Normal, sane folk who don’t convulse uncontrollably at the idea of actually making dare I say, progress in the treatment of fellow human beings, felt an overwhelming sense of pride as Barack Obama announced that the United States “would use all the tools of American diplomacy, including the potent enticement of foreign aid, to promote gay rights around the world.”

In a memorandum issued by the President Obama and in a speech by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Obama administration vowed to “actively combat efforts by other nations that criminalize homosexual conduct, abuse gay men, lesbians, bisexuals or transgendered people, or ignore abuse against them.”

Whoa, whoa, whoa! OMG, since when do gross gay people count as actual human beings? Does Jesus know about this?

The New York Times apparently does.

“I am deeply concerned by the violence and discrimination targeting LGBT persons around the world whether it is passing laws that criminalize LGBT status, beating citizens simply for joining peaceful LGBT pride celebrations, or killing men, women, and children for their perceived sexual orientation,” Mr. Obama said in a presidential memorandum.

Ugh, fine, but throwing rocks at them is still cool, right?

“In many ways, they are an invisible minority,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva. “They are arrested, beaten, terrorized – even executed. Many are treated with contempt and violence by their fellow citizens while authorities empowered to protect them look the other way – or join in the abuse. Too often, they are denied opportunities to work and learn, driven from their homes and countries, and forced to suppress or deny who they are to protect themselves from harm.”

Oh, so they’re like Occupy protesters here?

After saying the United States’ own record on the issue is “far from perfect” and that there is still work to be done domestically, Clinton urged the international community to act despite the fact that opposition based on “deeply held personal, political, cultural, and religious beliefs” remains. “Being gay is not a Western invention. It is a human reality.”

Which I guess can be said about the Kardashians as well.

“In reality, gay people are born into — and belong to — every society in the world,” she said. In countries “where people are jailed, beaten or executed for being gay,” she called on leaders to leap ahead of their constituents cultural or social mores, if necessary.

Wait, so does that mean the whole stoning/beheading in a public square is a no go? Cause if so, Uganda’s gonna be pissed!

“I’m not saying that gay people can’t or don’t commit crimes,” she said. “They can and do, just like straight people. And when they do, they should be held accountable. But it should never be a crime to be gay.”

Unless say, they do the unthinkable like wear white after Labor Day or heavens forbid, fuchsia gingham shirts tucked neatly into tight white pants and secured by a turquoise ’80s belt to a White House Garden Party.

Other than that, the U.S. going on record as being uncool with gay-hating foreign governments, and not wanting people to be murdered, tortured or imprisoned for their sexuality is a pretty uncontroversial thing, unless…UNLESS you are a fading, desperate drunkard like Rick Perry, who will prove once and for all he is the #1 presidential candidate of straight Jesus and all HIS one man + one woman (+ semi automatic machine gun) glory.

Well there’s no way Slick Rick Perry’s just going to sit back and let them gays get any of those “special rights” to exist, which is why he issued this fiery statement:

“Just when you thought Barack Obama couldn’t get any more out of touch with America’s values, his administration wants to make foreign aid decisions based on gay rights.
“This administration’s war on traditional American values must stop.
“I have proposed a foreign aid budget that starts at zero. From that zero baseline, we will consider aid requests based solely on America’s national security interests. Promoting special rights for gays in foreign countries is not in America’s interests and not worth a dime of taxpayers’ money.
“But there is a troubling trend here beyond the national security nonsense inherent in this silly idea. This is just the most recent example of an administration at war with people of faith in this country. Investing tax dollars promoting a lifestyle many Americas of faith find so deeply objectionable is wrong.
“President Obama has again mistaken America’s tolerance for different lifestyles with an endorsement of those lifestyles. I will not make that mistake.”

Aww, hell no! Instead Rick Perry will make the mistake of thinking that the only people in the world are obese racist old white people who live in the American south, and equate the rights of gay people to paying income tax.

But, don’t worry Rick! Everyone knows no more Republicans will accidentally turn gay as a result of this new policy. That’s what Teletubbies, the Military, and Craigslist is for!

[image via AP/Wonkette]

Rejoice, America! Barack Obama’s signature Socialist legislation, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, which doesn’t so much insure all Americans with actual health care as it does no longer allow billionaire health care executives to cackle wildly while doing the jitterbug on the sick, weakened bodies of children denied coverage, is finally heading to the Supreme Court, where nine men and women dressed in glorified Snuggies will rule on its Constitutionality, like whether your heart arrhythmia makes you 3/5ths what the white landowner with the robust, perfectly-beating heart next to you’s worth.

Hooray?

But will the wonderful, infallible pro-slavery document of the late 1700s permit American citizens the right to not die, penniless and alone in the streets, even if it’s not explicitly covered within its tattered, yellow pages of animal parchment?

