For our Jewish friends observing Rosh Hashanah:
L'shanah tovah tikatevu
(May you be inscribed for a good year)
Sep 142015
Sep 132015
As Puddy Tat always says "Almost every week, Republicans join a competition to see who can say the most outlandish things, and in the process, they push the envelope on just how nutty InsaniTEA can become. I trust that you will believe it, when I tell you that last week was no exception."
2. Mike Huckabee demonstrates once again that there is something deeply wrong with him.
The Huckster has had a very busy week being completely batsh*t crazy. First, he practically got into fisticuffs with fellow right-wing Christian Ted Cruz, as they jostled to position themselves smack dab next to Kentucky’s celebrity scofflaw, gay-marriage refusenik, Kim Davis. So enamored with Davis’ cause of denying same-sex couples the marriage licenses they are lawfully entitled to that Huckabee offered to take her place in jail, coincidentally after she had been released. So no big risk there.
Huckabee further demonstrated his confusion about how this whole Supreme Court thing works when he defended Kim Davis by saying that the Dred Scott decision is still the “law of the land.”
“I’ve been just drilled by TV hosts over the past week, ‘How dare you say that, uh, it’s not the law of the land?’” Huckabee said on Wednesday. “Because that’s their phrase, ‘it’s the law of the land.’ Michael, the Dred Scott decision of 1857 still remains to this day the law of the land which says that black people aren’t fully human. Does anybody still follow the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision?”
Well, ummm, Mike, no. And that’s because, as most 7th graders could tell you, or maybe 5th graders, the terrible Dred Scott decision was, thankfully overturned by the Supreme Court about a century ago.
Finally, Huckabee made excellent use of airtime on Fox towards the end of the week by wondering aloud whether some of the refugees fleeing Syria, often at great peril, might be doing so to get cable TV. They should be vetted, he said.
“Are they just coming because they’ve got cable TV? I’m not trying to be trite. I just don’t know,” is what he said, actually.
Yeah, really.
One Twitter user responded aptly with this:
@daveweigel Huckabee has a keen eye. These homes were obviously abandoned because they didn't have cable.
This is number 2 of five. Have a gander at the other four. Certainly right wing insanity is in full bloom!
Sep 132015
Hi everybody! I am back with more "stuff" that I hope will interest you. This coming week is a verry busy one for me between physio, teaching ESL, and taking my mother to appointments. As such, there may not be an Open Thread every day. I will tell you, I have a new appreciation for all the work Tom does to get the blog out, and he is a speed reader and extremely knowledgable on US politics.
Puzzle — Ship Building http://www.jigzone.com/puzzles/2015-09-13 my time 3:34 average time 4:30 How did you do?
Short Takes
Washington Post — H/T to JD — Corbyn’s rise echoes that of another senior-citizen socialist who has come out of nowhere this year to rattle his party's center-left establishment. Like Corbyn, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has been waging a surprisingly effective insurgency in a campaign that was once thought to be unwinnable.
“If you’re Bernie Sanders, you’ll take some heart from this,” said Tim Bale, a politics professor at Queen Mary University of London. “If you’re Hillary Clinton, you’ll be nervous.”
While Sanders is still fighting uphill in his effort to outmaneuver Clinton for the Democratic nomination, Corbyn’s once-quixotic-seeming campaign ended Saturday with a landslide win. Nearly 60 percent of voters backed him over three more centrist rivals just four months after Labour suffered one of its worst-ever defeats in national elections.
There certainly are movements globally for more people centred governance as evidence by the excitement around Bernie Sanders, the dump Stephen Harper in Canada, the disappointment with Tony Abbott in Australia, and now the Labour Party in the UK. Now, if only Citizens United could be overturned in the US. A related story can also be seen at http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/sanders-corbyn-and-the-coming-debate-inside-the-democratic-party/2015/09/12/a23673f4-597e-11e5-8bb1-b488d231bba2_story.html
The Nation — Appearing before the senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1966, George Kennan, the legendary Cold War diplomat often called “the father of containment,” criticized the escalation of the war in Vietnam. The United States, he said, should not “jump around like an elephant frightened by a mouse.”
