Comments

  2. Ray, rude-ass yankee says

    This should be required viewing for all members of congress, especially the teabaggers. They don’t even understand the document they purport to uphold.

  4. Crudely Wrott says

    Happy Birthday, Roy!
    And thanks for the tune. Somewhere my junior high civics and social studies teachers are smiling, snappin’ their fingers and doing the mashed potato like it’s goin’ outa style. ;^>

  7. rumleech says

    He has a not bad idea in the video. Maybe you can all send dunce caps to your tea-bagger representatives. Won’t change anything but they are cheap to make. Happy birthday to Roy (and Khantron).

  8. Walton says

    Happy birthday, Roy! I love so many of his songs. Especially the classic ones from the Bush years, like “Chickenhawk”, “Defenders of Marriage” and “Creation Science”. I also think “End of the Ship” is awesome.

  10. Beatrice, an amateur cynic looking for a happy thought says

    Happy birthday, Roy!
    Happy birthday, Khantron!

  14. awakeinmo says

    Happy Birthday Roy and Khantron!

    Brilliant! I must forward this to my dad to send to all his tea party friends.

  16. says

    Happy Birthday, Roy. Great song.

    Bad news from the right wing — lemmings over the cliff category:

    Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.) supported a clean bill, but reversed course this morning. Rep. Lou Barletta (R-Pa.) was on record backing this resolution, but he too switched sides. Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), who’s been so critical of his party’s radical wing that he compared Republican extremists to “lemmings with suicide vests,” even started lying about his support for a clean CR.

    Link.

  17. says

    International consequences of Republican chicanery in Congress:

    The bitter fiscal stalemate in Washington is producing nervous ripples from London to Bali, with increasing anxiety that the United States might actually default on a portion of its government debt, set off global financial troubles and undercut fragile economic recoveries in many countries.

    Five years after the financial crisis in the United States helped spread a deep global recession, policy makers around the world again fear collateral damage, this time with their nations becoming victims not of Wall Street’s excesses but of a political system in Washington that to many foreign eyes no longer seems to be able to function efficiently.

    Link.

  18. Bicarbonate says

    Well if the rethugs are so determined to “get something” out of their shutdown, maybe Obama could buy them all tickets to Disneyland. Problem solved.

  19. says

    Jon Stewart analyzes the Republican take on the debt ceiling and on defaulting on our debts. Scroll down for video.

    http://www.salon.com/2013/10/08/must_see_morning_clip_republicans_are_nuts/

    Michelle Bachmann, rabid Republican, analyzes President Obama’s foreign strategy:

    In an interview with Understanding the Times host Jan Markell on Saturday, Rep. Michele Bachmann accused President Obama of giving aid to Al Qaeda, which she said is proof that we are living in the Last Days. Of course, on the same day Bachmann gave the interview, a Delta Force operation approved by Obama nabbed a key Al Qaeda figure in Libya. …

    Bachmann said that the Al Qaeda funding (which isn’t happening) is a sign of the End Times: “This happened and as of today the United States is willingly, knowingly, intentionally sending arms to terrorists, now what this says to me, I’m a believer in Jesus Christ, as I look at the End Times scripture, this says to me that the leaf is on the fig tree and we are to understand the signs of the times, which is your ministry, we are to understand where we are in God’s end times history.”

    “Rather than seeing this as a negative, we need to rejoice, Maranatha Come Lord Jesus, His day is at hand,” Bachmann continued. “When we see up is down and right is called wrong, when this is happening, we were told this; these days would be as the days of Noah.”

    http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/bachmann-obama-supporting-al-qaeda-proving-we-are-end-times

    What I’m wondering is this: If the debt ceiling is not raised, how will Obama continue to send funding to Al Qaeda in order to bring about the End Times? Seems to me that rabidly religious Republicans may be at cross purposes here.

  22. says

    Rolling Stone weighs in on the “Tea Party Morons”:

    http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/pictures/eight-tea-party-morons-destroying-america-20131008

    Excerpt:

    Ted Yoho
    State: Florida
    Elected: 2012
    Core Beliefs: Compares Republicans fighting to defund Obama­care to “Rosa Parks, Lech Walesa [and] Martin Luther King.” Claims tanning-salon tax is bigoted against white people: “It’s a racist tax.” Says Bill of Rights ensures civilian access to military weaponry: “When you read the Second Amendment. . . the militia had the same equipment as the military to protect them against the tyrannical government.”

  23. blf says

    An expert can correct me, but I believe there is a small error in the song: The Constitution says nothing directly about the Supreme Court being able to rule that a law is unconstitutional. That capability was “institutionalized in the United States by the Supreme Court ruling in Marbury v. Madison“, as Ye Pffft! of All Knowledge puts it.

    (And happy new orbit, Ray!)

     ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

    I very strongly recommend reading today’s Paul Krugman column in The New York Times, The Boehner Bunglers:

    The federal government is shut down, we’re about to hit the debt ceiling (with disastrous economic consequences), and no resolution is in sight. How did this happen?

    The main answer, which only the most pathologically “balanced” reporting can deny, is the radicalization of the Republican Party. As Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein put it last year in their book, “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,” the G.O.P. has become “an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

    But there’s one more important piece of the story. Conservative leaders are indeed ideologically extreme, but they’re also deeply incompetent. So much so, in fact, that the Dunning-Kruger effect — the truly incompetent can’t even recognize their own incompetence — reigns supreme.

