Politics Plus

I’m writing early again to beat the heat, although yesterday was not quite as hot.  It’s only 84° inside.  Temperatures should decrease over the weekend with a comfortable week next week.  I took my first Chantix Friday morning in keeping with my 6/14 quit date.  So far, I’m still same BWAAAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

In the best laid plans of mice and men, I way overslept.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:47 (average 4:24).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From NY Times:  In general, do you think the current Supreme Court justices decide their cases based on legal analysis without regard to their own personal or political views, or do you think they sometimes let their own personal or political views influence their decisions?

Legal analysis 20%  Personal/political views 68%

Click through for the rest of an interesting NY Times/CBS poll.  The reason for this result is simple.  Only three members of the court were appointed by Democrats, and the fascist five (Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Thomas, and usually Kennedy) goose-step with the Republican Party and their 1% masters.

From Think Progress: A recent study not only confirms the claim that many of the guns used in the ongoing violence in Mexico are from the United States, but finds that some U.S. gun dealers depend on this illegal gun running to stay afloat.

Researchers at the University of San Diego’s Trans-Border Institute and Brazil’s Igarapé Institute put together a groundbreaking model to determine why Mexico, which possesses some of the toughest gun laws in the world, is so awash in firearms. In constructing their report — Way of the Gun: Estimating Firearms Traffic Across the U.S.-Mexico Border — the authors used the number of Federal firearms licenses (FFL) issued to sell small arms to create a demand curve, based on the distance by road from the seller to the nearest point on the U.S.-Mexico border to estimate a total demand for trafficking, both in terms of guns sold and the amount the industry took in.

Their results? A much larger number of U.S. guns circulating in Mexico than occurred under the now-lapsed federal Assault Weapons Ban, with an estimated 253,000 firearms purchased per year to be trafficked to Mexico between 2010 and 2012. Somewhere between 0.9 and 3.7 percent of all gun sales in the U.S. can be attributed to trafficking to Mexico, a rise from the amount in 1993. Most shocking, an estimated 46.7 percent of all FFLs issued “during 2010-2012 depended for their economic existence on some amount of demand from the U.S.-Mexico firearms trade to stay in business,” a number that has also risen since 1993.

This makes the NRA very happy, because killing Mexican children flies under the political radar, and is therefore less visible to US voters than killing US children for industry profit.

From Alternet: Philadelphia is so broke the city is closing 23 public schools, never mind that it has the cash to build a $400 million prison. 

Construction on the penitentiary said to be "the second-most expensive state project ever" began just days after the Pennsylvania School Reform Commission voted down a plan to close only four of the 27 schools scheduled to die. Facing a $304 million debt, the Commission instead approved a measly $2.4 billion budget that would shut down 23 public schools, wiping out roughly 10% of the city’s total. 

But it’s not like Pennsylvania does not have the money to fill the debt. Rather,  PA’s GOP-controlled House of  Representatives recently passed a tax break for corporations that will cost the state an estimated $600 million to $800 million annually.

Here we have a Republican solution to address the needs of a largely black city. They are not doing anything like this in districts that are predominately white.  Closing schools to build prisons is the height if InsaniTEA.

Cartoon:

Israel later called the incident a tragic mistake due to the mis-identification of the ship, which is unlikely. The U.S. has never publicly investigated the incident, despite repeated requests to do so from family members and crewmates of the slain.