2008 Told Ya So: Republi-CON Can't Govern (But HRC Showed She Can)

UPDATE VI:  "If you had to bet $100 on any single person to win the 2016 general election — to win $100 if you guess correctly — every rational gambler would chose Clinton."

Read the Washington Post, The math is clear: Hillary Clinton has better odds of becoming president than anybody else — by far.  

UPDATE V:  "Before all the craziness — before Donald Trump and Ben Carson and the need for two-tiered debates — Republicans’ biggest fear about next year’s election was having to run against Hillary Clinton. As we saw Tuesday night, they were right to worry."

Read the Washington Post, The GOP was right to fear Clinton.

UPDATE IV:  After the first Democratic presidential primary debate, Republi-cons should worry that 2016 is lost.

"Her experience and self-assurance in a setting where she has found herself dozens of times put her in command as she and her four lesser-known rivals for the Democratic nomination stood side by side for the first time. . .

Clinton appeared to be -positioning herself for a general-election campaign against whichever Republican emerges from that party’s nomination brawl."

Read the Washington Post, A self-assured performance by Clinton in Democratic presidential debate.

UPDATE III:  "House Republicans face a fateful choice — and not just over who will be their next speaker. It is a choice about whether they want to be a realistic, governing entity or a bomb-throwing band of purists that will, inevitably, hurt the party’s prospects not only for retaining the current GOP majorities in the House and Senate but for retaking the White House as well.

Based on the current evidence, the answer may well be the latter: bomb-throwing purists, at least among enough of the majority to prevent Republicans from functioning."

Read the Washington Post, Why would Paul Ryan want to be speaker?

UPDATE II:  "The question for House Republicans — and again, Gowdy hit the nail on the head — is what rock bottom looks like. Rock bottom at the presidential level for the party came in 1964 when Barry Goldwater won the Republican nomination but proved too conservative for the country as a whole and won only 52 electoral votes against Lyndon Johnson.

Given how heavily gerrymandered most House districts are, it's hard to imagine House Republicans suffering broad-scale electoral losses (or losing control of the majority) before the national redrawing of congressional lines in 2021. The one thing I can imagine that might meet the standards of 'rock bottom' is if Ryan decides not to run for speaker and what follows is a protracted, nasty fight — the result of which is some sort of power-sharing deal within the GOP or, even more remarkably, with Democrats.

Those scenarios — especially a power-sharing deal with Democrats — seem very unlikely to me, which may mean that House Republicans are still a ways from rock bottom. But even if they haven't bottomed out just yet, that doesn't mean there is anyone in the party who can lead it in its current form. There isn't."

Read the Washington Post, Trey Gowdy is right. The House is basically ungovernable.

UPDATE:  The Republi-con party "brought this upon itself with phony promises and incendiary but empty rhetoric."

Read the Washington Post, How Kevin McCarthy predicted his own demise.  

As I first said in 2008:

Fear, Anger, and Hatred, a great election strategy for the Republi-cons, just not a very effective governing philosophy.

Read the Washington Post, Washington finally figures out that congressional GOP is disastrously broken., which notes that "John Boehner himself identified exactly what drives the party’s right flank, suggesting that conservative Republicans whip people 'into a frenzy' by promising things 'they know are never going to happen.' Such as using the debt limit to bend Obama and Dems to their will."

Read also the Washington Post, Kevin McCarthy falls to a conservative coup, which alludes to the alleged affair by McCarthy.

Go The Donald, Go!

And because Obama has no backbone, here's hoping that Republi-con will call their own bluff:

I dare ya, I double dare ya, to shutdown the government and default. 

The Repbli-CON Plan to Destroy the Economy, Louisiana Edition

Kansas is not the only state where the Republi-con economic experiment has been a disaster. 

Read The Advocate, 'Out of tricks:' How Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has driven state to $1.6B budget deficit. 

Proving again that the economy does better under Democrats. 

Why I Support Trump

UPDATE II:  Why do Republi-cons support Franken-Trump/Trumpenstein's (© NoBullU.com):

"We like people who talk big.

We like people who tell us that our problems are simple and easy to solve, even when they aren't.

And we don't like people who don't look like us."

Read the Washington Post, I asked psychologists to analyze Trump supporters. This is what I learned.

UPDATE:  "Two authoritative chroniclers of 20th-century American populism and race, Alan Brinkley of Columbia and David Blight of Yale, dismissed the parallels [to Father Charles Coughlin (the radio-savvy populist demagogues of the Great Depression),  Huey Long,  Joseph McCarthy, Hugo Chávez, “that avatar of white-racist resentment, George Wallace”, or even Ross Perot]. Brinkley, the author of the definitive book on Long and Coughlin (Voices of Protest), said Trump was a first in American politics, a presidential candidate with no 'belief system other than the certainty that anything he says is right.' Blight said Trump’s 'real antecedents are in Mark Twain' — in other words, fictional characters, and funny ones.

There is indeed a lighter way to look at Trump’s rise and his impact on the country. Far from being an apocalyptic harbinger of the end-times, it’s possible that his buffoonery poses no lasting danger. Quite the contrary: His unexpected monopoly of center stage may well be the best thing to happen to our politics since the arrival of Barack Obama.

In the short time since Trump declared his candidacy, he has performed a public service by exposing, however crudely and at times inadvertently, the posturings of both the Republicans and the Democrats and the foolishness and obsolescence of much of the political culture they share. He is, as many say, making a mockery of the entire political process with his bull-in-a-china-shop antics. But the mockery in this case may be overdue, highly warranted, and ultimately a spur to reform rather than the crime against civic order that has scandalized those who see him, in the words of the former George W. Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, as 'dangerous to democracy.'"

Read New York Magazine, The importance of Donald Trump, which keen observes:

"What has made him more entertaining than his peers is not his superficial similarities to any historical analogues or his shopworn celebrity. His passport to political stardom has been his uncanny resemblance to a provocative fictional comic archetype that has been an invigorating staple of American movies since Vietnam and Watergate ushered in wholesale disillusionment with Washington four decades ago. That character is a direct descendant of Twain’s 19th-century confidence men: the unhinged charlatan who decides to blow up the system by running for office — often the presidency — on a platform of outrageous pronouncements and boorish behavior. Trump has taken that role, the antithesis of the idealist politicians enshrined by Frank Capra and Aaron Sorkin, and run with it. He bestrides our current political landscape like the reincarnation not of Joe McCarthy (that would be Ted Cruz) but of Jay Billington Bulworth.

Trump’s shenanigans sometimes seem to be lifted directly from the eponymous 1998 movie, in which Warren Beatty plays a senator from California who abandons his scripted bromides to take up harsh truth-telling in rap: 'Wells Fargo and Citibank, you’re really very dear / Loan billions to Mexico and never have to fear / ’Cause taxpayers take it in the rear.' Bulworth insults the moderators of a television debate, addresses his Hollywood donors as 'big Jews,' and infuriates a black constituent by telling her he’ll ignore her unless she shells out to his campaign. Larry King, cast as himself, books him on his show because 'people are sick and tired of all this baloney' and crave an unplugged politician who calls Washington 'a disaster.'

