We Are All Just At-Will Citizens of America, Inc. -- That Is Their Vision . . .

OOPS: Mitt Romney Calls United States A ‘Company’

Mitt Romney is focused on convincing Americans that his private-sector business record qualifies him to be President, which is perhaps why he accidentally called the United States of America a “company” instead of a “country” on Friday.

While Romney has spoken extensively about running the government more efficiently, like a private business, he has never compared the entire American enterprise to an actual business enterprise. But today, at an event in Florida, Romney did just that, saying his administration will reach out to people who “want to make sure this company deals with its challenges”:

Paul Ryan and I understand how the economy works, we understand how Washington works, we will reach across the aisle and find good people who like us, want to make sure this company deals with its challenges. We’ll get America on track again.

http://thinkprogress.org/election/2012/08/31/783791/romney-calls-america-company/


Oops My Ass!  That was no idle slip of the tongue.

That is exactly how Willard and Ryan and the Koch Brothers and the Wall Street gangsters and the rest of the 1% view America.  The United States of America is their fucking private company to run as they goddamn well please - period.  Fuck the democracy bullshit, and the Constitution, and the one man/one vote garbage.  The bottom line is that if they want to, they will gamble with America, Inc.'s money, reputation, people and this country's destiny as they damn well please.  And the reasoning, which they would only dare admit to amongst like-minded company, is because they are the majority shareholders and they own it all - they own fucking everything - and that includes you, me, our children, our grandchildren and the futures of each and every one of us.  And believe you me -- they definitely want more for themselves and less for us the people -- to them, we're just the hired help.


You all better wake up and start paying attention to this shit.


Here's the video:





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Marry Me Stephen Colbert!

Stephen Colbert tears into Lyin Ryan's convention speech like a starved lion sinking it's incisors into a fresh safari kill.  Quote:

"May I remind everyone out there - this is the Presidential RACE!  And to win a race - sometimes - you need to (taps arm) juice!  Ryan - stretching the truth to make his speech more effective, is just another form of doping - in that - if you believe him, you're a dope."

Stephen then makes a snide reference to Hitler's WWII Nazi propaganda chief Josef Goebbels, and while the crowd awkwardly held it's collective breath, most certainly aware of the implications of using the dreaded "Nazi" reference in politics, Colbert actually managed to make a salient, albeit joking point in the process.  That is his fucking genius.

Anyway - it's simply priceless - and the fucking lapdogs in the MSM, who for fear of hurting the oh-so sensitive fee-fees of their corporate paymasters and the right-wing media bloodhounds, they just slink off, tail between their legs and curl up in the corner -- dreaming that perhaps someday - they too might be permitted to be as bold as a comedian like Colbert in telling the truth to the American people in their chosen medium.

Watch the video - and cry for the death by abdication of duty, of your neutered fourth estate:






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Reality - What a Concept . . . No Really - It's a Helluva Important Concept

Blogger Digby ponders the dynamic behind the right winger's instinctive ability to just simply shut down their brains like a computer's power switch when confronted with irrefutable proof of their political leader's lies.

There are tons of people doing fact checks on Paul Ryan's unprecedented mendacity in a convention acceptance speech so I'm not going to bother. The Romney campaign has clearly decided that this is a base turnout election and the way to win is to throw red meat at their followers, regardless of the truth. They have their own media, after all, so it doesn't really matter if the other half of the country is screaming about their lies. Their voters won't hear it, and even if they do they won't believe it.

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2012/08/creating-their-own-reality-were-still.html


One entirely feasible possibility for this phenomenon, as Digby notes, is just plain old tribalism.  One side, when confronted with a truth that doesn't fit their black & white narrative of the world, willfully retreats in to their safe ideological bubble and stares out of it blank-eyed at the faces of those outside the bubble pleading to reason with them.  Only they are not hearing anything, because their bubble is vacuum sealed and no outside sound can penetrate it.

