Thank You Veterans!

Repost:

Kiss's Military Salute, filmed during a USO Tour in Iraq:

God's Chosen One?

UPDATE II:  What more can I say:

Read the Daily Mail, Inside Ben Carson's eccentric Maryland mansion - complete with a shrine to himself, gold leaf columns and a portrait WITH Jesus.

UPDATE:  After Carson's odd claims of violent behavior as a young man, CNN interviewed "nine friends, classmates and neighbors who grew up with the retired neurosurgeon say they have no recollection of violent incidents that Carson has claimed, including fights and an attempted stabbing."

In response Carson denies he is a liar, saying 'This is a bunch of lies attempting to say I’m lying about my history, I think it’s pathetic, and basically what the media does is they try to get you distracted.'

Later, Carson's campaign admitted that "Carson’s application and acceptance into West Point — a key part of the inspirational narrative of Carson’s rise — was fabricated."

Read USA Today, Ben Carson admits fabricating West Point story, report says.

And don't forget "Carson flat out lied about his relationship with a shady nutritional company."

Could the Chosen One actually be the Great Deceiver?

"In his various autobiographical and self-help books, Ben Carson writes of occasions in which God helps him, protects him and looks out for him, sometimes unsolicited, usually in direct response to prayer. Carson, a neurosurgeon and the current front-runner in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, invokes his mother’s teaching — 'If you ask the Lord for something and believe He will do it, then it’ll happen' — and sees the influence and intervention of the divine in his medical work and other aspects of his life. "

Read the Washington Post, 11 times God intervened directly in Ben Carson’s life, according to Ben Carson.

Read also the Washington Post, Ben Carson’s striking ignorance, which notes that "Carson has changed his Medicare plan from “End Medicare” to a new version that doesn’t make any sense. He refuses to acknowledge that his tax plan would force trillions of dollars in spending cuts to reach the balanced budget he wants, partly because he or his advisers appear to have no idea what does and doesn’t get taxed. (For example, Carson’s calculation would include taxing all government spending, including defense.) And he has confused the budget and the debt ceiling. Those are just some of the specifics he has actually talked about — even the conservative Heritage Action says he needs to release more detailed plans. We haven’t even touched on his many offensive comments about women, the Holocaust, Muslims, gays and so on.

Happy Shopmas!

UPDATE V:  "[T]here is reason to think that the modern celebration of Christmas is incompatible with Christianity. This can be understood most simply by juxtaposing the birth, life and message of Jesus of Nazareth with the civic rituals of Christmas.

According to the Gospel of St. Luke, Jesus was born in a barn, there being no room for him and his parents in the inn at Bethlehem. His way of living forsook the acquisition of wealth and worldly goods. His message celebrated and elevated the poor, and he was quick to warn of the danger of materialism: 'It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for one who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.'

Two thousand years later, observe the Christmas celebration in our modern, capitalist culture: a shocking emphasis on gifts, material exchange and consumption. Christians believe that it is imperative to know Jesus and that to know him we have to live like him. It is very difficult to argue that the civic rituals of modern Christmas reflect Jesus’s way of living."

Read the Washington Post, Has capitalism devoured Christmas?

UPDATE VI:  You have a choice, you could "Worship Fully, Spend Less, Give More and Love All".

'Turn Christmas upside down', with Advent Conspiracy:



Need help giving more, see GreatNonprofits, GlobalGiving, or Charity Navigator.

UPDATE V:  Happy Shopmas, earlier than ever!

Read U.S. News and World Report, The Holiday Shopping Season That Never Ends.  

UPDATE IV:   "Thanksgiving is just a preamble to the holiest day of the year, Black Friday, when Americans come together to bow before their lord, the Wal-Mart rollback guy, because Jesus isn't the only one that saves." 

Watch the Colbert Report, Stephen's Thanksgiving & Holy Black Friday:

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UPDATE III: You might also read the Pensacola News Journal, Advent Conspiracy reinvents Christmas, Movement encourages people to spend less on gifts and work to help others.


UPDATE II: "As I was reading 'How the Grinch Stole Christmas!' with my kids, I couldn’t help but marvel that the book (and the animated television special) endures as a holiday favorite, even as its core anticonsumerism message goes completely ignored.

Consider these lines, describing the Grinch’s reaction after those darn Whos join hands and celebrate in Who-ville, even after he has robbed them of their Yuletide baubles and Roast Beast:

'Maybe Christmas,' he thought, 'doesn’t come from a store.'

'Maybe Christmas…perhaps…means a little bit more!'"

Read The New York Times, The Movement Toward a 'Buy Nothing' Christmas.


UPDATE: A repost:

Those defending Christmas are not being true to their traditions and teachings. "There are no Christmas dinners in the Bible, which is why America’s Puritans, strict adherents of what that venerated text offers, never sat down by the raging fire awaiting St. Nick; indeed, they briefly banned Christmas in Massachusetts. Yule as we celebrate it today owes more to Charles Dickens than to Thomas Aquinas. . . Christmas is a product not of Nazareth but of Madison Avenue."

Read The New York, Faith and Modernity.