Trump also sounds like Hal Phillip Walker, the unseen candidate of the 'Replacement Party' whose campaign aphorisms percolate throughout Robert Altman’s post-Watergate state-of-the-union comic epic, Nashville (1975). His platform includes eliminating farm subsides, taxing churches, banning lawyers from government, and jettisoning the national anthem because 'nobody knows the words, nobody can sing it, nobody understands it.' (Francis Scott Key was a lawyer.) In résumé and beliefs, Trump is even closer to the insurgent candidate played by Tim Robbins and reviled as 'a crypto-fascist clown' in the mockumentary Bob Roberts (1992) — a self-congratulatory right-wing Wall Street success story, beauty-pageant aficionado, and folksinging star whose emblematic song is titled 'Retake America.' Give Trump time, and we may yet find him quoting the accidental president played by Chris Rock in Head of State (2003): 'If America was a woman, she would be a big-tittied woman. Everybody loves a big-tittied woman!'

Thanks to Trump, this character has leaped off the screen into real life, like the Hollywood leading man in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo. As a human torpedo blasting through the 2016 campaign, Trump can inflict more damage, satirical and otherwise, than any fictional prototype ever could. In his great comic novel of 1959, The Magic Christian, Terry Southern anticipated just the kind of ruckus a Trump could make. Southern’s protagonist is a billionaire named Guy Grand who spends his fortune on elaborate pranks to disrupt almost every sector of American life — law enforcement, advertising, newspapers, movies, television, sports, the space program. Like Trump, he operates on the premise that everyone can be bought. In one typical venture, he pays the actor playing 'an amiable old physician' on a live network medical drama a million bucks to stop in mid-surgery and tell the audience that if he speaks 'one more line of this drivel,' he’ll 'vomit right into that incision I’ve made.' The network, FCC, and press go into a tizzy until viewers, hoping to see more such outrages, start rewarding the show with record ratings.

There have already been some modest precedents for Trump’s real-life prank — most recently, Stephen Colbert, who staged a brief stunt run for president in 2007. The comic Pat Paulsen, a Smothers Brothers acolyte, ran for president intermittently from 1968 into the ’90s, aiming to call attention to the absurdity of politics. His first run was under the banner of the STAG (Straight Talking American Government) Party; later, he ran consecutively as a Republican and a Democrat. ('I like to mix it up,' he explained.) Paulsen came in a (very) distant second to Bill Clinton in the 1996 New Hampshire primary, one of four primaries where he qualified for the ballot that year. But a judge threw him off the ballot in California, declaring, 'I do not want to reduce the campaign for an important office like president of the United States to some kind of farce.'

Some kind of farce, nonetheless, is just what the modern presidential campaign has devolved into. By calling attention to that sorry state of affairs 24/7, Trump’s impersonation of a crypto-fascist clown is delivering the most persuasively bipartisan message of 2016. . .

Trump does take heretical economic positions for a Republican — “The hedge-fund guys are getting away with murder!” — but on the matters of race, women, and immigration that threaten the GOP’s future viability in nonwhite, non-male America, he is at one with his party’s base. What he does so rudely is call the GOP’s bluff by saying loudly, unambiguously, and repeatedly the ugly things that other Republican politicians try to camouflage in innuendo, focus-group-tested euphemisms, and consultantspeak.

In reality, Trump’s most noxious views have not only been defended by conservative stars like Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and late summer’s No. 1 best-selling nonfiction author, the radio host Mark Levin, but also by the ostensibly more “mainstream” Republican candidates. Trump is picking up where his vocal fan Sarah Palin left off and is for that reason by far the favored candidate of tea-party Republicans, according to a Labor Day CNN-ORC poll. Take Trump’s peddling of 'birtherism,' for instance. It’s been a right-wing cause since well before he took it up; even Mitt Romney dipped into that racist well in 2012. It took a village of birthers to get Republicans to the point where only 29 percent of them now believe that Obama was born in America (and 54 percent identify him as a Muslim), according to an August survey by Public Policy Polling. Far from being a fake Republican, Trump speaks for the party’s overwhelming majority. . .

What’s exhilarating, even joyous, about Trump has nothing to do with his alternately rancid and nonsensical positions on policy. It’s that he’s exposing the phoniness of our politicians and the corruption of our political process by defying the protocols of the whole game. . .

It’s as if Trump were performing a running burlesque of the absurd but intractable conventions of presidential campaigns in real time. His impact on our politics post-2016 could be as serious as he is not. Unsurprisingly, the shrewdest description of the Trump show’s appeal has come from an actor, Owen Wilson. “You can’t help but get a kick out of him,” he told the Daily Beast, “and I think part of it is we’re so used to politicians on both sides sounding like actors at press junkets — it’s sort of by rote, and they say all the right things. So here’s somebody who’s not following that script. It’s like when Charlie Sheen was doing that stuff.” As Wilson says, for all the efforts to dismiss Trump as an entertainer, in truth it’s his opponents who are more likely to be playacting, reciting their politically correct and cautious lines by rote. The political market for improvisational candor is as large as it was after Vietnam and Watergate, and right now Trump pretty much has a monopoly on it. . .

The best news about Trump is that he is wreaking this havoc on the status quo while having no chance of ascending to the presidency. You can’t win the Electoral College in 2016 by driving away women, Hispanics, blacks, and Asian-Americans, no matter how large the margins you pile up in deep-red states. . .

The one thing Trump never does is go quietly, and neither will his followers. As Ross Douthat, a reform conservative, wrote in August, Trump has tapped into the populist resentments of middle-class voters who view the GOP and the elites who run it as tools of 'moneyed interests.' If the Republicans 'find a way to crush Trump without adapting to his message,' he added, the pressure of that resentment will keep building within the party, and 'when it bursts, the GOP as we know it may go with it.'

Even if this drama does not play out to the convention, the Trump campaign has already made a difference. Far from being a threat to democracy or a freak show unworthy of serious coverage, it matters because it’s taking a much-needed wrecking ball to some of what has made our sterile politics and dysfunctional government as bankrupt as Trump’s Atlantic City casinos. If that’s entertainment, so be it. If Hillary Clinton’s campaign or the Republican Party is reduced to rubble along the way, we can live with it. Trump will not make America great again, but there’s at least a chance that the chaos he sows will clear the way for those who can."

Because Palin is not running.

Read also, the Washington Post, 7 honest-to-goodness arguments for supporting Donald Trump. 

More Republi-CON "Family Values" Hypocrisy

UPDATE XI:  For a summary of Republi-con "family values" hypocrisy during the 1990, read Slate, It's Truly Amazing How Hypocritical and Dishonest America's Leaders Were in the 1990s.

UPDATE X:  Just another family values Republi-con hypocrite.

Read the Daily Mail, Did rumors of love affair between Kevin McCarthy and a married congresswoman torpedo his elevation to House speaker? Internet goes berserk with guesses while alleged mistress denies it all.

Read also New York Magazine, How the Media Is Handling Kevin McCarthy’s Rumored Affair.  

UPDATE XI: Apparently "McMillin resigned as an assistant prosecutor in Montgomery County, Ohio, in 2005 after he had a romantic relationship with a victim in a domestic violence case he was prosecuting."

Read the Daily Mail, Married father-of-four Indiana Republican lawmaker abruptly resigns 'to spend more time with his family' after explicit sex video was sent from his phone.

Actually the next article makes it sounds more like rape by coercion.

And the article notes that a man, his wife and unborn child were killed when McMillin engaged in "a dangerous driving 'game'."

Read The Bilerico Project, Indiana's Jud McMillin: A Tale of Glass Houses & Rocks.

UPDATE X:  "An Indiana lawmaker has abruptly resigned after a sex video was reportedly discovered on his phone.

