Last Call

In GOP America, if you're hit by a flood, tornado, or say a hurricane like Isaac, you're on your own.

Rep. Raul Labrador (R-ID) told ThinkProgress at a Hispanic Leadership Network luncheon that Republicans should take a similar approach with disaster funding for Hurricane Isaac as they did after natural disasters last year. In 2011, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) led the Republican charge to deny disaster funding following major hurricanes and tornadoes unless the federal budget was cut in other areas.

Labrador said that Congress must “readjust everything we do” in order to find cuts to pay for Hurricane Isaac disaster relief. “If there’s emergencies, we don’t always need to keep borrowing money,” said the freshman Republican.

Here's the thing. We don't need to borrow money. Disaster relief funds are already in the budget and Republicans know it.  That's why they're trying to get rid of funding disasters ahead of time.

As Hurricane Isaac bears down on the Gulf Coast, there should be plenty of money — some $1.5 billion — in federal disaster aid coffers, thanks, in part, to a new system that budgets help for victims of hurricanes, tornadoes and floods before they occur.

It's a system that Paul Ryan, the Republican nominee-to-be for vice president, had hoped to scrap as a way to make his House GOP budget look smaller by about $10 billion a year. Politely, party elders told him no way, at least for now.

Do you think that if Romney/Ryan win and the GOP gets control of the Senate that disaster relief will still exist?  What do you think?

The answer of course is that it will exist for those who vote Republican.  They're eager to give rural red state farmers hundreds of millions to make up for lost crops in this year's drought.  But urban hellholes like New Orleans?

How long can you tread water?

The Pain In Spain Continues, Part 4

Spain's recession continues, and despite all the attention on the Obama/Romney fight, it remains that Spain could strain the European plains and cause a hell of a lot of problems should things fall apart over there between now and November.

Spain’s recession worsened in the second quarter as the government’s austerity push to reduce the euro area’s third-biggest budget deficit and a slump in consumer spending offset growth in exports.

Gross domestic product fell 0.4 percent from the previous quarter, when it declined 0.3 percent, the Madrid-based National Statistics Institute said today. That’s in line with an estimate published July 30. Separately, Spain’s borrowing costs fell to the lowest in three months at an auction today after the nation’s bonds rallied this month on optimism the European Central Bank will agree on a plan to help peripheral nations.

Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy last month gave up on his forecast for a return to growth in 2013 as he unveiled budget cuts that will expand austerity measures to a total of 15 percent of annual GDP by 2014. He is due to host European Union President Herman Van Rompuy today for the first in a series of meetings aimed at solving the nation’s funding issues.

“We fear that things are likely to get worse before they get better,” said Martin van Vliet, an economist at ING Bank in Amsterdam, who expects Spain will seek additional financial aid as early as next month. “With much more fiscal austerity in the pipeline and unemployment at astronomic highs, the risks are clearly tilted toward a more protracted recession.”

Yeah, gosh, protracted austerity is going to cause recession and massive unemployment for the next 18 months or so, awesome.  And that's if Spain's economy doesn't crash.  This is the good scenario.

And once again, keep in mind this is exactly what the GOP says they want to do to our economy:  balance the budget through steep cuts to social programs, government services, infrastructure programs, schools, public safety, highways and bridges, and civil service.  The equivalent of what Spain is doing here, cutting the budget by 15% of GDP by 2014, would equal eliminating about $2.4 trillion dollars from the budget here in America.  There would basically be no discretionary spending, period.  It would all go away.

Basically, Rajoy is doing what the GOP say they would do if they were in charge.  But here's the thing, they would actually make a lot of these cuts, and then make trillions in tax cuts for the rich in addition.  The tax cuts would far outweigh the spending cuts, and the deficit would skyrocket upwards.

Austerity is a proven failure.  The only thing worse is the GOP's fake austerity.

My Creation, Is It Real?

It’s my creation, I do not know.

If the dream of a New Jersey group comes to fruition there could be another creationist attraction located in Northern Kentucky. 

Founders of the Creation Science Hall of Fame, which now exists only as a website, would like to develop a brick-and mortar structure along Interstate 75.

“When we have the funds, we would like to locate on the highway, about halfway between the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter,” said Terry Hurlbut, secretary/treasurer of the group. “What better place to locate than between these two attractions? We envision that as people fly or drive in to see them, we will be a stop along the way.”

Oh good, just what I needed within shouting distance of my apartment, first the Scientology Church Of Greater Cincinnati, now the Hall Of Wildly Misappropriated Science Heroes.

The Creation Science Hall of Fame was developed as a website in 2009 and is devoted to sharing the beliefs of creationism. 

It includes a directory of living and deceased inductees and a brief profile of each.

The section dedicated to deceased inductees begins with the Renaissance period.

The list includes Leonardo da Vinci, Sir Isaac Newton, Samuel F.B. Morse, Louis Pasteur and George Washington Carver.

Living inductees include Ken Ham, founder of Answers in Genesis and the Creation Museum.

Isaac Newton’s ghost is going to knife him some Kentuckians, dammit.

On the other hand, if the place has an animatronic Nikola Tesla on a velociraptor, I’m stealing it before the place accidentally gets napalmed and covered in bees.  Evolved bees.

Lindsay Lohan, Jewel Thief

Grumbles about this have been around for a while.  I dismissed them at first, thinking it was a long step towards connecting her to a crime.  It appears it's a bit more serious than we thought at first.

Lindsay Lohan is now formally a suspect in the theft of $100,000 worth of watches and sunglasses ... law enforcement sources tell TMZ.

As TMZ first reported, Lindsay was at the Hollywood Hills home of Sam Magid a week ago when Sam called the LAPD and reported a jewelry theft.   We're told Lindsay has been at the house frequently, including at an all-night house party a week ago Sunday.

