Another camera angle on the “action” at GOP Rep. Paul Ryan’s $15-a-head Rotary Club luncheon on Tuesday. Cringe in horror as Tom Nielsen, a 71-year-old retired plumber from Kenosha, Wisconsin gets thrown to the ground and handcuffed for “trespassing” (like everyone else there, Nielsen paid a $15 fee for the luncheon) because he objected to Ryan’s plans to destroy Social Security and Medicare. He was also detained for resisting arrest.

This video has something the other ones I’ve seen do not, when smug, rat-faced Republican class warrior Ryan has the poor taste to make a joke at Mr. Neilsen’s expense…
 

 
Via Joe.My.God

 
Attention (formerly) middle-class jobless people in Wisconsin, don’t you go gettin’ sassy with Republican corporate stooge enemy of the people Representative Paul Ryan because… he’ll have your ass arrested... Via Politics USA:

Paul Ryan held his PPV town hall event at Klemmer’s Banquet Hall in Milwaukee. When some protesters who had paid their $15 stood up and asked him questions about jobs and the Bush tax cuts, Ryan not only had them kicked out. He also had three of them arrested.

The protesters got involved when Rep. Ryan tried to claim that our job crisis is directly related to our debt crisis. One person stood up and asked, “Our debt is out of control because of the tax cuts you’re giving…Our unemployment in 2003 was 6.2% before the tax cuts went through. Now our unemployment rate is 9.1%. What are you doing to create jobs, Congressman?”

This lady was shown the door. She was soon followed by another gentleman. Another woman stood up while Ryan was speaking and said, “You won’t talk to us. How can we give our opinions when you refuse to talk to us?” I think you can probably guess what happened to her. When someone stood up in the back and asked, “Where are the jobs, Ryan?” He mentioned corporations, and was escorted out.

How very Republican of him, eh? What a vicious, arrogant fuck Paul Ryan is. Don’t forget these voters also paid $15 for the privilege.

As I have written here in the past about Paul Ryan: “For the record, I’m not a big fan of violence, but it does have its place, historically, in the class war that’s raged since human society began. Admittedly, the image of, say, Rep. Paul Ryan, being forced to fellate a Colt .45 in front of news cameras and having to beg for his life by a once-proud middle-class father reduced to moving his family into a car is something I’d really enjoy seeing. (I think whoever did that would go down in history as a folk hero and at least THEY FEED YOU IN JAIL)”

Ryan might have thought he was being “clever” with this exercise, but there is little doubt that this video will hurt him politically every single time someone watches it. It already has.

How is this asshole a “public servant”? This man is a vicious Republican Ayn Rand-loving shit. He should NOT be in a position of power after displaying such cold-blooded, repulsive, arrogance like this to his constituents. Like they’re “the little people.” You can only imagine what he’d really like to do to them. Yuck. What an ugly human being. Please FB share this and Tweet far and wide.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The GOP’s ‘useless eaters’ solution: No more food for you, poor people!
 

 
Michael Lofgren is a Republican staffer, who was, until recently, serving the Senate Finance Committee. Lofgren has worked on Capitol Hill for nearly three decades. He explains why he left his job in a recent column for TruthOut. The Republican “11th Commandment”—Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican—is repeatedly violated in this barn-burner.

Some choice excerpts here, but the whole thing is a must read. His main target is the Republican Party, of course, but the Democrats are not spared, either:

But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.

To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachmann (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy.

On burning his GOP bridges:

I left because I was appalled at the headlong rush of Republicans, like Gadarene swine, to embrace policies that are deeply damaging to this country’s future; and contemptuous of the feckless, craven incompetence of Democrats in their half-hearted attempts to stop them. And, in truth, I left as an act of rational self-interest. Having gutted private-sector pensions and health benefits as a result of their embrace of outsourcing, union busting and “shareholder value,” the GOP now thinks it is only fair that public-sector workers give up their pensions and benefits, too. Hence the intensification of the GOP’s decades-long campaign of scorn against government workers. Under the circumstances, it is simply safer to be a current retiree rather than a prospective one.

If you think Paul Ryan and his Ayn Rand-worshipping colleagues aren’t after your Social Security and Medicare, I am here to disabuse you of your naiveté. They will move heaven and earth to force through tax cuts that will so starve the government of revenue that they will be “forced” to make “hard choices” - and that doesn’t mean repealing those very same tax cuts, it means cutting the benefits for which you worked.

