THE GODWINS ARE COMING! THE GODWINS ARE COMING!

Dr. Ben Carson, the right wing's favorite African-American conservative, is pandering again to the cray-crays in his party, and they love him to pieces for it.  

In classic Godwinian rant, American Progressives, Carson claims, will impose Nazism on the U.S. presumably by making nonProgressives wear yellow peace signs on their clothes and wrecking their businesses ala Kristallnacht. NonProgressives will make this country condemn innocent men, women, and children to death and march them to death camps.  

Dr. Carson, by warning conservative Americans about the coming Progressive/Nazi takeover of America, must also believe Progressives will annex Canada and Mexico to the U.S. and then immediately blitzkrieg all red states, maiming and killing hundreds of thousands of god-fearing nonProgressives, because THAT is what Liberal/Progressives want to do! Progressives want to turn America into NAZI GERMANY!!!!!11! 

So sayeth Dr. Crazy Ben Carson.

Yes, this guy, whom the presumably rational cons believe is a serious person, actually implied this.  

Who could forget how those Progressive Nazis demanded equal rights for their gay citizens, how the Progressive Nazis encouraged labor and trade unions, 
or how Progressives in the Third Reich encouraged Aryan women to reproduce only wanted children.

Yes, kindly Dr. Carson gave warning to his beloved TeaPublicans about the coming imposition of Nazism on America by American Progressives, and no one laughed in his face or called for the men in white coats with the butterfly nets!  

The cons are so eaten up by the fact that Barack Hussein Obama is the president of these United States, that they've sunk to the point of encouraging a talented pediatric surgeon with fevered hallucinations about Progressives to make a fool of himself in front of large crowds of people.  

Poor Dr. Carson.

These seriously stupid comparisons may arouse the TeaPublicans' darkest and swampiest fears of where they imagine this country is headed, based on nothing, but that is all the more reason for Dr. Carson's popularity with the low-information voters in that particular segment of the agitated voting public.

But do not let your paranoia consume you, O TeaPubs, because Dr. Carson has assured you all that even if you believe these coming unimaginable cataclysmic events, brought to you by NAZI PROGRESSIVES!, won't happen here, 'YOU'RE VERY WRONG!"

However, he, Dr. Super nonProgressive Carson, WILL NOT LET IT HAPPEN HERE!!!111!


Do you feel the comforting gooey warmth of safety now, O ye cons? Dr. Carson hopes so. He knows how to stir the deepest, creepiest imaginings of the dopiest, creepiest among you.  And you fall for this absurd twaddle every time.





"Dr. Ben Carson knows how to get an audience of conservatives going. In a recent speech, the retired Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon and current Fox News contributor suggested that progressives could turn the United States into the next Nazi Germany, according to The Huffington Post. 

The comments came at a Jan. 31 fundraiser for Oregon Republican Senate candidate Dr. Monica Wehby. A video of the speech, uploaded to YouTube, shows Carson discussing how the "secular progressive movement" wants to "fundamentally change who we are." The majority of Americans who have "common sense," meanwhile, are "afraid to speak out," Carson said, because "they will be targeted, they will be called names, they will be investigated by the IRS, and all kinds of unimaginable things will happen." 

A few moments later, Carson brought up the Nazis. "There comes a time when people with values simply have to stand up," he said. "Think about Nazi Germany. Most of those people did not believe in what Hitler was doing. But did they speak up? Did they stand up for what they believe in? They did not, and you saw what happened." 

 "And if you believe that same thing can't happen again, you're very wrong," Carson then added. "But we're not going to let it happen."  --Talking Points Memo



Godwin's Law

The REAL Death Panels: Red States

The half-wit, half-term ex-governor of Alaska warned the American people about "death panels" in the run-up to the passage of the A.C.A.   What she failed to point out was that it was the individual governors of red states who would be responsible for the d.p.s.  

Those red state governors refusing to expand Medicaid and extend health coverage are endangering the lives of their constituents, all for political reasons.  It is obvious they hate President Obama's A.C.A. more than they love the health and well-being of their fellow citizens.  That's nothing new since Mr. Obama became president, but in this case, their motivation for noncompliance is devastating to the poor, the disabled, children, and veterans.




"Thousands of Americans will die as a result of red state governors’ refusal to expand Medicaid and extend health coverage to their states’ neediest citizens, according to a study by researchers at Harvard University and the City University of New York.


Talking Points Memo reported that as many as 17,000 people will die because they cannot afford to access health care.

