Category: Wing Nuts

The whiners

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

Gin and Tacos:

The iconic political image of the post-Reagan era, for my money, is the 2003 Schwarzenegger campaign (in the California gubernatorial recall election) using “We’re Not Gonna Take It” by Twisted Sister as its theme song. To see Arnold and his fellow Orange County millionaires on stage stiffly pumping their fists to a dated song about the terrible unfairness of it all was…rich. It requires the kind of total lack of self-awareness usually found only in ancillary characters in slasher movies.

If there’s one thing I honestly, legitimately do not understand about politics, it’s how so many well-off conservatives have managed to convince themselves that they are the victims of an unfair society. They are the luxuriously oppressed, the forgotten, long-suffering minority that has everything that money can buy. The urge to grab these people, shake them, and scream “WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOUR LIFE? WHAT DO YOU NOT HAVE? HOW ARE YOUR NEEDS GOING UNFULFILLED?” is overwhelming. With right-wingers I know well, I have actually done this on more than one occasion. The amount of delusion necessary to allow someone to sit in front of a 70″ TV in a giant house with two luxury cars in the garage and complain about the unfairness of it all is incomprehensible.

Go read the rest.

Another governor rejects Medicaid expansion

~ odd man out

I guess this guy didn’t get the message that Republican governors “are thawing their icy resolve against expanding Medicaid under Obamacare.” From Huffington Post:

South Dakota Gov. Dennis Daugaard (R) opposes providing health benefits to more than 40,000 “able-bodied” poor people by expanding the state’s Medicaid program under President Barack Obama’s health care reform law, he told legislators Tuesday…

…If South Dakota were to expand Medicaid under Obamacare, its costs would be would $5.6 billion between 2014 and 2022 while the federal government would send $11.4 billion to the state, according to the Urban Institute and the Kaiser Family Foundation. But if South Dakota doesn’t expand Medicaid, the state will still spend $5.5 billion more because it is responsible for more than 40 percent of the expense of covering the 6,000 residents already entitled to the program but not enrolled, according to the study…

Wingnuts don’t worry about arithmetic.

Texas petitioners: Let my people go

~ odd man out

Roughly 80,000 petition-signing good ol’ boys ‘n’ girls have had it up to their 10-gallon hats with a federal government that insists on meddling in the affairs of their home state, cruel and unusual Texas. The New Republic recently addressed their grievances:

…Maybe the solution is simply to give Texas and other secessionist-conservatives what they really want: free passage to the land of all their conservative fantasies. Send them all off with gratis one-way tickets (I’m happy to earmark some of my socialist tax dollars for the effort) to a country with: a small federal government with limited power and meager influence over the private lives of its citizens; extremely weak trade unions routinely sabotaged by the federal government (i.e., a “pro-business environment”); negligible income tax; few immigrants, legal or otherwise; a dominant Christian population, accounting for some 70 percent of the people; no mandatory health insurance or concept of universal health care; a strong social taboo surrounding homosexuality and a constitution that already states, “All individuals have the right to marry a person of their choice of the opposite sex”; and a gun culture so ubiquitous that you can find automatic weaponry displayed openly on the streets of its capital city and in many households.

Sound like a Texan secessionist’s dream? Well, it’s no dream. This country already exists. It’s called the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Reality bites Rush

~ odd man out ~ 5 Comments

Re Rush’s use of “we”: Did he mean the Republican Party or white supremacists? Is there a difference? From The Inquisitr:

Controversial radio host Rush Limbaugh isn’t so much sad that President Obama won re-election as he is dismayed that Republicans seem to be losing the national conversation…

…Limbaugh announced on his radio show Wednesday that “we are outnumbered” now in the US, and called President Barack Obama’s re-election victory “the trend” from now on.

“We have to face some truths, we have to face some reality,” Limbaugh said. “We are outnumbered and we are losing ground. This was not a glitch. This is the trend. That happened last night. This is the trend. We are outnumbered. Whether you want to put it in terms of have we lost the country or not, there’s no other explanation.”

