Talk is Cheap; Republican Bullshit is Very Expensive

So now our deficit hawks want to continue the Bush tax cuts, enact more tax cuts for the rich, expand our already bloated defense budget, and now they have even given up on their token issue to pretend they cared about spending:

Hypocrisy alert: House Republican freshmen are begging their leaders to bring back a certain type of earmark so that they can help companies back home in an election year.
In a letter to Speaker John Boehner and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, 65 House Republican freshmen — or roughly three-quarters of the class — asked that the House consider a miscellaneous tariff bill jam-packed with special provisions to suspend duties on various foreign goods, even though it runs counter to the earmark ban Republicans campaigned on in 2010 and instituted when they took power.

The push is a sign that freshmen who arrived in Washington talking up their anti-pork principles are now worried about what — if anything — they’ll have to show constituents when they hit the campaign trail. And, in typical Washington fashion, they think they’ve found a loophole that will get them past the ban.

Because, you know, they are fiscal conservatives. Why anyone believes these bullshit artists is simply beyond me.

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Smoking Bans are Like The Holocaust

Here’s John Raese, who is running against Manchin:

He’s talking about the newly established smoking ban:

Smokers can no longer light up in bars, restaurants and workplaces in Monongalia County. The countywide smoking ban goes into effect today.

Hookah lounges and cigar bars that meet the county Board of Health’s definition are the only exemptions to the new law.

Monongalia County Health Department staff will start routine inspections next week, said Jon Welch, program manager for public health environmental services.

This small government conservative wants the feds or the state to override the decision of the local community.

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Manger Danger

Good old lunatic Bill Donohue, always good for a laugh:

This episode of “The Daily Show” was done to protest Fox’s alleged indifference to the “war on women,” and in doing so Stewart not only made a vulgar attack on Christians, he objectified women.

We are asking Stewart to apologize. If he does not, we will mobilize Protestants, Jews, Mormons and Muslims to join us in a boycott of his sponsors. Moreover, we will not stop with a boycott; there are other things that can be done to register our outrage. We are prepared to spend the money it takes to make this a nationwide issue, and we are prepared to stay the course. Tomorrow we will have something definitive to say, one way or the other.

They are going to boycott Jon Stewart because he said “vagina manger.”

Seriously.

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Early Morning Open Thread: Equal Time for the Graphic Guys

Since Tom’s already highlighted the Pulitzer photography awards, here’s Dave Weigel at Slate on the award for political cartooning:

...[I]t’s notable that Politico’s Pulitzer went not to any of its reporting (its scoop-a-minute debt limit coverage, for example), but to cartoonist Matt Wuerker. The cartoonist is the only outright liberal voice in a magazine all about ideology-free reportage on Washington/campaigns…

... Wuerker cut his teeth at publications like The Nation and Z… poke around the vast Internet, and you can find lots of Wuerker art with a strong POV. It’s a delightful little irony that the publication so often derided by the left as “Drudgico” has won its first Pulitzer for cartoons that made the Left’s arguments.

I haven’t seen much of Wuerker’s work, and Politico’s awards slideshow highlights arguments as sophisticated as a hammer and a drawing style just slightly more advanced than Ted Rall’s. Two swabbies labelled ‘John’ and ‘Mitch’ jeering “Here’s the plan. We let him go down… then we get to run the ship!” as Captain O, Nancy, and Harry frantically bail red ink from the sinking U.S.S. USA does not leave much room for interpretation, but there’s virtue in clarity, I guess.

Speaking of jabbering cartoons, Weigel also shares the latest from Louie Gohmert (R-Tea Party):

Eleven House conservatives, most of them freshmen, held a joint media meet-up this afternoon. No real agenda. The theme was “conversations with conservatives.” And the first question that tripped anybody up, from The Hill’s Russ Berman, was whether members were “excited” about incoming Republican nominee Mitt Romney.

“Well, first, we’re excited about the opportunity to defeat Barack Obama, more than anything,” said Rep. Jim Jordan, the shirtsleeved chairman of the Republican Study Committee….

Rep. Louie Gohmert, the aggressively quotable former judge from Texas, basically conceded the point. “If you’re not sure about whether to support Mitt Romney,” he joked, “whether you’re liberal, or whether you’re very conservative, you ought to be excited, because he’s been on your side at one time or another.”...

Gohmert returned to clean up his splatter. “So I’m not completely misunderstood,” he said, “I’m not as excited as I am desperate.”

I’m sure Mark Halperin will tell us that this is excellent news for John McCain “Mitt” Romney…

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An Interesting Legal Stance

Awesome:

Here’s a sign of just how big and messy the foreclosure problem is: Bank of America has sued itself at least nine times in the month of April.

