'As Societies Grow Decadent, The Language Grows Decadent, Too'

That Gore Vidal quote, continued: "Words are used to disguise, not illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests."

Apt words if you believe what Republicans say about the deficit.

Here's Ezra Klein:

The new Republican line is that there's a “Democrat tax hike" on the way. And it's a big 'un: "An unprecedented $3.8 trillion increase" that will affect -- and this is their bold and underline, not mine -- "every American who pays income taxes!"

To understand what's going on here, you need to go back 10 years to the passage of the Bush tax cuts. In order to maximize the size of the cuts, Republicans had to minimize the influence of minority Democrats on the package. So they chose to run the bill through the reconciliation process.

But that posed some challenges. Budget reconciliation had never been used to increase the deficit. In fact, it specifically existed to decrease the deficit. That's why one of its rules was that you couldn't use it to increase the deficit outside the budget window. Republicans realized they could take that very literally: The budget window was 10 years. So if the tax cuts expired after 10 years, they wouldn't increase the deficit outside the budget window. They'd also have the added benefit of appearing less costly in the Congressional Budget Office's estimates, as the CBO duly scored them as expiring after 10 years, which kept the long-range budget picture from exploding.

But the plan was never to have the tax cuts expire. Instead, the idea was that people would get used to the new tax rates, and no future Congress would want to allow a big tax increase, so when the time came, either Republicans in office would extend the cuts or Republicans in the minority would hammer Democrats until they extended them. And that's where we are now: Democrats control the government, so Republicans are screaming about tax increases as a way to get Democrats to extend tax cuts.

It's really hard to know where to start with this one. It's not a tax increase passed into law by Democrats. It's a reversion to old tax rates passed into law by Republicans. It's not how law is supposed to work. It's the result of twisting a budget process meant to reduce the deficit so you could use it to massively increase the deficit. And as for the policy itself, it's a fiscal nightmare: No one who professes concern for short-term deficits can argue for the extension of these deficit-financed tax cuts and retain credibility on debt issues. This is a litmus test. It's not Democrats who are trying to pass the largest tax hike of all time, but Republicans who are calling for the largest increase in the deficit in memory.

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Salon: A Conservative's Guide To Responding To Libya

Click image twice for larger view.

Click here for original piece.

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Donald Trump At CPAC: Arrogant Nimrod Hints At White House Run

From Gawker:

The first day of this year's all-important Conservative Political Action Conference, a summit for top Republican politicians and operatives heading into a presidential election cycle, wasn't dominated by Newt Gingrich or Tim Pawlenty or any other actual Republican politician. It was Donald Trump, the wealthy television clown, who stole the show with the blunt, meandering speech he'd invited himself to deliver at the last minute.
Why was Donald Trump even at this conference for dyed-in-the-wool conservative activists and humorless Ayn Rand cultists? Apparently he's still pretending to consider a run for the Republican presidential nomination, just like he was four months ago. And in his speech today he said he'd reach a decision by June, which gives him another four months to win cheap headlines by pretending to consider a run for president.
His speech, like all good Donald Trump speeches, was a stream-of-consciousness flushing of whatever arrogant quips were swirling through his thick head at the time. Here's a sampler:
"If I run and if I win," he said, "this country will be respected again. I can tell you that."

Jesus Christ, the Republican Party sure does trot out a stable of diseased horses, doesn't it?
Anyway, there's more here, including video of The Donald pissing off conservatives by telling them Ron Paul has "zero" chance of being elected president.
(Spoiler alert--it didn't go over very well...)

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'Very Fit Fun Classy Guy' Resigns

(H/T: Gawker)

Rep. Christopher Lee (R-NY) had big plans:


But then he went on Craigslist, and--pffft...

According to USA Today:

Rep. Chris Lee, R-N.Y., abruptly resigned Wednesday after the gossip website Gawker disclosed that the married congressman had e-mailed a shirtless picture of himself to a woman he met through Craigslist.

Shortly after arriving in Washington in 2009, (Lee) supported legislation that would have barred members of Congress from receiving a scheduled pay raise, according to The Almanac of American Politics. He recently joined dozens of GOP lawmakers in pushing legislation that sought to restrict abortions by eliminating tax breaks to employers if the health coverage they provide covers abortions.

Congressional career: aborted.

(Cost to taxpayers = zero! Craigslist is free!)


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Here's The Least We Could Do

From ABC News:

"I'm looking at the lay of the land now, and ... trying to figure that out, if it's a good thing for the country, for the discourse, for my family, if it's a good thing," (Sarah) Palin said in an interview scheduled to air in full Dec. 9 on ABC as part of (Barbara) Walters' "10 Most Fascinating People" of 2010.
Asked Walters: "If you ran for president, could you beat Barack Obama?"
"I believe so," Palin said.

Note to self: research expatriate job opportunities.

