Feel free to add your own: IN CON WORLD, Rooting out fraud is good. But Regulations rooting out fraud are bad. In CON WORLD, The gov't forcing a woman to give birth is good, But Forcing gov't to provide health care to keep it alive is bad. In CON WORLD, US unions are small and ineffectual, haha But Whenever the economy tanks, it is the fault of unions. In CON WORLD, Tons and tons of Weapons of Mass Destruction is not a lie, But man-made global warming is. In CON WORLD, Sta...

Simple answer--the US stationed our soldiers in Saudi Arabia during Saddam's attack on Kuwait. The jihadis who would become Al Qaeda were incensed by this, but were willing to allow it as long as Iraq was still a threat. Then Secr'y of War Dick Cheney said we wouldn't be there more than a day longer than necessary. Operation Desert Storm officially ended in February of 1991. We were still in Saudia Arabia and moving troops through Yemen to Somalia in 1992 when the first car bomb exploded in ...

I gotta go with Ford because he didn't put Social Security on the table for cuts.

1. You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity. False dilemma. The wealthy as a class need not be "legislated out of prosperity" for everyone else to benefit. Requiring Wal-Mart to give decent health care would cost the company one-half-a-cent on every item purchased. That will cut into their profit fractionally, but the benefits to the workers and society would be enormous. Same for living wage laws . . . or union card-check laws. 2. What one ...

Our Corporations, which createth heaven, hallowed be thy names. Thy Kingdoms come, thy wills be done, Through NAFTA as it is in the G7. Give us this day our tiny dole. And forgive us those who ask for more, as we forget them that fought for living wages. And lead us not into labor unions but deliver us from regulation. For thy art Holy Mammon, the power, and the money, for ever and ever. Amen.

A Few Counter-Intuitive Observations on the Scandal d' jour Everybody knows the rules of what is acceptable in Washington, DC. Start a war on a pack of lies like Bush-Cheney? Acceptable, you're keeping America "safe." Kill the middle class and drive up the national debt by giving tax breaks to the rich like Republicans since Reagan? Acceptable, you're "creating jobs." Refuse to report your wife's lobbying for special interests like Clarence Thomas? Acceptable, you're showing how much you h...

(Link) Quantitative Analysis of Face the Nation, June 5 GOVERNOR HALEY BARBOUR R-Mississippi REPRESENTATIVE NANCY PELOSI D-California; House Democratic Leader Interruptions Number of times host Bob Schieffer cut off and cut in on guest: Barbour—1 Pelosi—8 Confrontational responses to statements Barbour—0 Pelosi—12 Response to Barbour’s long, involved conspiracy theory that Obama wants high gas and oil prices and has deliberately pushed prices up to spur green sources and cut down demand: ...

I will 10. Close the Prison at Guantanamo Bay. (Link)/ 9. Toughen the laws to stop revolving door between gov't and lobbyists. (Link)/ 8. End no-bid contracts for military contractors. (Link)/ 7. Forbid companies in bankruptcy from giving bonuses to top management. (Link)/ 6. Allow judges to re-negotiate bank terms for homeowners when their houses go into foreclosure. (Link)-/ 5. Increase taxes on capital gains and dividends (which mainly benefit the rich). (Link)/ 4. Repeal Bush tax cut...

Here’s my modest proposal for April 1st, April Fool’s Day: we make a fool out of Scott Walker and his rich paymasters by buying nothing for 24 hours. Let’s see how unimportant the middle class really is when we don’t buy groceries, go out to eat, buy gasoline, hire a gardener, or pop a coke out of a vending machine. Granted, a few non-rich folks will also be impacted, like the wait-staff who don’t get a tip that day. But this is class war, and in a war, there’s collateral damage. We'll have...

King said, "You can’t talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can’t talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You’re really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry… Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong . . . with capitalism . . ...

