Category: Paranoia

What’s In A Name?

17 Nov 2010, Ar Raqqah, Syria --- Sheikh Ghazi Rashad Hrimis touches dried earth in the parched region of Raqqa province in eastern Syria, November 11, 2010. Lack of rain and mismanagement of the land and water resources have forced up to half of million people to flee the region in one of Syria's largest internal migrations since France and Britain carved the country out of the former Ottoman Empire in 1920. REUTERS/Khaled al-Hariri (SYRIA - Tags: AGRICULTURE ENVIRONMENT) --- Image by © KHALED AL-HARIRI/Reuters/Corbis
17 Nov 2010, Ar Raqqah, Syria — Sheikh Ghazi Rashad Hrimis touches dried earth in the parched region of Raqqa province in eastern Syria, November 11, 2010. Lack of rain and mismanagement of the land and water resources have forced up to half of million people to flee the region in one of Syria’s largest internal migrations since France and Britain carved the country out of the former Ottoman Empire in 1920.

What’s in a name? That which we call a turd by any other name would smell as rank.
—William Shakespeare [with apologies thereto]

In the aftermath of the horrific terrorist attack on Paris last week, GOPer presidential candidates are wetting themselves over the opportunity to change their image as clueless opportunists to macho champions of national security. A pissing contest has developed among the majority over whom would be tougher on the terra’ists than the feckless, petulant, secret Muslim in the White House. The centerpiece  of this emerging strategy is to put tens of thousands of combat troops into the Syrian meat grinder. (Time for a reprise of  The Who’s Teenage Wasteland?) Thus far, Senators Rand Paul and Ted Cruz and celebrity entertainer Donald Trump have resisted putting “boots on the ground,” but don’t be surprised if they start walking that back as the campaign heats up.

Another refrain emanating from the right wing noise machine is to attack anyone that won’t accept their rhetorical construction, radical Islamists, to describe terrorists that use a distorted interpretation of the Muslim religion to justify their actions, and to recruit impressionable and disaffected youth. (For a counter-view, see Juan Cole’s Top Ten Ways Islamic Law Forbids Terrorism.)  That includes Senator Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and President Obama. Framing the conflict that currently exists between less than 0.01% of the world’s Muslims and the largely Christian world as a Clash of Civilizations is part of The New American Century promoted by some of the same neocons that are part of  Jeb Bush‘s foreign policy team— you know, war criminals— like neo-conman Paul Wolfowitz, who helped “liberate” Iraq by toppling Saddam Hussein, setting into motion the very chaos responsible for the crisis that now infects the entire Middle East. (ISIS is the direct descendant of al-Qaeda in Iraq, created in 2004 to fight the US invasion.)

Naturally, the current batch of GOPer presidential candidates are too dense to realize that they are playing directly into the hands of the ISIS/ISIL/Daesh propaganda noise machine. Its operators would love nothing more than to get the non-Muslim world to condemn, by association, one of the world’s great monotheistic religions.

In conjunction with 1) the well-nigh hopeless economic situation facing the vast majority of young Arab Muslims, impoverished by the massive concentration of wealth into the hands of a few autocratic oil sheiks and their families (the ultimate example of wealth inequality); and 2) the history of Western military intervention in the Middle East that included putting military bases in the holy land of Saudi Arabia (which gave birth to the original Al Qaeda), together they provide a terrorist recruitment bonanza.  As former top aide and speechwriter to President George W. Bush and Washington Post opinion writer Michael Gerson writes:

Rejecting a blanket condemnation of Islam is not a matter of political correctness. It is the requirement of an effective war against terrorism, which means an effective war against the terrorist kingdom in Syria and western Iraq.

Not to be outdone by their Congressional colleagues, currently some 28 Republican governors and one Democrat have stated that, despite President Obama’s pledge to accept ten thousand Syrian refugees, a paltry sum compared to the commitment of individual European countries (Turkey is already hosting two million), they’re going to pull a Lester Maddox and block the “golden door ” of immigration with a big fat pick ax handle.  At least thirteen governors,  12 Democrats and one Independent, have said they would accept the refugees. While the Refugee Act of 1980 prevents states from refusing admittance, that won’t stop the Republican governors from posturing the hell out of the issue. Look for them to dump the mechanics of changing the law on Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell. Since 9/11/2001, none of the 784,000 refugees admitted into the country, some 35-40% of which are children, have ever been arrested on terrorism charges. Thus far, the federal government’s vetting procedures have worked just fine, thank you. (EDIT: By another accounting of approximately 785,000 refugees, a dozen have either been arrested or removed; none were from Syria.)