Law enforcement sources tell us ... Lindsay and her assistant Gavin Doyle are both suspects in the theft.

Now here's the twist ... We're told Sam has recanted his story and now says nothing was stolen.  But our sources say cops are not closing out the investigation because they believe they have independent witnesses who can finger Lindsay and Gavin as the thieves
.

Carrie Me Home

Some early released stills are out from the new Carrie remake.  And they look good.

I hold that Carrie is one of King's best book-to-movie translations despite the amount of storytelling that takes place in a teenage girl's private thoughts.  For the time, the effects in the classic were well done enough to be convincing, and the story was original enough to be terrifying.

The photos show a dedication to the original that is a necessity.  You can't change too much, something this iconic should be retold, not rebooted.  The prom dress and the nightgown are spot on.  While a retelling allows for some creative freedom, I pray they do justice to the ending.  There are enough improvements in special effects to allow a sharp rise in their ability.

I had no idea Julianne Moore had been cast as Carrie's psychotic mother.  I immediately was able to see how well she could portray her.  Practicing the spaced out look of Sarah Palin was surely a help.

Sorry, folks. A girl's gotta get in her digs where she can.

The Line Of The Convention So Far

Chuck Pierce reviews "You Didn't Build This!" night at the Tampa GOP Convention.

Ann Romney was sweet and lovely — and very defensive about people "attacking" hubby's success, but only as a "mom," of course — and Chris Christie brought down the house. But the Republican Party did something remarkable at its convention on Tuesday. It set out on an experiment to see exactly how much unmitigated hogwash the American political system can contain on a single evening. The Republican Party has set out at its 2012 convention in search of the Event Horizon of utter bullshit. It has sought to see precisely how many lies, evasions, elisions, and undigestible chunks of utter gobbledegook the political media can swallow before it finally gags twice and falls over dead, leaving the rest of America suckers all the same. What you didn't see in primetime, from Artur Davis to Ted Cruz, and from one 2016 contender to another, was the GOP embarking upon the task of seeing exactly how much nonsense it could produce at top volume before democracy screams and gives up, like Noriega in Panama when they played the metal music at him.

It was something to see, I'll tell you. An entire evening based on a demonstrable lie.

Ahh, and while Chuck has the GOP pegged as usual, the real line of the night, if not the convention and in fact the entire campaign was delivered by someone not on the stage at all.

An attendee at the Republican National Convention in Tampa on Tuesday allegedly threw nuts at a black camerawoman working for CNN and said “This is how we feed animals” before being removed from the convention, a network official confirmed to TPM.

The CNN official declined to confirm specific details of the incident to TPM but generally confirmed an account posted on Twitter by former MSNBC and Current anchor David Shuster: “GOP attendee ejected for throwing nuts at African American CNN camera woman + saying ‘This is how we feed animals.’”

Staggering racism aside, "This is how we feed the animals" pretty much sums up the entire GOP mindset for the the last 32 years, doesn't it?

Feed red meat to the base.  Feed lies to the press and the middle.  Feed contempt and hatred to the rest.  And look at the animals, the 99%, eat it up.  Durr hurr, stupid man animals will eat anything we throw at them.  Let's keep the dangerous ones locked up so we can gawk at them, and be sure to slaughter a few fatted calves so we eat well and they can rot in their pens and cages.  We're on display for their enjoyment, but never forget they'll put us down if we bite the hand that feeds us.

And a growing percentage of us think we can be the pigs in this Animal Farm before the two-legs come with the butcher's knife.  They won't cut me up, they say.  They'll cut up those other poor saps for meat.  They refuse to see we're all on the menu, but they figure the guys at the top will somehow be sated in their relentlessly greedy appetites before their turn comes.  They may be right, but the point is the Stockholm Syndrome crowd will knife us and leave us for the slaughterhouse all the same just to preserve their perceived power.

And that's the end of us.  We're all being fattened up for the table.  Only the fools can't see it.

The Only Ryan Speech You Need To See

Here's Paul Ryan discussing abortion, courtesy LGF:

Interviewer: Abortion now… something we’re talking about and I think our viewers want to know exactly where you stand, specifically, you’re pro-life, Catholic…

Ryan: Oh yeah, yeah.

Interviewer: But specifically where you stand when it comes to rape, and when it comes to the issue of, should it be legal for a woman to be able to get an abortion if she’s…

Ryan: Yeah, well, so, I’m very proud of my pro-life record, and I’ve always adopted the idea, the position that the method of conception doesn’t change the definition of life. But let’s remember, I’m doing the Romney-Ryan ticket, and the President makes policy. The President, in this case, the future President Mitt Romney, has exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the mother, which is a vast improvement of where we are right now.

To Paul Ryan,  rape is simply another method of conception.  But he's good with Mitt ending abortion and making exceptions, which the GOP will make so narrow as to be impossible to meet, thus assuring forced pregnancy for all women.  Please enjoy your little bundles of rapey joy under the Robot/Zombie '12 ticket, ladies.

You won't have much of a choice, after all.  When life hands you lemons, shut up bitch.

StupidiNews!

• Hurricane Isaac is bringing heavy flooding to low-lying areas of Louisiana as rural levees have been breached by what could be as much as 20 inches of rain.
• Ann Romney took the stage at the GOP Convention in Tampa last night to assure America's women that her husband Mitt is the kind of person who "makes her laugh".
• A three-judge federal court panel has tossed Texas's redistricting plan as clearly in violation of the Voting Rights Act, saying it disenfranchises Latino voters.
• Astronomers have discovered a distant binary star system with two planets where the entire system revolves in a complex pattern.
• Three Star Trek fans are overwhelmed by the internet support they're getting to restore the bridge set of ST:TNG from a junkyard.