Teabaggers are safe from zombies!

A tip o' the Brain to Being Liberal.

Quote of the Day

Paul Krugman

And Republicans still dream of dismantling Medicare as we know it, instead giving seniors vouchers to buy private insurance. In effect, although they never say this, they want to convert Medicare into Obamacare.

Heh. Somebody oughta 'splain "irony" to those clowns, not that they'd get it.

Crashing Glitching Bores

Will Durst on the Obamacare rollout mess hearings.

The sight of these grandfatherly types who couldn't tell a glitch from a Sneetch pretending to speak conversantly about something they have the same familiarity with as a calico cat does with calculus makes keeping a straight face difficult. Especially considering their extreme remonstrations of concern, which sound similar to cobras worrying that the mouse door is often unlocked.

Thing is, they're perfectly right. The rollout went less smooth than a 40 foot square steel donut rumbling down a pressed tin bridge. Democrats agree the website technology for Obamacare is so outdated it looks like Health and Human Services rescued it from Compuserve's trash using a dial-up modem. There are at least six or 17 areas of this country where a class of fifth graders could have constructed a more navigable site during study hall.

The ultimate techie nightmare. More crashes than Windows Vista through 27 stories of skylights. A health care portal with all the compassion and efficiency of the DMV. Coming soon: leeches. Although many claim that plenty of licensed barbers are already caucusing with the House majority. Face it, if the government created the Cloud, it would be called the Smog and leak antifreeze.
...

But by focusing their attention on the website, the GOP seems to be signaling they've accepted Obamacare, at least in theory. After trying to repeal it 50 times then shutting down the government in an attempt to defund it, they are finally, reluctantly, on board. And just want to straighten things out by letting the American people know this is the worst legislation in the history of ever.

In other words, they've graduated to complaining about the choice of the font on the menu and not the ingredients of the feast.

More.

If ya can't beat 'em, threaten 'em

From Kos in toto.

The teabagger core argument: Takers, makers and the violent end of democracy

Yeah, this is a mid-week nutpick, but it's a nutpick with a mission: To help explain the current conservative mindset.

It's a comment on a thread on Breitbart which is literally trying to unskew yesterday's Washington Post poll of the Virginia governor's race.

A veteran Virginia pollster, Breitbart News has learned, this the results of the poll are "at least" 6 points off, and notes that the Post polls ordinarily overestimate Democrat performance in the Commonwealth.

Ha ha ha! I never tire of the unskewers! But that's not what I want to focus on. Rather, it's this comment:

no amount of economic or cultural chaos and disaster will ever incite those people to turn on their democrat masters. However, considering Obamacare's devastation..should Virginia choose to drink the kool-aid too...and elect McAuliffe ...it will all but convince me that the country has totally surrendered to a communist future....and there won't be any turning the tide in 2014....

There are simply too many takers extracting from a shrinking class of makers in this country. The intricate web of taxation and regulation has imprisoned the economy....guaranteeing that the Cloward and Piven blueprint will succeed.

After that...it could be anarchy....insurrection...or revolution.....who knows?

The entire conservative mindset is encapsulated in those three short paragraphs—the sense that everything has gone to shit, but people stick with Democrats because they're takers while conservatives are makers, and that if it continues much longer ... violence! All wrapped up in a nice bundle of f'd up punctuation. (At least it was run through a spell checker.)

That whole "makers" vs "takers" was the basis of Mitt Romney's 47 percent nonsense. And it's also the modern formulation of the racists' lament, in case you were wondering why race was missing in the comment above. It's not good white people doing the taking, you know?

But that comment also hints at the desperation and resignation coursing through today's conservatives: The notion that they've lost the battle. Sure, 2008 and 2012 were big blows, but they were softened by 2010's GOP wave. They want to believe those two presidential years were anomalies, but they know better. Once Virginia goes Blue, bucking a 40-year trend in which the party in the White House lost the governor's race, it'll confirm their worst fears. They will have lost the country and 2014 will only ratify the nation's new direction.

Thus, the final appeal to violence—because if democracy fails them, then what is left? The question will be whether that violence will remain a fantasy as they politically disengage, or whether they'll begin to act on it.

The "skewed" polls show the top three spots - gov, lt gov, and AG - in VA will go to Dems. I certainly hope so. The Repug candidates are fucking crazy. Why is Breitfart trying to gin up violence?

Other than it's Breitbart (he's still dead), because the 'baggers/wingnuts/fundies/haters are starting to lose big time and they're sore losers and whiny little bitches. They talk a big game, but they're all flaps and no throttle and when all is said and done, more will have been said than done, as usual.

GOP Still Worried About "Those People"

Paul Krugman

Lots of commentators have been referencing a report from Democracy Corps about focus-group meetings with Republicans, and with good reason: Stanley Greenberg, the organization's co-founder, has basically provided a unified theory of the craziness that has enveloped American politics in the last few years.

What the report makes clear is that the current Republican obsession with attacking programs that benefit Americans in need, ranging from food stamps to health care reform, isn't about some philosophical commitment to small government. It's about anxiety over a changing America - the multiracial, multicultural society we're becoming - and anger that Democrats are taking Their Money and giving it to Those People. In other words, it's still race after all these years.

One irony here is that at this point it's the liberals who believe in America, while the conservatives don't (my em). I believe in our ability to change while retaining our essential nature; I believe that today's immigrants will be incorporated into the fabric of our society, just as Italian and Jewish immigrants - once regarded as fundamentally incompatible with American ways - became "white" by the middle of the 20th century.

Another irony is that the great right-wing fear that social insurance programs will in effect buy minority votes for Democrats, leading to further change, is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. The G.O.P. could have tried to reach out to immigrants, moderated its stances on Obamacare, and staked out a position as the restrained, sensible party. Instead, it's alienating all the people it needs to win over, and quite possibly setting the stage for the very liberal dominance it fears.

Good.

Headline and Quote of the Day

Britney Spears's Music Is Used to Fight Off Somali Pirates (Stop Laughing)

“I’d imagine using Justin Bieber would be against the Geneva Convention.” Heh.

Heh.

Dark Money Kochsuckers pay fine

ProPublica. Much more and many links at site

Two dark money groups linked to conservative billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch have paid a record $1 million in fines to California to settle allegations that the combined $15 million they spent on two ballot proposals in the state was not properly disclosed.

The civil settlement, announced Thursday afternoon in Sacramento, caps a year of investigation into the activities of the two Arizona groups, Americans for Responsible Leadership and the Center to Protect Patient Rights.
...

“What is the takeaway from this trail of dark money?” asked Ann Ravel, the outgoing head of California’s Fair Political Practices Commission, which investigated the groups along with the state attorney general’s office. “This is a nationwide issue. These groups exploit loopholes in the law to undermine the clear purpose of the law, to give essential information to the public.”
...

Anonymous money funneled through social welfare nonprofits and trade associations has become a major factor in federal elections since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in early 2010 opened up the door to unlimited corporate and union spending on outside ads, as documented by ProPublica. In the past two election cycles, social welfare nonprofits have spent more than $350 million, mostly from unknown donors, on election ads telling people to vote for or against federal candidates.

"Social welfare non-profits" my ass. That's a carefully engineered loophole you can drive an aircraft carrier through. More like a container ship fulla Benjamins.

And while the groups have been linked to the Koch brothers, it’s not clear how exactly they’re connected. The Center to Protect Patient Rights, which operates out of a post office box in Arizona and doesn’t even have a website, has been described practically like an ATM machine for various groups affiliated with the Koch brothers. The press release issued by California authorities says the Center and Americans for Responsible Leadership “operated as part of the ‘Koch Brothers Network’ of dark money political nonprofit corporations.”

The Kochs have long been known for spending millions to influence elections behind the scenes, through a complex network of groups that critics have nicknamed “the Kochtopus.” The Kochs themselves have remained determinedly in the background.
...

The fine is the largest in California history in a campaign-finance case.

The manner in which the groups paid it speaks volumes about how dark their money really is.

They paid by cashier’s check, sent by a Sacramento lawyer’s office Thursday morning, betraying no clue to the money’s origin.

