Mitt Romney, NASCAR fan

He's self-employed. Why shouldn't everyone else be?

If President Obama were a liberal

He would have made this case forcefully and pointedly for his entire presidency.

Some people ... are wishing our economy harm for political reasons, and those are people whose attitudes will have terrible consequences for virtually every working family in this country in terms of higher interest rates, in terms of significant job loss, in terms of making a very unstable global economy even more unstable. ...

Those are the choices that our right-wing Republican friends are giving us. Default with horrendous economic consequences for working families in this country and for the entire global economy or massive cuts to programs that working families desperately need. ...

In my view a group of people in the House whose views represent a small minority of the American people are holding this Congress hostage. It is time for the American people to stand up and say, enough is enough; the function of the United States Congress is to represent all of our people and not just the wealthy and powerful.

If Barack Obama had made this case instead of trying to please everyone - something Republicans chose never ever to permit anyway and damn the consequences for America - the teabaggers and wingnuts would not have won in November and would not be holding everything good about American government hostage to their neo-Confederate agenda.

Obama would have said, as I'm saying, You wanna call me a socialist? Whoop-de-do. You would anyway, you goddamned aristocrats and robber barons.

Nice credit rating ya got dere

... shame if anything happened to it.

Republicans have turned a dispute over a technicality into a religious war, which no longer has any relation to a reasonable dispute between the elected government and the opposition.

Look, the damage is already done, with or without a default. The Republicans from teabaggers to alleged mainstream conservatives have clearly demonstrated that the consensus that has held since 1776 - that we're good for our debts - is over. It's not safe anymore for other countries to treat the dollar as the world's reserve currency.

Ya think China is happy or sad about this?

Occasionally I worry

On general principles - that knowledge and insight are dispersed widely, that any organization large enough to be a coalition of interests is bound to make compromises against what's right for the benefit of what's possible, to name two - blind orthodoxy is almost always wrong. When you see Republicans who routinely passed debt limit increases under Duhbya hold the nation's credit-worthiness hostage under President Obama, you know they're rank hypocrites whose principle is not knowledge much less wisdom, but instead only what power they can derive from a political position.

How then can I claim that the Democratic Party and its interest groups are consistently right on every issue?

I can answer this question in three ways:

1. The Democratic Party is not consistently right on every issue. In fact, it's often badly wrong and compromised not just for practical gain but also morally. The Democrats are in bed with corporate lobbyists and the wealthy, just as the Republicans are. The difference is one of degree - Dems are bad, Repubs are actively evil.
2. The Democratic Party is in fact not liberal enough, and I've criticized it many times on that score.*
3. Democratic policies, politicians, and interest groups are reasonably often wrong. Republicans are decisively wrong in their platform. Democrats, like all humans, are subject to excess both personal and political.

To illustrate answer 3, I give you this municipal labor union overreach.

“It is commonplace, if you are a resident of the city of Chicago, to see work crews on which only a couple of people are working and others appear to be standing or sitting idle,” Mr. Ferguson said last week. “The remarkable thing about this is they are doing exactly what they are supposed to do. We have basically codified wasteful overstaffing.”

The purpose of labor unions is to gain a fair day's wage for a fair day's work, not to featherbed. Detailing five guys to walk along behind an asphalt paving machine with hand tools is a day's pay for a smelly stroll. I've heard conservatives use the phrase "unsustainable model" about all labor work rules, but that phrase surely applies to this.

Of course, it's a Democrat who's trying to reform his fellow Democrats.

* A second introspective question: Given answer 2, how do I differ from conservatives who said that Duhbya's greatest fault was his lack of sufficiently extreme conservatism?

Those teabaggers who started during the 2008 campaign to disclaim Duhbya on grounds that he was a moderate (oh, what bullshit) only did it when he was no longer useful to them, when they were facing loss of the government. I've been criticizing President Obama right along. Sure, I was euphoric that he had been elected, but I had believed him to be the least liberal candidate in the Democratic primaries, and I think events since his election - particularly putting Tim Geithner and Larry Summers in charge of economic policy - have proven Obama to be a tepid centrist.

Conservatives march in lockstep when they hold power. Democrats and liberals debate, dissent, and compromise.

Why conservatives think liberals found a messiah in Barack Obama

Psychological projection. A messiah is what fundie wingnuts want, and they assume we reason as badly as they do about how the world should be.



Michele Bachmann has the overwhelming narcissism to think that God wants her to be President. Because her husband says so. Oy vey.

Fortress America

Republicans often accuse Democrats of the politics of personal destruction. This is obviously ridiculous

If Democrats actually had any grasp at all of destroying a public persona, Newt Gingrich would be living in obscurity. He'd still be paying off his Tiffany's debts by skimming tax exempt contributions into partisan accounts, which he has always done with wild abandon. He'd be slushing up other, more palatable reactionaries, but no one would listen to him on TV about any organization he fronted.

Being out of the limelight would doubtless vex a man with such outsize appetites and ego, but he made his bed. More than once. And Democrats can barely even make him lie in it!

George Allen should be an embarrassment even to his fellow Republicans. Except that they are beyond embarrassment. Macaca moment? His would be a macaca  life. Instead, he's leading the pack to return to the Senate as Jim Webb retires. He couldn't even destroy himself.

David Vitter! Vitter didn't get caught with a dead girl or a live boy, but somehow the Democrats have been unable to make him vanish into the world of wingnut welfare. With his Harvard education, he should be fabricating bullshit Heritage Foundation studies that show how only conservatives deserve redemption from requiring hookers to go by the name Wendy when they were doing things his actual wife Wendy no doubt would not do. Instead, re-elected to the Senate on family values and no doubt trying to be more discreet.

If Democrats actually practiced the politics of personal destruction, they would at least be following these morons around getting their peccadilloes on digital video. Vitter's a two-time loser. How likely is it that he'll be able to give up the call girls? Allen actually needs his racism in southern Virginia. Gingrich? Another two-time loser whose third wife is well past Newt's historic limit of fidelity.

