Congress needs to stop the brinkmanship politics and work together to balance our nation’s budget and restore our bond rating. This will give businesses the certainty they need to invest in capital projects and expand their workforce. This in turn will create demand for goods and services that will buoy our economy. If Congress can't pass a budget on time, they shouldn't be paid.

Efforts should be made towards restoring our nation’s bond rating which will reduce costs for needed infrastructure such as roads, bridges, levies and water conveyance. These projects will also create jobs and stimulate the economy. Additionally, offering tax incentives to encourage business start-ups and new hires, providing job training and education in growing sectors of the economy, and supporting existing businesses so they can grow are all part of the solution.

Labels: Greedy Republican Bastards, nothing is certain except death and taxes, utter horseshit

Labels: institutionalized racism, Trayvon Martin, utter horseshit

Labels: Department of Homeland Security, security theatre, utter horseshit

Today, and not a moment too soon, the non-profit Citizens For Tax Justice (CTJ) has put out their findings revealing that twelve of the nations largest Fortune 500 companies, while making $170 billion in profits during the period of The Great Recession, paid an effective tax rate of negative 1.5%.

Yes, you read that correctly.

Not only have these twelve companies paid zero in taxes for the years 2008-2010, they actually received tax subsidies that added $62.4 billion to their bottom lines.

The companies were chosen by the CTJ to represent a range of industries, including manufacturing, energy, services, transportation and high tech and include – in alphabetical order – American Electric Power, Boeing, Dupont, Exxon Mobil, FedEx, General Electric, Honeywell International, IBM, United Technologies, Verizon Communications, Wells Fargo and Yahoo.

Here are the bullet points presented by the report:

• From 2008 through 2010, these 12 companies reported $171 billion in pretax U.S. profits. But as a group, their federal income taxes were negative: –$2.5 billion.

• All but two of the dozen companies enjoyed at least one no-tax year over the 2008-10 period, despite reporting substantial pretax U.S. profits in those no-tax years.

• Eight of the twelve companies reported net tax benefits over the full three-year period.

According to the study, not a single one of these companies paid an amount even close to the 35% statutory tax rate.

In fact, the tax rate paid by Exxon Mobile, when spread over the full three years, was only 14.2% – a full 60% below the 35% rate that corporations are supposed to be paying. And if we take a look at what Exxon paid over just the past two years, it totals a mere 0.4% on their pre-tax profits of $9.9 billion.

And get this – Exxon Mobile paid the most in taxes of any of the twelve companies on the list.

Here is my favorite part – had just these twelve companies paid at the actual 35% tax rate the GOP is telling us they are chaffing under, the sum would have added a full 12% to the totals the United States of America’s treasury received through corporate taxes.

We sure could use that money.

Labels: corporatism, greed, Republican lies, utter horseshit

Labels: batshit crazies, Glenn Beck, lunacy, utter horseshit

The US House of Representatives will have a chance to vote on a resolution to affirm the phrase "In God We Trust" as the nation’s official motto after it was approved by the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday.

Congressman J. Randy Forbes (R-VA), the founder and chairman of the Congressional Prayer Caucus, sponsored the legislation. It would encourage the public display of the motto in all public buildings, public schools and government institutions.

He said he introduced the bill in January because he was troubled by a pattern of omitting God from the nation's heritage.

"There is a small minority who believes America does not have the right to trust in God, who believes the United States should not affirm trust in God, and who actively seek to remove any recognition of that trust," Forbes said.

Labels: American Idiots, Christofascist Zombie Brigade, House Republicans, utter horseshit

Labels: American Idiots, Michele Bachmann, Republican lies, utter horseshit

Six in 10 of those saying Obama is a Muslim said they got the information from the media, with the largest portion — 16 percent — saying it was on television. Eleven percent said they learned it from Obama's behavior and words.

Labels: Barack Obama, bigotry, Islam, lies, utter horseshit, wingnuttia

TAPPER: So what exactly does the July 2011 deadline mean? Is it going to be a whole lot of people moving out, definitely, as Vice President Biden says? Or could it be more nuanced, as General Petraeus says, maybe just a couple of people leaving one province?

EMANUEL: Well, no, everybody knows there's a firm date. And that firm date is a date -- deals with the troops that are part of the surge, the additional 30,000. What will be determined at that date or going into that date will be the scale and scope of that reduction.

But there will be no doubt that that's going to happen. And I know actually -- I look at both of those, and they're not inconsistent. But remember where we were on Afghanistan policy, that war had waxed and waned. And there really hadn't been a focus on how to bring that war to -- and the effort (INAUDIBLE), even with al Qaeda and Taliban, to a point given what was going on in Iraq.

