Plowing Through More Republican Horseshit, IRS and NSA Edition

Most of you remember my old blog, dont'cha? I spent shitloads of time there from 2005-2008 bitching endlessly about the power of the US federal government and the potential abuse thereof.

And you know what I got for my fucking trouble? A endless amount of nonsense about the Unitary Executive Theory and the righteousness of George W. Bush. Most of those people would describe themselves as Tea Partiers today, and not readily admitting to knowing who Bush even was, let alone ever having supported him so throatily.

Then there's the Citizens United decision, which I've always had a mighty bug up my ass about.

I'm on the record as having said that political activity should get no preferential treatment under the tax code, from deducting lobbying costs right on down to deducting political contributions from your taxes. Shit, I don't even support the charitable deductions for charities that actually accomplish something other than shitty commercials.

If you're interested in knowing why, I'll tell you.

The more deductions you allow in the tax code, the higher the rates have to be to generate the revenue the government needs to operate. And if you want a government with the capability of both providing accessable health care to everyone and being prepared to bomb everyone from Jakarta to Winnipeg, we're talking about a fair bit of revenue.

Advocates of a flat tax have never been able to answer that basic fact. The more you deduct for yourself, the more everyone pays in higher rates. And this is what made the Ryan-Romney tax proposals last year such a bad fucking joke to anyone with a basic grasp of arithmetic.

My personal hero, Velociman, has one of the most misguided things I've ever seen up here.

A Redress of Grievances
That was, and is, the crime of the Tea Party groups. They are loose, and unaffiliated. When anyone attempts to wrest control of the Tea Parties at any level above the community they are whipsawed, and lashed.
That was the fearful thing. That is what keeps Obama awake at night. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of assembly and the right to redress grievances not as a sop of government, but as a natural right of man. From God, if you will. The Tea Parties were actually fomenting during the Bush bailout leading up to the 2008 election. They have never been specifically anti-Obama. Merely anti-spending. And yet they have been targeted and reviled as mutants, and racists.

There are any number of factual errors in those paragraphs, not least of which is that the Tea Party isn't almost wholly constituted by mutants.

Firstly, nothing calling itself the "Party Party" existed before Rick Santelli's retarded rant of February 2009, and that addressed relief to underwater homeowners under the thumb of the cocksucker banks, who themselves were just bailed out. And that Santelli said this from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade went almost completed unnoticed by everyone that isn't me.

Second, it's almost impossible to know if Tea Party groups are "loose, and unaffiliated" in light of Citizens United, which restricted disclosure of their donor base.

Thirdly, this isn't about a redress of grievances or even the First Amendment.

Let me repeat that. This isn't about a redress of grievances or even the First Amendment. The Obama administration never shut down the right of Tea Party groups to speak and, if they tried, they did a godawful job of it, since I couldn't escape those mutants last year.

It's actually about administrative tax law.

The Tea Parties weren't asserting a right, they were seeking a favour from the government in the form of non-profit tax status. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm not aware of the right to tax-exempt status for anyone but Indians in the Constitution. Anyone who suggests otherwise is either ignorant of lying.

My ultimate problem with these shithead Republicans is that they want other taxpayers to subsidize the cost of their bitching about how taxes are so high. Their right to free speech isn't inhibited as much their ability to get other people to pay for it is, so fuck them.

Now, do I think that that the administration specifically targeted conservative groups through the IRS? Sure I do.

Is that "Watergate," like so many idiots suggest it is? No, it is not.

President Nixon specifically targeted individuals for IRS harassment,  just as Johnson and Kennedy did before him. The difference is that they weren't organized groups seeking deductions in a post-Citizens United world, which begs such scrutiny. Nixon went after individual members of groups, journalists and sundry political enemies, which is a clear abuse of power and something no one has accused Obama of.

Then there's the recent NSA scandal, to which I ask ...... What did you think was going to happen? 

Most of you will remember that I went apeshit when I first heard about the Bush NSA program that was implemented in secret, without congressional authorization, after 9/11. I went on about it for years, actually.

But the people who were fine with it then - and in some cases demanded the prosecution of journalists that reported on it - are out of their tiny pinheads about it now. Of course, these are almost universally the same twats that want a secret war in Syria, so go figure.

However there are a couple of important distinctions.

First, Obama sought a FISA warrant for the records, which Bush never did, and Republicans insisted that he didn't have to under Unitary Executive Theory, the Authorization to Use Military Force Resolution of 2001 and the "Because ....Lincoln!" argument that they deploy whenever it fucking suits them.

Second, the GOP voted to change the law to to allow for exactly what Obama is doing today. Something I would advocate impeaching Obama for, Republicans legitimized way back when.

And that goes back to the tax case. Do you want to pay higher tax rates just because shiityy people with dishonest thinking don't wantto pay any at all?

The GOP and the Electoral College: A Bad Idea, or the Worst Idea Ever?

I promised myself that with the re-election of Barack Obama that I would spend more time attacking him and other liberals. The main purpose of the time and attention I've given to alleged conservatives is that they make it easy for people like Obama to win and there's very little point in shit-talking the other team when ours handicaps itself before a campaign even starts.

But Republicans insist on being what the military calls "a target rich environment." It's sad and serves only to create a virtual one-party state, but it is what it is. There's really no changing that until the party is ready to start changing itself in ways that don't horrify voters.

You know why Obama won twice? That's simple. The GOP has gone insane and elevated stupidity into a virtue. In a single sentence, that's it. As the demographics of America have changed, the Republican Party clung harder to its base of elderly white people, snake-handlers and the mentally ill. If things keep going the way they have for the last decade and a half, the only people voting the GOP line in 2016 will be potential school shooters.

2008 was bad, but understandable. Overcoming the debacle of George W, Bush's presidency would have been difficult under ideal circumstances and the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the coming of the Great Recession couldn't have been worse.

Last November was different. Even though I never thought there was much hope of beating Obama, the 2012 election was even worse than I suspected (or predicted) it would be. Instead of winning the Senate, like most of the smart folks expected them to, the Republicans managed to lose two seats. And they lost the popular vote for the House of Representatives by over a million votes, retaining control only as a result of gerrymandering.

The popular vote is becoming an existential problem for the GOP, having lost it in five of the last six presidential elections. If there's any one thing that suggests the party needs reforming, it's that.

So what do Republicans want to do? Change the rules of the game in such a way that they wouldn't have to persuade the majority of the electorate to vote for them.

Long story short, the want to change the Electoral College so that its votes are apportioned by congressional district, much like Maine and Nebraska does today. If the system worked that way last year, Mitt Romney would be president.

That idea is as desperate as it is dumb. Basically, it would mean that voters would no longer choose their representatives, representatives would choose their voters. It's almost impossible to imagine a scenario where the public would accept that because it fundamentally undermines the concept of popular democracy.

It also only works as concept so long as Republicans control the statehouses and governor's mansions. Once that's no longer the case, you wind up with even bigger Democratic majorities and the GOP ceases to exist.

It's striking to me that this idea is taking hold in states that are naturally blue, but elected Republicans in 2010: Florida, Virginia, Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

The problem with that is that the Republican governors in all of those states have approval ratings more common to pedophiles than chief executives. So far as I'm aware, not one of them (with the exception of Virginia's Bob McDonnell, who happens to be term-limited) is currently above 40%, which makes it extremely likely that none of them are going to win re-election. That being the case, it wouldn't be shocking if their legislatures went down with them.

If that happens, the Democrats draw the congressional districts. And after what Tom DeLay and Rick Perry did in Texas in 2002, there's nothing stopping them from doing it as soon as they take control. It's an idea that almost seems designed to blow up in the GOP's fucking faces. Republicans could change the law in those states this year, lose next year, and the Democrats could use it to tilt the election for them in time for 2016.

The party, including chairman Reince Preibus, has given up on the idea of not running psychopaths for national office, so they want to do the next best thing: Rig the system so it works like the House and rewards lunatic candidates with districts that favor that sort of thing.

Not only would popular vote losers taking office become far more common, it would be a disaster for the country. You think crises like the debt ceiling are bad now? Just wait and see what happens if this plan is adopted

Could they really be that goddamned dumb?

For the most part, they aren't. McDonnell and the likely nominee for governor this year, Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, Pennsylvania's Tom Corbett and Florida's Rick Scott are all running away from the idea as quickly as they can. Scott Walker in Wisconsin is saying only that idea is "interesting," ignoring the fact that not only did Mitt Romney not win Paul Ryan's congressional district, Paul Ryan nearly lost it. Only Michigan's Rick Snyder, who seems determined to get kicked out of politics and might actually be insane, is whole-heartedly for it. Ohio's John Kasich, who's delirious enough to think that he might be president someday, is strangely silent on the issue.

The University of Virginia's Larry Sabato characterizes the entire sick, stupid scheme better than I ever could.

