More Rosenstein

Month after month, we were led by the media to understand that Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein was one of the few good Republicans. He appointed Robert Mueller and supervised the Special Counsel investigation; the prevailing opinion was that Donnie Dick Drip would fire Rosenstein to set up termination of the Mueller investigation. Every time CNN hinted that Rosenstein was on the verge of being fired, I had to sweat it out for a day or so until it was clear that the media had been duped again.

Since Booger Barr's takeover of the Justice Department, Rod's stock has dropped dramatically. He's said and done things that muddy up his image as the guy who protected Mueller to ensure the investigation was completed.

Everybody knows that with the right amount of butt lubrication, Donnie can be manipulated like a preschooler. Did Rosenstein do whatever was necessary to keep Mueller's team on the tracks? Maybe we'll find out. Rod's resignation is official on 11 May, and he might be summoned to testify before the House Judiciary Committee.

Interesting Facts

Question: How is the so-called precedent (sic) different from a sweet potato?

Answer: A sweet potato is healthy for you, and you can legally cook one and eat it. Otherwise, in terms of appearance, personality, and intelligence, they are virtually identical.

Takeover Forthcoming

There's nothing wrong with Rep. Louie Gohmert that couldn't be cured with about 20 years of intense therapy in one of our better mental institutions.

Update 10:36 AM on Wednesday 7 January: The dickweed got three votes. His own plus two?

Sweet Home Alabama

Another thing that's completely predictable: Any gathering of Republican legislators anywhere will eventually waste time passing ridiculous symbolic gestures. It causes me to wonder why they do that. The most likely explanation is that the people who vote for Republican legislators are mostly ignorant yahoos who are impressed by meaningless symbolic gestures. I've also noticed this activity occurs most often in backwater hellholes like Alabama and Arkansas.

The Sad Destiny of Decent Republicans

Former Senator Chuck Hagel is one of a dwindling number of tolerable Republicans. You could probably write the names of most of them on a matchbook cover. Obama has nominated this sensible Republican to head the Defense Department, which means regular Republicans (the worthless asshole kind) now hate Hagel's guts.

Flashing Lights

If the Paul Ryan/Tea Party agenda is exactly what America needs, why is Willard M. Romney so anxious to deny policy positions he's taken for months? This should be setting off alarms about (A) the Ryan agenda, or (B) Mitt Romney, or (C) both.

Money Matters

If Obama continues to push a deficit reduction plan that involves the elimination of special interest tax breaks in addition to trillions in spending cuts, and if congressional Dems stand firm behind him, it looks like the Republicans will walk away without approving an increase in the debt ceiling.

There seems to be mixed opinion on what happens then. Conservatives mostly agree that it's no big fuckin' deal. Everyone else seems to believe the economic consequences will be catastrophic. Since I wasn't an economics major, I don't know which side is right.

One thing I do know is that if the conservatives are wrong and everything goes to hell in a handbasket this fall, it's critically important that American voters realize who caused the holocaust by refusing to compromise. The only upside to an economic disaster would be seeing the GOP locked into minority status for the duration of my lifetime. That would be one less thing for me to fret about.

Don't get mad...

Texas Republicans in the legislature keep making up new rules as they go along, as discussed in a Houston Chronicle editorial. The best part is the last sentence: At some point, the demographic shifts that are already beginning will probably result in a Democratic majority, and payback is gonna be hell. And when the retaliation starts, Republicans will be screaming about the unfairness of it all. We've seen it happen many times already, and it isn't a pretty sight.

Keeping things in perspective

Ask any conservative and he'll tell you the most important politician in America today is Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the mastermind behind the GOP budget plan that's supposed to solve the nation's fiscal problems. One newspaper pundit even proposed a series of national debates between Obama and Ryan, just the two of them going mano a mano.

Paul Ryan represents Wisconsin's House District 1, which is about as solidly red as any geographic area can be. In November 2010, with 99 percent of the precincts reporting, Ryan had 179,702 of 263,362 total votes, or roughly 68 percent. That's a substantial victory, but to keep things in perspective, the voting population in Ryan's district is smaller than the current population of Tulsa, Oklahoma (392,000).

In the 2008 presidential election, there were 2,928,655 votes cast in Wisconsin, and Obama got 1,670,474 of them (56.3 percent). To put it another way, Ryan's winning vote total in 2010 was about 6.1 percent of the total state vote two years earlier.

As a rule of thumb, members of the House of Representatives don't need to win many votes to stay in office, certainly nowhere near as many as a U.S. Senator, a state governor, and definitely not the president. District boundaries are drawn to make the re-election of incumbents as foolproof as possible. As much as anything, this probably explains why the U.S. House of Representatives is the closest thing to an insane asylum as we have in the federal government. A relatively small number of yahoos, assholes, dipsticks and lunatics can put House members in office, and the deck is stacked to keep them there.

