Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

Americans barely caring about Afghanistan is so last month.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

In my day, never was longer.

This blog will pay for itself.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

The words do not have to be perfect.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

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35Comments

  2. 2.

    Surreal American

    Incorrect.

    While the Ronald Reagan of fact and public record may have indeed signed the Simpson-Mazzoli Act, the Ronaldus Magnus of Blessed Memory would never agree to amnesty for illegals. Period.

  3. 3.

    R-Jud

    I deadlifted 242 lbs this morning, beating my previous best by 22 lbs. I would’ve made it 245, but ACORN showed up and ruined everything.

  4. 4.

    JK

    Chris Matthews outdid himself tonight with one of his all-time dumbest openings –

    “Is Obama too intellectual, is he too much of an egghead, is he channeling Adlai Stevenson?”

    Why can’t Matthews ever get laryngitis?

  6. 6.

    Comrade Alan

    It was almost exactly 23 years ago that Ronaldus Magnus signed the Simpson-Mazzoli Act granting amnesty to millions of illegal aliens.

    And a rallying cry for today’s conservatives against a new shamnesty that will grant amnesty to upwards of 50 million illegal reconquistadors.

  7. 7.

    Zifnab

    @R-Jud:

    I deadlifted 242 lbs this morning, beating my previous best by 22 lbs. I would’ve made it 245, but ACORN showed up and ruined everything.

    Send 245 pounds of bagged acorns to John Boehner and let him know you’re not going to let freedom be bagged by anti-Americans.

  9. 9.

    Midnight Marauder

    Surely, this isn’t the same Ronaldus Magnus that vigorously pushed for and signed the UN Convention Against Treaty? He’s against torture AND pro-illegal immigrants?

    /wingnut head explosion

  13. 13.

    New Yorker

    Ronald Reagan is not a real conservative! Primary him! Also, too.

    You know, as much as the Palinites like to worship at the altar of St. Ronaldus, they would have flipped out over some of the things he did:

    He raised taxes in 1986.

    He reached out to Gorbachev towards the end of his term.

    These two things alone would have had him excommunicated as soshulist appeaser in today’s GOP.

  14. 14.

    Violet

    @New Yorker:
    Yep. And by today’s standards, Nixon is a complete commie pinko soshulist.

    The teabaggers just keep coming up with more and more purity tests. Eventually no one will live up to their standard.

  15. 15.

    beltane

    @JK: He compared Obama to Adlai Stevenson during the campaign. Matthews must be on a repeating loop of stupid; next week we’ll hear about his elitist preference for orange juice.

  16. 16.

    Midnight Marauder

    @Rock:

    Where’d you hear that about Reagan?

    And is that question directed at everyone who has posted so far…?

  18. 18.

    Zifnab

    @New Yorker:

    These two things alone would have had him excommunicated as soshulist appeaser in today’s GOP.

    Bullshit. IOKIYAR.
    Rush Limbaugh was singing his praises (and has been ever since). Bill Kristol was composing ballads in his name.

    Kinda like when Bush looked deep into Putin’s eyes and saw the soul of sweet baby Jesus staring back at him, right before he ran up another half trillion dollar deficit and was forced to raise the debt ceiling in the name of fiscal conservatism.

    Give’m a couple more years. By 2012, people will be claiming they really miss GW, back when America was young and pure and we were a shining city on a hill and everything was wonderful.

    No one actually reads history anymore. Not since they cut it out of the school curriculum to make room for mandatory bible study.

  19. 19.

    Randy P

    @R-Jud:

    I recently started bench pressing because of an article posted on the wall of my gym. Then I started reading other articles online about bench pressing.

    I have come to the conclusion that nobody in sports medicine or physical therapy or whatever specialty writes these things knows what the hell they’re talking about. They’re just making it up. Here’s what I’ve learned:

    – Good old bench pressing is a much better way of generating all-round chest and shoulder strength than any of those new-fangled machines.
    – A focus on bench pressing can lead to injuries because it is not exercising all of the shoulder muscles. You should work with dumbbells.
    – It’s even better if you can get your feet off the floor and on the bench.
    – The worst possible thing you could do is get your feet off the floor and on the bench, as that will reduce your stability and lead to injury.
    – For best results, you want your back flat.
    – The problem with bench pressing is that it constrains your back to be artificially flat. You should put one of those foam tubes under your back.