Furthermore, Wingers are attacking Bernie for saying Climate Change is the USA’s number one national security issue, despite reports from the national security community affirming same. (See also On the Record: Climate Change as a National Security Risk According to U.S. Administration Officials.) Instead of acknowledging that these reports even exist, Wingers resort to outrage and personal attacks, accusing Sanders of being weak on defense.

Most wars are the product of resource scarcity. In the case of Syria, a devastating drought forced rural farmers to abandon their farms and migrate to the big cities to feed their families. This created social pressures that resulted in a number of peaceful demonstrations that asked for greater governmental support. These pleas for humanitarian assistance were met with extreme violence from the government of Basshar Al-Sadad, and rapidly devolved into a catastrophic civil war. Initially, Sadad sent in his goon squads to suppress the protesters. When that didn’t work, he upped the ante. Among other war crimes, he denied food and medicine to desperate civilian enclaves, and dropped barrel bombs on them from helicopters, some of which are believed to have contained chlorine gas, according to the Syrian American Medical Society.

Funny how one thing leads to another. The same mindset that denies anthropogenic climate change as a factor leading to regional wars, denies that US the Exceptional is no longer capable of being the world’s policeman. They’d rather pursue their own ideological crusade. Some day maybe they’ll reach the same level of  insight that the great philosopher Pogo reached when he observed: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

If Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz had their way, they’d amend Emma Lazarus‘s poem affixed to the Statue of Liberty as follows:

“Give me your tired, your poor,  (so long as they’re Christian)
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free (except the chlorine gassed, who might be terrorists in disguise),
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. (maybe not Anders “I’m 100% Christian” Breivik, though)
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me: (Muslims need not apply, despite what the Constitution says about religious tests)
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.” (Sorry, out of order)

 

Because Freedom: Erich Fromm Edition

Because Freedom — Liz Time Machine Liz Cheney sets the way back machine to 1961 to explain the Grand Obstructionist Party’s response to health care reform 

In his NY Times column Monday, Paul Krugman asks a question whose subtext subsumes its substance:

How many Americans will be denied essential health care in the name of freedom?

In case you haven’t noticed, the response to every critical policy issue proffered by the plutocratic funded Teabagger, Libertarian dominated GOP is a non-answer: no can-do, because, you know, freedom.  An easy, bumper sticker slogan that appeals to the low information voter and propagandists alike.

Rational gun safety laws?  Farmer Fred might have to drive 30 miles to town to record a transfer of his shotgun to his grandson. (Maybe he could combine it with one of his regular town trips, or like, when he has to register the transfer of a vehicle.) Financial regulation?  As the banksters are fond of saying: the invisible hand of capitalism is regulator enough, thank you very much. Pollution controls?  That costs jobs and all the freedom that goes with ’em.  Immigration reform?  Employers should be free to hire whomever they want, at whatever pay the market will bear.  That’s the free market, baby.

Krugman drills down on the healthcare issue:

“I’m referring, of course, to the question of how many Republican governors will reject the Medicaid expansion that is a key part of Obamacare. What does that have to do with freedom? In reality, nothing. But when it comes to politics, it’s a different story.

It goes without saying that Republicans oppose any expansion of programs that help the less fortunate — along with tax cuts for the wealthy, such opposition is pretty much what defines modern conservatism. But they seem to be having more trouble than in the past defending their opposition without simply coming across as big meanies.

Specifically, the time-honored practice of attacking beneficiaries of government programs as undeserving malingerers doesn’t play the way it used to. When Ronald Reagan spoke about welfare queens driving Cadillacs, it resonated with many voters. When Mitt Romney was caught on tape sneering at the 47 percent, not so much.

There is, however, an alternative. From the enthusiastic reception American conservatives gave Friedrich Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom,” to Reagan, to the governors now standing in the way of Medicaid expansion, the U.S. right has sought to portray its position not as a matter of comforting the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted, but as a courageous defense of freedom.”

Yup, the Romney Revelation required a reboot— blaming the victim can only take you so far, especially when the victims are so close at hand.  So, time to step into the Cheney time machine to make old things appear new again.

