I’m in the middle of packing. It’s amazing how much stuff I’ve accumulated, between George’s needs and everything else. I’ll let. you know later on that I have arrived home safely. Hugs to you all!!
Cartoon:
Dec 092015
TomCat
Dec 082015
Once again, this is today’s only article, as I have much to do to prepare for tomorrow’s trip home. Color me in rush mode. Expect only a brief Personal Update tomorrow.
Short Takes:
From The New Yorker: The billionaire Donald Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims from entering the United States has sparked deep disappointment among his supporters, many of whom had hoped he was planning to ban a sizable number of other religions.
In conversations with likely Trump voters across the country, reactions ranged from disenchantment to a sharp sense of betrayal as supporters tried to make sense of his decision to ban members of only one faith.
“I heard him on TV talking about banning Muslims and I was kind of like, ‘Is that it?’ ” said Carol Foyler, a Trump supporter from South Florida. “I mean, banning Muslims is a good start, but I thought a smart businessman like him would be a lot more thorough.”
Harland Dorrinson, a Trump supporter from San Antonio, Texas, agreed. “Saying you’re only going to ban Muslims when there are so many other religious groups to ban just feels like politics as usual,” he said. “I’ll give him a chance to explain himself on this one, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel burned.”
Andy has it spot-on. Republicans would ban all beliefs, except Republican Supply-side pseudo-Christianity, with their gospel of hate, greed and violence.
From NY Times: President Obama’s address to the nation Sunday was intended to reassure anxious Americans that the United States will defeat the Islamic State, known as ISIS or ISIL, “by being strong and smart, resilient and relentless, and by drawing upon every aspect of American power.” But success, he noted, “won’t depend on tough talk, or abandoning our values, or giving into fear. That’s what groups like ISIL are hoping for.”
If that’s true, ISIS must have been cheered by the presidential field, most of whom did their best to talk tough and stoke fear without advancing any workable ideas.
Donald Trump, a bigot without foreign policy experience, showed that there is nothing he won’t say or support to sow hatred. On Monday he outrageously proposed barring all Muslims from entering the country. There is no precedent for denying immigration based on religion, experts say, and any such test would surely be used as an excuse to attack Muslim Americans.
Ted Cruz, Twitter warrior, pledged after Mr. Obama’s speech to “direct the Department of Defense to destroy ISIS.” He played soldier all weekend in Iowa, spouting “We will carpet bomb them into oblivion,” to a tea-party crowd in Cedar Rapids, adding “I don’t know if sand can glow in the dark, but we’re going to find out,” whatever that means.
Marco Rubio took to Fox News [Faux Noise delinked] to remind Americans that they are, or should be, “really scared and worried.” He also said that “people are scared not just because of these attacks but because of a growing sense that we have a president that’s completely overwhelmed by them,” as if he alone had his finger on the pulse of America…
That’s what I would expect from the Clown Car.
From Blue Oregon: Merkley calls it: The Worst Idea from a Presidential Candidate. Ever.
That’s my Senator. Oregon leads the way.
Cartoon:
Dec 072015
Because I expect a very busy day today, preparing to return home on Wednesday, this is my only article today.
Religious Ecstasy:
Short Takes:
From The New Yorker: Moments after its conclusion on Sunday night, President Obama’s speech about combating ISIS came under heavy criticism from people with zero better ideas.
The President’s proposals, ranging from coalition air strikes against ISIS to beefing up intelligence about potential terrorists, were blasted for being “nothing new,” with the harshest criticism coming from people with nothing new.
“I was incredibly frustrated hearing the President say he would destroy ISIS,” New Jersey Governor Chris Christie told CNN. “ISIS needs to be obliterated.”
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz shared Christie’s scathing assessment of Obama’s speech. “The President seems to think that ISIS will go away just by us bombing them,” Cruz said. “If I am President, I will bomb them so hard that will feel like they have been triple-bombed.”
Andy is reporting straight news again. 😉
From YouTube:
Click here for a transcript of Obama’s speech. Your thoughts?
From NY Times: The international climate change negotiations entering their second and final week encompass a vast and complicated array of political, economic and legal questions. But at bottom, the talks boil down to two issues: trust and money.
In this global forum, no one questions the established science that greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels are warming the planet — or that both developed and developing economies must all eventually lower their greenhouse emissions to stave off a future that could wreak havoc on the world’s safety and economic stability.
In a major breakthrough, 184 governments have already submitted plans detailing how they will cut their domestic emissions after 2020.
Those pledges are expected to make up the core of a new accord, which could be signed next weekend. The agreement is also expected to require countries to return to the table at least once every 10 years with even more stringent emissions reduction pledges.
But can those governments be trusted to do what they say they will do?
Republicans are committing sedition to make the international community believe that the US cannot be trusted to keep our word.
Cartoon:
64 years later, the Republican Party is repeating the attack.
Dec 062015
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 shameful InsaniTEA can become. I trust that you will believe it, when I tell you that last week was no exception.
Nevada lawmaker posts festive, armed-to-the-teeth Christmas card.
