The GOP’s War On Facts, when everything went wrong, The Mittstorm Cometh VI: The Undiscovered Campaign, phone hacking arrests, and the worst campaign website I’ve ever seen.
Welcome to the Daily Sausage.
First up, in our ongoing efforts to conclusively prove that the Republican party no longer has any viable ideas whatsoever (while noting that individual Republicans may) and should be banished from our political discourse until such time as they can act like adults and not screaming children, we have this piece from Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and Raymond Vasvari: “The GOP’s War Against Facts”.
It’s time to acknowledge the elephant in the room: the GOP is intellectually and morally bankrupt.
Republicans in Congress introduce jobs bills that won’t create any jobs.
The list of positions on which the GOP and their supporters and enablers have been wrong is both long and distinguished. At what point do we just say “These people are wrong until proven right, because so far all they’ve been is wrong.”?
In today’s Gin and Tacos post, Ed discusses “understanding the predicament of the first generation of Americans to do worse than their parents.”. Ed is talking about his own generation, Generation X, but the same can be said of my generation, the Millennial generation; the difference being that we’re the first generation to do worse than our older siblings.
I’ve blamed Boomers in the past for the havoc and destruction that’s been wrought upon the world, but the truth is that it’s not their fault. Or, at least not entirely their fault. There are plenty of 40-60 year olds that had pensions, 401k’s, savings, investments, etc. wiped out by the greed and avarice of a privileged few.
At the end of the day, these are the people responsible: the people that would freeze wages for six years while raking in record profits and giving their CEO a massive pay raise. That’s who we should be angry at, because these are the same people that have destroyed public education and government services in this country. These are the same people that want to throw Social Security into the Wall Street casino. These are the same people that created the money-funneling system between lobbyists and politicians. Where’s the League of Shadows when you need them?
Next up: The Mittstorm Cometh VI: The Undiscovered Campaign.
As venerable scribe Charles P. Pierce notes, there doesn’t appear to be anyone on the Romney campaign that’s good at their job. You know that really great ad with the guy slamming the President for his completely out of context “You didn’t build that” comment? Well, as it turns out, that guy took almost a million dollars in government loans to get his business started. Not only that, but Romney’s “I saved the Olympics” feather, one of the three feathers in his cap (the other two being Bain Capital and Governor of Massachusetts), is predicated entirely on the fact that Romney bilked almost $1.5 billion out of a Republican-controlled Congress to do it.
So, let’s see here. Mitt Romney started his career as a corporate executioner at Bain Capital, taking in many cases perfectly fine companies and burning them to the ground with layoffs and debt because their stock price was insufficiently high, then pocketing the profits after shuttering the doors of their factories and shipping their jobs anywhere but America.
Then, Mitt left Bain Capital, sometime between 1999 and 2004 (no one is really sure when exactly it is that Mitt “retroactively retired”, and when he “retroactively retired” to) to go save a corruption and scandal-laden Olympics, but only by being bailed out by the American taxpayer to the tune of $1.5 Billion, or more than the entire annual budget for the Small Business Administration.
And finally, fresh off his Olympic “success”, he runs for Governor of Massachusetts and wins, and enacts a statewide healthcare plan that eventually becomes the model for a national healthcare plan, as well as signs on to a variety of other policies, all of which only eight short years later he will have to utterly repudiate.
Let’s go to the scoreboard! Mitt Romney wasn’t a good businessman, he didn’t save the Olympics, and he’s tossed everything he did as governor in the trash heap. By my reckoning, that leaves Ol’ Mitt’s cap mighty empty.
Mittstorm Level 6 – Galveston, Texas after the 1900 Hurricane
In other news, Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks have been charged over phone hacking charges from the former News of the World newspaper, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, the parent company of Fox News. This is news as both individuals were very close with Murdoch and his family themselves, which potentially leaves them liable under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in the Unites States.
And finally, for some lighter fare, we have the webpage of the official Mindy Meyer for New York State Senate campaign. (Here’s the cached version, in case the main site is down)
If you believed that this scene from “Idiocracy” was impossible, go take a look and ponder the meaning of this:
“I can tell you one thing, I have no experience in corruption,” said Meyer. “This is how politics has to change. There is always corruption, but I have the intention to follow my values and ensure that none of what happens in my district is corrupt.”
/facepalm
