La, la, la, la, I can't hear you

Let us point and stare in disbelief

Today's conservatives, endless source of satirizable idiocy!

Loving liberty and justice

Expect the wingnuts to propose yet another anti-expression Constitutional amendment, but this is yet another aspect of my tagline.

Culpable but not the most culpable

Click image for full Nick Anderson/Houston Chronicle cartoon.

Time for redistribution yet?

Limits of sympathy

Andy Borowitz:

The decision of Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) to support same-sex marriage after learning that his son was gay has inspired hundreds of other Republican lawmakers to stop speaking to their children immediately, G.O.P. leaders confirmed today.

(For the humor-impaired, yes, this is satire. You never heard of Borowitz, huh?)

I want to ask something more serious. Why is it that Republicans are so incapable of sympathizing with people who are different or in need, right up to the point at which someone in their family has a need?

It seems to me that they have a fundamentally tribal and defective moral sense that can't recognize others as deserving their human sympathy.

Update (3/25):  But girls should still submit to barefootedtude and pregnancy...

A hundred lb. of polite pit bull

Elizabeth Warren doesn't shy from the important questions. Her persistent cross-examinations of regulators cast in high relief the tolerance in official Washington for the unfair legal regime in which there is one set of rules for us little people and another far laxer set of rules for the movers and shakers who count themselves as the free market's gift to us all.

No wonder the banks wanted to keep her off the Senate Banking Committee. She is not willing to accept bland deflections of her questions.

Please, sir, I want some more

The plutocrats' (and Republicans') vision is to reduce us all to penury.

Pure blame-shifting

It really shouldn't surprise anyone with two brain cells to rub together that the House teabaggers have zero sincere interest in a deal to forestall the sequester. John Boehner (R-no) is on record as having gotten 98% of what he wanted in the original deal, and even allowing for a bit of hyperbole in that number, he knows he's not going to get a better deal, especially now that President Obama has found his spine.

Instead, what Boehner wants to do is shift the blame for the cuts onto Obama and the Democrats. He and his party of mercenary bastards really do believe that perception is reality. Thus the only thing that matters to him in the sequestration fight is to win the battle of perception.

Never mind whether these cuts hurt people. Republicans don't care about anyone who's vulnerable.

Never mind whether these cuts hurt the economy. Republicans have shown for years that the size of the economic pie doesn't matter to them. They in fact support economic inequality as a desirable goal, not merely a side effect of their desire to drown the government in the bathtub. When the economy hurts the middle class (and the forgotten poor), it also hurts the wealthy, but the wealthy recover their losses and attain even greater plutocratic power over the rest of us. And that's what Republicans support.

Never mind whether these cuts hurt the military, even. Since the voters no longer trust Republicans more than Democrats on the military, blame-shifting this is the GOP's way of trying to get that trust back. Obviously, an undeserving way.

Fortunately, Boehner seems to be failing to convince Americans that his lies are true. This must come as a surprise to him, since he and the Republicans have been so often successful at that in the past.

Update (3/1): Yep:

Amid clamoring from his more conservative members, Mr. Boehner eventually reaffirmed his own conservative principles, abandoning even the pretense of reaching a bipartisan solution on the spending cuts. He argued that the president had gotten his desired tax increases in the earlier showdown. And he promised no more one-on-one negotiating sessions meetings with Mr. Obama.

Need a couple more letters

We used to call bumpkin idiots gomers. They used to be decent enough people. Now they have a new name, gohmerts, and three decades of hate radio has made many of them unrepentant assholes.

Louie Gohmert makes you look good even if you were the kid in high school algebra who said, "Whattaya mean, x is a number!" Come to think of it, al-gebra sounds like creeping sharia!

Where will the Gohmerts go when even Texas is no longer xenophobic enough for them?

Blame game

Click on image for full David Horsey/LA Times cartoon.

Lessons, learned and unlearned

The New York Times hasn't learned from Whitewater to close its mouth to the puke funnel, lest shady right-wing operatives funded by wealthy wingnuts, force feed them anonymous bullshit from web sites with no integrity:

The inquiry began with an incendiary tip — unproven and vehemently disputed by Mr. Menendez — that Dr. Melgen had helped procure prostitutes, some of them underage, for Mr. Menendez, after flying the senator repeatedly on his private plane to the Dominican Republic, where Dr. Melgen has a home at a seaside resort. This information was put forward by an odd array of self-interested characters, including the right-leaning Web site The Daily Caller and someone — his identity remains a mystery — who claimed to be an American citizen who frequented the Dominican Republic.

Remember the Arkansas Project, Richard Mellon Scaife, and Drudge?

The VRWC, for its part, has learned. Spice up your libels and slanders with sex, and the media will line up on their knees for a taste. (Remember Media Whores Online? "The site that set out to bring the media to their knees, but found they were already there.")

The combination of allegations, of misuse of public office and of sexual misconduct, helped propel the story into the headlines and onto television, and set tongues to wagging at cocktail parties across Washington.

Do we really give a shit what tongues wag at Washington cocktail parties? Reporter Eric Lipton cares. It's not good enough that he reports the sourcing. The content doesn't meet any standards of responsible journalism.

