Bachmann Doubles Down On Drilling In Everglades, Says Only ‘Radical Environmentalists’ Would Oppose

GOP presidential front runner Rep. Michele Bachmann’s (MN) new notion to drill for oil in the Florida Everglades is compelling the public, scientists, and even a few in her own party to raise their eyebrows at her “incredible faux pas.” Ever resilient against the onslaught of facts, Bachmann doubled down on her call to drill […]/p

via Bachmann Doubles Down On Drilling In Everglades, Says Only ‘Radical Environmentalists’ Would Oppose.

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SNL: GOP 2012 Undeclared Candidates Debate (VIDEO)

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SNL: GOP 2012 Undeclared Candidates Debate

Crooks and Liars- By Heather

May 07, 2011 09:35 PM

Since so many of the undeclared potential presidential contenders decided to skip the first official Republican primary debate, Saturday Night Live decided to treat us to their version of the GOP 2012 Undeclared Candidates Debate, with Tina Fey returning as Sarah Palin.

The segment also featured Bill Hader as Fox’s Shepard Smith, Jason Sudeikis as Mitt Romney, Darrell Hammond as Donald Trump, Kristen Wiig as Michele Bachmann, Bobby Moynihan as Newt Gingrich and Kenan Thompson as the Rent is Too Damn High Party’s Jimmy McMillan.

As expected, Fey stole the show with her Palin impression.

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SOURCE

hat tip to Huffington Post for the photo and video

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Donald Trump Has Revealed the Truth About the Republican Party

Donald Trump Has Revealed the Truth About the Republican Party

Johann Hari
Columnist, the London Independent via: HuffPost

Posted: 04/28/11 11:04 PM ET

Since the election of Barack Obama, the Republican Party has proved that one of its central intellectual arguments was right all along. They have long claimed that evolution is a myth believed in only by whiny liberals — and it turns out they were onto something. Every six months, the Republican Party venerates a new hero, and each time it is somebody further back on the evolutionary scale.

Sarah Palin told cheering rallies that her message to the world was: “We’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the American way!” — but that wasn’t enough. So they found Michele Bachmann, who said darkly it was an “interesting coincidence” that swine flu only breaks out under Democratic presidents, claims the message of The Lion King is “I’m better at what I do because I’m gay,” and argues “there isn’t even one study that can be produced that shows carbon dioxide is a harmful gas.”

That wasn’t enough. I half-expected the next contender to be a lung-fish draped in the Stars and Stripes. But it wasn’t anything so sophisticated. Enter stage (far) right Donald Trump, the bewigged billionaire who has filled America with phallic symbols and plastered his name across more surfaces than the average Central Asian dictator. A survey suggests he is the most popular candidate among Republican voters. It’s not hard to see why.

Trump is every trend in Republican politics over the past thirty-five years taken to its logical conclusion. He is the Republican id, finally entirely unleashed from all restraint and all reality.

The first trend is towards naked imperialism. On Libya, he says: “I would go in and take the oil… I would take the oil and stop this baby stuff.” On Iraq, he says: “We stay there, and we take the oil… In the old days, when you have a war and you win, that nation’s yours.” It is a view that the world is essentially America’s property, inconveniently inhabited by foreigners squatting over oil-fields. Trump says America needs to “stop what’s going on in the world. The world is just destroying our country. These other countries are sapping our strength.” The U.S. must have full spectrum dominance. In this respect, he is simply an honest George W. Bush.

The second trend is towards dog-whistle prejudice — pitched just high enough for frightened white Republicans to hear it. Trump made it a central issue to suggest Obama wasn’t born in America (and therefore was occupying the White House illegally) — even though this conspiracy theory had long since been proven to be as credible as the people who claim Paul McCartney was killed in 1969 and replaced with an imposter. Trump said nobody “ever comes forward” to say they knew Obama as a child in Hawaii. When lots of people pointed out they knew Obama as a child, Trump ridiculed the idea they could remember that far back. Then he said he’d “heard” the birth certificate said Obama was Muslim. When it was released saying no such thing, Trump said: “I’m very proud of myself.”

The Republican primary voters heard the message right — the black guy is foreign. He’s not one of us. Trump responded to these charges by saying: “I’ve always had a great relationship with the blacks.”

MORE HERE

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Why Are the Republicans Afraid of President Obama?

One of the most often-overheard refrains from the Republican Party and its far-right base is that President Obama is the worst president in American history. Others say he “pals around with terrorists.” They say he’s destroying America. They say that he’s weak, that he dithers and that he’s effete — implying either that he’s gay or effeminate or both. Around half of all Republicans have told pollsters that he’s not even constitutionally eligible to be president, which ought to mandate an immediate removal from office.

But what does all of this say about the men and women who are noticeably hesitant to officially announce their candidacies for the Republican nomination? Not a single one of the well-known frontrunners has declared anything more than “exploratory committees” — quite literally the presidential campaign equivalent of dithering.

