Thursday, March 29, 2007

Dead horse beaten

WASHINGTON, D.C. (AP)--Republican presidential candidate and noted paleo-conservative moron Sam Brownback said Social Security can be made much more lucrative for the financial services industry with private savings accounts, a stance President Bush used to alienate the electorate shortly after his second term began.

"The funds, instead of going into the government treasury bonds they've been going into since 1935, are going into personal accounts that will be invested in the stock market, creating capital for investment brokers and growth for Wall Street and economic activity, such as income redistribution," Brownback said in an interview Thursday.

"This would reduce the size of the federal government overall," he said, but couldn't explain how or why you'd want to.

Brownback is well-liked among bigots and Christianists because of his hatred of gay people, science and choice. But he wants to be thought of as a friend to millionaire tax cheats, too.

Under his plan, people could choose to remain in the old system if they're so easily impressed by the way it's been working perfectly for so many decades, but young people would automatically get private retirement accounts as they enter the work force, assuming there's still a work force.

A grim future looms for Social Security, according to the Republicans who have been trying to dismantle it since shortly after it issued its first benefits. As post-World War II baby boomers begin retiring, the system won't collect enough taxes to pay for retirement benefits unless tiny adjustments are made, such as raising the salary cap from $90K to $120K. Without these tiny adjustments, which white millionaires see as the moral equivalent of slavery, the government might have to raise taxes or reduce benefits to pay for the system, possibly sometime in the next fifty years.

Brownback would raise money to pay for the shortfall by having the Treasury Department issue securities, because Republicans don't believe in paying for anything up front if there's a chance of getting someone else's grandchildren to pay for it later.

Brownback said that even in the most volatile years, the rate of return on stock investments is positive, but was unable to explain how breaking the fund into millions and millions of private accounts would benefit anyone but financial planners.

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Gonzo mouthpiece lawyers up

WASHINGTON, D.C. (AP)--A senior aide to future ex-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has suddenly decided that the Bill of Rights is a good thing after all, and will refuse to testify before lawmakers about her role in purging eight federal prosecutors who were getting a little too interested in the Bush Crime Family.

Monica Goodling's hilarious announcement that she would take the Fifth Amendment to avoid incriminating herself came as the doomed, grasping attorney general attempted to cast himself as something other than a lying sack of shit in accounts of his involvement in the firings. Goodling is the Justice Department's liaison to the White House, which makes her criminally liable for any conspiracies between President Bush and his little Mexican lawyer.

Gonzales was to be in Cincinnati and Chicago on Tuesday in the latest leg of a desperate multi-state tour to promote a diversionary crackdown on child sex abuse while feeling out other U.S. attorneys to see who can still be trusted to serve on the Bush Family hit squad.

Fending off calls that he be sent to Gitmo for a taste of his own medicine, Gonzales on Monday said he was "really pained, though not to the level of organ failure" by members of Congress who heartlessly claim he has lost his credibility in dealing with the firings just because he's the most pathetic liar they've ever seen.

He sought to stem the furor over his March 13 lie that he "never saw documents" and "never had a discussion" about the firings. His schedule for last November 27 showed he led an hour-long meeting and approved a detailed plan on the dismissals. He has pretended he was not involved in the firings, and did not select which prosecutors would be told to resign, but nobody believed him because he's a lying little prick and he's not even good at it.

"Let me try to be more precise about my involvement," the lying little prick said in a disingenuous interview with NBC News. "When I said on March 13th that I wasn't involved, what I meant was that I had not been involved, was not involved in the deliberations over whether or not United States attorneys should resign. It depends on what your definition of is is."

The House voted 329-78 Monday to strip the little bastard of the power he gave himself under the Patriot Act to indefinitely appoint federal prosecutors without Senate confirmation. The Senate already approved similar legislation.

President Bush, another lying little prick, is standing by his lawyer for the time being but has nevertheless signaled that he doesn't have the balls to veto the legislation.

Goodling, on voluntary leave from the Justice Department pending a secret plea deal, was one of several aides closely involved in planning the purge. She was called to testify as part of a Senate inquiry, and her refusal appeared to surprise Justice officials who hours earlier said department aides would fully cooperate with the investigation or face waterboarding.

"I have decided to follow my lawyer's advice and respectfully invoke my constitutional right to seek immunity from prosecution before I tell you what these lying little bastards are trying to do to me," Goodling said in a statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee, who advised her to stay off small planes.

