fayfreethinkers.com

Ezra Klein: "John Boehner isn't even trying to pretend his House of Representatives is a sane place anymore. The House GOP's debt limit bill -- obtained by the National Review -- isn't a serious governing document. It's not even a plausible opening bid. It's a cry for help."

And while the hopeless insanity of the Republican ransom note certainly matters, Jon Chait noticed something especially interesting about the GOP's "megalomaniacal ambition."

Does that list sound vaguely familiar? It's Mitt Romney's 2012 economic plan. Almost word for word, in fact. [...]
The fact that a major party could even propose anything like this is a display of astonishing contempt for democratic norms. Republicans ran on this plan and lost by 5 million votes. They also lost the Senate and received a million fewer votes in the House but held control owing to favorable district lines. Is there an example in American history of a losing party issuing threats to force the majority party to implement its rejected agenda?

Since the U.S. Civil War? No, there are no such examples."

Steve Benen

On Bullshit:

"...bullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true. They quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant. Frankfurt concludes that although bullshit can take many innocent forms, excessive indulgence in it can eventually undermine the practitioner's capacity to tell the truth in a way that lying does not. Liars at least acknowledge that it matters what is true. By virtue of this, Frankfurt writes, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are."

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7929.html

"Remember the fertilizer plant that blew in West, Texas? Hell, remember the Massey coal mine disaster? Remember how there inevitably was a story about how those places had been freed steadily from the death grip of government regulation by the Invisible Hand of The Profit Motive? Remember how people then wondered how such terrible things could happen to such wonderful people and everybody sent teddy bears and stuff?
For the love of weeping Christ, if you let the members of America's corporate elite go unsupervised and unaccountable, they will kill people, either all at once in cave-ins or big boom-booms, or slowly, a little at a time, by poisoning the air and the water and the food." --Charle Pierce, Esquire magazine http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/S ... ay_Stories

Bill Maher:

"The National Review said, "If the President thinks the NFL is too dangerous for his fictitious son, what about the military?" Right, because defending your country and kickoff returns are the same thing.
I don't know where Republicans get this weird delusion that they're the party of manliness, but this is Rush Limbaugh's bedroom.


(audience laughter and applause)

Talent on loan from God. Furniture on loan from Liberace. (audience laughter)

And yet somehow conservatives — who boast by far the bigger list of non-serving chickenhawks — see themselves as the tough guys. But it's rarely a real manliness, it's more the pathetic bluster of a blogger in his bathrobe demanding that Obama "man up and bomb Iran!" while his mother fixes his macaroni and cheese.

None of this is going to get better until Democrats stop letting Republicans claim they've got the big balls, just because. For one, I never quite got how my life would be better with increased ball size. (audience laughter) If you need to stick your balls in to get things going, you're doing it wrong! (audience laughter) And two, Democrats have to start being the party that redefines toughness as restraint. And stop responding to Republican taunts that have goaded Michael Dukakis into a tank, John Kerry into a duck hunting outfit, and Hillary Clinton into Iraq.

Because it's not really masculinity conservatives love, anyway — it's bullying. Somehow we've gone from Teddy Roosevelt's "speak softly and carry a big stick" to Chris Christie's "speak loudly and be a big dick". (wild audience cheering and applause)

Fox News's manly He-Man Brit Hume said liberals don't get Christie, because he's a, quote, "old fashioned masculine muscular guy". (shocked audience laughter) Or maybe four muscular guys in a garbage truck.

But bullying isn't a masculine virtue; standing up to bullies is. (wild audience cheering and applause) Ignoring society's least-abled people is not masculine; taking care of them is. (audience cheering) But to macho people like Rush Limbaugh, who said Obama not letting his son play football was "irresponsible", or Glenn Beck — another fountain of testosterone — who called on Obama to "stop being a chick" about football, this is what it always comes down to: Obama is a pussy like all Democrats are pussies.

It's all part of their narrative that (spoken sarcastically) "we will keep you safe, cuz we're the real men who aren't afraid to send your kids off to die in wars of choice. And the Democrats are a bunch of nancy-boys who think of war as some sort of last resort. They believe in engagement, and other pansy concessions that could lead to dialogue, or even worse, peace." (audience laughter and applause)

The former Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, published his memoirs this month, and wrote something that seemed to be absolutely devastating about Obama, that he wasn't enthusiastic about our war in Afghanistan, and that for him, it was all about getting out. That's bad?!? Gates said George Bush was a good President because he "had no second thoughts about Iraq". (audience laughter) Right. Because to have second thoughts, you first have to have first thoughts! (wild audience cheering and applause)"

Daily KOS

Meanwhile, in a Teabagger sleeper cell....