H.W. Says Son W. Was a Stupid Puppet of His Evil and Arrogant Warmongers, Marking the Beginning of the End of the Bush Dynasty

"After years of holding back, former President George Bush has finally broken his public silence about some of the key figures in his son’s administration, issuing scathing critiques of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

In interviews with his biographer, Mr. Bush said that Mr. Cheney had built 'his own empire' and asserted too much 'hard-line' influence within George W. Bush’s White House in pushing for the use of force around the world. Mr. Rumsfeld, the elder Mr. Bush said, was an 'arrogant fellow' who could not see how others thought and 'served the president badly.' . .

[W.] was responsible for empowering Mr. Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld and was at times too bellicose in his language.

[H.W. added] 'I do worry about some of the rhetoric that was out there — some of it his, maybe, and some of it the people around him,' Mr. Bush told Mr. Meacham. 'Hot rhetoric is pretty easy to get headlines, but it doesn’t necessarily solve" problems.

Read The New York Times, Elder Bush Says His Son Was Served Badly by Aides.

A former president is rarely publicly critical of another former president — especially by way of a tell-all book. Even more rarely has one president been the father of another. And those categories have never intersected. Until now.

And so begins another round of Bush family drama tied mostly to foreign policy, this time in the pages of an authorized biography of former president George H.W. Bush. While generally supportive of his son's presidency, he criticizes former president George W. Bush, former vice president Richard B. Cheney and former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld for how they responded to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Read the Washington Post, New book spells more family drama for Jeb Bush.

Read also Was It Worth It?

The Donald Fantasies

UPDATE:  "It is 'The Next Best Thing' to being Donald Trump’s 'apprentice,' the Trump University ads promised, drawing on what was then the runaway popularity of Trump’s television show, The Apprentice. Mentors would be 'handpicked by me,' Trump promised in a promotional video; and, his other promotional materials promised, they would teach students Trump’s 'secrets,' then guide them through get-rich-quick real estate deals and even find them lenders so that their deals could be financed with 'other people’s money.'

The court documents tell a different story. Michael Sexton, who was hired by Trump to be president of Trump University, testified in a 2012 pretrial deposition that 'none of our instructors … were handpicked by Donald Trump' and that the curriculum was written by an outside adult-education firm.

The record is replete with evidence that many of the supposed 'expert' teachers and mentors–who were mostly paid only sales commissions–had backgrounds in sales rather than experience in real estate investing, let alone successful investing. Two had filed for personal bankruptcy during the time they were mentoring.

Trump has testified in a deposition (after promising to sue the lawyers suing him) that he had no direct role in creating the curriculum or hiring the teachers. He did not know, he said, if his 'university' conferred degrees. (It didn’t.) And he could not explain what the sales materials were referring to when they touted Trump’s 'foreclosure system' for flipping distressed properties.

So far, Trump’s only courtroom defense beyond the procedural wrangling has been that these kinds of apparent misrepresentations are the kind of general puffery involved in any commercial marketing. A case his lawyers have cited is one in which Allstate insurance successfully defended its slogan 'You’re in good hands with Allstate.'"

Read Time, What the Legal Battle Over Trump University Reveals About Its Founder, which lists the many lies told in the effort to separate the suckers from their money.

Trump has even bragged about how he plays "to people’s fantasies."

"He’s the biggest phony in the world, yet people as gullible as me think he’s the greatest guy in the world," [says "Bob Guillo [who] put $34,995 on his American Express card to pay for the Trump Gold Elite package. He said he walked away with little more than meaningless certificates of completion and a photograph of himself with a life-size image of The Donald."]

Read the Washington Post, Donald Trump billed his 'University' as a road to riches, but critics call it a fraud.

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

The Republi-CON 'Media Bias' Myth

UPDATE VI:  "QUOTE OF THE DAY: President Obama at a DNC fundraiser late Monday: 'Have you noticed that every one of these candidates says, ‘Obama’s weak. Putin’s kicking sand in his face. When I talk to Putin, he’s going to straighten out’? Then it turns out they can’t handle a bunch of CNBC moderators at the debate. Let me tell you: if you can’t handle those guys, then I don’t think the Chinese and the Russians are going to be too worried about you.'"

UPDATE V:  "The problem isn’t that CNBC engaged in 'gotcha' questions meant to 'embarass' the Republican candidates. It’s that any serious look is a fatal blow to GOP plans and proposals, which don’t deliver on promised substance. Trump can’t deport millions of immigrants; Carson can’t raise enough revenue to fund the federal government; and the 'middle-class' tax plans of Bush, Rubio, and others shower most of their benefits on the rich. And as long as this is true, GOP candidates will have a hard time with all but the most friendly moderators."

Read Slate, Why the GOP Won’t Like Any Honest Debate Moderators.

Read also Slate, Ben Carson’s Winning GOP Debate Strategy: Flat Out Lying About Mannatech.

UPDATE IV:  "When the candidates were pressed on Wednesday to explain their “vision for America’s future,” most simply decided it was more advantageous to use their allotted time to rally their base (and bolster their campaign coffers) with anti-mainstream-media tirades. Yes, the CNBC debate was a hot mess, but any journalistic sins committed by John Harwood and co. were far outweighed by the candidate’s stonewalling. The biggest problem was not what the moderators asked but that they were unprepared for the candidates to deny the very premise of their questions. Exhibit A: Ben Carson flat out lied about his relationship with a shady nutritional company. Exhibit B: Donald Trump denied he ever said something his own website quotes him as saying. Exhibit C: Chris Christie reacted to a question about the possible financial regulation of fantasy football by lamenting they weren’t talking about ISIS—an odd response given it came after the participants were already complaining they weren’t being asked enough about the economy and finance."

