It's For Identifying Assholes

I live in Northern NY and unfortunately still see vehicles and clothing with the confederate flag on them. I want to thank John Oliver for pointing out the upside to that.

So, thanks for the head's up!

Freedom From Health Insurance, er Obamacare

As long as you work freedom into it, it has to be good. I'm beginning to love Chris Wallace. He must be angling to keep his job in the coming post-Rubert Fox News era. To be fair, he has shown flashes of brilliance in the past. Nice job in questioning former VEEP candidate Ryan here.

They're gonna have "a bridge from Obamacare." I don't think I want to buy a bridge from them, though. Oh yeah, the ramming down the throat thing is in there, too. 

Ryan instead insisted that that party only wants to give the American people “freedom from Obamacare,” including the 16 million who gained coverage under the law, and the 129 million who no longer have to worry about losing coverage because of pre-existing conditions. 

ASIDE: But not totally off-topic. Funiciello rambled on about healthcare on his radio that possibly only I listen to. He made a comment about a guy only making $10 an hour and having a family of four and then being forced to go out and purchase health insurance. Just wanted to point out how much that sounds like utter bullshit. My impression is that he would be eligible for his insurance to be fully subsidized. Unfortunately, I don't know that for sure. 

Say It Ain't So, Nearly Shoeless Joni

And after her rebuttal nearly brought tears my eyes. If I'd watched anyway.

Joni Ernst, the new Republican senator from Iowa who delivered the GOP response to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech Tuesday night, called in her address for cuts in government spending and described how her views grew out of her own “simple” upbringing, one in which her family diligently watched ever scarce penny, to the point where she owned only one pair of shoes.

Tears at my heartstrings at least. Of course, my brother and I had breadbags over our socks, too. So, I was really empathizing. Not that I remember that as particularly being a hardship of any kind. Of course, my family never received a half million in government handouts. My parent's were both union papermakers.

But the District Sentinel investigation showed that Ernst’s own father, Richard Culver, received $38,395 in taxpayer handouts, almost all of which went to corn subsidies. The Iowa senator’s uncle, Dallas Culver, made out even better, soaking up almost $370,000 in federal agriculture subsidies.

The total subsidies enjoyed by members of Joni Ersnt’s family came in upwards of $460,000

Ernst failed to mention her own family’s reliance on government assistance in her speech touting the virtues of self-reliance.

Really? I'm sure her opponent 5 years from now will bring it up.

In news of other right wing loons:

In the wake of international ridicule levied against the ill-reputed network, Fox issued a rare public apology last week for its inaccurate depictions of purported Islamist-controlled communities in Europe.

In one broadcast, self-declared radical Islam expert Nolan Peterson compared areas in Paris to war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan. He claimed that many parts of Paris are under Shariah law where French police will not enter.

“It was pretty scary. I’ve been to Afghanistan, Iraq, Kashmir, India, and at times it felt like those places in the no-go zones,” Peterson said. “You see young men wearing Osama bin Laden T-shirts. In a hookah shop, I saw a speech by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was leading an insurgency against American troops in Iraq at the time. It just, it seemed very mainstream and very accepted.”

And yet, we have citizens who hang on every word from Fox News and roam our streets freely. They should be in "no-go zones. Ironically.

Love this, from JoanWalsh:

Palin and Ernst have other things in common. The GOP’s answer to feminism, its strategy for winning female votes without changing its anti-female policies, seems to be recruiting sassy frontier gals who hunt and ride motorcycles and, yes, castrate hogs, but do it all in lipstick and (camouflage) pumps. And hey, in Iowa, it worked.

Bella Abzug need not apply.

Never heard of Curt Clawson but he is one boring motherfucker. Congrats on the Implody, Ted Cruz.

Bubble Boys

The Romney campaign seems to be illustrating the dangers of believing your own propagandists.

It may just be that (Romney) and those around him don’t grasp how the politics of foreign policy have changed in the Obama era – that the rhetoric Republicans routinely deployed against Democrats for the last decade doesn’t resonate anymore. There’s also the profound disconnect between the Obama caricature that the right has embraced – a weak, constantly vacillating leader who travels the world apologizing to other countries on America’s behalf – and the leader that the rest of the country sees. As Jonathan Chait theorized on Wednesday:

The miscalculation at work here is that Romney believed his “Apology Tour” method would neatly fit the events at hand — take an event that sort of vaguely resembled an Obama apology to Muslims who don’t like us, twist it around, and call it a day. But Romney had grown accustomed to spinning fantasies cobbled together from months-old Obama speeches and nurtured into legend by extensive repetition and exaggeration in the conservative subculture. What he failed to realize from the outset was that the embassy attack was an immediate, high-profile event that he could not hope to rewrite so brazenly.