 President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA) — also known as “Obamacare” — attempted to reform the nation’s health care system by increasing access to affordable health insurance plans, improving the plans that are available, and by making federal funds available to states to improve and expand their Medicare system, which offers free health care to low-income adults.


Republican governors and state legislatures in 23 states have refused the supplemental funds out of political motivations, but the study authors say that this act of political sabotage will have deadly consequences.

 “The results were sobering,” said study author Samuel Dickman to Pennsylvania newspaper The Morning Call. “Political decisions have consequences, some of them lethal.”

 The study found that a projected 423,000 diabetics will not be able to adequately manage their disease. Some 659,000 women will not receive mammograms and 3.1 million will not get necessary gynecological checkups like pap smears.

 The lack of early intervention and preventative care means that patients will only seek medical help when they reach the acute phase of illness, when treatment options are fewer and negative outcomes more likely.

 “Low-income adults in states that have opted out of Medicaid expansion will forego gains in access to care, financial well-being, physical and mental health, and longevity that would be expected with expanded Medicaid coverage,” said the study.

 The Kaiser Family Foundation reported that 25 states and the District of Columbia are expanding their Medicaid programs and 23 states are not. Pennsylvania and Indiana plan to expand Medicaid in 2014, but their plans have not been finalized."

SOURCE

According to Business Insider, here are the TEN UNHEALTHIEST STATES:

 1. Mississippi
 2. Arkansas
 3. Louisiana
 4. Alabama
 5. West Virginia
 6. Kansas
 7. Oklahoma
 8. South Carolina
 9. Tennessee
10. Indiana

National embarrassment and publicity hog,

George Zimmerman, has had his pathetic dream of making money off of the death of his victim, teenagerTreyvon Martin, cancelled.

So there's reason to believe there is some hope for this celebrity-crazed culture, and perhaps Zimmerman will finally descend into the ignominy he so richly deserves.




"A victory was earned today for the memory of Trayvon Martin, as promoter Damon Feldman announced today that due to public outrage, the George Zimmerman celebrity boxing match has been canceled."

 Feldman tweeted:

"Featuring George Zimmerman in the ring fighting an African American opponent was an attempt to exploit racial tensions for profit. It was also the height of disrespect to Trayvon Martin. 

Turning a young man’s murder into a cash grab was wrong. Zimmerman said that he would donate his cut of the purse to charity, but he still stood to profit off of the fight. 

It is obvious that Zimmerman is looking for ways to cash in on killing Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman wants to advance his celebrity, and the media attention that he would have gained from this fight would have done exactly that. 

 Only a group of heartless sociopaths could cook up a scheme like this, but hundreds of thousands of people stood up for decency. You said no. You put the pressure on, and you were successful. 

 It looks like George Zimmerman is going to have to get a regular job to pay his bills, because millions of Americans aren’t going to let him make money off of the fact that he shot and killed Trayvon Martin."

February is Black History Month

The Slave Narratives:














 Mag Palm account

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them

Naturally, and without surprise, the GOP noise machine took a CBO report on the A.C.A. and deliberately misrepresented what it said, claiming two million jobs would be lost because of the health care law. 

Nobel Prize winning economist, Paul Krugman, sets the record straight:



"Not a word of this claim was true. 

The budget office report didn’t say that people will lose their jobs. It declared explicitly that the predicted fall in hours worked will come “almost entirely because workers will choose to supply less labor” (emphasis added). And as we’ve already seen, Mr. Elmendorf did his best the next day to explain that voluntary reductions in work hours are nothing like involuntary job loss. 

Oh, and because labor supply will be reduced, wages will go up, not down. We should add that the budget office believes that health reform will actually reduce unemployment over the next few years. 

[...] Remember, the campaign against health reform has, at every stage, grabbed hold of any and every argument it could find against insuring the uninsured, with truth and logic never entering into the matter. 

Think about it. 

We had the nonexistent death panels. 

We had false claims that the Affordable Care Act will cause the deficit to balloon. 

We had supposed horror stories about ordinary Americans facing huge rate increases, stories that collapsed under scrutiny. 

And now we have a fairly innocuous technical estimate misrepresented as a tale of massive economic damage. 

 Meanwhile, the reality is that American health reform — flawed and incomplete though it is — is making steady progress. 

No, millions of Americans won’t lose their jobs, but tens of millions will gain the security of knowing that they can get and afford the health care they need."


 Aaron Carroll at CNN: 

 "I understand why opponents of the ACA have long tried to twist these facts to support a position that declares the ACA is hurting the economy and increasing unemployment. But I'm baffled as to why the media failed to see that the key piece of evidence, the CBO report, didn't uphold their claims. 

