Rick Scott's Irrational Behavior Escalates

We (or rather Carl Hiaasen) have already covered why Republican human/ bat hybrid Gov. Rick "Bat Boy" Scott (Teabag-FL) is the "emptiest suit in America."  Certainly, he has one of the emptiest souls in America, as evidenced by his refusal to expand Medicaid coverage in Florida because !Obamacare!  He's been playing a game of chicken not only with the Obama administration, but with his own Republican-dominated Senate which wants the expansion (the Florida House is another matter, loaded as it is with teabaggers, yahoos and other residents of Galt's Gulch).  Now, with deadlines looming, Bat Boy is getting ready to shut down the State government rather than provide Medicaid coverage to 800,000 low-income Floridians:

(AP) - Gov. Rick Scott told agency heads to prepare for the worst Thursday, asking them to list only the state's most critical needs in the event the Legislature can't reach an agreement on a budget that doesn't expand health care to the poor.

Scott sent the letter to agency heads the day after lawmakers said they were making progress on a budget impasse that they'll seek to resolve in a special session beginning June 1.

"Prepare a list of critical state services our citizens cannot lose in the event Florida is forced to shut down on July 1st," Scott wrote.

"[F]orced to shut down" ... by Bat Boy's soulless, rigid far-right ideology, that is.  Even the once great Washington Post Bezos Bugle says Bat Boy is "taking irrational to a new level."

Shame on Florida for electing and then re-electing this p.o.s.  Maybe they're learning what should have been evident from the beginning:  their governor is a bomb-throwing extremist.

(Photo: Yes, that's really Bat Boy - "Mmmm, that fly looks tasty.".)

Charge of the Right Brigade

After yesterday's bombshell NBC/Wall St. Journal poll rocked Rethugs on Capitol Hill, showing their brand in free fall with voters who dislike their extortionist approach, one would think that the "leaders" of the debacle would have learned something.  One would be wrong.

Speaking this morning at the ironically-named "Value Voters Summit" -- a collection of far-right wingers who make up the American Taliban -- radical Sen. Ted "Tailgunner Ted" Cruz insisted that his teabagger counterparts in the House hold firm and demand defunding of the Affordable Care Act in return for opening the Government.  This nutty and futile position has even been disavowed by the notorious Koch operation, among others.  It's what is driving the Rethug and teabagger numbers into the toilet.

While this has proven to be a lucrative fundraising gambit for Tailgunner Ted and the "Senate Conservative Fund" -- a front outfit of Jim "Demented" DeMint's Heritage Foundation -- no one in his or her right mind thinks that this will happen while President Obama has the veto pen and Dems control the Senate.  But feeding the reactionary mouthbreathers their red meat while separating them from their money is important to keep the wingnut welfare apparatus alive.

"Meet The Morons....

Who Caused the Shutdown" is a new post on Esquire.com's Charles P. Pierce's blog.  The first Congresscritter focused on is Rethuglican nutbag Vicky "Commie Toasters" Hartzler of Missouri, who believes, among other things, that the ChiComs are tracking us through the appliances they sell us.  We're not kidding.

Be sure to click the "NEXT" button at the bottom of each screen to see a sampling of the buffoonish menagerie of right-wing looniedom, and despair of our future as a democracy.

"The Reign of Morons"

From the estimable Charles P. Pierce:

We have elected an ungovernable collection of snake-handlers, Bible-bangers, ignorami, bagmen and outright frauds, a collection so ungovernable that it insists the nation be ungovernable, too. We have elected people to govern us who do not believe in government.

We have elected a national legislature in which Louie Gohmert and Michele Bachmann have more power than does the Speaker of the House of Representatives, who has been made a piteous spectacle in the eyes of the country and doesn't seem to mind that at all. We have elected a national legislature in which the true power resides in a cabal of vandals, a nihilistic brigade that believes that its opposition to a bill directing millions of new customers to the nation's insurance companies is the equivalent of standing up the the Nazis in 1938, to the bravery of the passengers on Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, and to Mel Gibson's account of the Scottish Wars of Independence in the 13th Century. We have elected a national legislature that looks into the mirror and sees itself already cast in marble.

We did this. We looked at our great legacy of self-government and we handed ourselves over to the reign of morons.

