The Party of NO gets a public spanking... Sorry, boys!

BALTIMORE - Banana Republican Congressmen invited President Barack Obama to lunch today for a “debate.”  Unfortunately, the Banana Republicans brought their knives to a gunfight.  President Obama refuted each and every one of the Right-Wing-Echo-Chamber-spawned talking points so definitively that the Banana Republicans were left utterly discredited and completely incoherent.  Even with over one hundred Banana Republicans ganging up on the President, they could not lay a finger on him.  The only thing Banana Republicans were able to accomplish was to agree to continue saying “NO” to any proposal for anything other than more TaxCutsForTheRich.  For some reason, no matter what the situation, in good times and in bad, for a Banana Republican, there is always a rationale for that.

Nine One What? Never heard of it

NEW YORK - Notorious cross-dressing Banana Republican former Mayor and staunch President MORON apologist, Rudy GHOUL-IANI (whose only reaction on Nine-One-One was to politicize his personal failure to protect the citizens of New York), was exhumed briefly today for a truly bizarre mission.  Thinking the extreme cold would somehow preserve his decaying gray matter, Banana Republicans sent him out to appear on ABC’s “Good Morning America” and claim that there had been no terrorist attacks under his beloved President MORON!  He also claimed that there had been one such attack under President Obama.  The befuddled senior citizen seems to have forgotten his own mantra over the last eight years or so.  Had he not been such a crassly immoral and abjectly opportunistic politician during his productive life, his decline might have engendered sympathy.  Oh well.

Michele Bachmann: Welfare Queen
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/michelle_bachman_welfare_queen_20091221/
Posted on Dec 22, 2009

By Yasha Levine

Michele Bachmann has become well known for her anti-government tea-bagger antics, protesting health care reform and every other government “handout” as socialism. What her followers probably don’t know is that Rep. Bachmann is, to use that anti-government slur, something of a welfare queen. That’s right, the anti-government insurrectionist has taken more than a quarter-million dollars in government handouts thanks to corrupt farming subsidies she has been collecting for at least a decade.

And she’s not the only one who has been padding her bank account with taxpayer money.

Bachmann, of Minnesota, has spent much of this year agitating against health care reform, whipping up the so-called tea-baggers with stories of death panels and rationed health care. She has called for a revolution against what she sees as Barack Obama’s attempted socialist takeover of America, saying presidential policy is “reaching down the throat and ripping the guts out of freedom.”

But data compiled from federal records by Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit watchdog that tracks the recipients of agricultural subsidies in the United States, shows that Bachmann has an inner Marxist that is perfectly at ease with profiting from taxpayer largesse. According to the organization’s records, Bachmann’s family farm received $251,973 in federal subsidies between 1995 and 2006. The farm had been managed by Bachmann’s recently deceased father-in-law and took in roughly $20,000 in 2006 and $28,000 in 2005, with the bulk of the subsidies going to dairy and corn. Both dairy and corn are heavily subsidized—or “socialized”—businesses in America (in 2005 alone, Washington spent $4.8 billion propping up corn prices) and are subject to strict government price controls. These subsidies are at the heart of America’s bizarre planned agricultural economy and as far away from Michele Bachmann’s free-market dream world as Cuba’s free medical system. If American farms such as hers were forced to compete in the global free market, they would collapse.

However, Bachmann doesn’t think other Americans should benefit from such protection and assistance. She voted against every foreclosure relief bill aimed at helping average homeowners (despite the fact that her district had the highest foreclosure rate in Minnesota), saying that bailing out homeowners would be “rewarding the irresponsible while punishing those who have been playing by the rules.” That’s right, the subsidy queen wants the rest of us to be responsible.

Bachmann’s financial disclosure forms indicate that her personal stake in the family farm is worth up to $250,000. They also show that she has been earning income from the farm business, and that the income grew in just a few years from $2,000 to as much as $50,000 for 2008. This has provided her with a second government-subsidized income to go with her job as a government-paid congresswoman who makes $174,000 per year (in addition to having top-notch government medical benefits). “If she has an interest in a farm getting federal subsidy payments, she is benefiting from them,” Sandra Schubert, director of government affairs for the Environmental Working Group, told Gannett News Service in 2007, when the subsidies to Bachmann were first publicly disclosed.

