Opinion
U.S. wealth inequality in one chilling video
This video demonstrates a few crazy things. One: US wealth inequality is even much greater than most Americans think. Two: US wealth inequality has grown tremendously in the past few decades. Three: US wealth inequality is absolutely insane. The visualizations…
A gay businessman fires back at Mississippi's far right as legislature passes anti-LGBT law
Tonight, the Mississippi legislature passed SB2681 --the so-called "Mississippi Religious Freedom Restoration Act." As Raw Story noted on February 3, 2014:
The broadly worded measure prohibits the government from placing a “burden” on a person’s free exercise of religion, which the measure defines as action or inaction that is substantially motivated by sincerely held religious beliefs — even if those beliefs are not compulsory or central to the person’s professed faith.
Following is a response from Jackson, Miss. businessman Eddie Outlaw, which originally appeared in the Jackson Free Press.
JACKSON — I keep hearing about the hypothetical baker whose religious convictions compel him not to make wedding cakes for gay couples.
This business owner whose religious liberties are under attack has been talked about at great length in every state that has proposed some form of "religious freedom" legislation. But let me ask you this: What of the countless members of the LGBT community who face discrimination every single day? I say "countless" because there's no real way to assign a number because so many of us cannot afford to be counted.
I acknowledge that I'm the exception to the rule. I can afford to speak out and feel a very profound obligation to do so. But, here in Mississippi alone, we can be fired or denied employment, we can be denied housing and face eviction, we cannot adopt a child in need of a loving home, and we aren't even included in anti-hate crime legislation. What we fight for isn't limited to, and doesn't stop with, marriage equality. We as a community, both visible and unseen, are fighting for our rightful place as fully equal citizens of this nation.
It's estimated that as much as 40 percent of our homeless youth identify as LGBT, and 43 percent of them say their parents forced them out because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. When paired with the fact that LGBT youth are more than twice as likely to attempt suicide as their heterosexual peers, it's not hard to imagine why so many of us move into adulthood and accept a life lived hiding in plain sight. Because we have no protections in Mississippi, most fear being visible or being outed because of a very real threat to their ability to provide for their families.
If an employer can fire someone because of their sexual orientation or gender identity, what's to stop a business owner from denying goods or services for the same reasons?
Legislation like SB2681, which the Mississippi Legislature passed today, would compound the potential for discrimination in Mississippi, and let's be honest, there is a long and well-documented history of discrimination based on religious beliefs in our state.
Conservative groups like The Alliance Defending Freedom and The American Religious Freedom Project have been influential in states like Ohio, Kansas and most notably Arizona, according to Talking Points Memo. Mississippi has an organization funded by the Southern Baptist Convention working to influence lawmakers, too.
In an email posted by Cottonmouthblog, Jimmy Porter of Christian Action Commission used thinly veiled threats against members of the House if HB2681 didn't pass.
"The Christian Action Commission will work diligently to ensure the blame will be laid at the feet of these 20 alleged Republicans. Approximately 60,000 Baptist households will read about it and know the truth," the email stated.
And in a move that goes against the national messaging that these proposed bills have nothing to do with "the gays" specifically, he writes "Our state passed the Defense of Marriage Act by the widest margin of any state at 86/87%."
Faced with a sea change on LGBT equality unparalleled in our country's history, the far-right conservatives are lashing out. While the nation and, yes, Mississippians, increasingly support full equality for the LGBT community, they would have us know our place.
The very same people who claim to "love thy neighbor" would have us stay in the closet for fear of discrimination. Legislation like SB2681 is certainly meant to whip up support in the conservative base, but it is also intended to cut off the progress the "Upitty Homo" has made in the fight for full equality under the law. But we've come to far to turn back now.
I don't have to look back very far in my lived experience to recall a time when I was afraid to live openly. I once thought the very best I could hope for was to get a job, fall in love, and keep that part of my life hidden from family and clients. The idea that I could be myself was mind-blowing at the time. Yet here we are. We find ourselves at a pivotal point in our struggles, well beyond the tipping point and so much closer to the finish line.
