Cha-Ching, Baby, Cha-Ching

UPDATE XI:  Here is a sample. In response to Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s speech on the '11 Commandments of Progressivism' that fast-food workers deserve livable wages, Palin said on her new channel:

'We believe?' Wait, I thought fast food joints, hurh. Don’t you guys think that they’re like of the Devil or something ... Liberals, you want to send those evil employees who would dare work at a fast food joint that you just don’t believe in, thought you wanted to, I dunno, send them to Purgatory or somethin’ so they all go vegan and, uh, wages and picket lines I dunno they’re not often discussed in Purgatory, are they? I dunno why are you even worried about fast food wages because ... Well we believe in an America where minimum wage jobs, they're not like life time gigs, they're stepping stones.

Read Slate, Sarah Palin Is Getting Good at Her Tina Fey as Sarah Palin Impersonation.

Or watch the Great Palin herself:



Reminds me of the election criticism of her tired cliches, random jargon, and catchphrases she had been coached to repeat, often resulting in nonsensical answers and gibberish during the election.

She must be using the Sarah Palin Quote Generator.

 

UPDATE X:  "Sarah Palin announces the launch of her own online news channel as part of a continuing quest to remind America of her existence. "

Watch The Colbert Report, The Sarah Palin Channel, which notes that "[i]t's all about Sarah Palin . . . a safe space where like-minded folks can hear things they already agree with from someone whose opinions they already know.":

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,The Colbert Report on Facebook,Video Archive

UPDATE IX:   It is the "the most rigorous infotainment site ever launched by a half-term governor of Alaska.

Read The Atlantic, Sarah Palin's Low-Budget TV Channel Is Pricier Than Netflix.

UPDATE VIII:  Years later, still monetizing the flools (a flock of fools).

Read the New York Daily News, Sarah Palin's new online channel provides commentary and more for $9.95 per month.  

Read also Slate, Sarah Palin to Sell Her Real American Lifestyle for $10 a Month, which notes that "Palin’s audience is composed of people who are steeped in the paranoid belief that everyone else is out to get them, a paranoia she's happy to stoke at every turn."

UPDATE VII: Giving new meaning to never missing a chance to monetize, first get knocked-up by your teenage boyfriend, then run a con as an "abstinence ambassador." Read the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Non-profit paid Bristol Palin more than it donated to anti-teen pregnancy programs, which notes:

That abstinence "charity" (a term used loosely as you will see) "took in about $1.7 million in donations and only gave $35,000 to groups trying to lower teen pregnancy rates.

Forty-six percent of Candie’s total expenses — $573,000 — went to Palin. Only 6 percent went to anti-teen pregnancy programs.

About $165,000 was paid to ABC for TV advertising."

Even for the Palins, this con strikes me as immoral.


UPDATE VI: Taking a chance to monetize to a new low, now she's cashing-in on the 9/11 terrorist attacks. CBS News, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin Sept. 11 Event Ticket Price: $73 to $225.

Pretty despicable if you ask me.


UPDATE V: Like Mother, like daughter -- never missing a chance to monetize. Read WHYfame, Bristol Palin's Story Sold to Us Weekly for $100,000!

And admit it, you knew it was coming, another unreality show. Read My Fox New York, Bristol Palin, Levi Johnston Eye Reality Show Ahead of Wedding.


UPDATE IV: Now the Palin clan will monetize out-of-wedlock teen pregnancy. Read the Washington Post, Bristol Palin to hit the paid lecture circuit, speaking about teen pregnancy.


UPDATE III: Compare Palin's efforts to monetize her new found 'celebrity' with Truman's refusal to accept corporate positions at large salaries. He declined the corporate offers because he knew they didn't want him, they wanted the office of the President, about which he later wrote "I could never lend myself to any transaction, however respectable, that would commercialize on the prestige and dignity of the office of the presidency."

FYI, when Truman retired from office, he returned home to Independence, Mo., his "only source of income was his $111.96-per-month World War I pension. In those days, ex-presidents didn't get pensions."

Later, Congress did enact a pension for former presidents. But when Congress attempted to give Truman the Medal of Honor, he said he would refuse it, saying the Medal of Honor was for combat bravery, and in any case, he did not consider that he had done anything to merit any award.

Truman is also quoted as saying: "My choice early in life was either to be a piano-player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there's hardly any difference."

Truman also said "I never give them hell. I just tell the truth and they think it's hell."

I think it's time to dig him up and clone him.


UPDATE II: "Nowadays, for both poles of the political spectrum but especially for the right, politics is a business—the entertainment business. The freak show, as Mark Halperin termed it, has been turned into a fully merchandised product. It was Fox’s Roger Ailes who had the insight that the American right was an underserved market, one with a powerful kind of brand loyalty. Fox News has turned a disaffected segment of the populace into a market, with the fervor and idiosyncratic truth standards of a cult. Wingnut-ism has been monetized, is one admittedly partisan way of looking at it. Palin stokes the disaffection of her constituents and then, with the help of Fox, offers to heal them, for a price. And—surprise—they’re more affluent than most Americans. Fifty-six percent make over $50,000 a year, according to a Times/CBS poll. Running for president is no doubt part of her business model. But forget elections (as many Palin supporters already seem to have done); she’s already the president of an alternative America—and also its CEO. " Read New York magazine, The Revolution Will Be Commercialized.


UPDATE: Not only is she getting the green, she demands the divas treatment and doesn't want you to know. Strictly nondisclosure, The Rogue Diva requires first class for two from Anchorage to California if she flies commercial, if not, a private aircraft that "MUST BE a Lear 60 or larger." In addition, she need a suite and two single rooms in a deluxe hotel. (Don't ask me why she needs three rooms for two people.) Of course, that is in addition to her speaking fee, as high as $100,000. Read the Washington Post, Calif. students find Palin contract in trash.

BTW, don't forget to "stock her lectern with two water bottles and bendable straws."

Just show her the money!

As I said last July, "[w]hy will the Rogue Diva quit her office early? The media was unfair. People were filing ethics complaints against her. Bloggers (and late night comedians) were saying mean things about her. She didn't want to be a lame duck. The state would be better off without her. Those are some of the reasons she gave.

She will build her network for 2012 by campaigning and fund raising for other candidates.

But I think the primary reason she quit is to cash in with a book and some speeches, maybe a little paid commentary on not-the-FoxNews, before she loses the 2012 Republi-con primary."

And cashin in she is. Read ABC News, Sarah Palin Has Earned an Estimated $12 Million Since July.

Cha-Ching, Baby, Cha-Ching! Those Republi-cons are all about the money!

Now if they could only balance a budget.

The Myth of Voter Fraud

UPDATE XII:  Another example where Republi-cons never let reality spoil a good delusion.

Read the Washington Post, A comprehensive investigation of voter impersonation finds 31 credible incidents out of one billion ballots cast, which includes a list of the 31 incidents.

The article also notes that "ID laws are not aimed at the fraud you’ll actually hear about. Most current ID laws . . . aren’t designed to stop fraud with absentee ballots (indeed, laws requiring ID at the polls push more people into the absentee system, where there are plenty of real dangers). Or vote buying. Or coercion. Or fake registration forms. Or voting from the wrong address. Or ballot box stuffing by officials in on the scam. In the 243-page document that Mississippi State Sen. Chris McDaniel filed on Monday with evidence of allegedly illegal votes in the Mississippi Republican primary, there were no allegations of the kind of fraud that ID can stop."

UPDATE XI:  "[V]oter-impersonation is a fake problem that doesn’t need a solution.

