Jeebus -- Forgive Them, For They Know Not What They Do . . . .

This dear readers is the proverbial casebook example as to why the Tea Party needs not only to be defeated, but defeated so brutally that they think twice and think hard about ever again attempting to hijack the American political apparatus for their own ideological gain:

When eight-year-old Olivia McConnell was perusing a menu at a restaurant that features all 50 of the official symbols of her home state of South Carolina, she noticed a glaring vacancy. South Carolina has a State American Folk Dance, a State Grass, a State Opera, even a State Lowcountry Handcraft, but—no offense to square dancing, Indian grass, Porgy and Bess, or sweet grass baskets intended—McConnell thought something was missing: a state fossil.

The third grader at Carolina Academy wrote a letter to her state lawmakers, Rep. Robert Ridgeway and Sen. Kevin Johnson, in a bid to give the woolly mammoth that honor. Olivia has sound reasons behind her nomination: One of the first discoveries of a fossil in North America was that of a woolly mammoth’s teeth, dug up by slaves on a South Carolina plantation in 1725; all but seven states have an official state fossil; and, most adorably, “Fossils tell us about our past.

Unfortunately for McConnell’s proposal, a pair of state senators with views as dusty as a mammoth’s bones is blocking her move to honor the furry fossil.

After Ridgeway and Johnson introduced a bill to amend the state’s code to include the Columbian Mammoth as the official state fossil of South Carolina, the state House passed it 94-3. The state Senate hasn’t been so accommodating.

Sen. Kevin Bryant, a pharmacist and self-described born-again Christian who has compared President Obama with Osama bin Laden, voted to sustain a veto by Governor Nikki Haley of funding for a rape crisis center, and called climate change a “hoax,” proposed amending the bill to include three verses from the Book of Genesis detailing God’s creation of the Earth and its living inhabitants—including mammoths.

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/south-carolina-lawmaker-8-year-old-god-should-get-credit-new-state-fossil


So to summarize, an innocent, smart, well intentioned, 8-year old girl with a laudable interest in science and paleontology, decides to engage her political representatives and submit a request to have her home state of South Carolina, like 40 some other states, designate a state fossil.

Sounds inoffensive and sufficiently apolitical enough right?  Just an elementary school kid with an affinity for fossils wanting to see their hobby receive some recognition.  It's not infringing upon anyone's rights or freedoms or religious proclivities.

Apparently not so if you're a religious fundamentalist Teabagger.

Even after a clear majority in the SC House voted 94-3 to pass the state fossil resolution, SC Senate Teanut representative Kevin Bryant blocked the bill from moving forward unless his demand that wording be inserted in to the bill which basically consisted of word-for-word bible verses detailing the creation story in the book of Genesis.

This dear readers is precisely the very same mindset that the Taliban -- you know, those creepy, extremist, stone-age thinking religious fanatics who we have been fighting and killing and dying at the hands of over in Afghanistan for a decade -- possess.  They truly are one and the same.  The only difference being that our home-grown American Taliban are roaming the halls of our state and national governments.

The Gadfly has said it repeatedly and will state it once again -- Americans of sound mind and manner ignore these lunatics at the peril of our democracy's future existence.



----TFG

They Are Reaping That Which They Have Sown . . . And Now They Are Blubbering Like Toddlers Over It . . . .

Charles Koch, he of the infamous Koch Bros. not-so-dynamic duo, went crying to Rupert Murdoch last week and convinced Unka Rupert to allow him some editorial space on the pages of the formerly respectable Wall Street Journal.

And boy what a tear-filled, plaintive bewailing act, of the likes that The Gadfly hasn't seen in some time, was unleashed.

Go read it here if you can stomach the spectacle of a billionaire industrialist who can spend $500 million on his political causes like you or The Gadfly would spend on a cup of coffee and a donut, sob openly about how the mean old liberals and the evil 'gubmint (the very same gov't he wants to own) are treating him, his brother and the other inheritance-baby tycoons:

Blogger karoli at Crooks & Liars had a pretty good take on it:

Koch: Instead of fostering a system that enables people to help themselves, America is now saddled with a system that destroys value, raises costs, hinders innovation and relegates millions of citizens to a life of poverty, dependency and hopelessness. This is what happens when elected officials believe that people's lives are better run by politicians and regulators than by the people themselves. Those in power fail to see that more government means less liberty, and liberty is the essence of what it means to be American. Love of liberty is the American ideal.

