Category: Wanker

Republicans Do Not Have a Monopoly On Stupid

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Case in point, Senator Barbara Boxer is proposing to deploy National Guard to public schools:

Federal funds would be made available to deploy National Guard troops at schools under legislation introduced Wednesday by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) in response to last week’s mass slaying at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn.

The Save Our Schools Act would leave it to governors to decide whether to call out the National Guard and how to use troops around schools.

“Is it not part of the national defense to make sure that your children are safe?” Boxer said at Capitol Hill press conference.

Yes, armed soldiers patrolling the corridors of our schools is such a good idea.

We really need to strengthen out Posse Comitatus law, not abolish it.

I Miss Madame La Guillotine

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Roll Stewart!

Jerry Della Femina, who made his fortune on Madison Avenue, is whining like a baby about taxes, and claims that he is selling his posh Hamptons estate as a result:

He got taxed out of town.

 Legendary advertising guru Jerry Della Femina is the latest Hamptons fat cat to unload his East End spread at the precipice of the dreaded fiscal cliff, The Post has learned.

 The flamboyant Madison Avenue guru has sold his 8,500-square-foot estate — the host of many legendary Hamptons bashes — for $25 million, and blames his flight squarely on President Obama’s fiscal policies.

 “I want the proceeds of this sale to go to my kids and my grandkids,” said the man behind iconic ad campaigns for Meow Mix and Absolut Vodka. “I don’t want my money going to Obama, and that’s what’s going to happen in the New Year. That’s why I sold right now, that’s why I wanted to get this done.”

Seriously.

This sort of sh%$ has me wishing for the return Maximilien de Robespierre.

I’ll leave it to Jon Stewart to express how I feel, though he was actually directing it to hack journo Bernie Goldberg.

Worst………Speaker………Ever

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You cannot negotiate with him, because, when push comes to shove, he is completely incapable of delivering the votes, even on a meaningless vote that was intended to call out a President that his caucus hates:

I just finished laughing from this spectacle on the House floor today. The House leadership tried desperately to pass “Plan B,” the main part of which was an extension of the Bush tax cuts on the first $1 million of income. In truth, all of the other giveaways in it would actually result in lower taxes for many wealthy earners, but tax rates have this weird power, especially within the Republican caucus. And you could just feel today that conservatives weren’t willing to pass the bill, even at that ridiculously high level. John Boehner and the leadership added a sweetener in the form of a package that eliminated the sequester on defense spending and applied it to more discretionary spending cuts, and even that barely passed, tainted by the association to Plan B.

We waited for a vote. And waited. Then the House Republicans held a closed caucus. And then Boehner had to come out and call the whole thing off.

The House did not take up the tax measure today because it did not have sufficient support from our members to pass. Now it is up to the president to work with Senator Reid on legislation to avert the fiscal cliff. The House has already passed legislation to stop all of the January 1 tax rate increases and replace the sequester with responsible spending cuts that will begin to address our nation’s crippling debt. The Senate must now act.

This is astonishing. Boehner spent three days talking up Plan B, which you just don’t do without the votes in hand. But conservative groups rule the House, and they turned against a bill that gives tax breaks to everyone making up to $1 million, along with enough reductions in other taxes to soften the blow for those poor millionaires. But House Republicans just aren’t going to do it, on this or any tax increase.

Seriously, negotiating with John Boehner is over the budget like negotiating with the Tatyana Egorova, coach of FC Rossiyanka, the leading Russian women’s soccer team over nuclear arms reductions.

Even if you assume good faith negotiations, they simply cannot deliver on their promises.

2 Manny Guns, Sulushen iz Moar Gunz

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So, the NRA has finally made a statement about how to prevent more gun deaths, at schools, and their solution is lots of people with high powered weapons, and if that gets too expensive, they are suggesting amateur volunteers with guns:

After a weeklong silence, the National Rifle Association announced Friday that it wants to arm security officers at every school in the country, implicating violent video games, the news media and lax law enforcement as being far more to blame for the recent rash of mass shootings than guns.

 “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” said Wayne LaPierre, the N.R.A. vice president, said at a media event that was interrupted by protesters. One held up a banner saying, “N.R.A. Killing Our Kids.”

 The N.R.A.’s plan for countering school shootings, coming a week after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., was met with widespread derision from school administrators, law enforcement officials and politicians, with some critics calling it “delusional” and “paranoid.” Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, a Republican, said arming schools would not make them safer.

