Deadbeats

WASHINGTON — The collapse of an interstate highway bridge in Washington state brings new attention to the limits of the country’s infrastructure, especially older structures that were designed with little room for error and were never intended to carry the number of cars and trucks they see today.

And herein lies the problem with conservatism.  You see, they want all this stuff, roads, firefighters, the electrical grid,  BRIDGES, healthcare, sewage treatment, the military, food inspectors, and on and on, they just don't want to pay for it. 

So we say this to conservatives, get out.  If you don't want to contribute to a safe, stable, competitive, successful society that you live in, get out of the country.  Go to Somalia.  In Somalia they have no taxes.  There is no regulation.  Of course there is no sewage treatment either.  So go there and wallow in shit for a while.  Let's see what that does for your worldview.

Simple Minded Scandal Mongers

LA Times: On IRS scandal, Spearker John Boehner ask, 'Who's going to jail'

First of all there is no scandal.  The IRS did nothing wrong.  They were just doing their job.  They should have been much tougher on these groups.  They should have revoked their tax exempt status. 

The answer to Boehner's question should be all the principals in the conservative political organizations that perjured themselves in their applications.  None of them are purely social welfare organizations as the statue requires of 501C4's or primarily social welfare organizations as the IRS interprets the statue to require.  Karl Rove is not feeding the orphans.

After Citizens United all kinds of new 501C4's sprang up.  The vast majority were conservative super PAC's funded by billionaires or corporations.  Fact of the matter is there really are very few if any billionaires or corporations funding progressive super PAC's.  As a result there are not too many of them.

The IRS used terms like Tea Party to CORRECTLY identify conservative political organizations.  But not the exclusion of progressive ones.  As we said, there just aren't that many of them.  Most people can't even name one.  We can.  Priorities USA.  They got a second look from the IRS as well.

Next "scandal" please?

Crooked

Daily Kos:  If this isn't crooked, it's only because we've defined crookedness down so much that it doesn't exist anymore:

Two months after contributing $110,000 to Gov. Rick Scott's re-election campaign, an upstart property insurance company is likely to reap a $52 million windfall, paid from the coffers of Citizens Property Insurance Corp.

And of course Rick Scott is about the biggest thief in the history of the universe. The man literally stole 1.7 BILLION dollars from the US taxpayer.  It's unbelievable the people of Florida actually elected this scumbag.

Liars, Tools, and Useful Idiots

TPM:  Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) said Friday that the IRS would have "shot" Boston Tea Party participants and "killed off" more than half of those who signed the Declaration of Independence if it were around in the late 1700s.

Actually it would have been his people that shot the protestors. 

See, the Boston Tea Party was not a tax revolt.  It was in fact, quite the opposite.

The Boston Tea Party was a revolt against a TAX CUT for the transnational corporation.

The tea tax had been in place for years.  Everybody paid it, it was an equal playing field, and just like today, that cost was passed along to the consumer.  Nobody really had a problem with it, EXCEPT the aforementioned transnational corporation. 

The world’s first transnational corporation was the British East India Company.  Perhaps you’ve heard of it.  Among other things they were in the business of importing and distributing tea in the colonies.  They didn’t want to pay the tax. 

So as transnational corporations are like to do, they lobbied the powers that be and in 1773 parliment passed the Tea Act, which among other things, gave the British East India company a big, fat, tax break.  They were now exempt from the tea tax.  All the local merchants still had to pay it, the little guy had to pay it, THE AMERICANS had to pay it, but not the British East India company. 

People got pissed off and the eventual result was a bunch of British East India tea getting dumped into Boston harbor.  

Now, TODAY, all these idiots walk around with tea bags hanging off their hat celebrating a conservative  movement, supporting a conservative movement, voting for a conservative movement, that’s funded by and all about tax cuts for the transnational corporation.  A movement that’s about pretty much about nothing but tax cuts for the transnational corporation. 

It's prefect really.  A perfect illustration of the moral bankruptcy, ignorance, and idiocy of the conservative movement.

Miscarriage And a Year In Jail

TPM:  Virginia state Sen. Mark Obenshain (R) won the Republican nomination to replace Ken Cuccinelli as the state’s attorney general this weekend. Obenshain once introduced a bill that would charge women with a Class 1 misdemeanor if they failed to report a miscarriage to police.

Yes you read that right, any woman who did immediately submit her miscarriage to a police investigation would have spent a year in jail.  This is the American Taliban.  This is your Republican party. 