Putting a face on all of the conservative Teabagger children I debate on Facebook:

THE PROBLEM ISN'T THE VA OR ERIC SHINSEKI
Excerpt:
"The problem with the VA system right now is that, for an entire decade, we sent people into the meat grinder of a war the architects of which conducted completely off the books. They kept it off the books used to keep the federal budget, and they did all they could to keep it off the books of the nation's moral conscience as well. They lied and they cooked their estimates on everything far worse than did the likely criminals who fudged the documentation at the hospital in Phoenix. The whole country was awash in the moral equivalent of a Ponzi scheme, all glistening and shiny and bedecked in bunting. Meanwhile, the physical, financial, and moral cost of it all built up and built up until the scheme got bigger and more complicated and, ultimately, it became untenable. And now, the people who launched it in the first place are tut-tutting about what happened when the whole thing finally collapsed. The one thing to remember about a Ponzi scheme is that the people who get in first get paid off. They got their war. They profited from the double-entry bookkeeping they kept on the national conscience and, now, there's a Democratic president, and a whole lot of injured veterans, who end up holding the bag." --Charles P. Pierce

Esquire


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"In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican." --H. L. Mencken

"I think that the proposition of going to Baghdad is also fallacious. I think if we we're going to remove Saddam Hussein we would have had to go all the way to Baghdad, we would have to commit a lot of force because I do not believe he would wait in the Presidential Palace for us to arrive. I think we'd have had to hunt him down. And once we'd done that and we'd gotten rid of Saddam Hussein and his government, then we'd have had to put another government in its place. What kind of government? Should it be a Sunni government or Shi'i government or a Kurdish government or Ba'athist regime? Or maybe we want to bring in some of the Islamic fundamentalists? How long would we have had to stay in Baghdad to keep that government in place? What would happen to the government once U.S. forces withdrew? How many casualties should the United States accept in that effort to try to create clarity and stability in a situation that is inherently unstable? ...it would have been a mistake for us to get bogged down in the quagmire inside Iraq." --Dick Cheney, April 29, 1991.

Bruce Bartlett, domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and GHW Bush:



Longer version:

[McCain] probably has his finger up in the air, looking around to see which way the tea party is blowing.

After the Vietnam experience, we all agreed that we must do more and do everything humanly possible to get all of our soldiers home who are captured, and we didn't ask questions about whether they were deserving or not. They're prisoners of war, they're American soldiers, they deserve to be brought home...

It's all been turned around now, because of the tea party. The Republicans in Washington constantly have their finger on the pulse of the grassroots, trying to figure out what they want, and how to pander to them.

But unfortunately, these people in the tea party are morons! I mean, they really are. They're stupid, they're ignoramuses, they have no idea what they're talking about, they're extremists, they're bigots.

Senator Thad Cochran... may very well lose his primary to some crackpot moron tea party person.

[Conservative Republicans] keep moving further and further to the right...

Fox-- which is essentially the Republican Party network, simply panders to the Republican Party line-- has an age 72 average viewing age. And so those people who make up the tea party are basically dying off."

http://thepoliticalcarnival.net/2014/06 ... ots-dying/

"Men do tend to think about things on a much higher level... we need our male colleagues to understand that
if you can bring it down to a woman's level... that's the way to go." --GOP Congresswoman Renee Ellmers

LINK

Reich on why the election isn't so bad:
"I was in the Clinton administration Election Day 1994 when Democrats lost both houses of Congress, and Newt Gingrich became king of the Hill. It was horrible. But you know what? It created all sorts of opportunities. It smoked Republicans out. They could no longer hide behind blue-dog Democrats. Americans saw them for who they were. Gingrich became the most hated man in America. The 1994 election also marked the end of the coalition of conservative Republicans and southern Democrats that had controlled much of Congress since the end of the New Deal."

And hey look, voter suppression works:
"Voter suppression watch: In the North Carolina Senate race, Thom Tillis beat Senator Kay Hagen by 48,000 votes. North Carolina’s voters were, for the first time, voting under one of the harshest new election laws in the country — which Tillis helped craft. The Election Protection hotline reported widespread problems with voter registrations and voters being told they were in the wrong precinct. Numbers from recent elections suggest the magnitude of voter suppression is close to 45,000 to 50,000 votes.

Similarly, in Kansas, Governor Sam Brownback beat back challenger Paul Davis by fewer than 33,000 votes. The Kansas secretary of state says more than 24,000 Kansans tried to register this year but their registrations were held in “suspense” because they failed to present the documentary proof of citizenship now required by state law. And the Government Accountability Office found that Kansas’s voter ID law reduced turnout by 17,000 voters in 2012. You do the math." --Robert Reich

"By the way, I also did say Jesus was white; as I've learned in the past two days, that is far from settled." --Megyn Kelly, the Kelly File, 21 December 2013 (transcript punctuation corrected for clarity)

http://nation.foxnews.com/2013/12/21/me ... a-comments

I guess she told us.

CHUCK TODD: Let me go to Gul Rahman. He was chained to the wall of his cell, doused with water, froze to death in C.I.A. custody.
And it turned out it was a case of mistaken identity.

DICK CHENEY: --right. But the problem I had is with the folks that we did release that end up back on the battlefield. [...] I'm more concerned with bad guys who got out and released than I am with a few that, in fact, were innocent.

CHUCK TODD: 25% of the detainees though, 25% turned out to be innocent. They were released.

DICK CHENEY: Where are you going to draw the line, Chuck? How are-- [...]

CHUCK TODD: Is that too high? You're okay with that margin for error?

DICK CHENEY: I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective.

LINK