dballance
dballance's JournalSalon is providing us with a sort of Top 10 Conservative Idiots for the week.
Some of the usual suspects are there.
10 craziest right-wing statements of the week –Tea Party meltdown edition
http://www.salon.com/2013/10/23/10_craziest_right_wing_statements_of_the_week_tea_party_meltdown_edition_partner/?source=newsletter
1. Justice Antonin Scalia: “The 14th Amendment protects all races, not only the blacks.”
No friend of affirmative action, voting rights protections, or anything he deems “racial entitlements,” the high court’s least inhibited conservative was at it again this week during oral arguments in a case in which advocates for minorities are challenging Michigan’s voter-approved ban on affirmative action in college admissions. The case reached the Supreme Court after a federal appeals court held the ban violates the 14th Amendment’s equal protection guarantee, in that it prevents minorities from lobbying for racial preferences, when other groups can lobby for their favored programs, Huffpo explained.
<snip>
2. Confused Republican thought the debt deal included money for Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army.
With all the dopey things said and done by intransigent Republicans in last week’s shitstorm of dopey intransigence, Republican Rep. Mick Mulvaney earned his place right up there in the pantheon. When the 11th hour deal to raise the debt ceiling and reopen the government was struck between Senate leaders Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell, it did not have much trouble getting through both houses of Congress. But there were those Republicans deluding themselves that they could fight on.
Rep. Mulvaney of South Carolina was one—and among his objections? The deal, he said, included funding for Joseph Kony’s Uganda-based Lord’s Resistance Army. Now, that would be pretty evil if it were true. Kony is an exiled war criminal with a messianic complex known for kidnapping children, and turning them into sex slaves and soldiers who kill their own families. The funding, if Mr. Mulvaney had read a little closer, was a small amount earmarked to the Pentagon which is funding African troops trying to capture Kony and end his reign of terror and atrocity. Ohhhh…oops. It seems Sen. David Vitter isn’t the only Republican in Congress Harry Reid could legitimately claim was not playing with a full deck.
<snip>
3. Tony Perkins: Democrats are the theocrats for wanting to help the poor.
This will be news to biblical scholars. The Bible apparently says that government should have no role in helping the poor. Expressly forbids it.
This comes straight from the horse’s mouth, Tony Perkins, head of the right-wing Family Research Council, in a radio interview with conservative host Janet Mefferd. He then follows what can only be termed a rather bizarre train of thought to its illogical conclusion which is that it is the liberals who are trying to establish a theocracy in this country, not conservatives, because liberals want government to help the poor. Wait, we thought Christianity forbids that. Color us confused.
end snips/
Read the rest at link above.
Hobby Lobby Takes Argument To Supreme Court
This is no surprise. The 10th Circuit in which Hobby Lobby resides ruled in their favor that they could challenge the contraceptive mandate. While the 6th Circuit (TN, KY, OH, MI) ruled against Autocam and upheld the contraceptive mandate. The Supreme Court will likely take the case to resolve the issue of the differing opinions across circuits. Let's hope they read the 6th Circuit's decision which, written by a conservative justice appointed by Reagan. It was quite a good decision. It made the point that the corporation, Autocam, is not a person and therefore does not have rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). That was the correct decision in my opinion.
Craft store Hobby Lobby filed papers with the Supreme Court on Monday asking it to look at its case against the Obama administration’s mandate that the company pay for birth control and abortion-causing drugs for employees.
The Health and Human Services mandate, Hobby Lobby argues, violates their religious freedom.
A federal court has already ruled in the Christian company’s favor, reports LifeNews.com.
http://freebeacon.com/hobby-lobby-takes-argument-to-supreme-court/
What does the member status "Flagged for Review" mean.
This seems relatively new and like something MIRT and admins might use to put members on a watch list? What's it mean and what does it do?
I Hope the Debacle proves to people that Calgary Ted Should NEVER be President.
Calgary Ted, the Senator from Canada should never, never, never be President. If he enters the primaries for 2016 then we need to start playing his "Green Eggs and Ham" clip endlessly and ceaselessly remind people he's actually from Canada.
There is this general thought that all people who want to be President are self-centered, narcissists and that is true to some extent. Calgary Ted though, totally takes the cake. Every time I see his face and that smug little smirk it makes me want to scream. 