At this juncture in the 2008 cycle, most of the major Democratic and Republican candidates were underway with their official campaigns. And yet…

Michele Bachmann, a would-be frontrunner, called the president “even worse” than President Carter. She accused him of being “infantile” and suggested he wouldn’t even run for a second term because the “floor has dropped out” from his support. However, tough-talking Michele Bachmann hasn’t officially declared her candidacy to run against this allegedly unpopular weakling.

Mitt Romney said that his “worst fears” about the president have come true and that the chief executive is pushing an “extreme liberal agenda.” Romney also accused the president of being “tentative, indecisive, timid and nuanced” on Libya. However, tough-talking Mitt Romney hasn’t officially declared his candidacy to run against such a timid and indecisive extremist. How would Mitt react when confronted by actual extremists? Hopefully not with the same timidity he’s exercising in his run for president.

Sarah Palin has screeched nearly every imaginable insult at the president (often while she’s utterly botching commonly-known facts about the Constitution). She accused him of “dithering” on Libya. He’s a “spectator-in-chief,” she said. She’s accused him of being a socialist. She told Sean Hannity that she “fears for our democracy” due to the president’s agenda. She’s famously accused him of being a terrorist sympathizer — this alone ought to compel her to run for president if only to rid the executive branch of an obvious terrorist. However, pit bull Sarah Palin appears to be “dithering” when it comes to her campaign to run against this alleged terrorist, socialist ditherer.

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Weiner: Bachmann Is “Hearing Messages From The Mothership”

Rep. Anthony Weiner (NY) addressed a crowd of over 2000 construction union leaders and members at the Building and Construction Trades Department 2011 Legislative Conference on April 5th in Washington, DC. Weiner spoke about the need to be on the offensive in policy battles. In the clip above, he added some colorful commentary on Tea Party frontwoman, Michele Bachmann.

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Bachmann Screws Up Fifth Grade American History

Bachmann Flubs Fifth Grade American History

Think Progress- By Alex Seitz-Wald on Mar 12th, 2011 at 3:00 pm

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) made a high profile trip to New Hampshire today as part of a potential 2012 presidential run, but the tea party favorite, who often refers to the early days of the Republic in speeches and media appearances, embarrassingly mangled basic American history, incorrectly stating that the battles of Lexington and Concord, and the Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock, to have occurred in New Hampshire, instead of Massachusetts:

“What I love about New Hampshire and what we have in common is our extreme love for liberty,” the potential GOP presidential candidate said. “You’re the state where the shot was heard around the world in Lexington and Concord. And you put a marker in the ground and paid with the blood of your ancestors the very first price that had to be paid to make this the most magnificent nation that has ever arisen in the annals of man in 5,000 years of recorded history.” […]

“I’m thankful that you are the first in the nation state because you are the liberty state,” Bachmann said. “That is your charge. You keep that baton of liberty. You’ve done it very well for almost 20 generations from the time the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, and I’m sure the very first one came up to New Hampshire and said, ‘This is where I want to be.’”

Of course, as the school children in attendance at the speech could likely tell her, the Battles of Lexington and Concord that sparked the American revolution in 1775, and the Pilgrims’ landing, took place in Massachusetts, not New Hampshire, “but Bachmann did not correct her error when she referenced the battles again later in her speech.” Ironically, The Republican Liberty Caucus of New Hampshire, which hosted the event, handed out pocket-sized copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution “on a table a few feet from where Bachmann spoke.”

This is hardly the first time Bachmann has flubbed the country’s basic history. She has repeatedly pronounced that America was founded on diversity and guaranteed freedom for all from its beginning, completely whitewashing the existence of slavery from America’s past. In January, CNN host Anderson Cooper lambasted Bachmann for “flunking history,” saying her diversity comments were “either a deliberate rewriting of our history, or signs that she has a shaky grasp on our history.”

SOURCE

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Michele Bachmann’s ‘Bombshell’: ‘Secret’ Costs In Affordable Care Act

by Joan McCarter for Daily Kos

Tue Mar 08, 2011 at 08:20 PM EST

Dumb as a bag of hammers, or staggeringly deceitful? Of course, there’s always room for both with Rep. Michele Bachmann, who just “discovered” $105 billion in “secret” money in the Affordable Care Act. Here she is on Fox News revealing her “bombshell.”

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Now, she might not have actually read the bill she voted on, or read the law she’s been lying about for all these months. That’s entirely possible. Because that “secret” money was right there, in the bill all along, as the House Democratic leadership team tweets:

There is no “secret money.” Three full months before the House passed the Senate bill, CBO – charged with accurately estimating the cost of legislation – provided a cost estimate of the legislation (Dec 19, 2009) that included the provisions Rep. Bachmann has just “discovered.” The final cost estimate was available on March 20, 2010 – a year ago. (CBO also concluded that the Affordable Care Act will reduce the deficit by $210 billion).

MORE HERE

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Americans Simply Don’t Do Sacrifice Anymore

The president wrapped up his address Tuesday night by asking Americans to pray for the victims — both human and environmental — of the BP oil spill. I thought it was a strange way to end his first Oval Office address during a national emergency insofar as praying makes the situation appear too big for conventional solutions. As though all that remains between us and a sea of oil is the Hail Mary.

This morning it occurred to me that this was the only thing he could really ask Americans to do.