 Even conservative politicians who had voiced support this week for arming more school officers did not rush to embrace the N.R.A.’s plan.

………

 Mr. LaPierre said his organization would fund and develop a program called the National Model School Shield Program, to work with schools to arm and train school guards, including retired police officers and volunteers. The gun rights group named Asa Hutchinson, a former Republican congressman from Arkansas who has been a strong supporter, to lead a task force to develop the program.

………

 But what the N.R.A. proposed would expand the use of armed officers nationwide and make greater use of not just police officers, but armed volunteers — including retired police officers and reservists — to patrol school grounds. The organization offered no estimates of the cost.

(emphasis mine)

Seriously, you want any Johnny off the street and hang out with MY children?  I don’t think so.

Tell you what, how we levy a tax on gun and ammunition sales to cover all this sh%$?

BTW, the Universe is having nothing of Mr. LaPierre’s bullshit. As they were giving their non-press conference (no questions allowed), another mass shooting was happening in Pennsylvania, and it happened despite the presence in the area of peace officers with guns:

The National Rifle Association today held its first press conference since last week’s deadly shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, and the takeaway was clear: We need more guns.

“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” said NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre.

He went on to call for an armed police officer to be stationed in “every single school” across America to prevent further mass shootings, as critics tried to point out that armed law enforcement officials might not be the panacea the NRA thinks it is.

But before they could finish their sentence, the counterargument made itself as news broke of a mass shooting event in Pennsylvania with multiple casualties, including state troopers.

According to local reports out of Blair County, at least four people were killed and five more were injured in a shooting spree near Altoona. The gunman is said to be among the dead, and at least two state troopers were hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries.

WPXI’s Courtney Brennan says she was told by emergency officials that the shooting suspect “was ‘mobile’ at one point and went up and down a rural road and shot victims.”

No additional information is available at this time, but a spokeswoman told the Altoona Mirror it was “a relatively large crime scene.”

Seriously, The Onion needs to shut down and lay off all of its own staff, because they have been trumped by the world we actually have.

Megan “Math is Hard” McArdle is the Most Horrible Person in Punditry

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In her latest spewing (no direct link, ever) she suggests that we need to train school children to gang rush gunmen:

I’d also like us to encourage people to gang rush shooters, rather than following their instincts to hide; if we drilled it into young people that the correct thing to do is for everyone to instantly run at the guy with the gun, these sorts of mass shootings would be less deadly, because even a guy with a very powerful weapon can be brought down by 8-12 unarmed bodies piling on him at once.

Ummm ……… You ignorant Randroid sociopath, you are are unaware of the physical capabilities of a 6 year-old child.

Let me illustrate this with pictures.

This is 8-12 6 year old children:

This is the worst ranked defense in the NFL, the New Orleans Saints:

While I could concede that the Saints (What is with those pink shoes and gloves) might be able to take down an adult armed with a wet noodle, those kids could not take down a llama, or for that matter, the Dali Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibet.

Repeating for the benefit of the terminally stupid:

Children with llama
New Orleans Saints:
Dali Lama

And the Dali Lama, and the aforementioned 2 “l” llama,  are both more likely to take down a gunman armed with an assault rifle than are the children.

Why does this child or privilege and political patronage have a job?

Thanks Merkel

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Not only is Angela Merkel’s hard money policies impoverishing much of the Euro Zone, which might cause the currency zone to break up, but it looks like it’s going to lead to the dissolution of Spain:

The center-right Catalan nationalist bloc CiU and the Catalan Republican Left (ERC) on Wednesday reached an agreement to call for a referendum on independence for Catalonia within two years.

The deal paves the way for Artur Mas to remain premier of the region. The CiU emerged as the biggest party in regional elections held last month but fell short of the absolute majority it was seeking. ERC was the second most voted party. The two sides still have to agree on the budget for next year. The accord on the referendum states that it must be held before the end of 2014 but does not give a specific date.

In a parallel development, the CiU, the ERC and other Catalan parties — with the exception of the local branch of the ruling Popular Party — reached an agreement not to implement the reform of the education system put forward by Education Minister José Ignacio Wert, which restores Castilian Spanish to the same level in the classroom as co-official regional languages such as Basque or Catalan.

The accord says the parties will adhere to the Catalan Education Law, which promotes immersion in the Catalan language. The parties described Wert’s proposals as “unacceptable” as they “prevent linguistic immersion by segregating pupils on the basis of language.”

Seriously, the pain caucus in the Euro Zone (Angela is their most senior member) is laying waste to everything that they touch.