On the debt ceiling nonsense:

Everyone knows that in a hostage situation, the reckless and amoral actor has the negotiating upper hand over the cautious and responsible actor because the latter is actually concerned about the life of the hostage, while the former does not care. This fact, which ought to be obvious, has nevertheless caused confusion among the professional pundit class, which is mostly still stuck in the Bob Dole era in terms of its orientation. For instance, Ezra Klein wrote of his puzzlement over the fact that while House Republicans essentially won the debt ceiling fight, enough of them were sufficiently dissatisfied that they might still scuttle the deal. Of course they might - the attitude of many freshman Republicans to national default was “bring it on!”

It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant.

On “Real Americans”:

You can probably guess who those people are. Above all, anyone not likely to vote Republican. As Sarah Palin would imply, the people who are not Real Americans. Racial minorities. Immigrants. Muslims. Gays. Intellectuals. Basically, anyone who doesn’t look, think, or talk like the GOP base. This must account, at least to some degree, for their extraordinarily vitriolic hatred of President Obama. I have joked in the past that the main administration policy that Republicans object to is Obama’s policy of being black. Among the GOP base, there is constant harping about somebody else, some “other,” who is deliberately, assiduously and with malice aforethought subverting the Good, the True and the Beautiful: Subversives. Commies. Socialists. Ragheads. Secular humanists. Blacks. Fags. Feminazis. The list may change with the political needs of the moment, but they always seem to need a scapegoat to hate and fear.

On the wimpy idiocy of the Democrats, their rhetorical incompetence and their amateurish PR:

How do they manage to do this? Because Democrats ceded the field. Above all, they do not understand language. Their initiatives are posed in impenetrable policy-speak: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The what? - can anyone even remember it? No wonder the pejorative “Obamacare” won out. Contrast that with the Republicans’ Patriot Act. You’re a patriot, aren’t you? Does anyone at the GED level have a clue what a Stimulus Bill is supposed to be? Why didn’t the White House call it the Jobs Bill and keep pounding on that theme?

You know that Social Security and Medicare are in jeopardy when even Democrats refer to them as entitlements. “Entitlement” has a negative sound in colloquial English: somebody who is “entitled” selfishly claims something he doesn’t really deserve. Why not call them “earned benefits,” which is what they are because we all contribute payroll taxes to fund them? That would never occur to the Democrats. Republicans don’t make that mistake; they are relentlessly on message: it is never the “estate tax,” it is the “death tax.”

On this point, I could not agree more. I do not understand why Democrats can’t master simple messaging. It always has to be nuanced, complicated, and wonky. Things I might understand but would have to boil down into far simpler terms for the average voter. It boggles my mind that Democrats (and this includes the President) cannot get a simple, easy message out there and hammer it home. Republicans seem to have mastered that.

And then there is this amazing excerpt describing the far reichwing of the GOP taken from a letter President Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote to his brother Edgar in 1954. How times have changed.

“Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

Their numbers are no longer negligible, but they’re certainly still stupid… At least one of their ranks wised up.

Read more:
Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult (TruthOut)
 

 

 
Does the name Matthew Vadum ring a bell? If it doesn’t, then consider yourself, uh, lucky, but unfortunately, dear reader, your luck has just run out…

Vadum is the portly, Truman Capote-esque conservative blogger you see/hear from time to time spinning over-wrought conspiracy theories about the former community organizer ACORN on cable news programs and talk radio. The Exiled calls Vadum “a fat little waffentwerp,” a “national laughingstock” and “the male equivalent of the squatty little nerdette who carved a “B” in her face and blamed it on evil Negroes.”

In 2008, Vadum infamously told The Daily Show that community organizers barter votes for Democrats in poor neighborhoods with crack. He’s written a book about ACORN called Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers that’s been published by the brain(dead) trust at World Net Daily (who else would touch it?). Endorsed by the likes of David Horowitz, Rep. Michele Bachmann and G. Gordon Liddy, Subversion, Inc. is paired on Amazon with Jerome Corsi’s Where’s The Birth Certificate?, also published by World Net Daily. Vadum is a columnist at Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government blog and a Senior Editor at the Capital Research Center in Washington, DC.

Recently Vadum published a controversial essay titled “Registering the Poor to Vote is Un-American” at a curiously named blog called American Thinker (curious because of the notable lack of critical thinking going on there and quotation marks around “Thinker”). If you read his essay cold, you could be forgiven for thinking that this was an Onion writer attempting a bit of Swiftian satire at the expensive of far-right autocrats. Nope, this dickhead actually means it!

Why are left-wing activist groups so keen on registering the poor to vote?

Because they know the poor can be counted on to vote themselves more benefits by electing redistributionist politicians.  Welfare recipients are particularly open to demagoguery and bribery.

Registering them to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals.  It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country — which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote.

So according to this repulsive hobbit, poor people voting in their own self-interest is somehow wrong? Democracy itself is somehow “un-American”?