Judge Adelman agrees, and supports his stance with a treasure trove of evidence. Citing research on the incidence of in-person voter fraud in American elections, Adelman notes that, in eight years of Wisconsin elections—2004, 2008, 2010, and 2012—researchers could identify only 'one case of voter-impersonation fraud.' And in that case, it was a man who 'applied for and cast his recently deceased wife’s absentee ballot.' Likewise, after 'comparing a database of deceased registered voters to a database of persons who had cast ballots in a recent election,' in Georgia, another researcher found 'no evidence of ballots being illegally cast in the name of deceased voters.'

Adelman even notes the sheer difficulty of committing in-person voter fraud, throwing water on the claim that this could ever be common. 'To commit voter-impersonation fraud,' he says, 'a person would need to know the name of another person who is registered at a particular polling place, know the address of that person, know that the person has not yet voted, and also know that no one at the polls will realize that the impersonator is not the individual being impersonated.' He ends with a note that sounds like sarcasm, 'Given that a person would have to be insane to commit voter-impersonation fraud, [the law] cannot be deemed a reasonable response to a potential problem.'

He also makes a key point about public perception: Insofar that anyone believes that in-person voter fraud is a problem, it’s because elected officials—almost all of them Republican—treat it as such, as they push for these laws. Put simply, voter impersonation is a fake problem that doesn’t need a solution."

Read Slate, Why Wisconsin’s Voter ID Decision Is a Very Big Deal.

As the Judge notes, Republi-cons continue to promote the voter fraud fraud.

UPDATE X:  In Ohio, "17 non-citizens illegally cast ballots in the 2012 presidential election"

That was "0.0003 percent of the total of ballots cast for either Obama or Romney in" Ohio .

Read Slate, Did 17 Illegal Voters in Ohio Steal the 2012 Election?

What a problem NOT!

UPDATE IX:  An "extensive probe" was conducted by South Carolina of "207 votes that allegedly were made by dead people in the Nov. 2, 2010 election — when a total of 1,365,480 votes were cast . . . (Note that the number of alleged dead votes was less than 2/10,000th of all of the votes cast in that election.) . . .

In the end, just five votes remained unresolved after extensive investigation."

The rest were "clerical errors."

Read another Four Pinocchios Republi-con claim about voter fraud at the Washington Post, The case of ‘zombie’ voters in South Carolina.  

Once again proving that you should always assume that a Republi-con is lying if his/her lips are moving.

UPDATE VIII:  How frequent is in-person voter impersonation?  "[A]bout one for every 15 million prospective voters."  Read the Washington Post, Election Day impersonation, an impetus for voter ID laws, a rarity, data show.  

UPDATE VII: "A court filing by the state of Pennsylvania, ahead of a trial starting later this week on a lawsuit filed by civil rights groups against the state’s new voter fraud law, contains an astounding admission:

The state signed a stipulation agreement with lawyers for the plaintiffs which acknowledges there 'have been no investigations or prosecutions of in-person voter fraud in Pennsylvania; and the parties do not have direct personal knowledge of any such investigations or prosecutions in other states.'

In other words, the state knows that voter fraud is a nonexistent problem, but will nonetheless defend a law that could potentially disenfranchise a huge number of the state’s voters. Of course, it’s not hard to see why the state — and particularly its Republican governor — would continue to support the measure."

Read the Washington Post, Pennsylvania admits it: no voter fraud problem. 

UPDATE VI: It is amazing, "the lengths to which Republican lawmakers will go to cut down the number of people who get to vote (preferably, of course, people who might vote Democratic)." Read The New York Times, Voter Suppression, Again, in Minnesota This Time.


UPDATE V: "The ACLU is offering a $1000 reward for anyone who can find a recent example of voter impersonation in Minnesota. My guess is they won't have to pay up." Read The New York Times, All Quiet on the Voter Fraud Front.


UPDATE IV: Efforts to restrict voter eligibility are nothing new.

"Many of the late 19th- and early 20th-century laws operated not by excluding specific classes of citizens but by erecting procedural obstacles that were justified as measures to prevent fraud or corruption. It was to “preserve the purity of the ballot box” that legislatures passed laws requiring voters to bring their sealed naturalization papers to the polls or to present written evidence that they had canceled their registration at any previous address or to register annually, in person, on one of only two Tuesdays. . .

The new procedures were widely recognized, by both their advocates and their targets, as having a far greater impact on some groups of voters — immigrants, blue-collar workers, the poor — than on others, and they often succeeded. In Pittsburgh in 1906, a personal registration law, sponsored by Republicans to check the influence of a crusading reformer, cut the number of registered voters in half.

In the 1930s, “pauper exclusion” laws were invoked to disenfranchise jobless men and women who were receiving relief. In 2000, Massachusetts disenfranchised prisoners after they formed an organization to promote inmate rights.

The targets of exclusionary laws have tended to be similar for more than two centuries: the poor, immigrants, African-Americans, people perceived to be something other than “mainstream” Americans. No state has ever attempted to disenfranchise upper-middle-class or wealthy white male citizens."

Read The New York Times, The Strange Career of Voter Suppression.


UPDATE III: Doonesbury takes on the voter fraud myth:




UPDATE II: Read the Washington Post, Five myths about voter fraud and The New York Times, The Myth of Voter Fraud.

Let's admit the obvious, the Republi-con myth of voter fraud is just an effort to suppress votes that favor other parties.


UPDATE: "The foundation of Florida’s election-law changes, the bedrock belief that spurred major reforms this spring, was the notion that voter fraud is rampant. So the Legislature passed and Gov. Rick Scott signed into law a bill that limits early voting, makes it harder for some groups to register voters, and will cause headaches for voters who’ve recently moved. Their ballots might not even be counted.

And guess what? We’ve known for months the “voter fraud” excuse was phony.

Okaloosa County Supervisor of Elections Paul Lux and Susan Blackwell, president of the Okaloosa chapter of the League of Women Voters, told us in May that instances of fraud are rare. It just isn’t a big problem."

Read the Northwest Florida Daily News, The myth of Florida voter fraud.

From Colbert Nation:

And when people [Republi-CONs] don't like get elected, there's only one explanation.

SEAN HANNITY (10/29/2010): Allegations of voter fraud continue to pop up all across the country.

BILL O'REILLY (10/28/2010): ... voter fraud ...

FOX NEWS MALE (10/31/2010): ... voter fraud ...

RUSSELL PEARCE (6/9/2010): ... voter fraud ...

MATTHEW VADUM (6/2/2010): ... voter fraud ...

Yes, voter fraud! Take Ohio, a crucial swing state in the last few elections. There, a statewide survey of votes cast in 2002 and 2004 found that out of 9,078,000 votes, there were four instances of fraud. That is a jaw-dropping 44 one-millionths of one percent! Folks, our democracy is under siege from an enemy so small, it could be hiding anywhere!

Watch:

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Video Archive

The Republi-CON War On the Poor, the Middle Class, and 'Lazy Blacks'

UPDATE IV:  The best defense is a good offense.

Read USA Today, Congressman charges Democrats with 'war on whites'.

Of course, Republi-cons never let reality spoil a good delusion.

Read the Washington Post, White people are winning the war on whites. 

 

UPDATE III:  "So who can blame poor Sean Hannity for looking like a right-wing blockhead for promoting the cause of a guy who turned around and said crazy, racist things? Well, I can.

Let me tell Sean about the Racist: The Racist hates federal subsidies. Not the subsidies that provide grassland to Nevada ranchers at below-market values. Nor the subsidies that bring water to the desert by, say, building Hoover Dam. Nor the subsidies that benefit mining operations in the Silver State. No, the Racist hates subsidies that sap the human soul: like food stamps for moms with hungry children. Especially if those moms happen to be, well, differently pigmented from him.

That's what's so interesting, not about this racist moron but about the Republicans who supported him until he revealed his views on slavery.

Bundy was plainly a nutcase, and the right-wing pundits and politicians should have seen that. He should never have been portrayed as a hero or a victim or anything other than a lawbreaker, a freeloader, a moocher. A taker.

