Open Thread–5/18/2013

 Open Thread, Personal, Politics
May 182013
 

Yesterday I took several hours implementing the changes recommended, while I was in the hospital, including establishing a tentative quit date, subject to having the necessary materials, on 6/7.  I am continuing to improve.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 4:47 (average 4:42).  To do it. click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From NY Times: Congressional Republicans, not resting with the Internal Revenue Service scandal, are moving to broaden the matter to an array of tax malfeasances and “intimidation tactics” they hope will ensnare the White House.

Republican charges range from clearly questionable actions to seemingly specious allegations, and they grow by the day. On Friday, lawmakers sought to tie the I.R.S. matter to the carrying out of President Obama’s health care law, which will rely heavily on the agency.

How completely absurd! This is a Republican product, began and carried out mostly during the Bush regime, by Bush people, and continued under Obama by Bush holdovers. They want us to believe that Obamacare is to blame?!!? You can fertilize your veggies with that InsaniTEA!

From Think Progress: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) expects a showdown in July over a potential second round of filibuster reform, and he’s prepared to push for a sweeping change to the minority’s ability to unilaterally obstruct judges and other nominees. According to reporting by the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, Reid “is eyeing a change to the rules that would do away with the 60-vote threshold on all judicial and executive branch nominations.” The test, according to Sargent, of whether Reid will push this reform is whether Senate Republicans lift their blockades on Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Richard Cordray, Labor Secretary nominee Tom Perez, and Environmental Protection Agency leader-in-waiting Gina McCarthy.

It’s about time that damn Nevada Leg Hound got off his arse, but why wait until July? Even more, why limit it to nominees?

From Right Wing Watch: Pete Santilli is the kind of person we normally wouldn’t cover here – an unhinged Internet ranter who exists somewhere to the crazier side of Alex Jones. Santilli’s broadcast – on which he details conspiracy theories on everything from 9/11 to Sandy Hook –  doesn’t even have Jones’ audience: he describes himself as “a radio talkshow host ready to take my show to national syndication; that is, of course, if the FCC regulated AM/FM radio stations can handle my truth & honesty.”

But in the past couple of months, Santilli has attracted two major gun activists to his show: National Rifle Association board member Ted Nugent, who used the opportunity to call President Obama a Nazi, and Gun Owners of America director Larry Pratt, who worked with Santilli to flesh out his theory that President Obama is raising a private army to overpower the U.S. military. Pratt, in particular, is taken remarkably seriously among the GOP – he has been partially credited with taking down a background checks measure in the Senate last month.

So, we started paying attention to Santilli, and we learned pretty quickly what Nugent and Pratt felt perfectly comfortable associating themselves with. On his show last week, Santilli went on a disgusting, violent rant [hatemonger delinked] in which he called for the entire Bush family and President Obama to be “tried, convicted and shot” for “treason” (and in George H.W. Bush’s case “involvement with his cronies in the John F. Kennedy assassination”) and for Hillary Clinton to be “tried, convicted and shot in the vagina.”

There are few names I did not call GW Bush, aka Crawford Caligula, aka Potomac Pinocchio, aka Neocon Nero, aka Texas Torquemada, etc. They provide truth through humor. I called for his arrest and incarceration, and I still do. But never once did I ever suggest employing violence against him, and I criticized those few who did. This is the level to which the NRA and the Republican Party have descended.

Cartoon:

18Cartoon

I spent many hours sweeping and sending samples to online friends all over the country.

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Open Thread–4/19/2013

 Open Thread, Personal, Politics
Apr 192013
 

I’m still down, but I need to apologize for inaccuracies in yesterday’s articles.  The fact is, I was just feeling too crappy to apply my standard depth of research, so I misunderstood the SCOTUS Short Take that, thankfully, Nameless corrected.  In the names of the Senate opponents of the fourth gun safety measure, I don’t know what happened.  I copied and pasted that list of names directly from the Senate website.  I have corrected the list here, and the list at the Senate’s site is now also corrected.

As I write I’m listening to MSNBC coverage in Boston.  Since the suspect in a firefight with police, who is now in custody. employed bombs, I think it’s a safe bet that he’s one of the people responsible for the bombing.  Update: The two people in the firefight were definitely the two bombing suspects.  One is dead and the other is at large.

Finally, I have some good news.  One of my guys, so far, was successful in his parole hearing and will be released in September.  It’s Critter, who always sends greetings to Critter.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:15 (4;10 average).  To do it click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From The New Yorker: In the halls of the United States Senate, dozens of Senators congratulated themselves today for having what one of them called “the courage and grit to stand up to the overwhelming wishes of the American people.”

