Today's True Blue Liberal Poll on Trumpcare

The House Republicans have finally announced their specifics for replacing The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) with The American Health Care Act (Trumpcare). Supporters of Obamacare are appalled at the number of people who will lose coverage and at the way it targets women and older Americans for special mistreatment. The Tea Party wing of the GOP is appalled that Trumpcare is leaving even a few tattered remnants of Obamacare's patient protections; they are calling for a straight repeal of the ACA and a return to the status quo ante a black man in the White House.

Which leads to today's Twitter poll:

Here's a simple poll to determine whether you are a liberal or a conservative.

I believe that replacing the #ACA with #TrumpCare will...

— True Blue Liberal (@TrueBlueLiberal) March 8, 2017

The 2014 Platform of Texas's Grand Ole Party -- The Comic Wingnut Gift That Keeps on Giving

As in 2012, the 2014 State Republican Party Platform of Texas continues to be a platform that calls for US withdrawal from the UN, World Bank, IMF, and World Trade Organization, an end to the Department of Energy and the ban on incandescent light bulbs, an Israel policy inspired by "God's biblical promise" and our "God-given right" to carry a firearm, an end to Social Security and the Environmental Protection Agency and more. Read it all if you want to see how far this supposedly mainstream political party has left the banks of the stream altogether. It also contains the headline-grabbing section about reparative therapy for gays because (of course) "Homosexuality is a chosen behavior that is contrary to the fundamental unchanging truths that have been ordained by God in the Bible..."

But tonight I want to concentrate on the section on "HONORING THE SYMBOLS OF OUR AMERICAN HERITAGE" in which flag desecration (against it) and the Confederate Widow's Plaque (for it) are addressed and there is this more open-ended  section:

Symbols of American Heritage - We call upon governmental entities to protect all symbols of our American heritage from being altered in any way. 

Does that include protection of the Yellow Snake Teabag Cop-Killer Flag from alteration?

How about that battle flag flown by traitors defending slavery during the 1860s?

"We are not prone to surrender, we Mississippians." --Chris McDaniel

But who would expect a teabagger to have any sense of history, or irony?

The Patron Saint of the Tea Party

As the lemmings with suicide vests are in the process of flying off the cliff in this third week of the GOP shutdown, it's important to look back at the forerunners of those who are currently waving Confederate flags in front of a black family's house in Washington DC. Specifically, we can't help thinking of March 23, 2003 every time we see the word socialist spelled "scholiast", or fields of waving yellow snake teabag flags, or a tricorner hat festooned with teabags.

On March 23, 2003, in the midst of nationwide demonstrations against the Iraq War, one unnamed flag-bandanna-bedecked Urteabagger and future meme confronted hundreds of antiwar protesters outside a Boeing missile factory and gave us the creatively-spelled sign that would launch thousands of imitators as soon as Barack Obama was inaugurated.

From a Google image search on the word "Morans"

Mr. Get-A-Brain!-Morans deserves to be the Patron Saint, or at least the Unknown Soldier, of the modern Tea Party.

The Strategy of Distraction

Here's the media strategy of the RNC and the Tea Partiers regarding the government shutdown summarized in one twitterer's recent photos. Among many tweets of mine about the government shutdown over the last few days, I posted this one this morning:

Typical Fox News Viewer's View of #GOPshutdown:"Why did Obama and Reid go out of their way to shut down wheelchair ramps at WWII memorial!?"
— TrueBlue Liberal (@TrueBlueLiberal) October 4, 2013

I received this (surprisingly free of grammatical and orthographical errors) response a moment later:

@TrueBlueLiberal why did Obama #shutdown WWII memorial which was open 24/7 before, but now he closes it? Take your rose colored glasses off
— Truth Teller (@LiberalLies2012) October 4, 2013

I went to this tweeter's page and found the following recent pictures:

The photo from October 3 shows the "Barrycade" and "Harrycade" representing the closing of the WWII Memorial, but the photos from September 30 say "SHUT 'ER DOWN! WE DON'T obama CARE!" and the other photos from late September show the thoughtful young 1950's white man in a conservative suit wondering "If there is a government shutdown who will spy on me, waste my money, and have contempt for me?"  If these pictures could speak a thousand words (and, of course, they do) they would tell us all about cognitive dissonance and the typical and predictable right-wing media response that focuses on weapons of mass distraction rather than core issues.  It was in full display last March when the only sequestration cut complained about on the right was Obama's Heartless and Personal Shutdown Of White House Tours Just To Punish The Children (THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!). Now, of course, as one troll pointed out to me earlier this week,  President Obama and the Democrats are Nazis because they hate WWII vets.