The president raised the troop level and civilian participation to 30,000. This was creating a window of opportunity for Afghanistan. We are now at that point in Afghanistan, and in fact for the first time in eight years, nine years, they're actually meeting their police recruitment requirements as well as their army recruitment requirements. So they themselves can take more and more responsibility for the security of that country.

Second is we're also -- about a half of al Qaeda has been eliminated in this last 18 months. So we're taking the pressure to al Qaeda, taking the pressure to the Taliban. And we're making progress as it relates to, as you know, after the president's meeting with President Karzai, went back to Afghanistan, held a peace jurga.

There is also progress being made on that side. All of this has been predictable in the sense that we knew once we created this window of opportunity, we were going to focus on what are the resources that are necessary, where are we going to be making progress. But the July '11 date, as stated by the president, that's not moving. That's not changing. Everybody agreed on that date. General Petraeus did. Secretary Gates did. As also Admiral Mullen agreed.

And the goal is to take this opportunity, focus on what needs to get done, and then on July 2011, is to begin the reduction of...

(CROSSTALK)

TAPPER: But it could be any...

EMANUEL: ... troops.

TAPPER: But it could be any number of people.
EMANUEL: That's what you'll evaluate based on the conditions on the ground. That is -- but what had to happen prior to that was having a date that gave everybody, the NATO, international forces, as well as Afghanistan, that sense of urgency to move.

Labels: Afghanistan, Rahm Emanuel, utter horseshit

Asked to Declare His Race, Obama Checks ‘Black’

It is official: Barack Obama is the nation’s first black president.

A White House spokesman confirmed that Mr. Obama, the son of a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas, checked African-American on the 2010 census questionnaire.

The president, who was born in Hawaii and raised there and in Indonesia, had more than a dozen options in responding to Question 9, about race. He chose “Black, African Am., or Negro.” (The anachronistic “Negro” was retained on the 2010 form because the Census Bureau believes that some older blacks still refer to themselves that way.)

Mr. Obama could have checked white, checked both black and white, or checked the last category on the form, “some other race,” which he would then have been asked to identify in writing.

There is no category specifically for mixed race or biracial.

Labels: idiocy, New York Times, racism, utter horseshit

Here's a chapter in the culture wars that no one saw coming: Sarah Palin and Fox News facing off against '80s rap star and actor LL Cool J.

Popular conservative blogger Allahpundit tweaked liberals who accuse Tea Party supporters of racist sympathies, saying they'll be "shocked to find the alleged Grand Dragon of the tea-party movement making chitchat with a hip-hop legend."

The problem is that no such chitchat was produced for the Palin show. LL Cool J, star of "NCIS: Los Angeles," tweeted Tuesday night: "Fox lifted an old interview I gave in 2008 to someone else & are misrepresenting to the public in order to promote Sarah Palins Show. WOW."

When contacted by Yahoo! News for comment, a Fox News spokesperson explained that LL Cool J had been informed in 2008 that the interview was planned as a segment for "Real American Stories"--though of course the network couldn't have known at the time that Palin would be hosting.

Update: Looks like the confusion isn't limited to the hip hop genre. Toby Keith's publicist tells the New York Times that Keith has never done an interview with Palin and she had no idea he was being used in the Palin special. She believes that Fox will be recycling an interview Keith gave Fox in 2009.

Labels: Fox News, Sarah Palin, utter horseshit

TPMDC dug deeper into the kerfuffle after Democrats accused Republicans of an elaborate plot to try and derail health care reform in the final hours before the expected vote Sunday in the House.

A Republican aide on Capitol Hill told me today in an interview they first learned about the memo at about 12:30, getting an email with the PDF attached. The aide's office decided not to do anything with the memo "without knowing where it came from or its origin," the aide said.

A Politico story describing and reprinting the memo was published soon after with a 12:46 p.m. time stamp and caught fire on the Internet, at one point being the lead item at the top of the Drudge Report.

Once the Politico story broke, it was a green light for Republican operatives. Michael Steel, a spokesman for House Minority Leader John Boehner, sent reporters an email just before 1 p.m. quoting from the memo. He also attached a copy of the memo, which appears to be the same PDF document that Politico posted.

A Senate Democratic aide said today their office started getting calls around 12:30 from reporters asking if the memo's claims were true. The Democratic aide's office was sent the PDF by reporters, who said they had obtained it from Republican lobbyists on K Street, the aide told me in an interview.