Ah, liberty. That thing you buy, but the rest of us have to earn. I have tasted the liberty of having my bank account depleted to pay for my family's health needs. I have eaten the fruit of the liberty tree that told me it was fine for me to lose my home, my savings, my retirement and my health. I have tasted the liberty that says I'm too old, too female, too costly to fill even the most menial jobs. That's the same liberty that demands expensive unsubsidized college educations with years of indentured servitude to follow.

That's the liberty you speak of? That liberty strands people in a life of inescapable poverty, dependency and hopelessness. Thanks, but no thanks.

http://crooksandliars.com/2014/04/pity-billionaires-charles-koch-edition


The whole response by karoli is just devastating.  After reading Koch's WSJ self-pity fest, go read karoli's response - you'll be a wiser and more informed American for it.

But not content to just forcefully respond with facts and reality, Majority Report's Sam Seder unleashes a vicious attack of mockery that even Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert would both tear up and cringe over - watch:






Unfortunately, the destructive political actions of the conservatives and their industrialist sugar daddies has compelled those who oppose them of lowering ourselves to their level of mean-spirited, cynical personal attacks, because quite clearly by virtue of Koch's caterwauling and boo-hooing all over the WSJ editorial pages, that appears to be the only kind of dialogue that bastards like him seem to understand and react to.

As disheartening as the malignity of it all is, at least it is comforting knowing that you are on the side who still places a premium value on those traits as they relate to reality, the truth and human dignity.



----TFG

They Say Justice in America is Blind. The Gadfly Agrees - Adding That it is Also Deaf, Dumb, Morally Challenged, and Corrupt . . .

This is a tragic story any way you look at it, but let's talk about this for a moment:

(Reuters) - A South Carolina mother who gave her infant daughter a lethal dose of morphine via her breast milk was sentenced on Friday to 20 years in prison, a prosecutor said.

Former nurse Stephanie Greene, 39, was convicted in Spartanburg on Thursday of homicide by child abuse, involuntary manslaughter and unlawful neglect of a child.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/04/us-usa-south-carolina-breastmilk-idUSBREA331G120140404



Ok - for the sake of this brief analysis and debate - let's agree that this drug-addicted woman was completely negligent in her use of harmful substances while nursing her newborn child.  The Gadfly doesn't have a problem agreeing to that observation.

Ok - so a jury convicted Greene and a judge sentenced her to 20 years in prison.

Let's draw a parallel here shall we?  Bear with The Gadfly - an eventual point will be made.

This woman was convicted and sentenced to a long prison sentence for putting life harming substances in to her body.  Greene's body, in this case, represents the life giving vessel from which her newborn infant daughter received the sustenance which in turn provided life.  Stephanie Greene poisoned that vessel and destroyed the life giving properties of the mother's milk which sustained the life of her child.

Still with The Gadfly dear readers?

For putting those poisons in to the vessel which, instead of sustaining the life of her baby girl, killed her, Stephanie Greene was deemed a very bad human being and sent away to pretty much rot in prison.

Let's take this whole sordid story to the next level.  Can we agree that like Stephanie Greene's body being a life-giving vessel to her infant daughter, the planet Earth and it's natural resources are a life giving vessel to the humans who inhabit it?  Ok - so when a major industrialist corporation illegally and clandestinely dumps radioactive materials from it's mining operations into a community's back yard - possibly exposing hundreds if not thousands to the deadly effects of those materials - how exactly is that different from what Stephanie Greene did to her baby?  Or how about when willful negligence results in an oil rig explosion that kills eleven people and the resulting oil spill despoils thousands of miles of beautiful American shoreline and destroys both human and wildlife habitat?  Or when equally gross negligence results in a major toxic chemical spill into a river that is the primary source of life giving, fresh drinking water for a region of half a million citizens?

Where are the criminal charges and the trials and the convictions and the prison sentences for the people responsible for willfully and knowingly exposing millions of Americans to the deadly substances which they are dumping in to our life giving vessel - our earthly environment?  How are their actions any different in essence than those that Stephanie Greene committed when she knowingly put drugs in to her body which she knew could harm her infant daughter?

