Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Last week a curious little news item surfaced that might have attracted more focused attention if it hadn’t been lost in the sturm und drung of Scandalpalooza.  It had to do with a letter from Michael Needham, CEO of Heritage Action for America, schooling House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor in how to do their jobs.  Needham’s advice boiled down to forget about legislation, it’ll only make us look bad; focus on your one true mission: destroy Obama. 

I guess, tactically, that’s not bad advice for several reasons: a) destroying Obama is pretty much the only unifying ideology left among Republicans and b) Republicans have no intention of legislating anyway so why not make that look like a shrewd political ploy.

You can read the entire letter here but here’s my personal favorite bit:

To that end, we urge you to avoid bringing any legislation to the House Floor that could expose or highlight major schisms within the conference.  Legislation such as the Internet sales tax or the FARRM Act which contains nearly $800 billion in food stamp spending, would give the press a reason to shift their attention away from the failures of the Obama administration to write another ‘circular firing squad’ article.

[Not the only “circular” activity going on with the GOP these days, I might add]

read the whole post »

Posted by Bette Noir on 05/22/13 at 10:50 AM
Comments (4) • Permalink

Saturday, May 04, 2013

Well, things are getting all testosterone-y out in the states, these days.  Letters are flying back and forth between Governors, Lt. Governors and the Department of Justice on a regular basis.  Still reeling from President Obama’s re-election and the dashing of their dreams of Mitt-topia, Republican governors in Red America have obviously decided that secession is way too costly and impractical and they are now concentrating their puffed-up provincial power on nullification.

In late April, Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R) signed the 2nd Amendment Protection Act, a so-called nullification act, in Kansas.  According to the new Kansas law, Kansas basically declares that it won’t enforce “unconstitutional laws” having to do with guns, magazines or ammunition:

Sec. 6. (a) Any act, law, treaty, order, rule or regulation of the government of the United States which violates the second amendment to the constitution of the United States is null, void and unenforceable in the state of Kansas.

Not really newsworthy since no one really expects them to uphold unconstitutional laws, anyway.  The key, here, is who decides whether or not a law is unconstitutional.  The Kansas law doesn’t go into that but everyone who’s passed high school civics knows the answer—and it isn’t the “Kansas Legislature.”

That’s just the silly part. 

The part that gave Eric Holder pause was this part:

Sec. 7. It is unlawful for any official, agent or employee of the government of the United States, or employee of a corporation providing services to the government of the United States to enforce or attempt to enforce any act, law, treaty, order, rule or regulation of the government of the United States upon a firearm, a firearm accessory, or ammunition that is manufactured commercially or privately and owned in the state of Kansas and that remains within the borders of Kansas. Violation of this section is a severity level 10 nonperson felony.

In defense of that bit of the law, State Representative Brett Hildabrand, shared visions of Nazis dancing in his head, saying:

The citizens of Kansas do not belong to the United States. The United States belongs to the citizens of Kansas! We cannot allow the response, “I was following orders” to be an excuse for violating our Constitutional rights. How many atrocities have been committed in history by people simply following orders?

I guess Kansans are more theatrical than I ever guessed.

read the whole post »

Posted by Bette Noir on 05/04/13 at 11:18 AM
Permalink

Monday, April 29, 2013

You know, I’m definitely beginning to pick up a trend regarding the freshman Senator from Texas—he just rubs people the wrong way. This sensation of almost visceral recoil has been remarked upon pretty much since he’s taken office. He’s been compared to Sen. Joe McCarthy on the regular (including at the estimable Rumproast if I may point that out), and that’s an unfortunate comparison, since McCarthy has become like a byword in senatorial overreach and lack of decency. (Except it seems as valid a comparison as it is unfortunate.)  He’s been considered a conspiracy theorist (Agenda 21, anyone?) and possibly a bit of a sexist prick (mansplaining, anyone?)  And even Our Mister Brooks has pointed out that his fellow senators roll their eyes regarding him and find him “off-putting”.  And the NYT’s columnist is, whatever his faults as a pundit may be, not exactly the sort of pundit who would slam a freshman Republican Senator for no unwarranted reason.

Really. Except for the things he says and does (like his support for federal assistance for the West, TX disaster after opposition to Superstorm Sandy assistance—consistency?) what could possibly be the unifying factor? It couldn’t merely be his possession of a backpfeifengesicht,  like the result of sneering one too many times, when, as anyone’s mother might have foretold, it could stick that way.  (I will stick with it being mostly about the things he does and says.)

