DebateGate

EDITORIALS

Paul LePage, the Republican governor of Maine, mentioned an uncomfortable truth in a radio address this month: Maine has more welfare recipients than income tax payers.

Democrats challenged the accuracy of this assertion.

The Bangor Daily News fact-checked LePage and discovered that 445,074 Mainers paid state income tax,  while 453,194 received some sort of state aid.

In Maine, Medicaid, welfare, food stamps and subsidies for education have a combined enrollment of 660,000.

Adjusting for overlap reduces the number to 453,194 - or 8,120 more people on state assistance than there are state income taxpayers in Maine.

What is situation in West Virginia?

Nationally, only 53 percent of the nation lives in a household that pays federal income tax.

While just about every worker has taxes withheld, many people have the entire amount refunded at tax time. With child tax credits and earned income tax credits, some people get more money from filing a return than they paid in.

But 30 percent of Americans live in households that receive some sort of public assistance that is means tested, meaning a person must have an income low enough to qualify for the aid.

The data is from the U.S. Census Bureau for 2009. Some programs have expanded since then as the economy is growing very slowly.

That means 92 million people are on public assistance in one or more of its forms. That includes 33 million children - or 45 percent of all the people under 18.

Medicaid is the top government program, covering 74 million people. That is nearly one in four Americans.

The next most used public assistance program is food stamps, which covers 34 million Americans or one in nine people.

Almost 20 million people live on cash welfare and 11 million live in public housing.

Some policymakers have encouraged dependence on government programs and discouraged job creation.

Producing more dependents than taxpayers is a formula for disaster.

 http://www.dailymail.com/Opinion/Editorials/201112220151

10 Pieces of Nasty Ancient Graffitti ? Now Translated!
People have been making graffiti since there was writing ? everywhere we go we find messages lost in time. Some of these ancient writings give us priceless insight into lost civilizations. Other pieces, though, just give us big lumps of awesome.

Here are 10 pieces of ancient graffiti that show that people really haven't gotten any sillier in the last couple thousand years.

http://io9.com/5867518/10-pieces-of-crazy-ancient-graffiti

New Ron Paul Ad - BIG DOG

The Bloody Red Flag


Trending online news topics often cough up amusingly odd juxtapositions, such as when ?Auschwitz? was #2 behind ?LeAnn Rimes? and right ahead of ?Holiday Bread Recipes? on Yahoo!?s home page. Although I didn?t get a screen capture, I swear to whatever God will listen to me that a few days ago, Kristallnacht was trending on Yahoo! amid a pack of similarly weighty topics such as Justin Bieber and Snooki.

What the hell was Kristallnacht doing in the news?

I won?t deny that it was horrible?I mean, especially if you were Jewish. But apparently it was trending because November 9th was the 73rd anniversary of the ?Night of Broken Glass.? Only two more years, and they?ll be celebrating the Diamond Anniversary. Or the Platinum. I?m not sure. I always get those two confused.

Either way?long time ago, no? Why are we still ?celebrating? it? Godwin?s Law dictates that ?As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.? Godwin?s Law should be extended to include online news sites?check enough headlines, and you?ll inevitably see something about the Holocaust. It?s inescapable. When they?and by ?they,? I of course mean ?the Jews??said ?Never forget,? they weren?t kidding!

Godwin?s Lawmen invoke their law as a sort of reductio ad absurdum argument to discredit anything perceived as even slightly to the political ?right? of center. If you believe that some people in your mid-sized Midwestern city exploit their welfare checks, well, you obviously want to roast Jews alive and naked in open-pit barbecues while force-feeding them pork.

?Goadwin?s Law: Any time someone mentions Nazi atrocities, remind them that the communists killed more people.?
To counteract its lamentably pervasive effects, I propose Goadwin?s Law: Any time someone mentions Nazi atrocities, remind them that the communists killed more people.

One could split hairs on dead scalps all day and night about moral equivalencies and methods of execution, but the communists killed more than the Nazis?a lot more, actually. This is an important fact for multiple reasons, not least of which is that it makes your standard-issue pierced-nose scruffy-haired lightly bearded coffee-shop leftist who invokes Godwin?s Law 20 times daily very uncomfortable. There is joy to be had in that fact alone.

