Simple Minded Scandal Mongers

LA Times: On IRS scandal, Spearker John Boehner ask, 'Who's going to jail'

First of all there is no scandal.  The IRS did nothing wrong.  They were just doing their job.  The answer to the question, who's going to jail, should be all the principals in the conservative political organizations that perjured themselves in their applications.  None of them are purely social welfare organizations as the statue requires of 501C4's.

After Citizens United thousands of new 501C4's sprang up.  The vast majority were conservative super PAC's funded by billionaires or corporations.  Fact of the matter is there really is very few if any billionaires or corporations funding progressive super PAC's.  As a result there are not too many of them.  The IRS used terms like Tea Party to CORRECTLY identify conservative political organizations.  But not the exclusion of progressive ones.  As we said, there just aren't that many of them.  Most people can't even name one.  We can.  Priorities USA.  They got a second look from the IRS as well.

Next "scandal" please?

Crooked

Daily Kos:  If this isn't crooked, it's only because we've defined crookedness down so much that it doesn't exist anymore:

Two months after contributing $110,000 to Gov. Rick Scott's re-election campaign, an upstart property insurance company is likely to reap a $52 million windfall, paid from the coffers of Citizens Property Insurance Corp.

And of course Rick Scott is about the biggest thief in the history of the universe. The man literally stole 1.7 BILLION dollars from the US taxpayer.  It's unbelievable the people of Florida actually elected this scumbag.

Liars, Tools, and Useful Idiots

TPM:  Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) said Friday that the IRS would have "shot" Boston Tea Party participants and "killed off" more than half of those who signed the Declaration of Independence if it were around in the late 1700s.

Actually it would have been his people that shot the protestors. 

See, the Boston Tea Party was not a tax revolt.  It was in fact, quite the opposite.

The Boston Tea Party was a revolt against a TAX CUT for the transnational corporation.

The tea tax had been in place for years.  Everybody paid it, it was an equal playing field, and just like today, that cost was passed along to the consumer.  Nobody really had a problem with it, EXCEPT the aforementioned transnational corporation. 

The world’s first transnational corporation was the British East India Company.  Perhaps you’ve heard of it.  Among other things they were in the business of importing and distributing tea in the colonies.  They didn’t want to pay the tax. 

So as transnational corporations are like to do, they lobbied the powers that be and in 1773 parliment passed the Tea Act, which among other things, gave the British East India company a big, fat, tax break.  They were now exempt from the tea tax.  All the local merchants still had to pay it, the little guy had to pay it, THE AMERICANS had to pay it, but not the British East India company. 

People got pissed off and the eventual result was a bunch of British East India tea getting dumped into Boston harbor.  

Now, TODAY, all these idiots walk around with tea bags hanging off their hat celebrating a conservative  movement, supporting a conservative movement, voting for a conservative movement, that’s funded by and all about tax cuts for the transnational corporation.  A movement that’s about pretty much about nothing but tax cuts for the transnational corporation. 

It's prefect really.  A perfect illustration of the moral bankruptcy, ignorance, and idiocy of the conservative movement.

Miscarriage And a Year In Jail

TPM:  Virginia state Sen. Mark Obenshain (R) won the Republican nomination to replace Ken Cuccinelli as the state’s attorney general this weekend. Obenshain once introduced a bill that would charge women with a Class 1 misdemeanor if they failed to report a miscarriage to police.

Yes you read that right, any woman who did immediately submit her miscarriage to a police investigation would have spent a year in jail.  This is the American Taliban.  This is your Republican party. 

The Accomplice

Americablog yesterday:  On CNN’s Reliable Sources this morning, host Howard Kurtz read a new statement from ABC’s Jonathan Karl:

“Clearly, I regret the email was quoted incorrectly and I regret that it’s become a distraction from the story, which still entirely stands.  I should have been clearer about the attribution.  We updated our story immediately.”

Actually he didn't attribute to anybody.  He reported it as a direct quote.  And without that fabricated evidence the story doesn't stand at all.  So basically he was a knowing accomplice to a Republican effort to use the deaths of four Americans to frame the President of the United States and the Secretary of State.  He should be fired immediately.  Certainly he should never be trusted again. 

Crimes Against Democracy

Headline:  Ohio Republicans Push Law To Penalize Colleges For Helping Students To Vote

Republicans hate democracy, plain and simple. If you don't plan on voting for them, they plan on robbing you of the right vote.  The only way to preserve yours is to make sure the GOP doesn't win enough elections so that they seize the right to take it way.  By any means necessary you had best make sure the GOP has no power.  Because they will snatch your democracy from you and laugh in your face while they do it.   If you have any doubt, read the quote below:

“I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people, they never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”-- Paul Weyrich, founder of the Herritage Foundation and the father of the modern conservative movement, 1980

We need Harry Reid to immediately schedule hearings in the senate on the country wide, institutional GOP efforts to steal elections by deliberately disenfranchising Democratic voters. We need to investigate it, attack it, and run on it. We need to brand their movement as enemies of democracy because, that's exactly what they are. 

It Was a Frame Up

Americablog:  CBS drops a bombshell by admitting that it was GOP on the Hill who lied to the media about White House (Benghazi) emails. 

Attention Democrats:  Benghazi is now about the Republican party fabricating evidence to try and frame Obama and Clinton.  Make sure to talk about it at every opportunity. 

