Tag: Democratic Party (United States)

Republican Doomsday Cult

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Doomsday Cult, Republican Crazies, Republicans, Republicans Regressive

Republican Doomsday Cult

Sure, it seems extreme, but extreme times call for extreme cartoons.  When you have the Republican Speaker of the House threatening a national default, food stamps being slashed while farm subsidies are increased and an attempt to defund a program that has been in existence for four years, things have gone to crazy-land.
Of course, Senator Ted Cruz has gotten all of the attention because he is the most, well, annoying, and he is disliked by Democrats and Republicans in true bipartisan fashion.  Rest assured, though, there are plenty of other loopy annoying guys in Congress.  Senator Cruz wasn’t the only one who voted to take $40 billion from food stamps while shoveling money over to farm subsidies.
And don’t worry, I spend plenty of time going after Democrats like that mean ol’ commie pinko Obama, it’s just that when a political party gets taken over by extremists who are ready to hit the doomsday switch, I’ve got to cartoon a little louder.  Let me know what you think, and be sure to comment, share and nail the cartoon to your nearest telephone pole.

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Red Brain, Blue Brain: Republicans and Democrats Process Risk Differently, Research Finds

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Process Risk, Red Brain Blue Brain, Risk Process

Red Brain, Blue Brain: Republicans and Democrats Process Risk Differently, Research Finds

A team of political scientists and neuroscientists has shown that liberals and conservatives use different parts of the brain when they make risky decisions, and these regions can be used to predict which political party a person prefers. The new study suggests that while genetics or parental influence may play a significant role, being a Republican or Democrat changes how the brain functions.

Republicans and Democrats differ in the neural mechanisms activated while performing a risk-taking task. Republicans more strongly activate their right amygdala, associated with orienting attention to external cues. Democrats have higher activity in their left posterior insula, associated with perceptions of internal physiological states. This activation also borders the temporal-parietal junction, and therefore may reflect a difference in internal physiological drive as well as the perception of the internal state and drive of others. (Credit: From: Darren Schreiber, Greg Fonzo, Alan N. Simmons, Christopher T. Dawes, Taru Flagan, James H. Fowler, Martin P. Paulus. Red Brain, Blue Brain: Evaluative Processes Differ in Democrats and Republicans. PLoS ONE, 2013; 8 (2): e52970 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0052970)

Dr. Darren Schreiber, a researcher in neuropolitics at the University of Exeter, has been working in collaboration with colleagues at the University of California, San Diego on research that explores the differences in the way the brain functions in American liberals and conservatives. The findings are published Feb. 13 in the journalPLOS ONE.

In a prior experiment, participants had their brain activity measured as they played a simple gambling game. Dr. Schreiber and his UC San Diego collaborators were able to look up the political party registration of the participants in public records. Using this new analysis of 82 people who performed the gambling task, the academics showed that Republicans and Democrats do not differ in the risks they take. However, there were striking differences in the participants’ brain activity during the risk-taking task.

Democrats showed significantly greater activity in the left insula, a region associated with social and self-awareness. Meanwhile Republicans showed significantly greater activity in the right amygdala, a region involved in the body’s fight-or-flight system. These results suggest that liberals and conservatives engage different cognitive processes when they think about risk.

In fact, brain activity in these two regions alone can be used to predict whether a person is a Democrat or Republican with 82.9% accuracy. By comparison, the longstanding traditional model in political science, which uses the party affiliation of a person’s mother and father to predict the child’s affiliation, is only accurate about 69.5% of the time. And another model based on the differences in brain structure distinguishes liberals from conservatives with only 71.6% accuracy.

The model also outperforms models based on differences in genes. Dr. Schreiber said: “Although genetics have been shown to contribute to differences in political ideology and strength of party politics, the portion of variation in political affiliation explained by activity in the amygdala and insula is significantly larger, suggesting that affiliating with a political party and engaging in a partisan environment may alter the brain, above and beyond the effect of heredity.”

These results may pave the way for new research on voter behaviour, yielding better understanding of the differences in how liberals and conservatives think. According to Dr. Schreiber: “The ability to accurately predict party politics using only brain activity while gambling suggests that investigating basic neural differences between voters may provide us with more powerful insights than the traditional tools of political science.”

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Who Is Barack Obama Raping Today, Charles Krauthammer?

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Barack Obama, Charles Krauthammer

Who Is Barack Obama Raping Today, Charles Krauthammer?

by Rebecca Schoenkopf

Charles Krauthammer, in his Edgar Suit

Charles Krauthammer, who is Barack Obama raping today? HA TRICK QUESTION!

Barack Obama is raping everybody today, because he is raping our treasury, because Hurricane Sandy. (Also, while we are aware it should be “whom is Obama raping,” because the rapee is the object of Barack Obama’s raping, well, in this one instance we just kind of don’t care. GRAMMAR BLOGGING!) Here is the first part, where Chuckles weeps salty tears for the unfairness we did to George W. Bush, before explaining how Barape Oraper raped us all, with his mighty black cock of fiscal irresponsibility.

