“Let them eat cake”?

“Let ‘em starve to death” would appear to be more the message that Marie Antoinette House Republicans seem intent on conveying. The House GOP leadership, getting behind the so-called “Ryan Budget” cooked up by good Catholic boy and Social Darwinist Rep. Paul Ryan, are calling for deep domestic spending cuts so that they can maintain future Pentagon spending levels without raising taxes. Six different House committees will be clamoring for deep cuts in the fraying social safety net so that the taxpaying citizens of the United States of America can keep Germany safe from the Russians well into the 21st century!

While our own people go without?

And when the Pentagon itself doesn’t even want the money?

What’s wrong with this picture besides everything?

Via Politico:

But what’s more explicit in this round is the real shift of resources from the domestic side of the ledger to military spending. Caught in the middle are not just Obama’s ideas but the working poor and long-term unemployed forced for the first time to rely on programs like food stamps in the current recession.

At one level, the pro-Pentagon, anti-tax stance fits traditional Republican doctrine. And the whole goal is to come up with enough savings to forestall automatic spending cuts that will fall most heavily on the Defense Department in January.

But what’s also driving the latest cuts is a newer narrative, voiced by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), that the social safety net is at risk of becoming a “hammock.” And even as the unemployment rate has begun to fall, conservatives are alarmed that the level of income-related government benefits continues to rise.

Nothing better illustrates this perhaps than the renewed focus on food stamps — now titled SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program). And the estimated $33.2 billion in 10-year savings there could have an immediate impact on the farm bill debate and come November, the 2012 elections.

An average family of four would face an 11 percent cut in monthly benefits after Sept. 1 and, even more important, tighter enforcement of rules would require that households exhaust most of their liquid assets before qualifying for help. This hits hardest among the long-term unemployed, who would be forced off the rolls until they have spent down their savings to less than $2,000 in many cases.

Indeed, food stamp enrollment and costs have exploded since the financial collapse four years ago, making SNAP a target for the right — but also a far bigger political issue in swing states like Florida, Nevada and Ohio.

National enrollment reached 46.4 million people in January 2012, a nearly two-thirds increase from the average monthly participation in fiscal 2008. The annual costs — now running in excess of $80 billion — have more than doubled in the same period. And even the most ardent food stamp proponents will sometimes say SNAP is a program “asked to do too much.”

It’s disturbing to contemplate living in a country that prioritizes guns over butter to the extent that America does, and we do so without ever really even asking ourselves why we do it. With so precious little societal debate allowed on the matter, when someone does try to question the Military Industrial Complex—like Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich—they get marginalized FAST.

As nutty as Ron Paul is (and trust me when I tell you that I think he’s plenty nutty) I don’t think that it was his Libertarian views on taxation or the free market economy—or even the zany racism and conspiracy theories of his newsletters or questionable white nationalist associations or ANY OF THAT—which caused virtually the entire GOP establishment to turn their backs on him (these things were probably all considered pluses!) but the fact that the guy was openly advocating that this country simply minds our own goddamned business. How dare he!

Me, personally, I’d rather have new roads, Medicare for all, free schools, bullet trains, alternative energy resources, repaired levees in New Orleans and Sacramento, an expansion of Section 8 housing, subsidized energy costs, childcare for lower income families and things like that than a new nuclear warhead. I see a need for an American military, sure, but when we find ourselves supporting the perpetual war economy that so obviously causes a detriment and not a benefit for the society that actually funds it, isn’t it time to step back and ask WTF we’re doing!?

But hey, I’m glad the Republicans are pushing this kind of thing so aggressively, because I expect it to go nowhere and it demonstrates—once again, should anyone not have gotten the multiple memos—what their priorities are and why they need to be roundly defeated at the polls this year. Make no mistake, I’m not, nor have I ever been, or ever once considered myself a Democrat. I could not give less of a shit about the Democratic party. Truly I do not care, but these horrible Scrooge-like Republican motherfuckers need to be obliterated in a electoral wipe-out of epic proportions this year.

