Stoopid

A big win for Steve Tilley, Birther Tim Jones, Jeff Roe and former possible statewide candidate Caleb Jones: "This is what the Republican-led Missouri House did Thursday when it was supposed to be debating a jobs bill in the now five-week old Missouri Legislature's special session: It took a break to pass a worthless — but not meaningless — resolution that directly slapped the face of one of the state's biggest employers. Missouri House Republicans have made their stance quite clear. They are pro-wasteful federal spending, pro-GOP consultant, pro-Texas. They're equally anti-middle class, anti-Boeing, anti-progress. And they are opposed to any jobs bill that might bring thousands of new jobs to St. Louis. We hope the business community that has been so generous with campaign funds for the House Republicans is paying attention."

There are actual terrorists in the world.  I don't think there are any in the Missouri General Assembly.

The Missouri House of Representatives today passed legislation requiring all candidates for president and vice president to wave their birth certificates in front of someone at the Missouri Secretary of State's office. Should the Senate pass the bill unamended and the Governor sign it, Missouri state law will read:

When certifying presidential and vice presidential nominees and requesting that such nominees be placed on the ballot, the state committees of each political party shall provide verifiable evidence of identity and proof of natural born citizenship.

As has been noted repeatedly in this space and others, this language is part of a national effort to foster continued doubts about the citizenship of Barry Soetoro, our Muslim Socialist overlord.

This headline and lede comes from the Missouri Baptist Convention's Pathway publication, not The Onion:

SHARIA LAW COMING TO MISSOURI?
by Allen Palmeri, associate editor

JEFFERSON CITY—Dozens of Muslim women in burqas came to the State Capitol on April 13 to extol the virtues of Sharia Law as they met with representatives and senators.

Rep. Anne Zerr, R-St. Charles, does not wear a burqa. Zerr is an American woman who dresses fashionably. In no uncertain terms, she told The Pathway that she likes her rights and freedoms just the way they are.

Kurt Bahr is bored with actual issues and legislation already

Representatives Kurt Bahr (R-St. Charles), Andrew Koenig (R-Winchester), Shane Schoeller (R-Willard), Melissa Leach (R-Springfield), Kathie Conway (R-St. Charles) and Thomas Long (R-Battlefield) are sponsoring legislation (HB1010) to make it a crime -- a crime!-- when any federal or state employee "enforces or attempts to enforces" any part of the federal health care reform law. 

From the bill as proposed:

4. Any official, agent, or employee of the United States government or any employee of a corporation providing services to the United States government that enforces or attempts to enforce an act, order, law, statute, rule, or regulation of the government of the United States in violation of this section is guilty of a class D felony.

5. Any public officer or employee of this state that enforces or attempts to enforce an act, order, law, statute, rule, or regulation of the government of the United States in violation of this section is guilty of a class A misdemeanor.

Bruce Bartlett, formerly a senior policy analyst in the Reagan White House and now a columnist for The Fiscal Times, doesn't have many nice things to say about a constitutional amendment proposed by Roy Blunt and his GOP colleagues in the Senate. 

And by "many," I mean none at all. 

Dopiest Constitutional Amendment of All Time?

Today, all 47 Senate Republicans introduced a constitutional amendment to balance the federal budget. Full text available here. Presumably, this is the amendment that Republicans plan to demand as their price for increasing the federal debt limit. Of course, simply refusing the raise the debt limit would balance the budget overnight -- the nation would default on its debt and we would be plunged into the worst fiscal crisis in history, but the budget would be balanced. I have previously explained the idiocy of right wing advocates of debt default (here and here) and the idiocy of a balanced budget amendment (here and here). However, the new Republican balanced budget proposal is especially dimwitted...

Even if Congress was willing to cut mandatory spending, it is practically impossible to do so quickly unless it is willing to reduce the monthly checks going to current retirees and other actions difficult to contemplate.

In short, this is quite possibly the stupidest constitutional amendment I think I have ever seen. It looks like it was drafted by a couple of interns on the back of a napkin. Every senator cosponsoring this POS should be ashamed of themselves.

“Farsi? Is that a language that Farsinians speak?”

At a House Budget Committee hearing in Washington yesterday, Rep. Todd Akin described all IRS agents as 'goons' -- as in "goon squad."  Why are they goons?  Because they happen to be employed by the IRS. Duh.    The Hill has the story:

The back-and-forth began after Akin questioned [Treasury Secretary Timothy] Geithner about President Obama’s fiscal 2012 budget, which includes spending increases for the IRS that could reportedly lead to thousands of more staffers at the agency.

The Missouri congressman said he thought energy might be better spent simplifying the tax code. "Not to mention the fact that it'd make us all look better if we don’t have a goon squad of 5,000 IRS agents tromping around the country with the economy the way it is," Akin said.

For his part, Geithner tried to point out that many of the new IRS employees would concentrate more on customer service or information technology than enforcement, and he referenced estimates that a dollar’s worth of enforcement could bring roughly $4 back in revenue.

Brilliant stuff as always, Todd.

UPDATE: As predicted by the good folks at The Pitch, Lichtenegger now says her Facebook account was "hacked," and is advising her fellow Representatives to change their passwords. 

To my fellows State Repres. My facebook page was hacked as I was driving home today. I understand I'm not alone. Please change your passwords as a precaution

---------------------------------

Rep. Donna Lichtenegger (R-Jackson) has been a member of the Missouri General Assembly for three whole weeks.  But it looks like she's adjusting to her new environment in Jefferson City quite well.