President Bush argued in February 2001 that his fiscal policy "returns ... the surplus to the American taxpayers". In his 2001 testimony to Congress, then Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan supported President Bush by offering projections of "an on-budget surplus of almost $500 billion ... in fiscal year 2010". The National Debt would soon be retired and the Boomer's retirements secure. Greenspan offered a projection of "an implicit on-budget surplus under baseline assumptions well past 2030 despite ...

No, it wasn't. From Fox: University spokeswoman Jennifer Fitzenberger told FoxNation.com "it was our idea to do the t-shirts." She said distributing merchandise at a memorial was appropriate and rejected the charge that the University over-commercialized the service. "Our intention was to have something to remember after the event...something that symbolizes our community's spirit...which would live on." When asked if the University had worked with the White House or any partisan groups on any ...

". . . it doesn’t get any bigger than this,” said Karen Miller-Kovach, the chief scientific officer for Weight Watchers International. “Fifteen years ago we said a calorie is a calorie is a calorie. If you ate 100 calories of butter or 100 calories of chicken, it was all the same. Now, we know that is not the case, in terms of how hard the body has to work to make that energy available. And even more important is that where that energy comes from affects feelings of hunger and fullness.” (Link...

(Link) This is from 13 July. Good reading if you missed it the first time. Blows the CON talking point out of the stratosphere. ***** Why does this make me sad? Because it's hard to see the country prospering when one of its two major political parties is this economically illiterate. McConnell isn't some backbencher. He's Senate minority leader. And he thinks there's "no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue." There's an ontological question here about w...

The CONs who perpetuate the "zombie lie" (a term coined by Krugman for lies that won't die no matter how often they are killed) that Barack Obama "was not born on American soil" have a problem. And it's not just the official birth certificate that Obama posted on the internet. And it's not just that they are batshit crazy. It's that if an American president has to be born on American soil then that disqualifies George Washington. He was born in 1732, some forty-four years before the United S...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't foreign nationals prohibited from giving money to political campaigns? Well . . . not anymore! Thanks to the SCOTUS giving corporate personhood to American companies, people like HUGO CHAVEZ can now funnel money through Citgo to the socialist candidate of his choice. Guess the CONs didn't think about that . . .

William F. Buckley, Jr. The foremost CON of his day, William F. Buckley started the arch-CON magazine The National Review in which he defended Joe McCarthy witch hunts. According to Wiki, In 1957, Buckley came out in support of the segregationist South, famously writing that “the central question that emerges . . . is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numeri...

I kid you not: (Link) Scrooge did not force Cratchit to father children he is having difficulty supporting. If Cratchit had children while suspecting he would be unable to afford them, he, not Scrooge, is responsible for their plight. And if Cratchit didn't know how expensive they would be, why must Scrooge assume the burden of Cratchit's misjudgment? As for that one lump of coal Scrooge allows him, it bears emphasis that Cratchit has not been chained to his chilly desk. If he stays there, he...

Referring to Democrats objecting to Bush's Supreme Court nominees after O'Conner retired, the round mound of radio sound said (in 2005) . . . “I'm tired of these Democrats acting like they won the election. Somebody needs to stand up and say, ‘When you win the election, you pick the nominees. Until then, shut up! Just shut up! Just go away! Bury yourselves in your rat holes and don't come out until you win an election. When you win an election, you can put all these socialist wackos, like Ruth...

Have you seen the reich-wing smear d' jour. Apparently, The Washington Times blog re-printed a statement that Navy grads were requested to leave swords and umbrellas at home during the ceremony . . . which prompted the rabid right to claim that "Full Dress White includes 'wear sword'. More to the point . . . those badges of office have been earned in a manner Obongo and his minions just wouldn’t begin to understand. Important traditions that inspire are kind of lost on the red banner crowd, app...

