Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

“In the future, this lab will be a museum. do not touch it.”

One of our two political parties is a cult whose leader admires Vladimir Putin.

DeSantis transforming Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

Our messy unity will be our strength.

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

I really should read my own blog.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

Quote tweet friends, screenshot enemies.

Let’s bury these fuckers at the polls 2 years from now.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

Republicans firmly believe having an abortion is a very personal, very private decision between a woman and J.D. Vance.

The lights are all blinking red.

You are either for trump or for democracy. Pick one.

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

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

A norm that restrains only one side really is not a norm – it is a trap.

Oppose, oppose, oppose. do not congratulate. this is not business as usual.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

This country desperately needs a functioning fourth estate.

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39Comments

  1. 1.

    SatanicPanic

    This probably all goes back to that time when Obama schooled those morons in the house on healthcare. That was a rhetorical beatdown for the ages, but that’s what you get for actively trying not to know things.

  3. 3.

    dmsilev

    Appropriate quote:

    Otto West: Apes don’t read philosophy.
    Wanda: Yes they do, Otto. They just don’t understand it. Now let me correct you on a couple of things, OK? Aristotle was not Belgian. The central message of Buddhism is not “Every man for himself.” And the London Underground is not a political movement. Those are all mistakes, Otto. I looked them up.

    I’m pretty sure Otto is a GOP Representative from either Georgia or Alabama.

  5. 5.

    c u n d gulag

    At least the fern in my living room moved when I was explaining what I knew about Quantum Mechanics to it.

    My Conservative uncle just sat there, staring out into space.

    You might say it was the breeze that moved the fern.

    But there was none, and in his comatose state, my uncle didn’t even fart.

  6. 6.

    dmsilev

    Also, too, I remember a few years back there was an episode when Secretary of Energy Steven Chu (which is to say, Nobel-in-physics winner Steven Chu) was testifying about something or another and some GOP Rep asked some mind-numbingly stupid question and proudly proclaimed afterwards that he had “stumped the Nobel prize winner.” As it happens, one of my colleagues at the time had had Dr. Chu as his PhD supervisor, and he said that the expression on the Secretary’s face was his “I’m talking to a complete and utter moron here. How can I get my point across to someone so ignorant?” expression.

  7. 7.

    mai naem

    I think they need to do something extreme. Something like invite all the teabaggers to some awesome anti-Obamacare meeting at some hotel and have the electicity go out at the hotel and hold a clean CR vote at the House at the same time and get it passed. Or, have President Obama use some bleach product on his skin and whiten his skin so that he looks like a white person and tell the teabaggers he was in fact a white person performing some kind of experiment.

  8. 8.

    Botsplainer

    @mai naem:

    Something like invite all the teabaggers to some awesome anti-Obamacare meeting at some hotel and have the electicity go out at the hotel and hold a clean CR vote at the House at the same time and get it passed.

    I was going to suggest that they all be invited to a special screening of “Birth of a Nation” and have a five foot stack of nitrate film be stacked up behind the screen…

  10. 10.

    Comrade Jake

    Larison had a nice piece on this whole business:

    Toying around with default threatens to impose greater costs on American taxpayers rather than reduce them. It is the perfect example of striking a symbolic blow against fiscal irresponsibility while adding to the country’s fiscal problems. If one seriously wants to control and reduce government debt, raising the debt ceiling ought to be the last thing that one worries about, since refusing to raise it simply makes paying off the debt that has already been incurred more expensive.

    Emphasis mine. You’d like to think someone like Lew could walk them through all of this, but I have my doubts.

  11. 11.

    JPL

    Pat Toomey seems to think the President has legal authority to pick and choose what bills to pay. Please if you live in PA, call his office and ask where in the Constitution, it says the President can pick and choose what bills to pay.

    Unfortunately, someone just tried to ask that question but the hearing was already over…

  12. 12.

    Comrade Jake

    @dmsilev: The moment you’re referring to is here.

    What’s awesome about it is – notice the title – Chu puzzled by simple question. In fact it’s just the opposite. Chu is wondering why a member of Congress wants an explanation of millions of years of geochemistry, but he does the best he can to put it in layman’s terms to Barton, who is a fucking dimwit of the highest order.

  13. 13.

    JPL

    Listening to the hearing reminded me of someone explaining that capital punishment deters crime. Republicans can’t be reasoned with.

  14. 14.

    maximiliano furtive, formerly known as dr. bloor

    The otter would be more interested in learning calculus than the tea baggers will be about mastering Actions Have Consequences 101.

    Can’t do a fucking thing about brutal, willful ignorance married to sociopathic paranoia.

  15. 15.

    Comrade Jake

    Here’s the same moment with a very different title, which amounts to: why is Joe Barton such an idiot?

    Amazing that wingers watch this and laugh at how we have an energy secretary who doesn’t know that God put oil under Alaska, while the rest of us watch the precise same sequence and laugh at Joe Barton.

    What color is the sky in your world?

  17. 17.

    Botsplainer

    @JPL:

    Pat Toomey seems to think the President has legal authority to pick and choose what bills to pay.

    I’m actually OK with this. He can withhold military retiree pay, social security checks and Medicare reimbursements from North, Central and Western Florida, the state of South Carolina, the California coastal counties surrounding San Diego and the areas surrounding Phoenix. If that doesn’t work, he could expand his embargo on paying out Federal funds to defense contractors.

