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GOP Family Values: New scandal brewing for Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker

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Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker just can’t get a break. Only in office a few months, already he seems to posses a bottomless pit of sleazy, stupid things that he’s done that are making it, you might say, a little hot for him.

On the eve of his buddy Judge David Prosser getting his ass kicked all over the electoral map, word has leaked out of a new scandal that’s taking shape in Madison: It seems that the ne’r do well. loser drunkard progeny of one of Walker’s biggest donors, Jerry Deshane, was given a plum state job.

From the Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal-Sentinel:

Just in his mid-20s, Brian Deschane has no college degree, very little management experience and two drunken-driving convictions.

Yet he has landed an $81,500-per-year job in Gov. Scott Walker’s administration overseeing environmental and regulatory matters and dozens of employees at the Department of Commerce. Even though Walker says the state is broke and public employees are overpaid, Deschane already has earned a promotion and a 26% pay raise in just two months with the state.

How did Deschane score his plum assignment with the Walker team?

It’s all in the family.

This is what happens when you vote for Republicans…

Can you imagine being a high school teacher worried about having your benefits cut or losing your job and hearing about some idiot rich kid with TWO DUIs getting a job at the taxpayer tit for over $80k a year and getting a fucking 16% raise in just eight weeks? Rep. Brett Hulsey, a Democrat from Madison said of party boy Deschane: “It doesn’t look like he’s ever had a real job.”

No, but he’s got a real rich daddy... Did he even have to write a resume or fill out a job application? I kinda doubt it, don’t you?

And in related news, a second WI Republican, Sen. Randy Hopper is likely going to face a recall election. You may recall Hopper as the fellow who left his wife for someone half his age who also got a government job well above the standard pay scale. Wisconsin Democrats and labor supporters have previously collected 145% of the necessary signatures needed to recall another Republican senator, Dan Kapanke. I don’t think either of these gentlemen will see out the end of the summer in their current offices. Nor will their buddy Scott Walker be in any position to give them sweetheart jobs when the voters sack them, because those days are over. Walker’s being watched for ANY slip up at this point and although for sure he’s DUMB, he’s not so dumb that he can’t read the writing on the wall. (Can you imagine what it must feel like to be Scott Walker? What a god-damned buffoon!)

This is getting sooooo gooood. I can’t wait for tomorrow’s vote in Wisconsin. Republican schadenfreude? Count me in, I feel like a little kid on Christmas Eve…

Posted by Richard Metzger
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04.04.2011
10:40 pm
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Michele Bachmann’s fabulist life

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Not content to simply um… improvise dubious (and easily verified) “facts” about American history, a few weeks ago, MN Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann also made up shit about her own family tree in an effort to appear “more Iowan” to voters in the state where she was born. Chris Rodda, author of Liars for Jesus writes at Op Ed News:

[At] the Rediscover God in America conference in Iowa, Michele Bachmann, like the other potential 2012 Republican presidential candidates who spoke at this conference, lavished praise on their fellow speaker, Christian nationalist pseudo-historian David Barton. Bachmann also revealed that her involvement in the history revisionism game goes back even further than her association with Barton. As a student at Oral Roberts University, she met John Eidsmoe, and worked as a research assistant on his 1987 book, Christianity and the Constitution. Eidsmoe is another Christian nationalist history revisionist, whose Christianity and the Constitution book predates the first edition of Barton’s book The Myth of Separation by a year. In fact, some of Barton’s lies are adaptations of Eidsmoe’s lies and half-truths, a number of which are debunked in my book. But I had no idea that Bachmann had been involved with Eidsmoe or his book until she talked about it at the Rediscover God in America conference, or that it was Eidsmoe who introduced her to Barton’s material.

But Bachmann’s admiration of history revisionists wasn’t the thing that really caught my attention in her speech at the conference. It was her detailed account of her family history, aimed at emphasizing her Iowa roots to this audience of Iowans. It was when Bachmann said she was a 7th generation Iowan, descended from Norwegians who immigrated to Iowa in the 1850s, that I started paying attention, simply because it would be mathematically impossible for a woman in her mid-fifties to be the 7th generation descended from people who immigrated in the 1850s unless each of their direct ancestors from every generation had had a child when they were still a child themselves. After catching this one obvious lie, I just couldn’t resist doing a little fact checking on the rest of Bachmann’s story. What I found was that Bachmann’s version of her family’s history was as much a work of fiction as anything found in one of David Barton’s books. She wants the people of Iowa to see her as one of them, so she simply changed her family history.

