Groucho Marx and the Tea Party Glee and Klown Klub sing the sacred Republican anthem

You had to know the permanent opposition to getting anything done in Congress was getting its inspiration from somewhere.

Now we know where.

Screw the poor and aged. Steal from pensioners and miserably paid employees. Rob the schools. Then use the money to subsidize millionaires and billionaires.

"Please sir, may I have another spoonful of thin gruel? For I am fiercely hungry." 

"Damn you, you accursed street urchin! Shut your whining mouth. Don't you know I have billionaires to feed?"

Quick – Go grab a pail so you’ll have something to puke into. Then go here and read the latest disgusting news about the Dickensian States of America.

Meanwhile, in more and more cities and states, being so poor you're homeless is now a crime.

And if you think you'd like to help the homeless poor by feeding them, have another think. In 50 cities, from Daytona Beach, Florida to Camden, New Jersey, feeding the homeless poor is now a crime, too. Just let 'em stand up (because it's against the law for them to sit or lie down) and starve.

By the way, who are those self-righteous bastards who keep smugly declaring that America is a Christian nation? Oh right, people like this guy.

What big, really really big government spending did to the American economy

We’re approaching the 45th anniversary of Americans to be the first people to walk on the moon. The date is July 24. This seems like the perfect time to send a reminder to the nincompoops who want to slash government spending and leave economic development to the so-called “free market.” 

Here’s a partial –very partial – list of some of the profitable products they would have killed if they killed one of the biggest government spending programs in history.

• Freeze dried food
• Lightweight film space blankets
• Cochlear implants
• The dust buster you use to clean the crap off your car upholstery
• Infrared ear thermometers – so much easier than the Tea Party temperature taking method of shoving a narrow tube of mercury-filled glass up your butt
• New kinds of water purification systems.  (Your dentist may be using one to keep from squirting polluted gunk under your gums
• Collision avoidance systems, soon to be applied to saving your butt when you fall asleep at the wheel
• Better prosthetic limbs, one of the reason so many of our wondered war vets can walk, or even run, rather than hobble or spend their lives tethered to a wheel chair
• Automatic insulin pumps, so that fat (and fat-headed) Tea Partiers can complain the gubmint has no business regulating what people put in our food while enjoying the benefits of Obamacare or Medicare

As I said, this was a very partial list.There are at least 1650 other space program spinoffs in the fields of computer technology, environment and agriculture, health and medicine, public safety, transportation, recreation, and industrial productivity. For more of these fascinating spinoffs of space science, go here.

The cost of the space program? Adjusted for inflation, it came to $851,000,000,000, according to one sourceq. It was money well spent because all the spinoffs not only made life better for Americans, they made jobs, by the hundreds of thousands and pretty much paid for themselves by growing and enriching the economy over time.

It’s time to put the government back in business again, before the tax-cutting, job-killing, progress-killing, technology-hating right wingers do more damage than that they already have turning the United States of America into a banana republic. 

P.S. My pal Garth Hallberg has taken the paranoid fantasies of the right wing – the ones that insist the whole moon shot happened in a TV studio and is part of a left wing plot to uh, you know, kill freedom – and had some fun with it in a delightful book called, “Boon Juster Or The Reason For Everything.” Take it to the beach with you while there’s still some summer left. And when you read it please remember that the numbskulls actually believe this stuff.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog

“Aching Hunger…Bliss Ineffable…Mad, Tender…Passion-wild, jealous…hungry…” Oh goody! Another Republican sex scandal, this one aged to perfection like a fine wine.

Warren G. Harding with his

starched color and awkward

pose was just another randy

 Republican crook

What is it about Republicans? They oppose birth control, oppose abortion, make dumb-bunny remarks about knees and aspirin to explain their favorite stupid birth control method – and then these moralizing oafs screw around on the side like March hares on an overdose of testosterone

Now, from the scandal-plagued, corruption-plagued  Warren Gamaliel Harding Administration of 1921-1923, the blathering Republican president whose language was described as, “an army of pompous phrases moving across the landscape in search of an idea,” (Does that sound like anything Republicans do today?) comes the romantically smarmy love letters of the married prez to his married mistress.

The letters are about to released, and ought to be published under the title, “50 Shades of Republican.”

Read the piece in the Washington Post. Then go take a cold shower.

Hey, the one thing you can say about Republicans is that they’re consistent in their pompous idiocy and surprising affinity for sexual philandering, from Herman Caine, to Newt Gingrich, to Mark Sanford, to name just some of them.

So if I have one regret about my mortality, it’s that I won’t live to see what your great grandchildren find out about today’s Republicans and Tea Party oafs. But in my heart of hearts, I’m hoping that they’ll read something about Rick Santorum.