This Is Your Country

From "The 45 Dumbest Signs At The 9/12 Tea Party Rally."

Really? Only 45?

See them all here: http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/the-45-dumbest-signs-at-the-912-teabagger-rally

Dime Store Mannequins Say The Darndest Things.

From Benjamin Bell in the Boston Herald:

Former Gov. Mitt Romney seemed to be in a state of hysteria Monday - a day before President Obama signed legislation that will usher in sweeping reforms of the nation’s health care system. In a statement on the House passage of the health care bill, Romney excoriated Obama, saying “America has just witnessed an unconscionable abuse of power. President Obama has betrayed his oath to the nation.”
But behind those caustic words is of course a man who, himself signed a universal health care bill into law for this great state. In the coming months and years, Romney is bound to assert that the two plans are completely different - but that is a losing strategy. The American attention span is getting smaller not larger. We communicate in 140 characters now. Engaging in a debate over the intricacies of the different types of universal health care plans is not something people want to do. So the reality is this: Romney supported universal health care in Massachusetts and he looks duplicitous bashing Obama’s plan when his plan was quite similar.

Mitt's a hypocrite? Huh. Must be runnin' for somethin'...

This Is Your Country.

Nitwit Republicans and their valets in the echo chamber have been screaming bloody murder about health care reform for over a year, bleating about "transparency" and "corruption," all the while implying that the goddamn Kenyan socialist in the White House is plotting to take away Bubba's guns, kill off Jesus (again), bang your wife and rename 'Murica somethin' Muslim. Or, as their marketing arm and gullible followers call it, a "plan."

Meanwhile, the estimable Ezra Klein--boldly going where few fellow newspaper journalists seem to go these days--actually came up with some, you know, facts:

Here are some things that happened on the night the GOP pushed the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit through the House of Representatives:

A 15-minute vote was scheduled, and at the end of 15 minutes, the Democrats had won. The Republican leadership froze the clock for three hours while they desperately whipped defectors. This had never been done before. The closest was a 15-minute extension in 1987 that then-congressman Dick Cheney called “the most arrogant, heavy-handed abuse of power I’ve ever seen in the 10 years that I’ve been here.”

Tom DeLay bribed Rep. Nick Smith to vote for the legislation, using the political future of Smith's son for leverage. DeLay was later reprimanded by the House Ethics Committee.

The leadership told Rep. Jim DeMint that they would cut off funding for his Senate race in South Carolina if he didn't vote for the bill.

The chief actuary of Medicare, Rick Foster, had scored the legislation as costing more than $500 billion. The Bush administration suppressed his report, in a move the Government Accounting Office later judged "illegal.”

Rep. Jo Ann Emerson, a "no" vote, spent the night "hiding on the Democratic side of the floor, crouching down to avoid eye contact with the Republican search team."

Rep. Butch Otter, who provided one of the final votes after hours of arm-twisting from the Republican leadership, said, “I thought there was a chance I would get sick on the floor.”

Remember all this? Probably not.

Klein has more here, and Salon chimes in here.

How To Sell Snake Oil 101.

Those images are from what was supposed to be a top-secret GOP fundraising presentation.

Ooops.
From Politico.com:

The Republican National Committee plans to raise money this election cycle through an aggressive campaign capitalizing on “fear” of President Barack Obama and a promise to "save the country from trending toward socialism."
The strategy was detailed in a confidential party fundraising presentation, obtained by POLITICO, which also outlines how “ego-driven” wealthy donors can be tapped with offers of access and “tchochkes.”
The presentation was delivered by RNC Finance Director Rob Bickhart to top donors and fundraisers at a party retreat in Boca Grande, Florida on February 18, a source at the gathering said.
In neat PowerPoint pages, it lifts the curtain on the often-cynical terms of political marketing, displaying an air of disdain for the party’s donors that is usually confined to the barroom conversations of political operatives.
The presentation explains the Republican fundraising in simple terms.
"What can you sell when you do not have the White House, the House, or the Senate...?" it asks.
The answer: "Save the country from trending toward Socialism!”

As opposed to trending toward what? A neo-Confederacy?

Please Don't Deface The Currency.

From the Los Angeles Times:

Ronald Reagan is honored by, among other things, an airport, a freeway, an aircraft carrier and -- ironically for a critic of big government -- one of the biggest federal buildings in Washington.
Now, some of the late president's admirers are launching a new effort to add another honor: printing his likeness on a $50 bill in place of Ulysses S. Grant's.
In polls of presidential scholars, Reagan consistently outranks Grant, said Rep. Patrick T. McHenry (R-N.C.), who introduced legislation to make the change.
A 2005 move to put Reagan on the $50 bill never made it out of the House Financial Services Committee, even though Republicans controlled the chamber at the time.
"President Reagan is indisputably one of the most transformative presidents of the 20th century," McHenry said in a letter to colleagues seeking their support. "Like President Roosevelt on the dime and President Kennedy on the half dollar, President Reagan deserves a place of honor on our nation's currency."
The move comes as efforts are underway in California and Nevada to name mountains after Reagan and as planning gets underway for a yearlong observance in 2011 of the 100th anniversary of Reagan's birth.