But Bachmann isn’t the only welfare recipient on Capitol Hill. As it turns out, there is a filthy-rich class of absentee farmers—both in and out of Congress—who demand free-market rules by day and collect their government welfare checks in the mail at night, payments that subsidize businesses that otherwise would fail. Over the past couple of decades, welfare for the super-wealthy seems to be the only kind of welfare our society tolerates.

In the 11 years for which the Environmental Working Group has compiled data, the federal government paid out a total of $178 billion to American farmers. We’re not talking about the Joads here. The bulk of subsidies go to the wealthy, not small farmers, as Ken Cook, the group’s president, explained to the Central Valley (Calif.) Business Times:

American taxpayers have been writing farm subsidy checks to wealthy absentee land owners, state prison systems, universities, public corporations, and very large, well-heeled farm business operations without the government so much as asking the beneficiaries if they need our money. … Even if you live smack in the middle of a big city, type in a ZIP code and you’ll find farm subsidy recipients.

Chuck Grassley, the longtime Republican senator from Iowa who warns his constituents of Obama’s “trend toward socialism,” has seen his family collect $1 million in federal handouts over an 11-year period, with Grassley’s son receiving $699,248 and the senator himself pocketing $238,974. Even Grassley’s grandson is learning to ride through life on training wheels, snagging $5,964 in 2005 and $2,363 in 2006. In the Grassley family they learn early how to enjoy other people’s money.

Sen. Grassley railed against government intervention in the health care market, telling The Washington Times, “Whenever the government does more … that’s a movement toward socialism.” As the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, he ought to know, especially because the government has done more for him and his kin than for Americans struggling with high medical bills and mortgages. Even the free-market think tank the Heritage Foundation criticized Grassley on his deep connections to farming interests and his stubborn lack of transparency.

Then there’s Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., whose family has been on the government take for at least the past 11 years, pocketing some $500,000. The senator recently held a “prayercast” with Michele Bachmann to beseech God to kill health care reform as soon as possible because it would bring an evil socialist spirit into America. Like Bachmann, Brownback has a fierce belief in God, the free market and a two-year limit on all welfare benefits—unless it’s welfare to rich Republicans who don’t need it.

Not surprisingly, Blue Dog Democrats are on board with this welfare-for-the-rich thing. Max Baucus, the fiscally conservative Democratic senator from Montana who did his best to sabotage the health care reform process before it ever began, collected $250,000 in taxpayer subsidies to his family’s farm while fighting to keep Americans at the mercy of free-market health insurance. Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, another Democrat, also helped hold the line against so-called socialized medicine for Americans who need assistance, even though her family farm business follows the socialized subsidy playbook to a T. The Lincolns pocketed $715,000 in farm subsidies over a 10-year period, and the senator even admitted to using $10,000 of it as petty cash in 2007. Democratic Rep. Stephanie Sandlin of South Dakota stayed true to her conservative free-market roots by voting against the public option. Meanwhile, her daddy, Lars Herseth, a former South Dakota legislator, collected a welfare jackpot of $844,725 paid out between 1995 and 2006.

That’s just the way the game is played these days. Republicans and conservative Democrats bitch and moan about the allegedly Marxist underpinnings of universal health care and do everything they can to deny struggling Americans access to social services. Meanwhile, many of them profit off taxpayers in a massive welfare program.

Farm subsidies have become so corrupt that payments sometimes go to dead people for years. Federal farm subsidies, which were originally meant to help struggling farmers survive, are now little more than taxpayer robbery, taking taxpayer wealth from working Americans and sending it to the have-mores. According to 11 years’ worth of Environmental Working Group data that tracks $200 billion in subsidies, the wealthiest 10 percent of “farmers” have collected 75 percent of the money. That’s exactly the kind of socialism that Rep. Bachmann and her elite ilk like.

It's pretty hard to mock someone who has already made a mockery of herself...

