Marner
mitchethekidFor your New Years levity…
Oh dear. Elisabeth Hasselbeck of Fox News’ Fox & Friends (one of the worst shows on television, along with Fox News’ The Five), has decided to start a Twitter campaign to celebrate the end of 2014. She asks people to share what they are “over” from 2014, using the hashtag #OverIt2014. Hasselbeck started things off with this tweet:
2014 has been a year full of things we don’t want to see in the New Year. What are YOU over? Comment with #OverIt2014 http://t.co/FjE8C989d3—
FOX & Friends (@foxandfriends) December 30, 2014
Ah, the old attack on Christianity. Personally, I’m pretty over people who complain that there is an attack on Christianity. Christ. (Oops.) They don’t get to force the entire school into treating creationism as a science, so it’s an attack on Christianity. For God sakes. (Oops, again.)
Apparently, a lot of people are “over” Elisabeth Hasselbeck and her ilk. Have a look for a few laughs before moving on to more important stuff, like college football games! Happy New Year!
Left is Right 
She’s putting the “Christ” back in “Christ, what an asshole.”
(Joke shamelessly swiped from an AV Club article about Kirk Cameron’s last cinematic abomination.)
Prepare to watch Mark’s mind get blown.
http://www.democracynow.org/2014/12/31/pope_francis_calls_for_action_on
Meanwhile, it looks like neocon got kicked off the daily pitchfork site.
Here’s an interesting article: What’s wrong with Georgia?
The short answer to the titular question? Conservatism.
See, Georgia’s been doing all the stuff conservatives insist MUST be done for a healthy economy:
*Slashed taxes like crazy, primarily ones that are aimed at the rich (yes, it’ll trickle down any year now, guys!)
* Made GA a right-to-work state (suck it, unions!)
* Slashed education spending (suck it, teacher’s unions! We’ll gladly mortgage our future to spite you now!)
* One of the first states to cut the duration of unemployment benefits (from 26 weeks to 18–suck it, unemployed people!)
The result? Georgia’s economy is in the shitter, and it had the highest unemployment rate in the nation (until this last round of stats came out, which saw fellow red state Mississippi take the title for the quarter by one tenth of one percent).
But how can this be? Conservative swear that their policies stimulate the economy and spur hiring! In fact, Georgia was recently named the “Best state to do business”–and therein lies the problem. It’s good for business, but it’s lousy for actual people. Richard Joiner, a former machine operator who is now unemployed, puts it perfectly:
But according to conservatives, it’s Joiner who’s the problem, not their failed policies. Conservatives care about abstractions–“good for business,” “freedom,” ideological purity, etc.–but people don’t matter at all. Worse, people are really just obstacles to being “good for business,” to “freedom,” and certainly to ideological purity.
After all, as the article points out, Joiner’s doing everything he’s supposed to do:
Yet according to conservatives, Joiner’s just a lazy moocher* trying to live high on the hog on the decadent luxury of unemployment. It’s a hell of a one-two punch: Conservatives destroy the economy, then they drastically shrink, if not outright remove, resources that would help the victims of said economic destruction get back on their feet.
Of course, Georgia is only the latest example of the crushing failure of conservatism. Kansas, famously, went full metal wingnut under Brownback, and the result has been pure calamity. Ohio tried conservative tax-cutting schemes, and all it got in return was shrunken revenues, leading to a reduction in services. Scott Walker makes wingnuts tumescent, but he’s been a failure for Wisconsin, as the Walker economy has been, at best, lousy (meanwhile, neighboring Minnesota, saddled as it is with commie socialist economy-killing liberals, is leaving Wisconsin in the dust). And in the big picture, the Bush administration followed the conservative line, slashed taxes, promised tremendous economic growth, and instead brought us the opposite: tremendous economic devastation. And then along comes Obama, implementing policies conservatives promise will lead to untold economic destruction, and instead he simply pulled the economy out of the Bush-created ditch and now has an economic record that tops Reagan’s (I know, not exactly the highest hurdle to clear, but for whatever reason, Reagan is the wingnuts’ gold standard).
Despite being wrong about everything–wrong about what liberal economic policies will do, devastatingly wrong about what conservative economic policies will do–conservatives insist that only they know what’s best for the economy. With a track record of failure after failure after failure, they still consider themselves shining successes. The conservative delusion is fun to mock, but it has very real, very bad consequences for the nation, and that’s not so funny.
*(Interesting to note that for all its “freedom” and whatnot, Georgia depends on federal money for nearly 40 percent of its state budget. Red states: Always the real moochers.)
Sounds like Sam Brownback’s Kansas.
Oh yeah, Kansas had been the prior horrific failure/embarrassment for conservatism. But lest you think said embarrassment/failure is over, things just keep getting worse. Elections have consequences, as the saying goes, and the people of Kansas are learning the hard way that one of the chief consequences of electing wingnuts is economic devastation.
Yet according to Mark, government in the problem.
According to Spook, the American public has been asleep since at least 1850. Then he says, “Perhaps 2015 will be the year when a significant portion of the American public wake up and realize what’s going on. I’m not holding my breath.”
Haha. If they haven’t woken up for 165 years, I wouldn’t be holding my breath, either. lol
Yet another thing conservatives got wrong (in particular Paul Ryan, who just can’t seem to get anything right): Inflation. That’s what you get when you can’t think beyond pitiful Ayn Rand talking points. And remember: Paul Ryan is supposed to be the conservative “wonk.” Yeesh. Kinda sad when your best and brightest is a D+ student. No wonder the poor guy is demanding that the CBO use “dynamic scoring” (better known as lying) for his ongoing jokes known as budget proposals. When reality is this brutal to you, you’ve gotta try your best to force everybody to go with your lies.
It truly boggles the mind the number of things conservatives get wrong, yet they are unable to recognize much less admit anything.