Politics Plus

I seem to be back on the mend and expect to be back to full time by the weekend.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:57 (average 4:42).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From NY Times: With two same-sex marriage cases before the Supreme Court, numerous commentators have latched on to remarks by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg critical of the court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide. It is not the judgment that was wrong, but “it moved too far, too fast,” she said at Columbia Law School last year, a view she has expressed in various speeches and law review articles. As one of the court’s moderate liberals and a champion of women’s rights, she is now being routinely cited to argue for a timid resolution on the issue of same-sex marriage that would strike down California’s ban on such marriages, but would leave prohibitions standing in about 40 other states.

How Justice Ginsburg will vote on same-sex marriage is unknown. But her comments misread the legal and political landscape at the time of the Roe decision and have been used to bolster the inaccurate notion that the court’s ruling on abortion rights somehow short-circuited a political process that was moving in the states to end criminalization of abortion. Some now argue that a toxic multidecade backlash against abortion rights could have been avoided if the court had given states more time to act — supposedly a cautionary lesson for marriage equality.

The real story, as explained by Linda Greenhouse, a former New York Times reporter who now teaches at Yale Law School, and Reva Siegel, a professor there, is that political conflict over abortion was escalating before the Roe decision, and that state progress on decriminalization had reached a standstill in the face of opposition from the Roman Catholic Church…

I seldom disagree with Justice Ginsburg, but in this case I do. In Roe v Wade, SCOTUS made a correct and timely decision, because church intrusion into state affairs was keeping from women a basic human and Constitutional right. In like manner, the Court should not condone religious intrusion into state affairs that is keeping from LGBT couples a basic human and Constitutional right. Moving "too far, too fast" in the right direction is NEVER the issue.

From Alternet: A Texas sheriff threw two Latino men into jail for 39 days "with no charges, no hearing, and no probable cause" and seized the $14,000 they had saved up to buy a new car, the men claim in Federal Court.

     Roberto Moreno-Gutierrez and Jaime Moreno-Gutierrez sued Hill County, the Hill County Sheriff’s Department and the Texas Department of Public Safety, in Federal Court. Hill County, whose seat is Hillsboro, is between Waco and Dallas…

To understand the absurdity and bigotry of this injustice, you’ll need to click through for the rest of the article. Of course, the responsible official, Hill County Sheriff Michael Cox, is a Republican.

From Crooks and Liars: The city of Stockton, California officially went bankrupt yesterday. Instead of concern for what that might mean for its residents in terms of services and their quality of life, Fox predictably focused on one thing: public pensions. And, instead of doing any kind of real analysis of the pension issues, or delving into the pushy behavior of the Wall Street creditors, Stuart Varney suggested the whole problem is due to slacker public employees living high on the hog for decades after just a brief stint of work. He looked forward to pensioners taking the hit and expressed hope that the same would happen in other California cities, too…

…And how many of those pensioners have worked for decades educating and protecting the public based on the promise of a comfortable retirement? While retiring at 50 may seem young to the 60ish Varney, I’d like to see him start hauling firefighter equipment and running into burning buildings before he sneers about retirement ages again…

I stopped volunteering as a firefighter by 50, because I was becoming a drag on the youngsters, and unlike the pros, I didn’t even have to do it every day. Like the party that the Republican Reichsministry of Propaganda serves, Varny concerns himself only with taking away what working people have earned.

Cartoon:

I screwed up.  Because I just received the last of the documents I needed to do my taxes, and I figured that I’d better get them done, before something else happens.  It set off my back pain.  I expected pain, but I thought it all would be somewhat lower.  In spite of poverty, I am not a corporate criminal, so I pay taxes.  Disgust over that comparison should help explain two of the Short Takes.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:31 (average 4:25).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Think Progress: Japan lowered its corporate tax rate one year ago this week, leaving the United States with the highest statutory corporate tax rate in the world. And as Washington turns its focus to corporate tax reform, groups of corporations aren’t letting lawmakers forget the anniversary.

The RATE Coalition, a group of corporations advocating for lower tax rates, sent top tax writers in the House and Senate a letter today noting the anniversary and renewing their push for lower tax rates…

…RATE isn’t alone. Business Roundtable, another corporate lobbying group that includes some of RATE’s members, announced plans to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying for lower corporate tax rates.

But while the companies are correct that America’s corporate tax rate is statutorily the highest in the world, what they aren’t noting is that few corporations actually pay the 35 percent rate. In fact, even as profits for American corporations hit a 60-year high in 2011, their effective tax rate hit a 40-year low, and the U.S. collects less in taxes as a percent of the total economy than every industrialized country in the world save Iceland. It’s been 45 years since corporations paid the full top tax rate, and 26 American companies avoided taxation altogether over the past four years…

Effectively, this exposes the Republican claim as pure deception.  TC paid more than GE!

From The Nation: States are giving unprecedented tax breaks to corporations—but unlike welfare recipients, Nation writer Greg Kaufmann says, "nobody’s talking about drug-testing them." Kaufmann joins a panel on The Melissa Harris-Perry Show to break down the hypocrisies of government largesse.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

This certainly exposes the Republican plan in action. Welfare for corporate criminals and their 1% vulture capitalists; poverty enhancement for the rest of us. Perry was spot on when she referred to the evaporated middle class.