These are Republicans who deserve to be outed. They're rank hypocrites or bigots. They'd be bringing their personal destruction on themselves, with only a nudge or two from us. Larry Craig's bullshit wide stance - that's some stretchy tighty-whiteys - doesn't concern me much. Even Paul Ryan's plutocratic taste in lobbyist-purchased wine is a dust devil among hurricanes.

Meanwhile, conservatives are constantly busy trumping up scandals against Democrats and our institutions.  The #bornfreecrew was searching Anthony Weiner's life on the web for solicitation of underage sex. When they didn't find that, they settled for a photo of the shape of his semi-erect penis, clothed in underwear. Weiner didn't show his junk and didn't get laid, but the conservatives - who do actually practice the politics of personal destruction - laundered their hit through Andrew Breitbart and hounded Weiner into resigning.

Laundered? The very idea that Breitbart could clean anything is absurd. He's a known liar and propagandist, yet even that has not destroyed his credibility with big media. They still provide faux balance and write stories that sanitize his defenses as if they were plausible. They still give him a platform to defend his dishonesty with more dishonesty.

It was one of Mr. Breitbart's Web sites, BigGovernment, that highlighted the heavily edited video clip of Shirley Sherrod, a black official at the Department of Agriculture, apparently saying that she had been biased against a white farmer she was supposed to help. Ms. Sherrod's full speech actually demonstrated the opposite, but do not expect Mr. Breitbart to be embarrassed.

He says there is an election-year strategy under way to ''falsely malign opponents of the Democratic party as racist'' and that he will continue to fight it.

An operative who falsely maligned a Democrat by airing a deceptively edited video clip to make a racist point still gets to call Democrats racists on the thinnest pretext. Without the reporter noting even in objective-speak that Breitbart is full of bullshit. Without editorial smirking. Without consequence. In fact, Times reporter Brian Stelter gives much more space to conservative sources than to liberal ones. He even outsources his objective analysis to David Frum:

David Frum, a former fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who now edits FrumForum.com, said some conservatives argue that the ends justify the means in cases of faulty journalism.

''Many conservatives have worked themselves into such fear that Barack Obama is not only wasting our money but actually trying to overthrow the Constitution that those fears can justify almost anything,'' he said in an interview on Friday.

Frum is well known to play it straight down the middle since he wrote speeches for Duhbya and then was a fellow for the American Enterprise Institute.

Well, someone had to say that. After all, Stelter had just quoted two other conservatives with their slightly negative takes on the scandal of falsehoods. Of course, both Shep Smith of Fox (the best journalist there, and that is damning with faint praise) and Glenn Lowry of NRO (one of the black loonies that wingnuts look to for reassurance that they can't possibly be racist since they like a few good ole black fellows) try to paint Breitbart's dishonesty as part of a larger problem.

It's almost as if the Times is afraid of the wingnut propaganda machine's ability to sustain permanent campaigns to damage their opponents.

Sure enough, if the Atlantic fucking Ocean buffers them, the New York Times will report on Rupert Murdoch's propaganda empire. They'll investigate the climate of fear and retribution of Fox-across-the-Pond:

“ ‘Fat, Jealous’ Clare Brands Page 3 Porn” was The Sun’s headline in response. Its editor, Rebekah Wade (now Rebekah Brooks and the chief executive of News International, Mr. Murdoch’s British subsidiary), sent a busload of semi-dressed models to jeer at Ms. Short at her house in Birmingham. The paper stuck a photograph of Ms. Short’s head over the body of a topless woman and found a number of people to declare that, in fact, they thoroughly enjoyed the sexy photographs. “Even Clare has boobs, but obviously she’s not proud of them like we are of ours,” it quoted a 22-year-old named Nicola McLean as saying.

So the Brits are coarser than we are. Or at least they print coarser stuff. We leave it to hate radio and web propaganda that pretends to scoop journalists.

When Fox comes up over here, our journalists are about as brave as British politicians over there. In other words, not at all. Remember when the White House attacked Fox as not a news outfit? Our chickenshit media rushed to defend the indefensible. I think they did out of fear. A reporter never knows when he'll need to whore out to sustain his lifestyle, and the web looks a lot more like small time street hustling compared to sucking up to Roger Ailes, however distasteful that no doubt is.

Something Breitbart said to defend his character assassination of Shirley Sherrod is a confession:

It's warfare out there.

He's the one making war. Until we on the left cotton onto that fact, we'll continue to be hounded from office. We'll continue to cave in the face of the wingnut noise machine. We won't win many elections.

They're fighting with stilettos with poisoned blades and attack sinister. We're being reasonable and taking adult positions. We've been thinking it can't get worse for three fucking decades. Yet each crop of radical conservatives is worse than the one before it. Because there are no punishments for their craziness.

The Republicans already give us blame for Chicago rules. "They put one of ours in the hospital; we put one of theirs in the morgue." It's long past time for us to start destroying some of our enemies.

Because this is a war for the soul of America. And we're losing to a bunch of plutocrat haters whose policies are very unpopular. It's time we showed up on the real battlefield and fucked a few of them up. Oh, they'll still draw their wingnut welfare from some Koch brothers foundation, but they'd at least have to keep their respective Callistas past their expiration dates. And eventually even billionaires will get tired of servicing a thousand oily egotistical needy assholes.

I don't have high hopes. If thirty years of decline haven't convinced our tepid Washington Democrats that there are no referees, that self-help is the only way to go, I'm not sure they're capable of waking up to the conservative party commissars now.

Free range advocates

If the world is their pasture, it must also be their toilet, right?

Click image for full Mike Luckovich/Atlanta Journal Constitution cartoon.

It Toles for thee

Click image for a gallery of Tom Toles/Washington Post cartoons.

Getting us out of the ditch

Click image for full Milt Priggee cartoon.

Like leeches for anemia

America, incredibly, has fallen again for the same old Republicans and their same old bullshit:

[M]y mind wanders over the past ten years. Republicans got the tax cuts they wanted. They got the financial deregulation they wanted. They got the wars they wanted. They got the unfunded spending increases they wanted. And the results were completely, unrelentingly disastrous. A decade of sluggish growth and near-zero wage increases. A massive housing bubble. Trillions of dollars in war spending and thousands of American lives lost. A financial collapse. A soaring long-term deficit. Sky-high unemployment. All on their watch and all due to policies they eagerly supported. And worse: ever since the predictable results of their recklessness came crashing down, they've rabidly and nearly unanimously opposed every single attempt to dig ourselves out of the hole they created for us.