They can refuse to recognize our unions now, but change is coming anyway.
They can fire us or deny us employment now, but change is coming anyway.
They can keep us from giving loving homes to children in need now, but change is coming anyway.
They can deny us goods and services now, but change is coming anyway.
They can try to make us live in fear, to force us to live in the shadows, to be satisfied as unequal citizens of this grand experiment for now, but change is coming anyway.
They can use hateful language, they can bully, they can beat us and leave us hanging on a fence to die now, but change is coming anyway.
Eddie Outlaw owns a business in Jackson, Miss., with his husband, Justin. He is a regular contributor to the Jackson Free Press.
[Image credit: Justin McPherson (left) and Eddie Outlaw (right) own William Wallace Salon and The Fondren Barber Shop in Jackson's Fondren district. They married inCalifornia, but it is not legally recognized in Mississippi. Photo by Trip Burns ]
Eisenhower's military-industrial warning rings truer than ever
The latest in the Snowden and NSA revelations show the reach of the military-information complex
On 17 January 1961, the outgoing US president, Dwight D Eisenhower, went on TV to deliver his valedictory address to the American people. Ike had been a relatively uncontroversial president. He had overseen a period of astonishing prosperity and economic growth. He had impeccable military credentials, having been supreme commander of allied forces in the second world war. So nobody could have accused him of being a radical.
Nevertheless, in his valedictory address Ike said this. "Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of ploughshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defence; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defence establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
"This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government. We recognise the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. ... In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."
Rings some bells, doesn't it? Over the 10 presidencies since Ike's the United States has spent more on its military-industrial complex than all of the other countries in the world combined have spent on defence. But 50 years is a long time in technology, and over that period there has been a steady decline in the importance of dumb "kinetic" weaponry and a rapid increase in "smart" miniaturised weaponry, together with the rise of the internet, cyber-espionage and information warfare.
Like any good parasite, the military-industrial complex has evolved to match the changing nature of the organism on which it feeds. It still does the kinetic stuff, of course, but in recent decades it has moved into non-kinetic areas, notably surveillance and cyber "security". Which is how Edward Snowden came to be an employee not of the National Security Agency, but of a long-standing member of the military-industrial complex, Booz Allen Hamilton – a company that has 24,500 employees, a market capitalisation of $2.5bn and annual revenues of $5.8bn.
As they burgeoned, the big internet companies looked with disdain on the leviathans of the military-industrial complex. Kinetic warfare seemed so yesterday to those whose corporate mantras were about "not being evil" and adhering to "the hacker's way". So when Snowden revealed NSA claims that the spooks had untrammelled access to their servers the companies reacted like nuns accused of running a webcam porn site. It wasn't true, they protested, and even it if was they knew nothing about it. Of course they did comply with government requests approved by a secret court, but that was the extent of it. As the months rolled by, however, this reassuring narrative has unravelled. We discovered that the NSA and GCHQ had indeed covertly tapped the data-traffic that flows between the companies' server farms. But since Google and co were – they claimed – unaware of this, perhaps their protestations of innocence seemed justified. More embarrassing were the revelations about the astonishing lengths to which one company (Microsoft) went to facilitate NSA access to its users' private communications.
Last Wednesday, another piece of the jigsaw slotted into place. The NSA's top lawyer stated unequivocally that the technology firms were fully aware of the agency's widespread collection of data. Rajesh De, the NSA general counsel, said that all communications content and associated metadata harvested by the NSA occurred with the knowledge of the companies – both for the Prism system and the covert tapping of communications moving across the internet.
