Repuglicans

How I wish all the repuglican noise and stoopidity would just go away.

tristero: In Case It Wasn't Obvious Modern conservatism is a vacuous pseudo-politics suitable only for those with the intellectual maturity of a 14-year old boy. Literally. Money quote: “ 'Barack Obama is the most left-wing president in my lifetime,” he said.'

Aravosis: Oklahoma tells Obama-voting gun owners to get out

Nasty story. Fortunately, the state handled it well. Well, they apparently didn't handle it well when they were first informed of the problem - it took a third person to tell them that they too were offended before the state felt they "had" to act.

Dunkley and his father, Daniel Reddy, who live in Tulsa, went to Broken Arrow on Tuesday night for a hunter safety course normally required to get an Oklahoma hunting license....

But when father and son arrived at the lesson, the volunteer instructor, Kell Wolf, asked if any of the students voted for President Barack Obama.

Reddy, a transplanted Californian — and former Marine — raised his hand.

According to Reddy and others in the room, Wolf called Obama "the next thing to the Antichrist" and ordered Reddy and Dunkley from the room. When Reddy refused, Wolf said he would not teach "liberals" and would cancel the course if Reddy didn't leave.

So Reddy and Dunkley left, as did a few others.

Read the rest of the story. ...

Josh Marshall says: Oy

If nothing else is clear in our current crisis, it is that the only thing more bankrupt than the big banks is the debate over whether or not to nationalize them. On This Week this morning, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) said he opposed nationalization but thought insolvent banks should be closed down.

Said Shelby: "I don't want to nationalize them, I think we need to close them. Close them down, get them out of business. If they're dead, they ought to be buried. We bury the small banks; we've got to bury some big ones and send a strong message to the market. And I believe that people will start investing [again] in banks."

Something like this is both heartening and insanely distressing at the same time because what exactly does he think people are talking about when people talk about nationalization? They're talking about some form of FDIC-like takeover, though probably one that would take longer and be much more complicated since you simply can't find another bank that is going to buy or most of its assets at some knock-down price over the weekend -- certainly not in the present climate. You either clean the bank up (which would require what amounts to a de facto bankruptcy proceeding) and sell it back into private hands or break it up and sell it off in individual pieces -- likely some combination of the two.

It would be one thing if Shelby were just one more Fox News robot. But he's the ranking member of the friggin' Banking Committee.

• John Cole finds this all Just Awesome:
  

  Ladies and gentlemen, the Republicans have some ideas how to move forward out of this economic mess:

  John McCain and Richard C. Shelby, two high-profile Republican senators, said on Sunday that the government should allow a number of the biggest American banks to fail.

  ...

  While the Alabama senator did not say which banks to shutter, he suggested that Citigroup might be on that list, saying the bank has “always been a problem child.”

  Looks like Monday will be a good day to short Citigroup.

  ... There may be drastic steps that need to be taken shortly, but the last damned thing the jittery market needs right now is Senators running around publicly suggesting we need banks to die.

  By the way- which member of the CNBC brain trust will blame Obama for Citigroup’s cliff dive tomorrow?

• Drum on Shelby's big idea and Josh's thoughts: Let God Sort 'Em Out
  

  This is worth unpacking a little bit. The FDIC is not set up to run distressed banks. It's set up to either (a) sell them off immediately to another bank or (b) hold onto them just long enough to liquidate everything. And the FDIC is really, really not set up to run a big money center bank like Citigroup, which is both a normal depository institution plus a fantastic agglomeration of other financial entities, including derivatives underwriting, asset management, private equity portfolios, a staggering variety of trading operations spread all over the world, and one of the world’s biggest insurance companies. This is not FDIC territory.

  Selling off Citigroup is also not an option. Who's big enough to buy them? Nobody. What's more, their stock is currently selling for about buck a share. There are thousands of rich investors who could buy the whole place, lock stock and barrel, anytime they wanted to. But no one wants to. There's a reason, after all, that huge chunks of the stuff on Citi's balance sheet is called toxic waste.

  So: the FDIC can't run Citigroup and nobody in their right mind wants to buy them. On the other hand, with Citi's stock hovering around a dollar, their shareholders have already lost nearly their entire investment. Allowing Citi to fail would hardly cause them any more damage than they've already suffered. So why not just let them go under, as Shelby wants?