This afternoon on Facebook, a giddy Lichtenegger [or someone posing as Lichtenegger] wrote for all the world to see, "I love lobbyist [sic]! All the free food and stuff you get. This job is awesome!"

Yesterday was a Wednesday, which means Lt. Governor Peter Kinder embarrassed himself on the twitternets.

Tuesday, the Federal Communications Commission approved new net neutrality rules that are intended to prevent internet service providers from discriminating with different kinds of content.   The goal is to make sure companies don't block (legal) services from competitors, and to prevent corporations from censoring or controlling what their customers are doing.   Activists on the left have expressed concern that the rules don't go far enough, and Republicans have coalesced around vapid 'government control' rhetoric. 

But Kinder -- obviously an expert on federal telecomm policy -- has decided that it's just time to defund and abolish the FCC entirely.  

Hey, why not? 

UPDATE: St. Louis Activist Hub has a good rundown of the "stuff" Martin tried to pull together to make his claims "plausible."

Apparently unable to document Friday's claim that "busloads of mentally handicapped service workers" hijacked Tuesday's election and unsuccessful in his attempts to "find enough stuff we can use to make [his fraud theories] plausible," Ed Martin has finally decided to concede his race against Rep. Russ Carnahan. 

Friendly reminded to the media:  Please remember not to treat Mr. Martin as a dishonest media-savvy egomaniac today, and construct all of your stories about Martin's concession in a way that makes his claims of "fraud" and "irregularities" seem legitimate. 

"We’re trying to find enough stuff we can use to make it plausible."

Ed Martin explains his strategy for manufacturing conspiracy theories about his Tuesday defeat to Tucker Carlson's Daily Caller, including today's sad attempt to convince folks that heretofore unknown "busloads of mentally handicapped service workers" may have stolen the election

KWMU: "Republican election commissioner [Carol Wilson] says private security guards did not touch any ballots or interfere with voting Tuesday at the St. Louis City Board of Elections....Martin wants an investigation of the firm's hiring...but Republican election commissioner Carol Wilson said only two security guards worked at the Board of Elections headquarters, where they guarded the front door."

While sore loser Ed Martin tries to raise money with his bogus claims of fraud in Tuesday's election, the Beacon picks up on Peter Kinder's interview with local radio personality and all-around silly person Dana Loesch, first noted here yesterday:

Martin, a Tea Party favorite, is currently behind by 4,400 votes, and has raised questions about possible irregularities in St. Louis. Martin formerly had been chairman of the city's Election Board.

Kinder, reflecting his role as party powerbroker, isn't going along with Martin's call. While praising Martin's performance, Kinder said, "Ed Martin clearly did not get it done in St. Louis County, and we're clearly taking note of that."

Kinder went even further in an appearance with radio talk show host (and Tea Party activist) Dana Loesch, saying on the air that he had talked with city GOP elections director Scott Leiendecker, and that it was clear that Martin had lost fair and square.

Here's a good indication that the House Republican Campaign Committee is more than a little concerned about Rep. Denny Hoskins' (R-Warrensburg) re-election campaign:  they're paying for robocalls declaring that Democratic candidate Courtney Cole "does not share our Christian family values" because she "has taken hundreds in campaign donations from a representative of the hard core pornography industry, including gay pornography." 

(Attacks like this aren't new for Missouri Republicans, of course.  In 2006, Rep. Sam Graves and Jeff Roe slimed Democratic candidate Sara Jo Shettles because she once sold ads for a science magazine that was owned by a magazine publishing company that happened to also own Penthouse.)

The HRCC doesn't say who the allegedly porn-loving (and gay porn-loving, which is apparently important to point out)-- donor may be, of course, but the crafting of the language sure suggests that it's a lawyer who represented some person or company that may or may not be actively involved in pornography. 

As the Huffington Post's Sam Stein writes, "The ties-to-hard-core-porn charge borders on a self-parody of an attack ad."  But the intent of the ad isn't to be funny (I think) -- it's to smear.

Citizens and reporters should demand that Hoskins and Missouri GOP leaders -- including GOP House Caucus leader Steve Tilley and the Lt. Governor Peter Kinder -- explain this garbage.

h/t Show Me Progress

Hey, fellas: You've already come up with creative, "dubious" and "strange" arguments for your Fox News lawsuit.  Why not ask CBS and Bob Schieffer if they want to sue some evil doers for this ad?    I'm confident the self esteem and dignity of an actual journalist like Schieffer was just demolished when people saw him interviewing an elected representative on the teevee.  Seems ripe for the pickin' to me.

I see over at the Turner Report that "Vicky Hartzler will say 'no' to San Francisco values."  Can someone explain what that means, please?  

Sigh.

ABC News has the story of a new billboard outside Kansas City on Highway 71 tying Barack Obama's "Democratic Socialism" to Adolph Hitler's "National Socialism" and Mao Zedong's "Marxist Socialism." It's apparently sponsored by a group called Francis Marion Nation LLC, headquartered in Georgia.

No word yet on how long our communist/socialist/fascist/pureevil president will allow these wackadoos to exercise their First Amendment rights to be wackadoos.

Who needs Medicaid when the poorest Americans and their children can get the medical care they need by just finding a provider who will give it to them for free?