Open Thread – Page 707 – Politics Plus

Open Thread–5/13/2014

Posted by TomCat at 12:41 am Open Thread, Personal, Politics

May 132014

I’m writing for tomorrow, and once again, tomorrow is almost here. The heat wave arrived a day early, and although 80° is not suffering weather, it’s just warm enough to interfere with sleep. The rest of the week will be worse with temperatures 90°s, but fortunately, maintenance will be installing my A/C by 11:00 AM. Then I can be one cool cat and catch up on sleep. Day 22.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 4:07 (average 5:54). To do it, click here. How did you do?

Short Takes:

From NY Times: Everywhere you look these days, you see Marxism on the rise. Well, O.K., maybe you don’t — but conservatives do. If you so much as mention income inequality, you’ll be denounced as the second coming of Joseph Stalin; Rick Santorum has declared that any use of the word “class” is “Marxism talk.” In the right’s eyes, sinister motives lurk everywhere — for example, George Will says the only reason progressives favor trains is their goal of “diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism.”

So it goes without saying that Obamacare, based on ideas originally developed at the Heritage Foundation, is a Marxist scheme — why, requiring that people purchase insurance is practically the same as sending them to gulags.

And just wait until the Environmental Protection Agency announces rules intended to slow the pace of climate change.

Until now, the right’s climate craziness has mainly been focused on attacking the science. And it has been quite a spectacle: At this point almost all card-carrying conservatives endorse the view that climate change is a gigantic hoax, that thousands of research papers showing a warming planet — 97 percent of the literature — are the product of a vast international conspiracy. But as the Obama administration moves toward actually doing something based on that science, crazy climate economics will come into its own.

Paul Krugman has nailed InsaniTEA again. Click through for a great editorial.

From Upworthy: Unless You’re Ridiculously Wealthy, I Have A Feeling This Graph Might Make You Pretty Angry

Have your wages gone up in the past few years? Unless you’re really loaded, chances are they have not. So let’s take a look at how exactly they have been changing.

Click through for data and an interactive graph that demonstrates the effects of the Republican War on the Poor and Middle classes.

From The New Yorker: After claiming on Sunday that human activity does not cause climate change, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) suddenly found his ignorance credentials under attack by potential rivals for the 2016 Republican Presidential nomination.

“Now that Marco’s thinking of running for President, he doesn’t believe in climate change,” said Texas Governor Rick Perry. “To those of us with long track records of ignorance on this issue, he seems a little late to the rodeo.”

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) echoed Gov. Perry’s criticism, calling Rubio a “dummy-come-lately” on climate change.

“At the end of the day, I have faith that Republican voters can tell the difference between someone who’s truly uninformed and someone who’s just faking it,” he said.

Republicans always demand more than maximum ignorance.

Cartoon:

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Texas was still fighting the Civil War a month after everyone else had stopped.

Open Thread–5/12/2014

Posted by TomCat at 12:01 am Open Thread, Personal, Politics, Religion

May 122014

I’m writing for tomorrow, and I’m rushing. Tomorrow is almost here. I have been busy with housework and could not sleep. Fortunately I did my research early this morning. Day 21.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:05 (average 4:18). To do it, click here. How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Daily Kos: The huge Kelvin wave that formed in the Pacific a while back, and may bring us a big El Nino, is now reaching the surface. It’s huge, and it’s one of the warmest ever recorded. Here’s the latest from NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center

0512Wave

The vertical scale is the depth of this pool of water, while the horizontal scale is the longitudinal location of the pool. A back of the envelope calculation shows that the pool is roughly 5500 miles wide! It seems reasonable to assume that water this warm and this amount of it, is going to dump a lot of heat into the atmosphere, and the resulting weather may not be very pretty for some people.

This may well be the source of the unseasonably hot weather I’m getting this Spring. Such events used to be less common and less intense.

From NY Times: Tom Wheeler, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, has had a tough month.

Two of his fellow commissioners this week said he should delay introducing a new set of net neutrality rules, which he had scheduled for May 15.

A group of 11 United States Senators told him Friday that rules allowing companies to pay an Internet service provider for express-lane access to consumers, as the rules are widely expected to do, would violate the principle of an open Internet.

And last week, a finger-wagging, tough-talking speech he gave to cable television executives received a lukewarm response and engendered questions about what some listeners perceived as a “father knows best” tone.