“Conservatives love, for example, to quote from a stirring speech Reagan gave in 1961, in which he warned of a grim future unless patriots took a stand. (Liz Cheney used it in a Wall Street Journal op-ed article just a few days ago.) “If you and I don’t do this,” Reagan declared, “then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.” What you might not guess from the lofty language is that “this” — the heroic act Reagan was calling on his listeners to perform — was a concerted effort to block the enactment of Medicare.”

So, it’s back to the future, where the right wing antediluvians think they can pour old wine into new wine skins.  Their conception of freedom is truncated into the freedom from formulation— freedom from government, which is to say, society as a whole.  The other formulation of freedom, freedom to, was long ago perverted into license— license to do whatever the hell somebody with means wants, ignoring the generations of collective effort that made their self-centered notions of freedom possible.

When but a sophomore in high school, I had the good fortune to encounter the writings of the noted psychologist, Erich Fromm, who made clear to me the nuanced differences between freedom from and freedom to. (As a horny teenager, I picked up his classic The Art of Loving, thinking it was a sex manual of some sort, but got hooked instead on his philosophical approach to life.) As long as we are doing a little time traveling, let’s go back another twenty years, to the publication of Fromm’s Escape From Freedom  in 1941 (during the height of The Third Reich). From the WikiP entry:

Fromm distinguishes between ‘freedom from’ (negative freedom) and ‘freedom to’ (positive freedom). The former refers to emancipation from restrictions such as social conventions placed on individuals by other people or institutions. This is the kind of freedom typified by the Existentialism of Sartre, and has often been fought for historically, but according to Fromm, on its own it can be a destructive force unless accompanied by a creative element, ‘freedom to’ the use of freedom to employ spontaneously the total integrated personality in creative acts. This, he argues, necessarily implies a true connectedness with others that goes beyond the superficial bonds of conventional social intercourse: “…in the spontaneous realization of the self, man unites himself anew with the world…”

A world unobtainable to the selfish and the cruel. What else explains their desire to destroy a society which they reject, from which they have chosen to ex-communicate themselves? Better its destruction than a constant reminder of their own dysfunction.

WikiP concludes its review with this (italic emphasis mine):

Fromm examines democracy and freedom. Modern democracy and the industrialised nation are models he praises but it is stressed that the kind of external freedom provided by this kind of society can never be utilised to the full without an equivalent inner freedom. Fromm suggests that though we are free from obvious authoritarian influence, we are still dominated in our thinking and behaviour by ideas of ‘common sense’, the advice of experts and the influence of advertising. The way to become truly free in an individual sense is to become spontaneous in our self-expression and behaviour and respond truthfully to our genuine feelings. This is crystallised in his existential statement “there is only one meaning of life: the act of living it“. Fromm counters suggestions that this might lead to social chaos by claiming that being truly in touch with our humanity is to be truly in touch with the needs of those with whom we share the world. This is the meaning of a truly social democracy and the realisation of the positive ‘freedom to’ that arises when people escape the malign influence of totalising political orders.

I heard Senator Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) play the “common sense” card yesterday, trying to explain his support for the watered down gun safety agreement he reached with his Democratic counterpart, Joe Manchin (D-W.VA). “Common sense” is the mantra conservatives are using these days to oppose government regulation of any sort.  “The advice of experts” is what fuels the whole deferential beltway pundit mentality.   And the advertising industry is exactly the foundation of the modern day political propaganda machine.

The more things change the more they stay the same.

Osama bin Moppin

Stephen shows Tennesseeans how to channel their Islamophobia

Cloned from the same pod that spawned noted Islamophobes Pam Geller, Frank Gaffney, and Louis Gomert, the Tennessee State Senate is jumping on the anti-Sharia bandwagon with legislation to protect its citizens from beards  and burkas. 

The Guardian reports:

The bill simplistically equates sharia with terrorism without any proof and declares that it is “treasonous” and incompatible with the US constitution. It incorrectly identifies sharia as a political doctrine that “requires all its adherents to actively support the establishment of a political society based upon sharia as foundational or supreme law and the replacement of any political entity not governed by sharia with a sharia political order.” The bill goes on to state: “Sharia requires all its adherents to actively and passively support the replacement of American constitutional republic, including the representative government of this state with a political system based upon sharia.”