Republicans are struggling to right their ship after the defeat of 2012. The unfavorable demographic trends for the GOP that we describe in our new book, Barack Obama and the New America, have sunk in, and the party knows it must do something. We have solicited ideas ourselves, believing that it is vital for America to have vigorous party competition. You will see some of those ideas, offered by our readers and Twitter colleagues, here. But nestled among the constructive ideas is a truly rotten one, the proposal to fix and game the Electoral College to give a sizable additional advantage to the Republican nominee for president.

We have asked Crystal Ball Senior Columnist Alan Abramowitz, Alben W. Barkley Professor of Political Science at Emory University, to examine the proposal and outline its likely effects. As we suspected, it would permit a GOP nominee to capture the White House even while losing the popular vote by many millions. This is not a relatively small Electoral College “misfire” on the order of 1888 or 2000. Instead, it is a corrupt and cynical maneuver to frustrate popular will and put a heavy thumb — the whole hand, in fact — on the scale for future Republican candidates. We do not play presidential politics with a golf handicap awarded to the weaker side.

Republicans face a choice that can best be characterized by personalizing it. A healthy, optimistic party is Reaganesque, convinced that it can win the future by embracing it, and by making a positive case for its philosophy and candidates to all Americans. A party in decline is Nixonian and fears the future; it sees enemies everywhere, feels overwhelmed by electoral trends, and thinks it can win only by cheating, by subverting the system and stacking the deck in its favor. Whose presidency was more successful, Reagan’s or Nixon’s? Which man made the Republican brand more appealing?

The Tea Party is Keeping it Classy!

One of the great things about the Tea Party is that it claims to be leaderless. There are also many factions of it that are constantly warring with one another over who actually represents the movement. In that they aren't unlike the Communist Party split in the days immediately after the Russian Revolution.

So why is that a great thing? Well, if you're the Tea Party, it allows you to avoid responsibility for anything! For a movement that never tires of advocating personal responsibility, when was they last time you saw them accept direct responsibility for anything that their members have said or done?

The correct answer is "never." Not once. It's always the fault of the mainstream media or some nefarious socialist plot (when the mainstream media itself isn't part of some nefarious socialist plot,) but it's never, ever their fuck up. That's the first reason that you shouldn't trust these people. The second reason is that they're idiots.

Timothy Birdnow is with Tea Party Nation. He has posting rights on their website, so I assume that he speaks for them in some way. And he sure is efficient. In this post he manages to cram so much crazy and stupid into such a small space, just 2,875 words, that you can't help but be impressed!  To give Mr. Birdnow his proper due, he also manages to stuff a healthy dose of small government rhetoric while calling for big government solutions. You really have to read it to believe it.

The takeaway from the Birdnow commentary that Mediaite is running with involves George Zimmerman. You remember George, right? Good. I'd rather not devolve into re-explaining his sad story, nor do I want to re-litigate it.

Birdnow says this about Friday's mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School; "Had George Zimmerman been at the front door instead of some mechanical card reader those children would still be alive."

Let me repeat that in case you missed it. "Had George Zimmerman been at the front door instead of some mechanical card reader those children would still be alive."

That's a highly debatable point, actually. Were those children carrying skittles and iced tea? If they were, that could have been a problem.

The fact that Mr. Zimmerman has been charged with second degree murder at least suggests that he isn't exactly judicious with a firearm and is perhaps best kept away from children. Mr. Birdnow also never explains how Zimmerman would have dealt with Adam Lanza's body armor. A head shot, you say? He shot Treyvon Martin in the chest.

It's really too bad that Mediaite focused on the Zimmerman angle because there's just so much other crazy in Birdnow's piece that it should be dealt with at length. He has a list of suggestions, few of which have anything at all to do with gun violence but are almost all paranoid, comic or both.

1. Homeschool. Take away the power of the radicals in the classrooms. Makes your kids safer, too.

Well, it makes your kids safe from strangers, I'll grant you that. But since most murdered kids are taken out by a close relative, why shouldn't they all be?

 2. Back Right to Work legislation for the public sector. Teacher’s unions have helped cement much of this in place. As long as we have group think in the classrooms we will never see the end of this.

Huh? Do non-union teachers have some ninja powers that I'm unaware of. It would be kind of cool if they did. Also, the unionized teachers were shot trying to protect the kids.

3. Engage in more frank discussion of race and culture. For far too long we have tiptoed around these issues, fearful of being branded a racist. If black thugs kidnap and rape a woman, ask if there is something in the black culture that fostered that. If an evil white kid murders a bunch of children at the school, ask the same question of the white community. What was it that spawned this behavior? What was this kid taught? We have to stop hiding from our respective national sins.

I'm not sure what "black thugs" kidnapping and raping a (presumably) white woman have to do with this, but okay. And what exactly does severe mental illness have to do with "national sins?"

It should also be pointed out that the overwhelming majority of the perpetrators of mass public shootings are white men. And the violence is rarely ever racially motivated.

5.Call evil out. We have to stop being sorry and start being angry. This is not a time for national grief so much as a time for national anger. We should stop tolerating this sort of thing. Indeed, stop tolerating any bad behavior. If you see kids jumping ahead in line, say, call them out. If you see punks bothering their neighbors call them out. Say something to the idiot blaring his car stereo. Say something to the foul-mouthed teens. Tell the brats to pull up their pants; nobody wants to see their filthy underwear and pimply behind. We have to start saying something, stop ignoring it. The first way any society maintains order is through social pressure from individuals. We have insanely given that up.

You know, in a nation where everybody is armed, I'm not sure that's very wise. This is, I think, the "broken windows" theory with one important difference. Every loudmouthed hillbilly like Timothy Birdnow gets to be a cop.

6.Work to devolve power back to the parents, the local officials, and the communities. A society that is top-down will inevitably lead to alienation of the sort we have seen here. This young man was twenty years old, and his actions were neither spurious nor random. As an FBI profiler said on television last night, he undoubtedly felt powerless and sought to remedy that. Why does a twenty year old feel powerless? He could leave his mother’s home at any time at his age. He feels powerless because he has lived in an over-bureaucratized society, one run ultimately from a far-away central location. He sees his life as at the mercy of others, and sees himself as having no real input or control. He has been coddled all his life, given free rein to indulge his senses but not to face the responsibilities that freedom necessitates. He was an eternal juvenile, a child who was not allowed to grow up. He lived in a world of the Progressives making, not in reality.

The family is the fundamental building block of civilization, and from it all power originates. The Left has systematically destroyed the family for the purpose of empowering the State, and this has destroyed so many lives. Individuals - especially immature individuals - need to be taught how to live, how to think, how to believe. Man’s animal passions must be placed in check and his rational faculties engaged. His moral compass must be set. Liberalism sought to destroy all the controls by destroying the family and community, centralizing power in meta institutions and granting the individual absolute moral autonomy without giving him the wisdom he needs to exercise it. . It is a recipe for disaster, as we have seen.

Um, wow.

Birdnow thinks the solution is a devolution of power from the federal government. He then cites the opinion of an FBI profiler and plasters his own opinion over that of the profiler. I've read a lot about profilers. Never once have I heard them cite "Progressives" as a cause of anything.

Moreover, who do you suppose that Birdnow wants to empower the family to triumph over the dastardly Left? My guess is Congress. I know, I can't follow his fucking logic, either.

7. Restrict the sex in movies, television, on the internet. There is a reason why young people commit these sorts of crimes, and sex plays no small part. Their passions are eternally inflamed, and they wander the Earth with no outlet for their overstimulated glands. People have understood the close relationship between sex and violence through history; sex was an inducement to military service in ancient times (and modern, too) and it has traditionally been understood that a sexually robust individual will fight harder and more aggressively. We are engaging half this equation, overstimulating our youth while denying them a planned outlet. Even if they were to live promiscuously (a very bad thing for society) they still cannot find adequate outlets for their passions, which have grown to titanic volume. Fighting is the traditional outlet. Societies have always carefully planned ways to release this tension constructively - through physical labor, through hunting, through military service, sometimes even through intellectual pursuits. Now we have nothing, no place for this pent-up frustration to go. The only answer is to follow the other societal coping mechanism, which is to tone down the sexual stimulation, encourage chastity and modesty. Our society has conveniently thrown that away as well. We have to restore it.

Parents, monitor what your children watch, what they look at on the internet. Make sure they dress modestly.

You have got to be fucking kidding me. These guys are going ape with an AR-15 because they're horny?  Are you serious?

Again, who is to be restricting "the sex in movies, television, on the internet?" This guy likes the government a whole lot more than he's letting on. And I love how "intellectual pursuits" can "relieve tension," but only "sometimes."

Birdnow obviously holds the Second Amendment very close to his heart, so much so that he sometimes forget that there's one right before it. Or would he prefer that it be stopped at the distribution point, which is government interference in business and exactly what the Tea Party is supposed to be fighting against.

You know what else relieves sexual tension, Tim? Furious masturbation and hardcore, animalistic fucking. Want proof? I'm the least excitable person I know.