Rep. Jud McMillin, the second-highest ranking Republican in the state's House of Representatives, stepped down Tuesday a week after he sent a bizarre text message to several people apologizing for 'anything offensive' they may have received from his stolen phone.

The 38-year-old Brookville, Indiana legislator said in a statement he was quitting after five years in office to spend more time with his family, Fox 59 reported."

Read New York Daily News, Rep. Jud McMillin abruptly resigns from Indiana House after sex video emerges.

So many family values hypocrites, so little time.

UPDATE IX:  This "married father of five [with an Ashley Madison account in which he said that he loved ' to have fun, in and out of bed'] has worked on all of his brother's campaigns since high school and donated millions of dollars to the Republican party."

Name this 'family values' hypocrite.

Hint: he "made $60million in 2000 when his trading company was sold - but became the subject of an SEC investigation in 2003 . . . [and while h]is former firm was accused of cheating clients out of millions of dollars . . . no criminal charges were brought against" him.

Need another hint: read the Daily Mail, Chris Christie's brother had Ashley Madison account where he wrote he wanted to 'bring some more spice into his life' and would 'try most anything once' - and met one woman online he had sex with 'a dozen times'.

UPDATE VIII:  What God said to the hypocrite:

UPDATE VII:  Another example of Republi-con hypocrisy.

She was divorced in 1994, 2006 and 2008, and "gave birth to twins five months after divorcing her first husband.  Their father was identified as her third husband, according to court records."

Now God speaks to her.

Read the Daily Mail, Revealed: Kentucky clerk refusing to issue gay marriage licenses has been married FOUR times and gave birth to twins out of wedlock.

UPDATE VI:   The title of the article says it all.

Read the Daily Mail, Pastor of Christian rehab program treating Josh Duggar was jailed for sex with an underage girl in his cabin during a church conference after telling her 'God approves'.

UPDATE V:  Read Wonkette, Josh Duggar In Sex Rehab Again, Because Check Out What He Did To This Porn Star.

UPDATE IV:  Duggar's real sin  -- his "work was focused on fighting the legalization of same-sex marriage. He's anti-choice and has fought against transgender rights. He’s even used his own marriage as a cudgel to bully gay people for being different:

[Instagram post with caption "Marriage = Man + Woman. I'm glad to support the corporate leaders defending traditional values! #Chickfila"]

In other words, he’s spent his life trying to stop people from making the best personal choices they can for themselves and their families. . . [while] attacking the private and yes, moral choices other people make about their own lives just because those choices conflict with his religious dogma."

Read Slate, Josh Duggar’s Apology Shows He’s Learned Nothing.

UPDATE III:  "Josh Duggar has confessed to cheating on his wife Anna amid reports he signed up for Ashley Madison, a website that specializes in facilitating extramarital affairs."

Read People, Josh Duggar Admits Infidelity and Pornography Addiction: 'I Have Been the Biggest Hypocrite Ever'.

Read also these prior posts: More Republi-CON Family Values, Republi-con Family Values, Exposing Republi-CONism, Republi-CON Family Values Hypocrisy, NAIVE-ocrat and Republi-CON Family Values Hypocrisy, Cont., More Republi-CON Family Values Hypocrisy, More of Those Republi-CON and So-Call Christian Family Values, Republi-CON Family Values in Wisconsin, Republi-CON Personalized Lawmaking is Cheap, Don't Ya Just Love Those Republi-CON Family Values, Don't Ya Just Love Those Republi-CON Family Values and Republi-CON Family Values, All In the Family Edition.

UPDATE II:  "Earlier this year, Missouri state House Speaker John Diehl, a Republican, resigned after it was revealed that he was sexting with a legislative intern. Diehl, who held himself out as an anti-gay and anti-choice family values conservative, was caught exchanging texts with the college freshman that had such bons mots in them as, 'Will have my way with you' and 'And leave you quivering,' which were obtained from her phone, where the intern had Diehl listed as 'Frank Underwood.' . .

As reported by the Kansas City Star, two of his fellow Republicans immediately chimed in, insisting that the real solution here is to start measuring hemlines."

Read Slate, Missouri Legislature Rejects Idea to Respond to Sexual Misconduct With an Intern Dress Code.

UPDATE:  Sorry, the false flag operation was just an effort to evaluate and expose his blackmailer and fight the "establishment machine.".

Read The Detroit New, Courser responds, says he was exposing blackmailers, which includes a comment from a fellow Republican who said Courser is "a man who never passes on an opportunity to preach about his supposed morals and his close relationship with God, constantly evoking religion in his personal and political stances."

"A Michigan state representative distributed a fake e-mail that suggested he had sex with a male prostitute so he could hide his relationship with another Republican state representative who is also a home-schooling mom, according to the Detroit News. Both lawmakers are Christian conservatives who frequently refer to their faith.

State Rep. Todd Courser, a married father of four, said in an audio recording that the e-mail was intended to create a 'complete smear campaign' of false claims so that a public revelation about his relationship with state Rep. Cindy Gamrat would seem 'mild by comparison.'

The Detroit News interviews suggested that the freshman representatives used their taxpayer-funded offices to maintain and cover up their relationship. The newspaper describes the two as 'socially conservative legislators who often invoke their Christian faith in pursuit of new legislation governing gun rights, abortion and marriage.' They found support through tea-party activism and formed their own legislative coalition.

Read the Washington Post, Politician reportedly leaked fake male prostitution e-mails to hide his real affair.

This story give new meaning to Republi-con coalitions.  ;-)

Read also Wonkette, Christian Teabagger Reps Have Terrific Plan To Hide Real Affair, With Pretend Gay Hooker Scandal, which notes the hypocrisy of the holier-than-thou Republi-cons "whose careers are built on regurgitating bumper stickers from 'the Bible' . . . if you’re impeaching the president for getting some extramarital knob-polishing, while you are doing the very exact same thing. Or if you are writing amicus love notes to federal courts demanding the preservation of traditional boy-on-girl marriage, while you are sexting a college intern who is not your wife. Or if you give speeches about how consenting adults who love each other are a danger to children, but you have a history of finger-banging your own very young sisters. Or if a thousand other examples we could easily provide for you, but you’re smart enough to get the point."

BTW, Courser often declared his 'Christian' religion and close relationship with God to the voters and still proclaims that "God brought me here and had me here and maybe it hasn’t accomplished anything but I have to believe it has done some good [in spite] of me."

Again I ask, why are Republi-cons such suckers for snake oil salesmen?

The "Republi-CONs Are Better for the Economy" Myth

UPDATE:  "Since the Second World War, the economy has done better when Democrats are in the White House . . .

Read the Washington Post, Hillary Clinton was right: The economy has done better under Democrats.

The chart below shows that the economy under Carter did better than under any Republi-con president since WWII, even better than under Reagan.

Trump is right when he says that "the economy does better under the Democrats than the Republicans. . .

Here's a chart showing the average rate of economic growth under each president since the Second World War, taken from a recent paper by Princeton University economists Alan Blinder and Mark Watson. They note that when a Democrat was in the Oval Office, the average rate of growth was 4.4 percent. Under Republicans, the average rate was just 2.5 percent.

It's not just broad measures of economic growth, either, Blinder and Watson observe. Industrial production increased at an average rate of 5.6 percent under Democrats, compared to 1.8 percent under Republicans. The unemployment rate under Republicans averaged 6 percent, compared to just 5.6 percent under Democrats. The average return on the stock market has been 8.1 percent under Democrats, and 2.7 percent under Republicans.