Being labeled a ?commie? doesn?t carry nearly the hornet-sized sting that being smeared as a ?Nazi? does, but why is that, especially if the commies killed more? On every city block you?ll see the earnestly confused irony-mongers sporting a goofball CCCP soccer shirt here, a wacky Lenin shirt there, and a solemn Che sweatshirt everywhere, but none of them would be caught dead in a Hitler shirt. Actually, the way things are these days, if anyone was caught in a Hitler shirt, they might wind up dead.

For the last couple generations we?ve been brainwashed?just as when I was a kid, my mother told me the communists brainwashed their citizens?into thinking the whole hubbub about ?commies? was one ridiculously overblown prematurely ejaculatory squirt of right-wing Red Scare paranoia and that the communists truly were as humane as the sheltered masses of mushy-minded American leftists had been deluded into thinking they were.

That?s really a nice sentiment, but then you have to deal with ?the 100 million.? Granted, 100 million is a round number?even smoother and rounder than six million?but for propaganda purposes, it?ll suffice.

Based on a rough mishmash of multiple historical estimates, 100 million is the number of people that communist regimes murdered in the 20th century. The Black Book of Communism claims a body count of around 95 million. R. J. Rummel, an expert in ?democide? and ?deka-megamurderers? (his neologism for those who kill in the tens of millions) suggests the total may be as high as 150 million. Estimates vary widely, but no historian worth their britches would say it?s under 50 million. Whatever way you slice the omelette, that?s a whole lotta broken eggs.

So the next time some horn-rimmed slack-shouldered left-wristed snark-monster dribbles that they represent the compassionate, caring, and pro-human side of the political spectrum, remind them of all the inhumanities perpetrated by the blind adherents to Mr. Marx?s Gospel of Universal Love.

Remind the world?s na?vely utopian ?fellow travelers? of how Marx endorsed ?revolutionary terror? and Engels gleefully foresaw ?the disappearance from the face of the Earth?of entire reactionary peoples? and how Lenin called for ?ruthless extermination? of ?ideological enemies? and how Trotsky said ?We have to run a hot iron down the spine of the Ukrainian kulaks? and how Mao said ?Deaths have benefits? because ?They fertilize the ground.?

Remind them of the Soviet Union?s unsung horrors?the emaciated children of the Holodomor and the mass murder in Katyn Forest, and the million or so executions during the Great Terror and gulag workers forced to eat their own feces and their skulls squeezed with iron rings and NKVD officers good-naturedly referring to their practice of shooting prisoners in the back of the head and watching their blood swirl down the drain as ?wet work.? Remind them of the hundreds of thousands of clergy beaten and tortured to death, crucified on gates and left in the cold to freeze into ice columns. Refresh their recollection about the stranglings and the machine-gunnings and the interrogations and the mental torture and the electric shocks and the tens of millions ground into oblivion in the state psychiatric hospitals and Siberian slave camps. Remind them of the engineered mass famines where peasants reverted to cannibalizing their own infants.

Remind them of the 20-40 million Chinese peasants who starved to death when Mao stubbed his toe during his Great Leap Forward, of the Cultural Revolution where ?enemies? were paraded, taunted, and thrashed to death in public. Of Red Guardsmen randomly selecting ?black elements? to pounce upon and club to a paste. Of ?enemies of the people? being mobbed, set ablaze, and bludgeoned with cold steel shovels. Of ?class enemies? having their organs cut from their bodies while they were still alive, then eaten in psychotic ?human flesh banquets? of class-war triumphalism. Of the estimated 20 million who perished in the forced-labor camps of Chairman Mao?s workers? paradise. Of re-education, forced confessions, and threats?all in the name of vague humanitarianism and eternally unverifiable delusions of socially enforceable equality.

NEVER let them forget.

It?s said that both Hitler and Stalin remarked on how easily ex-members from the other side converted to and assimilated into their respective new sides. Sounds about right to me.