Read Slate, The Republican Revolt Against the Media Is Empty, Grandstanding Nonsense.

BTW, the focus of the CNBC was "on the economy", ergo, no questions about ISIS.

UPDATE III:  "The Republican presidential candidates are right. The media does suck.

But not for the reasons the candidates complained about Wednesday night.

We in the media suck because we have rewarded their rampant dishonesty and buffoonery with nonstop news coverage. Which, of course, has encouraged more dishonesty and buffoonery.

Hence the aggravating behaviors that candidates doubled-down on during the debate, based on lessons that we in the media taught them. To wit:

Lesson No. 1: Lie, but lie confidently. . .

Lesson No. 2: Invent your own math.

This is related to Lesson No. 1, but more quantitative. Or less, depending on how you look at it. . .

Lesson No. 3: If you can’t think of something better to say, just bash the media. . ."

Read the Washington Post, The Republicans are right. We in the media do suck. 

UPDATE II:   The new Republi-con debate strategy -- lie and attack the questioner.

Read the Washington Post, A peevish pack of GOP contenders.

UPDATE:  Republi-con claim that the questions asked by CNBC were "Nasty? Prejudicial? Shameful? Now compare [them] to a question[s] posed by Fox News" hosts.

Read the Washington Post, CNBC is getting hammered because it’s not Fox News.

"What happened in this debate wasn’t an attack by the press on the candidates. It was an attack by the candidates on the press. Harwood, Quick, and the other CNBC panelists were no harsher to the Republicans on Wednesday than CNN’s Anderson Cooper was to Clinton and other Democrats in their debate two weeks ago. What was different this time was the reaction. Presented with facts and figures that didn’t fit their story, the leading Republican candidates accused the moderators of malice and deceit. . .

Yes, reporters sometimes screw up. But they have a troublesome habit of checking things. That’s what makes their statements, on the whole, more reliable than yours. It’s not true, as Stephen Colbert once joked, that reality has a liberal bias. But it is true that reality has a bias toward journalists. That’s because journalists spend a lot of time with reality. They get to know it."

Read Slate, Reality Sucks. 

The Republi-CON Budget CON, CONtinued

UPDATE III:  "Republican leaders claim that all the new spending [$112 billion over two years] is offset by spending cuts elsewhere. But according to the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, that is not true. “We estimate that when interest is added and gimmicks are removed, only half of the bill’s cost is truly paid for,” the committee declared. . .

If the Republican establishment wonders why Donald Trump has been surging in the polls, they need only look in the mirror. They are the Dr. Frankensteins that created the Trump monster that is now wreaking havoc on the GOP village. They have no one to blame but themselves."

Read the Washington Post, With this budget deal, GOP deserves Trump.

UPDATE II:  "By now it’s a Republican Party tradition: Every year the party produces a budget that allegedly slashes deficits, but which turns out to contain a trillion-dollar “magic asterisk” — a line that promises huge spending cuts and/or revenue increases, but without explaining where the money is supposed to come from.

But the just-released budgets from the House and Senate majorities break new ground. Each contains not one but two trillion-dollar magic asterisks: one on spending, one on revenue. And that’s actually an understatement. If either budget were to become law, it would leave the federal government several trillion dollars deeper in debt than claimed, and that’s just in the first decade. . .
Think about what these budgets would do if you ignore the mysterious trillions in unspecified spending cuts and revenue enhancements. What you’re left with is huge transfers of income from the poor and the working class, who would see severe benefit cuts, to the rich, who would see big tax cuts. And the simplest way to understand these budgets is surely to suppose that they are intended to do what they would, in fact, actually do: make the rich richer and ordinary families poorer.

But this is, of course, not a policy direction the public would support if it were clearly explained. So the budgets must be sold as courageous efforts to eliminate deficits and pay down debt — which means that they must include trillions in imaginary, unexplained savings.

Does this mean that all those politicians declaiming about the evils of budget deficits and their determination to end the scourge of debt were never sincere? Yes, it does.

. . . [It's a] con job"

Read The New York Times, Trillion Dollar Fraudsters.  

UPDATE:  And read the Washington Post, House Republican budget: There’s a mysterious $1.1 trillion in spending cuts in the House GOP’s budget.

"Republican budget writers have learned over the years to leave out specifics — the budget does include cuts in taxes on capital gains and stock dividends (through the repeal of Obamacare), along with cuts for business income and the foreign earnings of multinational corporations.

Now, think about the math here. To get to balance, all those spending cuts have to cover all those tax cuts, and then, above and beyond that, take the budget deficit down to zero by 2024 (all this while raising defense spending). The only way to get there — and we’ve seen this in all the previous House budgets written by Paul Ryan — is the magic asterisk that assumes extra revenue comes from somewhere (i.e., somewhere other than higher tax rates): Don’t ask, they won’t tell."
 