In one way, I suppose we shouldn't be surprised. The NSA and the internet companies ultimately share the same business model, namely intensive surveillance. The only difference is that the companies do it with the "consent" of their hapless users. What it means, though, is that we're witnessing the evolution of a military-information complex. And if you expect Obama to express regrets in his valedictory address, dream on.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
The climate change deniers have won
Scientists continue to warn us about global warming, but most of us have a vested interest in not wanting to think about it
The American Association for the Advancement of Science came as close as such a respectable institution can to screaming an alarm last week. "As scientists, it is not our role to tell people what they should do," it said as it began one of those sentences that you know will build to a "but". "But human-caused climate risks abrupt, unpredictable and potentially irreversible changes."
In other words, the most distinguished scientists from the country with the world's pre-eminent educational institutions were trying to shake humanity out of its complacency. Why weren't their warnings leading the news?
In one sense, the association's appeal was not new. The Royal Society, the Royal Institution, Nasa, the US National Academy of Sciences, the US Geological Survey, the IPCC and the national science bodies of 30 or so other countries have said that man-made climate change is on the march. A survey of 2,000 peer-reviewed papers on global warming published in the last 20 years found that 97% said that humans were causing it.
When the glib talk about the "scientific debate on global warming", they either don't know or will not accept that there is no scientific debate. The suggestion first made by Eugene F Stoermer that the planet has moved from the Holocene, which began at the end of the last ice age, to the manmade Anthropocene, in which we now live, is everywhere gaining support. Man-made global warming and the man-made mass extinction of species define this hot, bloody and (let us hope) brief epoch in the world's history.
If global warming is not new, it is urgent: a subject that should never be far from our thoughts. Yet within 24 hours of the American association's warning the British government's budget confirmed that it no longer wanted to fight it.
David Cameron, who once promised that if you voted blue you would go green, now appoints Owen Paterson, a man who is not just ignorant of environmental science but proud of his ignorance, as his environment secretary. George Osborne, who once promised that his Treasury would be "at the heart of this historic fight against climate change", now gives billions in tax concessions to the oil and gas industry, cuts the funds for onshore wind farms and strips the Green Investment Bank of the ability to borrow and lend
All of which is a long way of saying that the global warming deniers have won. And please, can I have no emails from bed-wetting kidults blubbing that you can't call us "global warming deniers " because "denier" makes us sound like "Holocaust deniers", and that means you are comparing us to Nazis? The evidence for man-made global warming is as final as the evidence of Auschwitz. No other word will do.
Tempting though it is to blame cowardly politicians, the abuse comes too easily. The question remains: what turned them into cowards? Rightwing billionaires in the United States and the oil companies have spent fortunes on blocking action on climate change. A part of the answer may therefore be that conservative politicians in London, Washington and Canberra are doing their richest supporters' bidding. There's truth in the bribery hypothesis. In my own little world of journalism, I have seen rightwing hacks realise the financial potential of denial and turn from reasonable men and women into beetle-browed conspiracy theorists.
But the right is also going along with an eruption of know-nothing populism. Just as there are leftish greens, who will never accept that GM foods are safe, so an ever-growing element on the right becomes more militant as the temperature rises.
Clive Hamilton, the Australian author of Requiem for a Species, made the essential point a few years ago that climate change denial was no longer just a corporate lobbying campaign. The opponents of science would say what they said unbribed. The movement was in the grip of "cognitive dissonance", a condition first defined by Leon Festinger and his colleagues in the 1950s . They examined a cult that had attached itself to a Chicago housewife called Dorothy Martin. She convinced her followers to resign from their jobs and sell their possessions because a great flood was to engulf the earth on 21 December 1954. They would be the only survivors. Aliens in a flying saucer would swoop down and save the chosen few.
When 21 December came and went, and the Earth carried on as before, the group did not despair. Martin announced that the aliens had sent her a message saying that they had decided at the last minute not to flood the planet after all. Her followers believed her. They had given up so much for their faith that they would believe anything rather than admit their sacrifices had been pointless.
