Favorite Thing of the Day

I have no idea how long this has been floating around but it just got sent to me and IT IS AWESOME.

(Click to engorge)

(h/t Jim)

Picture of the Day

In case you needed something to confirm what you very likely already knew.

The article this graph is from, in today's Salon, I think tries a little too hard to cement the connection between the Tea Party and the traditionally obstructionist, anti-federalist conservatives in the oh-so-white South -- and by that I simply mean that the author doesn't really need to elaborate on iron-clad facts by engaging in semi-tenuous conjecture. Those iron-clad facts speak for themselves.

Regardless, whenever some tea bagging idiot shrieks about how he or she "wants our country back," don't bother trying to fool yourself into thinking you don't know who they're afraid is taking it away from them.

It's All Downhill from Here

Salon's Andrew Leonard sums up the only exculpatory spin that can be put on the shit sandwich America is very likely about to be forced to swallow whole:

"If one wished to give the president the benefit of the doubt, one could argue that maybe there was nothing he could have done to get a better deal. House Republicans were willing to push the nation into default -- and that's a scenario no sane leader could responsibly endorse. Obama couldn't credibly threaten a veto of any legislation that would reach his desk because Obama ultimately would not and could not voluntarily choose to default on the nation's obligations. Obama had to choose between an awful deal or an outright catastrophe. There's no way to come out of that jam smelling of roses.

But he didn't need to try to sell this resolution as some sort of 'compromise.' The president said it was not "the deal I would have preferred." He should have been stronger. He should have said it's a bad deal that does not address the pressing needs of the nation, and sets in stone cuts in entitlements that will savage an aging population faced by spiraling health care costs. And then he should have acknowledged that he still had to sign it, because the alternative would have ensured a nearly immediate slide into recession and the strong possibility of a global financial shock."

That's about all there is to it. I realize that both sides of the political aisle aren't at all happy with this deal and maybe it could be argued that that's one of the best things you can say about it. Unfortunately, if nobody's happy then that generally means it's a crappy deal, and while I know there are those on the opposite side of the fence who claim differently, they're full of it: the Republicans got almost everything they wanted. The Tea Party put a gun to the head of the entire country and turned what should have been a simple political procedure into an effort to bury us all under a big, heaping pile of its ass-backward dogma -- and that it did. What was one of the most embarrassing episodes for this country in its short but celebrated history has just morphed into an almost unimaginably devastating sucker punch to the American psyche. Thanks to a misguided embrace of austerity in the middle of an economic crisis, we'll no longer enjoy the inviolable powerhouse status we've had as a nation for decades into centuries. We're now no better than the European countries our twisted and treacherous Republican leaders so casually condescend to as part of the prerogative supposedly granted to us by "American exceptionalism."

The world is laughing at us right now -- and maybe it should be.

And we just learned an important lesson that we've, ironically, never really been able to admit to ourselves: terrorism is nearly impossible to defeat because it works. Welcome to the new era of Hostage Politics in this country.

Quote of the Day

"The Republicans created the Tea Party. They rebelled. They devolved. And they have a plan."

-- Oliver Willis via Twitter

Rick Dross

Rick Scott perfectly personifies everything that's wrong with the far-right and with the unfocused Tea Party rage that thrust a bunch of maniacal idiots into power in the 2010 elections. He's a guy who made a fortune as the CEO of a massive for-profit health care company but who was forced out when that company was found guilty of fourteen felonies and had to pay the government back $600 million in a Medicare billing scandal. In other words, he basically operated a criminal enterprise. Since beating Democratic opponent Alex Sink by a razor-thin margin last year, he's pretty much run Florida into the ground -- an admittedly impressive accomplishment given that it was in such bad shape to begin with -- and made himself a man with almost no friends or supporters to speak of. Rick Scott is, no bullshit, the most profound and expansive case of buyer's remorse in the history of Florida politics.

