, to replace DeMint as Senator (which she subsequently did). Nor did Andrew Rosenthal's op-ed give any attention to DeMint's race and gender.

The most recent appointment of a new head to a conservative think tank I can find out about, when Thomas W. Gilligan became director of the Hoover Institution in 2015, was not covered in the Times at all, in spite of his white and male identities. The same goes for Arthur Brooks, who is also white and male, being named president of the American Enterprise Institute in 2009. Heather Mac's shop, the Manhattan Institute, has been headed by white guy Lawrence J. Mone since 1995, whose only mention in the Times, in 1997, also left the race question blank.

So the evidence is that when a white man is appointed to head a conservative think tank the Times never goes into frenzy, bean-counting or otherwise.

Annals of derp: When Obama's approach to HUD budget was the same as Trump's, except for a couple of details

Facepalm photo by Robert Sikora.

It's Jim "Crème" DeMint's house propaganda organ, the Heritage Foundation Daily $ignal, wondering why Trump gets criticized for doing exactly the same crap that President Obama did:

The president’s budget called for slashing funding for a block grant program primarily because it was difficult to determine whether it was getting the desired results.

That was President Barack Obama’s budget proposal for fiscal year 2012. It justified the $3.7 billion cut in the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Community Development Block Grant program by asserting:

Annals of Derp: Failing Obamacare or Failing Rightwing Arithmetic?

Oh, hai, Heritage Foundation,  it's been a while! What you been up to?

One of America's drug problems: Heritage Foundation economists are taking too many of them. Image via Newstarget.

The left insists Obamacare is working. The typical family today pays about 35% of their income for health care. https://t.co/Baqb1CTCiU pic.twitter.com/LolIpbOgYg

— Heritage Foundation (@Heritage) February 16, 2017

.@Heritage It takes some powerful drugs to read your source https://t.co/WzG3PvoaWH as saying that.

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) February 16, 2017

In particular because that isn't—um—what the source says. Because in the first place the Milliman numbers aren't what that family pays. It's the cost of health care, according to their calculations, for the "typical family of four on a standard average PPO plan" as paid by the family itself, their employer, their insurer, and/or the government. What that "typical family" paid in 2015 was not $24,671, the total Milliman costs, but quite a bit less than half of that:

Annals of Derp: Tell me what is Kansas thinking?

Via YouTube.

Rachel Sheffield and Elmore Wallace over at the Heritage Foundation's Daily Dogwhistle write about a major success for Kansas governor Sam Brownback. If you're not reading the rightwing press you may be under the impression that Brownback hasn't been successful in anything—

Brownback pledged to bring 100,000* new jobs to the state in his second term; as of January, he has brought 700. What’s more, personal income growth slowed dramatically since the tax cuts went into effect. Between 2010 and 2012, Kansas saw income growth of 6.1 percent, good for 12th in the nation; from 2013 to 2015, that rate was 3.6 percent, good for 41st.

Meanwhile, revenue shortfalls have devastated the state’s public sector along with its most vulnerable citizens. Since Brownback’s inauguration, 1,414 Kansans with disabilities have been thrown off  Medicaid. In 2015, six school districts in the state were forced to end their years early for lack of funding. Cuts to health and human services are expected to cause 65 preventable deaths this year in Sedgwick County alone. In February, tax receipts came in $53 million below estimates; Brownback immediately cut $17 million from the state’s university system. This data is not lost on the people of Kansas — as of November, Brownback’s approval rating was 26 percent, the lowest of any governor in the United States.

But no, apparently there's this one thing where he's accomplished something according to plan, kicking people off SNAP (or "food stamp") benefits if they don't get a job.

What pulled me in was Sheffield's and Wallace's obnoxious quotation from Lincoln:

Obamacare Tragedy Watch: Nashville Katz

Photo by army_arch. Liberty Bringing a Dr. Pepper Float to Table 36.

According to the Heritage Foundation's Daily Aufruf Signal, that wicked Obama is bringing about the shuttering of the Noshville Authentic New York Delicatessen in the Broadway district of, uh, Nashville:

Dec. 27, the midtown Nashville location of the restaurant, one of two [Tom] Loventhal owns, will be closing its doors in part because of Obamacare, he said.

West of Eden: Eight Heritage fails—OK, seven and a half

The Heritage Foundation, Washington, D.C. (Nah, it's a set design for The Fall of the House of Usher. by Mluisa Paci at Béhance).