There's a big difference between a reduction in the supply of labor and a reduction in the demand for labor. It's time we all learned the difference."

h/t Daily Kos 


 CBO Report: Obamacare Will Make Us More Free

Dumbass Pundit

I'm not posting this just for the sake of another "Outrage-A-Day" outragey outrage.

No.  The reason is this:  Laura Ingraham is really popular with a certain segment of the voting population,   She has a fairly good following on hate-talk radio; and as stated below, is a frequent guest on FAUX NOOZ's Bill O'Reilly show, another large audience.

That's why she's a menace to any society that values education and reasoned discourse.  Because of her unearned respect with her particular listeners and fans, they will take what she stated as fact, and form a biased opinion of Justice Sotomayor based on Ingraham's ignorance.  And Ingraham is sincerely and grossly ignorant. But I'm not so sure her stupidity is "conscientious."  It appears to be just plain ordinary vulgar stupidity, since it promotes xenophobia and bigotry.





Laura Ingraham, a conservative radio host and frequent guest host for Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News show, suggested on her radio show Tuesday that Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s “immigrant family background” calls into question her loyalty to the United States.

The context of Ingraham’s statement was a rant about Sotomayor’s decision to refer to people in the United States without citizenship or immigration papers as “undocumented immigrants” because, in Sotomayor’s words, calling “them illegal aliens seemed . . . insulting.”

After claiming that Sotomayor’s preference for one term over the other somehow reflects insufficient respect for the rule of law, Ingraham said that Justice Sotomayor’s “allegiance obviously goes to her, you know, immigrant family background, not to the U.S. Constitution.” Justice Sotomayor, who was born in the Bronx, is a Puerto Rican American.

Puerto Rico is part of the United States and Puerto Ricans are United States citizens. So Sotomayor does not actually have an “immigrant family background.” --Think Progress

Your Modern Republican Party, Part Infinity

February is Black History Month

Here's a bit of history from the 1960s, from the Citizens Council of Greater New Orleans:

John Elway, Jackass Hall of Famer

John Elway to Fox News: I’m Republican because ‘I don’t believe in safety nets’


Of course you don't Mr. Republican Famous Football Person!

And since you proudly state that you're a Republican, we already KNOW you don't believe in safety nets, Mr. Braggy Tight Pants.

Believing in safety nets means you'd believe in providing help to the elderly, the disabled, our veterans, and families with hungry children.

And if you believed in THAT, that would make you very NOT Republican!

So why are you, Millionaire Richy Rich Person, bragging about the fact that you don't give a rodent's behind about the elderly, the disabled, our veterans and hungry children?  

Is that something that will get you into the Jackass Hall of Fame?

A FITTING AD FOR SUPER BOWL SUNDAY

Oh, and this:

The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,The Daily Show on Facebook

ENJOY YOUR SUBERB OWL!

h/t Infidel753

CHRISTIE!

"Leave the bridge.    Take the cannoli."

h/t Wonkette

Today's Bit of Irony

BOONEVILLE, Kentucky — Rosanna Troyer is coping with the drop in her monthly federal food assistance from $367 to $303 by cutting back on meat purchases and buying more canned goods and macaroni and cheese. Her 12-year-old daughter is already sick of the hot dogs they’ve been eating frequently at their home in Owsley County, which has the lowest median household income of any U.S. county outside Puerto Rico. 

 “She says ‘mom, can’t we have something else? I told her, you got to wait, maybe next month,” said the 36-year-old Troyer. Troyer is one of the more than 47 million Americans who receive food stamps, all of whom saw their allotment drop on Nov. 1 as a temporary benefit from the 2009 economic stimulus package ran out. Few places feel the difference as profoundly as Owsley County, an overwhelmingly white and Republican area whose own representative in Congress voted against renewing the benefit. Food stamps are vouchers that can be used to purchase groceries. 


Bunch of undeserving TAKERS!  I'll bet they don't pay taxes either.   /sarcasm/

h/t Leslie P.

