Politics Plus

I’m writing for tomorrow, day 11.  It was the coldest day so far.  Tomorrow will be colder.  Tomorrow is a holy day in the Church of the Ellipsoid Orb.  My Broncos are worshiping with the Cardinals, but it will not be televised locally.  I will nit get to watch for the third week in a row, because the game is on at the same time as the damn Seachickens!  ARGH!!!

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 2:59 (average 5:19).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From The New Yorker: Congressional Republicans on Friday expressed outrage at the new leadership style that President Obama has demonstrated in the aftermath of the midterm elections, and demanded a return of the “passive and unassertive Obama to which we have grown accustomed.”

In a joint statement, House Speaker John Boehner and his counterpart in the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, accused Obama of “engaging in a flagrant display of leadership that we find deeply offensive.”

“For the past six years, we have enjoyed a President who has been conciliatory and acquiescent to the point of emasculation,” Boehner said. “We want that President back.”

McConnell threatened that if Obama does not return to his weak and ineffectual ways at once, “he will face the prospect of being a two-term President.”

LOL Andy! If only he had started this in 2009.

From NY Times: The House voted 252 to 161 on Friday to approve a bill that would direct the federal government to move forward on the Keystone XL oil pipeline, ahead of a vote scheduled for Tuesday in the Senate that could send the measure to President Obama’s desk.

There is little chance that the votes will clear the way to construction of the long-fought, long-delayed pipeline, which would carry petroleum from the Canadian oil sands to Gulf Coast refineries. In the Senate, where Democrats have a majority until the Republicans take over in January, it is unlikely, though not impossible, that the bill would attract 60 votes, enough to avoid a filibuster. But even if the bill does clear the Senate, Mr. Obama has signaled that he would probably veto it.

The vote count link above identifies the 31 Democrats who voted for the Landrieu Golden Parachute Act. If one of them is your Rep, please give them a call and tell them to take a long flying ____ off a short pier!

From AlterNet:

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Congress’s longest-serving independent, is reportedly seriously considering running for the White House. This is significant because Sanders openly declares himself to be a democratic socialist – a label which has been a taboo in U.S. political culture for decades.

But while Sanders will likely be attacked for identifying with socialism, it has a long history of being used by the reactionary right as a smear. In fact, that history pre-dates the Civil War. History blogger Matt Karp searched the Congressional record and found the very first instance that the word “socialism” was uttered in Congress. He found that the first time anyone used the phrase was when a North Carolinian congressman used it to attack opponents of slavery:

As far as I can make out, the first reference to “socialism” on the floor of Congress came  from North Carolina representative Abraham Venable in July 1848. During a debate over the Wilmot Proviso, Venable indulged himself in a familiar litany of destructive Northern manias, which ranged from “the wicked schemes of Garrison” to “the wild excesses of  Millerism, and of Latter-Day Saints, the abominations of Socialism, and of Fourieriesm …  and all the numerous fanaticisms which spring up and flourish in their  free soil…” […] This kind of pro-slavery, anti-Northern rant was the context for most mentions of “socialism” in Congress during the next several years.

Click through for more excellent information about how Republicans, and Dixiecrats (before the became Republicans) have been using socialism as a term to smear progressive gains. When 2016 comes, if Bernie is contesting for the Democratic nomination, I would support him over Hillary in a heartbeat.

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The following day, the Republican Party hired her as a strategy expert.

I’m writing for tomorrow, day 10.  We still have exceptionally cold weather, that continues to effect my COPD, but the brutal wind is past.  I’m quite uncomfortable, because I sprung the back on my computer chair.  It’s been going out for months, but yesterday it gave up the ghost,  I’ve ordered a replacement that will be delivered next week, but in the mean time, it’s sit straight up without being able to relax.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 4:50 (average 5:13).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Raw Story: Alex Jones stoked the paranoid fears of his listeners – and left no doubt about whether he was a Republican shill – by warning that net neutrality would lead to censorship of conservative Internet sites.