That’s right she just made it all up. Facts? She don’t need no stinking facts! She’s Michele Bachmann, ain’t she?

This woman is stupid and shameless, a winning combination in Republican presidential primaries. The people would cast a vote for this idiot will never even hear about this anyway, so what does she have to lose with a lil’ white lie?

Watch the video of Bachmann’s speech below. Read Rodda’s analysis of Michele Bachmann’s bogus claims for her family tree at OpEd News.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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04.04.2011
09:19 pm
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Stupid or evil: Republican Party to commit mass-suicide???
04.04.2011
04:51 pm
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Remember all those Republican TV campaign ads last November that warned senior citizens about how the Democrats were hatching plans to cut their Medicare? Some people, sadly, were ignorant enough to believe this claim, as preposterous as it was and that billionaires needed tax breaks, etc, etc, etc. Now we now have a GOP-controlled House. Well, folks, guess what? When you vote for a wolf in sheep’s clothing, don’t be surprised when they eat your carcass and spit the bones out once the election’s over:

This just in from Paul Krugman’s blog at the New York Times. Stunning:

So they’re really going to propose it.

More when we have some details. But two key points:

1. Privatizing and voucherizing Medicare does nothing whatsoever to control costs. We’ve seen that from the sorry history of Medicare Advantage. I’m sure that the Republicans will claim savings — but those savings will come entirely from limiting the vouchers to below the rate of rise in health care costs; in effect, they will come from denying medical care to those who can’t afford to top up their premiums.

Oh, and for all those older Americans who voted GOP last year because those nasty Democrats were going to cut Medicare, I have just one word: suckers!

2. E.J. Dionne is right: This will be Obama’s defining moment. Will he stand up for the principle that society takes care of those in need? Or will he cave in? I wish I had confidence in the answer.

Me, too!

House Republicans Propose $4 Trillion in Cuts Over Decade (New York Times)

Posted by Richard Metzger
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04.04.2011
04:51 pm
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Zombies vs. Teabaggers

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Look who wants in on the class war: It’s the undead vs. the Teabaggers as hordes of pro-labor zombies roamed around Madison, Wisconsin over the weekend in search of some brains. Looking for high IQ dining anywhere near the Tea party-dominated statehouse was perhaps a poor idea for a zombie banquet…
 
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Via Joe My God

Posted by Richard Metzger
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04.04.2011
04:14 pm
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GOP 2012: ‘Vile, shameless embarrassing losers’
03.30.2011
04:50 pm
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I mean, no way, right?

Joe Klein writing on the 2012 crop of potential Republican presidential nominees on his TIME magazine blog:

This is my 10th presidential campaign, Lord help me. I have never before seen such a bunch of vile, desperate-to-please, shameless, embarrassing losers coagulated under a single party’s banner. They are the most compelling argument I’ve seen against American exceptionalism. Even Tim Pawlenty, a decent governor, can’t let a day go by without some bilious nonsense escaping his lizard brain. And, as Greg Sargent makes clear, Mitt Romney has wandered a long way from courage. There are those who say, cynically, if this is the dim-witted freak show the Republicans want to present in 2012, so be it. I disagree. One of them could get elected. You never know. Mick Huckabee, the front-runner if you can believe it, might have to negotiate a trade agreement, or a defense treaty, with the Indonesian President some day. Newt might have to discuss very delicate matters of national security with the President of Pakistan. And so I plead, as an unflinching American patriot—please Mitch Daniels, please Jeb Bush, please run. I may not agree with you on most things, but I respect you. And you seem to respect yourselves enough not to behave like public clowns.

Joe, tell us how you really feel…

American Embarrassment (Swampland)

Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.30.2011
04:50 pm
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Rick Santorum: ‘Abortion is killing Social Security’

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You gotta hand it to him, Rick Santorum, that wacky wingnut Republican no-hoper presidential candidate, a man with even less of a chance of gaining the GOP nomination than, say, Newt Gingrich (or any of the rest of them for that matter), just won’t give up. Despite the fact that NO ONE, I mean NO ONE thinks he’s got a snowball’s chance in hot hot Hades of gaining traction with, you know, actual voters, Rick’s out there, fighting the good fight… or something. It’s hard to say what he’s really doing or what he thinks he’s accomplishing.

