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Republicans’ ‘Path to Prosperity’ plan: Whose prosperity are we talking about???

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In pages of The New York Times, David Brooks actually called the Ryan plan “courageous”! “Courageous”???  You’d have to be a Republican to believe that!

More like an all-out declaration of explicit class war.

How else to interpret the Ryan proposal? I’m all ears.

The public—you know, the people who actually live here in the richest country in the world and who will die here… in abject poverty if something like this gets passed—once they truly understand (even people who nominally consider themselves conservatives) what is being discussed—and what it means for THEIR OWN OLD AGE—are going to bail on the GOP in droves. Even Fox News-watching senior citizens will should be able to see through this. The GOP are really baring their fangs again. CSPAN is getting more and more like Planet of the Apes every single day.

Via Ezra Klein

Posted by Richard Metzger
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04.06.2011
03:30 pm
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Cheeto Jesus or Cheesus, if you will

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I’d be hard pressed to arrive at a more apt or truly American form for the good lord to take.
 

 
Thanks Jimi Hey !

Posted by Brad Laner
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04.05.2011
09:54 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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Oddly sinister promo for the 2011 National Day of Prayer

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Completely over the top, utterly ridiculous video for the 2011 National Day of Prayer. Like what is the message here supposed to be? That Christians can somehow stave off the Apocalypse and natural disasters by praying? I thought the end of the world and Jesus coming back were the whole point? Now I’m confused.

And what’s with the shitty bombastic music? Was “Carmina Burana” too expensive to license so they went for a cheapo knock-off instead? Note that the White House (where “that Obama” lives) and San Francisco (an American stand-in for Sodom and Gomorrah perhaps) have the ominous lightning flashes but the little church (which I presume resides somewhere in Sarah Palin’s “real America”) is bathed in a cone of holy light… Lame, but these things always are… Can’t these fucking assholes hurry up and be raptured already?

The funny part (if there is one) about all of the Christian apocalyptic madness of the current age is to consider how silly and dated this sort of superstitious insanity is going to look 100 years from now. Mark my words, after all of us are dead, there will be an ironic cult for Kirk Cameron movies and the Left Behind books. They’ll be collectibles from a less enlightened time for hipsters in the 22nd century.
 

 
Via Christian Nightmares

Posted by Richard Metzger
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04.04.2011
07:03 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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Pastor Sheryl Brady, Caucasian grandmother of Soul
03.29.2011
12:43 pm
Topics:
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Pastor Sheryl muthafuckin’ Brady lays it down in her peculiar gravel-voiced white-lady-meets-James Brown-style at ManPower 2010. Scroll in to about 1:20 for her entrance. When the music starts she really goes for it. Quite an act she’s got there, that Pastor Brady…
 

 
Via Christian Nightmares

Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.29.2011
12:43 pm
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Hopeless Republicans: Ten Commandments judge to enter race?

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The GOP presidential primary just gets better and better all the time! Michele Bachmann? Newt? Haley Barbour? Rick “frothy mixture” Santorum? If this primary season wasn’t already shaping up to be an embarrassment of comedic riches, look at the latest kook to throw his tin-foil hat in the Republican ring. From the Wall Street Journal:

Remember Judge Roy Moore? He was the Alabama Supreme Court chief justice removed from office over the Ten Commandments monument he erected outside the state courthouse. Now, he’s about to jump into the presidential election in Iowa, GOP officials say.

Eight years after a state panel removed him from the bench over the commandments spat, and five years after he lost in the Republican primary in the Alabama governor’s race, the 64-year-old judge is preparing to launch a presidential exploratory committee and enter the Iowa fray, according to multiple Iowa GOP officials.

Below, Moore speaking at an anti-gay rally in Iowa. These guys are the best. Another Republican culture warrior no-hoper who’ll siphon off some bucks from the most reactionary radical right-types. Go get ‘em. tiger.
 

