Satire – The Progressive Democrat

The unbearable dumbness of American as*holery

By One Pissed Off Liberal in the Daily Kos

Fight dumbassery everywhere you see it. We’ve been way too tolerant.

Sure, it’s your right to say whatever you want no matter how stupid or hateful, but is it a good idea? Are you doing yourself or society any favors? It’s your perfect right to be an idiot but your idiocy, once loosed upon the general public, is another matter. You don’t have the moral right to make other people suffer because you’re stupid. Sometimes life is about more than what you have a right to do, but what you should or shouldn’t do within the context of civilized society – which I submit, we should be aiming for. Civilization seems a worthy goal at this point.

America should be ashamed of producing so many stupid people. Virtually every one of whom has or had the potential to shine, and it was just never realized because we as a society are neglectful, especially of the poor and working classes. We do not have universal education any more than we have universal health care. In many cases, the poor just have a pipeline to prison.

There are aspects of our society, such as the failure to provide high quality education and social support to all, that encourage a culture of dumbassery. Think Confederate flag. Think prophet cartoons. Think sheer ignorance and cultural insensitivity.

I think virtually every human has the innate capacity to rise above such cultural backwardness. I think they have Ferrari brains like everyone else, they just never learn to shift gears. No one teaches them. They spend their whole lives driving a Ferrari poorly and never get it out of first gear. In that state, they are susceptible to dumbassery.

Two people are dead and one wounded because a bunch of dumbass macho yahoos down in Texas (who could have been so much more) thought it’d be cute to have a ‘draw the prophet’ contest…to prove they weren’t afraid of Sharia law and shit.

Read it all at the Daily Kos

World News Forum Commentary

Hello, Jewel. I vaguely remember this last CPAC convention. Basically, a bunch of rich donors to the Republican Party gathered to go over their talking points and write big checks.

This is sad stuff. This is the best they can do. Red state-blue state? Really, Rick? Texas ranks 21st among states in per capita income in the United States–New York ranks fourth, and most of the rest of the top twenty are blue states, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. And Texas has more citizens without health insurance than any other state, according to a Gallup poll taken in 2011:

Texas continues to be the state with the highest percentage of residents without health insurance. At 27.6%, its rate is more than four percentage points higher than the next highest state, Mississippi. This is the largest gap Gallup has measured between the first and second state since it began tracking health insurance in 2008.

During the last presidential election campaign, as I’m sure you’ll remember, Rick Perry’s Texas was lauded by Republicans as a model of sensible Republican fiscal management. Never mind that he used billions in Federal bailout funds to balance his state budgets, even while bashing Obama over federal stimulus spending:

But the reality of Perry’s relationship with fed-stim is complicated. Through the second quarter of this year, Texas has used $17.4 billion in federal stimulus money — including $8 billion of the one-time dollars to fund state expenses that recur over and over. In fact, Texas used the federal stimulus to balance its last two budgets.

Source: The Texas Tribune.

Because Republicans have no earthly idea how to grow an economy, they are desperate to slash spending whenever and wherever they can, except for rich people, because the very, very wealthy are, after all, the minority interest they represent.

America incarcerates a larger percentage of its population than Putin’s Russia or Communist China, and those countries put people in prison just for making the government mad by saying unpopular things. And Texas, by the way, executes more people than Saudi Arabia.

Republican governors have discovered that, in the long run, it might actually be cheaper to spend money on things like education than on incarcerating people. Republicans have had a sudden revelation: after decades of pushing for harder and stiffer sentencing laws, that maybe it doesn’t really make all that much sense to put every kid convicted of a minor drug offense into prison for decades.

Republicans are the party of bold new thinking. Trouble is that it’s progressive thinking from the 1930s.

Pope Francis Hurts The Tender Feelings Of A Billionaire Republican

Pope Francis has hurt the delicate feelings of Home Depot billionaire and Republican Ken Langone just by preaching the message of Jesus. Awww… Image: jfxgillis

If Pope Francis ever finds himself in need of a hammer and some nails, he may want to consider avoiding Home Depot. Ken Langone, founder of the company, has been whining kvetching pissing and moaning grumpy about Pope Francis having the gall to promote the message of Jesus. In recent months, the Pope has been on a verbal rampage against the horrors that the unrestrained greed of “savage capitalism” has wrought across the globe. He’s been preaching that the message of Jesus was not to get rich by screwing the poor but to serve them. This has deeply offended poor Langone’s tender sensibilities.

Just who the hell does Pope Francis think he is? The Pope or something?
Via CNBC.com:

Langone said he’s raised the issue more than once with Cardinal Timothy Dolan, archbishop of New York, most recently at a breakfast in early December at which he updated him on fundraising progress.

“I’ve told the cardinal, ‘Your Eminence, this is one more hurdle I hope we don’t have to deal with. You want to be careful about generalities. Rich people in one country don’t act the same as rich people in another country,’ ” he said.

Well, he’s right about that. The United States has some of the greediest rich people on the planet. And Pope Francis knows it. Not only did Wall Street executives destroy the economy and throw millions out of work, they gave themselves HUGE bonuses using tax payer dollars. And then spent the next several years screwing those very same tax payers in every conceivable way.

Addicted to the Apocalypse

Once upon a time, walking around shouting “The end is nigh” got you labeled a kook, someone not to be taken seriously. These days, however, all the best people go around warning of looming disaster. In fact, you more or less have to subscribe to fantasies of fiscal apocalypse to be considered respectable.

And I do mean fantasies. Washington has spent the past three-plus years in terror of a debt crisis that keeps not happening, and, in fact, can’t happen to a country like the United States, which has its own currency and borrows in that currency. Yet the scaremongers can’t bring themselves to let go.

Consider, for example, Stanley Druckenmiller, the billionaire investor, who has lately made a splash with warnings about the burden of our entitlement programs. (Gee, why hasn’t anyone else thought of making that point?) He could talk about the problems we may face a decade or two down the road. But, no. He seems to feel that he must warn about the looming threat of a financial crisis worse than 2008.

Or consider the deficit-scold organization Fix the Debt, led by the omnipresent Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles. It was, I suppose, predictable that Fix the Debt would respond to the latest budget deal with a press release trying to shift the focus to its favorite subject. But the organization wasn’t content with declaring that America’s long-run budget issues remain unresolved, which is true. It had to warn that “continuing to delay confronting our debt is letting a fire burn that could get out of control at any moment.”

As I’ve already suggested, there are two remarkable things about this kind of doomsaying. One is that the doomsayers haven’t rethought their premises despite being wrong again and again — perhaps because the news media continue to treat them with immense respect. The other is that as far as I can tell nobody, and I mean nobody, in the looming-apocalypse camp has tried to explain exactly how the predicted disaster would actually work.