Srsly?

AWOP’s daily look at the absurd.

What they don’t want you to now

The Pentagon doesn’t want you to know how they decide if a Afghan detainee is going to be locked away with no rights and no access to legal representation. But they kinda sorta accidentally gave the ACLU a document that shows how, and now they want it back. They’re using the usual claims of “highly dangerous,” “potentially detrimental” and such to convince a judge to do just that, but the ACLU says the doc never should have been classified “secret” to begin with and government lawyers are just “fear-mongering.” (Washington Post)

Yeah, that’ll work

Newt Gingrich has a great idea. I know that’s probably a scary thought all by itself. See, if we just cut the corporate tax rate to, say, 12.5 percent, then all the corporations that currently spend lots of money on lawyers (not accountants, apparently) wheedling their tax dollars down to zero will just pay their taxes! Presto! Amazing! Michele Bachmann has an even better idea — cut the corporate tax rate down to 9 percent. Now, it’s true that the top US corporate tax rate is a second-highest-in-the-world 35-40 percent, which the conservatives simply LOVE to point to all the time. What they don’t tell you is that the actual rate paid by corporations is significantly lower, particularly when you’re talking about the non-producing corporations like financial services and real estate. In fact, during one seven-year period studied by the government 55 percent of corporations paid ZERO taxes during at least one year. The effective corporate tax rate in the United States is closer to 25 percent, 4th lowest in the world. You wanna pay high taxes? Go to Italy, where the effective rate is actually higher than the official rate.

More crybaby conserverati

This guy may be the gift that keeps on giving. I’ve been watching him for a while, and he’s this absurd all the time.

Gee, imagine that. He needed e-mails for that? Maybe he never noticed the administration’s habit of pointing out that Faux News is, well, faux?

And then there’s this

Speaking of Faux News, where they just make shit up, host Eric Bolling, on some show that seemed to be called The View … from the Clueless, said he didn’t recall any terrorist attacks on US soil between 2000 and 2008, onaccounta George W. Bush bein’ so manly and all, I guess. So we’re having the 13th anniversary of 9/11 in a few months? Ah, but it was all about defending the “sending poor kids to die over there so our financial gurus in big tall office buildings don’t have to die over here” thing.

Get ‘em while they’re young

Remember this name: Sandy Adams, Republican congresswoman from Florida. She wants to strip the Department of Energy of any funds they might use to tell kids about energy efficiency, because, you know, they might go ask mommy and daddy why it’s a bad thing to make incandescent lightbulbs more efficient, or switch over to already more efficient bulbs. Politico, which isn’t much better than Faux News at times, didn’t give Adams’ reasoning for this bill, but implied it was to save money. They did note that during her presentation, she had flip charts showing cartoons and jokes, like, “How did Benjamin Franklin feel when he discovered electricity?” “He was shocked.” OMFG. The outrage. Meanwhile, the House is gonna approve that measure to bar funding from implementing a Republican bill signed by George W. Bush that requires manufacturers to make a better light bulb. Why? Because the morons believe their own talking points that the bill bans incandescent bulbs, and, by god, NOBODY’S GONNA TELL ME WHAT KIND OF FUCKING BULB I CAN AND CANNOT USE IN MY OWN GODDAMN HOUSE. And besides, I need 100w incandescent bulbs that use all that power. Never mind, of course, that the 2007 bill only requires that manufacturers improve the efficiency of their bulbs. That’s it. That’s all. It doesn’t ban anything. Nada. Nothing. We are ruled by imbeciles.

Meanwhile, back at the debt ceiling talks

John Boehner says the room is too big and too many people are there, and that’s why they can’t reach an agreement.

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Short URL: http://aworldofprogress.com/readingroom/?p=175

Posted by editor on Jul 15 2011. Filed under the reading room. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry