Born to run - away

Whereas a woman with a brain

... is an existential threat to the Talibangelicals.

Hey, Harry Reid, how slow are you?  Go fucking nuclear already.

Apropos of nothing

Why would anyone pay any attention to anything Sarah Palin says?  The husky that lives next door makes more intelligent noises.

Yet our vacuous media still thinks she has something to offer.

When I say conserfative

By conserfative, I mean one of those less-than-wealthy wingnut loyalists who stand up for the poor put-upon aristocrats of wealth in moronic support of policies that further enrich the fatcats and beggar the conserfatives. These moronic loyalists think of themselves as independent and clear-thinking, when in fact they yearn for a strongman and are the easiest sheeple to pull the wool over.

Just to clear that up, if it needed it...

I blog pseudonymously so I can keep using the word bullshit

You never know what sanctions you'll suffer for your opinions or for your language.

Also, too, I can still say fuck. These insane teabagger days, the ability to say fuck without being punished for it in real life is pretty helpful to my continued insouciance in the face of conserfative infestations and the general inability of our politics and our press to deal with evidence.

Left to our own devices?

Click image for full Bado/Le Droit cartoon.

Don't let the door hit you in the ass

The President needs to maintain his exceptional dignity while telling Teapublican assholes like Pete Sessions to hit the road and not come back.  They won't respect anything less.

Feature, not a bug

Rachel Maddow shows exactly why the Teapublicans were never, ever, ever going to back down from shutting down the government.

There's no reason whatsoever to think they'll change their minds (such as they have).

There's also no reason for confidence that they will shrink back from default when we soon bump up against the debt ceiling.

While we wait...

... for the coming shutdown of the federal government, here's something I found interesting.

Robber barons

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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Syrian Second Amendment

Click image for full Mark Fiore/Mother Jones animation.

Conserfatives

Timothy Egan nails the head-snapping misrepresentation of poor whites by their Teapublican overlords:

Among the 254 counties where food stamp use doubled during the economic collapse, Mitt Romney won 213 of them, Bloomberg News reported. Half of Owsley County, Ky., is receiving federal food aid. Half. 

You can’t get any more Team Red than Owsley County; it is 98 percent white, 81 percent Republican, per the 2012 presidential election. And that hardscrabble region has the distinction of being the poorest in the nation, with the lowest household income of any county in the United States, the Census Bureau found in 2010. 

Since nearly half of Owsley’s residents also live below the poverty line, it would seem logical that the congressman who represents the area, Hal Rogers, a Republican, would be interested in, say, boosting income for poor working folks. But Rogers joined every single Republican in the House earlier this year in voting down a plan to raise the minimum wage over the next two years to $10.10 an hour.

Instead of voting for their pocketbooks, poor whites have succumbed to a frankly tribal and bigoted appeal that finds fear and threats in blacks, immigrants, and anyone who's different. It's not an accident that the heart of this appeal to the basest of American traditions springs from the South, where it seeks to recapitulate Jim Crow. Never mind what the majority wants, suppress enough votes to keep the aristocracy in power.

The GOP can do this because they've changed the postwar social norm. After WWII, we all knew from the battlefield that we were one nation, all in this great cause of freedom and prosperity together. This made very threatening times for the lords of the manor. They might prosper even more under Democrats than under Republicans (look it up), but they needed greater income inequality to feel better about themselves.

So they took their financial resources and put them to work changing the social norm. Now, we have an entire right-wing media apparatus built for the purpose of convincing their racist teabagger serfs of a thousand things opposite the truth.

But the main new social norm for the conserfatives is the ardent faith that the government and organized labor are the source of their problems, when in fact they are the only counterbalance that exists to the plutocracy that has gluttonously gobbled up all the economic gains of the past thirty-five years and still cannot be sated short of neo-feudalism.

What’s at work here is the poison of ideology. Underlying the food assistance fight is the idea that the poor are lazy, and deserve their fate — the Ayn Rand philosophy. You don’t see this same reasoning applied to those Red State agricultural-industrialists living high off farm subsidies, and that’s why Republicans have separated the two major recipient groups of federal food aid. Subsidized cotton growers cannot possibly be equated with someone trying to stretch macaroni into three meals.