Read the Washington Post, The House Republican budget departs from both economic and political reality.

But a close examination shows some of the Republi-con gimmicks.

"[The budget proposal] pretends to keep strict limits on defense spending — so-called “sequestration” — but then pumps tens of billions of extra dollars into a slush fund called “Overseas Contingency Operations.” That means the funds count as emergency spending and not as part of the Pentagon budget.

It assumes that current tax cuts will be allowed to expire as scheduled — which would amount to a $900 billion tax increase that nobody believes would be allowed to go into effect.

It proposes to repeal Obamacare but then counts revenues and savings from Obamacare as if the law remained in effect.

It claims to save $5.5 trillion over 10 years, but in the fine print — the budget plan’s instructions to committees — it only asks them to identify about $5 billion in savings over that time.

It assumes more than $1 trillion in cuts to a category known as “other mandatory” programs — but doesn’t specify what those cuts would be.

It relies on $147 billion in additional revenue from “dynamic scoring,” a more generous accounting method.

It doesn’t account for the $200 billion plan now being negotiated to increase doctor payments under Medicare and to extend a children’s health-care program."

Read also the Washington Post, The House GOP budget is a gimmick.  

The Many, Many Republi-CON 'Benghazi' Myths and LIES

UPDATE V:  "The Republican candidate’s claims about Hillary Clinton and Benghazi fall apart under scrutiny."

Read Slate, Rubio Is Lying About Hillary Lying.

UPDATE IV:  After years of investigations, and an eleven hour hearing, "the truth about Benghazi: Hillary Clinton did nothing wrong. And Republicans can’t stand it."

Read Slate, The Benghazi Hearings Sham.

UPDATE III: "If there were some truly damning piece of information that the committee had discovered about Clinton in the course of their investigation, then all the public relations and spin in the world wouldn’t save her from their efforts. For instance, for some time Republicans have been obsessed with a conspiracy theory which has it that Clinton issued a 'stand down' order to the military, telling them not to go save the Americans who were in danger in Benghazi. Had that been something other than a bizarre fantasy of the most fevered quarters of the right, Benghazi would have been her undoing.

But that turned out to be fiction, and all the other efforts to find some shocking malfeasance on her part failed. Why did it have such a profound effect when Kevin McCarthy justified the Benghazi committee’s work by saying it had brought down Clinton’s poll numbers? Not because he provided some theretofore unknown piece of information, or because everyone was shocked at the very idea that the committee was political. It had an impact because it supplied a vivid illustration of a fundamental truth. That meant reporters could repeat it, refer to it, and use it to frame their subsequent discussion of the issue.

Read the Washington Post, Why the Clinton Benghazi testimony isn’t accomplishing what Republicans hoped, which notes at the end:

"[O]ver the long run, the facts can’t be escaped."

UPDATE II:  "So now we know: One of the principal reasons Republicans spent so much public money investigating the tragic Benghazi episode was to bring down Hillary Clinton’s poll numbers.

Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), the likely successor to House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), told Fox News’s Sean Hannity explicitly on Tuesday night that the Clinton investigation was part of a 'strategy to fight and win.' . .

McCarthy’s statement gave Democrats what they have long sought: a rather strong public hint that this investigation was never on the level. 'This stunning concession from Rep. McCarthy reveals the truth that Republicans never dared admit in public,' said Rep. Elijah Cummings (Md.), the committee’s ranking Democrat. 'The core Republican goal in establishing the Benghazi committee was always to damage Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and never to conduct an evenhanded search for the facts.' Clinton’s defenders hope McCarthy’s statement might prod the media to pay attention to the current behavior of the accusers and not just the past behavior of the accused."

Read the Washington Post, Kevin McCarthy’s truthful gaffe on Benghazi.  

UPDATE:  Read also, the Wall Street Journal, House Report Finds No Attempt to Mislead Public Over Benghazi (subscription required).

"A two-year investigation by the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee has found that the CIA and the military acted properly in responding to the 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, and asserted no wrongdoing by Obama administration appointees.

Debunking a series of persistent allegations hinting at dark conspiracies, the investigation of the politically charged incident determined that there was no intelligence failure, no delay in sending a CIA rescue team, no missed opportunity for a military rescue, and no evidence the CIA was covertly shipping arms from Libya to Syria. . .

The House Intelligence Committee report was released with little fanfare on the Friday before Thanksgiving week. Many of its findings echo those of six previous investigations by various congressional committees and a State Department panel."

Read AP, House intel panel debunks many Benghazi theories.

The article quotes Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., the committee's chairman, and Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, the ranking Democrat, in a joint statement saying that the committee "spent thousands of hours asking questions, poring over documents, reviewing intelligence assessments, reading cables and emails, and held a total of 20 committee events and hearings."

Sexy Barney, and Other Halloween Costumes That Might Get you Fired or Even Arrested

Repost:

"It's almost Halloween, which means that we're about to see another round of totally bizarre 'sexy' costumes."

Read Business Insider, The 15 Most Bizarrely Unnecessary Sexy Halloween Costumes Of 2013.

Also watch The Daily Show, Sexy Halloween Costumes:

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BREAKING NEWS, BREAKING NEWS! Are Gullible-Gallups and Zullo Going to Jail

UPDATE IX:  Not look good for Zullo as he finally realizes he's been play for a chump.

