Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

The GOP couldn’t organize an orgy in a whorehouse with a fist full of 50s.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

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

Infrastructure week. at last.

T R E 4 5 O N

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

This really is a full service blog.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

Optimism opens the door to great things.

I’m pretty sure there’s only one Jack Smith.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

“Squeaker” McCarthy

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

The republican caucus is already covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Late Night GOP Bad Ideas & Lies Open Thread

Late Night GOP Bad Ideas & Lies Open Thread

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From the District Sentinel post:

Amid a fledgling primary campaign, rural Iowa state lawmaker Joni Ernst crafted a quirky hardscrabble persona that propelled her to both the forefront of the race and, eventually, the United States Senate. In a 30-second spot that gained attention for its employment of hog castration imagery, Sen. Ernst (R-Iowa) claimed that her farmer parents “taught us to live within our means” and said that “it’s time to force Washington to do the same.” …

The truth about her family’s farm roots and living within one’s means, however, is more complex. Relatives of Ernst (née: Culver), based in Red Oak, Iowa (population: 5,568) have received over $460,000 in farm subsidies between 1995 and 2009. Ernst’s father, Richard Culver, was given $14,705 in conservation payments and $23,690 in commodity subsidies by the federal government–with all but twelve dollars allocated for corn support. Richard’s brother, Dallas Culver, benefited from $367,141 in federal agricultural aid, with over $250,000 geared toward corn subsidies. And the brothers’ late grandfather Harold Culver received $57,479 from Washington—again, mostly corn subsidies—between 1995 and 2001…

Sen. Ernst’s family’s financial interest notably came up once during her campaign. In October, Salon reported that Richard’s construction company was awarded $215,665 in contracts from the Montgomery County government in 2009 and 2010, while Ernst was the body’s auditor. The bids won by Culver included Federal Emergency Management Agency projects worth $204,794…

Skinner: People, these are all good ideas.
Marge: No they’re not, they’re TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE ideas.
Skinner: You’re right. It’s hopeless.

ETA: Via commentor LAMH36…

Reader Interactions

86Comments

  1. 1.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    turned on MSNBC to see if Tweety had stopped war-gasming, and he’s interviewing Ruth Wilson about The Affair, with Frank Bruni.
    Does Rachel have food poisoning or something? Alex Wagner, Joy Reid? The whole crew taken out by bad sushi?

  2. 2.

    fleeting expletive

    I’ve watched the first two episodes of Larry W’s show on Comedy Central. It has potential but he has got to get someone to make him stop sticking his tongue out and licking his lips every 20 seconds. Jon Stewart was pretty good tonight too.

  3. 3.

    Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)

    And since we’re repeating ourselves, the “bread bags” story has convinced me that Ernst grew up solidly middle-class (at worst) and was desperately casting around for a childhood story that made her sound poor. Because WE ALL DID THE SAME DAMN THING, JONI!

  6. 6.

    divF

    This is the first time I’ve ever heard about the whole breadbag thing. But then, I grew up in the DC suburbs, and there was rarely enough snow to make it worth anyone’s while (and if there was, the schools were closed anyway).

  8. 8.

    divF

    That was the one that they skewered Bilandic for not getting the snowplows out in time, which led to Jane Byrne getting elected Mayor.

    ETA: I lit out for California 10 years ahead of you. In 1969, it was the thing to do :).

  9. 9.

    Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)

    @divF:

    Yep, and when Byrne failed in her turn, it opened the door for Harold Washington to form his coalition and get elected, which drew a lot of ambitious young black politicians to the city, including a young community organizer named … well, you know.

    I think there’s a “Connections” episode in here somewhere.

  10. 10.

    BruinKid

    One of my friends on Facebook had this post about her response:

    Joni Ernst: Nobody at my school had more than one pair of shoes in the 1980s. Now let me tell you why trickle down works…

  12. 12.

    seaboogie

    Okay – here is a weird thing: I grew up in MN and WI and remember having the red boots over my shoes, and am now kind of thinking I remember bread bags on my feet in those boots too. I have no idea whether that is a true memory or not, because it seems kind of resonant, but this could be a trick of the mind.

    So now I am going to have to contact my mother (last on my list of favorite things to do) to ask about breadbags on our feet.

    Thanks, Obama!

