Saturday, March 27, 2010

Jim DeMint won't grow up, even pushing 60

Scam artist and occasional SC Senator Jim DeMint's little 30 boys-only treehouse PAC says four- four!- right wing loons running for the Senate are backing his "I'll stop earmarking for a year and then all bets are off" idea.

Of course, DeMint voted against the reconciliation bill that stripped the backroom deals he raises money on out of the health care reform law. DeMint's a Zombie legislator: he's against living ideas, and for the dead ones.

It's so much easier when you don't know your ass from a post hole.

When big, butch hater Daniel J. Cassidy- who, like so many Republicans of his era, didn't serve in the military- wants to opine about gays in the military on his blog, Sunlit Uplands (it's in his Hate Sidebar), who does he turn to?

Two women:  Penny Nance, who hasn't served in the military; and Wendy Wright, who has never served in the military, either.

Friday, March 26, 2010

Self-confessed fat guy calls fat black man "loathesome." All in a day's work around the Wake County, NC School Board.

When Carolina Politics Online says "I’m gonna get a little personal here," you can take it to the bank.


S/he manages to spew an array of ad hominem attacks that puts even Savonarola to shame.


First, the conservative obsession with penises rears it head, so to speak:
It’s wrong to bus some poor twerp half-way across the county so liberals and race-obsessed fools can have a jizz party over how “diverse” Wake County Schools are. 
Then, some race baiting:
But of course, the race pimps never lose a chance to get themselves a headline or two.
After that, some reaching out to young voters:
How much would you like to wager that 90% of these young protesters couldn’t articulate their message in a non-slogan way if their lives depended on it? “Resegration”. Resegration my fat hairy libertarian-cracked ass.
Then s/he really gets personal:

We will work to fight their efforts to end socioeconomic diversity,” said the Rev. William Barber, president of the state NAACP, on Wednesday. “We will use every legal and moral tool at our disposal.”
The N&O
Right after you’re finished with your daily brunch at the Golden Corral, right you bigoted fat-ass? This lardass is such a fat piece of shit, I can’t begin to tell you how loathsome he is.
Finally, a stirring rally to fellow haters:
So congratulations to the Wake School Board for trudging through the shit storm their opponents have made for them. I can’t begin to imagine how hard it was -and will continue to be. But you’re doing the right thing, and you have more supporters out there than you know. After all- they elected you. Keep up the fight.

Chait Sheet

Jonathan Chait's blog is a must-read. Today alone he:

-reveals that former Senator Phil Gramm's mother made the courageous decision, at 92, to give up medical care and die at home- with the safety net of a single payer insurance system under her. But Gramm says, as Senator DeMint goes on about all the time, "it's a matter of freedom."


- passes along news that Republican presidential candidates always have more facial hair than Democratic ones.

How could they tell when he was talking?

Thursday, March 25, 2010

Golly, what a drama queen. And to think the Republicans passed over David Dreier for leader because they thought he was gay.

Wanna see Congressman Permatan's bitchy rant?

If she wasn't a suicide already, Senator Vitter's DC Madam would be laughing

It was well past midnight, but when Senator Bob Bennett called up his vital health care reform amendment seeking to ban marriage equality in the District of Columbia- where the democratically-elected city council passed it by democratically-established procedures- Senators Jim DeMint and Lindsey Graham  were at and at it.

Here's the Bias Knows No Clock Club's membership:


YEAs ---36
Alexander (R-TN)
Barrasso (R-WY)
Bennett (R-UT)
Brown (R-MA)
Brownback (R-KS)
Bunning (R-KY)
Burr (R-NC)
Chambliss (R-GA)
Coburn (R-OK)
Cochran (R-MS)
Corker (R-TN)
Cornyn (R-TX)
Crapo (R-ID)
DeMint (R-SC)
Ensign (R-NV)
Enzi (R-WY)
Graham (R-SC)
Grassley (R-IA)
Gregg (R-NH)
Hatch (R-UT)
Hutchison (R-TX)
Inhofe (R-OK)
Johanns (R-NE)
Kyl (R-AZ)
LeMieux (R-FL)
Lugar (R-IN)
McCain (R-AZ)
McConnell (R-KY)
Murkowski (R-AK)
Risch (R-ID)
Roberts (R-KS)
Sessions (R-AL)
Shelby (R-AL)
Thune (R-SD)
Vitter (R-LA)
Wicker (R-MS)

As Teen Talk Barbie announced in 1992, "Math class is tough!"

Here's what you get for speaking truth to idiots:




Conservative-with-a-brain David Frum had the guts to tackle Senator Jim'DeMint's "Waterloo" plan for the numbnuts fundraising scam it was, and is, says Hendrick Hertzberg:



When Rush Limbaugh said that he wanted President Obama to fail, he was intelligently explaining his own interests. What he omitted to say—but what is equally true—is that he also wants Republicans to fail. If Republicans succeed—if they govern successfully in office and negotiate attractive compromises out of office—Rush’s listeners get less angry. And if they are less angry, they listen to the radio less, and hear fewer ads for Sleepnumber beds.
So today’s defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their listeners and viewers will now be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio. For them, it’s mission accomplished. For the cause they purport to represent, it’s Waterloo all right: ours.