The saddest part: Those people in Owsley County who are made hungry by Republican fealty to the wealthy will continue to blame the government and the United Mine Workers. In a way, the fucking morons deserve to live in a company town. They've failed to live up to their self-image as self-reliant, independent yeoman Scotch-Irish sonsabitches. But the rest of us don't deserve that company town. And their children don't either.

It's your fault if a bullet kills you

Not enough dead yet.

Never get out-f******ed again

Click image for full J.D. Crowe/Mobile Register cartoon.

Born free but everywhere in Cheneys

Does anyone really believe that the mild zephyr of packaged controversy between Darth Cheney's daughters Mary and Liz is about equal marriage? Really, it's all about ginning up a fake controversy about which one is the lesbian and which is the arch-conservative Wyoming Senate candidate. Free media!

I can just hear Liz saying, "Carpetbagger, dammit! I mean, teabagger! Ah, crap..."

Lazy blogging

Yeah, it's been a slow year around here. Y'know, work, personal life, blah, blah, blah...

I've missed several opportunities to go on record before some controversy was resolved. I haven't given timely opinions on hot topics. The NSA knows what I'm thinking; isn't that enough?

My lazy blogging is probably not going to change soon.

But I can do this.

• It's blatantly unconstitutional that our government is spying on us at great expense (and we're paying for it). It's bad when Obama does it, just as it was when Duhbya did it.
• Intervening in Syria is a terrible, no good, stupid idea. You can tell because most of the neocons are for it. It's a dick-measuring contest, and those don't lead to good outcomes.
• Besides, we couldn't have been any clearer about how to manipulate us if we'd said, "Psst. We'll blow up shit if you convince us the other Islamist dickheads with inconsequential differences from you that you're fighting actually used chemical weapons." (Oops, that's not very clear.)
• Tell me again why the wingnuts hate Obama. Republican universal healthcare (from before that was an oxymoron, granted). Republican Middle East policy, right down to the UN inspectors and the weak, secret evidence oversold by a Secretary of State. Republican economic "recovery," where Wall St. is bullish and the ordinary middle class is losing ground.
• Oh, but Obama is black.
• Larry Summers would be an awful pick for Fed Chair, maybe the worst pick possible. That guy may be brilliant in some bloviating sense of the word, but I don't think he has a nanogram of sound judgement, and he's fucked up almost everything he's touched.
• And I think David Marsters must be a commenter on this blog. Or else wingnut teabaggers are universally angry, ignorant bigots. (OK, that's more likely.)
• But it's really fiiine that a white supremacist can't manage to take over a town when it only has at most two dozen residents and a house there costs $8600 - Detroit, North Dakota.
• Too bad civil rights has been relegated to the nostalgia circuit.
• Joseph Stiglitz rocks.

No, I'll never be as terse as Atrios. Even when I try to go short, I wind up long. Must be the gin.

Shareholder democracy

I.e., not real democracy, but the much more rewarding kleptomaniac plutocracy.

Who loses?  For the past three decades, it's always the 99% who lose.

Update (8/29): It's a pain in the ass that Blogger has become increasingly mercurial about saving posts that include videos.

By their fruits

Or, in this case, by their fruitcake ideas.

I'm not even sure all these wingnut Republicans really truly believe global warming is natural.  Oh, sure, Michele Bachmann is vacuous enough to believe it, and so do many of the others, especially the idiots who've gone to fundie schools and have not even a passing acquaintance with science, at least not as anything other than a source of evil-ution and a punching bag for bullshit fundamentalist denial.

But surely some of these deniers are intelligent enough to understand the data.  Those are worse than the sincere deniers.  They are simply hypocrites who know what they have to say to be viable Teapublicans.

The fact that success in one of the two main American political parties requires a declaration of one's own stupidity - because so many of its base voters have chosen denial as their core epistemic principle - is truly frightening and a far greater existential threat than terrorism could ever be.

No way to change the climate

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There is simply no answer the teabaggers, denialists, oil tycoons, and wingnuts will ever accept.

What the shit is he putting in his tea?

Click image for full Adam Zyglis/Buffalo New cartoon.