They keep this shit up and they’re going to get it, so have at it, lads!

Prophetic words: President Dwight D. Eisenhower, one of America’s greatest war heros, gives his outgoing message to the American people warning about the Military Industrial Complex on January 17, 1961:
 

 
I guess when your job is to flap your lips for several hours each day that sometimes you’ve just got to resort to making shit up to fill airtime…

From the reichwing wackjobs at WND:

Limbaugh says he was about a quarter mile away from his home, and while using his iPhone with a voice-transcription feature that turns spoken words into printed text, a mysterious message suddenly showed up.

Limbaugh says the sentence read: “Obama’s minions are taking over and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

The blurb stunned the radio host, as he noted, “I hadn’t said anything like that!”

Unfortunately, he admits he doesn’t have evidence to show anyone.

Shocking, right? No, not the the “mysterious” message part, the conveniently missing evidence part:

“I was so discombobulated by what happened that I didn’t save what showed up on my iPhone,” he said. “I can’t prove this, because I didn’t keep the transcriptions. I deleted them. I don’t even know if I actually deleted them. I just didn’t send them. They are not on the phone. I went and looked.”

Limbaugh is so mystified by the strange event, he went into extreme detail about the specifics during his top-rated national broadcast, acknowledging that he cannot figure out how this could have happened.

Well, now, let’s see here. It seems to me that the simplest explanation for all of this is that ... Rush is just lying!

I can see no reason whatsoever to dig any deeper into this matter.

 
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

NRA poster boy.
 
Appearing at a National Rifle Conference over the weekend, Romney surrogate, gunslinger and Colonel Sanders look-a-like Ted Nugent frothed at the mouth like a rabid dog proclaiming that if Barack Obama is re-elected in November, “I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year.” He also barked that Obama’s head should be chopped off (see video). Isn’t there a law against that?

Hey Ted, you vile piece of dinosaur shit, I hope to fuck that Obama is re-elected and you stay true to your words. I’ll stand in line to piss on your grave.

Update: New York Magazine reports that the Secret Service is aware of Nugent’s remarks and they’ve begun an investigation. 
 

 
Arguing for more fairness in the nation’s tax code, Senate Democrats tried to bring legislation forward that would establish a 30% floor for households earning $1 million a year. Tried and failed. Predictably, the evil GOP strangled this baby in the crib so that their corporate masters won’t have to pay their fair share.

AND AMERICA WINS!

Via The New York Times:

Senate Republicans on Monday blocked a move to open debate on the so-called Buffett Rule, ensuring that a measure pressed for months by President Obama and Senate Democrats to ensure that the superrich pay a tax rate of at least 30 percent will not come to a decisive vote.

But the fierce debate preceding the 51-45 vote — the Democrats were nine votes short of the 60 they needed — set off a week of political wrangling over taxes that both parties insist they are already winning.

Senate Democrats intend to return repeatedly to the legislation, named after the billionaire investor Warren Buffett, who has complained that he pays a lower effective tax rate than his secretary. On Thursday, House Republicans will counter with a proposed tax cut for businesses that they say would spur job creation but would cost the Treasury almost exactly what the Democrats’ tax increase would raise.

Republicans say they like that contrast, and their language ahead of the vote on a motion just to take up the Buffett Rule was harsh and aimed squarely at Mr. Obama, who first proposed a 30-percent tax rate floor for anyone earning at least $1 million a year last September. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican minority leader, went to the Senate floor and all but called Mr. Obama a liar.

“By wasting so much time on this political gimmick that even Democrats admit won’t solve our larger problems, it’s shown the president is more interested in misleading people than he is in leading,” Mr. McConnell said of the Buffett Rule push.

Democrats said they saw that as a sign of weakness. Pointing to a Gallup poll from last week that indicated 60 percent of Americans supported the proposal, including 63 percent of political independents, Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, called the Republican response “proof positive” that “for first time in decades, maybe generations, they’re on the defensive on their signature issue,” taxes.

After he made that comment, a CNN poll was released putting support at 72 percent, including 53 percent of Republicans.

