Darryl Issa Spills The Beans

Issa admits in a self-satisfied fashion that 20 years of Republican nothingburger smears, capped by his and Trey Gowdy's witch-hunts which have come up empty, have achieved their purpose:

You know, people often ask Trey Gowdy and myself, what did our investigations do?” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) told Boston Herald Radio on Friday morning. Gowdy currently chairs the House Select Committee on Benghazi, while Issa conducted his own investigation in 2012 when he served as chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

“Well what they did is that they opened up an opportunity for the American people to sort of smell what’s in the garbage can,” Issa said. “And I think that’s the reason that a devout socialist who wants to nationalize almost everything in America is close to and probably will beat Hillary here in New Hampshire. It’s not because they like Republicans. It’s because they don’t trust Hillary.”

Yes, Issa, they don't. So your party's 20 years of lying implications, and your and Gowdy's part in that, have accomplished their purpose. Congratulations, you miserable piece of crap.

A Video The Donald Doesn't Want You To See

Here's a 2-hour UNFLATTERING documentary about Donald Trump's rise to his present position:

Republican Sabotage

Click here for an article at Daily Kos by Jon Per entitled "How the Obama economy overcame Republican sabotage."

It's a long article, but well worth the read.

La Dowd On Palin's Endorsement Of Trump

Click here for MoDo's article in The New York Times entitled "Sarah Palin Saves Feminism." The devastating finale:

But Palin has done us a favor by proving that a woman can stumble, babble incoherently on stage and spew snide garbage, and it isn’t a blot on the female copybook.

Minnesota Turnover - Pawlenty to Dayton

Click here for an article in the Huffington Post by C. Robert Gibson entitled "This Billionaire Governor Taxed the Rich and Increased the Minimum Wage -- Now, His State's Economy Is One of the Best in the Country."

When he took office in January of 2011, Minnesota governor Mark Dayton (billionaire heir to the Target fortune) inherited a $6.2 billion budget deficit and a 7 percent unemployment rate from his predecessor, Tim Pawlenty, the soon-forgotten Republican candidate for the presidency who called himself Minnesota's first true fiscally-conservative governor in modern history. Pawlenty prided himself on never raising state taxes -- the most he ever did to generate new revenue was increase the tax on cigarettes by 75 cents a pack. Between 2003 and late 2010, when Pawlenty was at the head of Minnesota's state government, he managed to add only 6,200 more jobs.

Dayton raised the state income tax (from 7.85% to 9.85%) on individuals earning over $150,000 and couples earning $250,000 filing jointly; he raised the state minimum wage to $9.50 (in increments until 2018). Since Dayton took power from Pawlenty in 2011, Minnesota has added 172,000 jobs to the economy; Pawlenty added a meager 6,200 jobs -- in two terms.

Even though Minnesota's top income tax rate is the 4th-highest in the country, it has the 5th-lowest unemployment rate in the country at 3.6 percent. According to 2012-2013 U.S. census figures, Minnesotans had a median income that was $10,000 larger than the U.S. average, and their median income is still $8,000 more than the U.S. average today.

Despite the fearmongering over businesses fleeing from Dayton's tax cuts, 6,230 more Minnesotans filed in the top income tax bracket in 2013, just one year after Dayton's tax increases went through. As of January 2015, Minnesota has a $1 billion budget surplus, and Gov. Dayton has pledged to reinvest more than one third of that money into public schools. And according to Gallup, Minnesota's economic confidence is higher than any other state.

Minnesota is far outperforming its Republican test-tube neighbor Wisconsin under conservative star and Koch brothers' pawn Scott Walker.

It's official -- trickle-down economics is bunk.

More NYT Book Reviews

Two more recent NYT reviews of "Why the Right Went Wrong" and "Too Dumb to Fail," by E.J. Dionne and Matt Lewis respectively. Click here for the article.

NYT Review of Jane Mayer's "Dark Money"

Click here for the full article.

By the mid-term elections in 2010:

The [Koch] brothers had spent or raised hundreds of millions of dollars to create majorities in their image. They had succeeded. And not merely at the polls: They had helped to finance and organize an interlocking network of think tanks, academic programs and news media outlets that far exceeded anything the liberal opposition could put together.

Mayer believes that the Koch brothers and a small number of allied plutocrats have essentially hijacked American democracy, using their money not just to compete with their political adversaries, but to drown them out.

Cat Learns To Use GoPro - Takes Better Selfies Than I Do

Click here for a the article from Team Notey.

The W. Economy

Answer to a question in Quora, by Chris Joose:

The Bush administration came into office with a budget that paid down not just interest on the debt, but principal as well- and Clinton was pushing to pay the debt down more aggressively still, to the tune of paying it off entirely by 2015 (tho he never did get that through congress).  Granted, he came in with a somewhat soft economy, as the market had corrected after the .com bubble, so it's not unreasonable to hedge by saying that everything wasn't all daisies and rainbows on the economic front.  That said, the Bush administration had every ability and opportunity (politically and economically) to manage costs and keep the budget under control- but it simply did not.

