This just in

photo © patrick hysell for openphoto.net CC:Attribution-ShareAlike

With much gratitude and hat tipping to DarkSyde over at DailyKos. I just had to share his list.

What we've learned this week:

• The best way to help the people who need it the most is by giving trillions in tax cuts and tax deductions to the richest who need it the least. The fact that this hasn't worked for eight years is justification to make it permanent.
• Republicans are willing to blow a trillion or more in Iraq and call anyone who doesn't go along unpatriotic, but we can't afford healthcare for Americans and must instead rely on deregulating insurance companies (No, I'm not making that up) and taxing healthcare benefits; anyone who argues otherwise is anti-American.
• This Just In: John McCain Invented the Blackberry!
• When CEOs drive century old Wall Street investment banks and multinational insurance firms into the ground with sheer greed and incompetence it's the responsibility of taxpayers to bail them out. When those taxpayers lose their jobs, homes, and healthcare because of corporate greed and incompetence, they're on their own.
• First dudes don't have to bother answering state investigators or responding to bipartisan subpoenas, as long as they're married to a Republican politician.
• John McCain was really all for regulation all along, after he and his party deregulated everything in sight, and hired the same dereg fundamentalists that flew the economy into the side of a mountain to run his campaign.
• The incoherent rantings of a African witch-hunting dominionist lunatic who sees demons hovering in the air are a respectable endorsement for being elected Vice-President.
• This Just In: Sarah Palin is a Young Earth Creationist End-O-the-World-Nutter.
• Republicans refer to pointing out any of the above as 'finger pointing' and 'lecturing,' while lecturing and pointing their fat sweating guilty sausage-like fingers at anyone who wanders into sight for the colossal failures of their own warped ideology.

I learned this from my wanderings around the housefrau blogosphere:

• What the Conservatives reject is the Liberal mindset that attempts to place restrictions on others rather than on themselves in the guise of protecting the environment. There are differences of opinion about what should be done to protect the environment and forcing your own views on others is not a Christian way of doing things, so the Conservative Christians don’t do that.

  That only applies to environmental laws. If someone is gay, then in the Conservative Christian view, they shouldn't be allowed to marry or raise children, and they will put constitutional amendments on the ballot to force that view on others. (Link provided on request, it's in comment #561 on that page)
  

• Christians are against sex outside of marriage. But every child is a gift from God and is never a mistake. Following the logic there, saying no to sex would be saying no to God bringing a child into the world. After all, God must have put that boy and that girl in that place for that reason. So Christians are all for sex, at any age or marital status, they are only against birth control and abortion.
  

• Conservatives, with the help of the single issue Christians who keep putting them in office, are robbing the country dry. (From Glen Greenwald)

Here is the current draft for the latest plan. It's elegantly simple. The three key provisions: (1) The Treasury Secretary is authorized to buy up to $700 billion of any mortgage-related assets (so he can just transfer that amount to any corporations in exchange for their worthless or severely crippled "assets") [Sec. 6]; (2) The ceiling on the national debt is raised to $11.3 trillion to accommodate this scheme [Sec. 10]; and (3) best of all: "Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency" [Sec. 8].

Put another way, this authorizes Hank Paulson to transfer $700 billion of taxpayer money to private industry in his sole discretion, and nobody has the right or ability to review or challenge any decision he makes.

• A single rumor can drain an American city dry of most if not all fuel in 24 hours.
  

Amazing what you learn.