Michael Hiltzik in the L.A. Times, who cites the positive Affordable Care Act (Obamacare!) news and the debunked Republican lies:
Positive news reports about insurance enrollments under Affordable Care Act have been coming out so steadily that they barely make headlines anymore. Still searching for a way to depict Obamacare as a "train wreck," GOP critics of the law have no option but to make up the bad news.The Republican war on the truth was so laughable even Republican staffers wouldn't defend the latest lies about Obamacare.
David Freedlander has the tale of the Republican nut tree bearing more fruit in Wisconsin:
[A]t the Sixth Congressional Republican Caucus in the northeastern part of the state, delegates in April passed a resolution reaffirming Wisconsin’s right to secede from the union should it choose to do so. The measure passed through the GOP convention’s Resolution Committee last week, and is set to be voted on (up or down) at the Republican State Convention this weekend.Once again, some Republicans are shocked (shocked!) that this resolution made it to the State Convention, and now they're furiously disavowing it. But some tea bagger faithful (a.k.a., The Republican Base) aren't so ready to give up the right to secede or nullify Federal laws they don't like:
“I do believe that a state has the right to secede if the voters wish. I just believe it is necessary at this time. We are not at the point. We are talking about nullification,” said Lewis. “We are led to believe that the Civil War ended that debate [on secession], but it didn’t. The Civil War was a war; one side won, one side lost, and because of that they didn’t secede, but we can still have the debate.
“We are not saying we need to colonize the moon or anything crazy like that,” he added. “We are fighting for our constitution.”"Lewis," who is not further identified in the article needs to be
Finally, Paul Rosenberg has a psychoanalysis of what passes for an intellect in the Republican/ New Confederate/ Stupid Party: Beltway media favorite Rep. Paul Ryan (R- Galt's Gulch):
A flim-flam artist is a specific kind of con-man, and a con-man, in turn, is often enough a specific kind of psychopath. Although it’s impossible to clinically diagnose someone from a distance, I believe a good case can be made that Ryan has exhibited classic signs of psychopathic traits, especially in two closely related dimensions, the interpersonal dimension: glibness/superficial charm (just look at how the Beltway press falls for him), grandiose sense of self-worth (it never bothers Ryan however wrong he may be about anything), cunning/manipulative (see how effortlessly he got a positive-looking photo-op with the Congressional Black Caucus, without giving up a single thing), and pathological lying (calling his decades-long devotion to Ayn Rand “an urban legend”), as well as the affective dimension: lack of remorse or guilt, and failure to accept responsibility for own actions (failure to apologize for his racist remarks about “inner-city culture,” brushing it off as merely being “inarticulate”), emotionally shallow and callous/lack of empathy (his draconian budget cuts, which would take us back to Dickensian England).Happy reading!