If you even think something like this, well, that’s very unfortunate for you, but to say it out loud and in public, you are, in effect, asking for people to agree with you (or at least open the Overton Window a little more). No surprise then to see all the ridicule and abuse hurled at Vadum—who calls himself a “Libertarian Conservative,” btw—in the blogsphere.

No surprise either, that he’s rather thin-skinned. Here’s his Twitter feed in case you feel like sending him some fan mail.

May I suggest the Twitter hashtag #MatthewVadumFuckFace?

Below, a photo-montage video of this ludicrous berk.
 

 
Let’s Make Matthew Vadum Bad-Famous (Videogum)
 
Registering the Wealthy to Vote is Un-American (Technorati)

 
Some end of the world tips from a man who claims that God saved him from a car wreck and back pain, personally,  in 1990 and now he wants to share his bounty with all of us. Because the end is nigh.
 

 
Via Christian Nightmares

 
Pima County, AZ Republican Chairman Pro Tem,  Mike Shaw, is the asshole who made the tacky decision to raffle off a Glock handgun for a local GOP fundraiser. Of course, Jared Loughner used a Glock during the tragic shooting spree there in January that killed six people and injured 13 others, including Democratic Representative Gabrielle Giffords. Was there NOTHING ELSE they could have raffled off in Gifford’s own district? A TV? A microwave oven? A box set of Newt and Callista Gingrich DVDs? NOTHING???

Even with this unusually harsh level of invective for television(!), Olbermann’s pretty much right on the money, here. I especially like the part about how the morally repugnant Pima County GOP should secede from the rest of us. They really should! Via Raw Story:

Shaw had defended the raffle Thursday by insisting Jared Loughner was responsible for shooting Giffords and killing six others, not the Glock.

“I could tell Mr. Shaw and the Pima County Republicans that they have ceased to be humans, that the rest of us think it would be a really good idea if they seceded from the country,” Olbermann explained.

Instead, he read a comment from James Kelley.

“It doesn’t mean the Republican party doesn’t have an incredible record of supporting the Second Amendment, but at this point it’s ill-advised and I won’t stand with them on this,” Kelley told the Arizona Daily Star Thursday.

“Mr. Kelley, critical of this crass, heartless, neanderthal gesture from the Pima County Republican Party is the Arizona Legislative District 29 Republican chairman,” Olbermann explained. “Bravo to him and not to this human-shaped pile of feces, Mike Shaw, and his Pima County Republican Party.”

If you want a gander at Shaw trying to defend himself on CNN, click over to Raw Story for the video. What a fucking idiot.
 

 
Friar Michael Rodriguez of El Paso’s San Juan Bautista Catholic Church is at it again with his anti-gay stuff, this time in the form of an offensive and condescending full page advertisement in the El Paso Times, the city’s largest newspaper. In the ad, the far-right priest calls gays “immoral,”“putrid,” and “depraved.”

From The Advocate:

The paid advertisement in the El Paso Times, titled “True Pastoral Care for Homosexuals,” is from Friar Michael Rodriguez of El Paso’s San Juan Bautista Catholic Church. The virulently antigay and antichoice Rodriguez first writes about showing compassion for gay people before explaining how gays are destructive sinners.

“Engaging in depraved and unnatural sexual acts will lead directly to the ruin of both the homosexual’s body and soul,” Rodriguez writes. “Our very anatomy cries out against the lie that homosexual acts are ‘ok.’”

Rodriguez closes his screed by saying we live in a “godless society” that condones homosexuality.

“Reflect, first there are (a) individuals committing mortal sins of a homosexual nature; next, evil extends its tentacles to (b) society as a whole accepting homosexual and homosexual activity as ‘normal”; and finally, iniquity’s victory is all but sealed when (c) laws are enacted which impose the putrid homosexual ideology on everyone, while those who, rightfully resist it, are ridiculed, attacked, and persecuted,” Rodriguez writes.

The ad claims that the statements don’t reflect the views of the El Paso Times, a newspaper that reaches more than 108,000 people daily. A phone message was left with the newspaper regarding the publication’s advertising policies, but as of late Monday the call was not returned.

Joe.My.God happened to find Friar Michael Rodriguez’s contact information if you want to give him a piece of your mind…
 

 

 
In a Q and A in the Washington Post’s “On Faith” column, famed evolutionary biologist and outspoken smart person, Dr. Richard Dawkins ridiculed Texas governor and GOP theocrat Richard Perry in a manner both highbrow and low-ball simultaneously. I found it most satisfying:

There is nothing unusual about Governor Rick Perry. Uneducated fools can be found in every country and every period of history, and they are not unknown in high office. What is unusual about today’s Republican party (I disavow the ridiculous ‘GOP’ nickname, because the party of Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt has lately forfeited all claim to be considered ‘grand’) is this: In any other party and in any other country, an individual may occasionally rise to the top in spite of being an uneducated ignoramus. In today’s Republican Party ‘in spite of’ is not the phrase we need. Ignorance and lack of education are positive qualifications, bordering on obligatory. Intellect, knowledge and linguistic mastery are mistrusted by Republican voters, who, when choosing a president, would apparently prefer someone like themselves over someone actually qualified for the job.