Read Obama Conspiracy Theories, No immunity for Zullo and Zullo plays for time.

UPDATE VIII:   What crime(s) is Zullo hiding?

Read Obama Conspiracy Theories, Mike Zullo takes the 5th.

UPDATE VII:  "In an angry rebuke, a judge on Friday ordered the U.S. Marshals Service to seize a collection of records from Sheriff Joe Arpaio's office and leveled harsh criticism at the sheriff's lawyers for failing to turn over documents that had been requested months ago in a racial profiling case.

U.S. District Judge Murray Snow's criticism centered on the agency's failure to hand over more than 1,400 identification documents in a related investigation into allegations that deputies pocketed items during busts.

The judge also focused on the agency's refusal to turn over 50 hard drives from Arpaio's secret investigation involving the judge. . .

Robert Warshaw, the official monitoring the sheriff's office for the judge, . . .

said the unit of the sheriff's office that stores evidence is a lockbox for keeping unflattering documents from public or court scrutiny. . .

Warshaw is examining allegations that members of Arpaio's immigration smuggling squad and other deputies regularly pocketed items from people during traffic stops and busts of safe houses used during smuggling. The judge has complained that Arpaio's office is conducting inadequate internal investigations of officer misconduct."

Read ABC News, Judge Chastises Arpaio's Lawyers for Withholding Records.

Imagine that ‘inadequate investigations’ by Sheriff Scooby-Doo and his gang.  Is anyone surprised?

UPDATE VI:  Were Zullo and Gullible-Gallups involved in a conspiracy to obstruct justice in Arizona?  We may soon find out. 

"[H]earings are back on schedule for the contempt proceedings against Sheriff Arpaio, and Deputy Sheridan:. That’s scheduled for September 22-25 and September 29-October 2. . .

Meanwhile the US Department of Justice moved to intervene in the Melendres case and Judge Snow granted their request for copies of the material supplied to Arpaio’s office by Dennis Montgomery. The DOJ ought to be very interested in the possibility that Montgomery absquatulated with secret CIA material, including harvested telecommunications metadata.

Right in the middle of what the Sheriff’s Office called the 'Seattle Operation' sits Mike Zullo who was one of the people babysitting Montgomery for Sheriff Joe, and involved in the email chain between Detective Mackiewicz, Larry Klayman and Dennis Montgomery that seems to contradict Arpaio’s claims under oath that he wasn’t targeting Judge Snow. This writer thinks that Zullo’s testimony is crucial in finding out whether Arpaio was up to his old tricks of investigating his enemies, and whether he lied about it to Judge Snow. Oooh, goody."

Read Obama Conspiracy Theories, Melendres case reignites: Will Zullo join Arpaio on the hot seat?

Now that DOJ is investigating, Zullo and Gullible-Gallups could easily find themselves charged as conspirators for obstructing justice in the Melendres v. Arpaio lawsuit. 

See 18 U.S. Code § 1503 and more specifically 18 U.S. Code § 1509 (Obstruction of court orders).

UPDATE V:  What proof did Montgomery offer of the CIA plot?

Can you believe 50-60 hard drives filed with recordings of the Al Jazeera network.

Read USA Today, Arizona sheriff spent $120K on probe targeting judge.

Read also the Phoenix New Times, Arpaio May Have Spent $1 Million in Pursuit to Disqualify Judge Snow.

In other words, Montgomery, a notorious scammer and con man, leveraged the biases and prejudices of his marks to convince them to pay him more than $100,000, and spend hundreds of thousands more in tax payer money.

These are the same people who are the leaders of the Birther movement.

Zullo and Gullible-Gallups, self-professed 'professionals', have been proven by their own ineptitude and stupidity, to be clowns, suckers, and bozos. They peddle lies and fear to desperate and angry people.  Zullo and Gullible-Gallups are nothing more than professional deceiver and con men.

Who would believe anything Arpaio, Zullo and Gullible-Gallups said?  Only fools!

Remember, how much time has past since the promised 'universe-shattering' revelations:


And there were the numerous other broken promises.

That sound you hear is the growing laughter at the Birther delusions.

Anyone who gave money to these bozos should sue!  (I think Zullo and Gullible-Gallups are stringing people along until the statute of limitations on fraud has expired.) 

UPDATE IV:  Apparently they believed their own BS.

Read Obama Conspiracy Theories,

Mike Zullo presents the "meatball hypothesis", which includes a transcript of the November 2013 Fact-Free Friday show when the Sheriff Scooby-Doo gang (including Zullo) first discussed and promised the 'universe-shattering' revelation(s) and Gullible-Gallups clearly confirms that he knew and believed the details of the so-called CIA plot revealed by notorious scammer, Dennis Montgomery;

Crazy in Arizona, which notes that with the Arpaio contempt hearing the "trunk of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s clown car is now open and all sorts of crazy stuff is coming out" and

Melendres status conference today: Judge could rule on Montgomery intervention, which notes how desperately Sheriff Scooby-Doo and his gang are trying to stop further revelations because:

"The Dennis Montgomery debacle is evidence that Joe Arpaio is gullible, and calls into question his judgment when evaluating evidence and sources, the same judgment skills he applied to Obama birth certificate claims and that ultimately led Arpaio to believe there was probable cause that Obama’s birth certificate was forged.

