Rand Paul's Answer to Poverty: Wage More War on Women

I've never been extremely impressed with Kentucky's freshman Senator Rand Paul. He seems keenly proud of his own brilliance -- despite the fact that few people other than himself can manage to find any evidence of it. His desire to be a Senator seems to stem more from his need to be a Very Important Person than his desire to serve his country. And you don't take it upon yourself to respond to the President's State of the Union Address -- in no official capacity whatsoever -- unless you think people need to appreciate the beneficent fruits of your towering intellect.

In short, Rand Paul is an incredible egotist, made even more insufferable by the fact that he's not actually all that smart.  He's five gallons of smart in a 50 gallon drum -- and the rest of the barrel is filled up by bullcrap. That's my impression. And it's an impression he recently did very little to dispell.

ThinkProgress: At a luncheon for the Chamber of Commerce in Lexington, KY, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) floated the idea of capping government benefits for women who have children out of wedlock, the Lexington Herald-Leader reports.

While he said that preventing unplanned pregnancies should be in the hands of communities and families, he added, “Maybe we have to say ‘enough’s enough, you shouldn’t be having kids after a certain amount.”‘ He went on to say, “I don’t know how you do all that because then it’s tough to tell a woman with four kids that she’s got a fifth kid we’re not going to give her any more money. But we have to figure out how to get that message through because that is part of the answer.”

CONTINUE TO POST>>

Leaving the Polar Vortex and the Climate Change 'Skepticism' Cult Behind

Somewhere between 11 AM to 2 PM today, I can expect to leave the dreaded polar vortex. We expect a balmy high temperature of 18 degrees Fahrenheit today. This would still seem frigid on any other day, but given the previous few days, it's a heat wave. What follows will be a more actual heat wave --  a January thaw, with above freezing temperatures through the weekend. Believe it or not, this is also dangerous weather, as melting ice and snow freeze at night and into the morning, creating hazardous driving conditions. A lot of salt is going to be sold to keep people's sidewalks clear of ice.

Meanwhile, the vortex drifts east. Meaning that Washington will still be very cold while Wisconsin is very warm. And the people up here in the normally frozen wastes will be treated to DC loudmouths saying that cold weather in the nation's capital means global warming is a hoax -- meanwhile, we'll be watching the snow melt off our roofs in the dead of January. The contrast will be stunning and the climate change deniers will once again look like morons. DC is not the entire world. The "global" in global warming means something; it's not a synonym for "local."

And of course, once the vortex moves on from DC, we won't hear a peep about how the current weather proves global warming wrong, since the east coast gets our weather systems eventually. The weather will seem very much like what you'd expect from global warming, at which point the moron chorus of deniers will fall silent -- just as they do during summer droughts and heat waves. For them, a cold few days proves global warming is a hoax, but a decades-long warming trend is just natural variation in global temperature that real scientists (i.e., Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly) are smart enough to ignore and "fake" scientists (AKA actual scientists) attach way too much significance to.

CONTINUE TO POST>>

Nugent SOTU Invite Not Helping the Gun Lobby's Cause

It probably won't surprise anyone too much to learn that Republicans in congress own more guns than their Democratic counterparts. More than twice as many GOP congress critters own firearms than dems -- 119 to 46. This probably has as much, if not more, to do with demographics than ideology. Republicans tend to be elected from more rural districts, where hunting and fishing are common pastimes. Democrats tend to come from more urban districts, where they really don't have a lot of use for a firearm.

Still, Texas Republican Rep. Steve Stockman might want to tread a little lightly for a bit, because I doubt his heavily-armed colleagues are too awfully happy with him right now. At a time when polling shows a vast majority in support of gun control, Stockman has invited a Motor City motormouth who vehemently opposes regulation to be his guest at tonight's State of the Union Address. And said motormouth is promising to run his mouth.

Raw Story:

Conservative rocker Ted Nugent says that the media underestimates him so he will “dominate” them and the “lies of the left” following President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech on Tuesday.

