Tea Party Welfare Queens

Keep your gubmint hands off my gubmint subsidies!

Everyone hates Glenn Reynolds' beloved Tea Party

It's so funny to watch Putz write these long love letters to the Teabaggers as though it were still 2009, and no one knew who they were.

Well, it's 2011 now, and everyone except the crazies hates them.

Glenn Reynolds doesn't like cynical politics.

After 8 years of Bush/Rove, Putz links approvingly to this quote.

I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a more cynical strategy on a problem so important in my lifetime. I hope they fail.

Really? Ever?

Using the War on Terror(TM) as a political weapon?
Using 9/11 to justify the invasion of Iraq?
Campaigning on amending the Constitution to keep the gays in their place?
Terri Schiavo?

I'm thinking Tom Blumer is 4 years old.

Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.

ZOMG BILL AYERS WROTE OBAMAS BOOK ZOMG

What a bunch of idiots.

What is perhaps even more bothersome than the wholesale acceptance of this theme by so many on the right is the embrace of the video linked in the AT blog post above by many who appear to have suspended critical analysis in lieu of wishful thinking. Ayers does indeed admit to writing Dreams but in such an obviously sarcastic manner that the question isn’t whether Ayers was serious but how in God’s name so many conservative bloggers failed to see the taunting sarcasm used in his “confession.” [...]

This is not an isolated incident for many on the right. Wanting something to be true - Obama’s foreign birth, his Muslim religion, Obama as socialist, Marxist, communist conspirator - leads many conservatives into uncritical, unsound conclusions about the president. Julian Sanchez referred to this mindset as “epistemic closure” where themes and narratives - sometimes wildly exaggerated - are bounced back and forth among conservatives until they take on a life all their own and the truth of them cannot be challenged, even though common sense or even the record say otherwise.

Also, water found to be wet.

Shorter Jum DeMint

AP: "Jim DeMint says other Republicans should run in 2012"

Shorter Jim DeMint: "It just dawned on me what a fucking joke our field of candidates is."

Same differences

Brent Bozell and Sean Hannity have a two-man wankfest over the media "double standard" involving Iraq and Libya. Because:

1. Lobbing some missiles at Libya and committing a couple hundred thousand ground troops to Iraq for a goddamn decade are quite similar

2. You all remember how skeptical the media was in the buildup to the Iraq War, right? God, they just hammered poor W.

Damn that lamestream media.

Following the logic of people like Putz and The Quitter: the "lamestream media" doesn't matter anymore, because no one pays really attention to them and they can't control all the information because of the ARMY OF DAVIDS -- but yet they're still somehow able to make Republicans -- who ignore said lamestream media -- dislike Republican politicians.

Amazing how that works.

Objectively pro-Gaddafi.

The white flag surrender monkeys are in full force today.

Don't they know that failing to support the Commander-in-Chief in a time of war is treasonous?

Libya reminds us that wingnuts like Glenn Reynolds were dead wrong about Obama.

Look at this smug triumphalism from Putz.

ANOTHER RUBE SELF-IDENTIFIES: YOU CAN CALL ME “SMUG” AS LONG AS YOU ACKNOWLEDGE THE STING. You were played. I told you so at the time. The whole hope-and-change thing was an obvious con, and you were among the rubes who fell for it anyway. And yeah, I’m rubbing it in.

Uh, what? Most people on the left I know who voted for Obama did so knowing that he called for increased defense spending and that he had supported just about every military action the US has taken since Vietnam -- except for Iraq.

The surge in Afghanistan was disappointing, but predictable. The withdrawal from Iraq seems sluggish, but is progressing. But the Libyan no-fly zone isn't surprising. Obama's never seriously challenged the wisdom of Pax Americana.

But wingnuts like Putz were insisting that a vote for defeatist, America-hating, pro-Arab Obama who ZOMG WANTS TO TALK TO IRAN!11!! was a vote to surrender to the Islamofascists.