“We kept hearing, again and again, that ninety per cent of the American people wanted us to vote a certain way,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky). “Well, at the end of the day, we decided that we weren’t going to cave in to that kind of special-interest group.”

“It was a gut check, for sure, but we had to draw a line in the sand,” agreed Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S. Carolina). “If we had voted the way the American people wanted us to, it would have sent the message that we’re here in Washington to be nothing more than their elected representatives.”…

The accuracy of this satire makes me want to puke.

From Huffington Post: Former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) skewered senators on Wednesday in a fundraising email sent out seconds after the Senate voted down an amendment to expand background checks for gun purchases.

"Moments ago, the U.S. Senate decided to do the unthinkable about gun violence — nothing at all," read the email from anti-gun violence PAC Americans for Responsible Solutions, according to the Arizona Republic. "Over two years ago, when I was shot point-blank in the head, the U.S. Senate chose to do nothing. Four months ago, 20 first-graders lost their lives in a brutal attack on their school, and the U.S. Senate chose to do nothing. It’s clear to me that if members of the U.S. Senate refuse to change the laws to reduce gun violence, then we need to change the members of the U.S. Senate."…

I could not agree more. Republicans should be opposed outright. The Democrats, who voted NO, should be primaried against firearms safety proponents.

From NY Times:

The story so far: At the beginning of 2010, two Harvard economists, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, circulated a paper, “Growth in a Time of Debt,” that purported to identify a critical “threshold,” a tipping point, for government indebtedness. Once debt exceeds 90 percent of gross domestic product, they claimed, economic growth drops off sharply.

Ms. Reinhart and Mr. Rogoff had credibility thanks to a widely admired earlier book on the history of financial crises, and their timing was impeccable. The paper came out just after Greece went into crisis and played right into the desire of many officials to “pivot” from stimulus to austerity. As a result, the paper instantly became famous; it was, and is, surely the most influential economic analysis of recent years…

…Finally, Ms. Reinhart and Mr. Rogoff allowed researchers at the University of Massachusetts to look at their original spreadsheet — and the mystery of the irreproducible results was solved. First, they omitted some data; second, they used unusual and highly questionable statistical procedures; and finally, yes, they made an Excel coding error. Correct these oddities and errors, and you get what other researchers have found: some correlation between high debt and slow growth, with no indication of which is causing which, but no sign at all of that 90 percent “threshold.”…

Click through for the rest of this fine Krugman editorial. In short, the entire basis of Republicans’ insistence on austerity is the result of omitting inconvenient data, cooking the data that is included, and calculation error.

Cartoon:

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Open Thread–4/17/2013

 Open Thread, Personal, Politics, Religion
Apr 172013
 

I’m still down and feeling like I should be buried in the deepest corner of my kitty box.  Nevertheless, I could not ignore today’s international holiday.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:07 (average 4:43).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From NY Times: A nonpartisan, independent review of interrogation and detention programs in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks concludes that “it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture” and that the nation’s highest officials bore ultimate responsibility for it…

Click through for much more.  This is what would happen if there were a criminal investigation into the Republican War Crimes committed by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, et al. It is years past due.

From Alternet: It’s a sign of how well relentless propagandizing works that Joe Stiglitz has to devote a lengthy op-ed in the New York Times to debunking the idea that our income tax system, whose salient characteristic is low tax burdens for the rich, is good for anyone other than the rich. Economists have increasingly taken note of the fact that the US experiment in lowering taxes produced the opposite of the outcomes that were claimed for it, namely, spurring growth and increasing incomes in all cohorts (the barmy “trickle down” theory). Cross-country comparisons show that advanced economies with higher growth rates, like Germany, typically tax their wealthy more, showing that high taxes on the rich are not a negative for growth. Instead, giving tax breaks to the rich has turbo-charged rentier capitalism…

Click through. The class warfare propaganda, inflicted on America by the Republican Party, needs to be debunked again and again and again.

From Right Wing Watch: On a recent "Faith and Freedom" radio broadcast, Matt Barber and Mat Staver were discussing the current Religious Right outrage over an Army Reserve briefing [faux noise dekinled] in which "Evangelical Christianity" was listed among various kinds of "religious extremism."

A spokesperson said the slide was not produced by the Army and was removed and the person responsible for it has apologized, but Staver and Barber know who is really to blame: the Southern Poverty Law Center.

 

Staver is correct that this is like what happened in Nazi Germany, except that it is Republican Supply-side pseudo-Christians that are dehumanizing gays, Muslims, and others, and in the case of gays, are even sponsoring their murder by the Ugandan courts. Talk about projection! There is only one reason SPLC designates groups as hate groups; they are groups that spread hatred.