***

A politician’s attitude to evolution is perhaps not directly important in itself. It can have unfortunate consequences on education and science policy but, compared to Perry’s and the Tea Party’s pronouncements on other topics such as economics, taxation, history and sexual politics, their ignorance of evolutionary science might be overlooked. Except that a politician’s attitude to evolution, however peripheral it might seem, is a surprisingly apposite litmus test of more general inadequacy. This is because unlike, say, string theory where scientific opinion is genuinely divided, there is about the fact of evolution no doubt at all. Evolution is a fact, as securely established as any in science, and he who denies it betrays woeful ignorance and lack of education, which likely extends to other fields as well. Evolution is not some recondite backwater of science, ignorance of which would be pardonable. It is the stunningly simple but elegant explanation of our very existence and the existence of every living creature on the planet. Thanks to Darwin, we now understand why we are here and why we are the way we are. You cannot be ignorant of evolution and be a cultivated and adequate citizen of today.

Nope, but you might become the Republican nominee for President of the United States. Funny how it works that way…

 
Or does she? Some folks on the Internet have said that she is actually asking “Who likes wet people?” but “Who likes white people?” seems more in character for Crazy Eyes, doesn’t it?

At least, I hope it’s true!
 

 
I don’t always agree with Noam Chomsky. I think he’s too reflexively anti-American (to the detriment to his works being more widely read), that he’s been getting a lil’ cranky as he gets older (as we all do) and sometimes he veers a little too far into conspiracy theory territory for my tastes. Still, when he’s on it, Chomsky can zero in on a complex confluence of events and trends and elucidate them like few other observers of national and world politics can. He recently took on the topic of American decline on the pages of al-Akhbar:

The post-Golden Age economy is enacting a nightmare envisaged by the classical economists, Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Both recognized that if British merchants and manufacturers invested abroad and relied on imports, they would profit, but England would suffer. Both hoped that these consequences would be averted by home bias, a preference to do business in the home country and see it grow and develop. Ricardo hoped that thanks to home bias, most men of property would “be satisfied with the low rate of profits in their own country, rather than seek a more advantageous employment for their wealth in foreign nations.

In the past 30 years, the “masters of mankind,” as Smith called them, have abandoned any sentimental concern for the welfare of their own society, concentrating instead on short-term gain and huge bonuses, the country be damned—as long as the powerful nanny state remains intact to serve their interests.

A graphic illustration appeared on the front page of the New York Times on August 4. Two major stories appear side by side. One discusses how Republicans fervently oppose any deal “that involves increased revenues”—a euphemism for taxes on the rich. The other is headlined “Even Marked Up, Luxury Goods Fly Off Shelves.” The pretext for cutting taxes on the rich and corporations to ridiculous lows is that they will invest in creating jobs—which they cannot do now as their pockets are bulging with record profits.

The developing picture is aptly described in a brochure for investors produced by banking giant Citigroup. The bank’s analysts describe a global society that is dividing into two blocs: the plutonomy and the rest. In such a world, growth is powered by the wealthy few, and largely consumed by them. Then there are the ‘non-rich,’ the vast majority, now sometimes called the global precariat, the workforce living a precarious existence. In the US, they are subject to “growing worker insecurity,” the basis for a healthy economy, as Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan explained to Congress while lauding his performance in economic management. This is the real shift of power in global society.

The Citigroup analysts advise investors to focus on the very rich, where the action is. Their “Plutonomy Stock Basket,” as they call it, far outperformed the world index of developed markets since 1985, when the Reagan-Thatcher economic programs of enriching the very wealthy were really taking off.

Before the 2007 crash for which the new post-Golden Age financial institutions were largely responsible, these institutions had gained startling economic power, more than tripling their share of corporate profits. After the crash, a number of economists began to inquire into their function in purely economic terms. Nobel laureate in economics Robert Solow concludes that their general impact is probably negative: “the successes probably add little or nothing to the efficiency of the real economy, while the disasters transfer wealth from taxpayers to financiers.”

By shredding the remnants of political democracy, they lay the basis for carrying the lethal process forward—as long as their victims are willing to suffer in silence.

Read more of American Decline: Causes and Consequences by Noam Chomsky

Below, Ali G interviews Professor Chomsky in 2006: