Category: It’s OK If You’re A Republican

We know who the real savage is, Pammy

~ susie ~ 6 Comments

pammy

*Here’s what the headline refers to.

This is Pam Geller’s hate group putting up these disgusting ads. Geller is the wingnut blogger who, through her batshit crazy blog “Atlas Shrugged”, devotes her life (and makes nice bit of cash doing so) attacking the usually-imaginary “Islamic threat.” Everything is a jihad, she attacks at fever pitch, and the louder she gets, the more money rolls into her group. (Not that she needs it, after her $4 million divorce settlement and then a $5 million insurance policy when her ex died.) She is, truly, a dreadful person. I hope passengers can exercise their own First Amendment rights by defacing these signs:

pam_Geller

When an anti-Islamic group decided to advertise on city buses and billboards this fall with photos of a terrorist poised to behead an American and a Muslim leader smiling at Adolf Hitler, transit officials in New York and Washington, D.C., huffed their disapproval – but allowed the ads to run.

They had no choice, they said, because the ads were protected under the First Amendment.

SEPTA’s officials disagreed and rejected the ads.

But the group behind the ads – the American Freedom Defense Initiative – won’t surrender quietly. The New Hampshire-based group sued SEPTA in federal court last week, complaining that the transit agency violated AFDI’s free-speech rights.

One local First Amendment expert says SEPTA picked an unwinnable fight.

“The most fundamental principle of the First Amendment is that you may never bar any message based upon the content of the message,” said Burton Caine, a law professor at Temple University and past president of the Philadelphia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. “This is absolutely prohibited, what SEPTA is doing.

“Everybody has this same idea that they like the First Amendment,” Caine said, “but when the speech is offensive, people will make all kinds of excuses why it’s not protected. The whole point of the First Amendment is to protect speech that offends. No exceptions.”

A federal judge said as much in 2012, ruling that the AFDI could post ads in New York City and Washington, D.C., that compared Muslim jihadists to “savages.”

Here’s Pam in classic wingnut attack mode, explaining to Ron Reagan Jr. that she knows his father better than he does:

Bet Texas wants gun control now

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

You knew this was going to happen:

Progressive radio host Thom Hartmann wonders how long it will take for Texas to change their open carry laws now that groups like the Huey P. Newton Gun Club are taking to the streets to protest.

As he discussed in the segment above, they used to have open carry in California as well, and that changed back in the 60’s when a conservative Republican state assemblyman, Don Mulford proposed legislation to put a stop to the Black Panthers showing up armed to the hilt any time they heard that an African American was being stopped on their police scanners.

Now that this is going on in Dallas, Texas, Hartmann wonders how long it’s going to take before we see the same thing happen there. As he noted, most of these open carry advocates don’t mind idiots running around with loaded firearms in public as long as they’re the right color.

Pennsyltucky budget process

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

TomCorbett

God, I hate PA Republicans. Just hate them. If the Capitol building collapsed and killed all of them, I’d say, “Oh, that’s such a shame.” But on the inside, I wouldn’t care.

Sen. Chuck McIlhinney (R., Bucks) said in a statement that he voted against it because he was angry about the budget plan’s allowance of additional gas drilling on state forest lands to raise revenue.

Senate Republicans had been willing to consider raising revenue through tax increases – including a new tax on the extraction of natural gas from the Marcellus Shale – but Republicans in the House took a hard line against any new or increased taxes.

Under the Republican plan, spending would increase by about 2.5 percent over the previous year – but the package also adds $220 million to that year’s budget. Though there would be increases for public schools and social safety-net programs, they are not what Corbett originally asked for when he unveiled his proposal this year.

For instance, Republicans are seeking to pare back Corbett’s “Ready to Learn” program from $240 million to $100 million. Philadelphia stands to receive $33.7 million under Ready to Learn.

Republicans have also been unable to agree on a plan to rein in the cost of public employee pensions. The Senate late Monday did pass a bill that would require elected officials, including legislators, judges, the governor, and the attorney general, to move into a 401(k)-style plan.

But that is a far cry from the overhaul Corbett is seeking, which would affect all new employees.

