Politics Plus

Yesterday really was a lazy day, because neither PT nor OT came to work me.  While I welcome every chance I have to work, I suppose one day off won’t hurt me.  Today is a holy day in the Church of the Ellipsoid Orb.  My Broncos, minus Peyton, are  meditating with the Patriots in the Sunday night game, so I will get to see it.  May the blessed Orb shine its holy light on your team, unless that team is notorious for wayward snow plows and depressurizing orbs.

Short Takes:

From Daily Kos (Classic 4/2014): We like to assert that Daily Kos is a reality-based community. At the very least we surely do not deny science. A new study appearing at Princeton’s website may test these assumptions for some of us here. For others, it will be grim vindication of what we already know: the United States of America is no longer a democracy, but rather an oligarchy.

The anecdotes are plentiful, from modest gun control proposals that saw 90% public support, to unemployment compensation, to infrastructure spending, to women’s rights; where a plurality exists even across party lines, the median public interest seems to hold no sway in policy making. Now science has proven this to be correct:

The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence. Our results provide substantial support for theories of Economic Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.

I’d say that in the last year and a half, we’ve regressed to fascist plutocracy.

From Roots Action: Rahm Emanuel Should Resign Now

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel oversaw the withholding from public view — for more than a year — of a video of a police murder of a teenager.

The police officer who shot 17-year-old Laquan McDonald 16 times, continuing to shoot his motionless body on the ground, has now been indicted for first-degree murder.

The video was kept secret for 13 months, during which time Emanuel never corrected the blatant lies by the Chicago Police Department that maintained the victim had lunged at the police with a knife just before he was shot. The video shows this to have been a complete fabrication.

A mayor willing to cover for the murder of his constituent is no mayor at all. Add your name:

Chicago residents and people across the country demand Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s immediate resignation.

Rahmbo must go! He is a disgrace to the Democratic Party. Click through to sign the petition, please.

From NY Times: With Colorado Springs residents telling chilling tales of hours spent hiding in stores near the shootout on Friday, the authorities shed no light publicly on whether they believed Mr. Dear, 57, had deliberately targeted Planned Parenthood. But one senior law enforcement official, who would speak only anonymously about an ongoing investigation, said that after Mr. Dear was arrested, he had said “no more baby parts” in a rambling interview with the authorities.

It appears that this Republican terrorism is a direct response to the fraudulent Republican videos attacking Planned Parenthood.

Cartoon:

Has that map changed, or what?

Yesterday OT worked with me on how to take a shower.  I didn’t mind too much.   Then PT had me walking with my prosthetic leg.  Today I plan a lazy day, except for whatever OT and PT have in mind.

Short Takes:

From NY Times: Carolyn Bouchard, a diabetic with a slowly healing shoulder fracture, hurried to see her doctor after Matt Bevin was elected governor here this month.

Ms. Bouchard, 60, said she was sick of politics and had not bothered voting. But she knew enough about Mr. Bevin, a conservative Republican who rails against the Affordable Care Act, to be nervous about the Medicaid coverage she gained under the law last year.

“I thought, ‘Before my insurance changes, I’d better go in,’ ” she said as she waited at Family Health Centers, a community clinic here.

Over the last few years, Kentucky captured the nation’s attention as the only Southern state to wholly embrace the health care law, most significantly by expanding Medicaid in 2014 to cover an additional 425,000 people so far. Now, with Mr. Bevin promising to “repeal the expansion as it currently exists,” Kentucky may become a laboratory for the kind of rollback that the law’s opponents have so far only dreamed of.

I feel sorry for the people of Kentucky, but not for Ms. Bouchard. People who don’t bother to vote deserve the deprivations that Republican rule invariably brings.

From NBC New York: Even before the deadly standoff at a Colorado Planned Parenthood was over, messages of support poured in for the health care provider, which itself released a message that was defiant in the face of violence.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton tweeted “Today and every day, we #StandWithPP” after shooting broke out at the health center in Colorado Springs, in which police said a gunman killed three people and wounded nine before giving himself up at about 7 p.m. ET.

Supermodel Chrissy Teigen asked her million Twitter followers to follow her lead and donate to the organization.

It wasn’t immediately clear if Planned Parenthood was the target of an attack or if gunfire erupted there for another reason. Authorities repeatedly said Friday it was too early to determine a motive or whether the shooter had any connection to Planned Parenthood.

“We don’t have any information on this individual’s mentality, or his ideas or ideology,” Colorado Springs Police Lt. Catherine Buckley said.

But Planned Parenthood has been attacked before — a clinic was set on fire this year in Washington State – and has long been the subject of protests for providing women with access to abortions.

The head of Planned Parenthood Rocky Mountains released a statement on the national organization’s website Friday afternoon saying that the group will never stop doing its work.

I’m sure I’ll have more to say about this when more information is available. In the meantime, like Bernie and Hillary, I stand with Planned Parenthood. I’d bet that the perpetrator comes from the pseudo-Christian version of the Daesh: the rabid Republican base.

From Alternet:The white supremacists who showed up to a Black Lives Matter protest Monday night in Minneapolis and shot five African-American participants were not there just by coincidence.

As more facts emerge in the case, it’s now beginning to appear that not only was the attack a carefully planned attempt to disrupt the demonstration, but the men who participated in the shootings had been radicalized in the course of conversing on websites and in chatrooms where racist and other far-right extremist ideology flourishes. Indeed, the men began networking in real life as a result of their Internet hatemongering.

See the Republicans hate! Hate! Hate!! Hate!!! Barf Bag Alert!!!!

The safety of the American people is far more threatened by Republican Party terrorism than it is by the Daesh.

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