Politics Plus

I’m writing for tomorrow, day 175, and due to volunteer work, I’ve been going non-stop since 6:00 AM, and it’s now evening, except for three hours of intense religions mediation upon the wonderful Holy Ellipsoid Orb.  Pardon my brevity.  The Cartoon is resurrected from last year.  (Early AM Update: Unplanned vertical sleep has me running way late).

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 4:23 (average 5:51).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Religious Ecstasy:

Short Takes:

From Daily Kos (Hat-Tip: JL A from Care2): …These are the sorts of bigotry, harassment and human rights violations faced on a regular basis  by American Indians seeking equal access to the ballot box. The discrimination that they endure is remarkably similar to that of African-Americans and Latinos, but odds are that you hadn’t been thinking about the voting rights of American Indians. In fact, outside of the #ChangeTheName controversy surrounding Washington DC’s professional football team, I doubt that American Indians have crossed many of your minds recently. This may be in part because there are only 1.9 million American Indians in this country and you don’t have much direct interaction with them, but I think it is also because the Civil Rights Movement in the United States during the fifties and sixties was almost exclusively an African American movement.

If you doubt me, I urge you to a little free association exercise with yourself and take note of the events from that era that first come to mind. When I think on it, the images I see are of sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina and bloody marches in Selma, Alabama; I envision Dr. King speaking of his dreams in front of a packed National Mall and I think about the bodies of 3 civil rights workers being buried on a hot Mississippi night during Freedom Summer. At no point do I think about “No Indians or Dogs Allowed signs” in Wyoming during the 1960s or the Occupation of Wounded Knee, because these things aren’t part of our mainstream narrative of civil rights in America. They aren’t part of our narrative, but they should be. Civil rights movements are not mutually exclusive and there is no cause too remote or removed from our personal experience to be fought. Many of us may not live near a reservation or interact with American Indians in our daily lives, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t hold ourselves as responsible for their voting rights as we do any other race or ethnicity. First and foremost, voter discrimination is not a southern problem; nor is it an African American problem, a Latino problem or an American Indian problem. It is an American problem and it’s about time we treated it as such…

This article is a veritable history lesson of the disenfranchisement of native people, and I’ve shared just a tiny part of it. Click through for a most informative read and an issue that needs more exposure.

From Upworthy: The context (not to mention that footage) at the beginning of this clip is key. Her reaction is just on point. It takes a lot to say something like that on live television.

Kudos to Sony Hostin. The rest? Not so!

From NY Times: It turns out that the Internet does not have infinite capacity. At least not for political ads.

As an increasing number of campaigns and outside groups are finding out, premium space on the web has long been booked. Digital advertising is maturing much in the way television did, as targeting becomes more sophisticated and the definition of a viewer expands drastically.

“Many political strategists don’t think of the Internet as something that can sell out,” said Rob Saliterman, leader of the elections team at Google, which owns YouTube. “But in these smaller states, just as there’s a finite amount of TV inventory, there’s a finite amount of YouTube inventory.”

Like anything else competition for these limited resources drives up their cost. It’s only a matter of time before legitimate human political advertising is crowded out by unknown corporate vultures, including foreign corporations.  Thanks SCROTUS!!

Cartoon:

I’m writing for tomorrow, day 173.  I spent the entire morning researching, and doing paperwork in for my prison volunteer work.  I did take a half hour off to bask in the sun, although there was not much.  If I play this right, I’ll have time for a nap.  If not, I’ll be playing roulette with a keyboard face plant.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:23 (average 5:02).  To do it click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Media Matters: Fox News used doctored video of an interview with President Obama to claim his description of briefings he received on the night of the Benghazi attack contrasts with former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s. In reality, their accounts are consistent.

Panetta discussed the September 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi during a September 7 interview [Faux Noise delinked] with Fox News host Bill O’Reilly. The Factor — and subsequently the October 8 edition of Fox & Friends — exploited the interview to revive the debunked claim that Obama didn’t describe the Benghazi attacks as terrorism and conclude "the administration did not want to talk about terror." To make their point, each program featured a clip of the president’s interview with O’Reilly in February in which the Fox host asked the president about the "terror" designation. The clip egregiously omits Obama’s response to the dialogue, in which the president explicitly says, "When somebody is attacking our compound … that’s an act of terror, which is how I characterized it the day after it happened."