That’s what lawyer and fraud expert Lynn Szymoniak discovered recently during a search for foreclosure filings in Palm Beach county Florida.”There are likely at least 100 examples of the same thing happening across the state,” Szymoniak says.

But Szymoniak says it sounds like “poor lawyering” on the part of BofA. She adds, “Someone was likely looking at the records to find anyone who could possibly have interest in the foreclosure suits. Bank of America probably owned the second mortgage and because they were using people who were simply filling out forms rather than using brain matter they just listed everyone including the bank itself.”

I’m going to sue myself for a billion dollars. I sure hope I win, cuz then I’ll be as rich as Romney.

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The War On Women Is Real

TDS:

As someone who doesn’t watch Fox news, ever, the little clips of Doocy and those other clowns are just terrifying. They really talk like that? With those odd, over-exaggerated mannerisms and weird tones? If I didn’t know any better, I would think it was an SNL clip mocking them. But it’s real.

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The Newest Outrage

Hillary getting jiggy with it.

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We Can Read That, You Know

Dear winger nutjob public officials writing stupid bigoted stuff on social media:  Hi there!

The Miami-Dade Fire and Rescue Department opened an investigation into a racist post on one of its captains’ Facebook page. According to The Grio, Brian Beckmann, a captain in the Miami-Dade fire department, posted a rant on his Facebook page suggesting that Trayvon Martin shooter George Zimmerman was unjustly accused and that Martin’s killing can be blamed upon poor parenting by “urban” parents who are “welfare dependent”.

Naah, people don’t read Facebook or anything. Your lousy racist screed? Nobody will see it. You know, except for possibly anyone on Facebook. Or on the internet. But what are the odds of that, right?

So, we’ll be in the “public apology” phase by the end of the day, followed by the “suspension pending investigation” phase, the “close-minded PC Libtards are afraid of the truth!” phase and eventually the “hope people have forgotten about it/quietly reinstated” phase, when it will all be repeated by the next bigoted slimebucket who wants to “tell the truth” about those people, just like it’s been going on for the last four years now in the spotlight and long since before out of it.

But what do I know, I’m just a ghetto hoodie hood rat with shitbag parents. Bonus points for packing in misogyny, class warfare and the media too, and it’s even spelled correctly. Hey, that’s why he made Captain, right?

[UPDATE]  Via Southern Beale in the comments, I see Charles Pierce goes Level 3 Super Combo on this one and crushes it out of the park.

The hell of it all is, I am not surprised by anything anymore, except for the stubborn stupidity of people who believe that anything they post on Facebook, or tweet around the Twitterverse, is in anyway private. It’s like those politicians who affect shock when they discover that the camera’s on, or that the tape recorder actually works.

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Wanker Of The Decade 3rd Runner Up

Atrios has announced the 3rd runner up for Wanker Of The Decade, and it’s none other than Joe Kline.
Which is about right.

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Congratulations, Arizona Women- Every Single One of You Is Now Officially Pregnant

According to Jan Brewer and the deep thinkers in the Arizona legislature:

Life starts earliest in Arizona, which now defines gestational age as beginning on the first day of a woman’s last period, rather than at fertilization. In practice, that means the state has banned abortions after about 18 weeks (20 weeks from the last menstruation) except in the case of medical emergencies. While that provision has been much discussed, abortions after that point account for only about 1 percent of the procedures currently performed.

The stipulation likely to be most widely felt is what experts are calling an effective shutdown of medication abortions. These nonsurgical abortions are usually performed within the first nine weeks of pregnancy, and account for between 17 and 20 percent of all abortions, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive-rights advocacy group. While women often take the pills at clinics and in their homes, the bill now mandates that a medical provider must have hospital privileges within 30 miles of where the procedure takes place. Many times clinics or homes are not within 30 miles of hospitals, and the distance prevents providers from other cities or even states from caring for women, says Elizabeth Nash of the Guttmacher Institute. Another factor that could contribute to what Nash called a “shutdown” of medication abortions is that the law requires abortion pills to be administered using outdated protocols, confusing providers and obscuring proper use of the drugs.

Now that Arizona has decided to separate being pregnant from when you actually become pregnant, every single woman is, according to the law, pregnant the moment they begin their last period, and will remain officially pregnant until the beginning of your very next period. There will apparently be a 1 day window in between these two events in which you are not officially pregnant.

Down the rabbit hole we go.

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The Best Defense is a Good Offense Unless Maybe the Defense Should Just STFU

Is this really the best defense that can be afforded George Zimmerman:

In trying to portray his client in as sympathetic terms as possible, Zimmerman’s new attorney Mark O’Mara said this evening that Zimmerman is “troubled by everything that has happened.” O’Mara added, “Truly, it must be frightening to not be able to go into a 7/11 or into a store and literally to be in fact a prisoner wherever he was.”

