Want to like Mitt Romney even less than you already do? Read on:

Well, it looks like the rich white guy who strapped a shit-scared dog onto the roof of his car and who brags about how he likes to “fire people” has always been that way.

This may have happened when future ruler of men Mitt Romney was just a kid, true, but it’s still really fucking disturbing. If the child is the father to the man, after you read this, ask yourself how many degrees away from being a “Dexter” this Mormon Little Lord Fauntleroy was!

And if you think that’s taking it too far, at the very least, Mitt Romney is a grown-up version of the nastiest, most obnoxious snobby rich kid characters that James Spader played in the 1980s (The millionaire Republican governor’s son who bullies Duckie. Tell me that young Mittens is not straight out of a John Hughes film).

Now he wants to be the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth!

Five eye witnesses, four of them on record here. This isn’t a hit job, it’s Mitt Romney’s actual biography. Looking at how Romney’s predatory Bain Capital made its money by sucking prosperous businesses dry, firing workers and selling off the assets, I don’ think this over-privileged fuck has changed all that much.

Be prepared to fucking barf.

Via The Washington Post:

Mitt Romney returned from a three-week spring break in 1965 to resume his studies as a high school senior at the prestigious Cranbrook School. Back on the handsome campus, studded with Tudor brick buildings and manicured fields, he spotted something he thought did not belong at a school where the boys wore ties and carried briefcases. John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t having it.

“He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann’s recollection. Mitt, the teenaged son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber’s look, Friedemann recalled.

A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.

The incident was recalled similarly by five students, who gave their accounts independently of one another. Four of them — Friedemann, now a dentist; Phillip Maxwell, a lawyer; Thomas Buford, a retired prosecutor; and David Seed, a retired principal — spoke on the record. Another former student who witnessed the incident asked not to be named. The men have differing political affiliations, although they mostly lean Democratic. Buford volunteered for Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008. Seed, a registered independent, has served as a Republican county chairman in Michigan. All of them said that politics in no way colored their recollections.

“It happened very quickly, and to this day it troubles me,” said Buford, the school’s wrestling champion, who said he joined Romney in restraining Lauber. Buford subsequently apologized to Lauber, who was “terrified,” he said. “What a senseless, stupid, idiotic thing to do.”

“It was a hack job,” recalled Maxwell, a childhood friend of Romney who was in the dorm room when the incident occurred. “It was vicious.”

“He was just easy pickins,” said Friedemann, then the student prefect, or student authority leader of Stevens Hall, expressing remorse about his failure to stop it.

The incident transpired in a flash, and Friedemann said Romney then led his cheering schoolmates back to his bay-windowed room in Stevens Hall.

Friedemann, guilt ridden, made a point of not talking about it with his friend and waited to see what form of discipline would befall Romney at the famously strict institution. Nothing happened.

Romney is now the presumed Republican presidential nominee. His campaign spokeswoman said the former Massachusetts governor has no recollection of the incident.

I guess he’s got an Etch-A-Sketch memory, too!

Who the fuck forgets an incident like this?

Of course there’s also the matter of how the biggest homophobes often turn out to be repressed closet-cases themselves… Just sayin’.

Jon Stewart, Rachel Maddow, and Stephen Colbert are going to have a field day with this, to say nothing of Bill Maher. Cue the vicious SNL skits and Funny or Die videos about THIS INCIDENT and, I hope, one of those great Taiwanese computer animations, too.

This is just the first page of four. Read the rest at The Washington Post, if you can stomach more.
 

 

 
If you saw the video that made the rounds recently of the homophobic buffoon yelling stupid shit at Rosie O’Donnell as she left the Super Bowl, “James the Preacher,” as that fuckhead refers to himself, is back and trying to hitch his bigoted wagon to O’Donnell’s celebrity. Again. How desperate for attention can you get? Yelling abuse at someone on the street, videotaping it, posting it on YouTune and THEN a month later going back in for a second attempt at 15 milliseconds of “fame?? That is just fucking pathetic.

During the original encounter, O’Donnell naturally got the better of this witless goon, but now “James the Preacher” is doubling down on the dumb and has posted a YouTube video “apologizing” for not rebuking O’Donnell using “more aggressive words.”