WASHINGTON - Well, BONER and his TeaBaggers are at it again.  As they describe any effort to provide healthcare to the forty-five million uninsured people in this country as a gov’mint takeover, they have finally proposed their own bill.  As if you had to guess, it consists entirely of increased protection for Insurance Companies!  Yes, though Insurors are raking record profits denying care to sick people, Banana Republicans figured out that “reform” should be another handout to them.  They never change.  They can’t.  They’re apparently TEAbAggiNG 4 Jesus!

Fuck You

Obama awarded Peace Prize….Get over it!  And by the way, last time I read a newspaper, Norwegians choose the Nobel, not Swedes…but i digress (and don’t get my info from Fox)  On the other hand, I don’t recall such vitriol when President MORON five years ago awarded the United States* Medal of Freedom (for those of you playing at home, the highest civilian honor bestowed in the name of the American people) to Cheney/Rumsfeld lackeys Tommy Franks, George Tenet and Paul Bremer for their roles in aiding and abetting the insanity of the “warforoil” in Iraq, which coincidentally, and, literally, was dumped on Obama. Arguably the award is a bit premature, but it’s a safe bet that it would have never been awarded to cartoon Disney characters like the Lady & the Tramp -McClain & the Palin.

*”America is the greatest, best country God has ever given man on the face of the Earth… and Sweden sucks.”  (Sean Hannity, Fox News Channel)

President MORON awards Medals of Failure

There's no prize for Mathematics either

OSLO - In light of Barack Obama’s receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize here today, one might wonder why no such honor was bestowed on the previous administration, The MORONARCHY.  If Nobel had decided that one of the categories in which he would award prizes would be unprovoked invasion of Foreign Sovereign Nations, President MORON, The DICK and RUMMY would have been naturals!  Alas, petty tyranny — President MORON’s only stock in trade — may in fact attract the attention of the civilized world, but it is hardly ever regarded as something to be admired.  For the record, President Obama’s name was submitted exactly twelve days after he took office.  The world was obviously waiting with bated breath.

You're Next!

WASHINGTON - The Tea-Baggers have won. The so-called Healthcare Reform Act has been so watered down that only the core principles are left. The only certainties are that there will be Socialists running the program; that their only activity will be manning Death Panels; their only constituents will be Illegal Aliens; and the only service they will be providing is Abortions. But Banana Republicans are thrilled: this time, at least, they were not the party of “No.”

Yes, now you can answer twenty questions about how you want your coffee poured, form a line in your own kitchen, and wait until your name is called!

SEATTLE - As it turns out, marketing overpriced homemade coffee is not without its political risks.  When noted Seven Dollar a Cup Coffee vendor, Starbucks, launched its new ad campaign to convince people that they could also spend lavishly on instant coffee, they ran a commercial.  The premise was that certain groups of individuals would not be able to tell the difference.  The last group identified in the original commercial was “people who yell at town hall meetings!”  Well, the bible-thumping undereducated Banana Republican Tea-Baggers — who simply have no sense of humor — saw this as a slight against their year long campaign to convince people that seeing a doctor was socialism and that the secretly-muslim-but-also-extremist-christian-and-yet-somehow-really-a-hippie president was in fact a Nazi!  Since they had spent the entire Summer yelling at their Congresspeople that the guv’mint ought’a jes’ keep its hands offa’ Medicare, they were not amused.  So, Starbucks had to reshoot the commercial referring instead to the “indisputably tall.”  Ignorance knows no bounds.

PARIS - The news that Bush Receives Award for Environmentalism was reported by Rennie Petersen: “The little-known Paris-based environmental organization, Les Fous Français pour l’Environnement Mondial, have awarded former U.S. PresidentMORON George W. Bush with their ‘Environmentalist of the Year 2009’ award. Their press release includes the following statement: ‘As is well known, the basic problem with the environment is that there are too many people. Former President Bush is hereby lauded for his efforts during his presidency to reduce destructive environmental emissions by reducing the number of humans, especially in Iraq, but also in Afghanistan and the USA. We hope that Mr. Bush will participate at our annual meeting in October to personally receive our prestigious award.’ Although the press release also provides ‘honorable mention’ for The DICK and RUMMY there is no indication of any award for them.”