Mr. Wheeler has vowed to forge ahead.

Late Friday, the Open Technology Institute at the New America Foundation released a letter from Mr. Wheeler, in which he said that he would ask for public input on whether to classify broadband Internet service as a sort of public utility, a route that many consumer advocacy groups have pushed…

Could it be that Wheeler designed a plan in compliance with a Republican court order to allow a corporate "fast lane" with the intent of stimulating opposition to that plan to use as a rationale for reclassification under Title II? Consider that Wheeler has supported Net Neutrality in the past. When the new rules are released, we must respond forcefully and often.

From Alternet: Charles Krauthammer continues the assault on science, calling it superstition.

Hey, Fox News managed to find another crazy, irresponsible idiot disguised as a sentient being to debunk facts and science: good old Charles Krauthammer. He said on Tuesday that the belief in global climate change is mere “superstition” akin to the “rain dance of Native Americans.”

Why would he say such a thing? Such a provably wrong thing? We have no idea. It could be wishful thinking. Sure, we wish this whole climate change catastrophe would go away, and that we could wake up from it like a bad dream. We wish all these meanie scientists conducting real research based on actual facts would just stop discovering that the news is so very, very bad, and bullying us about it.

Krauthammer took his point a little farther, about science actually being superstition. Yah, and the other way around, too. Up is down Charles. Black is white. No is yes. “It’s always a result of what is ultimately what we’re talking about here, human sin with pollution of carbon. It’s the oldest superstition around. It was in the Old Testament, it’s in the rain dance of Native Americans — if you sin, the skies will not cooperate.”

Still more crazy talk from Chuckie Kraut:

“Ninety-nine percent of physicists were convinced that space and time are fixed, until Einstein working in a patent office wrote a paper in which he showed that they are not,” Krauthammer said. “I’m not impressed by numbers, I’m not impressed by consensus.”

What does impress you Charles? On second thought, maybe don’t answer that.

This is just one of eight most wacko Republicans in their War on Science from last week alone. Click through for the other seven. Note that Krauthammer was not satisfied just to attack science. To the delight of the Republican Reichsministry of propaganda, Faux Noise, he also included a racist attack against Native American spiritual tradition. In sharp contrast, authentic Christian respect others’ beliefs.

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Open Thread–5/11/2014

Posted by TomCat at 12:19 am Open Thread, Personal, Politics, Religion

May 112014

I’m writing for tomorrow. My Air conditioner arrived last night. I spent this morning cleaning and preparing the area where it will be installed, so I got a late start on research. They will install it on Monday or Tuesday, and that’s just in time, because Wednesday is forecast to be a another unseasonal scorcher. Day 20.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 2:39 (average 4:45). To do it, click here. How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Right Wing Watch: Family Research Council President Tony Perkins implied today that Christians who support gay rights don’t have the same religious rights as conservative Christians because “true religious freedom” only applies to “orthodox religious viewpoints.”

Last month, a group of North Carolina ministers and same-sex couples, along with the United Church of Christ denomination, filed a lawsuit challenging North Carolina’s constitutional ban on same-sex marriage.

The clergy argue that because of a law that makes it a misdemeanor for a member of the clergy to perform a marriage ceremony without a state license, the same-sex marriage ban violates the religious rights of clergy who wish to perform such ceremonies.

When a caller on Monday’s edition of “Washington Watch” [pseudo-Christians delinked] asked Perkins about his views on the case, Perkins replied that the ministers don’t have the same religious rights as others because they aren’t real Christians and therefore aren’t protected by the “true religious freedoms” given to Christians. [emphasis added]

There you have it straight from the horse’s ass’s mouth. Republican Supply-side pseudo-Christians hold that the freedom of religion guaranteed in the First Amendment is for them only.

From Daily Kos: Of course there was going to be opposition to creating the first national women’s history museum. Now close your eyes and ask yourself this question—who do you suppose had the dumbest opposition to such a thing?

"I rise today in opposition to this bill, because I believe ultimately this museum that will be built on the National Mall, on federal land, will enshrine the radical feminist movement that stands against the pro-life movement, the pro-family movement, and pro-traditional marriage movement," [Rep. Michele Bachmann] said on the House floor Wednesday ahead of a vote on the bill.

Oh yeah, that’s the stuff. That’s why we’re gonna miss Michele Bachmann when she’s gone.

