Martin Luther King, Jr. influenced my political thinking more than any other individual. I was fortunate to have worked under him on Vietnam Summer and to have been present on the Washington Mall fifty-two years ago today on August 28, 1963. It’s hard to believe that we are once again fighting the battle to preserve the voting rights won as a result of his dream, and to restore them, where racist Republicans are outlawing the right to vote. After his speech, I need say nothing more.
Barring a surprise that has not been forecast, I have a whole week of sub-80°s days, and I can’t wait for the building to bleed off the heat. Today through Sunday are minor holy days in the Church of the Ellipsoid Orb. For one evening I’ll have to give up my solidarity with the LGBT community, because on Saturday my Broncos are having a service with the 69ers, a team notorious for wise receivers and very tight ends. 
The game will not be televised live here, because the networks are showing only the damn Seachickens, as usual. I will get to see the game later, though.
Jig Zone Puzzle:
Today’s took me 2:02 (average 4:19). To do it, click here. How did you do?
Short Takes:
From Daily Kos: In another entry in the 2016 annals of "If Trump’s doing it, me too," Ted Cruz went after Fox News host Megyn Kelly after she dared to ask him a question on whether he would deport citizen children born in the U.S. to undocumented immigrants. Nick Gass reports:
When Kelly pressed the Texas senator on what he would do as president, Cruz said that he’s “not playing the game” and declined to answer the question.
“What would President Cruz do? Do American citizen children of two illegal immigrants, who are born here, the children, get deported under a President Cruz?” Kelly asked.
Donald Trump, she said, “has answered that question explicitly.”
“Megyn, I get that that’s the question you want to ask,” Cruz said. “That’s also the question every mainstream media liberal journalist wants to ask.”
Asked whether it is an unfair question, Cruz said that it is “a distraction” from solving the issue.
“You know, it’s also the question that Barack Obama wants to focus on,” Cruz retorted.
Megyn Kelly? Mainstream?!? Liberal?!!? Bwaha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!!!
From NY Times: President Obama came to this once-stricken city on Thursday to make a case for his entire presidency: that when disaster strikes, the federal government should help not only to rescue the stranded but also to rebuild better and fairer than before.
“The project of rebuilding here wasn’t just to restore the city as it had been,” Mr. Obama said to several hundred people at a new community center in the once-devastated Lower Ninth Ward. “It was to build a city as it should be — a city where everyone, no matter what they look like, how much money they’ve got, where they come from, where they’re born, has a chance to make it.”
The president explicitly linked New Orleans’s recovery from Hurricane Katrina, which struck 10 years ago this month, to the nation’s recovery from the 2008 recession. “That’s the story of New Orleans, but that’s also the story of America,” he said.
Frankly, I think Obama was wrong to pay lip service to the New Orleans recovery, because the recovery aid has been unfairly targeted to whites by Republican state officials. Obama should have called them out for that.
From Media Matters: CNN political commentator Jeffrey Lord attacked Univision anchor Jorge Ramos for playing the "race card" even though he is a "blue-eyed, light-skinned … European Mexican." Lord also connected Ramos to Virginia shooter Vester Lee Flanagan II and alleged Charleston shooter Dylann Roof, claiming they all engaged in "dividing the country by race."
Ramos is an American, and every day CNN is looking more like Faux Noise Lite.
Cartoon:
Because tasks here have given me a very late start, and because the news seems dominated by only two stories, I’m going to take an easy day and make this the todays only article, so I will not be sending links today on Care2. After today we have several day’s of cool weather and forecast, and we may have something called “rain”, whatever that is.
Jig Zone Puzzle:
Today’s took me 2:44 (average 4:15). To do it, click here. How did you do?
Short Takes:
From Daily Kos: Beth Clarkson has extensively studied voting patterns in Kansas and noted several troubling statistical anomalies, ones that always benefited Republican candidates. She pressed for further transparency and was consistently rebuffed. She decided to sue Secretary of State Kris Kobach and Sedgwick County Elections Commissioner Tabitha Lehman:
While it is well-recognized that smaller, rural precincts tend to lean Republican, statisticians have been unable to explain the consistent pattern favoring Republicans that trends upward as the number of votes cast in a precinct or other voting unit goes up. In primaries, the favored candidate appears to always be the Republican establishment candidate, above a tea party challenger. And the upward trend for Republicans occurs once a voting unit reaches roughly 500 votes.
