There’s no time for much of anything today as I have an appointment with my Ocular Oncologist, and when I return Wendy will be coming to fluff and buff the TomCat.  In addition, I’m collecting data for our Monthly Report, which will be a day ot three late.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:45 (average 3:51).  To do it, click here. How did you do?

Short Take:

From NY Times: The Chinook salmon that Randy Settler and other Yakama tribal fishermen are pulling from the Columbia River are large and plentiful this summer, part of one of the biggest spawning runs since the 1960s. It is a sign, they say, of the river’s revitalization, through pollution regulations and ambitious fish hatchery programs.

But barely four miles upstream from the fishermen’s nets, state workers are still cleaning up after a major oil train derailment in June. About 47,000 gallons of heavy Bakken crude bound from North Dakota spilled when 16 Union Pacific cars accordioned off the tracks. All of it, Oregon environmental officials said, might have gone into the river but for a stroke of luck that carried the oil instead into a water treatment plant a few hundred feet from the riverbank.

That juxtaposition — the rebounding river coming a hair’s breadth from disaster — has resonated across the Pacific Northwest and brought about a day of reckoning. From ballot boxes to the governors’ desks in Oregon and Washington, a corner of the nation that seemed poised only a few years ago to become a new energy hub is now gripped by a debate over whether transporting volatile, hazardous crude oil by rail through cities and environmentally delicate areas can ever be made safe enough…

In two words, It can’t.

Cartoon:

The worst part of the heat wave is over, but it’s still very muggy, and it will take a couple of days fore the heat to bleed out of the brickwork.  Tomorrow, please expect no more than a Personal Update.  I have a follow up with my Ocular Oncologist, and when I return, Wendy will come over.  She isn’t here today, because she took her mother to the beach for the weekend.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 2:54 (average 4:32).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From NY Times: Donald J. Trump belittled the parents of a slain Muslim soldier who had strongly denounced Mr. Trump during the Democratic National Convention, saying that the soldier’s father had delivered the entire speech because his mother was not “allowed” to speak.

Mr. Trump’s comments, in an interview with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News that will air on Sunday, drew quick and widespread condemnation and amplified calls for Republican leaders to distance themselves from their presidential nominee. With his implication that the soldier’s mother had not spoken because of female subservience expected in some traditional strains of Islam, his comments also inflamed his hostilities with American Muslims.

Khizr Khan, the soldier’s father, lashed out at Mr. Trump in an interview on Saturday, saying his wife had not spoken at the convention because it was too painful for her to talk about her son’s death.

Only one adjective is sufficiently vile to categorize Rump Dump Trump’s bigotry: Republican.

From YouTube: Real Time with Bill Maher: New Rule – The Notorious HRC (HBO)

LMAO! To the Regressives, who will try to use this as proof, and the idealists taken in by and parroting them, Bill was using SATIRE!

Also from YouTube: Real Time with Bill Maher: Interview with Bernie Sanders

In this segment Bill was serious. Bernie made his position clear. "Donald Trump is the most dangerous candidate in the modern history of our country and he must be defeated." "The political revolution must continue the DAY AFTER THE ELECTION, and Hillary Clinton is President." Not only was his support for Hillary unequivocal, but also, made electing her a priority over his own revolution until after the election. Bernie made the only way forward for Bernie supporters clear. Those who claim to support Bernie, but help Trump instead, even unwittingly, do not support Bernie.

Cartoon:

Please pardon my brevity.  Nameless seems to have reached out and touched me with a case of Republicosis, so I’m making intermittent trips to the throne room.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:33 (average 4:45).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Daily Kos: …According to the Pew Research Center, The pool of self-identified independent voters is larger than either Republicans and Democrats; but despite not being card-carrying members, they still tend to lean towards one party or another. With leanings factored in, 87% of Americans identify either directly or indirectly towards either the Republican or Democrat parties. That leaves 13% of the voting population to divvy up among third party, which ties into the second issue: party size and influence.

Second, the viability of a third party Presidential campaign is directly tied to the size and influence of the third party in question. A Presidential campaign timeline looks something like this (immensely simplified):

Step 1: Announce your are running.
Step 2: Win your party.
Step 3: Win enough Electoral College votes to win the national election.

If you are a Republican or Democrat, Step 3 is merely difficult—you have a pretty sizeable base, and you are pretty much guaranteed that some subset of that party base is going to vote for you no matter what, so winning means adding to that base in the right parts of the country to get enough votes. For any third party, they have no base to start from, which means their entire strategy revolves around Democrat and Republican attrition. In other words, they have to do twice as much work as your average Republican or Democratic candidate. In today’s political climate, a third party has zero chance of winning the election.

How does a third party truly have a chance? By growing the base large enough so that your built-in support base is comparable to the others. Large enough that you can win significant numbers of governor seats and Congress seats. And this is something that neither the Green Party nor the Libertarian party has done, or will have done between now and November. Instead, they treat the Presidential race as an advertising campaign for their party, hoping to draw in a few more disenfranchised Republican or Democrat voters.

