DARPA’s Space Cannibals and Superman vs. the KKK

How Superman single-handedly thwarted the KKK. For realsies!

The bogus home page for Mankato, Minnesota may be one of the oldest running jokes on the ‘net. Created by Prof. Don Descy as a lesson on the inherent quality of information on the Web, it describes points of interest that include Mankato’s hot springs, underwater city, pyramid, nuclear submarine manufacturing plant and whale-watching areas. Unwitting tourists still get sucked in.

Help save the endangered Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus! There may be only a few left in the wild, and the captive breeding program can’t keep up with habitat destruction!

These tiny marsupials have so much sex they just fall apart and die, That’s a party animal!

DNA from ancient skeletons has revealed how a complex patchwork of prehistoric migrations fashioned the modern European gene pool.

Miguel Ordeñana is a biologist with Natural History Museum of Los Angeles and an expert on wildlife camera traps. You’ll never guess how he lures jaguars in for their close-ups.

One way to cut costs and improve resiliency of critical orbital infrastructure would be to recycle/cannibalize defunct satellites in orbit using robots. DARPA expects a demonstration of this orbital Frankensteinery by 2016.

The tea party group FreedomWorks has fallen into dire financial straits, and was forced to take out a $1 million line of credit earlier this year, sources close to the organization told BuzzFeed.

The Council for National Policy is the most powerful conservative group you’ve never heard of. They back the government shutdown, the  “Ground Zero Mosque” bullshit, blocking  a number of judicial nominees, and just generally acting like a bunch of Visigoths.

A Message To House Republicans From Guy Fawkes. He’s been there, gang. Listen to him.

In an escalation of the stalemate gripping Washington, House Republicans voted today to shut down the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that controls reasoning and impulses.

Forbes suggests The Tea Party’s Demands Are Not Unreasonable. They Are Impossible.

The National Alliance of Hostage-Takers and Blackmailers, a watchdog group that monitors negative images of extortionists in the media, today blasted President Obama for his repeated comparisons between them and the Tea Party Republicans, calling his remarks “degrading and hurtful.

Psychiatrists Deeply Concerned For 5% Of Americans Who Approve Of Congress (TheOnion).

The Gift That Keeps On Giving!

That Time GE Made a One-Man, Rocket-Propelled Reentry Vehicle/Body Bag. 

Judge Takes On Patent Troll With ‘Sham Employee’; Forces Troll To Defend Practice Before A Jury. This is going to be good!

Just a few holes transforms the fried chicken-peddling Colonel Sanders into a blood-vomiting demon.

Should Kratom Use Be Legal? The leaves of the herb kratom (Mitragyna speciosa), a native of Southeast Asia in the coffee family, are used to relieve pain and improve mood as an opiate substitute and stimulant.

Another form of wireless charging: Harnessing the power of lightning to charge a mobile phone. Ben Franklin on line two!

Naked mole rats live long lives—about 30 years—and stay healthy until the very end. Now biologists at the University of Rochester have new insights into the animal’s longevity—better-constructed proteins.

The Once and Future Tantrum

Happy 123rd anniversary, Yosemite National Park! It’s too bad the congressional Pubes & Goobs decided to shut down the government to celebrate!

Of course the Oklahoma delegation played its part as faux-populist Tea Party lick-spittles, but what do you expect from the likes of Markwayne “Lying Tradesman” Mullin or Jimbo “Unambiguous Tea Party-Doll” Bridenstein or the rest of the mouth-breathers that the rural base here seems to love? Calling attention to the Okie voters’ lack of critical reasoning skills would be to state the self-evident, judging from the type of pathetic douche-bags they keep sending to Washington.

And that brings us back to the current round of “Amateur Hour” at it’s most garish: the Goobs can barely muster the coordination required to drag all the furniture into a pile for the self-serving, cynical Pubes (like Ted Cruz) to apply their rudimentary fire-making skills to. There will follow much hooting and howling around the bonfire, some spirited poo-flinging and Piggy may be hunted for a time. Meanwhile, the nation’s business is put on hold. Surely this is what the Founding Fathers intended!

Eventually, the adults will show up (as they always do), kiss their little boo-boos and send them off to their warm, corruption-funded beds again. What passes for Tea Party ‘honor’ will have been served: they’ll have held their breath till they turn blue as Smurfs and thrown their tantrums for the cameras, given the global economy a limp, forced up the cost of borrowing for everyone, screwed workers out of timely paychecks, maybe even triggered some evictions… and call it ‘striking a blow for FREEDOM!” Most of these ass-clowns will probably be re-elected because Americans just aren’t very good at thinking any more. Too much kool-aid will stunt your brain.