They paid the fine, chump change to them, and we still don't know who they are.

This shit has to stop, but as long as we have a right-wing SCOTUS it will not.

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

Iran Removes Anti-American Posters as Western Nuke Talks Loom
“Death to Satan” replaced by “Welcome Satan.”

7-Eleven Begins Offering Premium Wines
To wash down those Slim Jims.

Not to worry. They still have cheap vodka.

Cop That Pepper-Sprayed Students Awarded $38,000 for Psychiatric Damage
Cops that beat the crap out of Rodney King hire a lawyer.

New Theory: Earliest Cave Paintings May Have Been by Women
Experts cite dearth of pornography.

Airlines Shrink Size of Seats, Add More of Them in Economy
Hoping to eventually break our will and force us to upgrade to business.

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

This is a little different!

Thanks to ajack2boys.

Why Poor Whites in Red-States Vote Against Their Interest

via Occupy Democrats.

In what is quite possibly the most powerful, insightful, and concise answer to the age-old question of why poor whites residing in red-states always vote against their own best interest, Michael Eric Dyson hits the nail right on the head and gives some powerful advice to these red-state voters.

In this powerful 90-second response to a viewer’s question, Dyson doesn’t attack nor belittle these white voters, but he does provide a very powerful example given by the Rev. Martin Luther King that shows why these voters living in red-states would be much better served by joining in solidarity with other poor Americans of every color in fighting for better wages, a fairer economy, healthcare for the poor, and the stemming of growing socioeconomic inequality.

It's too bad most of the poor people in red states won't see this on FOXNoise.

Headline of the Day

Democrat Blasts GOP’s Obamacare Hearing: ‘I Will Not Yield To This Monkey Court’

And a phrase is coined!

This cocaine tastes like Oreos

If it's Wednesday it must be Morford on corporate scientific engineering of addiction.

Then came a flawless little orgasm of a headline, a pitch-perfect, viral-ready soundbite of awesomeness packed with all the keywords Americans love most – Drugs! Cocaine! Oreo cookies! You! Rats! Addiction! Obamacare! Sex! – all about this cute little study that reveals how it lab rats, not all that surprisingly, love those famous, chocolatey discs of sugar and lard just as much as they love cocaine, and btw just kidding about the Obamacare and the sex. Sort of.
...

OMG, Oreos! Right? Tasty and barely digestible wheels of refined sugar, lard, chemicals and $20 billion/100 years of slightly evil marketing? And cocaine! Popular and cheaper-than-ever whiffs of refined coca plant, $1 trillion in completely failed drug war and absolutely zero marketing required, ever? Perfect.

You're on your own. I'm gettin' the munchies. Gotta go chop up an Oreo or ten and line 'em out...

We won't hit ourselves in the ass with the door on the way out...

Let the Dysfunctional Plantation-Based Red States Secede

I've got no problem with this. If we learned anything from last time, it's that you can't fix stupid. Better to let 'em go than fight to keep them.

Simply put, the Tea Party represents the 21st century rebirth of angry 19th century white male Confederates who wanted to secede from the United States and start their own dysfunctional country based on a plantation economy.

Maybe we should let them.

That was the slow pitch. Now for the fast curve:

And while we’re at it, let’s make it easier for Ted Cruz, Michelle Bachmann and the rest of their Tea Party friends to start their own plantation-economy style country, by starting a secessionist movement of our own in the “blue” states.

The idea of northern industrialized states seceding from America is nothing new.

Bada bing! If they won't secede, and they won't because they like our money too much, maybe we should.

It’s time for a new Hartford Convention.

So what would an America free of Southern lunacy and Tea Party radicalism look like?

Long list follows.

And, the Medicare eligibility age would be lowered to the moment birth, giving us a national single-payer healthcare system.

When this is accomplished, America will reflect a 21st century version of the ideals and visions of the Founders.

If it takes a secession of “blue” America to achieve all of this, then so be it.

It’s time to let small-minded bigots go back to their plantation-style economies and let them run their states like third-world countries.

Maybe instead of us seceding, we oughta just throw their ignorant racist asses out. It would be a grand experiment during which we would prosper from not sending more tax money to the moocher states than they pay in, and it would be over as soon as the people started to starve and begged to be let back in. Maybe, just maybe, they'd figure out the world doesn't work now the way it did 200 years ago and develop a little humility. I'd be happy if they'd just STFU. Ah, never happen.

Ever the optimist, I'm going to invest in chain link fence, barbed wire, and land mine companies. Might as well make a little money from the border fence that keeps sane people out of crazyland or the other way 'round. It'll be a long one.

Grrrr...

HuffPo

A senior official from former President George W. Bush's administration is quoted in “Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House” saying American troops went into Iraq because the U.S. was looking for a fight.

"The only reason we went into Iraq, I tell people now, is we were looking for somebody’s ass to kick. Afghanistan was too easy," the anonymous official said, according to Politico.

Afghanistan didn't have any oil, either.

Nice going, Dumya and The Dick. The ass "you" ended up kicking was OURS. Bastards.

Headline of the Day

From Red To Blue — Why the House Will Absolutely Change Hands Next Year

I don't really much care why as long as it does.

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

Violin Played by Titanic's Bandleader as Ship Went Down Auctioned Off
Winning bid made by Ted Cruz.

Fitting - the fiddle is known as "the devil's instrument":

Some conservative Christian denominations condemned dancing -- along with card playing and drinking -- as sinful and Satan-inspired. But listening to a good dance fiddler, even conservative Christians were apt to find themselves irresistibly lured into tapping their feet or moving to the music. The hypnotic and seductive lure of good fiddle music makes it a tool of the Devil.

Post Shutdown, Democrats Choose New Slogan for 2014 Elections
“Not Crazy.”

Michelle Bachman: We're in God's End Times
Offers herself as evidence.

Physics Nobel Prize-Winner Peter Higgs Doesn't Own Computer or Cell Phone
Was informed of his win by owl.

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

Marty Stuart on mandolin

Thanks to 1000Magicians, UK.

Wrecking Ball

Put down your drink! Ya might wanta hold off on lunch for a little while too...

If this goes viral, there won't be enough bleach in the WORLD!

On the flip side, I'm beginning to like Miley Cyrus.

Thanks to American Family Voices.

"48 Solyndras"

Thanks to oldfartrants.

Transcript:

The so called party of fiscal responsibility just wasted the equivalent of 48 Solyndras in taxpayer dollars in just 2 weeks! According to ratings agency Standard & Poor's, the shutdown cost $2 billion in real money, and over $24 billion in lost economic activity - which makes the $60 million Republicans wasted trying to repeal Obamacare over 40 times knowing it was impossible look like peanuts! To the GOP and fleabagger Bible thumpers, wasting billions of dollars on political stunts that have no chance of working over ideology and pride is more obviously more important than stopping starvation in America. And based on putting on a show about their hatred for Obamacare and Obama, they had no problem throwing millions of people under the bus, closing down services which millions of people depend on, and making the United States the laughing stock of the world, again, and a bad credit risk - again! This whole thing was over nothing! They could have done the deal they ended up doing 2 weeks ago - all John Boehner had to do was call a vote - but the Tea Party had him by the balls. So every dollar lost and bit of blame for this fiasco is on the heads of John Boehner, and the Republicans and teabaggers in his house. Approval for the GOP is at the lowest level in history! Every single poll proves it. When they say they're listening to the American people they're lying through their teeth, and always have been -- and anybody who believes it is an idiot! Stupidity is a bigger threat to America than terrorism is. Stupid people elect stupid leaders. What we just saw was an attempted coup by a handful of fascist billionaires who not only tricked a bunch of gullible idiots into voting against their own best interest, they actually infiltrated the US Government with anarchists, and they actually took down the government -- for awhile! This should scare the living shit out of everybody. Thomas Jefferson said "people get the government they deserve." I beg to differ - we deserve a lot better than this. And this is not what the majority of people in America voted for. We have elections for a reason. Well let me tell you something righties - we're coming for you, you treasonous fucks, we're coming in 2014, and again in 2016. But just keep doing what you're doing - it's working just fine... for us ;)

Lunch is served!