The very start of the language of the bill is profoundly disturbing. Sharia is falsely equated with Islamic law. Sharia refers to God’s will, laws, principles and values, found in the Qur’an and the traditions of the prophet Muhammad. Islamic law is the product of early jurists who interpreted and developed during it in the early Islamic centuries.

The hysteria continues with unsubstantiated accusations: “The knowing adherence to sharia and to foreign sharia authorities is prima facie evidence of an act in support of the overthrow of the United States government and the government of this state through the abrogation, destruction, or violation of the United States and Tennessee Constitutions by the likely use of imminent criminal violence and terrorism with the aim of imposing sharia on the people of this state.”

The bill states that its goal is not to outlaw freedom of religion or the practice of Islam. However, though breathtakingly devoid of evidence of any call to impose sharia in Tennessee or anywhere else in the US, it uncritically condemns sharia and asserts that it represents a major threat to Tennessee, brush-stroking the vast majority of mainstream Muslims and Islam in America.

Tennessee is no stranger to bigotry. Last year, TPM Muckraker reported that:

In a free training session on Monday, John Guandolo, a former FBI agent and the vice president of the Virginia-based Strategic Engagement Group (SEG), spoke to law enforcement officers in Rutherford County, Tennessee, at the World Outreach Church. The seminar was part of a three-day training course about Islam and the threat of terrorism, and was attended by roughly 100 law enforcement officers in the area, according to Middle Tennessee Public Radio. The Sheriff’s Department in Rutherford County confirmed that 25 of its officers had attended the training course. WSMV-TV attempted to film the event, and their camera was pushed away by Guandolo. But, according to reporter Nancy Amons, “Guandolo talked about Hamas and its plan to destroy Western civilization from within, and spoke of Islamic centers as potential military compounds.”

One of those terrorist compounds presumably includes the newly constructed Islamic Center of Murfreesboro,  Permits didn’t come easy, necessitating intervention from a U.S. attorneys and a federal judge. During construction there was vandalism, a bomb threat, and an arson fire that destroyed construction equipment. Members of the congregation received various threats via phone calls, letters, and email..

Tenessee mosque

Alleged Islamic terrorism compound at Murfreesboro, Tennessee

Bigotry by Tennessee officials isn’t limited to just Muslims, though. Earlier this month, U.S. Congressman Rep. Marsha Blackburn (yes, she insists on using the man suffix) voted against reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act signed into law by President Obama, explaining:

“I didn’t like the way it was expanded to include other different groups.”

 

By “other different groups”, Marsha of course means people that don’t look and act like her. The enhanced VAWA extends coverage for women in the LGBTQ, Native American, and immigrant communities. (As a paralegal working in Alaska in the mid ’90s, I can testify that violence against native Alaskan women is endemic. Too bad for them, in Martha’s World.)

Stephanie Northwood comments:

This law is important, and for the women it protected during its previous tenure, it was successful. Between 1993 and 2010 the rate of violence between intimate partners declined 67%. That is huge! Additionally, more instances of domestic violence are being reported to the police and are dealt with through arrests. The expansion of the law to cover the “different groups,” as Blackburn calls them, is absolutely necessary considering that three out of every five Native American women will endure violence by an intimate partner. Similarly, one out of every three to one out of every four same-sex relationships has endured domestic violence. The rate for heterosexual relationships is one out of four, thus showing women in same-sex relationships are fighting a very similar battle to that of heterosexual women. They deserve protection, too.

Everyone deserves protection from hypocritical, self-righteous, paranoid bigots. Do unto others, and all that.

———–

NB: Concerned that I sound like I’m dumpin’ on Tennessee. Never been there and I’m sure it has its share of lovely people. My only connection to the state is that it is the birthplace of my treasured 12 string guitar that I’ve had and played for forty years. A shoutout to J.W. Gallagher & Son in Wartrace, Tenn.

NRA To The Rescue

A day after warning of food riots resulting from President Obama’s socialist attempts to destroy the economy and take everyone’s guns away, Whacko Wayne is organizing an emergency arms shipment to Triumph’s passenger and crew, to protect themselves from each other as tempers flair and supplies run low.

SPECIAL STUPID

Ted Special Stupid

 

THERE’S A SPECIAL KIND OF STUPID out there in “Merca,” and over the last four decades or so, it’s been allowed to proliferate quite unimpeded by other aspects of cultural society, especially by things like intelligence, wisdom, facts, and truth.

