As seen on Craigslist:
These tea party folk heroes* just keep blowing up in their faces, you guys! It’s a mystery.
ETA: Obligatory Poe’s Law disclaimer: This isn’t a real Craigslist ad.
[H/T: Valued commenter Belafon]by Betty Cracker| 155 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads, Republican Stupidity, Assholes, General Stupidity, Teabagger Stupidity
As seen on Craigslist:
These tea party folk heroes* just keep blowing up in their faces, you guys! It’s a mystery.
ETA: Obligatory Poe’s Law disclaimer: This isn’t a real Craigslist ad.
[H/T: Valued commenter Belafon]This post is in: Open Threads, Republican Stupidity, Republican Venality, Assholes
MisterMix beat me to the front page with the YouTube clip of Cliven Bundy making his “never said that, taken out of context” extremely racist remarks, so we have had a chance to judge his affect and sincerity for ourselves. Now that I’ve watched it, I retract my suggestion from the wee hours that some people were saying Bundy might be clinically senile; from the evidence of this video, he’s just old and mean and (as my lace-curtain Irish granny would put it) common as pig tracks.
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The Rude Pundit offers his usual excellent discourse on the latest Rising Young RW Media Weasel, Jayson Veley:
… In an Introduction to Creative Writing course, [Professor Brent] Terry went on a calm, reasonable, and absolutely biased tangent on how “racist, misogynists, money-grubbing people have so much power over the rest of us. And want things to go back not to 1955 but to 1855. There are a lot of people out there that do not want black people to vote, do not want Latinos to vote, do not want old people to vote or young people to vote. Because generally people like you are liberals.”
This was recorded by conservative student Jayson Veley, who obviously turned it over to Campus Reform, the clearing house for pathetic whiners who can’t stand to have any ideas but their own informing the opinions of the precious, delicate angels who are in college. This led to a Fox “news” hategasm, of course, of course.
First, the editor-in-chief of Campus Reform, Jebediah Fuckagoat or something like that, got to go on Greta Van Susterenenenen’s show and say things like, “[T]his is creating an atmosphere for conservatives in the classroom where they are feeling — this is why the student that released this video, this audio, is remaining anonymous. How is he going to be treated to come out as a conservative in an atmosphere where he is called a racist?”
So what intrepid reporter found out that the anonymous recorder was the aforementioned Mr. Veley? Oh, wait. It was Jason Veley himself, who was so afraid of being known that he went on Megyn Kelly‘s Parade of Shit What I’ll Sneer At. Obviously, Veley was there to reveal what a madman Prof. Terry was, just abusing students in a completely inappropriate rant. Except the second that Veley said, “He was talking about this poem that was themed and centered around the ideas of racial inequality,” whatever little point Veley and Fuckagoat and Fox wanted to make was over because what Terry said had to do with what they read in class. That’s it. Issue done. Academic freedom ain’t pretty…
There is much more, and you should definitely click over to read it.
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And finally, because I can be a small, small person, I actually giggled at David Ferguson’s Raw Story update on another GOP media darling:
… A former aide to the Reagan White House and author of The Roots of Obama’s Rage, D’Souza is charged with using straw donors to illegally contribute $20,000 to the U.S. Senate campaign of Wendy Long, a former school friend of D’Souza’s who unsuccessfully ran against Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) in 2012.
… Prosecutors submitted documents to the court showing that in March of 2012, D’Souza attempted to donate $10,000 to Long’s campaign and was informed by the campaign that the donation was double the legal limit of $5,000 per individual.
The campaign wrote D’Souza back asking if the donation was from him and his then-wife, and included the necessary papers for an individual donation from both D’Souzas. The papers were completed and returned to the campaign, although Mrs. D’Souza has since informed prosecutors that the donation was made with neither her knowledge nor her consent.
Furthermore, the cuckolded husband of Denise Joseph — D’Souza’s mistress in the affair that ended his marriage and another straw donor to Long’s campaign — made audio recordings in October, 2012 of his wife discussing D’Souza’s plans should he get caught making the illegal donations.
Ms. Joseph told her then-husband that D’Souza planned to plea guilty if caught, but would first plead not guilty in order to make use of the limited window of time he would purportedly have “to get his story out there.” …
Because it’s never about right and wrong, legal or illegal — it’s always about the narrative. Do you suppose the first Mrs. Dinesh and the first Mr. Denise will attend the trial? And if so, will they share a bench in the spectator section, or is it bride’s friends on one side and groom’s on the other?