Let’s put this in concrete terms for Gary Johnson, the only third party blipping on the national poll radar. The current projections at fivethirtyeight as of this writing give Gary Johnson 0.6 electoral votes—in other words, he’ll be lucky to get a single Electoral College vote anywhere in the country. But it also gives him 7.7% of the popular vote. Right now, those same projections have a  1.4% gap between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, which means that the 7.7% of the population tilting at windmills to get a single Electoral College vote for Gary Johnson could very easily put Donald Trump in the White House… [emphasis added]

Every lefty that listens to Regressives and votes for a third party is casting a vote for Donald Trump, the true beneficiary of those third party votes.

From Media Matters: Fox News ignored a speech by the father of U.S. Army Captain Humayun Khan, who was killed in 2004 in the Iraq war, instead opting to air commercials during the speech. Fox later went live to a song by pop singer Katy Perry after the speech.

During the final night of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, PA, Khizr Khan spoke about the honor he felt to be present at the convention with his wife, “as patriotic American Muslims with undivided loyalty to our country.” Khan’s speech was preceded by a video that showed Hillary Clinton calling Captain Khan “the best of America” and explaining the circumstances of his death, for which he was posthumously awarded the Bronze Star and Purple Heart.

It is so typical of the Republican Rectumite Reichsministry of Propaganda, Faux Noise, to hide the truth behind Benghazi bullshit!

From Alternet: In an extraordinary ruling, a federal appeals court overturned a lower court ruling and granted a broad injunction against North Carolina Republicans’ sweeping voter suppression law. Crucially, the appeals court found that the legislation, which created a strict voter ID requirement, ended same-day registration, out-of-precinct voting, and pre-registration, was “passed with racially discriminatory intent.” And unlike recent rulings against new voter ID law in Texas and Wisconsin, which only ameliorated the impact of those laws, this decision blocks North Carolina’s entire voter ID measure.

This ruling is an enormous victory for voting rights, and not just because voter ID will no longer be required at the polls. The finding of discriminatory intent is key because it could ultimately serve as future grounds for placing North Carolina back under the Department of Justice’s “preclearance” regime for 10 years.

That certainly is good news. DOJ preclearance is needed in all states, with Republican legislatures, so it should be required in all states.

It’s another hot muggy day with the high forecast in the 90°s.  I’m running late, because I could not sleep last night, as it was too muggy.  Once I finally did fall asleep, I overslept this morning and got a late start.  I got all the Canadian Holidays from my Outlook calendar by deleting them one at a time, through 2026.  Next July 1, I’m going to het a BIG bowl of chili and point my butt North.  It’s only 313 miles to Vancouver.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:49 (average 4:29).  To do it, click here. How did you do?

From Politico: Donald Trump said Wednesday that, if he is elected president, he would consider recognizing Crimea as Russian territory and lifting the sanctions against Russia.

At a wide-ranging news conference, Trump said he “would be looking into that” when asked about his stance on Crimea and Russia. The Crimean Peninsula has been part of Ukraine for decades, but Russian President Vladimir Putin annexed the territory in March 2014 after a popular revolt toppled Kiev’s pro-Russian government.

This is documentation of a claim I made in an earlier comment. No matter how little you may like Clinton’s foreign policy, which appears to be an extension of Obama’s (a major improvement over the Bush Reich), please don’t try to tell me that Trump’s is better.

From I Side With: Answer the following questions to see which 2016 Presidential candidate you side with.

Click through to take the test yourself,  Here are my results.

Hillary Clinton 97%
Jill Stein 97%
Rump Dump Trump 4%

The key thing here is how much alike Hillary and Jill are. Back when Bernie was still included, I got 100% Bernie. Considering how alike the three are to call Clinton the lesser evil is irrational.

From NY Times: After a string of high-profile defeats, the prosecutors who were unable to win convictions of police officers in the death of Freddie Gray defended themselves on Thursday and sharply accused the city’s Police Department of undermining them.

At a news conference the day after their boss, Marilyn J. Mosby, the state’s attorney for Baltimore, announced she was dropping charges against the three officers who still awaited trial, the lead prosecutors — both seasoned lawyers — said the police had failed to serve search warrants for the officers’ personal cellphones. The lawyers also echoed a charge made in court that a detective assigned to the case was sabotaging it.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying it. As much as I appreciate and support the service the majority of police officers and condemn violence committed against police officers, the element of police culture that demands that good officers protect criminals in their midst from accountability must be ended. Every community needs a civilian review board with proportional community representation and teeth.

From YouTube: Bill Maher Live DNC Special Edition: July 28

Good points, in addition to…

FOMCROTFPIMPLMAO!

Cartoon:

Making Trump products in an Asian sweat shop.