Finally, making sure children dress modestly has certainly gone a long way in preventing Afghanistan into a violent and chaotic shithole. Oh, wait ....

8. Control drugs. Do not think that puffing a joint is harmless. Several American states decriminalized Marijuana, and it is actually legal in Washington and Colorado. Is it a coincidence that this shooting just occurred? Probably, but not in the long haul. Drugs and crime and violence go together. Trayvon Martin, the youth shot and killed by a neighborhood watch captain after he was assaulted , was likely high http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2888655/postswhen he was shot - and George Zimmerman has claimed Martin assaulted him, something backed by medical testimony. Martin had trace amounts of marijuana in his system, http://articles.nydailynews.com/2012-05-17/news/31753474_1_medical-... should be pointed out. Would Martin have done that had he been sober? And medical marijuana is a joke; there are far better substances that can be used. It is nothing but a way to backdoor legalization.

Again with the government! Remember, it's the state and local governments that are decriminalizing marijuana, precisely the people the people that these Tea Party types are supposed to trust more than the diabolical tyrants in Washington that they need their semi-automatic weapons to defend themselves against.

I know that you teenagers are hip enough that I don't need to point this out to you, but Mr. Birdnow doesn't understand that potheads are too busy giggling to attack anyone.

10.Go back to church. We need God more than ever, need prayer. It’s time the Ten Commandments were taught again. It’s time the Bible was taught. It’s time people learned the examples of the heroes of our Judeo-Christian heritage - heroes like Moses, who gave up his life as an Egyptian noble to become a shepherd and eventually lead his birth mother’s kin out of slavery, or David who spent years hiding from King Saul, and who, at one point, had Saul completely under his power (in the cave of Adullum) but would not smite the Lord’s anointed, or of John the Baptizer, a man who spoke the truth until his head was cut off, or of any of the Apostles who died for their faith. Most of all they should learn of Jesus, who refused to turn from the Truth and allowed himself to be sacrificed in the most painful manner possible for other people’s sins.

This evil can be fought, but not by any methods likely to be proposed by Progressives or imposed by our government. At best it will entail a top-down approach that will impose greater restrictions on the individual, on the family, and on the community. The solutions will be more of what caused this in the first place.

"Well, we obviously need the tyrannical and probably Marxist federal government to stop the porn and pot, but once that's taken over, the churches can take care of the rest."

You know what scares me even more than monsters like Adam Lanza walking among us? The fact that otherwise intelligent people support and vote for ideological nonsense like this.

"The Party of Stupid"

As I've been predicting for years now, the idiot wing of the Republican party - from Rush Limbaugh to Erick Erickson - is parading around the insane idea that sane people lose presidential elections and insisting that the party double down on the ideas that have failed over and over again. It's actually kind of endearing to watch, but not something I would ideally choose to represent a major ideological movement.

They are the key spokesmen (and they're nearly all men) of the "Alternate Reality" wing of the GOP, which dominated Fox News and the blogosphere over the last four years. As I've consistently said since 2009, I would have been shocked if Barack Obama didn't beat these people.

I didn't like the GM and Chrysler bailouts on principle, but I recognized at the time that there were more practical considerations at hand. As soon as the party decided that they were going to run through the Midwest screaming "Fuck you and your two million jobs," it was hard to see those people as anything but doomed. I knew that Tea Party talking points (which are never intellectually impressive) wouldn't withstand liberal demagoguery. But because it was common sense, Republicans ignored it and deluded themselves to the point that they were convinced that they would win Michigan and Ohio.

These people are doing something far more insidious than lying to you. They're lying to themselves. They really do believe that there's going to be some demographic resurrection of superstitious old white people that they can build a governing majority from. They really do believe that rattling on endlessly about nonsense like "self-deportation" is the best way to get Latinos to vote for them. And don't get me started about what these tools believe about single women.

Want to hear some neat facts? Great! They're good and they're good for you, you know.

The first one is the most important. I'm going italicize it for you to show just how important I think it is. The Republican Party has only won the popular vote in a presidential election once since 1988.

Here's some context into how long ago 1988 was. The majority of the people reading these words couldn't vote then, and I'm pretty sure that a plurality of you weren't even in high school yet. The careers of both Bill Clinton and Rob Lowe were thought to have ended at the Democratic convention that year. Cassettes overtook LPs that year and only real assholes owned CDs. Oh, and a president named Bush was just a year away from engineering a giant bank bailout.

Let's now look at the GOP's presidential nominees since then and examine why they actually lost, as opposed to why some shithead bloggers think they did.

Supposed conservatives like Newt Gingrich, Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot killed my hero, George H.W Bush. Bush 41 did a very dumb thing when he said, "Read my lips, no new taxes," mostly because he didn't know that he might have to invade the Middle East someday.

Reagan's deficits had grown to the point that, by the fall of 1990, the Democrats were threatening a government shutdown over them. At the same time, President Bush was inserting half a million troops into Saudi Arabia to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. A government shutdown during a friggin' war would have been optically less than ideal, so he negotiated and signed the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990, which moved the needle on taxes by about three points.

Gingrich, then the House minority whip, promised to support the bill, but later screwed the president by getting conservatives to vote against it. Buchanan challenged Bush in '92 primaries and Perot ran to his right as an independent, thereby handing the White House to Bill Clinton.

By 1996, Bob Dole saw what happened to Bush and became a full-on Grover Norquist zombie, running on an unaffordable 15% across-the-board tax cut, which allowed Clinton to tie him to Gingrich (ironically, since Dole loathed Gingrich as much as Bush did.) Oh, and Perot won 10% of Dole's vote, thereby handing the White House to Clinton.

George W. Bush and Al Gore ran as essentially the same guy. What killed Bush 43 in the popular vote was the last minute revelation of a DUI, leading superstitious Christian-types to think that he'd model his presidency after the lyrics of "It's So Easy" by Guns N' Roses, and causing them to stay home. Bush became president anyway due to a crafty Fourteenth Amendment argument before the Supreme Court.

John McCain and Mitt Romney, it should be remembered, didn't run as moderates at all. The psychopathic and goofy Republican primary  process forced both of them well to the right of their natural positions, the general electorate and common sense. The fact that they were "moderates" (and McCain was only moderate on issues like immigration) didn't kill them, their cowardice did. Both of them relentlessly coddled up to ideas and people that they knew were repugnant to the average voter, but they were more afraid of assholes like Limbaugh, Norquist and Pat Robertson they were of the general electorate.After all, they couldn't lose to a "community organizer," right? Wrong.

In Romney's case, the "conservative" candidates (and it's amazing how frequently the name Newt Gingrich comes up in this story, isn't it?) set the Obama campaign's strategy and themes up for them, with attacks on Bain and his credibility. This year's Republican primaries looked more like the "kill the frontrunner" exercise of the Democratic primaries from 1972-2004 than anything I've ever seen from the GOP.

George W. Bush in 2004 is the only Republican to win the popular vote in 24 years, and he only barely managed that by vastly expanding education and prescription drug entitlements. People forget this, but Bush also promised to spend a trillion dollars more than John Kerry did.

The idea that Bush 41, Dole, McCain and Romney lost because they were "too moderate" is as silly as it is disprovable. In each and every instance, they were kneecapped by the Robespierre Republicans of the alleged right and made unelectable.

In the last week, some voices from that camp have finally started talking sense. And they aren't voices easily discredited by the likes of Limbaugh, Erickson and Norquist.

Bill Kristol (who has a long and storied history of being wrong about everything from the war in Iraq to the wisdom of putting Sarah Palin on a national ticket) has challenged the retarded GOP orthodoxy on tax increases.

Everything that most Republicans know about taxes stops in 1982. What they're either too dumb to know or too dishonest to acknowledge is that Reagan's repeated tax increases didn't hurt economic growth, and Bush's and Clinton's  might have actually improved it. More importantly, the GOP has pissed away incalculable political capital defending millionaires and billionaires who often vote for the Democrats anyway.

I've spent the last five years warning Republicans about the long-term viability of Texas as a red state, given its demography. You're probably tired of hearing me talk about it.

The Democrats did something very smart in the last decade that the GOP was too smug to notice. They gave up entirely on the Deep South, preferring to concentrate on states with the fastest-growing Hispanic populations. That led to New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado and Virginia becoming reliably blue. I'm predicting right now that Arizona will become an important swing-state in 2016.

Which brings me back to Texas. If you don't believe me, maybe you'd prefer to hear it from the Tea Party's newest Jesus figure, the senator-elect from Texas, Ted Cruz.

“If Republicans do not do better in the Hispanic community,” he said, “in a few short years Republicans will no longer be the majority party in our state.” He ticked off some statistics: in 2004, George W. Bush won forty-four per cent of the Hispanic vote nationally; in 2008, John McCain won just thirty-one per cent. On Tuesday, Romney fared even worse.