?From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs? also sounds swell?that is, if you?re disabled and needy. Otherwise, it sounds unfair. Utopian schemes are by definition unrealistic and unworkable. State-sanctioned egalitarianism will always lurch into totalitarianism because it?s based on a fundamentally flawed id?e fixe?the nursery-school notion that everyone is equal. In its infantile insistence that not only is life unfair, but that something can be done about it, communists threw a tantrum that led to historically unprecedented bloodshed. They destroyed 100 million square pegs by vainly trying to squeeze them into round holes.

The atheistic folk religion of Marxism inevitably became totalitarian in practice because it is unflinchingly scriptural in its assumptions. It postured itself as the scientific culmination of the historical process, then, in the name of this higher calling, it murdered anything that got in the way. This movement of ?the people? wound up killing a hundred million of them.

So if you insist on waving your little red flag, don?t forget why it?s red.

http://takimag.com/article/the_bloody_red_flag#axzz1dDx0VQvs

CUPERTINO, Calif. (AP) -- Apple Inc. said the company's co-founder Steve Jobs died Wednesday. He was 56. "We are deeply saddened to announce that Steve Jobs passed away today," the company said in a brief statement.

"Steve's brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives. The world is immeasurably better because of Steve."

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Apple-says-company-cofounder-apf-2413458028.html?x=0

PUBLIC NUISANCES

The Obama Family Circus
by The Editors

September 02, 2011

Not so long ago, Barack Obama electrified and mesmerized not only America but the entire solar system and even parts of the Crab Nebula with his transparently empty promises, his smooth mulatto charisma, and an oratory prowess that sent tingles running up grown men's legs. Then, roughly five minutes after his inauguration, Obama lost all his charm and has flailed for the past two-and-a-half years as a frightened-and-flummoxed amateur who's obviously in way over his oversized ears. His approval rating has plummeted so precipitiously, it reached the point earlier this year where "only" 85 percent of African Americans said he's doing a swell job.

But except for that opening paragraph, we're not here to make fun of Barack Obama. Today, we aim our gleeful Schadenfreude at his blood relatives, many of whom have names that sound like slight variations of Ooga Booga Yabba Dabba Doo.

Historically, the press has made a bigger deal of Democratic presidents' wayward relatives than it has of GOP prez's familial fuckups. Whether this is due to editorial negligence or the fact that Republicans' families have kept their noses cleaner, we are not sure. Ronald Reagan's immediate family members did only slightly embarrassing things such as becoming a snarky, gay-seeming ballet dancer and a charmlessly meandering talk-radio host. Oh, and George Bush, Sr. had a mildly retarded son who became president for twice as long as his dad.

Over on the donkey side, America's media made huge hay of a bucktoothed, bespectacled, runway-staining Georgia cracker called Billy Carter and a coke-gobbling, talent-free wannabe musician named Roger Clinton.

But Barack Obama doesn't merely have a single embarrassing family member. He has a whole litter of them. But he's protected by the Black Shield, a new kind of skin privilege, one it's impossible to even mention without being branded with the irrevocably shameful "R" word. Due to such fears and also their elaborate financial and ideological entanglements with the current administration, most of America's press doesn't leap nearly so eagerly on Obama's familial skeletons as they do on Sarah Palin's retarded child or Michelle Bachmann's screaming faggot of a husband. The press isn't even in Obama's pocket - they're snuggled deep up in his underwear.

We are not constrained by such fears. But because a fundamental spirit of fairmindedness animates us, we'll leave his immediate family members out of it, although we can't help mentioning he was raised almost solely by Caucasians after age two and expressed his gratitude by checking off "black" rather than "white" or "some other race" on his Census form.

Since they're both dead, we will say nothing mean about his commie-sympathizing mud shark of a mother nor his violent, peg-legged, deadbeat alcoholic dad. Since they're still alive, we will refrain from taking cheap shots at his daughters Sushi and Mongolia and from disparaging his overbearing, insufferable, ball-busting, walking vagina dentata of a wife.

We're here simply to make sport of his less-immediate family members. It's funny to hear that Barack Obama has so many half-brothers, because genetically, Obama is a half-brother. Although we don't think he's fully responsible for any of their actions, we'll note that he seems reluctant to "spread the wealth" with any of them.