From The New Yorker: Saying that he could “no longer keep up the punishing pace of sabre rattling seven days a week,” North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un said today that beginning this month he will take weekends off from vowing to incinerate the world…

He expects to return to 7 day BS as soon as he finishes converting his nation to the more totalitarian Republican Tea Party.

Cartoon:

I continue to improve, but my back pain is still a bit too severe tor me to sit up for the 8+ hours it normally takes me to research, write, and distribute.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:48 (average 4:29).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From NY Times: IF President Obama blocks the Keystone XL pipeline once and for all, he’ll do Canada a favor.

Canada’s tar sands formations, landlocked in northern Alberta, are a giant reserve of carbon-saturated energy — a mixture of sand, clay and a viscous low-grade petroleum called bitumen. Pipelines are the best way to get this resource to market, but existing pipelines to the United States are almost full. So tar sands companies, and the Alberta and Canadian governments, are desperately searching for export routes via new pipelines.

Canadians don’t universally support construction of the pipeline. A poll by Nanos Research in February 2012 found that nearly 42 percent of Canadians were opposed. Many of us, in fact, want to see the tar sands industry wound down and eventually stopped, even though it pumps tens of billions of dollars annually into our economy.

The most obvious reason is that tar sands production is one of the world’s most environmentally damaging activities. It wrecks vast areas of boreal forest through surface mining and subsurface production. It sucks up huge quantities of water from local rivers, turns it into toxic waste and dumps the contaminated water into tailing ponds that now cover nearly 70 square miles…

Here in the US, we don’t often get to see Canadian perspectives on this issue, beyond the false claims that Harper’s harlots try to shove down our throats. This editorial is excellent.

From Huffington Post: Every time I write about the GOP’s image problem with Latino voters, some conservative sends me an angry missive insisting that it’s all the liberal media spreading lies. I discover that not only does the Republican Party respect Hispanics, but it has their best interests at heart. The missive usually ends by telling me that Republicans are actually the most open-minded and tolerant of Americans.

And then approximately 14 minutes later, a GOP leader will say something like this:

"My father had a ranch. We used to have 50 to 60 wetbacks to pick tomatoes."

That’s Alaska Representative Don Young, a Republican, who recently said this during a radio interview…

Young certainly personified Republican thinking on the issue.  What’s next?  Will Lindsey Poo be describing who was picking cotton in his antebellum youth?

From Think Progress: A Texas district attorney and his wife were shot to death in their home in Kaufman County last night, the latest instance in a recent spate of suspicious shootings of law enforcement officials. The deaths of Mike and Cynthia McLelland follow the shooting of a Kaufman County assistant district attorney in January, which stoked suspicions of a conspiracy to target law enforcement officials by a white supremacist group.

The assistant district attorney, Mark Hasse, was killed on the same day the Justice Department released a statement noting the Kaufman County district attorney’s involvement in a racketeering case against the Aryan Brotherhood, a white supremacist group based in Texas. The FBI had also begun investigating links between Hasse’s slaying and last week’s shooting of Colorado prison chief Tom Clemons by a member of another white supremacist group…

There is no definitive proof here, but this is starting to look like what leading Republicans often call a Second Amendment Solution.

Cartoon:

I continue to improve and hope to return to full speed this week.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 4:33 (average 5:08).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From MoveOn: What If MoveOn.org Was A City?

Kudos to MoveOn, a most valuable resource!

From NY Times: In the fight over the federal budget deficit, Social Security has so far been untouched. That may soon change.

In last year’s “fiscal cliff” debate, President Obama offered to reduce the annual cost-of-living adjustment, or COLA, for Social Security benefits, a spending cut favored by Republicans and scorned by Democrats. Republicans rejected the offer because Mr. Obama wanted tax increases in exchange, while Democrats said it would be too harmful. More recently, Senate Democrats did not include Social Security reforms in their budget and specifically rejected a COLA cut. The House Republican budget also steered clear of explicit cuts to Social Security, a move partly aimed at isolating Mr. Obama.

The question now is whether Mr. Obama will again propose to cut the COLA when he unveils his budget next week. We think he should not do so. The president might want to seem like he is willing to compromise by renewing his call for a COLA cut. But Republicans already spurned his offer and are unlikely to take him up on it now. They are more likely to paint him as a foe of Social Security, which would be reinforced by Democrats’ opposition to the cut.

Even if Mr. Obama avoided those pitfalls, a COLA cut is a bad idea, as we will explain in this editorial. It also is a distraction from the real problems of Social Security.

Click through for the rest of an excellent editorial. I agree that the COLA should be based on an intensive investigation in to what the actual changes in cost of living for seniors are. The article does not offer a projection, but I believe such an investigation would justify a COLA increase, not a cut. I disagree with one thing. The long term solution is to scrap the cap.

From Crooks and Liars: Exxon’s Pegasus Tar Sands Pipeline Ruptures in Central Arkansas

Once again, we have a demonstration of the environmental safety we can expect from moving especially toxic tar sands oil through a pipeline. We can expect the same if Keystone XL is approved, except on a much larger scale.

Cartoon:

At the time, due to the immaturity of youth, I was fixated on Vietnam, so I failed to recognize the good thinks he did.