This kid repeats himself for about two minutes straight. I don’t think he’s going to develop into an especially sophisticated thinker in the near future.

Why would someone living on government assistance write something like this? If your family’s livelihood, and more important your scatterbrained blogging, depended on your monthly disability check, would you be agitating for fewer taxes?
I like to run on soft surfaces and in the woods whenever possible. If there were a movement afoot to greatly increase federal funding for rail trails and greenways, would you think I were jogging a little to close to the bus exhaust if I started screaming holy hell about how wrong such a measure would be?
To my understanding, only people whose adjusted gross income exceeds $250,000 stand to be adversely affected by the proposed tax legislation. These people would see all of their income over $250,000 subject to a 40% tax, rather than the 35% they pay across the board now. Someone earning $300,000 and currently forks over $105,000 to Uncle Sam would fork over an extra $2,500 per annum. Someone pulling in a million a year would be required to pay an extra $37,500. If these folks want to complain, I don’t blame them. Expecting only those high earners to contribute to balancing the budget would not make for a good long-term economic strategy, although right now the average schmuck’s back would be broken by a tax hike. And none of this addresses issues such as effective and marginal tax rates, not that I understand them.
But that’s not the point here. The point is that I would bet that roughly 99 of the teabagger crowd on Wednesday stand to benefit if Obama gets his way. Yet not only are they moaning about it, they’re organizing rallies in public spaces. And at precisely this moment, by sheer coincidence, I am watching Countdown on delay and seeing Janeane Garofalo explain to Keith Olbermann that the teabagger phenomenon is about straight-up racism. Oh, look–a clip:

Gribbit has shown a strong bigoted streak in the past. Garofalo is probably right for the most part. But I do think that a lot of people are simply clueless about the Obama tax plan. They think that somehow, they will be soaked. Even people who have no jobs. There are scores of racists afoot, but looking at the bigger picture, the average U.S. citizen is profoundly ignorant in most practical ways. There are millions of people in this country being played for utter fools. They don’t seem to grok that Obama is prepared to give them a tax break. But maybe they do, and they simply don’t give a shit because they’re looking for any reason to hate the darky.
Regardless of the weighting of the various factors in this sad mullet-riddled sideshow, they’ve bought into the Neocon bullshit machine with all their hearts. Say what you will about the ongoing collapse of the Republican Party, but it may never lose is flair for taking advantage of the squint-eyed and the slack-jawed. Hopefully, however, it will lose its need.

…is watching everyone in a large, packed auditorium nod and cheer at her every vapid, backward utterance. One moron continually making a fool of herself in the spotlight can be laughed into the societal corner. Knowing that may thousands of people support her unconditionally makes me want to bring a mattock crashing down upon my own head.
Addressing an addled sampling of Indiana’s populace at the Vandeburgh County Right-to-Life dinner tonight, Palin once again exposed both her basic lack of intellectual candlepower and her 10-kiloton hypocrisy, prating on about the importance of abstinence despite the fact that she was well aware of her daughter Bristol’s sexual involvement with Levi Johnston, delivering more plaintive and dishonest pro-life tripe, and just sounding–again–like a madly winking anus would sound if backed by a sufficiently strong and steady supply of searing intestinal effluvia.
Why won’t this idiot disappear from national politics? Because millions of idiot Americans keep her afloat with unabashed support. They don’t care that her ideas are so backward as to be legitimately frightening were she actually in a position to do anything. She is terribly stupid. That is not a crime, but it is not an ideal qualification for political office, either. Her record in Alaska makes it clear that she is crooked, and based on her religious positions, she is possibly insane.
Look, America, there’s only so much of the blame Palin herself can absorb for continuing her surreal, incompetent stagger around the country. Wise the hell up. Wake the hell up. We all have reasons for liking and disliking certain government officials, but anyone who legitimately supports Palin needs to see a neurologist, lay off the mescaline, visit a whorehouse, or some combination of the three.
With that, I leave you with a ten-minute clip I ordinarily would not post here, being puritanical and all. This is explosively acidic comedian Doug Stanhope talking about Palin in Philadelphia last October. You have been warned: This is profane, and it uses some rather indelicate terminology. I loved it.