“This is not just an anomaly that occurred in one place,” Clarkson said. “It is a pattern that has occurred repeatedly in elections across the United States.”
The pattern could be voter fraud or a demographic trend that has not been picked up by extensive polling, she said.
She wants to look over the hard copies to check the error rate. You’d think in America, the heart of democracy, this would be a fairly simple request. But, no. Last night, Kris Kobach asked a judge to block the release:
In areas where Republicans control voting machines with no paper trail, such statistical anomalies are especially common nationwide, and they always favor the Republican candidate. At times, to ensure a Republican win, they even count more votes than a precinct has voters. So the reason Kobitch wants to block the release is obvious.
From Vox: America is an exceptional country when it comes to guns. It’s one of the few countries in which the right to bear arms is constitutionally protected, and presidential candidates in other nations don’t cook bacon with guns. But America’s relationship with guns is unique in another crucial way: Among developed nations, the US is far and away the most violent — in large part due to the easy access many Americans have to firearms. These charts and maps show what that violence looks like compared with the rest of the world, why it happens, and why it’s such a tough problem to fix.
The article has 17 excellent maps and charts. I shared 1. Click through for the other 16.
From Raw Story: One of the Kentucky county clerks who is defying court orders to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples said his religious faith requires him to notify LGBT people that they’re going to Hell…
…He argued that the U.S. Supreme Court lacked the authority to overturn Kentucky laws that were approved by a majority of voters — and he said he was willing to become a martyr over this “travesty.”
“Our law says ‘one man and one woman’ and that is what I held my hand up and took an oath to and that is what I expected,” Davis said. “If it takes it, I will go to jail over — if it takes my life, I will die for because I believe I owe that to the people that fought so I can have the freedom that I have. I owe that to them today, and you do, we all do. They fought and died so we could have this freedom and I’m going to fight and die for my kids and your kids can keep it.” [emphasis added]
If this Republican Supply-side pseudo-Christian is willing to die for his assumed right to harass LGBT couples, he certainly has my permission to do so. 
Cartoon:
When I realized this is Mamabear’s very first Bug Mouth Award, I was shocked, as Mama has been involved in this site for years. In fact she modeled a Care2 group after Politics Plus and, with my consent, used our name. That group was home to quite a bit of lively discussion, based on our articles, before she left Care2, and the group was lost. She’s back on Care2 now, and you can find her here.
A resident of Arizona, she lives surrounded by all manner of TEAbuggery most vile. Nevertheless she holds her head high and is strong in her support for a wide variety of causes, including, but not limited to, Animal Rights, Civil Rights, the Environment, Human Rights, Women’s Rights and Hillary Clinton.
Now that she is commenting more here, I hope that this is her first of many Big Mouth Awards. Please join me in showering her with the kudos and praise that are her just due.
I’m running late today because of the cleaning I had to do. Now I’m waiting for Store to Door to groceries and I have to put them away. I just turned on the news and two journalists were killed by a black guy, whose online manifesto has strong racial overtones. No doubt the Republicans will run wild with this one. Please joined me in condolences, thoughts and prayers for all who love the victims, Allison Parker and Adam Ward. Store to Door came, while I was writing. I stowed the food.
Jig Zone Puzzle:
Today’s took me 3:05 (average 4:56). To do it, click here. How did you do?
Short Takes:
From Daily Kos: In North Dakota, a white supremacist looking for a town he can take over and turn into his dreamed-of white supremacist enclave says he’d name the town after his new hero, Donald Trump.
Cobb, a hate crimes fugitive from Canada who is currently on probation for brandishing a gun at Leith residents in 2013, joins a number of other individuals with known white supremacist leanings who’ve expressed their adoration for Trump.
At Donald Trump’s Alabama rally, a neo-Confederate handed out flyers, news crews were unnerved by open bigotry and at least one fellow occupied himself by shouting "white power!" throughout the speech.
"I don’t know about the individual you’re talking about in Alabama," Lewandowski said on "State of the Union." "I know there were 30-plus thousand people in that stadium. They were very receptive to the message of ‘making America great again’ because they want to be proud to be Americans again."
These are the Republicans that want Hairball to be President. How can you tell the difference between these Republicans and other Republicans? These Republicans aren’t hiding under their sheets and hoods for election season.