ONYANGO "UNCLE OMAR" OBAMA
Although he moved to the USA in the early 1960s, the president's half-uncle is still an illegal immigrant who somehow has managed to finagle himself an authentic Massachusetts driver's license and a valid Social Security card since 1992. On August 24 of this year, his erratic driving led to an arrest by Massachusetts police, who pulled him over near the Chicken Bone Saloon in Framingham. A police report noted his "obviously red and glassy eyes," a "slurred speech pattern," and "a strong odor consistent with consumption of alcohol coming from his breath." His blood-alcohol level reportedly tested at twice the legal limit, making him a drunk uncle, or, if you prefer, a "druncle." The 67-year-old liquor-store employee had reportedly also sold alcohol to underaged individuals on two separate occasions. When advised of his right to make a phone call and arrange bail, he said, "I think I will call the White House." Although facing deportation, he has sought refuge from the same law firm that enabled his younger sister, the innately loathsome Zeituni Onyango, to avoid the same fate only last year.

ZEITUNI ONYANGO
We've encountered cockroaches with more appealing personalities. Obama's half-aunt, this South Boston slum-dwelling welfare leech received brief notoriety just prior to the 2008 presidential election but appears to have been silenced by her half-nephew's campaign, allegedly telling a reporter, "I can't talk about it... After [November] 4th, I can talk to anyone." She moved from Kenya to the US in 2000 and unsuccessfully applied for asylum in 2002. Her request was denied in 2004, but she stayed obstinately planted in free Boston public housing while receiving a monthly disability check. She was finally granted asylum in 2010 and arrogantly told a CBS reporter, "I didn't ask for it; they gave it to me. I didn't create it or vote for it. Go and ask your system... If I come as an immigrant, you have the obligation to make me a citizen."


SAMSON OBAMA
The president's Kenya-based cell-phone-peddling half-brother was found to have once lived illegally in Britain for seven years. In November of 2008, he was arrested in Berkshire for tailing a group of young females - one of whom was only 13 - into a coffee shop, at which point he "became aggressive" and "allegedly tried to sexually assault one of them." He reportedly gave false ID to questioning officers, claiming his name was Henry Aloo. En route from Kenya to Washington, DC in January 2009, he was denied permission to re-enter Britain due to the earlier incident. Immigration allowed him to stay in the airport overnight, after which he flew to our nation's capital to attend his famous brother's inauguration.


A'BONGO MALIK "ROY" OBAMA
We're not sure where he gets "Roy" out of all that, and we're not interested enough to research it. But this radical-Muslim polygamist once reportedly said that the black man - we're assuming he meant all black men rather than an unspecified single black man - must "liberate himself from the poisoning influences of European culture." We agree. He also once allegedly reassured America's Jews that his half-brother Barack would do good by them "despite his Muslim background." In May, the National Legal and Policy Center filed a complaint with the IRS, charging him with claiming that his organization is a tax-exempt, federally funded nonprofit outfit, while they say he's lying through his dazzlingly white teeth. His charity organization is somewhat deceptively dubbed the Barack H. Obama Foundation, but it's named after his dark-chocolate father rather than his mocha-tinted half-brother. According to critics, evidence of his organization's do-gooding does not extend beyond photos on his website.


GEORGE OBAMA
In August 2008 as election battle lines had been drawn between Barack Obama and John McCain, the Italian edition of Vanity Fair leaked the embarrassing news that Obama's half-brother George was living amid squalor in Nairobi, "earning less than a dollar a day." Shortly after his brother's election, Kenyan police arrested George Obama for allegedly possessing a full joint's worth of marijuana. George later said that the Vanity Fair report was "exaggerated" and that people in his slum make up to five dollars a day. George said he had a "relatively privileged childhood" that he squandered on "drink and drugs" after becoming a "gun-toting gangster" and spending a year in prison for robbery. "Many people presume I have a direct line to the White House," he wrote, "but I don't."


