Any man who took a casino into bankruptcy has some 'splainin' to do:
In a piece of good news for Mr. Trump, a new poll showed a majority of likely voters agreeing with the statement, “Donald Trump being sworn in as President would be a great last scene in a Planet of the Apes remake.”Or Idiocracy.
You're a senior citizen under Republican health care vouchers. The price of medical care has continued to escalate at a rate higher than inflation, but the buying power of your voucher is capped by law, so you're losing ground. For a while you can scrape together enough to buy private insurance, but your needs are greater every year.
Insurance companies are not there to be anyone's friend. Patients? They exist to care for their shareholders, and the mutual companies can't afford your annual costs.
At age 70, you have to choose between cancer treatment and heart treatment. You know your PSA level has increased thanks to the home analysis kit you bought at Walgreen's. At least you think you know; those things have a 30% false positive rate. But most prostate cancers are slow, so you pick the cardiovascular insurance. It only costs you $50,000 a year, which means you need a reverse mortgage and the entire annual payment from the privatized account that replaces less and less of Social Security with each passing year. (And just try to get what you have left invested in a no-load index fund. No one makes any fees off that, and your dwindling nest egg is too small to interest anyone anyway.)
A year or two later, still feeling pretty hale but in need of several medications, you can no longer afford any insurance without a low-dollar lifetime cap. Basically, the only use you get out of your insurance company is to negotiate volume discounts on routine care. Surgery beyond office procedures is out of the question, and even those mean a lean year at the kitchen table and skimping on your maintenance medications. Arthritis? Suck it up and suffer so you can keep taking your blood pressure meds.
With the level of care you're getting - minimal - your life expectancy drops. The closer you get to that last year when the bills really pile up and your ability to promise to repay your debts slides off in the five stages of grief, the less willing any reputable insurer is to cover you. Sure, there are companies that will take your premiums, but their policies have huge on-line PDFs filled with pretexts for denying your claims. It seems as if all they care about is your voucher.
At a time when your life expectancy under the old Medicare program would still have been ten years, the private insurers all expect you to die soon in a way that's very unprofitable for them. You can't get insurance coverage at any price. You're a pay as you go customer. With no money left.
With a touch of pneumonia, you get a friend to drive you to the ER. A course of azithromycin would only cost $200, but the physician on duty won't prescribe it without $1000 in fees for the ER and the exam, so you leave untreated.
You should have planned better.
Instead, the free market is so efficient that it doesn't need a death panel to end your useless, uneconomic life. Those last 10 years you could live that you don't? All profit for America.
The America of deserving titans of business, anyway, not unproductive freeloaders like you.
That's Republican health care for the aged. If you're a teabagger who buys into Paul Ryan's bullshit, there's a certain harsh justice there. You thought that harsh justice was for other people, and it catches you too.
It's not the poor. It's certainly not the middle class. It's the wealthy, never mind their bullshit Randian claims to be the god-like masters of the universe and bringers of all good things.
When the government gives away free money, they're first in line with the biggest wheelbarrow.
And none of them ever go to jail for burning down the economy with risk that they fraudulently sold.
Newt Gingrich (R-cheating for the flag) did two wives wrong because of his overwhelming boner for America. He was working hard and long cheek to cheek with other (younger) women, and he needed sex relief. Right there in the Speaker's office. If Bill Clinton could get some in the Oval Office...
John Ensign (R-much better looking than Harry Reid) had to go him one better and have an affair with a close friend's wife. That personal sacrifice shows just how much Ensign loves America. He was willing to wreck four lives at once and maybe get his own mother indicted for perjury for her involvement in paying hush money.
Top that, Gingrich! Isn't it about time you found someone to cheat with on Callista? She has to be expecting it.
What sweet young wingnut sycophant will be the next last refuge of a scoundrel?
Republican creed: Jesus didn't die for foster children. He died for deserving Republicans, who will receive his blessing for their ugly, mean, punitive deprivations. You think that's the sort of intentional sin that Christian forgiveness is supposed to expiate?
Neither do I.
(h/t Atrios)
Donald Trump was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, yet all he has to offer is resentment and Galtian ego, despite his avid use of bankruptcy laws to escape his debts and leave others holding the bag:
[E]ven with daddy's millions, the best business education money can buy, and income and capital gains taxes slashed to the bone, somehow, Donald J. Trump still managed to declare bankruptcy several times, and was accused of turning of millions of investment dollars into a pile of junk along the way.