Keep listening to Rush there Willard.

What if Ayman al-Zawahiri and other al-Qaida leaders gave up Osama Bin Laden for the express purpose of making Obama look good? Giving Obama stature, political capital. Obama got Osama! I mean really, do you think al-Qaida depends on Osama Bin Laden any more, like it did?… So they give him him, they give away his location. We go in, SEAL Team 6, Obama puffs up… Keep him in power, furthers the cause… Do you think the militant Islamists will be as hopeful of getting rid of Israel with a Republican president or with a Democrat president? Just throwing it out there.

The Republicans need to be beaten so badly that they come to their senses. It would be great to live in a country with two sane political parties.

Tin Soldiers and Obama’s Coming?

Maybe a few of these Keyboard Revolutionaries should be incarcerated to test their mettle. It’s easy to foment revolution sitting in a lazy boy. Thoreau was a martyr next to them. And he actually had a worthy cause (possibly opposite theirs).

Bloomberg Refudiates Palin

In a welcome display of Republican sanity, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has told Sarah Palin to piss off.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg "could not disagree more" with Sarah Palin's criticisms of the Ground Zero mosque, he said Monday.

Bloomberg said the $100 million mosque and community center is " a great message for the world that, unlike in other places where they might actually ban people from wearing burquas or building a building, that's not what America was founded on nor is it what America should become."

It’s alright Sarah, even Shakespeare in his prime had detractors. If those slings and arrows ever bug you and you’re wondering whether to be or not to be, please come down on the side of the latter.

Mark Williams chimed in with bits of insanity which can only be interpreted as attempts to make Palin look reasonable.

In other Ground Zero mosque news, Mark Williams, a Tea Party leader who called Borough President Stringer a "Jewish Uncle Tom" for supporting the project, has been kicked out of the National Tea Party Federation for making separate racially charged comments.

The Tea Party Federation also booted Williams’ Tea Party Express group after Williams wrote a mock letter from "the Colored People" to President Lincoln saying emancipation was a mistake.

Williams wrote an anti-mosque blog post in May saying that Muslims worship a "monkey god."

More Bloombergs, Fewer Palins!

Leftwing Slurs

Don Douglas gives us this disgusting bit of correspondence sent to Michelle Malkin. I am denouncing it, by the way:

You are a shitty Filipino prostitute, your only hope is to marry a white man. you are cheep and ugly. When I look to your ugly Filipino eyes , I feel ,I want to throw up. You want to be white but you are not. You are a shitty Asian horn and you will be for the rest of your life. Clean your rotten cunt before you write Filipino monkey.

I feel dirty just putting it up here. And Don goes on to say:

These are the kind of slurs I get routinely from Repsac3's merry band of haters.

As has been said so many times, put up or shut up. You know how to copy and paste, Don. Let’s see the slurs from the merry band of haters that approaches the bit above. I apologize for fat neocon hobo. You’re not a hobo, you just dress like one.

Might as well do a PowerMad roundup. Here’s another posting about a nut who attacks a group of DLI students. Included is this editorial comment:

Remember my comments about Repsac3's merry band of extremist henchmen? "I expect physical threats to my safety as forthcoming ... so always remember --- leftists are pure evil..."

Of course, my brother went to DLI and I would have myself if I hadn’t chosen another career field. I believe Don, along with Dick Cheney and most other neocons had other priorities while I was keeping Plattsburgh safe from the Rooskies. Love “extremist henchmen,” though.

In this posting, Don takes some really nice photos of some really lovely people. I’m sure the Department of Homeland Security under Lord Obama appreciates the quality. Names would nice, too. Probably not necessary, though.

What really struck me though is, why the Hell is the price of gas so high there?

 

That’s probably 40 cents a gallon more than it is here. Of course I don’t drive, so like I give a rat’s behind. Just curious.

Thank You, Mr. President

The Tea Party folks aren’t going to do it, so I will. Thank you Barack Obama for cutting my taxes. I could afford to pay more, but who really wants to if they don’t have to. The Tea Party folks think they are paying more, but they are quite possibly cretin idiots.

"In all, we passed 25 different tax cuts last year. And one thing we haven't done is raise income taxes on families making less than $250,000 a year -- another promise that we kept," he told supporters at the Arsht Center for the Performing Arts. "So I've been a little amused over the last couple of days where people have been having these rallies about taxes. You would think they would be saying thank you."

The president argued that America is on the road to recovery and headed in the right direction -- something an overwhelming number of Tea Partiers disagree with.

The Tea Partiers don’t want to see us on the road to recovery. Fuck them and their willful ignorance.

Mel Brooks, Prophet?

