Politics Plus

Yesterday I spent most of the day resting, although I did cook myself a steak, cheese whipped potatoes, Asian veggies, and chocolate cake  (bought).  I successfully moderated portions, as my glucose level this morning was 97.  Sleeping without sheets is very uncomfortable.  And my helper-friend is still AWOL.  Tomorrow is a holy day in the Church of the Ellipsoid Orb.  My Broncos’ meditation with the chargers will be televised.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 2:45 (average 4:46).  To do it. click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Daily Kos (classic 11/2015): Sixty million people died in World War II, but fascism won. It didn’t win on the battlefield. It didn’t win right away. It won because the same fears, the same greed, the same hatred that fueled its growth in the first part of the twentieth century never went away. The symbols of fascism became anathema, but the causes … went deep. And gradually, slowly, one step at a time, all those vices became first tolerated, then treated as virtues, and then as the only acceptable view.

Godwin’s Law—the contention that any argument will eventually come round to warnings about Hitler—is twenty-five years old, but for much longer than that, we’ve been taught that the use of that… f-word, is not to be taken seriously. Sure, every government program, new or old, is open to accusations of communism and warnings of a slippery slope toward some failed dictatorship. That’s expected. But to even acknowledge our long, stumbling lurch to the right; the building force of corporate power; the relentless need for war; a police whose power of enforcement is divorced from law; a preening nationalism that rewards the full rights of citizenship only to those who fit an ever-narrower mold… You can’t call it fascism. People will only laugh.

Godwin’s Law – a common meme used by Republicans, other fascists, pseudo-intellectuals, and people with their heads in the sand, or in smellier places, whenever anyone points out the verifiable commonalities between today’s Republican Party and Germany’s National Socialist Party, before Hitler became dictator. The Republican Reich must be stopped.

From NY Times: For decades, the south steps of the State Capitol have served as a staging area for rallies on issues ranging from abortion to immigration rights, but Friday was the first time that demonstrators walked around here with handguns on their hips.

On a chilly, overcast day, more than 100 Texans gathered carrying an array of holstered weaponry — Glocks, Smith & Wessons and more — to mark a change in the law that lets them openly display the fact that they are armed. The practice had been banned in Texas since 1871.

Similar demonstrations were held in several other Texas cities.

Look! The Republican Ammosexuals are exposing their penises.

From Alternet: A self-described “pro-family” conservative said on Facebook he should be allowed to grab the nipples of breastfeeding mothers if a law banning women exposing breasts in public didn’t pass. New Hampshire state Rep. Josh Moore (R) deleted the comment, but it was archived and posted by Slate.

How about grabbing Moore’s balls in public… with pruning shears?

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A new year begins with the promise for me that 2016 virtually has to be a better year than last.  May it be so for us all.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 5:14 (average 7:27).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Daily Kos (July): In one simple quote, Sister Joan Chittister, O.S.B. sums up the hypocrisy of many in the ‘pro-life’ movement:

"I do not believe that just because you’re opposed to abortion, that that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed. And why would I think that you don’t? Because you don’t want any tax money to go there. That’s not pro-life. That’s pro-birth. We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is."

While I disagree with her opposition to women’s right to make their own medical decisions, I respectfully disagree, because, unlike the Republican Party,  she is consistent.

From Media Matters: Fleeing from terror and indiscriminate violence in parts of the Middle East, millions of people have packed up and left their homes to start safer lives for themselves and their families elsewhere. But if you tuned into Fox News anytime in the last year, you’d think the refugees themselves — many of them Muslim — were responsible for the violence. In fact, painting Muslims as terrorists, radicals, and tacit supporters of ISIS, baseless demonization of Islam was the channel’s modus operandi in 2015. And it wasn’t just right-wing media. CNN also joined the smears, asking a Muslim human rights lawyer if he supports ISIS, questioning a Michigan mayor if she’s afraid of her majority Muslim-American city council, and forcing responsibility for the recent attacks in Paris onto an innocent French Muslim.

The slanders the Republican Reichsministry of Propaganda, Faux Noise, keep repeating are totally false.

From NY Times: Wealth can be bad for your soul. That’s not just a hoary piece of folk wisdom; it’s a conclusion from serious social science, confirmed by statistical analysis and experiment. The affluent are, on average, less likely to exhibit empathy, less likely to respect norms and even laws, more likely to cheat, than those occupying lower rungs on the economic ladder.

And it’s obvious, even if we don’t have statistical confirmation, that extreme wealth can do extreme spiritual damage. Take someone whose personality might have been merely disagreeable under normal circumstances, and give him the kind of wealth that lets him surround himself with sycophants and usually get whatever he wants. It’s not hard to see how he could become almost pathologically self-regarding and unconcerned with others.

So what happens to a nation that gives ever-growing political power to the superrich?

To find out, click through for the rest of this fine Paul Krugman editorial.

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