That aide and several Democratic staffers told us that reporters who posted the memo did not call them to check its authenticity. It appears to have been posted in the noon hour at The Washington Times and on Andrew Breitbart's Big Government Website (time stamp is Pacific time), but the Politico item received the most play on the heavily trafficked Drudge site.

Soon after we posted our initial story, in which Democrats cried foul on the memo at 2:39 p.m., Politico removed the item and memo with this disclaimer:

An earlier post in this spot detailed what was purported by Republicans to be an internal Democratic memo regarding the upcoming health reform vote Sunday. Democratic leadership has challenged the authenticity of the memo. POLITICO has removed the memo and the details about it until we can absolutely verify the document's origin.

The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder posted a mea culpa about the memo this afternoon, saying he should have checked its authenticity before publishing. A reporter for The Hill tweeted the publication opted against posting the memo.

But that didn't stop Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), who claimed on Twitter and his Web site that he'd "intercepted" the memo.

By 3:40 p.m. when House Republican leaders held a press conference on the Hill, reporters were ready with questions about the memo. The leaders dismissed its importance and accused the Democrats of attempting to pull a hoax on the American people.

"The appropriate question there really is ask the reporter who wrote the article alleging that it was a hoax. I know nothing more than what I read in Politico," Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) said. Watch that moment here.

Late Update: Politico addressed the memo in a piece filed tonight, saying that it had been sent to them by "multiple Republican sources" who could not verify that it was written by Democrats.

Labels: fake news, hack journalism, Republican lies, utter horseshit

"Filegate" is a term that always deserved scare quotes, because the putative scandal concerning the misuse of FBI files in the Clinton White House was so clearly, from its very beginning in 1996, no scandal at all. But the obvious absence of any credible evidence that Bill or Hillary Clinton or any of their employees or associates had ordered up such files, or committed any abuse of them, did nothing to dissuade mainstream media, right-wing outlets, or Republican politicians from hysterically promoting the pseudo-scandal.

Today it is amazing to recall how significant this nothingness was once deemed to be, with nightly coverage on network newscasts. On Capitol Hill, Sen. Orrin Hatch demanded a fingerprint analysis to determine whether Hillary Clinton had touched the files (she hadn't) while lengthy investigations got under way in the Senate, the House and the Office of the Independent Counsel led by Kenneth Starr. Bob Dole, the Republican presidential candidate in 1996, compared "Filegate" with Nixon's Watergate scandal and asked: "Where's the outrage?"

Yesterday the last wheeze of hype was squeezed from that old controversy, when U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth dismissed the remaining civil lawsuit against former Clinton administration officials in the FBI files affair. Brought by eccentric attorney Larry Klayman, who became a favorite of cable television and conservative funders during the Clinton era, those costly lawsuits were described in the judge's decision as essentially baseless.

Summing up his findings, Lamberth wrote: "After years of litigation, endless depositions, the fictionalized portrayal of this lawsuit and its litigants on television, this court is left to conclude that with the lawsuit, to quote Gertrude Stein, 'there's no there there.'" A Reagan appointee once lauded by Klayman himself as "this great jurist," he showed a talent for understatement when he noted that "after ample opportunity," the plaintiffs "have not produced any evidence of the far-reaching conspiracy that sought to use intimate details from FBI files for political assassinations that they alleged. The only thing that they have demonstrated is that this unfortunate episode -- about which they do have cause to complain -- was exactly what the defendants claimed: a bureaucratic snafu."

Labels: Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, utter horseshit, Washington scandals, wingnuttia

It's shocking, but it's true: Being a woman who's more than 20 pounds overweight may actually hike your risk of getting poor medical treatment. In fact, weighing too much can have surprising -- and devastating -- health repercussions beyond the usual diabetes and heart-health concerns you've heard about for years.

Recent studies have found, if you are an overweight woman you:

• May have a harder time getting health insurance or have to pay higher premiums

• Are at higher risk of being misdiagnosed or receiving inaccurate dosages of drugs

• Are less likely to find a fertility doctor who will help you get pregnant

• Are less likely to have cancer detected early and get effective treatment for it

What's going on here? Fat discrimination is part of the problem. A recent Yale study suggested that weight bias can start when a woman is as little as 13 pounds over her highest healthy weight.

Doctors have long known that obese women are more likely to die of ovarian and breast cancers, but when Schneider and her colleagues recently gave a group of overweight ovarian cancer patients chemotherapy based on their actual weights, they found that the women were as likely to survive the illness as thinner patients. "Doctors aren't intentionally under-treating overweight women," Schneider says. "We're just working with limited information."