Executive Orders and Other Things

An historian talks about Executive Orders:



"...great presidential leadership requires not only executive action but public persuasion and legislative action. It's like the old cold-war triad of land, sea, and air military capabilities. The presidents I've written about--Jefferson, Jackson, FDR--used executive power, often boldly and to the great consternation of their critics, to advance their agendas. Sometimes that's the only way to move forward. But these presidents also understood that the longterm success or failure of democratic leadership often turns on shaping public opinion and passing laws, not only on issuing executive orders. Such orders can be good starters but lasting reform usually comes from sustained public and legislative work. (In Lincoln's case, for example, the anti-slavery project of the Emancipation Proclamation was followed by the passage of the 13th Amendment. Or, in the case of Truman, he in a way began a war on Jim Crow by desegregating the armed services by executive order--a war that ultimately required the landmark laws of 1964 and 1965.) So executive orders are a critical element in statecraft." --Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize winning historian



A bonehead and history moron talks about Executive Orders: 

 "Of all the troubling aspects of the Obama presidency, none is more dangerous than the president's persistent pattern of lawlessness, his willingness to disregard the written law and instead enforce his own policies via executive fiat. On Monday, Mr. Obama acted unilaterally to raise the minimum wage paid by federal contracts, the first of many executive actions the White House promised would be a theme of his State of the Union address Tuesday night." --Sen. Ted Cruz (Crackpot-TX)


For a guy who claims he had an Ivy League education, Cruz is truly a clodpole.  And anyway, has anyone seen his diploma?  How do we know he actually attended Harvard?  I don't know anyone who saw him there!

 Cruz also stated: 

"There is no example of lawlessness more egregious than the enforcement—or nonenforcement—of the president's signature policy, the Affordable Care Act. Mr. Obama has repeatedly declared that "it's the law of the land." Yet he has repeatedly violated ObamaCare's statutory text.


 The law says that businesses with 50 or more full-time employees will face the employer mandate on Jan. 1, 2014. President Obama changed that, granting a one-year waiver to employers. How did he do so? Not by going to Congress to change the text of the law, but through a blog post by an assistant secretary at Treasury announcing the change." 



Reality: 


The [Obama] Administration's decision to delay the employer mandate was wise," in light of the Bush Administration's initially bumpy but ultimately successful phase-in of the 2004 prescription drug benefit to Medicare. Though "wise," is the current postponement "illegal"? On the contrary, Treasury's Mazur wrote to Chair Upton, such temporary postponements of tax reporting and payment requirements are routine, citing numerous examples of such postponements by Republican and Democratic administrations when statutory deadlines proved unworkable. 

 In fact, applicable judicial precedent places such timing adjustments well within the Executive Branch's lawful discretion. To be sure, the federal Administrative Procedure Act authorizes federal courts to compel agencies to initiate statutorily required actions that have been "unreasonably delayed." But courts have found delays to be unreasonable only in rare cases where, unlike this one, inaction had lasted for several years, and the recalcitrant agency could offer neither a persuasive excuse nor a credible end to its dithering. 

In deciding whether a given agency delay is reasonable, current law tells courts to consider whether expedited action could adversely affect "higher or competing" agency priorities, and whether other interests could be "prejudiced by the delay." 

Even in cases where an agency outright refuses to enforce a policy in specified types of cases -- not the case here -- the Supreme Court has declined to intervene. As held by former Chief Justice William Rehnquist in a leading case on this subject, Heckler v. Chaney, courts must respect an agency's presumptively superior grasp of "the many variables involved in the proper ordering of its priorities." 

Chief Justice Rehnquist suggested that courts could lose their deference to Executive Branch judgment if an "agency has consciously and expressly adopted a general policy that is so extreme as to amount to an abdication of its statutory responsibilities." 

The Obama Administration has not and is not about to abdicate its responsibility to implement the statute on whose success his historical legacy will most centrally depend. Cruz is a political hack, feeding his gullible listeners wrong information about executive powers." SOURCE

"Please, Sir, I want some more."

This will gladden the hearts of every TeaPublican/Libertarian who reads it.

Damned little TAKERS!


Lunches seized from kids in debt at Salt Lake City elementaryEducation »

School officials cite unpaid balances on students’ meal accounts.
By Lisa Schencker |
The Salt Lake Tribune
First Published Jan 29 2014 05:29 pm •
Last Updated Jan 29 2014 11:06 pm

Up to 40 kids at Uintah Elementary in Salt Lake City picked up their lunches Tuesday, then watched as the meals were taken and thrown away because of outstanding balances on their accounts — a move that shocked and angered parents.

 "It was pretty traumatic and humiliating," said Erica Lukes, whose 11-year-old daughter had her cafeteria lunch taken from her as she stood in line Tuesday at Uintah Elementary School, 1571 E. 1300 South.

Lukes said as far as she knew, she was all paid up. "I think it’s despicable," she said. "These are young children that shouldn’t be punished or humiliated for something the parents obviously need to clear up."  
Jason Olsen, a Salt Lake City District spokesman, said the district’s child-nutrition department became aware that Uintah had a large number of students who owed money for lunches. 