“In not too many years, Texas could switch from being all Republican to all Democrat,” he said. “If that happens, no Republican will ever again win the White House. New York and California are for the foreseeable future unalterably Democrat. If Texas turns bright blue, the Electoral College math is simple. We won’t be talking about Ohio, we won’t be talking about Florida or Virginia, because it won’t matter. If Texas is bright blue, you can’t get to two-seventy electoral votes. The Republican Party would cease to exist. We would become like the Whig Party. Our kids and grandkids would study how this used to be a national political party. ‘They had Conventions, they nominated Presidential candidates. They don’t exist anymore.’ ”

Look, I get that this is "reality-based thinking" and involves math, which Republicans hate, but that doesn't make it wrong. Ted Cruz has been a statewide political figure for the better part of a decade. I'm pretty sure that he knows the lay of the land better than some jackoff blogger or glorified deejay.
Arizona will be a swing-state in 2016, and Texas will go that way no later than 2024. Bet on it.

But the best overall analysis from an elected official so far comes from Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal.

“We’ve got to make sure that we are not the party of big business, big banks, big Wall Street bailouts, big corporate loopholes, big anything,” Jindal told POLITICO in a 45-minute telephone interview.

“We cannot be, we must not be, the party that simply protects the rich so they get to keep their toys."

He was just as blunt on how the GOP should speak to voters, criticizing his party for offending and speaking down to much of the electorate.

“It is no secret we had a number of Republicans damage our brand this year with offensive, bizarre comments — enough of that,” Jindal said. “It’s not going to be the last time anyone says something stupid within our party, but it can’t be tolerated within our party. We’ve also had enough of this dumbed-down conservatism. We need to stop being simplistic, we need to trust the intelligence of the American people and we need to stop insulting the intelligence of the voters.”

Calling on the GOP to be “the party of ideas, details and intelligent solutions,” the Louisianan urged the party to “stop reducing everything to mindless slogans, tag lines, 30-second ads that all begin to sound the same. “

He added: “Simply being the anti-Obama party didn’t work. You can’t beat something with nothing. The reality is we have to be a party of solutions and not just bumper-sticker slogans but real detailed policy solutions.”

That's key. Going back to 1980, the GOP has relied almost exclusively on bumper-sticker policies that even Reagan wound up walking away from. And Republicans have lied to themselves about that for thirty years now.

That was fine when the Democrats didn't have a reliable map to work with, or when Ross Perot fucked with their dreams. But the Democrats very much do have a workable map now. If you take away anything from last Tuesday, it should be that. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Virginia stays blue and North Carolina tilts back. Obama carried Cuban-Americans last week, giving the Democrats what looks to be a durable coalition in Florida. And Colorado legalized pot. They didn't decriminalize it or allowed for medical marijuana, they legalized pot. So I think that state can be safely put in the blue column for foreseeable future.

The canard of gay marriage never passing a popular vote was also demolished in no less than three states last week. If the Supreme Court doesn't step in first, I predict that'll happen in more - and redder - states. When the gay marriage trend started a decade ago, and the world didn't immediately end, more and more people have accepted it. I don't see how you turn back the clock on that.

Very nearly half of the states have now decriminalized cannabis in one way or another and 50% of the people support outright legalization. Nine states have legalized same-sex marriage and New Jersey, Rhode Island and California recognize gay marriages from states that allow for it. Well over 50% of Americans now support it. Three states, including deep red Montana, allow assisted suicide.

America isn't just getting younger and darker, it's becoming more libertarian. Last week, in state after state, voters proved that they wanted the government out of their lives as the GOP was campaigning on rape babies. I'm sure that's not the campaign Mitt Romney wanted, but it's the campaign Tea Party insurgents Todd Aiken and Richard Mourdock gave him. A party that campaigned against health care mandates used its majorities in multiple state legislatures to pass, or attempt to pass, mandates for trans-vaginal ultrasounds, which are medically and scientifically useless and serve only to treat competent adults like children. They railed against birth control whenever they could, which was settled law in 1965, for Christ's sake!

The Hezbollah (Party of God) ideology of the Republican party is being rejected more rapidly than even I thought possible. This might seem incredibly counter-intuitive, but I think that the American people actually did vote for a smaller government last Tuesday. But they voted for a smaller government in terms of their lives, as opposed to the very narrow interests that the GOP represents.

Even when two years of polling showed that a majority of Republican voters thought it was time for the Bush tax cuts to expire (at least) on the high-end earners, the party ignored them and powered on to its own destruction.

Over the next few years, I think you'll hear smart Republicans (to the extent that there are any left) stop referring to the rich as "job creators," which is the kind of Frank Luntz focus-group driven nonsense (see also, "death tax") that has driven America into bankruptcy. The GOP has been ideologically married to tax cuts without qualification since at least 1996, and they've only won the popular vote once since then. And, ironically, that was the one presidential term when taxes weren't cut. I think we can safely say, as a political matter, that America is officially on the wrong side of the Laffer Curve.

For way too long, the Republican party has been rooting against the Enlightenment and for what I lovingly call the Triumph of Ignorance. The days of the party branding itself against smart may finally be over, although I'm still reluctant to actually predict it. But it's become clear that they can no longer run around the country saying "We're all gonna die, and here's our bumper-sticker solution to everything!"

Look, I'm not suggesting that the GOP is going to die tomorrow. Gerrymandering has ensured a significant presence for them at least in the House through 2022. But I think we've just seen the last presidential election where they can appeal solely to superstitious and hateful old white men and expect to win.

The Senate's even worse. The Democrats were defending more seats than they had since LBJ was in the White House, and the GOP should've easily been able able to pick up at least five of them. Ideally, they could've won seven or eight. Instead, they suffered a net loss of two.

The fact is that they're getting killed not just on social issues, but on economic ones. They're getting murdered on the idea that they're competent managers of anything. Say what you will about "country club Republicans," but at least they knew how to run things. The Jacobins of the GOP are incapable of doing even that. Bush branded them as the party of Iraq and Katrina, and McCain and Romney were too afraid of their own idiot right to push back against it.

Mitt Romney bought into Erick Erickson's insipid, whiny and limp-dicked "47%" meme without understanding that the real welfare cases are the deepest red states, who are heavily subsidized through Washington by economic basket-cases like California and Illinois, who pay more in taxes than they get back. And pardon me for thinking that Erickson's supposed failure to make a proper living on national TV, radio and as a published author and prominent blogger is anybody's fault but his own. If he wants to take that up with anybody, it should be his fucking agent.

I've said for years that it would have been very hard for President Obama to lose this election. On the other hand, his victory marks only the second time in U.S history that there have been three consecutive two-term presidents, the first being Jefferson through Monroe (1801-'25.) As I write this, there's no reason to believe that Obama won't be succeeded by another Democrat, likely Joe Biden.

The GOP has now lost four Senate elections in a row, 2006-'12. Even after gerrymandering made them seemingly invulnerable in the House, they might have lost as many as eight seats there, to say nothing of the national popular vote for that body.

Those people are in a world of fucking hurt, not just demographically, but geographically. The more I think about it, the harder it is to envision an electoral map that carries them into the 2030s unless they seriously think about reforming themselves in deeply profound ways. Just two weeks ago, Republicans were saying that a vote for the Libertarians was wasted. The reverse could very probably be true in twenty years.

Limbaugh, Erickson and every other dickhead blogger out there aren't just haughty beyond words, they also know shit about history. They really don't seem to know that the Republican party was created only because the Whigs collapsed. And they don't seem to understand that another party can grow out their ashes.

Old fat men are always just a coronary away from being dead men* and the same principle of natural selection applies to political movements.

But please keep on being what even Bobby Jindal calls "The Party of Stupid." It amuses me and there are few things I love writing about more.


Artwork lovingly stolen from Esquire.


Editor's Note: Oddly enough, Erick Erickson is five and half years younger than I am. But my steady diet of pills. powders and amber liquids have granted me not only a beautiful swimmer's body, but eternal life! The idea of that disgusts me beyond words, but it is what it is.

Editor's Note the Second: One of you good people put this post on Reddit, which led to my biggest all-time traffic day of ever! And it was on a weekend. 

Looka this. 

(click to embiggen)

I haven't been overly diligent about checking my stats after I fucked up my template and killed Sitemeter, along with my links. But Blogger has had me averaging about 1,400 pageviews a day. In the week of the election, I went up to about 2.200. 

The Romney polling post? Nearly 68,000 in a single day. And it went higher as the night went on. Just two of my election posts last week accounted for about a fifth of the total pageviews this blog has had since February of 2009. I don't know about you, but I'm impressed with me over that. 

The post in question garnered two comments here. As of right now, there are 111 at the Reddit thread. 

I want you teenagers to keep that up. I don't host ads and I don't beg my readers for money, but Daddy has an ego to feed. Knowing that 68.000 people a day can read my drivel goes a long way in doing that. 