Nothing says Christmas like a family cradling their firearms.
Nevada Assemblywoman Michele Fiore captured the true meaning of Christmas with her 2015 family Christmas card, which she posted on Facebook this week. In it, every member of her clan above the age of toddlerhood is packing. And so many different kinds of weapons to choose from! There’s a Beretta, some Glocks, a Walther P22 for 5-year-old Jake, and for Michele, a Serbu Super-Shorty 12-gauge shotgun. Woohoo.
This marvelous public servant was a big supporter of wonderful, law-abiding Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy. She told MSNBC, “Don’t come here with guns and expect the American people not to fire back.”
For the holidays, she went with a much sweeter tone. “It’s up to Americans to protect America,” her festive message said. “We’re just your ordinary American family.”
Oh, good God, no. [emphasis added]
inserted from <Think Progress>
This is the Republican War on Christmas. This is also only the fourth of five shameful moments from last week alone. Click through for the other four.
Dec 062015
I’m already in rush mode, so I’ll be brief. Today is a holy day in the Church of the Ellipsoid Orb. My Broncos meditate with the Chargers, but I can’t watch it. 
The network is showing the Chiefs and Raiders instead.
Short Takes:
From Bernie Sanders: Say You Support Commonsense Solutions to Make Our Country Safer From Gun Violence
1. We can expand background checks to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and the dangerously mentally ill. This is an idea that over 80% of Americans agree with, even a majority of gun owners.
2. & 3. We can renew the assault weapons ban and end the sale of high capacity magazines — military-style tools created for the purpose of killing people as efficiently as possible.
4. Since 2004, over 2,000 people on the FBI’s terrorist watch list have legally purchased guns in the United States. Let’s close the “terror gap” and make sure known foreign and domestic terrorists are included on prohibited purchaser lists.
5. We can close loopholes in our laws that allow perpetrators of stalking and dating violence to buy guns. In the United States, the intended targets of a majority of our mass shootings are intimate partners or family members, and over 60% of victims are women and children. Indeed, a woman is five times more likely to die in a domestic violence incident when a gun is present.
6. We should close the loophole that allows prohibited purchasers to buy a gun without a completed background check after a three-day waiting period expires. Earlier this year, Dylann Roof shot and killed nine of our fellow Americans while they prayed in a historic church, simply because of the color of their skin. This act of terror was possible because of loopholes in our background check laws. Congress should act to ensure the standard for ALL gun purchases is a completed background check. No check — no sale.
7. It’s time to pass federal gun trafficking laws. I support Kirsten Gillibrand’s Hadiya Pendleton and Nyasia Pryear-Yard Gun Trafficking & Crime Prevention Act of 2015, which would “make gun trafficking a federal crime and provide tools to law enforcement to get illegal guns off the streets and away from criminal networks and street gangs.”
8. It’s time to strengthen penalties for straw purchasers who buy guns from licensed dealers on behalf of a prohibited purchaser.
9. We must authorize resources for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to study and research the causes and effects of gun violence in the United States of America.
10. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there are over 21,000 firearm suicides every year in the United States. It’s time we expand and improve our mental health capabilities in this country so that people who need care can get care when they need it, regardless of their level of income.
Please join me, and click through to sign! Bernie is spot on!!
From TPM: The head of Oklahoma’s prison system, who presided over two botched lethal injections and a third that was called off because the wrong drug was delivered, announced his resignation Friday amid an investigation into what went wrong with the executions.
Department of Corrections Director Robert Patton said in a news release that he will resign effective Jan. 31, but will begin taking accrued leave on Dec. 25. He said he has accepted a position in Arizona to be closer to family.
While this murdering Republican may be incompetent, his resignation does not solve the problem. End state sponsored murder.
From Think Progress: Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr. urged more students to carry guns on Friday, arguing that if the victims of Wednesday’s attack in San Bernardino, California were armed, they would have been able to protect themselves from the attackers.
“I’ve always thought that if more good people had concealed-carry permits, then we could end those Muslims before they walked in and killed them,” he said during the school’s convocation, before teasing the students about his own gun.
That’s the Republican Supply-side pseudo-Christian solution: Assume that Muslims are terrorists and murder them. Kill a Muslim for Republican Supply-side Jesus (the opposite of the real Jesus).
Cartoon:
Dec 052015
Here is the eightieth article in our Republicans on Parade series, featuring individuals who personify what the Republican Party has become. Today’s honoree is Virginia resident Jack Eugene Turner. He is so honored for his Republican approach to race relations.
Virginia resident Jack Eugene Turner drew community outrage after he put up a racist, threatening display in his front yard—for which he was eventually charged and convicted of a felony:
Turner was arrested in June after he used a piece of rope to hang a dark-colored, life-sized dummy from a tree. Witnesses at his trial said the display was a response to an ongoing dispute he had with his next-door neighbors, who are black. They testified Turner had sent them strange notes and frequently flipped his middle finger at them and at their relatives, who also live on the street…
…“He stated that he was a racist and he did like black people but did not like n—–s,” Caldwell said in court. After his first arrest, witnesses said, Turner also started draping Confederate flags in his windows.
