You'll always have a choice

Click image for full Tim Eagan/Press Democrat cartoon.

Humorless freakout

Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis: President Barack Obama from President Barack Obama

Why do Republicans and other wingnuts hate President Obama's viral Funny or Die video with Zach Galifianakis? I mean, other than their simple hatred of the President...

This video is reaching young people, and scaring them into not signing up for Obamacare is one way the health-free and die crowd now hope to kill universal health insurance.

Rationalizing extremism

The Heritage Foundation doesn't exist to research credible conservative alternatives. It exists to provide pseudo-intellectual claptrap to paste a fig leaf over the nasty bits of wingnut prejudice. Heritage proposed Obamacare in the 1990s, only to go full metal jacket on it when a Democrat proposed it.

Same on immigration:

[T]he study, which comes out under the leadership of conservative former Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), is a sharp departure from a “Backgrounder” the Foundation published in 2006. Then, Heritage noted that “worker migration is a net plus economically.”

The wingnut bullshit artists are in charge, and they need to keep the rubes inflamed so that they don't notice it's the plutocracy who are screwing them.

Update: My man Paul Krugman agrees with me. Usually it's the other way around.

The truth is that Heritage has never been in the business of doing economic analysis; it’s just a propaganda agency posing as a think tank.

The operation was a success

... but the patient died.

Remember how many Republicans said that America has the best healthcare?  Obamacare was going to screw that.

Oops.

The U.S. life expectancy for men is about 76 and ranks last in the 17 countries studied. For women, the life expectancy is about 81 years and ranked 16, followed by Denmark.

“Why are we falling behind leads to broader, complex questions,” Woolf said. “We were not surprised there was a health disadvantage, but by how big and pervasive it was.”

The disadvantage exists even though the U.S. spends more per capita on health care than any other nation, partly because of a large uninsured population and inaccessible or unaffordable medical care, according to the study. Americans also have riskier health behaviors, including being involved in more traffic accidents that involve alcohol and using firearms in acts of violence. Americans who don’t smoke and are not overweight also appear to have higher rates of disease.

Not that I expect any corrections of the record. Republicans had to say we're the best. They still have to say that. Being best at everything is what they mean by American exceptionalism. We're number one, we're number one.

What were we talking about?

Opportunity society

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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Opportunity to shed even more clauses of the social contract...

I'm with Tea Leoni

Outsource your thinking to me

What Mitt Rmoney wants you to trust him about:

See full-size at BartCop.

Problem is, Mitt's not trustworthy about anything other than lower taxes for the rich - and lately, he's trying to claim he's not trustworthy about that, his single previously inviolate political principle.

Old media won't tell you this

(h/t MoveOn)

More liberal bias

Arithmetic.

[D]oes Romney think we’re stupid? Hey, he also thinks we’ll buy into his promises to slash taxes by $5 trillion but make up the revenue by closing unspecified loopholes in a way that doesn’t raise taxes on the middle class – which turns out to be arithmetically impossible. So the answer is, yes, he thinks we’re stupid.

Too boring for Republicans to make it add up.

Shaking the Etch-A-Sketch

Paul RAyn (R-fudge the numbers) gives Mitt Rmoney (R-fudge everything) enough cover from teabagger wrath that he can once again claim parentage of Romneycare and bring it from exile back into the big house.

ROMNEY: Well, absolutely. I am very proud of what we did, and the fact that we helped women and men and children in our state… And then with regard to contraceptives, of course Republicans, myself in particular, recognize that women have a right to use contraceptives. There is absolutely no validity whatsoever to the Obama effort to try and bring that up.

Unbelievably cynical!

Suddenly, Rmoney will be taking all sorts of reasonable-sounding positions. Mitt is completely insincere, and the truth is unimportant to him. He says whatever he thinks he needs to say, regardless of what he's said before. He's the most consistent liar I've ever watched in politics, even worse than Richard Nixon.

Loyalty to the lie

Research has supposedly shown that conservatives are more loyal than liberals. I suspect that the problem is a bias in the object of loyalty. Conservatives may be more loyal to their tribe, while liberals are more loyal to their ideals.

In any case, conservatives have certainly proven loyalty to their favored lies and the liars who continue to propagate them long after they've been conclusively refuted:

Not long ago, if you told a whopper like [Sarah] Palin's and it was as thoroughly debunked as hers was, that would have ended the discussion. These days, it is barely even part of the discussion. These days, facts seem overmatched by falsehood, too slow to catch them, too weak to stop them. 

Indeed, falsehoods are harder to kill than a Hollywood zombie. Run them through with fact, and still they shamble forward, fueled by echo chamber media, ideological tribalism, cognitive dissonance, a certain imperviousness to shame, and an understanding that a lie repeated long enough, loudly enough, becomes, in the minds of those who need to believe it, truth. 

That is the lesson of the birthers and truthers, of Sen. Jon Kyl's "not intended to be a factual statement" about Planned Parenthood, of Glenn Beck's claim that conservatives founded the Civil Rights Movement, and of pretty much every word Michele Bachmann says. It seems that not only are facts no longer important, but they are not even the point. 

Rather, the point is the construction and maintenance of an alternate narrative designed to enhance and exploit the receiver's fears, his or her sense of prerogatives, entitlement, propriety and morality under siege from outside forces.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/07/01/154586/leonard-pitts-jr-on-facts-lies.html#storylink=omni_popular?storylink=addthis#storylink=cpy

The strangest aspect of persistent lying is that it exacts no penalty from the credibility of the liars. In a nation with truth as a social norm, Palin, Beck, Kyl, and Bachmann would long since have been laughed out of the national conversation.

