Nuclear War for Dummies

Unrolled thread from @kurteichenwald

And the Republicans are risking this just to get their tax cuts.

"Traitors" isn't too strong a word for this. "Country over party ," my gold-plated ass.

Liar McLying Face

Your reminder that the FCC (or rather, the three Republican members of the FCC board) were lying through their teeth when they killed Net Neutrality.



Documenting the laughable lies the FCC told at the hearing where it killed Net Neutrality / Boing Boing

Interlude: The Definition of Insanity

My governor, Doug Ducey, is a "trickle-down" fanatic. He believes in the nonsensical notion (popularized more than 30 years ago by Saint Reagan) that cutting taxes, particularly corporate taxes, will cause an explosion of growth that makes up for the lost revenue.

So it was that yesterday I was surprised (not) to see this headline in my local paper.

The Arizona Legislature’s budget analysts on Thursday predicted a budget shortfall that could top $100 million in the current and coming year as the impact of corporate tax cuts continues to overwhelm increases in sales, insurance premium and personal income tax collections.

Chief budget analyst Richard Stavneak told economists and state officials who make up the Legislature’s Finance Advisory Committee that the shortfall will hit $104 million. That’s out of an expected $10 billion in spending for the budget year that begins next July 1. A panel of state lawmakers also attended the meeting.

Excluded from that projection is $90 million in current spending that is labeled one-time but appears to be an ongoing commitment by the Legislature and Gov. Doug Ducey, Stavneak said. That puts the expected shortfall next year close to $200 million if that spending isn’t cut. The revenue picture could also brighten, but signals are mixed, he said.

This is the same kind of bullshit that Kansas Governor Sam Brownback pushed. How is Kansas doing?

Kansas expects budget shortfall around $350 million this fiscal year

Kansas, facing huge budget deficits, wonders what to do next

From the second article:

Q: Back up: How did we get here?

A: There are hundreds of bar graphs and pie charts and, someday, probably cartoons to illustrate this, but the very quick version is: Republican Gov. Sam Brownback proposed dramatic cuts to personal income tax receipts in 2012, a position consistent with the tea party movement that aimed to take spending out of government hands.

The Legislature approved the tax cuts. The strategy has faded somewhat nationally but lives on as the governing philosophy in Kansas, even though the cuts did not spur economic growth as their proponents predicted. Result: the gaping holes in the state budget.

Ya think?

This idiocy has been debunked over and over again. And now my state is headed down this same misguided path.

What's the definition of insanity again?

Blood on the Tracks

This is why Ed Kilgore is one of my favorite political writers.

My iron conviction is that if Mitt Romney had won last year and Republicans had retaken the Senate, we’d be well into a reign of fire and blood characterized by instant reconciliation-enabled enactment of the Ryan Budget, the total destruction of the Affordable Care Act, and for added measure, a “nuclear option” more thoroughgoing that that recently imposed by Senate Democrats. We might also be at war with Iran. 

I added in a comment to the article: "Also the elimination of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the National Labor Relations Board, and a federal Personhood Amendment."

A-frakking-Men, Ed.

"Some men just want to watch the world burn"

This is just...I can't believe the ignorance and stupidity of this man.

Griffith suggested the House should reject an unfavorable agreement from the Senate, even if it resulted in a debt default that severely damaged the economy.

“We have to make a decision that’s right long-term for the United States, and what may be distasteful, unpleasant and not appropriate in the short run may be something that has to be done,” he said.

Griffith, a former majority leader of the Virginia House of Delegates, cited as an example the American Revolution.

“I will remind you that this group of renegades that decided that they wanted to break from the crown in 1776 did great damage to the economy of the colonies,” Griffith said. “They created the greatest nation and the best form of government, but they did damage to the economy in the short run.”

Yes, because destroying the United States' and the world's economy, hurting countless people, and damaging the U.S's reputation and good name is just like the American Revolution!

I think George Washington and Thomas Jefferson would spit in your face, sir.

The Madness of Tea Party George

"Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power."  ~Charles A. Beard

As usual, Jim Wright nails it.

You cannot reason with people who are incapable of reason, whose fanatical positions are based on irrational discredited beliefs such as “death panels.”  It is not possible to reach a rational compromise with these people because they are not rational people.  And in the end, it is perfectly within the legal framework of the Constitution to ignore their minority insanity and move on.

Read the whole thing.

"That's a bunch of malarkey"

Charlie Pierce eviscerates Paul Ryan's Randian excuse for a budget.

