Third Time’s the Smarm

From Crooks and Liars:

Mitt Romney is rebranding himself again, this time as a poverty fighter

Seriously?

Seriously.

“Under President Obama, the rich have gotten richer, income inequality has gotten worse and there are more people in poverty than ever before,” Romney said. “Under this president, his policies have not worked. Their liberal policies are good every four years for a campaign, but they don’t get the job done.”… He added, “People want to see rising wages and they deserve them.”

By the time the debates begin, he’ll have blamed the Great Depression and ever other evil that Republican policies have brought about on the Democrats.

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Rick Scott’s Seamus

Looks like Gov. Fire Marshal Bill had no other use for his dog Reagan than as a prop.

Shortly after winning the GOP nomination in 2010, Rick Scott announced to the world through Facebook that his family had rescued a Labrador retriever.

And, with help from his Facebook friends, Scott gave it a name: Reagan.

…

Asked last week what had happened to the dog, Scott’s current and former communications directors refused to answer.

…

On Monday, the Times asked the governor to clear up the mystery.

“He was a rescue dog,” Scott said, “and he couldn’t be around anybody that was carrying anything, and so he wouldn’t get better.”

I guess prop is better than poop – but a lying scumbag is a lying scumbag, meaning that, even though that proffered excuse one that some people have had to give after a shelter pet proved to be more than they could handle (it does happen), if you believe Rick Scott then you probably also believed Mitt the Flip when he said that Seamus enjoyed being in his car-rooftop dog cage.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I Give You the 2036 Republican Presidential Nominee

From NPR:

A Texas judge has rejected a request from prosecutors that she send a teenager to jail for driving drunk and causing a crash last year that killed four people and seriously wounded two others.

The case grabbed attention across the nation in December when the boy’s attorneys argued that the 16-year-old defendant suffered from “affluenza” — effectively, that he was coddled too much by his wealthy parents, who have never held him accountable for his actions.

District Judge Jean Boyd ruled then that the teen would get 10 years of probation for causing the deaths. It was conditioned on his getting long-term psychological and addiction treatment. If the terms of the probation are violated, the teen could be put in prison.

The boy’s parents agreed to send him to an undisclosed rehabilitation center in California that would reportedly cost them $450,000 a year — though there was no word on exactly how long he would likely be there.

No confirmation yet as to whether his $450K/year ‘treatment’ is actually an internship at Bain Capital.

Remember: Decrying the Term ‘Class War’ is a War Crime

From comments to a piece up at Jezebel:

I’ll never forget the day I sat next to a rich girl in my freshman year of college as she complained how people who shopped at Old Navy were “so trashy” while I wore a v-neck Old Navy t-shirt. Here I had been, thinking I was fairly trendy, as Old Navy had just come to my town a few years ago, and was very popular there. The shock, and the hurt were enormous.

And I grew up lower middle class, far from poor.

…

I’ll never forget the time in college when I mentioned eating at IHOP, and a dorm-mate started laughing at me. She thought it was a hilarious joke, because “only poor people in movies eat at IHOP.” She’d never even seen one, coming from a fancy town where there were no chain restaurants.

And Mitt the Flip and Marie AnnToinette still don’t understand why, even if there was no such thing as Obamacare, enough real people who have had it with the clueless monied elite would have still voted as they did so as to keep Marie AnnToinette’s top priority as being Rafalca, and not replacing all of the things in the White House that ‘those people’ used.

So Much for Romney Losing

Why bother with Pres. ‘Corporations are People’ when there are plenty of Mini-Mes to do his bidding?

A bill introduced by Montana state Rep. Steve Lavin would give corporations the right to vote in municipal elections:

Provision for vote by corporate property owner. (1) Subject to subsection (2), if a firm, partnership, company, or corporation owns real property within the municipality, the president, vice president, secretary, or other designee of the entity is eligible to vote in a municipal election as provided in [section 1].

I won’t copy it here, but there’s nothing in that subsection 2 that would prohibit an ‘own one square inch of Florida’ or ‘buy a Scottish title’ scheme that would enable an infinite number of distinct corporations from magically coming into existence and, thereafter, each owning one square inch of “real property within the municipality” to, thereby, manufacture any number of votes necessary to erase any and all electoral influence by real people.

The idea that “corporations are people, my friend” as Mitt Romney put it, is sadly common among conservative lawmakers.

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The bill does contain some limits on these new corporate voting rights. Most significantly, corporations would not be entitled to vote in “school elections,” and the bill only applies to municipal elections. So state and federal elections would remain beyond the reach of the new corporate voters.

For now.

In fairness to Lavin’s fellow lawmakers, this bill was tabled shortly after it came before a legislative committee, so it is unlikely to become law.

For now.

According to the Center for Media and Democracy, Lavin was a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council’s (ALEC) now defunct Public Safety and Elections Task Force.

Frogs…

Pots of water…

Increasing heat…

Yadda, yadda, yadda….

Pic of the Day: Dec. 31, 2012 (Special ‘Goodbye to 2012 and all of its Republican Nutjob Spores’ Edition)

Okay, the photo was taken in 2011 just beyond the right field fence during a Quad Cities River Bandits game at Modern Woodmen Park in Davenport, Iowa, but it really, really, really applies more to 2012, Mitt, Ann, Tagg, et. al.

Then it is Equally “Effective” to Compare Antonin Scalia to Adolf Hitler (Or, in the Alternative, to Bernie Madoff)

From Raw Story:

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia told an audience at Princeton University on Monday that comparing same sex coupling to bestiality and murder is politically “effective.” According to the Associated Press (AP), Scalia was explaining to a question by a gay student, Duncan Hosie, who asked the conservative judge why he considers it necessary to draw parallels between laws banning LGBT sex and laws banning bestiality and murder.

“I don’t think it’s necessary, but I think it’s effective,” Scalia replied, adding that he believes legislative bodies are within their purview to ban acts that they believe are immoral.

Fine…

Catholic Church?

You are ooutttttaaaaa here!!!!!!!!!!!!

Seventh Circuit judge and University of Chicago lecturer Richard A. Posner criticized Reading Law in The New Republic, saying Scalia’s judicial philosophy was “incoherent” and ideologically blinkered.

Posner also pointed out that Scalia’s book and his judicial rulings cite cases that never actually established the things that Scalia and his co-author Bryan A. Garner claim they established.

A Republican con artist?  Who’da thunk it?

(And, yes, before anyone says it: I know that Posner was also appointed by Reagan – but, if you noitice, no Republican has been intellectually honest enough to elevate him to the DC 9.)

“How many readers of Scalia and Garner’s massive tome,” [Posner] wondered, “will do what I have done — read the opinions cited in their footnotes and discover that in discussing the opinions they give distorted impressions of how judges actually interpret legal texts?”

What was the honest phrase that was attributed to Mitt Romney even though he was never honest enough to say it?  Oh yeh: ‘I can lie faster than you can fact check.’

Advantage Judge Posner (though I suspect that Posner’s critique will be banned at the law schools at Ave Maria, Liberty and Regent Universities.)