Inflation is only measure by which the economy's performance under Democratic and Republican presidents is more or less equal. Prices have increased an average rate of 3 percent under Democrats, compared to 3.3 percent under Republicans — not a significant difference.

You might be thinking that even if the economy as a whole does worse under Republican presidents, the wealthy do better, since Republicans tend to favor low-tax policies on the wealthy. That's not true either, though.  As the political scientist Larry Bartels shows in this chart, things have been better for Americans under Democrats, now matter how much money you make.

"

Read the Washington Post, Rand Paul is attacking Donald Trump for making a 100% true statement about the economy. 

Get Ready for Some Republi-CON Budget Hypocrisy

UPDATE IV:  "Sen. Lindsey Graham is asking for federal aid for his home state of South Carolina as it battles raging floods, but he voted to oppose similar help for New Jersey in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in 2013."

Read CNN, Graham opposed Sandy aid but wants help in South Carolina.

UPDATE III:  First make "lots of speeches about how wonderful it is", then pass "a non-binding but politically charged measure that promises a balanced federal ledger in 10 years", "then adjourned for a two-week break".

Actual budget cuts -- NONE.

Read NPR, Ryan Budget Vote Produces 'Win' For Both Parties and ABC News, House Passes Ryan Budget With [With Promises to Make Future] Big Cuts. 

UPDATE II:  In 2010, she supported a plan that "would have taken over 30 years to balance the budget", but now demands that the budget be balanced today, without, of course, explaining how to do it.

Read Slate, Sarah Palin, Paul Ryan, and the Clash of Cynicisms.

Only in Republi-con-stan.

UPDATE:  More Republi-con budget hypocrisy, this time a phony vote to "avert for one year the planned cuts to doctor payments", part of those phony Republi-con budget cuts:



For backgroung, read Talking Points Memo, House Abruptly Passes Medicare Pay Fix By Voice Vote, which stated:

"The Republican-led House abruptly and unexpectedly passed a Medicare physician payment fix Thursday by an unrecorded voice vote, amid questions about whether the bill had the votes to clear the chamber.

It would avert a 24 percent pay cut to doctors that was set to take effect April 1.

After temporarily recessing the House, GOP leaders emerged from a closed-door meeting and called up the bill for a voice vote. A recorded vote can be demanded by one-fifth of members present in the chamber, but such an objection wasn't mounted. So the bill was subsequently declared passed."

As you could tell, the "'no' votes clearly outmatched the 'ayes.' [Tennessee Republi-con John] Duncan gaveled in the 'ayes' anywayway, proclaiming that, sure, they had amounted to the 2/3 needed for passage."

Read Slate, Watch the House Gavel in a Basically Phony "Aye" Vote for Medicare Money.

"Oklahoma has one of the most conservative congressional delegations of any state: seven Republican men, including fierce advocates for cutting federal spending.

Five of those seven voted no in January on a bill to provide $50 billion in disaster funding for states hit by Hurricane Sandy."

Read the Washington Post, Conservative Okla. lawmakers face dilemma: Will they support tornado relief funding?

The End of the World, Again, Cont.

UPDATE VII:  "Farewell! God knows when we shall meet again." ~William Shakespeare

Read the Washington Post, Why the group eBibleFellowship believes the world will be annihilated today. 

Read also the Daily Mail, Don't make any plans for Thursday: Christian doomsday group predicts world will be 'destroyed by fire' tomorrow.

UPDATE VI:   Doesn't look like Hurricane Joaquin is God's wrath upon Obama in Washington DC after all.  How could that be after yesterday's prediction?

Does God have bad aim? Or is Carl's God just inept?  Or perhaps Carl doesn't actually know God, he is listening to Satan.  Which is it?

Maybe Imam Truthiness (formerly known as Pastor Truthiness and Pastor Poppins) can explain.

UPDATE V:  The clock (below) now counts the time since Imam Truthiness (formerly known as Pastor Truthiness and Pastor Poppins) and his sidekick's September 2015 'Blood Moon' end of the world.

UPDATE IV:  Now our local Imam Truthiness (formerly known as Pastor Truthiness and Pastor Poppins) and his sidekick say the end is near -- in December, as evidenced by the news de jour.

Today's claim is that Hurricane Joaquin is God's wrath upon Obama in Washington DC because of gay rights, or Israel, or whatever.

Don't forget to buy the book you sheeple!

Read also The End of the World is Near, Again.And I might add again and again and again . . .

Why are Republi-cons such suckers for snake oil salesmen? 

UPDATE III:  Read also the Washington Post, Despite this mysterious theory, world survives supermoon eclipse.  

UPDATE II:  Did the world end yet?

Read Slate, Mormon Leaders Reassure Faithful: Sunday’s “Blood Moon” Isn’t Sign of Apocalypse, which notes the appeals for calm made through the state's major newspaper. and TV.

UPDATE:  "There will be blood in September -- literally, according to the Internet postings of end-times believers.

The night of September 27-28 will bring a 'blood moon.' To skywatchers, it simply refers to the copper color the moon takes on during an eclipse, but to some Christian ministers, the fourth and final eclipse in a tetrad -- four consecutive total lunar eclipses, each separated by six lunar months -- fulfills biblical prophecy of the apocalypse. (The first three in the series took place April 15, 2014; October 8, 2014; and April 4, 2015.) . .

[These] assertion was quickly debunked by scientists and skeptics. . .

The astronomical site EarthSky.org added that tetrads, of which there have been 62 since the first century, follow natural cycles and are easily calculated. Moreover, three of the four most recent eclipses were not visible in Israel itself. 'What good is a blood moon if God's chosen can't see it?' wrote Seidensticker.)"

Read CNN, Blood moon has some expecting end of the world.

More claims of the end times by our local Imam Truthiness (formerly known as Pastor Truthiness and Pastor Poppins).

Despite the failure in April 2014 of the universe shattering, now we have predictions of the end times in September 2015.  Here is the countdown to the end of the month:



Read also The End of the World is Near, Again.

Doing the Devil's Work and Supporting Middle East Dictators

UPDATE V:  "A new book detailing the brutal torture and murder meted out by the regime of President Bashar al-Assad serves as a harrowing reminder of the true nature of the man Russia is now fighting for and wants the West to prop up."

Read the Daily Mail, 'People had deep cuts, some had their eyes gouged out, their teeth broken': New book reveals the grotesque torture and murder meted out by Syrian dictator Assad – the man Russia's Putin is helping to keep in power.  

WARNING; The article includes graphic photos.

UPDATE IV: I heard our resident Pastor-to-the-Dictators supporting Middle East dictators again. I wonder how he can call himself a Christian but defend "hundreds of killings, arrests and torture cases by the government of President Bashar al-Assad."

Read The New York Times, Syrian Official in Hama Resigns to Protest Bloodshed.

I guess it is all part of his religious mythology.

UPDATE III: When you hear our resident Pastor-to-the-Dictators and other so-called Christians bemoan the threat to Israel from the unrest in Syria, ask them if they know the story of 15-year-old Tamer Mohammed al-Sharei, who refused "interrogators demand . . . [to] proclaim strongman Bashar Assad as his 'beloved' president." Instead al-Sharei "chanted an often-heard slogan from anti-regime street protests calling for 'freedom and the love of God and our country.'" His reward:

"Inside a filthy detention center in Damascus, eight or nine interrogators repeatedly bludgeoned a skinny teenager whose hands were bound and who bore a bullet wound on the left side of his chest. They struck his head, back, feet and genitals until he was left on the floor of a cell, bleeding from his ears and crying out for his mother and father to help him."