It could lead to more questioning relating to the Cold Case Posse, and possible revelations about money paid to Mike Zullo by the Department

Information detailing the Montgomery investigation could come to light that defines what the Cold Case Posse was actually doing, while allowing birthers to assume that they were pursuing Obama."

In summary, Zullo and Gullible-Gallups, self-professed 'professionals', have been proven by their own ineptitude and stupidity, to be clowns and suckers.

And these are the leaders of the Birther movement.

UPDATE III:  For more on 'Comrade Arpaio Stasi-like moves' and the "The Man Who Conned the Pentagon", read the Phoenix New Times, Arpaio Sought Assistance From Former AG Tom Horne's Office in Dealing With Confidential Informant.>.

The article notes that Montgomery has a "still-open superior court criminal case in Clark County, Nevada, where Montgomery was charged with multiple felony allegations from 2008 of allegedly passing bad checks."

Again, stupid is as stupid does.

UPDATE II: Pastor Gullible was very subdued on Fact-Free Friday, falsely denying he knew Montgomery, claiming the 'investigation is still ongoing, there are legal hurdles, connections and interconnections' to be made, and trying to pretend nothing was wrong. 

He also said that 'phone lines were open', but of course no calls were taken on the air.

His sycophant side-kick tried to claim the angry masses demanding release of the so-called investigation, as he has several times recently.

Of course, no dates were mentioned for any conference or news conference, because there is, and never was, anything to disclose except fraud by Pastor Gullible.

People are starting to realized that they've been had.

Anyone who donated money should sue.

UPDATE:  Also read the Phoenix New Times, Judge Snow Rips the Lid Off an MCSO Riddled With Corruption, Confirming My Reporting in the Process.

In brief, here is the story:

In August 2013,  someone sent Arpaio a Facebook message concerning an alleged 2012 conversation with the wife of Judge Snow, the federal judge assigned to the cases pending against Arpaio.  The judge's wife supposedly said that the Judge hated Arpaio and wanted Arpaio removed from office. 

Then in November 2013, Zullo and Gallups began promoting the 'universe-shattering information' that would dethrone Obama. 

That was when a notorious scammer, Dennis Montgomery, alleged "'that the CIA hacked into individual bank accounts' and that 'approximately 50,000 of them' were Maricopa County residents."  The CIA plot supposedly involved Arpaio's nemesis-es DOJ and federal judges. 

So the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office assigned several investigators to the so-called case and began "paying [Montgomery] as much as $10,000 a month . . . [and] purchased $50,000 worth of computer equipment for Montgomery."

Of course, "Arpaio was [just] up to his old tricks, attempting to conflict the judge, find dirt on him, and retaliate for adverse rulings."  Arpaio has a history of malfeasance, racial profiling, feuds with judges and County Supervisors, abuse of power, election law violations, misuse of funds, and even a staged assassination plot. 

He stays in office by scamming and swindling to birthers for money and media attention.

These so-called law-enforcement professionals fell for Montgomery's con hook, line and sinker.  (Kinda scary to think they carry guns.)  Before it was done, the investigation "cost as much as $500,000 to $1 million" of Maricopa County taxpayer money.

Of course, there never was a CIA plot, and the judge's wife never made any such statement.

Some people are just desperate to hear what they want to hear.  That is how people get conned.

So now you know why there will never be any 'universe-shattering' revelation(s). 

And that is why Pastor Gullible (our Resident Pastor-to-the-Dictators (AKA Pastor Truthiness (formerly known as Pastor Poppins))) has quit talking about his birther fantasies.

P.S.

It is hard to believe how stupid these people are.

OMG, is it true — after so many years of fantasies and delusions . . .

Will Sheriff Scooby-Doo and his gang (including Zullo and Gullible-Gallups, Arpaio’s enablers and co-conspirators) be going to jail?

What will Pastor Gullible say today on Fact-Free Friday?

Of course, I’m sure he will discuss this universes-shattering development in the investigation, NOT.

After you read the following, someone call in today and ask him to comment.

Read Obama Conspiracy Theories, Universe-shattering investigation revealed in court testimony Friday and Arpaio: perjury?

Republi-CON Clowns and Jokers Make HRC Look Presidential (Thank God the End Is Near ;-)

UPDATE III:  Tired of the bozos getting all the attention and lovin, establishmnet candidates are readyto quit.

Read the Washington Post, The GOP candidates are mad as hell, and they’re not going to take it anymore.

UPDATE II:  "With Thursday's interminable, pointless, haranguing, disorganized, utterly amateurish attempt at a smear job, the Republicans and their tenth-rate congressional attack schnauzer, South Carolina's Trey Gowdy, got people feeling sorry for Hillary Clinton. Over the course of 11 long hours, they made the most eloquent argument for a Hillary Clinton presidency yet offered by anyone, including Clinton herself."

Read Rolling Stone, Trey Gowdy Just Elected Hillary Clinton President.