House Broken

As one result of last year's elections, there are about 90 new Republicans in the House of Representatives who have no business being there. Apparently they're all cut from the same pattern as Michele Bachmann; they have an inflated view of their own importance and have decided the federal government should orbit around them. At the moment they're playing games with budget bills -- threatening, for example, to shut off paychecks to members of the military if they don't get their way.

He probably won't do it, but Obama needs to go ahead and bust these motherfuckers right now. The longer he puts it off, the more obnoxious they're gonna get. They'll keep shitting on the floor until Obama gets 'em housebroken.

The Agenda Item

In January 2009, before Obama had been in office long enough to warm the seat of his chair, Rush Limbaugh, with a degree of candor that his multi-million dollar income allows, made the statement that more cautious Republicans only whispered privately among themselves in closed rooms. He declared that he wanted Obama's presidency to fail.

Anyone who doubts Limbaugh speaks for the Republican Party has missed the stories about elected GOP officials crawling to him in supplication because they've said something that pissed him off. It's a given then -- the GOP wanted Obama to fail before his presidency had even started.

There are signals on the edges that economic recovery is in its nascent stages, and the greatest of many GOP fears is that Obama will be president during a period when the economy begins to grow, people go back to work, and voters decide to chill out for awhile. Among Republicans, fear is the great motivator.

When you understand that failure of the Obama administration is THE agenda item and that economic recovery during his first term is a potential disaster for the GOP, all the other puzzle pieces fall into place.

Movin' On Up

Back in the days when really nasty Republicans like Dick Cheney, Tom DeLay, and Karl Rove dominated the American political stage, Darrell Issa was a tiny turd in a big crapper, so far back in the line that you had to work at keeping up with the news to even know his name. Apparently, Issa's moving up in the world and will be leading the GOP charge to investigate corruption in the Obama administration. It's a strange world we live in when somebody like this guy gets to be a bigshot.

Tea-dious Tsunami ?

Can you feel the excitement ? I know I can. The Republicans, boosted by voters from the tea-dium party movement, have gained more than enough seats to control the House in the next session, and the Senate is still within reach. The guys who have spent roughly two years milling around on the sidelines, pausing just long enough to shout profanity or throw rotten garbage onto the field, have been given the car keys again. This time they promise not to drive full speed into the ditch, and American voters, always suckers for a good TV ad, fell for it again.

The tea-dious partiers, aka the clan with the plan, want some tax cuts, lots of deregulation, some more tax cuts, and a huge reduction in the federal deficit, maybe a trillion dollars or so. Oh, and did I mention some tax cuts ? Since tax INCREASES are out, the spending cuts will have to be monsters to get the budget balanced. Eventually, programs that conservatives like will get the axe, then the proverbial shit will be in the proverbial fan.

Roughly half of American voters are semi-literate primates, and their idea of a joke this year is to elect people who have no government experience and hate the government to run the government. Now that's a swell concept.

As retirees, mrs. bee and I could really benefit from cost-of-living increases in our pensions, but those are totally out of the question until the economy is booming again and system trust fund coffers are flush with ready cash. I therefore have a vested interest in seeing a robust economy with full employment, and that's exactly what the Republicans have promised. I've lived through a lot of years of Republican government and most of them sucked, but maybe they'll get it right this time. Or maybe they were able to con a lot of gullible voters who have a 30-second attention span.  

Tea time ?

People like Ron Fournier of the AP keep writing stories about them, so I can't ignore the teapeople as easily as I want to. The media keep speculating about the impact the teapeople will have in the 2010 and 2012 elections; I don't honestly know but my guess is that it'll be much less than media writers think.

First, the Tea Party isn't really a party in the conventional sense. The people who wear the label probably chose it because it has historical connotations, and because tea bags are readily available at a reasonable price. Even the Democrats are more organized than the Tea Party, which tells me something.

Second, the teapeople are not a new voting bloc emerging out of primordial goo. These people have been voting, and from what I've seen, most of them have been voting a long time. The vast majority have been voting for Republicans. If you can find a teaperson who voted for Clinton in 1996, Gore in 2000, Kerry in 2004, and Obama in 2008, I'll buy you a Starbucks. If you can find one who voted for the Dem in any ONE of those elections, I'll buy you a soda pop.

So what we have are a bunch of aging, disgruntled Republicans who voted for Bush/Cheney both times, and may have grumbled a little about budget deficits over the checkerboard --- but only got motivated to join a traveling dog-and-pony show when The N and Democrats started planning the budget. Now they're claiming to be an independent movement, but in reality they're only a Republican splinter group that adds very few votes, if any, to the totals the GOP is already getting.

Third, being made up largely of geezers with too much free time on their hands and lacking even a fraction of the organization of a scatterbrained mob like the Democrats, the Tea Party won't be fielding any candidates of their own. All they can do is try to muscle the GOP into nominating a waste of oxygen like Sarah Palin, or even worse, a Palin wannabe like Rick Perry (the main difference between the two being that Ricardo wouldn't resign his governorship if his worthless life depended on it).