Kennan’s metaphor of the frightened elephant is a strangely apt one for the situation in which we find ourselves nearly half a century later. In the GOP primary, the candidates are calling for a foreign policy defined by fearmongering and senseless aggression. Their agenda includes plans to reverse President Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran; abandon renewed diplomatic ties with Cuba; escalate tensions with Russia; and deploy US troops to Syria. Much like Kennan’s agitated elephant, the Republican candidates see challenges posed by Iran, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, the Islamic State and other extremist groups that are far out of proportion to any real harm they could ever inflict on US interests. They are so out of touch with reality that even admitting the folly of the Iraq War is seen by them as a sign of weakness. The far greater danger is the combination of paranoia and hubris that characterizes the foreign policies of the Republican candidates, who would lead us into still more self-inflicted disasters. They would have us rush to embrace unnecessarily militaristic responses to otherwise manageable challenges, bringing yet more chaos to the Middle East and Eastern Europe while costing the nation even more in lives and treasure.
http://www.thenation.com/article/the-danger-of-foreign-policy-by-bumper-sticker/
Although a long artical, it is certainly worth reading. Katrina vanden Heuve makes some great points. And who could resist looking at that picture of McTurtle with his back-up choir which includes Cornyn of Texas.
Daily Kos — Sarah Palin continues to entertain us with her superior intellect. Could it be that she formulates her words in a manner only some can understand? Well, Rachel Maddow has asked for our help in deciphering a strange and convoluted statement Palin made at the rally against the Iran Nuclear Agreement.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/09/10/1420001/-Sarah-Palin-confounds-Rachel-Maddow-Tell-me-what-this-means?detail=emailclassic
Do read the rest of this short piece, and if you can't understand Palin, you're in good company! I might even venture to say that if you do understand, you've been possessed by Teabuggery! Saints preserve us! You know it is bad when even Glenn Beck is wishing he didn't know Sister Sarah!
My Universe — Since I can't do cartoons like TC, JL suggested something like this, at least that's what I thought she meant. Being the ailurophile I am, I thought I would treat you to this new feline birthing method!
Sep 122015
It has been a long week for everybody, and the weekend is here. We can't do much more to check on the Puddy Tat until Monday, so I thought a "similar to TC's Open Thread" would keep us busy. I'd also like to thank all of you for your patience, but I would especially like to thank Nameless, JL and JD for all the behind the scenes work They have done and are doing. And lastly, but never lastly, please continue to hold Tom in your thoughts and/or prayers.
BTW, I can't seem to get the hot links to work so unfortunately, you'll have to copy/paste the links into your browser.
Fantasy Football — Don't forget to check your rosters. The games have started! . . . and you can bet that Tom's Teabag Trashers want to take the trophy home again this year.
Puzzles —
Candy Fruits http://www.jigzone.com/puzzles/2015-09-10 my time 3:47 average 5:17
Yacht Ropes http://www.jigzone.com/puzzles/2015-09-11 my time 3:35 average 5:07
Key Blanks http://www.jigzone.com/puzzles/2015-09-12 my time 3:51 average 6:31
How did you do?
Short Takes
Raw Story — An Oklahoma County judge on Friday gave the state a month to remove a 6-foot-tall (1.80-meter) granite monument containing the Ten Commandments from Capitol grounds after the state’s top court said it had been erected illegally.
District Judge Thomas Prince denied a motion from Attorney General Scott Pruitt to keep in place the monument that had been on Capitol grounds since 2012 and garnered strong support from Oklahoma’s Republican leadership.
In June, the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled the monument must be removed because the Oklahoma Constitution bans the use of state property for the benefit of a religion.
