From Near Collapse to Booming.

AFP/Raw Story: General Motors (NYSE: GM – news) , Ford (NYSE: F – news) and Chrysler (Xetra: 710000 – news) reported their best US sales performances since 2007 on Tuesday amid booming overall auto demand following the US industry’s near-collapse five years ago.

Such is the difference between Republican and Democratic Party public policy.

Sick

Raw Story: Officials in Florida on Monday said that an elected Florida Republican Party committeeman had been arrested on multiple charges of possessing and transmitting child pornography. 

Walton County Sheriff Mike Adkinson confirmed to The Northwest Florida Daily News that Lane Rees, a former Walton County Commissioner, was taken into custody around 5 p.m. on Monday after a month-long investigation. 

There does seem to be a very high incidence of child molestation in conservative circles. We figure it's the repressive nature of the fake morality in the movement.  It makes people hide and suppress their normal adult urges until they explode in fits of criminal perversion. 

You Go Gary

Booman:  We continue to hear arguments from the Republican establishment that the party is too socially conservative, particularly on gay marriage and immigration reform. But the social conservatives have a pretty decent rebuttal. Take this, from Gary Bauer:

Social conservatives are particularly — and understandably — bothered that the elites rarely want to discuss the elephant in the room: that the party’s economic policies don’t necessarily appeal to the the rank and file, who vote Republican because it is the party of traditional values.

“If we gave our voters an accurate portrayal of our ideas, that we want to cut the rate of growth on Social Security, give tax cuts to billionaires and then the values issues, the values issues would be more popular than the economic agenda of the current Republican Party,” said Bauer, citing particularly those Mass-attending Roman Catholics who have fled the Democrats.

Bauer added, “I would caution the donor wing of the Republican Party that is driving a lot of this: If they think social conservatives are the only thing preventing Republicans from winning, they’ll learn that their economic agenda will go down the tubes along with the Republican Party’s prospects.”

That's a pretty astonishing admission on Gary Bauer's part, if you stop and consider the implications of what he's saying. If you just read between the lines there a little bit, he's saying that the Republican Party's leaders (including Mr. Bauer himself) are not giving an accurate portrayal of their economic policies to the rank-and-file. He's saying that he basically gives the party a pass on economic policies that don't serve his value-voters' interests. He's saying that he and other socially conservative leaders are basically in on the hoax, and that they'll tell the truth about the GOP's economic plans if their social interests are no longer represented in the party. 

He's saying the only way Republicans get poor and middle class whites to stab themselves in the throat economically is God, guns, and gays.   That's something we all know but it's rare indeed to have one of their own articulate it.  In any case, it's a truth that if widely accepted would decimate the Republican party and the conservative movement.  Here's to the truth no matter who's telling it. 

Minority Outreach

Raw Story:  Republican Rep. Don Young of Alaska on Thursday used a racial slur during an interview with a local radio station.

“My father had a ranch. We used to hire 50 or 60 wetbacks to pick tomatoes,” Young said in the interview with KRBD. “You know, it takes two people to pick the same tomatoes now. It’s all done by machine.”

Does anybody have any doubt about how he refers to black people?  But back to the native people for a moment, you've got to love the GOP, white Europeans come here, murder the natives, steal the land, call them racist names, and in general demonize and terrorize them, all the while happily letting them pick our produce, flip our burgers, and do our gardening.  What a bunch of scumbags.   

Scary

Huffingtonpost: Media attendees at Rep. Doug LaMalfa's (R-Calif.) first town hall were left with a head-scratcher.

The Redding Record-Searchlight reported late Monday that a Tea Party group instituted a blackout during the scheduled Q&A section of LaMalfa's appearance. The paper claims that it was also asked to refrain from tweeting his comments, or face a potential ban from future events. 

KRCR-TV adds that the following ground rules were set by a Tea Party organizer before LaMalfa's event: no filming of the congressman's introduction or the Q&A session, as well as a request for the TV station to exit before that latter portion of the event began.

It's come down to this.  The leading edge of the GOP is so toxic, so revolting, so off putting, that they can't even let people hear what they're saying.  

Lib Media Not Racist Enough

Daily Kos:  Robert Zimmerman, Jr., brother of Trayvon Martin shooter George Zimmerman, is on a media offensive, with definite emphasis on the offensive, to defend his brother with racists attacks on his brother's victim. That includes a Twitter campaign in which he repeatedly tweets images of Trayvon Martin along with those of a young, black man who's been detained in Georgia for the murder of an infant.

Both pictures feature the young men flipping the middle finger at the camera, with the caption “A picture speaks a thousand words…Any questions?” Zimmerman has, thus far, tweeted the comparison to the Anthony half of Opie and Anthony, Michael Moore, the NAACP, and a Breitbart News editor, as well as the NRA. If Zimmerman’s point is that anyone who uses that gesture is a murderer, then they’re going to have to arrest the entire Garden State Parkway. If you suspect that wasn’t his point, you might be right.

To make absolutely sure that his point was being made, Zimmerman also tweeted out this:

Lib media shld ask if what these2 black teens did 2 a woman&baby is the reason ppl think blacks mightB risky

We wouldn't have bothered with this except to notice the Zimmerman camp appears to be conservative (right?  lib media?).  Which would explain the racism anyway...

Death Toll + 1

Raw Story:  The former head of the South Carolina Republican Party on Sunday lashed out at an Iraq war veteran who now opposes the war, saying that he should have “come home in a body bag.”

So the GOP lies us into a devastating war and occupation, one of the people who didn't die as a result has a problem with it, and the former head of the SC GOP wishes he would have been one of the hundreds of thousands who did die because of what they did.  What a rotten movement.