The Talking Ted

The Daily Banter: Ted Cruz Has Already Won (and He's More of a Man Than You Anyway)/9.25.13

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)

Quote of the Day

"Just because a couple people on the Supreme Court declare something to be ‘constitutional’ does not make it so. The whole thing remains unconstitutional."

-- Talking Monkey Rand Paul

Of all the statements being made in connection with today's historic Supreme Court ruling on the ACA, this for me is the reaction that's the most salient -- because it so perfectly sums up the right-wing mindset and illustrates where their blind outrage comes from and how it will continue to manifest itself. It's all there: the complete ignorance as to how our government works; the arrogant belief that any reality that challenges conservative demands, be it a decision by the voters or the highest court in the land, can be casually dismissed as illegitimate; the unwavering obstinacy and vow to fight on no matter how many times they're told that they can't have it their way.

This battle isn't over for them. It'll never be. Not until they're satisfied on this issue and every other one and until they're given back complete control of our government. This is simply the way the Republicans are these days. Give them what they want and no one gets hurt. A complete refusal to accept any way other than their own -- anyone other than themselves -- as valid and legal.

I'd say that it's like dealing with hijackers or hostage-takers -- but it's really more like dealing with children.

Quote of the Day

"I have a mindset that says bipartisanship ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view."

-- Tea Party darling Richard Mourdock, who defeated long-time Republican Senator and relative moderate Dick Lugar in yesterday's Indiana primary

So there you have it. Today's Republican party summed up in one neat little sentence. It's no longer about politics or compromise or working together for the good of the country -- it's about obstruction at all costs and rabid, eliminationist fanaticism. And it's going to doom the United States government to gridlock until the inevitable finally happens: the Republican party as we know it purifies itself into extinction.

The Ex(tort) Presidents

If you're a regular reader of this site there's a pretty good chance that the only thing you know about Univision is that every time you flip past it on your way to something else on the dial it seems to be airing the same insanely hallucinatory show -- the one that involves Spanish-speaking puppets, a shouting fat guy in a bad suit and a lot of 15-year-old girls in bikinis. While that kind of programming really does feel like the tent-pole upon which the network builds its schedule, there's a show set to run this coming January that'll make the typical lunacy on Univision look like an extended episode of Charlie Rose: the Republican Presidential Debate.

Well, it was set to run, anyway.

As it turns out, Univision is about to become the latest battlefield in the modern media war that pits press-savvy politicians against whichever news outlets refuse to bend to their will and influence. The politicians, this time around, are travelling in a pack: they're the GOP presidential candidates, five of whom have now agreed to boycott the upcoming Univision-hosted debate because they take issue with a story the network ran on Florida Senator, Tea Party idol and running-mate-in-waiting Marco Rubio. Apparently Rubio claims that Univision's heavily promoted investigation into a decades-old bust of his brother-in-law on drug charges was payback for not granting the network a one-on-one interview; he and his political allies are now demanding satisfaction in the wake of the embarrassing story, and by satisfaction I mean they want heads to roll, including the one attached to Univision News President Isaac Lee.

Obviously if anyone at Univision really did try to blackmail Rubio into giving him or her a sit-down, that's a huge ethical violation and should be dealt with harshly. But it's not the place of a political candidate -- let alone five of them in concert -- to basically take him or herself hostage until a series of demands is met by a news outlet. What Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, Jon Huntsman and Herman Cain are doing amounts to the same thing they're accusing Univision of: trying to use extortion to achieve a desired end. The fact that this miasma points out the dangers of a news organization aligning itself or even sponsoring a political event is also noteworthy.

If the accusations against Univision are true, then at least a few people need to lose their jobs -- not because a bunch of political candidates have gathered to demand it, or else, but because it's the right thing to do. The candidates should be told to go screw themselves.

Assistant Quote of the Day, Jr.

"I always think to myself, 'Fire the first shot' ... Bring it on. We outnumber them in this country, and we have the guns... I’m not kidding."

-- Andrew Breitbart, speaking to Tea Partiers in Massachusetts last Friday

You know, I'd unleash a giant ration of outrage at the fact that the right continues its insatiable addiction to irresponsible, hyper-violent rhetoric even though that kind of thing has already had frightening consequences.

But this is Andrew Breitbart we're talking about. He's a blogger. He lives in fucking Los Angeles. He couldn't be less of a tough guy if he had peacock feathers sticking out of his ass and was sucking on a Hello Kitty pacifier coated with pure estrogen.