The decision prompted Republican lawmakers to say they will look at impeachment for the justices who made the decision and legal briefs from the attorney general’s office to keep the monument in the shadow of the Statehouse.
http://www.rawstory.com/2015/09/judge-gives-oklahoma-a-month-to-remove-ten-commandments-from-capitol/
Republicans like to think it is their way or the highway!
The New Yorker — Republicans, who mercilessly mocked Barack Obama’s lack of government experience before he became President, now favor Presidential candidates with no experience whatsoever, the head of the Republican National Committee has confirmed.
The R.N.C. chief, Reince Priebus, said that he sees “no contradiction at all” between Republicans’ contempt for Obama’s pre-White House résumé, which included eleven years spent in public office, and their rabid enthusiasm for G.O.P. rising stars Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and Carly Fiorina, whose combined years in public office total zero.
http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/party-that-mocked-presidents-lack-of-experience-favors-one-with-no-experience-whatsoever
Is Andy reporting straight news again? The anachronistic Republican bubble machine is at it again!
NY Times — Visitors to Japan are often surprised by how prosperous it seems. It doesn’t look like a deeply depressed economy. And that’s because it isn’t.
Unemployment is low; overall economic growth has been slow for decades, but that’s largely because it’s an aging country with ever fewer people in their prime working years. Measured relative to the number of working-age adults, Japanese growth over the past quarter century has been almost as fast as America’s, and better than Western Europe’s.
Yet Japan is still caught in an economic trap. Persistent deflation has created a society in which people hoard cash, making it hard for policy to respond when bad things happen, which is why the businesspeople I’ve been talking to here are terrified about the possible spill over from China’s troubles.
Deflation has also created worrisome “debt dynamics”: Japan, unlike, say, the United States after World War II, can’t count on growing incomes to make past borrowing irrelevant.
Another fine article by Paul Krugman.
Now normally, TC would have a cartoon. All I can offer you is "Kim Davis' stunt demolished in one brilliant tweet".
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/09/04/1418315/-Kim-Davis-stunt-demolished-in-one-brilliant-tweet?detail=emailclassic
Sep 102015
SoINeedAName here – but I'm not sure if this will even post. Maybe TC has to give it his imprimatur to get published.
Oh, well … it was worth a try.
Sep 102015
It's SoINeedAName posting.
I just thought the 9/3/15 "Personal Update" post was getting a bit unwieldy to manage and navigate for information with so many Comments, so I decided I'd try my hand at putting up two new posts:
[1] Dated Open Thread and
[2] Updates, Questions, Concerns WRT TC
This is my first try at WordPres – so I have no idea if it will even post. If you think it's a bad idea, just ignore it, because I doubt that I can unpublish it. It will NOT hurt my feelings one bit.
Sep 032015
After puttering around for a bit, unable to really get into gear, I came to the realization that there’s just no more gas in this tank, and I need to take a day for R & R. Tonight is a minor holy day in the Church of the ellipsoid Orb. It’s the last week of the preseason. My Broncos are having a service with the Cardinals. Unfortunately, it won’t be televised locally. The networks still think Portland is a suburb of Seattle, so all we get is the damn Seachickens game. I can see the replay, but not until Saturday night. Fantasy Football players, our season begins one week from tonight on 9/10. You should have your starting lineup set before then.
Jig Zone Puzzle:
Today’s took me 4:09 (average 5:47). To do it, click here. How did you do?
Cartoon:
Sep 022015
In August, Politics Plus increased in activity slightly from July.
