Newtie!

OK, let's be clear here. We want there to be no misunderstanding.



Are we clear on that? He misspoke. It wasn't what he meant to say. He was frazzled. That wasn't a planned speech; he just went off the cuff, and dropped the ball. He went out there, and just flubbed it. It was a mistake, now let it go.

Of course, context is important, right? So let's take a look at these impromptu, unrehearsed remarks that he regrets having said now.

("But," I hear you wailing, "that'll take forever! That fucker starts talking and just won't stop! I don't have that kind of time! Plus, his voice gives me the shingles!" Ah, but I wouldn't do that to you: this is just the money shot. Three minutes and two seconds (plus a 15 second ad, because MSNBC has to pay the bills).

.
See that? Off his game. No way he could have rehearsed that, right? All that stammering and stuttering. He was winging it. Never would have said something like that. He was taken completely off-guard. Anybody who could say that was a prepared argument is just blind.

So let's repeat this for you. It's very important that you understand.



You got that? This has nothing to do with Newtie spending 15 hours on the phone with every Republican in Congress. The Koch brothers didn't say a word to him. It was a complete misunderstanding. He was tired, and had to squint to see through the glare off David Gregory's platinum helmet of hair. He opened his mouth, and some truth just fell out. That's so unlike him! It landed in a big pile of bullshit, but there it was, naked. For everybody to see. It was embarrassing, but that's our Newt. Big enough to look the camera in the eye and lie his ass off about it.

And by the way, don't make fun of Callista.


She can't help it. It's fucked up you're even talking about it.


Bitch ain't crazy.


It's congenital.

Crocodile tears

Most bad drivers, like the American public in general have no concept of momentum or kinetic energy. Americans are the sort of people who will complain they're still falling after the parachute opens. Americans were the people who lapped up Fox News' "Democrats are pessimists trying to tear down the economy which is strong, strong, strong" and the Administration's "Debt doesn't matter" philosophy and are still the people who remain steadfastly unaware that the Republicans raised the Debt ceiling 7 times in the 8 years they held the White House and asked for a bigger bailout with no accountability or accounting. They're just shocked, shocked, shocked to see what that farleftliberalcommie president is doing and just look at the tears in Boehner's eyes.

Listening to Tim Geithner trying to be re-assuring on Meet the Press this morning didn't do much to dispel the idea that Republicans want nothing more than to allow default so as to give the illusion of Democratic guilt to their "look what Obama did" strategy. If he's right that the government will still pay it's bills after August 2nd, there will still be serious repercussions for all of us. If Geithner is right that a larger catastrophe than the Great Depression has been diverted it makes little impression on those who don't remember what caused the 1930's to be what they were and what brought about the rebound. They don't remember that every experiment in drastic upper bracket cuts has has the same negative result, that an extra few percent on the top bracket puts more back into the economy than cuts do or remember that paying off the debt on WWII brought steady expansion and job growth and infrastructure improvement. The kids in the back seat will continue to bitch until the money they imagined they had five years ago materializes again.

No, it's burn baby burn and the new Utopia will rise from the ashes and far better to let people who need Social Security and Medicare to stay alive die and reduce the surplus population than for hedge fund tycoons to pay an extra couple of grand more and send an extra couple of grand less to to offshore tax havens. If Medicare is indeed bankrupting us, it's by Republican design. If the debt is expanding, it's part of their plan to pay it off by reducing taxes and eliminating things they have opposed for 75 years on "moral" grounds. They look on economic tragedy as an opportunity and are probably quite aware at the Boehner and Koch Brothers and Murdoch level, that the 'lower the income to make the debt go away' strategy will, like pulling back on the stick and cutting the throttle, send us spinning downward instead of climbing. It's what they want.

I would be tempted to give a shit once again if there were any significant number of people who recognized that funny feeling in the rectum for what it is and weren't too easily seduced by the feeling of importance one gets by joining the Low-Brow Brotherhood of Trolls and Tea Smokers Marching Band, but there aren't enough and and no, I'm not tempted.

Liquid Water on Mars - But No Signs of Intelligent Life on Earth

Planetary scientists recently detected hydrated salts on these slopes at Horowitz crater, corroborating their original hypothesis that the dark streaks on Mars are indeed formed by liquid water.

On Monday, NASA announced the results of a new study showing that salty liquid water flows seasonally on Mars, giving the red planet one of the essential ingredients for life.

The study focuses on the mysterious recurring slope lineae, or "RSL" -- narrow, streaky features on the planet's surface spotted by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft.