Republicans want corporations to be free to pollute, exploit, rape, and pillage. You want clean water, air, food? Those corporations will be happy to sell you your birthright from their exploitation of the common weal. At inflated prices, like what they get for bottled water.
In exchange, you and I might get a few crummy jobs, but they don't care a whit whether we can live a middle class life on what they'll deign to pay us.
This is the same approach they've taken to taxation, whole bakeries of bread for the wealthy, a few moldy crumbs for rest of us.
It did work for them. Moronic teabaggers.
The big media is full of co-opted fools. Paul Krugman makes them look bad almost every week, and yesterday he shovelled the covering bullshit off of the so-called work of his so-called colleagues:
Last week, Mr. Ryan unveiled his budget proposal, and the initial reaction of much of the punditocracy was best summed up (sarcastically) by the blogger John Cole: “The plan is bold! It is serious! It took courage! It re-frames the debate! The ball is in Obama’s court! Very wonky! It is a game-changer! Did I mention it is serious?”The truth is that Republicans have nothing to offer but lies marinated in bullshit to make them, oddly enough, more palatable. Krugman's losing competitors love nothing more than to dish out copious, self-composting dumpster loads of nonsense well-aligned with the Republican marketing of snow to Eskimos. No, stop me, marketing snow to Eskimos would be better than what the GOP does. Republicans market laetrile to men with erectile dysfunction. Or lawn service to gila monsters. Or bicycles to fish.
Then people who actually understand budget numbers went to work, and it became clear that the proposal wasn’t serious at all. In fact, it was a sick joke. The only real things in it were savage cuts in aid to the needy and the uninsured, huge tax cuts for corporations and the rich, and Medicare privatization. All the alleged cost savings were pure fantasy.Again, the Republicans don't give the slightest shit about deficits, except as leverage to reward the wealthy with further spoils of their total victory in class warfare.
On Wednesday, as I said, the president called Mr. Ryan’s bluff: after offering a spirited (and reassuring) defense of social insurance, he declared, “There’s nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. And I don’t think there’s anything courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don’t have any clout on Capitol Hill.” Actually, the Ryan plan calls for $2.9 trillion in tax cuts, but who’s counting?
It’s not nice to say this (but the truth is rarely nice): whatever they may say, Republicans are not concerned, above all, about the deficit. In fact, it’s not clear that they care about the deficit at all; they’re trying to use deficit concerns to push through their goal of dismantling the Great Society and if possible the New Deal; they have stated explicitly that they want to reduce taxes on high incomes to pre-New-Deal levels. And it’s an article of faith on their part that low taxes have magical effects on the economy.Read it all. He also hits our shared point about the misuse of civility.
When they claim they care about the deficit, Republicans are lying:
Under the GOP plan, public debt would reach 70 percent of GDP in the same window.Republicans actually care about cutting the taxes of the very rich.
In other words, the spending cuts Republicans would realize in the first 10 years would be outpaced by deficit increasing tax-cuts, which Ryan also proposes.
What Paul Ryan (R-more for the rich) demanded of the Congressional Budget Office: bullshit projections based on fatuous nonsensical assumptions. Normal people call this lying.
We liberals will never ever get heard and understood until job one for us is saying this about Republicans:
Most of our big media pundits are worse than useless. They are actively contributing to the decay of America into banana Republicanism.
They are lazy- Reading the commentary from Sullivan and Brooks and Klein and others, aside from being completely wrong, what stood out to me was how simply predictable it was, regurgitating the coalescing villager CW about Ryan: The plan is bold! It is serious! It took courage! It re-frames the debate! The ball is in Obama’s court! Very wonky! It is a game-changer! Did I mention it is serious? The math demands it! We need to have shared sacrifice! This puts us on the right course! It’s serious and bold!
Read any one of their pieces the last couple of days, and it was like conventional wisdom/villager mad libs. Actually reading the bill, realizing it isn’t serious, it isn’t bold, that it won’t set us on the right path because it gives away as much in taxes as it cuts from the needy, realizing the only people sacrificing are the poor while the well-off are lavished with trillions in tax cuts- well, doing that and actually thinking, like Bruce Bartlett, James Fallows, Paul Krugman, Dean Baker, and others managed to do, that would be just way too much work. Better to roll with the conventional wisdom, churn out a load of bullshit, and when confronted by people that you are wrong, have a hissy fit about the hard left, whine about being picked on and someone using four letter words and capital letters, and dig in. Instead of absorbing what people are telling you, link to the National Review and McMegan, and don’t even bother to figure out basic math such as 22-18. There is a word for this behavior- it is lazy. These guys are on autopilot, have their narrative, and they are sticking to it.