Former George W. Bush adviser Karl Rove once told writer Ron Suskind that people in the media, and anyone else who dared to disagree in any way with Bush's decisions and policies, were people who lived "in what we call the reality-based community."  Darth Rove went on to explain, "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

And this is exactly what the modern day conservatives, spearheaded by the dizzying ignorance of the teabagger/birther crowd, have done.  They have created their own fantastical, adolescent, paranoid, and warped view of the entire world and by God they just know that anyone who disagrees with them is a commie, pinko, socialist, Muslim loving, gun confiscating, America hating, evil liberal tool of Satan himself.

It is simultaneously tragic and fascinating to watch it unfold all at once.  Unfortunately, the tragic aspect of it will end up adversely affecting not just the delusional wingnuts themselves, but everyone else on the planet as well via the ripple effect.  And when it gets to that juncture folks, there is no uncomplicated and safe retreat to sanity and reality.


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**UPDATE**

The Rude Pundit sees what I see re: the inability of right wingers to experience the unfettered beauty of reality and accept it for what it is (reality), and sums it up only as the Rude One is capable of doing:

Imagine you have a friend who a few years back heard that if you feed poodles money they will shit out gold bricks. So your friend starts feeding his hard-earned cash to all the pampered poodles he can find, and they gobble those bills down. But, surprise, surprise, despite what he heard, the dogs end up shitting shit. Still, he clings to this bizarre, completely disproven idea: poodles shit gold. Now, after some time, he's low on cash. You tell your friend to stop putting out plates of money for the goddamned poodles. No, your friend says. Instead, he must cut back on other things, like doctor visits and food and more, just so he'll have the spare money to give the fucking dogs. "One day, these little bitches are gonna pay off," he tells you, sounding completely crazy, "and I'll be on easy street." But until then, he's just got hands that stink like dog shit. And there's your lesson in Republican economics.

KA-CHING!


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RightWingneyCare [ Let 'em Die! ] . . .

Ahh yes - along with a (see chart above) high child poverty rate, here is yet another lovely legacy that conservative political ideology and governing policies have gifted to Americans:

Americans younger than 65 are more likely to die from a lack of timely healthcare than their peers in France, Germany or the United Kingdom, according to a new study.

Research published in Health Affairs looked at the rate of "potentially preventable" deaths — deaths before age 75 that could be avoided with timely and effective healthcare — and found that the United States lags behind its U.K. and European peers.

The United States was also less effective than France, Germany and the United Kingdom in remedying the problem between 1999 and 2007, study authors wrote. 

The research was sponsored by the Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit research foundation.

"Despite spending about twice as much per person each year on healthcare as France, Germany or the U.K. ... the U.S. is increasingly falling behind these countries in terms of progress in lowering the potentially preventable death rate,” said Commonwealth Fund President Karen Davis in a statement.

http://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatch/public-global-health/246515-study-us-tops-france-germany-uk-in-potentially-preventable-deaths


Far be it for me to presuppose, but it seems to me that it would be somewhat difficult to realize the full potential of that rugged American individualism and exceptionalism when you are zipped up in a body bag due to the fact you have died prematurely as the result of a shitty and inefficient for-profit driven health care system.

Dontcha' think??



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Lying Liars And Their Lying Lies: Zombie-Eyed Granny Starver Edition

Of the many bald-faced lies and misleading claims that zombie-eyed granny starver Paul Ryan made in his speech last night, there is one in particular that gets the 'Pants & Scrotum Sac On Fire' prize.

Ryan insinuated that Obama was somehow responsible for the closing of a GM SUV manufacturing plant in his hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin and giving the 2000+ workers there a sense of false hope that their jobs would be secure.  Ryan's quote:

"A lot of guys I went to high school with worked at that GM plant. Right there at that plant, Obama said: 'I believe that if our government is there to support you … this plant will be here for another hundred years.' That's what he said in 2008. Well, as it turned out, that plant didn't last another year."