    P.S. My mother grew up in Iowa, so maybe Wonderbread was the Jimmy Choo of the prairies. (Manolo Blahnik would have been Roman Meal, back in the day…)

  14. 14.

    RobertDSC (Quad Intel Mac)

    @lamh36:

    Pats fan here, just waiting for the league to weigh in officially. I don’t buy any of the reports or accusations, especially since the officials had access to every ball on every play and didn’t do anything about them.

  15. 15.

    Turd Burglar

    Kenneth the Page says “gimme some breadbags” as he takes a drink of water in mid-speech.

    So far Jindal, Rubio, and Ernst have screwed the pooch. Can the stupid tradition of “responses” to SOTU finally end now? Why is this even necessary? Did Reagan sneak the Fairness Doctrine back in, from beyond the grave?

  16. 16.

    Villago Delenda Est

    Cripes. They’re all hypocritical scum. It’s about “those people” and welfare with these vile assholes.

    Wipe them out. All of them.

  18. 18.

    seaboogie

    @Mnemosyne (iPad Mini): Your ankles were smaller than mine if a twist-tie worked…no wait – I think I’m older – back in our day, we didn’t even have twist ties….why, we had to pull out our own hair – and it took a while to grow it – and braid it just so….I remember one winter so cold that my sister with the long hair was just plain bald by springtime!

  22. 22.

    ? Martin

    I guess the GOP has decided that bootstraps are played out – pulling ourselves up by our breadbags now.

  28. 28.

    Alison

    Having been born and raised in CA*, I was utterly confused by this bread bag thing and had to ask around. I will never understand why people ever decide to settle down in cold ass places. I mean, snow is pretty but fuck that noise.

    *ETA: In the Bay Area, that is. We got snow on the ground all of one grand time thus far in my life…and everyone lost their shit and the snow melted by mid-morning.

  32. 32.

    NotMax

    Link fail fix.

    @Mnemosyne

    I go back much further than Ernst*, but most all the kids had one pair of everyday (school) shoes and one pair of dress shoes (if they had older siblings, that last was hand-me-down).

    Any more would have been a wasteful luxury, because kids’ feet outgrow shoes pretty danged fast.

    *Pre-sandwich bag days, back when sandwiches were wrapped in waxed paper.

  34. 34.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @Alison:

    In the Bay Area, that is. We got snow on the ground all of one grand time thus far in my life…and everyone lost their shit and the snow melted by mid-morning.

    We got about 2″ of snow here in LALA land 53 years ago, today.

  35. 35.

    FlyingToaster

    I grew up in Missouri, and we had both leather and rubber boots. Black Leather and Yellow Rubber. My mom bought them at Sears Outlet. A pair of each every fall; if I didn’t destroy them, my next-youngest sister got them two years later. If she didn’t destroy them, my brother got them in his turn, and finally my youngest sister. Dilapidated and holed boots were replaced.

    I never heard of bread bags but I knew some kids used sandwich bags if their boots cracked or got holes. But it wasn’t a default procedure; we wore boots with thick knit socks, or two pairs of socks, because it was 5 below when we walked to school. And boots with treads because of ice.

    There’s a reason we used to call them “Iowegians”… they elect nutcases like this one.

  36. 36.

    mdblanche

    Major Major’s father Joni Ernst was a sober God-fearing woman whose idea of a good joke was to lie about her age. She was a longlimbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. She advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose men who turned her down. Her specialty was alfalfa pigs, and she made a good thing out of not growing breeding any. The government paid her well for every bushel of alfalfa drove of pigs she did not breed. The more pigs she did not breed, the more money the government gave her, and she spent every penny she didn’t earn on new land to increase the amount of pigs she did not produce. Joni Ernst worked without rest at not breeding pigs. On long winter evenings she remained indoors and did not mend harness breadbags, and she sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. She invested in land wisely and soon was not breeding more pigs than any other woman in the county. Neighbors sought her out for advice on all subjects, for she had made much money and was therefore wise. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” she counseled one and all, and everyone said, “Amen.”

  37. 37.

    seaboogie

    @David Koch: Clearly your kink is pretty carb-based. It’s okay – we’re family and we understand. The gluten adverse might not be so accomodating, though. The whole foot thing is so last year “helloooo, gay marriage”. The carb/gluten thing is something that we can all still rally around. It’s just wrong.

  39. 39.

