On top of everything else, Rick Perry now has a "pastor problem." In an introduction for Perry at the Values Voters Summit, Robert Jeffress -- a Perry backer -- launched into a rant that painted Planned Parenthood as a "slaughterhouse for the unborn" and Mitt Romney as a member of the "cult" of Mormonism.
Of course, as is always the case with endorsements from religious right whackjobs, Team Perry should've seen this coming from a million miles away. Jeffress has a history of making bigoted statements, at one point asserting that Muslims, Jews, Mormons, and gays are all going to hell. In the future, GOP candidates, do a little research before having one of these lunatics speak for you. Maybe do something crazy like look them up on -- *gasp* -- lefty blogs and news sources, where everything rightwing isn't automatically perfect and wonderful and covered with several thousand coats of whitewash. Any staffer who ever says, "WorldNetDaily and Andy Brietbart like him and that's good enough for me!" should be fired. And probably pantsed.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, President Obama's crazy socialist tax-and-spendathon of a jobs bill would cut the deficit and "have a noticeable impact on economic growth and employment in the next few years." Clearly, it must be stopped or the
The Standard & Poor's downgrade of the US credit rating is now meaningless.
Steve Jobs: The Motion Picture.
Matt Yglesias helps gas up the 99-percenter bandwagon, with chart porn that shows different people living in different economic realities. Long story short, if you don't think there's a problem, it has a lot more to do with your social circles than it does with the real world.
Proving that Michael Bloomberg and the NYPD are just being assholes, another city -- Philadelphia -- "rolls out the welcome mat" for Occupy/99% protesters and has no problems. For future reference, if you start beating up protesters, other people are just going to show up to protest that, too. This is what's known among people capable of rational thought as "counterproductive."
Finally, Michele Bachmann is a perfect illustration of why you don't want to be the early frontrunner -- there's no place to go but down, down, down. And that's a sad place. Although, given who it's happening to, it's also hilarious.
