Day 91.  This is today’s only article, because I was unable to sleep last night night and have to stay up for a grocery delivery.  Tomorrow may be a light day too, because I have to go out for a haircut.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:18 (average 4:44).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Upworthy: They Asked 100,000 Men What Makes The ‘Perfect’ Woman. Ellen Chimes In.

I fully agree with her, but it is improving. When I was a young man, we considered the perfect woman a blonde nymphomaniac with big boobs, whose father owned a liquor store.

From The New Yorker: Media advisers to former Governor Jeb Bush are hoping to exploit nostalgia for what is widely seen as the greatest era in American history, the years 2001 to 2009.

Tracy Klugian, who heads the newly assembled Bush media team, said that he and his staff are poised to tap into the nation’s longing for a time “when everything in this country seemed to be going right.”

A centerpiece of the marketing strategy will be evoking memories of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. “It’s been a long time since the United States has invaded another country for no reason,” he said. “People are sentimental about those simpler times.”

Additionally, Klugian and his fellow Bush marketers hope to remind Americans of “a chapter in our history that showed what this nation was made of: Hurricane Katrina.”

“A lot of people are nostalgic about the way the government didn’t panic about Katrina and instead took its time to come up with a response,” he said. “I think when we look back on those days, we all say, ‘Heck of a job.’”

Finally, Klugian said, the Bush team hopes to rekindle Americans’ memories of “one of those most exciting times in recent history,” the financial meltdown of 2008.

Andy just gave us a perfect summary of what we could expect from Strike Three.

From Daily Kos: Here’s a post about the story from a Vermont blog: No good deed goes unpunished. Apparently a local TV station did a story about it and got a huge number of incredibly ignorant comments on their Facebook page, here: WCAX: One state senator thinks Vermont should have a Latin motto. What do you think?.

The crazies came out of the woodwork: "If you live in the United States, you need to learn English!" "Vermont ain’t no Latino area." "This is America, not Mexico or some other Latin-American country." And so on.

The stupid… it burns.

Apparently these people don’t know that "E Pluribus Unum" is a Latin phrase. Or that Latin was the language of educated people until well into the Medieval Period. Or that prior to Martin Luther (Germany) or Wycliffe or Tyndale or King James (England) you pretty much had to read the Bible in Latin. It helped if you knew Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, too.

Latin Motto for the Republican Party: E Elephantus Merda.

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Day 90.  I’m waiting for Store to Door to  call and take my grocery order.  Correction: They just called.  Today I get to configure Mailwasher Pro, the software I use to filter the hundreds of SPAM email I get daily to work with my new Comcast email addresses.  Also, the building managers will be around sometime today for their quarterly sanitation and maintenance inspection, so I’ve been house cleaning to prepare for that.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:13 (average 4:42).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From The New Yorker: President Barack Obama’s increasing popularity is forcing congressional Democrats to consider admitting that they know him, a leading Democratic staffer revealed on Monday.

After months of denying ever having been in the same room as the President, some Democrats are tentatively rethinking that position now that his approval rating has hit fifty per cent, the staffer said.

“We’re watching that number very closely,” the Democratic staffer Robinson Petrack said. “We could be looking at a scenario where it’s safe to acknowledge his existence again.”

Petrack said that while many congressional Democrats have not used the word “Obama” in a sentence since the President’s approval rating dropped to thirty-nine percent last year, they are toying with the idea of resuming that practice now.

But even as Democrats contemplate admitting that they have met Obama or even shaken his hand, some worry that such moves could have perilous consequences if his approval rating drops again.

Andy may be on to something here. People love to whine about Obama. But, while I fully admit Obama has done many things I don’t like, consider the alternative. If McConJob had won six years ago, there is only one thing that would have prevented nuclear global destruction to the tune of Bomb Bomb Iran.  A Teabagger might have Second Amendment Solutioned him, giving us President Drill Baby Dingbat, instead!

From Daily Kos: This has happened to me a few times through my lifetime, but I just can’t stop giggling like a teenager. I can just hear the comedians now. Enjoy-we need it.

FOMCROTFPIMPLMAO!