The reality is that there are no principled positions advanced by the Right, which can only dish out a wilted word-salad of nihilistic platitudes and strategies for kicking people already laid low by the banksters and vulture capitalists that own the GOP body and soul. Their idiotic base will applaud their fraudulent malfeasance in office… and we can do this all over again in a few months! Blather, rinse, repeat!

It’s more than just a Monday!

Exxon doesn’t just hate your children! They also really hate free speech, too!

The Daily Beast has the scoop: It looks like Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) is under investigation by the Office of Congressional Ethics for alleged misuse of campaign funds. Maybe they’ll get around to the way she stiffed her Iowa staffers too?

Word on the street is that more subpoenas have been issued in California’s probe of a Koch-backed political group.

NPR has done several stories on the intriguing effects of ketamine on the brain. This morning I heard “How An Unlikely Drug Helps Some Children Consumed By Fear“. Late last year they presented “Ketamine Relieves Depression By Restoring Brain Connections“. Fascinating stuff!

A vial of deadly virus has disappeared from University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston on Saturday. The sample of Guanarito virus causes Venezuelan hemorrhagic fever (VHF) which has a recorded case  fatality rate of 23.1%.  Officials insisted there was no threat to the public, that the sample had probably been destroyed by accident, and the lab’s cleaning crew is currently under investigation. Blaming the janitors!? I feel reassured, don’t you?

Banks gone bad: our evolved morality has failed us!

Not another fish story: a fishmonger in the south of China has found a live bomb in a squid’s stomach.

Scientists in Norway have found a pre-Viking tunic in a thawing glacier, a discovery they say highlights a rare advantage of global climate change.

The Onion: Find The Thing You’re Most Passionate About, Then Do It On Nights And Weekends For The Rest Of Your Life. Yeah, it’s the story of my life.

When Devo met Disney: unless you’ve got kids, are a really big Devo fan, or some pervy Nickelodeon-watching weirdo, Devo 2.0 (or DEV2.O) the 2006 reworking of some of the group’s best loved songs for The Walt Disney Company might’ve passed you by.

Burning Ice and a Shape-shifting Jesus

Richard Broughton, Associate Professor of Biology at the University of Oklahoma, has penned an excellent response to HB 1674, a piece of so-called “academic freedom” legislation aimed at giving equal time to the ridiculous beliefs of ‘Young Earth’ Creationists, witch doctors, astrologers and other crazies in science classrooms. I’d say the Prof.  deserves a raise!

Today, Japan announced the first successful extraction of methane from offshore deposits of methane hydrate. As the world’s largest importer of liquified natural gas, this technology offers the promise of a domestic energy resource for Japan. Yes, it’s still a carbon-based fuel, but at least they won’t have to import it if this thing works out for them.

If you can’t stand the news just buy the press, I guess. The villainous Koch Brothers consider purchasing the L.A. Times.  We already live in a world where just six corporations control almost all we see and hear.

We’re already hosts to at least one alien life-form:  a corporation is a Constitutionally protected irresponsible anaerobic organism that feeds on money. If that’s not an alien life form, I don’t know what is.

Prenda Law, whose business model was to accuse thousands of people of illegally downloading copyrighted porn then threatening to ‘out’ them if they didn’t pay a ransom “settlement”, had a very bad day in court on Monday. The judge was not amused by their apparent chicanery. Ken at Popehat has the best write-up I’ve seen.

Manhattan private eye Bob Nygaard has materialized as the scourge of psychics who fleece vulnerable clients out of fortunes. Since 2008, this dogged private dick has helped cops collar seven criminal “clairvoyants”.

Some inconvenient facts for the Teabaggers in your life: black people, who make up 22% of the poor, receive only 14% of government benefits, while white people, who make up 42% of the poor, receive 69% of government benefits. Oh dear. If this gets out…. nah, it won’t change a damned thing!

A shape-shifting Jesus comforts Pontius Pilot over dinner in a newly translated 1200 year old Coptic version of the Passover tale. The text is written in the name of St. Cyril of Jerusalem, who lived during the fourth century (as are several other dubious homilies).