Paul Ryan's economics are not economics so much as they are a statement of political philosophy. All political economics are based in political philosophy but, in Ryan's case, political philosophy is not the root of his notion of a political economy. His political philosophy is his notion of political economics. He believes that there are certain things that the government should not do for its citizens, and he would believe that if the balance showed a 20-gozillion surplus. His goal is to stop the government from doing those things. Everything else he does — every "budget" he proposes — is in service to that philosophy. His whole career has been made within the confines of that philosophy. It has blinded him to the very real human effects of what would occur if his "budget" ever was adopted, it also has blinded him to his own staggering hypocrisy — a man seeking to demolish the very safety net that got him through high-school and college, a man talking about the perils of government who's never had a real job outside of it. He is engaged in an extended act of camouflage through which he concocts disguises for policy preferences that the country has told him, over and over again, it does not want, and which the country has told him, over and over again, do not reflect the country's idea of itself.


I don't believe Paul Ryan is a sociopath (at least, not in the way Mitt Romney was) but I cannot understand how he lives with himself, proposing a horrorshow like this. Does he not realize that people will die if they're thrown off Medicaid? Does he not know that all of us will end up paying for the people who no longer have insurance, who go again and again to emergency rooms to get pain relief for those workplace injuries, or antibiotics for those rotten teeth, but who can never solve the underlying problems because they can't afford it? Does he not envision himself getting older, with the slow inevitable creeping malaise of arthritis or diabetes or heart disease coming upon him, with no way to avoid it because the voucher (excuse me, "premium support") he gets from the government does not provide enough to pay for the care and screenings that could prevent it? Does he not consider that poor women who can no longer get family planning services from Planned Parenthood will end up giving birth to children they did not want and cannot afford, and everyone else will support said children? (Texas recently ran into this conundrum, and is now considering restoring funding. Gee, reality wins again!)

Really, how can you look at yourself in the mirror each morning while pushing such immoral bullshit?

Speaking of morality, here's a lengthy commentary from faith leaders condemning the Ryan budget.

This budget, if pursued and passed, will send a message, in both tone and tactic, that our government is more concerned with protecting those who control wealth and privilege than supporting those upon whom that wealth and privilege has been built. 

It's getting to the point where, each time I see Paul Ryan on the tube, I'm looking for the rotting corpse of Ayn Rand shambling along behind him, attached at the hip.

Yet this smiling blue-eyed boy still advocates this nonsense, while ignoring, as Charlie Pierce said, the "staggering hypocrisy" of making sure other people won't get their Medicare and Social Security now that he's got his.

Just like Joe Biden said during the vice-presidential debate, "now all of a sudden these guys [pointing to Paul Ryan] are so seized with concern about the debt they created."

Yeah. They're so concerned they want to destroy the New Deal and all the progress we've made over the past century....all for our own good.

Nearer My End To Thee

Oh man, I really really hope this is not just wishful thinking.

I've been wondering since the conventions why so many Republicans are so desperately clinging to the Romneybot, and telling so many lies to get him elected (in addition to the candidate's innate untruthfulness). This may be the reason.

When Mitt Romney loses—and, hopefully, when Democrats secure majorities in both Houses of Congress—I expect to see the end of the Republican Party. As the Bryan Fischer quote indicates, the rabid conservatives will blame the debacle on the GOP not being conservative enough. We might see an emergence of a radically right wing party, on the order of the National Front in France: nativist, fundamentally religious, and so far to the right as to be unable to appeal to voters outside of their circle. Whatever "moderates" are left in the party might form a rump GOP; but without the shocktroops of the Right, it too would have little electoral strength. We might very well be on the cusp of witnessing the demise of the conservative movement for a generation—enough time to put the country on a solid footing, so that when conservatives finally re-emerge as a political force, too much has changed to be undone. It's really the only hope the country has to survive as a decent place worth calling home.

Read the whole thing.

The Zombie Duck

This is just astounding. It's quite long, but it's well worth reading every paragraph.

Tim Wise: If It Walks Like a Duck and Talks Like a Duck

Respectable conservatism is dead. It is rotting in a grave, out of which hole has crept the most nefarious and zombified substitute, reeking of an acrid and putrescent characterological rot, upon which no calm and dispassionate bit of reason may find even a temporary home.

Word.

Asshat of the Day

By now, surely everyone has heard that Mitt Romney picked Paul Ryan to be his running mate, so I'll turn the proceedings over to the irreplacable Charles Pierce.

We're not worthy, Charlie.