The Accomplice

Americablog yesterday:  On CNN’s Reliable Sources this morning, host Howard Kurtz read a new statement from ABC’s Jonathan Karl:

“Clearly, I regret the email was quoted incorrectly and I regret that it’s become a distraction from the story, which still entirely stands.  I should have been clearer about the attribution.  We updated our story immediately.”

Actually he didn't attribute to anybody.  He reported it as a direct quote.  And without that fabricated evidence the story doesn't stand at all.  So basically he was a knowing accomplice to a Republican effort to use the deaths of four Americans to frame the President of the United States and the Secretary of State.  He should be fired immediately.  Certainly he should never be trusted again. 

Crimes Against Democracy

Headline:  Ohio Republicans Push Law To Penalize Colleges For Helping Students To Vote

Republicans hate democracy, plain and simple. If you don't plan on voting for them, they plan on robbing you of the right vote.  The only way to preserve yours is to make sure the GOP doesn't win enough elections so that they seize the right to take it way.  By any means necessary you had best make sure the GOP has no power.  Because they will snatch your democracy from you and laugh in your face while they do it.   If you have any doubt, read the quote below:

“I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people, they never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”-- Paul Weyrich, founder of the Herritage Foundation and the father of the modern conservative movement, 1980

We need Harry Reid to immediately schedule hearings in the senate on the country wide, institutional GOP efforts to steal elections by deliberately disenfranchising Democratic voters. We need to investigate it, attack it, and run on it. We need to brand their movement as enemies of democracy because, that's exactly what they are. 

It Was a Frame Up

Americablog:  CBS drops a bombshell by admitting that it was GOP on the Hill who lied to the media about White House (Benghazi) emails. 

Attention Democrats:  Benghazi is now about the Republican party fabricating evidence to try and frame Obama and Clinton.  Make sure to talk about it at every opportunity. 

Attention Harry Reid:  We need hearings in the senate immediately as to who fabricated the evidence, what role ABC played in reporting the fabricated evidence, what role the Republican cut in funds for security played in this attack, and finally, since the Republicans were so sure right off the bat that it was a terrorist attack, whether they had any role in it.  Did they pay somebody to attack the embassy in the lead up to the election to try and damage Obama?  Given the fact they fabricated evidence to try and implicate him, it would be worth looking to see if they were the cause of attack in the first place.

Pro-Cancer

Think Progress:  Conservative states, business groups, fossil fuel companies, and politicians who deny the science of climate change are petitioning the Supreme Court to reverse Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations on greenhouse gases and to weaken the Clean Air Act. This would involve the Court either limiting or reversing its own 2007 decision, Massachusetts v. EPA, which found that the EPA is required to regulate carbon pollution as pollution.

Well, that's your conservative movement for you.  That's your Republican party.  They get money and power, you get cancer.

The Unamerican Assholes Who Cried Wolf

Headline:  Benghazi emails show show CIA deputy CIA director did most of the editing on talking points

Headline: Email supporting GOP case was a fake

So now that it's been shown how ridiculous and dishonest the entire Republican party has been on this Benghazi deal, we have some questions for the politicians and oligarchs that run their movement (as well as all the idiots who vote for them).   Are you really just the low character jerks this episode shows you to be?  We're you really running around for 8 months, holding hearings, threatening to impeach the president for what was always obviously nothing?  Can you offer up any reasons why you're now nothing more than the boy who cried wolf?  Should you have any credibility left about anything after this episode?  Should anybody trust you?  Should anybody view you as decent Americans?  Should anybody like you?  Do you like yourself?

The Corruptionists

Headline:  Chamber of Commerce Big Winner in Increasingly Conservative Supreme Court

Last term, the Chamber of Commerce was undefeated — it won every Supreme Court case it weighed in on. So far this term, it has secured favorable rulings in 6 out of 7 cases.

That's sick.  The headline should say the American people are the big winner... but such is life on the Roberts Citizens United Corruption Court.  The Republicans are a corporatist party first and foremost, so it's no surprise they turned over control of the courts to the corporations.  They'll do the same thing with other two branches of government if we let them.

Sincerely, Mitt Romney.

Huffington Post:  Rand Paul on Saturday accused President Obama of working with "anti-American globalists" to "plot against our Constitution."