Cartoon:

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…why Democrats should not follow through with Republican plans.

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Barrasso’s Oath

 Politics
Apr 122013
 

Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) is a medical doctor.  As such, he has to have had considerable exposure to the scientific method.  In addition, he gas to have taken the Hippocratic Oath, promising to do no harm.  Sadly, he seems quite content to ignore both.

12BarassoOathToday, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee held its confirmation hearing for Gina McCarthy, who was nominated by President Obama to be our next Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator. During the hearing, one of her chief inquisitors was Senator John Barrasso (R-WY), who is one of three doctors in the United States Senate and a long-time opponent of public health safeguards from dirty air, water and climate pollution.

Barrasso used this opportunity to indicate that he only applies the physician’s Hippocratic Oath to “keep them from harm and injustice” when the harm would occur to the profits of big oil and coal companies. Furthermore, he frequently denies the ever-strengthening scientific understanding that human activity is responsible for climate change. It’s like a physician denying that smoking causes cancer.

Barrasso began his opening statement today by falsely accusing the Obama administration and the EPA of “making it impossible for our coal miners to feed their families…. These people are heroes and they deserve better than what they are getting from the EPA.” The facts say otherwise — the average number of coal-mining jobs under the Obama administration has been over 15 percent higher than under George W. Bush. Moreover, McCarthy has received a lot of support from industry officials including American Electric Power, a company that relies heavily on coal…

…So why is Senator Barrasso is protecting polluter interests over public health? Maybe it has something to do with the $526,866 in campaign donations from oil or gas. Or maybe the $122,831 from the coal industry? Whatever the reason, the doctor is a longtime practitioner of political malpractice. [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Think Progress>

The spelling in my graphic is NOT a typo.  I’ve shared the beginning and the end of the article.  Click through to read the details on how Barrasso has abandoned his medical training, his oath, and his constituents to support the destruction of our planet for polluter profit.

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Why Republican Minority Outreach Fails

 Politics
Apr 112013
 

Not Long ago, Rand Paul embarrassed himself and his party with a  condescending attempt to paint the GOP as attractive to Latinos.  Yesterday he was outright insulting, when he embarrassed himself and his party to black students at Howard University.  Republican minority outreach has one problem.  To succeed, Republicans must convince minority communities that obviously racist GOP policy is not at all racist.

11PaulHowardSo now we know the basis of Kentucky's libertarian Sen. Rand Paul's strategy for expanding the Republican Party's appeal to African Americans: amnesia.

That's the only conclusion I can reach after watching the C-SPAN broadcast of Paul's 52-minute appearance today at Howard University. He deserves credit for appearing before a potentially hostile audience to make the case for conservative policies with which most black voters utterly disagree. But he also deserves strong criticism — even derision — for pretending that there's any mystery about why most black folks are so skeptical about the GOP. He wants us to forget the party's recent history — and his own.

So in his speech today, he asked, "How did the party that elected the first black U.S. senator, the party that elected the first 20 African-American congressmen, become a party that now loses 95 percent of the black vote? How did the Republican Party, the party of the Great Emancipator, lose the trust and faith of an entire race?"

He went on to argue that blacks began to switch their long-standing allegiance from Republicans to Democrats during the Great Depression. "The Democrats promised equalizing outcomes through unlimited federal assistance, while Republicans offered something that seemed less tangible: the promise of equalizing opportunity through free markets," Paul argued… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <The Root>

Rand seems to think that he gets to make up a history different from what actually happened. He insulted black people by accusing them of moving to the Democrats during the great depression, because they prefer welfare to opportunity. Horse feathers shit! The Republican Party came to be as the progressive party that freed the slaves and, after the war, fought for their equality. The Southern Democrats, aka Dixiecrats, were the racists that opposed them. In the 1960s, Northern Democrats and moderate Republicans combined to pass the Civil Rights Acts and Voting Rights Acts. In a play for political power, the Republicans adopted the Southern Strategy, in which they adopted the Dixiecrats racist policies. The Dixiecrats switched to the Republican Party and became its base. Until that time, black people were overwhelmingly Republican. Only after the Republican Party adopted racism as policy did the majority of black people change their support to the Democrats. That's what really happened.  Idiot, son of Idiot, named after Idiot spread more BS than an agricultural spreader.

Rachel Maddow demonstrated, in no uncertain terms, that Rand Paul also lied when he claimed he has never been against the Civil Rights Act.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Like his racist father, Paul has said he believes that businesses have the right to racist discrimination.

I believe that the Republican Party is committing slow suicide.  Because demographics in this country are shifting, they will need successful minority outreach to survive.  However the only they can do this is to abandon racism and bigotry, but if they do, they lose their base, without which they cannot survive.  When they adopted the Southern Strategy, they sold out to hate to gain power.  Now they can’t let go of it.