Bush entered office with a budget surplus, and a majority of the house controlled by his party.  After his first mid-term election, his party controlled both houses of congress, meaning his party controlled both the executive and the legislature for 4 years.  During this period, the following happened:

• Tax cuts, primarily for the wealthy.
• Wars. Not paid for, not even put on the budget. One aspect of these wars, new in our era, is that they were largely conducted by mercenaries and contractors, who happened to have generous contract terms and close personal relationships with members of the Administration.
• Medicare, part D- which forbade the government from negotiating drug prices- in effect, a great big taxpayer-funded giveaway to the pharmaceutical industry.
• 'benign' non-enforcement of any sort of financial crime you can describe, which led to the biggest financial meltdown in living memory
• A series of recessions, each characterized by 'jobless recoveries', loose monetary policy, continued tax cuts, and the creation of a new security agency with enormous cash flow and zero accountability for it
• General mismanagement and enormous growth of the government, but without even a sop to controlling costs, unless you count this: the administration cut the budget for government auditors, whose function is to control waste, fraud, and abuse.  Typically, a dollar spent on an auditor returns 20 in prevented waste, and it's clear from history that it was not an accident.

Politically, the Bush administration had everything it needed to continue paying down the debt.  When Clinton left office, we were paying down principal on the debt.  But it seems to have deliberately made choices to siphon as much money into the pockets of the well-connected as possible, with disastrous fiscal results

8 Tai Chi Breathing Exercises

White Supremacist Anti-Government Bomb Plot, 2003

This is the Wikipedia entry for "Tyler poison gas plot." Do you remember this? I don't. I was living in Ireland at the time, but nevertheless, you'd think this would be enormous news.

The Tyler poison gas plot was an American attempt at domestic terrorism thwarted in April 2003 with the arrest of three individuals in Tyler, Texas, and the seizure of a cyanide gas bomb along with a large arsenal that included at least 100 other conventional bombs, machine guns, an assault rifle, an unregistered silencer, and 500,000 rounds of ammunition. The chemical stockpile seized included sodium cyanide, hydrochloric acid, nitrite acid and acetic acid.

The three individuals were linked to white supremacist and anti-government groups.

They were: William J. Krar, originally from New Hampshire; Judith Bruey, Krar's common-law wife; and Edward Feltus of Old Bridge, New Jersey

Feltus was a member of the New Jersey Militia. Krar was suspected of making his living travelling across the country selling bomb components and other weapons to violent underground anti-government groups. Federal authorities had their eye on Krar since at least 1995 when ATF agents investigated a possible plot to bomb government buildings, but Krar was not charged. Since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, their attention was focused on middle-eastern terrorist activities and were only alerted to Krar's recent activities by accident when he mailed Feltus a package of counterfeit birth certificates from North Dakota, Vermont and West Virginia, and United Nations Multinational Force and Defence Intelligence Agency IDs. The package was mistakenly delivered to a Staten Island man who alerted police.

On May 4, 2004 Krar was sentenced to 135 months in prison after he pled guilty to building and possessing chemical weapons. Ms. Bruey was sentenced to 57 months after pleading to "conspiracy to possess illegal weapons."

As per a lookup at the BOP prisoner database on September 18, 2012, Mr. Krar is listed as deceased on May 7, 2009. Ms. Bruey was released in May 2008, and no information is available for Edward Feltus.

A Commander In Chief Has To Kill Ducks

A Ted Cruz campaign ad:

Election 2016 - Pity The Poor, Forlorn Koch Brothers

Cry me a river, Chuck:

In an interview with The Financial Times, Mr. [Charles] Koch bemoaned the state of the field of Republican candidates seeking the nomination and suggested that big money was losing its influence in politics these days. His concern over the policies of Donald J. Trump and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas was especially clear.

"It is hard for me to get a high level of enthusiasm because the things I’m passionate about, and I think this country urgently needs, aren’t being addressed," said Mr. Koch, 80, the chairman of Koch Industries.

Fox Nation (Managing Director, Jesse Watters) Publishes Multiple Death Threats

Incredible! Click here for the full message at NewsHounds (motto: "We watch Fox so you don't have to!"). Posting as "Josey Wales," his identity was revealed as Scott Orton, of Puyallup, Washington, and he was charged with "issuing interstate threats." He is free on bail.

He repeatedly posted on Fox Nation, offering to pay $10,000 to "take out," "shoot," or "kill" Marilyn Mosby (Baltimore prosecutor on the Freddie Gray case); Planned Parenthood's Dr. Deborah Nucatola; San Francisco sheriff Ross Mirkarimi; and Cate Dyer, CEO of StemExpress, a company that does medical research on fetal tissue.

Follow the link: The murder threats are graphic and explicit. I knew Jesse Watters (Bill O'Reilly's lickspittle) was a lowlife and Fox Nation is a cesspool, but this is really beyond the pale.