For two decades, he grazed his cattle on land that did not belong to him and refused to pay the landowner. Right-wingers, one would think, would hate that. He refused to respect law enforcement, in fact threatened to take up arms against the peace officers whom Republicans usually trip over themselves to honor. I thought conservatives believed in law and order.

What if, instead of being a right-wing rancher who flouted the law, Bundy was the leader of a left-wing group of college radicals who occupied a government building? Ronald Reagan notoriously said of Berkeley protestors, "If there is to be a bloodbath, let's get it over with. No more appeasement!"

Or what if Bundy had been the leader of the New Black Panther Party? What if he and his followers had, for 20 years, brazenly stolen from the federal government, refused to obey court orders and threatened police with guns? Would Hannity have been duped into defending him? Fat chance.

Or, umm, what if Bundy had been a Muslim, declaring a tiny caliphate on that dusty piece of Nevada? Does anyone really think Fox News would have made a hero of him then?

Bundy's status as a deadbeat welfare queen should have been sufficient for the likes of Hannity to know better than to support him. His threats of violence against American law enforcement personnel should have had Hannity up in arms.

Instead, the right-wing noise machine once more looks like a bunch of dupes and dopes, blindsided when their newest hero turns out to be a racist. It won't be the last time this happens."

Read CNN, Conservative hero is racist rancher? Didn't see that one coming.

UPDATE II:  It's all Martin Luther King Jr.'s fault says Cliven Bundy:  "If I say Negro or black boy or slave, if those people cannot take those kind of words and not be (offended), then Martin Luther King hasn't got his job done yet."

Read CNN, Rancher says he's not racist, still defiant over grazing battle.  

UPDATE:  The newest Republi-con hero -- Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy.

"Since 1993, the feds say the Nevada rancher has been illegally grazing his herd on federal land. So, acting on a court order, the Bureau of Land Management tried to seize some of Bundy’s herd. Next thing you know, he’s a Fox News-enabled hero of the put-upon right wing with a platform to pop off about government overreach and whatever else is rattling around upstairs. And when that happens to some conservative heroes, they always seem compelled to expound on the plight of the Negro."

Read WP, Cliven Bundy's outrageous comments about 'the Negro'.

I've talked about the Republi-con war on the middle class, now an observation by "a Republican in good standing (although maybe not anymore), indeed someone who used to be known as a conservative firebrand, is telling. Republican hostility toward the poor and unfortunate has now reached such a fever pitch that the party doesn’t really stand for anything else. . .

One reason, the sociologist Daniel Little suggested in a recent essay, is market ideology: If the market is always right, then people who end up poor must deserve to be poor. I’d add that some leading Republicans are, in their minds, acting out adolescent libertarian fantasies. 'It’s as if we’re living in an Ayn Rand novel right now,' declared Paul Ryan in 2009.

But there’s also, as Mr. Little says, the stain that won’t go away: race.

In a much-cited recent memo, Democracy Corps, a Democratic-leaning public opinion research organization, reported on the results of focus groups held with members of various Republican factions. They found the Republican base 'very conscious of being white in a country that is increasingly minority' — and seeing the social safety net both as something that helps Those People, not people like themselves, and binds the rising nonwhite population to the Democratic Party. And, yes, the Medicaid expansion many states are rejecting would disproportionately have helped poor blacks."

Read The New York Times, A War on the Poor.

Also this week, a senior Republi-con party official admitted that strict new voter ID laws were intended to prevent the poor and "a bunch of lazy blacks that wants the government to give them everything" from voting.

The next day, he told "the Mountain Xpress in a follow-up interview that 'the comments that were made, that I said, I stand behind them. I believe them.'"

The official was asked to resign by party officials, in part, because he "did not seek approval from party officials before speaking with 'The Daily Show.'"

Read the Los Angeles Times, GOP official ousted for 'lazy blacks' comment on 'The Daily Show'. 

Self-Evaluation

I'm sarcastic & I have a smart ass attitude . . . It's a natural defense against drama, bullshit & stupidity:

Those Wacky Wepubli-CONs

UPDATE: "As a House analyst for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, I’ve personally interviewed over 300 congressional candidates over the course of seven years, both to get to know them and evaluate their chances of winning. I’ve been impressed by just as many Republicans as Democrats, and underwhelmed by equal numbers, too. Most are accustomed to tough questions.

But never have I met any candidate quite as frightening or fact-averse as Louisiana state Rep. Lenar Whitney, 55, who visited my office last Wednesday. It’s tough to decide which party’s worst nightmare she would be.

Whitney, a graduate of Nicholls State University who is running for Louisiana’s open 6th District, owned a dance studio in Houma, La., for 34 years and also worked in sales for small telecommunications and oilfield equipment companies. She clearly relishes poking Democrats in the eye, cites Minnesota’s Rep. Michele Bachmann (R) as a political role model, and takes kindly to the nickname 'Palin of the South.' . .

The GOP’s fringe fears aren’t limited to the Deep South. In Wisconsin, state Sen. Glenn Grothman is locked in a fierce three-way primary for retiring moderate GOP Rep. Tom Petri’s 6th District, near Sheboygan. In 2012, Grothman sponsored a bill to classify single parenthood as a contributing factor to childhood and neglect. Grothman has derided the Democratic group Emily’s List as a 'historically racist organization' and has been quoted alleging 'unwanted pregnancies are the fault of mothers … many mothers lie about the circumstances of their pregnancies.' If Grothman wins the August primary, he would be the favorite in November. . .

[A]t the moment, there are more than enough exotic Republican candidates not easily persuaded by basic facts or scientific evidence to overshadow others in the GOP laying out cogent policy alternatives, such as retiring GOP Rep. Dave Camp, whose tax reform plan died a quiet death this spring. The newest pack of provocateurs threatens to continue wreaking havoc on the party’s image among the growing ranks of independents and college-educated voters in 2015 and beyond."

Read the Washington Post, The most frightening candidate I’ve met in seven years interviewing congressional hopefuls.  

 "Timothy Ray Murray lost out to opponent Frank Lucas in the Oklahoma Republican Primary and rather than take defeat gracefully he, well, he claimed Licas wasn't human.

In an incredible statement on his website after his defeat, Murray wrote: ‘It is widely known Rep. Frank D. Lucas is no longer alive.’

He went on to claim that Lucas was in fact HANGED in a televised execution in Ukraine in 2011 and replaced by a robot body double."

Read Daily Star, Failed US politician claims opponent was executed and replaced by a ROBOT.

According Murray's webite:

"This is a situation similar to the Senators’ from Kentucky situation in the 2012 election. I am contesting that this matter has happen since his election was blocked, because of the U.S. Defense Department’s use of Mr. Murray’s DNA. To my knowledge, the U.S. Defense Department has not released to the public that information, as it is their confidential information about many people. Congress is likely wanting me to state that all my DNA used will not result in benefits to people I have never had relations with of a family nature. I have been bound to protect that information unless it causes harm to The People."

Read also Business Insider, Oklahoma Republican Claims His Opponent Is A 'Robot Look-Alike'.

Another one lost to hysteria, dispair, and rage, thanks to Hedgehog News and the tea party radio network. 

The Mess That is the Middle East

UPDATE IV:  Of course maybe "[t]he conflict raging in Gaza is different this time. . .

'This is unprecedented in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict,' says CNN's Ali Younes, an analyst who has covered the region for decades. 'Most Arab states are actively supporting Israel against the Palestinians -- and not even shy about it or doing it discreetly.'

It's a 'joint Arab-Israeli war consisting of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia against other Arabs -- the Palestinians as represented by Hamas.'"

Read CNN, This time, Gaza fighting is 'proxy war' for entire Mideast.  