If you're curious as to why he's so universally regarded as a guy who couldn't manage a 7-11, just watch his performance on CNN this morning. Christine Romans, and eventually a smelling-blood-in-the-water Ali Velshi, pound him into paste over both his inability or unwillingness to answer questions about the debt ceiling debate, and, apparently, his lack of knowledge of what the debt ceiling even is.

This man is the governor of the fourth most-populated state in the country.

Mediaite: Two CNN Anchors Try, and Fail, To Get Florida Governor Rick Scott To Answer Their Debt Ceiling Questions/7.27.11

By the way, as I mentioned earlier today, watch how quickly Scott employs the go-to GOP talking point about how government needs to be run like a business. And then ask just about anyone in Florida how well that's worked out for them under Scott's administration so far.

Assistant Quote of the Day

"The greatest concern to the Cut, Cap and Balance Coalition is the integrity of the Cut, Cap and Balance Pledge that was signed by 39 House Members and 12 Senators, and whether voting for the proposed deal constitutes a Pledge violation... We hold that is does violate the pledge, on several grounds."

-- From a declaration issued today by a coalition of more than a hundred Tea Party groups which warns that any vote for John Boehner's debt ceiling proposal constitutes a violation of a pledge signed by dozens of Republican lawmakers

This is what it's come to. The Republican party is completely beholden to these people and terrified of the threats made by them. And these people are blithering idiots who honestly don't think that a U.S. default would be a big deal -- that it's some kind of hoax like climate change, evolution or the death of Elvis.

They'll willfully cause this country to be plunged into economic catastrophe if the GOP doesn't immediately disavow their insanity. This cannot be allowed to happen.

Quote of the Day, Jr.

"Republicans will lose if they support the (Paul) Ryan Medicare plan. Americans do not support the Ryan plan. Expect the GOP to then blame the Tea Party for losses."

-- South Florida Tea Party Chairman Everett Wilkinson in an e-mail sent to fellow tea party types and obtained by the Palm Beach Post

Cesca's response to this is pretty much on the money:

"Why shouldn’t they blame the Tea Party? ... The entire Republican party is to blame for their enabling of, and pandering to, the lowest common denominator, but that lowest common denominator is the Tea Party."

The unfortunate thing is that while the tea bagging insurgents have the ability to continue inflicting heavy damage on the GOP and its goal of unchecked power, in the end the shameless desire for that power will be too great and the party will come together for its own good. It always does.

Learning Disabled

As God is my witness, this is not from the Onion. It's from an article in the St. Petersburg Times about a Tea Party summer camp supposedly being sponsored by the 912 Project, called the "Tampa Liberty School."

Behold, an example of Poe's Law in its purest possible form:

"'One example at Liberty: Children will win hard, wrapped candies to use as currency for a store, symbolizing the gold standard. On the second day, the 'banker' will issue paper money instead. Over time, students will realize their paper money buys less and less, while the candies retain their value.

'Some of the kids will fall for it,' Lukens said. 'Others kids will wise up.'

Another example: Starting in an austere room where they are made to sit quietly, symbolizing Europe, the children will pass through an obstacle course to arrive at a brightly decorated party room (the New World).

Red-white-and-blue confetti will be thrown. But afterward the kids will have to clean up the confetti, learning that with freedom comes responsibility.

Still another example: Children will blow bubbles from a single container of soapy solution, and then pop each other's bubbles with squirt guns in an arrangement that mimics socialism. They are to count how many bubbles they pop. Then they will work with individual bottles of solution and pop their own bubbles.

'What they will find out is that you can do a lot more with individual freedom,' Lukens said."

My first thought: No way this is for real. It's so insane -- as Alex Pareene over at Salon says, it anticipates every possible joke you could make and beats you to it -- that it just cannot be anything other than brilliant satire.

Because if it isn't -- we're even worse off than I thought.

Quote of the Day, Jr.

"What we're looking for is real control of Congressional spending, not some fallacy they invent to make the electorate feel good for a temporary time."