Climate change deniers are as committed. Their denial fits perfectly with their support for free market economics, opposition to state intervention and hatred of all those latte-slurping, quinoa-munching liberals, with their arrogant manners and dainty hybrid cars, who presume to tell honest men and women how to live. If they admitted they were wrong on climate change, they might have to admit that they were wrong on everything else and their whole political identity would unravel.
The politicians know too well that beyond the corporations and the cultish fanatics in their grass roots lies the great mass of people, whose influence matters most. They accept at some level that manmade climate change is happening but don't want to think about it.
I am no better than them. I could write about the environment every week. No editor would stop me. But the task feels as hopeless as arguing against growing old. Whatever you do or say, it is going to happen. How can you persuade countries to accept huge reductions in their living standards to limit (not stop) the rise in temperatures? How can you persuade the human race to put the future ahead of the present?
The American historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Eril M Conway quoted a researcher, who was asked in the 1970s what his country's leaders said when he warned them that C02 levels would double in 50 years. "They tell me to come back in 49 years," he replied.
Most of the rest of us think like the Washington politicians of the Carter era. And most of us have no right to sneer at Dorothy Martin and her cult either. We cannot admit it, but like them, we need a miracle to save us from the floods.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
Ladders on Everest are just the latest step in our commodification of nature
Ladders on Everest? For a place already blighted by litter, fistfights and unburied dead bodies, it's not so much "health and safety" as "access all areas". Its greatest hero, Edmund Hillary, declared in 2006, two years before he died: "I think the whole attitude towards climbing Mount Everest has become rather horrifying. The people just want to get to the top." His successor, Stephen Venables, the first Briton to climb the peak without oxygen, agreed. "The mountain has become a commodity, to be bought and sold like any other," he said. We humans have come to expect the natural world to come commodified, negotiated, shaped to our needs. From high to low, there's nowhere we can't go, nothing we can't do. In this age of the Anthropocene – the era of human manipulation heralded by the industrial revolution – it is a given that we have tuned the environment to suit ourselves. Dominion is all; human ingenuity has encompassed the planet. Now pass me the phone: "I'm on the mountain."
What mystery is left when the roof of the world resembles your loft conversion? Or when the third person ever to have descended to the bottom of the world – the Mariana Trench in the Pacific, which is 10km deep – is a movie director, James Cameron? Even outer space, courtesy of Richard Branson, is already becoming a future tourist destination.
Nature is no longer red in tooth and claw, but filmed and tagged. Leviathans of the deep must be tracked by electronic signals on their enigmatic missions, bleeping back news of their trysts. Migrating birds, which defy all our aviation technology by flying from one pole to another, are banded with little rings so that we know where they go, and when. In parts of sub-Saharan Africa, those same bands appeal to children who trap and kill the birds and use the rings to make necklaces.
Our curiosity is part of what we are; it is what has enabled our rise to the status of apex predator. It is part of our glory, but it may also be the means of our downfall. Like Pandora, we cannot leave secrets uncovered; we have to reinvent the world in our image, and apply our technology to its mysteries. This week scientists announced the results of experiments on the narwhal, the "sea unicorn", to understand why it should bear such a weighty ivory tusk. Apparently this wondrous appendage is actually used by the Arctic creature to determine the salinity of the water, and thus of the state of the ice. But in order to gather this information, a narwhal had to be captured and its tusk clamped in a plastic tube.
Recently, as part of the Litmus Project, an arts-science initiative at the University of Southampton, I've been working with a marine biologist, Dr Verity Nye, whose task it is to observe the deep sea bed, and the miraculous vents that sustain chemosynthetic life. Dr Nye is regularly discovering new species of crustacean down there, in the sunless depths; bizarre, pallid, alien animals that garden their own fringed limbs for sustenance. But even here, as far from "civilisation" as one could imagine, her fellow scientists have been shocked to discover Coke cans on the ocean floor. And as those remote locations are revealed, conglomerates are already preparing to mine them for their rare earth metals – so that we can make more mobile phones. Meanwhile, the results of a Google-funded survey of the sea bed of the Southern Ocean will be immediately loaded on to Google Earth – long before the scientists' ship has returned to dock – enabling fishermen to identify and exploit new resources.
