Scoutmaster’s Opinon

Even Perry’s old Boy Scout Troop Leader, the one who awarded him his Eagle Scout badge, said he likely won’t be voting for him.

Wallar Overton, 72, took over from his father as Perry’s scout master just before the governor earned his Eagle Scout badge. When asked whether he’d support his former scout, Overton replied: “I don’t know how to say this, just leave me blank on that.”

Ouch.

The Crest of Stupid

It is my sincere hope that this weekend will represent Peak Stupid. To borrow from Hunter S. Thompson, I hope that five years from now we’ll be able to stand on a tall hill in Maryland and look down into Washington DC and see the highwater mark where the Stupid crested before it began to recede. We need this national nightmare to stop. A federal balanced budget amendment is the stupidest, most irresponsible idea to be introduced by the leadership of a party in the history of the country. And, yet, John Boehner is forced to pretend he thinks it’s a good idea. Putting our AAA credit rating at risk is the dumbest, most reckless behavior we’ve seen since South Carolina seceded from the Union. Today, I see Jon Huntsman, a Republican candidate for the presidency, pleading with Republicans to stop pretending that climate change isn’t occurring. It was nearly 130 degrees in Iowa last week and we’re still having a debate on this?

Regardless of you opinion of the current crisis – whether its a sign of the end times, or just a potential minor hiccup in the markets, I think we can agree with these sentiments.

Tarkin Doctrine

From the Lord Vader School of Business Administration.

It’s pretty clear at this point the Emperor can do pretty much whatever he wants. He could have installed puppets in the Senate. He could have continued to dominate it and made an ongoing token effort to deal with their bullshit (which is really what government is all about and why conquering the world isn’t as fun or sexy as it sounds). He could have installed some sort of other system or infrastructure to support, you know, a galactic empire. One person, even with Dark Side force powers, can’t rule too many people at once. He can maybe manage a team of 20-100 people, and that’s assuming he has some small degree of magical mind control at his disposal….

So, the Emperor and Tarkin focus on making one really huge, high-impact investment: The Death Star. They throw in Alderaan as part of that investment. This doomsday weapon will supposedly free up their resources to spend less on administration, personnel and infrastructure, and continue to function without a Senate. It seems like a big investment until you realize how much they save by not actually having a functioning government.

This sounds vaguely Republican to me.

Priority

Regardless of your view on Roe v Wade, this is asinine considering the budget insanity that awaits us.

Gov. Rick Perry announced Saturday the addition of another issue to his list of “emergency items”: legislation requiring women to receive ultrasounds before having an abortion. The Legislature can take up the items immediately instead of waiting until after the first 60 days of the session.

If you’re so concerned with the kids, maybe don’t gut education and CPS. This man and his party will leave this state in ruin. Assuming he ever leaves.

More…

Bloodbath

We knew it was going to be rough, but wow.

The health and human services portion of the proposal would cut Medicaid provider rates — what doctors and hospitals and others are paid — by 10 percent. And it doesn’t include funding for population growth or for increased costs or utilization rates. There’s also a $4.3 billion cut included to account for the federal stimulus money used in the current budget that’s not available for the next budget. The proposal would cut a total of $16.1 billion in health and human services spending. That’s a 24.6 percent cut.

9/11 & Congress

Jon Stewart gets pissed.

Dear Crimson Wave Riders,

Man what a terrible name. Last night you did some pretty neat stuff politically. You apparently won with a write in candidate in Alaska. You took back the house. You used a mess of legal voodoo to allow non-profits to match the fund-raising levels of your rivals (something that’s going to bite all us NGO’s in the ass, I think). You made me drink a lot of red wine and throw things at the Television (this is not really all that hard). Most improbably, you made an electorate believe that you were the party to change the course of government, even though over the past 18 months you’ve been unwilling to compromise on a single goddamn thing that would be good for the country.

But that’s neither here nor there. Your stonewalling policy worked, and applaud you for it in the same fashion I applaud when disaster movies smash up our cities and national monuments. Now though, you have a serious challenge: governing. Not campaigning, not raising money, not sound-biting, governing.

Lets see how you do. You’ll pardon my skepticism though if I have my doubts as to how applicable your current resumes (‘once filibustered 27 bills’) are to problems like the economy, immigration, election reform, etc.

Best of luck.

Fear and/or Sanity

Well,  Jon Stewart may yet save the country…

This was not a rally to ridicule people of faith. Or people of activism or to look down our noses at the heartland, or passionate argument or to suggest that times are not difficult and that we have nothing to fear. They are and we do. But we live now in hard times, not end times. And we can have animus and not be enemies.”

“Not being able to be able to distinguish between real racists and Tea Partiers, or real bigots and Juan Williams or Rick Sanchez is an insult, not only to those people but to the racists themselves, who have put in the exhausting effort it takes to hate.”

“The press is our immune system,” Mr. Stewart says. “If it overreacts to everything, we actually get sicker. And perhaps eczema. And yet, with that being said, I feel good. Strangely, calmly good.”

Damn straight. And damn brilliant.

1070

Pardon my language, but this is fucking insane.

NPR spent the past several months analyzing hundreds of pages of campaign finance reports, lobbying documents and corporate records. What they show is a quiet, behind-the-scenes effort to help draft and pass Arizona Senate Bill 1070 by an industry that stands to benefit from it: the private prison industry.

The article goes on to describe the process, whereby legislators from across the country meet each year at conferences and draft sample legislation, ostensibly a kind of state-house happy hour networking event, although private companies (like representatives form the private prison industry) spend tens of thousands to attend and get in on the action, going as far as to suggestion what legislation to draft.

The draft language proposed in Arizona matched, to the letter, a draft bill proposed at one of these conferences.

The Busy Majority

My kind of rally…

We’re looking for the people who think shouting is annoying, counterproductive, and terrible for your throat; who feel that the loudest voices shouldn’t be the only ones that get heard; and who believe that the only time it’s appropriate to draw a Hitler mustache on someone is when that person is actually Hitler. Or Charlie Chaplin in certain roles.

Are you one of those people? Excellent. Then we’d like you to join us in Washington, DC on October 30 — a date of no significance whatsoever — at the Daily Show’s “Rally to Restore Sanity.” Ours is a rally for the people who’ve been too busy to go to rallies, who actually have lives and families and jobs (or are looking for jobs) — not so much the Silent Majority as the Busy Majority. If we had to sum up the political view of our participants in a single sentence… we couldn’t. That’s sort of the point.

Also counter-balanced by Colbert’s March to Keep Fear Alive