When the leaders of this country can provide a coherent, substantive answer to those questions from The Gadfly, perhaps there is still a chance we can still have a meaningful, productive dialogue.  But for as long as those questions go unanswered by those "leaders", they have no right to expect any measurable level of respect or deference from the written words on this shitty little blog.



----TFG

Alice "Antoinette" Walton: Let The Peasants View Renoir . . . .

The Gadfly has been talking about the steadily vanishing American middle class for years.  Why?  Well, first - because The Gadfly has long and proudly considered his self part of that economic demographic and secondly history has shown that a robust and growing middle class is a very good thing for a nation's long-term prosperity and growth, which The Gadfly thinks are good things for people.

But since the age of St. Reagan and the inception of the insidious and now wholly disproved conservative theory of trickle down economics, the American middle class has been disappearing faster than what little remains of the Tea Party's sanity.

Bill Maher talks about this sad state of affairs and he highlights the case of one of the Walmart heirs, Alice Walton, who while publicly claiming she wanted to "make a difference" in people's lives, spent over a $billion building a haughty, gaudy art museum near Bentonville, Arkansas (Walmart's HQ).  Maher, rightly flabbergasted, wondered if a $billion art museum, which everyone knows will cater mostly to the kind of people that billionaire baroness Alice Walton associates with, was really the appropriate way to "make a difference" in American's lives at a time of such widespread economic hardship.  And especially so knowing that the company Walton inherits her billions from pays a measly average of $8 an hour to their employees - of which nearly a third make so little money that they find it necessary to apply for public assistance like food stamps to support their families.

Watch:






Maher also correctly notes the slowly disintegrating goods and services sectors which for decades existed almost solely due to the patronage of middle class consumers.

So if Americans truly believe the conservative and Tea Party mantra that the Alice Waltons of the world are more in need of tax breaks and economic help than the cashiers and floor walkers at Walton's Walmart --- well then you just need to make a beeline for the nearest restroom, dunk your head in the toilet, and pull the flush lever repeatedly.



----TFG

‼ fffbbbbbbbpppppppt ‼ That's The Sound of Pusillanimous, Conservative Thinking Being Emasculated in a Fell Swoop . . .

Fox "News" resident fathead (with a loud mouth to match) Bill O'Reilly has yet to learn his lesson when it comes to trying to match wits and humor with Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert.

Watch Colbert put O'Reilly over his knee and spank his big fathead ass over Billo's assertion that income inequality is simply an unerring fact of existence that is as inherent as life and death:

The Colbert Report
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It's probably best that you stick to your day job as resident blowhard on Fox "News" O'Reilly.  You sure as hell do not have what it takes to compete in the arenas of intellectual acuity or big picture thinking.



----TFG

Put One in the Win Column For Measured Sanity . . .

Nice to see someone with common sense, who also happens to possess some pretty impressive badass, hero credentials, bitch slap one of these gun goon assholes on national tv.

Watch how Vietnam Combat veteran and U.S. Medal of Honor recipient Jack Jacobs tells gun nut John Lott to blow it out his ass for making the ridiculous insinuation that having every individual armed on the Fort Hood military base would have prevented this week's tragic shooting:






At some point, the wingnut idiocy simply needs to be stood up to - and stood up to with unmovable conviction.  Good for Col. Jacobs for standing his ground against just such idiocy.



----TFG

There's Something Happening Here . . . What it is Ain't Exactly Clear . . .

Esquire's Charlie Pierce uncovers the story of another right-wing whackadoodle running for Congress down in -- where else? -- Florida -- and this one is really a fucking doozy:

I'm probably not being torpored when I say that this doesn't sound like something that a family-values conservative should be spraying around the Internet. But, to me, the really hilarious part about brother Rush here is that he is attempting to run to the right of incumbent Ted Yoho, the Florida tea-party goober with a name like a chocolate snack food, and Yoho's a real prize his own self. In that case, I'm thinking, having the extra personality or three might be the only way to get a fair fight.

Chazz, wrote in one Yahoo message board, titled "The Fallen," dated Feb. 12, 2010: At first I thought you were just stupid and I wanted to stick my dick in your mouth to shut you up while I snorted a line off my new machete that was blessed by Rui (sic) but then I remembered that you were typing so my dick would really have to be in your hands to keep you from typing but since you are walking in Omaha that's not really realistic right now. I'm sorry, I tried. Rae tells me that you are a Maiden, and it's your job to be kind of stupid and that I'm not supposed to have intercourse with Maidens. You shouldn't believe everything that people tell you or you're going to end up naked and sore, tied to the floor of a van marked "Free Candy." And stop letting people torpor (sic) you. -Chazz Darling, Power of Discord, Important member of the LS.