Rep. Steve Stockman (R-TX) on Monday announced that he had invited Nugent to attend the annual speech, even though the pro-gun activist had been investigated by the Secret Service for threatening the life of the president.

Speaking to KFYI talk radio host Mike Broomhead on Monday, Nugent said that he would attend the speech “knowing that everything President Obama ever said has been a masterful scam – a masterful smoke-and-mirrors deceit, fraud, scam from hell.”

That ought to go well.

CONTINUE TO POST>>

Sen. Ron Johnson: Mouth Over-Used, Ears Neglected

You might have noticed that I was out all last week. I had the second cold of the season, which is weird. Unfortunately, the surest way to give me writer's block is to stuff my sinuses and wrap my head in that weird cloud-of-cotton feeling you get with a rhinovirus. As a result, I managed only to watch a bunch of TV -- along with quite a few episodes of MST3k.

But if you thought I was hiding my face in shame as a Wisconsinite, though, that would've been a good guess. After all, we're the state that elected Sen. Ron Johnson, who John Nichols writes will never "be accused of being the sharpest tack in the box." If you want to instantly grasp Johnson's intellectual power, imagine a diehard Rush Limbaugh fan with the wherewithal to buy a senate seat. That's him. That's the guy in a nutshell. Nearly always steered 100% wrong by his local talk radio station and convinced beyond question that he's 100% right. A blockhead and a blowhard, inexplicably given the title of "Very Important Man."

Nichols' weekend column also says that during the first two years of his first term, Johnson "didn’t do much and wasn’t noticed much. While he ranted and raved about debts and deficits, he voted as a predictable partisan. He rarely dissented from the party line and the media — and most Americans — paid him little mind."

Then this happened...

Huffington Post:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton got testy on Capitol Hill Wednesday in response to a query from Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who called into question her department's accounting of the Sept. 11, 2012, attack in Benghazi, Libya.

CONTINUE TO POST>>

The NRA's Pro-Assassination Argument

According to George Mason University Historian Christopher Hamner, John Wilkes Booth was very clear on his reason for assassinating President Abraham Lincoln. Booth, considering himself a southern patriot, had plotted elaborate plans to kidnap the president, most of which were completely unrealistic fantasies; one "involved capturing Lincoln in his box at Ford’s Theater and lowering the president to the stage with ropes," Hamner writes. But it wasn't until he'd heard a speech by Lincoln that he settled on the easier and more realistic scheme of killing the president. The war was all but over, the confederacy had clearly lost, and Lincoln was looking ahead toward the future.

...Lincoln’s speech that evening outlined some of his ideas about reconstructing the nation and bringing the defeated Confederate states back into the Union. Lincoln also indicated a wish to extend the franchise to some African-Americans—at the very least, those who had fought in the Union ranks during the war—and expressed a desire that the southern states would extend the vote to literate blacks, as well. Booth stood in the audience for the speech, and this notion seems to have amplified his rage at Lincoln. “That means nigger citizenship,” he told Lewis Powell, one of his band of conspirators. “Now, by God, I’ll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever make.”

And so, on the night of April 14, 1865, a shot rang out in Ford's Theater, accompanied by the slogan, "Sic semper tyrannus!" -- "Thus always to tyrants."

The reason I bring this up is because the word "tyranny" is being thrown around a lot by demagogues and the gullible types who hang on their every word. Most recently, it's come up in the debate over limits on guns. Gun nuts argue that the Second Amendment is some sort of inoculation against tyranny, so it pays to ask: who gets to decide who's a tyrant?

