This week, Congressional Republicans have voted to take both food and healthcare from Americans in need. #JustKeepingTrack
— Brad Friedman (@TheBradBlog) September 20, 2013
@billmon1 "they did skip water & breathing." // Uh, not really. Didnt see their House hearing on climate, eh? LISTEN: http://t.co/pG9A0bX6S3
— Brad Friedman (@TheBradBlog) September 20, 2013
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Apart from hoping the TeaHadists’ Jesus shows up to explain to them exactly how wrong they are, what’s on the agenda for the start of the weekend?
WereBear
If Jesus showed up, they’d stand their ground and shoot him.
Mike G
Apart from hoping the TeaHadists’ Jesus shows up to explain to them exactly how wrong they are
I imagine real Jesus showing up and saying, “What the fuck is wrong with you people? Didn’t you read my book?”. Followed shortly by teatards declaring him a “terrist” and having him deported.
jeffreyw
Biscuit needs a home.
Redshirt
I think the Repukes have moved on to outright evil. No more justifications, no more cover stories, no more charades. Outright evil, and OK with it, as are their constituents. Christians all.
Mnemosyne
I should have a new post up at my blog tonight or first thing tomorrow — “What the Heck is ‘Pre-Code’?”
(I knew there would be questions, so I had the post ready to go. :-)
Mnemosyne
@jeffreyw:
FLOOFY!
Sorry, had a Yutsano moment there.
jeffreyw
Moar biscuit.
JPL
@Redshirt: They convinced at least 27% that evil is what gets you into heaven.
SarahT
Remembering Troy Davis, murdered two years ago tomorrow by the state of Georgia:
blog.scottlangleyphoto.com/2013/09/troydavis2013.html?m=1
gogol's wife
@Mnemosyne:
Looking forward to it.
I keep looking for Omnes Omnibus now that I know we share an alma mater, but I never seem to stay up late enough to see him here.
Getting sleepy right now, as a matter of fact.
PsiFighter37
This stuff is infuriating. I sit at work all day with CNBC on, and assholes like Steve Liesman and John Harwood – who I am sure know better (certainly better than clowns like Andrew Ross Sorkin and Maria Bartiromo) – just report stuff with a straight face. I know Chuckles gave the media’s game away – “we’re too fucking lazy to do our jobs, and it’s all Obama’s fault anyways” – but you cannot put up graphics that say “Boehner: Healthcare costs are going up, not down” without stating the facts that disprove that statement right away.
Seriously, the Republicans are a bunch of serial liars (and in Orange Julius’ case, a lazy drunk), but no one EVER.CALLS.THEM.OUT. Someone really needs to have a Will McAvoy moment and think long and hard about why exactly they became journalists anyways.
Aside from that, my massive hangover is finally almost gone (I did several prayers this morning, if you catch my drift), and I’m going for a sushi dinner in an hour. Looks to be a gorgeous weekend here in NYC…love the fall here.
Ash Can
@jeffreyw: I gained a pound just looking at that photo.
Yatsuno
@Mnemosyne: Floofy haz no limit. As our dearly departed lordship demonstrated amply.
TaMara (BHF)
@WereBear: OMG, I love that. I’ve thought that many times. You know brown skin and all…
TaMara (BHF)
@jeffreyw: Steve needs a buddy.
magurakurin
@Mike G:
except it isn’t really his book. It’s Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John’s book. Plus the quote they like to go to for the food stamps about not working and not eating is from Thessalonians, which was written by Paul, and really has nothing to do with Jesus. It is directives from a cult leader to his follwers. But you are right, Jesus would be pissed and the Repukes would shoot him if he came back today.
lamh36
Wow. This is why it is important for us to teach our kids our history and encourage them to read even outside of school work. How the hell do you ban “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison from the freakin’ library!!!!
courier-tribune.com/sections/news/local/county-board-bans-‘invisible-man’-school-libraries.html
Redshirt
@magurakurin: Indeed. If there was ever really a Jesus, this Bible, or New Testament, was written 70-100 years after his death and codified into the version we know, for the most part, in the 300’s AD. In other words, a work of fiction.
scav
@magurakurin: PseudoMatt, PseudoMark, and PseudoJohn isn’t it? The early leaders had better opportunities for prime apostle-squatting tactics.