More benefits? Only if you were raped and can prove it

~ odd man out ~ 1 Comment

ThinkProgress reports on an immodest proposal regarding poor mothers and newborns:

…Despite the fact that low-income women who give birth to children would logically need increased assistance to care for their larger family, Pennsylvania lawmakers — State Reps. RoseMarie Swanger (R), Tom Caltagirone (D), Mark Gillen (R), Keith Gillespie (R), Adam Harris (R), and Mike Tobash (R) — don’t want their state’s welfare program to provide additional benefits for that newborn. If a woman gives birth to a child who was conceived from rape, she may seek an exception to this rule so that her welfare benefits aren’t slashed, but only if she can provide proof that she reported her sexual assault and her abuser’s identity to the police…

Repeat after me — turnout is key

~ odd man out ~ 1 Comment

Alternet on the danger of complacency:

…The truth is, national polls don’t amount to a hill of beans in this election. What counts is turnout and, as AlterNet reported in July, political operative and former Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed is putting together an impressive get-out-the-vote operation, via his organization, Faith and Freedom Coalition, which funded by right-wing billionaires. Now that the New York Times weighed in with a front-page Sunday piece by Jo Becker about Reed’s organizing, perhaps the liberal establishment will take a deep breath and reassess whether its triumphalism is warranted — or even helpful to the liberal cause…

David Freed, PA Republican Candidate for AG, Piggie of the Week.

~ susie

Our Piggie of the Week is a Pennsylvania special: Republican candidate for attorney general, David Freed.

Freed is all class: he used a 16 year old rape victim in a dishonest attack ad against Democrat Kathy Kane.  Turns out Freed was lying, which we learned when the victim’s father spoke out.

So if you wonder what it means to be a Pennsylvania Republican, there you have it.

Also available in green, orange, and at our youtube channel.

This week with witless Ann Coulter

~ odd man out ~ 2 Comments

Michael B. Keegan, on the difference between a provocateur and an insulting ignoramus:

When you put Ann Coulter on TV, she may say something provocative. She is also guaranteed to say something offensive, tasteless, and meant only purely to provoke controversy. These are not the same thing.

George Stephanopoulos, host of ABC’s This Week, appears to have forgotten the difference between provocative discussion and straight-up trolling.

Last Sunday, This Week invited Coulter to participate in a roundtable discussion for the third time this year. Reliably, Coulter managed to fit as many ignorant and insulting statements as she could in her time on national television while shamelessly plugging her latest book. She announced that civil rights are only “for blacks” – not for “gay rights groups, those defending immigrants, and feminists.” She continued, “We don’t owe the homeless. We don’t owe feminists. We don’t owe women who are desirous of having abortions, or gays who want to get married to one another.”

We could spend our time countering Coulter’s anti-gay, anti-immigrant, anti-feminist, anti-homeless rant, but that would be a waste of time. Her cheap attempts at provocation have kept her in the public eye for years but have never, as far as I know, led to a productive discussion. Her attacks on 9/11 widows, women voters, abortion providers, Jews and Muslims are not designed to start an honest conversation. Instead, they were shameless attempts at self-promotion at the expense of decency and civility.

Coulter is a wag without wit whose only talent is for tireless self-promotion. The fact that the mainstream media has to rely om her as a “provocative” spokeswoman for right-wing points of view speaks volumes about how low the media and American conservatism have sunk.

Subtle as a flying tomahawk

~ odd man out

From Huffington Post:

The chief of the Cherokee Nation on Wednesday demanded an apology from Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) for what he called an “uneducated, unenlightened and racist portrayal of native peoples” by senior staff on his campaign and in his Senate office.

At a recent campaign rally, senior Brown staffers led a crowd of Brown supporters in a series of “war whoop chants” and “tomahawk chops,” an attempt to mock Elizabeth Warren for citing her Native American ancestry in a Harvard guidebook…

The Cherokees might wait a long time. Brown can’t distance himself from the Romneybot’s agenda. He took the low road out of desperation because he knows he can’t make a credible case for Republican wing-nut ideas.