CONTINUE TO POST>>

Conservatives Learn the Exact Wrong Lesson

Ta-Nehisi Coates has been putting in some really stellar work over at The Atlantic for a while now, but he really deserves some sort of headline award for his post, "Hippies Wander Into the Lions' Den, Maul Lions." In it, he points out that crazy lefty ideas like marriage equality and marijuana legalization were big winners Tuesday night. Issues that the Republican Party thought were fairly safely on their side and only fringey nutjob politics turned out not to be so safe at all. The right had laughed at these things as weak and crazy liberal goofiness -- right up until weak and crazy liberal goofs cleaned their freakin' clock. This was not an election in which rock-ribbed conservatism was endorsed by the electorate. No, this was an election where barefoot, who-cares-who-you-love, tofu-chewing, pot-smoking, Prius-driving, gender-neutral Occupy Wall Street types smacked the rightwing stupid[er].

It was, in Coates' words, "one of the most progressive nights in American history, and arguably the most progressive night in American history in some 40 years."

Which makes this reasoning a little hard to figure:

The Hill:

Conservative leaders on Wednesday lashed out at Mitt Romney, saying his attempts to paint himself as a centrist and hide his principles cost him the presidency.

They vowed to wage a war to put the Tea Party in charge of the Republican Party by the time it nominates its next presidential candidate.

CONTINUE TO POST>>

Defending a Con Man's Right to Run a Con

If the honor wasn't already taken by wingnut blogger Jim Hoft, fellow wingnut blogger Glenn Reynolds would be a solid contender for the title of Internet's Dumbest Man. They both deal in histrionic dishonesty and over-the-top fake outrage, aiming their posts straight at the most gullible, paranoid, and idiotic readers on the web. If their websites went dark overnight, the world would be a much less stupid place.

But, like Hoft, Reynolds serves a purpose -- both are excellent examples of just how insane the right wing in this country has become and both of these would-be Glenn Becks demonstrate the strident, limitless idiocy that characterizes the wingnut blogosphere. If I were to write a counter post for every stupid and just plain wrong post just one of these two morons wrote, I would never post anything else -- there are only so many hours in a day. So it's not my intention to straighten out the readers of this Reynolds post, but rather to show just how unfathomably stupid those readers must actually be. Anyone who joins in on the hero-worship of known con artist and meth cook Nakoula Basseley Nakoula is a proven idiot, but this goes far beyond that.

Long story short, Reynolds believes (or pretends to believe -- I'll take him at his word and assume he's dumb enough to believe it) that President Obama must resign because of this:

By sending -- literally -- brownshirted enforcers to engage in -- literally -- a midnight knock at the door of a man for the non-crime of embarrassing the President of the United States and his administration, President Obama violated [his oath of office]. You can try to pretty this up (It’s just about possible probation violations! Sure.), or make excuses or draw distinctions, but that’s what’s happened. It is a betrayal of his duties as President, and a disgrace.

He won’t resign, of course. First, the President has the appreciation of free speech that one would expect from a Chicago Machine politician, which is to say, none. Second, he’s not getting any pressure. Indeed, the very press that went crazy over Ari Fleischer’s misrepresented remarks seems far less interested in the actions of an administration that I repeat, literally sent brown-shirted enforcers to launch a midnight knock on a filmmaker’s door.

But Obama’s behavior -- and that of his enablers in the press -- has laid down a marker for those who are paying attention. By these actions he is, I repeat, unfit to hold office. I hope and expect that the voters will agree in November.

CONTINUE TO POST>>

Why Romney Picked Ryan -- A Dumb Guy Told Him To

I suppose I have to write the obligatory Paul Ryan post. The good news about that is that there's a lot to talk about with Ryan. The bad news is that everyone's saying it. The worse news is that a lot of pundits are trying to come up with new, clever things to say about Ryan and down that road lies idiocy. I was resigned to repeating (and hopefully clarifying) some of the unstupid things pundits were saying -- a not very fun post to start the week.

And then I saw this:

Politico:

Once again, Bill Kristol gets his way — and once again, watch out.

For two consecutive presidential cycles now, the founding editor of the Weekly Standard has successfully led the conservative media drumbeat for a bold vice presidential pick: In 2008, he fervently supported and promoted Sarah Palin for months before the country even knew her name. In 2012, he urged Mitt Romney to “go for the gold” with Paul Ryan.

