CRYBABY: Racist moron dishes hate then buckles under heat

Cloaked with the veil of social network anonymity, they're big, bad, bold and bodacious. They spew racism and spread hate. They talk smack about the weakest among us pumped up on power, entitlement and, I suspect, steroids. They're a new breed of cyber-bully -- cowards so full of self-loathing, fear and conspiracy theories that they can live next door to you wearing their daytime personas so neatly that you'd never believe they could muster such hate in their hearts.

They talk of Jesus and the Bible and The Constitution in such glowing terms that you greet them each day fully believing that they actually believe in these things. They posture as some cartoon caricature of a dime novel hero: someone strong, invincible and bearing the standard of justice and morality.

Yet, the latest poster boy of such jingoistic "heroism" did the unthinkable in these circles of contrived bravado: he sat down and cried when caught. John Wayne would be sad to see it.

Meet Timothy Dluhos, the 34-year-old FDNY EMS lieutenant and latest variety of the legend in my own mind sort who boldly went where no real hero resides: Twitter. Here, he ranted and raved about the injustices of being an EMS lieutenant in the largest, most diverse U.S. city on a public forum -- not smart enough to know the genesis of TMI is always knowable. And, after blowing hard about the badass nature of guns and brawn, was too whiny to hold up to questioning from a wimp reporter armed with a mere notepad and pen.

Here's his reaction:

Pull up your diapers, man. You sort of look like this girl ...

Heir Club 4 Growth: Orangutan Edition

In the modern world of cuckoo conservatism, too many deranged lunatics of the right-wing variety have come to the fore to name any one of them the movement's standard bearing Top Grifter. Yet, if any one of these air-sucking bimbos wins the prize for taking best advantage of his 60 minutes of idiocy-producing fame, it would be the self-promoting, mop-topped ignoramus formerly known as Donald Trump.

Trump has gone from failed presidential candidate for the Compost Tea Party, that fecal-strewn dumping ground for deranged American pseudo-politicians, to simply failed American absent the ability to differentiate between the Trump-descriptive term "joke" and "legally-binding contract."

What follows is a take-down of the idiot's judiciary-clogging frivolity by the comedian who fired up the lone cell in The Donald's brain -- Bill Maher. Hilarity follows.

Oh, Donald ...

Mittens, gay Latina? Oh, dear!

Science slaps Republican ignorance upside the head

Republican embrace of creation theory over empirically-determined scientific knowledge leads to serious stumbles along the campaign trail. The GOP strategy for fixing the nation's dearly beloved safety network raises voter eyebrows because their methodology defies easily verifiable biology.

Face it, people make babies, babies grow older, some take care of their parents and later some elders are cared for their kids. The Romney/Paul message to seniors is "We're cutting the social fabric down to a tiny voucher just not for you." Now that's all well and good until scientific realities remind you that many of those seniors have children for whose futures they have concerns. And then you have that moment when those children realize that Mitt's talking about them.

"Stop it, this is hard." Mitt muffs the math on healthcare.

Another area that eludes the education averse right wing is mathematics - that lynchpin of all things scientific. Seniors 65 and older comprise 17 percent of all active voters; alas, this is dwarfed by the 83 percent of the 18-64 age group. Therefore, pandering reassuringly to a smaller group of voters, while waving off younger groups with vague generalities, explains why the electorate, as it wakes with a pounding hangover after indulging too heavily in the sweet Romney party juice, is feeling morning after remorse and returning to the Obama fold.

When a campaign caricatures its Faithful

[UPDATE: 9/25/2012 Bonus video added]

A funny thing happened during Willard's black March to the White House. Somewhere along the way it stopped doing what campaigns do out of tradition -- sketch out the broad outlines of its candidate -- and bizarrely put pen to paper to draw the most farcical caricature possible of its ardent supporters.

Led by the odd choice of putting a rambling old man on stage to hold court with an empty chair, Mitt Romney's staff has stumbled into simultaneously painting the boss and his adherents as something his earlier campaign most decried: weird.

That word first spoken in a still, small voice -- describing Mitt's religion, his cardboard stiffness, his inability to relate to people -- has crescendoed into a cacophonous roar of disapproval for nearly everything he touches.

“What Romney does not get,” says Jack Blum, a veteran Washington lawyer and offshore expert, “is that this stuff is weird.” - Vanity Fair, Aug 2012

"Bill Kristol: ‘Kinda weird’ Romney pays lower tax rate than middle-class people" - Raw Story, Aug. 20, 2012

"Romney: Old Rich Weird Dude" - WRKO Boston, Aug. 28, 2012

"Romney Aides Call Eastwood Speech ‘Strange,’ ‘Weird,’ ‘Theater Of The Absurd’" - Talking Points Memo, Aug. 31, 2012

Like his money and our jobs, Willard promises to off-shore foreign policy decisions on Israel

Thank goodness for phones.