As a result, the child-nutrition manager visited the school and decided to withhold lunches to deal with the issue, he said. But cafeteria workers weren’t able to see which children owed money until they had already received lunches, Olsen explained. 

 The workers then took those lunches from the students and threw them away, he said, because once food is served to one student it can’t be served to another. 




 



This happened.   Just yesterday.  In America.

Finally, the Libertarian/Conservative dream comes to fruition.

Can someone tell me what the hell has happened to our nation that made the adults in that school feel comfortable to do this to those children?  

We have lost our way.  

When multi-millionaire politicians like Mitt Romney and others of his kind tell the American people over and over and over again that half of us are "takers," and just want "free stuff," this is what happens. 

Unthinking morons, like the people in that Utah school, instead of using their heads, humiliated and abused innocent victims because their political heroes have taught them that the poor are undeserving moochers, and that their children should be shamed for having been born into poverty.


Their "Jesus" must be so proud of them all.

Post-SOTU Reflections and the Continuing War of Words by (O)CT(O)PUS of The Swash Zone

Contrary to the constant sneer and jeer of rightwing rhetoric, President Obama has always been a centrist politician and hardly the “socialist dictator” as alleged by Republicans.

Perhaps Jon Stewart expressed it best last night: “President Obama is apparently now in the 'f*ck it' stage of his presidency" - given six non-stop years of legislative obstruction, filibustering, gridlock, and Godwin-style name-calling

F*ck it, indeed. Consider this ABC News interview of Warren Buffet and his secretary, Debbie Bosanek, who reveal an inconvenient truth about the American tax system:

 

What drives income inequality in America? Debbie Bosanek pays a Federal income tax rate of 35.5%. In contrast, her boss pays 17.5% on income estimated to be 200 times greater!

“Everybody in our office is paying a higher tax rate than Warren,” she says.

“I pay hardly any payroll taxes, Buffet admits. “Gov. Romney hardly pays any payroll taxes. Newt Gingrich hardly pays any payroll taxes. Debbie pays lots of payroll taxes,” he continues.

Repeat this admission across the economic spectrum of American life, and what you have is a massive redistribution of income from the middle class to a special privileged class. Yet, Republicans have lashed out: They dismiss Buffet’s admission as an act of “class warfare.” One has to ask: Which side of this war is hurling the bombs?

Here are more inconvenient facts: Since 1979, the productivity of American workers has risen 80%; yet, the wages of these workers have risen less than 11%:

Please note the precipitous rise in income for the privileged class: Over 240%.  In other words, American workers have put enormous wealth into the pockets of their employers, yet received next to nothing in return.

Since 2001, this trend has turned ever more ominous as shares in the national economic pie have essentially turned upside down. Middle class wage increases have fallen to less than one percent. The überclass now pockets a whopping 99% slice of the national pie but constitutes only 1% of the population.

Meanwhile, US multinational corporations are laying off workers at home and shipping jobs overseas:

Given these data, consider this thought experiment: If you are a Kochroach raking in $1 billion per year, what is the cost benefit ratio of spending $100 million on PACs and stink tanks to avoid a tax hike? The difference between a 17.5% tax rate versus 35.5% (drum roll) is:

$180,000,000 each and every year

for as long as ye shall live (badda boom)!

“[The GOP] has built a whole catechism on the protection and further enrichment of America's plutocracy. Their caterwauling about deficit and debt is so much eyewash to con the public … [The GOP] could not abide so much as a one-tenth of one percent increase on the tax rates of the Walton family or the Koch brothers, much less a repeal of the carried interest rule that permits billionaire hedge fund managers to pay income tax at a lower effective rate than cops or nurses” (Mike Lofgren, Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult).

Mike Lofgren's words explain the stalking point phrases of “class warfare” and “job creators” framed and marketed by PACs and stink tanks to protect the überclass. Now you know why the Kochroach Brothers spend buckets of bucks to convince ignorant country bumpkins to vote Republican - and against their own economic self-interest.

Recently one of those country bumpkins - or perhaps a psy-ops troll employed by the überclass - left this comment under a recent post by Shaw:

"Just compare the "poor" in the US to the rest of the world and you have to come to the conclusion that our system is better for poor people. How much more do you Bleeding Heart Liberals want us to do for these people, most of them ar [sic] lazy slobs anyway who just take, take and take!"  Steve

My reply:

"For your information, most of the impoverished people of this country are the working poor earning subsistence wages - people who mow your damn lawn, pick up your damn garbage, flip your fucking hamburgers, and pick your damn fruits and vegetables under a hot sweltering sun – jobs which shiftless lazy bastards such as yourself consider beneath your contemptible dignity."