UPDATE III:  Two years later, Israel loses again because:

You only have power over people so long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything, he's no longer in your power - he's free again. – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Read also Slate, Israel’s Deadly Gambits, which notes that "[t]he Israeli government seems to have forgotten how to think strategically; at the very least, they have a self-destructive tendency to overplay their hands. . .

[T]he Iron Dome anti-missile shield, whose production [Obama] greatly accelerated, has shot down the few dozen—out of several hundred—Hamas rockets that would have exploded in Israeli cities.

As a result, Hamas’ rockets—most of which have landed in the middle of nowhere—have killed just one Israeli, while Israeli air strikes have killed more than 200 Palestinians and wounded another 1,500-plus, most of them civilians, many of them children, including the four children whose deaths while playing on the beach were captured by photographers on the scene.

Fatality ratios mean little up to a point, but a 200-to-1 ratio seems awfully disproportionate. Israeli bombs have struck 1,500 targets in Gaza so far—another remarkable fact: Who knew there were 1,500 militarily legitimate targets in that tiny, impoverished strip of land?"

UPDATE II:  As I first stated more than three years ago, "[t]he reasonable solution has always been obvious: to draw a borderline somewhere between the Mediterranean Sea and the Dead Sea that both sides, however grudgingly, could live with. Yet the conflict casts a shadow over world peace, and continues to fester."

Read The New York Times, The Elephant in the Map Room, which notes that"we need to look at the conflict with fresh eyes. For Jewish Israelis, the Biblical relation with the land of their forefathers is crucial to why they're there. But in his controversial book 'The Invention of the Jewish People,' Shlomo Sand argues that Judaism used to be a proselytizing religion like Christianity or Islam, and that consequently many of today's Jewish Israelis are descendants of converts, without an ancestral link to Eretz-Israel. Inversely, many of the Palestinians may just be the descendants of the large Jewish community who remained to toil the land, even after the destruction of the Temple and the suppression of the Bar Kochba revolt in the first and second centuries, respectively - and who gradually converted to Islam in the centuries after the Arab conquest."

UPDATE: A new foreign policy for the Middle East:

Some, no make that many, took issue with my frank discussion of the options in the Middle East. As I see it, kill them all (one side or the other, right-wing radical propose killing all the Muslims and letting Allah sort it out, but not very Christian if you ask me), relocating one party to someplace outside the Middle East, such as South Florida (again either party makes no difference for the discussion cause it ain't gonna happen), or relocation within the current borders of Israel, I suggest Palestinians to the north.

Of course the discussion wasn't well received. But I think most people fail to understand the situation in the Middle East. As luck would have it, Thomas Friedman, Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times columnist sums it up well in his article today, Don’t Try This at Home:

"Where to begin? Palestinians are now divided between the West Bank and Gaza, with a secular Palestinian Authority based in Ramallah in the West Bank and a fundamentalist Hamas government based in Gaza. But Hamas is further divided between a military and political wing, and the political wing is further divided between a Gaza-based leadership and a Damascus-based leadership, with the latter taking orders from both Syria and Iran.

Are you still with me?

Best I can tell, the Palestinians from Gaza are simultaneously negotiating a cease-fire with Israel in Cairo, pursuing war-crimes charges against Israel in Europe, digging new tunnels in the Sinai to smuggle more rockets into Gaza to hit Tel Aviv and trying to raise money for reconstruction from Iran. Meanwhile, the West Bank Palestinian leaders are busy publicly collecting food and blankets to help all those Palestinian civilians brutalized by the Israeli incursion into Gaza, while privately demanding to know from senior Israeli officials why they wimped out and didn’t wipe Hamas in Gaza off the face of earth — casualties be damned.

Israel, meanwhile, has a government in which the prime minister, foreign minister and defense minister each has a different peace plan, war strategy and cease-fire conditions for Gaza, and the foreign minister and defense minster are running against each other in Israel’s election on Tuesday. Speaking of that election, a whole new party, Yisrael Beiteinu, led by Avigdor Lieberman, which has been accused of having “fascist,” viciously anti-Arab leanings, appears headed to make the biggest gains and possibly become the kingmaker of Israel’s next government. The other day, the Labor Party leader, Ehud Barak, was quoted in the newspaper Haaretz as criticizing Lieberman as a lamb in hawk’s clothing, asking: “When has he ever shot anyone?”

How did this conflict get so fragmented? For starters, it’s gone on way too long. The West Bank is so chopped up and divided now by roads, checkpoints and fences to separate Israel’s crazy settlements from Palestinian villages that a Palestinian could fly from Jerusalem to Paris quicker than he or she could drive from Jenin, here in the northern West Bank, to Hebron in the south.

Another reason is that every idea has been tried and has failed. For the Palestinians, Pan-Arabism, Communism, Islamism have all come and gone, with none having delivered statehood or prosperity. As a result, more and more Palestinians have fallen back on family, clan, town and tribal loyalties. In Israel, Peace Now’s two-state solution was blown up with the crash of the Oslo peace accords, the rising Palestinian birthrate made any plans to annex the West Bank a mortal threat to Israel’s Jewish character, and the rockets that followed Israel’s withdrawals from both Lebanon and Gaza made a mockery of those who said unilateral pullouts were the solution.

All of this has led to a resurgence of religiosity. According to Haaretz, the following questions were posed by a well-known rabbi in one of the pamphlets distributed by the Israeli Army’s Office of Chief Rabbi before the latest Gaza fighting: “Is it possible to compare today’s Palestinians to the Philistines of the past? And if so, is it possible to apply lessons today from the military tactics of Samson and David? A comparison is possible because the Philistines of the past were not natives and had invaded from a foreign land.”

Who in the world would want to try to repair this? I’d rather herd cats, or become John Thain’s image adviser, or have a colonoscopy, or become chairman of the “bad bank” that President Obama might create to hold all the toxic mortgages. Surely, any of those would be more fun. If Mitchell is still up for it, well, then God bless him. My next column will look at some ways we might just start over. "

Here is my suggestion, rearrange the current borders as such:

In short, New Palestine to the north, New Israel to the south, exact borders TBD, BIG wall in between.

Better hurry, before the next war starts.

I Dare, I Double-Dare the Republi-CONs to Impeach Obama

UPDATE IX:  "Asked at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast about the chatter, Ryan offered this:

    . . . [The Republicans’ differences with the White House do] not rise to the high crime and misdemeanor level.

Read the Washington Post, Paul Ryan just nailed the impeachment question.

UPDATE VIII: Republi-cons have been asking for impeachment since early 2009, soon after Obama took office.

Read the Washington Post, Impeachment talk is back. Here’s a timeline of how we got here. Again.

I warned about blowback (see below.)

UPDATE VII:  "Politically, the Boehner suit is a fool’s errand because it won’t do what he wants it do. Rather than tamp down talk of impeaching Obama, it will lead to an increased clamor for it. Yeah, Boehner said, “I disagree” when asked about Sarah Palin’s impeachment blabber. But, look, Boehner’s caucus is filled with folks who have wanted to punish the president for various and sundry “offenses” since at least 2010."

Read the Washington Post, Boehner’s ‘political stunt’ will lead to Obama’s impeachment.  

UPDATE VI:  "Okay -- so, who's talking about impeachment? People who want to build lists and raise money. No one is floating this idea unless it's attached to an ask. As Erik Wemple reported, the reason Palin's column did not appear at Fox News -- the reason Breitbart scooped it -- was that it was shopped by SarahPAC."

Read Slate, "Impeaching Obama" is Just a Fundraising Gimmick (for Now).

Reminds me of another scam:

BREAKING NEWS! -- Sheriff Joe’s Scooby Doo Gang and Pastor Truthiness (aka Huckster and Con Man) Engaged in a Scam and Swindle to Get Birthers' Money!!

