He gave "Our American Cousin" three thumbs up!

Ted Cruz's PAC must smell like Napalm in the morning.

As CNN’s Dana Bash pointed out to Cruz, he had nothing to show for his efforts — President Barack Obama’s health care reform law had not been defunded nor delayed — after 16 days of a government shutdown. Cruz, however, said that he disagreed: “Months ago, when the effort to defund Obamacare began, official Washington scoffed, they scoffed that the American people would rise up, they scoffed that the House of Representatives would do anything and they scoffed that the Senate would do anything.”

Scoffing's effectiveness has certainly been underestimated.

[cross-posted at Firedoglake]

As I was saying

From Robert Costa, the "Nutjob Whisperer":

Referring to his plan to preemptively send the Senate a House-passed bill, Speaker John Boehner told his conference this morning that he’d “rather throw a grenade than catch a grenade.” But with his right-wing troops abandoning him again, it was the speaker who was left holding the bomb.

After a day of furious negotiating with fellow Republicans over how to tweak a bill he had unveiled in the morning, it was left to stunned members of his leadership team to confirm to reporters that the vote had been canceled...
 
The canceled vote was no Twilight Zone episode, however, but something far too familiar. Republicans eagerly compared it to the fiscal cliff’s famous “Plan B” episode, when Boehner brought lawmakers into a closed-door meeting in the Capitol basement, said the serenity prayer, and told them the vote was canceled.

The Christian rite accompanying legislative chaos today was Florida representative Steve Southerland’s rendition of “Amazing Grace” — “all three verses,” said Representative Michael Burgess (Texas) afterwards in amazement.

But Southerland is an undertaker by trade, and the song is normally sung at funerals. It’s hard not to see’s today’s failure as the death of the House GOP’s role, in at least this standoff.

Well, this has worked out well

Boehner would like to add, he really enjoyed "Our American Cousin".

The office of Speaker Boehner told the office of Majority Leader Harry Reid's on Tuesday night that they would be willing to send them a "message" so that the procedural process of getting a debt limit and government funding bill could move faster. 

The communication between the two was first reported by Salon's Brian Beutler and was confirmed by an aide to the Huffington Post. The aide said that the news was delivered after House Republican leadership failed to move their own bill to resolve the dual matters.

A message is a legislative vehicle that if sent from Boehner to the Senate would allow Reid to skip one cloture vote. This would ensure that if one Senator wanted to gum up the works, he or she could only force 30 hours of consideration.

We have gone past the singularity into the event horizon of full derpitude

I guess even the densest of the right-wing's usual apologist only have extreme irony left.

Yes, of all the people to ask that question. Hard to believe that it took until now for her to ask whether the Party being controlled by a bunch of homophobic immigrant hating creationists who think Obama was born in Kenya have only NOW shut down their brains. But then again, she's Megan McArdle and thankfully you are not.

[cross-posted at Firedoglake]

Sad news for her NFL Career

I am the co-habitant of a four legged fuzz ball that has from time-to-time been featured on this here blog.   She's a good ol' mutt who is now over 14 years old -- this weekend she tore her ACL -- ending her season on whatever NFL team a 25-pound long-haired Border/Gordon mix would play for.

She's getting better, but it must be tough to have to give up jumping after all these years.

Always popular at funerals

A Gathering of the Legion of Dumb

Or THE BANQUET OF PLAINLY NUTS...all last night in the basement of a restaurant.
As opposed to where they should all be...the basement of their parent's house.

Sen. Ted Cruz met with roughly 15 to 20 House Republicans for around two hours late Monday night at the Capitol Hill watering hole Tortilla Coast.

The group appeared to be talking strategy about how they should respond to a tentative Senate deal to reopen the government and raise the debt ceiling without addressing Obamacare in a substantive way, according to sources who witnessed the gathering. The Texas Republican senator and many of the House Republicans in attendance had insisted on including amendments aimed at dismantling Obamacare in the continuing resolution that was intended to avert the current shutdown.

Sources said the House Republicans meeting in the basement of Tortilla Coast with Cruz were some of the most conservative in the House: Reps. Louie Gohmert of Texas, Steve King of Iowa, Jim Jordan of Ohio, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Raúl R. Labrador of Idaho, Steve Southerland II of Florida, Mark Meadows of North Carolina and Justin Amash of Michigan.

The group is a collection of members who have often given leadership headaches in recent years by opposing both compromise measures as well as packages crafted by fellow Republicans. And, it seems, leadership unwittingly became aware of the meetup.

The tortillas were more sentient than that group.

Sums it up well

From here.

John McCain would have remembered it, he lived it.

Oh the things you learn.

You hear a perfect record cited over and over in the debt limit debate: The United States has never defaulted. Better put an asterisk by that. America has briefly stiffed some of its creditors on at least two occasions.

One was in 1979 because of a technical glitch, quick rectified under "History's Greatest Monster", Jimmy Carter. The other...during the War of 1812, or as Sarah Palin and Ted Cruz know it, "the time Roosevelt let the Germans burn down a white house at Pearl Harbor"

Once, the young nation had a dramatic excuse: The Treasury was empty, the White House and Capitol were charred ruins, even the troops fighting the War of 1812 weren't getting paid...

Undoubtedly, this seems like a capital idea for reenacting by the modern Tea Party.

 [cross-posted at Firedoglake]

Well, at least they aren't subtle

What a benevolent sight...where was the wooden cross and lighter fluid so you could REALLY get what passes to you as a point across?