Paul Ryan is an authentically dangerous zealot. He does not want to reform entitlements. He wants to eliminate them. He wants to eliminate them because he doesn't believe they are a legitimate function of government. He is a smiling, aw-shucks murderer of opportunity, a creator of dystopias in which he never will have to live. This now is an argument not over what kind of political commonwealth we will have, but rather whether or not we will have one at all, because Paul Ryan does not believe in the most primary institution of that commonwealth: our government. The first three words of the Preamble to the Constitution make a lie out of every speech he's ever given. He looks at the country and sees its government as something alien that is holding down the individual entrepreneurial genius of 200 million people, and not as their creation, and the vehicle through which that genius can be channelled for the general welfare.

To add my two cents: I would not vote for Mitt Romney if he was the Last Presidential Candidate on Earth and God Hirself was holding a gun to my head. I cannot believe any rational American citizen would contemplate putting this sleazy, arrogant, dishonest, lying slimeball into the highest office of the land.

But his pick of Paul Ryan for VP only solidifies my contempt. Paul Ryan, after all, wants to dismantle Medicare as we know it, turning it into a voucher system. No, make that a coupon system--you're given a fixed amount to purchase healthcare (just as a store coupon takes only fifty cents or a dollar off the actual cost of the merchandise), and if the annual cost of healthcare is rising beyond the value of your coupon, well, too bad, so sad, you have to make up the difference.

I didn't pay my Medicare taxes for all these years--fifty years by the time I retire--to have the system yanked out from under me just because Paul Ryan has some kind of juvenile Ayn Rand obsession.

Together, these two Twitrands constitute the worst Presidential ticket I have seen in my lifetime.

Vulture/Voucher 2012--"You People Are On Your Own"

Vote for them at your peril.

"It was a pleasure to burn"

“No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?”  ~George Orwell, Animal Farm

“The point is, there is no feasible excuse for what are, for what we have made of ourselves. We have chosen to put profits before people, money before morality, dividends before decency, fanaticism before fairness, and our own trivial comforts before the unspeakable agonies of others.”  ~Iain Banks, Complicity

Scare-mongering?

Damn straight.

Joe Biden lays out Mitt Romney's dystopian Presidential horror show.

Imagine what the Supreme Court will look like after four years of Governor Romney. Imagine what it will act like. Imagine what it will mean for civil rights, voting rights, and so much we have fought so hard for. Imagine a Justice Department that supports, rather than challenges, continued efforts to suppress the right to vote. Because that’s what will happen if they win.

The Hunger Games, anyone? (Minus our female saviour, because she'll be perpetually barefoot and pregnant.) Yes, it's a good book, but I don't imagine Suzanne Collins wrote it with the idea of being a prophetess.

 

"True freedom is to share all the chains our brothers wear"

"Freedom would be meaningness without security in the home and in the streets."  ~Nelson Mandala

The evolution of modern Republican thought.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If, God and the Flying Spaghetti Monster forbid, Mitt Romney gets in the White House, I fully expect him to push legislation to repeal EMTALA. Gotta get rid of all those freeloaders piling into the emergency rooms, you know.

The cruelty and inhumanity of these people, all in the name of "freedom," is monstrous.

 

 

"Going off the rails on a crazy train"

So this op-ed appeared in my hometown newspaper today, which rather surprised me; I was always under the impression that if my newspaper's editor ever printed something like this, s/he would be run out of town. 

First, the writer lists his Republican bonafides. 

Indeed, my first political act was passionately lobbying my fourth-grade classmates to vote for Reagan over Walter Mondale in a mock election in 1984. As an adult, I continued to be a rock-solid Republican- I helped run my law school’s chapter of the Federalist Society and its Republican club. And after the election of President Obama in 2008, I served as an officer in my state Republican Party.

Then he lowers the boom. 

As a local GOP official after President Obama’s election, I had a front-row seat as it became infected by a dangerous and virulent form of political rabies.

In the grip of this contagion, the Republican Party has come unhinged. Its fevered hallucinations involve threats from imaginary communists and socialists who, seemingly, lurk around every corner. Climate change--a reality recognized by every single significant scientific body and academy in the world--is a liberal conspiracy conjured up by Al Gore and other leftists who want to destroy America. Large numbers of Republicans--the notorious birthers--believe that the President was not born in the United States. Even worse, few figures in the GOP have the courage to confront them.

Republican economic policies are also indefensible. The GOP constantly claims that its opponents are engaged in "class warfare," but this is an exercise in projection. In Republican proposals, the wealthy win, and the rest of us lose--one only has to look at Rep. Paul Ryan's budget to see that. 

He is not the first prominent Republican or moderate to say things like this, nor is he the first to leave the party over it. The comments to this article are instructive; of course some of the commenters get into fights, but many of them call the writer a "RINO"--Republican In Name Only--thus proving his point. 