  The answer is that we could do this. This was the gamble Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson took last September when they allowed Lehman Brothers to fail — dammit, it's time to enforce some market discipline on these guys! — and their gamble failed spectacularly. The global financial system nearly collapsed even though Lehman wasn't all that big.

  But hey — maybe Lehman taught everyone a lesson. Maybe all of Citgroup's creditors and counterparties have already priced in the possibility of default. You never know. And maybe if Citigroup fails, and they all end up with a bunch of worthless notes, they'll just shrug and go about their business.

  Then again, maybe not. Maybe Citigroup really is too big to fail. And maybe if they fail, and all their creditors and noteholders and counterparties are stiffed, maybe they'll all fail too. And then all of their creditors and noteholders and counterparties will also fail. Etc. And then it's back to the dark ages for all of us.

  Which is it? I don't know. All I can say is: Richard Shelby has way bigger balls than I do. Call me a wuss if you must, but I'm really not willing to take the gamble and find out, especially since I think the odds are pretty strongly in favor of Citigroup having the ability to take all the rest of us down with them if they collapse. Shelby, however, the ranking Republican member of the Senate Banking Committee, guardian of the nation's financial health, is apparently willing to just say "fuck it," roll the dice, and hope against hope for snake eyes.

  Of course, this is precisely the kind of imbecilic, high-stakes gambling that got us into this mess in the first place. Maybe Shelby ought to think twice before deciding that the hair of the dog might get us out.

Amato: Chris Wallace asks McCain if he wanted to tell America: "I told you so," as if McCain should have won the election

... At the end of the interview he asked McCain how he thought PRESIDENT Obama was doing in the job and then said something I had to rewind a bunch of times to see if I wasn't hallucinating.

Wallace: How do you think he's doing so far?

McCain: I think he's working very hard. I think he continues to have the support of the majority of the American people. I think he's making very serious mistake in this budget which will have very dangerous consequences in increasing taxes no matter who it is....

Wallace: You ever feel like saying ' I told you so?"

McCain: Oh, I'm sure that would be pleasant feeling, but the point is we're in such a severe crisis....

"I told you so?" WTF is that? How dare Wallace ask that question? Have you no decency, sir? President Obama barely has had a chance to sit down in the Oval office and grab a cup of coffee and this jerk is basically calling him a failure and touting John McCain's ideology as the correct one even though it was that ideology that got us into this mess.
And America solidly rejected John McCain and Sarah Palin to run this country. And it's the same ideology that is being used to obstruct every move Obama makes to try and dig us out.

...

Josh Marshall found it all Bundled Together Nicely If you would like to read the maximal version of all the Republican talking points on Obama and the economy wrapped into one package, by all means read this piece on the economy by the AP's Tom Raum.


FDL's Blue Texan: Texas Board of Education Chairman Believes Earth is Less Than 10,000 Years Old, Could Influence Your Kids’ Textbooks

This state is so awesome.

McLeroy [an avowed creationist] is among board members who want the standards to require a more critical approach to the teaching of evolution. It's a theory that McLeroy, 62, believes lacks the empirical data required to be taught without discussion of its particular insufficiencies.

...

In addition to asking teachers to engage Texas students in a discussion of how gaps in the fossil record might undermine the notion of common ancestry, McLeroy says he will ask board members to adopt a curriculum standard that would ask students to explain how the complexity of cells does or does not support the idea of natural selection, an explanation of how organisms evolve.

Let's take a look at McLeroy's insufficiencies. His website advocates everything from abstinence-only to intelligent design and the guy's a dentist -- not a biologist (and surprise! -- a Republican). The fact that this flat-earther's got any say at all in what goes into my kids' science books really pisses me off.

So why should you care?

Whatever the board decides will have a large impact across the country given Texas' ability, because of its size, to influence what is printed in textbooks. The board is expected to make a final decision on the science curriculum March 27.

Not so funny.

You can tell the Texas Education Agency (TEA) what you think of McLeroy's extremist views here.

Texas Freedom Network has some dossiers on the crazies currently on the Board as well as a petition to stand up for science.

This video is fascinating. Heather at C&L: Frank Schaeffer, Author of "Crazy for God" on What's Left of the GOP: Today the Republican Party is rooting for doom

D.L. Hughley talks to Crazy for God author Frank Schaeffer, whose father was one of the founders of the religious right. Schaeffer discusses his articles at the Huffington Post Why Obama Must Not Work With Republicans and Why Are the Republicans Such Anti-Obama Liars?.