What we observe, we also destroy. And yet we also assume too much. In her new book, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Elizabeth Kolbert puts it all into a salutary context: that in the geological strata of deep time, we humans will leave behind a layer the thickness of a cigarette paper. Thus will pass the sum of all human art and endeavour – from great cities to cutting-edge technology, from ladders on mountains to litter on the sea bed; all reduced to a slime sandwich. Tasmania, from where I write, boasts one of the greatest expanses of wilderness in the world. Beyond all expectation, swathes of its temperate rainforest have escaped human attention (though perhaps not for much longer).There are still big green gaps on the Tasmanian map, proposing an enticing notion: that even in the "developed" world, one might be defeated by nature. Then I discovered that same forest is traversed by a steel "air walk", 600 metres of mesh suspended 20 metres above the forest floor, from which lofty height we humans may look down on the world, masters of all we survey. I'll bet there are Coke cans down there, too.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
[Hiker image on Shutterstock]
Elon Musk writes a letter to the people of New Jersey
Editor’s Note: Following our first article and then second brief article on the Tesla–New Jersey controversy, here’s one more. I’m not going to add commentary unless I’m stimulated to down in the comments. Below is simply a letter from Tesla…
Look who’s selling your voting records
Investigative journalist Julia Angwin, author of the new book Dragnet Nation, speaks to Bill in this three-minute clip about the ways in which the government and the private sector are compiling a personal profile of you. Did you know, for instance,…
George P. Bush and the U.S. obsession with political dynasties
For a nation that constitutionally bans inherited power, America has always had a soft spot for political royalty. So it came as no surprise that when George P Bush won the Republican primary for the little-known but powerful position of Texas land commissioner last week, it attracted national attention.
The relative of two former presidents, he is already the subject of speculation as to whether he too may one day lead his country from the White House.
From the early days, when John Quincy Adams, the nation's sixth president, was the son of its second, political brand names have endured in America. The most talked about names of potential candidates for the 2016 presidential election are those of former presidents, even if Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, brother of George W and son of Bush Sr, have yet to declare an interest in running.
Barbara Kellerman, leadership specialist at Harvard University's John F Kennedy School of Government, believes several factors are at play in the nation's continuing obsession with political dynasties. The cult of celebrity, the electoral system and nostalgia for bygone days all play a role, she says.
The nature of the electoral system "is about the individual not the party", says Kellerman. "It used to be in back rooms but now it is in primaries. There are a very small number of people voting in primaries and they tend to vote for people they know.
"We are quite nostalgic," she adds, "and the name of George Herbert Walker Bush – president number 41 – was a time of relative gentility. The names of Bush and Clinton remind us that we are quite centrist in America. That it is not all Ted Cruz, but we have centrist politicians."
For that reason, she said, "if Jeb Bush runs he will lend his discourse more on his father than on his brother".
Kellerman, the author of several books, including All the Presidents' Kin: Their Political Roles, singles out the Kennedy dynasty, which has spawned senators, a president and ambassadors, including Caroline Kennedy, the current US ambassador to Japan, as proof of the culture of celebrity in politics.
"Starting with John F Kennedy, we get to know not just the candidate but the candidate's spouse, the candidate's children and the candidate's siblings. It's no accident that Caroline [daughter of JFK] is a celebrity in her own right."
According to a 2009 study on US political dynasties, between 1966 and 1996 about 10% of the members of US Congress had relatives enter Congress ahead of them. More recently, Time, writing about the chances of former vice-president Dick Cheney's daughter Liz in the Republican senate primary in Wyoming (before she later dropped out), reported: "There are 37 current members who have a relative who served in Congress."
Pedro Dal Bo, an associate professor of political economics at Brown University and co-author of the 2009 report, said: "We compared people who had been in Congress for one term and people who had been in Congress for more than one term. Being in Congress for longer affects your chances of a family member getting into Congress in the future. It is a big effect," he said.