My favourite Reddit comment comes from Podunk14, who said "This blog needs more swear words before I would be able to consider it a credible source of information."


All I can say, Podunk14, is that I'll try. I'll try with all of my black little motherfucking heart! 

Truth and Consequences: Simpson-Bowles or the Fiscal Cliff?

One of my greatest personal joys in the aftermath of Tuesday's election is watching Republican shitheels bemoan the fact that "the American people voted to continue fiscal irresponsibility." The basic fact of the matter is that the American people weren't given a choice in the matter, other than possibly supporting Gary Johnson's Libertarian ticket.

President Obama never really had a plan and the GOP couldn't stop lying about theirs. Both sides were dealing in fantasy economics that were predicated on not ending a sixteen trillion dollar debt (which makes it important to remember than American GDP is only fourteen trillion) without touching their beloved middle class or current entitlement recipients, which is a recipe for disaster.

You can't say that you're going retire a debt of that size - or even significantly reduce deficits - in a reasonable period of time without going to where the money is.

The Romney-Ryan plan cut rates in ways that no mathematically literate adult thought they could pay for and was more than made up for with trillions in new defense spending. Furthermore, by cutting entitlement spending only for future retirees, they exploded the short-term deficits.

Republicans said that they oppose any tax increases because they would hamper future economic growth, which is another indication that they don't know what they're talking about if they're, in fact, telling the truth.

As I've mentioned before, what happened in September of 2008 wasn't a recession. The recession started in the summer of 2007. The collapse of Lehman Brothers precipitated a financial panic, which is a very different breed of animal. History tells us that financial panics take a decade or more to fully recover from. The world's third-largest economy, Japan, still hasn't recovered from its 1990s financial panic.

There are other reasons to doubt a full American recovery. Most significantly, The economic superpower status of the United States was artificial to begin with. America grew the way that it did after World War II for the simple reason that all of its major competitor economies were destroyed by the war.

By the time that Europe and Japan fully recovered from the war, in the early 1970s, real American household income stagnated, which was hidden by massive borrowing, both public and private. By 1980, the frugality of the "Greatest Generation" was dead, American families began living on credit and inflation was rampant. President Reagan broke inflation by inflicting the 1982 recession on the economy, but his tax cuts exploded the public debt. Throughout it all, Congress ballooned both military and entitlement spending. Private business grew the economy in the late '80s with the Leveraged Buyout (LBO) phenomenon, but that further raised the level by which debt as a driver of economic growth.

Globalization aggravated the problem by almost entirely wiping out the U.S manufacturing sector. Without manufacturing, there was no way that America could sustain its already artificially high living standards, except through the debt of last resort: their home equity. As manufacturing died, the financial service industry replaced it, but only for a time. You can only grow an industry like that so long as there remains a window to create debt.

In the fall of 2008, the bottom fell out of the debt-driven economy that sustained everything for almost forty years and that window slammed shut. Worse, there's not going to be anything to replace it in the near or mid-terms. I have no reason to believe that the United States will ever return to the levels of its Golden Age.

Neither the Republicans or the Democrats are going to tell you the truth about that. Ever. To do so would burst the bubble of the American Dream that has kept Washington from ever being questioned in anything resembling a serious way.

All that leaves is debt. In perverse way, the death of American economic expansion creates the ideal atmosphere in which to address that debt. Even a really bad recession won't look or feel much worse than what the United States is in now, so Washington doesn't really need to worry about the political cost of structural economic reform that minimizes at least the pubic debt. Of course, that requires the political class finally telling people the truth for once in their fucking lives.

The Republican party, in particular, has been singularly unwilling to do that, instead relying on Paul Ryan's almost pornographic fantasies to save them. This brings me to The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, which most of you know as Simpson-Bowles.

Contrary to Republican assertions, Obama didn't "walk away from Simpson-Bowles. The GOP strangled it in the cradle.

Any realistic solution to an intrinsic problem is going to cause pain and if there's one thing a democracy abhors, it's pain. That's why commissions like Simpson-Bowles are created in the first place, to do the job that Congress can't.

Simpson-Bowles was supposed to be modelled after the military base closing commission that was created after the end of the Cold War. Presidents Bush and Clinton, along with Congress, knew that base closings were to be an all or nothing proposition.

For that reason, Congress created a commission that severly limited its own powers. The commission's final report would be introduced and Congress could only give it "an up-or-down vote," meaning that amendments couldn't be attatched to it and it wouldn't be subject to the Senate's filibuster rule. It worked beautifully with base closings and it was supposed to be the model for Simpson-Bowles.

Then the six Republicans that had sponsored the enabling legislation to create Simpson-Bowles voted against it on final passage. That meant that if Obama introduced its final report to Congress, it would be amended to death in the House and filibustered in the Senate. Worse, the GOP would be able to demagogue all of the worst parts of it on the campaign trail this year. The President would have been crazy if he did that.

And the GOP continues to be singularly dishonest. On Wednesday, Speaker John Boehner took a break from crying to say that "We’re willing to accept new revenue under the right conditions." That sounds great until you realize that what he means by "revenues" is closing loopholes through tax reform, but not raising new revenues with tax increases.  Basically, he's using the Romney plan as his negotiating position.

Now, I don't know how many of you were paying attention this week, but the Romney plan was pretty thoroughly discredited. Unless he's completely out of his mind, I can't see why Obama would bother to win an election only to pass the crown jewel of the loser's economic plan. Can you?

To be fair, the Democratic plan to raise taxes on "the top 2%" is also horseshit because it doesn't raise anywhere near the revenue needed to address the problem in a serious way. Also, the rich aren't driving the debt, the middle class is, with all of its insane entitlements and tax breaks. The Bush tax cuts need to expire for everybody. That alone raises about $4 trillion over the next ten years.

There's absolutely no chance of a "Grand Bargain" between now and December 31. And Washington should definitely not be allowed to kick the can down the road by passing legislation to defer the sequester by even a second. If you do that, you effectively make the Bush tax cuts permanent and make things even harder to negotiate down the road.

That leaves two choices: A clean vote on Simpson-Bowles or the fiscal cliff. I prefer either to waiting and seeing nothing get done.

Hammer to Fall: Why Conrad Black is Wrong About Tom DeLay

I have a certain amount of sympathy for Conrad Black. While I refuse to refer to him as Baron Black of Crossharbour because I think British royal titles are moronic unless you slay a fucking dragon or something, I do respect his intelligence and feel that a great injustice was done to him over the last decade.

I'm not going to argue Black's guilt or innocence, but I'll believe until the day I die that the United States didn't have jurisdiction to prosecute him, especially for the obstruction count that he was convicted of. All of the actions prosecuted in United States of America v. Black occurred in Canada, so fuck the United States.

The fact that Hollinger was a NYSE traded company are essentially meaningless. If that alone justifies the application of American criminal laws on foreign nationals foe actions outside the territorial U.S, then foreign nationals would do well to de-list their stock there. The Americans are out of control when it comes to the extraterritorial application of their fucking laws and that isn't going to change until it bites them in the pocketbook.

I also admire Mr. Black's advocacy of criminal defendants, which is something that all conservatives should engage in a lot more often.

If you believe that conservatism is predicated on a distrust of the power of the state and the competence of the state to wield that power responsibly, it only stands to reason that you would side with the most vulnerable potential victims of said power. Instead, too many conservatives have for too long advocated for increased government power against the individual in the criminal justice system. Worse, in arguing for that, they have insipidly put forth that the relevant parts of the Constitution don't mean what they actually say.

Sure, our friend Conrad had to feel the cold boot of the state himself before he came around to this view, but that shouldn't make his current writing any less worthy of your respect.

That's why I'm more than a little sad about this article of his.

In this context, Tom DeLay is, to use another hackneyed American media expression, an authentic American hero. I had hoped that after the chief of staff of the former vice president, Scooter Libby, had been convicted by a rabidly partisan jury when there was no conclusive evidence, only an uncorroborated difference of recollection with a journalist; and then six-term senator Ted Stevens was convicted on the basis of what was subsequently found to be wrongful withholding of exculpatory evidence, that the executive and legislative branches of the federal government might awaken to the threat that the rogue prosecutocracy poses to them. (Justice came too late for Senator Stevens; he lost his place in the Senate, very narrowly, a few days after the erroneous judgment, and died in an air crash after his conviction was reversed.) To paraphrase Scotland Yard in vintage murder cases, no man or woman in America is safe from this monster.

Yes, Ted Stevens was fucked over in a Kafka-esque nightmare. The fact that he was very probably guilty of something matters not a fucking whit. Justice demands that he be prosecuted with something specific and the government go out of its way to play fair. That didn't happen, and the fact that the prosecution team wasn't immediately sent before a firing dquad at dawn shows just how seriously the Justice Department takes justice.