And clearly, that was all wrong.

Who are the rubes, exactly?

Glenn Reynolds: We're Not Winning!

I continue to be amused by Mr. We're Winning The War on Terror If You're Paying Attention's (ca. 2001-2009) complete transformation into a cheese-eating defeatist surrender monkey.

I’ve got no problem with taking down Khaddafy, which has been a U.S. goal for decades. I just think we’re bungling it. Waging war halfheartedly, on the cheap, and by committee is not a formula for success.

Troop underminer!

Somebody kill it. Please. Kill it with fire.

Amazingly, the column itself is actually worse than looking at this:

I should get hazard pay for reading a blog this bad

Gateway Dumbshit:

DISGUSTING… WI Progressives Blame Scott Walker For Teacher’s Suicide

These People Are Disgusting…
The far left is using a woman’s suicide to attack Governor Scott Walker. The Progressive, a liberal website in Wisconsin, reported this week that a Wisconsin teacher committed suicide because of Governor Scott Walker’s union bill. The website says she was “distraught” to learn that she was going to have to pay 12.6% instead of 6% of her insurance premium cost?

Really?… Really?

I don't know...really? Let's take a look at what the post says.

Wisconsin Teacher in Apparent Suicide, “Distraught” Over Walker’s Cuts
Matthew Rothschild, March 17, 2011 | The Progressive

Jeri-Lynn Betts, an early childhood teacher in the Watertown, Wisconsin, school district, died on March 8 of an apparent suicide.

A colleague says she was “very distraught” over Gov. Scott Walker’s attacks on public sector workers and public education . .

“She was an amazing person,” says the Rev. Terry Larson of the Immanuel Evangelical Lutheran Church in Watertown, where she was a member. “She really put her heart and soul in her work,” adds Larson, who officiated at her memorial service on March 15...Figuring out all the contributing factors behind a likely suicide is a complicated problem. Such deaths are in some ways incomprehensible—and always tragic..."Susan advised me that Geri had a long history of depression,” Officer Jeffrey Meloy wrote in his report. “Susan stated that the last several weeks had been ‘stressing her out’ due to the protests and the introduction of the budget repair bill and the uncertainty involved in the teaching world, as far as who was going to have jobs and what services were going to be cut. . . . Susan stated that Jeri truly loved her job and was about the most outgoing and bubbly person you could ever want to be around. Susan stated that everybody had noticed, however, the last few weeks since the introduction of the budget repair bill that Jeri was having a lot of difficulty.”

Nice reading comprehension skills, buddy. I clearly see where the story says she killed herself "because of Scott Walker's union bill" and because "she was going to have to pay 12.6% instead of 6% of her insurance premium cost?"

It must be pretty hard to read things thoroughly with one's head so far up Sarah Palin's twat.

The highly-succesful Bush/Cheney administration.

It's easy to make fun of rubes like Surber for thinking Bush was awesome, but keep in mind, the NY Times is employing people who think exactly the same way.

How to succeed as President? Be like Bush!

Every now and then, it's good to be reminded that there's still some dark, ignorant backwoods corner of the country that still thinks George W. Bush was a successful president.

I have all along wished for Barack Obama’s success because I knew the only way for him to be a successful president would be to adopt the policies of President Bush.

Can't wait to hear Romney or Huckabee extolling the virtues of Bush/Cheney during the campaign. I mean, if he was so successful, they'll want to piggyback on that success, right?

Moran.

Naturally, Putz linked.

Two party system.

I've been saying a long time that we've currently got two parties in this country: one is corrupt, and the other is corrupt and crazy.

And while I'm not a big fan of "Suck on This," he does get this almost right.

President Obama has the right convictions...but he has not shown the courage of his convictions. The Republicans have just gone nuts.

Because what we really need is to be fighting wars in 4 Middle Eastern countries.

Wow, this is stupid.