Tim Minchin sings the praises of Magic Woody Allen Velociraptor Jesus:

Remember, Remember…!

Happy Guy Fawkes Day and Bonfire Night, everyone. Guy has been called “the only man to enter Parliament with honest intentions“. Remember, the best place to light a fire is always under the seat of power!

Getting the lights back on after a week without is reason enough to celebrate in NYC.

The downside to near-light-speed travel seems to be getting fried by relativistic radiation, a real buzz-kill.

What could be better than hunting for Bigfoot from a blimp? I mean queue up the Thomas Dolby!

The GOP is in crisis mode! There is a last minute split over whether to emphasize misogyny or racism as their defining value.

John Scalzi has some sage words about the GOP:

“The modern national Republican party is a hot mess, a simmering pot of angry reactionaries driven by selfishness and willful ignorance, whose guiding star is not governance but power, and whose policies and practices are tuned to build an oligarchy, not nurture a democracy”.

Living as I do in a very “red” state, I go to the polls tomorrow knowing that my vote in the presidential race is worth nothing. Oklahoma’s electoral votes are “winner take all”, and this state hasn’t backed a non-Republican candidate for president since LBJ won here in 1964. That’s a very long streak of stupid, so I’m used to none of my choices ever getting the benefit of my vote.

My very first presidential vote was cast for John Anderson in 1980, largely for his proposal to put a  (gasp!) 50 cent a gallon tax on gasoline, that and his honest regret over backing the Gulf of Tonkin resolution (he was the only candidate with the balls to say it had been a very bad idea). He got my vote, wasted or no.

I joined the GOP for several years to agitate for abortion rights while Reagan was in office, but the GOP was just too crazy for me even then. At the county level they barred motions from the floor of the convention just to keep rights advocates from ruining their little nazi christian soldier routine. I couldn’t stand it any more and I left.

Of course, nowadays neither Nixon or Reagan would make it in the GOP: they’d both be branded as socialists by the crazies in the base and the Koch brothers wouldn’t give either of them a dime because, as bad as they both were for the country, neither of them would be as willing to completely roll over for corporate interests like the current crop of soulless, back-stabbing traitors like Boehner, Cantor, Ryan and McConnell. Ass-clown corporate sell-outs, all. Country will never come first for this venal gang. And “the base”? It’s like something from a  George Romero movie: brain-dead zombies as far as the eye can see, wanting to take their country back… to the 1900s, apparently. I never imagined so many could be so dumbed down in my lifetime.

So, yes, I had hoped for more “change”, but in the face of the zombie hoards and bitter partisan obstructionism from the GOP, Obama has done all he could and will get my vote again.

Sure, he’s turned into centrist (there are no radical presidents allowed that aren’t Republicans) and shovelled money at banks and Wall Street, but faced with the fallout from Dubya’s eight year fiasco what else could he do, let the country go bust?

I like “Obamacare”, it’s a step toward single-payer (which is the only thing that makes sense), I appreciate the tax reductions that the GOP will pretend didn’t happen, and I like his actions on equal rights and nondiscrimination (the Lilly Ledbedder Act, getting rid of DADT, starting to move on immigration reform), all against incredible opposition from the GOP zombies that would rather have the country fail than have any Democrat re-elected…  so of course Obama will get my vote again, and gladly! Fuck the GOP and all they stand for: they act like villains and I’ll treat them like villains.

I’ll also be voting for John Olson in the House Dist. 1 race. The GOP is running Bridenstine, a hard right wingnut Tea Party goofball that wants a 30% “flat tax” that would eviscerate the middle and lower income earners, and has a hint of Hitler youth about his that I don’t like, policy questions all aside. Oklahoma’s oh-so-straight GOP droids and gun nuts seem to like his pretty mouth and the churchy noises he makes, so he’ll probably win by an unholy margin, but I won’t be voting for him.

In the State Rep race, I’m backing David Phillips, mostly because I’ve seen and heard incumbent Jadine Nollan’s act for the last few years in office and I’ve had enough of her whacko bullshit. She’s part of the Crazy Caucus that voted for the so-called “personhood amendment” to the state constitution, so she’s got to go. I want a representative that thinks for a change.

Most of the referenda on the ballot are easily sorted out. I’m voting NO on State Questions 758 and 759. Anything with the names Ritze, Kern or Shortey on them earns my opposition. These three are part of the Crazy Caucus.