As Pierce goes on to say, don't expect any of this to change in an electoral tsunami any time soon.   It's taken 50 years to get us to this point and it may take another 50 to get us out.  We have too many people invested in making sure dots aren't connected and blame is evenly distributed =cough= mainstream media =cough= for fingers to be pointed in the right direction.  It's going to be a long struggle against the ungovernable collection noted above, and to restore the notion that government can work in the public interest once "the reign of morons" is ended.

Saturday Reading - Tea Party Edition

There's a really thoughtful piece over by Kim Messick over at Salon concerning the "paranoid aesthetic" of the Tea Party and its archetypal freak, Glenn "Boo Hoo" Beck.  It's worth the read. Here's a small fragment:

The Tea Party’s paranoid narcissism helps us explain another important feature of its politics: an intransigent dismissal of the necessity, even the morality, of compromise. In 2011, Democrats and many Republicans looked on in horror as the Tea Party caucus in the House of Representatives pushed the country to the brink of its first ever default; only when it had exacted punishing concessions from President Obama did it agree, sullenly, to accede to an increase in the debt limit. A similar debacle may play itself out in connection with immigration reform.

The piece is a detailed analysis of the movement and it's historical (hysterical?) underpinnings, tracing the "aesthetic" of victimization and umbrage through all it's manifestations.  That this noisy  faction of a minority is driving the agenda in so many respects is just appalling.

Meet David Lane, American Teavangelical

Let's get to know David Lane, the faith "outreach coordinator" for Sen. Rand "Aqua Buddha" Paul (Objectivist- KY), who wrote this in the Wing Nut Daily World Net Daily:

As to the future of America – and the collapse of this once-Christian nation – Christians must not only be allowed to have opinions, but politically, Christians must be retrained to war for the Soul of America and quit believing the fabricated whopper of the “Separation of Church and State,” the lie repeated ad nauseum by the left and liberals to keep Christian America – the moral majority – from imposing moral government on pagan public schools, pagan higher learning and pagan media. Bill Bennett’s insight, “… the two essential questions Plato posed as: Who teaches the children, and what do we teach them?” requires deep thought, soul-searching and a response from Christian America to the secular, politically correct and multicultural false gods imposing their religion on America’s children. [our emphasis]

One need only view the crackpottery at the recent Ralph Reed circle jerk "Faith and Freedumb Coalition Conference" (see below) to realize how close we may be to having the David Lanes of America imposing their religion (a wholly unrecognizable, medieval Christianity) on the rest of us.  The best way to think of Lane's philosophy is, "Christian Sharia Law."

To think that this wanker is advising someone who, albeit fancifully, is being yakked about among the Beltway media numbnuts as a potential Rethuglican presidential nominee in 2016, should send chills up every thinking person's spine.

The Angry Right-Wing Mob On Display

While we didn't watch the teabagger / Rethug poofest last night, we saw this report about a moment when Wolf "The Situation. . .Room" Blitzer posed a hypothetical situation about an uninsured man dying in a hospital. When the Wolf Man asked, "are you saying society should just let him die?" several in the teahadist audience shouted "yeah!" before nutty Ron Paul could respond.

This is the angry, greedy, radical right in full view of the public, stripped of the mainstream media's overly polite and timid coverage of them. No doubt that the ones shouting "yeah!" would describe themselves as "Christian," too. Then there's this related study on the racial resentment that motivates teahadists, whose hatred of President Obama has at least as much to do with his race as his policies.

Here's the magic moment when the teabagger crowd yells "Let him die!":

Boiling Tea

Not only do the teahadist Tories' views run counter to those of our Founding Fathers, as Bill Maher noted in our earlier post, but 13% of them feel that violence is justified against the current government, according to a new poll. Again, we hope we're wrong, but would it surprise anyone if a teatard snapped and committed an act of political violence in the weeks and months ahead?

Not Ivory Soap Pure

"A surprising number of Virginia's Tea Party zealots have convinced themselves that former Sen. George Allen (R), who's likely to try a comeback in 2012, just isn't right-wing enough anymore. Allen's lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union is 92.3%." -- Steve Benen, in today's Washington Monthly blog.

It figures that those liberals at the American Conservative Union would like Allen.