Which is why it doesn’t exactly shock the socks off of me to find that The Washington Post‘s own Jennifer Rubin has found a bone to pick with him over his description of his fellow Republicans as “squishes” over their curious lack of faith regarding a filibuster over background checks. Except, really? Jennifer Rubin? The Mitt Romney Booster Club’s Head Cheerleader? The pundit who once referred to Rand Paul as “formidable” over his Benghazi conspiracy theories (pitched way out of the strike zone of one SOS HRC?).

One pauses, truly, to take it all in. Reagan’s Eleventh Commandment is all to pieces, is it not? Or is Cruz just a law unto himself, unaware that ideological purity aside, a representative democracy is something like a popularity contest, and one really does have to serve somebody other than oneself?

I leave it to the reader to decide.

(X-Posted at Strangely Blogged.)

Posted by Vixen Strangely on 04/29/13 at 10:31 PM
Permalink

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

As more information comes to light about the Beantown Bombers, it becomes increasingly clear that Uncle Ruslan was right all along: The brothers were / are a pair of not-too-bright losers. Mother Jones offers a list of odd and stupid things the Boom-Boom Bros did that directly resulted in their death and/or capture. These items include leaving their carjacked hostage alone in the vehicle while they went into a convenience store for Red Bull and then failing to toss their escaped victim’s mobile phone, enabling the cops to track their every move.

They’re murderers, sure, but sophisticated terror kingpins? Please. And yet the very lawmakers who most frequently have to pause to wring the accumulated ball-sweat out of their much-humped personal copies of the US Constitution are now ready to torch that document because of the supposed existential threat posed by clowns like the Boom-Boom Bros.

Senator Lindsey Graham, perpetually trying to butch up sufficiently to head off a possible tea party primary challenge, took to the Senate floor yesterday to baldly declare a thought-crime and ethnic-caste standard that would eliminate due process for certain American citizens:

“Here’s what we’re suggesting, that the surviving suspect—due to the ties that these two have to radical Islamic thought and the ties to Chechnya, one of most radical countries in the world—that the president declare preliminarily that the evidence suggests that this man should be treated as an enemy combatant.”

The “we” in that first clause includes Senator John McCain, the Hanoi Hilton survivor who is apparently transformed into a squealing candy ass at the sight of a teenage jihadi-wannabe’s wispy moustache. Senator Kelly Ayotte rounds out the new neocon triumvirate in lieu of the departed Joe Lieberman. She’s an improvement over her predecessor only in that her mouth isn’t bracketed by alarming skin-pleats and she doesn’t have a mewling voice that tempts listeners to drive chopsticks through their own eardrums to escape its range. But on foreign policy, she’s pretty much Joe in a dress.

In the interest of civility, let’s assume that these three and their fellow Republicans aren’t corrupt, cynical hucksters who are attempting to transform the blood of innocent people into political gain. So they must be cowards instead, sniveling, bed-wetting chicken-shits who are ready to toss our national experiment with free speech and equality before the law into the toilet and hide under the nearest rock—and not before the very real and powerful threats arrayed against it from within and without, but before a pair of moronic clowns like the Boom-Booms. Some “Daddy Party.”

[X-posted at Balloon Juice]

Posted by Betty Cracker on 04/24/13 at 11:55 AM
Permalink

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Bqwhatevr O evr’s the matter with you pissy-pants oversensitive lady Liberals? Soon-to-be-formerly Amherst Representative Peter Hansen (You-had-to-ask?-New Hampshire) was only referring to women as “Vagina’s” for effect:

My point in the choice of words was twofold: One was shock content and the other was to try to get into the mind of the perpetrator.

“Try to get into” is an interesting construction, there, Peter, but I’d say you did it! You got deep into the Perpetrator’s Mind. So dark in there, isn’t it?  Dark and warm, and ungrammatical.

Rep. Hansen was merely responding via email to detractors of the “Stand Your Ground Law”:

There were two critical ingredients missing in the illustrious stories purporting to demonstrate the practical side of retreat. Not that retreat may not be possible mind you. What could possibly be missing from those factual tales of successful retreat in VT, Germany, and the bowels of Amsterdam? Why children and vagina’s of course.