For a generation, stretching back to the 1980s, Kristol has used his influence to goad Republicans to be bolder and more ambitious — and riskier, for themselves, the Republican Party, and the nation—in their decisions. This extends beyond political calculation to policy. In 2003, Kristol was at the forefront of the lobbying effort for the Iraq war, which — however history judges it — cost far more in blood and treasure than he and his fellow neoconservatives had anticipated.

CONTINUE TO POST>>

In Payroll Tax Cut Debate, GOP War on Facts Marches On

There are a lot of things to dislike about the modern Republican Party. There's the attitude they have toward what they consider "the other" -- i.e., gays, lesbians, non-Christians, etc. -- that casts nearly every person who doesn't look like they just stepped out of Normal Rockwell print as an obvious enemy of America. There's the authoritarian bent that would control who you love and what you say, that would listen in on your phone calls and torture you pretty much at whim, that would have even minor offenders in prison and loves the death penalty, and would mark every miscarried pregnancy as a potential murder scene and force women to give birth against their will. But the biggest problem with the Republican Party -- in fact, the problem from which almost all of the other problems stem -- is their hostility to plain, provable fact.

From climate to evolution to economics, we see Republicans believing what they'd like to be true, rather than what is true. When Michele Bachmann said that the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine (which reduces cervical cancer in women by preventing a very common STD) caused "mental retardation," it wasn't because she had any evidence of it, but because she wanted it to be true. Social conservatives oppose the HPV vaccine because they believe that protection increases sexual activity among teens. Not surprisingly, this isn't true either, for the exact same reason that airbags don't increase car crashes. But Bachmann believes whatever it is she wants to believe, because that's just what Republicans do.

Case in point:

Reuters:

In late-night votes, the Senate, as expected, defeated a Democratic plan that would have extended and expanded the payroll tax cut that is scheduled to expire on December 31.

CONTINUE TO POST>>

The Bush Tax Cuts Failed. Period

It's a chart that's been making the rounds for a while now. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities graphed out the main drivers of current and projected deficits and came up with the following:



TARP, bailouts, the stimulus? Ain't crap. And the economic downturn didn't really make much of a dent. The big driver of current and future deficits are the Bush era tax cuts. Although the hole blown in the deficit by the cuts dwarfs them, it pays to point out that we fought two wars -- which Bush made sure were off-budget -- while giving people who could afford to help pay for those wars a free ride.

This isn't pie-in-the-sky liberal loopiness here. These are history, these are facts. We were told that tax cuts would help us "grow our way out of deficits." They didn't. Again, that is fact. We were told the tax cuts would give us a rollicking, healthy economy. Look around you. They failed. That is a fact. In short, every argument in favor of the cuts has failed to materialize. The Bush tax cuts are -- as a simple matter of historical fact -- a complete failure. They are currently zombie policy; dead arguments, inexplicably still shambling around, serving no actual, real world purpose and feeding off the public dime.

CONTINUE TO POST>>

No, the Government Doesn't "Just Print Money"

It's not often that I blog about a letter to the editor in my local paper. Generally, one person's misinformed opinion isn't worth worrying about. But sometimes, the opinion expressed is so wrong, yet so widespread, that it must be addressed. I'll quote the whole thing here, so you can get the full impact.

Wisconsin State Journal:

It amazes me how supposedly intelligent folks can claim that the stimulus, bailout, bribery money is an actual benefit to those receiving it. You read about brain drain out of Wisconsin when it comes to jobs, but what about brain drain when it comes to intellect?

It's not hard to understand the simple concept of currency value. Print more money and the existing money becomes worth less. Print even more and it continues to drop. At some point it will become worthless. Read about Germany's Weimar government of the 1920s to get a glimpse of what it could be like here.

