oh boy…..

Steve Benen: Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann campaigned in Florida yesterday, attending services at a Baptist megachurch near Tampa. Afterwards, the right-wing lawmaker offered a rather unique perspective on the weekend’s weather developments:

“I don’t know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We’ve had an earthquake; we’ve had a hurricane. He said, ‘Are you going to start listening to me here?’ Listen to the American people because the American people are roaring right now. They know government is on a morbid obesity diet and we’ve got to rein in the spending.”

…. under sensible political norms, this should probably be a career-killer for a national political figure …. anyone who thinks the federal budget prompted God to send a hurricane that killed 20 Americans has issues that far exceed flakiness …. Bachmann’s reported remarks should effectively ruin her political ambitions.

Full post here

‘desperation’

Yep, this is the GOP’s ‘Mr Reasonable’:

‘there is nothing too bats–t for these people….’

Rick Perry arrives for a campaign stop in Iowa City, August 15

Paul Begala (Daily Beast): I first met Rick Perry in 1985. He was a Democratic freshman state rep, straight off the ranch in Haskell, Texas. He wore his jeans so tight, and, umm, adjusted himself so often that my fellow young legislative aides and I used to call him Crotch. Even among state representatives, even among Texas Aggies (graduates of this cute remedial school we have in Texas), Perry stood out for his modest intellectual gifts. Hell, he got a C in animal breeding. I have goats who got an A in that subject. But lack of brains has never been a hindrance in politics.

… Rick Perry threw his hair in the ring on Saturday. His entrance into the GOP presidential field can be a game changer. Perry can raise money as well as Mitt. He can rally the base as well as Michele Bachmann, and he will say or do anything to win. And in today’s Republican Party, if you want to be the nominee you have to be willing to do some really crazy s–t.

You’d have thought that Mitt Romney was the guy who would do whatever it takes. Like the defendant in a Stalinist show trial, Mitt has renounced everything about his prior life: his positions on gay rights, abortion rights, TARP, gun control, campaign finance, immigration, etc. Abandoning nearly everything you have stood for certainly evinces a desire to win (if not a steely spine).

… Perry told The Daily Beast’s Andrew Romano that Social Security is “a Ponzi scheme,” and that both it and Medicare are unconstitutional… he has already flirted with secession. Secession? Even Jefferson Davis opposed secession when he was a senator from Mississippi. When you’re more open to secession than Jefferson Davis was a century and a half ago, well, you’ve gone pretty far.

…. Perry will claim that Texas leads the nation in jobs created. As a joke currently circulating in the Lone Star State puts it, “Sure, Perry has created thousands of jobs. I’m working three of them.” Texas does in fact lead the nation in minimum-wage jobs and in both the number of people who are uninsured and the percentage of the population that’s uninsured. Under the supposedly antigovernment Perry, government jobs grew at twice the rate of private-sector jobs.

… he presided over the execution of one of his constituents, Cameron Todd Willingham, who was probably innocent. But I’m not sure that’s a liability in today’s Tea Party–obsessed GOP. There’s a legend in Lone Star politics that one of Perry’s Republican rivals in Texas tested the Willingham issue in a focus group. One Republican man, the story goes, squinted and said, “Well, I like that. Takes a lot of balls to execute an innocent man.” At that moment, folks say, Perry’s rival knew opposing him was fruitless.

….he has the most important quality of all: the willingness to do whatever it takes. That’s truer than ever in relation to today’s Tea Party–dominated Republican Party. You’ve gotta be willing to do anything, say anything, accept anything, propose anything, endorse anything, pledge anything. There is nothing too bats–t for these people….

Full article here

peculiar pals…

Alex Pareene (Salon): Mother Jones writes about Rep. Michele Bachmann’s connections to Olive Tree Ministries, an evangelical Christian operation founded by a former Jew for Jesus and longtime friend of Bachmann’s named Jan Markell. Olive Tree Ministries … is obsessed with Israel because it believes we are living in the end times. Bachmann’s been on Markell’s radio show multiple times, attended an Olive Tree Ministries conference, and left a testimonial on its website. As MoJo says:

“…in 2005, the then-state senator denied any knowledge of Olive Tree Ministries. However, Markell tells Mother Jones that she’s known Bachmann off and on for 35 years, and says she spoke about Israel at Bachmann’s church in the late 1970s. “My hunch is that they misquoted her,” Markell says. “She’s been at my conference. Why she would have said otherwise, I don’t know.”

….So Bachmann stands with Israel because she needs the Jews to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem so that Christ can return, rapture the Christians up to Heaven, convince the Jews to worship him during the Tribulations, and then rule over the Earth from Israel for 1,000 years. (This is what these people believe, very, very literally.)

….in 2006 she was a member of the Salem Evangelical Lutheran Church of Stillwater, which belongs to the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod. WELS is one of the very conservative “confessional” Lutheran denominations that maintains that the “antichrist” is the pope. You know, the leader of the Catholic Church? That pope….

…In 2008, as I’m sure you remember, Michele Bachmann repeatedly called Barack Obama “anti-American” because of his “mentor”, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. And here is Bachmann’s good friend and minister Bradlee Dean calling the pope “that devil disguised as a minister of righteousness.”

It seems more than fair to ask whether Michele Bachmann is anti-Catholic, and whether, should she be elected president, she’d purposefully sabotage a Middle East peace deal in order to bring about the Second Coming. Or whether she’d launch some sort of tactical strike against Vatican City. I think she would. Look who she pals around with!

Full post and videos here

oh dear…

TPM: The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office’s initial analysis of the House GOP budget released today by Rep. Paul Ryan is filled with nuggets of bad news for Republicans.

In addition to acknowledging that seniors, disabled and elderly people would be hit with much higher out-of-pocket health care costs, the CBO finds that by the end of the 10-year budget window, public debt will actually be higher than it would be if the GOP just did nothing.

Under the so-called “extended baseline scenario” – a.k.a. projections based on current law – debt held by the public will grow to 67 percent of GDP by 2022. Under the GOP plan, public debt would reach 70 percent of GDP in the same window.

In other words, the spending cuts Republicans would realize in the first 10 years would be outpaced by deficit increasing tax-cuts, which Ryan also proposes. After that, debt projections under the plan improve decade-by-decade relative to current law. That’s because 2022 would mark the beginning of the Medicare privatization plan. That’s when, CBO finds, “most elderly people would pay more for their health care than they would pay under the current Medicare system.”

If the current Medicare system were allowed to continue, CBO found that an average 65-year-old beneficiary’s costs would be only 25 percent of what it’d be in the individual private insurance market. Under the GOP plan, those costs would jump to 68 percent.

In plain English, “the gradually increasing number of Medicare beneficiaries participating in the new premium support program [the GOP’s Medicare privatization plan] would bear a much larger share of their health care costs than they would under the current program.”

Thank you Ladyhawke 😉

d’you know? this world is pure bonkers