So Lets Say Obama Ignores the Debt Ceiling Come Thursday
Let's imagine this scenario. It's Thursday and no resolution to the crisis comes along. Then on Friday Obama declares a state of emergency or declares under the 14th Amendment that we have to pay our debts and instructs Treasury to issue bonds despite the lack of approval from Congress. Remember, the debt ceiling limit is a law, the 14th Amendment is the Constitution. There is some grounds for ignoring the law in favor of the Constitution.
So, national and global financial crisis averted. Markets stabilize after plummeting in after-hours trading on Thursday. The GOP House is pissed for having their supposed bargaining chip taken away from them - ostensibly forever now. In retribution for saving the national economy and the global economy the Tea Bagger wing of the GOP House draws up articles of impeachment.
Would those go anywhere? Would Boehner allow them to proceed in the House? Would it actually be a gift to Obama because it could cause the coverage of those articles of impeachment to drag on well into the 2014 election cycle and keep in the national conscience the fact that the Tea Baggers are nuts? This isn't a stain on a dress here. It's the global economy.
I think it would be a gift to Obama and the Dems in the 2014 elections. People are already pissed at the GOP. Impeachment for saving the global economy when people already see the GOP as petulant children bent on only serving their party interestss just might not play well.
Xerox on EBT issue: "power outage during a routine maintenance test caused the temporary glitch" BS!
Does anybody really believe that bullshit? In all my 30+ years in IT I've never seen a power outage cause a software glitch. Was this power outage on the UPS systems? Those do happen. UPS's are machines and they do fail - rarely.
Power outages either take down the machines or perhaps cause spikes but those should be filtered out be any UPS unless it's the UPS that has the issue. But that would typically mean a sudden, unexpected power-down of the computers. Not modification of software code allowing unlimited purchases.
I'm not sure what PR flacky at Xerox came up with that bullshit but without some further explanation I'm not buying it.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57607332/ebt-benefit-card-glitch-sparks-walmart-shopping-sprees-in-louisiana/
Columbus didn't "Discover" anything. Seriously. The NA Continent was already discovered.
Please, I'm sick of the picture of Columbus as the noble explorer who "discovered" America. He was a profiteer. Well FFS. The North American continent was already populated with a thriving set of indigenous peoples who "discovered" it long before the great white man. It had long been discovered and populated. Columbus didn't discover shit. He was damned lucky he just happen to run into it on his way to Asia. Otherwise he and all his men would have disappeared into the ocean trying to get to Asia most likely.
Columbus, like all Europeans of the time, assumed he was superior to the natives of Haiti and the Dominican Republic and promptly began enslaving them. He opened up North America to the African slave trade. He and his sons were profiteers and slavers. No noble motives of proving the world was round. Just profit.
We need to stop telling the BS mythology that is so popular just because it's popular.
for more:
What Happened to the Indigenous Race?
The Rancid Myth of Columbus
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/10/04/the-rancid-myth-of-columbus/
I Wish Media Would Stop Quoting the VV Straw Poll as if it Meant Something
I'm getting sick of seeing how Ted Cruz is so popular and one proof of that is he won the Values Voters straw poll. Well winning that straw poll is no better than winning an online poll on any site. It is statistically irrelevant.
Around 2000 motivated people assembled in DC by choice to attend a conference. They were not elected delegates or representatives of anyone. They are people who are already motivated to be at the conference and active in politics. They are by no means a valid random statistical sample from the population of GOP voters. They are an extreme evangelical faction. This presents all sorts of statistical bias in the sample. Yet I see media outlet after media outlet touting Cruz's success in the poll as if it were meaningful.
If they're too afraid of the FRC to report this accurately and call them Christian Extremists, which is what they are, then they should just not report it at all.
Overheard at Breakfast at Elmer's this am
FYI, Elmer's is a local PNW chain much like a Shari's or Denny's elsewhere. But better quality food bought locally here in the PNW. I buy local!
The two guys sitting at the booth behind me were, not surprisingly, talking about the shutdown. I didn't get it all but I got the gist of it. One of them said usually considers himself a Republican but that this posting by the Repubs is just out of control. Then they followed up complaining about a short-term rise in the limits for six weeks. Saying it made no sense to do that and then do this all over again in six weeks.
People are catching on thank goodness.
I'm thinking the discharge petition is Obama's fallback
The closer it gets the more House GOPers will want to do something. It's also a great solution for Boner because he does not have to bring the vote to the floor and piss off the Tea Baggers.
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Name: DaveGender: Male
Hometown: Gallatin, TN
Home country: USA
Current location: Portland, OR
Member since: Mon Nov 6, 2006, 03:59 PM
Number of posts: 5,756