When Batshit B is gone, we shall have lost a wondrous source of material for humor. But I can live with the loss. 😉

From The New Yorker: Millions of unemployed Americans who have fruitlessly been looking for work for months are determined that Congress get to the bottom of what happened in Benghazi, a new poll indicates.

According to the survey, job-seeking Americans hope that Congress will eventually do something about job creation, but they are adamant that it hold new hearings about Benghazi first.

By a wide majority, respondents to the poll “strongly agreed” with the statement “I would really like to find a job, but not if it in any way distracts Congress from my No. 1 concern: finding out what really happened in Benghazi.”

The problem here is that Republicans will think Andy is serious.

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Open Thread–5/9/2014

Posted by TomCat at 12:44 am Open Thread, Personal, Politics

May 092014

I’m writing for tomorrow, and tomorrow is almost here, so I shall be brief. The volunteer corporate paperwork took me about eight hours to complete. ARGH! Fortunately, I took some time for political research, before I started. Day 18.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:33 (average 5:47). To do it, click here. How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Upworthy: Traffic getting you down? Smog in the air?

This photograph taken in 1991 shows how much road space 72 people would need if they used bicycles vs. cars vs. a bus.

0509TakeTheBus

Now I have no choice, but even when I could drive, I opted to travel via public transit to reduce my carbon footprint. I realize that not all have that option, but we need to redesign our cities so that more do.

From Daily Kos: The New York Daily News reported today that Dutchess County controller Jim Coughlan, a Republican candidate for the New York State Senate, tweeted the following about MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry:

Keep your stinking paws off my kid, you damned dirty ape.

According to the report in the Daily News Coughlan denies knowing that Harris-Perry is African American and instead was simply quoting the famous line from the original Planet of the Apes. Sure, not racist at all. It is so believable.

And what did Harris-Perry say to set Coughlan off?

“We have never invested as much in public education as we should have,” Harris-Perry said, “because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children: ‘Your kid is yours, and totally your responsibility.’”

Right! The typically racist Republican did not know she is black. He also does not know the Pope is Catholic and has no idea where bears shit!. Whatever happened to: "It takes a village to raise a child?" Republicans love that one, when they are using it as a rationalization to keep children from adoption by gay parents.

From NY Times: Americans are less worried about climate change than the residents of any other high-income country, as my colleague Megan Thee-Brennan wrote Tuesday. When you look at the details of these polls, you see that American exceptionalism on the climate stems almost entirely from Republicans. Democrats and independents don’t look so different from people in Japan, Australia, Canada and across Europe.

According to Pew Research Center surveys conducted last year, 25 percent of self-identified Republicans said they considered global climate change to be “a major threat.” The only countries with such low levels of climate concern are Egypt, where 16 percent of respondents called climate change a major threat, and Pakistan, where 15 percent did.

0509Climate

Click through for much more data. Democrats certainly need to improve, but the next time some fool tells you there is no difference between the two parties on climate change, remember this.

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Open Thread–5/8/2014

Posted by TomCat at 12:15 am Open Thread, Personal, Politics

May 082014

I’m writing for tomorrow and feeling much more awake than I did yesterday. I cleaned the apartment, had groceries delivered and put them away and organized my desk for tomorrow’s task. It will be my day to do the annual paperwork our non-profit prison volunteer group. Depending on how long that takes, I may or may not have articles for tomorrow. Day 17.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 4:35 (average 5:26). To do it, click here. How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Daily Kos: Oh, Fox News. There could never be enough facepalms or headdesks to adequately respond to your brazen stupidity. The 24-hour propaganda network addressed marriage and earnings during Fox & Friends Sunday. Question being, isn’t it terrifying and unnatural that some women earn more than their husbands? Co-host Clayton Morris was in charge of pressing a panel of guests on this very urgent question:

MORRIS: Is there a problem with men earning less than women in the household, and do you think that it could throw off — that it actually could cause big marital problems?

Yes, it absolutely could. If the husband is an insecure jackass whose sense of self is tied to money and having his wife be subordinate to him.

The mouthpiece from the Republican Reichsministry of Propaganda, Faux Noise, did everything he could to twist his panelists’ arguments, and when he couldn’t, he dismissed them as "cultural issues".

From NY Times: Stanford University announced Tuesday that it would divest its $18.7 billion endowment of stock in coal-mining companies, becoming the first major university to lend support to a nationwide campaign to purge endowments and pension funds of fossil fuel investments.