The current poster weenie for this affliction is National Rifle Association executive tool, Wayne LaPierre.
SpecialStupidWayne

LaPi— Mmm. Wait.
Actually, the poster weenie for this affliction is NRA tool, Ted Nugent. But LaPierre is the suit that spouts the crazy at official NRA propaganda sessions. Recently he pointed out to a few Senators that tighter gun control laws aren’t needed— because criminals ignore laws.

“They’re criminals, they’re homicidal maniacs… we all know that homicidal maniacs, criminals, and the insane don’t abide by the law.”

Ah.  So, since criminals don’t always follow laws, no new laws (regulation) would work— because criminals break laws— so laws won’t work— because criminals, by definition, break laws— so we shouldn’t resort to laws as a way of trying to regulate or restrain criminals, homicidal maniacs, or the insane, because, you know, laws break.

See?

SpecialStupidPalin1

Ironically, it’s a perfect example of what Right Wing Nut Jobs call “Special Stupid” — a peculiar and tortured logic maze created and justified by fear— and its shadow— hate.  It’s simplistic and selfish, and a hypocritical way of negating everything Jesus ever said about loving your neighbor, one another, or, because, foreigners.

But like nearly everything in the lizard brain, the blazing irony of Special Stupid defies not just logic, love, fact, truth, and common sense, but even the most basic level of moral humanity— while assuming the very mantel of superior morality at the point of a gun and wrapped in an American Flag.

And it is this ongoing cultural conundrum of the cold dead values of the past, being inexorably and evermore forcefully supplanted by the progressive values of true brotherhood, which will occupy center stage of American politics until the battle is won.  And it will not be won with bullets.

SpecialStupidTom

 

 

 

 

 

Tin Foiled Again (Update)

Three GOP Stooges, from left to right, Steve Forbes, Jack Welsh, Allen West, see Signs of an Obama conspiracy emanating from Der Tube

Sasquatch might as well have traipsed across the White House lawn Friday with a lost Warren Commission file on his way to the studio where NASA staged the moon landing. – Yahoo News

In the wake of a laughable GOP convention and an uplifting Democratic one, followed closely by the devastating disclosure of the Romney 47% moocher vid, polls showed Obama opening up a significant lead over Romney in the swing states, with favorable down-ticket results for the Democratic senate candidates as well.

This gave rise to the skewed polls conspiracy in which Wingers howled about a cabal of biased poll takers and librul media-ites working overtime to discourage Republican voters from showing up to vote.  As if their overwhelming hatred of President Blackenstein (h/t Bill Maher) wasn’t motivation enough.

The angry peasant mob hadn’t even made it to the White House Castle gates to vent their latest outrage when they were hit by yet another thunderstorm of cognitive dissonance, the September job numbers.  What the rest of the country welcomed as much needed rain during a long economic drought, the Wingers saw as a devastating flood that swept away one of their major talking points— unemployment over 8% during the entirety of the Obama Administration, proof that that Obama’s 2008 campaign pledge to lower the rate below 8% was as bogus as his current proposals and promises.

Now, there is always a certain amount of fluctuation in the final numbers of most economic metrics, such as GDP, which routinely undergoes two modifications after initial estimates are made. The uncertainty in estimating unemployment numbers is reflected in the divergent numbers provided by the two main data sets used for their calculation—monthly polling by the Bureau of Labor Statistics of some 50,000 households, the Household Data survey; and numbers provided by a list of employers, the Establishment Data survey. The Household Survey showed that for September “Total employment rose by 873,000”; and the Establishment Data showed “Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 114,000.” (Employment Situation News Release, October 5, 2012,  Bureau of Labor Statistics)

The smaller number in the Establishment Data is likely due to the fact that during an economic recovery, new employers are missed in monthly surveys that coincide with accelerations in the rate of recovery.  This was the case in September, which more fully accounted for rises in the July and August numbers.  Similarly, the slowdown in GDP in the second quarter caused a downward revision in the employment numbers for those months.  In general, underestimations are more common in uptrends, overestimations more common in downtrends, because of the inherent time lag factor. All of which creates an unavoidable, structural margin of error that necessitates subsequent revisions.