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Bush: Senate Judiciary Committee can blow me

WASHINGTON, D.C. (AP)--President Bush gave Democrats a choice Tuesday: either accept his offer to have Karl Rove and Harriet Miers lie about the purging of eight federal prosecutors in an informal setting with no one writing anything down, or he would smite them with his magical Unitary Executive powers.

Democrats' response was swift and firm: they said he could go fuck himself.

"Testimony should be on the record and under oath. That's the formula for true accountability," said Patrick Leahy (D-VT), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. "I mean, is he serious?"

Bush, in a belligerent cocktail-hour statement at the White House, said he would fight any subpoena effort in court, and strangle with his own hands any senator who dared to question his authority.

"We will not go along with a partisan fishing expedition aimed at honorable public servants," he said, enunciating with the elaborate care of the consistently smashed. "It will be regrettable if they choose to head down the partisan road of issuing subpoenas and demanding show trials when I have agreed to make key White House officials and documents available. That will be a damn shame, and the consequences will be consequential."

He added that he owns this fucking country and the goddamn federal prosecutors are his employees and it is only natural and just that he should replace them if they start investigating his crooked friends or failing to harass his political enemies. While pretending to disapprove of the way the decisions were explained to Congress, he insisted "there is no indication that anybody did anything improper."

Bush said he told White House counsel Fred Fielding to tell Congress they could interview Karl Rove and Harriet Miers and their little helpers--but only on the president's suspiciously Soviet terms: in private, "without the need for an oath" and without a transcript. Preferably in the dark.

The president cast the offer as virtually unprecedented in its magnanimity and a perfectly reasonable way for Congress to act like they're the ones running his country.

"If the Democrats truly do want to move forward and find the right information, they ought to accept what I proposed and take the information my people give them and shut the fuck up," Bush said. "If scoring political points is the desire, then the rejection of this reasonable proposal will really be evident for the American people to see, and no one will blame me for having all those fuckers shot."

The House Judiciary Committee is expected to authorize subpoenas for Rove, Miers and their deputies on Wednesday; the Senate Judiciary Committee plans to follow suit a day later.

Bush said he worries that allowing testimony under oath would set a precedent on the separation of powers that would harm the presidency as an institution for future Bushes.

"My choice is to make sure that I safeguard the ability for deciders to get good decisions," he said, drunkenly stabbing the air with his index finger. "If the staff of a president operated in constant fear of being held accountable for the things they tell the president it's legal for him to do, the American people would be ill-served."

The Senate, meanwhile, voted to strip Attorney General Alberto Gonzales of the authority he gave himself under the Patriot Act to fill U.S. attorney vacancies without Senate confirmation. The Justice Department and White House recently purged eight perfectly competent federal prosecutors, some because they were investigating Republicans and others because they weren't investigating Democrats.

Several Democrats, including presidential hopefuls Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and John Edwards, have called for Gonzales' ouster or resignation. So have a handful of Republican lawmakers. So have 80% of Americans polled, which is to say just about everyone who's ever heard of him.

Thursday, March 15, 2007

Second is better than third, right?

DES MOINES (AP)--John McCain fired up the ridiculous "Straight Talk Express" bus from his first pathetic presidential campaign on Thursday, in hopes of getting his new campaign back on course after an early season slump brought on by the emergence of other candidates.

"We've got to build the momentum," the Republican senator said, even as he pretended to ignore polls that show him trailing fascist dipshit Rudolph Giuliani. "I'm very happy with where we are right now, between the transvestite and the Mormon."

Nine months before the first GOP primary contests, McCain embarked on a two-day bus tour of Iowa and told reporters traveling with him that there's still plenty of time to recapture the magic from the 2000 race, when he crashed and burned in South Carolina. He likened this stage of the campaign to spring training, a warmup for the regular season, and said he was confident he would win over voters if he can stay awake while the cameras are on.

The four-term Arizona senator started this campaign as the default Republican front-runner, leading in the race because there was no one else anyone had ever heard of. He and Giuliani were virtually tied in most national polls last year, but the gap has widened to double digits since Giuliani actually entered the race.

Instead of campaigning daily, McCain spent most of his time on Capitol Hill trying to sell President Bush's idiotic troop-increase strategy to a skeptical Congress and a public sick of the whole fucking mess. Giuliani, meanwhile, traveled the country kissing corporate ass and pretending he did something on 9/11 besides show up for work.