Sarah Palin less popular than Charlie Sheen.

Damn you, lamestream media.

In which Glenn Reynolds falls out of love with Rand Paul.

Oops.

Imagine this—what if there had never been a President George W. Bush, and when Bill Clinton left office he was immediately replaced with Barack Obama. Now imagine Obama had governed from 2000 to 2008 exactly as Bush did–doubling the size of government, doubling the debt, expanding federal entitlements and education, starting the Iraq war–the whole works. To make matters worse, imagine that for a portion of that time, the Democrats actually controlled all three branches of government. Would Republicans have given Obama and his party a free pass in carrying out the exact same agenda as Bush? It's hard to imagine this being the case, given the grief Bill Clinton got from Republicans, even though his big government agenda was less ambitious than Bush's. Yet, the last Republican president got very little criticism from his own party for most of his tenure.

For conservatives, there was no excuse for this.

But...but...Putz said mean things about earmarks!

Evan Bayh: Man of Principle

Not content with the paycheck from his sweet-ass lobbyist gig, Evan "I quit the Senate because there is too much partisanship" Bayh is now getting paid to appear on Fox News.

Way to ratchet down the partisanship, asshead.

Right-wingers: still wrong about everything.

It's always the media with these people.

Japan currently faces a real emergency. As a result of the earthquake and the ensuing tsunami, thousands of people are dead, and tens of thousands more are missing and may be trapped under rubble, severely injured, and in danger of death by thirst or suffocation. There are over 500,000 people without shelter, with a blizzard on the way, and even the as-yet unscathed could soon face death from epidemics caused by thousands of unburied corpses.

At such a time, nothing could be more scandalous than the current campaign by much of the international press to spread panic over trivial emissions of radiological material from several disabled nuclear power stations.

And,

Anyone who has done a little reading on the Japan nuclear crisis will know that we’re facing a less dangerous situation than Three Mile Island.

Meanwhile, back on planet Earth.

Japan's nuclear crisis is equivalent to number six on the INES scale of nuclear accidents from one to seven, Kyodo news agency quoted the French Nuclear Agency as saying.

The 1986 Chernobyl disaster was a seven and Three Mile Island a five.

Litmus tests and circular firing squads

What does the modern Republican Party do when it stumbles upon a candidate who might actually be a plausible favorite to beat Obama? Why, they decide he is insufficiently conservative and tear him to pieces.

Fresh off his twin heresies of shelving a Wisconsin-style "right to work" bill and continuing his policy of making abortion a non-issue in his platform, Daniels has continued to dig his own grave by endorsing 30-year veteran Senator Dick Lugar, one of the last Republicans in the upper chamber with half a brain in his skull.

I wouldn't vote for Daniels, but when he was my Governor for six years he struck me as a sincere non-ideologue with what I believe are some very bad ideas about the role of government in the economy. He isn't a complete idiot. He has the ability to explain even his half-baked ideas to the public without making everyone think he is insane.

And for all of these reasons and more he is totally unacceptable to the modern GOP.

The Mother of All Two Minutes of Hate

Well, it's officially a hot war now. These are fighting words.

Funny how The Quitter, who responds furiously to every little minor slight -- remains silent.

Knee jerk Joe, doing what he does best

Joe, you've got a face that is just made for punching. And the words to match it.

Glenn Reynolds - not very big on cause and effect.

Putz, on the Japanese disasters.

As I’ve said before, the Japanese do disaster-prep better than we do.

Hmmm. And who is responsible for disaster-prep? Oh right, government.

Imagine the tyranny involved in having the government install an alarm in your house!! And what business does the government have marking footpaths? Blowing money on seawalls and censors is just so much government waste.

Pretty much. And all that stuff requires taxes and regulations and government -- the things Putz spends his dreary life constantly railing against.

In other words, don't bitch when the fire comes after you've defunded the fire department.

Drill baby drill.