After he was found guilty, the judge let him free on bond with the condition he didn’t put up any other symbols or messages on his property. Apparently unable to control his racist rage, he is back in cuffs after putting up another heinous display:
On Tuesday, police said Turner was arrested for a second time after he put up a sign in front of his home that read “N—– lives don’t matter. Got rope?”
Inserted from <Daily Kos>
I have little add, except that it’s hard to find a more accurate example of today’s Republican Party.
Dec 052015
Yesterday the hospital pulled a fast one on me. Although they have told me that they will mot discharge me until my bed arrives later this month, my insurance decided that I can rent a bed, while waiting for my bed to arrive, so they are discharging me next week. I’m feeling a bit freaked, because there is so much I don’t know how to do. I’m not confident that I’m ready. I may be intermittent over the next few days, as I attend to the details. I’ll keep you posted.
Short Takes:
From Daily Kos: A Missouri state representative has pre-filed a bill that would make it as difficult to buy a gun as it is to get an abortion. According to St. Louis Magazine, Democratic State Rep. Stacey Newman’s bill would “require anyone buying a gun to follow the restrictions required of women seeking abortions, including a 72-hour waiting period.”
Newman is a longtime advocate for common-sense gun laws, and also a pro-choice activist, which makes her a fish out of water in the predominantly right-wing-Republican Missouri legislature, where she is regularly subjected to jeers, sneers and outright insults. Still, she has courageously drafted House Bill 1397.
Kudos to Stacey Newman! Click through for the details of her bill.
From NY Times: Only hours after news broke that a suspect in a mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., had a Muslim name, the well-practiced organizations that represent American Muslims to the broader public kicked into action, as they routinely do after each terrorist attack attributed to Muslim extremists.
They issued news releases condemning the attacks as inhuman and un-Islamic, posted expressions of grief on Facebook and held news conferences in which Muslim leaders stood flanked by American flags alongside clergy of other faiths and law enforcement officials.
“Groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda,” Salam al-Marayati, president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, said at a news conference in Los Angeles on Thursday, “are trying to divide our society and to terrorize us. Our message to them is we will not be terrorized and we will not be intimidated,” either by the terrorists or, he said, “by hatemongers who exploit the fear and hysteria that results from incidents like this.”
But the message is apparently not getting through. Muslims and leaders of mosques across the United States say they are experiencing a wave of death threats, assaults and vandalism unlike anything they have experienced since the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001.
Authentic Muslims are not responsible for the terrorist acts of extremists , who twist Islam to suit their own hateful agendas, in the same way that authentic Christians are not responsible for the terrorist acts of Republicans, who twist Christianity to suit their own hateful agendas.
From Alternet: Cops Turn Off Body Cams Before Killing Man, Witnesses Watch Them Plant Gun and Drugs
Witnesses say they watched in disbelief as cops killed a man, then planted a gun and drugs ‘within arms reach’ of his lifeless body.
Click through. Another day, another murder committed by Republican racist police.
Cartoon:
Dec 042015
The more time passes, the more convinced I become that we need to act fast to protect our earth from the Rep0ublican war on science. Unless we remove Republicans from control of the House and Senate, and keep them out of the White House, the next generation will inherit a poisoned earth. Paul Krugman appears to agree.
Future historians — if there are any future historians — will almost surely say that the most important thing happening in the world during December 2015 was the climate talks in Paris. True, nothing agreed to in Paris will be enough, by itself, to solve the problem of global warming. But the talks could mark a turning point, the beginning of the kind of international action needed to avert catastrophe.
Then again, they might not; we may be doomed. And if we are, you know who will be responsible: the Republican Party.
O.K., I know the reaction of many readers: How partisan! How over the top! But what I said is, in fact, the obvious truth. And the inability of our news media, our pundits and our political establishment in general to face up to that truth is an important contributing factor to the danger we face.
Anyone who follows U.S. political debates on the environment knows that Republican politicians overwhelmingly oppose any action to limit emissions of greenhouse gases, and that the great majority reject the scientific consensus on climate change. Last year PolitiFact could find only eight Republicans in Congress, out of 278 in the caucus, who had made on-the-record comments accepting the reality of man-made global warming. And most of the contenders for the Republican presidential nomination are solidly in the anti-science camp…
…More important, probably, is the denial inherent in the conventions of political journalism, which say that you must always portray the parties as symmetric — that any report on extreme positions taken by one side must be framed in a way that makes it sound as if both sides do it. We saw this on budget issues, where some self-proclaimed centrist commentators, while criticizing Republicans for their absolute refusal to consider tax hikes, also made a point of criticizing President Obama for opposing spending cuts that he actually supported. My guess is that climate disputes will receive the same treatment.
But I hope I’m wrong, and I’d urge everyone outside the climate-denial bubble to frankly acknowledge the awesome, terrifying reality. We’re looking at a party that has turned its back on science at a time when doing so puts the very future of civilization at risk. That’s the truth, and it needs to be faced head-on.
Inserted from <NY Times>
Which earth shall we pass on?