Opposite world

A new French study claims that GMO corn causes tumors in mice. The corporate spin is to say 'some scientists question the results', the same scientists that told you smoking was safe. Corporate domination of agriculture isn't possible without corn, so they don't care if it kills people. There are a whole host of reasons to ban corn production. A really simple one is that we will run out of phosphorus in 50 years or less. There is no other way to get phosphorus in large quantities without mining it in a very few places in the world. Diamonds are plentiful by comparison, so the Chinese are moving to lock up the supply. Organic farming would fix the problem, but that's not the corporate way, at least until they get rid of all the family farmers. Once they have no competition they can implement plantation style farming, they can also stop feeding all you 'takers', you 47 percent-ers.

Mittens and his corporate shills have tried to create an equivalency between Willard's trashing of the 47% and the secretly recorded comments by candidate Obama in 2008. The difference is that Obama's remark that rural Pennsylvania voters are disgruntled and fearful so they cling to their guns and religion. They've kind of dropped that narrative since what Obama said was obviously true, and he has a record as President that doesn't support the rightwing propaganda that he discriminates against 'those people'.

As a direct result of Obama's policies in the middle east, crowds of outraged civilians ranged across eastern Libya on Friday night seizing, looting and burning building. The crowds, outraged over the death of US diplomats seized right wing Islamist militia headquarters and either turned them over to government troops, or burned them down. The anti-American violence that was predicted by right-wing media because of Obama's failure to conduct a 'strong' US policy in the Middle East has not only failed to materialize, but the opposite has occurred. You can bet Rush will give this full coverage on Monday. 

The papyrus discussing Jesus's wife has turned out to be notes take by a couple's therapist. He had a problem with her calling out his dad's name repeatedly during sex.

Read More

Mittens thinks you're stupid

Willard has released his 2011 taxes. In order to get his tax rate up, he declined the deduction for his Mormon required contribution, otherwise his rate would be under the 13% he claimed earlier that he was paying. This is less than the Self Employment Tax that every small businessman has to pay even before the income tax kicks in.

To keep his rate above the 10% he was required to pay given his religious contributions he purposely overpaid $500,000 in taxes. Something he derided as stupid in an interview earlier this year, he said he wouldn't be fit to President if he paid more than required. The one thing he's said that's true, he's not.

For the median American worker $500,000 represents more than 20 years of take home pay. Just a modest rate of interest on the money would be more than the average American makes. This includes all of the 47% who Mitt thinks are beneath contempt.

In reality Mittens can take the deduction on next year's taxes whether he becomes President or not, so the accounting slight of hand cost him nothing.

Queen Ann is getting really snippy with the press that dares to ask her anything but softball questions, "Just stop it...." The questions are only going to get less appropriate for her highness.

Read More

Reality is setting in

Obama addressed the AARP convention by video feed this morning to rousing applause. Paul Ryan addressed them in person an hour later. When he said the first thing they needed to do was repeal Obamacare, he was booed down. He tried to call it a mixed reaction and went on from there. It's not hypothetical anymore, Republicans consider the 47% expendable, and seniors, who are in that group, are catching on.

Paul Ryan has borrowed $2 million to try to keep his own Congressional seat in Wisconsin. Romney trails in Badger state by 14 points, after the Walker win Willard was chortling about that state being a lock for him. Not so much anymore. The motto on Wisconsin flag dating from the 19th century is "Forward". It's a blue flag with two working people on either side of the seal. It's not the Republican flag.

Read More

The consensus of rats

Mittens passed out huge bonuses to his senior campaign staff in August according to his FEC filing. Republicans are questioning why their money is going to reward such incompetence. They of course don't want to take responsibility for picking him to run, or rather allowing the billionaires to pick him. Nor do they want to take responsibility for the fact that it's not really Mitten's fault that he's not slick enough to sell the big Republican lie anymore, nobody is. People are starting to emerge from the bubble and look around, the Republicans can't stop it.

Willard didn't really have any choice but to pay big to keep his staff, promising cushy government jobs that would allow them to funnel billions to their family and friends obviously wasn't going to happen. Tim Pawlenty grabbed his cheese and jumped the ship quicker than a Republican dodging responsibility for a collapsed Interstate Highway bridge. The rest of the rats wish they'd gone with him.

Read More

Rice is Nice, ding ding ding

The corporate media has been trying really hard to minimize the revelation that rice has dangerous levels of arsenic contamination. They sort of talk around it as if it were natural, and of course the 'organic' brown rice is far worse than the good polished 'white' rice.