MARK OKOTH OBAMA NDESANDJO
Barack Obama's well-educated light-skinned half-brother currently resides in China, running an Internet business that Chinese officials have suggested runs afoul of tax laws. Critics have accused him of "helping to promote cheap Chinese exports" to the detriment of America's economy. He also accused Barack Obama Sr. of beating him as a child. "I could not remember any good things about my father," he has said. "My skin had turned hard emotionally for so many years." Still, we're not nearly as bothered by any of that as we are by whatever that thing is he's wearing on his head.


Read more: http://takimag.com/article/the_obama_family_circus/print#ixzz1WmpzFtiO

Who Cares About the Middle East?
by Jim Goad

While reading yet another headline about, oh, I don't know, a wayward dromedary whose scrotum was implanted with a cell-phone-triggered incendiary device designed to blow up a VW minibus filled with sorghum-harvesting kibbutz workers, it hit me like a suicide bomb:

I don't care.

It's not that I've ever cared about the Middle East - it's that I've finally realized I don't care. How much don't I care? A whole lot. There's almost an intensity to my not caring. A ferocity, if you will.

I know I'm supposed to care about the Middle East. And I know that if I don't care, I'm supposed to feel guilty, but I can't even manage that much. I can't even feel bad about not feeling bad?that's how much I don't feel bad. Should I feel bad about that? I don't care. I'm sorry for that. Actually, no - I'm not sorry. I'm not sorry at all.

Who cares about the Middle East?

Not I.

OK, I care enough to tell you that I don't care, but that much and no more.

AIPAC wants me to care. CAIR wants me to care. But I don't.

Does the Middle East care about me? Not bloody likely! But I don't expect it to care. That's the difference between me and the Middle East.

In the simplest terms, the modern Middle East can be split into two distinct and perpetually hostile sides: Israel and the rest. Israel's population is said to be inbred; then again, so is the rest's.

In geopolitical terms, both sides are guilty of human-rights abuses. Regardless, our last president wore Israel's silly hat and held hands with the Saudi king. Our current president wore Israel's silly hat and bowed before the Saudi king. And I get a strong sense that neither president ever gave an Arabian fig about me.

In personal terms, I'm considered a gentile to one side and a kafir to the other. In other words, both sides consider me to be the "other." Yet if I dare mention it, one side will call me an anti-Semite and the other will dub me an Islamophobe. Both terms are unabashedly dishonest. One term presumes that Semites could never possibly do anything that might lead to anti-Semitism, while the other assumes that Muslims are never scary enough to induce Islamophobia. (Let's leave the discussion of what exactly constitutes a "Semite" for another day.)

Still, Americans are expected to care about the Middle East for reasons that are both pragmatic and ideological.

In pragmatic terms, there's the dirty matter of crude oil. The West, for all its glossolalia and gibberish about freedom, is economically enslaved to the vast reserves of black gold bubblin' beneath the Middle East's burnished sands. For the time being at least, Middle Eastern oil lubes the West's pistons, a fact that's amusing to them and embarrassing to us.

It's been postulated that over the past decade, it would have cost around $1.3 trillion?roughly the same amount that's already been frittered away to fight those useless foreign wars?for America to ditch the oil addiction and switch to nuclear power.

If it means we can get the frick out of the Middle East, I'd happily support any form of alternative energy, especially if we can find an alternative to the word "alternative." Let's harness the sun, water, and wind. Let's harness Al Gore and Michael Moore's flatulence. Let's construct slave-labor camps where whiny progressive urban bicyclists generate electricity via 24-hour forced pedaling at the crack of a whip. I say we put our full energy into deriving none of our energy from the Middle East.

Ideologically, there's the persistently harebrained idea that the Middle East?those parched lands on which all this cousin-fucking and brother-killing has occurred seemingly uninterrupted since antiquity?is somehow holy. For 1,500 years, the Jews, Christians, and Muslims have been the Three Stooges using their warped concepts of the One True God to play a game of "Who's your daddy?" against one another. But since the Promised Land makes no promises to me, I feel zero obligation toward it. And in the grander scheme, maybe it's not the best idea to formulate modern foreign policy based on ancient prophecies from hallucinating goat-shtuppers. Otherwise, we may provoke Armageddon merely by being stupid enough to believe in it.