In response to President Obama’s State of the Union Address, Republicans have responded with:

"Kommandant-In-Chef" - Randy Weber (R-TX);

“6,778 words. 'Benghazi' is not one of them” - Steve Stockman (R-TX);

“Obama speech reads like dictates from a King” - Tim Huelskamp (R-KS);

“The world is literally about to blow up” - Lindsey Graham (R-SC).

Words and more words, but nothing of substance. How long will the middle class tolerate this bullshit? Historically, no society has tolerated unchecked economic privilege and injustice for long. It is only a matter of time before the war of words spills into the streets. When that day arrives, my choice of weapon will not be ink.

PERSISTENCE

I listened to Mr. Obama's SOTU, which was mostlhy an outline of his plans to continue to move the country forward, with or without the useless Boehner and his House Republicans.

The speech was, for the most part, optimistic, focusing on what we Americans can accomplish if we have the will and the good sense to work together.

I hope every Democrat running for office in 2014 will use the image of the GOPers NOT applauding when President Obama said this:


"This year, let’s all come together – Congress, the White House, and businesses from Wall Street to Main Street – to give every woman the opportunity she deserves. Because I firmly believe when women succeed, America succeeds."



The GOPers richly earn the "anti-women" label they protest is so undeserved.


Andrew Sullivan had this to say about the speech:


"The metaphor of the soldier slowly, relentlessly, grindingly putting his life back together was a powerful one for America – and Obama pulled off that analogy with what seemed to me like real passion. One aspect of his personality and his presidency is sometimes overlooked – and that is persistence. He’s been hailed as a hero and dismissed as irrelevant many times. But when you take a step back and assess what he has done – from ending wars to rescuing the economy to cementing a civil rights revolution to shifting the entire landscape on healthcare – you can see why he believes in persistence. Because it works. It may not win every news cycle; but it keeps coming back. 

 If he persists on healthcare and persists on Iran and persists on grappling, as best we can, with the forces creating such large disparities in wealth, he will look far, far more impressive from the vantage point of history than the news cycle of the Twitterverse sometimes conveys."


President Obama is persistent.  And history tells us how that is rewarded:




“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan Press On! has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race,” – Calvin Coolidge.


Charlie Pierce gives us a review of one (how many rebuttals did they need to answer what they claim is a "weak" president? 5? 6? LOL!) wingnut's confutation to President Obama's SOTU.


Oh, and those Executive Orders the Gee-Oh-Pee-ers are wetting themselves over?


"Whenever a President is forced to govern by Executive Order, it isn't testimony to his leadership weakness, but to the adversarial, obstructive, and deliberate actions of the people who fight his attempts to move this country forward. If we had a Republican Congress who hadn't blocked 18 Jobs Bills, 3 Infrastructure Bills, Bills against Minimum Wage, against extending Unemployment Benefits to 1.6 million Americans, against Equal Pay for women, Executive Order would never have to be considered, but a REAL LEADER DOES WHAT HE HAS TO MAKE THIS A BETTER AMERICA FOR ALL OF US." - Marian D. Fisher

THINGS GO DIRTIER WITH KOCH!

A friend from my hometown posted this on his facebook page:


"David and Charles Koch are in the process of hosting their biannual conservative training session for billionaires in Indian Wells, California. The effort this year is to raise millions to mislead the public about Obamacare and to use that information to defeat vulnerable Democratic representatives and senators in the upcoming mid-term elections. They have rented out the entire Hotel Esmerelda (558 rooms), closed the restaurants to the public for three days, and shut down the recreational facilities (see the picture). They have also surrounded the grounds and nearby golf course with telephone laden security guards, all dressed in black (see my new friend). It was truly eerie watching this unfold."


If anyone can refute this, feel free to do so.  But I don't think anyone will.




"Though the donors will funnel tens of millions of dollars into the election this year, they will not have to disclose a single cent. Using an elaborate array of foundations, nonprofits, and other legal entities, the Koch network sponsored bus tours, attack ads, think tanks, and hired Tea Party organizers to shape the midterm elections two years ago. 

Now it appears they are expanding the effort. The most that the public knows about these meetings has been culled from leaked audio tapes, reporting from journalists like Ken Vogel, and from an invitation I exclusively reported back in October of 2010. The document I posted over a year ago explained that during the meetings, strategy is discussed, from legislative campaigns to judicial elections, and money is raised from an assortment of executives from the oil, banking, manufacturing, and real estate industries." --SOURCE





Now what was all that whining about we hear from the GOOPers about George Soros?