He's actually babbling on about the newest UN anti-gun conspiracy theory rattling around behind the sloped foreheads of the American-right wing, but since when do Republicans have anything but unconditional support for anti-American globalists?  Fact of the matter is, starting with Reagan Republicans have been all about the transnational corporation and the tax breaks, corporate personhood and deregulation that led to globalization and the great outsourcing.  Hell, as of a few months ago, their standard bearer was Mitt Romney who help pioneer the whole process.  Meanwhile, Democrats try to pass legislation stripping corporations of the tax breaks they enjoy for outsourcing and all the Republicans in the senate, including Rand Paul vote against it.

Dead Because Of Partisan Politics?

TPM:  After yesterday’s nothingburger of a hearing, John Boehner asks President Obama to release a State Department email.

I think the best take on this was from Dana Milbank of all people – “They summoned a whistleblower to Capitol Hill, but instead they got a virtuoso storyteller.” A riveting account of a horrific incident which really didn’t tell us stuff we didn’t know before or do what Republicans wanted, which was to suggest bad acts or dereliction on the part of President Obama or Hillary Clinton. About all you could use Hicks’s testimony for is actual oversight aimed at improving security policy going forward.

So the Darrell Issa clown show yesterday proved the current Administration didn't trade American lives for political gain.  It turns out then, the only people who did trade American lives for political gain in this episode was the Republican party.  It's was the Republican party that sold out these four Americans for political gain.  The Republican party, including Darrell, Issa, successfully voted to cut funds for diplomatic security, and did sot only after Obama was elected.  If they had better security in Benghazi they would be alive today.  Harry Reid should hold hearings on that in the senate. 

How's That Minority Outreach Going For You?

Think Progress: The Heritage Foundation’s analysis of the economic consequences of immigration reform uses absurd methodology to come to conclusions entirely at odds with the organization’s own findings in 2006. Perhaps one explanation for this incoherence is that one of the paper’s coauthors, a new hire, opposes Hispanic immigration because he thinks Latinos are stupid.

A)  The Heritage Foundation is the conservative think tank, over and above all others.  It's founder, Paul Weyrich, is widely described as the father of the modern conservative movement.  B) A conclusion that Hispanics have lower IQ's is the very definition of racism.  When you ascribe an undesirable characteristic to a particular racial group, when you call Latinos genetically inferior, that's pretty much what racism is. C) Therefore, conservatives are the very definition of racists.  A+B=C.   Of course, if you know your political history you know the modern Republican party deliberately built its base with racists, and so this won't surprise you one bit. 

Gun Industry Rights Group

Raw Story:  A small Connecticut gun rights group gained attention on Wednesday after issuing a press release that smeared the father of a boy killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Wow.  Just wow.  What do you do with people who trade the lives of our children for gun industry profits?  Jesus said "live by the gun (sword), die by the gun (sword)."  After reading such things from the gun industry rights groups, we can only hope that's true.  The world would truly be a better place without them.   

Why Aren't You In Prison?

Daily Kos:  Dick Cheney says the Bush Administration was always ready for terror, especially on 9/11:

Ex-Vice President Dick Cheney claims the Benghazi attack was a “failure of leadership” by the Obama administration, and that the Bush administration would have been ready and would have responded to the Sept. 11, 2012, attack that killed the U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens and three other American embassy staff.

“When we were there, on our watch, we were always ready on 9/11, on the anniversary,” Cheney told the U.K.’s Daily Mail.  “We always anticipated they were coming for us, especially in that part of the world . . . I cannot understand why they weren’t ready to go.”

Yeah, you were ready for 9/11.  What is that, some kind of sick joke?

We can't understand some things ourselves.  We can't understand is why you were getting intel that said Bin Ladin determined to attack inside the United States all summer long and your ass clown administration was on vacation.  We can't understand why you lied us into Iraq and got 30,000 Americans dead or maimed.  We can't understand why your company Halliburton made hundreds of millions dollars on the deal.  Frankly, we, and most of the world can't understand why you're not in prison for life in the Hague.  And if you don't end up in hell, we won't understand that either. 

Mark Sanford (R-Asshole)

Headline: Sanford Wins: South Carolina voters reject family values, honesty, integrity and responsibility.

We would expect nothing less from state that led all the other treasonous states in betraying the country, taking up arms against the country, turning their back on the country in order to keep slavery.  A state that to this day still flies the confederate flag above the statehouse.

As for this particular scumbag, he also turned his back on his family and his kids, who were waiting for him to come home on fathers day.  They were literally waiting by the door for him to come home.  But he never came.  He was off indulging by himself banging his mistress.  Really when you think about it, South Carolina and Mark Sanford are perfect for each other.