What is more difficult, he said, is to assess the reason behind it. "There are alternative theories. One is that it is like a brand name. There was a study in Argentina that looked at relatives of politicians who had the same name and ones without the same name. You can compare nephews, for instance, from different sides of the family. They found there was a value in the name.
"The last name tells you that they are related, something about the family characteristics.The public know this politician has a reputation to protect."
Russ Baker, author of Family of Secrets, The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government and The Hidden History of the Last 50 Years – says that the reliance on political brand names in the US is partly driven by voter apathy.
"It's different for different strata of society. We are extremely jealous of the British and their Royal family, and although we have the idea of being able to rise from nothing, we are hung up on status. We crave the fantasy of royalty, we think its ennobling. We like the Kennedys and the Bushes and the Clintons.
"For average people, these families give us a sense of security. If we don't question what they actually stand for, then we don't have to actually feel guilty about our apathy."
The other big interest in American political royalty, says Baker, comes from wealthy businessmen who donate to candidates in return for political favours.
"They know the money that enables them to get elected can be repaid," he says.
It is notable, he adds, that "George P Bush is land commissioner – they have control over assets and mineral rights of a state that is larger than most European countries".
"Money is the key. So is celebrity. The media is looking to give people what they want and what they want is dancing with the stars. Why bother looking at the substance of what these people are, what their values are?" asks Baker.
But it is not just politics that is a sucker for a big political name, he adds, pointing out that Jenna Bush Hager, daughter of George W and Laura Bush, is a special correspondent for NBC's Today Show and a contributor to NBC Nightly News, while Chelsea Clinton, daughter of Bill and Hillary, was hired as a special correspondent for NBC in 2011.
"Nepotism is very much alive in America. Just look at those who get handed jobs on our news sites. It's like everything has got to have a child of one of these political dynasties."
Watch: True Detective's Rust Cohle eviscerates Matthew McConaughey's self-delusions
Watch Rust Cohle respond to Matthew McConaughey with utter Rustian contempt. The only thing that I could think of when I watched Matthew McConaughey's self-congratulating, god-thanking Oscars speech was how much Rust Cohle would hate it. I tried to block it out so I could enjoy True Detective in which McConaughey is brilliant. But I couldn't. So instead, I thought I would have Rust Cohle explain to Matt why his speech was so ridiculously aggrandizing and delusional. So, here is what Rost has to say about it... in his righteous own words.
Torture backer Dick Cheney wants 'military options' against Putin for 'blowing off' treaties
Former Vice President Dick Cheney on Sunday cited treaty violations by Russian President Vladimir Putin as a reason that the U.S. should consider "military options" in response to the invasion of Ukraine.
"I worry when we begin to address a crisis, the first thing we do is we take options off the table," Cheney told CBS host Charlie Rose. "I don't think the administration should do that."
"In a sense, [the Obama administration said] no military," he continued. "He seemed to operate that way most of the time. There are military options that don't involve putting troops on the ground in Crimea. We could go back and reinstate the ballistic missile defense program."
Cheney pointed out that Putin had violated commitments "like the Budapest Memorandum, when Russia, the U.S. and Britain guaranteed the borders of Ukraine in return for Ukraine giving up their nuclear weapons. Very important. And Putin is just blowing that off."
"The real question is how much do you want to allow Putin to ignore those agreements -- very, very important agreements -- that ended the Cold War, led to the unification of Europe and the liberation of millions of people?" he asked. "I do not believe we should allow him to do that without paying a price."
"We have a treaty obligation under Article 5 of the NATO treaty, an attack against one is an attack against all."
As vice president of the United States, Cheney was accused of violating United Nations Convention Against Torture with his support for waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques of alleged terrorists.