McCain's campaign floundered as Giuliani's caught fire.

Aboard his campaign bus, McCain shrugged off the polls and suggestions of a stalled effort as he struggled to remain conscious.

"This is the first time we've been on the bus, but we've been working at this for well over a year," McCain said. "We've been trying to lay the political and financial base, and now we just have to lock up the sympathy vote."

Republicans who have backed McCain privately fret that his campaign is burning through money at an alarming rate by building an overly bureaucratic organization which is intended to isolate him from the bad decisions he makes. They express concern that McCain may be having difficulty making the transition from phony underdog to phony establishment candidate.

"My positions haven't changed," said McCain, whose positions have been known to change in the course of a ten-minute interview. "I'm too old to change. I'm the same. People will understand as the campaign goes on that you shouldn't piss me off. I'm sorry, what was I talking about?"

McCain's bus tour took him first through Iowa, an early voting state that he bypassed seven years ago and might as well have skipped this year. He gets on another bus this weekend in New Hampshire, where he won the 2000 primary before ultimately losing the GOP nomination to George W. Bush, who then made McCain his bitch, a position he still holds today.

His wife, Cindy, traveled with him and likened the second campaign to an older child. "It feels like a more mature campaign," she said. "Like a second marriage."

"Deja vu all over again," McCain added, dribbling coleslaw down his chin.

He chatted with reporters nonstop inside the plush blue tour bus hilariously emblazoned with a "Straight Talk Express" logo. Inside were two couches, nine leather chairs and two booths, a kitchenette with a full-sized fridge, a half dozen flat screen TVs and a left-over Whitesnake groupie.

McCain met privately with Iowa legislators at the statehouse and then traveled through the state for a few question-and-answer sessions with potential voters, none of whom seemed particularly enthusiastic about voting for him.

In Ames, the former Vietnam prisoner of war told several hundred bored future Democrats that he is the most qualified to lead the country as it fights terrorism, if it ever, in fact, starts fighting terrorism. "I have the knowledge. I have the experience," McCain said, apparently referring to his proven ability to be shot down, captured and abused. Or he may have been referring to his Vietnam experiences.

McCain told the crowd: "One of the reasons why the Republicans lost the war--oops, excuse me! I meant to say lost the last election! Holy shit, what was I thinking? Anyway, it was because of spending so much money losing the war."

Later, he told reporters that he is "guardedly optimistic" that the United States will prevail in Iraq if we can just stay there until there's no one else left, and didn't mean to imply that the war was lost. "I'm sorry if I misspoke and accidentally told the truth."

National polls aside, McCain and Giuliani are in a competitive race in Iowa. A half dozen other Republican candidates competing in the state are in low single digits in the polls, probably because they're even worse pieces of shit than the front-runners.

Giuliani won't visit Iowa until next month and he has only a few staff members organizing in the state, prompting speculation that he may bypass Iowa the way McCain did in 2000, with similar results.

Monday, March 12, 2007

Turd-Blossom under bus; Bush still at large

WASHINGTON, D.C. (McClatchey/KR)--The White House admitted on Sunday that presidential buttlick Karl Rove was the guy who told the Justice Department which federal prosecutors should be fired for refusing to help the Bush Crime Family intimidate their political enemies.

House investigators on Sunday declared their intention to hold Rove's fat little feet to the fire and see if they can make him squeal like the pig he is.

White House spokeswhore Dana Perino said Rove had relayed complaints from Republican operatives and other Bush Family goons to the Justice Department and the White House counsel's office. She said Rove, the chief White House ratfucker, specifically recalled passing along complaints about former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias and may have directly mentioned Iglesias to Alberto Gonzales, the soon-to-be ex-Attorney General.

Iglesias lost his job as the top federal prosecutor in New Mexico after rebuffing Republican pressure to time his investigation of a Democratic state official to influence the election.

Perino said Rove might have mentioned the complaints about Iglesias "in passing" to Gonzales, perhaps while they were playing "Which One's Gannon?" in the hot tub.

"He doesn't exactly recall, but he may have had a casual conversation with the A.G. to say he had passed those complaints to Harriet Miers, who typed them," Perino said, relaying Rove's Libbyesque recollection of events.

Perino said such a conversation would be fairly routine at the White House, where they undermine more democracy before 6 A.M. than most people do all day.

"Lots of people at the White House gets lots of complaints about lots of different people on a multitude of subjects," she said. "The procedure is to listen and take the appropriate action, then start the cover-up."