Oh dear Flying Spaghetti Monster, here's a clickbait listicle from the Heritage Foundation,

8 Things Obama Got Wrong on the Iran Deal

bylined Michaela Dodge, "specializes in missile defense, nuclear weapons modernization and arms control as policy analyst for defense and strategic policy in The Heritage Foundation’s Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies". I'll bet she does, and what you got, Michaela?

1. The president stated that, “Between now and the congressional vote in September, you are going to hear a lot of arguments against this deal, backed by tens of millions of dollars in advertising.”

This assertion is flat out wrong.

Happy Birthday Alexis de Tocqueville!

Jacques-Louis David showing his lack of painterly imagination in the 1824 Mars being Disarmed by Venus and the Three Graces. Tocqueville really didn't know much about art. Image via Wikipedia.

A new superlatively bad writer, Arthur Milikh, assistant director of the B. Kenneth Simon Center for Principles and Politics at The Heritage Foundation, celebrating the 210th birthday of Alexis de Tocqueville on July 29 (or 225th in the original version, as you can see from the URL) in the Daily Dogwhistle Signal:

We often boast about having attained some unimaginable redefinition of ourselves and our nation.

Do you now? What gets you in the mood? Asking for a friend.

Lede, buried: Insulin

Reginald Denny and Mary Astor in Oh, Doctor! (1925), by Henry A.Pollard.

Once upon a time diabetes was a fairly quickly executed, though exceedingly painful, death sentence, and then once upon a more recent time, starting at the beginning of the 20th century, scientists began figuring out how it worked, and developed effective treatments, culminating in the late 1930s with the development of insulin derived from pig or cow pancreata, which enabled patients to control their own symptoms.

Then in the 1970s, with the development of recombinant DNA technology, it became possible to manufacture a synthetic human insulin, which might have worked better in some cases, and was more expensive and hence profitable for the manufacturer, with the upshot that today in the United States the older animal insulin is no longer available and now we have patients dying because they can't afford the $400 a month it costs to treat it with the newer product. This according to an NPR story from this morning reporting on research by Jeremy Greene and Kevin Riggs published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine:

Obamacare Tragedy Watch: Scotts Bluff edition

Protester on the right looks a little like Pam (don't think it's her, though). Photo by Jonathan Ernst/Reuters, March 2013.

Haven't had one of these in a while!

Pamela Weldin, a San Diego dental hygienist who was diagnosed with carpal tunnel syndrome in 2000, subsequently moved to Minatare, Nebraska, in the Scotts Bluff region, where she acquired a catastrophic insurance policy from Humana and a "directorship" with The Pampered Chef, a multilevel marketing cookware company selling frying pans at a 200% markup over normal retail value to unwary ladies at Tupperwarish parties where wine is served, with three employees and an annual sales volume of $558,000.

Why she would have had the catastrophic coverage is pretty clear: she couldn't get a reasonable policy in those days, because she had a preexisting condition and no insurer would touch her with a normal policy, for which they'd essentially be paying out more every month than they were taking in in premiums. She must have been thrilled by Obamacare, right?

The shorter Heritage Canard

Just to clarify what may have been a fairly serious case of tl;dr:

On NPR this morning some fool Republican freshman congressman invited to explain why he's voting in vote no. 50-something to repeal the Affordable Care Act (for the freshmen it's all exciting because it's their first time, they're all Obamacare Repeal Virgins), transcript is not up and I can't be bothered to listen to the thing again to get the name of the fool and his exact wording, said, among other things,

White House Fool Report: The Heritage Canard

Via.

So apparently Eugene Robinson and Sam Stein were trolling Mr. Joe Scarborough the other morning on the subject of how deeply accommodating the president has been to his opposition and brought up as a case in point the Affordable Care Act: Robinson saying something along of the lines of "when he wanted to do universal health care he came up with a Republican plan out of the Heritage Foundation" etc. etc. etc., which I saw over at Crooks & Liars and and went, as I'm wont to do on this point, almost as bonkers as Mr. Joe did.

Scarborough went bonkers, of course, because it was evidence that the president really does try to cooperate with the GOP, in contradiction to his narrative of the moment, adopted from Mr. Jonah:

Annals of derp: The Great Depression

Economist Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation, at the College of the Ozarks Free Enterprise Forum in April 2014.