As far as I know, the writer didn't become a Democrat; I believe he registered as an Independent. Nevertheless, it's a sad and terrifying comment on a major political party that has gone completely off the rails, to the point where they drive away those who view themselves as sincere, honest conservatives. 

"A larger pattern of rejection of reality"

"For me, the most disturbing aspect of the Republican political culture is how it puts its unquenchable thirst for power, domination and a radical ideology above facts, reason and the truth."  ~Al Gore

“The dismaying truth is that birtherism is part of a larger pattern of rejection of reality that has taken hold of intimidating segments of one of the two political parties that alternate in power in our governing institutions. It is akin to the view that global warming is a hoax, or that the budget can be balanced through spending cuts alone, or that contraception causes abortion, or that evolution is just another theory, on a par with the theory that the earth is six thousand years old.” 
― Hendrik Hertzberg

In a classic "no shit Sherlock" moment, the Washington Post notes the following:

Let's Just Say It: The Republicans Are the Problem


We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.


The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

Holy Flying Spaghetti Monster, you'd think they just learned that water is wet.

This, of course, has been obvious to a lot of people since President Obama's inauguration. In fact, the Huffington Post reported that Republican conniving started that night. With the takeover of the GOP by the white ultraconservative bloc calling themselves the Tea Party, Congressional dysfunction was assured.

This is pointed out by an invaluable book I just finished reading, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, by Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson. To me, this book is very damning, because it simply reports on what the authors saw and heard during the past couple of years, visiting various Tea Party groups. I've stuck bookmarks throughout the book's pages (since it's a library book, I can't highlight it, and I hate doing that to a poor defenseless book anyway). Here are some relevant paragraphs.

By now it should be obvious that Tea Partiers have a self-centered understanding of democracy. Tea Partiers consider themselves to be the true, patriotic Americans, and they believe that elected Republican representatives are "hired" to do pretty much exactly what Tea Partiers themselves say should be done. Government by and for the Tea Party, could be the motto. Little thought is given by local activists or by national advocacy groups to discussing vital national issues with people outside the Tea Party. When we spoke with small grassroots activists and observed discussions in meetings, we never heard anyone acknowledge the need for two-way dialogue with other Americans who think differently from Tea Partiers. The talk was all about getting GOP representatives to do what they had "promised" Tea Party voters, with no acknowledgment that other kinds of voters also supported successful GOP candidates, let alone any acceptance that Democratic representatives, elected by other constituencies, also have legitimate roles to play in Congress and state legislatures. [p.183]

In other words, they just want politics, laws and a Constitution for themselves, not for the entire diverse population of this country.

Despite their fondness for the Founding Fathers, Tea Party members we met did not make any reference to the intellectual battles and political compromises out of which the Constitution and its subsequent amendments were forged, let alone to the fact that key Founders were Deists, far from any brand of evangelical fundamentalism. Nor did they realize the extent to which some of the positions Tea Partiers now espouse bear a close resemblance to those of the Anti-Federalists--the folks the Founders were countering in their effort to establish sufficient federal authority to ensure a truly United states. The Tea Partiers we met did not show any awareness that they are echoing arguments made by the Nullifiers and Secessionists before and during the U.S. Civil War, or that their stress on "states' rights" is eerily reminiscent of dead-ender white opposition to Civil Rights laws in the 1960s. [p. 50]

Hmm. Wonder what it is about President Obama that sets these people to frothing at the mouth?

Heaven help us if they get into power in November. The country they would remake in their image is not one I would want to live in.

"The bigger a man's gun the smaller his doodlewick"

"Not every situation calls for your patented approach of 'shoot first, shoot later, shoot some more and then when everybody's dead try to ask a question or two.' "  ~"The Wild Wild West," 1999

To put it mildly, I'm not enthralled with Arizona's Republican governor, Jan Brewer. I heartily wish Janet Napolitano had never taken the post as head of Homeland Security, not only because that department needs to be abolished entirely, but because my state desperately needed her to stay and veto the idiotic, woman- and brown-person-hating legislation the Republican legislature has been passing for the past few years.

Nevertheless, I must give credit where credit is due.

Brewer vetoes bill allowing guns on public property

This is amazing to me, since Jan Brewer also signed Arizona's infamous immigration law, and more recently the 'life begins at menstruation' law. Occasionally she shows flashes of intelligence and common sense, and this is one of them.

Of course, the Legislature is up in arms over this, because my state is full of paranoid yahoos who think the modern-day equivalent of the OK corral lurks around every corner. This is not new--more than thirty years ago, as a kid looking at books in my local Hasting's, I remember staring in amazement at a skinny cowboy striding into the store, six-gun proudly strapped to his right hip.

