Headlines - Wednesday June 8

Perry's stunt to appeal to the religious nuts

Rick Perry is running for president. If not in 2012, then surely in 2016. Rick Perry has invited all of the US governors to Reliant stadium to pray for our country.

When you don't have real solutions and are too ideologically paralyzed to address problems, prayer is just perfect.  Nothing ventured.  No costs.  And, the batshit crazy people will love you.

 

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Dumb vs Dumber

 

Highly Anticipated Palin-Bachmann Camp Feud Begins

 

 

AND IN THIS CORNER: Newly-hired Bachmann political consultant Ed Rollins has thrown out the much-anticipated first swing in the Sarah Palin camp's direction, calling America's Top Grifter names on a radio talk show. Ooooh, venom! Rollins told a radio show host that Sarah Palin is "not serious," which is kind of something we assumed even Sarah Palin knows about herself, but okay, sure. Not quite the juicy zinger we were looking for, but this is still basically the warm-up round. READ MORE »

 

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QOTD: "You cut taxes and the tax revenues increase." (President George W. Bush, February 8, 2006)

 

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Colbert: Paul Revere's famous ride.

 

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Kind of embarrassing being on the same side as Al Qaeda. Via ThinkProgress, we hear from American-born al-Qaeda spokesmen Adam Yahiye Gadahn. He recommends would-be terrorists get weapons to attack Americans via the so-called gunshow loophole.

 

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We keep telling you that profit-motives and healthcare not only don't mix, but are actually at cross-purposes. Believe us yet? "Cancer medicines desperately needed by sick children and adults are in short supply, undermining the ability of U.S. doctors to administer treatments, top oncologists warned this week. ... Many drugs are scarce because there is no incentive for drugmakers to manufacture low-cost generics, which have slim profit margins for pharmaceutical companies. Doctors do not expect that equation to change any time soon, making them scramble to find acceptable alternatives, or to ration or delay treatment when they cannot. ... Generic chemotherapy drugs are in particularly tight supply at the nation's hospitals, including mainstay cancer treatments such as cisplatin, doxorubicin, cytarabine and leucovorin. ... "These are chestnuts. These are not old-fashioned drugs. They remain incredibly important drugs which serve as the backbone for treating many of the most common and treatable cancers," said Dr. Robert Mayer of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and a past president of American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) which held its annual meeting in Chicago this week." (Blue Girl wrote about this last fall. You can find the post here.)

 

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Hard to believe this came from a Conservative.

 

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Snowbilly Snooki decided she would try to copy the Obama England trip and get an audience with Margaret Thatcher:

Sarah Palin wants to show to the Republican right that she is the true keeper of the Ronald Reagan flame by meeting the late president's closest ally on the world stage.

A meeting with Margaret Thatcher in the centenary year of Reagan's birth would be the perfect way of launching her bid for the Republican nomination for the 2012 US presidential election.

This is what Palin told Christina Lamb in the Sunday Times:

I am going to Sudan in July and hope to stop in England on the way. I am just hoping Mrs Thatcher is well enough to see me as I so admire her.

It appears that the former prime minister has no intention of meeting the darling of the Tea Party movement. Andy McSmith reported in the Independent this morning that Palin is likely to be "thwarted" on the grounds that Thatcher, 86, rarely makes public appearances.

It would appear that the reasons go deeper than Thatcher's frail health. Her allies believe that Palin is a frivolous figure who is unworthy of an audience with the Iron Lady. This is what one ally tells me:

Lady Thatcher will not be seeing Sarah Palin. That would be belittling for Margaret. Sarah Palin is nuts.

Thatcher will show the level she punches at when she attends the unveiling of a statue of Ronald Reagan outside the US embassy in Grosvenor Square on Independence day on 4 July.

I bet the people handling Palin go to bed every night thinking about just ending it all. Every time she opens her mouth, she makes herself look like a clown.

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Mann Coulter: Police Should Fire On Liberal Protesters More Often

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Jill: Next up: Scarlet Letters

 

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Somewhere along the line President Obama stopped getting Daily Economic Briefings. "White House officials said the meetings slowly petered out, but Obama still receives a daily economic briefing on paper." In his defense, I think I would cancel having Larry Summers speak to me every day, too. But still! Now that Goolsbee has quit, I'm not sure that The Carebear has an economics team anymore, so maybe things will get better? (The Hill)

 