“This has been the plan for a decade – free-quote-Wi-Fi that’s paid for by taxpayers, but you have no rights on that Wi-Fi, and you can’t get to InfoWars.com or DrudgeReport.com, that the White House officials have said they want to shut down, basically,” Jones warned this week on his radio program. “So this is it, they’re coming.”

Jones, who claims to be nonpartisan, promoted a widely mocked statement by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who misrepresented the president’s statements on regulating Internet service providers like utilities to claim “net neutrality is Obamacare for the Internet,” reported Right Wing Watch.

To be clear, this Republican propaganda is patently false. Reclassifying the Internet as a public utility under Title II of the Telecommunications Act has no relationship at all to creating publicly funded Wi-Fi networks. It also does the opposite of what Jones claims. It prevents ISPs from blocking, or even slowing, Internet access to any sites, even the wacky-doodle brain drains listed above.

From Media Matters: The U.S Department of Energy’s (DOE) renewable energy loan guarantee program is turning a profit after weathering years of media attacks and misinformation that attempted to paint the now defunct solar energy firm Solyndra as representative of the program’s failure. Media outlets from The Washington Post to CBS News spent years profiling Solyndra, wrongly suggesting its demise was illustrative of widespread waste, fraud, failure, and political corruption among DOE loan guarantee recipients — but will the program’s latest successes receive a comparable platform?

On November 13, NPR reported that the DOE loan program, designed to "accelerate the domestic commercial deployment of innovative and advanced clean energy technologies," is now turning a profit exceeding $30 million after collecting $810 million in interest payments. NPR noted that the program was never intended to make money, making the development all the more remarkable:

I remember how Republicans were calling this a taxpayer giveaway to special interests. Of course the were doing what Republicans always do. They were lying. Kudos to the renewable energy load guarantee program!

From The New Yorker: The election of Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) as the Senate Majority Leader was announced on Thursday by a puff of toxic black coal smoke rising from the United States Capitol.

Speaking from the well of the Senate, McConnell blasted President Obama’s recent climate-change deal with the Chinese, saying that it violated “the human rights of carbon.”

“I’m not a scientist,” he told his colleagues, “but I’m told that carbon is the basic building block of all life on earth. And that means it should enjoy the same human rights as you and I.”

Andy has a good point, and Bought Bitch Mitch will be spewing toxic gasses for the next two years.

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I’m writing for tomorrow, day 9, and it’s cold enough to freeze the tea bags off a brass idiot.  Our weather is rapidly spreading into the rest of the country, and I hate to say it, but you folks are in for some misery.  On stories that I’m not covering today, congrats to Obama on his climate deal with China.  Note the hypocrisy of Republicans, who say the deal isn’t good enough to solve the problem, while denying that the problem exists.  Also Kudos to the little space ship that could.  My COPD is still a mess, but I’m more ready for it.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 2:51 (average 4:25).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Daily Kos: Increasingly teachers are speaking out against school reforms that they believe are demeaning their profession, and some are simply quitting because they have had enough.

Here is one resignation letter from a veteran teacher, Gerald J. Conti, a social studies teacher at Westhill High School in Syracuse, N.Y.

Chick through, Because we are careening into national stupidity at an exponentially increasing speed, we need to attend to what this teacher has to say.

From Upworthy: On Nov. 5, 2014, police in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, arrested a 90-year-old man for feeding the homeless. Needless to say, Russell Brand’s anger is totally called for.

Have you ever seen a more perfect example of an authentic Christian persecuted by Republican Supply-side pseudo-Christians?

From The New Yorker: The United States of America, a nation with a population of approximately three hundred million people, totally accepts that the next President of the United States can only be selected from two families.

In interviews conducted across the country, Americans acknowledged that, while the United States boasts many exceptional people in the fields of technology, business, public policy, and government, none will be offered to voters as candidates because they do not come from one of the two families deemed eligible.

LOL Andy! I’d love a ban on Bushes and Clintons.

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