There are two possible outcomes of the debt ceiling negotiations. Either President Obama gives the insane Republicans everything they ask for in their worst temper tantrum, or America will default.

Why would the results be any different? Republicans already know that they can kneecap the economy and not only escape all blame for their irresponsibility but in fact they can pin the blame on Democrats. For the simple reason that the American polity is sick, probably mortally wounded. The voters are balky, panicky, irrational. The media are by and large stupid and determined to pretend that stupidity has an equal call on our attention and respect, while intelligence and information are as despised as they were by jocks in middle school.

A default would shake our economy to the core. America derives huge benefits from the dollar and the T bill being the world's reserve. A reckoning on that score is coming anyway, but this would accelerate the world's departure to a broader basket of currencies, including the renminbi. Since the wealthy investor class would be inconvenienced (in their net worth if not in their daily lives), Obama will probably cave.

Thus again the middle class will suffer, the plutocrats or their lobbyists will buy $350 bottles of wine for the likes of Paul Ryan (R-austerity is for others), and the economy will go to hell.

Yet Americans, misinformed and goaded toward the right by a bought and paid for media, will vote for and scream for more Republican bullshit.

Lying to gain teabagger cred

Orrin Hatch (R-say anything to stave off an even more extreme wingnut) joins the Limbaugh lying liars:

"The top 10 percent are paying 70 percent of all income taxes. The top 50 percent pay something like 98 percent of all income taxes. Fifty-one percent don't pay anything," Hatch said.

"Democrats say they [the 51 percent] pay payroll taxes. Well, everybody does that because that's Social Security. They pay about one-third of what they're going to take out over the years in Social Security," Hatch said.

He knows this is intended to deceive. He knows the Democratic rejoinder is true. Still, he says the lie anyway.

Why liberals think the Teabaggers harbor racists

Because they do. By their own proud admission!

Yup, they're douchebaggers.

You're just noticing this now?

Another feckless Democrat only now realizes the bad faith and bullying of the dark side:

[New Jersey Senate President Stephen] Sweeney’s beef with the governor goes much deeper. He feels the governor [Chris Christie (R-ya wanna make someting uv it?)] has acted in bad faith.

The governor’s budget, he says, is full of vindictive cuts designed to punish Democrats, and anyone else who dared to defy him. And he is furious that the governor refused to talk to him during the final week.

"After all the heavy lifting that’s been done — the property tax cap, the interest arbitration reform, the pension and health care reform — and the guy wouldn’t even talk to me?" Sweeney asks.

Sweeney's lack of the most basic ability to discern the willingness of a Republican adversary to screw anyone for political gain completely disqualifies him from national office. We already have enough naive Democrats in Washington.

(h/t Eschaton)

Aztec sacrifice

Chickenhawks fail at the fundamental moral task of putting themselves in the place of those whose lives are at risk:

For chickenhawks like Rush Limbaugh and Dick Cheney who grew up during Vietnam conscription, deft draft-dodging provided them safety and psychological distance from bloodshed. As the data show, compared to draftees, that distance likely made them feel comfortable demanding other people face death on the battlefield, knowing that they wouldn't face such a fate themselves. Put another way, having avoided the draft, there was no "self-interest" in opposing war -- indeed, there was only self-interest in promoting wars in a media and political environment that increasingly rewarded rank bellicosity.

It's no wonder they can't put themselves in the place of the needy. They have no familiarity with the golden rule, the foundation of morality.

Someone else always gets his heart ripped out, not them.

Dreams of electronic sheep

Only these sheep are as bare-toothed angry as they are ill-informed and illogical:

Without exception, however, every reader objecting to my criticism of talk-radio ethics mentioned Soros. It was like being scolded by parrots. Most called Soros a commie -- highly unlikely for a billionaire financier and philanthropist -- although I know very little about his views.

It's called the straw man fallacy: refuting arguments nobody's made.

Then there's the argumentum ad populum, another favorite of talk-radio fans: somebody with a big audience must be correct. Furthermore -- motive again -- I must be jealous of their success.

That's pretty much like saying Rush Limbaugh's jealous of President Obama. You buy that?

Look, these guys are playing you for suckers. They're reading scripts written to trick you into believing that the bigger Scrooge McDuck's bullion pile is, the better it is for you. Take away the call screeners and the mute buttons, and most of them wouldn't last two weeks. Talk radio is the political equivalent of wrestling.

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)

The trouble with Democrats

Democrats have no clue that we're at war.

Gov. Deval Patrick (D-establishment), whom I helped elect twice, says complimentary things about Grover Norquist:

Grover Norquist — the brain and able spokesman for the radical right...

Sorry, no, you may know Norquist from the Dunster House dining hall at Harvard, but he's evil. Stop pretending we're all in the same goddamn fraternity. We're not.

He wants to establish a plutocratic oligarchy that would just as soon line you up against a wall as feed you. He's everything that's wrong with elite America, a whore to wealth who enjoys his role.

We need to say so. Time for liberals to understand that pussyfooting in defense of a sane and reasonable America is a vice.

Killing the safety net

Zillions for offense, not a penny for anything else.

Or something...

Even saying fuck, fuck, fuck, which I seem to be doing a lot lately, is not cathartic enough to glide past $3.7 trillion.

Quality of wingnut reason

I know. Debunking Jeff Jacoby is like striking out a kindergartener with a high hard one. It makes you feel like the pre-adolescent asshole who's barely passing 7th grade but gives the short-bus kids a hard time just to feel superior to someone, anyone.

Jacoby's got nuthin'. Well, he has reflexes, sure, I'll grant that. But hardly any higher function.

He hangs his whole column on a thin tissue of thoughts that any intelligent sixth-grader could refute. For example:

No one was a fervent proponent of gay marriage 44 years ago this month when the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that laws barring whites and blacks from marrying were unconstitutional.

