Come again?

From Talking Points Memo:

"Yes, in the process and maybe it’ll take till sometime into next year, but we’re certainly going to be in the process. Very complicated ― Obamacare is a disaster," Trump said on Fox News. "You have to remember Obamacare doesn’t work, so we are putting in a wonderful plan. It statutorily takes a while to get. We’re going to be putting it in fairly soon. I think that, yes, I would like to say by the end of the year, at least the rudiments, but we should have something within the year and the following year."

What is this s.o.b. saying? And please share at least the outline of the 'wonderful' plan you are putting in, since inquiring minds want to know.

Who fuckin' cares?

The most-discussed political story this week has been the inaction of Congress on a bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security. The bottleneck is in the House, where the tea party crazies have their greatest influence. One report says the reason the GOP isn't sweating a possible shutdown of DHS is this: Their constituents don't give a shit one way or another.

Strength in numbers

In Texas, conservative Republicans are a voting majority, if not a numerical one. They are therefore able to live their entire adult lives without ever realizing how goddamned ridiculous they look to people like me, or caring.

Impeachment

The tea crackers can't get the idea of impeaching Obama out of their tiny minds. Most of the impeachment racket is coming from worthless skin bags like Louie Gohmert. What's pathetic about David Dewhurst is that he knows better, but is such a candy ass motherfucker that he'll add his voice to the noise just so he can be in the club. Being taken behind the woodshed by the tea crackers in 2012 got the worthless fuck's attention; he never wants to go through that again.

Rand

Sen. Rand Paul is already running for the 2016 Republican nomination, and he's one of the early favorites. Someday, hopefully, a Republican will run for president and will base his campaign on a single promise -- not to be the biggest fucking asshole in the world. If such a Republican materializes in my lifetime, he may get my vote. Realistically, though, I'm not holding my breath.

Sudden Death

A lot of the power and authority that Republicans were eager to give Bush 43 and Little Dick Cheney doesn't look like such a terrific idea with Obama now calling the shots.

The impact won't be pretty.

There are several things going on in the world right now that hit closer to home for me than the goddamned lunatic behavior of today's Republicans. I've fallen behind on a lot of the news and am trying to catch up. When I read about the stuff they're pulling in Washington and in various state capitols, I imagine the GOP as a giant glass container full of fresh shit that's been thrown out of an airplane flying at an extremely high altitude. It seems like it might drop forever, but it will inevitably collide with earth. When it does, I don't want to be in the immediate vicinity of the splatter.

Focal shifts

Based on what I'm reading, the right-wing commenting class is in general agreement that Willard's selection of Pablo Ryan has fundamentally altered the nature of the presidential campaign by shifting the focus from a referendum on Obama to a referendum on tea party ideology. I'm no expert, but this seems like a strategic mistake to me.

Reagan won the White House largely by asking people if they were better off than they had been four years earlier. That seems like an approach that should've worked for Romney, since most people seem to believe they're worse off now than they were in 2008. On the other hand, the tea party movement had its glory days in 2010 and has been losing altitude since then. If I was betting, I'd bet 75 percent of Americans don't know any details of the so-called Ryan budget plan, assuming they've heard of it at all, and will have trouble seeing how it puts extra Twinkies in their lunch sacks.

Maybe the National Review and Weekly Standard opinion shapers are right, though. Maybe what the country needs is chance to rule on the tea party agenda at the national level and settle things once and for all.

Good News ?

The congressional deficit-reduction super-committee is apparently ready to prove what most of us believed all along -- that the whole concept was an exercise in futility.

There is some good news here, however. In situations like this, where the parties are equally represented (50/50), the Republicans almost always get their way because they have a gift for marching in lockstep while there are always a few Democrats who wimp out and peel off to vote with the GOP. The Republicans not only get what they want, but if things don't work out as planned, they dodge the blame by claiming their measure had bipartisan support. I've been watching Democrats act like gutless cowards for years, and that's one reason I despise them almost as much as I loathe the fucking Republicans.

This time, though, it looks like the Democratic contingent held together in their insistence that any agreement would require revenue (tax) increases in addition to spending reductions. That always seemed like a reasonable stance to me, but since nearly every GOP motherfucker in Washington has signed the Grover Norquist pledge, I knew they'd never go for it.

The supercommittee's failure to submit a plan is supposed to automatically trigger billions in spending cuts from both domestic programs and the defense budget. Already, there are GOP slimeballs wanting to change the rules and take defense cuts out of the mix. Fuck that shit. Somewhere, at some time, those motherfuckers need to be held accountable for the consequences of their bullshit, and the Democrats need to stand tough and make sure that this is the time and the place.