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/jake-rush-florida-040414


Holy Dungeons and Dragons Batman!

So basically - here we have this guy named Jake Rush, who is running for Republican Ted Yoho's congressional seat in Florida.  Rush is presenting himself to his would-be district constituents as a Bible embracing, family values, constitution loving former Sheriff's Deputy, who is going to be more conservative than the Tea Partier Yoho, and for all intents and purposes, the savior of the people of Florida.

What Jake Rush wasn't sharing with his would-be constituents was the fact he has been leading a secondary life and lifestyle as an underground role-playing (RPG) demigod named "Chazz Darling" - and ol' Chazz seems to have a hankering for not only cocaine-fueled, sexually explicit online banter with his fellow role-players, but also an affinity for satanic ritualism, vampires and succubi, book burning, sadomasochism and of course - the perennially favorite obsession with wingnuts - rape.

Now - before the RPG fanatics get their spiked, leather undies knotted in a bunch by wondering what kind of unfair bias The Gadfly has against role-playing games and the people who partake in them, and why should it be anyone's business at all -- well -- The Gadfly will tell you -- he has none.  None whatsoever.

However when someone like Jake Rush, who aspires to higher political power, and campaigns on promises that if elected he will legislate laws which impose his and his supporters religious and ideological views on The Gadfly and other Americans who don't have the same world view as he does -- then The Gadfly has a major league fucking problem with that.  And as such, this guy's fantasy world alter-ego and every shred of his activities and involvement in his "hobby" is publicly fair game, and the people whom he is wanting to represent in the halls of government have every damn right to know about all of it.

Setting all of that aside though -- honestly -- what on earth is going on within the conservative movement these days?  What form of mass psychosis has invaded the social hive that these people have barricaded themselves in and afflicted their higher thinking capabilities?  And once again - The Gadfly will ask the obvious question - why do Americans keep electing these deranged clowns to public office?  The Gadfly is having a real, real hard time wrapping his brain around what is happening to this country.  It's like a surreal, Kafkaesque nightmare that apparently has no foreseeable end to it, and it is leaving The Gadfly with a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach.

When will their lunacy end?  Or perhaps the more frightening question is -- how will it end?



----TFG

The USO Entertained Revolutionary War Troops With Dogfighting and Cockfighting -- Betcha' Didn't Learn That One in History Class . . .

Some day there is going to be an entire wing of academic psychological study devoted to trying to identify exacly what kind of post-modern brain disease has afflicted the Tea Party crowd:

Observe:

Kentucky Republican Senate candidate Matt Bevin continued to address his presence at a rally for supporters of legalizing cockfighting by saying America's Founding Fathers were very involved in the cockfighting world too.

"But it's interesting when you look at cockfighting and dogfighting as well," Bevin said in an interview on the Terry Meiners Show on Louisville's WHAS on Thursday. "This isn't something new, it wasn't invented in Kentucky for example. I mean the Founding Fathers were all many of them very involved in this and always have been [sic.]"

The comments come less than a week after Bevin attended the rally. He's since said that he thought the rally was actually for supporters of states' rights.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/matt-bevin-cockfighting-founding-fathers


Ok - so allow The Gadfly, at risk of mortal damage to his brain and senses, to analyze this.

Tea Party candidate Matt Bevin, who is challenging Mitch McConnell in Kentucky, goes to a cockfighting rally to drum up campaign support -- because it makes sense that the kind of people Bevin appeals to, quite simply put, would be in abundance at such an event - no?  Anyhow - so when word gets out to the media about it, Bevin feigns supreme ignorance by claiming that he thought it was just an innocuous gathering of state's rights supporters.  Not satisfied with that level of duplicitous buffoonery, Bevin kicks up the bamboozling stupidity a notch or three by subsequently claiming that it's no big deal because America's founding fathers were big fans of cockfighting and dogfighting, therefore -- it's all good.

Sigh . . . . . now The Gadfly's brain is hurting....

They're not even making an effort to hide their sociopathy any more.  It is on full-throat display for all to see and be horrified by.