It's not just one random twitterer with 29 followers playing up this single-note response to the current shutdown. Michele Bachmann has made multiple grandstanding photo-ops to the Memorial just down the Mall from the Capitol. Rand Paul has managed to combine GOP distractions in one sentence by saying they sent more security guards to the WWII Memorial than to Benghazi. The shutdown's poster boy Rafael Edward "Calgary Ted" Cruz released an official statement about Obamacare causing the Memorial's shutdown. And to prove that this distraction is an official party policy, Chairman of the RNC Reince Preibus (if that is a real name) has offered to have the party pay for five security guards to keep the Memorial open. Is the Republican National Committee willing to pay for scabs to keep all the other departments of the government working as well?

Finally, here's a video of one of the parade of GOP Congressional Grandstanding Photo Opportunists, Robert Randolph "Randy Robby" Neugebauer (R-TX) at the WWII Memorial berating a young Park Ranger for doing her job:

You can tell a lot about a person by the way he treats those he feels are "below" him. Not even the giant American flag in his breast pocket excuses his behavior.

Coming Up Next From the RNC/FOX Media Machine: Blaming Obama and Reid for the earthquake that closed the Washington Monument.

A Remedial Civics Lesson For Teapartiers

People on Fox News and Teapartiers on Twitter need to stop referring to the Affordable Care Act as "A Bill".
It's "A Law" and it has been since it was passed by the 111th Congress and signed by the President in 2010.

Today's Fine White Whine Comes from the Vineyard of Donald Trump

"...It was a terribly drawn suit, an incompetently drawn suit and they did it very quickly. ... Maybe this is a mini-IRS. Maybe we need to get the Tea Party after these people because this could maybe be a mini-IRS." 

--Donald Trump on Fox News, 26 Aug 2013

The Total Collapse of
Teaparty (#TCOT) flag.

Translation: Waah Waah Waah.  The Lightweight Attorney General of New York under orders from our Kenyan President Obama is going after me and my phony baloney "University" just like the IRS under Obama's marching orders harassed those poor non-political Tea Party groups, so now those non-political Tea Party groups should come to my aid. Waah Waah Waah.

In a logical world Donald Trump's fraudulent "Trump University" scam would be just one more reason for his disqualification for any type of public office, but there's still a good chance that we'll see him as the game-show-host clown in the 2016 GOP Clown Circus (and of course if he can't make it, the game-show-host clown-in-waiting Chuck Woolery will be happy to fill in that spot on the debate stage).

This Will Be The Only Time I Post on the IRS "Scandal"

There seems to be only one difference between the IRS scrutiny received by political groups on the left and right when they applied for tax-exempt status. One side went into the full Fine White Whine of spoiled privileged children and the other side knew they were asking the Internal Revenue Service for a special favor

The Gaspin' Flag commemorating the
2012 Total Collapse of Teaparty (a.k.a. #TCOT)

and were willing to endure the extra questioning to support their claims that they were "social welfare" organizations (probably an exception that shouldn't have been given to any of these political [or religious, but that's another argument] organizations) rather than purely political entities. 

One side fed Darrell Issa's televised Obama Witchhunt Committee with hours of sob stories about how their constitutional right to not pay taxes was interfered with by government questions, reaching an apex with a tearful Wetumpka (Alabama) Tea Party President Becky Gerritson proclaiming that she was not a 'serf or vassal' willing to answer too many questions or fill out lots of forms for her organization's tax-exempt status (which was not, after all, denied).

My favorite quote from the other side comes from the (non-whiny) executive director of one of the progressive groups that was also forced to fill out IRS paperwork (the horror):

“If you’re going to ask for exceptional treatment, you should expect to go through exceptional screening. We all play by the same rules, and if they don’t like the rules, they don’t have to play.”
--Ed Espinoza, Progress Texas (quoted on Politico, 7/22/13)

The Gaspin' Flag for commemorating the 2012 Total Collapse of Teaparty (#TCOT)

Just call me Betsy Ross for my alterations to the infamous yellow snake teabag flag...

The official "Gaspin' Flag", which will soon be flying over Total Collapse of
Teaparty (#TCOT) memorial service barbecues throughout the red states.

Please feel free to use and share this variation on the old Gadsden flag that the teabaggers appropriated during their headlong rush to irrelevance.