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Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-idle threats) hasn't learned that Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-fuck Reid) can never be trusted to honor the spirit of a deal. I mean, seriously, after all these years. Reid and President Obama should refrain from giving each other negotiation tips.

McConnell, for his part, has learned that his continued douchebaggery has no adverse consequences for him or his pasty band of obstructionists:

In the spirit of the bipartisan, but toothless rules reforms the Senate passed last week, Senate Minority Mitch McConnell and over 40 of his members are vowing to block confirmation of a permanent Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director unless Democrats agree to pass legislation dramatically weakening the agency.

Yet here's something that will never ever happen:

McConnell’s renewed filibuster threat seem to have caught him by surprise somehow. But if at some point later this year it becomes clear Republicans will continue to block Cordray past the end of his recess appointment, Reid could in theory revisit the filibuster reform fight.

Stop negotiating. Use the power you have. Impose your will.

Na ga happen.

Only a socialist would adjust for inflation

U.S. Congressman* Marsha Blackburn (R-gun moll) pines for her early days, growing up in Mississippi, when moral teenagers were damn glad to make $2.15 an hour, unlike today's lazy no-accounts. But:

Blackburn was born in 1952, so she likely took that retail job at some point between 1968 and 1970. And according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ inflation calculator, the $2.15 an hour Blackburn made then is worth somewhere between $12.72 and $14.18 an hour in today’s dollars, depending on which year she started.

At that time, the minimum wage was $1.60, equivalent to $10.56 in today’s terms. Today’s minimum wage is equivalent to just $1.10 an hour in 1968 dollars, meaning the teenage Blackburn managed to enter the workforce making almost double the wage she now says is keeping teenagers out of the workforce.

Self-refuting Tea Party wingnuts like Blackburn want to return to a fantasy land that exists only in their feverish, foolish imaginations.

They don't know enough about the world to understand inflation, and they don't care to learn.

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* Yes, her Congressional web site calls her a Congressman.

Maybe this is to reassure her Tea Party constituents that she's not one a them libbers. It can't be that she's reserving this one area from Southern Baptist submission to her husband.** Maybe she's just running a sloppy operation. There are two very different district maps on her site, one of which shows a district office way outside her district.

Ding, ding, ding. First theory correct:

As Blackburn worked her way around the room, the constituent motioned for her to come back: “Little lady, if you win this thing, what we gonna call you — congresslady? Congressgirl?”

“Sir, congressman will be just fine,” replied Blackburn.

Can I just say this? Barf!

** Nope, she's Presbyterian.

My Senator Elizabeth Warren

Seriously, can you imagine Scott-free Brown (R-Fox) having anything like this level of expertise and polite confrontation on any subject?

Greed, dishonesty, and fear-mongering

Be sure you see the emotional last 30 seconds of this video.

Update (2/16): Added back the video clip that Blogger ate. Did it taste good?

The source of our doom

America is not in trouble because we've fallen away from god. We're in trouble because bullshit, rather than honest inquiry, is the social norm:

[A]t this point the conventions of punditry call for saying something to demonstrate my evenhandedness, something along the lines of “Democrats do it too.” But while Democrats, being human, often read evidence selectively and choose to believe things that make them comfortable, there really isn’t anything equivalent to Republicans’ active hostility to collecting evidence in the first place.

The truth is that America’s partisan divide runs much deeper than even pessimists are usually willing to admit; the parties aren’t just divided on values and policy views, they’re divided over epistemology. One side believes, at least in principle, in letting its policy views be shaped by facts; the other believes in suppressing the facts if they contradict its fixed beliefs.

Danger to self or others

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

The factual background from Keith Ellison (D-MN):

Well, Tom, the problem with saying this is the president’s idea is that you voted for the Budget Control Act. I voted against it. We wouldn’t have ever been talking about the Budget Control Act but for your party refused to negotiate on the debt ceiling something that has been routinely increased as the country needed it. You used that occasion in 2011 August to basically say we are going to default on the country’s obligations or you’re going to give us dramatic spending cuts. That’s how we got to the Budget Control Act.

Consistent Republican agenda

The Republican Party favors this above all else: Increasing income inequality.

This is John Kasich's proposal for Ohio - and he's supposed to be one of the reasonable Republicans!

The GOP is about making nearly everyone poorer while they make the rich richer.

Who answers the phone at 2:37 am?

Background at ThinkProgress.

Update (4/7): Blogger keeps eating video embeds. Maybe that's because they use Flash and crash every couple of tries. Steve Jobs was definitely right about the suckiness of Flash.

Something to remember before a premature victory lap

Former governor William F. Weld and former lieutenant governor Kerry Healey also said they would not run, leaving few strong options for Bay State Republicans hoping for a victory in the June 25 special election.

Scott Brown (R-stop Obamacare) was a long-shot State Senator of little distinction when he ran - a campaign 40 times as large as any he had ever run. He was blessed by facing the worst campaign ever from Martha Coakley.

Coronations are dangerous in a democracy. In more ways than one.