Could there be a less-inspiring, less-intelligent, less-attractive candidate than Rick Santorum? Of course there could be, never count out the GOP when it comes to scraping the bottom of the loony bin, but the odds are against a lesser contender turning up in this election cycle. Even Ron or Rand Paul have better chances of moving into the White House than Santorum—effectively none, of course—and yet like a buffoonish Energerizer Bunny, he just keeps on going. BUT WHY? WHO is urging him to run? What kind of people shows up at his campaign events? What’s his motivation to run for President in spite of overwhelming indifference?

Who the fuck knows? Michele Bachmann probably even thinks Santorum is a pinhead. What alternate conclusion could anyone, even a Republican, come to when faced with a statement like this one:

“The social security system in my opinion is a flawed design, period. But, having said that, the design would work a lot better if we had stable demographic trends. … The reason social security is in big trouble is we don’t have enough workers to support the retirees. Well, a third of all the young people in America are not in America today because of abortion, because one in three pregnancies end in abortion.”

Mull that one over. Nope, Social Security’s problems have nothing to do with the fact that after $106,800 the wealthy don’t have to pay anything else into the fund. Repeal Roe v. Wade and America’s financial woes will magically right themselves…

I can’t even get a hard on to make fun of Rick Santorum anymore. Why let perfectly good mockery go to waste on a guy like him?

Via Wonkette

Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.30.2011
01:45 pm
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IN prosecutor resigns after advising Walker to stage fake attack on himself!

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Above, Carlos F. Lam, former Indiana Deputy Prosecutor, now and forevermore, just an unemployable idiot!
 
The gods of Republican schadenfreude have once again smiled on America’s working class. However the events in this story took place so quickly that there was scarcely enough time for it to make the news nationally, so here’s a post-mortem on the dead as a doornail legal career of one utterly silly fellow,  a former Indiana deputy persecutor prosecutor—and arch Republican buffoon—by the name of Carlos F. Lam.

Amidst the more than 50,000 emails sent to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker during the heat of the anti-union uprising, a two paragraph email from Lam, shall we say, stuck out like a sore thumb. In it, a PUBLIC OFFICIAL WHO ACTUALLY HAS A LAW DEGREE wrote:

“If you could employ an associate who pretends to be sympathetic to the unions’ cause to physically attack you (or even use a firearm against you), you could discredit the unions. Currently, the media is painting the union protest as a democratic uprising and failing to mention the role of the DNC (Democratic National Committee) and umbrella union organizations in the protests. Employing a false flag operation would assist in undercutting any support that the media may be creating in favor of the unions. God bless, Carlos F. Lam.”

According to the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism:

Carlos F. Lam submitted his resignation shortly before the Center published a story quoting his Feb. 19 email, which praised Walker for standing up to unions but went on to say that the chaos in Wisconsin presented “a good opportunity for what’s called a ‘false flag’ operation.”

At 5 a.m. Thursday, expecting the story to come out that day, Lam called his boss, Johnson County, Ind., Prosecutor Brad Cooper, and told him he had been up all night thinking about it. “He wanted to come clean, I guess, and said he is the one who sent that email,” Cooper said.

He came into the office and gave his resignation verbally, Cooper told the Daily Journal in Franklin, Ind. The resignation was announced after the Center’s initial story was published.

Email headers with detailed IP addresses suggested that the message was sent from Indianapolis.

Lam, an Indianapolis resident, at first told the Center he never wrote it.

Reached Tuesday by phone at the number listed on the email, Lam confirmed his email address matched the Hotmail address appearing on the Walker email, but said he had never written to Walker. “I am flabbergasted and would never advocate for something like this, and would like everyone to be sure that that’s just not me,” he said, after being read the email.

Except that it was him. And he SIGNED IT WITH HIS OWN NAME and even added his telephone number! And it came from his IP address! Of course it’s not him, why, a um, a UNION THUG must have sent it!!!!

Shit, these Republicans crack me the fuck up! How can someone able to pass the bar exam not realize this is a PREPOSTEROUSLY stupid thing to do???

From Mother Jones:

Lam wasn’t alone in proposing to undermine unions with sleazy tactics during the Wisconsin protests. The day after Lam sent his email, radio talk show host Mark Williams [former Tea Party Express leader] wrote a blog post urging his followers to cause trouble at a Sacramento solidarity event by wearing Service Employees International Union T-shirts and say outrageous things to embarrass the union. “If I do get the ‘in’ I am going to do my darnedest to get podium access and take the mic to do that rant from there,” Williams wrote. “With any luck and if I can manage the moments to build up to it, I can probably get a cheer out of the crowd for something extreme.” This, of course, was the same Mark Williams who infamously wrote a blog post in the voice of black slave who said that slavery was “a great gig.”