I’m voting YES on State Questions 762, 764 and 765. Changes to the state pardon & parole board,  water and sewer infrastructure bonds and making changes to the Department of Human Services management all sound like good ideas to me.

I’m voting NO on State Question 766. It exempts all intangible property from ad valorem taxation, which sounds like bad policy and a give-away to corporations and the “one percenters” to me. There are already specific exemptions for certain classes of intangibles in place; we can selectively add more if we need to. We shouldn’t be exempting everything with a broad brush.

Return of the Shape-Shifting Clown!

6,000? 9,000? 13,000? Just which orifice are Creationists pulling their estimates for the age of the Earth out of, anyway?

“Extraterrestrial War: Dinosaur Era spawns World War III scenario“, as reported at Examiner.com, ponders whether it possible that an Extraterrestrial War involving humans and aliens lead to the detonation of a weapon on Earth, which then resulted in the mutations of a population of dinosaurs into shape shifting-enabled entities? (Answer: not so much). It’s a plot-line as feasible as any recent GOP tax plan!

How can anyone believe M’Lord Romney will “get tough with China” when he won’t talk to the workers of Bain-owned Sensata, who’s jobs he is shipping to China? It’s almost as likely as the Examiner article above.

Billionaire William Koch, the financier of many brands of evil, is facing a lawsuit in federal court from a former top-level employee who claims the energy mogul lured him to a secluded property, where he was imprisoned and interrogated for a period of time, according to a report in Courthouse News. Those little people complain about everything!

While Governor of Massachusetts, M’Lord McMittens  diverted Medicaid funds from health care for the needy and into the state’s general fund with a classic shell-game. The Wall Street Journal labeled such financing mechanisms “Medicaid Money Laundering” and a “swindle.” Just another punk-ass GOP grifter, I tell you!

Steven King’s exasperated screed against the greedy rich folks, “Tax Me, for F@%&’s Sake!”, will remain one of those classic comic political reads long after the 2012 elections. And he means that stuff about lighter fluid, too!

“Politicians are products, my friend!”: E. J. Dionne on how M’Lord Willard of Romney’s unpopular policies will keep him flipping-flopping like a fish out of Dom Perignon until election day cometh.

As Dubya once stammered: “Thanks for blaming the black guy!”. Keep focused on the fact that it was the Afghanistan/Iraq wars and the Bush tax cuts (not food stamps, Pell grants and PBS) that drove the deficit to new heights. Thanks, GOP, for all you’ve done to us!

Speaking of Dubya, Beachcomber has a good look at the long history of inventing pretexts for war. Can’t have those “Mission Accomplished” moments without a war to hang them on, can you?

“It’s all a Big Gay Plot!!” shrieks the  American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer, and the poor dear’s nearly fainted over the SPLC’s “Mix It Up at Lunch” program. Maybe Bryan is just a little butt-hurt over being “outed” as the leader of a hate group?

“There is harm, however—intellectual harm, historical harm, and moral harm—in attributing to Darwin a startling majority of the 20^th century’s tragedies.” Paul Johnson’s new book on Darwin starts out factual, then veers off into the Crazy that we’ve all heard (and refuted) before.

In “Times Like These Are Different“, Paul Krugman thumbs his nose at the squawking of the deficit hawks (who thumb their noses at evidence-based economic theory). Austerity only exacerbates economic contraction when your back is against the zero lower bound, but borrowing is basically free now, so use cheap money to get demand going again.

NBC reports on a large geoglyph found in Russia that could predate the Nazca lines by a thousand years. Graffiti of the Gods?

The Internet Archive has a great collection of old-time radio programs. Inner Sanctum, various sci-fi adaptations and more. Gotta love that public domain!

Loren Coleman investigates the odd synchronicities surrounding October 13 throughout history. He also points out some interesting overlaps between Jack Kirby, the Argo movie, and bigfoot. It’s a small, entangled universe, indeed.

I Can See My House From Here!

There are now credible reports that Assad’s brutal regime in Syria is dropping Russian-made cluster bombs on civilian areas, a heinous war crime. One hit Tamanea last Tuesday, scattering anti-personnel ‘bomblets’ between two schools. More than 100 civilized countries have banned the use, stockpiling, transfer or sale of cluster munitions under a convention which became international law in 2010, but neither Syria, Russia, China nor the United States are signatories. We must be the “good guys“, right?