-- Mark Meckler, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, firing a shot across the bow of Congressional Republicans

You knew it was going to come to this. The Huffington Post used a relationship metaphor, and I'll use one as well, only mine is a little more biting and, I think, more fitting: That horrific piece of Maury show white trash the Republican party fucked last year because it was convenient? She just called to tell them she's got a baby now, and guess who the father is. The GOP was always courting disaster when it decided to lie down with this unmanageable monster and now it's stuck having to do its bidding or risk it showing up with a shotgun at four in the morning.

What does that mean for the rest of us? Well, in this particular case it could mean financial disaster, because the Republicans are now trying to hold the debt ceiling hostage, at least partially at the whim of America's unsophisticated hick demographic -- the people who fear and demonize book learnin' and who've acquired their business savvy from that bumper sticker they saw once. I don't like Tim Geithner any more than the next guy who'd like to see half of Wall Street guillotined, but I trust him to understand global economics better than the head of the Tea Party Patriots, who admits he's a "pretty simple guy." Geithner aside, Paul Krugman says that failing to move the debt ceiling is something you don't want to risk, and him I do trust.

Bottom line: If you thought this unholy alliance between the Beltway aristocreatures and the tea baggers they always falsely believed they could easily manipulate had reached its ugliest point -- guess again.

Now that I think about it, here's a new bumper sticker idea for the next big Tea Party march on Capitol Hill:

The Tea Party: "We're not going to be ignored, John."

The Party's Over

I wanted to take a second to briefly follow-up Saturday's post that highlighted racism within the Republican/Tea Party. It sparked a heated debate both via e-mail and over at my Facebook page.

Listen, no one's making the accusation that all members of the GOP, or even members of the Tea Party, are racist. Far from it. But I've said it before and I think it bears repeating that the Tea Party as a political movement absolutely has its roots in a certain amount of racism and xenophobia -- and it's not something that can be squelched by the argument that there are a couple of Tea Party darlings who happen to be black (Allen West, Herman Cain). The fact is that the Tea Party came to be only after Barack Obama became president; no one made the decision that he or she had had enough and needed to join with like-minded individuals to "fight back" against government waste and overreach until the person supposedly behind it wasn't the traditional, aging white Christian male who had occupied the White House since the thing was built. George W. Bush presided over the most egregious increase in governmental authority and the most awesome waste of taxpayer dollars in memory, and yet it wasn't until the guy in power represented the changing, now-multicultural face of America that anyone decided they'd had enough.

As a movement and at face value, the Tea Party has no issue with blacks or Hispanics or anyone else; what it represents, though, is a stand against an America that now no longer keeps minorities "in their place." Basically, if you're black and buy into the far-right mentality, which once again as an entity states that old white guys should be in charge because they represent the "real America," then you're okay; but God help you if you're multicultural and see the world from a perspective that can't be summed up in a catchy phrase that fits neatly on a bumper sticker, because you're illegitimate.

Add to that the fact that the GOP has been hijacked by the lowest common denominator among those who classify themselves as conservative and you've got a recipe for the polar opposite of progress. What you have is a bunch of people straining to hold onto a reality that simply doesn't exist anymore. The brand of politics the GOP now embraces as a rule has drifted so far from the hyper-intellectualism once championed by people like William F. Buckley that it's almost impossible to reconcile what we're currently witnessing with the storied history of conservatism in America.

Really, think about this for a moment: Public Policy Polling currently has Donald Trump running well above the rest of the possible Republican contenders in the upcoming White House race. Trump, a self-obsessed reality TV star with a checkered past and three bankruptcies under his belt, is potentially -- should he not be pulling everyone's chain in an effort to increase the Q-score of his brand -- the GOP nominee for president. The same poll finds that 23% of Republican voters say they won't vote for someone who believes that Barack Obama is an American citizen.

This is what the Republicans, via the Tea Party and its irrepressible and unfocused rage, have become. This is the global punchline a once-great political party has morphed into.

And to those on the left, center-left, or independent who claim to be so disappointed in Barack Obama's performance as president that they're willing to support an ineffectual third-party candidate or simply sit out the 2012 election altogether as a show of protest -- think about the potential cost of doing so. Please, think good and hard about it.