Attention Harry Reid:  We need hearings in the senate immediately as to who fabricated the evidence, what role ABC played in reporting the fabricated evidence, what role the Republican cut in funds for security played in this attack, and finally, since the Republicans were so sure right off the bat that it was a terrorist attack, whether they had any role in it.  Did they pay somebody to attack the embassy in the lead up to the election to try and damage Obama?  Given the fact they fabricated evidence to try and implicate him, it would be worth looking to see if they were the cause of attack in the first place.

Pro-Cancer

Think Progress:  Conservative states, business groups, fossil fuel companies, and politicians who deny the science of climate change are petitioning the Supreme Court to reverse Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations on greenhouse gases and to weaken the Clean Air Act. This would involve the Court either limiting or reversing its own 2007 decision, Massachusetts v. EPA, which found that the EPA is required to regulate carbon pollution as pollution.

Well, that's your conservative movement for you.  That's your Republican party.  They get money and power, you get cancer.

The Unamerican Assholes Who Cried Wolf

Headline:  Benghazi emails show show CIA deputy CIA director did most of the editing on talking points

Headline: Email supporting GOP case was a fake

So now that it's been shown how ridiculous and dishonest the entire Republican party has been on this Benghazi deal, we have some questions for the politicians and oligarchs that run their movement (as well as all the idiots who vote for them).   Are you really just the low character jerks this episode shows you to be?  We're you really running around for 8 months, holding hearings, threatening to impeach the president for what was always obviously nothing?  Can you offer up any reasons why you're now nothing more than the boy who cried wolf?  Should you have any credibility left about anything after this episode?  Should anybody trust you?  Should anybody view you as decent Americans?  Should anybody like you?  Do you like yourself?

The Corruptionists

Headline:  Chamber of Commerce Big Winner in Increasingly Conservative Supreme Court

Last term, the Chamber of Commerce was undefeated — it won every Supreme Court case it weighed in on. So far this term, it has secured favorable rulings in 6 out of 7 cases.

That's sick.  The headline should say the American people are the big winner... but such is life on the Roberts Citizens United Corruption Court.  The Republicans are a corporatist party first and foremost, so it's no surprise they turned over control of the courts to the corporations.  They'll do the same thing with other two branches of government if we let them.

Sincerely, Mitt Romney.

Huffington Post:  Rand Paul on Saturday accused President Obama of working with "anti-American globalists" to "plot against our Constitution."

He's actually babbling on about the newest UN anti-gun conspiracy theory rattling around behind the sloped foreheads of the American-right wing, but since when do Republicans have anything but unconditional support for anti-American globalists?  Fact of the matter is, starting with Reagan Republicans have been all about the transnational corporation and the tax breaks, corporate personhood and deregulation that led to globalization and the great outsourcing.  Hell, as of a few months ago, their standard bearer was Mitt Romney who help pioneer the whole process.  Meanwhile, Democrats try to pass legislation stripping corporations of the tax breaks they enjoy for outsourcing and all the Republicans in the senate, including Rand Paul vote against it.

Dead Because Of Partisan Politics?

TPM:  After yesterday’s nothingburger of a hearing, John Boehner asks President Obama to release a State Department email.

I think the best take on this was from Dana Milbank of all people – “They summoned a whistleblower to Capitol Hill, but instead they got a virtuoso storyteller.” A riveting account of a horrific incident which really didn’t tell us stuff we didn’t know before or do what Republicans wanted, which was to suggest bad acts or dereliction on the part of President Obama or Hillary Clinton. About all you could use Hicks’s testimony for is actual oversight aimed at improving security policy going forward.

So the Darrell Issa clown show yesterday proved the current Administration didn't trade American lives for political gain.  It turns out then, the only people who did trade American lives for political gain in this episode was the Republican party.  It's was the Republican party that sold out these four Americans for political gain.  The Republican party, including Darrell, Issa, successfully voted to cut funds for diplomatic security, and did sot only after Obama was elected.  If they had better security in Benghazi they would be alive today.  Harry Reid should hold hearings on that in the senate. 

How's That Minority Outreach Going For You?

Think Progress: The Heritage Foundation’s analysis of the economic consequences of immigration reform uses absurd methodology to come to conclusions entirely at odds with the organization’s own findings in 2006. Perhaps one explanation for this incoherence is that one of the paper’s coauthors, a new hire, opposes Hispanic immigration because he thinks Latinos are stupid.

A)  The Heritage Foundation is the conservative think tank, over and above all others.  It's founder, Paul Weyrich, is widely described as the father of the modern conservative movement.  B) A conclusion that Hispanics have lower IQ's is the very definition of racism.  When you ascribe an undesirable characteristic to a particular racial group, when you call Latinos genetically inferior, that's pretty much what racism is. C) Therefore, conservatives are the very definition of racists.  A+B=C.   Of course, if you know your political history you know the modern Republican party deliberately built its base with racists, and so this won't surprise you one bit. 

Gun Industry Rights Group

Raw Story:  A small Connecticut gun rights group gained attention on Wednesday after issuing a press release that smeared the father of a boy killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Wow.  Just wow.  What do you do with people who trade the lives of our children for gun industry profits?  Jesus said "live by the gun (sword), die by the gun (sword)."  After reading such things from the gun industry rights groups, we can only hope that's true.  The world would truly be a better place without them.