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This sort of thing is why we resent the hell out of republicans pretending that they are the "pro-military / pro-veteran party. "Republican Paul Ryan and the House of Representatives are looking to end VA healthcare for over 1.3 million veterans who are Priority 7 & 8. These veterans are the least disabled veterans using the system, usually with disability ratings of 0 percent or no service-connected disability. According to the Congressional Budget Office "Option 35," the cuts would leave 130,000 veterans with no healthcare alternative. This means veterans with conditions not recognized by the VA, like certain diseases from Agent Orange exposure, would have to pay for healthcare out of pocket if they had not other service connected disability. ... Currently, the VA spends over $4 billion yearly to treat these vets, despite co-pays intended to offset the expense.  Ryan's cuts are intended to save $6 billion off the VA's tab and $62 billion over the next 10 years. Instead of merely increasing the co-pay or taxing Wall Street, Congress wants to just cut your benefits out, all together. ... Disabled American Veterans (DAV) is fighting the across the board cut because many of the veterans in question have come to rely on VA healthcare over the years. In times when healthcare costs are astronomical, these veterans will go without the care they were promised, if the proposal becomes law. DAV voiced additional concerns that this attempt is just the start of a gradual and specifically focused erosion of veterans' benefits."

 

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This begs a question...Glenn Beck is taking his schtick to the internet, where he wants to charge subscribers $5-10 per month to stream his stream-of-consciousness paraniod, delusional wingnuttery. You know, the same stream-of-consciousness, paranoid, delusional wingnuttery that people stopped watching for free on Fox. Something tells us this is not going to go well for Herr Beck.

 

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More than a third of voters "have some qualms" about a Mormon president, according to a new Quinnipiac University poll that could point to trouble for Mormon presidential hopefuls Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman. Overall, just 45 percent of voters had favorable views of Mormonism, while 32 percent had unfavorable ones.

 

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Today marks the 10th anniversary of the first of President George W. Bush's two tax cuts, which have played a disproportionate role in blowing up the deficit and debt. As the Center for American Progress' Michael Ettlinger and Michael Linden found, the federal debt would be at a sustainable level today — even with the wars and the financial crisis — were it not for the Bush tax cuts. ThinkProgress has assembled this short animation showing how the Bush tax cuts drove the deficit and debt up and are still ruining the budget picture today.

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Koch-backed Americans For Prosperity Places Fake Eviction Notices On Detroit Homeowners' Doors To Scare Up Support

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Squinty Koch-worshipper Scott Walker, behaving in his familiar cartoon villain fashion, removed a specially commissioned David Lenz painting of three disadvantaged Wisconsin kids skipping down a snowy street from the mantelpiece of the governor's mansion. This seems about right, because the smiling faces of poor children probably leave scorch marks on Scott Walker's soul.  Show him a painting of some suffering, hungry children and he'll put that into the statehouse next to his statue collection of unemployed teachers with untreated illnesses. The painting, which was part of a series of paintings with "subjects intended to remind state leaders of the people they represent," was replaced by a painting of a bald eagle. Scott Walker likes to be reminded of eagles, the people who elected him. FREEDOM WINS. READ MORE »

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Make California State Parks Into Off-Road Dirt Tracks, Says OHV Lobby

Even though California is home to some of the richest companies in the world (Google, Apple, HP, Facebook, Wells Fargo, Disney, etc. ) and many of the world's richest people (Steve Jobs, George Lucas, Mark Zuckerberg, the Getty family, Larry Ellison, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, the Hearst family, Charles Schwab, etc.) for some reason the state can't seem to do much in the way of collecting enough tax money to run things. And that's why the state park system, a state park system that is the envy of most entire nations, is out of cash and doing incredibly dumb and desperate things to make up for a $22 million budget cut. (That's a whopping 59 cents per California resident, by the way.) So people are coming up with ideas! Ideas like, "Let's turn over the state's wilderness parks to off-road motorcyclists and quads and other exhaust-belching land-raping cretin machines."

Keep reading: http://wonkette.com/446967/make-california-state-parks-into-off-roader-dirt-tracks-says-ohv-lobby

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Bin Laden Corpse Honeymoon Over, America Now Back To Hating Obama

It's official: Americans have now "forgotten 9/11." Obama is tied with Mittens in a new Post-ABC poll after losing his "bin Laden bounce," and voter focus has mysteriously switched back to the jobs crisis. Our national honeymoon with bin Laden's corpse is over (the sex was already sort of dropping off), and America is still married to the Kenyan Muslim Socialist black guy who is not very talented at helpful distractions.  In the olden days, this would have meant it was time to start another war so that Americans could NEVER FORGET all over again. READ MORE »

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The Party of:

• Current Senator Diaperman David "whoremonger" Vitter
• Resigned after losing control of the House, Serial adulterer and blow job aficiando Newt Gingrich
• Resigned to avoid ethics charges a year+ later, Sexy Senator John "ethics man" Ensign
• Now retired Governor Mark "kiss me south of the border" Sanford
• Retired and the end of the term Senator Larry "wide stance" Craig
• Resigned following revelation Congressman Mark "Underoos" Foley

…is demanding that Anthony Weiner resign, you know, for honor. Which looks to me like the only one from their party who did that was Mark Foley.

Meanwhile, Clarence Thomas is smiling.