Bwahahahaha! Enjoy, bitchez!

A tip o' the Brain to the Brain's Facebook page. It's confusing...

The Sabotage Of American Democracy

Andrew Sullivan

What the Tea Party represents, in stark contrast to conservatism, is a radical attack on the very framework of our governing system. It is not right or left within our democratic system. It is a form of secession from it and a de facto abandonment of the notion of one country under one rule of law. It is about sabotage rather than opposition. It is bad enough when one party will seek to sabotage the law of the land – by attempting to rally the public to spurn the new healthcare law, in the hopes of causing it to collapse. But when the dominant faction of one party is bent on sabotaging our democracy, it must not simply be tolerated or appeased the way John Boehner shamefully did. It must be defeated. Anything less is a form of appeasement of forces and ideas that are truly antithetical to the democratic way of life and to constitutional governance.

Yes, in my view, the situation is that grim. If the Republican right’s fanaticism still blinds them to the error of their ways after they nearly destroyed the global economy (and brutally damaged the American one), it becomes clear that only a total collapse of the American government and economy could truly teach them the futility of their deluded aspirations. The rest of us cannot and must not tolerate that. We must draw a line. That line, for those who still believe in the regular order of our democracy, is November 2014.

Priority 1 in '14.

You are all completely insufferable

No, not you...

There's a lot going on today. Needs some time to settle out. Shorter: we're winning.

I almost forgot that if it's Morford it must be Wednesday. Here young Mark goes on about the Dark Side of the interwebs.

Ah, the Internet. It’s an equal opportunity debaser.

Hate and meanness, you could say, have reached epidemic levels, seem to have poisoned the national dialogue in ways we’ve never seen before. Witness Congress, the modern GOP and its own pet hate group, the Tea Party, contaminating the US government with an open loathing for the black president so virulent and barefaced, they’re willing to shut down the government, default our national debt, and destroy lives of their own constituents to prove it. Now that’s commitment.

It wasn’t always like this. Sure, we’ve always detested various groups for no valid reason; our prejudices and intolerance for race, gender and nationality are legendary. But America used to be all about broad areas of hate, wide swaths of intolerance: your tribe, your silly god, your heritage, your idiotic national sport. The French! Blacks! Chinese and Jews and the Irish! Gays, New Yorkers, Russians! Feminists who hate love and God and men! My team of violent helmeted thugs is better than your team of violent helmeted thugs, and I’ll shoot you dead and riot in the streets to prove it! See? Easy.
...

And then there’s anonymous commenting. That one gets my vote – and I’m far from alone – for Worst Invention of the Millennia; few things have done more to destroy healthy, intellectual dialogue than allowing anyone to say whatever they want about any topic, news story or piece of journalism without recourse, without any real knowledge of the subject, without putting their real name, face, or email address to their sneer. The consensus is universal: Anonymous commenting encourages the very worst, lowest aspects of the human animal.

Yes, please sign a name or be anonymously ignored.

But I have to say, there is a key distinction to be made between pointed satire/cultural criticism, and straight-up meanness for its own sake, just to get attention, just to hear itself scream and draw more bloody hate into the fray. Not surprisingly, this distinction is completely lost on those who think things like higher education, science and books are for elitist jerks.

Harrumph. At least us elitist jerks are smarter than them ignoramus jerks.

I'm going dark 'til tomorrow unless something breaks that's wonderful enough I need to tell you about. See yas.

Just for fun

Constitutional scholar Sarah Palin explains complicated Constitutional law words to you

Neverending punchline and holder of the Bump-it Industries Constitutional Law Chair at Mat-Su GED’s-r-Us University takes time out from palling around with Canadian terrorists to explain to America that that there Obammer fella is cruisin’ for an impeachable bruisin’ if he doesn’t pay America’s bills the way the Founding Fathers and Jesus would want him to:

(Note: this is also a drinking game. Every time Palin writes the word “debt”: drink a Bartles & Jaymes. But if you wake up tomorrow and find yourself to be a knocked-up-teenager, it’s your own damn fault. Whore.)

I’m sorry. Where were we? Oh yes, Prof. Dr. Palin, please proceed:

Go.

The worm turns...

The funniest thing to me about the teatard rally at the White House is, for the first time in my memory, it was old white right-wingers calling the cops who were there - without pay - to preserve order tools of the establishment instead of young lefties. Probably old law-and-order racist voters too. Also probably the first time they weren't cheering the cops on to whup up on the demonstrators as well.

I see yer deuce-high and raise ya...

I like Eugene Robinson, but he's usually a little too mild for me. He's upped his game some in this piece.

A crazy thing is happening in shuttered, dysfunctional Washington: Democrats are pushing back.

This phenomenon is so novel and disorienting that many Republicans in Congress, especially the tea party bullies, seem unable to grasp what’s going on. They keep expecting President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to fold like a cheap suit because, well, such a thing has happened before. I guess it’s understandable that the GOP might have forgotten the difference between bluffing and actually holding a winning hand.

Dems are famous for caving and snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Not this time, and it's about goddam time. Will they hold? We will see.

It is understandable that the activist Republican base might think victory through blackmail is the natural order of things. It’s not. It’s a distortion of American democracy that weakens the nation, and it has to end.

I'm looking at this less like a poker game and more like finally confronting the schoolyard bully. I hope the Dems don't think a bitch slap will do the trick. He needs to be left prone, bleeding and crying.

Update:

Bobby Reich makes my point:

Suddenly the Republicans are acting like the school-yard bully who terrorized the playground but finally got punched in the face. They’re in shock. They’re humiliated. They’re trying to come up with ways of saving face.

With bloodied nose, House Republicans are running home. They’ve abruptly turned negotiations over to their Senate colleagues.
...

The question is how thoroughly President Obama has learned that extortionist demands escalate if you give in to them.

We will see.

Headline of the Day

Read This One Document If You Want To Understand Why Republicans Followed Ted Cruz Off A Cliff

I may just wait until I can go stand on the edge and piss on the pile of 'em...

Oh, the irony...

I need some comic relief. Ironic Times.

GOP Confused, Divided About Why It Shut Down Government, What It Wants
As predicted in Revelations.

REMINDER
There's no such thing as a free credit score.

Actually, there is: AnnualCreditReport.com

More Drama in NYC Motorcycle Melee
Everyone involved was an undercover cop.

Now that's undercover work!

Weighing Campaign Finance Law, Scalia Says, “I Don't Think $3.5 Million is a Heck of a Lot of Money”
Barely enough to buy a Congressman.

Scalia Says He Believes in the Devil
Consults him regularly.

Easy. Ol' Scratch shares a phone number with the Koch bros on Fat Tony's speed dial.

Hanukkah, Thanksgiving Fall On Same Day for Last Time In Nearly 80,000 Years
Providing extremely rare eight days of indigestion.

Burrrrrp....

"Let's go wave the slave flag in front of a black guy's house! That'll show 'em!"

10/16 - Thanks to Crooks and Liars for the link!

The Confederate Flag Won't Help Conservatives Win the Shutdown

Someone actually thought it was a good idea to bring a Confederate flag to protests at the White House, ones attended by Sarah Palin and Ted Cruz. Shockingly the flag's presence is backfiring for conservatives who hoped today's protests would be the big momentum turn in their favor.
...

Never mind the horrible polling numbers that show Republicans taking a huge hit for the shutdown. At their big turnaround effort to win public opinion, the Confederate flag reared its ugly head and undid any progress or good will they hoped to earn on Sunday. Many were quick to explain just how terribly, impossibly bad this looks for Republicans:

A tweet:

Good for the media. They've finally found the grand mastermind of all conservative politics: some random jackass with a Confederate flag.

Typically representative, I would say.

The secesh, aka "the losers", slave flag is reviled by MOST of this country. If brains were dynamite, the teatards couldn't blow their nose.

The asshole in the center is disgracing MY Marine Corps flag. It needs to be properly disposed of by burning. With him wrapped in it if it was up to me. The goddam slave flag needs to be properly pissed on. Who the fuck do these clowns think they are, anyway? Good Americans? My ass.