Maybe the Republicans can nominate a candidate like Palin and win a national election in 2012. Strange things happen in American politics. But in reality, Palin was the de facto head of the GOP ticket in 2008, at least in terms of media attention and publicity, and she lost pretty badly to a guy named Barack Hussein Obama. My hunch is that there are still a lot of moderate, independent voters out there who aren't happy about things, but aren't so dissatisfied that they've started dangling teabags from their sombreros. The Republicans need a big chunk of those voters, and I don't see how they'll get them by jumping through hoops to placate a splinter group like the teapeople.

Cohesion

An editorial in the Houston Chronicle remarks on the fact the health care reform bill was passed without a single Republican vote. I've often written that the greatest distinction between Republicans and Democrats is the ability of the GOP to unify and march in absolute lockstep. I've watched them do it for years now, and a while back compared the GOP congressional majority to a Panzer division plowing through a field of daisies. Their ability to cohere allows Republicans to take the narrowest majority and use it to ram through any measure their leaders want. It's both awesome and nerve-wracking to behold.

Because Democrats tend to fragment rather than cohere, they need more substantial majorities to get anything done, and usually don't have them. This weekend, their majority was barely enough.

Whether the health care reform laws will survive court challenges or benefit most Americans remains to be seen. Will the Republicans pay a penalty or gain an advantage by having cohered in their opposition to anything Obama wants ? That also is up in the air for the moment.

Mickey and me

It's nice to be needed. In yesterday's mail, there was another warm, personal letter from my old friend, RNC chairman Michael Steele, or Mickey as I like to call him when we're having beers. Mickey appreciates my opinions so much that he sent me still another questionnaire, this one called the 2010 Obama Agenda Survey. Mickey's letter said that my opinions, and those of the other people who fill out the survey, will be used to overcome the "non-stop, swooning coverage" of Obama's agenda by the "ultra-biased" news media. Mickey and the RNC need me to act quickly to keep the Democrats from carrying their momentum into the midterm elections. As he said in the letter, "It is up to you and me to stop them." Mickey always has my back.

Knowing the Republicans are counting on me, I filled out the questionnaire. Based on my answers, I support Obama's plans to raise taxes, give amnesty to illegal immigrants, bankrupt Social Security, nationalize health care, stifle the national economy, and create massive new government bureaucracies. I didn't write Mickey a check for 500 bucks to help the GOP "rebuild from the grassroots up, and come back with renewed energy and a strong commitment to conservative principles of low taxes, small government, personal responsibility, and a strong national defense."

My question to Mickey is, "What part of 'go fuck yourself' do you not understand ? "

What's it all mean anyway ?

Nine fairly short paragraphs that make more sense of Tuesday's election results than anything else I've read on the subject.

Freak show

This column by Ellen Goodman clarifies the reason I spend most of my time here writing about conservatives in general, and Republicans in particular. Conservatism became the dominant U.S. political philosophy with Reagan's election in 1980, and the Republicans were the dominant party from that point until 2008, with the exception of the first two years of the Clinton administration. As much as they try to pretend otherwise, Republicans were dealing the cards for most of the past thirty years and they get the lion's share of the blame for the mess things are in.

Setting aside how much blame accrues to them for the predicament we're in, the thing that really pisses me off is that instead of (a) trying to clean up the mess, or (b) standing quietly on the sidelines while Obama tries to clean it up, the GOP is (c) doing everything it can to ensure that Obama's efforts fail. As usual, given a choice of alternatives, the Republicans have chosen the worst one. Like cockroaches, the only thing Republicans are good at is contaminating everything they contact.

Added 6:38 pm, same day: And somehow I just knew this ignorant slut would find some way to get in on the show. Cockroaches.

Friday free-for-all

Washington Monthly is the source for this item, which perfectly explains why we need the expression "Aw, go fuck yourself." With luck, Ricardo will be hearing it soon, when the feds consider the merits of his request.

If you look up the word "fascism" in an online dictionary, you'll probably find this definition or something very similar. If we're really becoming a fascist nation like so many right-wingers are saying, then we should be seeing a lot less tolerance of dissent. That will mean no more tea parties and most of the people who comment on AM radio and Texas newspaper websites will be rounded up and put away somewhere. People like this guy would definitely be on the shit list, which proves there are silver linings in almost any dark cloud.

Senator Jim DeMint is saying that if Republicans stall the health care reform bill awhile, it will be Obama's "Waterloo." As DeMint says, it will "break him." Like cockroaches, Republicans are starting to scurry around looking for new dark, damp places to reproduce. DeMint and Jeff Sessions are a couple that got caught in the light and started running in circles. Interestingly enough, DeMint is apparently one of his party's hot numbers for 2012. I'm becoming convinced the GOP is doing everything in its power to ensure that I will not vote Republican in what remains of my lifetime. That's kind of a shame, because the Democrats aren't really satisfactory as a default position.

Let's see you two fight each other

Catfight.

In a world where good news and fun stuff are hard to come by, several months of Rick and Kay Bay going for each other's jugular may turn out to be premium entertainment.