 
Via Joe.My.God

Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.28.2011
06:28 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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Christian Nightmares speaks!
03.14.2011
03:11 pm
Topics:
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The man of mystery behind Christian Nightmares gives an interesting interview over email to Matthew Paul Turner of Jesus Needs New PR blog

For those of us who had to undergo a fundie detox at some point or another in our lives, the following should ring quite true:

MPT: Can you tell me a little about your childhood as it relates to faith?

CN: Hmm… as it relates to faith… I don’t know if I ever was a true believer, I was just too afraid not to believe. I was completely controlled by fear. So many of the sermons in church ended with, “If you were to walk out of here today and get hit by a car, do you know where you’d spend eternity?” I didn’t know, and it was petrifying! If they were right about this place called Hell—a place of complete and utter darkness, a never-ending lake of fire where lost souls are tortured for all eternity—then I was screwed if I was wrong. I didn’t have the guts to let my chips ride on that one, especially at such a young age. I think I tried to talk myself into believing, and I recited the Sinner’s Prayer, just to be on the safe side. But because in my gut I didn’t really believe, I was constantly doubting myself, and incredibly insecure and anxious. And then the pastor would regularly preach things like, “You say that you’re saved, but are you really saved? Did you really mean it when you asked the Lord into your heart? Are you really living for him?” It totally messed with my head. I’d think to myself, Well, I said the prayer . . . I thought that was all I had to do! I’m pretty sure I believed it in that moment . . . But what if I didn’t? I became really paranoid and terrified of death. And I must have asked Jesus into my heart thousands of times: Before I’d get into a car or on a plane (just in case we got into an accident), and every night before I’d go to bed (just in case, for some reason, I died in my sleep), to name just a few scenarios. It was crazy! But it was very real to me at the time. Needless to say, it didn’t do much to build up my confidence and self-esteem, and it shaped my personality and worldview in some pretty negative ways. It’s taken me years to reverse this, and I’m still not all the way there yet.

MPT: Did your church experiences involve any true-to-life “Christian nightmares”? Care to share a couple?

CN: There was one Good Friday, when I was about 10 or 11-years-old, where I was forced to eat a heaping tablespoon of horseradish to get a better sense of “how much Christ suffered for you on that cross!” It was presented as “the least you can do considering all Jesus did for us!” That was pretty nightmarish, and ended with me hugging a toilet bowl.

I was also petrified of The Rapture, this idea that, at any moment, the Trumpet of the Lord could sound and all of the believers would get wisped up into Heaven, but that I might get Left Behind. Not only was I really scared and depressed by the idea that most of the people I knew might suddenly vanish and I’d be left to fend for myself, but I also thought that if that happened, then I would know that it was all true after all, and that my only chance of joining my friends and family up in Heaven would be to reject the Mark of the Beast, and then probably be beheaded (we’ve all seen those movies in church, right?). I became obsessed with The Rapture, really paranoid about it. There were many times when I thought that it had happened. I’d be talking with my mom in the kitchen or something, then turn around and she’d be gone, and I’d think to my self, Oh my God, this is it—it’s happened! And I’d yell out, “Mom? MOM?!!!” Of course, she’d just gone downstairs to fold laundry or something . . . I can laugh about it now, but I didn’t then.

Read the entire interview at Jesus Needs New PR.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.14.2011
03:11 pm
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‘Left Behind’ author sees Bible all over disaster

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Some people see vast devastation and the human toll, others, like Christian author Tim LaHaye see an opportunity for self-promotion!

Tim LaHaye, the best-selling author of the “Left Behind” series of Bible prophecy novels, was one of many visiting the island of Maui who had to be evacuated to upper floors of the Marriott Hotel today.

He said being caught in the crossfire of the fourth largest earthquake in modern history helped prepare him for two prophecy conferences he was scheduled to address in Hawaii.

“The Bible tells us in Matthew 24 that one of the signs of the last days – one of the birth pangs to occur – is an increase in earthquake activity and intensity,” LaHaye told WND. “We’re seeing that happen here. It’s not just earthquakes, but hurricanes and all kinds of natural disasters.”

Give it a fucking break, asshole! At least for a day or two, huh?

Via (where else?) World Net Daily

Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.11.2011
02:53 pm
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