UPDATE:  "Apocalyptic rhetoric is more than the evidence of historical ignorance and bad speechwriting. It leads to a distorted politics. If the United States has reached its midnight hour, it means that the institutions that have gotten us here are utterly discredited. . .

Trump and Carson can succeed only if the end times are upon us. And I don’t mean that in a theological way. In normal times, innovative policy and governing skill would matter most in selecting a president. Successful governors and legislators would naturally rise to the top. Only in a crisis of institutional legitimacy does the outsider become the savior. This means Trump, Carson and other apocalyptic politicians must encourage a mental state of emergency among Republicans. Lacking any relevant qualifications in the current political system, these candidates must bring that system into complete disrepute. Since the politicians have made such a hash of things, they insist, a businessman or a neurosurgeon couldn’t possibly do worse.

Oh, yes they could."

Read the Washington Post, Why Trump and Carson want to bring about America’s apocalypse.

"You can choose from a litany of insurrections, government shutdowns and other self-inflicted wounds. But this year’s carnival-like GOP presidential primary makes one event, in retrospect, stand out as a crucial turning point on the road to upheaval: the 2008 embrace of then-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be a heartbeat from the presidency.

Palin’s blatant lack of competence and preparedness needs no belaboring. What’s critical is that substantive, serious Republican leaders either wouldn’t or couldn’t declare, before or after the election: “This is not what our party stands for. We can and must do better.”

By the campaign’s end, GOP operatives were shielding Palin from even the simplest questions. . .

[Then] Palin became a Fox News fixture, reinforcing the newly formed tea party’s 'never compromise' demands. Bombast, not reason, reigned. . .

Whether McCain actively sought Palin in 2008 or passively yielded to aides’ pressure, he set a new standard for GOP candidates who rely on lots of sizzle and little substance.

Once McCain put Palin on the ticket, Republican 'grown-ups,' who presumably knew better, had to bite their tongues. But after the election, when they were free to speak their minds, they either remained quiet or abetted the dumbing-down of the party. They stood by as Donald Trump and others noisily pushed claims that Obama was born in Kenya. And they gladly rode the tea party tiger to sweeping victories in 2010 and 2014.

Now that tiger is devouring the GOP establishment. . .

It’s hard to feel much sympathy. The Republican establishment’s 2008 embrace of Palin set an irresponsibly low bar. Coincidence or not, a batch of nonsense-spewing, hard-right candidates quickly followed, often to disastrous effect."

Read the Washington Post, The GOP’s dysfunction all started with Sarah Palin.

Read also the Washington Post, Republicans are ‘in denial’ about Hillary Clinton. 

Don't Ya Just Love Those Republi-CON Family Values

UPDATE IV:  "Five women are suing the Institute in Basic Life Principles, a radical Illinois-based Christian ministry that espouses a stringent patriarchal worldview, for permitting the systemic sexual abuse and harassment of its members.

The negligence suit comes more than a year after fundamentalist leader Bill Gothard resigned from his position as head of the organization after more than 30 women alleged that he harassed or molested them, some when they were minors.

In their lawsuit, the five plaintiffs claim that the Institute in Basic Life Principles acted with willful and wanton disregard for their well-being and conspired to cover up the allegations of abuse. . . conducting a bogus internal investigation of the abuse, for appearances only."

Read Slate, Five Women Sue Duggar-Connected Ministry for Sex Abuse Cover-Up.

See also Republi-CON Family Values, All In the Family Edition. 

UPDATE III:  BTW, the lawsuit "is searing in its criticisms of Doug Phillips. 'Phillips’s patriarchal movement teaches that men are, and should be, in the absolute control of women,' reads the complaint, claiming that Torres-Manteufel was therefore bullied into believing she had no choice but to submit to Phillips' alleged sexual abuse, even though she feared it made her 'damaged goods.'

In other words, women within this movement are perceived to exist only for the end-goals communicated by the male leaders that perceive themselves as the 'patriarchs' of this world,' the lawsuit reads. . .

The scandal around Phillips is just the latest in a long line of ugly shocks to the far Christian right that threaten to destabilize and possibly capsize the community. As The Wire reported in early March, Bill Gothard, the leader of the Institute in Basic Life Principles, resigned his position in the wake of a series of accusations of alleged sexual abuse from dozens of women in the organization. IBLP, like Vision Forum Ministries, is a major clearinghouse for adherents to Biblical patriarchy, teaching members to shun contraception, embrace extreme forms of female submission, and, of course, use homeschooling to shelter young people from the outside world.  Unsurprisingly, IBLP is also associated with the Duggar family, who participated in the organization’s many training seminars on embracing Biblical patriarchy and who called Gothard their 'number one recommended resource' for family advice. He has exerted political influence in other ways, as well, befriending Sarah Palin and bringing her in for his International Association of Character Cities conference.

Similarly, both Bob Jones University and Patrick Henry College—schools that were established in no small part to give these homeschooled and sheltered kids from far Christian right backgrounds a place to go to college—have been at the center of accusations of indifference and even of allegedly covering up reported sexual abuse on campus. BJU received a lot of heat when they fired an outside firm that had been brought on to investigate accusations of sexual abuse, only to rehire them when it looked like they were punishing the firm for being too thorough in exposing the problem. Patrick Henry College was the recent target of an exposé in The New Republic that explored how young women who brought sexual abuse complaints to the school were frequently drummed out of the college or made to felt that they had somehow brought the abuse on themselves.

