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Chely Wright and Cyndi Lauper on MSNBC’s Thomas Roberts re: President Barack Obama coming out in support of Gay Marriage

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Responding to a local reporter’s question, Mitt Romney said Thursday that he doesn’t oppose Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s attempts to drug test state workers:

“The states have rights under their constitution to do what they think is best,” Romney said. “The governor here is trying an idea, and I’m not going to disagree with Governor Scott. The idea of people being tested is something, which, we’ll see what the results are.”

Apparently, it makes no never mind to him what the courts have to say about this. They say it’s unconstitutional.

Back in February, the all-but-crowned GOP presidential nominee wasn’t so weasel-wordy about the drug testing of another group of Floridians, welfare recipients, as reported by Laura Clawson:

Jeff Hullinger: [Lawmakers] have bantered about the proposition that welfare recipients should be drug tested. How do you feel about that?

Mitt Romney: Well my own view is, it’s a great idea. People who are receiving welfare benefits, government benefits, we should make sure they’re not using those benefits to pay for drugs. I think it’s an excellent idea.

Of course, it’s a dreadful idea, as the courts noted in that instance as well. Either Romney is unaware of this or he just figured his audience was part of that cohort which thinks courts are illegitimate when making rulings not in lockstep with the latest authoritarian intrusion.

For once, however, you have to give him credit for not changing his mind from the time he starts a paragraph until the time he gets to the end. He’s been favoring drug testing for at least the past 18 years, back to 1994 when he sought to unseat Sen. Edward Kennedy.

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Talking Points Memo:

“Dreams From My Real Father,” a 97-minute film narrated by an Obama impersonator, weaves the narrative that Obama’s grandfather wasn’t a furniture salesman but an undercover CIA agent who convinced Barack Obama Sr. to marry his teenage daughter to hide the fact that she was impregnated by a 55-year-old communist named Frank Marshall Davis. [...]

The film has been favorably reviewed by WND’s Jerome R. Corsi, who wrote an entire book arguing that Obama’s birth certificate is a fake and that he was really born in Kenya and ineligible to be president of the United States.

Of course, both conspiracies cannot simultaneously be true (for that matter, not even one of them can be true, given the readily available evidence, but setting that aside for a moment, etc). It is a bit odd, however, that now “secret Muslim Kenyan” is no longer the go-to conspiracy theory for some people. No, “secret Muslim Kenyan” is what the government wants you to think. In reality, Barack Obama was the offspring of a communist, his grandpa was an undercover CIA agent and he was quickly shuttled off to Bill Ayers for proper indoctrination into how to someday be a secret communist president posing instead as a secret Muslim Kenyan president. Oh, and all of this took place so that, many decades later, children could stay on their parents’ health insurance a bit longer. I think.

This does, however, nix the whole notion of Barack Obama not being a citizen, so not all birthers are as quick to endorse it as Jerome Corsi. Jerome Corsi, after all, would endorse the notion that Barack Obama was a space alien brought here to help Hitler take over France but that the time-traveling plotters involved got their timing wrong by 70 years or so, so long as it made Jerome Corsi a few bucks to say it. Orly Taitz, for one, is not amused:

WND and Corsi, wrote Taitz, are “trying to kill the case by making up an American citizen father for Obama.”

Conflicting conspiracy theories? Which one to believe? That one over there has America’s Dumbest Sheriff endorsing it, but this one comes with a film narrated by an Obama impersonator. If that isn’t evidence, what is?

On the other hand, why would you even go with the “Obama’s father was really an elderly secret communist” angle? Is this a new schism between people who are more afraid of a black president and those who are more afraid of a communist one? Was the original conspiracy just getting too cluttered, just like any other long running franchise, so that a reboot was needed in order to wedge all the new, most fashionable ideas in? I have no idea. I had some previous notion that perhaps Corsi would, for his newest trick, announce that Barack Obama was in fact fathered by bad kerning, and as a typographical-American should be removed from office on that basis. It hardly matters what the conspiracy is, so long as you provide it with a decent narrator.

Hearing about things like this (and how very, very prevalent they are, when it comes to politics, science, or anything else that somebody, somewhere, finds personally objectionable), the only conclusion one can come to is that humankind is, for all our preening, made up of some damn stupid individuals—and that our ancestors are unbelievably damn lucky to have managed to form governments or civilizations at all, given what they had to work with.