While the Obama quote Ryan refers to is accurate, the details Ryan is willfully and deceitfully excluding are that Obama made the statement while visiting the plant as a presidential candidate in February 2008.  At that point he was simply a Democratic presidential candidate and had not even wrapped up the nomination. Four months later, in June of 2008, while George W. Bush was still President of the United States, GM announced that the plant would drastically scale back production. The plant completed laying off most of its workforce in December 2008, a full month before Obama had even taken the oath of office. The "government support" Obama spoke of to the Janesville workers in his February 2008 visit – his auto bailout plan, which took effect in early 2009 – simply did not arrive early enough to save the plant.  Ultimately that very same bailout plan has been widely credited by a majority of economists, and the auto industry execs themselves, with saving the American auto industry from complete and utter collapse and preventing a recession from turning in to a full blown depression.

Also - it is critically important to acknowledge the full mendacity of granny starver Ryan's lie by noting it in the context of the fact that Ryan's would-be boss, one Willard Mitt Romney, published an op-ed in the New York Times in November 2008 (one month before the remaining Janesville employees were layed off) under the headline "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt."

The core lesson to be gleened here from Senator granny-starver's speech last night - is that he and Willard both know full well that it is vital to their White House ambitions to keep the low information voters that Fox News churns out week after week fat, happy and gullibly misinformed.  Thus - their entire campaign, right down to the bare foundation, is built upon layers and layers of outright lies and misinformation.  There is an old saying that "in war, truth is the first casualty."  Politics is war in a sense.  But Willard and Ryan have moved the goalposts so far when it comes to the truth, that not only is it a casualty, they are now gleefully pissing on that casualty's corpse.


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Whistle While You Work (and work until you die) . . .

Pat Robertson: Raising Retirement Age To 72 Won't "Hurt Anybody Because People Really Like To Work"

Hell - why not raise the retirement age to 80.  Fuck it - better yet -- just eliminate the retirement age altogether!  That will most assuredly instill the spirit of American "exceptionalism" in the peasantry! 

I have no doubt that if Willard and Paul Ryan were to hear Robertson's senile musings on this subject, they both would get instantaneous 2 inch erections.

And it goes without saying - how dare Pat Robertson call himself a Christian?  What kind of heartless  prick would want people working themselves into the grave?  Honestly, if I live to be a bazillion years old, I will never, ever understand what motivates these lizard brains to think the way they do.


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Gordon Gekko On Steroids . . .

If you read one single article about Mitt Romney prior to entering that voting booth come Tuesday, November 6, 2012 - make it this one.  Here is an excerpt:

By making debt the centerpiece of his campaign, Romney was making a calculated bluff of historic dimensions – placing a massive all-in bet on the rank incompetence of the American press corps. The result has been a brilliant comedy: A man makes a $250 million fortune loading up companies with debt and then extracting million-dollar fees from those same companies, in exchange for the generous service of telling them who needs to be fired in order to finance the debt payments he saddled them with in the first place. That same man then runs for president riding an image of children roasting on flames of debt, choosing as his running mate perhaps the only politician in America more pompous and self-righteous on the subject of the evils of borrowed money than the candidate himself. If Romney pulls off this whopper, you'll have to tip your hat to him: No one in history has ever successfully run for president riding this big of a lie. It's almost enough to make you think he really is qualified for the White House.

The unlikeliness of Romney's gambit isn't simply a reflection of his own artlessly unapologetic mindset – it stands as an emblem for the resiliency of the entire sociopathic Wall Street set he represents. Four years ago, the Mitt Romneys of the world nearly destroyed the global economy with their greed, shortsightedness and – most notably – wildly irresponsible use of debt in pursuit of personal profit. The sight was so disgusting that people everywhere were ready to drop an H-bomb on Lower Manhattan and bayonet the survivors. But today that same insane greed ethos, that same belief in the lunatic pursuit of instant borrowed millions – it's dusted itself off, it's had a shave and a shoeshine, and it's back out there running for president.

Mitt Romney, it turns out, is the perfect frontman for Wall Street's greed revolution. He's not a two-bit, shifty-eyed huckster like Lloyd Blankfein. He's not a sighing, eye-rolling, arrogant jerkwad like Jamie Dimon. But Mitt believes the same things those guys believe: He's been right with them on the front lines of the financialization revolution, a decades-long campaign in which the old, simple, let's-make-stuff-and-sell-it manufacturing economy was replaced with a new, highly complex, let's-take-stuff-and-trash-it financial economy. Instead of cars and airplanes, we built swaps, CDOs and other toxic financial products. Instead of building new companies from the ground up, we took out massive bank loans and used them to acquire existing firms, liquidating every asset in sight and leaving the target companies holding the note. The new borrow-and-conquer economy was morally sanctified by an almost religious faith in the grossly euphemistic concept of "creative destruction," and amounted to a total abdication of collective responsibility by America's rich, whose new thing was making assloads of money in ever-shorter campaigns of economic conquest, sending the proceeds offshore, and shrugging as the great towns and factories their parents and grandparents built were shuttered and boarded up, crushed by a true prairie fire of debt.

Mitt Romney – a man whose own father built cars and nurtured communities, and was one of the old-school industrial anachronisms pushed aside by the new generation's wealth grab – has emerged now to sell this make-nothing, take-everything, screw-everyone ethos to the world. He's Gordon Gekko, but a new and improved version, with better PR – and a bigger goal. A takeover artist all his life, Romney is now trying to take over America itself. And if his own history is any guide, we'll all end up paying for the acquisition.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/greed-and-debt-the-true-story-of-mitt-romney-and-bain-capital-20120829


If this article doesn't fucking make you seriously concerned about your children's and your children's children's futures, then honestly, I cannot fathom any other humanly possible way of getting through to you.


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Voter Discrimination - So Easy Even A GOP Caveman Can Do It . . .

Discrimination so blatant that even GOP appointed judges were easily convinced by the evidence:

By Robert Barnes, Published: August 28

A federal court on Tuesday threw out Texas’s redistricting plans, saying the maps drawn by the Republican-led legislature undermined the political clout of minorities who are responsible for the state’s population growth.

The three-judge special panel in Washington said Texas could not prove that plans for the state’s congressional districts and both houses of the legislature were not drawn without intentional discrimination against the state’s burgeoning Latino population. In addition, it said new district lines removed the “economic guts” from congressional districts now held by African-Americans.

“The only explanation Texas offers for this pattern is ‘coincidence,’ ” wrote U.S. Circuit Judge Thomas B. Griffith. “But if this was coincidence, it was a striking one indeed.”

Griffith was joined in the decision by U.S. District Judges Rosemary M. Collyer and Beryl A. Howell. Griffith and Collyer were nominated by President George W. Bush; Howell is an Obama nominee.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/texas-redistricting-discriminates-against-minorities-federal-court-says/2012/08/28/f6e6a2e0-f156-11e1-892d-bc92fee603a7_story.html


This story truly highlights the level of desperation that the GOP is gripped by, and the underhanded lengths to which they are entirely willing to go to in order to keep themselves in power.  It's not sinister enough that, in states where they are in political power, they are using the legislative process like a bludgeoning weapon to pass all of these fraudulent voter ID laws, to address as they smugly claim, a problem (in person vote fraud) that they cannot even provide evidence that it exists.  Anyone with half a fucking monkey brain knows goddamn well that these laws are intended for one singular purpose - and that is to prevent as many minorities and Democratic leaning voters as possible from exercising their constitutionally guaranteed right to participate in the American electoral process.  I have no shame in stating that this kind of chicanery is eerily reminiscent of the pre-WWII fascist/totalitarian regimes of Germany and Italy and if anyone can disprove that claim, please feel free to take a whack at it.