JPL
@TaMara (BHF): Glad to see you posting again. I know it will take a long time for your community to get back to a new normal.
sacrablue
@jeffreyw: That’s not fair!
lamh36
Posted as OT in last thread:
Shorter POTUS to Boehner: NMFTG
Mnemosyne
@lamh36:
What’s really sad is that the complaint came from the mother of an 11th-grader. That’s a junior in high school. Seriously, how sheltered is that kid that she’s old enough to legally attend rated-R movies by herself but can’t dare to be exposed to Ralph Ellison?
ETA: Though the 12-page detailed letter about how awful the book is says “mentally ill mom” to me.
WereBear
I heard that crap this afternoon and I got livid. A lot of the people on food stamps have a job. A lot of our soldiers are feeding their kids with those food stamps. Wal-Mart workers, fast food workers, home care workers.
These Republican assholes are so despicable.
beltane
@PsiFighter37:
The “journalists” you see on TV are there because they wanted money, fame, and a glamorous lifestyle but were too unattractive and lacking in talent to make it in Hollywood. I once was seated near a journalism major and her friends in a restaurant and listened (eavesdropped?) as she told her buddies that her goal was to be the next Barbara Walters, and that while her first career choice was acting, she knew she wasn’t quite attractive enough for a lucrative acting career.
schrodinger's cat
@jeffreyw: Looks like Tunch sans the orange tail.
beltane
@WereBear: Geez, if they succeed in starving the poor we’re going to have a situation where millions of famished, malnourished Americans start seeing all those fat teabaggers not as people, but as ambulatory pork roasts and baked chickens, just like in the old Looney Tunes cartoons.
lamh36
@Mnemosyne: yeah, that letter reads like it was written by a kid.
The effort by some conserv school districts to totally whitewash America’s original sin of slavery and years of racial terrorism and inequality is just ridiculous and has always been happening, but since the election of the country’s first Black POTUS now these stories become front page news when before it’d be delegated to “local coverage” only if at all
It’s like the racial attitudes of this country have just exploded to front pages since Obama’s election.
Case in point a story like this, would have never made big news. What the heck is up with the re-encactment BS? What students can’t read and comprehend???
Parents Outraged Over Field Trip Where Students Reenacted Slavery And Were Called The N-Word
buzzfeed.com/hnigatu/parents-outraged-over-slavery-re-enactment-field-trip-where
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@magurakurin:
That’s the trippy part – Paul trumps Jesus in their minds. Even from their POV that’s a bit twisted.
Old Dan and Little Ann
Citizens Bank credited my bank account $103 today due to a class action lawsuit. Those miserable fucks robbed my wife and I blind when we were younger due to overdraft fees. We were charged well over a thousand dollars over the course of several years due to the fact we simply were not making enough money to pay our bills. I went into the bank on 3 or 4 occasions to raise hell and one lady asked me if I “ever thought about balancing my checking account.” I asked her how she sleeps at night working for group that charges $39 fucking dollars if you are short by a dollar. 4 transactions under 5 bucks and your short and your penalize $156 dollars. Fucking Bastards! I’ve only read through the first few pages of the lawsuit but it brings back too many bad memories. Mother fucking bankers can rot in hell!
WereBear
I dunno; bitter, stringy, past their prime. That’s stewing meat, you ask me :)
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@magurakurin: They’d be aghast at the original DHF, and would certainly not embrace his message. Then they’d shoot him.
Villago Delenda Est
@Mike G:
The Teatards do not revere Jesus. They revere Jeebus, Son of Mammon.
muddy
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: They should call themselves Paulines and not Christians.
Redshirt
@Villago Delenda Est: There’s a checklist!
ArchTeryx
@beltane:
I coulda been an actor, but I wound up here
I just have to look good, I don’t have to be clear
Come and whisper in my ear
We need dirty laundry!
One of the few 80s songs that’s MORE relevant now then when it was written.
Karen in GA
My nephew and his wife are trying to have a baby. His sister set up a fundraising site to pay for fertility treatments because evidently it’s something like $3,000 and they don’t have that kind of money. He’s angry that his state government doesn’t force insurers to cover fertility treatments.
And my nephew is happy to see food stamps being cut.
Am I wrong for thinking, “You’re okay with seeing kids go hungry, but you can’t even have a kid without asking for handouts”?
My family pisses me off sometimes.
(Adding: I know, treatment options are expensive as hell. Not knocking anyone who could use financial help and really wants a kid — just annoyed by the hypocrisy of it all.)
beltane
@Karen in GA: If they are struggling to raise $3,000 to conceive a child they are going to struggle mightily with the costs of feeding, clothing, and housing that child. People who are one pink slip away from needing food assistance shouldn’t begrudge others that assistance.