Wanker of the Day

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Brendan Nyhan, who seems to think that fact checkers should put their thumbs on the scale so they can condemn the standard political fibbers and the pathological liars in equal numbers.

Read the exchange in the comments between him and Dan Froomkin, where the latter eviscerates Nyhan for his dumb-ass “a pox on both their houses” bullsh%$.

Shame on the Columbia Journalism review for publishing this crap.

Nicholas Kristof is an Evil Person

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I’m not sure what I can say about a man who says this (No link, not ever, he is on my “do not link” list after this):

This is painful for a liberal to admit, but conservatives have a point when they suggest that America’s safety net can sometimes entangle people in a soul-crushing dependency. Our poverty programs do rescue many people, but other times they backfire. Some young people here don’t join the military (a traditional escape route for poor, rural Americans) because it’s easier to rely on food stamps and disability payments.

You have to understand that he came to this conclusion after talking to ONE guy from Kentucky, and an American Enterprise Institute “Scholar” who believes that all social welfare programs should be block granted to the states, so the money can be given to rich people.

You see, he thinks that the money spent on kids who get SSI, most of whom actually need the support, should instead be spent on should be spent on early childhood development.*

Somehow Mr. Kristof thinks that overpaid people with cushy jobs, like New York Times OP/ED columnists, shouldn’t pay a bit more in taxes, or pay a bit more to have their lawns manicured, or their tables bussed, or their clothes cleaned, or their floors swept.  Somehow, that suggestion is simply gauche.

I do not have the words to express my level of contempt for Kristof as a failed human being.

Fortunately, Charlie Pierce does have the words.

Go read/

H/t Atrios.

*BTW, when Michelle Rhee went to war with the teachers’ unions in Washington, DC, she never had a plan for early childhood development. This is typical of people like Rhee and Kristoff. They are less interested in finding solutions than they are in demonizing the least amongst us.

And Republican Wankertude Reaches New Heights

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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell just filibustered his own bill:

My admiration for the Senate’s minority leader, the Hon. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, is limited. But his latest move took even me by surprise.

 In a tactic he thought would put the Obama Administration in an uncomfortable position, yesterday McConnell proposed a measure that would give the president, rather than the Congress, the responsibility for raising the federal debt ceiling.

 Then, when Democrats surprised him by being willing to bring it up for a vote, McConnell reacted in the way that comes most naturally to him: by threatening a filibuster. Attentive readers will recall that over the past six years, McConnell has been responsible for most of the filibusters in America’s 225-year Constitutional history. ………

If anyone wonders if the casual use of the filibuster has not gone over the edge, they need to understand this: The Senate Minority Leader filibustered his own bill.

I understand that their are people who legitimately believe that the filibuster, as well as other traditions make the Senate the “World’s greatest deliberative body,” but I think the fact that that proves that it is nothing more than, “A petri dish for narcissistic sociopaths,” because The Senate Minority Leader filibustered his own bill.

What part of, “The Senate Minority Leader filibustered his own bill,” don’t you understand?

The Goal is Not Recovery, It’s the Dismantling of the Social Safety State

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That’s what the right wing push for austerity is all about.

Case in point, the chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, who is saying that since austerity is further depressing the British economy, it has become necessary extend austerity until at least 2018:

Britons, many already weary of government austerity budgets that some economists say are impeding the country’s recovery, are going to have to wait even longer for relief.

The architect of the austerity program, George Osborne, the chancellor of the Exchequer, told Parliament on Wednesday that the government had missed one of its self-imposed debt-cutting goals and would have to extend the belt-tightening into 2018, a year longer than previously promised.

Although Mr. Osborne maintained that the debt reduction plan was still on track, his presentation drew heckling and laughter from some opposition lawmakers, particularly after he argued that new tax measures would show that “we’re all in this together.”

The next general election in Britain will take place in 2015, well before the end of austerity measures that have included cuts in welfare services and the elimination of tens of thousands of public sector jobs.

On Wednesday, the Office for Budget Responsibility, a nonpartisan body that is monitoring the economy, said it now expected full-year data to show that the economy shrank 0.1 percent this year, instead of growing 0.8 percent, as the office had previously forecast.

It also said the economy would grow 1.2 percent next year as opposed to the 2 percent predicted earlier.

“It’s a hard road but we are getting there,” Mr. Osborne told Parliament. “Britain is on the right track. Turning back now would be a disaster.”

