“That was my brother’s death you were cheering, you a$$holes” September 15, 2011

 

Required reading at Daily Kos

When finished you may go out and kick the shit out of any Tea Bagger you find. Don’t worry, you won’t hurt them: they have neither brains nor hearts, and whatever spark of humanity they may have is dedicated to destroying what’s left of democracy, freedom, human decency, and educated intelligence in the United States.

Note the really key comment in the article, that of the eight Republican assholes on stage, all of whom want to be President of the United States, not one objected to the cheers of the audience, an audience comprising your friends and neighbors and relatives who want sick people without insurance to suffer and die.

Listen hard, people, because these sick motherfuckers are all around you.

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Who Is Barack Obama? September 14, 2011

President Obama likes to think he models himself after Abraham Lincoln in the way he operates in government.

I think it has become apparent that Mr. Obama’s heart and soul and actions are modeled strictly on Neville Chamberlain at Munich.

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The Crimes of Bushbama… Ongoing September 11, 2011

Matthew Rothschild has a long piece at The Progressive site on President Obama’s continuation and intensification of American policies that threaten citizens of the United States, of any country the President deems a problem, and that threaten to bring down United States democracy itself. His lead…

On this tenth anniversary of 9/11, let’s face facts: The United States is a more repressive place to live in, and it conducts itself in a more lawless manner overseas. The edifice of repression that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney erected after 9/11, far from being dismantled by Barack Obama, has actually been buttressed. And he’s even added a couple of new floors. We are not the same nation we were ten yeas ago. We are less free. We are more bellicose. And our leaders have put in place mechanisms that future Presidents may use to utterly destroy our democracy.

And then the ugliness begins.

Worth reading.

(You don’t really believe the United States stopped torturing its prisoners just because the President said so, do you?)

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Rick Perry: Liar, Hypocrite, Welfare Queen September 7, 2011

The Republican darling from Texas who wants to gather to himself all the perks of the White House and will tell any lie and live any hypocrisy to get him there, and has for all his life taken every taxpayer dollar he can get his grubby hands on, is taken apart by Jim Hightower in this piece over at Common Dreams.

A taste:

Worse, probe even a millimeter into the million-jobs number that he is sprinkling around like fairy dust, and you’ll learn that Perry’s jobs are mostly "jobettes" that can’t sustain a family. They come with very low pay, no health care or pension, and no employment security, labor rights or upward mobility — many are only part-time and/or temporary positions.

Here’s a particularly revealing stat that the Perry pixies don’t want us to see: On his watch as governor, Texas added more minimum wage jobs than all the other 49 states combined. More than half a million Texans now work for $7.25 an hour or less. He can brag that he’s brought Texans down into a tie with Mississippi for the highest percentage of workers reduced to poverty pay.

And Hightower notes that Perry has spent pretty much his entire life sucking at the public teat.

So when this taxpayer-supported lifer flits into your town to declare that he will slash public benefits and make government "as inconsequential as possible," he means in your life, not his.

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John Judis: Republicans Are Insurrectionists September 6, 2011

Over at The New Republic John Judis has called out the Republicans for what they are, and it ain’t pretty. The remarks come in the midst of an analysis of President Obama’s confusion about what comprises courage and what comprises compromise. It should be obvious by now to anyone with three live brain cells that Obama lacks courage and has no clue about the skills of compromise. But on the Republicans, here’s Judis:

Over the last four decades, the Republican Party has transformed from a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the minority. It is the party of Watergate and Iran-Contra, but also of the government shutdown in 1995 and the impeachment trial of 1999. If there is an earlier American precedent for today’s Republican Party, it is the antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened to nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to, and who later led the fight to secede from the union over slavery.

Today, Republicans are threatening a government shutdown and an international monetary crisis over raising the debt ceiling. They have demanded a set of ruinous concessions as a condition for raising the ceiling. These conditions would include draconian budget cuts at a time when economic growth has virtually stalled—it grew a mere 0.9 percent the first half of this year—because of the exhaustion of the 2009-10 government stimulus. To gain Tea Party votes, House Speaker John Boehner set another condition for raising the debt ceiling again in six months: the passage by the House and Senate of a constitutional amendment to balance the budget. An amendment of this kind would make it impossible for the federal government to reverse economic downturns. The Republicans are, in effect, demanding a major constitutional change in return for not shutting down the government and undermining the American economy. That’s insurrectionary behavior.

No argument here. The Republicans are elitist scum, out to destroy the country for no reason other than to feather their own nest. Too bad they don’t understand that they’re crapping in their own nest too.

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The Raw, Beating Heart of Republican and Tea Party ‘Philosophy’: It’s Ugly, Really Ugly September 2, 2011

Over at a site called American Thinker, which might be considered an oxymoronic title given the piece of conservative ‘thought’ that appears there under the byline of a particularly ugly piece of work called Matthew Vadum, you can find the following lead to Mr. Vadum’s article:

Why are left-wing activist groups so keen on registering the poor to vote?

Because they know the poor can be counted on to vote themselves more benefits by electing redistributionist politicians.  Welfare recipients are particularly open to demagoguery and bribery.

Registering them to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals.  It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country — which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote.

That’s where the Vadums and the Perrys and the Pauls and the Bachmanns and the rest of the whole raft of Republican sociopaths want to take us, into the land of hating the poor and the minorities, into the land of superior beings (wealthy Republicans and Tea Partiers) and inferior beings (everybody else).

Vadum represents those people who would actually put Granny before a death panel and shove her under the bus if she were poor or brown or disabled or in some way needful of help from society. Or perhaps more likely they wouldn’t even bother with death panels, considering them an unnecessary expenditure of money that could be better spent on champagne, caviar, and expensive whores (inferior women, of course, but useful). No, they’d just let the old broad die in the gutter, her pain felt by no one, her cries unheard by her country, her government, or her moral and financial superiors.

Their only measure of man is money.

In their world the ugliest minds and the dirtiest souls will rule. The world has been there before, far too often. The Republicans hunger for it, thirst for it, lust for it, can neither see nor imagine a world that rises above their filthy vision of humanity.

The Vadums of this country are evidence of how small, how tiny and mean, how ugly the American spirit has become. And evidence that it’s getting smaller and uglier every day.

High Tech And The Brits September 1, 2011

A bit of British humor… My Blackberry Is Not Working

(A tip of the hat to my friend John out in haboob country.)