"In ratifying the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel Inhuman and Degrading Treatment in 1994, the Senate defined 'cruel, inhuman and degrading' as any practice that would violate the Fifth, Eighth or 14th amendments," a Washintgon Post editorial noted in 2005. "Interpreting the Constitution as permitting waterboarding in secret prisons is, to most experts outside the administration, legally outrageous and politically untenable."
"They want to give themselves the authority to commit human rights abuses without having to explain or justify themselves to the public, the world -- or an impartial court."
Watch the video below from CBS' Face The Nation
Sarah Palin uses her CPAC speech for a shout-out to the libs at 'MS-LSD'
We’ve been fans of alicublog writer Roy Edroso for years. Is there anyone who understands the angst of conservatives better than Roy? He’s our man on the ground at CPAC — Ed.
"Does anybody here love Sarah Palin?" asked introducer Chris Cox of the NRA. Response noise level: First encore, Bon Jovi, Foxwoods. "Unapologetic supporter of the right to keep and bear arms" was the first thing he mentioned, which makes sense, because she's got a TV show on the Sportsman Channel coming up that's apparently about that.
After an ad for SarahPAC, the former Governor of Alaska appeared to loud, sassy music. She thanked a lot of people including our armed forces ("If you love your freedom, thank a vet!").
She also thanked the young people -- or as Washington thinks of them, she said, "Obamacare suckahs!" Because "you'll pay the bills in our brave new world." She then made a joke about "change" you first heard in 2008, and said "not a smidgen" in a derpy voice. She called that liberal network MS-LSD, and said "Yes you can" had become "No you can't."
And "there's no such thing as a free lunch, there's also no such thing as free birth control... there's no free ride... someone always pays and if you don't know who that someone is, it's you..."
Oh hell, let's just list the catch-phrases, that's really all she does:
"Social engineering politicos."
"Nothin' to see in Benghazi, move along."
"It's like yuh-all WENT ROGUE!"
"Liberty needs a Congress on Cruz Control."
On Ted Cruz's Congressional shutdown defeat by RINOS: "They joined the laptops of the lame stream to trash the foot soldiers who had fought for America!"
"I do not like this Uncle Sam
I do not like his health care scam
I do not like this dirty crooks
Or how they lie and cook the books.
I do not like when Congress steals
I do not like their crummy deals..." (w/sing-song voice)
"The America beyond the wealthy DC suburbs... that's where you'll find Amazing America."
"Hangin' with the Choom gang." (w/gangsta lean)
"I just feel that we got each other's back and you know that this is the string of a great awakening, I know that america's eyes are open." (Extended metaphor here about people trying to make America go back to sleep.)
"Instead of putting fear of God into our enemies, peace through strength -- brought to you courtesy of the red white and blue -- is only what the UNITED STATES MILITARY CAN DO!" (Big cheers.)
(Something about a boot that would stomp on America.)
"John (Kerry), why the long face?"
"The only thing that stops a bad guy with a nuke is a good guy with a nuke."
"The only thing rising in [Obama's] la-la-land is the Russian empire. But I'm probably being too hard on the President. I mean, who could have seen this coming?" (Extremely big cheers.)
To Congressional RINOs: "Remember that 2010 election that swept you into power? You didn't build that!"
"There aren't enough low-information voters in the country to save the opposition this year."
"Our buddy from Duck Dynasty..." (Big roar. Also, "in another time, Phil might have stayed fired," but "people all over America understood that Phil's right to express himself was about our right to express ourselves. We pushed back and he won!")
"C'mon, libs, can you really 'I am Woman, Hear me...'? No.... Only Mama Grizzlies can say, 'Hear me roar!'"
"We're the party with the plank that protects even our littlest sisters in the womb."
You know what? I'm going to beat the rush at coat-check.
All the arguments against raising the minimum wage have fallen apart
Conservatives should be on the front line of the battle to raise the minimum wage. Work is supposed to make one independent, but with the inflation-adjusted federal minimum down by a third from its peak, low-wage workers depend on billions of dollars…
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