In case you were wondering why all of a sudden the rice has arsenic in it even though arsenic poisoning has been known for hundreds of years, the problem is corporate agri-business. They've been shifting huge amounts of irrigated cotton land into rice production. Never mind that a hundred plus years of using arsenic as a pesticide on the cotton has contaminated the soil beyond redemption. Corporations never pay the price for these things, rich people that own the corporations can be careful what they eat. It's not all the rice that's contaminated, even though the corporate media would make you think so. I'd be surprised if the arsenic levels reported come close to real levels in the rice from recently converted land.

You know that classic Rice-A-Roni ad with the cable car? It always goes 'ding ding ding'. Three chimes of the bell on a San Francisco cable car is the signal for an emergency. The big socialist nanny state could ban the growing of edible grain on this arsenic contaminated land until it's safe. A couple of hundred years at most. If Mittens gets elected this stifling of the private market will be prevented. Eat hearty!  Ding ding ding!

Read More

Gravity is just theory

Romney has been claiming for months that the political donations were just rolling in because he was  way more popular than the President. Now his campaign is deep in the red, and he's spending all his time begging rich people for more money. Simply put, Mittens wasn't really out raising Obama by leaps and bounds, it really was that he was employing Enron style accounting. They were adding together accounts that he has no access to spend. He was committing fraud to make himself look better, but he'll probably pay no price for it, as they'll just claim incompetence. The Masters of the Universe always claim incompetence when their numbers don't add up, that is when they can't just claim liberal bias. Numbers do have liberal bias, along with colors, shapes, gravity....

Read More

The 80%

It's obvious that the American people are deserting the Republican party of entitlement for the rich. When you look at the numbers it's not that surprising. It's long been known that when you question people on their values, their hopes for America, their sense fairness, and what aspects of the American system that they support, you get a surprising answer. Fully 80% of Americans are Liberal.  The majority don't accept the label because they've had it drummed into them their entire life that 'liberal' means something else.

In order to convince people that they weren't liberals required that history be rewritten, that math be turned on its head, and well, forget science. The simple fact is that the people that created the United States were almost all liberals. They created a liberal economy, generations of liberals fought to uphold liberal values and defend this country from people who weren't liberals. Sure the United States wasn't always the good guy, but the bad was draped in liberal values in order to fool the 80% into thinking they were doing the right thing.

Americans might not be calling themselves liberals in any greater numbers, but they are coming back to liberal values. They are realizing that the conservatives are just frauds when they pretend to have liberal values and call it conservative. The 20% only care about themselves, or they've drowned themselves in the conservative Kool aid, and some people are just stupid.

We can have 1790s America back again (for everyone this time) once the 80% learn what liberal really means. That it's really what they believed in their hearts all along.

Read More

Welfare for the 0.01%

The income tax credits that to the working poor with kids were in fact a Republican idea. It was simply a way to cut labor costs for companies like Walmart in order to give them a further advantage over the small businesses that they have been muscling out. Without billions in government subsidies these 'free market' enterprises wouldn't be able to compete. In fact your typical Walmart worker doesn't shop there at all. This is why you always see a dollar store, the thrift store and a food bank in the same town with the Walmart.

Of course once private business is completely eliminated it will become a moot point.

Romney Press Release in The Onion

Read More

The 47% vs the 0.01%

Mitt Romney has declared that the Republican Party is the rightful home of the Hispanic Community. He means the live-in maids, the rest can live in the barrio and come out to tend gardens of his estates, feed the dancing horses, that sort of thing. He feels disadvantaged that while his father was born a Mexican citizen, Mittens can't get the 'free stuff' like the White House. After all Obama got there only on 'affirmative action'. I'm only paraphrasing, his actual words recorded secretly in front of millionaire campaign donors are if anything worse because he seems to firmly believe them.

Willard is not really trying to distance himself from his remarks that claimed that '47 percent of Americans are dependent on government handouts and don't want to support themselves [look up quote]. However he claims these remarks were "off the cuff". Well no they weren't, these are standard rightwing talking points. Mittens may not want the 47% to know his class regard their lessors this way, but they do. The number is based on the threshold for paying Federal income tax. Under the current rates, 47% of Americans are making too little to pay income tax. That doesn't exempt them from paying all the other taxes and 'service fees' that Republicans have imposed to shift taxes from the wealthy to the middle class.

There is also the fact that if the past 32 years of Reaganomnics hadn't happened that the median income would be twice as high as it is now. Instead less than $50,000 for a household, it should be $100,000. That's how bad it's become. The factories have been crated up and sold, vast swaths of America look worse than Germany after the war, because they are.

The thing is, these 'values' extend all the way down the right-wing spectrum to people that 'depend on' the government themselves. The only 'odd' thing about this screed was that he said out loud that he doesn't care about the majority of Americans. Not only can the needy forget about any support from him, but unless you vote for him, "it's not his job to care about those people". Anybody who thinks they are getting his 'loyalty' by voting for him can expect that to last until the polls close.