On the other hand, there was no shortage of "conclusive evidence" regarding Scooter Libby's factual guilt. Libby lied to the FBI and perjured himself before a Grand Jury and there were several respected and disinterested eyewitnesses who testified to that effect. The only injustice in his case was that President Bush commuted his sentence, especially so shortly after the Clinton impeachment saga, which was essentially about the same thing.

And Tom DeLay is a two-legged fucking monster. To suggest that he's "an authentic American hero" is nothing short of laughable. DeLay is the undead, walking embodiment of everything that's wrong with politics generally and the Republican Party in particular.

During the Clinton impeachment, Speaker Newt Gingrich was finally kicked out of politics for well over a decade. DeLay and his fellow Texan and blood-enemy, the appropriately named Dick Armey were just below him, as Whip and Majority Leader respectively.

In simpler times, Armey would have become Speaker upon Gingrich's resignation and DeLay Majority Leader. But the Republican House conference was still somewhat sane back then. They knew that both of those twisted fucks would have been a public relations disaster. So they elected Robert Livingston Speaker.

Unfortunately, Livingston was also fabled for his love of strange pussy and was forced to resign just as the Articles of Impeachment against Clinton were being voted on. DeLay then essentially hand-picked the obscure and incompetent Dennis Hastert as a puppet Speaker. Armey was effectively bypassed and himself resigned in 2002, allowing DeLay to enable Bush to engage in the wildest spending spree in American history.

But absolute power was never quite absolute enough for young Tom. So he went out about using his influence with the Texas legislature and the state's mouth-breathing goof of a governor, Rick Perry, to engage in some unprecedented and probably unconstitutional redistricting in 2003, designed to increase the GOP's national House delegation at the expense of the Democrats.

Even that wasn't enough. Texas has an age-old law banning corporate contributions to state candidates. DeLay figured that he could work around that by funnelling the corporate contributions through the Republican National Committee, who would then launder them back to his preferred legislative candidates in Austin. That's money laundering and that's a fucking felony.

Conrad Black sees it differently.

Tom DeLay is fighting a good fight and has taken his tormentors most of the way toward the highest appeals court in the tenebrous thickets of Texas criminal justice, while denying them their almost inevitable moment of glee and self-satisfaction by avoiding imprisonment thus far as he pursues his appeal, which was heard Wednesday. The issue is $190,000 of contributions to his PAC, which were given to the Republican National Committee, which funneled them into seven Texas House races where the Republicans were successful, which allegedly facilitated a favorable redistribution of federal House of Representatives seats that durably advantaged the Republicans.

It has now come down to whether the state’s money-laundering law covers transfers made by check—like so much American legal skirmishing, serious points and the fate of human beings are gradually reduced, amidst mountainous enrichment of the rapacious American legal system, to arcana too absurd for any normal person to take seriously. PACs in Texas are allowed to support parties but not candidates, and the issue comes to whether this was a conversion of contributions gradually and by stages and without specific intent or a guilty mind, to a technically illegal end, or if it was an active and multilevel conspiracy to violate (ridiculous, vague, and unworkable) election-financing laws. The fact that the question even has to be put at this point, after it has been batted round and through various courts for over five years, should be enough to establish the reasonable doubt whose absence the law requires for criminal convictions, but which, by the miraculous operation of American criminal justice, is almost never found to exist.

Black's argument in this case is ridiculous on its face.

The fact that DeLay's PAC sent the donations through the RNC is evidence enough that he knew that sending them directly to his state candidates was illegal. That tends to demonstrate a consciousness of guilt and can lead reasonable people to conclude that he conspired to violate the state law on corporate contributions. I'm shocked that he wasn't convicted of conspiracy, too.

I'm inclined to agree with Black that most campaign finance laws are "ridiculous, vague, and unworkable" and I'd just as soon have them all done away with. But I very rarely get my way, and the law is the fucking law. Furthermore, "a conversion of contributions gradually and by stages" should make a reasonable person more inclined to believe that there was a "specific intent or a guilty mind," not less. A person who thought that their actions were lawful would have dumped all the converted contributions at once.

If this is the stuff that makes Tom DeLay a "hero in the martyrology being created by the antics of the American prosecutocracy," then Rod Blagojevich might properly be something akin to a saint.

As I mentioned earlier, I support Conrad Black's scrutiny of American justice. It's long overdue and he could bring serious conservatives to where they should have been decades ago. Too many people are essentially losing their lives because the government is more powerful than they are and richer in resources.

Having said that, sometimes a motherfucker is just guilty beyond words. And Tom DeLay is such a motherfucker.


Neat Editorial Note: None of the above should suggest that Tom DeLay isn't a clever little cocksucker. You see that photo at the top of the post? That's his booking photo.

DeLay was indicted in Travis County, which is Austin. He turned himself in after a warrant was issued in Harris County, which surrounds Houston. Apparently Harris County is the single Texas jurisdiction that doesn't include anything that indicates that you've been charged with a crime in their booking photos.

That allowed DeLay to make his arrest look like a campaign photo. Which was genius!

Allen West goes full retard. Again

Until about 10 years ago, the worst thing that you could call a conservative was a McCarthyite, so shameful was the legacy of the gloriously long-dead, drunken junior senator from Wisconsin. The author of that legacy was reviled by conservatives for several decades, even to the point of his name being used as an epithet.

As is true with most things in the last decade, there has been a mighty attempt at historical revisionism regarding Joseph McCarthy by what laughably passes for "public thinkers" in the Republican party (as opposed to the conservative movement) such as Ann Coulter and Glenn Beck.

Aside from destroying innumerable lives for no reason at all, undermining the First Amendment's free association and speech rights, and going a long way in creating the great American National Security State, it's largely forgotten that McCarthy never actually produced any actual communists. I'll grant you that he had innumerable lists of supposed communists but he never went so far as to actually name any, despite repeated threats to do just that. In his six year political reign of terror, McCarthy's investigations didn't lead to the conviction of a single person for subversion, communist or otherwise. Not. One.

That isn't to say, of course, that there was a lack of communists to convict in Washington. We now know, as was largely known at the time, that there was indeed communist infiltration of the highest levels of the federal government during the height of the Cold War. It's just that McCarthy didn't expose any of them. In the final analysis, Tailgunner Joe was an opportunist, a drunken demagogue and, most important, an abject failure at what he saw as his life's mission.

You would think that such an appalling record of incompetence and needless personal destruction is something that the modern Republican party would want no part of. But things, it appears, have changed. With Coulter's rise to prominence, most especially with her book, Treason, McCarthy has become almost fashionable in some circles of the GOP and has become mainstreamed with the rise of the Tea Party.

Despite the protestations of their high priests at Newscorp and Freedom Works, the Tea Party and (to a large extent) Fox News aren't conservative as much as they populist. Because of the rise of both, the Republican party itself has become more populist than conservative but it could be the strangest form of populism in American history.

Traditional populism aligned itself with the condition of the "common man" or "the worker", which is why it has, up until very recently, been associated with the political left. Even Reagan-era conservatism had some scholarly bearings. You'll remember that supply-side economics was predicated on the theory of the Laffer Curve. While Reagan's style and rhetoric were often populist, his ideology wasn't.

The Tea Party and the opinion hosts on Fox haven't bothered with ideas like the Laffer Curve in years. I would be stunned to the point of senselessness if I saw evidence that Sean Hannity even knew what it is. Theirs is a populism based on the premise that jiggering the tax code to the benefit of the very wealthy for it's own sake is something that "the common man" should expect will benefit him. This is why Paul Ryan's deficit reduction plans have been front-loaded with tax cuts that dwarf even those of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.

Like populist movements throughout U.S history, it is built on a foundation of  not just ignorance, but proud ignorance. The less you appear to know, the more successful you'll be in a populist movement, which explains Sarah Palin's entire career better than anything else.

Which brings me to Representative Allen West of Florida's 22nd congressional district. Being of a military background, Congressman West doesn't do things halfway. Where people like Palin and Hannity are proudly ignorant, West fetishizes stupidity in a way that normal adults would stop at nothing to hide, but modern politics rewards. Add to that the fact that he's an unrepentant fucking war criminal and you have a natural leader of the Tea Party.

Well, over the last couple of weeks, young Allen has come to embrace his inner McCarthyite with endlessly entertaining results.

On Tuesday, Rep. Allen West spoke at a town hall in Florida. During his appearance, he told the crowd he’s “heard” that up to 80 House Democrats are members of the Communist Party.

The Palm Beach Post reported on the event, adding that West “wouldn’t name names” to back up his assertion. Currently, there are 190 Democrats in the House.

That's notable in so far as even McCarthy himself never went that far. He said that communists subverted the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, not that they were welcomed into them. Nor did McCarthy ever go so far as to say outright that nearly half of the Democratic congressional caucus were actually members of the Communist Party of the United States.

Of course, West's assertion was so blatantly and laughably ridiculous that it couldn't be ignored, except by Fox News and the Tea Party blogosphere, both of whom are as spectacularly dumb as West himself. The only people who took him seriously was the actual Communist Party of the United States, which is insulted that anyone would associate it with something as spineless as the Democrats.