CONTINUE TO POST>>

On Milbank's Palin Embargo

I'm not completely sold on Dana Milbanks's embargo on Sarah Palin news for the month of February. Personally, I'd like the unpopular Palin and the equally brainless demagogue Michele Bachmann to become the two vacant faces of the Republican Party. The only downside to this that I can see is that people will start equating a midwestern accent with idiocy.

In any case, it's not February yet, so deciding to join in or to violate the ban is a moot point. Which is good, because it turns out someone told Sarah to say something clever and she's extremely proud of herself.

Politico:

Former Alaska GOP Gov. Sarah Palin said Wednesday night that President Barack Obama's call for "winning the future" during his State of the Union address is best framed by the acronym it shares with a much different phrase -- "wtf."

"That was a tough speech to sit through and try to stomach," Palin said during an interview with Fox News’s Greta Van Susteren.

CONTINUE TO POST>>

For the GOP, We are All Just 'Minor Things'

Here's a short list of things that are the height of tyranny -- at least, in terms of healthcare reform -- according to Republicans (and courtesy of Crooks and Liars):

-Excluding children under age 19 with pre-existing conditions
-Lifting lifetime and annual limits on benefits paid. No longer can a price be put on someone's life.
-Allowing young adults to remain on their parents' policies.
-Closing the Medicare Part D donut hole for seniors.

These things must be repealed or the Republic shall surely fall! So the party's majority in the House of Representatives voted to save America from communism last night, passing a bill to repeal the healthcare reform law. Unfortunately, the effort is doomed to fail and is seen as symbolic (read, "political theater"). The hyperbolically and inaccurately titled "Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act" has no chance of ever becoming law itself. It would have to pass in the Senate -- where it stands no chance -- then to the president's desk -- where it'll be surely vetoed. Then it's back to Congress, where there's no chance of a veto override. The only thing more doomed than this bill are Sarah Palin's presidential ambitions.

CONTINUE TO POST>>

Poor, Poor Sarah Palin

One thing I've believed for a long time is something I believe is obvious -- you don't get to decide what other people find offensive. If you say something and someone is insulted by it, then the wisest thing to do is explain that you didn't put that very well, apologize, and move on. It's a pretty simple concept. Even in cases where you believe you're right, just drop it and move on. Maybe you didn't mean it the way it was taken, maybe you meant it exactly that way, but are surprised the other person found it so offensive, maybe they're completely misunderstanding what you said -- whatever, doesn't matter. Apologize and move on. If you get bogged down in an argument over whether there's any cause for offense, you're going to lose the thread of your conversation and get stuck arguing about an issue that simply isn't the point. Needless to say, this is less than constructive. If you unintentionally hurt someone's feelings, apologize and let it go, because -- no matter what it was you meant to say -- those hurt feelings are real.

The right has never gotten this. When they say something that's offensive, they often stick to their guns and argue that you have no right to take offense. You see it all the time. What should've been a simple, momentary distraction becomes an issue all its own. And, as all of these tertiary distractions snowball, Republicans suddenly find themselves on the defensive, fighting battles that have absolutely nothing to do with the original point. No wonder conservatives make a deliberate effort to stay on message and all recite exactly the same words -- get them to wing it for a second and everything goes spiraling completely out of control, as they skirmish over idiotic trivia like word-choice. It's like a political version of adult ADD.

The latest example of this is Sarah Palin's use of the term "blood libel" to explain that she's been the real victim in the Tucson shooting incident. When some took offense at the term, the smart thing to do would have been to say, "Blogger Glenn Reynolds used that term and I thought it sounded nifty! That's what it means? Yikes! I sure didn't mean that!"

CONTINUE TO POST>>

Wingnut Blogosphere's Fake Outrage of the Day

As we discuss these issues, let each of us do so with a good dose of humility. Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let us use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together...

And if, as has been discussed in recent days, their deaths help usher in more civility in our public discourse, let's remember that it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy, it did not, but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to our challenges as a nation, in a way that would make (the victims) proud.
-President Barack Obama, eulogizing the victims of the gun tragedy in Tucson.