I invite you to point and laugh at an idiot. Ladies and gentlemen, “James the Preacher,” a sad little loser who is a representative of a God who “doesn’t love everybody” and who (repeatedly) refers to his critics as “effeminate” as he spits all over his computer screen. Glory be to the Highest!:
 

 
Via Daily Kos

 
Here’s a transcript of the idiotic robocall that the Santorum campaign tried to ding Mitt Romney with in Ohio prior to Super Tuesday:

“Hi, my name is Brian Camenker; I’m a Jew from Massachusetts. And this is Darcy Brandon; I’m a Christian from California. If you believe as we do that marriage and sexuality should only be between a man and a woman, please help us stop Mitt Romney. As Governor, Romney signed “Gay Youth Pride Day” declarations, promoted homosexuality in our elementary schools, and unconstitutionally ordered state officals to make Massachusetts America’s first same-sex marriage state. Romney supports open homosexuality in the military, the appointment of homosexual judges, and the ENDA law, making it illegal to fire a man who wears a dress and high heels to work, even if he’s your kid’s teacher. When you vote tomorrow, please vote for social sanity and Rick Santorum, not for homosexuality and Mitt Romney. Rick Santorum is the only candidate who can be trusted to uphold traditional marriage, a straight military, and the rights of American children to have both a mother and a father. This message paid for by JewsandChristiansTogether.org and not authorized by any candidate. To get the facts before you vote, visit Jews and Christians Together.org.” (You can listen to it at Gawker)

If I got a robo-call like that, I’d be fucking furious—I never will, I live in Los Angeles—but it almost becomes amusing when you look into the background of Brian Camenker, a longtime anti-gay activist in Massachusetts, as Sarah Posner did on Religious Dispatches.

Here’s how the “Jews and Christians Together” press release described Camenker’s views on Mitt Romney:

Brian Camenker, president of Mass Resistance and compiler of much of that Romney research and one of the robo-call voices said, “Mitt Romney would be the most liberal Republican ever nominated for the Presidency. Romney is so far left, he spoke against the right of the Boy Scouts to screen-out homosexuals. Mitt Romney proved during the January 8 Meet the Press debate that he’s still as far left on the gay agenda as always. He proudly announced, ‘a member of my cabinet was gay. I appointed people to the bench regardless of their sexual orientation.’ Asked when he last stood up and spoke out for increasing gay rights, Romney said ‘Right now.’”

 

Shopped?

Here’s another tidbit about Fox News guest Camenker in 2007, via Know Thy Neighbor:

At yesterday’s hearing of Joint Committee on Education, Brian Camenker of MassResistance in support of Bill S321—Parental Notification—spent his three minutes of allotted time to speak in support of this bill by claiming that homosexuals were not among the 6 million Jews, gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses and social outcasts killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust. Camenker went as far as to say that the whole “pink triangle” was made up in order to arrest Catholic priests.

And it gets worse, one of Camenker’s minions who testified twice agreed with Brian. In her testimony before the Joint Committee on Education, she said that it was the Nazis themselves who were the homosexuals and they gave pink triangles to and arrested only the “most flamboyant of their own people.”

Look, I think Mitt Romney absolutely sucks, but the idea that these appalling weirdos (and Rick Santorum) think they can get any traction with this kind of stuff is bloody preposterous, like Mr. Camenker himself, as seen in this hilarious Daily Show piece from 2008:
 

 
Hilarious article in The Brooklyn Paper about a new chocolaty cocktail named in honor of Republican knobhead Rick Santorum:

“People really like it even though it’s named after something gross — both the person and the Dan Savage meaning,” said John Rauschenberg, co-owner of Pacific Standard. “It’ll be an election fixture at least until primary season is over.”

The duo behind the beer hole near St. Mark’s Place often put out cocktails with suggestive names, such as the Corn Holed Fashioned or Mike Gallego’s Cup.

But the Santorum, a milky mixture of Baileys, orange vodka, bitters and chocolate flakes, seems to be sticking.