Hmm. While we're in the argument-by-introspection wayback machine, let's venture back another forty-four years before Loving v. Virginia. No one was a fervent proponent of interracial marriage in 1923. Or, at least, not for very long before they were fucking lynched.

This is the quality of wingnut reason - debunked as easily as falling out of a kayak and hitting water. Yet the Jacobyns will continue their claims that gay marriage doesn't feel like marriage to them. Because they can't do the complicated moral reasoning of the golden rule, so they have to fall back on their stunted, childish intuition of what's icky to their daddy.

Near the end, Jacoby makes a prediction:

The new laws in New York and some other states authorizing same-sex marriage may be destined for a long run as well, but I suspect they too will likely eventually collapse.

I suspect Jeff will likely continue to be a reflexive right-wing doofus with a silly boy's scraggly beard. Therefore, he will be. (Yeah, bullshit as reasoning, even if it's probably going to come true.)

Then the capstone:

Marriage — male-female marriage — is indispensable to human welfare. That is why it has existed in virtually every known human society. And why it cannot be permanently redefined.

Which of course is why we're so keen to hang onto polygamy - have to keep that permanent definition out of Jacoby's own Torah. Or why the specific, wife-protecting strictures on a just divorce in the Old Testament (reacting to a previous social norm of disposing of menopausal wives, you think?) have given way to fundamentalist covenant marriage. Unchanging? Ask Britney Spears. Ask Henry VIII, for Christ's sake.

This banal crap passes for reasoning in today's ascendant conservatism. Just fucking shoot me now.

Hot breath of doom

America is choosing to slurp up plutocratic bullshit:

[H]ow do you revise the historical narrative when the evidence of what led to economic catastrophe is so overwhelming and the events at issue so recent? You and your political allies just do it. And you bet on the old axiom that a lie is halfway around the world before the truth can tie its shoes.

If you are Rep. Paul Ryan, you ignore the fact that our federal budget deficit has ballooned more than $1 trillion annually since the financial collapse. ... Instead of focusing on the real cause of the deficit, you conflate today’s budgetary disaster with the long-term challenges of Medicare so you can shred the social safety net.

If you are Alan Greenspan, you retreat from your 2008 epiphany in which you acknowledged your “state of shocked disbelief” that “the whole intellectual edifice” of your deregulatory ideology had collapsed. ... [A]fter driving the economy over the cliff, you offer to give driving lessons.

If you are JP Morgan’s chief investment officer, you refute the statement that your chairman and chief executive, Jamie Dimon, made to the FCIC in 2010 blaming the failures of major financial institutions on “the management teams 100 percent and . . . no one else.” ...

If you are most congressional Republicans, you turn a blind eye to the sad history of widespread lending abuses... You refuse to acknowledge what went wrong and then try to stop efforts to make it right.

Societies that fail to learn true and hard lessons from events, fail. Failure is the path that our richers and betters have chosen for us. They have propagandized vast portions of the population into believing that liberals are blame, when we are the exact people who have been most right about how to structure an economy to nurture the middle class and grow the fastest. Instead, like the Russians before us, we are destined for oligarchy, authoritarianism, and the end of the American dream.

I think we're past the tipping point. After the Bushists fucked up everything, and Democrats swept into office in droves, Karl Rove's thousand-year permanent majority for government by wealth is tantalizingly within reach for the forces of reaction. And all Democrats can do is dither and cave.

Republicans will buy the 2012 election, the Supreme Court has put it on the block. They will own all three branches of government. They will kill the filibuster, as we should have, and consolidate their already firm grip on the federal judiciary. They will sweep away the twentieth century to restore the Gilded Age, despite the repeated clear and dismal failures of their economic policies. But this century's Vanderbilts and Rockefellers will be ecstatic. That's what they're buying.

No sex, lies, and video (digital)

My daughter came home from work yesterday evening and, to accompany Thai food, she wanted to watch "Easy A". Oh, well, I've been the only owner of a Y chromosome in a movie theater. Twice. "Thirteen Going on Thirty" and "The Princess Diaries". One good, one bad, so...



"Easy A" is hysterical. Maybe I laughed too loud. At least I was only embarrassing at home.

It occurred to me about halfway through that our modern media culture is a perfect match for North Ojai High School, all gossip, rumor, and sensation, perception is reality, who cares what's true, image rules.

Typically, Hollywood slaps a happy ending on the triumph of bullshit. Olive's webcast, guerrilla marketing and all, we're supposed to believe, is good enough to shovel it out of her young life. It's a comedy, after all. And Facebook won't follow you all the days of your life.

I suppose I should take some joy from this movie metaphor. If I really can stretch it, it means that media is not channelling middle school pubescent angst and might be mature enough for high school adolescent angst. But I'm not feeling the joy.

Emma Stone's Olive wasn't having sex. We, on the other hand, are fucked. The Supreme Court's wingnut majority continues to hand wealthy people and corporations bigger and bigger megaphones, as if they needed them, to drown out the free speech of everyone who can't go toe-to-toe with whichever billionaire bogeyman is currently most prominent in financing the conservative con-game whose basic message is that we'd all be happier as peons in thrall to their every whim. Because they're so rich, they must be the greatest people who ever lived.

But I didn't let these dark thoughts spoil my viewing pleasure. I've been repressing reality a lot lately.

Wait, you mean torture's a crime?

Apparently, torture is illegal. Who knew the U.S. would prosecute it?

Torres said that if Nezirovic is convicted of the naturalization fraud charges, the immigration office will take him into custody and start deportation proceedings after he serves any prison sentence handed down by the federal judge. ... Nezirovic could then be tried for detainee abuse in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Torres said.

Oh, it's not the torture, it's the lying.

Quality of life policing

Click image for full Signe Wilkinson/Philadelphia Daily News cartoon.

Smoking boehners

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

Why liberals think bigots prefer the Republican Party

Because they do.

Today at the supermarket, an asshole proud to be an asshole wore a T-shirt that said, "George Bush, Love him or hate him, he killed a ton of Arabs."