Do they really know nothing about the conservative corporatist fascists plotting in their own backyards to forever alter our democracy?  The low-information voters were fed the lie that it is President Obama who would "fundamentally change" America, while, covertly, the billionaire Koch brothers are doing that very thing.  The Koch brothers cynically turn us against each other, while plotting to buy up every legislator they can to make this country into their own private empire.  It won't matter who the president is.  America will belong to the Kochs.




My friend:  

"Citizens United, which permits a powerful few to raise millions to influence elections, has the potential to fundamentally alter our democracy. "

Mitt Romney's Man Crush

FLOTUS and Jetsam

Mrs. Obama is our FLOTUS.


The howler monkeys who throw their poop against the wall every time Mrs. O. says "the" are the JETSAM.


Here's the inimitable Sheria of The Swash Zone to tell us about the very sorry JETSAM, who, on cue, feel the urgent need to say something stupid and malicious about our First Lady.




Subway Partners with Michelle Obama, Sincerely Ignorant respond with Hate




Seriously, they can only wish their women were as intelligent, gracious, and gorgeous:

Mitt and Vlad, sitting in a tree, K I S S I N G...

Mitt Romney has a very large man-crush on Vladimir Putin because Mittens sez Vlad is better at being preznit than Obummer.

Comrad Mitt!  Is that a kalashnikov in your magic underwear or are you just happy to see me?

Loser Romney, who, incidentally, lost the presidential race to Obama, told NBC that the Russian leader “outperformed” the president “time and time again on the world stage.”  Did we mention Willard lost miserably to Barack Hussein Obama?  Well, in case you didn't know.  He did.

Excellent Mittens! But you, of the off-shore bank accounts, "outperform" every great Pay-Tree-OT in praising the former head of the COMMUNIST KGB over our American President.

BTW, Vlad blows you some of his bestest поцелуи!

Mittens' Commie hero said this about those icky gaiii Olympic athletes coming to Sochi:




Gays Are Welcome at Olympics as Long as They ‘Leave Kids Alone’


In addition, Vlad announced that clergy members (sorry) of the Catholic Church are also welcome as long as they... well you can finish it, I can't.  I'm very busy watching my bananas ripen.

Oh dear.  If the Gee-Oh-Pee-ers aren't tongue-kissing ex-Commie KGBers (Hello Mittens!), their gazillionaire supporters are writing cri de coeurs to the Wall Street Journal, telling the world that the 99 percenters are being meany Nazis to them. 

Tom Perkins sez he and his fellow gazillionaires are suffering just like the Jews and the millions who died horrible deaths by the Hitlerites.  Poor Tom Perkins!  His life is turning into one big Kristallnacht!

About that "sanctity of marriage" meme that anti-marriage equality people always trot out...

'Red' States Have Higher Divorce Rates Than 'Blue' States, And Here's Why




New Study Finds That Divorce Rates Are Higher in Counties with a Greater Concentration of Conservative Christians


"Demographers Jennifer Glass at the University of Texas and Philip Levchak at the University of Iowa looked at the entire map of the United States, going county by county, to examine where divorces occurred in 2000 and what the characteristics of those counties were. Their work confirms that one of the strongest factors predicting divorce rates (per 1000 married couples) is the concentration of conservative or evangelical Protestants in that county."

Trends in teen births in U.S.:

Glenn Beck haz a sad.

This blog has written about conservative, self-identified "recovering dirt bag" , Glenn Beck, and his crazy rants that were featured every night on FAUX NOOZ.

Now, in a cynical attempt to sound penitent (for gawd only knows what financial advantage) he admits that his harangues and histrionics were divisive and that they tore the country apart.

Beck is a phony.  

Always was and always will be.  I remember listening to his corrosive screeds on AM radio when I lived in Florida. I never thought a blathering nincompoop like him would ever attract a national audience.

But, FAUX NOOZ. 

That cable station gave him a platform to spread his idiotic conspiracy tirades to galaxies of unthinking zombies.

Now he's sorry.

Cry me a "you-know-what-kind-of-" river, Glenn.  Now go away. And stay there.



"Conservative talk show host Glenn Beck, now an older and wiser and richer man, told Fox News' Megyn Kelly on Tuesday that he regrets having "played a role, unfortunately, in helping tear the country apart" during his tenure with the network. Beck was with Fox from shortly before the 2008 election until 2011, during which time he became notorious for his encouragement of the Tea Party and his far-reaching conspiracy theories about Socialist infiltration of the Obama administration. Or, as Kelly put it in introducing Beck for her interview, Glenn "had a very successful run here at Fox News, but also became a bit of a lightning rod."