The RSL are typically about 15 feet in width or smaller, and appear on slopes during the planet's warm seasons. They fade during cooler seasons, then reappear the following year as the planet gets warmer again.

In the same newspaper, I read about the American conservative movement, for whom facts are subordinate to politics. I read bizarre conspiracy theories about birthers, death panels, undocumented workers, and imaginary voter fraud.  I read revisionist accounts about how GWB kept us safe, or why supply-side economics creates jobs – despite all evidence to the contrary.

I read about Donald Trump ("Mexicans are rapists and criminals"), Ben Carson ("no Muslim is fit to be president"), Carly Fiorina ("babies writhing on a dissecting table"), and Ann Coulter ("How many f*#king Jews ...").  Rampant racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, Islamophobia, misogyny ... the GOP has morphed itself into a HATE GROUP!

Then I read about how Super PAC money distorts representative democracy, and why any Republican who violates party doctrine can expect a primary challenge funded by the Heritage Foundation and the Koch brothers. 

I want to go home to the peace and quiet of a Martian landscape.  There is no intelligent life on Earth.

Is the GOP Abel to raise Cain?

Herman Cain's attempt to position himself as an "outsider" is a key plank of his presidential campaign: unlike the rest of them, he wants you to know that he is not a professional polician, and that's part of why he should be elected.

Perhaps that's the entire problem. Maybe his inexperience is the reason for the abject stupidity of his ideas, and has nothing to do with him being a brainless twatwaffle.

On the other hand, maybe it's both.

One of Hermie's earliest ideas, that as president, he would never sign a bill longer than three pages, was widely derided by anyone who understood that there are, in fact, complex problems that might take a little longer merely to explain, much less fix.

Hermie's response? He explained that anybody who actually listened to him or took him at his word was stupid.

Some of these idiotic reporters thought I was serious. The joke’s on them. The message was short bills. Understandable bills. No it’s not literally going to be three pages. The executive summary will be three pages.

Of course, reporters aren't the only stupid people in Cain's tiny little world - basically anybody who questions him must automatically be stupid, right? In his latest book, This is Herman Cain, Hermie explained how Ron Paul's stupid followers were conducting a systematic conspiracy to make him look bad.

"I get the same stupid question at almost every one of these events," Cain writes. "I know it’s a deliberate strategy. How can a person randomly show up at a hundred events and ask the same stupid question to try to nail me on the Federal Reserve?"

(Apparently, Hermie isn't used to people with more than 5 followers.)

Actually, "stupid" is his favorite word. He loves to describe people that way: he gave a whole speech at CPAC around the theme that stupid people are ruining America. Which is odd. Because, despite having risen from a humble beginning to CEO of a crappy pizza chain, Herman Cain just doesn't come across as the brightest motherfucker on the planet.

Admittedly, his business model didn't take a genius to develop: pay people eight dollars an hour to deliver pizzas that cost less than a dollar to make, and charge twelve to eighteen dollars apiece for them. It's not like it's an original idea or anything. Hermie just put one interesting spin on the idea: if you use cheaper ingredients, they cost less. But then, instead of improving on the pizza, you give it an exciting, all-crime ad campaign. (As in, "I'm stealing from you by charging you money for this crappy pizza.")

Cain is more than willing to spew the most ignorant talking points with great authority, and totally without shame. It's not just that you're stupid if you disagree with him, you're lazy if you don't have a job. Oh, and by the way, this whole "Occupy Wall Street" movement? In Hermie's world, that's not just lazy people (OK, that's mostly what it is), that's lazy people being manipulated by the White House.

Because conspiracy theories go across real well with the modern Republican party.



Cain can't even get his birther talking points right:

"Barack Obama is more of an international," Cain said. "I think he’s out of the mainstream and always has been. Look, he was raised in Kenya..."

(Look, moron, Obama lived in Indonesia, and only for four years - ages six to ten. Were all your ideas set in stone when you were in second grade?)

He can't even spew the standard GOP rhetoric correctly. In the middle of accusing the left of being (once again) stupid, this time for not reading the Constitution, he tries to make his point by quoting... wait for it... the Declaration of Independence.

"...when you get to the part about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, don’t stop reading! Keep reading!"

Gonna be reading a long time there, big fella.



And his current big campaign promise is the 9-9-9 tax plan (9% income tax, 9% business tax, 9% sales tax). A plan which is basically hated by everybody, Democrat or Republican, except Herman Cain.

Bruce Bartlett, an adviser in the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, says that 9-9-9 is unfair to working taxpayers. "It's the most upside-down tax plan that’s been put forward to tax the poor and the middle class," he says...