If ya can't fix 'em, fuck 'em

This is unconscionable and needs to stop toot de fuckin' sweet. Dopin' 'em up rather than spending money and time on 'em is no way to treat Veterans or anybody.

VA doctors tell House lawmakers of pressure to prescribe veterans opiates

Department of Veterans Affairs physicians told a House subcommittee today that hospital administrators regularly pressured them to prescribe highly addictive narcotic painkillers to patients, even those they had not personally examined.

The hearing marked the first time VA officials have spoken publicly about the skyrocketing number of painkiller prescriptions since The Center for Investigative Reporting revealed the trend last month.

“There are multiple instances when I have been coerced or even ordered to write for Schedule II narcotics when it was against my medical judgment,” said Dr. Pamela Gray, a physician who formerly worked at the VA hospital in Hampton, Va.

Primary care doctors who don’t want to prescribe large amounts of opiates may resign, do as they are told or be terminated, Gray said. Gray was fired.
...

CIR found that VA scientists have known for two years that the fatal overdose rate among the agency’s patients is nearly double the national average. Since then, CIR’s analysis showed, the rate of opiate prescriptions has continued to rise.
...

Veterans told lawmakers that alternative treatments to opiates existed only on paper and that they find it very difficult to get medical care that goes beyond powerful medication.

Please read the rest. This is disgusting.

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

Emmylou Harris is joined by Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings for a live version of "Your Long Journey" from an event in 2012.

Thanks to AlsoTakenAlso, UK.

A Message To House Republicans From Guy Fawkes

Goblinbooks

I know what you're going through, people. I've been there. I don't want to brag, but government shutdowns are kind of my thing.

You get a great idea to reform the whole system. Radical? Sure, maybe. "But damnit," you think, "It's got to be done."

And then the whole thing collapses. Someone exposes your role in the plot, and suddenly everyone thinks you're the Bad Guys. Yeesh.
...

You might not get elected to the big offices (and I'm leaning heavily on the word "might," here)... but people will respect you for being true to yourselves.

This isn't Obama's shutdown. It's not a Democratic shutdown. It's your shutdown, and by God, you'd do so much more if you could only get away with it. Because you really believe you're right and everyone else is a socialist who hates this country, don't you? Yes, you do. Let the world know it.

You need to let that freak flag fly, kids. You're going to shock and disgust plenty of people, sure. But in a few hundred years, you will inspire generations of fringe activists and kids who want to piss off their parents. Ted Cruz's pasty mug on thousands of masks in the streets. Can't you see it? It will be magical.

Heh. Dark magic.

Be careful what you wish for...

The Kochs Can't Control the Monster They Created

The billionaire conservatives join the ranks of business interests trying to rein in the populist right, but they're no longer in a position to dictate to the movement.

When it finally penetrates the teabaggers' thick skulls how bad the Kochs et al punk'd 'em, the billionaires who started all this shit will be begging for Obama to send 'em to Gitmo where they'll be safe. Heh.

Gotta get a bumpersticker like this...

Help Wendy Davis fuck some shit up

El Rude-o is soliciting donations for Wendy Davis for Governor of Texass. He doesn't usually do this.

Davis is gonna need all the help she can get. Texas is one of the nation's breeding grounds for dumbfucks who want to turn the clock back to 1950something. But it'd be worth it to start to wreck the Republican machine that has dominated Texas for a generation. It'd be worth it to make Rick Perry and Ted Cruz cry. And it'd be worth it because you know that Ann Richards and Molly Ivins would be behind her with all the intensity and cutting wit they could muster.

Let's help her fuck some shit up.

Fuckin' A. We'll kick down.

Shortcut

Note to Repugs: Why bother with voter suppression? Just do it this way:

Azerbaijan released election results before voting had even started

Supply-Side Jesus and the Death of Shame

William Rivers Pitt. This is a good one!

The single greatest political strength of the modern Republican Party is their utter and complete lack of shame. They will say anything - literally anything, no matter how delusional or self-contradictory - if it gets them what they want, or at least deranges the political debate in America enough to keep the other side from getting what it wants.

I have written or spoken those words more than a thousand times in the last twenty years. It is a bedrock principle for me, one of the core underpinnings of my political world view. It has been true ever since the rise of Ronald Reagan and the injection of Supply-Side-Jesus evangelical Christianity (Video by Al Franken - G) into electoral politics and fundamental American economics. Every time I say it, and every time I write it, it is truer than it was the last time.

Case in point: on Tuesday afternoon, following President Obama's press conference regarding the shutdown, House Speaker John Boehner called a presser of his own to push the GOP's galactically shameless dialogue pivot about how the shutdown never had anything to do with defunding the Affordable Care Act, but has actually been about the debt and the deficit and the future of our children and stuff.

No, really, he said that... [...]

I just love this next ¶:

And while all this fuss and feathers was taking place, this: Senator Ted Cruz, who with each passing day appears more and more to be the likely product of a test-tube combination between a dented egg from Phyllis Schlafly and the weakest sperm Joe McCarthy ever produced, hates the very idea of socialized medicine. He did that little faux-filibuster to tell you about it. He has aired ten billion commercials about it. He has raised all kinds of money railing against it. He geeked up the House Tea Party caucus to fly face-first into a windshield because of it.

Yet the veterans are still getting screwed, the dead soldiers are getting doubly screwed, and all by the same pack of brazen liars who trumpet their love of the military after pouring body after body after body into the meat grinders of Iraq and Afghanistan. The amoeba in the mud puddle knows those were Republican wars, the soldiers and veterans know it for damn sure, and the American people know it, too...and now that this glad-handing pack of conservative hucksters with flags on their lapels and "Support The Troops" on their lips have gutted the basic services provided to those troops and veterans, a lot of scales are falling from a lot of eyes.

Veterans benefits offices are closing. Veteran's benefits are on the verge of ending, and until the Fisher House Foundation stepped in, the families of soldiers killed in the line of duty were well and truly screwed...but the posh, exclusive gyms for members of Congress that are funded with taxpayer dollars remain open, thanks to a word from Speaker Boehner, because they are "essential."
...

President Obama and the Democrats in Congress, to their great credit, have held the line. No "Grand Bargain," no deals of any kind. Pass a clean CR, raise the debt ceiling, period, end of file. Nothing, but nothing, is more important than standing firm on this, because hostage politics must end.

In the meantime, let their lack of shame do its brutal, corrosive work on the hull of the death ship that is the Republican Party. They are taking on water and listing badly. Let them sink, and let us finally bury Supply-Side Jesus and all his adherents under fathomless fathoms of cold, dark water.

Amen.

Headline of the Day

GOPers willing to lose House in losing bid to kill Obamacare

We're more than willing to help.

How to get lucky

If it's Wednesday it must be Morford on why some people are lucky and some people aren't.

See? Obvious. But there’s a catch: Despite its simplicity, it’s not at all easy to change modes and switch that luck energy on. After all, misery is addictive. Millions of people are deeply attached to their suffering, their haphazard convictions, their inability to see how their own nervous monofocus and attachment to particular goals or obsessive desires might be blocking out all manner of opportunity right here and now, in the white-hot immediate moment.
...

Can we extend this a little? Can we say, with reasonable seriousness, that this is perhaps a fundamental difference between the progressive and conservative mindsets? Open-minded, flexible and awake versus regressive, uptight and fearful? It’s not a perfect formula, but my guess is it’s not far from a universal truth.

This much we know: When conservatives and fundamentalists of any sort don’t get the world they demand and expect, what happens? They rage. They lash out. Regress. They wallow in paranoia and resentment, or dig their heels into the bogus idea that the “old ways” were better, when they almost never were.

They also reject current reality. Maybe they buy guns, listen to hate radio, join reactionary movements, see liberal conspiracy everywhere, become libertarians or NRA members or (worse) Tea Party zealots who can’t tolerate, much less understand, the realities of nature, God, science, love, sex, the world. “It’s just not fair,” they say, like a toxic mantra, until they die.

It will be great good luck for the rest of us when they do.

HotD II

How The Shutdown Taught The GOP To Love Big Government

Bwahahahaha! The GOP has always loved them some big government as long as it's THEIRS! Sorry, Crazytrain, we ain't havin' it.