The university said it acted in accordance with internal guidelines that allow its trustees to consider whether “corporate policies or practices create substantial social injury” when choosing investments. Coal’s status as a major source of carbon pollution linked to climate change persuaded the trustees to remove companies “whose principal business is coal” from their investment portfolio, the university said.

Kudos to Stanford University. May all major colleges follow suit.

From CNN: Old habits die hard.

Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber will tell you that.

The former emergency room doctor was on his way to dinner Monday evening when he noticed a woman in need of help in downtown Portland.

So, of course, he did what any trained physician would.

He ordered his driver to stop. And using medical equipment he had in his car, he performed CPR until the paramedics arrived.

The woman had "apparently overdosed" on heroin, the governor’s spokeswoman Nkenge Harmon Johnson said.

That’s our Kitz! No doubt, Republicans will try to spin this into an adulterous romantic interlude. 😉

Cartoon:

[Republican spelling intentional]

Open Thread–5/7/2014

Posted by TomCat at 12:27 am Open Thread, Personal, Politics

May 072014

I’m writing for tomorrow. The quarterly surgery on my foot was more painful than usual. The gr4owth was more deeply embedded than it normally is. But now that it’s over, I can walk without foot-pain for a few more weeks. I am, however, quite tired, and most of the day is gone, so this article is tomorrow’s only. Day 16.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:47 (average 5:06). To do it, click here. How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Upworthy: Out Of The World’s Most Dangerous Animals, I Bet You’re Most Afraid Of The Safest Ones

0507Animals

They forgot ChickenHawk. GW Bush killed more.

From Daily Kos: ACA Signups: The Final* Graph of the 2014 Open Enrollment Period

0507aca_chart

Click through for details and a closer view. Unlike Republicans, these numbers don’t lie.

From The New Yorker: In what legal experts are calling a landmark decision, on Monday the United States Supreme Court struck down what many believe to be the main reason the country was started.

By a five-to-four vote, the Court eliminated what grade-school children have traditionally been taught was one of the key rationales for founding the United States in the first place.

“The separation of church and state has been a cornerstone of American democracy for over two hundred years,” said Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority. “Getting rid of it was long overdue.”

You know this Republican decision is too rich in embedded satire for Andy to leave it alone.

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Open Thread–5/6/2014

Posted by TomCat at 1:37 am Open Thread, Personal, Politics, Religion

May 062014

I’m writing for tomorrows, and it’s late in the day, as I’ve been busy with a variety of tasks. Good news! I got the word that phase one of my formal volunteer training has been approved, and I’ve been scheduled for phase two, institution specific training at OSP. I’ll be spending two nights away from home early next month. Fortunately I’ll be staying in a motel, not a cell. :twisted: Let’s see… should I stay at the Super 8 Motel I used the last trip down, or the Motel 6 I used the trip before that? ;-) Tomorrow morning I have a Podiatrist appointment for my quarterly surgery to cut the growth from my foot. Therefore I may have little or nothing for you on Wednesday. Day 15.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:57 (average 5:42). To do it, click here. How did you do?

Short Takes:

From NY Times: Last week, House Republicans released a deliberately misleading report on the status of health reform, crudely rigging the numbers to sustain the illusion of failure in the face of unexpected success. Are you shocked?

You aren’t, but you should be. Mainstream politicians didn’t always try to advance their agenda through lies, damned lies and — in this case — bogus statistics. And the fact that this has become standard operating procedure for a major party bodes ill for America’s future.

About that report: The really big policy news of 2014, at least so far, is the spectacular recovery of the Affordable Care Act from its stumbling start, thanks to an extraordinary late surge that took enrollment beyond early projections. The age mix of enrollees has improved; insurance companies are broadly satisfied with the risk pool. Multiple independent surveys confirm that the percentage of Americans without health insurance has already declined substantially, and there’s every reason to believe that over the next two years the act will meet its overall goals, except in states that refuse to expand Medicaid.

Paul Krugman went on to say that Republicans will not admit they were wrong. I agree with him, and American voters must be informed over and over again that they are lying, until after they stop.

From Alternet: Lie number one: The rich and CEOs are America’s job creators. So we dare not tax them.

The truth is the middle class and poor are the job-creators through their purchases of goods and services. If they don’t have enough purchasing power because they’re not paid enough, companies won’t create more jobs and economy won’t grow.