But the Goddamn Liberal Media, which always loves to pick on a retard, pressed the Congressman to clarify his remarks. This is where things went from amusing to hilarious with astonishing speed.

Regarding his original comments, West said, “No, I don’t regret it whatsoever.” He went on to imply that Wilson was a communist who hid behind the label “progressive”

“And I think that if you would take the time to study the political spectrum of ideologies, you’d understand that at the turn of the [20th] century, American Communists renamed themselves as progressives. If you study the Woodrow Wilson administration, people referred to the Woodrow Wilson administration as a progressive administration.”

Wow. It's been a good, long time since I've seen something so stunningly, yet beautifully stupid. His comments are ignorance in Technicolor.

First, the idea that progressives are communists was invented by Glenn Beck about three years ago. Like West, Beck uses the terms "progressive", "socialist" and "communist" interchangeably, demonstrating that they don't know anything about any of them. Everything Beck knows about history came from a lunatic named W. Cleon Skousen, who was too racist and paranoid for even the Mormon Church of the 1950s. More sadly still, everything Allen West knows about history, he learned from Glenn Beck.

Second, not only was Wilson not the most progressive of American presidents, he wasn't even the progressive in the 1912 campaign in which he was elected. Former President Theodore Roosevelt was the nominee of the Progressive Party. An honest-to-goodness Socialist, Eugene Debs, was on the ballot that year and won 6%, garnering nearly a million votes.

Allen West won't tell you this (most probably because he doesn't know it) but the progressives were more closely associated with the Republican party than with the Democrats. The most politically successful progressives of the era, including Robert La Follette and Hiram Johnson, were Republicans.

Most Americans don't know this, but the McCarthy era wasn't the first Red Scare in the United States. That actually occurred following the Russian Revolution and America's entry into the First World War. There had been political witch hunts in the U.S before, but they mostly targeted anarchists. Anarchism hadn't yet ceased to be a political philosophy and become a fashion statement for people like Malcom McLaren and the former John Lydon.

Just as Beck and West morph progressivism, socialism and communism into one another, Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer bundled trade unions, anarchists, socialists and communists together and went after them with the full force of the federal government. This assault on civil liberties became known as the Palmer Raids, and it was far worse than anything that Joseph McCarthy managed to pull off because Palmer was both competent and sober. Moreover, it was carried out under the supervision of a young man named J. Edgar Hoover.

The Palmer Raids were finally stopped by a federal court judge, who included in his ruling this sentence  "a mob is a mob, whether made up of Government officials acting under instructions from the Department of Justice, or of criminals and loafers and the vicious classes."

And who did Mitchell Palmer work for during this American nightmare, you ask? The answer might shock you, especially if you're Allen West.

It was President Woodrow Wilson.

Herman Cain's descent into madness continues

When last we left Herman Cain, we explored the nightmarish landscape of his second Sick of Stimulus ad. More than even the Teutonic exhortations of "Nine, Nine, Nine" during his parody of a presidential campaign, the Sick of Stimulus advertising strategy demonstrates the awful depths of his mental illness. As a matter of fact, I think that it speaks to the fundamental liberalism of American society that he's allowed near children unsupervised.

I have some of the most hardened and cynical readers on the Internet, which I'm actually rather proud of. And even they were shocked by the deranged and depraved imagery that Cain is regularly employing to make some inexplicable point. In a world where folks like Rick Santorum vow to rid America of obscenity once and for all, ol' Herman is bringing snuff movies and animal cruelty to the masses.

Of course, that's not all that Cain's up to. Oh no, dear reader. He's far to diverse for that, and he wants you to know it.

The pizza man is also taking the time to go on televison and insult women.

When asked about the gender gap favouring Obama, Herman had this to say;

 

"Yes, President Obama is very likable to most people, if you just look at him and his family. But if you look at his policies, which is what most people disagree with, it's a different story. And I think many men are much more familiar with the failed policies than a lot of other people, as well as the general public."

If you ever wondered why Republicans make the best boyfriends, now you know. They understand that chicks just aren't that good at paying attention, which liberals can't bring themselves to admit. In fairness, most liberals are gay, so they really shouldn't know that. And there is no Republican authority on the fairer sex quite like Mr. Cain, being married and enjoying the company of at least one mistress. While he knows dick about economics, Herman knows what broads like!

But Sick of Stimulus will always be the great love of his life. Even more than the silken insides of a female employee, he embraces the psychic dissonance that are those ads. He holds them closer to his soul than he can any other living thing. In an almost Brokeback Mountain way, I imagine that he wishes that he knew how to quit them, but he knows that he never will. The ads just spit in their hand and Herman knows that he can never refuse them.

SOS knows the importance of versatility. In their first two ads, Cain and the creepy little blond girl actually took a fish out of water and blasted a bunny wabbit out of the sky. By now the concept is more than a little fucked out. Like most of you, I wondered if the creepy little blond girl had the same depraved indifference to human life that she so callously displayed toward lesser life forms in previous Cain ads.

In the new ad, the Animal Kingdom rises up to exact its beastial revenge on its two-legged tormentors as the creepy little blond girl presides over the inhuman spectacle..



That's right, for the first time in the history of political messaging, someone has been eaten alive by cocks, as opposed to the reverse. Although, it's more than a little perverse to have a pre-pubescent girl there to watch without a trace of human emotion. Maybe, like the women Herman referred to on Fox News, she wasn't paying attention. That seems to be the way things roll on the Cain Train.

As much as I'd like to, I wouldn't think it proper to leave you without sharing one of my script ideas for the next Sick of Stimulus ad. And since I was sad to see the horrifying nerd with the shotgun from the Rabbit ad absent from Chickens, I'm bringing him back.

We dissolve into a shot inside a cramped prison cell. There we find the nerd in the Buddy Holly glasses cowering in the corner between his cot and the bars. He has a blond wig askew atop his head and lipstick smeared across his lower face. His clown-like visage is belied by the tears running freely down his face.

Cut to the creepy little blond girl standing on the other side of the bars, blocking the view of the nerd, but not completely.

"This is American small business", she intones flatly as we hear Buddy Holly whimpering. We see an enormous human-shaped shadow moving toward him on the back wall of the cell.

We cut to the nerd's African-American cellmate. The sleeves are cut off of his orange jumpsuit, revealing scars and poorly inked prison tattoos running up his heavily muscled arms.

Cut to the black predator hanging bedsheets across the bars. From out of the frame we hear the creepy blond girl's voice; "This is American small business under confiscatory corporate tax rates." The sound of a zipper being slowly lowered follows her declaration.

In silhouette, we see the giant cellmate viciously raping the nerd. We hear his screams as his rectum is being torn apart by the dusky marauder. The slender pale victim wants to defend his virtue, but he's so very afraid. He knows that you can't fight City Hall, let alone the huge cock of the IRS. 

"Say it, bitch!", we hear the prison rapist yell.

"I love you, Uncle Sam! You own me! I do it all for you!" Buddy Holly whimpers through his heaving sobs.

"Again, you pussy punk! Say it again!"

"I love you, Uncle Sam! You own me! I do it all for you!" He's now grunting the words as he's wailing from the pain of the assault.

The shot fades to black and fades back in, where we see the sheet covering the bars gone. The black rapist his holding his lilly-white prey to his chest and lovingly stroking the blond wig. The weaker man tries not to cry openly as his master places sweet kisses on the top of head. 

Creepy little blond girl steps into the shot and asks, "Any questions?"

Cut to a close up of the nerd, tears now running down his face uncontrollably, mortified by the fact that his indignity was witnessed by a nine year old girl. How in the fuck did she get into prison in the first place, he wonders. There is no sign of life left in his eyes. He's defeated and humiliated, but resigned to his fate. He knows, now and forever, who The Boss is. And it ain't Bruce Springsteen. This Boss is more like the late Clarence Clemons, except bigger, blacker, and he isn't the one doing the blowing. 

Cut back to creepy blond girl, who repeats, "Any questions?"

Fade into the cliff with Herman Cain and his sweater vest. The Sick of Stimulus logo appears over the sunset.

I really should've stayed in advertising school. It turns out that I'm pretty good at this! If you're a big-time Madison Avenue executive and want to pay me a ton of money to create disturbing imagery and have sex with busty redheaded secretaries, you can contact me at skippystalinATgmail.com or @skippystalin on Twitter. I smoke a lot, drink a ton and pretend that I'm someone I'm not, so I fit right into the Don Draper image that everyone loves so much these days.

I'll make us all rich!

Keystone, Canada and some facts about oil

The first vote I ever cast in my life was for Brian Mulroney's Progressive Conservative Party in 1988. The federal election was based on one issue, whether Canada should enter into a free trade agreement with the United States. If the circumstances today were the same as they were 24 years ago, I wouldn't hesitate to vote the same way again, but they aren't.