When Celina Reeder, a 5-foot-5, 185-pound woman with a torn ligament in her right knee, was told by her surgeon she needed to stop eating so much fast food before he would schedule surgery, the Woodacre, California, woman was astounded. "I left his office feeling ashamed," she recalls. "And I don't even eat fast food! The more I thought about it, the madder I got. So I switched surgeons. Anybody who thinks doctors treat heavy women the same as thin women has obviously never had a weight problem. I really felt like my doctor didn't respect me."

She may have been right. University of Pennsylvania researchers found that more than 50 percent of primary care physicians viewed obese patients as awkward, unattractive, and noncompliant; one third said they were weak-willed, sloppy, and lazy. In addition, researchers at Rice University and the University of Texas School of Public Health in Houston found that as patient BMI increased, doctors reported liking their jobs less and having less patience and desire to help the patient.

Whether they know it or not, doctors' attitudes may actually encourage unhealthy behavior. Feeling dissed about their weight can make some women turn to food for comfort. "Stigma is a form of stress, and many obese women cope by eating or refusing to diet," Puhl says. "So weight bias could actually fuel obesity."

Studies have also found that overweight women are more likely to delay doctors' appointments and preventive care, including screenings for cancer, because they don't want to face criticism. "It can be frustrating to treat obese patients," admits Dr. Lee Green, M.D., M.P.H., a professor of family medicine at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. "I spend most of my time treating the consequences of unhealthy lifestyles instead of actual illnesses. People come in complaining of foot or knee pain, and I'm thinking, Do you not see that you're in pain because you're 60 pounds overweight? I don't say that, of course. I try to encourage them to lose weight."

Labels: medical malpractice, utter horseshit, weight

It's a little easier to understand why a Houston man who claimed to have thwarted a potential terrorist attack on a flight leaving Atlanta has not answered repeated requests to tell his story.

He was not on the plane, AirTran Airways says.

"After conducting additional research into this situation, we have verified, according to flight manifests [legally binding documents] that the individual that allegedly created a first-hand account of events on-board AirTran Airways Flight 297, a Theodore Petruna, was never actually on-board the flight," AirTran said in a statement, which the The Atlanta Journal-Constitution was the first to obtain.

An e-mail from a Tedd Petruna, in which he told the AJC via a Facebook message Friday was intended only for friends and family, made the rounds online this week after a friend apparently forwarded it to others. In a matter of days, Petruna's account appeared in chat rooms and blogs and on conspiracy theorists' Web sites.

The AJC was forwarded the e-mail dozens of times this week, as readers saw Petruna's tale and noticed conflicting information between it and earlier news reports of the flight delay Nov. 17. Some readers simply asked the AJC to further investigate the matter.

But others who forwarded the message accused the AJC of participating in a politically correct cover-up.

The intriguing story made for intense fodder among bloggers.

Petruna's story appeared in a blog on the Web site for The Project 9.12, a group started by Fox News commentator Glenn Beck. A Canadian news site picked up the story. Dallas Morning News airline columnist Terry Maxon made it the subject of his blog for a second time this week on Friday. And snopes.com, a Web site that sniffs out rumors to decipher between fact and fiction, followed the story.

In its continued investigation into the incident, the AJC made several attempts to speak to Petruna about the incident. He has declined throughout the week to respond to repeated e-mail and phone attempts by the AJC to talk to him. That last request was made Saturday.

Additionally, AJC interviews with people on the plane, airline officials and federal agencies did not corroborate his story.

Labels: utter horseshit, wingnuttia

• 9/11/01


• Anthrax letters


• DC Snipers


• Grenade blasts outside U.K. embassy in New York


• Ohio sniper attacks


• Knoxville church shootings


• Arson attack on women's health clinic in Concord, NH (5/2000)


• Catholic priest who drove his car into the Northern Illinois Health Clinic then pulled out an ax before being shot at by a security guard; (9/2000)


• Bombing of Tacoma, Washington women's health clinic (6/2001)


• Anthrax hoax letters send by Clayton Waagner to 554 women's health clinics (11/2001)


• Arson attack on women's health clinic in Palm Beach (7/2005)


• Molotov cocktail thrown at women's health clinic in Shreveport, LA (12/2005


• David McMenemy of Rochester Hills, Michigan, crashed his car into the Edgerton Women’s Care Center in Davenport, Iowa, then doused the lobby in gasoline and started a fire (9/2006)


• Package left at a women’s health clinic in Austin, Texas, contained an explosive device capable of inflicting serious injury or death (4/2007)


• Planned Parenthood clinic in Virginia Beach, Virginia, set afire (12/2007)


• 20% of all women's health clinics in the U.S. attacked during 2008

Labels: American Idiots, Bush Administration crimes, just another outrage, lies, Republican lies, utter horseshit

Here's the biography of Van Jones: he was a bookish black kid from Tennessee who went to Yale Law and moved to San Francisco and became a radical. Then he decided to use his law degree and smarts to clean up and make things better from inside the establishment.