Oh hai Heritage. And what's your Chief Economist Stephen Moore got to cheer about today?

Mr. Burns’ docudrama on the Roosevelts—for those who weren’t bored to tears—repeats nearly all the worn-out fairy tales of the FDR presidency, including what I call the most enduring myth of the 20th century, which is that FDR’s avalanche of alphabet-soup government programs ended the Great Depression. Shouldn’t there be a statute of limitations on such lies?

Well, hm, and what's today's argument about how the New Deal didn't work?

Priorities

Heritage Senior Research Fellow in International Regulatory Affairs Brett D. Schaefer at the Daily Signal is shocked to realize how twisted the president's priorities are:

At the 2014 United Nations Climate Summit on Tuesday, President Barack Obama offered a stunning–in fact, deeply disturbing–insight into his views on threats to the United States and the American people.

Et tu, Wonk?

Headline at Heritage's Daily Signal:

Aetna CEO Admits Obamacare Customer Numbers Worse Than Expected

Paragraph to which the headline refers:

Bertolini said the initial Obamacare enrollment numbers were worse than expected but younger enrollees increased in April in May, when Aetna picked up two-thirds of its customer growth through Obamacare.

I.e., the headline should have read "Aetna CEO Admits Obamacare Customer Numbers Worse Than Expected Until They Got Better".

Another headline at the same site announces:

Saturday cheap shot: The nativists are restless

Image via Blog with a View.

From the Heritage Facebook page, clickbait that would do NewsMax proud:

The Heritage Foundation

2 hrs · 

Why isn't this headlining the news?

The Shocking Secret Obama Won't Talk About -- And It's Putting You In Danger.

Bowing to pressure...it's no excuse.

THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION

Share

Actually, though, the story isn't exactly a secret, having been reported by CBS and USA Today, among others, and has approximately zero connection to President Obama, and it's maybe a little less shocking than it thinks, too. It's the report of a report by the [jump]

Binges of Madison County

Pillars of the Community, Madison County, 1939, via Shorpy. Always a false front.

Ohai, Heritage, whassup?

.@unitedliberty: One of the saddest #Obamacare horror stories yet http://t.co/zRgsWajaTU
— Heritage Foundation (@Heritage) April 21, 2014

Wow, it's been a while! Glad to see you're still on your game and all. And tell us all about Madison County, Alabama, and its tragically dispossessed widows?

Madison County Commissioner Roger Jones said no one realized just how much the new federal health care law would change things, especially for the spouses of some of his former employees.

“What I’m trying to do is get this coverage back to them,” said Jones. “A lot of these people are on fixed incomes. Some of them are living on Social Security and very little else, and health insurance is very important to them.”

Annals of derp: HHIMM to Intellectual Beauty

Heritage tonight:

Yikes! This is how #Obamacare is treating young people: pic.twitter.com/4ZiWBRd3E7
— Heritage Foundation (@Heritage) April 11, 2014

Where do you suppose they got this data? First note when they got it, in the little note just under Alaska: six months ago, when it's pretty hard to imagine how they could have put together a such a magisterial picture of such data as there was at the time, when [jump]

Dire Straights

From Sun Club Color Studio, of Mobile, via Action News 4 Pittsburgh.

Katrina Trinko in the DeMintia ward on St. Patrick's Day defending the parade organizers in New York and Boston for refusing to allow LGBTQ groups to march openly, and kind of disappointed in the beer companies that withdrew sponsorship:

Let’s just imagine the situation reversed. In Alabama, for instance, let’s say there was a Thanksgiving parade. Traditional marriage advocates wanted to march holding signs about marriage – [jump] 

Annals of derp: Elective amenities

Heritage:

Report: U.S. Is One of Seven Countries That Allows Late-Term Abortion

The United States is one of only a handful of developed countries in which late-term abortions after 20 weeks—five months—are allowed, according to a new report from the Charlotte Lozier Institute. At that stage, the child is capable of feeling pain and women are at increased risk for the negative effects of abortion.

Except it's no truer than the last time the claim went around (when it was Mrs. Governor Anita Perry of Texas and former California Senate candidate Carly Fiorina who gave the number as 4 rather than 7. As Politifact Texas explained at the time,

Image via Crazy Uproar.