I first wrote about my support of Canada's withdrawal from NAFTA back in 2005. As it happens, the American political system makes it singularly incapable of living up to its treaty commitments. A single senator, or a group of them, can decide that free trade isn't in the economic interests of their constituents and force the administration to violate a treaty.

American presidents like to say that there's little that they can do from stopping their legislature from essentially abrogating a treaty that they themselves ratified. It arrogantly presumes that the other party to a treaty should actually care about U.S domestic politics, which it really shouldn't. A treaty is just that, a treaty. If American lawmakers can't bring themselves to live up to the laws that they've passed (which treaties are - apparently, so long as they don't involve torturing folks), then they have no business ratifying those treaties in the first place.

The fact is that the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations have repeatedly violated NAFTA without consequence, most egregiously during the softwood lumber dispute. The United States government essentially stole $5 billion from Canadian softwood exporters, which was ruled illegal no fewer than three times by the NAFTA arbitration panel and the World Trade Organization. As this was happening, the Bush administration also imposed steel tariffs that even they didn't deny were illegal and served no other purpose than a spectacularly failed manoeuvre to win Pennsylvania in 2004.

After the third ruling, President George W. Bush said that the matter needed "further negotiation." This is a fairly unique thing to hear from the American government, whose Supreme Court has held that evidence of actual innocence isn't enough to overturn a criminal conviction, including one that carries the death penalty. Bush, who carried out a record number of executions as governor of Texas, didn't seem particularly willing to negotiate after those convictions were brought down.

For reasons that still don't make sense, Stephen Harper decided to roll over and give the United States everything it wanted upon his election as prime minister in early 2006. Even though Canada won, we still managed to lose. It was tantamount to economic treason, and one of the many reasons that I've refused to ever support the Conservative Party under Harper.

The Obama administration later abused Harper's capitulation by including an illegal "Made in America" provision in their 2009 stimulus bill. However, anyone who has paid attention to the Democratic presidential primaries since 1992 knows that Democrats, especially the more liberal ones, aren't ideologically committed free traders. They're more pragmatic, willing to exploit their union stooges for votes, then go for the real money that free trade provides.

Free trade requires basic honesty to to succeed. Unfortunately, as I said back in 2005, the United States is to honest free trade what Saddam Hussein was to transparent weapons inspections. If Canada weren't run by such nutless wonders for the last decade and a half, we would've withdrawn from NAFTA.

The 1989 Free Trade Agreement made sense because there was no end in sight for America's economic dominance and the country had a reputation of electing adult presidents whose word could be trusted. Neither of the above have been true for at least a decade now. The last president I would trust to stand up to the reprobates in Congress on behalf of a legally binding treaty was George H.W. Bush, and he's been gone for awhile now. The last three American presidents have had trouble abiding by U.S law, let alone international obligations.

Given their history with free trade, the Republican party and their lapdog "conservative" pundits are the last people who should be lecturing anybody about anything. On the other hand, they seem to really enjoy lying and have come to be Olympic gold medallists in it.

Which brings me to the Keystone pipeline project, which is inspiring all kinds of new and breathtaking levels of dishonesty from what passes for the Right in the United States these days.

Republicans think that Canada is pissed at the U.S because Obama temporarily (and anyone who knows anything about politics knows that he's going to reverse himself immediately after the election) deferred Keystone's development. To be fair, Prime Minister Harper is dissembling mightily himself, in ways that I'll explain soon, mostly because he likes interfering in foreign elections.

Because Rupert Murdoch is essentially the foreign-born head of the GOP (when he isn't being distracted with the prospect of prison time in England), his newspapers are an excellent resource to research and debunk the party's talking points.

President Obama must be planning to skip this year’s presidential election and run for prime minister of Canada instead.

Why else, after all, would he be working so hard to help Canada open new markets for its oil outside the US and attract higher prices — even as motorists here are increasingly socked every time they fill up their tanks?

This of course ignores why oil prices are what they are. There are four reasons why everyone is getting gouged.

First, is increased demand, both in the United States and in India and China. Republicans, their rhetoric aside, don't seem to understand that when demand approaches supply, prices increase.

Canadian oil will be on the world market whether Keystone is built or not, so it won't affect price in any significant way. Keystone is the delivery system for a resource, not the resource itself. By the way, where do those people think they've been getting most of their oil for the last decade, anyway?

Then comes the futures market, which responds to world events and trends to determine price. Since the GOP displayed its obstinate refusal to regulate those markets in any way, shape or form in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis, it's hard to see how they expect Ottawa to help them.

One of the things that drives market speculation are the continuous threats by Republican ward-heelers to bomb, sanction or otherwise disrupt the Middle Eastern countries that produce most of the oil in the first place. I might be the only person who notices this, but the price of oil was considerably lower before the United States tried to turn the Muslim world into a swarthier version of Kentucky.

Finally, oil is a commodity that is traded in American dollars. Since George W. Bush became president, the value of the dollar has been cut roughly in half. Economists will tell you that when a currency loses value, it takes more of it to buy a product. Of course, Republicans can't tell you that because someone might point out that the dollar crashed and the cost of oil skyrocketed before Obama's election, and that fucks with their narrative.

Two of the major factors in price involve capitalism and the third is controlled by a completely voluntary, if wildly counter-productive, foreign policy. They have nothing at all to do with where you drill, how much, or how much you want to pervert the tax code to facilitate said drilling. And it doesn't have anything to do with Keystone or Canada.

The GOP demagogues out there are pretending that all, or even most, of this oil is destined for American cars, which it isn't.

Look at a map of the Keystone route. Notice that it ends at the refineries on the Gulf of Mexico? Those refineries are there for a reason, teenagers.

You see, the United States used to produce 50% of the world's oil. The oil would drilled, refined, and then shipped to foreign markets. Because building refineries is expensive and an environmental challenge, foreign producers now ship their crude to the Gulf of Mexico, where it refined and either sold in the U.S or shipped right back out.

Even with domestic prices where they are, a good percentage of American oil is still being shipped overseas for world consumption. What makes anyone think that the Alberta tarsands oil - which is mostly refined before leaving Canada - will be any different?

Harper, in Washington, cited Obama’s decision to kill the project, which would’ve created 30,000 American jobs along its path. He said the decision is forcing Canada to look elsewhere for customers.

No doubt, China, in particular.

“The very fact that a ‘no’ [to Keystone and Canada’s oil] could even be said underscores to our country that we must diversify our energy-export markets,” Harper said.

Diversification means new sales prospects for his country and can also allow it to make more money by raising prices.

As Harper explained: Canada takes “a significant price hit by virtue of the fact that we are a captive supplier” to the US — bound by treaty to provide much of its oil to its southern neighbor, even if other bidders are willing to pay more.

But what if Washington won’t take the oil?

“We cannot be . . . in a situation where really our one and, in many cases, almost only energy partner could say no to our energy products."

Harper's position is what is what trade experts commonly refer to as "horseshit."

Obama's not saying "no" to the oil. He's saying no (again, temporarily and for cynical political reasons) to the means of transporting the oil. In the decade since the Bush administration's destruction of the U.S dollar finally made tarsands oil profitable, that oil has been getting to the American market just fine.

As the Prime Minister pointed out in his back-handed and highly disingenuous Rose Garden remarks, Canada is "captive supplier." Or as the New York Post helpfully notes, we are "bound by treaty", specifically NAFTA, which requires us to supply the U.S even if we didn't have enough to service our own market, and it requires us to do so at a discount. Most Canadians are probably blissfully unaware that the same applies to fresh water.

It's an enormous logical leap on the part of Harper, the Post, and GOP dickheads everywhere that refusing Keystone constitutes a liberation of Canada from our treaty obligations. I - and honest people who have a reputation for knowing what they're talking about - can't believe that the NAFTA arbitration panel or the WTO would see it that way either.

Don't get me wrong. I wish that they would because that could be a predicate for Canadian withdrawal from NAFTA once and for all. We would then be able to diversify our economy on the international market and free ourselves from an increasingly bankrupt United States and its atavistic asshole politicians.

Republicans are now doing what the Democrats did for a generation, using a trade agreement that was signed twenty five years ago as a campaign season tool. Well, one of the reasons I originally wanted to get out of NAFTA was because I was exhausted by the Democrats doing that. The fact that the GOP has gotten in on the act means that it's never going to end. What both parties don't seem to understand is that their domestic political demagouging at home has the potential of causing economic instability here.

I also don't remember a choir of Republicans taking Canada's side when President Bush was repeatedly raping us on softwood and steel. That would be intellectually consistent, and that's well beyond your average Tea Partier.

But it is awfully nice to see American conservatives applaud when a foreign leader goes to the White House and very publicly pisses on the shoes of the President of the United States. I trust they'll feel the same way when it happens to one of their guys.


For even more of this electioneering nonsense, please go to Red State and read the ramblings of some guy named Repair Man Jack.