It doesn't stop. Not for a moment, not for a second, not for a heartbeat. it was a time for Americans to come together and, for just once, stop the idiotic sniping and spin and phony outrage and crappy punditry and just breathe for a second. A memorial for the victims of an act of chaos, Barack Obama's appearance in Tucson last night was the act of a president. It was what any president would do in a moment of national shock and it was this president who did it.

CONTINUE TO POST>>

The GOP's $100 Billion Lie

Yesterday, I mentioned that Republicans began their first day of their new House Majority by breaking one of their oaths made in their Sacred Pledge. Where the party had sworn in their "Pledge to America" to make cuts that "will save $100 billion in first year alone," they now say the number -- which they'd apparently reached into their pants to retrieve -- was merely "hypothetical."

But words mean things. The only way that number could be hypothetical would be if the GOP had asked voters, "If we promised you an insanely large, made-up number -- say, $100 billion -- in spending cuts, would you elect us?" But they didn't. At least, not straight out like that. "Will save" means "will save," not "could save." It's a definite statement and, when written in the body of a signed document with the word "pledge" in the title, constitutes a concrete promise. Once again, Republicans -- with the help of a credulous and/or uncritical media -- lied to the American people. Clearly, there was no math behind the figure, no one sat down at a ledger book and added up all the savings. It was merely an impressively large number that could be used for a bait-and-switch.

If you doubt that $100 billion was an invented number, consider that the new House Republican Budget Czar, Paul Ryan, has no idea what they're planning on cutting. "That is what is gonna happen in the appropriations process down the road," he said when asked for specific cuts. "So I can't tell you the answer to that because, as a budget committee person, we simply lower the cap and then those things go down. We're gonna be reducing all domestic discretionary spending. I can't tell you by what amount and which program, but all of it is going to be going down, and the aggregate amount will be back to 2008 levels before the spending binge occurred."

CONTINUE TO POST>>

Smashing the Punditry's Crystal Ball

It's 2011, so throw out your old calendar. Scratch that; recycle your old calendar. It's paper, so start off the new year on the right foot. There's no reason for us to be killing trees just to know what day it is. We've got a world to save and all.

Along with the literal take on "out with the old, in with the new" regarding our calendars, there are several traditions that you can count on during this transition. In the media, these include "listicles" of the top ten worst, top ten best, top ten most important, and top ten most embarrassing whatevers of 2010. These are sometimes good, mostly stupid, and not especially informative.

But another tradition in the media are year-end predictions. What's going to happen in the new year? This is an activity that you should never be talked into engaging in, because it's a surefire embarrassment down the road. If you want measure the worth of a pundit, look at how glibly they toss off predictions and how inaccurate those predictions are. Worse, look at the ways in which they often come true.

CONTINUE TO POST>>

Taking Exception to the Concept of "American Exceptionalism"

I've been watching Adam Curtis' four part BBC documentary, The Century of Self, which you can watch here. It's a fascinating, but depressing, look at the history of propaganda and public relations. To boil things down about as much as you can, it tells us how a group of powerful people came to the conclusion -- based on now discredited psychological theories -- that democracy was deeply flawed. The reasoning was based on a belief that the vast majority of people were irrational and had to be guided by an enlightened elite or democracies would devolve into mob rule, which in turn would lead to fascism or communism. The average person, the thinking went, was not persuaded by rational arguments and had to be influenced in their decisions by emotional arguments. Put simply, you are dumb. You're basically nothing more than a clever monkey and, if left to your own devices, you'll eventually wind up throwing your feces at random people on the street.

The problem of course, was that this was entirely wrong. People weren't incapable of understanding rational arguments, what was happening was that many of the arguments put forth by this ruling elite weren't very good. These were simply political disagreements, but the flawed thinking of the time would have it that everything a person did had a psychological basis. So a logical, rational disagreement with a political argument was seen as a symptom of a mental illness that nearly all human beings shared. You didn't disagree because you'd come to a different conclusion based on the set of facts put forth, you disagreed because you were insane -- just like everyone else who hadn't been "cured" of their inherent mental illness.