Hertzberg adds:




By the end of the day after Waterloo, Senator DeMint had introduced a measure to repeal the bill. Michael Steele, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, had announced, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” that the party’s message for the midterms is “absolutely” about repealing the bill. And Mitt “Romneycare” Romney had posted a fatwadenouncing the bill (“an unconscionable abuse of power”) and its most prominent supporter (“President Obama has betrayed his oath to the nation”) and concluding with this battle cry:
For these reasons and more, the act should be repealed. That campaign begins today.
That Frum post explains why this may not be such a hot idea:
No illusions please: This bill will not be repealed. Even if Republicans scored a 1994-style landslide in November, how many votes could we muster to re-open the “doughnut hole” and charge seniors more for prescription drugs? How many votes to re-allow insurers to rescind policies when they discover a pre-existing condition? How many votes to banish 25-year-olds from their parents’ insurance coverage? And even if the votes were there—would President Obama sign such a repeal?
Not very likely—about as likely as the Republicans winning a sixty-seven-vote majority in the Senate, which is what they’d need to override a Presidential veto, and which (as Yglesias notes) they aren’t going to have even if, come November, they win every single Senate race in the country.

Take that, Palin!



The Penguin makes an endorsement.

"Just say no" leads to "just nullify."

Funny, how, when a batshit-crazy political idea comes up, it always seems to lead back to South Carolina:


The old states' rights argument, if successful, could upend years of federal legislation. Will we have a system where states can pick and choose among federal laws? We want our elderly to get Medicare, and give us more highway money, but forget this health-care expansion.
That sounds like the logic of the nullifiers of the 1830s, fighting to resist a federal tariff they thought was too high. South Carolina Gov. Robert Y. Hayne, their leader, sounded rather like today's "tea partyers." His state, he declared in 1832, was "inflexibly determined never to surrender her reserved rights, nor to suffer the constitutional compact to be converted into an instrument for the oppression of her citizens."
 
Andrew Jackson's response to the nullifiers is classic. He denounced "the strange position that any one State may not only declare an act of Congress void, but prohibit its execution." He also wondered how a state could "retain its place in the Union, and yet be bound by no other of its laws than those it may choose to consider as constitutional."

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

South Carolina comes up short- again




A study of condom sales in the US says The Palmetto State ranks 44th in penis size.


49 and 50 are Utah and Wyoming.


Little wonder the sheep are nervous. They can't laugh.


47's Alaska, which may explain why Levi was so coy in Playgirl.

Sunday, March 21, 2010

Where, exactly, Congressman King?


Following reports yesterday that black and openly gay Democratic lawmakers were subjected to spitting and epithets from anti-health care reform protesters outside the Capitol, Republican leaders said Sunday that the incidents were "isolated" and "reprehensible."
On CNN's "State of the Union," Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) denounced the use of such slurs "in the strongest terms."
House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), said on NBC's "Meet the Press" that the "isolated incidents" were "reprehensible."
Later on the same program, Michael Steele, the Republican National Committee's first black chairman, agreed that the incidents were "reprehensible," and added, "we do not support that."
"What you had out there yesterday were a handful of people who just got stupid and said some ignorant things," Steele said.
Not all Republicans were so quick to condemn. Roll Call reports that Reps. Steve King (R-Iowa) and Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) both downplayed the incidents.
"I just don't think it's anything," King said. "There are a lot of places in this country that I couldn't walk through. I wouldn't live to get to the other end of it." He added that health-care supporters were "embellishing" the story to undermine the opposition.
"When you use a totalitarian tactics, people, you know, begin to act crazy," Nunes said on CSPAN. "I think that people have every right to say what they want. If they want to smear someone, they can do it." He said the epithets were "not appropriate" but that the whole crowd shouldn't be characterized by the behavior of a few members.


Economic development in the Upstate



Greenville NewsSome of the over a thousand glow stick wielding Google fans practice their glock stick spinning as they wait to spell out Google in Falls Park Saturday night in an attempt to get Google to bring their super high speed internet service to Greenville.

Good morning



In honor of the Teabaggers and the Republican Congressional delegation:

It does not matter much what a man hates, provided he hates something.
     -Samuel Butler, Note Books (1912)

He was of a time when literature was considered a value, and preservation a good

Former Interior Secretary Stewart Udall has died. Consider his work and compare it to Senator Jim DeMint's view of national parks:


Few corners of the nation escaped Mr. Udall’s touch. As interior secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, he presided over the acquisition of 3.85 million acres of new holdings, including 4 national parks — Canyonlands in Utah, Redwood in California,North Cascades in Washington State and Guadalupe Mountains in Texas — 6 national monuments, 9 national recreation areas, 20 historic sites, 50 wildlife refuges and 8 national seashores. He also had an interest in preserving historic sites, and helped saved Carnegie Hall from destruction.
“Republicans and Democrats, we all worked together,” Mr. Udall said in a television interview with Bill Moyers. But by the time of that interview, Mr. Udall added that Washington had been overtaken by money and that people seeking public office fought for contributions from business interests that viewed environmental protection as a detriment to profit at best...
..It was Mr. Udall who suggested that John. F. Kennedy invite Robert Frost to recite a poem at Mr. Kennedy’s Inauguration. Mr. Udall accompanied Mr. Frost to the Soviet Union in 1962, a trip meant to foster better ties with Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev.
Mr. Udall also held evenings at the Interior Department with the poet Carl Sandburg and the actor Hal Holbrook. In addition, he invited the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Wallace Stegner to be the department’s writer in residence. It was Mr. Stegner’s presence that prompted Mr. Udall to write “The Quiet Crisis.”
Mr. Udall was also an early supporter of Rachel Carson, the biologist whose book “Silent Spring” brought attention to the environmental hazards of pesticide use.

It's 1979 all over. Don't these people learn?