This is what the bullies want - not justice, not even law, they want to be the Whitey Bulgers of geopolitics. They want to be vicious, tribal, loyal, and most deadly. The ideals America was founded on? Who gives a shit about ideals? They want the realities - pogroms and genocide against native Americans, enslavement and abuse of forcibly imported Africans and their descendants, extirpation of all linguistic minorities, and elimination of everyone different in thought or behavior.

In short, scoundrels taking their last refuge in sociopatriotism.

Filet mignon of bullshit

The Daily Show - Fox News False Statements
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Who speaks for the working man?

Another pro-lifer who's lying

In the sorry state America is now in - perhaps our death-spiral - Teapublicans such as Rand Paul don't really believe in life:

Mary Jane Koren, a geriatrician and vice-president of the Commonwealth Fund, noted that seniors often suffer health problems and are put in nursing homes after falling down. Poor nutrition leads to decreased muscle strength, meaning a higher chance of falling—and weaker seniors are more likely to be gravely injured in such a fall. Koren noted that by 2020, the annual cost of medical care for seniors who fall is expected to reach $54.9 billion—many magnitudes more than the approximately $2 billion per year the federal government spends on nutrition assistance for senior citizens.

Senator [Rand] Paul, however, explicitly rejected this logic. “It’s curious that only in Washington can you spend $2 billion and claim that you’re saving money,” he said. “The idea or notion that spending money in Washington somehow is saving money really flies past most of the taxpayers.” Instead, Paul touted the “nobility of private charity” as opposed to government-funded “transfer programs.” He suggested privatizing Meals on Wheels and other government assistance for hungry seniors

The simple premise that's missing from Paul's "logic" is that this anti-hunger program saves money if you assume you actually want to save lives.  Paul wants to cut taxes so bad that he doesn't care whether old people die.  And they voted for him.

Of course, in Teapublican world, seniors should have planned better.  If they had just taken care to be more economically viable, they wouldn't have to choose between food and medicine.  Losers!

If you vote for Republicans, this is what you get.  Good luck with that.

In the bag

Click image for full Clay Bennett/Chattanooga Times Free Press cartoon.

The horror

The Daily Show
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Sex rated R, violence a lovely PG-13

Think of the graphic, frightening violence we permit in our entertainment and our foreign policy. But a penis is out of bounds. That's the wrong kind of first person shooter.

Again, I'm not defending what Anthony Weiner did or the complete foolish narcissism of the way he did it. I just think, as Glenn Greenwald does, that our response to Weiner's peckerdilloes should have been derisive laughter and an immediate move to the next topic. Instead, moving on is what we did on behalf of Bushists who openly admitted doing things that in all previous circumstances had been war crimes. Ho hum, we said.

What the wealthy call socialism, I call a healthy middle class

Update: More from Robert Reich:

The President should advance ideas that work, and go to battle for them.

Supply-side economics doesn’t work. It’s been tried for thirty years, to no avail. And now, when our continuing economic crisis is so palpably being driven by inadequate demand, it’s more bogus than ever.

The last thing we need is for the President to go over to the supply side.

(For the wealthy)

Click image for full Mike Luckovich/Atlanta Journal-Constitution cartoon.

Can't trust Republicans with money

The financial failures alone should have been enough to remove Darth and Duhbya from their locations, disclosed and undisclosed, to Leavenworth.  Because they abhor accountability of any kind, $6.6 billion was simply pilfered in Iraq.

Who knows how much of it was five-finger discounted by overpaid mercenaries from the likes of Blackwater (now Xe).

Maybe Ahmed Chalabi is thrilled not to have become President of Iraq.  It always seemed as though he was in the whole three card monte with the neocons in order to get rich.  Maybe it was just a failure of imagination on his part.  By now, he may realize that being President only paints a bigger bullseye on your chest.

Then there are the billions we spent putting coats of paint on rubble and calling it public works.  We could really use that money to create a few stopgap jobs right about now.

Bad for business

Click image for full Clay Bennett/Chattanooga Times Free Press cartoon.

Take arms against a sea of troubles

Click image for full Tom Toles/Washington Post cartoon.

Why liberals think Fox harbors racists

Because they do.

How else would they pander to the racists who make up a good chunk of their audience?

Tongue in cheeks

I've tried to think of a dick joke subtle enough to be original. But I haven't. Too oxymoronic a quest. So...



Really, what kind of narcissistic prick photographs his own penis? Right, self-answering...

Of course, we all know that every woman in western civilization wants one thing above all else, and that's high-res digital pix of what has to be the least aesthetic visible part of the male body. If you're so in love with your own package that you want to show it to everyone, chances are you're also very proud when you make doo-doo in your diaper.

Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-putz) could have sent around pictures of his tongue. Take a lesson from Ashley Dupré - she's a pro, after all. From a man, a lingual shot would have been evidence of a sense of humor and an eagerness to please at the same time. That could have brought thumbs up on the online dating sites. (Up where? The P spot? How does that geometry work?)

Look yet again at the difference between Democrats and Republicans. A Democrat commits ludicrous peccadilloes, and that's enough to provoke hissing fleeing abandonment. On the other hand, Newt Gingrich (R-when's Callista's expiration date?) is a serial and ugly adulterer in the party of abstinence, and yet his political people only abandon him because he's mailing it in from a luxurious cruise in the Mediterranean and is too lazy to do the work of touching hoi polloi in Iowa.

Weiner is tweeting his 'nads, while Gingrich wants to tweet his ads. Oh, and Gingrich is fatter than Al Gore, but the media are forbidden from noticing.

Last, I am forced by my contract with the Bloggers' Labor Organization (protector of American BLO jobs) to observe that this is David Vitter watch, day 1441. After getting caught in prostitution scandals twice, which by the way is a crime, unlike tweeting your shlong, however weird that may be, Vitter got re-elected as a family values Republican, and the republic hasn't fallen. Yet.

Lamestreaming media

Palin denies jumping the snark

... no matter how much the snark wants her to:

[S]he saved her most fulsome praise for her favorite American hero, Paul Revere: “In his famous cry, ‘One if by land, two if by sea,’ Paul Revere proved that you don’t have to know how to count higher than two to be a great American.”

Who remembers that famous day and year anyway?

Click image for full Ed Hall/Artizans cartoon.

But they're poor

... and rich people never steal anything.