He was, he openly acknowledges, a "full-on Marxist" in early '90s California. He joined a revolutionary Marxist group and protested police brutality. Then he founded the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, which combats over-incarceration, police brutality, and urban poverty and violence.

Running a civil rights group dedicated to producing real and immediate improvements in urban life will make a revolutionary Marxist a bit more pragmatic. Jones began focusing on job creation, and, with a bit of prognostic intuition that ought to put Thomas Friedman to shame, he decided, in the late-'90s, to focus on "Green Jobs." This is, you know, capitalism—he wants to create wealth, and use market forces to make the world and black communities better places!

And in 2008 he wrote a book called The Green Collar Economy, and it made the Times best-seller list, making him as much of a figure of the mainstream as Sean Hannity or Malcolm Gladwell.

So here we have a radical youth turned respectable liberal. Respectable enough to be on Time magazine listicles and win World Economic Forum prizes and everything. Respectable enough for Tom Friedman to profile him. And The New Yorker. Respectable enough for Meg Whitman, as in former eBay CEO and wealthy Republican California gubernatorial candidate and John McCain advisor Meg Whitman, to proclaim herself "a huge fan of Van Jones."

And for both his activism and his charm he was rewarded with a White House job with the Council on Environmental Quality. He was tasked with making sure stimulus money for green jobs actually went to green jobs. And he's a great person to have in this administration—he is a genuine environmentalist and the only special interest he's beholden to is poor people. He is the sort of person we were all praying Obama would bring with him to DC, instead of Larry Summers.

And that is one of the reasons he is now being ritually and savagely demonized.

To understand why and how he's being demonized, we have to look at the way information and misinformation makes it way from crazy blogs to crazy pundits to crazy citizens to, suddenly, the non-crazy regular media.

Labels: Barack Obama, despair, right-wing hatemongers, spinelessness, utter horseshit, wussy-ass Democrats

Just so we're clear, here's a helpful guide to the rules of market watching, as they relate to partisan politics:

When the market went down on Bush's watch before the 2008 elections, this was Bill Clinton's fault.

When the market went down on Bush's watch between November 2008 and January 2009, this was Barack Obama's fault.

When the market went down during Obama's first seven weeks in office, this was definitely Barack Obama's fault.

And when the market rallies on Obama's watch during the second week in March, George W. Bush deserves at least some of the credit.

Labels: George W. Bush, Republicans, utter horseshit

nother local resident asked Shelby if there was any truth to a rumor that appeared during the presidential campaign concerning Obama’s U.S. citizenship, or lack thereof.

“Well his father was Kenyan and they said he was born in Hawaii, but I haven’t seen any birth certificate,” Shelby said. “You have to be born in America to be president.”

Labels: Republican lies, utter horseshit, wingnuttia

The somber, elegiac tones before President Obama’s oath of office at the inauguration on Tuesday came from the instruments of Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman and two colleagues. But what the millions on the Mall and watching on television heard was in fact a recording, made two days earlier by the quartet and matched tone for tone by the musicians playing along.

The players and the inauguration organizing committee said the arrangement was necessary because of the extreme cold and wind during Tuesday’s ceremony. The conditions raised the possibility of broken piano strings, cracked instruments and wacky intonation minutes before the president’s swearing in (which had problems of its own).

“Truly, weather just made it impossible,” Carole Florman, a spokeswoman for the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, said on Thursday. “No one’s trying to fool anybody. This isn’t a matter of Milli Vanilli,” Ms. Florman added, referring to the pop band that was stripped of a 1989 Grammy because the duo did not sing on their album and lip-synched in concerts.

Ms. Florman said that the use of a recording was not disclosed beforehand but that the NBC producers handling the television pool were told of its likelihood the day before.

The network said it sent a note to pool members saying that the use of recordings in the musical numbers was possible. Inaugural musical performances are routinely recorded ahead of time for just such an eventuality, Ms. Florman said. The Marine Band and choruses, which performed throughout the ceremony, did not use a recording, she said.

“It’s not something we would announce, but it’s not something we would try to hide,” Ms. Florman said. “Frankly, it would never have occurred to me to announce it. The fact they were forced to perform to tape because of the weather did not seem relevant, nor would we want to draw attention away from what we believed the news is, that we were having a peaceful transition of power from one administration to the next.”

Labels: inauguration, utter horseshit, wingnuttia