The River Wanders...

more-commonsense:

motherjones:

#thewaywelivenow

1. Notice how big Texas has grown on that guy’s T-shirt.  I bet the guy puts his camera on zoom to take pictures of his personal body parts, too.

2. Good go.  BTW, we don’t buy our insurance from other nations. That’s going to bite your ass big time.  We do buy oil, but slap a 19% tariff, so we’ll be drilling more in the Real United States and forgoing your crude offerings.

3.  Yes, please! That alone would cure the effect of most of the Gerrymandering in the US House.  We don’t protect the voting rights of Hispanics in your state (or any state) anyway so 40% of your population is Hispanic but you only have 6 US Congressmen (from 2012 election) with Hispanic names, and that includes Rep Flores (R) who has to go back 4 generations to link up to his Hispanic name, and looks more pink than I do.

4. Yes, please. Glad to see the backside of most of your creepy US House reps who are holding an inordinate number of chairman seats, and your senators. Jeb Hensarling, it’s time for you to go home!

5. B’bye!  We’ll treat you as fairly as we treat all weak nations.  You can have 2 miles off your shore and we’ll take the rest of the Gulf for “our” oil.  Thanks!

6. And we’ll want our military bases back, or at least everything that makes them valuable to your economy, the US funds that pay for them, the equipment, technology, our soldiers, and our space technology.  You can have the shell of the buildings  we’ll leave, or maybe we’ll blow them up before departing. Military secrets, you know.

7.  You mean we won’t have to pay for all the welfare you soak up?  Oh BTW, societies with a lot of unhelped  poor folk, tend to do very badly.  But now that we’ve warned you, we’ll shove off.

8.  And about that farm aid  (and the other welfares that no one calls by the “w” word like federal help for drilling, scientific research, schools, airports, roads, etc.)  To make up for it you can tax your church donations instead of making them exempt like we do.

9.Ta!  We know that you’ll be successful in all you do.  Oh wait…

Picture of Big Tex burning at October’s state fair used via Creative Commons License Attribution (CC by 2.0) thanks to flickr user greychr who has no connection to this blog or blogger.

(via liberal-focus)

paxamericana:

Veterans won’t be getting a new, billion-dollar jobs program, not from this Senate. Republicans on Wednesday afternoon blocked a vote on the Veterans Job Corps Bill after Jeff Sessions of Alabama raised a point of order — he said the bill  violated a cap on spending agreed to by Congress last year. The bill’s sponsor, Patty Murray of Washington, said that shouldn’t matter, since the bill’s cost was fully offset by new revenues. She said Mr. Sessions and his party colleagues had been furiously generating excuses to oppose the bill, and were now exploiting a technicality to deny thousands of veterans a shot at getting hired as police officers, firefighters and parks workers, among other things.

The vote was 58-40; the bill needed 60 votes to proceed.

It would be easier to admire the Republicans’ late-breaking fiscal scrupulosity if their motives — denying  the Obama administration any kind of victory this year, whatever the cost to jobless vets — weren’t so transparent.  It’s probably useful to remind Republicans like John McCain (a “nay” on the jobs bill) that wounded, jobless and homeless veterans aren’t a fact of nature. They’re a product of the wars that Congress members voted for, the war debt they piled on, and the economy they helped ruin.

“It’s unbelievable that even after more than a decade of war, many Republicans still will not acknowledge that the treatment of our veterans is a cost of war,” Ms. Murray said in a statement after the vote.

If you haven’t yet figured out that the gop is out to sabotage Barack Obama and will throw ANY and EVERY American under the bus to do so, they you need a lobotomy and a swift kick in the ass (not necessarily in that order because I want you to appreciate the pain of the ass-kicking).

(via randomactsofchaos)

Because shit this pompous and condescending needs to be played over and over and over and over and over again.  And then just once more.

quickhits:

Rep. Steve King, one of the most staunchly conservative members of the House, was one of the few Republicans who did not strongly condemn Rep. Todd Akin Monday for his remarks regarding pregnancy and rape. King also signaled why — he might agree with parts of Akin’s assertion.

King told an Iowa reporter he’s never heard of a child getting pregnant from statutory rape or incest.

“Well I just haven’t heard of that being a circumstance that’s been brought to me in any personal way,” King told KMEG-TV Monday, “and I’d be open to discussion about that subject matter.”

“I’ve never personally seen it, therefore it does not exist.”

This is how I know that China is a made up place, like Middle-earth.

How is this man elected to anything but a dunk tank?

(via randomactsofchaos)

[Read] this from the New York Times: “The news media have played a crucial role in Mr. Obama’s career, helping to make him a national star not long after he had been an anonymous state legislator. As president, however, he has come to believe the news media have had a role in frustrating his ambitions to change the terms of the country’s political discussion. He particularly believes that Democrats do not receive enough credit for their willingness to accept cuts in Medicare and Social Security, while Republicans oppose almost any tax increase to reduce the deficit.”