From YouTube: Rachel Maddow 03*02*2015 Vaccine questions trip up Christie, Paul

PIGnocchio can probably pull his fat from the fire after his gaffe. However, this could be curtains for Idiot, Son of Idiot, Named after Idiot. His internal Bircher, that he tries to hide, rose to the surface.

Cartoon:

Too bad this only happens to the poor and middle classes!

Day 89.  Woe is me!  The Holy Orb has gone dark and will shed no more light on the world until Autumn. :-(  The Seachickens demonstrated, once again, why I have not become a fan.  The game was theirs to win, but bwaaaack-buk-buk… They did the Seachicken Choke.  Nevertheless, it was an excellent game.  I have  a pants-load of work to do.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:12 (average 4:48).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Daily Kos (Hat-Tip Lynn Squance): Fox News has been proven repeatedly to be a purveyor of disinformation and outright lies presented as facts. Knowledgeable observers long ago ceased to take their reporting seriously. However, it’s one thing to be called out for shoddy journalism by experienced media analysts and news professionals. But when a high school class can demolish the highest rated cable "news" network with ease, the folks responsible should reconsider their career choices.

Last July O’Reilly sent his stalker/producer Jesse Watters to Bennington, Vermont in order to malign the residents of the city and the state as liberal, pot smoking, ski bums. It was a purely vicious exercise in childish insults that had no news value of any kind. But it is the sort of mean-spirited filler that Watters has made his specialty. Watters is also the founder and editor of Fox’s community website, Fox Nation, mangling the truth is the primary objective. [Note: don’t miss this epic and hilarious take down of Watters by Stephen Colbert]

The students at Mount Anthony Union High School in Bennington happened to be studying journalism when they came upon this piece. So they used it as a case study to conduct a "professional integrity audit" based on the ethics codes of the Society of Professional Journalists. What they discovered was that O’Reilly’s program violated the ethics codes so many times they lost count.

Kudos to these kids, but were they right to hold O’Lielly and Faux Noise to ethical standards for journalists? The Republican Reichsministry of Propaganda are not journalists. They are Republican propagandists.

From NY Times: Alma Ramos, a soft-spoken prep cook at a Tex-Mex restaurant, was eager to sign up for health insurance through the new HealthCare.gov marketplace last year. But Ms. Ramos, a single mother of three, quickly hit a baffling hurdle.

Because of a wrinkle in the Affordable Care Act, Ms. Ramos made too little money to receive federal aid for buying private insurance — and too much to qualify for Medicaid, the government health care program for the poor. But she found a solution…

…All told, four million adults in nearly two dozen states fall into the gap, and Texas has the most, nearly one million.

Republicans blame Obama for this, as do even some Democrats, but such blaming is incorrect, not just unfair. The ACA required states expand Medicaid to remain eligible for Medicaid funds, because the federal government would pay for it. However, Republicans filed suit and the Fascist Five Injustices of SCROTUS (Republican Constitutional VD) sided with them. This left Republican governors free to inflict this harm on their own citizens, trying to make Obama look bad. The fault here lies entirely with the Republican Party.

From Washington Post: HOW FAR will Republicans in Congress take their reckless flirtation with undermining government this time?

Will they, as seems increasingly likely, fail to pass a bill that the president can sign ensuring adequate funding for the Department of Homeland Security and its 280,000 employees before the agency’s support expires Feb. 27? Are they ready to let funding lapse, secure in the knowledge that Border Patrol officers, Secret Service agents, airport security personnel and other so-called essential employees would still have to report to work — even though they would not be drawing paychecks?

A number of prominent Republican lawmakers clearly believe that denying funding to the nation’s premier organ of domestic security is no big deal, as long as the move expresses the GOP’s anger about President Obama’s executive actions on immigration.

As Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.) put it to Politico: Letting the department’s funding lapse would not be “the end of the world.”

The Republican Party care nothing for our nation’s security. Everything the do is intended to do one of two things. One is the transfer of wealth from the poor and middle classes to billionaires. The other is the establish a permanent, totalitarian, Republican Reich, in which elections exist for show only. In this case, every penny spent keeping America safe is a penny Republicans can’t give to a billionaire. Also, they hope that blaming Obama for their sedition will help them win the presidency.

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