They did nothing

"Fiddled while Rome burned" would be too referential.

Messaging Matters gives this précis of Teapublican accomplishment:

“They Did Nothing.” It’s that simple. The Republicans on the economy? “They did nothing.” On jobs? “They did nothing.” Rebuilding America’s crumbling roads and bridges to help businesses move their products? “They did nothing.” Immigration? “They did nothing.” Climate change? “They did nothing.” Bringing American jobs back home instead of shipping them overseas? “They did nothing.” Keeping guns out of the hands of criminals, terrorists and the mentally ill? “They did nothing.”* The list goes on and on. And to be clear, the Democrats must articulate their positive agenda. In fact, President Obama has taken to the road to do just that. Saying the Republicans did nothing only makes sense if Democrats clearly explain what solutions they stand for and on which the Republicans should work, with some compromise and cooperation by both sides.

Sorry, I slipped. MM tells me to say "extreme Republicans."

(H/t DailyKos)

Romnesia

Not sure the President is right about having a cure for romnesia. It's been a pre-existing condition for a very long time now.

(h/t DailyKos)

Why did you think I call him Darth?

Click image for full Matt Wuerker/DailyKos cartoon.

Political bankruptcy

Republicans want to return to disastrous policies because they would then have to admit the emptiness of their ideas and their own uselessness in solving any national problem bigger than changing the diaper of some busted Wall Street institution:

The economy didn't just crash under a Republican president, it crashed under Republican policies. It crashed with low taxes. It crashed with deregulated markets. It crashed with huge restrictions on union activity. It crashed with massive cuts in environmental regulations. It crashed with lowered trade barriers. It crashed with big fat Pentagon spending.

They got what they wanted. They got CEOs with no limits on their wealth. They got banks with no limits on their "creativity." They got trade agreements that guaranteed manufacturing could be moved to the dirtiest, cheapest, most desperate source available. They got massive cuts in capital gains taxes and equally large boosts in the wealth they could pass along in estates. They got everything they said would make us all wealthy. They got record oil and gas drilling. They got record giveaways of public land. They got everything they said would create jobs. They got the middle class to shoulder more, more, more of the burden so that those beautiful job creators would be free to work their magic.

They can't say the economy crashed because taxes went up, because they didn't. They can't say that the economy crashed because there was a raft of new regulation, because there wasn't. They can't blame it on "union thugs" or Saul Alinsky or the guy who writes Happy Holidays cards at Hallmark. They can't blame it on a president who was elected when the world was already in free fall. Only, of course they do. They say it because they have no choice.

I've hit some of these themes for a long time, but I don't think I've ever hit them as well as Mark Sumner on DailyKos. Go read the whole thing.

A tough time to be sane, 2011

Click image for full Tom Tomorrow/DailyKos cartoon.

We just socialize risk

Multiple guess

One of these candidates will be the Republican nominee. That alone should fill us all with existential dread.

Click image for full Tom Tomorrow/DailyKos cartoon.

If only this were hyperbole

The Republican Party has a fetish for crazy.  Hunter nails it on DailyKos:

Make no mistake here, I haven't ever forgiven you for Bush. Listening to that dimwit speak for five minutes should have convinced you what a mistake it would be to let that barely functioning manchild play with the entire free world like it was his personal Jenga game, and his first few public appearances were when you and I parted ways for-freaking-ever. But Perry, now? Rick Perry, who is the dumber version of George Bush? The less principled version? The less eloquent version? If that's who your leading pundits wanted in the race, if that's the be-all, end-all conservative savior (emphasis on the end-all, I guess), then who is it going to be after eight more years? A goddamn vase full of geraniums?

It makes you look bad. It makes you look dumb. It makes you look like, well, like a party so thoroughly detached from their mental capacities that they would actually look up to a guy like Rick Perry as being their brain trust.

I could have quoted any of a dozen other paragraphs. (But not geraniums - too gay - instead a barn full of tobacco.)

Light dawns

Click image for full Tom Tomorrow/DailyKos cartoon.

The new new deal

Click image for full Matt Bors/DailyKos cartoon.

Me or your lyin' eyes?

Mitt Romney is and always has been a bullshitter and a fabulist.

(h/t DailyKos)

Onana's idle hands

Click image for full Matt Bors/DailyKos cartoon.

What's the difference?

Click image for full Eric Lewis/DailyKos cartoon.

Garbage in garbage out

Click image for full Tom Tomorrow/DailyKos cartoon.