From Reuters:

The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to decide the fate of President Barack Obama’s healthcare law, with an election-year ruling due by July on the healthcare system’s biggest overhaul in nearly 50 years.

The decision had been widely expected since late September, when the Obama administration asked the nation’s highest court to uphold the centerpiece insurance provision and 26 states separately asked that the entire law be struck down.

And then, if all goes well, drowned in a lake of brimstone and fire with the rest of the sinful acts of justice like Social Security, Civil Rights, and Voting Rights, where it belongs.

At the heart of the legal battle is whether the Congress overstepped its powers by requiring all Americans to buy health insurance by 2014 or pay a penalty, a provision known as the individual mandate.

Legal experts and policy analysts said the healthcare vote may be close on the nine-member court, with five conservatives and four liberals. It could come down to moderate conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy, who often casts the decisive vote.

The law, aiming to provide more than 30 million uninsured Americans with medical coverage, has wide ramifications for company costs and for the health sector, affecting health insurers, drugmakers, device companies and hospitals.

A decision by July would bring the healthcare issue to the heart of the presidential election campaign. Polls show Americans are deeply divided over the overhaul, Obama’s signature domestic achievement.

Less divided are the fringe-right millionaire and billionaire business executives, who thanks to the biggest provisions of the law not taking effect until 2014, have a rare chance to completely erase the whole Obamacare “affordable insurance for everyone” fiasco before it actually happens.

But what about the people, you ask?

The people???

Ugh, to health with them!!

So, remember those death panels you keep hearing about?

It’s called the Supreme Court.

[image via AP]

While Republicans, like Louisiana Rep. John Fleming, were busy whining about how $6.3 million a year just ain’t what it used to be (I mean who do you have to screw to get some freakin’ foie gras around here!?), President of Socialism, Barack Obama, was busy concocting his evil plan to reduce the ballooning deficit by having the (black) balls big enough to ask precious multi-millionaires and billionaires to actually pay their fair share of taxes instead of just making dumb poor and old people collect bottle caps and harvest their own organs to do it.

Ugh, the nerve!

Ignoring yet another meaningless warning from Republicans against terrible Commie tax increases, President Obama unveiled his new deficit-reduction plan, “The Buffett Rule,” forcing the nation’s wealthiest one percent to give half their salaries, in cold-hard cash, to the Nation of Islam, greenpeace loving halogen lightbulb manufacturers fix the crumbling economy and close the ever-widening gap between the wonderful, virtuous rich and revolting, needy poor. Or something like that.

President Obama on Monday will call for a new minimum tax rate for individuals making more than $1 million a year to ensure that they pay at least the same percentage of their earnings as middle-income taxpayers.

In remarks in the White House Rose Garden, Obama drew stark contrasts between Republican’s penchant for backing “tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires” while requiring seniors, the middle class and the poor to tighten their belts and accept sacrifices.

“During this past decade, profligate spending in Washington, tax cuts into multi-millionaires and billionaires, and two wars have turned a record surplus into a massive deficit,” Obama said. “If we don’t act, the debt will eventually crowd out everything else, eventually affecting us from investing in things like education and Medicaid. We need to cut what we can’t afford to pay for things we need.”

And what we need is bigger tax breaks for über-rich corporations! I mean seriously, what else should we do, let Rep. John Walsh and his family starve to death on his hobo salary of $400,000 after adjusting for whatever the hell else he does with the remainder of the paltry $6.3 million he annually pockets from his various Subway and UPS franchises (accidentally order the five (hundred) dollar footlong?).

Well, some people (Republicans) simply will not stand for this class warfare! Asking the perfect, morally flawless job creators like corporate CEOs, oil barons, and heiresses to give the big bad gubmint their hard-earned money is simply outrageous. What the hell does this look like, Soviet Russia or something?

“This plan eliminates tax loopholes that primarily go to the largest business and corporations–tax breaks that small businesses and middle class Americans don’t have to pay,” Obama said. “We can’t afford these special lower rates for the wealthy, which by the way, were initially talked about as temporary measures.”
“Either we have to ask the wealthy to pay their fair share, or we have to ask seniors to pay more for medicare, or gut education. This is not class warfare. It’s math.”

Exactly! After all, the only thing scarier to Republicans than gross poor people is gross numbers. Though, I guess as a compromise, we could always just propose gutting Republicans instead!?

Finally, a solution we can all swallow!

Plus, on the bright side, unlike John Fleming’s enormous family of ravenous, $200,000/year truffle-stuffing gluttons, we’ll finally have something to shove down our pie holes that doesn’t cost four times what the average American schlub makes in an entire year.

Winning!