From NY Times: …As questions continue to dog Mrs. Clinton about her use of a private email account, a spotlight has landed on Ms. Abedin [Huma] the aide so often at her side that she has been called Mrs. Clinton’s “surrogate daughter.”
Ms. Abedin’s own emails on her boss’s private server have drawn increasingly intense scrutiny — as has an arrangement she made to earn income privately while she worked for Mrs. Clinton at the State Department. Ms. Abedin was on Mrs. Clinton’s personal payroll, and her other outside employers were the Clinton Foundation and Teneo, a consulting firm founded in part by Douglas J. Band, who was a counselor to former President Bill Clinton.
When that arrangement was revealed more than two years ago, political opponents including Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, raised concerns about potential conflicts of interest. But those quieted until the email controversy provided a new opening — and the potential for new information to be unearthed.
In a recent letter to the State Department, Mr. Grassley suggested that Ms. Abedin, at Mr. Band’s request, may have asked Mrs. Clinton to urge President Obama to give a White House appointment to a Teneo client, Judith Rodin, the head of the Rockefeller Foundation…
Huma is a particularly tempting target for Republicans, because she represents three groups that Republicans hate with passion. First, she is a Democrat. Second, she is a Muslim. Third she is woman, who appears to be neither barefoot, nor pregnant. Nevertheless this remains problematic, because Hillary’s camp continues to dance so close to the fine line between illegal and unwise. While I’m convinced it’s the latter, there’s enough potential scandal for Republicans to use to cast public doubt.
From The New Yorker: With U.S. Presidential elections now costing more than five billion dollars, there must be a cheaper way to find the worst people in the country, experts believe.
According to Davis Logsdon, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota, the United States could use current technology to find the nation’s most reprehensible people at a fraction of the five-billion-dollar price tag.
“Any search for the worst people in the country should logically begin one place: on Twitter,” said Logsdon, who recommends scouring the social network for users who consistently show signs of narcissistic-personality disorder, poor impulse control, and other traits common to odious people.
Once a comprehensive list of those Twitter users is compiled, Logsdon said, it could be cross-referenced with a database containing the names of people who have presided over spectacular business failures, have been the target of multiple ethics probes, or are currently under indictment for a broad array of criminal offenses.
“After we crunch the numbers and find the twelve or so worst people in our database, we could then put them on television to demonstrate just how awful they are as people,” said Logsdon, who noted that that part of the current system “works very well.”
Actually, Andy, there’s a cheaper way than that. Just compare the amount of money that they have gotten from the nevermind brothers. The more nevermind they have sucked, the more reprehensible they are.
Cartoon:
In all my discussion for the race for the Democratic nomination for President, I have never even mentioned Joe Biden, as I hadn’t the slightest inkling that he had any inclination to run. However, recent events indicate that I (along with virtually everyone else) may have been mistaken, and if Joe does run, it will change my order of support for candidates.
Joe Biden’s team appears to be leaning more towards a presidential run than away from one, according to a Democratic source who has been in touch them. This source doesn’t believe a decision has been made but left a conversation with those advising Biden with a strong sense he very well might enter the race.
Biden has been told by aides he should make a decision by October 1st.
A possible plan — if he decides to run — currently involves Biden announcing his intentions in the first week of October, the source said.
Speculation about a Biden run was sent into overdrive when he met Saturday with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, the progressive icon whose decision not to run herself was a major boost for Clinton.
And on Monday, President Barack Obama’s press secretary, Josh Earnest, praised Biden’s "aptitude for the job" and said it’s possible that Obama will endorse a candidate in the Democratic primary… [emphasis added]
Inserted from <CNN>
Rachel Maddow reacted to the story and provided more evidence.
If Joe does run, I think the campaign will turn very ugly, because Hillary will be going for blood.
Now my list of candidates in order of preference is this: Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Martin O’Malley, any stray dawg, Jim Webb. Bernie just echoes my positions on most subjects. Of the best known candidates, Joe is far more credible as an opponent of plutocracy than Hillary, as some think she is just giving lip service to class warfare, while raking-in Bankster bucks.. I actually prefer Martin O’Malley’s policies, but I don’t think he can win a national election until people know who he is. Webb could probably pull Republican votes, because electing him would be like having a Republican in the White House.
After the stresses of the last few days, I am feeling quite tired. Tomorrow is a grocery delivery day, and I have some extra cleaning to do for that.
