ThinkingMeat

After a hiatus of a few months, our old pal Justin Higgins is back and blogging up a storm. And if Justin is blogging, that means that the lies are flying thick and fast.

He’s decided to help carpet-bomb the debate over Ohio’s new anti-union law, known as SB5, with complete falsehoods. SB5 strips public employees (including police, firefighters, and teachers) of most collective bargaining rights. It’s basically a big fat “fuck you” to those who protect us and educate our children — so of course Justin is all in favor of it.

First, Justin regurgitates a lie from the poorly-named “Build a Better Ohio”, a pro-SB5 group:

[Ohio voters] believe it’s fair to ask government employees to pay a small portion of their retirement contribution, rather than forcing taxpayers to provide gold-plated pensions for free.

Justin and his fellow prevaricators would have you believe that public employees contribute nothing toward their own retirement pensions. Five minutes’ research on the website of the Ohio Public Employees Retirement System quickly reveals the rank dishonesty of this claim:

From their earnable salary, OPERS members currently contribute the following percentage according to their type of employment:

• 10% for local and state government employees
• 10% for public safety employees
• 10.10% for law enforcement employees

Read the rest of this entry »

Shorter David Barton:

• How dare the law tell me that I cannot assert my absolute dominance over someone smaller than I am by physically assaulting them?

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard, and shamelessly pilfered from Sadly, No.

Anyone who has paid even minimal attention to US politics during the past three years can see one thing clearly: The Republicans, who have allowed their party to be hijacked by the lunatic fringe that calls itself the ‘Tea Party’, now promote a dystopian vision of an America defined by divisiveness and hatred of the other.

That is all.

Think hard about where you shop. If you get your groceries at Whole Foods, for instance, you are supporting anti-Muslim bigots.

A recently released Gallup poll of Muslim Americans [PDF] reveals that they oppose terrorism more than any other major religion.

Even before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Americans have debated whether Islam as a religion innately encourages violence and terrorism and whether Muslim Americans secretly sympathize with organizations and movements such as al Qaeda.

To that end, it is worth noting that Muslim Americans are the least likely of all major religions in the U.S. to justify individuals or small groups attacking civilians. Eighty-nine percent of Muslim Americans say there is never a justification for such attacks, compared with 79% of Mormon Americans, 75% of Jewish Americans, and 71% of Protestant and Catholic Americans. Moreover, the frequency with which Muslim Americans — or any other faith group — attend religious services has no effect on whether they justify violence against civilians.

Someone will have to explain to me why the wingnut right is intent on demonizing Muslims as a danger to society and civilization, when it is far more likely that your average Mormon, Catholic, or Methodist will support the commission of terrorist acts.

(hat tip: Salon)

Dennis G. at Balloon Juice:

It turns out that the Tea Party is bad for business. It seems that a movement rooted in rage — fueled by racism — and acting without any grounding in reality will fuck things up when it gets power. Who knew? Who could have predicted it?

The always-informed Jon Perr has posted an excellent article listing 25 Things We Learned During the Debt Crisis. The whole thing is worth a read, but these points seem to me to be the most salient:

(1) We learned that Republicans really care about the national debt, but only when a Democrat is in the White House. As Dick Cheney put it, “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.”

(2) We learned that the national debt tripled under Ronald Reagan, forcing him to raise the debt ceiling 17 times. Overwhelmed by the torrents of red ink unleashed by his supply-side tax cuts of 1981, Reagan raised taxes eleven times while in office. (His deficit reduction initiatives of 1982, 1984 and 1987 relied on over 75% in new tax revenue.) It’s no wonder Reagan called the mountain of debt he bequeathed to America his greatest regret.

(3) We learned that George W. Bush nearly doubled the national debt, leaving Barack Obama a $1.2 trillion annual deficit and almost $11 trillion in debt on January 20, 2009.

(4) We learned that the Bush tax cuts were the single biggest factor in erasing the projected surpluses Dubya inherited from Bill Clinton. The Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 accounted for almost half of the red ink during his tenure, and if made permanent, would contribute more to the debt over the next decade than Iraq, Afghanistan, the recession, the stimulus and TARP combined.

The debt ceiling crisis was entirely engineered by the Republicans, and the fact is that Republicans don’t give a good goddamn about debt ceilings, deficits, fiscal responsibility, or recessions. Republicans care about one thing and one thing only: acquiring and holding on to power.

So long as American voters fail to understand this simple truth, this country will continue to sink under the sheer weight of venal, power-hungry Republican demagogues.

Shaw Kenawe:

The Tea Partiers are shocked, shocked, SHOCKED! that they’ve been characterized as the slash and burn terrorists that they most certainly are. When you act like thugs, people will call you thugs, and the American people see the Tea Party as nothing more than know-nothing thugs who terrorized the country with the threat of financial disaster unless they got their way. This is the behavior of jihadists, not politicians.

It’s an article of faith among conservatives that they are, at any given time, the smartest kids in the room. Just ask Jack Savage, author of a blog post at Unified Patriots entitled “Why They Think They’re Smarter Than Us”. The “They” in that title is, of course, liberals. Jack explains, using his amazing powers of mental telepathy with which he can scan the minds of every single living liberal and examine their thought processes in minute detail, just why liberals are so unbelievably stupid.

Of course, there’s no possible way that conservatives could be stupid. Just look at a small sampling of their intellectual achievements:

• The astoundingly intelligent conservatives instigated a war of aggression against Iraq based on intelligence reports that falsely claimed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that he did not, in fact, possess. These same conservatives happily used the lies of an Iraqi informant to justify that war.
• The incredibly brilliant conservatives drowned an entire American city by making massive cuts in funding for flood control projects. Once New Orleans was in ruins, the conservatives demonstrated how easy it is to completely botch the job of disaster relief by replacing experienced FEMA employees with ignorant political cronies.
• The massive intellect of the modern conservative tells him that climate change cannot possibly be happening, despite inconvenient facts like the recent, sudden increase in the heat content of the oceans and the thousands of shattered high-temperature records across North America.
• Our unbelievably bright conservative colleagues have decided that raising the US federal debt limit and forestalling the destruction of the US economy is simply not permissible if it means that some disadvantaged kids might get to go to college. Education, you see, is a luxury that our country can ill afford.

I cannot tell you how relieved I am to know that our hyper-intelligent conservative overlords are on the job, fixing all the world’s problems with their keen insights and their firm grip on reality.

Bob Cesca:

[G]uess what — while we’re all slogging our way through the impending second Republican recession, I can assure you, there will be millions of us spending our remaining free time pinning this entire thing on the pasty white foreheads of every last member of the Republican Party. Bet on it.