Thursday, April 24, 2014

Kochs leave one zoo to claw at another

In case you think you've heard everything there is to know about Team GOP - - you haven't.


The billionaire Koch brothers, the biggest gorillas in the room these days, have extended  their claws  into a hometown  issue that is pathetically  marginal to their grandiose right-wing schemes to control the whole political universe.

Plunderbund has a piece reporting how the Koch enterprise, Americans for Prosperity, has barged into a 1.25 mill replacement levy for the Columbus Zoo. Although the brothers have plenty of experience as congressional zookeepers,  they are opposing the levy on the May 6 ballot  as just one more nasty way the government is taking your money. To this end, Plunderbund reports that Americans for Prosperity is sending out anti-levy mailers to voters across Franklin County.

It might help if the zoo had its own gorillas. But not much.

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There's more about the  hyperactive folly on the right:

Rand Paul, the pre-season presidential favaorite among Republlcans, may be  reconsidering  his  fervant support of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who is armed and defiant of the government's effort to rid federal lands of his cattle.  The New York Times reported Bundy's racist comments at a news conference, which defines him.  Charging that blacks willingly seek federal assistance  by turning to dependency, he declared:

"They abort their young children,  they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton.  And I've often wondered, are they better  off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are  they better off under government subsidy.  They didn't get no more freedom. They got less freedom."

Seems to me, Bundy has already decided that they should be "doing things".  Rand Paul now says he found those remarks offensive.

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Staying on the angry right:  Republicans in the Missouri House want to impeach Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon for, among other things, supporting joint tax returns from same-sex couples legally married in other states...GOP state Rep.John Becker, from Union Twp., near  Cincinnati, wants  to impeach U.S. District Judge Timothy Black for ruling that Ohio must recognize out-of-state gay marriages...In Latta, S. C.,  Mayor  Earl Butland stirred up a storm by firing the town's popular first female  police chief, Crystal Moore, because she' openly gay.  He said he would prefer to have somebody who drinks too much instead of a gay person being around  children.

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Finally, the old birther is back.  Donald Trump, I mean.  He has now found another way to denigrate President Obama.  Trump doesn't like the way Obama exits Air  Force 1, "hopping and bobbing all the way."  He says it's so "inelegant and unpresidential".

Which also describes Trump's presence in politics.



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