“You find the things that you love.  And you love them the most that you can.”

-What it Means to Be a Nerd 

No matter how great the challenge, no matter how fierce the opposition, there’s one thing the past few years have shown: Planned Parenthood is not going anywhere.  As long as we’ve got to fight to make sure that women have access to quality affordable health care, and as long as we’ve got to fight to protect a woman’s right to make her own choices about her own health, I want you to know that you’ve also got a President who’s going to be right there with you, fighting every step of the way.

-President Obama

Rachel Maddow, on the conservative media embracing conspiracy theories. 

The Beltway common wisdom on this is wrong. The social conservatives have triumphed in the Republican Party. And you could tell it — not from what they say to the Beltway press — you can tell it from how they are using the power that they have in governing all over the country.

You cannot distill this stuff out of the Republican Party. This is the Republican Party. If you kicked them out of your bedroom, they would have no idea where else to go.

On the Republican side, Iraq was a war of liberation if you ask them in 2013.  On the Republican side, the Iraq war is what kept us safe so we wouldn’t get attacked again like we did on 9/11 if you ask them in 2012. “That smoking gun could have been a mushroom cloud! Thank God we went in!”  They are still there arguing that.  We have been through two presidential election cycles since then.  It is now 10 years after the war and the war is over, and this is still the line at the top-tier of the Republican party — trying to sell us the same lies that got us into that war in the first place.

Rachel Maddow, on what the Republican party still doesn’t understand about the Iraq war.

Let the record show: that you can be a United States senator for 21 years, you can be 79 years old, you can be the Chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and one of the most recognizable and most widely respected veteran public servants in your nation. But if you are female while you are also all of those other things, men who you defeat in arguments will still respond to you by calling you hysterical and telling you to calm down. They will patronize you and say they ‘admire your passion, sweetie,’ but of course they only deal in facts, not your silly girly strong feelings. It is inescapable, you can set your watch by it.

In case you missed it: The Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act this week and Justice Scalia referred to the act as a “racial entitlement.” 

kileyrae:

‘Building momentum for regime change’: Rumsfeld’s secret memos

By late November, Rumsfeld was meeting with Gen. Tommy Franks, Centcom commander, to plot the “decapitation” of the Iraqi government, according to the now declassified talking points agenda from the sessions (shown on television for the first time in the documentary). The talking points suggest that Rumsfeld and his team were grappling with a tricky issue: “How [to] start?” the war. In other words, what would the pretext be? Various scenarios were outlined: “US discovers Saddam connection to Sept. 11 attack or to anthrax attacks?” reads one of them. “Dispute over WMD inspections?” reads another. “Start now thinking about inspection demands.”

The documentary Hubris: Selling the Iraq War airs tonight on MSNBC

Rachel Maddow: GOP tries to hide extremist base with “rebranding” 

Rachel Maddow: The GOP’s New Math

Republicans are trying to figure out if they can use the fact that Republicans have control of the state government to change who that state votes for for President.  

Wisconsin this past election would have cast its 200,000 more votes for Obama than Romney.  But, instead of Obama getting 10 electoral votes out of it, Wisconsin effectively would have cast half a vote for Romney and half a vote for Obama — it would have been 5 to 5 in terms of electoral votes.  Extrapolate this out to the national level under the most aggressive plan that’s been put forward on the Republican side and President Obama would have finished the election nationwide with 5 million more votes than Mitt Romney but Mitt Romney could still have won the electoral college and won the presidency. 

davidtribby:

“(NRA) You are not to be taken seriously anymore when the adults are talking.”

I <3 Rachel Maddow

John Boehner is bad at his job (and Rachel Maddow does a really good job of explaining why).

Extremists in GOP undermine U.S. global leadership on living standards for people with disabilities

Nate Silver was not making up fake projections about the election to make conservatives feel bad; Nate Silver was doing math.  

And climate change is real.  Rape really does cause pregnancy sometimes.  And evolution is a thing.  And Benghazi was an attack on us, not a scandal by us. And nobody is taking away anyone’s guns.  And taxes have not gone up. And the deficit is dropping, actually.  And Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction.  The moon landing was real.  FEMA is not building concentration camps.  And U.N. election observers are not taking over Texas.  And moderate reforms of the regulations on the insurance industry and financial services industry in this country are not the same thing as communism.  

-Rachel Maddow, Time for Republicans to Leave the Bubble

Your daily Biden.