After getting a lot of lip from Democrats and Republicans alike, the Representative stood his ground: “Having a fairly well educated mind I do not need self appointed wardens…”

There was more, but yr. editrix stopped reading and had a nice lie-down with some Creme De Cassi’s.

read the whole post »

Posted by Mrs. Polly on 04/17/13 at 10:16 AM
Permalink

Thursday, March 28, 2013

When Tennessee legislators first got a look at the $16 million renovation of their beloved State House in Nashville, imagine how shocked and awed they were to find a Muslim ritual footbath, where a utility sink used to be, right in the Men’s room outside the House Chamber.  Appalled, legislators launched an immediate in-House investigation calling on Senate Clerk Russell Humphrey to get to the bottom of how such an item had crept into the renovation plan, without their approval.

According to Humphrey:

There was concern about why it had been modified.

Republican Sen. Bill Ketron, (R-Murfreesboro) confirmed that he had spoken to Humphrey about whether there were “religious reasons” for the new sink after the issue was raised by Rep. Judd Matheny, (R-Tullahoma).

[Matheny denied that he was involved in raising questions about the basin.]

read the whole post »

Posted by Bette Noir on 03/28/13 at 07:19 AM
Permalink

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

I’ve been fascinated by some of the overwrought “revolution!” language that the usual Christian right trolls are using regarding the case against Prop 8 being considered by SCOTUS. It’s not that I’m comfortable that the pendulum has swung so far that there’s little resistance to marriage equality—it’s that I just don’t see that many people be invested enough to start a civil war over it. Regular folks just aren’t thinking about gay folks getting married all the time. It doesn’t really impact them because, well, it just doesn’t. Gay people getting married doesn’t raise anyone’s taxes or take away any right that any has previously enjoyed.

Which is why I find this analogy from NOM’s president, Brian Brown, so especially creepy:

I think we’re going to win these cases. But say the worst happens and we lose in a broad way – that means that the Court somehow does a Roe, aRoe v. Wade, on marriage and says that all these state constitutional amendments are overturned, gay marriage is now a constitutional right – well, we’re going to press forward on a Federal Marriage Amendment. We’ve always supported a Federal Marriage Amendment, and there’s a lot of misconceptions about it. Some people try and argue, ‘Well, this is against federalism.’ No, our founders gave us a system where we can amend the Constitution. We shouldn’t have to do this, we shouldn’t have to worry about activist judges, you know, making up out of thin air a constitutional right that obviously none of our founders found there and no one found there until quite recently. But if we do, for us, the Federal Marriage Amendment is a way that people can stand up and say, ‘Enough is enough.’ We need a solution in this country, we cannot be, as Lincoln said, half slave, half free. We can’t have a country on key moral questions where we’re just, where we don’t have a solution. And if the Court forces a solution, the way we’ll amend that is through the Federal Marriage Amendment.

“Half slave, half free.” I can kind of understand wanting to do a Lincoln quote-pull because Lincoln, you know, was kind of a big deal. It’s just funny that Brown seems to think that people living in the states where marriage equality is recognized would be morally the people living in the “slave states”.  Because those poor beset-upon long-suffering religious people would lack the freedom to…

To…

read the whole post »

Posted by Vixen Strangely on 03/27/13 at 09:43 AM
Permalink

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Can it really be only ten weeks since Texas’ own Mr Big Stuff glided into the US Senate on his leathery little wings?  It seems like decades since Ted Cruz has even taken a breath.  I can’t believe I’m actually writing about him—again, but, Lordy, he’s a mother lode of monstrosity in a world teeming with monsters.

Cruz’ latest feat was to make a Senate ceremonial resolution on Multiple Sclerosis Awareness Week all about Ted Cruz.  And, no, Ted Cruz, does not have MS.  Such resolutions, representing the unsexy side of a senator’s job, are mundane, bipartisan, uncontentious bits of feel-good legislative business that help Americans stay connected to their government.  Things like Black History Month and the 10 Year Anniversary of the loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia come to life via such resolutions.  99.9% of such resolutions pass via “unanimous consent,” the Senate’s fast track for noncontroversial legislation.

read the whole post »

Posted by Bette Noir on 03/19/13 at 12:19 PM
Permalink

Monday, March 18, 2013

Ermagerd. Sworn off Palin for more than a few years, then two consecutive posts in a couple of days. The shame, the shame. What provoked this?