What truly needs to be noted though is that these anti-American tactics are being used primarily because the right wing knows that this modern conservative movement, spearheaded now by the extremist Teabaggers and the corporate authoritarians who make up their leadership, are morally, intellectually, spiritually and ideologically bankrupt to the core.  Therefore - they have no choice but to cheat to compete in the marketplace of ideas.

This election is not even about Obama or Romney at this point.  It's about whether or not America is going to embrace the fair and just principles of it's constitutional forefathers or the corruption, greed and avarice of a small group of moneyed elites who believe they own America and have the right to ignore constitutional law and precedent whenever it is contrary to their financial interests.

It's a simple choice.


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50 Shades of Orwell . . .

I mean truly - is anyone outside of the Fox News wingnut bubble even remotely surprised by this?:

Earlier this month, Mitt Romney was welcomed for a campaign event at the Century Mine in Beallsville, Ohio, by hundreds of coal workers and their families. Now many of the mine's workers are saying they were forced to give up a day-worth of pay to attend the event, and they feared they might be fired if they didn’t, according to local news radio WWVA.

The claims have been mostly denied by Rob Moore, Chief Financial Officer of Murray Energy Company, which owns the mine. He acknowledges that workers weren’t paid that day but says no one was made to attend the event. Well, kind of.

"Our managers communicated to our workforce that the attendance at the Romney event was mandatory, but no one was forced to attend," he told local news radio WWVA, which has received several emails from workers claiming that the company records names of workers that don't attend those types of events.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/28/century-mine-romney-ohio-mandatory_n_1836674.html


And check out those priceless non-denial denials ("mostly denied") by the Mine company official in that they acknowledge that the miners were docked a day's pay for the event, yet purportedly "no one was made to attend the event."  Yet in the very next sentence the same official admits that the miners were indeed informed that attendance at the Romney speech was "mandatory."

Now - I don't know what kind of dictionary right wingers use, but I checked three of the most popular dictionary sites on the web and looked up the word "mandatory" and the definition was consistent and similar in all three editions.  The definition was something like this:

1: authoritatively ordered; obligatory; compulsory:
2: permitting no option; not to be disregarded or modified:

I am unable to comprehend how the right wingers can see this for exactly what it is - and no - online dictionaries do not have a well known liberal bias.

There is a well known word for this type of behavior.  It is called authoritarianism -- bordering on fascism.  It is dangerous to Democracy and freedom.  It is sinister.

Some of you may actually believe that you aren't part of the 99% simply because you identify your political affiliation as Republican or Libertarian or Independent, but if that is the case, you best wake up and smell the coffee.  The Romneys and the Kochs and the Adelsons of the world do not give a flying fuck about you after you've pulled that lever for their chosen puppet in the voting booth.  They are aristocrats, as are their puppets, and you and I are just the hired help, and the sooner you accept that reality and feel betrayed enough by it to want to do something about it, the better off all of us will be in this country.


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Wake up Elders . . . . The Grim Reaper is Knocking at Your Door - and it's the duo of R & R

This isn't rocket science kids.  Just look at the numbers and the charts.  Numbers don't lie:

The Romney/Ryan proposal to transform Medicare’s guaranteed benefit into a “premium support” structure for future retirees could increase costs by almost $60,000 for seniors reaching the age of 65 in 2023, a new report from the Center for American Progress finds. Current seniors would also have to pay more for preventive, hospital, and physician services should Romney and Ryan repeal the Affordable Care Act, facing an increase in health spending of between $7,900 and $18,600 over the course of their retirement.

http://thinkprogress.org/election/2012/08/24/739271/seniors-will-pay-60000-more-for-medicare-under-romneyryans-plan-report-finds/


If America let's these two corporate tools have power over everything ... grandma - grandpa -- you better start stocking up on cat food because that is all you will be able to afford to eat if these cocksuckers get their way.


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