Click image for full Ted Rall cartoon.

Signature madness

The louche douche Lyndon LaRouche has young people circulating petitions at the Massachusetts Democratic Party's annual convention.  The first is a call for restoration of Glass-Steagall - not such a bad idea, actually.  But it's a lead-in for their call to remove President Obama from office, on the grounds that he's "the same as George W. Bush."

Uh, no.

These are the same weirdos who held signs in 2008 portraying Obama as Hitler.  Credible!

Paul Revere, Second Amendment fundamentalist

Just when you think she can't possibly be that ignorant, something like this comes along.  Sarah Palin can't even keep track of the mythic legends of American history that conservatives normally love (this one with the added benefit of being true).  She just makes up bullshit to suit her own weird inchoate opinions.

Why don't all Americans laugh her out of the room?

Answers in Genesis

Wrong answers of course.  There is no way in hell two of every species in the world of bird, animal, and "creeping thing of the ground" could fit on this non-seaworthy three-story tub.

Enough to remember

Is it enough to remember those who have given their lives in service?  Is that enough?

How many new war dead before Memorial Day 2012 do we need to accomplish our geopolitical goals?  Do we have enough to remember?

The completion of a decade at war is coming in September or in March, depending how you date the beginning. Is memory enough, or should someone in power be bringing peace?

Andrew Bacevich asks...

Waiting for FDR

Through my disappointment, I still support President Barack Obama.  I wanted a new FDR.  I didn't get one.

Obama has proven time and again that he has been captured by economic orthodoxy that serves first the wealthy and then, if there's anything left, the rest of us.  In other words, he's a Republican, although a Republican of thirty years ago, not one of today's current crop of crazy Ayn Randed Republicans, for whom a tax cut is the answer to every question (every question that doesn't involve a chastity belt, anyway).

So unemployment remains viciously high.  Persistently, degradingly high.  People who've worked hard all their lives are being reduced to destitution that they will never escape except by dying.  They may get that final relief rapidly.  Republicans want to phase out both Medicare and Social Security in ways that will allow only the wealthy to live their retirement lives in anything other than desperation.

And no one in power cares enough to do much of anything:

Unemployment is a terrible scourge across much of the Western world. Almost 14 million Americans are jobless, and millions more are stuck with part-time work or jobs that fail to use their skills.  ...

Yet a strange thing has happened to policy discussion: on both sides of the Atlantic, a consensus has emerged among movers and shakers that nothing can or should be done about jobs.  ...

[S]omeone needs to say the obvious: inventing reasons not to put the unemployed back to work is ... a grotesque abdication of responsibility.

Elite policy that fails to respond to the legitimate concerns of the population eventually engenders violence.  Hopeless people burn down buildings.  They riot.  They attack other people.

This violence hardly ever targets the real villains.  Voters failed completely to discern the real enemies of the middle class in 2010, and they had time to come to grips with it.  It's impossible to expect enraged mobs to think clearly.  This easily predicted violence will almost by definition be senseless.

I see the current waste of human beings and the coming even worse waste, and it depresses me.

A lot at stake

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

Who?

Click image for full Mike Marland/Concord Monitor cartoon.

Limits of sympathy

I was at Boston College Law School's commencement on Friday and was amazed to hear speaker after speaker refer to these "uncertain times."  Wow, I thought, I would never have guessed these lawyers would be both so liberal and so insightful that they would see the impact of the Great Recession on the people at large.  Or maybe it's the parlous state of American democracy and civil society that they see.  Either way...

Then it struck me.  They were worrying about lawyers, about their fellow guild members, not about the population at large.  Times are uncertain for the employment of lawyers, especially newly minted juris doctors.

What would it take for all Americans to see the peril that now exists to our society in stark and persistent income  inequality, in the power equality that permits the wealthy to buy elections, in the waste of human lives in favor of corporate unaccountability, in the vicious vituperation from wingnuts that is the new normal?  How many people have to suffer for the rest of us to understand?

Gift of hope

John Quiggin thinks there's hope for us:

The fact that, with no observable exceptions, the US Republican Party relies on delusional beliefs for most of its claims about economics, science and history has been obvious for some years.

...

A pro-reality journalism will inevitably be hostile to the Republican party and its intellectual apparatus, but that doesn’t mean it should fall into the trap of reflexive support for the Democrats. The point is to report the truth, and report lies as lies, without falling into the equal and opposite traps of ‘balance’ and partisan loyalty.

Then again, he's in Australia, so he may underestimate just how divorced from reality our public discourse really is.

Taking bullshit seriously

America is filled with ignorant religious nuts (and they're not the only kind).  Some of them make a fetish of the end of the world.

That's not news.  Or, it shouldn't be news.

Yet the media continues to report the pro-rapture statements of Harold Camping as if he were credible.

Camping said that he's now realized the apocalypse will come five months after May 21, the original date he predicted. He had earlier said Oct. 21 was when the globe would be consumed by a fireball.

Who are the AP's sources?  Camping, a disappointed follower, and Tim LaHaye, another pro-rapture voice famous for his bullshit "Left Behind" fictionalization of the fiction of Revelation.

I guess all the atheists they asked for a comment must have sputtered out something with bullshit in it, and they couldn't use that.  Yeah, sure.

Usually the media does its false objectivity dance to keep from noticing Republican bullshit, but Christianity is even more completely immune from media critique, no matter how bizarre its backwaters and increasingly its mainstream.

Onana's idle hands

Click image for full Matt Bors/DailyKos cartoon.

What's the difference?

Click image for full Eric Lewis/DailyKos cartoon.

On the sixth day, CNN caught up

I heard about filter bubbles on Facebook nearly a week ago - and I'm sure I'm not one of the first.  CNN scoops up the story and dusts it off today.

And then CNN headlines it as a personal scare story - "What Google knows about you" - instead of Eli Pariser's clear point about what Google, Facebook, and Yahoo, among many others, are hiding from you and what that means for society.

Why is it we need big media?  They're late, they don't filter out the bullshit, most of their pundits are third rate purveyors of conventional wisdom (and I'm being charitable), they don't investigate, they print official press releases as gospel, they fan the flames of manufactured controversy, and they have no institutional memory to help bring Alzheimer's/ADHD America back to reality.  They expect to be paid for this record of failure?