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Open Thread–4/10/2013

 Open Thread, Personal, Politics
Apr 102013
 

I’m way pooped, but as always, I could not be more proud of my guys.  We met with a dozen yesterday, and one of the things we discussed was how to deal with catastrophic life events.  You’d be amazed how often such an event triggers a downward spiral of dysfunctional choices ending in prison.  Their honesty and self-awareness was exciting.  Three of them are up for decisions on parole, so please remember them, however you connect with the infinite.  Critter sends greetings to Critter.  I get to replies either later today, after I get some sleep, or tomorrow.  Tomorrow appears routine. 

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 4:55 (average 5:33).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From MSNBC: Lawrence O’Donnell debunked Republican bullshitology on taxes.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Even ‘Iron Pants. Thatcher was far more generous to the 99% that today’s Republicans. Despite Republican claims, we are one of the least taxed nations in the industrialized world. That’s not so true for the 99%, but the 1% pays so much less that they pull the percentage of GDP down. Except for welfare for the 1%, we are one of the least industrialized nations in public services for the taxes we pay. That is the landscape in which Republicans are trying to reduce taxes and increase services for the 1%, while increasing taxes and reducing services for the 99%.

From The New Yorker: Senate Republicans today vowed to filibuster a controversial bill supporting the right not to get shot.

G.O.P. leaders lambasted the bill, arguing that the right to go to school, work, or one’s home without fear of being shot was not guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

“The Second Amendment makes it very clear,” said Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyoming). “The right to bear arms shall not be infringed by a tiny minority’s desire not to be shot.”

Once again Borowitz’ satire is as real as actuality.

From Think Progress: Late last month, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R) filed a petition asking the full United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit to reinstate Virginia’s “Crimes Against Nature” law, which makes oral and anal sex a felony. A three-judge panel of that same court had struck down the law, noting that it cannot be squared the Supreme Court’s decision in Lawrence v. Texas, which prohibits laws criminalizing non-commercial sexual activity between consenting adults. Yesterday, the Fourth Circuit issued an order rejecting Cuccinelli’s request. Notably, not one of the court’s judges requested a poll of the court to consider Cuccinelli’s petition, so his petition received no support whatsoever from the court’s members.

Republicans want government too small to interfere with the corporate right to steal, but just big enough to put a cop in every bedroom. Perhaps sex that produces little Republicans should be a felony. Winking smile

Cartoon:

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Animals are people too, and cat is where it’s at, but who let that dawg join?

Good night!

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The Problem with RepubliCare

 Politics
Apr 082013
 

While far too many are focused on the proposed cuts to the safety net contained in Obama’s budget, not enough are focused on how the Republican Party is trying trash the safety net.  One of the best examples of how they are doing so is RepubliCare. as this excellent editorial by Paul Krugman demonstrates.

RepubliCarePresident Obama will soon release a new budget, and the commentary is already flowing fast and furious. Progressives are angry (with good reason) over proposed cuts to Social Security; conservatives are denouncing the call for more revenues. But it’s all Kabuki. Since House Republicans will block anything Mr. Obama proposes, his budget is best seen not as policy but as positioning, an attempt to gain praise from “centrist” pundits.

No, the real policy action at this point is in the states, where the question is, How many Americans will be denied essential health care in the name of freedom?

I’m referring, of course, to the question of how many Republican governors will reject the Medicaid expansion that is a key part of Obamacare. What does that have to do with freedom? In reality, nothing. But when it comes to politics, it’s a different story.

It goes without saying that Republicans oppose any expansion of programs that help the less fortunate — along with tax cuts for the wealthy, such opposition is pretty much what defines modern conservatism. But they seem to be having more trouble than in the past defending their opposition without simply coming across as big meanies.

Specifically, the time-honored practice of attacking beneficiaries of government programs as undeserving malingerers doesn’t play the way it used to. When Ronald Reagan spoke about welfare queens driving Cadillacs, it resonated with many voters. When Mitt Romney was caught on tape sneering at the 47 percent, not so much… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <NY Times>

Click through the rest.

Ever since Obama first revealed that his budget contains entitlement cuts, I have opined that he was making a proposal that would never come to fruition t stake out political territory  I don’t feel so lonely anymore, now that Krugman has come out with the same explanation I have been giving.  I’m sure he did not get the idea from me.  Rather, it’s just that great minds fall in the same ditch. Winking smile

The following map is a mere shadow of a fantastic interactive version from The Advisory Board.  Click through to play with it for more information on Medicaid expansion about your state and others.

8MedicaidMap

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