Quote of the Day, Jr.

"Oh, come on! Everybody who knows me knows that I am not a racist. It was a joke. I have friends who are black."

-- Tea Party activist and member of the Orange County Republican Party central committee Marilyn Davenport, defending the above photo she circulated in an e-mail along with the comment, "Now you know why —- No birth certificate!"

Nope, no racism there.

Net Brutality

Allen West is a freshman congressman from Florida. He's a Tea Party darling who, among other noteworthy achievements, retired from the Army after taking a shot at an Iraqi civilian in order to intimidate him, compared President Obama to Hitler and encouraged people to arm themselves against the government, and named as his chief of staff a far-right talk radio host whose lunatic rhetoric was connected with a credible threat that led police to lock down every single school in Broward County, Florida last November.

In other words, Allen West is a real peach.

So maybe it's not surprising that he sees the AOL-Huffington Post deal as the end of all life as we know it.

From Media Matters:

"You look out there, you see that AOL has purchased the Huffington Post. Now all of a sudden a very far left liberal blogger such as Arianna Huffington has a huge influence in the Internet world," he said. We cannot allow ourselves to be suppressed. We cannot allow them to take over the Internet."

Three things: First of all, Arianna Huffington just sold her wholly independent, "very far left liberal" blog to the most conservative, milquetoast internet media conglomerate in America -- and pocketed $315 million dollars for herself and her partners in the process. If that doesn't win her some street cred from the big business-fellating crowd, what the hell will?

Second, is there anything more comical than listening to a right-wing blowhard feign victimization at the hands of the supposed liberal juggernaut bent on quashing his or her views? The constant cries of "we will not be silenced or suppressed" from a group whose media bullhorn is positively deafening these days is the stuff of cheap farce. That said, the conspiratorial "encroaching threat" argument is one that's been used by the most unimaginative political talking heads on the right -- to great effect -- for the past few years, so it's not surprising a hack like West would bust it out.

Third, you wanna know why the conservative movement is losing the internet? Media Matters goes on to nail it: What has the avowed right got in terms of new media that's truly groundbreaking? Sure, it owns the talk radio medium and it's correct when it boasts that as of now progressives don't stand a chance of breaking its stranglehold -- and there's even an argument to be made that the left can't put a dent in Fox News's adamantium hull on television. But the internet is an entirely different beast; it's a place where innovation and imagination triumph and it's one that lends itself to the non-linear way the left and center-left tend to think. In much the same way that conservatives look down their noses at any attempt by progressives to match the success of, say, Rush Limbaugh, progressives can rightly claim that their political adversaries haven't even come close to smacking it out of the park on the internet the way HuffPo has. Yeah, there's Drudge, but that's almost 15 years old and it's barely evolved since its inception -- and there's no way in hell a major corporation of any kind would get near Breitbart with a pair of rubber gloves and a cattle prod.

Don't like what you see when you "look out there," congressman?

Maybe you need to take a harder look at who your audience is.

Quote of the Day

"I have loved being chairman, but I'm tired of the nuts."

-- Colorado GOP Chairman Dick Wadhams, who just resigned in frustration

Beck and the Tea Partiers: shrieking toward victory.

(via Cesca)

FTW

Granting Asylum: Update

You know, Bill Maher's really kind of gone to the dark side during interviews lately, being more bitter and preachy than funny, but he made a great point a little while ago on CNN.

While no one's more excited than me to watch the clown car crash that will almost certainly be Michele Bachmann's rebuttal to the State of the Union address tonight, why the hell is anyone actually carrying the thing? Bachmann certainly has every right to voice the lunatic delusions swirling around inside that tiny hamster cock of a brain of hers, but no one's saying the cable networks or anyone else for that matter have a responsibility to indulge her by broadcasting them to the world. Essentially, the "Tea Party" is nothing but the ultra-nationalist al Aqsa Martyr's Brigade of the Republican party; yes, its leadership and many of its members claim to be above partisanship when it comes to directing their substantial and largely unfocused outrage, but that's really only because they want to see the country move so far to the right that its nose is pressed against the wall and they don't feel like the GOP is doing enough to make that happen. In other words, they're just Republicans who feel like the Republican party isn't being Republican enough. Show me a Democrat who professes to also be a tea bagger and I'll show you somebody in the final stages of syphilitic brain atrophy.