And remember, it's been more than three months since Birther Fool's Day, Bwahahahaha!!!!

UPDATE V:  "Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) said today that he plans to sue President Obama for violating the United States Constitution with what Boehner called 'his outrageous practice of accomplishing things.' . .

Ripping the President for his 'willful insistence on doing things,' Speaker Boehner said that his lawsuit was intended 'to restore the inaction and inertia that have been the hallmarks of our democracy.'"

Read The New Yorker, Boehner Calls Obama’s Practice of Accomplishing Things Unconstitutional.

UPDATE IV:  "The graphic below shows the frequency with which presidents have issued executive orders. Republicans are right: President Obama is absolutely unique…in how infrequently he issues them! The last president to issue executive orders at such a slow rate was Grover Cleveland who served from 1885-1889 & 1893-1897. What’s more, Republican complaints about President Obama’s use of such powers is a bit ironic, given historically Republican presidents use executive orders more frequently."

Read The Brookings Institution, Obama's Executive Orders; A Reality Check.

UPDATE III:  "After going out on a not-so-wobbly limb to suggest that Republicans would push to impeach President Obama if they succeeded in retaking the Senate, George Will’s Sunday column read like a real threat. . .

I’d be a little more sympathetic and understanding if I didn’t know that Republicans had it in for Obama before he stepped into the Oval Office on Jan. 20, 2009.

Robert Draper’s book, released in April 2012, reports on a several-hours-long dinner of leading Republicans held the night of Obama’s first inauguration where they agreed to oppose the new president on everything. Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), now the incoming House majority leader, is quoted as having said at the dinner, 'If you act like you’re the minority, you’re going to stay in the minority. We’ve gotta challenge them on every single bill and challenge them on every single campaign.'

Michael Grunwald’s book, released in August 2012, added new information that extends the timeline of Republican recalcitrance. The Post’s Greg Sargent found the ah-ha paragraphs on page 207.

    Biden says that during the transition, he was warned not to expect any cooperation on many votes. 'I spoke to seven different Republican Senators, who said, `Joe, I’m not going to be able to help you on anything,' he recalls. His informants said McConnell had demanded unified resistance. 'The way it was characterized to me was: `For the next two years, we can’t let you succeed in anything. That’s our ticket to coming back,'" Biden says.

    The vice president says he hasn’t even told Obama who his sources were, but Bob Bennett of Utah and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania both confirmed they had conversations with Biden along these lines.

The plan all along has been to crash the Obama agenda and then climb on top of the wreckage and seize power. Not only are Republicans complicit in the 'failures' they rail against, but they are also the reason the president has had to resort to executive action to get some things done. Even Will agrees Obama is within his authority to do this. He just doesn’t like the degree to which he has done it. Poor dear."

Read the Washington Post, Speaker Boehner’s Obama impeachment dress rehearsal. 

UPDATE II:  "George W. Bush is conspicuously absent . . . from every Republican discussion of impeachment. As he must be. If Bush enters the conversation, then McCarthy and company must explain why his administration didn’t meet the conditions of 'high crimes and misdemeanors': why Fast and Furious is impeachable but Operation Wide Receiver, its predecessor, was not; why 'the willful misleading of the American people' and 'the provision of false information to Congress' about an anti-Islamic video is a dereliction of duty but doing the same about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is not; and on and on. Only by making a convincing case on those issues can Republicans demonstrate theirs is a principled rather than partisan position."

Read U.S. News and World Report, Not Serious.

UPDATE : More empty talk of impeachment.

Read The New York Times, Ignoring Qualms, Some Republicans Nurture Dreams of Impeaching Obama and Time, The Escalating GOP Call to Impeach Obama. 

No, with all that empty talk of impeachment, I triple-dog-dare the Republi-CONs to impeach Obama.

Read Businessweek, Why the GOP Might Try to Impeach Obama Over Benghazi and Huffington Post, Impeach the President!... But Make It Quick.

But beware the blowback.  Read the grio, Why no one takes impeaching Obama seriously. 

The Republi-CON 'Obama's to Blame For the Child Immigrant Problem' Myth

UPDATE II:  "It was a good idea back in 2008, in the final days of the Bush administration.

With almost no opposition, Congress passed a new law to protect immigrant children from sex traffickers trying to bring them to the United States. It required judges to hold hearings for youngsters from countries other than neighboring Mexico and Canada, preventing them from possibly getting turned away at the border. . .

Why does it take so long for a hearing?

One reason is that Congress has failed to provide enough money for timely hearings".

Read CNN, Unintended consequences: 2008 anti-trafficking law contributes to border crisis.

UPDATE:  More Republi-con hypocrisy:

"In the two weeks since President Obama announced that, in the absence of congressional action on immigration reform, he was planning to go it alone on addressing the problem, many conservatives have accused the White House of overstepping its executive authority.

Now some Republicans are making the opposite claim: that the president isn’t doing enough to take advantage of his ability to do something about the flood of children detained at the border from Central American nations without waiting for the law to change. During an appearance on Meet the Press, Michigan Representative Mike Rogers, a Republican who chairs the House intelligence committee, said , “The president has tools in his toolbox that he can do immediately to stop this.”

Specifically, Rogers suggested that Obama—who has asked Congress for $3.7 billion to deal with the issue—can simply begin returning the children home, despite a 2008 antitrafficking law that gives children entering the U.S. from countries other than Canada or Mexico legal protections that prohibit speedy deportation."

Read Businessweek, On Immigration, Republicans Say Obama Is Exercising Too Much Authority, and Not Enough.

Actually, the problem began with a law passed in 2008 by the "unanimous consent in the House of Representatives" and Senate. 

Read National Journal, Why We Don't Immediately Send the Border Kids Back. 

So many of the very same Republi-cons who are complaining now voted for the law in 2008.

The First Thing We Do, Let's Hate All the Gays

UPDATE:  And why not stone them to death, because "'I know what was done in the Old Testament and what was done back then was what’s just. … And I do stand for Biblical morality.'"

Read Slate, Oklahoma Tea Party Candidate Supports Stoning Gay People to Death.  

Then we can use religion to justify discrimination, bigotry, and hatred of minorities, interracial couples, bossy women, Jews, Muslims, atheists, Sikhs, and others.  (Republi-cons, please feel free to substitute your favorite epithet.)

Read The Daily Beast, Arizona’s Pro-Discrimination Law Won’t Stop With Gays.

Without fear, anger and hatred, where would the Republi-cons be.

Live Happy

From an email:

The way you live your life may be your gift to those who come after. Make it a fantastic one:

Live it well.

Enjoy today.

Do something fun.

Be happy.

Have a great day.

Which reminds me of the following quote:

When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down 'happy.' They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.  -  John Lennon

Republi-CON Political Opportunism and Hypocrisy, Cont.

UPDATE V:  "Critics question whether Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl should have been rescued from the Taliban in light of claims that he was both a deserter and a ballerina."

Watch The Colbert Report, Bergdghazi:

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,The Colbert Report on Facebook,Video Archive

Again, this is possibly the most brazen and disgusting political opportunism and hypocrisy I have ever heard.  Republi-cons would have preferred Bergdahl be publicly beheaded before giving any credit to Obama.

UPDATE IV:  "Rep. Richard B. Nugent (R-Fla.), a lawmaker whose three sons have served in the military, made the case of captive soldier Bowe Bergdahl a personal cause. Nugent delivered speeches about Bergdahl on the House floor. He introduced two resolutions affirming that the United States would not abandon him in Afghanistan.

What Nugent wanted, he told a crowd at a rally for Bergdahl in February, was for 'the United States to do everything possible not to leave any members of the armed forces behind.'

But now, Nugent says that — when he said 'do everything possible' — he did not actually mean everything. Now that Bergdahl is free, the Florida Republican has become a critic of the deal that freed him. . .