Massive Holdings and Income

Think Progress:  Gabriel Gomez, the Republican nominee to fill John Kerry’s open Senate seat in Massachusetts, is running on a platform of Congressional reforms including a constitutional balanced budget amendment. But while he is using the recycled talking point that the federal government should model itself on businesses and families and stop spending more money than it takes in, a ThinkProgress examination of his own financial disclosure filings reveals that he has taken out debt of his own.

Gomez, a wealthy private equity investor who was paid more than $993,000 last year in salary and bonuses, won last Tuesday’s Republican primary and will face Rep. Ed Markey (D) in the June 25 Senate special election. The cornerstone of his campaign is his plan to “reboot Congress.” 

In addition to proposing unconstitutional legislative measures including a line-item veto and a “No Budget No Pay” law, he suggests Congress should enact a dangerous Balanced Budget Amendment to the U.S. constitution.
He explains:

BALANCED BUDGET AMENDMENT: Massachusetts has to balance its budget, and so does every family and every business. The federal government should do the same.

Government is nothing like a business and cannot be run as one — its aim is to protect its citizens, not to turn a profit. But even businesses and individuals often borrow in the short term to make investments for the long term — mortgages, lines of credits, and other sorts of loans are facts of life for millions of Americans and businesses of all sizes. Start-up businesses rarely break even for the first several years and few people can afford to buy their first home outright or pay for their kids to go to college out of pocket.

None of this should come as news to Gomez, who himself has borrowed money. His financial disclosure form reveals that despite his massive holdings and income, he took out a student loan in 2010. The debt, currently between $50,001 and $100,000, is to be paid back over a 23-year term at a 3.5 percent interest rate.

Typical asshole Republican.   Even though he's super rich, he's taking advantage of tax scams and federally backed benefits designed to help the poor and the middle class... while he demonizes government for providing them no less.

Conservatives are a trip.  They pretty much all do the same thing with Medicare.  They bitch and moan and call it socialism but the second they turn 65 and see what their for-profit medical insurance company does to them, they come running to Medicare as fast as they can.

As for Gabrial Gomez, somebody should check to see if he also applied for food stamps.  Greedy prick.

Make Sure To Pose For Pictures

Headline:  Gun Protesters Plan March On Washington With Loaded Rifles To ‘Put The Government On Notice’

Perfect.  This should be an opportunity to document who exactly intends to betray the country and commit treason so that they may be put on the terrorist watch list.

In 1864 southern conservatives made war on the United States in order to preserve slavery.  Their movement still exists.  They can be indentified by their devotion to the confederate flag, the stockpiling of guns, and their constant threats against the government. They already betrayed the United States once.  By their own words and actions you better believe they're capable of doing it again.

Bring It On

Raw Story:  The chairman of a House investigative committee has named three witnesses who will appear at a May 8 hearing on the US response to the terrorist threat that cost four Americans their lives in Benghazi, Libya.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R) of California said the hearing promises to highlight discrepancies between Obama administration officials and others with knowledge about US actions before, during, and after the Benghazi attack.

That's fine.  Hopefully we can use the opportunity to expose the fact Republicans cut funds for diplomatic security after Obama was elected.  Additionally, we encourage Harry Reid to schedule hearings of his own in the Senate.  We suggest he start with an investigation of Darrell Issa.  Then we can move on to all the Republicans who lied us into the Iraq slaughterhouse.  Then we can investigate Dick Cheney and Halliburton and Blackwater and all the war profiteers that sucked up hundreds of billions of tax payer dollars in the Iraq. Then we can go after the Republicans who got paid off to look the other way while that fertilizer plant created the conditions that exploded an entire town in Texas.  We could go on all day.  Suffice to say that if the Democrats held hearings and "investigated" like the Republicans do, most of the elected and appointed  Republicans in office today would be in prison.  

The GOP Nazi Problem

Think Progress:  A former Bush White House official on Thursday made the case that Nazi Germany had adhered to the laws of war during World War II when defending the Bush administration’s decision to open the Guantanamo Bay prison for terror suspects. 

There is so much wrong with this, we don't even know where to begin.  First of all, it really doesn't do their movement any good to compare their actions to the Nazis. Second, the Nazis didn't follow the rules of war.  They baked and gassed 6 million Jews, turned prisoners of war into slaves, and sent civilian populations of occupied countries to concentration camps. And last, Republicans need to stop praising, imitating, and promoting Nazis.  Sadly, it seems they just can't help themselves.