    At my level I guess I don’t have to worry too much about injury. Sounds like most of the issues happen when you’re trying to show off with 200-300 lbs. I was pleasantly surprised to realize that I’m lifting 105 lbs, if the bar is indeed 45 lbs. I thought I was well under 100 lbs and I was telling myself “you have to start somewhere”.

  22. 22.

    Martin

    @New Yorker:

    Nah. The teabaggers (TEA = Taxed Enough Already) flipped out over Obama when Obama *cut taxes*. And this horrific national debt that they say Obama can’t do anything because of? Where were they the last 8 years?

    Nope, they rewrite the rules to match their own narrative.

  23. 23.

    Zifnab

    @Randy P: Go rock climbing. You work all your muscles. You’re always just lifting your body weight, so it scales as you do and – hey – you should be able to lift your own body weight anyway. And I’ve never seen a girl not drool all over a regular rock climber.

  24. 24.

    R-Jud

    @Randy P: The advice out there is totally weird. Bench pressing can be scary when it gets heavy (I wouldn’t know, I can barely lift 80). From what I can tell, most resistance training fatalities happen on the bench when someone fails and crushes their neck/chest.

    If your eventual bench load starts to worry you, do pull-ups instead. It’s a much better compound movement anyway. When that gets too easy, you can add weight. Being a lady and all, I am not really fit enough yet to do unassisted pull-ups. But I’m working on it.

  25. 25.

    Mike G

    It was almost exactly 23 years ago that Ronaldus Magnus signed the Simpson-Mazzoli Act granting amnesty to millions of illegal aliens.

    Yet another appropriate occasion for David Gregory to invite President John McCain to appear again on Meat the Press.

  26. 26.

    El Cid

    Reagan was pressured into the 1986 amnesty in large part due to the begging of (a) his death squad government allies in El Salvador, since by that time roughly 1/3 of the national income was from remittances of Salvadorans that had fled the civil war to the U.S., and by (b) his service industry buddies in Southern California who depended on cheap, controllable, and variable labor for construction and restaurant industries.

    I’ll give him a tiny bit of credit, though, for working with the Democratic Congress for 1986’s largest ever corporate tax hike when loopholes were closed out, and for creating the then-conservative principle that the poorest working Americans should not be bearing the burden of federal income taxes, but, back then, as now, Republicans weren’t interested in actually paying for their massive spending programs (military and weapons system and foreign wars).

  27. 27.

    Brachiator

    It was almost exactly 23 years ago that Ronaldus Magnus signed the Simpson-Mazzoli Act granting amnesty to millions of illegal aliens.

    Wait a minute. Was this the same Simpson-Mazzoli Act that made it illegal to knowingly hire or recruit illegal immigrants and required employers to attest to their employees’ immigration status?

    So, let’s see, the law had more holes in it than a Carrie Prejean sex tape excuse. Some people got amnesty, but employers still had a way to continue to hire illegal immigrants and to underpay them and to undercut the wages of legal residents and citizens. That’s certainly a win for somebody.

  28. 28.

    El Cid

    On IRCA, a basic look back:

    The second Simpson-Mazzoli Bill finally passed both houses in 1984, but it came apart in the conference committee over the issue of cost. This year marked an important turning point for the reform effort. First, employer opposition to employer sanctions began to subside, placated at least in part by the “affirmative defense” clause in the law which explicitly releases employers from any obligation to check the authenticity of documents presented to them. Second, agricultural employers shifted their focus from opposition to employer sanctions to a concerted campaign to secure alternative sources of foreign labor. As opposition to employer sanctions waned and growers’ lobbying efforts for extensive temporary worker programs intensified, agricultural worker programs began to outrank employer sanctions component as the most controversial element of reform.
    …
    The hiring process also changed as employers turned to indirect hiring through subcontractors. “Under a subcontracting agreement, a U.S. citizen or resident alien contractually agrees with an employer to provide a specific number of workers for a certain period of time to undertake a defined task at a fixed rate of pay per worker”.[4] “By using a subcontractor the firm is not held liable since the workers are not employees. The use of a subcontractor decreases a worker’s wages since a portion is kept by the subcontractor. This indirect hiring is imposed on everyone regardless of legality”.