Read the Washington Post, Witness saw teen severely beaten in Syrian jail for failing to praise president.

Support of evil, brutal dictators is no long-term solution for peace in the Middle East.


UPDATE II: When you hear our resident Pastor-to-the-Dictators and other so-called Christians bemoan the threat to Israel from the unrest in Syria, ask them if they know the story of Hamza Ali al-Khateeb.

"He was the 13-year-old Syrian boy who tagged along at an antigovernment protest in the town of Saida on April 29. He was arrested that day, and the police returned his mutilated body to his family a month later. While in custody, he had apparently been burned, beaten, lacerated and given electroshocks. His jaw and kneecaps were shattered. He was shot in both arms. When his father saw the state of Hamza’s body, he passed out."

To learn more, read The New York Times, The Depravity Factor, which notes that Middle East peace "cannot be found without acknowledging and wrestling with a government’s moral character."

Support of evil, brutal dictators is no long-term solution.


UPDATE: More fact-free fantasies! Is there any need to respond to his statement today, which a guest of his made on a past show, that the Earth's rotation creates oil deposits?

Pastor Truthiness (formerly known as Pastor Poppins) is at it again, preaching fear anger and hatred with fact-free fantasies, but don't be duped.

Yesterday he was bragging that he is always right and challenged callers to cite otherwise. A few of his usual sycophants to flatter him and agree with him. I called to prove he is a fraud and he refused to take the call.

Of course, he denied the missile nonsense, and never discussed his prior claims that God talks through an oil well.

It is impossible to discuss his birther delusions. (It is clear that he hasn't even read the Congressional Research Service that would agree that Obama is a "natural born citizen," (the Congressional Research Service is a part of the Library of Congress, providing professional, objective and non-partisan public policy research to members of Congress and their staffers. The writer of the memorandum is a qualified constitutional attorney who has summarized the historical and legal material with references, showing, by contrast, how shoddy the birther arguments are) (this memorandum explains why even Republi-CON Congressmen/women refuse to join the Birthers), and he hasn't talked to Barbara Nelson, who "specifically remembers his birth" because she spoke with the obstetrician who delivered [Obama] shortly after his birth.)

And he continues his slander by innuendo, one example -- Michelle Obama did not surrender her license to practice law, another example -- denying the theory of evolution.

But lately he has been weaving a myth to link Obama and the Muslim Brotherhood. (During his first effort he couldn't even pronounce Mubarak's name correctly.)

His support of Middle East dictators and summary police executions for the benefit of his religious myths is the clearest indication that the devil resides in his heart and works his magical tongue to mislead you regarding the real reason for the Egyptian uprising: Khaled Said, 28, who was beaten to death by Egyptian police in June 2010:

"Police officers at an Internet cafe below his apartment were exchanging a video that showed officers divvying up seized narcotics and cash. Relatives think the clip was delivered via Bluetooth to Said's computer by accident. The young man shared it with friends, who forwarded it to others.

Two of the detectives implicated in the video approached Said outside his building, in the Sidi Gaber district of Alexandria, about noon June 6. One grabbed him by the shoulder and hauled him inside the Internet cafe.

The officers smashed Said's head against a marble table repeatedly, until the owner of the shop asked them to take it outside. They then dragged Said inside a nearby building where the two kicked him and smashed his head against stone steps, witnesses later told relatives.

The next day, Said's mother was notified that her son was at the morgue. The cause of death, she was told, was severe cardiovascular asphyxiation caused by a high level of drugs in his system. The initial police report received by the family said Said had apparently died after he swallowed a bag that contained marijuana.

Finding that account suspicious, relatives bribed a guard at the morgue to take a photo of the corpse. It showed Said's skull had been cracked and his face disfigured.

After local prosecutors expressed little interest in pursuing the case, Kassem, who was a father figure to Said, began holding news conferences. Said's cousins created a page on Facebook to expose what they called police brutality. "

"Since last June, the Khaled Said Facebook page has attracted more than 473,000 members and has become a tool not only for organizing the protests but also for providing regular updates about other cases of police abuse. "

Their efforts to expose police brutality took hold after the Tunisian uprising, which "started when a young merchant, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire after the police confiscated his produce cart Dec. 14, 2010. Following that, demonstrations, riots and strikes constituted the most dramatic wave of social and political unrest in Tunisia for the past three decades."

Those who support Middle East dictators and summary police executions do the devil's work.

And the Banksters Lived Happily Ever After (Screwing You)

"What's the problem with having banks that are "too big to fail"?

You could answer this question with a long and technical history of how governments and taxpayers bailed out financial institutions during the Great Recession to ensure that their frailties didn't wreck the economy for everyone else. And how the financial crisis led to financial mergers and acquisitions that, in the end, just made these banks bigger.

Or you could read this eight-frame comic by Zach Weinersmith of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, which gives a pretty accurate description."

See the cartoon at the Washington Post, A hilarious cartoon captures what went wrong with Wall Street.

The Republi-CON 'We Oppose Welfare' Myth

UPDATE III:  Jeb! the hypocrite, criticizing  the 'free stuff' black voters get.

Jeb! is/was a minority owner of the Jacksonville Jaguars, which got $121 million from the City of Jacksonville to renovate "the stadium in which the newly formed Jaguars would play football."  And "while his father was in the White House, Bush was retained to help sell pumps built by a firm called Moving Water Industries. To expand its business in Nigeria, the firm relied on a $74 million loan guaranteed by the federal Export-Import Bank."  Not to mention the many tax credits he gets to subsidize his wealthy lifestyle.

Read the Washington Post, Jeb Bush says black voters get ‘free stuff’. So does he.

   

UPDATE II:  "$250 million in public money to [the Milwaukee Bucks for] the team’s new arena . . .

It’s another reminder that the principles of small government and fiscal responsibility that conservative politicians like Walker pledge their fealty to are highly contingent on who’s benefiting and who’s being hurt."

Read the Washington Post, Scott Walker’s crony capitalism, which notes that "one of the Bucks owners, Jon Hammes, is a national finance co-chairman of Walker’s campaign and has given $150,000 to a Walker super PAC."

UPDATE:  Another corporate welfare queen protected by Republi-cons, the for-profit colleges industry.

"A 2012 Senate investigation found that 15 of the largest for-profit colleges received 86 percent of their revenue from federal student aid programs, and spent 23 percent of their budgets, $3.7 billion dollars, on some form of recruitment. By comparison, nonprofit colleges spent less than a percent of their revenue on marketing, according to the investigation."

Read the Washington Post, Slick for-profit college marketing is starting to backfire. 

"Americans pay nearly twice as much per pound as foreigners do for sugar, thanks to U.S. import restrictions and subsidies. . .

[Government regulations have] cost American consumers and businesses $15 billion since 2008 and 120,000 jobs since 1997."

Read the Wall Street Journal, The Sugar Scandal.

Republi-cons oppose welfare for poor people, but not their rich corporate benefactors.

Be Very Very Afraid of 'The Invisible [Republi-CON] Bond Vigilantes'

UPDATE XII:  What ever happened to those preditions of hyperinflation?

Read the Washington Post, And now let us remember the worst economic prediction ever.