Because they do.
We asked voters on this poll whether they think interracial marriage should be legal or illegal- 46% of Mississippi Republicans said it should be illegal to just 40% who think it should be legal.The social norm in Mississippi is that it's still o.k. to think integration in the bedroom should be, not even merely frowned upon by white bigots, but against the law.
If wingnut talk radio didn't pay actors to deliver lines to Rush Limbaugh and his belligerent ilk, there'd be no way to screen out all the obviously incoherent bullshit that teabaggers believe.
Remember teabagger Dale Robertson? A year ago, he was taking incoming rounds for something he had done in the depths of history - 2009 to be exact.
The Barack Hussein Obama Administration and the internationalists in our U.S. Department of State are quietly surrendering our national sovereignty to the future One World Government based at the United Nations. Should this surrender of our sovereignty be stopped immediately and the internationalists be removed from office?He also has a web site. It's about as well-designed as his protest sign - none of them effeminate esthetics for him. On the site, he refers to himself in the third person - "Dale Robertson is a man of courage and conviction... Sincerely, Dale Robertson". But he's a founder!
Fighting disinformation and propaganda from Fox is a dirty unrewarding job, and the pigs' ratings go up, but someone has to do it now that Keith Olbermann is no longer knocking the big cow chip off Bill O'Reilly's shoulder.
The Democratic Party doesn't seem able fight the right anywhere outside of fundraising emails, so I'm glad at least Media Matters is stepping up to the plate. This should be leverage to be asked by big media to speak for liberals.
We're only plowing 70% of your street this winter. It's a green program to use less fuel!
We'll give your kids the three Rs, and AP courses or a foreign language are available à la carte so that we can provide you exactly what you want!
No more WIC for you women and your babies! It's a diet plan. Start your baby on the scientifically proven calorie reductions of a lifetime! (Immoral and stupid, the perfect Republican plan...)
That's what business - or a Republican - would do:
“I have never regretted raising prices in the face of significant cost pressures, since we can always course-correct if the outcome is not as we expected,” Heinz’s chairman and chief executive, William R. Johnson, said last month.
This 2008 ESPN video has been coming 'round on the git-tar again:
I saw this on Facebook. Actually, I saw a similar vidlet on something called Godvine, edited to hide its origin. Google helped me find this version, which at least is clear about its origin. I'd embed something from ESPN itself, but all it has is this print story.
I can see why Godvine would want to claim the story, even though none of the fine sportswomen mention God, at least on air. It is a heartwarming story of virtue and altruism, just the sort of values that Jesus honored. Those who aspire to godliness should want to set a social norm of generosity and helpfulness toward their fellow humans.
The radical capitalists don't live this way. They don't put their character before their profits. Wall Street defends its profits as deserved, even as it denies that deserving matters. The very accrual of wealth is self-justifying to the moral midgets of the plutocratic right wing.
They'd look at the young women who helped their opponent to their own detriment as willing losers. They'd scoff at their sacrifice, at altruism in any sense. They'd deny even the possibility of altruism and assert that Mallory Holtman and Liz Wallace must have derived value from their act, even though they lost the chance to reach the playoffs because of it. Of course, the selfish, Rand-inspired capitalists would also sneer at anyone so naive as to put sportsmanship above profit. Those softball players need a good capitalist re-education camp to learn the value of having no values other than mercenary ones.
This contrast between wealth and Christianity is a tension among conservatives. They've tried to spackle the fault line with the prosperity gospel, a totally ahistorical and patently laughable attempt to claim the divine right of wealth. If those people are going to heaven, it's hard to see the meaning of Jesus' ministry to the poor and powerless.
In Congress and state legislatures around America, wealth is attacking anyone who is weaker. The social consensus that this bleak greed is ugly and wrong seems to have died in our age of selfishness and bullshit. But there may come a reckoning for the wealthy class warriors, when at last people understand that Republicans will take food from the disabled so that their kleptocrat corporate cronies can sneak a hundred more Havana cigars across the Gulf of Mexico for their smoking parties.