Nugent is one of several conservatives in Congress who have made a similar shift this week. First, they demanded that President Obama get Bergdahl back. Then, when the soldier was released, they blasted Obama for giving up too much to get him.

Those conservatives have been mocked by Democrats and cable-news talkers, who accuse them of playing politics. “It is clear they are worried his release could be seen as a victory for President Obama,” Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said on the Senate floor Wednesday.

In interviews and statements, some in the group have said they did not contradict themselves. They always wanted Bergdahl back. They expected it might take a deal with the Taliban. Indeed, the broad outlines of this deal — including the five Taliban commanders to be exchanged — had been discussed publicly since at least 2011.

But still, these conservatives say, they didn't expect the final deal would be this bad.

In February, The Washington Post reported on the revival of talks to free Bergdahl in exchange for releasing five Taliban commanders held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, into the custody of Qatar — the exact outlines of the deal that was eventually announced. When asked at the time by CNN’s Anderson Cooper about reports of such a deal, Sen. John S. McCain (R-Ariz.) said he might support an agreement for Bergdahl that included some kind of prisoner exchange.

'Obviously I’d have to know the details, but I would support ways of bringing [Bergdahl] home, and if exchange was one of them I think that would be something I think we should seriously consider,' McCain said.

But after Obama announced Saturday that he had swapped the Taliban prisoners for Bergdahl, McCain criticized the exchange as 'a mistake.' . .

Several members of Congress from both parties issued tweets celebrating Bergdahl’s return, only to delete them as the story grew murky. . .

Just after Bergdahl’s release, Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) released a statement that said: 'Our prayers have been answered and we offer our thanks for the perseverance of the family and the many Idahoans who have kept this vigil. We appreciate the men and women who made this release possible.'

Five days later, Crapo expressed doubts about the exchange, telling a local news outlet: 'I believe that is a problem . . . that could potentially result in a problem for our national security.'"

Read the Washington Post, The Bergdahl boomerang: GOP lawmakers who long urged a rescue now sour on the idea. 

In other words, Republi-cons were for doing everything possible to get the POW back, before they were against doing anything to save him. 

This is possibly the most brazen and disgusting political opportunism and hypocrisy I have ever heard.  Republi-cons would have preferred Bergdahl be publicly beheaded before giving any credit to Obama.

UPDATE III:  "So the prisoner exchange in Afghanistan is 'much like' the 2012 attacks on U.S. facilities in Libya because, in both cases, the administration did or didn’t do something and then later gave an account of why it did or didn’t do that something. Scandalous.

And this is just the beginning of the uncanny similarities. Both events happened — you’re not going to believe this — under President Obama! And in both instances, one of the people involved was — yes, you guessed it — Susan Rice! Don’t forget that Bergdahl and Benghazi both begin with the letter 'B,' and although Afghanistan is in Asia and Libya is in Africa, both continents begin with the letter 'A.' . .

A bit of idle speculation was all Obama’s critics (particularly those at Fox) needed to fire up the Benghazi scandal machine. . .

Former congressman Allen West (R-Fla.) found the two instances similar because 'there is a lot to this whole episode — like Benghazi — that we may never know.'

Luckily for West, knowledge is not a requirement. He has already declared l’affaire Bergdahl an impeachable offense."

Read the Washington Post, From Bergdahl to Benghazi, Republicans fire up the scandal machine. 

UPDATE II: How important is the Benghazi so-called scandal to the Republi-con reelection strategy?

Says Iowa Republi-con Rep. Steve King "We need to try this thing, really, in the public eye, the autopsy of Ambassador Stevens should be released to the public. That's another piece of information that's missing."

Read Slate, What House Conservatives Want From the Benghazi Committee.

UPDATE:  What ever happened to the [fill in the blank] scandal.  "It went the way of pretty much every Obama administration 'scandal,' which is that it turned out to be not nearly as scandalous as Republicans had hoped.

In fact, a clear pattern has emerged on how these scandals have unfolded, one that might be helpful to keep in mind as we start paying attention to [yet another so-called scandal]. Here’s a handy guide:

Stage 1: Worse than . . .

Stage 2: The facts show something problematic, but . . .

Stage 3: The (not so) dramatic hearings.

Stage 4: The rage at the media for not paying enough attention.

Stage 5: The last gasp."

Read the Washington Post, The five stages of GOP scandal-mongering: A reader’s guide. 

Repeat as necessary, the same or another so-called scandal, with indignation and outrage.

"If you compare the costs of the Reagan Administration’s serial security lapses in Beirut to the costs of Benghazi, it’s clear what has really deteriorated in the intervening three decades. It’s not the security of American government personnel working abroad. It’s the behavior of American congressmen at home."

Read the The New Yorker, Ronald Reagan’s Benghazi.

Read also:

The Daily Dolt, Rumsfeld Asserts Embassy Attacks Due To "Perceived American Weakness." Wait, How Many Embassy Attacks Were There Under Bush?,

The Huffington Post, 13 Benghazis That Occurred on Bush's Watch Without a Peep from Fox News

The Huffington Post, Jon Stewart Tears Fox News Apart For Benghazi Hypocrisy, which notes the lack of Hedgehog News hysteria over "a long list of intelligence failures under the Bush administration, including a pre-9/11 report on Osama bin Laden's intentions to strike inside the U.S. and the false claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which led to the 2003 U.S. invasion", and

Media Matters, Krauthammer Whitewashes Bush's History To Bash Obama Over Embassy Attack, which includes a list of embassy attacks over the last 35 years.

See also, Republi-CON Political Opportunism and Hypocrisy.

 

The Republi-CON Media CONplex, Cont.

UPDATE V:  "Stephen Colbert is not only funnier than any cable news show—although Fox News can be unintentionally hilarious—he’s also better at informing his audience about the issues than traditional news outlets. That’s not just my opinion; it’s the conclusion of a study released Monday by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center."

Read The Daily Beast, Colbert Is Ivy League TV Compared to Fox News, which quotes a few jokes from Colbert, including this one to illustrate religious/Christian hypocrisy:

"If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn’t help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we’ve got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don’t want to do it."

UPDATE IV:  This time it is Bush's chief speechwriter from 2001 until 2006, who has realized the harm done when the lunatics are running the asylum, or in this case, the  Republi-CON political party:

 "Among the saddest aspects of a political culture premised on the exaggeration and organization of grievances is the way policy debates get pulled into a vortex of paranoia. . .

This is the way the modern ideological market often works. It is driven by entrepreneurs of outrage, marketers of resentment, innovators in the on-time delivery of anger. Their market share does not need to be large to be influential. Several thousand calls to Congress can seem like a populist wave."

Read the Washington Post, The entrepreneurs of outrage.

UPDATE III:  Ironically, even a long-time Republi-CON nut now realizes that 'the party needs to control its nuts.'

"'Republicans don’t want careers in government and give little thought to how to get there,' she writes. 'Often they run for president only because they hope it will lead to more speaking gigs and TV appearances. That may explain why Republicans seem to attract the sort of candidate who enjoys startling people at cocktail parties with outlandish remarks. There’s a great living to be made by appealing to rubes and hotheads. Even if you lose, you’ll get a talk show.'

Two pages later: 'About half of the Republican presidential candidates in the last two election cycles would have inspired every stupid woman in America to drive to the polls, sobbing, in order to vote against them.'"

Read the Washington Post, Ann Coulter back on airwaves, reenergized by shutdown and exemplifying unhappiness of GOP.

UPDATE II:  "Sarah is selling Sarah. The former vice presidential candidate and half-term governor of Alaska is a commodity of one and a marketing machine. She has created a new politics of profit.