UPDATE XI: "When it comes to views on economics, Republicans have been consistent, clear and wrong."

Read The New York Times, G.O.P. Monetary Madness, which notes "that hard-money doctrine and paranoia about inflation have taken over the party, even as the predicted inflation keeps failing to materialize. For example, in February, Representative Paul Ryan, who is somewhat inexplicably regarded as the party’s deep thinker on matters economic, harangued Mr. Bernanke on how terrible it is to “debase” a currency and pointed to a rise in commodity prices in late 2010 and early 2011 as evidence that inflation was finally coming. Commodity prices have plunged since then, but there is no sign that Mr. Ryan or anyone else is having second thoughts."


UPDATE X: How about those invisible Republi-CON bond vigilantes. Read the Washington Post, Average rate on 30-year fixed mortgage ties low of 3.94 pct.; 15-year also hits record.


UPDATE IX: For all the anti-Keynesian folks out there, please explain:




UPDATE VIII: A told ya so by the 2008 winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, in The New York Times, One Point Seven Seven:

"That’s the current interest rate on 10-year US bonds.

Remember, back in 2009 there was a big debate between people like me, who said that we were in a liquidity trap and that interest rates would stay low as long as the economy was depressed, and people like the WSJ editorial page and Niall Ferguson, who said that government borrowing would bring on the bond vigilantes and send rates soaring.

How’s it going?

And just to be clear: this isn’t just about I-told-you-so. We’re talking about different models, different visions of how the economy works. Their vision led to calls for austerity now now now; mine said that the overwhelming danger was that we wouldn’t provide enough stimulus, and that we would pull back too soon. Sure enough, we didn’t and we did. And now catastrophe looms."

Republi-cons continue to sacrifice workers to appease their imaginary inflation gods.


UPDATE VII: It has been several weeks since the so-called downgrade. So how are those bond vigilantes doing? Read The New York Times, Mortgage Rates Hit 50-Year Low.


UPDATE VI: "Fitch Ratings said Tuesday it will keep its rating on U.S. debt at the highest grade, AAA, and issued a 'stable' outlook, meaning it expects the rating to stay there." Read The New York Times, Fitch Ratings Keeps U.S. at Top Credit Rating.


UPDATE V: "Thirty years ago, it became clear that defeating inflation was crucial, even if the means needed to accomplish that would cause a deep recession. . . . [But i]t is time for a new lesson to be learned. Sometimes we need inflation, and now is such a time. " Read The New York Times, Sometimes, Inflation Is Not Evil.


UPDATE IV: "Behold the power of a stupid narrative, which seems impervious to evidence." Read The New York Times, The Downgrade Doom Loop.


UPDATE III: More from that 'liberal' commentator won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics:

"[T]here is no reason to take Friday's downgrade of America seriously. These are the last people whose judgment we should trust.

And yet America does have big problems.

These problems have very little to do with short-term or even medium-term budget arithmetic. The U.S. government is having no trouble borrowing to cover its current deficit. It's true that we're building up debt, on which we'll eventually have to pay interest. But if you actually do the math, instead of intoning big numbers in your best Dr. Evil voice, you discover that even very large deficits over the next few years will have remarkably little impact on U.S. fiscal sustainability.

No, what makes America look unreliable isn't budget math, it's politics. And please, let's not have the usual declarations that both sides are at fault. Our problems are almost entirely one-sided - specifically, they're caused by the rise of an extremist right that is prepared to create repeated crises rather than give an inch on its demands.

The truth is that as far as the straight economics goes, America’s long-run fiscal problems shouldn’t be all that hard to fix. It’s true that an aging population and rising health care costs will, under current policies, push spending up faster than tax receipts. But the United States has far higher health costs than any other advanced country, and very low taxes by international standards. If we could move even part way toward international norms on both these fronts, our budget problems would be solved.

So why can’t we do that? Because we have a powerful political movement in this country that screamed “death panels” in the face of modest efforts to use Medicare funds more effectively, and preferred to risk financial catastrophe rather than agree to even a penny in additional revenues.

The real question facing America, even in purely fiscal terms, isn’t whether we’ll trim a trillion here or a trillion there from deficits. It is whether the extremists now blocking any kind of responsible policy can be defeated and marginalized. "

Read The New York Times, Credibility, Chutzpah And Debt.


UPDATE II: "Virtually unnoticed last week was that [another ratings agency] kept a Triple A rating on the United States." Read The New York Times, Moody’s: Why the U.S. Is Still AAA.


UPDATE: So much for the inflation fear-mongers.

Today the Bank of New York began charging a fee on large deposits. Read the Wall Street Journal, BNY Mellon Deposit Fee: Life in the Liquidity Trap.

BTW, a liquidity trap, "in Keynesian economics, is a situation where monetary policy is unable to stimulate an economy, either through lowering interest rates or increasing the money supply. Liquidity traps typically occur when expectations of adverse events (e.g., deflation, insufficient aggregate demand, or civil or international war) make persons with liquid assets unwilling to invest."

I guess John Maynard Keynes was right after all.

Of course, one 'liberal' commentator has been scoffing at inflation concerns for years.

From more than two years ago, read The New York Times, The Big Inflation Scare, where he speculates that "inflation fear-mongering [was] partly political, coming largely from economists who had no problem with deficits caused by tax cuts but suddenly became fiscal scolds when the government started spending money to rescue the economy. And their goal [seemed] to be to bully the Obama administration into abandoning those rescue efforts."

I guess that's why that 'liberal' commentator won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.

I wonder what the Hedgehog News prize winning economist would says now.

(Warning, that is a satirical comment.

Hedgehog News doesn't have any prize winning economist on the payroll.

But Hedgehog News does have many Republi-con candidates on the payroll.)

"S&P has triggered another invisible attack by the invisible bond vigilantes." Read The New York Times, What If They Announced A Downgrade And Nobody Cared?

BTW, a bond vigilante "is a bond market investor who protests monetary or fiscal policies they consider inflationary by selling bonds, thus increasing yields."

If you don't understand this post, you should refrain from debating fiscal policy issues.

Get Ready For a Republi-CON Rumble

UPDATE V:  "John Boehner was brought down by the same conservative forces he once courted."

Read Slate, The Revolution Devours Its Own.  

UPDATE IV:  "Meet the new leader, same as the old leader. Rep. Eric Cantor’s defeat last week was a message from grass-roots conservatives to Washington’s Republican leaders: No more business as usual. But on the eve of the election to replace Cantor as majority leader—the second most powerful person in the House of Representatives—it doesn’t look like there’s been much of a change in how the House will function. Rep. Kevin McCarthy, who was in the No. 3 position, is now going to be elevated to Cantor’s old post. McCarthy is not an agent of change. On the issue of immigration, for example, which helped inflame opposition to Cantor, McCarthy is even more moderate. (He has in the past expressed support for giving undocumented immigrants a path to legal status.) House Speaker John Boehner, whom grass-roots activists criticize as a capitulator and dealmaker, is more powerful than ever, because without Cantor waiting in the wings, there is less threat that another member of the House could harness his grass-roots critics."

Read Slate, Under Old Management.  

UPDATE III: "How big a deal is the surprise primary defeat of Representative Eric Cantor, the House majority leader? Very. Movement conservatism, which dominated American politics from the election of Ronald Reagan to the election of Barack Obama — and which many pundits thought could make a comeback this year — is unraveling before our eyes.

