Yes, the Republicans Really ARE Trying to Destroy Medicare

Despite what you may have heard from Politifact, the statement, "The Republicans are trying to end Medicare" is the TRUTH, not the so-called "lie of the year". Jason Linkins at HuffPo has the lowdown on all this right here. Excerpt:

But let's recall, Politifact, that your lie of the year is "Republicans voted to end Medicare." And end it, they did vote to do! Now, if the Democrats had said, "Republicans take Medicare out behind the Cannon Office Building and horsewhip it," that's a different story. But you've decided -- incorrectly -- that the most vanilla way of the describing what happened is a deception.


And "privatizing" Medicare ends Medicare, as Medicare is a public entitlement program. (As a thought exercise for the folks at Politifact, why not stop buying gas for your car? You'll notice that at some point, your car will stop going forward without you pushing it. You did not "end your car." You've just made it less useful by no longer "funding" it with petrol.)


Politifact goes on:


They ignored the fact that the Ryan plan would not affect people currently in Medicare -- or even the people 55 to 65 who would join the program in the next 10 years.


Ha! No one in the world ignored that! That's the way you make ending an entitlement politically palatable -- you tell the people who are currently receiving the entitlement or about to receive the entitlement that it won't affect them. That way, the AARP doesn't, you know, SUMMON THE FORCES OF DARKNESS to vote you out of office. It's actually like Politifact just showed up in Washington yesterday!


[Politifact]: They used harsh terms such as "end" and "kill" when the program would still exist, although in a privatized system.


But it wouldn't exist in a privatized system as imagined by Paul Ryan! In the Paul Ryan plan, the premium support is not tied to health care cost. Healthcare costs go up, the premium support fails to keep up, and the result is altogether unrecognizeable from Medicare.


Read the whole thing, as they say in BlogLand. And remember:

Republican politicians are the ENEMIES of ordinary Americans. Period.

HURRAH! Kim Jong-il is Dead!

The most brutal tyrant on Earth, the leader of the Stalinist hell known as North Korea, has finally died. Kim was a brutal, vicious, unfeeling monster who allowed millions of his own people to starve and built around himself a cult of personality so vulgar and obscene that Caligula would be embarrassed by it. North Korea is quite literally the least-free nation in the world, and quite possibly the worst nation in the world in which to live. It is all the fault of the barbaric government first headed up by Kim's father, the scum-sucking Kim Il-sung, and then by Little Stalin himself. If I believed in hell, Kim Jong-il would be headed there. Good riddance to this piece of human garbage, and may his brutally and cruelly oppressed people someday be liberated and shown the truth about their "Dear Leader". 

I'm only sorry that he didn't die 30 years ago.

Think I'm too over the top in my sentiments? Read on--and link on, my friends.

An account of the death toll from North Korea's famine in the 1990s is here.

Satellite photos of North Korean death camps are here.

An account of conditions in North Korea's Gulags may be found here.

Additional information on North Korea's death camps, including accounts of grotesque, hideous atrocities, is here.

Amnesty International's report on North Korea's barbaric government is here.

An account of the wretched living conditions in North Korea is here.

Reporters Without Borders reports on North Korea's system of utter and complete censorship here.

And a satellite picture to remind us of the contrast between a free society and a slave state:

(Click to Enlarge to Be Both Disgusted and Amused)

Something You REALLY Need to Read

It's from our friends at DKos,and it's right here. The title alone is worth it:

Newt Gingrich is a Lousy Human Being

(They had me at that.)

But the contents of the article BEG for your attention. It's not just Gingrich's views that are so often utterly, shockingly, confoundingly wrong--it's the fact that Gingrich himself is such a rotten person.
For example, did you know that not only did Gingrich argue with his first wife about a divorce the day after her third surgery for cancer, he stiffed her on child support after the divorce to the degree that his wife couldn't pay bills for electricity, medical care, and other expenses for Gingrich's own children? (I understand she was forced to turn to charity for help.) What a bastard. (I also understand that Gingrich said his first wife wasn't attractive enough "to be the wife of a president"!!!)