Yeah, because Doc Holliday was surely hiding in the comic book section!

This immature Wild West attitude has not abated, unfortunately, as Arizona's august lawmakers have so amply proven. Jan Brewer has now slapped them down two years in a row. They should give it the hell up.

"Anti-abortionists obliterate the rights of the living"

"It is always the moralists who do the most harm. Abortion is the logical outcome of civilization; only the jungle gives birth and moulders away as nature decrees. Man plans."  ~Max Frisch

In today's Arizona Republic, there is a little column that I wanted to share. It sums up the anti-abortion faction in my rapidly regressing state. It's an email from a state representative, in reply to a constituent who voiced her opposition to a new bill that would ban abortions after 20 weeks (no matter what that pesky Supreme Court says, dagnabit).

Personally, I'd like to make a law that mandates a woman watch an abortion being performed prior to having a 'surgical procedure.' 

Personally, I'd like to remind you that as a woman, I am a adult human being, and you have no business mandating that I watch any kind of procedure.

If it's not a life, it shouldn't matter. If it doesn't harm a woman, then she shouldn't care. 

Because apparently I am too stupid to know what an abortion really is, and I need to frightened and/or shamed into reconsidering. Notice how the Almighty Legislator thinks she should dictate what should matter to me, or what I should care about. Only someone who believes pregnant women are less than human could twist their brains around this kind of reasoning.

And don't we want more transparency and education in the medical profession anyway? We demand it everywhere else. 

This would only hold water if everyone were compelled to watch any sort of surgery their doctors were recommending, from removing an ingrown toenail to having a heart transplant, before undergoing the surgery themselves. I don't see that happening, do you? To suggest such a thing would be ridiculous. Everyone knows what a heart transplant is, just as everyone knows what an abortion is--it's terminating a pregnancy. If I didn't want to be pregnant anymore, I wouldn't be asking for it, and I don't need you treating me like a halfwit, incapable of knowing what I really want.

Until the dead child can tell me that she/he does not feel any pain--I have no intentions of clearing the conscience of the living--I will be voting YES.

So apparently this legislator will only accept talking to the dead as legitimate evidence, not modern-day scientific research. Yet women will share the pain they feel, and she ignores them.

Not to mention the fact that I don't see anyone rushing to mandate that men contemplating vasectomies first watch the procedure before they are allowed to have it. Why, those little swimmers must be alive! Look how they wriggle, even though they don't have any brains or conscious awareness! We need to shame or frighten men into not having a legal procedure that will restrict these little peoples' chances to be born!

The Founding Fathers wisely wrote a "no religious test" clause into the Constitution. However, I wish they had included a "Humanitarian Clause." That is, no one who denies full autonomous rights to half the population should ever be allowed to hold public office.

The Purity Brigade

In my neck of the woods, this is called "cutting off one's nose to spite one's face."

Centrist Women Tell of Disenchantment With Republicans

You can't insult, belittle, demean and threaten 50% of the population and expect their support.

What's hilarious about this is that President Obama doesn't have to say a word. He's just standing back and watching the Republicans guarantee his re-election. The level of cluelessness on their part is just astonishing.

But I suppose that's what happens when you put purity and ideology (and religious precepts that absolutely do not belong in government) ahead of actually governing.

Show Me, Suckazz!

Since we're, you know, ruled by the Constitution and all, and aren't a theocracy (yet).

Seriously, I live across the street from a lesbian couple. If they could get married in my state, their marriage would have nothing to do with me, my values, my life, my decisions, and my ability and/or willingness to get married myself, no more than my marrying a man would affect them.

You'd think Republicans would understand that, being such advocates of freedom, small government, less governmental intrusion, and so on.

"Respect for others guides our manners"

"I speak to everyone in the same way, whether he is the garbage man or the president of the university."  ~Albert Einstein

 I do not understand why anyone would think this is an appropriate joke to spread about the President. 

Normally I don't send or forward a lot of these, but even by my standards, it was a bit touching. I want all of my friends to feel what I felt when I read this. Hope it touches your heart like it did mine. 


A little boy said to his mother; 'Mommy, how come I'm black and you're white?' " the e-mail joke reads. "His mother replied, 'Don't even go there Barack! From what I can remember about that party, you're lucky you don't bark!

 What is it about this President that makes people disrespect him so? Hmmm, let me think...

"Persecution is a tribute the great must always pay"

"Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution."  ~George Eliot

After watching last night's CNN Republican debate, I can only conclude that the modern-day Republican Party is of besieged* white males, by besieged white males, and for besieged white males.

No one else need apply.

(*Besieged by whom? You decide.)