Politics Plus

I’m writing for tomorrow quickly and preparing to go to the prison for volunteer work.  I have a CoDA meeting with about twelve guys.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 5:04 (average 5:23).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Fantasy Football Report:

Here’s the latest from our fantasy football league, Lefty Blog Friends.

Scores:

Standings:

Next week I play Judy from Care2.

Short Takes:

From Represent.us: A lobbyist and a Senator walk into a restaurant…

Note how we get stuck with the tab. Click through to connect with these folks campaigning to get the money out of the system.

From The New Yorker: The N.S.A. leaker Edward Snowden today reached out to the United States government, offering to fix its troubled healthcare.gov Web site in exchange for immunity from prosecution.

Speaking from an undisclosed location in Russia, Mr. Snowden said he hacked the Web site over the weekend and thinks he is “pretty sure what the problem is.”

“Look, this thing was built terribly,” he said. “It’s a government Web site, O.K.?”

Mr. Snowden said that if an immunity deal can be worked out, “I can get to work on this thing right away—I don’t need a password.”

He couldn’t be much worse than the clowns in charge now. Of course, the down side of having Snowden do it it that in days the Russians would know more about our exchanges than we do.

From Crooks and Liars: A new study released today concludes that Koch Industries and its subsidiaries stand to make as much as $100 billion in profits if the controversial Keystone XL pipeline is granted a presidential permit from U.S. President Barack Obama.

The report, titled Billionaires’ Carbon Bomb, produced by the think tank International Forum on Globalization (IFG), finds that David and Charles Koch and their privately owned company, Koch Industries, own more than 2 million acres of land in Northern Alberta, the source of the tar sands bitumen that would be pumped to the United States via the Keystone XL pipeline.

That’s 100 billion more reasons to oppose it.

Cartoon:

Writing for tomorrow, I’m making this a light day to get as much rest as I can before going to prison for volunteer work tomorrow.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 4:08 (average 5:36).  To do it, click here,  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Alternet: Confused Republican thought the debt deal included money for Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army.

With all the dopey things said and done by intransigent Republicans in last week’s shitstorm of dopey intransigence, Republican Rep. Mick Mulvaney earned his place right up there in the pantheon. When the 11th hour deal to raise the debt ceiling and reopen the government was struck between Senate leaders Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell, it did not have much trouble getting through both houses of Congress. But there were those Republicans deluding themselves that they could fight on.

Rep. Mulvaney of South Carolina was one—and among his objections? The deal, he said, included funding for Joseph Kony’s Uganda-based Lord’s Resistance Army. Now, that would be pretty evil if it were true. Kony is an exiled war criminal with a messianic complex known for kidnapping children, and turning them into sex slaves and soldiers who kill their own families. The funding, if Mr. Mulvaney had read a little closer, was a small amount earmarked to the Pentagon which is funding African troops trying to capture Kony and end his reign of terror and atrocity. Ohhhh…oops. It seems Sen. David Vitter isn’t the only Republican in Congress Harry Reid could legitimately claim was not playing with a full deck.

This is just one of ten examples of Republican lunacy in just the last week. Click through for the other nine.

From Daily Kos: The fallout from the Republican shutdown continues, this time according to a new CNN/ORC International poll:

According to the survey, 54% say it’s a bad thing that the GOP controls the House, up 11 points from last December, soon after the 2012 elections when the Republicans kept control of the chamber. Only 38% say it’s a good thing the GOP controls the House, a 13-point dive from the end of last year.

This is the first time since the Republicans won back control of the House in the 2010 elections that a majority say their control of the chamber is bad for the country.

Lets make sure that this trend continues!!

From The Nation: One of the many disgraceful aspects of the media coverage of Obamacare–and criticism of the ACA, and the Tea Party claims in general–is the rote depiction of the new law as "very unpopular" or "opposed by most Americans according to polls" because it goes too far.  Most people are said to be happy with the health care system as is, and so on.  In other words, repeating the GOP line.

Now, those who have supported the law have long claimed that the simple bottom line poll numbers are misleading.  Yes, those numbers generally show that, say, 51% don’t like the ACA and only 44% approve.   Yet, as we know (but many in the media fail to recognize, even beyond Fox News), a lot of Democrats and liberals are unhappy, wisely, because the law doesn’t go far enough, or that President Obama didn’t fight for the public option or single payer or Medicare for all.   So how many of them are included in that bottom line number who "oppose" the ACA–but from the left?

Polls have indicated there’s a fair number but now there’s a new one today that CNN actually took the trouble–at the end of its online report, true–to break out.  And, lo and behold, it turns out that fully 12% of those opposed feel the law doesn’t so far enough.

So, as they note, that means that instead of just over 50% being against the law because it goes too far–the impression most in the media have left–at least 53% actually back the law or believe it should be expanded.

One year from now, after people have had a chance to experience what it really is, instead of Republican lies about it, the matter won’t even be close.

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