Open Thread: A Smorgasbord of GOP UglinessPost + Comments (159)
by Betty Cracker| 167 Comments
This post is in: Election 2016, Glibertarianism, Politics, Republican Stupidity, Republican Venality, The Party of Fiscal Responsibility, Assholes, Schadenfreude
I’m not sure tribble-topped presidential aspirant Rand Paul recovers from this:
In a variety of campaign appearances that were captured on video, Paul repeatedly compared Reagan unfavorably to Carter on one of Paul’s top policy priorities: government spending. When Paul was a surrogate speaker for his father, then-Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), during the elder Paul’s 2008 presidential quest, his sales pitch included dumping on Reagan for failing to rein in federal budget deficits. Standing on the back of a truck and addressing the crowd at the Coalition of New Hampshire Taxpayers picnic in July 2007, Rand Paul complained about Reagan and praised his father for having opposed Reagan’s budget…”
David Corn’s Mother Jones article linked above includes six video clips of Baby Doc slagging on Reagan as a spendthrift as the younger Paul campaigned for his daddy. What Paul says about Reagan exploding the debt is all true, of course.
And it’s not wise to underestimate the Republican base’s capacity to ignore facts and focus on shiny objects: That’s how they came to deify the folksy, addled, debt-exploding Z-grade actor as an exemplar of fiscal rectitude in the first place.
But imagine the field day Paul’s primary opponents will have parading this heresy before the cameras at every debate. The message that Reagan actually was a profligate spendthrift won’t sink in, but the fact that Paul unfavorably compared Baby Jeebus Reagan to Satan’s Valet Carter sure will.
by Betty Cracker| 260 Comments
This post is in: Domestic Politics, Open Threads, Politics, Republican Stupidity, Assholes, Flash Mob of Hate, Fools! Overton Window!, General Stupidity, Good News For Conservatives, I Reject Your Reality and Substitute My Own, Our Failed Media Experiment, Peak Wingnut Was a Lie!
Someone crowdfunded a movie (trailer above) about how talk radio crawled inside her father’s brain like one of those hideous sandworms in “Wrath of Khan” and transformed her dad from a mild-mannered Kennedy Democrat into a crabby, resentful, sludge-spewing ditto-head. And then Fox News came along to reinforce his new asshole world view.
The aspiring filmmaker found that many others shared a similar experience. The film will link it back to the source, Roger Ailes, who plays Darth Vader to Rupert Murdoch’s Emperor Palpatine (mixing sci-fi metaphors, but you know what I mean). The film also asks if it’s possible to deprogram individuals who have been brainwashed by Fox.
Anyhoo, TPM has had several posts on the topic, as pointed out by valued commenter JPL. Have you seen the Fox Effect among your friends, relatives and acquaintances?
My dad is a born wingnut — the majority of Southern white males of his generation (born shortly after WW2) are. But Fox has definitely armed him with talking points and reinforced his biases. We get along fine since we have an agreement not to talk politics, but that wasn’t always the case.
Do you think the Fox Effect can be reversed? I have my doubts; I suspect talk radio and Fox just give voice and encouragement to latent assholery rather than creating it from scratch.
This post is in: Election 2016, Excellent Links, Republican Stupidity, Assholes, Decline and Fall
#GOPScamPAC RT @AaronBlakeWP: The Draft Ben Carson super PAC raised $2.4m last quarter. Spent $2.2m on fundraising. http://t.co/mn69shtY2A
— Brad Friedman (@TheBradBlog) April 17, 2014
Jane Goodall explained for us, fifty years ago, how a crafty primate could use the simple tools at hand to increase his noise-producing capacity, and thereby his social dominance in the local tribe. Molly Ball, at the Atlantic, reports on the simple tools heartland patriots of last weekend’s Freedom Summit:
Ted Cruz Is Beating Rand Paul in the Tea Party Primary
… Saturday’s Freedom Summit, billed as an early audition for potential 2016 candidates, provided a rare opportunity for right-wing activists to directly compare the Texan and the Kentuckian. The senators spoke practically back to back, and the crowd clearly loved them both. But Cruz’s theatrical delivery wowed them more than Paul’s comparatively cerebral appeal, and his rhetorical focus on conservative red meat found more favor than Paul’s detours into libertarian concerns….Both headlined weekend events with the New Hampshire Republican Party in addition to appearing at the summit, which was sponsored by Citizens United and Americans for Prosperity. (Yes, the Supreme Court plaintiff that helped deregulate campaign finance and the Koch Brothers’ political nonprofit collaborated—a liberal conspiracy theory come to life.) Cruz finished his speech by asking audience members to subscribe to text-message alerts for his “movement,” a tech-savvy means of building a list of grassroots supporters…
…[T]he decidedly Tea Party crowd also gave a warm welcome to right-wing gadfly Donald Trump and talk-radio host Mike Huckabee, both of whom are also flirting with presidential runs. Potential candidates with more establishment appeal, such as former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, were not on the schedule; Trump castigated Bush for his sympathetic view of illegal immigrants, and multiple speakers, including Cruz, bashed the Common Core educational standards, which Bush vocally supports. Scott Brown, the former Massachusetts senator now running in New Hampshire, also declined to appear at the event…
(Rude aside from a Masshole: Cosmo Boy Brown knows his appeal, such as it is, lies with the ‘moderates’ of what used to be called the Establishment GOP. He’s too lazy to go full-metal anklebiter with the True Believers, especially if he can make just as nice a living touring the country-club luncheons to View with Alarum and deplore the death of bipartisanship, as was in the glory days of Ike and ‘Poppy’ Bush.)
