The Un-War On Christmas

Do you see it?  There on the side of the wagon and again on the banner under the picture of the wagon?  It says "White House Christmas Tree".

I'm serious - if you bring any of the usual shit about "anti-Christian this" or "holiday that", I can't guarantee I won't get all medieval on your dumb ass.

Here's the video:


Yeah - it's just that boring.  It's always just that boring.   Why is it ALWAYS the Little Stoopid that DumFux News and the wingnuts choose to make into a Big Stoopid?

Here's a tho't - what if DumFux News is actually helping Obama and all those Big Gubmint rascals by distracting our attention away from Torture and Murder-by-Drone and Domestic Spying and a hundred other bigger things by getting us to concentrate on a bunch of fanciful junk that isn't true and wouldn't fucking matter even if it was true?

Today's Toon

From Democratic Underground:

And I'll Say It Again

No Dynasties.

No more Bushes, no more Clintons, No more Kennedys, no more Rockefellers - no more legacy candidates for anything anywhere anytime ever (unless of course, I change my mind because somebody comes along who's completely awesome).

Cleveland Leader linking to NYT

President Barack Obama's second term hasn't even officially begun, but already speculation is beginning to mount for the next presidential race in 2016. It is now rumored that former Florida governor Jeb Bush, the son of former president George H.W. Bush and brother of former president George W. Bush, is looking to throw his hat in the ring for the Republican ticket in 2016.

Jeb Bush is not that completely awesome guy.  And neither is Hillary Clinton.  Look at who serves in any level of government, and you'll find way too many people whose number one item on the resumé is "born into a family of wealth and power".

Knock that shit off.

The Krugman

I don't like feeling I'm becoming kinda captured by a slanted narrative (just sayin' that one straight out), but I'll try to contain my discomfort (for a while anyway) because Paul Krugman seems always to be trying to talk some sense into us.

And he keeps coming up with real info about real events that we need to weigh against all the fantastic predictions of doom coming from the Austerity Freaks.

But what about the brief but nasty slump in 1927? That wasn’t caused by spiking interest rates; it was, instead, caused by fiscal austerity, by the measures taken to stabilize the franc.

So even when we look at the closest thing I can find to the scenario the deficit scolds want us to fear, it doesn’t play out at all as described.

It’s quite remarkable: our policy discourse remains largely dominated by fears of an event that the fear-mongers can’t explain in theory, and for which they can offer no historical examples in practice.

Music In Advertising

Banishment

This one - from Rod Dreher at The American Conservative - is really fun.  And it's easily the most honest of what I've read since the Great GOP Meltdown.

(Fun Fact:  Laura Ingraham was heard recently saying she's convinced the GOP, in its current wingnut configuration - and in spite of being pretty well drubbed - is still a major-league thing because "conservative radio" is still so very popular.  Hang by a thread much, Laura?)

Anyway, Dreher starts with slamming Dick Morris:

Got that? Dick Morris believed it was his “duty” to go on TV and say that Romney was going to win this thing, because everybody on Team Romney at the time was depressed. It’s hard to know whether Morris really believed what he was saying, as he claims to, but there can be no doubt that he saw his role as cheerleading for the Republican candidate, not offering straightforward analysis.

Dick Morris is a conservative figure who really ought to never be heard from again. He’s a hack. I say give him a Dubya Award for Meritorious Service To The Conservative Movement, and push him off the stage. (“Meritorious” in the sense that, say, a boss who is firing an employee for screwing up makes an insincere but face-saving statement about how much the company has benefited from the employee’s service, and wishes him the best of luck in his future endeavors).

...then Dreher asks his readers to suggest others who should just fade away, and that's when it really starts to roll.

EarlyBird says:

It’s been a while since she’s really been on the public stage – perhaps she actually has the capacity for shame – but Sarah Palin needs to go far, far away and never come back, never “write” another book.

She is not stupid, she’s something worse: proudly ignorant. There has probably never been as vapid, empty of a “conservative” as Palin who’s gone as far in her career as she has.

She doesn’t know the first thing about governance, and her record as governor of Alaska shows she has no interest in actually implementing ideas and policies and doing the hard work of governing, but she instinctively knows how to throw red meat out to the base, rallying the worst instincts among the right with crypto-racist and fully reactionary nonsense about “real Americans.”

These are the people that make the electorate think, “the Republicans aren’t able to govern.”

She’s a disgrace to American politics, and an indictment of how off the rails the GOP has become in recent years. That she was such a darling for so long is jaw dropping.

But there's a good dose of the same ol' shit too:

Louis says:

The only ignorant people are the ones who overlook the damage done by Republicans in Washington, D.C. What was Sarah Palin’s big crime? There isn’t one. I would prefer her as president to any of the Bushes any day of the week.

The Tax Thing

I've seen and heard some whining going on about what a bitch it'll be for hard-working white-collar Dems who'll have to pony up on the tax raise because they're busy making money north of the magic $250k level, living in a not-very-fancy neighborhood with a coupla kids etc - and now they have to get ready to pay up on Obama's promise to hike taxes, and it's so unfair because gee, $250k just doesn't buy what it used to buy blah blah blah.

Please - get a fuckin' grip.  You're supposed to be the "smart ones", remember?

Obama's basic plan is to boost the tax rate on income OVER $250k, which means you'll pay exactly the same rate on the FIRST $250k; paying the higher rate only on the amount you earn after $250K.

You sit down and do just a tiny bit of arithmetic, and wow - look at that - if you're pullin' down $300k, your total rate goes up by about 3/4 of 1%.  Think you can handle that one, Mr Super-Genius?

What (prob'ly) Won't Happen

This is a list of some of the things that aren't going to happen - at least not at the Federal level - because enough of us found the good sense to vote for Obama.

(from Ol' Doc Maddow, via Addicting Info)

(1) “We are not going to have a Supreme Court that will overturn Roe vs. Wade. There will be no more Antonin Scalias and Samuel Alitos added to this court.”
(2) “We’re not going to repeal health reform. Nobody’s going to kill Medicare and make old people in this generation — or any other generation — fight it out on the open market to try to get themselves health insurance. We’re not going to do that.”
(3) “We’re not going to give the 20% tax cut to millionaires and billionaires, and expect [cutting] programs like food stamps and kids’ health insurance to cover that tax cut.”
(4) “We’re not going to make you clear it with your boss if you want to get birth control with the insurance plan that you’re on.”
(5) “We are not going to redefine rape.”
(6) “We are not going to amend the constitution to stop gay people from getting married.”
(7) We’re not going to double down on Guantanamo.
(8) “We’re not eliminating the Department of Energy, the Department of Education, or Housing at the Federal level.”
(9) “We are not going to spend two trillion dollars on the military, that the military does not want.”
(10) “We are not scaling back on student loans because the country’s NEW plan is that you should borrow money from your parents.”
(11) “We are not vetoing the Dream Act, we are not ‘self-deporting.’”
(12) “We are not letting Detroit go bankrupt.”
(13) “We are not starting a trade war with China on Inauguration Day in January.”
(14) “We are not going to have — as a president — a man who once led a mob of friends to run down a scared gay kid to hold him down and forcibly cut his hair off with a pair of scissors while that kid cried and screamed for help. (And there was NO apology, not EVER.)”
(15) “We are not going to have a Secretary of State John Bolton. We are not going to bring Dick Cheney back. We are not going to have a foreign policy shop stocked with architects of the Iraq war, we are not going to do it … We had the choice to do that if we wanted to do that, as a country, and we said no, last night, loudly.”

Thankful

For home.


For love and family.


For dreams of better things to come.

Turkey And Football Day