How any sane American can continue to support and be associated with these psychotic quacks is leagues beyond The Gadfly's comprehension.



----TFG

Corporate Personhood --- Laws Which Apply to You and I Do Not Apply to Them . . . .

Jon Stewart channels The Gadfly's long-standing wonderment as to whether there are any truly honorable and humane business people left in this fucking country:


Part 1:

The Daily Show
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Part 2:

The Daily Show
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They killed people and knew they were killing people and yet still had the brass balls foresight to write their legal exoneration in to the bailout covenant with the government.

Can someone remind The Gadfly again why it is that he should feel any measure of reverence for these capitalist pieces of shit? . . .



----TFG

The Gadfly is Back In The Saddle and Wouldn't Ya' Know There's a Goldurn Bur Under It . . .

Well, dear readers, The Gadfly has returned from his week-long sojourn to the land of sin and money, and to his own credit, not to mention giddy surprise, he's not much worse the wear - although he did come close to disaster with that Friday evening binge at the bar whose name contained words describing an infamous corn-mash beverage and the description of the outcome of imbibing too much of that beverage.

Anyhow, The Gadfly is happy to be back, and as such, let us return to the arduous task of afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted.

Let's start with this bit of asshattery - shall we?:

House Republicans passed another Obamacare repeal bill Thursday, this one indirectly aimed at the law's employer mandate -- but, following in the footsteps of almost all of the other repeal bills that came before it, this is likely the end of the line for the proposal.

The bill passed 248 to 179. But the Senate looks unlikely to take up the bill, and even if it somehow cleared through the upper chamber, the White House has pledged to veto it.

It is the 52nd attempt by the House GOP to undercut or repeal part or all of Obamacare, according to House Democratic leaders. By House Republican leadership's own count, only seven have become law.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/house-gop-obamacare-repeal-30-hour-rule



52 (that's 50 + 2 for you fuzzy math people) attempts to repeal the ACA, efforts which even Ted Cruz has openly acknowledged has not a snowball's chance in hell of succeeding.  So why do they persist?  The teabagger politicians will tell you that it is a symbolic message letting their zombie minions know that they are sticking to their word about seeing that Obama fails, no matter the cost to the country as a whole.

You know - The Gadfly would be a bit more forgiving of the GOP, for he knows that in politics, the job of the "opposition" party is to oppose.  But it has also been, at least prior to the Clinton era, a given that the two parties would find common ground when it came to seeing to the overall best interests of the American people and the nation's prospects for prosperity and success.

The modern day GOP, however, with the Tea Party forming the snake head of their ideological movement, has burned those traditional cooperation bridges to ashes.  They are, for all intent and purpose, on a mission of scorched earth politics that any sane and prudent individual instantly recognizes as being the impending stake in the heart of representative democracy as we know it.  Their coddling alliances with the industrialists and the bourgeois plutocrats is more than sufficient evidence of that observation.

52 attempts to undo a law whose core intention was to do something about the immoral travesty that 45 million Americans were walking the streets of our cities with no access to basic, affordable health care.

52 attempts to undo a tenet of that law which said that record profits reporting health insurance companies could no longer deny coverage to men, women and children who have had the misfortune to have pre-existing medical issues.

52 attempts to to undo the benefit of Americans avoiding life ruining financial devastation due to an inability to pay for medical care that they did not have coverage for.

If the G-O-fucking-P and the teabaggers truly gave a rat's fucking ass about this country and ALL of it's people, they would have forgone at least half as many of those attempts to repeal the ACA and instead used those efforts, time and taxpayer money to propose and pass productive jobs bills, to pass an extension of UI benefits for the long term unemployed, to pass immigration reform, to pass legislation protecting the long term viability of Social Security, to pass meaningful legislation to address and reverse the slow-motion environmental Armageddon that the industrialists are perpetrating across and throughout our precious natural resources - at home and abroad.  And that's just the short list of things they could be productively devoting their time to.

So yeah -- call The Gadfly wholly unimpressed with the GOP's 52nd sophomoric attempt at futility.  And if Americans want to ensure the accelerated desolation of this Great American Experiment -- well then -- just keep electing these Cro-magnon teabagging boors to high office - for they are more than happy to oblige to seeing that mortal denouement come to pass.



----TFG