Ruckus
@TaMara (BHF):
If Jesus showed up it’s not that they’d shoot him, it’s that they wouldn’t even believe him to be Jesus. He could perform miracles and they still wouldn’t believe him. Because he’d be the wrong color, because he would be pissed that his name had been used in vain so much, and because they really are decedents of satin who are trying to fool everyone that they believe in Jesus. If you are at all christian that last one can be your only reasonable, logical conclusion. Besides would he be able to speak the language that americans call english? They for sure wouldn’t believe any translations. Just end up calling him “moooslum”.
Ksmiami
@Karen in GA: if they can’t afford the treatment maybe a baby is not the right choice… I mean it takes like 250 k to raise a kid today
TAPX486
Rev. Al had a tea partyer on tonight. They really do live in a different dimension. She was quite adamant that Obamacare was passed behind closed doors and jammed down the peoples collective throat. She seems to have missed the pre-2008 election debates where healthcare was a major issue. Heck even McCain was talking about health care reform. She also missed the gang of 6, the 18 months of hearings and talk show appearances by various and sundry congress critters. None of that happened in her world. The truly sad thing is she seem quite sincere in her beliefs
Mathews had a Texas tea party republican congressman on. They were discussing whither Calgary Cruz met the natural born citizen test. According to the critter he does. When Mathews asked him if Obama, with an American mother also met the criteria, he would not answer the question.
There simply is no way you can talk to these folks or try and find common ground where they have a world view from planet Fox.
mikefromArlington
You need to add Bradblog to your blog roll. He’s hot great articles on republican voter suppression tactics…really opened my eyes up in 2010
Ruckus
@Old Dan and Little Ann:
If I believed in any religion I’d bet that bankers would have to improve several orders of magnitude in order to be allowed in hell. Got to keep out the rifraf or the place will turn to shit.
Karen in GA
Oh yeah, I have no idea how they think they’d afford it. He bitches about the state not requiring that insurers cover it, and I want to say, “Well, maybe the state thinks that if you don’t have extra savings now, any kid you have would only end up on — AHEM — public assistance. Maybe they think it’s in their interest to make it more difficult for you to have children.”
Of course, if everyone always thought that way, I and a lot of people I know would never have been born. But still.
Oh, did I mention that when he was a kid, there were times when he would have starved if his parents hadn’t received public assistance?
Spike
@ArchTeryx: Except for that “Kick ’em when they’re up” part.
Roger Moore
@Karen in GA:
I have a good guess: they assume they’re going to be doing better in the future. They’re only down temporarily, so they’ll be able to afford to raise the kid once they bounce back and start doing better. God will provide.
nineone
He did show up, and he’s a-tellin’-’em, but they ain’t a-lissenin’ ‘cos they’re mad he doesn’t look like Ted Neely.
Redshirt
Official Hell vacuum society post.
Chris
@WereBear:
Internets won on at 8:27PM EST, on the very first comment. You are an artist.
RSA
@lamh36: From the article:
… in the winner of the 1953 National Book Award for Fiction. So a community defers to a retired police chief with a high school degree for literary judgments. This is a nice illustration of the risks of localized control of public education.
Chris
@Redshirt:
This is why I’ve never understood Biblical literalism and/or sola scriptura. The 300s AD? That’s farther from the time of Jesus than we are from the Founding Fathers… and that’s just the New Testament. If you throw in all the books in the Old Testament, it’s a gaggle of books spanning a thousand years or so. It’s like making a compilation of books starting at Chaucer and ending with J. K. Rowling, with collected works from the intervening centuries in between, and trying to weave them all into one official canon. Actually worse than that, because not all the books were even written in the same language.
At least the Koran came from only one prophet, and was codified within two decades of that prophet’s death.
Heliopause
On what basis would one assume that putative Jesus, should he “show up”, is not a “Teahadist”, or even an outright fascist?
ruemara
@Roger Moore: Mom?
Chris
@WereBear:
It really shouldn’t surprise me – they tried to destroy Social Security under Reagan and again under Bush, tried to kill Medicare in the Gingrich years and I believe the Ryan budget provided something for that too. And shit, they destroyed an entire country simply to get a second term, a few more seats in Congress, and a few more defense contracts for their owners.