Because wingnuts clamor to be lied to and the media no longer care about anything other than eyeballs on their ads, we are a nation on the path to failure. It may already be too late to rescue the greatness of America from its self-professedly loyal destroyers.

Living a lie will do that to you.

That's no double standard

Obamacare wasn't a tax a couple of days ago, but now it's a tax.

Fortunately, Mitt Rmoney realized that Obamacare could be a tax at the same time Romneycare isn't because the Supreme Court has only ruled that Obamacare is a tax.

“The Supreme Court is the highest court in the nation, and it said that it’s a tax, so it’s a tax,” Mr. Romney told CBS News. “They have spoken. There’s no way around that.”

Since it hasn't ruled on Romneycare, Rmoney can call it anything he wants. Win!

You think I'm kidding.

Furthermore, Rmoney has enough super PAC money to overrule the appearance that he signed universal healthcare (now anathema to Teapublicans) that included an individual mandate (socialistical attack on the freedom to die free from a strong case of freedom) and is paid for in part by a penalty just exactly like Obamacare's so-called tax (SSSSH!  Look over there!).

Tongue piercing

Click image for full Rob Rogers/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette cartoon.

Pity the poor frothing wingnut

Obamacare, take the test.

If you don't get at least 8 out of 10, you need to study the actual law before you pontificate.

Yes, I scored 10 of 10.

No spiking the ball

When you win, drive home your points, then celebrate in private. Check.

Forward!

Why Republicans want to end academe

They don't control it:

The U.S. Supreme Court should uphold a law requiring most Americans to have health insurance if the justices follow legal precedent, according to 19 of 21 constitutional law professors who ventured an opinion on the most-anticipated ruling in years.

For now, anyway...

Moral consequences

Actual moral consequences, rather than the orgasm someone might have in a way that offends Rick Santorum:

If Rick Santorum had his way, I wouldn’t have been able to get that test, and she most likely would have died. Because according to him, tests that give parents vital information about the health of their unborn children are morally wrong. Though he has no medical training, and no business commenting on the medical decisions that women and their doctors make, he argues that such tests shouldn’t be provided, or that employers at least should be allowed to opt out of paying for them on “moral grounds.”

Exception for rape

No, not the one you're expecting.

Virginia Republicans want to mandate rape in one exceptional case. They want to force penetration of thousands of women with a foreign object. Not only will the woman not consent to the procedure except under duress, the doctor who performs it won't be willing either.

These so-called small government Republicans want transvaginal ultrasounds precisely because 88% of abortions are performed so early in pregnancy that the fetus is not clearly visible on transcutaneous ultrasounds. The first attempt to use shame and sin to push women back into barefoot-and-pregnant failed, so they'll go the next step.

These same all-your-vaginas-are-belong-to-us Republicans worship Ken Cuccinelli, who claims it's unconstitutional to mandate you purchase health insurance. Heaven knows it's terrible if you can't mooch off the rest of us and evade insuring yourself. These GOP misogynists nonetheless think (term, advisedly, etc.) that they have the power to insert an ultrasound wand inside a pregnant woman (non-virgin!) who seeks an abortion.

Anti-abortion ideologues - practically all of the Republican Party willing to speak for the record - despise the reasoning about reserved and implied penumbral rights in the Constitution that Roe v. Wade extended from Griswold v. Connecticut. They are willing, despite often claiming all sorts of rights from the Tenth Amendment, to treat every stray vagina as freehold of the state. Contraception? How dare you!

Everyone should fear this expansive Republican view of state power over the bodies of the powerless. You're next, asshole.

You want to be gay? You must undergo an anesthesia-less colonoscopy. All in the name of being better informed about your choice, of course. The GOPers are so generous with information (so long as it's not science). So you can get a good look at those AIDS-spreading rectal tears - and then some. Betcha an adenoma will look pretty damn good by comparison.

You want a vasectomy? First, we'll mandate the surgeon crush your testicles between bricks. So you know what's it's like to be a poor little dying swimmer.

You want higher education for your daughter? First, you have to watch one of us - no, all of us! - fuck her, 'cause you know that's what will happen in those godless secular humanist university dorms. So you'll be well-informed and won't make the same mistake with your next daughter.

These Republicans are sociopathic cultists in the throes of power-mad mania. Salem witch trials, ha! They'll be tattooing a scarlet A on every liberal harlot until they run out of red ink on I-95 entering Massachusetts. Where it really hurts. They want culture war.

The hot breath of doom, is that what I feel on my neck? Or just embarrassment that these useless fucks are the same species as me?

You'd think he said f*ck on air

The odd thing about CNN's response to Newt calling Mitt a liar is that they're so aghast. Our public conversation is filled with lies, and yet journalists have no interest in anything other than excusing them and pretending they don't exist. It violates their bizarre politesse to point out blatant falsehoods.

Poor Gingrich doesn't like being swift-boated. Although, actually, the Romney slush fund ads are much more truthful than anything the Swift Boat Liars ever said. It is really really rich to hear Romney supporters attack Gingrich for flip-flopping and for supporting an individual healthcare insurance mandate.

Imagine even better

Another case where tepid Democratic insurance reforms are nonetheless vastly superior to Republican plans, which in healthcare, amount to, "Kill the weak!"