    NotMax

    @FlyingToaster

    There was something unique about the aroma of 25 pair of wet galoshes or boots slowly warming and giving up moisture while they were sitting in the cloakroom at the back of the classroom.

    No, we didn’t have lockers in elementary school.

  40. 40.

    Anne Laurie

    @NotMax:

    No, we didn’t have lockers in elementary school.

    We didn’t have lockers, but we did have twice as many kids in each classroom!

  44. 44.

    seaboogie

    @sm*t cl*de: That was very clever (you made me look it up). Per NotMax and the lockers though, I remember a 5th grade teacher giving us a lecture on deodorant, as in “tell your parents to get you some, pronto!” Must have been after gym class, back when there were still such classes as gym and art and music.

  45. 45.

    Morzer

    @sm*t cl*de:

    They had schools for mooses back then? Man, ain’t nothing new under the damn sun. Although I ain’t complaining. I don’t grudge other people their sun just because I grew up with a lame old moon with bits taken out of it.

  49. 49.

    FlyingToaster

    @NotMax: We had 30-32, and a dress code that meant we had at least half the class’s snow pants drying in the cloakroom while we shivered in our skirts and knee socks. And ALL of the kids’ boots :)

    Kansas City Missouri Public Schools, 1966-1972. Complete with cross-bussing, no jeans, no t-shirts, girls in skirts or dresses and boys in pants and button shirts and class sizes ‘way beyond what was manageable. I do NOT miss it, ever.

    And Iowa is not colder. It’s the same fricking climate.

  50. 50.

    FlyingToaster

    @Anne Laurie: Yep. 30+kids, at least one of whom was guaranteed to be ADHD and another who never said a word the entire school year.
    @Morzer: And it’s still there.

    In my day, it had cinder block walls, the “Cloakroom” was a partially-walled off area (Center wall, open at each side) at the back of the classroom equipped with hooks and shelves, no cubbies, heaven help you if your parents forgot to label your boots/gloves/coats/scarves/mittens/lunchbox, because at least 7 other people also had black extra-small mittens and a GI-Joe lunchbox.

  52. 52.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @FlyingToaster: We had 36-40 kid per class. The school district had trouble keeping up with the population growth. The town grew from about 5000 people in 1960 to 100,000 by 1975.

  54. 54.

    NotMax

    @BillinGlendaleCA

    Back when I was teaching (late 70s), had one 11th grade American history class of 52, held in the portable classroom farthest from the main building.

    But it gets even worse – the class would meet for half a period, then they would all leave for lunch and come back after that for the second half of the class.

    By the time attendance was taken (twice!) actual class time was ridiculously tiny.

  55. 55.

    Anne Laurie

    @seaboogie:

    I remember a 5th grade teacher giving us a lecture on deodorant, as in “tell your parents to get you some, pronto!”

    In our parochial school, the nuns teaching grades 5-8 just kept the windows cracked, unless it was below zero outside or the rain was blowing sideways.

    Elementary school actually wasn’t too bad. But our high school ‘winter uniforms’ (Oct-April) included mandatory woolen blazers, none of which we could afford to dry-clean more than once or twice a year. There were primitive showers in the gym, for those who weren’t too body-shy, but 40 – 60 hormonal teenage girls in a single overcrowded classroom went way beyond the power of mere deodorants. As for the all-male classes on the other side of the swinging doors dividing the building… the zoological smells that wafted through every time a teaching brother burst through those doors was, shall we say, discouraging even to the more inquisitive/horny among us girls!

  59. 59.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @Morzer: On the Daily Show tonight Asif Monvi thought he found a hotbed on Sharia law; but he was mistaken, it was a Korean BBQ(the funny alphabet threw him off).

  60. 60.

    Tommy

    About to click “Install” to upgrade to Windows 8.1. If you don’t see me around for a week or so, well you will know things went sideways, I threw my computer out the window, and I ordered an Apple, which I was an Apple “fan boy” from 1987 until 2004. In fact, this will be the first time I’ve upgrade the OS on a Windows machine. I tended to just buy a new “box.”

    Wish me luck, and yes I have everything backed up, twice. That is how little faith I have in a Windows upgrade :).

  62. 62.

    Tommy

    @Tommy: Oh the fucking hell with that install. I’d lose every single application and have to reinstall. You got to be kidding me. My Dell is 3 months old. $2780 just for the CPU (no monitor, printer, just the box). Beast of the machine because I need the power and speed for work (and I just want it!) That is ridiculous.