America's coarse aristocracy

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.

Trying to provoke violence?

Not content to have passed the union-busting legislation he rammed through, Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-my way or the highway) has turned to party-busting.  He now arrogates to deny Democratic Senators their lawful votes in committee.  Republicans all over America look for ways to rule by fiat and to deny the vote to those they dislike.  The authoritarian Fitzgerald has combined the two.  Next he'll form an exploratory committee to run for President.

You might think that this won't change the outcome of any votes.  The committees all have Republican majorities.  But this tinpot ruling means that Fitzgerald only needs the votes of half his caucus to move legislation out of committee.  That means the most extreme 30% of Wisconsin citizens effectively run the State Senate.  The teabaggers, in other words.

This means that any moderate Republicans who might make overtures to the center have no one to make overtures to.  In the long run, this may help the recall efforts, the righteous campaign to turn these anti-democratic thugs back out into the streets.

Fitzgerald isn't even pretending that republican government matters.  You citizens who elected these Democrats, your votes are meaningless.

What is to be done?

Don't get mad.  Get even.

• Continue the recall, and get these thugs out of office.
• Occupy the capitol building.  Peacefully.  But expect mass arrests and manufactured or provoked riots.  Gov. Walker was contemplating it.  He'll do it.  These men have no conscience.  They only understand power.
• File an emergency lawsuit in U.S. District Court.  If this isn't an equal protection violation, the words equal and protection are meaningless in Republican bizarro-world.
• Call President Obama. The U.S. Constitution, supreme law of the land and superior to any pipsqueak tinpot Republican legislative capo di tutti capi, states in Article IV, section 4:

  The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.

  Time to get to guaranteeing, Mr. President.
  

(h/t Jed Lewison at DailyKos)

Shared sacrifice

(h/t DailyKos)

Still more Republican insincerity

Republicans don't care about the deficit.  They only care about cutting taxes, not about balancing the books.  Any other claim is ignorant or a lie.

Republicans have already voted for tax cuts that will add nearly fifteen times more to the national debt as they are proposing to cut on the spending side.

Yeah, I know, bullshit from Republicans is not exactly news.

Poaching on our preserve

Jon Kyl (R-hypocrisy), who advocated ending the filibuster in the middle of a Congressional session when Republicans held the Senate majority, is now incensed that Democrats might change the rules at the beginning of the session, when they're entitled to, at least historically.

These guys are totally shameless.  They completely do not believe that a restraint on someone else implies that they are restrained by the same rule.  They have no grasp at all of the golden rule.

IOKIYAR!

Why Republicans have to lie

Republicans want to bring back the old deal, the 1929 deal:

Among other changes, the Ryan Roadmap proposes:

• Raising taxes only on those Americans making between
  $20,000 and $200,000, while slashing taxes in half
  for the wealthiest Americans. The middle class would
  pay higher average tax rates than millionaires – an
  unprecedented reversal of progressive U.S. tax policy.
• Eliminating taxation of corporate income and replacing
  it with a consumption tax that would disproportionately
  hit middle-class Americans.
• Placing the entire burden of deficit reduction on
  spending cuts. The Ryan Roadmap prioritizes dismantling
  social insurance programs, not balancing
  the budget.
• Replacing Medicare and Medicaid with inadequate
  vouchers to purchase health insurance in a broken
  marketplace.
• Privatizing Social Security for wealthy Americans
  and ending Social Security’s role as universal social
  insurance with benefits tied to lifetime earnings.

The GOP wants you to be all alone and on your own.  If you deserved help, you wouldn't need it, not even if you were actually paying for it.

Republicans don't give a shit about the deficit either:

The hefty tax hikes on the middle class included in the
plan do not go toward deficit reduction. Nor does the
Roadmap’s overall revenue plan improve the long-term
fiscal outlook. The plan actually reduces federal revenue
relative to either current law or current policy.

Republicans use the deficit as a way to perpetually cut taxes on the wealthy.  If there were no deficit, you middle class peons might actually expect something from your government.  And they can't have you expecting that!

Unless there's a war (to protect their lifestyle).  Then you can expect a draft notice.

(h/t Meteor Blades at DailyKos)

Update: In case you imagined that Paul Ryan (R-plutocracy and penury go together) might become unpopular in the Republican caucus because of his proposals, he's giving the GOP response to President Obama's State of the Union address.  In an attempt to make Ryan look moderate, Michele Bachmann will lip-synch a Glenn Beck monologue in an unofficial Teapublican response.