We won’t explain how the drink matches up with an alternate definition of the word “Santorum,” as The Brooklyn Paper is a family publication — but the bar’s liberal proprietors are certain it’ll satisfy any boozy desires.

The owners of the 4th Avenue bar expect that word of their “social lubricant” will reach the sweater-vest wearing Republican candidate. “I hope this drink makes Santorum want to throw up,” Rauschenberg told The Brookyn Paper’s Kate Briqelet.

Nicely, nicely!

Via Joe.My.God

 
The old adage, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire” comes to mind when pondering a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences which found that the rich and privileged are more prone to behave unethically—-to lie, cheat and even take candy from a child—and to be more selfish drivers than those who are less well off.

In one aspect of the multifaceted study, 129 undergraduates, both wealthy and poorer students, were given a jar of individually wrapped candy. They were told that the candy was meant for some children, but that they could help themselves if they wanted any. The more well-off undergraduates felt freer to take more candy than lower income participants, the study found. From ABC News:

Scientists at the University of California at Berkeley analyzed a person’s rank in society (measured by wealth, occupational prestige and education) and found that those who were richer were more likely to cheat, lie and break the law than those who were poorer.

“We found that it is much more prevalent for people in the higher ranks of society to see greed and self-interest … as good pursuits,” said Paul Piff, lead author of the study and a doctoral candidate at Berkeley. “This resonates with a lot of current events these days.”

In the first of two studies, researchers found that those who drove more expensive cars (an admittedly questionable indicator of economic worth) were more likely to cut off other cars and pedestrians at a busy San Francisco four-way intersection than those who drove older, less-expensive vehicles.
In other experiments,  wealthier study participants were more likely to admit they would behave unethically in a variety of situations and lie during negotiations. In another, researchers found wealthier people were more likely to cheat in an online game to win a $50 prize.

Greed is a “robust” determinant of unethical behavior, according to the study.

“This has some pretty clear implications,” said Piff. “Inequality is very much on Americans’ minds, and the potential effects of severe inequality on individual levels of behavior are major.”

Large sums of money may give people greater feelings of entitlement, causing those people to be the most averse to wealth distribution, Piff continued.  Poorer people may be less likely to cheat, because they are more dependent on their community at large, he said. In other words, they don’t want to rock the boat.

Interesting.  A right-winger would throw it back at you that poorer neighborhoods are where the majority of crimes are committed, but police are seldom brought in on matters of white collar crimes, are they? Stats compiling the actual damages of both types of crimes would be telling, but it seems clear enough already that the oligarchy in America would have a more out-sized influence than the car thief, pick-pocket or even a small army of welfare cheats.  Compare even a murderer to Bernie Maddof and that much still seems obvious.

“People in power who are more inclined to behave unethically in the service of gains and self-interest can have great effects on society as a whole,” said Piff.

And it’s difficult to say whether richer people get to the top because of their unethical behavior or whether wealth causes people to become this way. “It seems like a vicious cycle,” he said.

Spoken like a scientist. Here’s the take-away:

Piff said he hoped to further his research by figuring out ways to curb these patterns of behavior among wealthier individuals.

Oh shit! He said “it.”  The thing that you never, ever hear discussed, because it’s forbidden to question the motives and behaviors of the “job creators” in American society. The cat is out of the bag. We’ve got a diagnosis. Now what?

Personally, I can’t WAIT until this one bubbles up as a topic for Fox News talkers to become irate about. This could get really good (and funny) if this study and Paul Piff’s lightly blunt comments get some traction in the news cycle.  I’d love to know what Eric Bolling would make of this study, wouldn’t you? (Not because I can about what he thinks, just for the yucks).

“What it comes down to, really, is that money creates more of a self-focus, which may account for larger feelings of entitlement,” said Piff.  “We hope to further study how we can curb these patterns and how that will affect our social environment.”

 
Bob Larson, world-renowned “exorcist” and Christian radio/TV host (and flaming asshole), began his career in the 1960s denouncing demonic rock music and “leftists.” He later incorporated “Dungeons & Dragons” and demonic possession into his “act.”