But before that happens, allow me to step in and try to initiate my own Mideast peace process.

To my Arab and Muslim friends in the Middle East, especially the ones who aren't clit-slicing camel-fisters, I say, salaam. Although I can't honestly claim I enjoy the taste of hummus, I acknowledge that the United States' behavior in the Middle East has been despicable. My government's definition of what constitutes a corrupt, anti-democratic regime is inconsistent, or it would have bombed Saudi Arabia into glass years ago. America once supported Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan's war against the Russkis but wound up killing him. It supported Saddam Hussein in Iraq's war against Iran and even told him it was none of our business if he invaded Kuwait. But when he invaded Kuwait, America waged war against him. Under the pretense of WMDs that were never found, America invaded Iraq again and eventually killed Hussein, too. My only defense is that I've never successfully elected any American politicians and therefore don't consider myself the least bit responsible for their decisions, so please don't bomb me or my family. But as a heartfelt expression that I feel what my government did was wrong, I'd like to give you back all your Muslims.

To my Jewish/Israeli/Hebraic/Ashkenazi/Sephardic friends in the Middle East, I say, shalom. Considering your tiny numbers, it's astounding what you've been able to accomplish throughout history. I admire the world's practicing Jews as well as the ones who've stopped practicing and have gone professional. I'm still not sure whether your peeps comprise a race or a religion, so I don't know whether your territorial claim to Israel is a matter of "blood and soil" or "soul and soil." Either way, I gotta tell ya - although Israel's reestablishment in the Middle East may seem heroic and divinely sanctioned to you, I think your presence there is a really bad idea. Considering what happened in WWII, a screenwriter couldn't have scripted a better scenario for a sequel than placing Jews smack-dab in a vast area surrounded by hundreds of millions of locals whose holy book talks major smack about Jews. I can't envision any possible peaceful resolution to your presence there. Helen Thomas got in trouble for suggesting you should all "go home" to Poland and Germany, which was stupid - at least the Poland and Germany part. But how about New Jersey? I'll even throw in Delaware?no one cares about Delaware. You can have all of Nebraska. Or the entire Mojave Desert. I'm not sure that God really cares where you live. But for your own safety and to avert an imminent WWIII, I'd suggest you get the hell out of the Middle East pronto.

If neither side sees fit to agree to my generous terms, I wash my hands of the whole matter. Let them eat sand. Let them blow each other to bits. Go ahead and cry me a Nile. Fill up the Dead Sea with your tears. I can't muster two teardrops to rub together over your plight. I don't have a dog, nor a pony, nor a false god in this fight. I'm not my brother's keeper, especially when it ain't my brother. America has 99 problems, but the Middle East ain't one.

http://takimag.com/article/who_cares_about_the_middle_east#axzz1VR5dAh5e

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-obama-approval-20110814,0,2481281.story

latimes.com

Gallup: Obama job rating sinks below 40% for first time

By Michael A. Memoli

10:31 AM PDT, August 14, 2011

President Obama's summer woes have dragged his approval rating to an all-time low, sinking below 40% for the first time in Gallup's daily tracking poll.

New data posted Sunday shows that 39% of Americans approve of Obama's job performance, while 54% disapprove. Both are the worst numbers of his presidency.

Obama's approval rating has hovered in the 40% range for much of 2011, peaking at 53% in the weeks following the death of Osama bin Laden.

But Americans' view of his job performance continued to tick downward as the debt-ceiling debate heated up. By the time he signed legislation averting a federal default, he was mired in the low-40% range.

The polling setback comes as the Republican race to unseat him has kicked into overdrive. The past week has been dominated by the activity in Iowa ahead of the Ames Straw Poll, and the entrance of a new contender in Texas Gov. Rick Perry. The candidates have routinely assailed Obama's leadership in appealing to conservative activists who dominate this stage of the nominating contest.

Obama is set to launch something of a counter-offensive on Monday with a three-day bus tour of the Midwest, a trip that includes two stops in Iowa. The White House denied that the itinerary was politically motivated, however.

The three-day tracking poll was conducted from Aug. 11-13.

Copyright ? 2011, Los Angeles Times