Palin's reanimation on the tea party stage probably means no more than the other intentions she has floated but never executed. She spent almost a year of the last presidential election cycle teasing the far right that she was going to run for president. She never did, but lots of network TV interviews and speculative articles drove up her name recognition and brand identification.

And she's not running again.

Palin is re-running the same show in her home state of Alaska by hinting that she is going to be a candidate for the U.S. Senate. She will not run though. There is too much risk of failure. She's not the near-unknown who was elected governor of Alaska and then quit 2½ years into the job. She has a profile, and she intends to use it to make money, which is one commitment she knows how to keep. Running and losing is always bad for business.

Palin is a product. Not a candidate."

Read CNN, Sarah Palin follows the Donald Trump method. 

UPDATE:  "When Senator Ted Cruz of La Mancha jumped on his trusty steed and charged the windmills, he explained: 'Everyone in America knows Obamacare is destroying the economy.' He added that accepting the Affordable Care Act would be like appeasing the Nazis.

Cruz is a smart man, and maybe this is just disingenuous demagoguery. But there’s a scarier possibility: After spending too much time in the Republican echo chamber, he may believe what he says.

In the 1990s, as conservative talk radio spread across America, liberals felt victimized. But, in retrospect, the rise of talk radio, Fox News Channel and right-wing Web sites may have done greatest harm to conservatives themselves.

The right-wing echo chamber breeds extremism, intimidates Republican moderates and misleads people into thinking that their worldview is broadly shared.

That’s the information bubble that tugs the entire Republican Party to the right . .

Research suggests that the echo chamber effect is disproportionately a problem on the right, leading inhabitants to perceive a warped reality. Many Republicans were shocked that Mitt Romney was defeated last fall because they had been assured that he would win. And a Pew survey last year found that the proportion of conservative Republicans who believe Obama is a Muslim has doubled since 2008 to 34 percent.

Then there was the time Glenn Beck aired the theory that Obama is the anti-Christ (he later said he had been joking).

The right-wing bubble makes it harder to elect Republican presidents by enforcing an ideological purity in primaries that weakens candidates in general elections. Too much time in the bubble also leaves some Republican politicians saying things that just sound nutty to independents."

Read The New York Times, Suffocating Echo Chamber.

"Regular readers know I have a love/hate relationship with the Tea Party. What I love is all the good people participating in the civic process for the first time; the determination to challenge corruption in the GOP establishment; the effort to bring civil-liberties concerns and skepticism of foreign wars back under the Republican tent; the commitment to a republic where people are free to pursue happiness as they see fit; the healthy skepticism of central planning that subverts markets with cronyism and corporatism; and alarm at our national debt.

What I hate about the Tea Party is the epistemic closure that plagues it; the unthinking embrace of obviously unqualified politicians like Herman Cain; the notion that "real American" culture is something other than pluralistic; the unseriousness about governing; its frustrating inability to distinguish between mutually beneficial compromise on one hand and betrayal of principle on the other; the veneration of hucksters like Glenn Beck and blowhards like Rush Limbaugh; the double-think that characterizes its attitude toward the safety-net; and the subset of its rank and file that expresses personal disdain for all non-conservatives even while casting themselves as disrespected victims.

I've always been far more sympathetic to the Tea Party's rank and file than to its elites. In my experience, an American who shows up to a community protest rally tends to be earnest and well-intentioned, whereas the ideological entertainers they tune into on the way home tend to be cynical, opportunistic hucksters who constantly misinform while selling cheap anger and gold at obscene markups. 

I've argued in many posts that right-wing media regularly and egregiously misinforms its Tea Party audiences, whose trust in talk radio and Fox News is misplaced, and called on conservatives who know better to affirm as much. As I see it, Tea Partiers would be furious if they understood the degree to which they're misled, and would manage a better movement if better served by conservative media. . .

[T]he vast majority of Americans assume the media they consume isn't regularly filled with obvious untruths. While there is media bias across the ideological spectrum, talk radio and Fox News engage in a special kind of misinformation.

The Tea Party rank and file deserves better."

Read The Atlantic, A Soldier Criticizes His Army Comrades' Tea Party Ideology. 

And see The Republi-CON Media CONplex. 

Countdown to Fools Day, Bwahahahaha!!!!

UPDATE V:   After enumerating the 64 pages of the delusions and lies, Arduini asks [beginning on page 61, presented in a different order] Pastor Truthiness aka Huckster and Con Man and Sheriff Joe’s Scooby Doo gang ould be so "consistently, comprehensively and unapologetically wrong"?

Do they beleve what they say?  If so, it "would not reflect well on their intelligence, but then again neither of them has ever demonstrated any but the most ordinary of intellectual gifts. Zullo is demonstrably one of the worst investigators in the history of the profession. And without the technological help of the Internet, Gallups would still be just an obscure southern pastor of only the 2 nd largest SBC congregation in the little town of Milton "

Is it "an expression of fundamentally racist impulse[?] This is not to say that all Birthers are racists, or more specifically that either Gallups or Zullo are racist. Certainly, there has been next to nothing in their statements, writing or actions that betray an obviously racist motivation. But they embrace enthusiastically the contention that Obama is somehow 'other.'"

Or have:

"Gallups and Zullo together have simply been engaged in a scam[?] It is a suggestion certainly worthy of consideration. “Send money” had been one of the most consistent components of their message since the earliest moments of their collaboration, and recently Mike Shoesmith has been compelled to explicitly deny that accusation. But even before the first Cold Case Posse press conference, Zullo was cashing in via an eBook published for sale on Amazon. His excuse for immediately getting his hands caught in that particular cookie jar was that the media had refused to cover the press conference, and so an alternative way to get the story out was required. This is difficult to reconcile with the fact that the eBook was actually already on sale before the first press conference had even taken place.

Cormac Herley, a computer security expert at Microsoft Research, wrote a paper in 2012 explaining why the Nigerian Email Scams are so pathetically obvious to the average person.  Using an approach called “signal theory” he mathematically analyzed the con but with an important new insight. He decided to look at the con from the perspective of the scammers rather than that of the victims. He realized that it cost them next to nothing to spam the world. But to make real money, they needed to be able to efficiently tell the difference between the 'true positives' ( those who would get sucked in deeply enough to send a significant amount of money ) and the 'false positives' ( targets who might seem like suckers at first, but who later got suspicious and bailed out early before they paid off). 'False positives' were expensive. They wasted time and resources that could have been more profitably spent on the 'true positives.'

In short, the Nigerian Email Scams are deliberately stupid specifically to filter out even those with only the tiniest bit of common sense, and to insure that those responding were already identified as complete idiots.

It is difficult to listen to a Gallups broadcast without suspecting that this is also his intent. Seriously… 'universe shattering?' 'Deeper and deeper, darker and darker?' 'Tons of  evidence is piling up,' but 'I’m not at liberty to tell you' what it is?  Scores of 'VIPs are on board,' powerful people with 'unlimited financial resources' and 'standing' to 'move this forward to congressional investigations' or 'criminal prosecutions,' but I can’t tell you who any of them are?

What rational person could listen to months of such elaborate and melodramatic gibberish and not run for the door? The argument that this has been nothing more than an elaborate grift designed to separate the most credulous and vulnerable of Birthers from their retirement checks is not without merit."

Read also, Slate, The GOP’s Grifter Problem, Why the Republican Party attracts provocateurs, faux martyrs, and grifters in droves, which notes " the energy of the conservative movement—and thus the Republican Party—is geared toward these people. If you want money and attention, you could do worse than become a conservative provocateur. Right-wing resentment—stoked by impossible promises and harnessed through donations—built a fortune for Glenn Beck, a political career for Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, and a burgeoning media empire for the late Andrew Breitbart. . . it's hard not to see the whole operation as a perpetual swindle."