I saw this argument used today in response to a letter to the editor written by a woman supporting New Hampshire House Bill 436, which, if passed by the state senate, would render banning same-sex marriage unconstitutional.
I am certain that the triumphant troglodyte who issued that comment–and followed up with the claim that homosexuality was “un-natural”–thinks he’s made a logically airtight statement and not taken a dump on his keyboard. His statement is inane because if someone’s parents had been strictly homosexual, they wouldn’t be her parents. That’s like saying that if my parents has been Bill and Hillary Clinton, then I wouldn’t exist because they never had a son named Kevin.
I told the guy that extreme stupidity was a survival disadvantage (not altogether true, but no matter) and was therefore just as unnatural, and yet there he was, writing dumb comments on the Internet. With the vote on HB 436 coming up, the trogs have really come out of the woodwork to make noise, and it’s yet more evidence I don’t need of how moronic the citizenry as a whole can be. It’s no wonder so many folks have weight and substance-abuse problems and have affairs; eating, screwing, and pickling our brains is about all most of us can figure out how to do.

In a speech in Ankara, Turkey the other day, the President raised the ire of hardcore Christians the other day, and he did it in the usual way: by having the temerity to state the benign and the obvious.

In a press conference before the address, the President reached out to his largely Muslim audience, reminding them that the United States of America is not “a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation.” Rather, he insisted, “we are a nation bound by a set of ideals and values.”

This is neither revolutionary nor inflammatory–at least to people who don’t spend most of their lived contemplating the sight and smell of their sigmoid colons.

In short, President Obama assured his audience that we have nothing to fear from each other, and that we have a great deal in common. Such was the peace-making message of this US president.
But back home, there are men and women on the right side of the Christian spectrum who have responded with dismay and disbelief, accusing the President of “throwing Christianity under the bus.”
Which speech were they listening to? Or does a reaction like that suggest that they were not listening at all?

People like Tara Wall (above link) can hear just fine. They simply refuse to contemplate things which overthrow long-cherished ideas such as “America is a Christian nation.” No matter how plain and inescapable the evidence appears to mentally intact folks, people like Wall are, when presented with this evidence, simply incapable of not repeating the “founded on Judeo-Christian principles” line and related memes just as deeply entrenched. Whatever intelligence these types demonstrate in their everyday affairs, when it comes to Christianity, they in effect become cows which have suddenly developed fully functional vocal cords and larynges but retain their bovine intellects. All they can do is make what amounts to curious lowing and bawling sounds, not unlike the teacher from “Peanuts.”
The maddening thing about reactions like these is, to me, not really about the Christian-versus-secular aspect. It’s that this sort of Christian unabashedly considers herself intrinsically superior to people of other faiths. When Obama noted that the U.S. is equally free of undue Christian, Muslim, or Jewish influence, the cow-Christians don’t hear this as “everyone is equal.” They instead feel badly slighted for not being afforded special privileges. These are people with the laughable temerity to fancy themselves paragons of humility, but it’s hard to imagine anything more fundamentally and profoundly arrogant.
There’s really nothing to be done about these assholes and their merry death-cult except wait for it to gradually slide toward meaninglessness, as is happening now. It won’t occur within my lifetime, but the jig is mostly up; in a world where virtually everything contradicts the idea of any sane person believing the Bible to be true, there will ultimately come a time when only those who really are insane will be on board with this, just as those positing a literal Zeus today would be regarded as lunatics.
The whole “Christian nation” issue is garbage anyway. Christians are free to worship as they please, gather in big pretty buildings they don’t have to pay taxes to perpetuate, and agitate for causes that basically seek to fuck up the country, although they can’t see it that way. Apparently, this freedom is not enough for some of them.