The evidence is clear: Austerity in a depressed economy further depresses the economy, and reduces tax revenues.

Austerity is not about creating growth, nor is it about reducing deficits.  It is merely camouflage for an assault on social insurance.

And Congress Gets Into Antivax Bullsh%$

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What a surprise, the conman Darryl Issa supports this, and rather depressingly Dennis Kucinich jumps in with both feet:

I’m not exaggerating. The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held a hearing trying to look into the cause and prevention of autism. Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) launched into a several-minute diatribe (beginning at 12:58 in the video above) that starts off in an Orwellian statement: He claims he’s not antivax. Then he launches into a five-minute speech that promotes long-debunked and clearly incorrect antivax claims, targeting mercury for the most part. Burton has long been an advocate for quackery; for at least a decade he has used Congressional situations like this to promote antiscience.

In the latest hearing, Burton sounds like a crackpot conspiracy theorist, to be honest, saying he knows—better than thousands of scientists who have spent their careers investigating these topics—that thimerosal causes neurological disorders (including autism). He goes on for some time about mercury (as does Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) starting at 21:44 in the video), making it clear he doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about. For example, very few vaccines still use mercury, and the ones that do use it in tiny amounts and in a form that does not accumulate in the body.

Talking about the danger of mercury in vaccines is like talking about the danger of having hydrogen—an explosive element!—in water. It’s nonsense.

I won’t go further into details, because this shameful travesty of truth and medical health goes on for an hour. On Forbes.com, Steven Salzberg wrote a fantastic article about this Congressional farce. I strongly urge you to read it, since Salzberg brings the hammer down on the Congresscritters who think they know more about science than the scientists who actually devote their lives to this topic.

Let’s be clear, the anti-vaxers do more than hurt themselves, and their hapless children. They harm those for whom vaccines have limited effectiveness, or who are too young, like Dana McCaffrey, because they destroy herd immunity.

The modern version of this was started Andrew Wakefield by a con man who had an interest in a (surprise, non working) “treatment” alternative ginned up a phony controversy to line his own pockets.

The people who support this crap are being either evil or stupid.

They’ve Lost the F%$#ing Heritage Foundation

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Yesterday, I mentioned that the Republican budget proposals were fact free, well, it appears that people at the right wing Heritage Foundation agree with me:

The House Republican leadership has offered a substantive counteroffer to President Obama’s frivolous fiscal cliff proposal of last week. At first blush, it appears little more than categorical, pre-emptive capitulation.

To be fair, the details of the Republican proposal are extraordinarily vague. Nor is much clarity or comfort gained from the three-page accompanying letter sent to the President and signed by Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI), and three other senior members of the House Republican leadership.

Much can and likely will come out in the days ahead clarifying what a few figures and labels on a single sheet of paper mean. One can only hope the additional clarity substantially improves the picture. However, it is very difficult to be hopeful.

That’s gonna leave a mark.

Normally, I think that the Heritage foundation is full of crap.

Even amongst the right wing think tanks, it’s hacktacular.

Full disclosure, a friend of mine was fired by the Heritage Foundation because she got cancer, so I am not favorably inclined toward these guys.

H/t Talking Points Memo.

I Don’t Know Whether to Feel Schadenfreude, or to be Appalled

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I’m not q big fan the USPTO’s tendency to grant a patent to everything these days, and I’m even less of a fan of Apples use of its patent portfolio as an alternative new ideas, but the folks at Cuppertino just got hit with a completely bogus patent claim:

An apparent shell company has filed a $3 million patent infringement lawsuit against Apple for including headphones with its iPhones.

 A company called Intelligent Smart Phones Concepts sued Apple last week in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging that Apple infringed on U.S. Patent No. 7,373,182. The abstract for “Wireless Mobile Phone Including a Headset” describes an interface that allows a removable headset “to receive at least telephony audio signals from the phone, and to provide audio signals to the phone.”

Seriously, keep patent examiners away from toilet paper, because they will sign off on anything.

Not Enough Bullets

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If I were Al Sharpton, I’d be Screaming at Her

Remember Carly Fiorina?  The former CEO of HP?  The one who first came to prominence by presiding over massive accounting irregularities masquerading as blockbuster sales at Lucent?

Well, when she got fired as CEO, HP employees are reported to have spontaneously burst into song, specifically the song Ding Dong the Witch is Dead.

I’m sure that she cried all the way to the bank, because she got a $40 million dollar golden parachute.

She knows what the problem with the good old USA is, it’s that public employees’ unions have it too good: (at about 3 minutes into the video.