Well, on Saturday we saw La Diva Loca give her all in a TMI style to a CPAC rabble desperate for distraction from its own endless misery, and inevitably we focused on her Bloomberg big guvmint-bashing Big Gulpaloser, like just about everybody else who was near a keyboard. Perhaps predictably, where some of us—perhaps, let’s be hopeful here, the vast majority of humanity and possibly any eavesdropping aliens—saw teeheehee juvenile pathos and completely unintentional self-parody (and responded with our own juvenilia, because that’s how we roll), her fans saw A HEROIC STAND AGAINST THE MAN!!!!

A few spinoff memes among those with access to Photoshop and way too much time on their hands could be expected, but a full-on IRL movement? Oh yeah. Heeeeere’s Twitchy:

Awesome: Sarah Palin sips Big Gulp during CPAC speech; ‘Bloomberg’s not around’ [pics and video]

Now, I should warn you of a couple of things. First, that headline is no lie, and if you click it, there are indeed pics and video, and it ain’t pretty; and second, if you’ve never visited malevolent douchesquirrel Michelle Malkin’s Twitchy before, its sole raison d’être, other than mobilizing twittering zombie hordes to relentlessly harass anybody who catches Malkin’s eye and ire, is generally to drag a bunch of rabid derp off the twittersphere and blend it with even more rabid derp in its comment stream, I guess in the hopes that a singularity of derp will be triggered that will engulf the entire universe and beyond in a tidal wave of megaderp—thus fulfilling those apocalyptic predictions of peak wingnut and the wingularity ta-DA!

The ingredients on this occasion range from the pedestrian

Cynthia Yockey @conservativelez

Palin at CPAC: He’s got the rifle, I’ve got the rack (of husband Todd and their Xmas gifts to one another.) Then sips Big Gulp.

to the arguably ill-advised

Michelle Malkin ✔ @michellemalkin

CPAC podiums need to be stocked with 32-oz Big Gulps, not teeny water bottles.

to the marginally more excitable!!!

Roel Marasigan @HeadsWillRoel

Classic Sarah Palin giving nanny Bloomberg a jab at #CPAC!!! pic.twitter.com/bngVu81ZUm

So far, so lame. I’ll kick you off with the first comment over there, then after that you’re on your own if you’re wingnutcurious enough to get off the boat, and don’t say you haven’t been warned, as it gets worse from here on in (though there is some evidence of sedition). Behold the yawning sinkhole in perception:

nc • 2 days ago

Her comedic timing was dead-on perfect! She tells the “rack” joke with a dead pan straight face, then immediately reaches for the Super Big Gulp to deflect any sense of impropriety. Comic genius!

This would be tragic and humorous in a relatively mundane way (“dead pan straight face” *snork*) in itself, but as Wonkette reports, we’re now headed back into the realms of full-on icon-worship again, as the old fanbase at Conservatives4Palin apparently hasn’t entirely been reduced to living under bridges and toasting pigeons on curtain rails through over-donating to The Palin Family and Friends Holiday and Meth Fund SarahPAC, or if it has, it seems to have access to Obamaphones and the Internet down there. Venture after the fold if you dare/can be arsed.

read the whole post »

Posted by YAFB on 03/18/13 at 09:38 PM
Permalink

Saturday, March 16, 2013

We’re not here to re-brand a party, we’re here to rebuild a country. We’re here to restore America and the rest is just theatrics. The rest is sound and fury. It’s just making noise.

The next 37 long minutes were indeed taken up with sound and fury—the familiar gurns, squawks, shrieks, and dribbling, punctuated by the novel sound of slurping, to rapturous applause. It’s 2013. It’s CPAC. And it’s Sarah Palin.

Yep, the Grifta from Wasilla, having added Fox News pundit (failed) to her résumé, is BACK. And she’s still totally bonkers. And not in a good way.

Lord knows, when the éminences grises behind CPAC booked her, they knew what to expect. It’s an easy call, because whatever else she’s been doing in her copious spare time since bombing out of the ‘08 election in tears, in between lush speaking gigs and boring the pants off Greta van Susteren she hasn’t come up with much new material.