    Or in other analysis:

    Most important was Congress’ unwillingness to mandate a reliable way for employers to verify the legal status of whom they were hiring. As a result, more than two dozen different kinds of existing documents were permitted. Employers were required only to complete and maintain a record (the I-9 form) of having checked one or more of them. The law called upon employers to accept any document that “reasonably appears on its face to be genuine” and included provisions that discouraged aggressive questioning about legal status because of fears of being charged with hiring discrimination… The fatal weakness was that most of the documents that were allowed were easy to counterfeit. A fraudulent document industry flourished to serve immigrant communities. The easy availability of fraudulent documents has also severely undermined the government’s ability to show the “knowing” hire of unauthorized workers, a legal requirement that had to be proven… Meanwhile, resources devoted to sanctions enforcement have been puny. There are more than 8 million employers in the country. In 1990 there were about 500 investigators enforcing employer sanctions; today, fewer than 100.

    By the way, don’t tell me people were unaware that the construction boom that went on in the mid-1980s as many of the deregulated S&L’s sought to stash their cash in real estate, leading to an unprecedented (and of course short-lived) commercial real estate building boom throughout the Southeast and Southwest, was built upon an imported Latin and primarily Mexican work force.

    Plenty of people seem willing to apply harsh sanctions to persons illegally in the country. The political establishment consensus seems to break down when you really suggest systematically cracking down on the employers who hire such persons.

    Plus, if I’m allowed to veer into crazy land, it would be nice if we’d back policies of governments in our hemisphere to make life better for their vast majority versus whatever corporate investor trade advantages our uppermost economic interests might prefer, so that it was a lot more possible to survive decently in the rest of the hemisphere. But that’s crazy talk.

  29. 29.

    Brittancus

    The SANCTUARY STATE of California needs to be placed on urgent notice by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) The state seem to be untouched by ICE, perhaps because they have cohorts of Democratic-Marxists running the Sacramento Assembly. Certainly E-Verify, the highly successful inhibitor of illegal workers throughout America, conferred less of an impact under California’s sanctuary city policies. But more likely because powerful House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, has been pandering overwhelming support of the illegal immigration organizations, that have been growing in leaps and bounds. California has done hardly anything to the detriment of real Angelino’s, mainly because of pathetic Governor, Mayors, judges, elected officials and police departments are conspiring insensibility or are completely indifferent to the progressive crisis. Although estimates of the illegal immigrant population are inexact, the best estimation suggests that California is home to about 2.8 million illegal immigrants back in 2006.

    Owing to the Southern border fence being nothing more than a phantom of what was originally planned, millions more poor humanity have likely swept across in the last decades. California has become a refuge for anybody who has reached the United States, and it estimated that ONE IN ELEVEN WORKERS IN CALIFORNIA IS AN UNDOCUMENTED ALIEN. Because of the travesty of our misguided laws, many pregnant women slip through the loose net of the Border Patrol, or airport inspection and can then immediately declare their baby is an American citizen once born? Under the refuge umbrella of the Sacramento retards, government entitlements have reduced California to near bankruptcy. Arizona has learned the hard way as a border state for being a financial sponge of the illegal immigrant invasion, and has introduced E-verify as a strict enforcement law. Arizona is just one state that has an employer sanctions law, intending to restrict any employers in the State from knowingly or intentionally hiring and/or employing illegal workers.

    As of January 1, 2008, all employers in Arizona, regardless of size, are required to use the federal E-Verify program to identify the status of new employees. Thirteen states have passed laws that have mandatory laws relating to the operation of E-Verify, with strict ruling, with others states pending. California seems to be living in an unreality of costs to its legal population. In hosting America’s largest population of illegal immigrants, California bares a huge cost to provide basic human services for this fast increasing, low-income segment of its population. The expenditure according to (FAIR) in the costs of education, health care and incarceration of illegal aliens, and concludes that the costs to Californians is $10.5 billion per year. Among the key finding of the report are that the state’s already struggling K-12 education system spends approximately $7.7 billion a year to school the children of illegal aliens who now constitute 15 percent of the student body. CAN WE EVEN IMAGINE WHAT THE GROWING COST BEING AT THIS LATER DATE?