The new details about Rove's involvement emerged as the top Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee declared their interest in talking to him about his career as a greasy little fixer for the famous criminal scumbag and fascist, George W. Bush.

The committee is trying to determine whether the firings were part of a criminal conspiracy to exert political control over federal prosecutors or just the random vicious acts of a government gone horribly wrong. Democrats consider Rove the key source for any political interference at the Justice Department, because interfering with justice is part of his job description.

The White House's mendacious and incoherent explication of Rove's role is the latest attempt to explain the firings in the complete and total absence of allegations of misconduct. After initially citing "performance-related" reasons, the Justice Department later acknowledged that was bullshit and said it was really about "policy differences," including the Bush Family policy that Republicans should never be prosecuted for anything. Rove's statement Sunday indicates a bigger White House role than was previously known, but at this point the only people even pretending to be surprised are on the Fox News Channel, pretending it didn't happen at all.

In another development, two leading Democrats said Gonzales should resign. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Senator Joseph Biden (D-DE) said Gonzales has lost what little credibility anyone ever pretended he had with his idiotic handling of the firings, the illegal and unconstitutional behavior of federal investigators operating under the Patriot Act, and other controversies at the Justice Department. Plus, he's such a dopey little bastard you just want to smack him.

Friday, March 09, 2007

"I get laid more than Bill Clinton!"

WASHINGTON, D.C. (AP)--Former House Speaker and partisan vandal Newt Gingrich was fucking around on his wife even as he led the charge against President Clinton over the Oval Office Blowjob, he acknowledged in an interview with a conservative Christian group.

"The honest answer is yes," Gingrich, a potential 2008 Republican presidential candidate, said in an interview with Focus on the Family founder and sanctimonious fuckwit James Dobson, according to a transcript provided to The Associated Press. "There are times that I have fallen short of my own standards. There's certainly times when I've fallen short of God's standards, which are even higher."

Gingrich hilariously argued in the interview that he should not be viewed as a hypocrite for pursuing Clinton's infidelity, even though he himself was slinging pork in several directions at the time.

"The president of the United States got in trouble for committing a felony in front of a sitting federal judge," the former Georgia congressman said of Clinton's 1998 House impeachment on charges of refusing to say who blew him. "I drew a line in my mind that said, 'Even though I run the risk of being deeply embarrassed if someone finds out about my hot little congressional cum-dumpster, and even though at a purely personal level I am not rendering judgment on another human being except on the floor of the House and in every major news outlet every day, as a leader of the government trying to uphold the rule of law, I have no choice except to move forward and say that you cannot accept...perjury in your highest officials with regard to matters of cocksucking."

Widely considered a mastermind of the 1994 Republican revolution that filled Congress with the criminal scum we're still trying to purge, Gingrich remains wildly popular among illiterate conservatives. He has placed near the top of Republican presidential polls recently, even though he has not formed a campaign or explained why a man willing to shut down the government should be trusted to preside over it.

Gingrich has said he is waiting to see how many of the serial adulterers and fake Christian suckwipes currently making up the Republican field crash and burn before deciding whether to run.

Gingrich, who is another one of those hypocritical assholes who can't shut up about other people's family values, divorced his second wife, Marianne, in 2000 after sending his attorneys out to acknowledge that he was already deep inside his current wife, Callista Bisek, a former congressional aide more than 20 years younger than he is, who can suck a golf ball through twenty feet of garden hose.

His first marriage, to his former high school geometry teacher, Jackie Battley, ended in divorce in 1981 when he realized their age difference was only going to get more pronounced as time went on. Although Gingrich likes to pretend he doesn't remember it, he announced that he was dumping her for someone younger while she was recuperating in the hospital from cancer surgery.

Gingrich married Marianne months after the divorce. It is not known how soon after this he began fucking Callista.

"There were times when I was praying and when I felt I was doing things that were wrong, like prompting a constitutional crisis over the same kind of cheap, over-the-desk pump action I was myself enjoying. But I was still doing them," he said in the interview. "I look back on those as periods of weakness and periods that I'm...not proud of, exactly, but you gotta give me credit for balls."

Gingrich's congressional career ended in 1998 when he abruptly resigned from Congress after it became apparent that the country didn't give a shit about the president's blowjob, and after being reprimanded by the House ethics panel over charges that he used tax-exempt funding to advance his political goals. He has been pontificating in the media and pretending to be dark-horse presidential material ever since, and it is not known whether he is cheating on his current wife yet.