The Reagan Undead

Short piece by Charles P. Pierce on the holdover trickle-down zombies that ate our nation's face. And planned the shutdown. Please forgive me for the link. These are desperate times. Heh.

Will the sad detritus of the Saint Ronnie administration ever stop fouling American public life? We have Our Lady Of The Magic Dolphins on the teevee almost every weekend. We had a whole clutch of the foreign-policy fantasts rehabilitated during the late reign of C-Plus Augustus. And now, this guy, who once advocated concentration camps for student demonstrators, who personally oversaw the most embarrassing "investigation" into the porn industry ever conducted, and who functioned as lookout and getaway driver for the Iran-Contra crooks, up to and including the increasingly dim president himself, comes back to help screw up the nation again. Nobody listens to Gary Hart, but Edwin Meese III still has a place in public life. Wingnut welfare is forever.

At least part of the blame has to be shared by those nominal Democrats who, either through their silence on the crimes of that era, or in their admiration for Reagan's "style" and toothy obliviousness. (The latest of these, alas, is Chris Matthews, who has written a book about how Tip O'Neill and Ronnie made politics "work," and who, between 1980 and 1982, probably sold out truly progressive politics for at least two decades.) A number of truly horrible things were set in motion in our political life in the 1980's. The people responsible never have really been called to account for it. Now, one of the worst of them is back, doing further damage. I am, frankly, stunned.

I'm not. Meese's big brag back in the day was that there wasn't quite enough evidence to indict him when he worked for the Alzheimer's President.

Insufficient evidence to indict. The words are not an endorsement. Yet Edwin Meese III waved them like a badge of honor Tuesday as he announced his long overdue resignation as U.S. attorney general.

They're ba-ack...

Headline of the Day

The GOP Has Been Planning The Government Shutdown Since Last Year. Here’s The Proof

This comes as no surprise.

Word

Click to embiggen

A tip o' the Brain to Hammer the Gods.

The Boehner Bunglers

Paul Krugman

The federal government is shut down, we’re about to hit the debt ceiling (with disastrous economic consequences), and no resolution is in sight. How did this happen?

The main answer, which only the most pathologically “balanced” reporting can deny, is the radicalization of the Republican Party. As Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein put it last year in their book, “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,” the G.O.P. has become “an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

But there’s one more important piece of the story. Conservative leaders are indeed ideologically extreme, but they’re also deeply incompetent. So much so, in fact, that the Dunning-Kruger effect — the truly incompetent can’t even recognize their own incompetence — reigns supreme.
...

It has been obvious for years that the modern Republican Party is no longer capable of thinking seriously about policy. Whether the issue is climate change or inflation, party members believe what they want to believe, and any contrary evidence is dismissed as a hoax, the product of vast liberal conspiracies.

For a while the party was able to compartmentalize, to remain savvy and realistic about politics even as it rejected objectivity everywhere else. But this wasn’t sustainable. Sooner or later, the party’s attitude toward policy — we listen only to people who tell us what we want to hear, and attack the bearers of uncomfortable news — was bound to infect political strategy, too.
...

Unfortunately for all of us, even the shock of electoral defeat wasn’t enough to burst the G.O.P. bubble; it’s still a party dominated by wishful thinking, and all but impervious to inconvenient facts. And now that party’s leaders have bungled themselves into a corner.

Everybody not inside the bubble realizes that Mr. Obama can’t and won’t negotiate under the threat that the House will blow up the economy if he doesn’t — any concession at all would legitimize extortion as a routine part of politics. Yet Republican leaders are just beginning to get a clue, and so far clearly have no idea how to back down. Meanwhile, the government is shut, and a debt crisis looms. Incompetence can be a terrible thing.

Not "can be", Paul - "is".

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

Republicans Agree to Raise Debt Ceiling
If Obama releases his birth certificate.

Fox News Refers to Government Shutdown as “Slimdown”
Refers to debt ceiling as “Meaningless IOU.”

Obama Tells GOP to “Knock It Off”
“Suck it up,” “cut to the chase,” and “shit or get off the pot.”

Survey: Bible Belt Loves Porn More Than Cosmopolitan Areas
And damn proud of it.

Sunday Emmylou Blogging

This one's for Bear, who noticed...

The Triumph Of The Ratfuckers

An homage to Donald Segretti, the first political ratfucker to call himself that, in the context of what the teabaggers are up to by Charles P. Pierce.

But first a little background. The whole idea of "RF" was started by Big Daddy Roth back in the day. It was "Rat Fink" because we couldn't wear "Rat Fuck" on our T-shirts back then. We knew what he meant. That little hotroddin' rat was an idol and symbol to us teenagers. So was Big Daddy Roth.

The most popular Ed "Big Daddy" Roth monster was Rat Fink. Rat Fink started as a drawing that Ed had put on his refrigerator. Ed "Big Daddy" Roth was a genius at designing cars, but it was Rat Fink that brought him fame. By 1963, teenagers across America were buying Rat Fink model kits and mass-produced Rat Fink T-shirts by Ed "Big Daddy" Roth.
...

The Ed "Big Daddy" Roth Gang included: Rat Fink, Drag Nut, Mother's Worry, and Mr. Gasser. They soon became heroes to young kids across the nation who could relate to the stories and themes of the Ed "Big Daddy" Roth gang.

Back to the modern-day ratfuckin' bastards.

As the Reign Of The Morons enters its third day, let us pause for a moment to pay tribute to a political visionary whose entire career presaged the current moment, anticipating the essential dynamic in play in Washington right now in all of its petulant, kindergartenish glory. Let us raise a morning glass to Donald Segretti, the ratfucker.

(As any student of Watergate knows, "ratfucking" was the word used by Segretti and a number of other officials in the Nixon White House for the dirty tricks they ran in student elections when they all were at the University of Southern California. Segretti -- as well as his pal, Dwight Chapin -- simply transferred these techniques to our national elections.)

There are two basic philosophical foundation stones to ratfucking. The first is that political sabotage for its own sake is a worthy enough goal. There doesn't necessarily have to be an obvious purpose or obvious logic behind it. Everything is simply tactics. Those tactics either work or they don't. To believe this, of course, one must first believe that all politics is a essentially a zero-sum game of power; you win and the other guy loses. Who rules? Period. One cannot for a moment contemplate the notion that politics -- and therefore, government -- has anything to do with the public good. I trust I don't have to spell out the parallels between this elemental basis of ratfucking and what the Republicans are about in their current campaign of vandalism. This has now entered a time in which we are seeing sabotage for sabotage's own sake. Remember, the conservative rump faction has brought this shutdown upon the country because its members refuse to agree to a federal budget that contains lower discretionary spending than even Paul Ryan contemplated. That's because now -- as Congressman Marlin Stutzman pointed out clearly yesterday -- this isn't about the budget, or even about economics, it's about who wins and who loses. It's about whether or not John Boehner, the castrato Speaker Of The House, can keep his job. The public, as was said during our previous Gilded Age, be damned.

The second basic philosophical tenet of ratfucking is that it is essentially bullying. It is essentially about ridicule and deceit as ends in themselves. [...]
...


We are coming into the first weekend -- and therefore, the first Green Room festival -- since the Reign Of The Morons began, so I suspect we will see a lot of ratfucking gussied up as high rhetoric come Sunday. But, for the rest of us, we are living through a living history of sabotage, through a single extended dirty trick. We are all of us, milling around the public square, wondering who cancelled the rally today and somewhere, in a Days Inn near the airport, a clever young man snaps his suitcase shut and moves on to the next town. There is always another rat to fuck, after all.

Ah, Grasshopper, he who fucks the rat will eventually get fucked by the rat he fucked. It is written - he who pitches will also catch.

A Love Letter To Sen. Ted Cruz From a Left-Wing Socialist Hippie Libtard

The last coupla ¶ from a post you should read at The Political Garbage Chute

But one thing is for certain, Senator Cruz. You are going to drag the Republican Party down into the muck and the mire and you have no compunction at all to feel even the slightest bit remorseful for it. You are all Four Horsemen of the Republican’s Apocalypse. You are the Republican House Majority Harbinger of Death — and you will bring about the destruction of the most obtuse, obstructionist, worthless congressional bodies in fifty or more years. That is why I have to love you. You are doing for the rest of us what we cannot do.