Geronimo! Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner is attempting to break the high-altitude skydiving record in less than an hour. Jumping from the edge of space 23 miles up, he is expected to go fully super-sonic during his descent. Live feed here. Update: he made it and pulled off a perfect landing under the chutes. Way to go!

A sadder update: Arlen Specter, long-serving former senator from Pennsylvania, lost his battle with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma this morning. He was 82.

Tuesday is Ada Lovelace Day, celebrating women in science, technology, engineering and math. Lady Ada was the first computer programmer, developing routines for the Babbage Engine, wayyy before it was cool and wayyyy before Microsoft.

The Nobel Prize in Quackpottery honors the surprisingly unscientific ideas of Nobel prizewinning scientists. Winners must have already won the Nobel Prize in a scientific field and must openly embrace some form of anti-scientific or pseudoscientific quackery.

Did they get fries with that? Scientist claims evidence that pre-historic humans snacked on giant panda in south-western China.

A review of “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty“. Covering the rise and fall of Venice, with reflections on the self-destruction of our modern-day 1-Percenters. Might be a good companion read for Tuchman’s “A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century“.

Don’t let him touch your plumbing, he’s stimulated! Hypocrite Oklahoma congressional candidate Markwayne Mullin will give the GOP’s national address this weekend, bitching about the stimulus plan after siphoning off $370,000 of it for himself. He claims if he’d only known the money came from the stimulus he probably wouldn’t have touched it, but documents show his firm was well aware that the funding came from the stimulus before he lined his pockets with it. Markwayne Mullin: just another lying Bush-league ass-wipe.

Can you “Spot the Racist”?

“Biden laughed at Ryan constantly, and it pissed a lot of people off. Fuck them. It was the laugh of an old man who has heard enough bullshit to last ten lifetimes.” — The Rude Pundit

Meet the GOP All-Stars: Romney, Ryan, Rivard, DesJarlais and Akin. This Is Who They Are. This Is What They Do.

Happy Anniversary! It been a year since the GOP filibustered the American Jobs Act. No job? Blame the GOP for doing all it can to wreck the economy! It’s what the Koch brothers pay them to do. Desperate serfs are compliant serfs!

Speaking of just how much the GOP hates America, Sensata, one of the companies currently being pillaged and raped by Bain Capital, was ordered to take down American flags while they were training their Chinese replacements in preparation for their jobs being shipped over-seas. Oh that Mitt, he loves practical jokes even more than America!

Ready for another dose of the same Bush-Cheney economy destroying trickle-down policies? Just vote for Romney, you’ll get your wish.

Holy class warfare! Get a load of the Romney-Ryan plan to destroy Medicaid! Talk about a couple of bad apples!

Oh, look, another corporate “person” is born to replace the one caught filing hundreds of fraudulent voter registrations and other shenanigans. I’m not sure but the father appears to be the GOP and the mother is Nathan Sproul.

Here’s proof that crime just doesn’t pay at our level: former Morgan Stanley exec walks after “allegedly” attacking cab driver with a knife. He’s now forming a professional cabbie slashing league for the very rich.

“All for One!” (as long as I’m the One)

“Don’t mourn, organize!” It’s always a good time to reflect on the life and legacy of Joe Hill: poet, song writer, IWW organizer. Despite being framed for murder in Utah and being executed by firing-squad after a sham trial, he kept his sense of humor to the end. In his last letter, he asked Big Bill Haywood: “Could you arrange to have my body hauled to the state line to be buried? I don’t want to be found dead in Utah“. He was fearless, kept it light, and absolutely would not stop organizing workers to fight against the same patrician oligarchy we see beginning to re-emerge. With the Takers at the top holding more assets than the remaining 90% combined, we need Joe Hills now more than ever.

This time it’s the Chief Economist at Moody’s declaring the Romneytronic™ Tax plan to be unworkable. What’ll it take, St. Ronnie from on high?

Which M’Lord Willard of Romney will greet us today? Now they’re running an add criticizing cuts to government spending. Make up your minds, M’Lord!

Have you tried the new, improved Moderate Mitt™? He’s absolutely guaranteed to tell you things that aren’t true 24/7/365 or no money back!

Here’s another endorsement M’Lord Romney could have done without: Jerry Sandusky. Company you keep, ’nuff said*.

No, the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates are NOT the same. Lots in common, but take their attitudes toward women, for example.