Daniel Shaviro, a New York University law professor who specializes in taxation, calls the plan "not viable." For rich people—defined as those who work for themselves and don’t have to take a salary—it essentially becomes an 18 percent total tax on all money. But for poor people collecting a paycheck, Shaviro says, it amounts to a 27 percent tax.

This plan was developed, not by an economist, but an investment banker with ties to the Koch brothers (unless it was stolen from SimCity). And basically, the rich get taxed less, the poor and middle class get taxed more, and the government gets less money.

This is the kind of "leadership" we can expect from Herman Cain? It doesn't take a lot of logic to rip his ideas to shreds.

If he does, by some miracle, win the primaries, Herman Cain may actually make history, though. He will be the first black man to get another black man reelected.

Paranoid psychosis is the new normal.

Gather ‘round, children. Let me tell ‘ya how things was when I was your age.

Now, when I was young, fringe conspiracy theories were still kept... well, in the fringes. My father was a West Point grad, and as such, sentenced to life as an Army officer; we weren’t exactly flaming radicals and pot-smoking hippies around my house. You had your John Birch Society, but nobody "respectable" belonged to it since the Fifties. On the other side of the coin, there were "those radicals" (technically, an attitude left over from the Sixties, but there you are); they weren’t exactly in the majority in society, and were pretty universally looked down on, too. Generally, expressing a sentiment in public that didn’t fit into the "mainstream" was likely to either get you into a lively debate, or cause people to edge away from you (depending on who was around).

I’d run into fringe ideas every so often, but perhaps less than some people.
I still remember the woman in the kaftan nursing her baby and giving me a glowering side-eye as I, naïve military-brat that I was, cheerfully pored over independent-press books explaining how vaccinating children was another example of the white man keeping the black man down, by poisoning his naturally healthier immune system. That "we must return to the land of our ancestors." That white men were solely responsible for black people being poor. (OK, so in later years I'd learn that this last, while perhaps not even mostly true, did have a certain core of reality...)

I loved some of the fringier ideas: ghosts, UFO's, psychic powers. But for the most part, I always wondered why people would fall for some of the most unmistakably ridiculous ideas.

So, flash forward around three decades or so. And we have people openly believing the most paranoid, ridiculous crap that has ever left a skidmark on a page. And the majority of the sweat-stained stupidity seems to emit from the Right side of the argument.

I mean, if you think about it, it does make a certain amount of sense. First, we had the Clinton Years, where the Right was trying to paint him as a murderer, thief, rapist and philanderer (and as it turns out, one of those was true).

And if you follow that with the Bush Years, where the party in power is trying to build that power up through the force of fear,
aided and abetted by an entire television network devoted to spreading their strange lies, you have a people softened up to believe just any ridiculous pile of idiocy that people tried to feed them.

Oh, I'm sorry. America didn't believe ignorant crap under Bush? You mean, like the multi-billion dollar Fortress of Evil bin Laden had dug into the Pakistani mountains? Or that Iraq could attack the US with unmanned drones any minute now!

But the Huntsmen of Greed failed to keep a tight enough rein on the Horses of Insanity, and, as these things so often do, Entropy entered into the picture and everything fell into chaos.

Actually, to an extend, the Huntsmen of Greed can be blamed for the collapse of their own fiendish plans; it was Rupert Murdoch, after all, who gave Glenn Beck a national stage, and thereby mainstreamed some of the most hair-flamingly batshit conspiracy theories - perhaps we can point to him, but perhaps Murdoch was merely giving in to forces already beyond his control.

Whatever the reason, drooling lunacy has taken over much of the Right Wing, and the politicians of the Gibbering Old Paranoid party, not willing to give up the tattered remnants of whatever power they might have had, are willingly being swept along in the tidal stream of tempestuous Teabaggers: the only strategy left for these figureheads at the bow of the boat of Bedlam at this point, is to obsess over trivialities, to keep the wild-eyed crowd that's carrying them from focusing on real issues.

The rabid weasels who imagined "death panels" and "Obama reeducation camps," and were able to convince the masses that these things exist, are finding themselves overwhelmed by the forces that they, themselves, unleashed, not imagining that throwing open the Gates of Madness might allow more through the door than they had predicted.

We have entire websites devoted to the idea that America has been taken over by a radical, terrorist-loving, Marxist socialist fascist tyrannical Satanic Islamic atheist Kenyan whose sole aim in life is the utter destruction of all that we hold dear.

We'll ignore the biggies: Townhall, Pajamas Media (that plucky, faltering startup of lunacy), Glenn Beck's the Blaze, and look even farther down the ramp, where the gibbering is loudest.