I don’t mean that conservatism in general is dying. But what I and others mean by “movement conservatism,” a term I think I learned from the historian Rick Perlstein, is something more specific: an interlocking set of institutions and alliances that won elections by stoking cultural and racial anxiety but used these victories mainly to push an elitist economic agenda, meanwhile providing a support network for political and ideological loyalists.

By rejecting Mr. Cantor, the Republican base showed that it has gotten wise to the electoral bait and switch, and, by his fall, Mr. Cantor showed that the support network can no longer guarantee job security. For around three decades, the conservative fix was in; but no more. . .

So whither movement conservatism? Before the Virginia upset, there was a widespread media narrative to the effect that the Republican establishment was regaining control from the Tea Party, which was really a claim that good old-fashioned movement conservatism was on its way back. In reality, however, establishment figures who won primaries did so only by reinventing themselves as extremists. And Mr. Cantor’s defeat shows that lip service to extremism isn’t enough; the base needs to believe that you really mean it.

In the long run — which probably begins in 2016 — this will be bad news for the G.O.P., because the party is moving right on social issues at a time when the country at large is moving left. (Think about how quickly the ground has shifted on gay marriage.) Meanwhile, however, what we’re looking at is a party that will be even more extreme, even less interested in participating in normal governance, than it has been since 2008. An ugly political scene is about to get even uglier.
 
Read The New York Times, The Fix Isn’t In. 

UPDATE II:  "Republicans simply don’t trust bipartisan deals.

It’s an ideological trait that goes beyond mere hatred for Obama, which is considerable. . .

Opposing Cantor because he’s too lovey-dovey with Obama is insane. But that, more than any ideology, is the reason Cantor lost, and the reason Republicans have been reportedly forced into legislative strategies — default threats, shutdowns, killing immigration reform — they see as contrary to their own best interest. Even Cantor’s totalistic obstruction is not enough. Conservative Republicans want them to fight, and fight, and fight."

Read New York Magazine, Conservatives Don’t Hate the Immigration Deal. They Hate All Deals.

UPDATE:  "The Republican primary for a Senate seat in North Carolina Tuesday offers the most desperate political prognosticators a chance to read the tobacco leaves heading into 2016."

Read the Wall Street Journal, N.C. GOP Primary Offers Preview of Sorts for 2016.

"Any Republican donor who thought that the shutdown would 'break the fever' of the Tea Party, or that it would prove the pesky base wrong about its strategy, clearly didn’t know enough conservatives. . . The immediate political legacy of the #StandWithCruz moment is a surge of primary challenges, mostly in states or districts that Democrats won’t even try to win. The goal: replace the graybeard Republicans who 'caved' with Cruz/Lee doppelgangers who won’t."

Read Slate, The Next Ted Cruz. 

This might even continue through the 2016 election cycle.

OMG, Franken-Trump/Trumpenstein (© NoBullU.com) And His Media Enabler Have Had a Falling-Out

UPDATE II:  "Last month, Fox calculated that they needed Trump more than he needed them. That calculus may be changing."

Read Salon, The Donald Trump vs. Fox News saga rages on: Why this time is different — and worse — for The Donald, which concludes "[r]egardless of how the Trump-Fox saga plays out, Trump isn’t going away anytime soon. Every other network will gleefully book him as a guest whenever they can. His rare combination of confidence and lunacy still makes for great TV. And if Fox does cut ties with Trump, it will likely alienate further a segment of the conservative base that is already suspicious of the establishment.

Which, of course, is great news for the Democrats."

UPDATE:  Who is the real Trump, an 'over-the-top conservative' or the world's greatest prankster? 

See if you know:



And read the Washington Post, Donald Trump: Real-life manifestation of Stephen Colbert’s alter ego?

"In what can only be a calamity for the folks at 'Fox & Friends,' Donald Trump today signaled via Twitter that he’s not going on the network . . .

It’s unclear to what Trump is referring when he mentions the unfair treatment of the leading cable news network. What is clear is that the candidate on Monday night zipped off some absurd complaints about coverage of his candidacy on 'The O’Reilly Factor.' . .

As we’ve noted, those complaints carried the usual Trump trifecta of baselessness, thin-skinnedness and narcissism."

Read the Washington Post, Donald Trump is boycotting Fox News. 

Less Booze, More Meth

"'Dry counties' that prohibit alcohol sales seem to have . . . higher rates of DUI-related car crashes . . . [more] binge drinking"and more meth labs and incidents.

Read the Washington Post, These places banned booze. Now they’re dealing with something far worse, which included this graph:

So does that make our local Imam Truthiness (formerly known as Pastor Truthiness and Pastor Poppins), who opposes alcohol sales, a drug pusher?

The Republi-CON 'Clinton Was the First Birther' Myth

"Clinton's campaign, one of the most thoroughly dissected in modern history, never raised questions about the future president's citizenship. The idea that it did is based largely on a series of disconnected actions by supporters of Clinton . . .

Clinton never personally called for the release of Obama's birth certificate or questioned his American bona fides."

Read the Washington Post, Republicans are blaming Hillary Clinton for the ‘birther’ movement. That’s wishful thinking.

Capitalisn, As Explained By 'Pharma Bro' (and Volkswagen and Bad Peanut Butter)

Why "raise the price of a life-saving drug by more than 4,000 percent, from $1,130 to $63,000"?

Because that's the "unabashed pursuit of profit", AKA capitalism.

Read the Washington Post, Pharma bro’ Martin Shkreli and the very American debate over maximizing profit, which notes that "[w]ith job creation, employment and corporate profits all up, yet wages stubbornly stagnant, many Americans feel that the system is flawed."

The article also references Volkswagen’s admission that it cheated on emission tests . . . "'both [stories] show the danger of a corporate culture that eschews basic morality in the pursuit of profit.'"

Read also Mother Jones, You Can't Go to Prison for Destroying the Economy, But Bad Peanut Butter Is Another Story.

Religious CONservatives

"[C]onservatives lament that Francis has de-emphasized the church’s traditional fear and loathing of women and sex. How a church governed by male celibates should have come to view its areas of core competency as gender relations and reproduction is a good question. By returning to the kind of issues that St. Francis and the Nazarene focused on — stewardship of the Earth, championing of the have-nots — Francis has been a great disappointment to those Catholics nostalgic for the spirit, if not the letter, of the Inquisition.

A pope infused by the spirit of St.Francis of Assisi and Jesus poses a threat to the current economic order. Conservatives are right to fear and despise him, as they would be right to fear and despise his role models."

Read  the Washington Post, Pope Francis poses a threat to the current economic order. 

The Insiders Are Dropping, Who Next?

"For a Republican establishment frightened and bewildered by the rise of Donald Trump, Monday's news that Scott Walker would quit the presidential race came as a welcome relief. Walker's exit seems to make it easier for the party's elites to consolidate behind one of the remaining formidable mainstream contenders — generally agreed to be Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio — and stop Trump.

But there's one lingering loose end that should keep the establishment up at night. Namely: with Walker gone, both remaining elite-preferred candidates have big problems with the GOP base on the very issue that propelled Trump to the top of the polls — unauthorized immigration."

Read Vox, With Walker gone, GOP elites have to sell "amnesty" to a base that hates it.

Read also Vox, Jeb Bush should drop out for the good of the Republican Party., which notes that "for months now the Bush campaign has gone nowhere but down. The more people see of Bush, the more they feel 'meh' about him. If he quits now for the good of the party, people will say he was a good man driven by a strong sense of duty and noblesse oblige. If he waits for months as his public support continues to bleed away, he'll be humiliated."