How can we be sure the Taliban hasn’t infiltrated the Republican party? They share so many goals, including turning the clock back to a time that never was.

Have you considered the risks involved in being a Democrat in this day and age? I don’t like to consider being shot at one of them, but there it is. Evil doesn’t work for free in America, and Citizens United lets the Kochs and Banksters  and corporate psychopaths legally pick up the tab. Once the GOP got it’s fascism all ‘wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross’, their ‘base’ can be convinced that any tactic is justified.

Why are people so damned easy to manipulate, anyway?

We’re coming up on the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and some students in Florida are restoring a Nike surface-to-air missile to commemorate it. “The irony is a lot of these kids are Cuban,” said George T. Baker principal Sean Gallagan. “And if this missile was used as it was intended a lot of these kids wouldn’t be here.” A little irony can be a good thing.

Didja hear the one about the hugenormous eyeball that washed ashore in Florida? Looks like it came from a swordfish. “What big eyes you have!”

Meanwhile, a robot sub is mapping the Antarctic under the ice-cap. Watch out for the krakens, little sub!

This new tentacle-bot is freaky weird. It looks like a much more personal appliance to me.

For the love of Bast, keep your cat well-fed and be glad they aren’t much bigger: they are killing machines!

There’s been an annoying headline,”Fears grow that Syria may shut down Internet“, that’s been at the top of my Syria/Aleppo news section for the last few days. I’m old enough to remember life without digital communications being pretty livable, so on first blush this all sounds like a #firstworldproblem punchline. I can’t help but picture the cartoon dictator gloating “Without Porn the revolution will CRUMBLE! Mwuahahahah!” while twirling his mustache and disconnecting the Interwebs plug.

I know the ‘net has been very important  during the last few year of unrest, revolts and throwing-off of hereditary despots and military regimes throughout the region.  “The whole world is watching!” really has no meaning when they can’t watch, and that’s where the power of the Internet comes in. Still, the list of fears for the Syrian rebel of my imagination goes on the order of “low ammo/food/water/medical supplies; death by artillery, air-strikes, snipers; traitors; global apathy; cholera… Oh, and loss of internet service. Yeah, that would really suck, too”. Yeah. Not as much as continued international inaction or the constant air raids, but, yeah.

*Yes, I know it’s a parody. How much better is it than Lindsay Lohan though, am I right? 

What’s with the GOP? (w/ correction)

It’s getting to be a sinister comedic tradition: the annual GOP spasm to sacrifice Big Bird on the altar of “balancing the budget“. We saw M’Lord Willard of Romney trot out that tired line again in last night’s debate. Of course, that’s just a side-show for the real havoc the GOP is bent on inflicting on the 90% .

What’s with these guys? It’s like the GOP has become that kid that sits there and bangs his head on the wall over and over again: it’s obvious that something’s wrong with that kid, but everyone pretends not to notice or says that “it’s just a phase”. Is it that they don’t acknowledge that the budget for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (that allocates the funds for public television and radio) amounts to just 0.012% .00014% of the federal budget in 2011, or is it that their Randian sensibilities can’t stand having non-commercial media around? Maybe they are just bent on destroying anything that smacks of “the general welfare” and the common good?

So grow up, GOP, and knock off the “moocher/looter” talk.  Not only can it be turned back on your party, anyone beyond (a healthy) late adolescence knows that is a dick-headed world-view. Some of us miss the days when the GOP had principled positions and weren’t just providing cut-rate blowjobs to the Koch Brothers, BP, Monsanto and the other wealthy scumbags that keep them in office.

Maybe there’s a better way to balance the budget without cutting into Granny’s cat food budget, like restricting deductions on incomes over $500K a year and/or eliminating the bullshit tax-dodges used by corporations to avoid paying any tax at all (or, like  General Electric, getting a multi-$billion tax refund)? Sure, nobody likes paying taxes, and me neither, but taxes are the entry fee to living in a civil society, and if you are going to raise revenues (and we do need to do that) let’s at least raise them from those with the wherewithal to pay a tiny bit more more without having to go hungry.

Corporations are not people: they won’t starve in the streets, their shareholders will just get a few pennies less. If you believe 10 years of historically low tax rates are slowing “job creation” (rather than a collapse of demand due to Wall Street stealing everyone’s money), well you are just the kind of fools the GOP is looking for. Double dittos, y’all!