1. Pat Sajak (TV Celebrity). The popular right-wing moron offered this valuable observation to the dialogue on climate change:
“I now believe global warming alarmists are unpatriotic racists knowingly misleading for their own ends. Good night.”
No comment necessary.
2. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. Walker, who is currently suing the federal government to enable Wisconsin to drug test food stamp applicants, is trying to package this as a way to help low-income people:
"For us, it's not a punitive thing, it's a progressive thing," Walker told The Huffington Post. "We're trying to help people who are in need of our assistance to get jobs . . . .because the best thing we can do with them is to make sure they get the skills and education they need, and make sure they are drug free if they have an addiction, to get back in the workforce."
Apparently it escaped Walker’s knowledge register that the majority of adults living receiving food stamps are either working or are not considered eligible to work because they're retired, disabled or students. To say nothing of the children Walker wants to deny nutritional assistance because their parent smoked a joint. Walker claims that many employers have told him that they'd hire more people if only they could find drug-free applicants. Ask to name the employers who say this, he responded:
"Well, I've talked to them for years. I'd have to go back and look through my schedule over the years, but we've had employer after employer say that consistently that they want employees that are drug free and they want employees that can pass basic employability skills."
Don’t hold your breath for his list of employers. The austerity-minded governor also has no problem spending for drug testing, despite the fact that drug testing government aid applicants has been shown to be a waste of money in states that tried this before Walker got to it. The cost of testing a lot of applicants turns out to outweigh the savings from rejecting benefits the tiny percentage of applicants who fail their tests. Walker’s effort is just one more example of right-wing disdain for low-income people whom they blame for being poor. Why don’t they just come out and say it?
3. Tom Perkins. Perkins, the billionaire venture capital huckster, and Carly Fiorina backer, who last year in a letter to the Wall Street Journal wailed about “a rising tide of hatred of the successful one-percent,” saying it was like Nazi Germany’s “war on its one percent, namely its Jews.”
To relieve the plight of the put-upon rich victims, Perkins offered “The Tom Perkins System”: Voting, he explained, should be like owning stock in a corporation with rich taxpayers getting more votes.
“You pay a million dollars in taxes, you get a million votes.”
Pretty fitting he would back Fiorina, who as CEO of Hewlett Packard drove its stock value down and fired 30,000 employees; both are afflicted with malignant narcissism.
4. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). So we won’t get McCarthy as speaker-of-the-House. This probably pissed off Fox News’ Sean Hannity, who in an interview before McCarthy dropped out of the Speaker’s competition, got the Bakersfield Congressman to promise to defund Planned Parenthood, executive amnesty and immigration, Obamacare, and repeal the Iranian nuclear deal, which he called an unmitigated disaster that would lead to a modern day Holocaust. He asked McCarthy: “Will you tell conservative America tonight that you will fight to the end … to defund those issues and use the power of the purse?”
“Yes, the answer is yes,” McCarthy said.
The power of the purse! If the President and Senate don’t agree to these promises, then the government shuts down. This is what right-wing conspiracy extremism has come to: outright extortion.
5. Former Judge, Andrew P. Napolitano, Fox News Channel’s “Senior Judicial Analyst.” Seething over this Pope's demonstrated compassion towards the poor, his embrace of immigrants, and his exhortations to preserve the natural environment, the Republican Party has apparently settled on a strategy of, quite literally, demonizing him. In a stunningly wretched column truly worthy of the unofficial mouthpiece of the GOP, Napolitano makes the breathtaking leap to linking Pope Francis to the Biblical Antichrist:
“The pope has seriously disappointed those who believe the Roman Catholic Church preserves and teaches the Truth. The Truth is Christ risen and unity with Him. It is not a debate about the minimum wage or air conditioning.” . . . “Pope Francis is popular on the world stage, and the crowds love him, but if he fails in his basic duties as the pope, if his concern is more for secular than sacred, if he aids the political agenda of the atheistic left, he is a false prophet leading his flock to a dangerous place, where there is more central planning and less personal liberty.”
