I was attacked by a troll on twitter today. The moron was still screaming about a comment I made on Monday while guest hosting the Randi Rhodes Show. She didn’t like that I said the Democrats were spineless and they they should have gone after Clarence Thomas for lying about his conflict of interest on the Affordable Care Act and non-disclosure of his wife’s income from that conflict of interest.

The moron continued on, ascribing to me things I never said and implying that she knows what I know and don’t know. Nice.

As for the “emo” label, I think she was trying to invoke an insult the Democratic apologists hurled at progressives who dared to criticize from the left, “emo prog”.

I know I shouldn’t waste my time on this nonsense, but it’s a symptom of the depths of idiocy to which this nation has sunk. Instead of agreeing that if the Democrats had taken action against the Supreme Court after it selected the president in 2000, or after Clarence Thomas thumbed his nose at what it means to sit on the highest court in the land, that idiot uses her time to go after me for an offhanded comment I made on the air? And we wonder why this country has gone down the shitter?

Thankfully not all people are idiots.

The other day I was talking about how I’d like to be able to pick and choose how my tax dollars are spent. Listener Mike heard that, and suggested a guest.  Alex Ebert is an American singer-songwriter and composer. He is the lead singer for the band Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. Ebert won a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score for his musical contributions to the film All is Lost. 

But I didn’t call him to talk music. Instead, we talked about an idea he came up with to allow US taxpayers to decide how our tax dollars are spent. Check it out at The New IRS – and figure out where you’d like your dollars to go.

We started the program listening in to a few minutes of a press conference call on the Trans Pacific Partnership with  Congressmen Alan Grayson and Brad Sherman, who both sit on the Foreign Affairs Committee and  Lori Wallach of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. Although the 10 minutes we heard was fascinating, there was a lot more to the call. You can listen to the whole thing here.

Every single Republican in the US Senate plus independent Angus King filibustered the Paycheck Fairness Act yesterday.  The headlines say they “blocked” it.. but no, they filibustered it so it couldn’t even come up to a vote. Chicken shit. Every last one of them.

Amy Simon of She’s History returned to the show this morning to talk about all that’s wrong with that.

And to underscore how dumb some in this country are…

Last May, Representative Louie Gohmert (R-Dumbfuck, TX) was grilling Attorney General Eric Holder about the latest witch hunt from the right. The hearing devolved into what it must sound like in Gohmert’s mind.

That epic moment in American history ended when Gohmert was cut off from further ranting and he ended by saying to Holder, “Don’t cast aspersions on my asparagus.”

This week, Gohmert continued his disrespectful behavior at another hearing featuring Holder, this time daring to tell the AG he knows what Holder is thinking!

“I realize that contempt is not a big deal to our attorney general, but it is important that we have proper oversight,” Gohmert said.

Holder snapped back: “You don’t want to go there buddy, all right? You don’t want to go there, OK?”

“I don’t want to go there?” Gohmert responded.

“No,” insisted Holder.

“About the contempt?” Gohmert asked. “You should not assume that this is not a big deal to me. I think that it was inappropriate. I think it was unjust. But never think that that was not a big deal to me. Don’t ever think that.”

Gohmert added, “Well I’m just looking for evidence. And normally we’re known by our fruits. And there have been no indications that it was a big deal, because your department has still not been forthcoming in producing the documents that were the subject of the contempt.”

This time, it was Eric Holder who invoked the smelly vegetable, saying

“Good luck with your asparagus.”

So yesterday, Gohmert goes on the radio with his buddy Glenn Beck, and explains where the whole “casting aspersions on asparagus” nonsense came from in the first place:

“

[Holder and I] had a very heated exchange last year… There’s a writer with TheBlaze that said I bungled the line – obviously he have didn’t understand – but Percy Foreman was a very, very liberal criminal defense attorney. He was incredible in the courtroom, and when somebody started attacking his integrity, he stood up and said, ‘I object. He’s casting aspersions on my asparagus.’ And people would scratch their heads, but it brought down the level of the rancor. So I was using a Percy Foreman line from criminal trials back probably 50 years ago.”

Unfortunately, the genius who wrote up the article for Glenn Beck’s website where the video of the exchange was posted  didn’t get a by-line. I would have liked to congratulation that person for still having a job.

He or she actually transcribed that statement like this:

“…but it brought down the level of the ranker”

Whomever wrote that piece had no idea what the fuck he/she was talking about. Ranker? Really? After I called them out on the show and tweeted about the idiocy, they just went in and changed the text with no *edit notification to show they corrected a mistake.  That’s your right wing “journalistic” integrity for you.

I just should have screen shotted it before they had a chance to change it.

And so it goes…. Hey GOP, keep cutting funding for education and all your employees can be as smart as the nameless one who doesn’t know what rancor means.