Barf Bag Alert!!

Brain-washed sheeple have a warped view of this issue, because what Obama REALLY said landed on the cutting room floor of the Republican Reichsministry of Propaganda, Faux Noise.

From Daily Kos: There are good cops and then there is an unknown NYPD officer who blatantly robs a man at his birthday party:

Lamard Joye was celebrating his 35th birthday with friends last month near a basketball court in Coney Island, Brooklyn. At some point, the police arrived and stopped a friend of his.

From several feet away, Mr. Joye objected. What happened next is now under investigation by the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, which is in possession of a cellphone video of the ensuing confrontation.

The video of the encounter, on Sept. 16 at around 12:20 a.m., shows a police officer steering Mr. Joye against a chain-link fence to pat him down. “Look,” Mr. Joye says. “Look, you see this? Look.” The police officer reaches into Mr. Joye’s pocket, removes what appears to be a folded stack of bills and steps back.

This is no the video with the article. That could not be embedded, but this video is enhanced. This proves that Brooklyn has at least one Republican.

From The New Yorker: As the mystery surrounding the absence of dictator Kim Jong-un deepens, the North Korean government on Wednesday issued an official statement reassuring its citizens that it had “a deep bench of brutal madmen.”

While it offered no comment about the status of Kim, the statement from the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) emphasized that “making North Korea an authoritarian horror-drome is not the achievement of one man; it has been and will always be a team effort.”

Andy should tell them not to worry. Our Republican Party can lend them dozens of experienced leaders, who are just as brutal, and just as crazy.

Cartoon:

I’m writing for tomorrow, day 169.  I took the regular bus to my Cat Scan.  Since I was actually there less than half an hour, the upside is that it took me 3 – 4 hours less than the Lift Bus would have.  The downside is that I had to walk about 1.75 miles in places where there was no shade.  I took water, but I’m quite worn out.  Fortunately I did research before I left, so you get a full Open Thread.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:03 (average 4:59),  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From NY Times: In its campaign across northern Syria and Iraq, the jihadist group Islamic State has been using ammunition from the United States and other countries that have been supporting the regional security forces fighting the group, according to new field data gathered by a private arms-tracking organization.

The data, part of a larger sample of captured arms and cartridges in Syria and Iraq, carries an implicit warning for policy makers and advocates of intervention.

It suggests that ammunition transferred into Syria and Iraq to help stabilize governments has instead passed from the governments to the jihadists, helping to fuel the Islamic State’s rise and persistent combat power. Rifle cartridges from the United States, the sample shows, have played a significant role.

I’ve heard many ask, of late, why we don’t just give weapons to the people fighting ISIL and let them deal with it. This is the reason.

From Think Progress: New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R) argued on Sunday that President Obama has declared war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria in order to help Democrats win the midterm elections in November and expressed concern that he would abandon the fight in the new year.

Is that a load of RS (fouler than BS) or what? Throughout his presidency, Obama has been more willing to use military force than most anticipated.

From Right Wing Watch:

Last month, a number of Americans joined anti-gay and anti-abortion-rights activists from around the world at a Kremlin-backed conference on “Large Families and the Future of Humanity” in Moscow. The conference was originally organized under the name of the Illinois-based World Congress of Families, but WCF “suspended” its planning of the event after Russia seized part of Ukraine…then the event went ahead as planned with only nominal changes. Two WCF officials, Don Feder and Larry Jacobs, attended the conference officially in their personal capacities, and Feder gave a speech on how the sexual revolution will make the human race extinct.

Despite doing it on the sneak, Republican Supply-side pseudo-Christians are still offering fool support for Vladimir "GOP Pootie" Putin (R-RU) in his Republican campaign of hatred against gay people.  This is also sedition.

Cartoon:

For a mere four bits…
I’ll sniff your nose and your toes…
I’ll sniff your eye and your thigh…
I’ll sniff your lip and your hip…

Where else can you get such a thorough Cat Scan for fifty cents?