We’ve endured the most anemic recovery on record because most Americans don’t have enough money to get the economy out of first gear. The economy is barely growing and real wages continue to drop.

We keep having false dawns. An average of 200,000 jobs were created in the United States over the last three months, but huge numbers of Americans continue to drop out of the labor force.

This is just one of Robert Reich’s four biggest Republican lies about inequality. Click through for the other three. As always, the Reich on the Left is right and the Reich on the Right is wrong.

From TPM: Billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer’s attempt to lure Charles and David Koch out of the shadows appears to have fallen short.

Steyer had challenged the conservative benefactors to a public debate on climate change. But the brothers aren’t interested.

“We are not experts on climate change,” Koch spokeswoman Melissa Cohlmia in told the Wichita Eagle in an e-mail on Friday afternoon. “We do believe there should be free and open debate on the climate issue and it should be based on sound science and intellectual honesty."

For guys who claim not to be expert, they sure spend a lot of $millions convincing sheeple that climate change is a hoax. What hypocritical cowards they are!

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Open Thread–5/5/2014

Posted by TomCat at 1:20 am Open Thread, Personal, Politics, Religion

May 052014

I’m writing for tomorrow and am feeling quite tired having done three weeks of laundry, folded it, and put it away. Therefore, I shall be brief. Day 15.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:21 (average 5:51). To do it, click here. How did you do?

Short Takes:

From NY Times: Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who had been invited to give the commencement address at Rutgers University in New Jersey this month, said on Saturday that she would no longer give the speech. Her announcement came after weeks of protests by some students and faculty members over the university’s decision to invite her.

Protesters had argued that Ms. Rice should not have been selected as the speaker because of her involvement in the Iraq war during the Bush administration. Students staged a sit-in last week outside the office of the university’s president, Robert L. Barchi, to protest the speech, scheduled for May 18th.

On Saturday, Ms. Rice released a statement saying that she did not want to detract from the day’s festivities.

Condi Rice (R-Chevron) should be giving her speech at The Hague. Kudos to the students at Rutgers for rejecting a Republican war criminal.

From Roll Call (H/T Daily Kos): Rep. Janice Hahn just wanted to hear evangelist Billy Graham’s daughter speak at Thursday’s National Day of Prayer gathering on Capitol Hill, but she ended up storming out of the room before that portion of the program could get underway.

The California Democrat said she was appalled by the remarks of Dr. James Dobson, saying she felt he went against the event’s stated nonpartisan and apolitical intent by bashing Barack Obama and calling him the “abortion president.”

“We have this annual, national day of prayer, which is supposed to bring the whole country together to pray for our nation, and typically you put politics aside and you come together,” Hahn told CQ Roll Call. “James Dobson just absolutely violated that, and I really think he did damage to what we try to do up here in Washington, D.C.”

Dobson, the founder of the conservative group Focus on the Family and host of the radio talk show “Family Talk,” told those assembled in the Cannon Caucus Room that Obama’s promotion of policies forcing taxpayers to fund abortion services was “offensive to [his] very conscience.”

For Republican Supply-side pseudo-Christians, if it isn’t hate-based, it isn’t prayer.

From Alternet: Glenn Beck: Hillary Clinton will have lesbian sex in White House.

Radio host Glenn Beck makes no secret of his distaste for Hillary Clinton. Another thing he dislikes: gay marriage.

Beck is not sure that Hillary is a lesbian, but he is sure she would be willing to say she is a lesbian if it helps her get elected. Of course, she would. This is a woman who had her daughter knocked up in order to be a grandmother while she is running for president. Hillary stops at nothing. Having shoes thrown at her. Doing whatever it is she is supposed to have done in Benghazi. Faking an aneurysm.

But the target here was gay marriage and all the politicians who opportunistically jumped on board to support it, all because of what Beck and his sidekicks scoffingly called “the arc of history.”

One of Beck’s sidekicks gave him an opening he just had to drive through when he mentioned that Hillary Clinton came out in favor of gay marriage last year.

“Did you just say, came out?” Beck asked with a little glint in his eye.

"I’m telling you," Beck said, "Hillary Clinton will be having sex with a woman on the White House desk if it becomes popular."

They all laughed and laughed, imagining that very scene.

This is just one of the seven vilest Republicans of last week. Click through for the other six.

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