So the inane, demented, “Are We Congressman or Kindergarteners” playground scuffle time slot slug fest between the White House and John Boehner’s office is now officially over, with Barack Obama giving up even faster than usual in some lame misguided attempt to placate his Grand Old enemies, who’d like nothing more than to ship him back to deepest darkest Africa, at the expense of alienating those who actually matter, like say, the unemployed, NFL-watching, Snuggie-wearing, Pringles-stuffing, American public.

Maybe if Aaron Rodgers was the one giving the jobs speech, things would’ve been different?? But since he was blessed with arm strength, not oratory skills, President of capitulation, Barack Obama, will no longer deliver his very important jobs speech during Wednesday night’s network premiere “Are you dumber than a Teabagger?” GOP presidential debate, and instead speak the following evening, on the one night America forgets the fact that it’s fat, broke, and jobless in order to watch grown men in neon tights bend, grunt, and toss an oblong ball as an excuse to jump on each other in sweaty piles during the NFL season opener.

The date Obama requested falls on the same day as one of the Republican presidential debates, this one the first to feature Texas Gov. Rick Perry. Instead, Obama will now be competing against the NFL season opener.

Obama and Boehner squared off Wednesday, not over the contents of the speech but the date on which Obama will give it.

The White House and the Speaker’s office were at odds over whether the president’s staff had talked to Boehner’s office about the date before announcing it to the press.

Both sides dug in on their arguments, with Boehner’s office saying that the White House had only given them a heads up shortly before announcing the date instead of talking with the speaker about the schedule.

Sorry, Obama, parenting presidenting is hard work!

The big question now becomes what other terrible Republican ideas (or death wishes, if you prefer) will Obama give in to next to spare America the pain and suffering of being once again drowned in John Boehner’s unnaturally orange-colored booze tears?

Will President Obama finally grant the GOP their Christmas wishlist of giant white corporate castles built from the bones of immigrants and welfare recipients, surrounded by a moat of sludge-filled toxic ooze teeming with delicious, regulation-free, three-headed mutant fish?

Oooh, ooh, or maybe he’ll order the EPA to withdraw a proposal for tighter smog regulations, so that America’s children might have less oxygen flowing to their brains on their way to school and everyone can feel the wondrous pleasure of choking on their own beautifully capitalist, albeit highly noxious fumes. Merry lung cancer, America!

Maybe that will help Obama win the GOP’s love!? Probably not, though!

In a dramatic reversal, President Barack Obama on Friday scrubbed a clean-air regulation that aimed to reduce health-threatening smog, yielding to bitterly protesting businesses and congressional Republicans who complained the rule would kill jobs in America’s ailing economy.

Withdrawal of the proposed regulation marked the latest in a string of retreats by the president in the face of GOP opposition, and it drew quick criticism from liberals.

Environmentalists, a key Obama constituency, accused him of caving to corporate polluters, and the American Lung Association threatened to restart the legal action it had begun against rules proposed by President George W. Bush.

Yes, but the important question is, did he please a one John Boehner with all this wonderful human suffering?

A spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, had muted praise for the White House, saying that withdrawal of the smog regulation was a good first step toward removing obstacles that are blocking business growth.

**Cough, cough** How sweet, he’s too choked up to speak!

But perhaps more than some of the other regulations under attack, the ground-level ozone standard is most closely associated with public health — something the president said he wouldn’t compromise in his regulatory review.

Ozone is the main ingredient in smog, which is a powerful lung irritant that occasionally forces cancellation of school recesses, and causes asthma and other lung ailments.

Oooh, sounds sexy!

Naturally, the greedy bastards brilliant business minds at the Chamber of Commerce reacted with typical glee. “This an enormous victory for America’s job creators, the right decision by the President, and one that will help reduce the uncertainty facing businesses.”

Less so for the uncertainty facing Mother Earth.

Meanwhile, environmental groups were unrestrained in their disdain toward the decision. “The Obama administration is caving to big polluters at the expense of protecting the air we breathe,” League of Conservation Voters President Gene Karpinski said. “This is a huge win for corporate polluters and huge loss for public health.”

What ever do you mean?

Corporations are people, too! Now they just happen to be people who can now legally go around poisoning children.

There’s your job creating right there!

Oh, and as an added bonus, the debt ceiling will now be covered in lead-based paint and insulated with asbestos. Hooray for America!

2012 Fever is on the rise in Iowa, where desperate Republican candidates (and Marcus Bachmann!) deep-throated footlong corndogs (for freedom) in order to get elected President of the “Ames Straw Poll,” hobnob with racist, old, white Midwesterners, provide endless comedic relief to the rest of us, and of course, prove to the entire nation their skills are second-to-none when it comes to gobbling down various delicious meat-on-stick combinations.

Hotttttttt!

Michele Bachmann narrowly won the Iowa straw poll of Republicans on Saturday in the first big test of the 2012 presidential campaign, as Texas Governor Rick Perry formally launched a White House bid that could reshape the race.