Similar rhetoric is being used by other right-wing news outlets, including the Washington Times and Newsmax. The Pope’s embrace of “leftist” positions on immigration and climate change, two of the GOP’s most sacred cows, poses a serious threat: he must be marginalized at all costs. While the conservative right also condemns the Pope for changing Catholic policy towards annulment and abortion, its core message is to paint the Pope as an anti-capitalist demon, worthy of the label “Marxist,” which they use to discredit anyone advocating government regulation of corporations—most importantly the fossil fuel industry. The Pope’s pronouncements on immigration threaten the anti-immigration consensus that holds the fragile GOP coalition together. Without this glue the Republican structure begins to fall apart.
In trying to foment fear and hatred of this Pope through such dog-whistle rhetoric, the Republican Party has succeeded in debasing itself even more than it has already done with its ignorant policies.
6. President-seeker Ben Carson. With Carson passing Trump, he’s coming under more scrutiny for past comments he’s made. Among several that indicate a weak intellectual grasp on reality, Carson said he believed Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was encouraged by the devil.
“Amazingly, there are a significant number of scientists who do not believe it, but they're afraid to say anything," Carson added, saying he would be writing a book, "The Organ of Species," that shows how the organs of the body refute evolution.
Carson's deeper thoughts on how the world works, on morality, on existence do kind of answer one burning question about Carson—how in the hell he thinks he should be president. He's so steeped in magical, black and white thinking, so sure of his interpretation of the "Word of God" that he's probably never questioned his own qualifications.
7. More Ben Carson. I don’t know if the soft-spoken Carson is insane, but he sure has a lot of crazy ideas. The neurosurgeon has said he wants to overturn Roe v. Wade and do away with Medicare and Medicaid. His latest mind-boggling proposal is to re-purpose the Department of Education. He doesn’t want to shut it down; he wants to turn it into an investigatory body that would:
“monitor our institutions of higher education for extreme political bias.”
If a Carson administration decided it disapproved of the “extreme” political speech on a university campus, the school would lose its federal funding. Asked about this on Meet the Press, Carson patiently explained to a skeptical Chuck Todd that he simply meant, well, exactly that. The federal government would "invite students at the universities to send in their complaints" about political bias among their professors, upon which Ben Carson's government would "investigate" those professors for improper political bias, and institutions found to be harboring that "propaganda," to use Dr. Ben Carson's word for it, would lose their funding.
Reminded that Carson’s definition of “propaganda” might look like “free speech” to others, the Republican replied, in a bit of a non-sequitur, “Well, that’s why I said we’re going to have the students send in. And we will investigate.”
As someone who believes that the theory of evolution is the work of the devil and that the Big Bang Theory is a “fairy tale,” would there be any limit to what President Carson might find “improper” and “propaganda?” How would Carson respond if a student objected to a course’s content? Would he order it cancelled or just require pre- and post-class disclaimers, like “this course could be hazardous to your health.”
8. Clay County Director of Schools Jerry Strong. Strong announced that the entire school district was closing until further notice due to lack of funding. If it wasn’t shocking enough that such an announcement was be made in the middle of the school year, leaving parents and students in a lurch, his explanation took incredulity a step further. Inept management? Nope! Inability to pass local taxes to support the school? No way. Not even excessive teacher union demands, a popular conservative bogeyman. The reason? Obamacare!:
"Clay County's inability to generate the revenue to offset the mandates is what's caused this to come to a head," he said. "The straw that broke the camel's back was really the Affordable Care Act for us and it has made it very difficult for us to have our employees properly covered and meet the mandates of the law. That was going to require new revenue and the commission felt like they couldn't do that through a tax increase."
Thanks, Obama! Through your insidious plan to get affordable healthcare for educators, you have forced their hand. Where has Clay County, one of the most impoverished counties in America, with thousands of residents lacking health coverage, turned for political support? Not to a pro-ACA democrat (Al Gore used to represent the district), but to the far right. It elected Tea Party Republican Diane Black in 2010 and went 62/37 for Romney in 2012. Go figure.
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And the winner is:
Napolitano is a very worthy candidate, but because of his monthly double the winner this month is Ben Carson.
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