Sorry, the god ate my homework

Click image for full Clay Bennett/Chattanooga Times Free Press cartoon.


When was the last time a prominent atheist wished for the end of the world?

What will the media do the next time a prominent fundie wishes for it?

Every news site comment thread in America

Ignorant, peevish, narrow-minded, misinformed, livid, intolerant, they are an army of everything that's wrong with America...

Yeah.

On to the next bullshit from the lying wingnuts

Have I mentioned (lately) that I'm totally sick of big media and the D.C. village pretending that purveyors of obvious and contemptible bullshit (cough Jerome Corsi cough) make any fucking sense at all?

We live in a culture saturated with runny uncomposted bullshit.  Yet the social norm is to treat vicious nonsense as if it deserves respect and civility.  It doesn't.

Birthers, trickle-down so-called economists, and other Republican bullshiters deserve mocking, derisive laughter and a good swamp twirly.

Apocalypse never

Even the teabaggers are tired of teabagging.  Once Donald Trump jilted the birthers and other sordid wingy nuts and went back to his shitty, neo-feudalist TV show, even Nimrata "Nikki" Randhawa Haley, the wingnut governor of the wingnuttiest state, South Carolina, couldn't draw more than 10, I mean 8 teabaggers.  And who knows how many of them were simply luckless passersby.

Maybe the teeming hordes of blissful idiots all stayed home to wait for Jesus to rapture them.  No such luck, though.

Christ stood them up too.

Eight!  Though that's still not the single digit I'm offering them...

Bad judgement day

God guarantees President Obama's re-election:

The Rapture will usefully thin out the Republican field, which, since I assessed it in our current Comment, has already been culled by the departure of Trump and Huckabee. As of tomorrow, Palin, Bachmann, Santorum, and possibly Pawlenty (a Lutheran who attends an evangelical megachurch) will be out of the picture, having been bodily swooped up to Heaven (along with, redundantly, Huckabee).

Back here on Planet Earth, the two Mormons, Romney and Huntsman, will still be in the race, obviously. So will Daniels (mainline Presbyterian), Gingrich (hopelessly sinful), Paul (follower of militant atheist Ayn Rand), Bolton (Lutheran, but no sign he takes it seriously), Johnson (political pothead), and Cain (Baptist, but from the social-justice Dr. King wing).

That will leave eight men scrambling for the support of a very different Republican primary electorate. The religious right will still be a factor, but its numbers will be greatly reduced and those “left behind” are apt to be relative moderates.

Hendrik Hertzberg notices what many liberal pundits have missed.  The Rapture will take a big bite out of the Republican base.  Obama's approval rating could reach two-thirds!

But I'm worried.  God seems to be running late on Revelation.

See you in hell

Throw papa from the temple

It wasn't the crime researchers' fault. Nothing in their education or institutions should be changed to make them more resistant to being paid to prostitute their credentials in the service of a long train of criminal conspiracies and abuses.  Poor little victims of society...

They were surrounded by a culture of bullshit, and they were insufficiently trained to deal with the huge appeal of making shit up and pawning it off on credulous readers as if it were factual.  It's not just that 87.3% of all statistics are made up on the spot.  They were far more methodologically sound than that.  They took in voluminous data from the very hierarchy that protected the perpetrators and accepted it as gospel.  And I don't mean that metaphorically.

With everyone around them taking the money to produce a thin tissue of rationalization, why wouldn't they join in?  Take the money and run, babeee!

Never mind when secondary sex characteristics become visible.  Those altar boys had increasing levels of testosterone - it's scientific! - and the poor entrapped victim priests simply couldn't resist it at a time when college kids were openly lustful and the one true unalterable word of the lord was, uh, sorry, I lost my train of thought.

Ten years old?  No longer a child!  Oral sex with a fifth grader couldn't possibly be pedophilia.  Any sensitive man of god could tell he was about to break out in adolescent acne any day now.  Isn't that a little peach fuzz in the armpit?

The so-called researchers from John Jay College of Criminal Justice - what a misnomer! - concocted rationalizations for the very same fig leaf theory their sponsors had made up of whole cloth.  What a coincidence!  No, they were paid to uphold these despicable lies.  Until John Jay College dismisses the authors of this study, it has made itself the Heritage Foundation of boy-buggering, an institution with zero credibility and even less moral worth.

And what could redeem the Catholic hierarchy?

Privatization of your taxes

First, charter schools cost more with lesser results for a student population that should have had higher achievement.

Now, it's true of prisons too.  Privatized prisons in Arizona cost more than state-run prisons.  And they don't take the most expensive inmates, which should make it easy for them to have a lower average cost.  The libertarian advocates of all things private could then have made a bogus claim that they were saving money, and they would have been able to make a bullshit argument that they had complied with the law that requires cost savings for taxpayers.  But, no, they have Republicans to defend their extra costs, so no worries.

Charter schools, private prisons, both ways to transfer money from unionized public employees to wealthy investors, screwing middle class taxpayers.  If that's not a perfect microcosm of Republican policy, I don't know any that's better.  Winner take all!

Clearing the field

Lost between the end of Trumpapalooza and Arnold's proof that steroids didn't turn his junk completely to Raisinettes, Mike Huckabee dropped out.  Despite persistently polling as a contender.

Why?

Perils of moderation

For three decades now, three facts have been true:

• Republicans have been determined to have no adversaries to their right.
• Democrats have been willing, sometimes eager, to take any shit-ass deal that they can spin as half a loaf, even if it's really just a moldy crust of bread that no one in his right mind would eat, lest he get ergotamine poisoning and suffer Republican accusations of witchcraft.
• The village media of provincial Washington D.C.has made a fetish of calling for bipartisanship.

In response, Republicans have continually moved further and further to the extreme right.  If the press is going to call for a Solomonic division of the baby and the Democrats are going to cave and go along, why shouldn't the Republicans stake out an extreme position?  It's rational - in the feeble sense that economists use.