If you let Brietbart so much as hold a gun he'd shoot his own balls off.

Assistant To the Quote of the Day

"Our people are suffering now, and they need support now. And they (Congress) can all go down there and get back to work and figure out budget cuts later."

-- New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, basically telling Eric Cantor and those like him in Congress, who have demanded that federal aid for hurricane victims be offset by budget cuts, to go fuck themselves

Keep in mind, Christie is a Republican darling right now -- and between his recent castigation of the "crazies" who rallied against his appointment of a Muslim judge to the bench and now this, when the story is finally written about the death spiral of the Tea Party in America, his outrage is going to be shown to have played a big role in it.

Comment of the Week

Posted in response to Monday's "Burden in Their Hand" piece:

"I'm a Tea Partier (Agnostic) and would like to explain our side of the story to you rather mystified folks.

One common thread seen in liberal blogs is confusion and rage. I felt that way too in my twenties when I had no idea how the world worked and was pissed I wasn't being handed out free money.

And in this liberal blog like all the rest we see that same rage reflected, and understandably.

Since few of the commenters here - and certainly not the writer - are interested in free market economics, it follows that you're not interested in what screws up free market economics, are you?

Instead you rail against those of us who pay your bills under that system, and that we're not paying you enough.

We on the right were all just like you once, and are happy to pay your bills only to the point that you learn how to do it yourself.

You can even call us greedy when we keep a little of our earnings for ourselves."

-- Todd Dunning

It might be a good idea, Todd, that before you begin criticizing the supposed rage-filled rants of others you do your homework and not make your own blanket assumptions about the people your diatribes are aimed at. I can't speak for everyone on this particular thread -- although I do know the backgrounds of one or two people here -- but I haven't been some doe-eyed kid in almost two decades, at least. I'll be 42 in December and trust me when I tell you I have a damn good idea how the world works. I've earned a very nice living throughout my life and continue to do better than a lot of people. You're not providing the financial charity without which I and at least a good portion of the readers here wouldn't be able to speak our minds. So please spare me the tired maxim that if you're a conservative at 20 you have no heart and if you're a liberal at 40 you have no brain. I guarantee you you're not the one and only "adult" in the room, as you seem to condescendingly believe you are. Thanks for being the very sort of cliché you conveniently decry, though.

What we're witnessing right now in conservative politics goes far beyond a few people wanting to keep the money they've earned while everyone else apparently expects some kind of handout. You can believe that all you'd like, but much like your initial assumption about those who disagree with you, you'll be comically wrong. The current model of Republicanism -- and I generally try to qualify that statement simply because while the GOP has always protected the very wealthy to some extent, even at the expense of the less-fortunate, this level of naked class warfare is something new altogether -- seems to be about protecting a very small portion of the population at all costs, even at the expense of the vast swath of those who aren't just getting "handouts" but who are earning and yet still struggle. The American dream we all learned about in school was never that you sit around waiting for somebody to throw money at you; it was simply that if you work hard, even at a middle-class brand of job, you can provide for you and your family and can live a decent life. The ability to do that has now been chipped away through years of corporate deregulatory largesse and the coddling of those who basically gamble people's money away and make billions even when those people -- and the people gambling, by the way, thanks to hedge fund types -- lose and lose very big. Being rich didn't used to be a zero-sum game -- and I know many conservatives love to claim it isn't at all -- but these days there are those who actually make money when others go down hard and when Wall Street fails big, the rest of us have to bail it out anyway. Which means that, yes, it kind does feel like a zero-sum situation right now.

Beyond that, what the GOP is now trying to do is dismantle any form of social program that actually helps people and, if possible, hand it over to the generally soulless free market barons who've already proven that they'll tear through the American working and middle class, grab a cocktail at lunch and occasionally be in the Hamptons by dinner. Believe it or not, that's not all that much of an exaggeration and if you really believe it's some kind of liberal fantasy ripe for easy dismissal by you, the hypocritical nonsense that is the Tea Party, whomever, then there's probably not much I can say to convince you otherwise regardless. You're just too set in your ways -- having been on this earth for as long as you have, oh great grown-up -- and I'm wasting my time.

Everything I wrote in the piece you've chosen to comment on is true. I didn't make up the fact that the House Republicans who would rather slice off their own arms than submit to new taxes on the wealthy or well-off are now fighting to stop the extension of a payroll tax break for largely working class people. I couldn't invent that kind of shamelessness, even in my most imaginative delusion.