I’m very grateful to Jim Newell, now liveblogging in the unlikely environment of The Guardian, for keeping tabs on the parade of fail at this year’s Gathering of the Indescribables as I really wasn’t feeling up to it. Also to my co-bloggers marindenver and Vixen Strangely, who’ve been taking up the slack. However, when somebody as absolutely desperate for attention as Sarah Palin bobbles along, it would be downright cruel of me not to indulge her at least a little, so here goes.

Her turn wasn’t totally lacking in some semblance of political gravitas, as she insisted that enough with the navel-gazing already, Republicans just need to hit the streets and get persuadin’:

They’re not our enemies. They’re our sisters and our brothers. They’re our neighbors, they’re our friends. It’s imperative to reach out and to share that conservative message of liberty and less government and lower taxes.

So double-bolt your doors and bar your windows before you turn in tonight, just in case.

Boob jokes. They featured, as Jim notes:

Palin sets up a quite extraordinary breasts-and-ammo joke by telling the crowd that for Christmas, her husband had bought her a rack to hold guns on the back of her truck. Then comes the sexy punchline:

He’s got the rifle, I’ve got the rack!

As attendants carried the coronary casualties in the audience out to the waiting fleet of ambulances, as an example of “less government” Palin chose Mayor Bloomberg’s War on Soda (this is where the slurping comes in), ostentatiously sucking on a mammoth serving through a straw in a manner which suggested that if there was a baseball in there, goshdarn she was havin’ it. If she followed it up with a burp, the networks cut it and the written record is silent. But it did lead to a new party game:

read the whole post »

Posted by YAFB on 03/16/13 at 06:24 PM
Permalink

Friday, March 15, 2013

Help me out here.

If, as Mitch McConnell claimed at CPAC today, the Democrats’ 2016 “presidential ticket looks like a rerun of the Golden Girls,” given that the all-star lineup at CPAC 2013 includes in its cast Jeb Bush, Eric Cantor, Steven Crowder, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, Newt Gingrich, Bobby Jindal, Michele Bachmann, Steve King, Ron Johnson, Wayne LaPierre, Dana Loesch, Reince Preibus, Sarah Palin, Rand Paul, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, Wayne Allyn Root, Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, Rick Santorum, Donald Trump, Scott Walker, Ben Shapiro, Allen West, the ghost of Andrew Breitbart, and Mitch himself, what rerun shows would best encapsulate:

(a) CPAC 2013?
(b) the Republicans’ prospective 2016 presidential ticket?

read the whole post »

Posted by YAFB on 03/15/13 at 11:30 AM
Permalink

Tuesday, March 12, 2013

It would appear that the Republican Party’s “dark night of the soul” is finally over with the dawning realization that better marketing is the answer.  And what a relief that is to the GOP because . . . EASY TO FIX!  With just a little word-smithing and outreach, the masses will discover the heretofore esoteric beauty and humanism of the Republican Platform.

That’s when your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to become makers rather than takers will discover their inner conservative; and when the wretched refuse of someone else’s teeming shore, the homeless, tempest-tost will learn that the “path to citizenship” is a torture-test unless one has an advanced degree.

That’s when the masses will rip off their Obama bumper stickers and stand in long lines for hours to vote, in multiple precincts, for the candidates who found just the right words to explain how un-American it is to be poor and/or old.

It’s really, really stupid.  I know . . . but its what they believe, so what are you going to do?  For the last three months or so, all sorts of folks, including some of their own persuasion, have told them “look you pathetic chuckleheads, it’s not “branding,” it’s not merchandising.  Your policies absolutely suck, not to mention the fact that you lie and cheat and live in a fantasy world.”

read the whole post »

Posted by Bette Noir on 03/12/13 at 10:59 AM
Permalink

Monday, March 11, 2013

A regular favorite of the blog, former Senator Scott Brown, has become gainfully employed after the manner of non-politicians, in the field of law. And this sounds like such a good thing, after all. After being in the US Senate, lawyering is an excellent trade, practically a form of rehabilition…

Although it kind of looks like they are a connected sort of firm.  Sort of your lobbying lite and let’s do lunch sort of deal. But let’s be clear, Scott Brown is there to be a lawyer, in between FOX News appearances. Because to do otherwise would be unseemly. 

In other news, Joe Lieberman and Jon Kyl are at AEI, because of bipartisanship. (For a quick reference: Jim DeMint’s at Heritage, because of partisanship.)