Joshua Roberts/Reuters

I am not the first person to note this

But doesn't Ted Cruz have a striking resemblance not only psychologically but physically with Joe McCarthy?

Oh look "Democracy Fan Fiction"

Congress has probably never been less popular (which is a bit like saying "Syphilis sees popularity dip") but I'm going to peremptorily call bullshit on this one.

Only one-quarter of Americans think that their own member of Congress should be reelected, according to a new HuffPost/YouGov poll. That's a sharp departure from similar polls conducted before the government shutdown.

In the new survey, 25 percent of respondents said they believe the member of Congress from their district deserves to be reelected, while 47 percent said they did not. Another 27 percent said they weren't sure.

It would be nice to think that the crazy party would be replaced by the party of generic kleptocrats but considering past history and the fact that the GOP has twelve and a half-months to get outraged about an African-American guy I'm pretty confident crazy will survive...the rest of us, not so much.

[cross-posted at Firedoglake]

There are spelling errors...

And then there are SPELLING ERRORS!

Leebus Christ!

Koch brothers must have outsourced for assholes from overseas...

Looks like 'Murica just isn't into teabagging anymore:

The tea party group FreedomWorks has fallen into dire financial straits, and was forced to take out a $1 million line of credit earlier this year, sources close to the organization told BuzzFeed.

Judging by the picture in the story of the wanker who runs it now, Artisanal Hipster is not in fashion.

Derp! Derp!

Uh...derp?

A public hearing for suspended Gliberton, Pa. police Chief Mark Kessler, whose YouTube gun demonstration videos drew national attention, was cut short Thursday night when a man dropped a semi-automatic pistol on the floor, the Republican Herald reported.

An unidentified man dropped the pistol, which the Republican Herald described as possibly a .45 semi-automatic, about 90 minutes into the hearing. The firearm did not discharge and no one was injured.

Behold the genius

I know, hard to believe that this:

According to the Washington Examiner, Ted Cruz held a closed-door lunch meeting on Wednesday during which he claimed that his plan to defund Obamacare through a government shutdown had placed the GOP in a politically advantageous position.

Turns out to be wrong...

The Republican Party has been "badly damaged" by the government shutdown, according to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released Thursday evening, which finds public opinion souring on the GOP and some of its core positions.

Americans blamed Republicans over President Barack Obama for the shutdown by a margin of 22 percentage points, with 53 percent saying the GOP deserved more blame, and 31 percent saying Obama did. Approval ratings for the Republican Party and the tea party were at 24 percent and 21 percent respectively -- both record lows as measured by NBC/WSJ.

Let bygones be bygones...or else

Hard to believe big banksters feel immune from little things...like the law and ethics. Those are for other legal entities that are defined as people, namely the one's that are actually people.

In a March 2012 meeting, a group of examiners at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York agreed that Goldman Sachs had inadequate procedures to guard against conflicts of interest — guidelines aimed at stopping firms from putting their pursuit of profit ahead of their clients’ best interests. The examiners voted to downgrade a confidential rating assigned by the New York Fed that could have spurred costly enforcement actions and other regulatory penalties. It is not known whether the vote materialized in a rating change. The former examiner who pushed for a downgrade, Carmen Segarra, now contends in a lawsuit filed Thursday that just weeks after the vote, her superiors asked her to change her findings on Goldman and fired her after she refused.

One cannot take a few million out of Lloyd Blankfeld's bonus package, it's so unfair, unfairness is for everybody else.

[cross-posted at Firedoglake]

And somewhere the Koch Brothers are going "what a clever idea!"

Future GOP policy:

Oops: Azerbaijan released election results before voting had even started

Mmm...mmmm...my Generation!

Is probably the last generation that has a chance to make any positive contribution to prevent catastrophic climate change.

And so far all we've produced is gay marriage and the Tea Party.

 So that's a mixed bag (although let's face it the Baby Boomers own the Tea Party).

So we've blown it...fortunately we have a good shot at being dead before this happens.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Starting in about a decade, Kingston, Jamaica, will probably be off-the-charts hot — permanently. Other places will soon follow. Singapore in 2028. Mexico City in 2031. Cairo in 2036. Phoenix and Honolulu in 2043. And eventually the whole world in 2047. A new study on global warming pinpoints the probable dates for when cities and ecosystems around the world will regularly experience hotter environments the likes of which they have never seen before. And for dozens of cities, mostly in the tropics, those dates are a generation or less away. "This paper is both innovative and sobering," said Oregon State University professor Jane Lubchenco, former head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who was not involved in the study.

You can see my generation's contributions in the comment section.

Ugh.

A large group of Major Kong Impersonators

They ALL want to ride the bomb down to the ground.

But what Wall Street fails to realize, according to Potomac Research Group's Greg Valliere, is the extent to which the Tea Party just doesn't care. Valliere wrote to clients this morning:

We talked to Tea Party stalwarts last night, and tried to make our best arguments. "Don't you realize the Republicans could lose the House in 2014?" We don't care, they said. "Don't you worry about a catastrophic reaction in the financial markets?" We don't care, they said. "Don't you worry that the Democrats will aggressively play the Social Security card with seniors?" We don't care, they said.

"This is the Alamo, it's Braveheart, battles to the death. These people are on a Mission from God," Valliere says.

It's going to be a long wait for that mortality table to catch up to me. [Cross-posted at Firedoglake]