  19. 19.

    Trakker

    One of the bigger differences between smart people and the ignorant is that smart people know what they don’t know. They know the limits of their expertise and know when to turn to experts for further information.

    I’m gobsmacked by how many poorly educated, ignorant people in America today who are certain THEY know more than the experts. They laugh at all the experts who tell us that defaulting on our obligations could ruin our nation and the world for decades! How can any fking elected official put 330 million Americans at risk by assuming they are smarter than the experts?

  22. 22.

    feebog

    I wonder if Lew’s explanations will have any effect. The Teabaggers were told weeks ago about many of the consequences of a government shutdown, yet they seem to be genuinely gobsmacked when military families didn’t get their death benefits, or National Parks actually closed.

  24. 24.

    becca

    Remember when if there was just “a one percent” chance that Saddam had WMD, we had no choice but to blow the place up?

    Now there’s more than a fifty percent chance the world could be plunged into global depression and all the ugliness that follows… hey, no biggie!

    I hope these reps’ districts start feeling heat if shit goes down. Direct experience with their freedumb platform colliding with reality will be harsh medicine.

  26. 26.

    VOR

    @dmsilev: Yes, it was Rep. Joe Barton (R – Oil Industry) asking why oil was found in cold places like Alaska if oil was the result of decomposition from 100s of millions of years old plants and animals. Barton seemed to be implying that Global Warming was nonsense since this clearly meant there once were forests and jungles in Alaska. Dr. Chu tried to get the concept of plate tectonics across, that yes there once were forests and jungles on that land but that the land was in a different place on the earth at that time. Barton just sat there with a smug grin on his face. Um, Barton, maybe ask your friends in the Oil companies as they accept and understand basic geology like plate tectonics.

  27. 27.

    Zifnab25

    @becca:

    Direct experience with their freedumb platform colliding with reality will be harsh medicine.

    Nonsense. If the economy tanks, we just blame the President. Obama will be the Democrats’ Herbert Hoover. Or, maybe, its Heinrich Brüning.

  29. 29.

    chopper

    @VOR:

    Rep. Joe Barton (R – Oil Industry) asking why oil was found in cold places like Alaska if oil was the result of decomposition from 100s of millions of years old plants and animals.

    oh, for fuck’s sake (pinches bridge of nose).

  30. 30.

    J

    In asking are these people complete morons–the answer is yes–some commentators are seem to me to be overlooking something, namely the extent to which they are being ‘useful idiots’. Brinksmanship requires convincing your opponent that you’re so insane that you’ll do it–push the button, drop the bomb–or that you’re such a cretin you’ll do it because you don’t understand what you’re doing. The Republicans have opted for brinkmanship type b. Looking like complete idiots is of course hardly a challenge for many of them.

  31. 31.

    nemesis

    So the clowns on the Hill have blinked. No, caved. The gop has offered a short term spending package with NO string attached. Looks like they lost.
    Obama should tell them to piss up a rope and demnd a 1 year extension.

  32. 32.

    cmorenc

    @Comrade Jake:

    Here’s the same moment with a very different title, which amounts to: why is Joe Barton such an idiot?

    Amazing that wingers watch this and laugh at how we have an energy secretary who doesn’t know that God put oil under Alaska, while the rest of us watch the precise same sequence and laugh at Joe Barton

    I’m dumbfounded where Barton and the wingers get any notion that Chu was at all stumped by Barton’s question; Chu promptly gave a tersely precise, accurate answer to Barton’s question. Barton somehow thinks the fact that oil is currently underneath Alaska, in a chilly northern latitude is an irrefutably unanswerable point about the nature and timing of its origin, and thereby thinks he has Chu stumped whatever answer Chu might have given.

  33. 33.

    NonyNony

    @cmorenc:

    I’m dumbfounded where Barton and the wingers get any notion that Chu was at all stumped by Barton’s question;

    We’re talking about people who think “WERE YOU THERE? DID YOU SEE IT HAPPEN? YOU CAN’T PROVE IT IF YOU DIDN’T SEE IT HAPPEN!” is the kind of thing you should teach your kids to confront their Biology teachers with when those teachers start talking about evolution.

    They think you win an argument by being the loudest and, if you can, turning off the other guy’s microphone. Of course they think that Barton “won” that confrontation.

  34. 34.

    nemesis

    Correction: looks like the gop are “discussing” the possibility of a 6 week extension to the debt ceiling issue.

    Question: Can President Obama reject this offer, in favor of a one year extension, and still apear to be reasonable?

    A 6 week extension is nothing. It feeds into the gops desire to cripple government, lurching from one manufactured crisis to another. My gut says Obama is not of the temperment to reject the gop offer, although he should.

    The gop cant fight on two fronts-the government shutdown and the debt default. They are stuck. Let em twist, Mr President. They are in trouble. Your boot is on their neck. Whatcha gonna do?

  36. 36.

    catclub

    @nemesis: “My gut says Obama is not of the temperment to reject the gop offer, although he should.” Agreed.

    Actually, since he is more patient than about anyone else ( Jesse Helms class patience), he can wait them out and they will get sick of the six weeks first.

  37. 37.

    ARoomWithAMooose

    If baggers really think the shutdown and debt limit fights (not to mention tying them to Obamacare) are winners for them, why not an extension till next summer, where they can make an election issue out of it (please).

    Can’t think of anything more motivating to the non-nutters.

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