    Well I guess I’ll have to spend a Saturday downloading all the installers I need, saving to a DVD/my external drive, then think about trying the installer again.

    Please Microsoft, try to find a way to upgrade my OS a little harder and more painful. I am sure if you work at it you can figure it out.

  63. 63.

    Morzer

    @Tommy:

    Only Microsoft could have crafted an abomination like Windows BastardSonOfVistaAnnoyingPaperclip 8.1 and inflicted it on a world that was perfectly happy with Windows 7.

    You might want to consider using one of the workarounds that let you have the classic Start menu back at least.

  64. 64.

    Arclite

    “I know because I won both of them.”

    Biden cracked a nice smile. Boehner looked like he shit himself.

  65. 65.

    Tommy

    @Morzer: I guess I will just “eat” that $88 because I can’t see myself walking down the path that I’d have to walk down to install 8.1. There are a few apps I want to run, but want to run, not need to run that require 8.1. I can live without them much easier than live not having a few core programs I use daily.

    What I love is I ran the MS 8.1 wizard that looks at my system and sizes up what Windows 8.1 would mean. It gave me back a list of apps that would work on 8.1. It was a fraction of the list of my total apps, and it fucking didn’t even include any of their own MS Office apps (I really only use Outlook — machine just came with Office installed).

    Just had a note saying it couldn’t analyze everything. Well it would seem like maybe you shoud.

    What the fuck!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  66. 66.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @Tommy: It’s not that bad, though I’ll admit win 8.x is better with a touch screen. I just got a 23″ Acer for xmas(gift card from the kid, I paid the rest).

  69. 69.

    Morzer

    @BillinGlendaleCA:

    Yes, BUT Windows 10 isn’t 8.1 8.1 seems to be Microsoft’s attempt to prove that competent design is optional and customers won’t care. Think of it as the result of a Jindal-Cruz collaboration with Steve Ballmer.

  70. 70.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @Morzer: I run win8.1 on my two desktops and tablet. On my primary destop, I do use Start8(win7 style start menu).

  72. 72.

    Death Panel Truck

    “I have no more campaigns to run…I know, because I won both of ’em.”
    — Barack Obama

    This is what’s known as “Twisting the Knife.” Well played, Mr. President. Well played.

  73. 73.

    Zinsky

    Did everyone catch the pig castrator refer to it as “the Keystone JOBS bill”? You gotta hand it to the Repugs, they are propagandists without peer. Joseph Goebbels had nothing on these smarmy liars.

  75. 75.

    Elizabelle

    @seaboogie:

    maybe Wonderbread was the Jimmy Choo of the prairies.

    And it can be again, if we follow Joni Ernst’s policies. Shoes for me, breadbags for thee. (You taker!)

    This is kind of a new low for GOP responses, is it not, if all anyone remembers is ersatz footwear?

  76. 76.

    FlipYrWhig

    It seems a bit precious to tell heartwarming stories of pluck and poverty that recall the Little Rascals WHEN YOU WERE BORN IN 1970. “As kids we wore breadbags on our feet and then we listened to the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack for 7 consecutive hours!”

  77. 77.

    Cervantes

    @Zinsky:

    You gotta hand it to the Repugs, they are propagandists without peer. Joseph Goebbels had nothing on these smarmy liars.

    True enough, I am sorry to say.

  79. 79.

    Cervantes

    @Turd Burglar:

    So far Jindal, Rubio, and Ernst have screwed the pooch. Can the stupid tradition of “responses” to SOTU finally end now?

    Here’s a question: can you recall any instances of this “tradition” from when Obama’s immediate predecessor was in office?

  81. 81.

    Heirn

    @Tommy: If you paid for it you aren’t just updating to Windows 8.1. You are moving from Home to Pro. I updated my laptop from 8 to 8.1 without a problem. And it didn’t cost me any money.

  83. 83.

    The Golux

    @Heirn: I’ve been putting off upgrading from 8 to 8.1 because I’ll also have to upgrade from Office 2003, which is desupported in 8.1, even though it works perfectly well for my needs.

  85. 85.

    Original Lee

    @evap: I was in high school in southwestern Michigan. Lots of snow. We have photos of us standing on top of the snow talking down to the snow plow operators.

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