UPDATE IV: Since shortly after Birther's Fool Day, "Frank Arduini has posted a compiled, footnoted version of his series of articles on Carl Gallups at SCRIBD", which begins:

"At the most granular level [Gallups] embraces as true every absurd Birther ‘fact’ no matter how long ago it was utterly debunked. His more comprehensive theories are simultaneously erroneous on their own and mutually contradictory when considered together. His pronouncements on the issue have progressively escalated in urgency and absurdity over the months and years, and yet the outcomes have never once changed. Every deadline he sets is missed. Every prediction he ventures ends up being wrong. Every accusation he makes proves false. Every promise he makes crumbles to ash in the mouths of his rapt Birther flock.

But only long enough for him to rinse and repeat. "

The 64 page article is a complete timeline of the delusions and lies promoted by Sheriff Joe’s Scooby Doo gang and Pastor Truthiness aka Huckster and Con Man.

On page 26, the much claimed 'universe-shattering' evidence is revealed -- a Sherrif who attended the The Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) in May 2013 and a closed session "limited to 'sworn law enforcement officials' and 'congressmen' . . . to provide a 'FULL criminal disclosure' of the 'new information' that Zullo claimed to have accumulated over the year since the Posse’s first press conference:

[P]osted to his FaceBook account (with what was for him a typically casual attitude towards grammar, spelling, capitalization and syntax) that:

here’s what I was told, VIA cold case possie , 1) bozo isn’t American nor was he born in Hawaii, 2) they believe he’s Saudi , 3) their not his real parents, 4) Russia is involved, 5) it wasn’t an accident he’s president, 6) bill ayers and the weather underground are involved, 7) Kenya played a roll, Hawaii state officials did the birth certificate, he has several other names , not just the ones the public knows about, 9) he don’t exsist in the usa until the age of 5.....10) WERE ALL F*CKED "

Enjoy a good laugh at our dear Pastor!  But anybody who believes this really is a fool!!

UPDATE III:  After another show "promising universe-shattering disclosures, but providing nothing but 'any day now,'" Pastor Truthiness aka Huckster and Con Man 'threw the birther web sites under the bus', complaining of "the amount whining, complaining and false information and flat-out fabricated information that continues to spill out of the birther movement." [A great example of the pot calling the kettle black.]

Read Obama Conspiracy Theories, Gallups turns on birthers: calls them "whiners".

Soon after, "a firestorm of commentary erupted" and was then erased, but not before it was copied.

Read Obama Conspiracy Theories, Triple-scrubbing the birthers.  

Then watch What Birthers Believe, to understand the warped racist Birther thinking that "Barack Obama was intentionally conceived to become president and destroy America."

And read Obama Conspiracy Theories, CCP Universe-shattering evidence revealed, which notes:

It is common for people who believe one conspiracy theory to believe others, and as far as I am concerned, it is no stretch whatever to connect the random dots weaving Obama birtherism into the well-established traditions of the John Birch Society, theories of the International Communist Conspiracy, black helicopters and UN Agenda 21. If the world woke up to a vision of being controlled by a secret elite, where wars, disasters, and calamity were all controlled by hidden hands, where even the President of the United States was a puppet fiction, wouldn’t that truly shatter the universe?

Conspiracy theorists have a hard time coming to grips with rejection. They feel that anyone with moderate intelligence, courage, and honesty will inevitably agree with them. Perhaps this is why Mike Zullo and Carl Gallups set goal after goal involving VIPs that are getting on board, only to be unable to deliver. Perhaps they expected that meeting with a VIP equaled convincing them—but that just didn’t happen.

I hope Zullo comes out with his universe-shattering information, because it would make him even more of laughing stock, and we could all go home."

And because revealing the so-called "universe-shattering information" would make Pastor Truthiness aka Huckster and Con Man a laughing stock even to 'Gallups' gullibles', it will always be "any day now". 

UPDATE III:  For all the Birther Fools, call Pastor Truthiness aka Huckster and Con Man, and ask him to reconcile the following Bible verses with his numerous lies:

Proverbs 12:22 (KJV): “Lying lips are abomination to the Lord: but they that deal truly are his delight.”

Proverbs 15:14 (KJV): “The heart of him that hath understanding seeketh knowledge: but the mouth of fools feedeth on foolishness.”

And when he attempts to bolster his credibility on legal issues by claiming to that he is "a former Florida law enforcement officer", ask him why his name is not in a  database of past and present Florida law enforcement officers.

UPDATE II:  Today is the last day, or not.  Tomorrow, Birther Fool's Day, we will know who the fools are.

Bwahahahaha!!!!

UPDATE:  A radio talk show host -- a "man who got rich making multiple false claims", "promis[ing] to reveal the things 'They Don’t Want You to Know About', a clever marketing strategy that makes it seem as if The Powers That Be are suppressing information you need" and that "the government constantly [was] trying to suppress the truth, with nefarious figures involved in a vast conspiracy" -- was held in contempt of court, fined $37 million, and sentenced to 10 year in prison.

"He also claims to be a victim of this conspiracy himself, with the government trying to keep him from telling people what’s really going on", which he knows because he gets “information from a secret group . . . Of course, since they’re a secret group, he cannot reveal the identities of the people in it or much else about it.”

No, it wasn't the Pastor Truthiness aka Huckster and Con Man, or anyone else from the "Sheriff Joe’s Scooby Doo gang", at least not yet.

Read Slate, Kevin Trudeau: Quackery Promoter Jailed for Contempt, which notes that "[s]kepticism and critical thinking are tiring. They’re exhausting. The battles against pseudoscience, against the attacks on reality, against the erosion of the ability to make rational decisions…they never end. There is always more nonsense out there, more outrageous claims that fly in the face of reality. And what’s worse is how often it’s the same thing again and again."

This is a continuation of the Birther Bwahahahaha!!!!, the growing laughter at the Birther delusions.




Birther Fool's Day is the first day after the month that the universe 'shattered', as promised by the "Sheriff Joe’s Scooby Doo gang"to 'Gallups' gullibles' on 'fellatio Friday' in mid-December (the 'universe-shattering' twist was being promoted elsewhere in late November).

It is no coincidence that Birther Fool's Day is April 1st.

Try to contain your laughter, if you can.

If a Protest Happens and No One Attends . . .

The flop that was American Operation Spring, maybe 100 people attended, a reliable count is hard to find.

Read Poilticus USA, Operation American Spring Rallies a Few Hundred Lunatics at Most.

Just about 10-30 million fewer people than the 10-30 million people predicted to attend.

I'm embarrassed for WEBY and one of my classmates who sounded quite ignorant promoting the event.

Name That Medical Device

Hint:  this odd tool is still heavily used at all levels of politics.

The Tea Party Suckers

"A Washington Post analysis found that some of the top national tea party groups engaged in this year’s midterm elections have put just a tiny fraction of their money directly into boosting the candidates they’ve endorsed. . .

Out of the $37.5 million spent so far by the PACs of six major tea party organizations, less than $7 million has been devoted to directly helping candidates, according to the analysis, which was based on campaign finance data provided by the Sunlight Foundation. . .

Roughly half of the money — nearly $18 million — has gone to pay for fundraising and direct mail, largely provided by Washington-area firms. Meanwhile, tea party leaders and their family members have been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in consulting fees, while their groups have doled out large sums for airfare, a retirement plan and even interior decorating.

The lavish spending underscores how the protest movement has gone professional, with national groups transforming themselves into multimillion-dollar organizations run by activists collecting six-figure salaries.

Three well-known groups — the Tea Party Patriots, the Tea Party Express and the Madison Project — have spent 5 percent or less of their money directly on election-related activity during this election cycle."

Read the Washington Post, Tea party PACs reap money for midterms, but spend little on candidates.

The so-called Tea Party is really just a subsidiary of the Republi-con party