You are destroying the Republican Party from the inside, and I for one hope you never, ever stop.

Amen.

We Are Living Through an Attempted Coup:

El Rude-o on the shutdown etc. Links at site.

What the GOP has done, first through the ludicrous overuse of the filibuster and now through the shutdown and the threat of breaking the debt ceiling if they do not get a law overturned, is to use perfectly legal means to achieve their goals. It is, however, a contortion of the Constitution and the rules of Congress that'd make a circus performer say, "How the fuck did you get your head all the way up your own ass?" The ultimate goal of the effort is to undo the will of the people of the United States by forcing the President to accept the GOP agenda.

So let's just call this what it is: it's an attempted coup. (my em)

The Tea Party, having cowed the leadership of the Republican Party, are attempting to stage a creeping coup by using the Constitution against the nation. It's so breathtakingly ballsy it's almost admirable. Fuck, it's even something the GOP laid out in a plan, the Williamsburg Accord. We just didn't pay attention. The nation is currently being wrecked by a tyranny of the minority, and, unfortunately, it's up to the cowards leading the Republican Party to stop it.

And that, dear liberals, dear Americans, is why it's not just economic anxiety that hangs over us like a guillotine blade. It's existential nausea that we may finally reap the seeds of our doom that we planted a generation ago.

I will fight it until my last breath. Obama and the decent people in Congress had better do that too.

"Government Shutdown For Dummies" by Old Fart Rants

You're not dummies. Watch it anyway.

One chickenshit boozehound is holding me, you, and every American hostage over right-wing ideology and fear of losing his cushy job!

Thanks to oldfartrants.

Why Right’s Lemmings Don Suicide Vest

Good article.

The government-sabotaging fervor of the Republican Right – likened by one GOP congressman to “lemmings with suicide vests” – can only be understood from inside the right-wing bubble where a distorted view of the Constitution prevails and actual democracy is disdained, writes Robert Parry.

Long article, go read. The crux of the biscuit:

As Virginian Anti-Federalist leader Patrick Henry warned his fellow slave-owners in urging them not to ratify the Constitution, “they’ll free your niggers!”

The GOP in a nutshell.

Headline of the Day

The GOP Takes Its Clothes Off in Public: It's Not a Pretty Sight, Even for Some Republicans

O the horror! I'm getting an awful visual of Orange Boner and Yertle, and worse, Crazy Eyes Bachmann! I've dragged my computer under the bed and I'm staying here until they put their clothes back on! Hide the children!

Short statement on the debt ceiling by President Gordon

On the theory that the Principal should run the school and not the kindergarteners, I hereby revoke the privilege given to Congress to vote on the debt ceiling, a privilege they have abused due to an inability or unwillingness to do their job of proper governance for the American people. I hereby invoke the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. The full faith and credit of the United States will be upheld. To the House GOP I say so fucking sue me and suck it, bitchez.

Headline of the Day

If Sabotage of the US Economy Is Terrorism, Send the House GOP to Guantanamo

Were I the Prez, they're only ONE of the domestic terrorist groups I would have kept Gitmo open for.

The Reign Of Morons Is Here

Part of a good rant you should read by Charles P. Pierce:

We have elected an ungovernable collection of snake-handlers, Bible-bangers, ignorami, bagmen and outright frauds, a collection so ungovernable that it insists the nation be ungovernable, too. We have elected people to govern us who do not believe in government.

We have elected a national legislature in which Louie Gohmert and Michele Bachmann have more power than does the Speaker of the House of Representatives, who has been made a piteous spectacle in the eyes of the country and doesn't seem to mind that at all. We have elected a national legislature in which the true power resides in a cabal of vandals, a nihilistic brigade that believes that its opposition to a bill directing millions of new customers to the nation's insurance companies is the equivalent of standing up the the Nazis in 1938, to the bravery of the passengers on Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, and to Mel Gibson's account of the Scottish Wars of Independence in the 13th Century. We have elected a national legislature that looks into the mirror and sees itself already cast in marble.

We did this. We looked at our great legacy of self-government and we handed ourselves over to the reign of morons.

This is what they came to Washington to do -- to break the government of the United States. It doesn't matter any more whether they're doing it out of pure crackpot ideology, or at the behest of the various sugar daddies that back their campaigns, or at the instigation of their party's mouthbreathing base. It may be any one of those reasons. It may be all of them. The government of the United States, in the first three words of its founding charter, belongs to all of us, and these people have broken it deliberately. The true hell of it, though, is that you could see this coming down through the years, all the way from Ronald Reagan's First Inaugural Address in which government "was" the problem, through Bill Clinton's ameliorative nonsense about the era of big government being "over," through the attempts to make a charlatan like Newt Gingrich into a scholar and an ambitious hack like Paul Ryan into a budget genius, and through all the endless attempts to find "common ground" and a "Third Way." Ultimately, as we all wrapped ourselves in good intentions, a prion disease was eating away at the country's higher functions. One of the ways you can acquire a prion disease is to eat right out of its skull the brains of an infected monkey. We are now seeing the country reeling and jabbering from the effects of the prion disease, but it was during the time of Reagan that the country ate the monkey brains.
...

Among other things, the Library Of Congress is closed as a result of what the vandals have done. Padlock study and intellect. Wander aimlessly down the mall among the shuttered monuments to self-government. Find yourself a food truck that serves monkey brains. Eat your fking fill.

"The elephant must go down!"

Andy Sullivan on the shutdown:

When ideologies become as calcified, as cocooned and as extremist as those galvanizing the GOP, the American system of government cannot work. But I fear this nullification of the last two elections is a deliberate attempt to ensure that the American system of government as we have known it cannot work. It cannot, must not work, in the mindset of these radicals, because they simply do not accept the legitimacy of a President and Congress of the opposing party. The GOP does not regard the president as merely wrong – but as illegitimate. Not misguided – illegitimate. This is not about ending Obamacare as such (although that is a preliminary scalp); it is about nullifying this presidency, the way the GOP attempted to nullify the last Democratic presidency by impeachment.

Except this time, of course, we cannot deny that race too is an added factor to the fathomless sense of entitlement felt among the GOP far right. You saw it in birtherism; in the Southern GOP’s constant outrageous claims of Obama’s alleged treason and alliance with Islamist enemies; in providing zero votes for a stimulus that was the only thing that prevented a global depression of far worse proportions; in the endless race-baiting from Fox News and the talk radio right. And in this racially-charged atmosphere, providing access to private healthcare insurance to the working poor is obviously the point of no return.
...

I regard this development as one of the more insidious and anti-constitutional acts of racist vandalism against the American republic in my adult lifetime. Those who keep talking as if there are two sides to this, when there are not, are as much a part of the vandalism as Ted Cruz. Obama has played punctiliously by the constitutional rules – two elections, one court case – while the GOP has decided that the rules are for dummies and suckers, and throws over the board game as soon as it looks as if it is going to lose by the rules as they have always applied.

The president must therefore hold absolutely firm. This time, there can be no compromise because the GOP isn’t offering any. They’re offering the kind of constitutional surrender that would effectively end any routine operation of the American government. If we cave to their madness, we may unravel our system of government, something one might have thought conservatives would have opposed. Except these people are not conservatives. They’re vandals.

This time, the elephant must go down. And if possible, it must be so wounded it does not get up for a long time to come.

Amen.

Common Sense At Last!

Raw Story

Farmers in California may finally begin growing industrial hemp under a new law signed Wednesday by Gov. Jerry Brown.

Lawmakers have been discussing the proposal since 1999 to allow approved residents to grow hemp for industrial purposes by reclassifying the plant as a fiber or oilseed crop.
...

Similar bills have been vetoed four times by three different California governors over concerns about federal laws outlawing industrial hemp, which is considered no different from marijuana under U.S. law.

But U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has said the federal government won’t interfere with states that permit the possession or regulation of marijuana.

California lawmakers have said industrial hemp should obviously be permitted, since it’s not even technically a drug.

Governor Moonbeam is working out quite well for my state the second time around! Probably better than the first time.

Flashback

N.Y. Times columnist says the GOP is finally having its ‘60s — and Ted Cruz is the new Abbie Hoffmann

Mopping keyboard, righting chair, change shirt for one with no snot/coffee on it...

“What’s happening here ain’t exactly clear,” Keller said, quoting a 1966 song written by Stephen Stills. “But I have a notion: The Republicans are finally having their ‘60s. Half a century after the American left experienced its days of rage, its repudiation of the political establishment, conservatives are having their own political catharsis.”

Keller cast the retrograde Texas Sen. Ted Cruz as the “spotlight-loving” Abbie Hoffman, because this is a 1960s analogy, and the tea party was compared to the “manifesto-brandishing” Students for a Democratic Society.
...

“To those of us who lived through the actual ’60s, the conservative sequel may seem more like an adolescent tantrum than a revolution,” Keller writes. “For obvious starters, their mobilizing cause is not putting an end to an indecent war that cost three million lives, but defunding a law that promises to save lives by expanding access to insurance. Printing up unofficial ‘Obamacare Cards’ and urging people to burn them is a silly parody of the protest that raged 50 years ago. But bear with me.”
...

He compares the “libertarian flank” who were drawn to the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll of the 1960s radical movement to the “political freeloaders drawn by the addictive drugs of power and television attention.”
...

“Conditions are ripe for the rise of new leaders, some of whom will be demagogues and charlatans,” Keller writes.

Gee, ya think? I think you have a slightly belated grasp of the obvious, Mr. Keller.

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

Poll: Most Americans Have No Idea Obamacare Launches This Week
Nearly half never heard of Obama.

AIG CEO Says Criticism of Large Bonuses “Just as Bad” as Lynching
Except without the noose, the sudden breaking of the neck and spinal cord and the fact you still have the $5.8 million they gave you for Christmas.

North Carolina Town's School Board Reverses Ban on Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man
After some faceless, nameless black guy complained.

Pope: Atheists Can Be Redeemed if They “Do Good”
Like, say, give money to the Church.

"California’s economy is booming because ‘we’re tea party-free!’ "

MUST SEE! Stories at Raw Story and HuffPo.

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

Thanks to 1000Magicians, UK.

The Crux of the Biscuit...

A tip o' the Brain to Seniors for a Democratic Society. Also on Facebook.

Tailgunner Ted Will Yap Until He Can Yap No More

Charles P. Pierce

I wasn't ready, but the 2016 Iowa caucus campaign kicked off this afternoon when Tailgunner Ted Cruz announced that he would bop-til-he-dropped before he'd let the Affordable Care Act get funded. This was preceded by some lovely soprano trilling by newly minted eunuch, Mitch McConnell. As has been pointed out, this is something of a mock filibuster, but that's because it isn't an attempt to do serious legislative business. It's an extended campaign commercial, B-Roll for the local stations in Ottumwa and Council Bluffs.
...


We have been joined at the moment by konztitooshinul skolar Mike Lee of Utah, who just talked about "the devastating impact of inflation," of which there is, at the moment, none. "Whenever government acts," Lee just mentioned, "it does so at the expense of our own individual liberty."

Cruz is back. "The founding of our nation embodied many revolutions." He also referred to the Founders as "we."

He'd look stupid in a wig.

Looks pretty stoopid even without one.

This is like taking a history class from Abbott and Costello.

At least they were funny and didn't obstruct the progress of the nation.

How Bad Is the GOP Rift? Worse Than Democrats in the 1980s

Good. Stu Rothenberg

Political parties seem to suffer through internal battles periodically, but the current state of the GOP is much worse than what Democrats went through some 25 years ago, when organized labor and old-style liberals fought against the Democratic Leadership Council for the soul of the party.

I still remember going to post-election events during the 1980s and watching Al From, then president of the DLC, blame his party’s presidential defeats on liberals and organized labor, only to have someone from the party’s liberal wing whale on From or Will Marshall, the DLC’s first policy director, as Republicans impersonating Democrats.

Pretty much.

Now, libertarian and tea party elements of the GOP are in open warfare with pragmatists and institutionalists. Republicans in the House and Senate taunt each other on a daily basis in newspapers or on cable television, which is only too happy to provide a platform.

More platform! More platform!

But while the GOP has lost the popular vote in five of the past six presidential contests, the races have been close enough that party ideologues have ready excuses – bad candidates, a long war in Iraq and Afghanistan, an unfair media, etc. As a result, they have not yet confronted their political problems the way Democrats did, particularly after Michael Dukakis’ defeat in 1988.

But Republican control of the House, which could well extend at least through the rest of the decade, particularly if another Democrat wins the White House in 2016, should not obscure what is happening. Party infighting and the weakening of the party’s pragmatic impulses will continue to erode support for the party until the obvious happens.

“The only remedy for a party that is deluding itself is a major defeat,” (my em) says Marshall, thinking back to the 1980s.

That is already making 2016 look like a potentially dangerous election for the GOP.

Let's have a "dangerous election for the GOP" in 2014 and get the House back two years before we get President Hil.

Repugs were WHAT?!

For Jay in NC. Eerily apropos, I think, given his comment on the second post below this one. :-)

It's crazy-makin' ta think the Repugs were once the liberals! Of course, then came civil rights and letting The Other (than white men) vote and the Southern Strategy and on and on...

Cruz Does Not Understand Green Eggs and Ham

Kos

Among the more bizarre moments of Senator Cruz's fake filibuster tonight was his reading of the Dr. Seuss book Green Eggs and Ham from the floor of the U.S. Senate....

This is an odd choice of a book for Senator Cruz to read in that its message actually supports the position of the Democrats that the Affordable Care Act (otherwise known as Obamacare) should be allowed to go into effect as scheduled.

In the story Green Eggs and Ham, the narrator starts by telling the reader how he does not like Green Eggs and Ham under any circumstance. A lot of the book contains lists of circumstances under which the narrator would not eat Green Eggs and Ham.

Some of the lists of circumstances are there if you feel the need.

Then the narrator, after much urging by Sam-I-Am, eats the green eggs and ham to prove Sam-I-Am wrong. However, much to the narrator's surprise, he actually likes Green Eggs and Ham.
...

The narrator then goes on to actually thank Sam-I-Am for encouraging him to try the Green Eggs and Ham.

I do so like
green eggs and ham!
Thank you!
Thank you,
Sam-I-am

Senator Cruz-Obamacare is like Green Eggs and Ham. Like the narrator in the story, some people have come to the conclusion (after hearing a lot of right wing propaganda) that they won't like Obamacare even though they have never tried it. A lot of their opposition is based on their fear of trying something different from what they are used to. However, like the narrator in the story, once the American people try Obamacare, I think that they will like it. And like the narrator in the story who thanks Sam-I-Am for forcing him to try the green eggs and ham, I think that the American People will ultimately thank President Obama and the Democrats for Obamacare.

So do I.

Update:

Meep Meep Watch

The title will be instantly explained when you go see Andy Sullivan's post.

David Corn echoes a lot of what I’ve been arguing about Obama’s trajectory at this point in his second term. Politico-style pageview-grabbers keep talking about a “lame duck” while the GOP keeps talking as if Obamacare, which only truly gets going next month, is already fatally wounded. McCainiacs talk as if getting Putin to take ownership of preventing further use of chemical weapons in Syria is some kind of defeat for the US – which it is only if you truly want another Middle East War. And in Washington, Obama’s solid refusal to jump into negotiations over the defunding of Obamacare or the debt-ceiling has allowed the Republicans to organize themselves into a Dick Cheney hunting expedition. After Syria, moreover, there is the first real chance of a deal with Iran over its nuclear program along the lines of Assad’s sudden volte-face. The long term strategy of sanctions and an open hand is bearing fruit.

None of this will please Maureen Dowd. And yes, of course, much can still go awry. Politics requires nimbleness of action and steadiness in strategy. But when I watch Karl Rove laying into Congressional Republicans, and Bill Kristol, in panic-mode, calling for Israel to strike Iran, I can’t help but smile. This terrible strategic president, this useless schmoozer, this aloof, Washington inadequate has a lot of foes back on their heels right now.

