Yeeouch

After Secretary of State and Superwoman Hillary Clinton collapsed due to flu-related dehydration and exhaustion and bonked her head last month, conservative conspiracy theorists descended on Fox News and various right-wing failblogs to explain that she was making up her concussion to avoid having to testify on the attack at the Benghazi embassy on September 11th that resulted in the deaths of four Americans.

At a December 17th State Department daily press briefing, Fox News “reporter” Justin Fishel asked a question that seemed to imply that he was making this absolutely absurd accusation.

The response from the State Department after the fact is nothing short of epic. Check it out after the jump.

Sorry, Mitt. But you’re going to have to pay some taxes. With President Obama busy spending much of his time trying to stop House Republicans from purposely destroying the economy in order to get the kind of cuts to Medicare they’ve spent years campaigning against, most of America has missed that we now have what some experts are calling the […]

I’m not sure if I should laugh or cry…

Joshua Green at Bloomberg Businessweek has a hilarious piece about the utter fail whale that is the Tea Party caucus in Congress at the moment. In it, he details how utterly “hapless” (to use his word) the anti-Boehner contingent was when it came to their failed attempt to replace him as Speaker of the House.

He lays it out in three steps (which you can cackle at after the jump.)

Good for the goose but not for the gander

On December 22nd, The Journal News in an area just outside of New York City published an interactive map of those people in that area holding handgun permits. By clicking on the dots on the map, you could identify the name and address of the people with these permits. As the newspaper said in its piece, “Map: Where are the gun permits in your neighborhood?”, the data does not include owners of rifles or shotguns which can be purchased without a permit. It also “does not mean the individual at a specific location owns a weapon, just that they are licensed to do so.”

The gun fetishists went nuts.

“It’s an invasion of privacy!” they cried.

“It violates my rights!” they whined.

“It’s puts people in danger!” they warned.

Watching them fall all over themselves to put their 2nd Amendment rights above the 1st Amendment rights of the newspaper to share public information has been very illuminating.

Much more after the jump.

Thirty-fourth time’s a charm?

Republicans have been trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act since it was passed. The last time was in July 2012. That was the 33rd attempt.

Today, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann introduced legislation to try it again for the 34th time.

More idiocracy after the fold.

Wow

Before we head off into 2013, I wanted to take a moment to look back on 2012, a year that put Eclectablog on the map.

As you can see from the chart below the fold, Eclectablog had a stellar year in 2012. When we started the year, we were getting well under 100,000 pageviews per month. Not bad for a small blog but certainly not in the Big Leagues. By the end of the year, however, we had 3,307,857 pageviews and nearly 3 million unique visits. Our highest month was, not surprisingly, October, with well over a half million pageviews. Even in December, when people were sick of the election and politics in general, we had 272,000+ pageviews.

Much more after the jump.

Small government, my butt

As I wrote last week, the hypocritical “small government” Republicans passed 282 bills during the short inflamed duck session. So many, in fact, that when Governor Snyder took a holiday break outside of the state, Lt. Governor Brian Calley was enlisted to sign 50 of them.

More after the Eclectablog cliff.

Oh, the humanity (unless it’s not in my district) Yesterday, Representative Peter King from New York took to the House floor to lambast Speaker John Boehner and others who are holding up disaster relief to victims of Hurricane Sandy. “I can’t imagine that type of indifference, that type of disregard, that cavalier attitude being shown to any other part of […]

They didn’t beat Obama or save tax breaks for the rich but they’re still planning mandatory Reagan tattoos Here’s the good news: The Bush tax cuts, which we designed to give 15% of their benefit to the richest 2%, have now been extended for everyone but the richest, creating the most progressive tax code in generations. President Obama used the […]

Inflamed duck, indeed I knew that Republicans had passed a lot of bills through the Michigan legislature during the lame inflamed duck session but I had absolutely no idea just completely batshit nuts they had gone until this morning. That’s when I read this headline at Michigan Radio: MICHIGAN GOVERNOR MAKING HIS WAY THROUGH 282 BILLS Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder […]

Chapeau: doffed

2012 was a year full of politics in Michigan. As a political writer, particularly one writing from the progressive side of things, I never had a single day where there wasn’t something happening in Michigan worth writing about. We weren’t far into 2012 before I realized that women were standing up and speaking out in larger numbers and with a louder, stronger voice than any other group of people in our state. So much so that I have taken to calling 2012 the Year of Michigan Women in Politics.