Democrats need to stop playing along.  Republicans are our adversaries.  They can't be reasoned with.  They can't be bargained with.  And they will not stop until they kill the New Deal.

Trump 2016

Four years from now, when Donald Trump needs his undeserving ego stroked, when the asshole vote is up for grabs (unless Chris Christie is in the race), when he has PR to do for a shitty, ritually abusive television show that exhibits all the worst ugly aristocratic features of 21st century American society, will the media once again take him seriously as a candidate for President?  Even though he has been through divorces and bankruptcies like trailer trash?  Even though he has no experience or organization or policy?  Even though he couldn't make money with a casino?  Even though he has the personal magnetism of a piece of carrion too ripe for a vulture?  Even if he has less control over his own message than the most afflicted, unmedicated sufferer of Tourette's?

Of course they will!  They're the media, after all.  It's their job to suck up to rich people.

I don't think the TV talking heads are all stupid, though many of them are, but they definitely think we're on average stupid.  Trump's polling trajectory proves they're right about that.

Untrustworthy

Republicans are not about reality.  They're about sales pitches - and fever pitches.

 It turns out the six-month spending bill Congress passed in April increased discretionary outlays through the remainder of the fiscal year by a bit over $3 billion. In other words, total direct spending will be higher by the end of September than if Congress had just set spending on autopilot for the remainder of the fiscal year back in April.

and:

Republicans got done in a 10 year time-frame a bit more than they hoped to accomplished by September.

Repeat after me:

• You can't trust Republican facts.
• You can't trust Republican analysis.
• You can't trust Republican good faith.

(h/t Tom Levenson)

Balkanizing the net for fun and profit

Business continues to pose a greater danger to democracy (and especially to privacy) than government.

Mission impossible - chimera

Click image for full John Cole/Scranton Times/Tribune cartoon.

Only encourages them

You can't save old people's or poor people's lives:

"I don't think I can vote for someone like that," Pennsylvania Republican Eric Tolbert said. "He says he's sorry, but how do I know that's the real Mitt Romney? What happens if he gets elected and tries to help sick people again?"

"I like Michele Bachmann now," Tolbert added. "Because what this country needs is a president who doesn't give a fuck about helping people.

That's just an incentive for them to get sick more and more.  Are we going to have to save their lives over and over again?

Democrats blow the media

The Daily Show - Who Killed Osama bin Laden
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Democrats once again prove their incomprehension of modern American big media.  You would think that, in the past 30 years, they would have figured out that the media makes no judgements whatsoever whether the Republicans are obviously bullshitting.  The so-called non-partisan political media is a meeting facilitator.  The talk show yappers won't check facts.  They don't interview skeptically.  They ask what appear to be challenging questions, but they won't follow up to flag obvious lies and lying liars for the audience.

The yappers think that's fine.  They view their job as giving the sides the opportunity to make their cases, nothing more.

Their performance reveals this.  Starkly.  Democrats, who haven't yet cottoned onto it, are slow learners.  Or too lazy to show up on Sunday mornings.

Of course, I'm only writing about those talking heads who regard themselves as objective.  Everyone on Fox and the other right-wing propaganda outlets does their biased best to make Republicans look good.

See no evil

Click image for full Randy Bish/Pittsburgh Tribune-Review cartoon.

Meaning in bullshit

Vanity, thy name is Rudolph.  Giuliani...

[I]f Giuliani turns out to be the best Republican for the job, the 2008 candidate for the GOP nomination said, "I could probably be talked into doing it."

No one with a normal ego could even consider a run for President.  Rudy wants to be talked into running.

Yeah, right, a groundswell of support will prove once and for all that Donald Trump and Chris Christie are mere pretenders to the asshole vote, that they remain not only a potent part of the Republican base but also now and forever Rudy's most gaseously effusive supporters.

Of course, the big media role in all this is clear too.  They have Rudy's number in their cell phones, and he'll take their calls.  Flattery goes both ways in the elite electronic village.  Accountability?  Not so much.

There is one small excuse for CNN giving Giuliani a platform.  They can tell that there's not a credible Republican candidate yet in the race.  Trotting out their old warhorses is just a way to vamp until ready and fill the vast desolate air time with some kind of familiar noise.

Signifying nothing.

Word made flesh

Update: Better title.

Why Republicans bullshit

Need a dozen good laughs?  See this satire.

Tango's down

Just a little Brain-Out on the carpet

The Daily Show
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

The next wingnut contrive-versy

Sharia burial!  Give it a few days...  The birthers need a new so-called issue.

Never mind that the consensus seems to be that burial at sea accords with some Muslim customs and not with others.  The wingnuts don't care about facts.  They have an entire disinformation apparatus to make up any bullshit they need.

And they need to go through the day in a constant state of outrage and alienation from everyone who's not in their tribe.

Yesterday morning, they resented Osama bin Laden continuing to breathe.  Today, they resent that President Obama directed the effort to find and capture or kill him.  And they're thanking Duhbya, whose every major move and attitude gave punishment of al Qaeda the short shrift in his failed geopolitical game of Risk.

No comment necessary

Garbage in garbage out

Click image for full Tom Tomorrow/DailyKos cartoon.

Née to the groin

Coincident to the much televised marriage of another horse-faced Windsor to the lovely commoner Kate Middleton, I've been reading Common Sense.  Here's a sweet excerpt:

England, since the conquest, hath known some few good monarchs, but groaned beneath a much larger number of bad ones; yet no man in his senses can say that their claim under William the Conqueror is a very honorable one.  A French bastard landing with an armed banditti, and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives, is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original.  It certainly hath no divinity in it.

It's about as sound a basis for a system of government as strange tarts lying in ponds distributing swords.

And then:

Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.

I'm a little-d democrat too.  I have no patience for pageantry at the price the British pay for it.  These fantastic leeches need an honest job for the first time in generations.

Just as I have no patience for the divine right of Wall Street...

No business like show business

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.

Honestly, isn't it obvious to everyone that America has thrown an even bigger nutty than a John Bircher's previously impotent dream of a wet dream?

Medicare-less

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.

Republican deficit bullshit exposed

The true freeloaders

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.

More patriotic than Newt

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?

Goodwill toward men

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)

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.