Here is our latest summary:
Data from August 2015:
|
Reported period |
Month Aug 2015 |
|
|
|
|
|
First visit |
01 Aug 2015 – 00:00 |
|
|
|
|
|
Last visit |
31 Aug 2015 – 23:59 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Unique visitors |
Number of visits |
Pages |
Hits |
Bandwidth |
|
Viewed traffic * |
9,612
|
32,079 (3.33 visits/visitor) |
91,883 (2.86 Pages/Visit) |
245,973 (7.66 Hits/Visit) |
3.09 GB (100.86 KB/Visit) |
|
Not viewed traffic * |
|
|
339,768 |
390,747 |
5.84 GB |
Data from August 2014:
|
Reported period |
Month Aug 2014 |
|
|
|
|
|
First visit |
01 Aug 2014 – 00:00 |
|
|
|
|
|
Last visit |
31 Aug 2014 – 23:59 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Unique visitors |
Number of visits |
Pages |
Hits |
Bandwidth |
|
Viewed traffic * |
10,783
|
33,440 (3.1 visits/visitor) |
89,785 (2.68 Pages/Visit) |
248,922 (7.44 Hits/Visit) |
3.20 GB (100.28 KB/Visit) |
|
Not viewed traffic * |
|
|
316,168 |
381,627 |
4.61 GB |
This August was a mixed from last year, but more up.
Here is our latest demographic data from Quantcast:
They miss a ton of raw data, but among those they can identify they are a valuable source of information. We are still mostly older, well educated, poor and middle class, and politically active Democrats.
Here is our latest ClustrMap:
ClustrMap misses a lot of, because many visits can’t be easily traced to a location. It shows only the visits from March 3 to August 20, when it was last updated.
Here are our top five articles:
Jane Smiley: Capitalist Pigs 1/17/2010 5,460
Bill Maher–New Rules–8/28 8/29/2015 296
Last Week’s Hilariously Unhinged Republican Moments 8/9/2015 278
Personal Update–8/22/2015 8/22/2015 238
Last Week’s Despicable Republican Moments 209
The count represents only the people who followed an external link to that specific article. I’m quite pleased that four from August made the cut, but I’m surprised one was a Personal Update. Perhaps we’re entering a pattern where our newer content drives more traffic, except for the one from 2010.
Here are our top non-blog/news referrers:
Care2 2,538
Google 1,164
Stumbleupon 268
Baidu 160
All but Google are up.
Here are our top blog/news referrers:
http://bildungblog.blogspot.com/
http://oakcreekforum.blogspot.com/
http://progressiveerupts.blogspot.com/
http://zenman1550.tumblr.com/
http://reconstitution.us/rcnew/
http://anaverageamericanpatriot.blogspot.com/
http://ragingprogressive.tumblr.com/
http://mockpaperscissors.com/
I have usually included fifteen here, but these eight are the only ones with two or more referrals. This is the one stat that still disappoints me most, because it means that we are no longer a go-to site for bloggers. However, it seems we’re becoming a go-to site for activists, which is also good.
Here are our top commentators:
jla (237)
Edie (166)
Lynn Squance (155)
Joanne D (144)
SoINeedAName (92)
Jim Phillips (74)
Lona Goudswaard (72)
Patty (54)
Vivian B. (47)
Pat A (46)
Jerry Critter (33)
mamabear (16)
Beth (12)
Avril Lomas (10)
Arielle (6)
Dotti Lydon (6)
There’s one extra because of a tie. As the resident Big Mouth, I don’t count. Those who leave their URLs in their comment headers, also get “linkey-love” here. People who submit articles to Care2 can use their submitted news link from there.
We have 304,347 links on other websites.
As of Midnight on September 1, we have 5,728 articles and 68,274 comments.
Kudos to Lona and Mamabear for posting the 67,000th and 68,000th comments.
I recommend using your own avatar. Go to Gravatar. Sign up using the email address you use to post comments here and upload the image you want to use as your avatar. Whenever you comment under that email address here or on any WordPress blog (several others too), that image will become your avatar.
The political campaign is heating up much earlier than it normally has. Whether you support Bernie, Hillary, Joe (if he runs) or Martin, please base your arguments on the good things about your choice. However, it’s open season (politically) on the Republican candidates. They and the Republican Bubble Machine will be repeating so many lies so often that we’ll be hard pressed to keep repeating the truths. Expect little help from the media. I’ll do my best to assist you, by exposing the lies and presenting the truths clearly.
Thank you for all that you do, here and elsewhere. You make doing this job worth the effort!