Tim Pawlenty, the former governor of Minnesota, dropped out of the presidential race Sunday morning after finishing a distant third in Saturday’s Iowa GOP straw poll.

T-Paw, we hardly knew ye. And that was how we liked it.

Candidates who go all-in but fall well short in Ames typically find it difficult to raise money, and without personal wealth to fall back on, Mr. Pawlenty decided to cut his losses and bow out. In addition, the entry of Texas Gov. Rick Perry into the race Saturday, combined with Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann’s victory in the straw poll, has shifted the focus to their expected battle for the hearts and minds of conservatives.

Good-bye, what’s his name, Tim Polenta or whatever. Hello, crazy lady and new “serious candidate” guy, Rick Perry. The one who prayed to God for rain.

USA! USA! USA! USA!

So, while the mercury was rising in the cornfields deep fat fryers of bumblef**k Iowa, things were cooling off considerably for a one, Barack Obama, whose popularity has plummeted thanks to a hellish economy and even more hellish Congress filled with hellish human teabags.

According to the latest Gallup Poll, Barack Obama’s approval has fallen to 39%, his lowest presidential approval rate yet, putting him on par with adult onset diabetes, bumper-to-bumper traffic, heat rash, mowing your lawn with a small pair of dull scissors, and getting stuck in an elevator, marooned a deserted island, or just having to spend an extended period of time with any one of the lovely Republican presidential candidates, not including Tim Pawlenty, who falls somewhere between Ebola and the Plague.

But what ever should an increasingly unpopular politician do to raise cash money, when “being good at your job/saving the nation from catastrophe” just doesn’t seem to cut it?

Umm, let’s see, ask, “What Would Sarah Do?” then hightail it to the nearest bus depot, get behind the wheel of the biggest, most souped up, 18-wheeler tour bus available, paint a big, gaudy American flag right smack dab in the middle, and rumble aimlessly across the country, whoring yourself out for as much money and attention as possible.

Oh look, he’s already got one of Sarah Palin’s tricks down pat. Blame everybody else for everything wrong all the time, every hour of every day, “as though your job depends upon it.”

From The Hill:

President Obama, itching to spend more time outside of Washington, begins a three-day bus tour of the Midwest on Monday afternoon in Minnesota.

Obama is expected to use the trip to highlight his own criticism of Congress and Washington as he increasingly looks to run against Washington in 2012 despite four years on the job in the Oval Office.

“During the debt-ceiling debate we were trapped here, it felt like, for many, many weeks,” White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer said Friday.

“He got his first trip out of Washington [last week] to Michigan, and he’s looking forward to traveling back home to Illinois, to Minnesota, and also, of course, to Iowa, which is a place that always has had a special connection with this president and this White House.”

See, Obama hates being nailed down at his job as much as the rest of the 9-5 schlubs in America. Well, other than pray-the-gay-away therapist/personal stylist exraordinaire/secret sausage king Marcus Bachmann, that is.

“If you’re talking about a stunt, I don’t think a stunt is what the American people are looking for,” White House press secretary, Jay Carney, told reporters. “They’re looking for leadership, and they’re looking for a focus on economic growth and job creation.”

By shoving thick tubular meat down their throats, we presume!

While the economy continued its downward hell spiral thanks to Standard & Poor’s (really, that’s the best name you could come up with? Really?) very responsible decision to downgrade America’s debt and grind it into highly toxic, spite-flavored tea leaves for Republican enjoyment, Fox News was busy thinking up the most offensive, racist headline their little brains could muster accusing President Obama of celebrating his 50th “birth”day instead of single-handedly creating jobs for every (white) person in America.

The nerve! No, no, not Fox News equating a celebrity-studded backyard birthday BBQ in the White House Rose Garden with some kind of secret Muslim anti-employment Socialist Black Panther rally where they do scary “black people things” like listen to “hip-hop” and eat char-grilled burgers. Why, Barack Obama celebrating his five decades on this planet with actual black people, instead of just old racist white men who watch Fox News all day, of course!

Ugh, I mean, why didn’t this barbecue party create jobs? The least he could’ve done is hire some Fox News viewers to flip burgers and re-fill beer glasses. For Christ’s sake, why is Obama always pallin’ around with black people, anyways? Why can’t he party with some employed people like Ted Nugent for a change, or does he only like musicians who are black, blind and talented?

Maybe if he had some more white people there, other than Tom Hanks, Rita Wilson, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and the scores of similarly milky-hued people in attendance, they would accidentally create some jobs while Obama parties?

Point is no one knows. What Fox News does know, however, is that black people are not allowed to have money or parties or fun or BBQs unless the white people in the country get their money and parties and fun and BBQs first. It’s like this Negro President of ours STILL cannot remember the rules!

Maybe Fox would have better luck if they put it into rhyme over a phatty beat.

Finally, their first real job!