    California’s addiction to ‘discount’ illegal alien labor is bankrupting the state and posing gigantic impediment on the state’s shrinking middle class tax base,” stated Dan Stein, President of FAIR. “California voters rebelled and overwhelmingly ratified Proposition 187, which sought to limit liability for mass illegal immigration. Since then, state and local governments have blatantly disregarded the wishes of the voters and continued to disburse publicly financed benefits for illegal immigrants It should be noted the Prop 187, was never allowed to reach the Supreme Court regarding whether it was constitutional? Today, California communities have been reduced to third world population, of illegal aliens families crammed into home garages and unscrupulous illegal alien landlords living on the proceeds.

    We cannot accept our politicians paying lip service to the American population. Neither party has followed the true wishes of the majority of the US people? They have succumbed to the greed of special interest lobbyists and the open border Marxists. The Democrats have been infiltrated by anti-American, anti-sovereignty personages such as Liberal Billionaire George Soros. I watched the History Channels presentation of Second World War. Millions of American lived through the carnage in Europe and in the Pacific and now veterans remain homeless, while illegal alien families get priority in low income housing? WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS OUTRAGOUS PICTURE? This is the exact same story in the Great Britain and the rest of Europe. Now the President Obama wants to open the doors to this nation even wider, by forcing upon us another financially crippling AMNESTY? Does he not realize that millions upon millions more indigent people, will try to reach America before the Democratic Congress finalizes this so-called Comprehensive Immigration reform?

    Read about corruption and sanctuary city policies at JUDICIAL WATCH. CAPWEB, ALIPAC, CAPSWEB, AMERICAN PATROL & THE DARK SIDE OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION. Hunt down you politician either over the phone at 202-224-3121, or go their in person. Tell them that they are–OUT–if they vote for any kind of AMNESTY. Tell them E-Verify must be made permanent, to start the “ATTRITION” enforcement procedure for every illegal worker in America? What can you do for AMERICA? We cannot afford overpopulation growth, or corrupt politicians pandering to illegal immigrant open border fanatics?

  30. 30.

    LD50

    “Is Obama too intellectual, is he too much of an egghead, is he channeling Adlai Stevenson?”

    We’re all used to the GOP fighting the hippies all the time, but when they turn to fighting the battles of the fifties, it’s clear they’ve run out of ideas.

  31. 31.

    LD50

    The Democrats have been infiltrated by anti-American, anti-sovereignty personages such as Liberal Billionaire George Soros.

    Well, to be honest, I’ve gotten pretty dependent on his checks by now.

  33. 33.

    KaffeeMeister

    Brittanicus:

    Politicians are not supposed to primarily support the wishes of the electorate. They are supposed to do what is in the best interests of the country and the constitution. An example of what happens when local government fails is the story of modern California. Selfish folks supported the lowering of taxes and super-majorities for raising them, while other folks demanded that certain government funding for education or roads were also appropriated. Now what do you have? Not nearly enough funds for any of the state priorities, infrastructure crumbling all over the place.

    The state of California has not been helped by its’ self involved conservatives. It seems like everything that they have done is to turn gold into lead.

  35. 35.

    Brachiator

    @KaffeeMeister:

    Selfish folks supported the lowering of taxes and super-majorities for raising them, while other folks demanded that certain government funding for education or roads were also appropriated. Now what do you have? Not nearly enough funds for any of the state priorities, infrastructure crumbling all over the place.
    …
    The state of California has not been helped by its’ self involved conservatives. It seems like everything that they have done is to turn gold into lead.

    California’s problems go far beyond the simple mythology of selfish people not wanting taxes to be raised, and presumably unselfish people wanting to spend money on worthy projects.

    An equally simple mythology is that self-involved conservatives have prevented good hearted liberals from rescuing the state. The most recent budget was a deal crafted by the governor and the Democratic and Republican leadership. All but 3 Republicans were allowed to vote against the budget so that the state GOP could keep its cover of being anti-tax increases.

    And now that the projected budget deficit is $21 billion, liberals and conservatives still insist on consoling themselves with fairy tales of good guys and bad guys instead of doing the really hard work of dealing with the problem.

    Sacramento is equally delusional. There is an $11 billion bond proposal on the table to improve California’s water infrastructure. But the lawmakers couldn’t resist loading it up with pork, from stuff like building bike trails, buying open space and building “watershed education centers.”

    Meanwhile, public libraries are being shut down for lack of funding and public parks are forced to close earlier.

    What a system.

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