Had Alexander Graham Bell never invented the telephone, a Mitt Romney presidency would be devoid of a working policy on relations with Israel and the general Middle East. In chiding Republican contender Newt Gingrich in a 2011 primary debate for calling Palestine an "invented" people, Romney made clear just who would pull the strings for his administration in all things pertaining to the Middle East.

“Before I made a statement of that nature, I’d get on the phone to my friend Bibi Netanyahu and say: ‘Would it help if I say this? What would you like me to do?“

According to a New York Times article, a United States ambassador to Israel under Clinton Martin S. Indyk, said that whether intentional or not, Mr. Romney’s statement implied that he would inappropriately “subcontract Middle East policy to Israel.” Others have warned of a shadow government that would operate with impunity within a Romney administration and cover a vast network of policy decisions.

Netanyahu has pulled Romney's governance strings since he took the reins of Massachusetts as governor back in 2003. The Times again tells us that the prime minister has advised Romney over the years in matters of politics, economics and the Middle East.

 When Mr. Romney was the governor of Massachusetts, Mr. Netanyahu offered him firsthand pointers on how to shrink the size of government. When Mr. Netanyahu wanted to encourage pension funds to divest from businesses tied to Iran, Mr. Romney counseled him on which American officials to meet with.

When Americans fight for their lives against terrorists overseas, Romney critiques their choice of weapons

I get that political campaigns are intramural sport. Protecting American lives is not. Americans rightly expect presidential candidates to know the difference.

Hitting send on their fax machines even as American public servants overseas were being slaughtered by rocket-bearing marauders, the Romney campaign, in it's effort to cross the finish line and shout "First," proved it could not distinguish between the two.

It wasn't just about his habitually dickish shoving to get his entitled, pasty ass at the head of line (son Tagg on dinner: "Dad always goes through the line first") it was about his warped sense of "winning." Just as he did at Bain, Romney merely saw the dead and dying Americans in harm's way as nothing more than a means to furthering his personal fortunes.

Displaying the most unpatriotic, unAmerican crassness imaginable, Mitt Romney saw not dead and injured foreign service workers who could be serving him if, God or Mohammed forbid, he were president, but a commodity to be traded on the public opinion market. In that moment, the Great Mormon Hope went from auditioning for Head of State of the most powerful nation in the world to The Great American Head Case by sniping at the embassy's weapon of choice as the assault of their compound became imminent.

The bi-partisan gut reaction was swift, visceral and resoundingly negative. The moment was called Romney's "Lehman" moment, harkening back to his predecessor John McCain's campaign meltdown in the face of the financial crisis. But it was much greater than even that. And his current opponent Barack Obama didn't miss the point.

"Governor Romney seems to have a tendency to shoot first and aim later."

Crap! Even the cheerleading section is getting ticked off

Transcript below the fold ...

The Old Man and The Seat

Laughed at or with? Clint Eastwood at RNC in Tampa

I've always pretty much appreciated most of Clint Eastwood's early works but it wasn't until Gran Torino that I found him both inspired and inspiring. Then came his "Morning in America" ad, which spoke to an ailing nation looking for a ray of hope and he knocked it out of the park.

I don't much idolize actors or actresses, whether they politically agree with me or not. I recognized the absolute star power Oprah brought to a young senator's campaign in 2008 and I was excited that she lent her gravitas to the affair. I was similarly impressed to see the Hollywood lineup that stood in support of Barack Obama. Not that they swayed my thinking on the politician, it just made the campaign more fun and I do tend to gravitate toward and support like-minded individuals. Sue me, I'm human.

On the other hand, I still watch re-runs of Frasier, howbeit with fewer personal laugh lines after learning of Kelsey Grammer's support for the Tea Party. Frankly, I more hold him in contempt for being a manwhore and stinking up my TV than for his political views. He's comported himself as a relatively sane Tea Party supporter, unlike the few third string losers such as Nugent, Norris and Voight with little else to lose, and have hitched their fading stars to that mob.

So now we return to Eastwood standing on stage talking to a chair. Despite Bill Maher's  full-throated defense (which seems so desperate, one wonders where his defense of Clint's comedic efforts ends and his own begins) of the roundly mocked schtick, it did "kill," as Maher contends -- just not in the way Bill thinks.

The other attempted defense is that of "senior abuse." Read how The Examiner valiantly works to distort Rachel Maddow's critique of the farce into some horrifying form of attack on seniors:

Ryan: Let them eat corn!!

Unless you're someone who makes the state fair circuit a regular pastime, news that Iowa State Fair's giant pumpkin competition took a huge hit this year is barely a blip on your radar.

Due to a persistent drought and the hottest July in the recorded history of Julys, this year's weigh-in for the behemoth gourds showed significant weight reduction among its top giants. For the first time in years, the winner clocked in at under 1,000 pounds.

As though to soften the competitive blow, farmer Dan Carlson, half of the winning Peterson-Carlson team for the past three years, pointed to farmers facing fates worse than their own, asking, "Have you seen the corn crop lately?”

It was among all this talk of less than super-sized pumpkins and drought and devastated corn crops that Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan came to stump for votes.