As a reminder, in the beginning there were 17 so-called major candidates: Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, Jim Gilmore, Lindsey Graham, Mike Huckabee, Bobby Jindal, John Kasich, George Pataki, Rand Paul, Rick Perry, Marco Rubio, Rick Santorum, Scott Walker, and Donald Trump.

The Modern Media Cycle, As Explained By 'Pizza Rat'

"Pizza Rat is, per Internet consensus, many lofty things: a spirit animal, 'all of us,' a parable of life in New York City. But as the Internet’s latest viral Phenomenon, in the big-P sense of the word, Pizza Rat is also the perfect case study of how things go viral in 2015."

Read the Washington Post, The three stages of going viral in 2015, according to the Pizza Rat meme.

More Republi-CON Budget Lies and Hypocrisy

"A drive to cut federal spending and reduce the national debt has for years topped the Republican Party’s national agenda. But this year, on the campaign trail and on Capitol Hill, curbing the nation’s spending and borrowing no longer appears to be the GOP’s top priority.

The leading GOP contenders for president have emphasized large tax cuts over deficit and debt reduction so far this campaign, a reversal from 2012. In several cases, the candidates’ tax plans are projected to add trillions of dollars to the debt, even using optimistic forecasts for how much economic growth those cuts would spark."

Read the Washington Post, Deficits and debt are no longer at the top of the GOP agenda. 

Jeb! Who?

UPDATE:  Who said "Barack Obama is a talented man -- and by the way he's an American, he's a Christian."

Read the Washington Post, Jeb Bush responds to Trump: Obama is an 'American, he’s a Christian'.

So much for Jeb!

"If Jeb Bush is going to run for president as something other than a Bush, it will take a transformation worthy of Rachel Dolezal.

And yet the former Florida governor, who once accidentally checked 'Hispanic' on a voter registration form, is doing everything but change his appearance to de-emphasize his inheritance. His presidential campaign logo, introduced over the weekend, is a simple exclamation: 'Jeb!' His brother, the 43rd president, and his father, the 41st president, were not in attendance for his presidential announcement speech in Miami on Monday. He didn’t even mention them until nearly the end."

Read the Washington Post, Jeb Bush runs away from his family name.

Read also the Washington Post, Jeb’s logo can’t hide the troublesome family name, which notes that  that "[t]he logo is Jeb! but voters do know his last name."

Remember All That Republi-CON Doom and Gloom on Obamacare

UPDATE VI:  "Remember how much Republicans wanted to repeal Obamacare?

The Republican majority in the House of Representatives has voted more than 50 times to repeal the law. Conservatives have twice brought challenges to the Supreme Court — a court with powerful voices that often lean in their direction — only to be largely rebuffed both times. The last government shutdown was driven by Republicans who insisted on defunding Obamacare . . .

When it comes to meeting one of its most important goals — providing coverage to the uninsured — it is working extremely well."

Read the Washington Post, The success of the Affordable Care Act is a hugely inconvenient truth for its opponents, which notes that "the success of the ACA strikes at the heart of the dysfunction strategy employed extremely effectively by anti-government conservatives. This is the self-fulfilling-prophecy strategy that campaigns on: 'Washington is broken!' . . .

Never mind that those making that case are the ones doing the breaking."

UPDATE V:  So much for that Republi-con "Obamacare would destroy the economy" myth.

"In a 2011 press conference, John Boehner used the phrase "job killing" once every two minutes. Then in 2012 we had the best year of job creation since 2005. In 2013 we had an even better year of job creation. Then in 2014, we had an even better year, the best since 1999."

The article included this graph:

Read also, the Washington Post, Can someone please print this graph on a T-shirt?! Sharp decline in the uninsured since the ACA came online, which included this graph:

Read Vox, A chart that Obamacare's fiercest critics will have a hard time explaining.

UPDATE IV:  The "uninsured rate has dropped over four points since Obamacare went into effect a year ago — and that the uninsured rate, now at 12.9 percent, is at its lowest point since Gallup began to 'track the measure daily in 2008.'

Gallup describes its findings this way: 'The Affordable Care Act has accomplished one of its goals: increasing the percentage of Americans who have health insurance coverage.'"

Read the Washington Post, As GOP continues denouncing Obamacare as failure, uninsured rate falls yet again. 

UPDATE III:  It's the 2014 election, curious why you haven't heard more about Obamacare, because it is working.

Read Topix, Stunning Admission From This Republican Governor: Obamacare Helps People.  

UPDATE II:  "One of the many, many, many predictions of Obamacare failure made by conservatives is that insurance companies would systematically drop out of the exchanges. They made this prediction many, many, many, many, many times. The data is starting to come in and, guess what, insurance companies are joining the exchanges. Dan Diamond reports that, in every state that has reported information so far, the number of insurance companies competing in the exchanges will expand in year two."

Read New York Magazine, Today’s Obamacare Non-Train-Wreck News. 

UPDATE:  Saved by Obamacare:

"Dean Angstadt fells trees for a living.

He's a self-employed, self-sufficient logger who has cleared his own path for most of his 57 years, never expecting help from anyone. And even though he'd been uninsured since 2009, he especially wanted nothing to do with the Affordable Care Act.

'I don't read what the Democrats have to say about it because I think they're full of it,' he told his friend Bob Leinhauser, who suggested he sign up.

That refrain changed this year when a faulty aortic valve almost felled Angstadt. Suddenly, he was facing a choice: Buy a health plan, through a law he despised, that would pay the lion's share of the cost of the life-saving surgery - or die. He chose the former.

'A lot of people I talk to are so misinformed about the ACA,' Angstadt said. 'I was, before Bob went through all this for me. I would recommend it to anybody and, in fact, have encouraged friends, including the one guy who hauls my logs.' . .

Read The Philadelphia Inquirer, Once opposed to ACA, now a convert.

Angstadt  now realizes it was Republi-con lies repreated on Hedgehog News that almost got him killed.  

"All the disasters conservatives have predicted to date have failed to materialize. The website did not have to be rebuilt from scratch. The exchanges did not have to push back their start date. The administrative fix did not render the law unworkable. There has been no actuarial death spiral. Democrats have not called for repeal. All the disasters have simply been pushed further into the future. . .

[N]one of the things conservatives warned about happening have actually transpired. The evidence to date is completely consistent with the hypothesis of success. Costs and premiums have come in under projections, young people have signed up, insurers plan to expand their participation, and actuaries project stable premiums."


Read New York Magazine, Obama Declares Obamacare Victory.

Go, The Donald, Go, the Colbert Edition

UPDATE :  "Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal says the GOP front-runner is an "egomaniacal madman who has no principles" and who risks costing the party its chance to regain the White House. . .

The governor said: 'The silly summer season is over. It's time to get serious about saving our country. It's time to send Donald Trump back to reality TV.'

He called Trump a 'carnival act' and said rivals shouldn't be 'kissing up' to him."

Read MSN, GOP contender Jindal brands Trump a 'madman'. 

"Sometimes the easy jokes are the best ones, and Stephen Colbert’s first extended bit as host of the Late Show locked in on a very familiar target: the alpha-male, Oreo-boycotting presidential candidate known as Trump."

Read Slate, Colbert Kicked Off His Late Show Reign by Mocking Donald Trump. For Five Minutes Straight.

Or just watch: