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.
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.