You expect such buffoonery from Williams. But from a deputy attorney general and a county prosecutor? All in all, it’s been a rough month or so for prosecutors in the great state of Indiana.

That last sentence, should you have already forgotten, refers also to disgraced Indiana state Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Cox, who wrote on his Twitter account that riot police should “use live ammunition” in the Wisconsin capital against union members and protesters. When Mother Jones reported on this matter on Feb. 23, Cox was fired from his job.As he should have been.

With all their new-found free time, Cox and Lam will have lots of time to consider the fact that career-wise, they’re both KAPUT in the legal profession. Who would hire lawyers THIS STUPID? An idiotic, loose cannon attorney is the last thing any respectable law firm requires. These stunts will follow them around on Google like shit on their shoes for the rest of their lives and I sure hope they’ve both got some INSANE debt from law school. Imagine what it must be like googling yourself and reading articles like this one calling you an abject moron and there are tens of thousands of them! And if either one of them is married, good luck holding onto your wife!

Indiana prosecutor Carlos F. Lam resigns after recommending Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker stage fake attack against himself (Post Crescent)

Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.25.2011
02:27 pm
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Michele Bachmann for President!?!?!
03.24.2011
12:35 pm
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YES!!! It really looks like the dingbat MN Congresswoman from what must be the lowest IQ district in all of America—they elected her didn’t they? I rest my case—is going to, or has already, if you’ve been watching her behind the scenes moves, thrown her hat in the ring for the Republican Presidential nomination. CNN reports that she’s planning to form a national exploratory committee in June, if not earlier and she’s already making moves in Iowa (where her office could open as early as this weekend) New Hampshire and South Carolina. Comedians, lefty pundits and every single Democrat in the nation are praying to the gods of schadenfreude that Michele Bachmann makes good on her threat. Hell, the woman might even be able to keep the great Garrison Keillor from retiring!

Me? Lets just say, I think it will be good for democracy…. and leave it at that!

One extremely funny thing to contemplate is “Who would be her running mate?” should she secure the nomination (in some fucked up parallel universe, I mean). Looking at the field of all possible candidates—and American electoral politics being what they are—it would almost assuredly be a male Republican. Which one of them would to craven enough to take a strap-on up the ass and be her bitch boy? Obviously, figuratively speaking, that would be a requirement for the job.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.24.2011
12:35 pm
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Stupid or Evil? MN GOP tries to outlaw the poor having more than $20 in cash!

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What’s next from the folks who gave us John Kline, Michele Bachmann and Erik Paulsen? You don’t wanna know… This one is fucking breathtaking.

I’m going to debut a new category on Dangerous Minds for this doozy: “Stupid or Evil?”

From Fight Back News:

St. Paul, MN – Minnesota Republicans are pushing legislation that would make it a crime for people on public assistance to have more $20 in cash in their pockets any given month. This represents a change from their initial proposal, which banned them from having any money at all.

On March 15, Angel Buechner of the Welfare Rights Committee testified in front of the House Health and Human Services Reform Committee on House File 171. Buechner told committee members, “We would like to address the provision that makes it illegal for MFIP [one of Minnesota’s welfare programs] families to withdraw cash from the cash portion of the MFIP grant - and in fact, appears to make it illegal for MFIP families to have any type of money at all in their pockets. How do you expect people to take care of business like paying bills such as lights, gas, water, trash and phone?”

House File 171 would make it so that families on MFIP - and disabled single adults on General Assistance and Minnesota Supplemental Aid - could not have their cash grants in cash or put into a checking account. Rather, they could only use a state-issued debit card at special terminals in certain businesses that are set up to accept the card.

The bill also calls for unconstitutional residency requirements, not allowing the debit card to be used across state lines and other provisions that the Welfare Rights Committee and others consider unacceptable.

Buechner testified, “We’ll leave you with this. It is not right to punish a whole group because of the supposed actions of a few. You in this room could have a pretty rough time if that was the case. It is not right to stigmatize and dehumanize women living the hard life of trying to raise children while living 60% below the poverty level. It is not right to use racist, bumper-sticker hate to inflict human misery for political gain.”

These people are evil and stupid. What’s happening to this country that such bizarre people can make it into public office? THIS is what you get when you vote Republican or sit out the midterm elections.

Via Crooks and Liars

Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.18.2011
02:03 pm
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