There’s days I wouldn’t mind being an ex-senator. The US Senate is a stepping stone to interesting opportunities.

Posted by Vixen Strangely on 03/11/13 at 11:54 PM
Permalink

Sunday, March 10, 2013

You know, I really don’t want to be back talking about 2016, but Jeb was all over the Sunday shows, and it was hard not to look at it as being possibly just as much about 2016 as about peddling his book. And yes, maybe it’s a little bit like being a “crack addict” to speculate about this—but really? Are we going to shrug off the legacy of big bro’ as “not baggage”?

Heavy sigh. The last quarter-century is all about Bushes. There is no escape here. How to explain?

That outsider artist reinventing himself as a premier puppy painter?  Is forever linked with an Administration that oversaw a war in Iraq that will always be associated with gross abuse. (I wonder if there isn’t something in W that makes him uniquely suited to capturing the soul of puppies. They, too, are scolded for making messes they don’t entirely understand and aren’t sure what they should do to fix.)

But Jeb himself isn’t quite ready to articulate a vision for the future, at odds with his book, at odds with interviews of mere days ago.  He can invoke the Reagan Administration of which his own father was a part as a time of less partisanship—but it doesn’t help him begin to explain how to arrive at a less-partisan future—anymore than his brother’s “compassionate conservatism” did. Not when the 1988 campaign of his father against Dukakis was one of the most wedge-issue-tainted smear-jobs. Not when the first Gulf War has so much to do with a very specific vision of power and patriotism. That is what W inherited—and it’s Jeb’s legacy, too, like it or not. Which is why he’s spinning like a tire in a damp rut over immigration. Does he, like his father, supposedly lack “the vision thing”? Or has he only seen too much?

No matter. Na’gonna happen. Not even if folks in the Beltway bubble want to make it happen.

(X-Posted at Strangely Blogged)

Posted by Vixen Strangely on 03/10/13 at 10:24 PM
Permalink

Where’s a laughing Biden when you need one?

Paul Ryan, the very, very serious thinker of the Republican Party, the numbers guy who puts together oh-so-serious budgets designed to throw the Olds and the Poors off their Medicare and Medicaids becauz that’s what serious people do, went on Fox News Sunday to discuss his newest veryserious budget which will be officially unveiled next Tuesday.  Unfortunately he discussed it with Chris Wallace, one of the people at Fox who actually has thinkingskillz.  Here is the exchange:

On Sunday morning, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) stopped by Fox News Sunday to preview his new budget, which will be released in full on Tuesday. As it had the past two years, this year’s version will call for massive cuts to social service programs, including food stamps, job training, Medicaid, and Medicare. Host Chris Wallace challenged Ryan on the viability of his plan, pointing out that he wants to repeal and replace Obamacare, and, “that’s not going to happen.”

Still, Ryan insisted that he and then-running mate Mitt Romney won the election on this issue because they “won the senior vote”:

 

  WALLACE: Are you saying that as part of your budget you would repeal — you assume the repeal of Obamacare?

  RYAN: Yes.

  WALLACE: Well that’s not going to happen.

  RYAN: Well, we believe it should. [...] 

Yes, and since we believe it should happen magical Repeal Fairies will make Obamacare go away between now and when this Budget *goes into effect*.

Hmmm.  I’m just imagining this scenario in a corporate conference room with the controller presenting the budget to the CEO.

CEO:  “Ryan, this budget assumes that revenues will triple when we introduce our new product line of flying pigs.  Are you assuming we can create flying pigs?” 

RYAN: “Yes”

CEO:  “Well that’s not going to happen!”

RYAN:  “Well we believe it should happen.”

How long between the end of that conversation and the issuance of the pink slip to young Ryan?

Ryan also says, after reiterating that wishing Obamacare away can make it so, that the purpose of budgets is to make hard choices.  Um, no Paul.  Budgets sometimes require you to make hard choices but that is not their purpose.  The purpose of a budget is to make the most realistic assessment possible, based on known facts, of what your revenues and expenses for the coming fiscal period will look like.  Pretending that things will happen that are not going to happen and using the budget to further right wing ideology and destroy programs that you don’t support is *not* the purpose of a budget.

You can definitely see why this oh-so-serious thinker had to scramble his way into gummint welfare for a living - he wouldn’t last 10 minutes in the real world.

Posted by marindenver on 03/10/13 at 04:41 PM
Permalink