So Obama too is willing to take the political risk of cutting the popular programs called Medicare and Social Security. In fact, what Obama wants is not to protect these programs from cuts, but rather to receive appropriate credit from the media corporations for his willingness to cut them. This, we are about to be told endlessly, is in stark contrast to Romney-Ryan’s willingness to cut Medicare and Social Security. But the biggest contrast seems to be that the media gives Romney and Ryan the credit that Obama covets.

Oh no, Obama supporters will reply, there’s a big difference. Romney wants to cut these programs, while Obama is willing to cut them. Romney is evil, while Obama is noble and gracious in his appeasing of evil. I’m sorry, but won’t the catfood that grandma lives on taste as bitter regardless of whether her income was removed maliciously or accommodatingly?

There IS a BIG difference between restructuring (Obama) and eliminating(Grover Norquist, Ron Paul, Romney, Ryan, et al).  Obama didn’t rise to prominence because he’s a Paris Hilton media baby; he rose to prominence on his IDEAS.  Too bad most of them have been #Koch blocked by the teabaggers who made it into Congress.

(via randomactsofchaos)

jarrydwillis:

Republicans don’t believe in science & therefore don’t believe in videotape.

They also refuse to acknowledge:
Climate Change
Evolution
Africa is a continent, not a country
President Obama’s Birth Certificate
That Romney apologized for America after he insulted the Olympics
The Founding…

reagan-was-a-horrible-president:

sarahlee310:

In 1983, Bill Bain asked Mitt Romney to launch Bain Capital, a private equity offshoot of the successful consulting firm Bain & Company. After some initial reluctance, Romney agreed. The new job came with a stipulation: Romney couldn’t raise money from any current clients, Bain said, because if the private equity venture failed, he didn’t want it taking the consulting firm down with it.

When Romney struggled to raise funds from other traditional sources, he and his partners started thinking outside the box. Bain executive Harry Strachan suggested that Romney meet with a group of Central American oligarchs who were looking for new investment vehicles as turmoil engulfed their region.

Romney was worried that the oligarchs might be tied to “illegal drug money, right-wing death squads, or left-wing terrorism,” Strachan later told a Boston Globe reporter, as quoted in the 2012 book “The Real Romney.” But, pressed for capital, Romney pushed his concerns aside and flew to Miami in mid-1984 to meet with the Salvadorans at a local bank.

It was a lucrative trip. The Central Americans provided roughly $9 million — 40 percent — of Bain Capital’s initial outside funding, the Los Angeles Times reported recently. And they became valued clients.

“Over the years, these Latin American friends have loyally rolled over investments in succeeding funds, actively participated in Bain Capital’s May investor meetings, and are still today one of the largest investor groups in Bain Capital,” Strachan wrote in his memoir in 2008. Strachan declined to be interviewed for this story.

When Romney launched another venture that needed funding — his first presidential campaign — he returned to Miami.

“I owe a great deal to Americans of Latin American descent,” he said at a dinner in Miami in 2007. “When I was starting my business, I came to Miami to find partners that would believe in me and that would finance my enterprise. My partners were Ricardo Poma, Miguel Dueñas, Pancho Soler, Frank Kardonski, and Diego Ribadeneira.”

Romney could also have thanked investors from two other wealthy and powerful Central American clans — the de Sola and Salaverria families, who the Los Angeles Times and Boston Globe have reported were founding investors in Bain Capital.

While they were on the lookout for investments in the United States, members of some of these prominent families — including the Salaverria, Poma, de Sola and Dueñas clans — were also at the time financing, either directly or through political parties, death squads in El Salvador. The ruling classes were deploying the death squads to beat back left-wing guerrillas and reformers during El Salvador’s civil war.

[…]

The connection between the families involved with Bain’s founding and those who financed death squads was made by the Boston Globe in 1994 and the Salt Lake Tribune in 1999. This election cycle, Salon first raised the issue in January, and the Los Angeles Times filled out more of the record earlier this month.

There is no shortage of unsavory links. Even the Tribune article referred to by the Romney campaign reports that “about $6.5 million of $37 million that established the company came from wealthy El Salvadoran families linked to right-wing death squads.”

More….

I guess Romney likes death squad money since he doesn’t have to pay taxes on it.

(via truth-has-a-liberal-bias)

Fox News and its commentators Bill O’Reilly and Greta Van Susteren as well as network reporter Juliet Huddy are being sued for defamation and infliction of emotional distress.

The plaintiff is Aviva Nash, who runs the New York-based business Drum Cafe. She’s filed a lawsuit in Bronx Superior Court that alleges the Fox News personalities accused her of being a con artist who steals from U.S. taxpayers.

(via reagan-was-a-horrible-president)