The Democrats have vowed to return to the Buffet Rule again and again. It’s an issue they should use to its full advantage, bludgeoning the Republicans senseless with it, by making it THE topic of the Spring and Summer months and lovingly placing it on their heads like a paper Burger King crown… or around their necks like a noose.

Why show these bastards any mercy when they’ve got their backs to a rather steep political cliff?

Just who does the GOP leadership thinks it’s fooling anymore? (Fox News viewers and Teabaggers aside, of course.) The Great Republican Crack-up of 2012 continues to pick up speed!

Below, Senator Bernie Sanders gives ‘em hell on the Senate floor yesterday:
 

 
The medium is the message in Denver artist Andy Bell’s portrait of George Zimmerman made of 12,000 Skittles.

Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin, a black teenager who was armed with a cell phone, a bottle of tea, and a bag of Skittles.

 
Former Special Counsel to Richard Nixon and the first from his administration to become a Watergate jailbird, influential Christian leader and anti-gay activist Chuck Colson remains hospitalized in critical condition after suffering a brain hemorrhage last week. In Colson’s honor, Joe.My.God. reminds us of the ridiculous Born Again Christian comic based on Colson’s evangelical memoir of the same title.

Quoting from Gamma Cloud:

Published by Spire Christian Comics in 1978, Born Again is the sugar-coated, “feel good” story of Chuck Colson’s suffering and redemption.  It’s a relatively typical tale in some respects, as Colson professes that he was converted to Evangelical Christianity through the help of his friend Thomas Phillips who had himself been “saved” some time earlier.  Phillips provides Colson with a copy of the C.S. Lewis book Mere Christianity and Colson subsequently immerses himself in the text, learning all kinds of Jesusy insight. (Incidentally, despite the fact that he apparently needed “saving,” Colson effectively maintains that he was basically law-abiding – and apparently naïve and blissfully oblivious of the wrongdoing and unethical behavior swirling around him – throughout all of his work with the Nixon administration and CREEP.) While serving time in a Federal prison for convictions related to the Watergate scandal, Colson shares his enlightenment with other inmates and he ultimately decides to start a ministry and devote his life to spreading the word far and wide.

Well…I guess some of that story is true.

The fact of the matter is that Chuck Colson: Born Again is nothing short of a grand and glorious collection of obfuscation and half-truths.  Colson’s yarn portrays the man himself as an pious martyr acting in service of a naively innocent Richard Nixon.  In one of the more laughable parts of the story, it’s inferred that John Ehrlichman learned of the Watergate break-in while watching the evening news.  Indeed, the entire question of wrongdoing and guilt is effectively marginalized through the omnipresent argument that Richard Nixon’s coterie of henchmen acted under the Nietzschean principal that “what is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.”  With respect to this particular version of the Watgergate story, it’s basically unclear as to whether the “love” that spurred Nixon and co. to action was an unfettered and dogmatic love of country or a just good old-fashioned lust for power, influence and control.

As soon as I saw the cover, I recalled leafing through this silliness at my parents’ church in the late 70s. At the time, I was reading Kurt Vonnegut’s then new Jailbird and if you know what that’s about, you’ll laugh at the thought of picking up Chuck Colson: Born Again at the same time.

In 2008, George Bush gave this asshole the Presidential Citizens Medal.
 

 

 
Bigoted, idiotic Florida Republican congressman Allen West is being touted by many of his fellow dipshits, including Sarah Palin and Herman Cain, as their pick for the Republican VP nod, but on Tuesday in Palm City, FL, Rep. West let his inner Senator Joe out, claiming that “he’s heard” up to 80 U.S. House Democrats are “Communist Party” members!

Copping one of Michele Bachmann’s moves? That’s pathetic to begin with! Sadly, West declined to name even one. Who are they? I want to know who they are so I can fucking vote for them!

Crooks and Liars adds:

Someone should ask West to produce the names of the Democrats in the House who are Communists or tell us where he’s “heard” that number—or STFU.