“Sometimes the hypocrisy of the Democrats would leave Diogenes stunned,” Krauthammer said. “The Democrats spent two years savaging President [George W.] Bush over his treatment of Katrina. All of a sudden it’s a paragon of how to deal with disasters.”

LET’S UNPACK THIS A BIT RIGHT?

We — meaning “the entirety of the human race except for the illustrious personages of Fox News” — did not rag on George W. Bush because Congress was taking too long to fund assistance. We LOST OUR FUCKING MINDS because he LOST AN AMERICAN CITY. And four days after the levees broke, he had no idea PEOPLE WERE LIVING AND DYING LIKE ANIMALS WITHOUT A RESCUE IN SIGHT.

Of course, his priorities were in order. It only took him an additional six days to suspend the Davis-Bacon Act, which ensures that workers on federal contracts receive a minimum wage.

All right, Kraut. What’s next?

“And this idea that somehow the person to blame for suffering of the people today, months after Sandy, who aren’t getting help … is John Boehner, because of a bill he didn’t pass on January 1 — it’s preposterous, and the press is playing along that line,” he added.

Krauthammer said Boehner’s postponement of the pork-laden legislation was the right call, given that Congress was able to pass legislation raising the debt ceiling of the National Flood Insurance Program.

What is this pork we keep hearing about, anyway? Take it away, Weekly Standard!

But one of the big objections to the bill was that Senate Democrats had filled it with pork.

In fact, “Democrats expanded the legislation during a mark-up to include not just areas affected by Sandy, but also to provide money for ‘storm events that occurred in 2012 along the Gulf Coast and Atlantic Coast within the boundaries of the North Atlantic and Mississippi Valley divisions of the Corps that were affected by Hurricanes Sandy and Isaac,’” we reported previously.

Oh, so it is money for other people affected by the same hurricane, plus another hurricane? You are right, that sounds TERRIBLE.

The expansion of the bill was a way to provide a financial incentive for senators from red states–”two Republicans senators from Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas, and the one Republican senator from Louisiana”–to vote for the bill. “The Sandy kickbacks provide an incentive for those Republicans to vote on the bill,” we wrote.

Oh, so helping people from red states was a bribe for senators from red states — which they demanded and then complained about? I believe former president/future first lady Bill Clinton has a term for that, and that is “brass.” What is it we call it again? We can’t remember, but it is stronger even than “chootzpah.”

OK, thank you for the backstory, Weekly Standard, now let us get back to Charles Krauthammer, please.

“I think what Boehner did in postponing the vote until today was absolutely right,” Krauthammer declared. “That was a rape of the Treasury — $60 billion, including a ton of pork. The part that was essentially passed today to replenish the flood insurance. That is right, and the rest ought to be debated in regular order.”

Isn’t it funny how Republicans love to call everything rape except actual rape, which does not actually exist except in the fever dreams of feminists (who are all Andrea Dworkin) or anytime a black man looks at a white woman or wants hurricane funding. (Same thing.)

[DailyCaller]

Read more at http://wonkette.com/495885/who-is-barack-obama-raping-today-charles-krauthammer#37VQj4VdebEXPp7o.99

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Why I’m Voting to Re-Elect Barack Obama

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Republican Anti-Science, Republican Hypocrisy, Right Wing Clown Car, Right Wing Crackpots, Right Wing Crazies, Right Wing Culture Wars, Right Wing Extremism, Right Wing Fascism, Right Wing Fascists, Right Wing Freaks, Right Wing Lies

Why I’m Voting to Re-Elect Barack Obama
Via:- Charles Johnson

I have to admit I’m making a deliberate effort to ignore the political world today, at least more than usual. I made up my mind a long time ago to vote for Barack Obama, and against anyone the Republican Party put up. I don’t agree with everything Obama has done, but overall he’s achieved quite a bit in his first term, despite ferocious and often deranged opposition from Republicans, and deserves a second term as much as any President I’ve ever seen.

The GOP is a serious danger to the future of this country The Republican Party … well, if you’ve been reading the site for the past couple of years you know what I think about them. They’re lost in cloud cuckoo land in so many ways and on so many levels, there’s just no doubt that they represent a serious danger to the future prosperity of this country — not just for their magical thinking on economics, but in their denial of many areas of modern science (based on either religious fanaticism or cynical political calculation for personal profit), their continuing, relentless attempts to roll back progress on women’s reproductive rights, and the shockingly prevalent racism and xenophobia that have bubbled up to the surface in a highly disturbing way since the election of our first black President.

At this point, it’s not even really about Mitt Romney, although he’s an especially cynical example of the Republican brand. Nobody the GOP could prop up and nominate would ever convince me to vote for a Republican in the foreseeable future, because of what the party as a whole represents: reactionary paranoia, manifesting as authoritarian rule whenever they gain power.

In my life, I’ve voted twice for Republican presidents, and Democrats every other time — and the second time I voted for a Republican (John McCain) it was with grave misgivings.

I’ll have no misgivings at all about casting my vote for Barack Obama.

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