Jim DeMint recently had some choice words for Harry Reid and Senate Democrats. Incensed at Reid’s plan to keep congress in session until several key spending bills and an arms control treaty had passed, DeMint noted just how un-Christian a thing this was to do:

We shouldn’t be jamming a major arms control treaty up against Christmas; it’s sacrilegious and disrespectful,” he told POLITICO. “What’s going on here is just wrong. This is the most sacred holiday for Christians. They did the same thing last year – they kept everybody here until [Christmas Eve] to force something down everybody’s throat. I think Americans are sick of this

As logically unassailable as DeMint’s brilliant analysis of the sacreligious underpinnings of Reid’s move is, we think his most salient and insightful revelation is just how sick the American people are of Jim DeMint being forced to go to work right on up to Christmas Eve itself. This new insight piqued our interest and made us wonder: what other things does Jim DeMint think that the American people are sick of? So we did a little research and came up with the following. After the jump:  Five Things the American People are Sick of (according to Jim DeMint) Read more »

If you haven’t seen it yet, you should. This video should be required viewing for anyone who is preparing to go on Fox News:

[ Crooks & Liars Flash video not available. ]

Sadly, I have a pretty strong feeling Rep. Anthony Weiner won’t be invited back on the network any time soon.

Via: Crooks and Liars.

“And, you know, they live in this fantasy world where it’s always 1945. America’s always number one… Marc Rubio, who’s the new teabag senator from Florida, the new — the new Bobby Jindal, I think, he made a speech, it was astounding. And this is not uncommon for a Republican to talk about this at the CPAC Convention. He said this is the only country in the world where an idea that started out as an idea on a cocktail napkin could wind up being traded on the stock exchange. No, other countries have napkins and stock exchanges. But you see, this is their room full of balls at Chuck E. Cheese. Their fantasy world they live in.”

–Bill Maher, on Fareed Zacharia’s GPS (12/5/2010). 

Remember Sarah Palin’s infamous death panels lie which was intended to derail the Health Care Reform Act? The charge was that under so-called “Obamacare” government burocrats would have authority to determine which needy patients live and die based on an economic calculus that weighs those individuals’ potential benefit to society against the cost of their treatment. The lie grew out of a dishonest representation of the President’s call for comparitive effectiveness studies on medical treatments that would save the government money by identifying and steering patients towards the most effetive treatments for their ilnesses. The theory was that ineffective treatments are simply a waste of money, and patients will most likely benefit from avoiding them. The death panel lie was so outrageous yet so pervasive that it was crowned Politifact’s Lie of the Year for 2009.

Well, fast-forward a year and guess what: we’ve finally got those death panels Sarah Palin warned us of. But don’t expect Palin, the GOP leadership or Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks to raise a fuss. That’s because these death panels are in Arizona and are a result of the GOP led legislature deciding that discontinuing Medicaid funding for certain organ transplants –even though this would mean almost cetain death for some 100 indigent patients–  was well worth the $4.5 million a year savings it would bring:

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The National Air and Space Administration‘s announcement that it will hold a news conference tomorrow to speak on a discovery of “astrobiological significance” has got the blogs and news media a buzz. Theories on what NASA is about to reveal vary wildly, from speculation that the Space Agency will annouce that signs of life have been discovered on one of Saturn’s moons, to talk of newly discovered exotic life forms here on Earth that portend possible future discoveries beyond our planet. Having perused the vast literature and spoken with mulitple experts in government, academia and industry we here at Stinque have weighed the evidence, eliminated the impossible, pushed the improbable off to one side and come up with a list of what we believe are 10 plausible discoveries that NASA might reveal at tomorrow’s press conference. And here they are, in no particular order: Read more »

The rhetoric from the right, which is all to often echoed by the maintream media, is that the Obama administration has moved policy so far to the left that it produced a backlash from a traditionally right-of-center populace. The latest object of right-wing scorn is the Federal Reserve’s program of Quantitative Easing, meant to fight the growing specter of deflation while hopefully promoting employment. This policy has been roundly criticized by right-wing luminaries as varied as Ron Paul, William Kristol and Sarah Palin. So how far to the left is this policy? It is so leftist that in 2000 the policy was promoted, in an almost identical economic circumstances, as a way of helping Japan out of its economic malaise by no less prominent and raging a leftist than Milton Friedman: Read more »

So this is how haggling is supposed to work: you’ve got a sheep herder named Akhbar, wants to sell one of his sheep. You’ve got a farmer named Muhamed who wants to buy a sheep. Akhbar knows that the going rate for sheep is 35 Kubokis, and he doesn’t want to sell his for any less. So he starts the haggling process by offering Muhamed a great deal on a fine, strong, young buck at 60 Kubokis. Muhamed also knows the going rate for sheep is 35 Kubokis and he refuses to pay a dime more, so he answers that the scrawny, sickly, old specimen before him isn’t worth more than 20 Kubokis. Read more »