Making unsubstantiated claims about large numbers of Communists in the government used to lead to disgrace. That this wackadoo is considered a possible veep pick tells you everything you need to know about the fetid state of the Republican Party.

Hell, this latest silliness will probably help West who once said that his priority in the House was to make sure that “this liberal, progressive, socialist agenda, this left-wing, vile, vicious, despicable machine that’s out there is soundly brought to its knees.”

It just gets better and better, doesn’t it? These guys are the best!
 

 
In a rambling speech today before a group of onlookers in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum pulled out of the race for President…and the heavens wept.

In his typically brain-addled style, Santorum recalled some of the highlights of his campaign:

Even fun things like the sweater vest—amazing thing, that sweater vest. From then on the sweater vest became the official wardrobe of the Santorum campaign . . . We sourced that sweater vest to a company that was making them here in the United States.”

Expect the sweater vest-wearing, right-wing, religious zealot to re-emerge like the walking dead in 2016.
 

 
A shocking piece of investigative journalism from The Rachel Maddow Show has been percolating up the charts at reddit and elsewhere. Trust me, it’s absolutely worthy of your undivided attention for the next 16 minutes.

Here’s the gist of it: The Michigan constitution deliberately calls for an exceptionally slow process before bills can be signed into law. Of the 566 bills that have been signed into law in the past year—since all three branches of government came under the control of the Republicans—546 of them were passed under “immediate effect,” implying an emergency or timely necessity of some sort.

Chris Savage at Eclectablog explains why this is so disturbing:

“Immediate effect” can only occur if 2/3 of the members of the House vote for it. But Republicans do not HAVE 2/3 of the House. The entire reason that they have been avoiding using roll call votes is because they did not have the votes to make the laws immediate effect. In other words, over 96% of the laws passed by the Republicans since January 2011 have been illegal in their implementation.

Simply stated: Michigan Republicans are putting their radical laws into “immediate effect” in a blatant power grab, even though they don’t have enough votes to do so. Democracy? They don’t need your stinking democracy!

National treasure Rachel Maddow on why you should care:

The 2010 elections ushered in a lot of radicalized Republican legislatures and governors across the country and have done a lot of radical things. Scott Walker is famous for a reason.

But what`s happened in Michigan is the most radical thing Republicans have done anywhere in the country. They have eliminated democracy. They have eliminated voting rights at the local level in their state. They have tried to eliminate Democrats` voting rights in the state legislature.

Whether you`re on the left or you`re on the right or you`re in the center or if you don`t particularly care about politics, if all you care about is that we have a form of government in this country called democracy, we vote. If you care about the idea that we still use voting here, we still use democracy, if you care about the Constitution—frankly, Michigan ought to have a flashing red light siren on it right now.

And indeed since the original Maddow segment aired last week, both the media and the public have taken notice. What was little-known even in the state of Michigan is now becoming a major national story. If the furor grows loud enough, even Fox News will be obliged to tackle it—as opposed to simply ignoring it the way they normally would ignore something like this. But HOW will they report APPROVINGLY on THE SUBVERSION OF DEMOCRACY BY THE REPUBLICANS??? It will be interesting, amusing and probably alarming to hear how the Republican establishment will try to spin this in the coming week.

And what about the Tea party-types who got these “conservatives” into office? How do they feel about their candidates now? Cognitive dissonance R US!

At approx 12 and a half minutes in you get to see these wascally Republican clowns in action. By the end of this piece, my jaw had dropped to the floor. This story is nothing short of mind-blowing.

It occurred to me, though, where were the fucking Democrats when all this happened? Were they sleeping? Not there? I can see this happening a few times, sure, but at what point would you cry foul? After 2 or 3 dozen times? After maybe 300 bills passed by “immediate effect”? How many was too many? That’s a bit ridiculous, too. Michigan needs to toss these GOP brownshirts out pronto, sure, but after that, the state needs to look into getting some new Democrats.

I mean, Christ, this is like sending Hobbits to do battle with Orcs.

Maddow promises a follow-up segment on Monday’s program.