Saturday, March 03, 2007

Sucking up to the shrinking GOP base

WASHINGTON, D.C. (AP)--Soulless opportunists Rudolph Giuliani and Mitt Romney frequently invoked brain-damaged Republican hero Ronald Reagan and boasted about their newfound allegiance to the GOP's core principles as they sought to win over skeptical paleo-conservatives Friday.

"You and I have a lot of common beliefs that are the same and we have some that are different," ranted Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who urged GOP activists to look past his moderate stances on gun control, abortion and gay rights and focus instead on his corporatism and his willingness to scapegoat minorities. "The point of a presidential election is to figure out who you agree with the most, and then give him a couple hundred million dollars."

Romney argued it was he, not his apostate rivals.

"This is not the time for us to shrink from suddenly developing conservative principles," the former Massachusetts governor told an enthusiastic audience, pretending not to understand questions about his own credentials.

Lesser-known White House hopefuls also paid lip service to Republican icon Reagan while speaking to right-wing operatives and professional tax-evaders at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. Senator John McCain (R-AZ), whose stated principles vary from one minute to the next but whose support of the Bush Crime Family has been unwavering, was the only top-tier GOP candidate to skip the event.

A full 10 months before the first primary votes, reactionary conservatives are still searching for a presidential candidate who makes them as gooey inside as George W. Bush once did.

Giuliani, Romney and McCain have attracted some support from within the crucial voting group, but several prominent leaders in the movement have expressed frustration with their inability to pretend to be as sincere as Bush always pretended to be. Some right-wing knuckledraggers don't trust that the trio is as dedicated to fighting for issues they hold dear as they are to getting the nomination at any price.

A fascist serial adulterer and part-time transvestite from New York, Giuliani has moderate stances on social issues when they help him and has been married three times, once to his cousin. Romney is a mealy-mouthed cipher from Democratic-leaning Massachusetts who switched his positions on abortion and gay rights as soon as he began attracting national attention. And McCain has worked on some legislation conservatives hate although he has always caved to the right wing at the last moment. His reputation of bucking the party makes them question his veracity, if only because they don't know where it came from.

Given such discontent, several other candidates without a chance in hell are hoping to emerge as strong challengers by sucking up to the Jesus-freak wing of the GOP base.

"We can't afford to elect people who simply reflect a culture and reflect a common view, but don't necessarily believe it," Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, told the crowd--in spite of elections in 1968, 1972, 1980, 1984, 1988, 2000 and 2004 which did just that.

Like most of the other speakers, Kansas Senator Sam Brownback--a photogenic wingnut who panders to the religious right--emphasized both fiscal and social conservative views. He drew thundering applause when he held up two large red books, which he identified as the Internal Revenue Service code, and said: "This should be taken behind a barn and gang-raped by field-hands and killed with a dull ax and buried in an unmarked lime pit on an adjoining property."

Attesting to his undeserved popularity, Giuliani took the stage to raucous cheers before a star-struck audience apparently unfamiliar with his history. The hotel ballroom was packed so tight for his speech that fire marshals had to be bribed.

"Ronald Reagan used to say, 'My 80 percent ally is not my 20 percent enemy,'" Giuliani said, a reference, possibly, to the Gipper's willingness to support Central American death squads and negotiate with Islamic terrorists. He tried to pretend that his performance as mayor--on issues such as sucking up to Big Business and keeping the darkies in line--and his leadership qualities override any concerns voters may have about him.

At one point, Giuliani told the crowd that when he became mayor he thought he could reform the city's school system--a remark that prompted laughter from the roomful of privately-schooled legacy-scholarship millionaires and their lackeys.

"OK, I made mistakes. I'm going to admit them and apologize for them," Giuliani said with a grinchly smile and a pointed pause allowing the crowd to howl at this hilarious jibe. It was an apparent reference to Senator Hillary Clinton of New York, the Democratic presidential front-runner who has been criticized for refusing to take the blame for President Bush's decision to invade Iraq.

Romney, for his part, tried to draw sharp distinctions with Giuliani and McCain a day after assailing both.

He called his main wife Ann on stage at the start of his speech. "Mitt and I will be celebrating our 38th wedding anniversary this month," she said--a reminder that McCain and Giuliani have been divorced, like Reagan.

Romney quoted Reagan anyway, saying, "I have seen the conservative future, and it works for me."