Now Bob Larson is offering an online “demon test” for the low, low price of just $9.95. He’s even trademarked the name “Demon Test®”!

From his website (which I refuse to link to):

Taking the Demon Test® may be the most important spiritual decision you make. This Test is the result of more than 30 years of research and thousands of hours in personal ministry with troubled souls. Through this vast experience we have been able to design this test so that we may quickly determine an individual’s spiritual condition.

If you are concerned about your test score, we highly recommend that you schedule personal one-on-one time with Bob Larson. You may choose a one-hour Encounter Session or a full or half-day Intensive Session. These sessions are held during Bob’s on-the-road seminars (please click here to review Bob’s current schedule) or at our Center for Spiritual Freedom in Phoenix Arizona.

In one hour you can begin living the life you’ve always wanted. Let Bob Larson, the man who has dealt with more demons than anyone on the planet, show you how to overcome every obstacle of every day. Stop the cycles of failure, poverty and sickness. Break family curses at the ROOT! Discover why you are the way you are and immediately change destructive habits. If you have demons, you’ll be delivered. If you have issues, they’ll be uncovered. If you have infirmities, the healing will begin. No pastor, priest, or counselor has dwelt with more spiritually bound people sad seen them set free. This isn’t counseling. This isn’t therapy. This is intervention to get answers NOW! Your lifetime of suffering can end. Your torment can stop. The job you need, the relationships you desire will be within your reach. The choice is simple—stay stuck or move on to spiritual fulfillment and success in every area of life. Get free, stay free, and live free!

The first step on your journey to a new life begins with the Demon Test®. To contact us, please call 303-980-1511 or click here to send an email indicating your interest in a personal Session with Bob.

That was his idea to post his own phone number on the Internet, not mine. Christ can I imagine some fun things to prank call Bob Larson with. It used to happen all the time on his radio show. He’s practically inviting it here (If anyone does “engage him” like that, post it on YouTube and be sure to let us know).

In the clip below from the Showtime series La La Land, dodgy TV psychic “Shirley Ghostman” (played by Marc Wootton, who I rate a godlike comedic genius) visits Bob Larson at his home in Glendale, California. This clip is bust-a-gut funny until you realize that this guy makes well over a million dollars a year from gullible people with mental issues.
 

 
Via Joe.My.God/Turtle Box Bulletin

 
Hero of anti-immigrant, racist Republicans everywhere, AZ Sheriff Joe Arpaio was charged by the Justice Department with a rather long and utterly appalling list of civil rights violations.

Arpaio’s comically egotistical thirst for self-promotion (he briefly starred in a reality TV series) and flagrant disregard for civil rights have been well-known for a long time—it’s why the likes of Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain and Rick Perry all wanted to fellate this crotchety old bastard for his endorsement—but now the media notoriety he’s sought after might prove to be Arpaio’s undoing. Associated Press writes:

The civil rights report said Latinos are four to nine times more likely to be stopped in traffic stops in Maricopa County than non-Latinos and that the agency’s immigration policies treat Latinos as if they are all in the country illegally. Deputies on the immigrant-smuggling squad stop and arrest Latino drivers without good cause, the investigation found.

A review done as part of the investigation found that 20 percent of traffic reports handled by Arpaio’s immigrant-smuggling squad from March 2006 to March 2009 were stops - almost all involving Latino drivers - that were done without reasonable suspicion. The squad’s stops rarely led to smuggling arrests.

Deputies are encouraged to make high-volume traffic stops in targeted locations. There were Latinos who were in the U.S. legally who were arrested or detained without cause during the sweeps, according to the report.

During the sweeps, deputies flood an area of a city - in some cases, heavily Latino areas - over several days to seek out traffic violators and arrest other offenders. Illegal immigrants accounted for 57 percent of the 1,500 people arrested in the 20 sweeps conducted by his office since January 2008, according to figures provided by Arpaio’s office.

Police supervisors, including at least one smuggling-squad supervisor, often used county accounts to send emails that demeaned Latinos to fellow sheriff’s managers, deputies and volunteers in the sheriff’s posse. One such email had a photo of a mock driver’s license for a fictional state called “Mexifornia.”