The other good news is that nearly all the signs are indicating Perrito and Moochele Bachmann will do well to finish as high as fourth or fifth place in Iowa and New Hampshire, which should effectively finish them off as White House contenders. That would still leave Newtered and Sugar Cain in the running, but I can't visualize a scenario in which either of them wins in November. As much as I personally hate that fucking Perry, I worried that he might be able to fool voters just enough to squeeze out a narrow EC victory -- so if he really is ready to crash and burn, it's a load off my mind.

Another W ?

I didn't watch any of the GOP debate on TV last night since I have enough clusterfucks to cope with in my life already. The online commentary today indicates that it was a Mittens vs Perrito Show, with Newter, Pizza Guy, Ron Crawl, the other Rick (Santorum), and has-been Michele Bachmann just taking up space. Without having seen any of the exchanges and relying strictly on post-event analysis, it seems like Perry shares some of George W. Bush's worst tendencies. I hope that as the campaign progresses voters will see the same things I'm seeing and realize Perrito would be another W, only worse.

Perrito is sticking to his "Ponzi scheme" position on Social Security -- just like W stuck to every bad decision he ever made (at least until the wheels came off circa 2006). Refusing to change your mind is considered to be a strength in the subculture of Texan masculinity, so Perry will probably stand behind every piss-ignorant political statement he's ever made. With luck, that'll be enough to keep him from gathering momentum with independent voters and send him into a death spiral in the general election.

Proof

If El Perrito's goal is to prove that he's crazier than Michele Bachmann and a much bigger asshole than George W. Bush ever thought about being, he's off to a great start. Every time this dipshit opens his mouth, he proves that things could get worse in America than they are today.

Lunatic Fringes

Last night, I decided to kill an hour watching Lawrence O'Donnell's show on MSNBC. One of the topics he covered was the pledge some hardcore rightwing group is trying to get all the GOP presidential candidates to sign, promising to honor their marriages and similar horseshit. An article in USA Today says that Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty have announced they won't be signing the pledge.

I almost feel sorry for Mormon Mitt. There was a time when people like him ran the Republican Party, and being a Republican didn't necessarily mean that you were crazier than a shithouse rat. Those days are fading fast -- the new GOP stars are flaming assholes like Bachmann, and to get any traction whatsoever, the Romneys and Pawlentys of the party have to lower themselves to her level. With that in mind, it's a little reassuring that Mitt and Tim have respectfully declined to sign the pledge.

Added 11:00 pm, Friday 15 July:

Okay, I gave Timmy Pawlenty too much credit too soon. My bad. Talking Points Memo reports on the level of desperation the Timster must be experiencing as he watches Crazy Eyes Bachmann suck the air out of his sails in Iowa. Default ? Okay, been there, done that. In Minnesota.

Hot topics on talk radio

While I was out driving around this afternoon, I decided to listen to a few minutes of Sean Hannity's rightwing gabfest on AM radio... just for old times' sake, you understand. For the ten minutes or so I was tuned in, the hot topic under discussion was Michele Bachmann and the terrible way she's being treated by the liberal mainstream media. Bachmann is a lot like that other broad, Sarah somebody, and tries to jazz up her speeches with references to history not as it was, but as she wishes it had been.

Like the other broad, Bachmann can't just smile sheepishly and admit she misspoke -- she makes herself look even dumber by jumping through all kinds of hoops to prove she was right the first time, and everybody else, including prominent historians, is WRONG, WRONG, WRONG.

God save us all if this bimbo ever wins any election other than the one for her cheesy little seat in the House.

Von Ryan's Express ?

According to The New Republic, there are indications that Rep. Paul Ryan may be planning to squeeze into the circus parade with hopes of landing the GOP nomination. Ryan's budget proposals have already become the official Republican policy doctrine, and as TNR points out that should make him the official leader of the party. If Ryan and Bachmann both join the quest for the White House, there will be two current members of the House of Representatives seeking the office.

I've already reached the conclusion that gerrymandered House districts enable a lot of freaks, rubes and dipshits to serve as U.S. Representatives. The number of votes required to win a House seat just isn't that great and unfortunately, House members like Bachmann delude themselves into believing their winning majority in the home district is equivalent to majority support in the nation as a whole.