The spread between last month’s rate of 8.1% and this month’s 7.8% can thus be explained without resorting to wild conspiracy theories.  But in the GOP zeitgeist, the imagined presence of sinister Democratic plots plays into the larger narrative of Winger victimhood. How else to explain that despite their imagined superiority they don’t have total control of the US government?  And why current polls shows them to be the losers that they are?

That September’s unemployment number came in under 8% is proof of a diabolically engineered October Surprise, a deliberate manipulation of BLS data whose minions are acting on the orders of Obama’s re-election machine, identified by former GE Chairman Jack Welch in a tweet as “these Chicago guys.” Asked by Chris Matthews whether he had any proof, Welch admitted he had none, and insisted he wouldn’t change a single word of his tweet.

That didn’t stop other GOPers like former presidential candidate and Welch fellow plutocrat, Steve Forbes, from jumping into Teh Crazy pool. They were joined by right wing whackos like radio squawk host Laura Ingraham; Teabagger inspiration and CNBC reporter Rick Santelli; Michelle Bachmann‘s male counterpart in the House of Representatives,  Allen West, and of course Fux News’ leading conspiracy monger, Eric Bolling and Fux’s chief business host, Stuart Varney. (For a sampling of conspiracy tweets, see Media Matters’ compilation, and TPM’s tevee compilation.)

Prior to the conspiratorialists’ hijacking of the debate, the GOPers explained that the decrease in the unemployment rate is due to a number of factors;  an increase in part-timers (often a preliminary to full time employment); lazy people content to live off “free stuff,” like unemployment insurance;  and people who have simply given up because the economic outlook is perceived as being so dismal. (Never do we hear from the Willardites, or the MSM for that matter, about the 7,600 Baby Boomers who turn 60 every day, the traditional retirement age, but are still counted as individuals no longer looking for work.)

But the tin foil hat crew, aka Job Truthers, has broken new ground.  Conn Carroll, the Washington Examiner’s senior editorial writer, tweeted that while he didn’t think that the BLS cooked the numbers, it was rather the case of  “a bunch of Dems [who] lied about getting jobs.”  The implication being that the Free Stuffers are an integral part of the poll skewing conspiracy, who hope to re-elect Obama by making the employment picture look rosier than it is, just to keep those checks a-comin’.

Now, all this could be passed off as just so much election year craziness, of no consequence after Nov. 6.  But with public trust in government already at a modern low, assailing the reputation of a critical government agency like the BLS, composed of career economists who have a history of serving both Republican and Democratic administrations in an exemplary, non-partisan manner— that is the real danger here.

TPM describes the BLS and its operations as follows:

For starters, the Bureau of Labor Statistics isn’t currently run by a political appointee.  For most of Obama’s term, the commissioner was a holdover appointed by President Bush.  The current acting commissioner John Gavin is a career BLS economist, not an Obama appointee.

The underlying data behind the BLS reports is also publicly released and used by analysts across the private sector and academia, meaning a conspiracy would have to survive scrutiny from trained economists of all political stripes.

Nor is there much time to cook the books at the top level if they wanted to.

Even if the Rethugs manage to lose this year’s election through sheer foot-shooting incompetence, they can point to success in their long range goal of undermining the public’s trust in government, as well as their trust in “facts.”  Their previous strategy of obstructionism and polarization is being augmented this election cycle by attacking the credibility of previously unassailable government institutions, as well as vital private and public polling agencies.

Even if they lose, they win.

Or so they think.

UPDATE (10/9):  Wacky Welch out at Reuters and Fortune Magazine.

Sez Fortune:

Welch said he will no longer contribute to Fortune following critical coverage of the former CEO of General Electric, saying he would get better “traction” elsewhere. On Friday, Welch suggested that the Obama administration, calling them “these Chicago guys,” had manipulated the monthly jobs report in order to make the economy look better than it actually is just weeks before the election. Welch has been battered by criticism since making the suggestion on Twitter.

Aw, another poor, picked upon billionaire.

Key Romney Adviser Gets Etch A Sketched For Being Gay (Update)

The Daily Show Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook Stewart explains that the video of Fischer’s homophobic rant is blurry because it’s being broadcast from 50 years ago Well, that didn’t take long. Two weeks after appointing the openly gay Richard Grenell as his foreign policy spokesman, Cowardly Lyin Willard Romney etch-a-sketched him …