Incidentally, while I certainly appreciate your comment, next time you might want to make an actual argument as opposed to just being a patronizing jerk who steps in for no other reason than to arrogantly declare that he's smarter than everybody else. Trust me on this -- you're not.

Scorning Joe

Normally a story that features this many senile old guys wouldn't even be worth mentioning, but given that one of them is the notoriously sadistic Joe Arpaio -- who just happens to be the sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, where Mexican immigrants almost literally go to die -- it warrants some minor attention. Apparently, Arpaio, who's already accused of misspending almost a hundred-million dollars in public funds, feels like the only way he can defend himself from the charges against him is to spend more taxpayer money "investigating" -- wait for it -- the validity of President Obama's birth certificate.

Why? Because the Tea Party demanded it.

Needless to say, the minute it heard about this important news story, the brain trust at WorldNetDaily immediately dispatched its own hallucinatorily crazy old coot to get to the bottom of it.

"At the request of tea party leaders in Arizona, famed Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has promised to investigate the validity of Barack Obama’s purported long-form birth certificate in a determination of the president’s eligibility for the county’s 2012 election ballot.

Tea party leaders in Surprise, Ariz., met with Arpaio and WND senior reporter Jerome Corsi Thursday morning to express concern that a fake birth certificate would be used to document the president’s eligibility to run in Maricopa County, where Arpaio is the chief law enforcement officer.

Arpaio told the tea party leaders the complaint is within his jurisdiction, and he will be forced to investigate. He said he expects political pressure, but he pointed out that as the chief law enforcement officer of Maricopa County, he’s taken an oath to respond to citizens who approach him about enforcing the law."

So there you have it: Not only does Arpaio indiscriminately torture brown people, just for the hell of it, and very likely misuse taxpayer dollars while he's doing it -- if you try to hold his feet to the fire on it, as the Obama administration has, he'll just spend more taxpayer cash vindictively hunting you down as the most wanted on his personal enemies list.

Guys like this are generally so far along in their dementia that most of their families have already called the crew from Hoarders out for help in dealing with them. Arpaio, meanwhile, has access to an armored tank and a police force. Something is very, very wrong with Arizona.

Gods and Monsters

That New York Times article dissecting the Tea Party -- the one I published a quote from earlier today -- is revealing on so many levels that it's worth referencing more than once. While the first excerpt I posted highlighted a fact that shouldn't surprise anyone -- namely that, while loud, the Tea Party isn't very big and it's certainly not very popular -- another finding within the story is even less surprising. It answers the question, "Just what is the Tea Party made of?"

Remember that the people who wrote the article have been studying the rise of the movement that would ultimately become the Tea Party since 2006.

"So what do Tea Partiers have in common? They are overwhelmingly white, but even compared to other white Republicans, they had a low regard for immigrants and blacks long before Barack Obama was president, and they still do.

More important, they were disproportionately social conservatives in 2006 — opposing abortion, for example — and still are today. Next to being a Republican, the strongest predictor of being a Tea Party supporter today was a desire, back in 2006, to see religion play a prominent role in politics. And Tea Partiers continue to hold these views: they seek 'deeply religious' elected officials, approve of religious leaders’ engaging in politics and want religion brought into political debates. The Tea Party’s generals may say their overriding concern is a smaller government, but not their rank and file, who are more concerned about putting God in government."

What does this mean? Simple: the Tea Party is basically nothing but the hard-right, conservative Christian wing of the GOP as it has existed for years. Again, no surprise there at all. This is why for all the shouting about how smaller government and controlled spending are at the top of the list of their demands, the tea baggers as a group have been engaging in horseshit misdirection pretty much since the beginning. When George W. Bush was throwing taxpayer dollars around like he was President Diddy, the then non-existent Tea Party didn't give a damn -- that's because Bush was a white, conservative Texan who may as well have been wearing a giant diamond-encrusted Jesus piece around his neck, his religious affiliation was so obvious. He was forgiven his transgressions -- hell, they weren't even considered transgressions -- simply because of who he was and how comfortable he made the usual suspects among conservative America. It's only after the guy in the White House morphed, against their divinely inspired will, into a black, multi-cultural, progressive "elitist" who represented the kicking down of the castle gate they'd always taken for granted would be in place to protect their dominion that they collectively decided to raise holy hell.