Read the whole thing and let me know what you think.

And then if you agree that this sumbitch needs to be politically destroyed, let me know and we'll help save America--together.

Seventy Years Ago Today

I've been to Pearl Harbor twice. You really owe it to yourself to go. You really do, if only to experience the Arizona Memorial.

Eternal rest to them.

Gingrich: Liar, Hypocrite, Fraud, Grifter

There are many people to blame on the political Right for the appalling  landscape of American politics. Roger Ailes, who has been a race-baiter and professional liar par excellence ever since his days working for Nixon, and who is the evil presence behind Fox "News", the television propaganda arm of the Radical Right, certainly has been key. Utterly vile Republican political consultants, such as the late Lee Atwater and his apt pupil, Karl Rove, have lowered our politics to depths of ugliness and dishonesty so astonishing and depraved I would have hardly thought them possible at one time. Smirking racist and anti-Semite Patrick Buchanan has consistently interjected white supremacist poison into our discourse. And of course, the whole network of Right Wing Hate Radio hacks, led by vicious, corrupt, borderline-criminals such as Rush Limbaugh, vomits out a constant river of lies and smears. But in this whole despicable bunch, one figure stands out: Newt Gingrich, now the favorite to be the Republican candidate for president in 2012. Jonathan Alter has given us a useful reminder of this lying con-artists's personal history here:

In 1988, as a young representative, he helped drive House Speaker Jim Wright from office for allegedly violating House rules to profit from a book; at the same time Gingrich himself was skirting House rules to promote his own book. A decade later, in a separate matter involving a college course he taught, the Republican-controlled House made Gingrich the first speaker ever to be fined for violating House rules.


In 1989, he viciously attacked Democratic corruption at the House bank and post office. It turned out he was among those members overdrafting from the same House bank.


In 1994, he implied that liberals were at fault in the Susan Smith case, in which a mother infamously drowned her children. He later said the shootings at Columbine and Virginia Tech stemmed from the same “situation ethics” of liberals.


In 1998, he led the fight to impeach President Bill Clinton for the Monica Lewinsky affair while he was already five years into an extramarital affair of his own — with a congressional staffer (soon to be his third wife) who was 23 years his junior.


In 2009, he called Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor a “racist” not long before he said the secret to understanding President Barack Obama was his embrace of the radical “Kenyan anti-colonial” mentality of his late father.


In 2011, he blasted the president for seeking the help of the United Nations instead of just bombing Libya unilaterally. After military action began, he said without blinking, “I would not have intervened.”

Liar. Right-wing radical. Moral lowlife. Smear-artist. Con man. Lobbyist king. That's Gingrich in a nutshell. And lest people allow themselves to be impressed by "professor" Gingrich's academic credentials, one of the commenters on this story makes an excellent point:

I wish people would stop referring to him as a history professor with the same tone of voice that they use for real academicians. He got his doctorate from Tulane studying Belgian education policy in the Congo. He taught at West Georgia College for crying out loud and couldn't get tenure. How bad do you have to be???


I don't doubt that the reason he was hired in the first place is that the year (1969) before he was hired (1970) the university went on a hiring binge where they got more new professors than had been on the whole faculty ten years prior.


If Freddie Mac paid $1.6 million for a "historian" with these credentials, then that in itself shows that Freddie Mac management is totally and completely inept.

Heh heh. well-put. And by the way, remember this: Gingrich ACTUALLY said that President Obama is a graver threat to America than Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler were. If he actually believes this, he's somewhere between an idiot and a lunatic. If he doesn't, he's a cynical, lying scumbag who is feeding the worst hatreds of the Radical Right's most unhinged members. In any event, he deserves to be politically crushed as thoroughly as any human in America deserves to be. In a way, it'll be fun if Gingrich is nominated by the lunatic Republicans.

We'll strip the bark off of this son-of-a-bitch.