But somehow they manage to keep shocking me every now and then. The food stamps budget is one of these cases. It’s just such a perfectly in-character moment of “let’s find the people deepest in the gutter and kick them where it hurts most, because no matter how many pressing duties Congress has at the moment – doggone it, we just like doing that.”
This is what I meant yesterday about being at the point where I pretty much always assume malignant intent from conservatives – meaning not just the politicians but the average voters too. I am rarely ever proven wrong. (As the chorus of “good work! Show those lazy cheating moochers who’s boss!” on Facebook demonstrates, with not a single Gooper objecting).
CONGRATULATIONS!
@Old Dan and Little Ann: Wells Fargo did the same to me. Probably a couple of thousand all told back when I was young, poor and starving. Stayed with ’em cause I traveled a lot, shouldn’t have. The end came when my local credit union was more than happy to write me a mortgage as a brand-new account holder, and Wells Fargo wouldn’t even talk to me about it after having been with them for seventeen years. I managed to avoid strangling the branch manager (not his fault) when he asked me why I was leaving after so long, which is probably the most impressive feat of self-control in the history of mankind.
So I put up with some ATM fees from time to time on travel, but have a bank that kicks ass and treats me like a human being and not shit on the bottom of a boot. In return I’ve thrown them almost 200 thousand dollars worth of business. Business that Wells Fargo lost out on. I hope every Wells branch burns to the ground and their executives die in a hellish pit of fire.
Chris
@Ruckus:
According to the New Testament, when Jesus claimed to be the son of God, the clergy reacted by accusing him of blasphemy. (Naturally, since they’d think they were the only ones entitled to speak for God, and anyone outside of the framework they understood was automatically a blasphemer or a sorcerer or something equally bad).
I’ve said this before, but I remember watching The Passion with fundie friends and laughing on the inside the entire time when that part came up, thinking “this is you right here and you don’t even realize it. You’d never follow Jesus if he showed up. You’d be the clerics trying to have him lynched for not being what you expected.”
different-church-lady
Actually, they did manage to lash out at water.
WereBear
@CONGRATULATIONS!: For me, it’s CitiBank.
They were always quick to be overbearing, but they had branches all over and we worked in the City and lived on the Island and they were one of the first to have online banking.
But when I was widowed and came in to sort through the paperwork, they were so inflexible and condescending — knowing that I had just endured the loss of a loved one, that was why I was there — that I can only assume they had fired everyone with a soul.
Chris
@Roger Moore:
And when they don’t, they’ll say that they totally would have done better if Politically Correct Liberals and Affirmative Action hadn’t been skewing the market so that unqualified blacks and Mexicans got all the jobs that should’ve gone to them.
And when they manage to make it through after taking public assistance a dozen times, they’ll thump their chest about how they did it all by themselves and that’s why they’re voting to take away public assistance from all those lazy people who expect the government to take care of them.
Heck, the kid will probably grow up being taught both those things from the time he can walk.
SIA
I’m on vacation and have probably spent too much time reading blogs today. Are things really awful right now or is it just me? With the debt ceiling crap, the hysteria around defunding the ACA, and now seeing the GOP voting to cut food stamps while making sure the subsidies are there for Big Ag, this country just feels like it’s just circling the drain. Has it always been like this and I’m just more aware? Christ on a broomstick.
Joey Maloney
@scav: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John
Played a trick and put us on:
Inventing Jesus and four nails
Really helped their hardback sales!
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
One of my friends left Bank of America by standing in the lobby and screaming at the manager she was dealing with, “My money would be safer in a mattress than it is with you people!”
I’ve been with my smallish regional (and Japanese-owned) bank for almost 20 years now. Fortunately they were not one of the many regional banks that BofA swallowed up along the way.
Anne Laurie
@SIA:
The analogy I use to comfort myself is that America is like this blog, only on a much larger scale — mostly well-intentioned people, usually doing the best they can, with periodic outbreaks of Malignant Arsehole by a minority with influence out of all proportion to their size.
Wish I could remember which essayist referred to America as a strong nation suffering from a dangerous intermittent fever of rampant inequality, as a strong man might be brought low by intermittent malaria.
SIA
@Anne Laurie: Thank you Anne, I actually do feel comforted by that. You hit it exactly:
Things feel terribly out of proportion but hopefully it’s just an outbreak of an “intermittent fever”.
Mike G
And yet teahadists never mention that the Bible is silent on the subject of farm subsidies, one of their favorites of the many forms of welfare they collect inbetween thumping their chests about their own Randian self-reliance.