What did you expect? "Welcome sonny," "Make yourself at home," "Marry my daughter." You've got to remember, that these are just simple farmers, these are people of the land, the common clay of the new west. You know . . . morons.

The only way Obama is going to win over these people is if Mongo comes to town. And I hope that doesn’t metaphorically happen.

President Barack Obama says he believes the Tea Party is built around a "core group" of people who question whether he is a U.S. citizen and believe he is a socialist.

 

Apparently he feels there are some in the Tea Party who are sane. We can only hope.

But beyond that, Obama tells NBC he recognizes the movement involves "folks who have legitimate concerns" about the national debt and whether the government is taking on too many difficult issues simultaneously.

 

Please excuse all the verboten cut and paste.

Where Have All the GOP Leaders Gone?

Frank Rich in the NYT recaps some of the descent into chaos of our fellow citizens on the right end of the spectrum:

But the laughs evaporated soon enough. There’s nothing entertaining about watching goons hurl venomous slurs at congressmen like the civil rights hero John Lewis and the openly gay Barney Frank. And as the week dragged on, and reports of death threats and vandalism stretched from Arizona to Kansas to upstate New York, the F.B.I. and the local police had to get into the act to protect members of Congress and their families.

How curious that a mob fond of likening President Obama to Hitler knows so little about history that it doesn’t recognize its own small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht.

He notes the reaction to the passage of this bill as compared to the passage of Medicare, Social Security and the Civil Rights Bill:

But there was nothing like this. To find a prototype for the overheated reaction to the health care bill, you have to look a year before Medicare, to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Both laws passed by similar majorities in Congress; the Civil Rights Act received even more votes in the Senate (73) than Medicare (70). But it was only the civil rights bill that made some Americans run off the rails. That’s because it was the one that signaled an inexorable and immutable change in the very identity of America, not just its governance.

And of course, the gutlessness of those in the Republican party to do anything to tamp down emotions, in particular the most recent candidate for the Oval Office:

After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, some responsible leaders in both parties spoke out to try to put a lid on the resistance and violence. The arch-segregationist Russell of Georgia, concerned about what might happen in his own backyard, declared flatly that the law is “now on the books.” Yet no Republican or conservative leader of stature has taken on Palin, Perry, Boehner or any of the others who have been stoking these fires for a good 17 months now. Last week McCain even endorsed Palin’s “reload” rhetoric.

Are these politicians so frightened of offending anyone in the Tea Party-Glenn Beck base that they would rather fall silent than call out its extremist elements and their enablers? Seemingly so, and if G.O.P. leaders of all stripes, from Romney to Mitch McConnell to Olympia Snowe to Lindsey Graham, are afraid of these forces, that’s the strongest possible indicator that the rest of us have reason to fear them too.

Go. Read.

And if you want to, and I wouldn’t recommend it, go from the sublime to the stupid head on over to powerline. They haven’t quite claimed that John Wilkes Booth was a Democrat, but give it time.

Feel the Power of the Fang

I realize it’s all fun and games until someone goes full metal McVeigh. I can’t help myself. All afternoon I’ve been all, “Feel the power of the fang” and variations on it. 

I’ve been enjoying the works of Bob Lonsberry since my sojourn at SUNY Brockport. Like many of his ilk, he seems to be slipping the bonds of sanity over the health care bill. This, of course, is someone who absolutely no problem with a needless war fought in Iraq or the spying done by the NSA on Americans wherever they might be.

Suddenly the right is re-discovering their libertarian roots, though. Big government declaring war and saying fuck your privacy is not a problem. Big government trying to do something about the 45 million Americans without health insurance is a call to arms (literally?).

For the last two days, I’ve worn the same shirt. Tomorrow I will wear one like it.

It’s yellow, with a rustic drawing of a rattlesnake, and a line of text below: DONT TREAD ON ME.

And when I can open my mouth, I will. And when I can’t, my shirt will speak for me.

Don’t tread on me.

That is a warning the Obama Democrats chose not to heed.

And now they will feel the fang.

No idea what feel the fang means. Wingers have a bad habit of talking in code. If he has only one fang, Obamacare may help. I trust there is some dental coverage included.

Hopefully some psychological coverage as well. Lighten up, Bob.

All you wingers make sure you take the Tea Bagger Socialist-Free Purity Pledge. Hat Tip to Parsley’s Pics.

What a Wonderful World

No special reason for this. Just feeling good today. Don’t feel like pissing anyone off. And everyone knows that I’m a glass three quarters full sort of person, when I’m not being nihilistic anyway. And the more the tea party folks piss and moan the better I feel.

Armstrong could sing about it being a wonderful world after the life he had growing up and the tea party folks can gripe because of their imaginary concerns over health care reform? WTF? Maybe I don’t mind if I piss someone off.