I can’t imagine how many of our primate ancestors made the very early discovery that fire equals good, only to have their heads caved in by fellow primates that were certain fire was a plot by the primate devil and/or the primate Illuminati. How many thousands of years went by before the whole “let’s use fire to keep warm” or “hey, let’s cook this damn meat to make it less putrid” thing took off to the point where the vaguely bipedal practitioners didn’t just get torn to bits for suggesting the idea? That is impressive enough, but then to have gone on to develop bronze, or cement, or Nintendo systems—now that took some true miracles. No, the astonishing thing about civilization is that it can withstand such a very large percentage of crackpots, during any given era, who are bent on knocking down the whole thing because it conflicts with their own personal motivations or notions of which particular bogeymen are waiting behind which particular corners.

What was I talking about? Oh, I was saying how miraculous it was that human civilization can actually exist, given the omnipresence of such profound dunderheads as Jerome Corsi, Orly Taitz, et al. Yeah, that. I don’t know why I can no longer hear the name “Jerome Corsi” without thinking of world-shattering, civilization-crumbling stupidity, but it just pops into my head, every single damn time.

Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2008:

Reading coverage of the presidential race, I think perhaps I may be the one of the few remaining people on the planet that remember that George W. Bush ran for the presidency, in 2000, on a theme of being a bipartisan who would “change the tone” in Washington.

This was dutifully reported by, well, everyone. We were told that George W. Bush was terribly bipartisan as governor of Texas. Republican cronies were marched up in front of the cameras to tell us that he was great at working across the aisle, blah blah blah.

Coupled with these constant assertions of bipartisanship and CEO acumen was the campaign theme of “compassionate” conservatism: conservatism tempered with sympathy for the poor, and the sick, and the elderly, and minorities, and schoolchildren, and all those other groups of Americans that conservatism normally couldn’t be bothered with (after all, they own very little stock), so all his handlers and speechwriters needed to make up a new word for Bush’s supposed new brand of conservatism, to sort of cram the notion of basic human empathy and decentness into it somewhere. This, too, was roundly applauded by reporters and pundits in spite of absolutely no actual evidence that anyone anywhere meant a word of it, and considerable evidence that they did not.

Tweet of the Day:

When Herman Cain’s endorsement is worth more than the endorsement of the last Republican president, all you can do is sabotage the economy.
— @LOLGOP via TweetDeck

High Impact Posts. Top Comments. Overnight News Digest.

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Yesterday, Mitt Romney gave a speech in Iowa in which he vowed to cut spending dramatically and slammed President Obama for spending too much:

Today America faces a financial crisis of debt and spending that threatens what it means to be an American. [...] The people of Iowa and America have watched President Obama for nearly four years, much of that time with Congress controlled by his own party. And rather than put out the spending fire, he has fed the fire. He has spent more and borrowed more.  [...] Washington has been spending too much money and our new President made things much worse.

Romney singled out President Obama’s stimulus plan for particularly harsh scorn:

President Obama started out with a near trillion-dollar stimulus package – the biggest, most careless one-time expenditure by the federal government in history.

Leave aside the fact that it was actually a $ 787 billion plan and that Romney himself had praised it in January of 2009. Instead, check out what Mitt Romney told a town hall audience last week about spending:

I’m not going to cut a trillion dollars in the first year. And I heard a question. Why not? And the answer is: taking a trillion dollars out of a $ 15 trillion economy would cause our economy to shrink and would put a lot of people out of work.

So from one side of his mouth, Romney says President Obama’s “trillion-dollar stimulus plan” as the single worst expenditure the federal government has ever made. From the other side of his mouth, Romney says he wouldn’t immediately cut a trillion dollars in spending because it would “shrink” the economy and “put a lot of people out of work.” From one side of his mouth, Romney says President Obama’s spending policies threaten “what it means to be an American,” yet from the other side of his mouth Romney says departing from those policies would be bad for the economy.

And the thing about Romney is that he says this kind of stuff every single day. Keeping up with his two-faced inconsistency is exhausting—and we’ve got nearly six more months of it ahead of us.

Daily Kos

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Chris Mathews introduces a troglodyte to his audience.

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The survey by the international rights group mirrors two previous reports on the risks facing women and girls that had focused on California, where most of the nation’s farmworkers reside.

“Our research confirms what farmworker advocates across the country believe: sexual violence and sexual harassment experienced by farmworkers is common enough that some farmworker women see these abuses as an unavoidable condition of agricultural work,” said the report.

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The collection is silly, shocking and predictably offensive. Yet the works go beyond the initial gawk-factor with their reflections on masculinity, power and representation — ideas that still resonate in our political theater today. The paintings allow for a hilarious take on some of the world’s most known despots and powerful religious figures, revealing a new side to men who are not known for their sense of humor.

What do you think, does Benito Mussolini ‘s dangly earring make you laugh or cringe?

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