“If you want to grow the movement, we cannot be the party of fat cats, rich people, and Wall Street,” [Paul] said. Paul went on to argue against indefinite detention, to mock Justice Department terrorist profiling, and to argue for more lenient sentences for marijuana dealing—nontraditional conservative subjects that seemed to perplex the audience.
Cruz, on the other hand, told the crowd only what he knew it wanted to hear. His speech, unlike Paul’s, was infused with personality, beginning with cute stories about his young daughters. Of his defiant five-year-old, Caroline, who likes to play a game she calls “attack the Daddy,” he mused that she must be taking her cues from Senate Republican leadership…
I agree that we, as Democrats, should be focused on turnout for our candidates in 2014. But the more noise the biggest fools in the GOP make promoting their wide range of grifters, Talibangelicals, and crazies, the better the contrast we can draw for the proverbial low-information voters this year.
Dominance Displays Among the GOP HardcorePost + Comments (19)
This post is in: Austerity Bombing, Election 2014, Fuck The Poor, Republican Stupidity, Assholes, Blatant Liars and the Lies They Tell, Decline and Fall, General Stupidity
Richard had a happy healthcare reform story earlier. Here’s a sad one.
It’s okay with Florida’s wingnut state legislature if working people die due to lack of healthcare. It’s not that these upstanding Christians actively want folks like 32-year-old mother of three Charlene Dill to collapse and die on a stranger’s floor because she couldn’t afford medication.
It’s just that state-level wingnut legislators need to deny the president a healthcare reform victory at all costs, and Ms. Dill and 17,000 others like her are eggs that had to be broken to whip up a wingnut-tantrum omelet.
So now Ms. Dill’s children will grow up without a mom, and Republicans in the FL legislature can go back to Cockroach Acres and tell their constituents that they bravely stood up to the Kenyan usurper and told him to keep his socialist federal dollars out of Flarda. See? It all evens out.
The wingnut state legislature was abetted in this process by the Roberts Court, which made the Medicaid expansion portion of the ACA optional, leaving Ms. Dill and more than 750K other working Floridians out in the cold and giving wingnut legislatures another hill that the working poor can die on.
Even Rick Scott, who purchased the Florida governorship for $73 million in 2010, knows turning down federal Medicaid expansion dollars is stupid. A crook who used to run a healthcare outfit that famously defrauded the feds, Scott can smell the potential in a fund transfer from a mile off, but he backed down when his fellow tea party loons started screeching about Obummercare.
Bill Nelson, the state’s blue dog US senator, has come up with a novel idea:
For months, Nelson, a Democrat, has sought a way around the opposition while still meeting federal requirements. He thinks he has found it in a never-tried-before plan: Using health care dollars raised by counties to pay the state’s share of the expansion once it is required after the first three years.
“If you really want to get it done, and if your reason for opposing it really was that you didn’t want to commit state tax dollars in the out years to expanding Medicaid, then this is the opportunity to do that,” Nelson said Wednesday.
It’s a good idea, but it won’t work because the state legislature’s approval would still be required. And of course, the state legislators don’t really give a shit about being on the hook for Medicaid expansion down the road.
It’s all about defining themselves as staunch opponents of Obamacare at the next Kumquat Festival event. So more people will die. The real death panel decrees it.
This post is in: Open Threads, Republican Stupidity, Assholes, Romney of the Uncanny Valley
Hey @SenatorReid here's a shot of @MittRomney paying taxes. Does it every year. It's how you get your paycheck. pic.twitter.com/DwSMXzYhuR
— Josh Romney (@joshromney) April 15, 2014
Via NYMag:
… On Tuesday evening, Josh Romney tweeted this… It’s a sick burn (well, for a Romney) but it does raise some questions. Why doesn’t Romney e-file? Did he wait until April 15 to mail his tax forms? Can’t he pay someone to go to the post office for him? Check back in 2016 for Josh’s explanation.
So I guess if the lads can’t nag the ol’ man back into the presidential-primary arena next year, young Josh may just have to step up and show us peons How It Is Done. Third generation’s the charm, you guys!
Mandatory TBogg links:
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Apart from contemplating whether enjoying the Romney trust fund lifestyle would be worth growing up with Willard as your dad, what’s on the agenda for the evening?
Wednesday Evening Open Thread: Still Bitter!Post + Comments (116)