Carly Fiorina, who reportedly stood to receive more than $42 million after being ousted at HP in 2005, says that public workers should receive less benefits because “it is not fair” that unions are “so rich.”

During a Sunday panel segment on NBC, MSNBC host Al Sharpton asserted that Congress must agree to raise taxes on the wealthy before cutting spending.

“This is about fairness,” he explained. “Why do we need to need to deal with the tax on the rich first? Because we must ensure Americans we are dealing with fairness. We keep talking about shared sacrifice, there was not shared wealth and shared prosperity. So, you’re asking people that didn’t enjoy the good times to share in paying for the tab that they never enjoyed.”

Most of the American public might think that a an unbroken record of failure, capped by a $40 million golden parachute might be a bigger problem than the the deferred compensation known as a mortgage.

Seriously, business management seems to be a petri dish for sociopaths.

H/t Chris in Paris at Americablog.

Journalists Who Should Be Working as Pastry Chefs

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Declan Mccullagh, everyone’s favorite “Draw by crayon Libertarian,”* has a scoop.  That Senator Pat Leahy had an amendment to the privacy bill in his committee that would allow warrantless access to your electronic communications by a big honking number of federal agencies.

One small problem though, he got his hands on an out of date draft that had never been seriously considered, and was not put forward by Leahy:

This would be particularly disturbing in the wake of the scandal surrounding Generals Petraeus and Allen, whose emails were exposed during a wide-ranging and questionable FBI investigation and have brought the discussion of limits on the surveillance state to the fore. But when reached by phone, Patrick Leahy’s spokesperson David Carle bluntly said the article was “wrong.”

 The version of the bill that Declan McCullagh excerpts in his report appears to be one of many that have been drafted and passed around, but is not a version that would be considered seriously at a hearing to review the bill next week.

 “Senator Leahy does not support broad carve outs for warrantless searches of email content,” says a Senate Judiciary aide. “He remains committed to upholding privacy laws and updating the outdated Electronic Privacy Communications Act.”

 A person who has been privy to conversations about the impending bill intended to update privacy protections around digital communications for the modern age said that this was a “snapshot of a discussion point” and that it’s inaccurate to say it’s the version being pushed forward. This particular draft of the bill incorporates amendments suggested by Senator Chuck Grassley who has expressed concern that too much privacy protection for our email could negatively impact safety tasks.

OK, That’s a bit of an oops.

So, he accused Pat Leahy of trying to take away our privacy rights on the basis of a draft from Charles Grassley. ……… Oops.

What is Mccullagh’s response to all of this? He claims that his story forced Leahy to change his bill:

Sen. Patrick Leahy has abandoned his controversial proposal that would grant government agencies more surveillance power — including warrantless access to Americans’ e-mail accounts — than they possess under current law.

 The Vermont Democrat said today on Twitter that he would “not support such an exception” for warrantless access. The remarks came a few hours after a CNET article was published this morning that disclosed the existence of the measure.

Not even a mention of reports that it was never a real amendment, and that Chuck Grassley was the author of the draft.

So, he took a draft from a Republican, one that is consistent with that Senator’s history, and ascribed it to a Democrat, because, you know, Democrats are evil!

Not surprising.

Declan McCullagh was one of the chief promoters of the “Al Gore invented the Internet meme.”

His editors need to smack him upside the head with a clue-by-four, and tell him to get the facts straight.

*Not my bon mot. It’s from the always entertaining Andrew Orlowski of The Register.

Please, Do This

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In 1968, my father said, “Those stupid bastards, they’ve nominated Nixon. There’s no way that they will win now.”

He was, of course, spectacularly wrong, but I feel much more secure in saying that I support Charlotte Allen’s call for Sarah Palin to be the 2016 Republican nominee:

The Republican Party has been doing a lot of hand-wringing and finger-pointing since the presidential election. Half the conservative columnists and bloggers say the GOP lost because it overemphasized social issues such as abortion and gay marriage. The other half says the party didn’t emphasize them enough. And everyone denounces Project ORCA, the campaign’s attempt to turn out voters via technology.

But I’ve got a suggestion for cutting short the GOP angst: Sarah Palin for president in 2016.

You think I’m joking? Think again.

Read the rest of the article. There’s not a bit of snark. She’s serious.

I so want to see this.

I think that we could have a 40 state Democratic victory.

The difference between Palin and Nixon is two fold:  She’s as dumb as a bag of hammers, and she believes her own PR.