Anyway, I can't recall the last time a House member was a viable presidential candidate. Recent history indicates it's hard enough for a senator to win the presidency, and like governors, senators have at least won statewide elections. Off the top of my head, it seems like Gerald Ford was the last House member to become president, and he only made it through a sequence of circumstances unlikely to occur again anytime soon. Senator Obama beat Senator McCain, but might not have beaten former governor Romney.

Eventually a Republican will emerge from the party clusterfuck, and conservatives will congregate around him (or her, as the case may be). The best thing is that whoever moves to the front of the line will push the other dozen or so assholes to the back of the line.

Pawlenty of criticism

Today's Republican Party is divided into roughly three segments: (a) traditional tax-cutting, deregulating, privatizing economic conservatives, (b) hardcore evangelunical Christians, and (c) the Tea Party people. Some overlap occurs among the segments, producing glassy-eyed freaks like Michele Bachmann and that Palin gal.

Tim Pawlenty strikes me as possessing the tendencies of a group (a) Republican, and he's now apparently officially in the race for the 2012 nomination. Somehow, I had the idea that he was already in, but I suppose nothing is official these days until it's on Twitter or YouTube. Anyway, it looks like anyone who wants to run against Obama next year will have to find some way to appeal to all three GOP constituencies, with the unfortunate result that all their candidates will come off looking like Bachmann or Palin. That's sad, because the old Tim might've been a relatively nice guy.

Here's how bad things have gotten: Thanks to the Tea Party contingent, some guy named Herman Cain is in the race, too. Herman is famous for running a pizza franchise operation and as a right-wing talk radio host. Never held any elected office, but has decided to begin his political career at the top, rather than working his way up the food chain. Sorry, Herman. If I want a black dude in the White House, I'll keep the one who's already there.

Same old same old...

Each Monday the local fishwrap runs a sidebar on its editorial page called the Valley Tally (aka, How Your U.S. Lawmakers Voted). The Valley is represented in congress by four Republican members of the House and two Republican members of the Senate, so the votes are usually predictable.

For the week ending March 4th, all four House members voted NO on a proposed amendment to HR-662 that would have stripped the transportation bill of funding for the infamous Bridge To Nowhere in Alaska. People who have been paying attention will recall that during the 2008 presidential election, the Bridge To Nowhere became a symbol for out-of-control pork barrel spending by Congress. The kind of earmark that the Tea Party swore it would abolish forever. Yeah.

The same four GOP House members voted NO on a proposal by Democrats to suspend the oil depletion allowance and other big tax breaks for the energy industry. The price of gasoline is creeping upward toward four dollars per gallon at my neighborhood Exxon station, so I'm taking a dim view of any government subsidies that increase oil company profits -- not that what I think matters, you understand.

Same shit, different day.

Who's an idiot ?

The Tea-dious are swaggering around like they own the fucking joint, and are getting more obnoxious by the day. Maybe they'll get a reality check in 2012.

Accurate Observations

I like Ron Reagan a lot more than I ever liked his deceased father, and he definitely has Sarah Palin figured out.

Tea-dium Update

After all was said and done, it seemed pretty obvious to me that the Tea Party movement that dominated the political news this year was really just another name for a bunch of aging, angry Republican voters. There's a good article in Newsweek magazine dealing with the Teadious People, who split along traditional GOP lines: (A) libertarian fiscal conservatives and (B) evangelunical conservatives. The story suggests a fissure may eventually develop between the factions over competing agendas, which wouldn't bother me at all.

Tea-dium

The people who make election predictions in the media have convinced me Republicans will regain control of the U.S. House next year, and might accomplish something like a 51-49 Senate majority if every single race breaks their way. If the predictions are accurate, the next congress will strongly resemble the ones that were in session from 1995 to 2007, when the Republicans owned the House and did no worse than a tie in the Senate (2001-2003).

According to what I'm reading, the latest version of the Republican contract on America is an ambiguous load of horse manure that promises tax cuts, massive deregulation of corporate America and financial institutions, and budget cuts that will amount to a tiny percentage of overall federal expenditures. In other words, their new plan strongly resembles every GOP plan since the one they brought with them in 1995. A few Republicans are already promising to begin investigations of the Obama adminstration, which resembles the GOP promises in 1994 to investigate Clinton's involvement in Whitewater and other scandals.

Looks like if you loved what was happening in congress 1995-2007, you'll be tickled pink 2011-2013. Something tells me a lot of people who joined the Tea-dious Party movement because the idea of that N in the White House made them crazy are in for a rude awakening and a reality check over the next 24 months or so.