Politics Plus

At long last we have a cool day.  It might even rain, whatever rain is.  I was obviously still exhausted yesterday, because I had forgotten my helper friend was coming over to do heavy cleaning.  On the down side, I worked my butt off for most of the afternoon.  On the up side, the dreaded task is past, and I didn’t have to do it!!  Not that’s a “Wooo Hooo!” event.  For another “Wooo Hooo!” event, I have to admit I was wrong about the Ellipsoid Orb.  In preseason Wee1 1, there were only six services last night.  The holy Orb blessed the Packers, Lions, Ravens, Bears, Foreskins, and Chargers, but not the Patriots, Jets, Saints, Dolphins, Browns, and Cowboys.  The rest of the services are tonight and my Broncos service with the evil Seachickens is televised.  After yesterday, I’m still quite pooped.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:43 (average 5:15).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From The New Yorker: Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is gaining legions of new admirers by shamelessly pandering to voters who want to hear the truth, critics of the Vermont senator say.

According to those critics, Sanders has cynically targeted so-called “truth-based voters” to build support for his Presidential bid.

“People come to Sanders’s rallies expecting to hear the truth, and he serves it up to them on a silver platter,” the political strategist Harland Dorrinson said. “It’s a very calculated gimmick.”

But while Sanders’s practice of relentlessly telling the truth might play well in states that are rich in truth-based voters, like the early primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire, critics say that his campaign could stall in states where the truth has historically been less important, like Florida.

“At some point in this campaign, voters are going to get truth fatigue,” Dorrinson said. “Right now, the novelty of a politician who doesn’t constantly spew lies is grabbing headlines. But after months of Bernie Sanders telling the truth, voters are going to start wondering, Is that all he’s got?”

Dang! It’s a good thing Andy tipped us off! Otherwise Bernie might have gotten away with all that damn truthfulness!!

From The Daily Mail: California will be hit by the biggest El Niño on record this winter, according to the latest forecast.

Dubbed the ‘Godzilla El Niño’ or ‘Bruce Lee El Niño’, the weather event looks set to bring more rain and tropical cyclones to the Pacific Southwest since records began in 1950.

But analysts warn it still won’t be enough to atone for four years of record-breaking droughts.

In fact, the dry and cracked land will be hard-pushed to withstand the three-month storm, meaning there will likely be an onslaught of mudslides and floods.

Here’s some related video.

Here in Oregon this is likely to mean a winter much warmer and dryer than normal, with inte3nse storms, when and if we do have them.  It will be followed by severe summer drought. We’ll have it bad enough, but it looks like our neighbors to the south are about to get Californicated.

From Media Matters: A RedState post claimed that Hillary Clinton proves "even a homely woman can sleep her way into power." RedState’s editor-in-chief Erick Erickson recently disinvited Donald Trump from the RedState Gathering event for Trump’s sexist attacks on Fox’s Megyn Kelly.

The attack on Clinton comes in a RedState post [GOP Hate Site delinked] from one of its front page contributors, who goes by "streiff," who wrote:

If Hillary Clinton possesses any unique selling propostion [sic] beyond proving even a homely woman can sleep her way into power, it is her tenure as Barack Obama’s secretary of state. That seems to be a slender enough reed when polls show the electorate could give a flying rat’s patootie about experience and favor a change agent above all.

The post is featured at the top of the RedState home page.

As long as misogynist hatred is directed at a Democrat and not at a blonde, notorious for décolletage, from the Republican Reichsministry of Propaganda, Faux Noise, Republican hypocrites just love it.

Cartoon:

I’m still well short of recovering from my volunteer day, so today’s articles come with limited research.  In other words, there may well be better stories that I have not even heard about yet.  Today is a minor Holy Day in the Church of the Ellipsoid Orb.  It’s preseason Week 1.  I’m amazed that the Broncos service will not be televised, because they are playing the damn Seachickens. If I had a nickel for every Broncos game I’ve missed, because the networks think Portland a a suburb of Seattle, I could be a progressive version of the Koch Brothers, except that I would not own politicians I supported.  I’m sure very few starters will get much playing time, so there’s little need for fantasy players to pay too much attention to their players’ performance yet.  May the blessed Orb shine its holy light on your team, unless it’s the damn Seachickens.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 2:54 (average 4:37).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From The New Yorker: In an effort to boost his foreign-policy credentials, the billionaire Donald Trump on Tuesday said that, if he were elected President, he would defeat ISIS with “brutal and relentless” attacks on Twitter.

“Under President Obama, ISIS has been able to maraud and rampage with impunity,” Trump told Fox News. “When I’m in the White House, the leaders of ISIS are going to bear the brunt of the most vicious tweets the world has ever known.”

The real-estate mogul said that, as President, he would set aside a portion of the time that he currently allots to excoriating journalists, politicians, and assorted other perceived enemies on Twitter to focus his fury on the leaders of ISIS.

Dang!!  Is Hairball revealing his strategy to Andy on the sly?

From PRWatch: The Koch brothers and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) held their annual summits in California this year. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was a featured speaker at both, capturing enthusiastic applause as he won the Koch summit straw poll last night reports Politico.

As the Koch network of funders gets ready to unleash an unimaginable $900 million on the 2016 campaign, they are busily trying to remake their public image and spin undisclosed dark money as a plus in political campaigns.

Charles Koch told the billionaires and millionaires attending his Freedom Partners summit that they needed to recast their multi-million dollar effort to sway elections in the mold of "freedom movements," such as the American civil rights movement. In a similar vein, attendees of the ALEC conference were busy recasting the notion of undisclosed "dark money" in political campaigns as "anonymous free speech" similar to that engaged in by Lewis Carroll or George Orwell when they relied on pseudonyms to publish various novels.

Get ready for a trip down the rabbit hole.

Am I the only one who is not surprised that the Fartfuhrer of Fitzwalkerstan is the number one sucker of … nevermind?

From Daily Kos: Harry Reid isn’t running for re-election and is feeling just a little bit unleashed. A lot unleashed. So he’s taken to the opinion page of The New York Times to point out that his successor in Senate leadership, Mitch McConnell, has pretty much sucked so far.

The situation started when Republicans took over the House in 2011, but it has picked up rapidly since they took control of the Senate earlier this year. The conclusion is unavoidable: Republican control of Congress means constant crisis.

In the seven months that Republicans have controlled the Senate, we’ve suffered from the expiration of critical national security tools, come within hours of partially shutting down the Department of Homeland Security and witnessed a complete shutdown of the Export-Import Bank, a previously uncontroversial agency that supports hundreds of thousands of American jobs. Routine business like confirming nominees is ignored.

While Republicans have kept virtually none of their promises about how they would run Congress, one promise they have kept is their vow to use essential appropriations bills to manufacture even more crises. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican Senate leader, laid out this strategy last year, saying that President Obama “needs to be challenged, and the best way to do that is through the funding process.”

Reid’s larger point is to highlight the fact that—despite all of McConnell’s insistence that there will not be a government shutdown on his watch—we’re headed toward a government shutdown. That’s happening because of McConnell’s instigating his fellow Republicans to use the funding process to "challenge" President Obama. Or repeal Obamacare, or defund women’s health, or whatever the extremist cause du jour happens to be.

You know that the problem is critical when the Nevada Leg Hound, Harry Reid, stops humping GOP legs, whining for favors, rolling over, and playing dead long enough to blow the whistle. That said, Chuck Schumer would be so bad that I’d miss the Leg Hound!

Cartoon: