Motley Moose – Archive

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28 Senators Are Staying Up All Night To Bring Attention To Climate Change

On Monday, 28 senators are planning on staying up all night talking about climate change, an effort that aims to “wake up Congress” about the seriousness of the issue.

The “talkathon” will start after Senate’s last votes Monday and is expected to last until Tuesday at 9 a.m. It was organized by the Climate Action Task Force, a group launched in January whose goal is to take an aggressive stance on climate change in Congress. Twenty-six Democrats and two independents have committed to attend the talkathon and are planning to tweet throughout the night using the hashtag #Up4Climate.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), one of the members of the task force who will be participating in the talkathon, said the goal of the all-nighter was “to break the pattern of the Senate and show the interest of at least 20 senators who will be participating through the night.”

CSPAN Video Feed

Twitter Hash Tag #Up4Climate

Floor Remarks Of Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) #Up4Climate Senate Floor

The scientists have done their work:  We now better understand the human causes of climate change and we understand its profound and accelerating impact.  Unfortunately, too many policy makers deny the evidence, or refuse to cross political lines to solve the problem.  But it is time that we wake up and act on climate change.

We have taken some steps in the right direction.  This past summer, President Obama announced his Climate Action Plan to cut carbon pollution.  The Environmental Protection Agency has begun creating new carbon emission standards for future power plants.  The Department of Energy is working on ground-breaking energy technologies, and the Department of Transportation is studying transportation planning to address future risks and vulnerabilities from extreme weather and climate change.  The Transportation Department is also addressing vehicle fuel efficiency which is saving vehicle owners and operators billions of dollars a year.  While these are all positive changes, it should concern us all that they are not nearly enough to address the problem at hand.  Congress needs to lift its blinders and wake up to this problem by enacting legislation that prioritizes renewable energy development, supports energy efficient technologies, and taxes carbon pollution.

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McConnell: We Will ‘Crush’ Tea Party Challengers ‘Everywhere’

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) believes that incumbent Republicans won’t have a problem holding their seats in the 2014 elections.

“I think we are going to crush them everywhere,” McConnell said about Tea Party challengers in a New York Times interview published Saturday. “I don’t think they are going to have a single nominee anywhere in the country.”

E.J. Dionne: The Right’s New Clothes

Republicans truly are having the internal debate that [Rep. Paul] Ryan called “messy,” “noisy,” and “a little bit uncomfortable.”

But Ryan may have revealed more than he intended when he downplayed conservative divisions. “For the most part,” Ryan insisted, “these disagreements have not been over principles or even policies. They’ve been over tactics.”

In which case, this is not an argument over ideas at all, but a discussion of packaging.[…]

But what’s most troubling here is that it did not occur to Ryan to check the [brown paper bag lunch] story because it apparently didn’t occur to him that most kids on free lunch programs have parents who do care about them. They just can’t afford to put a nutritious lunch in a brown paper bag every day.

Ryan was so eager to make an ideological statement about family structure that he was not bothered by the implicit insult he was issuing to actual families of children on the lunch program. A little more empathy could have saved Ryan a lot of trouble. He apologized for the factual error but not for the insult.

… for now, I am inclined to respect [Sen. Ted] Cruz for giving us his views straight and not pretending he’s manufacturing new ideas. If conservative rethinkers such as Ryan have more than rhetorical and tactical differences with Cruz, they have yet to prove it.

(Bolding mine)

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The President’s Weekly Address post is also the Weekend Open News Thread. Feel free to share other news stories in the comments.

From the White House – Weekly Address

In this week’s address, President Obama highlighted the momentum building across the country to give Americans a raise and reiterated his call for Congress to increase the minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10. The President has already signed an executive order to raise the minimum wage for people working under new federal contracts. Companies large and small are choosing to give workers a raise because they know it’s good business. And Governors across the country are answering the President’s call by working to raise their states’ minimum wages. Now, it’s time for Congress to get the job done and restore opportunity for all Americans by raising the minimum wage to “ten-ten.”

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Fresh from the shores of Nonsensia:

“The left is making a big mistake here. What they’re offering people is a full stomach and an empty soul. The American people want more than that.  This reminds me of a story I heard from Eloise Anderson. She serves in the cabinet of my buddy, Governor Scott Walker. She once met a young boy from a very poor family, and every day at school, he would get a free lunch from a government program. He told Eloise he didn’t want a free lunch. He wanted his own lunch, one in a brown-paper bag just like the other kids. He wanted one, he said, because he knew a kid with a brown-paper bag had someone who cared for him. This is what the left does not understand.”

-Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, March 6, 2014

Paul Ryan: Free Lunches Make Kids Soulless

Okay, fine. Some kid would rather have his parents pack him a lunch than get it for free at school. Most kids would also rather have their parents drive them to school and drop them off than ride the bus. But just as not every child has a parent who can drive them to school, not every kid has parents who can afford to give them lunches every day. That’s why “the left” supports things like school buses and free and reduced-price school lunches. Because a free bus ride and a free lunch may not be the best possible way to transport and feed children, but it’s better than nothing.

Ryan’s plan is to reduce funding for the school lunch program. So more kids will have empty stomachs, but their souls will be full.

Wait! What’s this?? Not True??!??

The paper-bag lunch story is from a 2011 book about a hungry, panhandling kid in New York City. http://www.aninvisiblethread.c…

And the kid in the book wasn’t turning down gov’t subsidized lunches at school, he was reacting to a private benefactor’s offer to pay for his cafeteria lunches at school.

Fact Checker: Paul Ryan and the story of the brown paper bag

The Pinocchio Test

Here at The Fact Checker, we often deal with situations in which people misspeak. We certainly don’t try to place gotcha. But this is a different order of magnitude. Anderson, in congressional testimony, represented that she spoke to this child-and then ripped the tale out of its original context. That’s certainly worthy of Four Pinocchios.

But what about Ryan? Should he get a pass because he heard this from a witness before Congress? It really depends on the circumstances. In this case, he referenced the story in a major speech. The burden always falls on the speaker and we believe politicians need to check the facts in any prepared remarks.

In this case, apparently, the story was too good to check. But a simple inquiry would have determined that the person telling the story actually is an advocate for the federal programs that Ryan now claims leaves people with “a full stomach and an empty soul.” So he also earns Four Pinocchios.

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Tea Party Might Just Fizzle In Ted Cruz’s Texas

For Texas tea partiers, Tuesday’s primary might just be a grim day. Tea party candidates running in federal elections this cycle have struggled to get a foothold in the Lone Star state as the movement turns five.

The best example of the fizzle is one-time conservative favorite Rep. Steve Stockman (R-TX), who’s run such an incompetent campaign against Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) that even other tea party groups have turned against him.

Maybe arming fetuses is not as popular as Stockman thought it would be?

Rudderless Tea Party Searches For Meaning Five Years On

WASHINGTON: Several hundred die-hard Tea Party activists Thursday found themselves sandwiched between a much larger convention of chiropractors and the annual fly-in lobbying convention of the National Treasury Employees Union.

Held at a Washington Hyatt, the fifth anniversary event for the Tea Party Patriots was a far cry from the halcyon days of 2009 when tens of thousands of conservatives descended on Washington for a Tea Party rally.

But more than sheer numbers was missing from Thursday’s event: The day lacked either a single leader or issue to rally around. While Obamacare may have birthed the movement, it no longer motivates the Tea Party, if Thursday’s lineup was any evidence.[…]

Bachmann used her off the cuff speech to hit everything from the rise of China to the budget. Bachmann, who will retire at the end of this year, even warned the movement to not “take your marbles and go home” simply because of their 2012 electoral defeat.

Rep. Steve King, one of the early adopters of the Tea Party mantle, took a more philosophical approach, arguing the movement is about securing the fundamentals of Western culture like “liberty” and “free markets.” […]

Indeed, the only thread that ran through the day was the idea that the Tea Party can still wield power in the next election. At one point a Tea Party Patriots official took the stage to announce the group had raised more than $1.1 million over the last 10 days, announcing, “Let’s show those establishment people and the permanent political class we mean business and we don’t need their money, ’cause we gots our own!”

Bachmann’s calls for the gavel of Harry Reid got polite applause, but the biggest cheers – and the fact that Republicans should be most concerned about – came when Rep. Tim Huelskamp called for the forcible end to Speaker John Boehner’s leadership.

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