On Sunday, Corbett and House Republican leaders had given Philadelphia Democrats an ultimatum: Vote for the GOP pension plan in return for Republican support for an increase to the cigarette tax in the city.

Democrats criticized the ultimatum as political horse trading that holds the welfare of Philadelphia schoolchildren hostage.

One of my friends just suggested we secede from the state and form our own. After all, we send a lot more money to the state than they send back!

H/t Shawn Sukumar Attorney at Law.

Flailing

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

John Boehner

Shameless John Boehner, doing what he has to do to keep his job:

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) confirmed Wednesday that he will file a federal lawsuit challenging the executive actions of President Barack Obama, despite supporting President George W. Bush’s extensive use of executive authority.

Boehner said at a news conference, “You know the constitution makes it clear that the president’s job is to faithfully execute the laws and in my view the President has not faithfully executed the laws.” He added that the suit was “about defending the institution in which we serve” because “what we’ve seen clearly over the past 5 years is an effort to erode the power of the legislative branch.” He refused to say which specific actions he believes to be illegal.

President Obama has issued about 180 executive orders — a power that has been utilized byevery president since George Washington except for the brief-tenured William Henry Harrison — and taken other executive actions. A Boehner spokesman denounced these as “a clear record of ignoring the American people’s elected representatives and exceeding his constitutional authority, which has dangerous implications for both our system of government and our economy.”

But Boehner embraced the power of a Republican president to take action, even at times when he would circumvent Congress by doing so. President George W. Bush’s issuedhundreds of orders of his own over his eight years in office. In 2001 and 2007, Boehner strongly supported unilateral actions by Bush to prevent embryonic stem-cell research involving new embryos, saying the 2001 decision “preserves the sanctity of life and allows limited research that could help millions of Americans suffering from life-threatening diseases.” He endorsed a 2008 Bush executive order to limit earmarks. In the final days of Bush’s second term, he even wrote to the president asking him to use an executive order to exempt a historic steamboat from safety regulations after Congress opted not to do so.

Short-term memory

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

John Boehner

Notice how Republican principles only apply to Democratic presidents?

WASHINGTON (AP) — House Speaker John Boehner (BAY’-nur) is talking about suing President Barack Obama for allegedly exceeding his constitutional authority when it comes to administering the laws that Congress passes.

Boehner has frequently accused Obama of picking and choosing what portions of laws to enforce, sometimes by issuing executive orders. That is particularly so for health care and immigration. Spokesman Michael Steel says the Ohio Republican told members of the GOP rank-and-file a lawsuit is possible, but didn’t provide details.

Steel also noted the House has passed legislation on two occasions attempting to rein in Obama’s actions, but the Democratic-controlled Senate has refused to act on them.

Almost heaven, Arizona

~ susie ~ 6 Comments

John Huppenthal

I would sooner have my nose twisted off my face than retire in Arizona, mostly because the thought of spending what’s left of my life surrounded by smug white people in golf clothes, spouting teabagger philosophy, is more than I can bear. Yes, I know there are some good people in the state, but I kinda suspect people like the state schools superintendent are in the majority:

Huppenthal’s comments included calling people who receive public assistance “lazy pigs” and he went on to put the blame of the Great Depression solely on the shoulders of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He also claimed that the president wrote in his memoir that “he was born in Kenya!!!”

Under the name Falcon9, he wrote, “We now know that (Franklin D. Roosevelt) was almost completely responsible for the great depression. Only in liberal mythology did FDR ‘save’ the nation. … Worse yet, Roosevelt’s disastrous economic policies drug down the whole world and directly led to the rise of a no-name hack named Adolph Hitler who was going nowhere until Germany’s economy went into the tank.”

According to AZFamily, Falcon9 wrote on Blog for Arizona that “successful small businessmen/job creators are being taxed to death.”

The post continued: “Meanwhile, Obama is rewarding the lazy pigs with food stamps (44 million people), air-conditioning, free health care, flat-screen TV’s (typical of ‘poor’ families).” (Parentheses were in the original post.)

Prosecutors: Gov. Walker at center of ‘criminal scheme’

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

TBO_9796 (2)

Oh dear, the Republicans seem to be running out of presidential candidates!