True

Headline: Palin Tells NRA Audience Leaders Are Exploiting Tragedies For Gun Laws.

She's right.  Her team causes the tragedies, our team points to those tragedies as justification for laws that will stop them from happening.  So we agree. 

Again we ask, what do you do with people who trade the lives of Americans for gun industry profits? 

Sick Racket

Raw Story:  Fox News host Andrea Tantaros expressed concern on Friday over President Barack Obama’s support for over-the-counter access to birth control for girls aged 15 and up.

“I’m just wondering, at 15 years old, is the Obama daughter, Malia, going to go on birth control?” she asked on her radio show. “Are they gonna put her on birth control? Because he’s very concerned with the contraceptives and pharmaceuticals that are going in the mouths of everybody else’s 15-year old daughter.”

Because conservatives would rather teens that do have sex get pregnant so they can force them to have the baby and then not provide any social service what-so-ever when the teen can't afford to take care of it.   Really, they're just deliberately torturing this population to rile up their base and get elected on issues such as abortion, cutting the safety net, birth control, etc.  Pretty sick. 

Dirty, Dictatorial, Disgusting, Banana Republic

Think Progress:  The ALEC-sponsored bill to gut North Carolina’s clean energy standard failed last week in one House committee. But as the Charlotte Observer reports, last night it passed a Senate committee over shouted objections to do something most people take for granted in a democracy — counting votes to see which side has more.

Over the objections of Democratic lawmakers, a Senate committee approved legislation Wednesday to end the state’s 6-year-old renewable energy program.

Opponents of the bill shouted “No!” when voting to show their frustration at Republican Chairman Bill Rabon’s refusal to count votes with a show of hands. In what was clearly a razor-thin margin, both sides said they would have won if the votes had been counted.

“North Carolina is not a banana republic,” Democratic Sen. Josh Stein of Raleigh, one of the no votes, said after the meeting. “That was no way to run a proceeding.”

Should we hate them more for not counting votes or always shilling for dirty energy?  So many ways to hate the GOP, so little time...

The Confederates

Salon:  There’s plenty of proof of an authoritarian streak and animus toward democratic ideals in today’s conservative movement. There was the movement’s use of its judicial power to halt a vote recount and instead install a president who had lost the popular vote. There is the ongoing GOP effort to make it more difficult for people to cast a vote in an election. There is the GOP’s record use of the Senate filibuster to kill legislation that the vast majority of the country supports. There is a GOP leader’s declaration that what the American people want from their government simply “doesn’t matter.”

Up until today, you might have been able to write all that anti-democratic pathology off as one infecting only the Republican Party’s politicians and institutional leadership, but not its rank-and-file voters. But then this morning Fairleigh Dickinson University released this gun control-related pollshowing that authoritarianism runs throughout the the entire party.

Take a look at the cross-tabs on page 3 of the national survey. That’s right, you are reading it correctly: Almost half (44 percent) of all self-described Republican voters say they believe “an armed revolution might be necessary to protect our liberties.” Just as bad, more Republicans believe an armed revolution might be necessary than believe one isn’t necessary.

It's time for progressives to start openly questioning the patriotism of Republicans.  It's time to ask if they're actually as big a security risk as they themselves seem to indicate they are.  

In 1864 southern conservatives made war on the United States in order to preserve slavery. They already betrayed the United States once.  By their own words and actions you better believe they're capable of doing it again.

Would Rather Mass Killings at Elementary Schools

Huffingtonpost: Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) revealed that some members of his party opposed expanding background checks for gun sales recently because they didn't want to "be seen helping the president."

If true this should disqualify them from holding office.  Anybody who would enable mass killers to spite the president is unfit to walk the streets, much less serve in congress.  But it's not the real reason.  The real reason is even more horrific: Republicans have made the choice to trade the lives of American citizens for gun industry profits. 

The Pollution Party

Raw Story:  Conservatives are less likely to purchase products labelled as environmentally friendly, according to research published online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“A popular strategy for marketing energy efficiency is to focus on its environmental benefits,” Dena Gromet of the University of Pennsylvania, the lead author of the study, explained. “But not everyone values protecting the environment. We were interested in whether promoting the environment could in fact deter some individuals from purchasing energy efficient options that they would have otherwise selected.”

Seriously, they're pro-pollution. There are various theories and scientific studies that seek to explain why this is, evangelical dominionism, the belief end times are near so what does it matter, the belief the earth needs to be broken for Jesus to come back, etc, but the real reason is conservatives are pretty much just assholes.