This is allegedly George Zimmerman’s defense attorney making the case. Apparently he is unaware that Trayvon Martin was killed by his client for… going to 7/11.

Is this really the best the legal community can do in a high profile case? Is everyone in this country just a total moran?

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The Sounds of Silence

Posted without comment:

That’s no way to get invited to a barbecue, Sam.

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Marky Mark

Atrios names Halperin his #4 Runner-Up for Wanker of the Decade. Inexplicably, Atrios fails to mention this episode, in which Halperin insisted that McCain not knowing how many houses he had during the 2008 election was good news for McCain.

You really have to appreciate his logic. McCain can’t answer a reporters question, so therefore AYERS! It’s really Halperin’s crowning achievement.

You have to appreciate how stupid something is for Will, McCain, and George Steph to mock it.

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Looks Like Lowry Spoke Too Soon

Remember this statement from Rich Lowry the other day:

Needless to say, no one at National Review shares Derb’s appalling view of what parents supposedly should tell their kids about blacks in this instantly notorious piece here.

Oops:

Unbeknowst to us, occasional Phi Beta Cons contributor Robert Weissberg (whose book was published a few years ago by Transaction) participated in an American Renaissance conference where he delivered a noxious talk about the future of white nationalism. He will no longer be posting here. Thanks to those who brought it to our attention.

I hate it when that happens.

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Steal This Bike

Via Gawker, The Daily Caller’s Mark Judge lives in DC and is white.  His bike was stolen last week.  This means that because DC’s population is mostly black, that Mark Judge is now free to unleash his inner racist upon the Capital, unfettered by “guilt” or “the common sense God gave a spiny echidna” or “humanity”.  Handy!

When I got home I vented to my friends. I told them I was going to scour those neighborhoods until I found the bike. In reply, a liberal friend gave me a lecture about profiling and told me to just forget about the bike. “That person needs our prayers and help,” she said. “They haven’t had the advantages we have.”

That’s when I lost it. I had been carefully educated by liberal parents that we are all, black and white, the same. My favorite movie growing up was “In the Heat of the Night.” Yet that often meant not treating everyone the same. It meant treating blacks with a mixture of patronizing condescension and obsequious genuflecting to their Absolute Moral Authority gained from centuries of suffering. It meant not treating everyone the same.

It meant leaving valuable things like a bike in a vulnerable position in a black part of town because you didn’t want to admit that the crime is worse in poor black neighborhoods.

I decided that I’m just going to let go of my white guilt. We’re all human, we all experience pain in our lives. And black pain is no different than white pain.

It felt good to say it: Black pain is no different than white pain. I’m tired of people using the moral authority of past generations for their own personal gain and self-aggrandizement. Soledad O’Brien, a Harvard graduate, acts like she just stepped off the Amistad.

Sure.  It’s cool to ignore, belittle, and denigrate the black experience because you’re tired of black people basically being black in your life, and if we would just stop being black, right?  Like Trayvon Martin?  Like those five shooting victims in Tulsa?  Like President Obama and the Obama family?

See, here’s what guys like Mark here mean by “white guilt” and that is “I really don’t like black people, and I really want to affix blame for racism in America on them exclusively, because I’m sick of having to keep the presence of mind to not offend them and I really haven’t taken the time to try to understand them outside media stereotypes and the right wing bashing on the President for the last four years, and besides being a racist ass is just easier.”

So yeah, another guy goes and “speaks the truth about blacks” and he’ll be “unfairly persecuted in our overly politically correct society”.  Which is where garbage like this always ends up in the end, down the same chute of racism as the rest.

Can’t wait to hear the defense on this one.  But of course it’s our fault because we had to have collectively stolen his bike, right?  And most of all throughout American history privileged white males have of course been the real victims of the last 250 years, right?

Jesus wept.

[UPDATE]  And we have a winner in the “Can’t wait to hear the defense on this one” from MacRanger over at Macsmind.

There are black ass clowns, black racists, black murderers, rapists and even idiots running the country. We have no reason to feel guilty for that. In fact as I’ve told you on many occassions I’m 2nd generation Irish. Never felt guilt, didn’t have to. The Irish had nothing to do with the treatment of Blacks in this country and in fact in many ways were treated even worse.

It’s time to push back against liberals who have goaded whites into guilt. In light of the crimes blacks have committed against whites in the last 100 years, I say it’s even. Move on.

Really?  I mean I know Lionel Richie’s new country album is pretty bad, but…

(Cross-posted at ZVTS)

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