Who's planning that? Fox News?

Joseph Goebbels Would Have Loved Today's Republican Party.

Republicans have been lying about health care reform for almost fifty years. They've always had lots of help.

Today's desperate crop of corpocrats are continuing their party's shameless ways, and their latest charade is an outright lie about a budget procedure they are blatantly mislabeling.

As such, it's not really a new era, but it is another day in 2010's Tea Bag Nation. And it's another lie from Matt Drudge.
Simply put--atomic weapon imagery and bold, red headlines aside--reconciliation is not the "nuclear option," no matter how many times Republicans and their lapdogs like Drudge repeat the lie that it is. And that's a fact.
Rachel Maddow points out the GOP's lying bullshit here:



There's more about budget reconciliation and the "nuclear option" here. And if Democrats really had balls--if they wanted to enact real reform--they'd use reconciliation to pass a single-payer health care system for all.

Well, That Didn't Take Long.

Teabag Nation is mad, mad, mad at brand-spankin'-new Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown for bucking GOP wishes and voting in favor of debate on a Democratic jobs bill.
In other breaking news, they are also mad at almost everything else.

Everybody In The Whole Cell Block Was Dancin' To The Jailhouse Rock.

That's conservative hero and recent dirty tricks perp James O'Keefe with the epically stupid Glenn Beck a few months back, claiming with an idiot's bravado that a little time in the Crowbar Hotel didn't scare him.

I wonder if Jimmy will like his new bunkmate?

Republican National Committee: Same Old Song & Dance.

From the New York Times comes further proof that the Republican Party is so far off the deep end that it's scraping bottom:

The battle among Republicans over what the party should stand for — and how much it should accommodate dissenting views on important issues — is probably going to move from the states to the Republican National Committee when it holds its winter meeting this January in Honolulu.

Republican leaders are circulating a resolution listing 10 positions Republican candidates should support to demonstrate that they “espouse conservative principles and public policies” that are in opposition to “Obama’s socialist agenda.” According to the resolution, any Republican candidate who broke with the party on three or more of these issues– in votes cast, public statements made or answering a questionnaire – would be penalized by being denied party funds or the party endorsement

The proposed resolution was signed by 10 Republican national committee members and was distributed on Monday morning. They are asking for the resolution to be debated when Republicans gather for their winter meeting.

The resolution invokes Ronald Reagan, and noted that Mr. Reagan had said the Republican Party should be devoted to conservative principles but also be open to diverse views. President Reagan believed, the resolution notes, “that someone who agreed with him 8 out of 10 times was his friend, not his opponent.”

Hence the provision calling for cutting off Republicans who agree with the party on seven of 10 items. The resolution demands that Republicans support “smaller government, smaller national deficits and lower taxes,” denial of government funding for abortion, and “victory in Iraq and Afghanistan.” It calls on candidates to oppose amnesty for illegal immigrants and repealing of the Defense of Marriage Act.

Invoking Ronald Reagan is still considered a winning formula for the GOP. Why not go really old school, and throw in Herbert Hoover, too?

'If Barack Obama Has A BLT Tomorrow, Republicans Will Try To Ban Bacon.'

Hey, Kids! If Your Parents Or Your School Didn't Let You Watch The President Today, Watch This & Then Ask Them Why.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Jim Bunning Redux?

I know that politicians are often full of hot air, but this would be ridiculous.

From the AP, via ESPN:

Curt Schilling, the former major league pitcher who won the allegiance of Bostonians by leading the Red Sox to the 2004 World Series, said Wednesday that he has "some interest" in running for the seat held for nearly 50 years by Democratic Sen. Edward M. Kennedy.

Schilling, a registered independent and longtime Republican supporter, wrote on his blog that while his family and video game company, 38 Studios, are high priorities, "I do have some interest in the possibility."

"That being said, to get to there, from where I am today, many, many things would have to align themselves for that to truly happen," he added.

Yes, Curt, great statesmen-in-waiting often defer to their video game company responsibilities. (Or something like that...)

Do us all a huge favor: stay on the sidelines and fondle your bloody sock.

No More Mr. Nice Guy.

This GOP Voter Just Read The Latest Pew Research Poll.

It's NBA Draft Day, and Rush Limbaugh's Plaything--AKA: The Republican Party--reminds me of the Los Angeles Clippers: it's run by idiots, it's starting line-up sucks and it has no bench.

The difference? The GOP doesn't have a Number One pick.

From the Pew Research Center, here's the team that takes the court for the GOP:

Wow. More like the Washington Generals...