A bit! It was indeed a successful run for the parent company — until Beck's assertion that President Obama was racist and had "a deep-seated hatred for white people" prompted advertisers to pull spots from his program. 

(Later, religious groups objected to Beck's claims that social justice work was associated with Nazism.) 

 But now Beck sees the errors of his ways, understands that these excoriations weren't helpful (like when a guy who'd heard Beck's repeated attacks on the non-profit Tides Foundation was arrested on his way to shooting the place up)."

GOP Hopeful

Chicago GOP hopeful: Autism and dementia are God’s punishments for LGBT rights




"One of the Republicans lining up to challenge Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) for her seat representing the 9th District of Illinois told the Chicago Daily Herald that God is “angry” with the United States and has sent scourges to punish the American people. Candidate Susanne Atanus believes that autism and forms of dementia are punishments sent by God because of the growing support for marriage equality in the country and the prevalence of abortion. 


 “I am a conservative Republican and I believe in God first,” Atanus said at an endorsement session with the Daily Herald on Monday.

God controls the weather, she said, and tornadoes are evidence of his wrath. “God is angry. We are provoking him with abortions and same-sex marriage and civil unions,” she said. “Same-sex activity is going to increase AIDS. If it’s in our military it will weaken our military. We need to respect God.”

RACE FOR THE CUCKOO BANANAS

President Barack Obama:


“ 'There’s no doubt that there’s some folks who just really dislike me because they don’t like the idea of a black president,' Obama said in the article by David Remnick, appearing in the magazine’s Jan. 27 edition. 

 'Now, the flip side of it is there are some black folks and maybe some white folks who really like me and give me the benefit of the doubt precisely because I’m a black president,' Obama said in his most direct comments on how race has affected his political standing since he’s been in office."


The wingnut blogsphere went berzerk.  Google and read for yourself. I haven't the stomach to link to their rot.

President Obama made an evident statement that has nothing to do with blaming anyone or anything.  He spoke a truth.  And that should be the end of it.  But the rightwing noise machine will have none of it.  They've misquoted, misrepresented, and plain lied about what he said, hence the controversy.  It's all so witheringly predictable.

Charlie Pierce of The Atlantic explains the knee-jerk reaction from the howler monkeys of the rightwing noise machine:

"If that isn't the perfect Barack Obama quote, I don't know what is. Some people hate the idea of the black man in the White House, but some people think it's cool, and so it goes. Not only is it the perfect Barack Obama quote, but it is the perfect illustration of the rhetorical limitations that have been put on this president simply because he is the black man we elected. For lack of a less historically freighted term, the president is our common property in the most ordinary times, and these are far from the most ordinary times. From the start, and partly as a result of his own rhetoric, this president has worked within limits much tighter than those within which any of his predecessors have worked. Anger -- real, righteous anger -- never has been an option for him. Occasionally, it has leaked out -- when he called out the Supreme Court, "Continue, Governor." -- but that generally has resulted in a swift stampede toward the fainting couches. Throughout his presidency, I have thought of that moment in The Great White Hope, the one that the exiled Ali once made James Earl Jones re-enact on the streets of Manhattan, where the Jack Johnson character shakes his fists at the sky, and bellows at his distant, cowardly tormentors, "Here...I...is!" That kind of moment for this president always, always had to be subtext, lest it make people nervous about the person on whom they had bestowed this great blessing. He could never be Truman, threatening to kick a newspaper critic in the 'nads. He could never be LBJ, goddamming his way to legislative victories, one after another. He had to be conciliatory. He could not be the Angry Black Man. After all, we white folks let him be president. Where was the gratitude there?" 




Ta-Nahisi Coates, one of The Atlantic's best writers, forcefully and perceptively cuts through the b.s. while talking about the kerfluffle over Richard Sherman of the Seattle Seahawks. Coates' words explain why so many people went cuckoo bananas over the simple truth President Obama said in his interview in The New Yorker:


"And then there is us, ashamed at our own nakedness, at our humanity. Racism is a kind of fatalism, so seductive, that it enthralls even its victims. But we will not get out of this by being on our best behavior—sometimes it has taken our worse. There's never been a single thing wrong with black people that the total destruction of white supremacy would not fix."

FLOTUS!

Mrs. Obama shows us how much fun eating healthy and exercising can be.