Incidentally, in a somewhat related item, I continue to get amusingly irate e-mails from people who remain less than pleased with the crack I made about Sakina Mengle's role in the Tea Party movement; for those who don't remember, Miss Mengle is the black woman featured on the "Diverse Tea" website and someone who contacted me and called me out for my admittedly juvenile joke at her expense.

Miss Mengle and I had a very nice conversation, if you recall. Her Tea Partying supporters aren't quite as magnanimous.

Behold, Pierre:

"You are a disgusting turd! The Tea party is made up of all sorts of people who are concerned for America's future. And I am quite confident each of them is more intelligent than you and more informed, and less filled with racial prejudice. It is an inclusive group which is positively focused and doesn't make disparaging remarks about someone of color who supports, and is entitled to support, another point of view. Learn about American democracy and get a life!"

Yes, Pierre. The Tea Party doesn't make disparaging comments about someone of color who supports other points of view besides its own. Unless, of course, that person happens to be the President of the United States.

Big fan of anything, though, that calls somebody a turd and still manages to be pretty articulate.

Quote of the Day

"The Tea Party is increasingly swimming against the tide of public opinion: among most Americans, even before the furor over the debt limit, its brand was becoming toxic. To embrace the Tea Party carries great political risk for Republicans, but perhaps not for the reason you might think... Polls show that disapproval of the Tea Party is climbing... In data we have recently collected, the Tea Party ranks lower than any of the 23 other groups we asked about -- lower than both Republicans and Democrats. It is even less popular than much maligned groups like 'atheists' and 'Muslims.' Interestingly, one group that approaches it in unpopularity is the Christian Right."

-- From a New York Times story called "Crashing the Tea Party"

Don't even bother trying to figure out why the current crop of GOP leaders and hopefuls all seem to be slavishly groveling before an entity -- two if you count the Christian Right -- that's even less popular in this country than self-described atheists. It'll just make your brain hurt.

Will and Disgrace

These days, particularly with the political divide in Washington as substantial and insurmountable as it is, there's very little that's more offensive than a politician arrogantly invoking the supposed will of "the American people." Think about how often you've heard that phrase in just the past few weeks, from dozens of different leaders from both sides of the aisle. It's generally the worst kind of cliché: a pompous politician claiming to speak for the entire republic and to be doing its collective bidding. But recently it's become flat-out insulting, given that it's impossible for any representative from either party to bridge the gap between the highly polarized political extremes and only the most lunatic among the electorate actually want to see government gridlocked to the point of threatening the world.

Still, if you needed confirmation of that which you very likely already knew, a new poll proves unequivocally that when guys like John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Mitch McConnell and Jim DeMint claim that their intransigence is nothing more than a case of succumbing to the will of the people, they're basically full of shit. The Tea Party and the ever-widening extremist wing of the Republican party may be loud, but they're not very big. According to a CNN/Opinion Research survey, just 33% of the American public currently hold a favorable view of the Republican party, compared to 59% who have an unfavorable view. If you're looking for context, yes, those numbers are as dismal as they sound. The Democrats, meanwhile, are holding relatively steady -- and even -- at 47% favorable and 47% unfavorable.

Both sides have played a role in creating a profound nationwide distrust of and distaste for our current government, but make no mistake -- the Republicans are rightfully getting most of the blame. What's most noteworthy about this, though, is that as of this morning the usual suspects within the GOP are continuing to tout their absurd stance on slashing entitlement and social programs while waiting in line to slavishly get on their knees and blow Grover Norquist as a simple case of doing the people's work. And you can be damn sure this will continue unabated.

The people have spoken loud and clear, saying that they overwhelmingly want to see corporate tax breaks ended, loopholes closed, and the wealthy forced to pay their fair share -- but if you think for a moment that something like verifiable reality will stand in the way of the Republicans' agenda and a lot of propagandistic nonsense about how it's all being done under the direction of the masses, you're crazier than one of those old people sitting in a lawn chair cheering the U.S. credit downgrade.

That's because they don't work for the average American. They don't work for you, and they never have -- not lately anyway.

Salon: Could the Tea Party Actually Be Obama's Salvation in 2012?/8.11.11

Quote of the Day

"What makes America look unreliable isn’t budget math, it’s politics. And please, let’s not have the usual declarations that both sides are at fault. Our problems are almost entirely one-sided -- specifically, they’re caused by the rise of an extremist right that is prepared to create repeated crises rather than give an inch on its demands."

-- Paul Krugman in yesterday's Times

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.

Quote of the Month

"They have acted like terrorists."

-- Vice President Joe Biden on the Tea Party Republicans in Congress