Why? Simply stated, it doesn’t require any effort to silently invoke spirituality while stopped at a traffic signal or while chewing a gluttonous mouthful of Double Down. Actually, I take back that second part. I can’t imagine doing anything other than suffering a massive infarction while eating a Double Down.

Instead of prayer, the president could have asked us all to make sacrifices towards the goal of weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels. Maybe he should have asked for sacrifice. It probably wouldn’t have hurt. But it would have been mostly ignored.

Americans simply don’t do “national sacrifice” anymore. During World War II, Americans were asked to ration everything from sugar to oil to cheese — even shoes. Those days are long gone. Today, we’re asked to go to Disneyland or the beach. Or we’re asked to pray. (It’s difficult to imagine the modern right-wing, for example, accepting the rationing of anything at the behest of the current president when most of them refuse to fill out a U.S. Census form. More on that presently.)

The BP oil spill has been a daily reminder of our toxic relationship with decomposed dinosaurs. On just about every blog and every cable news show, we’ve watched in shock-horror as 75,000,000 gallons of oil spew from the top of the Deepwater Horizon’s blowout preventer. We see it. We cringe. Some of us shout, “Why, oh, why?!” Others curse Tony Hayward and BP. Maybe some of us curse President Obama or former President Bush. A clear majority of Americans are pissed off, and they’re taking it out on everyone except themselves: the ones actually buying the oil.

Once we’re exhausted with blaming and yelling, we climb into our oversized cars, crank up the air conditioner, drive to Burger King and order a ammonia-washed beef sandwich the size of a baby — while mindlessly idling at the drive-thru.

As the president pointed out last night, scientists, experts and politicians alike have been urging us to make the transition to clean energy and away from fossil fuels. In the last ten years alone, we’ve endured the largest terrorist attack on our soil and subsequently fought two wars, all prompted by American intrusions into the Middle East to satisfy our collective petro fix.

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Sarah Palin And The Tea Party Fiasco

Sarah Palin’s still going to collect her Tea Party Convention speaker’s fee, despite the looming signs of imminent fiasco

Crooks and Liars- By David Neiwert Friday Jan 29, 2010 3:00pm

Sarah Palin confirmed on Greta Van Susteren’s show last night that she’s very much planning to show up and speak at the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville, despite the distinct odor of Scam the whole affair is giving off.

Palin: Oh, you betcha I’m going to be there. I’m going to speak there because there are people traveling from many miles away to hear what that Tea Party movement is all about and what that message is that should be received by our politicians in Washington. I’m honored to get to be there.

This, even as some of her fellow wingnuts are catching the same whiff — namely, Reps. Michele Bachmann and Marsha Blackburn, who have pulled out of the event:

In separate statements, released by their congressional offices, the lawmakers said that appearing at the convention might conflict with House ethics rules. But they also said they are concerned about how money raised from the event will be spent.

Palin last night had no such concerns — and said no one should be concerned about that big wad of cash the convention organizers are paying her:

Palin: The speaker’s fee will go right back into the cause. I’ll be able to donate it to people and those events, those things that I believe in, that will help perpetuate the message, the message being: Government, you have constitutional limits. You better start abiding by them.

Hmmmmm. It sounds like we’re going to have to rely on Sarah’s say-so when it comes to how she actually spends the money. Smells even more like Scam, doesn’t it?

Of course, the whole scenario, as David Corn explored with Keith Olbermann last night, is developing into quite a fiasco — mainly because Tea Partier and Birther J.D. Hayworth has decided to challenge Palin’s former running mate, John McCain, in the Arizona Senate primary.

Palin is staying loyal to McCain. This has outraged the Tea Partiers, as Alan Colmes points out:

She has now chose to align herself with several bad actors. What should this be called, the Rinoization of Sarah Palin. […]

She is certainly entitled to write a book and make money for her and her family, but other than what has she has done to support Republican and patriotic candidates. … Perhaps, Sarah was too busy talking to her agent about her Fox deal. Where the hell was Sarah?

This is what you get when you build a movement around paranoid right-wingers. There is probably no faction more historically famous for viciously turning on each other in struggles over money and power than right-wing populists.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch.

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National Tea Party Convention

Guess Who’s Headlining The First ‘National Tea Party Convention’?

WONKETTE 10:41 AM on Thu January 7 2010 By Juli Weiner

No one guessed anyone besides Sarah Palin, right?

This thing is taking place next month in Tennessee and also features Michele Bachmann plus Others. And, uh, it is the “first ever Tea Party Convention,” which means nothing. Christian Science Monitor with the scoop:

On its face, the gig would seem a step down for Ms. Palin, one of conservative America’s most popular and polarizing figures (not to mention major thorn in the side of the Obama White House).

But with an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll ranking a generic “Tea Party” as more popular than either Democrats or Republicans, and Palin herself rivaling the charming Mr. Obama in poll popularity, many experts see the Tea Party event as a potential milestone for a mounting, even transformational, force in US politics.

Okay so everyone just hope Sarah Palin continues to be aware of how much she prefers money to power!

[Christian Science Monitor]

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