I don't want to get too far into the weeds with this -- if you're interested in all this stuff, you can just watch the documentary yourself -- I just want to lay down the background to what is happening right now. This all exists right now. There is a would-be ruling elite in America -- an unholy alliance between the corporate and the governmental -- that believes that you aren't rational, that you're incapable of logic, and that you must be tricked into making the right decisions. If you doubt that, explain to me why a majority of voters in the 2010 elections believed things that simply were not true. There's a concerted effort to get people to vote based on fear, because there are those who believe you're not capable of rational thought. Propaganda appeals to emotion, not logic, so whether its true or not is irrelevant.

CONTINUE TO POST>>

Because Conservatives Always Need Something to be Terrified of, 'Death Panels' are Back

American conservatives are a national embarrassment. Frightened, gullible, and angry over things that aren't actually happening, they take up the most insane positions merely to be contrary (see Sarah Palin's pro-childhood obesity stance). And, in reaction to healthcare reform, they've given themselves plenty of phantoms to be afraid of. PolitiFact's Lie of the Year for 2010 is the claim that healthcare reform marks a "government takeover of healthcare." Last year, the big winner was Sarah Palin's "death panel" lie. If you need to become terrified of something that doesn't actually exist, go find a conservative. They can help you out, because they're the experts at this stuff.

And they never seem to notice that their gloom and doom predictions always fail to pan out. During the Clinton administration, for example, the right was freaking out over what they claimed was the largest tax increase in history. It would destroy the economy and put millions out of work, as gazillionaires would conclude that it was too expensive to be rich and quit the money-making business. Not surprisingly, the wealthy didn't stop thinking it was worth the effort it takes to be wealthy and what followed was the longest economic expansion in American history. In short, Republican fearmongering was shown to be just about as wrong as it possibly could be. But they didn't seem to notice this -- "tax increases equal economic doom" is still a god-given truth for them, despite the fact that it was proven untrue before their very eyes.

To put it bluntly, conservatives are delusional. They don't live in the same world of facts and history as the rest of us, but rather in a fantasy world where everything they wish was true is true. And the things they wish for betray a seriously demented frame of mind. Why do they wish every Muslim was a terrorist? Why do they want the President to be foreign-born, sparking a constitutional crisis? Why do they wish with all their crazy little hearts that healthcare reform means dystopian "death panels" weeding out the sick and infirm? Why do they want these awful things to be true?

CONTINUE TO POST>>

Blizzard Knocks Out the Right's Powers of Reasoning

It's always entertaining to see the rampant stupidity that a winter storm brings out in conservatives. A big blizzard really brings out the dumb. For them, snow means there's no such thing as climate change. But it's called global warming for a reason -- it effects the entire globe. Yet a weather event over a tiny fraction of that globe means it's snowing everywhere. Or something. Seriously, I can't work up enough ignorance to get the argument to make any damned sense at all. Apparently, being a wingnut requires a special talent for idiocy that I lack.

Add in the news that scientists now believe that global warming means more snow and, perhaps, lower temperatures in the winter and the right becomes insufferable.

Robert Stacy McCain:

Global warming is a hoax, a dishonest racket. a crooked scam whose chief purpose is to provide taxpayer-funded employment for "environmental science" majors. In a truly just society, the perpetrators of this hoax would be treated like Bernie Madoff.

That's right, the fact that it snows in the winter is solid proof that global warming is a crock and that scientists should be prosecuted. Never mind that warming is predicted to raise global temperatures only by low single digits and that no climate scientist anywhere has predicted the end of snowfalls, if there isn't actually fire raining down out of the sky, the whole thing is obviously hooey.

CONTINUE TO POST>>