You've heard this one over and over again in all of its many manifestations: "The top one percent pay 67 percent" or "the top 10 percent pay 92 percent of all the income tax collected" or some such nonesense. This proves again Benjamin Disraeli's contention that "there are lies, damn lies, and statistics." The idea is that because so much government revenue comes from the rich, they are over-taxed and can't be expected to sacrifice any further. Nevermind that because of many other taxes (bes...

would it have revealed something like this? Thank you all very much. Tonight, I have a privilege given few Americans except for very wealthy white men— the privilege of accepting our party's nomination for president of the United States. And I accept it with gratitude, humility and confidence. Dickheads. In my life, no success has come without a good fight: for instance, it wasn’t easy to dump my crippled ex-wife and hook up with this rich bimbo and this nomination wasn't any different. That's...

Think about it--he's got more houses than he can keep track of and spends a quarter of a million on servants. You think that every single individual in his army of employees, practically all of them working in ARIZONA AND CALIFORNIA, are all AMERICAN? Not bloody likely. Lou Dobbs would have fun with THAT story.

People say that we billionaires aren't interested in giving back to society. That's not true! When Karl Rove came to Kansas for a Republican fund-raiser yesterday, we turned out to show our support. Karl Rove is a man to be admired and extolled to the world. He stands on principle! He doesn't let a little thing like legal niceties or even the US Constitution get in the way of making the rich vastly richer. We even got a newspaper write up: Protest over Rove speech is a bit formal BY DION...

2.1 percent . . . that's not even keeping up with inflation. I can't remember a period, even the Nixon-Carter years, when the Dow has been so flat for so long. Jan 2001 Dow at 10,600 (Link) Today, seven years later Dow at 12,159 (Link) That's barely a 14 percent increase over seven years. We'd have been better off buying a bank CD. ***** Thanks to Worst. President. Ever., Democratic and Republican alike get to work a few more years before we can afford to retire. But . . . praise ...

But the agenda (of Congressional oversight) was different during the Clinton administration. The government reform panel alone, for example, issued 1,052 subpoenas related to investigations of the Clinton administration and the Democratic National Committee from 1997 to 2002, and only 11 subpoenas related to allegations of Republican abuse. The panel received more than 2 million pages of documents and heard from 44 Clinton administration officials, including two White House chiefs of staff, acc...

Thanks to the NRA and reich-wingers like Todd Tiahrt, even information about CRIMINALS can't be shared by the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearm Bureau with local law enforcement. However, illegal wiretapping is on-going . . . The solution? Create a GUN-PHONE. Then the NRA and its loyal minions will fight to the death to keep law-enforcement from having ANY KNOWLEDGE of who has that gun-phone and what it's been used for. Think about it. It solves all our privacy problems . . . On edit: :sar...

I also was saddened by Cindy Sheehan's resignation as the spokesperson against the war. When I heard her speak on television, she seemed terribly weary of the entire ordeal. That's very understandable: she and people like her (people like US, in fact) are trying to change an entire political-economic-media SYSTEM that is based on war and the threat of war. It's what the 60's leftists called "The Establishment"--the status quo that has what it wants and knows how to keep it. The Establishme...

Here's my song parody. Enjoy. ***** (To the tune of "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch") You're a mean one, Mr. Bush. You really are a heel. You have lied us into I-raq, For petroleum you’d steal. Mr. Bush . . . You're a bad banana Making (pause) oily black deals. You're a monster, Mr. Bush. Your heart's an empty hole. You killed and maimed and bombed them, Yet you want to bomb some more. Mr. Bush . . . I wouldn't touch you, with a (pause) thirty-nine-and-a-half foot pole. You're a vile o...

Remember the Francophobe hate-mongering the right-wing wallowed in, when those "sissy snail-eating Frenchies" refused to back the coalition to invade Iraq? French fries became "freedom fries" etc. Now it appears that the Brits want to cut-and-run too. (Link) That's it for me, dammit. No more "English muffins." It's FREEDOM muffins, from now on. And "London broils"? I don't think so . . . FREEDOM broils How about British Thermal Units? Not anymore they aren't: now they're FREEDOM Ther...