Romney was talking to the his real base, pirates who can loot and pillage their way through life. The worse off the middle class is, the more power they have. Romney wasn't just talking about the supposed fact that 47% are getting handouts, but the problem of government protecting this 47% from the people in the room that were clapping. The talk about what slackers these people are simply justifies preying upon them. Serious criminals always blame their victims.

Some people question how Romney could be the CEO of a big company like Bain and be so dumb? Well he's not really a CEO but a Somalia style pirate, his company just handled a lot of other peoples money, they didn't have to make anything or even show a profit in any real sense of the word. They simply stole anything that they could carry away.

When Bill Kristol says you should simply quit the race between the convention and the election, you know as a Republican you are in trouble. It was already clear that Obama would be re-elected, and now Republicans aren't even pretending. You almost have to feel sorry for Mitt, he never really had a chance since he was running on Republican values, but now he'll take the fall for their failure.

Some numbers: 60% of this group Romney has only disdain for have jobs and are simply poor, Staples doesn't pay very well; 25% are retired and don't work, although many 'retirees' would be in the working poor group; 15% are unemployed, or disabled, or otherwise on 'welfare', or simply live in the street. More than half of this group voted for McCain in the last election, can you say 'landslide'?

Read More

Romney's secret plan

Romney's campaign announced today that he will be coming out with a concrete five point plan to fix the economy. With early voting starting in Iowa next week, he's cutting it kind of thin. Since he was supposed to be the expert, the 'smart guy in the room', the whiz kid of Bain Capital, why didn't he share any of this wisdom with voters before? Why was the plan secret?

The 'intellectual' leader of the Republicans, Paul Ryan, says tax reform policies need to be vague in order to get them passed in Congress. This guy should lose his House seat once they hear him back in Wisconsin. The math simply doesn't work. Even if you closed all the 'loopholes' on the poor who 'don't pay taxes', you know: child credits, home mortgage interest, credits for the blind, that sort of thing; the money simply isn't there.

You couldn't cover the current Bush budget deficits on that basis (we are still on his budget less 200B in cuts Obama made), let alone cover another 5T in tax cuts for the rich and an additional 2T in military spending (the Pentagon doesn't even want). The Federal government is the smallest its been compared to the population since 1952. Keep in mind the typical government worker is a school teacher. The red states have eliminated 1.2 million teachers, social workers, police, firefighters and they are paying an economic price for it. Romney and Ryan would do the same for the whole country.

The elimination those public sector jobs doesn't save money at all, these people spend their salaries into the economy creating more jobs while literally creating the future of this country. The choice is stark, continue on the path of decline we embarked on 30 years ago, or not. The decline is accelerating as we have been creating generations of poorly educated, ill equipped for jobs, and superstitious potential new Republicans. This is a trend we have to reverse while we still can.

Read More

Undecided?

A recent AP survey found small business owners to be "undecided" in the Presidential race. Okay, if you read the article you will discover that the Democrat leaning businessman was pro-Obama, the 'independent' and the 'Republican' were undecided. The Independent might be expected to be undecided, but the Republican didn't know who he wanted to vote for?

How bad can Romney be? Well the reality is that he's just an empty suit with enough digits to sign any pro-billionaire legislation plopped in front of him, and even Republicans are catching on to it. Right of center, well, really even the far right of center don't know who to vote for. If you compare them to history even mainstream Democratic candidates are far right of center, Eisenhower would equate most of today's Republicans with the John Birch Society, or worse. Any small businessman who thinks they are in the same interest group with billionaires are guppies who dream of being sharks. Shark food is what they will be.

The PM of Israel, Nuttyyahoo, (why a parliamentary system isn't such a good idea) is screaming that Iran is only months away from a building a NUKE and a 'red line' must be drawn now, right now, for god's sake they're on the doorstep....!!!!! No wonder Obama won't give this guy a meeting. He's clearly trying to affect US elections, and should be called out for it. Israel should be made to pay a price for allowing this nut case to represent them.

As for the hysteria over Iran getting 'the bomb', so what? They aren't crazy, even if their front man (with no power) is a bit odd. None of the really crazy, 'push Israel into the sea' nonsense was ever actually said by him. It's just right-wing propaganda, read the transcripts (you know, look it up). Nobody gets upset about Pakistan having them, of course those are Chinese bombs (if they really exist).  Iran isn't going to use such a weapon, even if it had it. It would be all over for them 20 minutes afterward, and they know it.

[Update] The Chicago teachers strike will go into a second week. The right will try to play this to their advantage. That's hard for them to do that with anyone but their brain-dead base, since Obama's former chief of staff is behaving like a Republican, it sends a confusing message.

Read More