Madison — Prosecutors allege Gov. Scott Walker was at the center of an effort to illegally coordinate fundraising among conservative groups to help his campaign and those of Republican state senators fend off recall elections during 2011 and ’12, according to documents unsealed Thursday.

In the documents, prosecutors lay out what they call an extensive “criminal scheme” to bypass state election laws by Walker, his campaign and two top Republican political operatives — R.J. Johnson and Deborah Jordahl.

The governor and his close confidants helped raise money and control spending through 12 conservative groups during the recall elections, according to the prosecutors’ filings.

The documents include an excerpt from an email in which Walker tells Karl Rove, former top adviser to President George W. Bush, that Johnson would lead the coordination campaign. Johnson is also Walker’s longtime campaign strategist and the chief adviser to Wisconsin Club for Growth, a conservative group active in the recall elections.

“Bottom-line: R.J. helps keep in place a team that is wildly successful in Wisconsin. We are running 9 recall elections and it will be like 9 congressional markets in every market in the state (and Twin Cities),” Walker wrote to Rove on May 4, 2011.

Walker, who is running for re-election and is considered a possible 2016 presidential candidate, responded Thursday by criticizing the case that prosecutors were trying to build.

The Rude Pundit tells us how he’d interview Iraq war hawks

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Paul Wolfowitz

The Rude Pundit:

If the Rude Pundit were the host of the great and mighty Meet the Press, the wheezing old man of the Sunday morning gabfests that pretend to serious talk about political shit that actually matters to the actual lives of actual people, and he had as a guest the former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, the man who pushed and pushed for the U.S. to invade Iraq back in the day, he might ask, as host David Gregory did, “[W]hat do you do then, as a policy matter now to stop this?”

“This” is the expanding civil war between the Shi’ites and Sunnis, with an insouciant flavor of Kurd peeking through. You know, that thing that was going to happen the moment the U.S. military left Iraq, no matter how long.. That thing that all of us were predicting.

So he might ask the question, but Wolfowitz would immediately get punched in the nuts by the Rude Pundit because that’s what you do. It’d be a pattern for pretty much every talk show. Weekly Standard editor and man who is wrong about everything, William Kristol, might be able to say, as he did on Morning Starbucks with Joe this morning, “Is this an acceptable outcome for the 4,500 Americans soldiers who died in Iraq or the 2,000 who died in Afghanistan?” But then he’d get punched in the nuts.

Richard Perle, who, with Wolfowitz, helped push the Bush administration into war, was on the public radio show The Takeaway this morning, blathering about how he was right about toppling Saddam Hussein and then everyone else fucked the whole thing up. Host John Hockenberry engaged Perle in a conversation when, frankly, he should have been punched in the nuts. All of ’em. Every singe goddamned one.

Paul Bremer. Just pound the shit out of their nutsacks so that every time they even think of commenting on the sectarian violence in Iraq, they get a pain that makes them need to shit themselves instead of the pain. It’s the only way to guarantee that they’ll shut the fuck up about the need to go back to Iraq.

Oh look

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Debt Collection

GOPers voting for tax cuts without paying for them!

At this point, congressional Republicans no longer even try to justify the rhetorical contradictions. When Democrats want to make any kind of public investment, even after a natural disaster, GOP officials insist every penny must be fully paid for without raising anyone’s taxes by any amount at any time.
But when those same Republican lawmakers want to cut taxes, they magically discover that the deficitisn’t so important after all.
The House on Thursday passed two bills to permanently extend tax credits that expired at the end of 2013 despite veto threats from the Obama administration.
The more expensive of the two tax measures the House passed, 272-144, extends a provision known as Section 179 that allows small businesses to write off up to $500,000 worth of investments a year. […]
The House also passed, 263-155, a pair of incentives, packaged together in one bill, to help a type of small business known as S corporations. S corporations do not pay federal income taxes and instead pass along income to their shareholders, who then report that on their personal tax returns.
The final roll call on the first bill is here, the roll call on the second is here. Both enjoyed near-unanimous support from the same House Republicans who believe the United States is facing a debt crisis and that the budget deficit risks destroying future generations’ lives.