The 'pitch' of Biblical patriarchy, as epitomized by Michelle Duggar, is that women will be coddled and worshipped in exchange for giving up their ambitions and the autonomy to practice an extreme form of female submission. The unpleasant truth is that a culture that teaches that women are put on earth for no other purpose but to serve men is not going to breed respect for women. Instead, these incidents show a world where men believe they can do whatever they want to women without repercussions. Is it any surprise that a subculture that promises absolute control over women will attract men who want to dominate and hurt women? Don’t believe the TLC hype. Biblical patriarchy is a sour, dangerous world for women, and luckily, that reality is finally being outed."

Read The Daily Beast, Sex Scandal Rocks The Duggars’ Christian Patriarchy Movement.  

UPDATE II:  On the issue of using religion and sex, meet Douglas Phillips, friend of the Duggar family and former "president of the extreme Christian right group Vision Forum Ministries, [who] admitted to, in his words, having 'a lengthy, inappropriate relationship with a woman.' . .

Phillips resigned in October, but now it seems that his public pronouncement regarding that 'inappropriate relationship' may have seriously downplayed what actually happened. Lourdes Torres-Manteufel, who says she was the woman Phillips confessed about, is now suing Phillips and Vision Forum for what she alleges was an abusive and manipulative relationship that caused her serious mental harm and distress."

The link is to the lawsuit, which describes something much worse, including sexual assault and battery under the guise of religion.

Read Slate, Woman Sues Christian Right Leader Douglas Phillips for Alleged Sexual, Mental Abuse.

Apparently Phillips has a history of "Ecclesiastical Tyranny and Abuse".

UPDATE:  The staffer is/was the wife of a "high school pal and campaign donor of McAllister's . . .she started working for McAllister the day after he won his seat.

Her husband, Heath Peacock, said McAllister 'has wrecked my life' and that he and his wife are 'headed for divorce.' He also claimed that, by the way, McAllister faked his devotion to religion to win votes."

Read CNN, Congressman a kissing hypocrite.

And guess who was "'removed from the payroll' within the 24 hours after their embrace was exposed"? Hint, it wasn't the Republi-con CONgressman.

"Just four months on the job, U.S. Rep. Vance McAllister, R-Swartz, has landed himself in hot water after a video surfaced Monday purportedly showing Louisiana's newest congressman kissing a married staffer."

He had won a special election to Congress in November, campaigning on 'Faith, Family, and Hard Work'. 


Read The Times-Picayune, Vance McAllister on video showing kiss with staffer: 'I've fallen short and I'm asking for forgiveness'. 

The Republi-CON Epiphany - Their Party if a Fraud!

"The Republicans advocating for continued scorched earth tactics aren’t incompetents. They’re frauds. And from their point of view, they actually are getting the results they want. They get to continue telling the story they want to tell."

Read the Washington Post, Freedom Frauds.

The article references The New York Times, The Republicans' Incompetence Caucus, which notes that:

"Over the past 30 years, or at least since Rush Limbaugh came on the scene, the Republican rhetorical tone has grown ever more bombastic, hyperbolic and imbalanced. Public figures are prisoners of their own prose styles, and Republicans from Newt Gingrich through Ben Carson have become addicted to a crisis mentality. Civilization was always on the brink of collapse. Every setback, like the passage of Obamacare, became the ruination of the republic. Comparisons to Nazi Germany became a staple.

This produced a radical mind-set. Conservatives started talking about the Reagan 'revolution,' the Gingrich 'revolution.' Among people too ill educated to understand the different spheres, political practitioners adopted the mental habits of the entrepreneur. Everything had to be transformational and disruptive. Hierarchy and authority were equated with injustice. Self-expression became more valued than self-restraint and coalition building. A contempt for politics infested the Republican mind. . .

This anti-political political ethos produced elected leaders of jaw-dropping incompetence. Running a government is a craft, like carpentry. But the new Republican officials did not believe in government and so did not respect its traditions, its disciplines and its craftsmanship. They do not accept the hierarchical structures of authority inherent in political activity.

In his masterwork, 'Politics as a Vocation,' Max Weber argues that the pre-eminent qualities for a politician are passion, a feeling of responsibility and a sense of proportion. A politician needs warm passion to impel action but a cool sense of responsibility and proportion to make careful decisions in a complex landscape.

If a politician lacks the quality of detachment — the ability to let the difficult facts of reality work their way into the mind — then, Weber argues, the politician ends up striving for the 'boastful but entirely empty gesture.' His work 'leads nowhere and is senseless.'

Welcome to Ted Cruz, Donald Trump and the Freedom Caucus.

Really, have we ever seen bumbling on this scale, people at once so cynical and so naïve, so willfully ignorant in using levers of power to produce some tangible if incremental good? These insurgents can’t even acknowledge democracy’s legitimacy — if you can’t persuade a majority of your colleagues, maybe you should accept their position. You might be wrong! . .

These insurgents are incompetent at governing and unwilling to be governed. But they are not a spontaneous growth. It took a thousand small betrayals of conservatism to get to the dysfunction we see all around."

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

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?