    …

    It has been obvious for years that the modern Republican Party is no longer capable of thinking seriously about policy. Whether the issue is climate change or inflation, party members believe what they want to believe, and any contrary evidence is dismissed as a hoax, the product of vast liberal conspiracies.

    …

    Everybody not inside the [republican] bubble realizes that Mr. Obama can’t and won’t negotiate under the threat that the House will blow up the economy if he doesn’t — any concession at all would legitimize extortion as a routine part of politics. Yet Republican leaders are just beginning to get a clue, and so far clearly have no idea how to back down. Meanwhile, the government is shut, and a debt crisis looms. Incompetence can be a terrible thing.

  24. tbtabby says

    Happy birthday, Roy! You’ve still got the talent for teaching the right-wingers a lesson, literally in this case.

    And if the Teabaggers aren’t willing to take a lesson on how the government works from a hippie like Roy, maybe they’ll take it from two WWII veterans.

  25. says

    Tea Party news from Arizona, comparing Obama to Hitler:

    Think Progress link.

    Arizona State Rep. Brenda Barton (R) compared President Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler in a Facebook post Monday criticizing the rangers in the shuttered National Park Service for keeping the parks closed. She called on rogue “Constitutional Sheriffs” to arrest park service rangers for doing their jobs.

    Barton initially posted, urging citizens to encourage their local sheriffs to consider “revoking the arrest powers (that they granted in the first place) to federal agents operating within their county.” … But in a second posting, Barton minced no words, calling Obama “De Fuhrer [sic]” and urging local sheriffs to arrest park rangers who enforce rules keeping people out of National Parks that are closed due to the federal government shutdown.

    It’s quite a story. Barton, a right-wing state lawmaker who thinks she knows how to spell Hitler references, is angry about the government shutdown affecting national parks. From there, she somehow convinced herself that the president is “dictating beyond his authority.” How? No one knows. Does she realize it was lawmakers from her own party that are responsible for the shutdown? Apparently not.

    Asked about her online comments, Barton told the Arizona Capitol Times, “It’s not just the death camps. (Hitler) started in the communities, with national health care and gun control. You better read your history. Germany started with national health care and gun control before any of that other stuff happened. And Hitler was elected by a majority of people.”…

    Maddow Blog link. Check out the photo of Baron. It’s priceless.

    Barton is listed as an Apostolic Christian, whatever that is, on Vote Smart’s website.

  26. says

    In an article titled The Reign Of Morons Is Here, Charles Piece examined the crop of Republicans about to devastate the world economy. An excerpt of from the Esquire article is below:

    …

    In the year of our Lord 2010, the voters of the United States elected the worst Congress in the history of the Republic. There have been Congresses more dilatory. There have been Congresses more irresponsible, though not many of them. There have been lazier Congresses, more vicious Congresses, and Congresses less capable of seeing forests for trees. But there has never been in a single Congress — or, more precisely, in a single House of the Congress — a more lethal combination of political ambition, political stupidity, and political vainglory than exists in this one, which has arranged to shut down the federal government because it disapproves of a law passed by a previous Congress, signed by the president, and upheld by the Supreme Court, a law that does nothing more than extend the possibility of health insurance to the millions of Americans who do not presently have it, a law based on a proposal from a conservative think-tank and taken out on the test track in Massachusetts by a Republican governor who also happens to have been the party’s 2012 nominee for president of the United States. That is why the government of the United States is, in large measure, closed this morning. …

    We have elected an ungovernable collection of snake-handlers, Bible-bangers, ignorami, bagmen and outright frauds, a collection so ungovernable that it insists the nation be ungovernable, too. We have elected people to govern us who do not believe in government.

    … We have elected a national legislature in which the true power resides in a cabal of vandals, a nihilistic brigade that believes that its opposition to a bill directing millions of new customers to the nation’s insurance companies is the equivalent of standing up to the Nazis in 1938, to the bravery of the passengers on Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, and to Mel Gibson’s account of the Scottish Wars of Independence in the 13th Century. … we handed ourselves over to the reign of morons.

    This is what they came to Washington to do — to break the government of the United States. It doesn’t matter any more whether they’re doing it out of pure crackpot ideology, or at the behest of the various sugar daddies that back their campaigns, or at the instigation of their party’s mouthbreathing base. It may be any one of those reasons. It may be all of them. …

    Both sides did not do this. Both sides are not to blame. There is no compromise to be had here that will leave the current structure of the government intact. There can be no reward for this behavior. I am less sanguine than are many people that this whole thing will redound to the credit of the Democratic party. For that to happen, the country would have to make a nuanced judgment over who is to blame that, I believe, will be discouraged by the courtier press of the Beltway and that, in any case, the country has not shown itself capable of making. …

    With the vandals tucked away in safe, gerrymandered districts, and their control over state governments probably unshaken by events in Washington, there will be no great wave election that sweeps them out of power. I do not see profound political consequences for enough of them to change the character of a Congress gone delusional. The only real consequences will be felt by the millions of people affected by what this Congress has forced upon the nation, which was the whole point all along.

  27. David Marjanović says

    Michelle Bachmann

    Michele. Her parents seem to have believed she was a male Italian.