Downlo

The real ‘welfare queens’

An important point:

If someone who works is still eligible for food stamps and government assistance – it’s really the employer who is federally subsidized. These “job creators” are taking advantage of government programs so they won’t have to cut into their profit margins to pay living wages.

Ron Paul is a wingnut.

paxamericana:

Ron Paul wants to define life as starting at conception, build a fence along the US-Mexico border, prevent the Supreme Court from hearing cases on the Establishment Clause or the right to privacy, permitting the return of sodomy laws and the like (a bill which he has repeatedly re-introduced), pull out of the UN, disband NATO, end birthright citizenship, deny federal funding to any organisation which “which presents male or female homosexuality as an acceptable alternative life style or which suggest that it can be an acceptable life style” along with destroying public education and social security, and abolish the Federal Reserve in order to put America back on the gold standard. He was also the sole vote against divesting US federal government investments in corporations doing business with the genocidal government of the Sudan.

Oh, and he believes that the Left is waging a war on religion and Christmas, he’s against gay marriage, is against the popular vote, opposes the Civil Rights Act of 1964, wants the estate tax repealed, is STILL making racist remarks, believes that the Panama Canal should be the property of the United States, and believes in New World Order conspiracy theories, not to mention his belief that the International Baccalaureate program is UN mind control.

(h/t)

Hey kids, Ron Paul is a far-right Republican kook, through and through. Him wanting to legalize marijuana doesn’t mitigate his essential conservatism.

(via stfuconservatives)

Are We a Democracy?

Current calls for “less government” actually mean less power for elected leaders and for the bureaucracies that serve them and more power for the “oligarchy” of millionaires and corporations.  Such calls also imply less power for the people (the democratic element), since, while elected leaders are directly responsible to those who vote, those whose power is based on wealth are not.  In fact, many of us who bristle at any government interference with our freedom and privacy, accept, as an economic necessity, similar interference from the companies we work for or do business with.

(Source: The New York Times)

“I got mine; fuck you!” is not a tenable organizing principle for any society.

Right wing projection and Occupy Wall St.

One thing I found interesting when a bunch of right wingers ganged up on me on Twitter, screeching incoherent nonsense at me in response to this bit of satire, was how most of them assumed that I don’t pay federal income taxes. They coughed up the same crap about how those of us who support Occupy Wall St. are lazy parasites who don’t want to work, and are playing victim. And that we hate people who do work and pay taxes.

But of course I pay federal income taxes. I’m a 34-year-old woman who makes a middle class living. That I don’t throw a fit about it and act like it’s the greatest injustice in the world doesn’t mean I don’t pay federal income taxes. That’s because I’m a fucking grown-up. The ready assumption that everyone who pays federal income taxes is a big, screaming toddler about it is what probably galls me more than anything about the “53%” nonsense. Screeching about your taxes just makes me assume you are in a constant tantrum because of other things in life that are less than pleasant: that you have to work for a living, that food has calories, that not everyone you want will have sex with you…. 

But it is interesting how much [conservatives] project onto the left. Liberals are protesting real problems: unemployment, the foreclosure crisis, the war. And conservatives respond by saying, “Quit whining about real problems and listen to me whine about having to be a fucking grown-up. Wah!” And then say that liberals are “playing the victim”. It’s just one of the worst cases of projection I’ve seen in all the years I’ve spent observing right wing projection.

(My emphasis.) Feeling unjustifiably aggrieved for doing what you’re supposed to do anyway sums up the whole 53% thing pretty well.