Not from The Quitter -- from Bill.

Former President Bill Clinton said Friday that delays in offshore oil and gas drilling permits are “ridiculous” at a time when the economy is still rebuilding, according to attendees at the IHS CERAWeek conference.

Clinton spoke on a panel with former President George W. Bush that was closed to the media. Video of their moderated talk with IHS CERA Chairman Daniel Yergin was also prohibited.

But according to multiple people in the room, Clinton, surprisingly, agreed with Bush on many oil and gas issues, including criticism of delays in permitting offshore since last year’s Gulf of Mexico spill.

Heckuva job.

Good point, K-Lo

K-Lo: "Good for Peter King. Let's Have More Hearings."

I concur. We'll start by grilling fat, pasty white guys who financially supported the IRA during its active terrorist years.

Get off my lawn

Alan Simpson proving definitively that he is not an old, cranky, out of touch white guy:



Sounds like someone needs a clean diapey.

Get this fucker gone

A break from our regularly scheduled mockery of limp-dicked wingnut sycophants in the blogosphere and mainstream media:

United Wisconsin is for Wisconsin residents to sign a pledge to recall Scott Walker and Rebecca Kleefisch. Since we can not distribute the actual petitions until 11/3/11, sign a pledge online for recall as we will only have 60 days to collect 540,206 signatures. The database will be essential for a successful recall. http://www.UnitedWisconsin.com

Next January there will be a 60-day mad dash to break it off in Scott Walker's ass. Get signed up now and be ready to do your part in January. Sitting on the sidelines for this one isn't going to be an option.

David Frum: Will GOP Give Climate Science a Fair Shake?

No.

This has been another...

Tim Pawlenty has absolutely no chance to be president.

It's official.

He must wear specially made pants to house these enormous balls

Just try to fathom the nuts it takes for Charles Koch to write an editorial decrying "crony capitalism" in the United States. But don't worry, the Koch brothers aren't as nasty as you've been led to believe:

I am confident that businesses like ours will hire more people and invest in more equipment when our country's financial future looks more promising. Laying the groundwork for smaller, smarter government, especially at the federal level, is going to be tough. But it is essential for getting us back on the path to long-term prosperity.

Once wages get low enough and benefits no longer exist in the private sector they'll consider hiring you. What a couple of guys.

George Will realizes that leading Republicans are crazy.

Better late than never, I suppose.

If pessimism is not creeping on little cat's feet into Republicans' thinking about their 2012 presidential prospects, that is another reason for pessimism. This is because it indicates they do not understand that sensible Americans, who pay scant attention to presidential politics at this point in the electoral cycle, must nevertheless be detecting vibrations of weirdness emanating from people associated with the party.

Gee, ya think George?

Hard to argue with this.

Kaus: still 'tarded

Oh, Mickey K.:

It’s all about the deficit to (David) Brooks. But the damage done by public sector unionism isn’t mainly the producing of deficits. It’s the crippling of government, so that bad teachers can’t be fired and productivity stagnates and virtually everything the government does it does crappier than private industry does it. That’s a big, ongoing problem for Democrats, which is why maybe it doesn’t trouble Brooks.

I couldn't make this shit up if I tried.

NRO tries, fails at sarcasm

It's only effective if you have a sense of humor, and god knows conservatives don't:

He has declared war on the state’s public employees, who live on a scant $140 a day. These brave members of the proletariat are being coerced by the “duly elected” “majority party” “in control of both houses of the legislature and the governorship” to give up 5 percent of their incomes to help fund their pensions, and to pay 12 percent of their health-care. The time for bold action — and screaming, and fuzzy riffs — is now.

The wit, it stings.

Zero Hedge

Matt Taibbi has said some nice things about these guys, but I find the non-stop, Randpaulian drumbeat of "this is Weimar Germany!" really quite bizarre.

"Our priorities will be the people's priorities."

Sadly, no.