Jig Zone Puzzle:
Today's took me 3:21 (average 4:37). To do it, click here. How did you do?
Short Takes:
From The New Yorker: They don’t pay taxes. They circumvent our laws. They get free stuff from the government. They are America’s billionaires, and many would like to see them gone.
According to a new survey by the University of Minnesota’s Opinion Research Institute, the American people hold the nation’s billionaires in lower esteem than ever before, and a majority would like to see new laws enacted to deport them.
“They come here, take thousands of our jobs, and export them overseas,” one respondent said, in an opinion echoed by many others in the survey.
“They are part of a shadow economy that sucks billions of dollars out of the United States every year and puts it in Switzerland and the Caymans,” another said.
Images of hedge-fund managers arriving via helicopter in the Hamptons this summer have only reinforced the impression that authorities have turned a blind eye to their movements.
“Many of these people should be in prison, and the government is looking the other way,” one respondent said.
Stirring even more controversy is the billionaires’ practice of having babies in the United States and using the nation’s porous estate-tax laws to pass down untold wealth to the next generation.
“They should leave and take their children with them,” one respondent said.
At times, Andy makes a brilliant suggestion. This is one of those times. Lets start with the nevermind brothers.
From Daily Kos: "Ted Cruz Criticizes Carter Day After Wrenching Talk on Cancer," says the Bloomberg headline, and so we are obliged to take another rubbernecking glance at the most repellent man in politics.
A day after Jimmy Carter appeared on national television to talk about the cancer that's ravaging his body, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz criticized the former president's administration in a speech in Iowa.
"I think where we are today is very, very much like the late 1970s," the senator from Texas said on the Des Moines Register's political soapbox stage at the Iowa State Fair.
"I think the parallels between this administration and the Carter administration are uncanny: same failed domestic policies, same misery, stagnation and malaise, same feckless and naïve foreign policy," Cruz said. "In fact, the exact same countries—Russia and Iran—openly laughing and mocking at the president of the United States."
Uranus Inspector could not be further from the truth. The real similarities are that Carter and Obama both are decent men, doing their best, and were sabotaged by Republicans. Republicans even made a secret deal with Iran, giving them better terms on the hostage release, in return for KEEPING OUR HOSTAGE CITIZENS CAPTIVE, so they could win the election. I think that covering up proof of which individuals committed this treason is one of the reasons that Republicans oppose the Iran deal now.
From MoveOn: If you have friends who’ve been tricked, duped, or bamboozled by the war lobby into opposing the Iran nuclear deal, share this new ad with them from our friends at Americans United for Change:
Please click through to share this wherever you can.
Cartoon:
In the midst of our Bernie fever, let is not forget that there is at least one other serious contender for the Democratic Presidential nomination. Hillary just introduced part of her plan to make college more affordable. It has some commonalities with ideas that I have suggested in the past.
As part of Hillary Clinton’s college affordability plan, or New College Compact, she announced she will expand the number of AmeriCorps members to 250,000 on Thursday. There are currently a little over 75,000 AmeriCorps members, and the number hasn’t increased for years.
For members who finish two years of full-time AmeriCorps service and complete a year of public service, they will be able to receive more than $23,000 through the Segal AmeriCorps Education Award compared to the current maximum award of $11,550. The awards would also be made tax-free.
Shirley Sagawa, a senior visiting fellow at the Center for American Progress who played a crucial role in drafting the legislation that created the CNCS in 1994, said Clinton’s plan will make it much easier for college students to participate in AmeriCorps.
“AmeriCorps has always been intended as a way to offset the cost of college and its certainly not operating at scale and the fact that the education award is taxable has made it not as valuable as it might be so I think the Clinton plan addressing these challenges in a really important way,” Sagawa said.
Sagawa said that it has made a difference for a lot of students who either want to make connections in their chosen career early or high school students who don’t know what they want to do yet and hope to find the answer at AmeriCorps…
Inserted from <Think Progress>
I do liked the idea, but it does not go far enough. I would have government completely fund college and graduate degrees in return for serving the needy while earing a living wage for a period do years determined by the length of free education. For example, a medical doctor might receive a completely free education in their specialty, but would agree to work on a Reservation or in an inner city clinic for ten years.
I guess HillaryCation is a lot like ObamaCare. It’s not what we want, but, if it becomes an alternative to nothing, lets take it and build on it later.