And yet the enabling of Bachmann and the rest of these assholes will mean that the right will be given the opportunity to air its grievances against the president's message not once but twice tonight. And why? Because the cable news channels like trainwrecks as much as we do -- precisely because we like them, because they know we'll be watching.

The Washington Post: CNN Defends Airing Bachmann Speech/1.25.11

Granting Asylum

You know, what with concentrating on Inara's last few days here and all, I wasn't kidding when I said I haven't been paying much attention to politics.

Which is why I apparently missed this late last week:

The Washington Post: Michele Bachmann To Deliver Her Own State of the Union Rebuttal/1.21.11

I'm not exaggerating in the slightest when I say that this is going to be the greatest fucking thing in the history of everything that has ever existed ever.

There'll be Barack Obama, the President of the United States.

Then an establishment GOP flunky.

Then a circus clown with Down's Syndrome tripping on Felix the Cat acid.

Have your popcorn ready.

Quote of the Day

"One is a group of exclusively white men who live in a bygone century, have bad teeth and think of blacks as three-fifths of a person... and the other are the founding fathers."

-- Bill Maher on the difference between the invoked-to-death Founding Fathers and the Tea Party

Someone's Listening

There's something going on in South Florida right now that might be worth paying close attention to.

Stop me if this sounds familiar: Yesterday, every public school in Broward County -- all 300+ of them -- were locked down for most of the day after a "credible threat" was apparently made against them by someone who called in to a local radio show. Turns out that radio show belonged to Joyce Kaufman -- a conservative talk show host who, last July 4th, took to the mic to say that "if ballots don't work, bullets will," and who recently ranted that America is in danger of "losing our culture" to illegal immigrants.

The latest is that the police have the suspect in custody who reportedly made the threat -- according to his wife, his claim was that he was going to shoot up a school or a government building -- and that he's being anything but cooperative.

On the surface, this reads like yet another case of some far-right firebrand with a microphone urging revolution and, not surprisingly, finding that somebody in her audience is willing to take her up on it. We've seen it before -- we know that we will absolutely see it again. But here's the twist: Joyce Kaufman was recently picked to be the Chief of Staff for incoming Florida Republican Congressman and Tea Party darling Allen West (they're pictured above). She was going to Washington, DC with him.

I say was because, as this story began breaking just a couple of hours ago, Kaufman immediately backed out and said that she won't be taking the job.

Let me go back to the beginning. Every kid who goes to a public school in Broward County, Florida had to be locked inside his or her classroom yesterday. For hours. Because one wingnut psychopath may have promised violence at the irresponsible and incendiary goading of a conservative talk show host.

More to come.

Really.

(Update 4:26PM: Here's the official write-up from the AP: MIAMI (AP) — A conservative radio talk show host tapped to be chief of staff for incoming U.S. Rep. Allen West is stepping down from her congressional job a day after 300 Florida schools were locked down when a threat was linked to her show. Joyce Kaufman announced Thursday that she would not be West's aide. Kaufman said on her show that she wants to avoid any repercussions to the Florida Republican, but she didn't elaborate and hasn't returned telephone messages. Kaufman has drawn fire for some of her comments. At a recent tea party rally, she told the crowd that if "ballots don't work, bullets will." Police have said the message to Kaufman from the suspect mentioned gun rights but they have refused to release its contents.)

Assistant To the Quote of the Day

"I want to thank the Kennedy Center, or, as it will soon be known, the Tea Party Bowling Alley and Rifle Range."

-- Tina Fey, during her acceptance speech for the Kennedy Center's Mark Twain Prize last night

FTW