That doesn’t happen entirely by accident.

Say what you will, Obama is showing himself to be the Stealth Ninja Jedi Prez I've been calling him for years now. He plays the long game and is flexible. Not perfect by any means, but no one is and I'm still down wid him.

It’s Hard to Hate Rand Paul

So says Daddy Frank in his latest monthly article. I'm most certainly no fan of Paul except for the blessed damage he is doing to the Repugs. An interesting read.

Though he has been at or near the top of near-meaningless early primary polling, he is nonetheless a long shot to ascend to the top of the GOP ticket, let alone to the White House. And a good thing too: A Paul presidency would be a misfortune for the majority of Americans who would be devastated by his regime of minimalist government. But as we begin to imagine a post-Obama national politics where the Democratic presidential front-runners may be of Social Security age and the Republicans lack a presumptive leader or a coherent path forward, he can hardly be dismissed. Nature abhors a vacuum, and Paul doesn’t hide his ambitions to fill it. In his own party, he’s the one who is stirring the drink, having managed in his very short political career (all of three years) to have gained stature in spite of (or perhaps because of) his ability to enrage and usurp such GOP heavyweights as John McCain, Mitch McConnell, and Chris Christie. He is one of only two putative ­presidential contenders in either party still capable of doing something you don’t expect or saying something that hasn’t been freeze-dried into anodyne Frank Luntz–style drivel by strategists and focus groups. The other contender in the spontaneous-authentic political sweepstakes is Christie, but like an actor who’s read too many of his rave reviews, he’s already turning his bully-in-a-china-shop routine into Jersey shtick. (So much so that if he modulates it now, he’ll come across as a phony.) Paul doesn’t do shtick, he rarely engages in sound bites or sloganeering, and his language has not been balled up by a stint in law school or an M.B.A. program. (He’s an ophthalmologist.) He speaks as if he were thinking aloud and has a way of making his most radical notions sound plausible in the moment. It doesn’t hurt that some of what he says also makes sense.

The hell it doesn't! Heh. But then again, I agree with Pat Buchanan sometimes too. It's disturbing, until I realize that even a blind pig can find an acorn once in a while.

But not everyone on the right believed Christie had thrown a knockout punch at the infidel within the GOP. Writing in Commentary, Jonathan Tobin noted that other conservatives had been echoing Paul’s condemnation of the “national security state” and accused as unlikely a subversive as Peggy Noonan of defecting to the “old line of the hard left.” Even the ultimate GOP tool, the party chairman Reince Priebus, had praised Paul’s filibuster as “completely awesome.” Tobin worried that a “crack up” of the “generations-old Republican consensus on foreign and defense policy” would be at hand if others didn’t follow Christie’s brave example and stand up to Paul and his cohort before “they hijack a party.”

The truth is that that consensus cracked up long ago—done in by the Bush administration and the amen chorus, typified by McCain, Kristol, and Krauthammer, that led the country into the ditch of Iraq. As Reason, the Paul-sympathizing libertarian magazine, pointed out approvingly, Paul’s filibuster “could have been aimed 100 percent at George W. Bush and the policies the Republican party and the conservative movement have urged for most of the 21st century.” And he had gotten away with it despite the protestations of the old conservative guard. Christie may think he can rewrite or reverse this history by attacking Paul, but he’s in denial. Bellicose exhortations consisting of a noun and a verb and 9/11 reached their political expiration date with the imploded Giuliani campaign of 2008.
...

None of this means that Paul has any serious chance of appealing to centrist and liberal Democrats in significant numbers in a national campaign. He labors under most of the same handicaps as the rest of his party. He has no credible commitment to serious immigration reform. He is an absolutist on guns and abortion. He is opposed to gay marriage (though trying, like many Republicans these days, to keep the issue on the down-low). In a speech at the Reagan Library this year, he acknowledged that the Republican Party will not win again until it “looks like the rest of America,” but his own outreach efforts have been scarcely better than the GOP’s as a whole. His game appearance at the historically black Howard University backfired when he tried to pretend that he had never “wavered” in his support of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 even though his recent wavering was a matter of public record, captured on video.

While Paul has tried to stay clear of the loony white Christian-identity extremists who gravitated to his father, he had to sacrifice an aide who was recently unmasked as a onetime radio shock jock prone to neo-Confederate radio rants under the nom de bigot “Southern Avenger.” What was most interesting about the incident, however, was the response of another cardinal of the waning GOP Establishment, the George W. Bush speechwriter turned Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson, who argued that Paul’s harboring of the Southern Avenger illustrates why it is “impossible for Rand Paul to join the Republican mainstream.” By that standard, the party would also have to drum out Rick Perry, who floated the fantasy of Texas’s seceding from the union, along with all the other GOP elected officials nationwide who are emulating Perry’s push for voter-suppression legislation in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s vitiation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That Gerson would hypocritically single out Paul for banishment in a party harboring so many southern avengers is an indication of just how panicked the old GOP gatekeepers are by his success. They will grab anything they can find to bring him down.
...

He is a godsend for the tea party—the presentable leader the movement kept trying to find during the 2012 Republican freak show but never did. Next to Paul, that parade of hotheads, with their overweening Obama hatred and their dog whistles to racists, nativists, and homophobes, looks like a relic from a passing era. For that matter, he may prove equally capable of making the two top Democratic presidential prospects for 2016, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, look like a nostalgia act.

Biden maybe, but speaking as a guy who's going to turn 68 in a coupla days, Hil's a babe!

Read it or don't, your call, but it's an interesting article.

.

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

Sixteen States Introduce Rules Restricting Access to Advice About Obamacare
Explain “what they don't know won't hurt them.”

Microscopic Images Reveal Planthopper Insects Have Gears
Hailed as Steampunk Animal of the Year.

$800 Million Salvage Effort Rights Cruise Ship Costa Concordia
In time for passengers to board for 3-day cruise to Sardinia.

“Hello Kitty” Beer Debuts in Asia
Each can bears warning for 6-year-old girls to drink responsibly.

The Kochs, A Nazi Past, Oil & The Foundation of The Right

Unknown Journal, wherein the writer ties the Koch brothers to Ilse Koch, "the bitch of Buchenwald", Hitler, Stalin, the John Birch Society, and thence the Tea Party. Very long and interesting read. Here's the last ¶:

In the Koch family’s alliance with American Republicans: conservatives, constitutionalists, racists, tea partiers, military hawks, drooling fearful populists… the Koch family has found an alliance in the continued homogenization of society. Republicans gain purity in a world they have always viewed as a dirty, impure space and corporate empires like Koch Industries, built under the care of Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union, rise to lead the police state.

When it comes to the "vast right-wing conspiracy" I have no trouble believing all this.

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

Published on Sep 20, 2013
1980 Pop Goes The Country

Thanks to 1000Magicians, UK.

Snippet of the Day

Charles P. Pierce

Uh-oh, without even knowing how he did it, because that is what happens when you wander through the monkeyhouse blindfolded, Tea Party fave-rave Tailgunner Ted Cruz has gotten himself crossways with his fellow nutballs in the House because he has declined to produce magic sparkle ponies from out of his arse.

Heh. Everyone wants a pony, but...

Quote of the Day

From an op-ed in that commie rag, The Wall St. Journal:

Republicans must threaten to crash their Zeros into the aircraft carrier of ObamaCare. Their demand is that the House pair the "must pass" CR or the debt limit with defunding the health-care bill. Kamikaze missions rarely turn out well, least of all for the pilots.
...

The kamikazes could end up ensuring the return of all-Democratic rule.

Ah, so. WSJ got THAT right - the GOP are ALL a buncha Zeroes. Sayo-fuckin-nara assholes. I wish you all a speedy trip straight down with a big splash into oblivion.

Gee, they say that last sentence like it's a bad thing. Heh.

Headline of the Day

Stewart: Republican diplomacy ‘is like a glory h*le: Just stick it in and you worry about the consequences later’

Go watch Stewart do Miss Lindsey to a T damn near to her fainting couch!

Just for shits 'n giggles:

Thanks to YubaNet.