The most obvious of these black holes of idiocy is World Net Daily, where, just dipping into the rancid pools of whatever passes for journalism there, we can discover a banner headline proclaiming:

Birth certificate doesn't meet Hawaii standards
Image White House released 'may not be a certified copy'
(WorldNetDaily Exclusive)

Yes, Joseph Farah, the publisher and Birther-In-Chief at WND, can't let go of the idea that Barack Obama is the result of a plot forty years in the making, because there's no way that a black man could get elected as President of the United States, right?

In fact, scrolling down the page, we find no less than ten other birther-related stories (and three ads) before we come to the "international coverage" - if, by "international," you mean the-Middle-East-but-mostly-Israel (because we can't have the Rapture if Jerusalem falls, after all...). The overriding focus of everything WND-related is that Obama has taken over the country, and is struggling to put Sharia Law in place.

Other websites can't manage this kind of message discipline, of course. Renew America, for example, has a shotgun blast pattern, with stories on "Obama is a hypocrite!"; "raising the debt ceiling will destroy America!" (a Newsmax crossover!); a story stolen from Fox News telling us that George Soros, a liberal, has "ties" to news organizations (with nary a mention of Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers, of course); Michelle Malkin and her latest "one-lunatic-equals-Islamic-conspiracy" rant; and a string of other "news" items.

The "news," though, is not the entertaining part of RenooAmurika: that would be the columnists (splayed out along the left-hand border, ironically). There we find such notables as:

Jeannie DeAngelis: a housewife and grandmother who conflates things like the USDA studying children's eating habits and illegal immigration; she crossposts at the American "Thinker" and her own blog Jeannie-ology (with the hilariously unself-aware banner "WHERE WHAT STARTED AS A CATHARTIC EXERCISE TURNED INTO AN OBSESSION!" All caps, of course, but with only one exclamation point. This is self-control, for Jeannie.)

Randy Engel: claims to be "one of the nation's top investigative reporters," but that's only if you add the codicil "...in the field of Abortion and Stem Cell Research are Eugenics!"

Bryan Fischer: American Family Association member who I might have mentioned once or twice, who only occasionally branches out from "all gay, all the time."

Judie Brown: president and co-founder of the American Life League, who chronicles the decay of the Catholic Church. Oh, and abortion.

Among so many, many others.

From there, we can move on to the already mentioned American "Thinker," which doesn't even bother with the false patina of respectability of the "news" features that RescrewAmerica pastes to the wall. They go straight to the crazy, with columns and inane ramblings by anybody who walks by, as long as they can spew spittle when repeating the phrase "Obama is destroying America!" Some of their winners include:

Robin of Berkeley: a self-proclaimed former ("recovering") liberal, she also claims to be a psychologist, despite the fact that she is willing to diagnose full-blown clinical psychosis based on second-hand reports (or two-line responses from people who argue with her). Irony has no place in Robin's world.

Chuck Rogér: Despite the suspiciously French last name (probably born named "Charles" - pronounced "Shar"), he's more of a generalist, finding the death of Society-As-We-Know-It ("we" being white and male, of course) in Sex Ed courses that actually mention condoms. (Because we know how successful Abstinence Only courses are. Right, Bristol?)

Bruce Whitsitt: One of many authors who've only puked out three or less articles, explains how all leftists hate cops and police, and the police should never be chastised for killing the wrong person. Because they don't. And even when they do, it's not their fault.

Lloyd Marcus: Apparently only has one theme: "I'm black, and I hate Obama!"

Of course, for the deepest, blackest pit of ugliness, there's no place better than Free Republic. Ironically, although "freeper" is the commonly used slang term for this particularly virulent species of paranoid racist, "freep.com" is actually the website for the Detroit Free Press. Don't make that mistake!

And there are thousands of little, lesser websites - sweaty loners sitting in their basements, blogging away amid the cases of canned food and ammunition. They're all out there, willing to believe any ridiculous fantasy that comes down the pike. As long as it proves that they're right, and the end of the world is coming and it's the liberals' fault!

They rant, they rave, and they grind their teeth down to nubs, equating Barack Obama with every "villain" in history. Was he Hitler? Marx? Stalin? Mao? Satan? Or even Che Guevara? What about Genghis Khan?

(Quick hint - when looking for Che Guevara links, use the additional tag "-flag" - some low-level Cuban staffer working for the Obama camp put a Cuban flag with the image of Guevara on a wall during the election - probably a bad idea.)

It doesn't matter what you imagine as the most catastrophic event in the history of the universe - there will be someone out there who will find a way to blame it on Barack Obama.