The report said that the sheriff’s office launched an immigration operation two weeks after the sheriff received a letter in August 2009 letter about a person’s dismay over employees of a McDonald’s in the Phoenix suburb of Sun City who didn’t speak English. The tip laid out no criminal allegations. The sheriff wrote back to thank the writer “for the info,” said he would look into it and forwarded it to a top aide with a note of “for our operation.”
 
Federal investigators focused heavily on the language barriers in Arpaio’s jails. Latino inmates with limited English skills were punished for failing to understand commands in English by being put in solitary confinement for up to 23 hours a day or keeping prisoners locked down in their jail pods for as long as 72 hours without a trip to the canteen area or making nonlegal phone calls.

The report said some jail officers used racial slurs for Latinos when talking among themselves and speaking to inmates.

Detention officers refused to accept forms requesting basic daily services and reporting mistreatment when the documents were completed in Spanish and pressured Latinos with limited English skills to sign forms that implicate their legal rights without language assistance.

The agency pressures Latinos with limited English skills to sign forms by yelling at them and keeping them in uncomfortably cold cells for long periods of time.

As Miranda Blue, writing on the People for the American Way blog, adds:

These allegations are disturbing enough in themselves. But what’s even more troubling is that the person behind them has been not only held up as a hero by the Right, but has served as an inspiration for immigration legislation around the country. In a report last year, we examined the ways the anti-immigrant Right has worked to dehumanize immigrants in order “to inflame anti-immigrant sentiment and build political opposition to comprehensive immigration reform.” It should come as no surprise that Sheriff Joe is the movement’s figurehead.

Nope, none at all!

At the Justice Department press conference today, Arpaio was accused of violating the Constitution and Federal laws.

Thomas Perez, who heads the Justice Department’s civil rights division said the Arpaio investigation represents the most egregious case of racial profiling in the nation’s history, worse than anything he’s seen himself or reviewed in professional literature. Investigators interviewed more than 400 people, reviewed thousands of pages of documentation and toured Maricopa County jails as part of the probe.
 

 
A grand total of THREE, yes, three assholes stage their own completely witless counter-protest today in lower Manhattan.

“Get a job”?

Seriously? THAT is the best you can do? The very BEST and smartest and most clever thing you can think of? In a SEA of clever, funny signs you come up with lameness and you’re the ones who still have a job???

Apparently so. When you’re an apologist for a failed economic system… yes, THIS is the best you can do.

There are no jobs, lickspittle dummies! That’s one of the reasons these people are keeping you from getting to work today, Republican fools! Occupy everywhere!

UPDATE: Listen to one of these cretins, a fool named Derek Tabacco. UPDATE 2: They’re related!
 

 
Via Adam Gabbatt’s Twitter feed

 
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)

 
The highly controversial new law in Wisconsin gutting collective bargaining rights for state union workers is now in effect and already changes are afoot in the dairy state. Not good ones.

Via Think Progress:

As the Madison Capital Times reports, “Besides losing their right to negotiate over the percentage of their paycheck that will go toward health care and retirement, unions also lost the ability to claim work as a ‘union-only’ job, opening the door for private workers and evidently even inmates to step in and take their place.” Inmates are not paid for their work, but may receive time off of their sentences.

The law went into effect last week, and Racine County is already using inmates to do landscaping, painting, and another basic maintenance around the county that was previously done by county workers. The union had successfully sued to stop the country from using prison labor for these jobs last year, but with [Governor Scott] Walker’s new law, they have no recourse.

The use of free inmate labor to replace public sector workers is truly a disturbing trend. That’s right folks. Forget about the off-shore outsourcing of jobs. Forget about China’s cheap labor. India’s, too. And don’t blame the Mexicans and illegal immigrants for taking your job, either, bub.

Nope. We’ve got a bigger problem now: How are Americans going to compete in the jobs marketplace against slave labor?

Deeply unpopular Gov. Scott Walker promised to create 250,000 new jobs in Wisconsin during his term in office, but he didn’t say these jobs would be created in the county jails!

This is what you get when you vote Republican.