Politics Plus

This is the first day in weeks that I’ve made it until Noon without having to turn on the A/C.  I took a much-needed nap, and am ready for more.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 2:36 (average 5:45).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From KP Daily Funnies: How ISIS Really Feels About Trump

I have no doubt that the Daesh would be almost as happy to see Rump Dump in the White House, as Putin would.

From TPM: Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) — the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and thus a major player in the GOP Senate’s refusal to confirm President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee — opened the door to confirming Judge Merrick Garland in a lame-duck session, even as he continued to defend Republicans’ stance that the successor to the late Justice Antonin Scalia should be chosen by the next president.

At a question and answer session in Sioux City Monday, Grassley told attendees that, "It had nothing to do with Garland," but there was an "understanding" that Supreme Court vacancies that opened in up in a president’s final year should not be filled by that president, according to the Sioux City Journal.

But, he added, his blockade on considering Garland might lift if enough of his GOP colleagues express a desire to push the judge through after the election.

This is what Snake in the Grassley is actually saying. If Clinton wins the election, and if Democrats win control of the Senate, Republicans are likely to confirm Garland, a moderate appointee, so that Hillary cannot replace the currently sizzling Injustice Sturmbannführer Scalia with a more liberal Justice than Garland would be. Once the election is over, I hope Obama will remove Garland’s name from nomination, since Obama originally nominated him as someone he thought Republicans might accept.

From PoliticusUSA: Donald Trump and his for-profit presidential campaign thought they had the market cornered after winning the Republican nomination, but an enterprising fellow grifter invaded Trump’s turf and stole $1 million from his supporters (marks).

Because Donald Trump has no digital campaign operation to speak of, a grifter by the name of Ian Hawes was able to establish a super PAC and begin raising money by running a contest that promised the winner would get to have dinner with Donald Trump.

The money came pouring in, but there was a problem. Donors (marks) thought that they were giving to the Trump campaign. Democrats have run fundraising contests like this one for years, so donors (marks) were easily fooled into believing that the man who lives in Trump Tower would come down from his penthouse and share a quick trip through the McDonalds drive thru with them.

The donors (marks) never read the fine print of the contest that stated that the super PAC was only going to purchase two tickets to a future Trump fundraiser. There was no dinner alone with Trump.

Trump was livid that someone was smart enough to exploit his donors (marks) better than he could so he did what Donald Trump does best.

FOMCROTFPIMPLMAO!! Stupid !!!

Cartoon:

Wendy is already on her way here, and I want to get as much as I can written, before she arrives.  Other than dusting and polishing the TomCat, we’ll be cleaning, cooking, changing printer toner, tightening nuts and bolts on my wheelchair, and doing the dreaded task.

That’s as far as I got.  Wendy has come and gone, having accomplished all of the above.  I’m quite tired, so please pardon my brevity.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:34 (average 4:53).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Daily Kos: One day after an audio popped up incriminating Maine’s Republican governor for saying 90% of drug dealers are black and Hispanic, a second video was posted on Friday exposing even more extreme racist and dangerous hate speech. Here is the text is the short 34-second video along with the text where Gov. LePage is basically saying to shoot the enemy — and the enemies are blacks and Hispanics.

“That guy’s a bad guy. I don’t care what color he is.  When you go to war. If you know the enemy, the enemy dressed in red and you dress in blue, you shoot at red — don’ t shoot! Kem, you’ve been in uniform. You shoot at the enemy. You try to identify the enemy. And the enemy right now, the overwhelming majority of people coming here (to the United States) are people of color, or people of hispanic origin.”

Barf Bag Alert!

The only reason this Republican racist keeps winning is that opposing votes are split between a Democratic candidate and a third party candidate.

From Alternet: Sarah Palin, still feeling the Trump love from afar, but a teeny bit worried.

Like Ann Coulter, Sarah Palin loves her some Trump, even if his campaign has done its darndest to keep her at arm’s length after she made some truly incoherent speeches on his behalf. But like Coulter, Palin is a little worried that Trump might be going soft on all those rapists Mexico is sending here.

On Thursday, Palin decided to phone it in to Fox’s Eric Bolling, who was sitting in for Bill O’Reilly. Her main point: Donald is still going to build that wall. “Donald Trump understands that enforcing the laws and building that wall are paramount to what the will of the people is, and thank God, he’s still preachin’ that!” she reassured the worried Fox audience.

Hallelujah!

Apart from the wall, Palin also had some carefully considered, reality-based plans to discourage people who are here illegally. “Well, we have to quit incentivizing those who are here illegally, keeping them here, by not employing them, not giving them free health care, free college, free phones, free Happy Meals, free anything!” she said.

WTF is she talking about!

Perhaps Katrina Pierson summed up the whole Trump campaign words-to-reality-relationship best this week when she explained that contrary to appearances, Donald Trump was still the same old bigot he always was. “He hasn’t changed his position (on immigration),” she said. “He has changed the words he is saying.”

Well, that certainly clears everything up!

Maybe Bloody Bullseye Barbie will try labeling minority areas with gun sights. It worked when she did it to Gabby Giffords. This is just the fifth of five listed dumb Republican assertions from last week alone. Click through for the other four.

From Crooks and Liars:

Meet Jessica Jin. Texas Tribune:The Cocks Not Glocks movement was created by UT alumna Jessica Jin last October after she learned that sex toys, but not firearms, would still be banned in classrooms.

“As long as you have a dick on your backpack, people will be thinking about the guns inside of other people backpacks” Jin said Tuesday, dildo strapped to her backpack.

On the Cocks Not Glocks Facebook event, Jin wrote: “The State of Texas has decided that it is not at all obnoxious to allow deadly concealed weapons in classrooms, however it does have strict rules about free sexual expression, to protect your innocence. You would receive a citation for taking a dildo to class before you would get in trouble for taking a gun to class.

Kudos to the protestors, but they better not point their dildos at TX cops!! They’d be gunned down.

Cartoon:

Last night, I stayed up late to optimize our site.  First, I analyzed the load times for plugins and found that we had a huge resource hog.  Our Top Commentators plugin used more than three times the resources of all our other plugins combined and was adding 33% to the time it took to load every page.  I really liked it, but dang!!  I took it out.  Next, I optimized the database.  Most important, I have begun optimizing images.  We have over 25,000.  One I have the old ones done, I’ve set up a service to automatically optimize new ones for about $10 per month.  Now I get to venture into the heat for abuse.  I’ll finish when I return.

PT went very well.  Courtney was merciless, but I managed all her tasks.  I stopped at the bank on the way home, but when I got here the elevator was out of service AGAIN.  I had to wait in the heat for an hour, before the repair tech could run the assembled cripples upstairs.  In the interim, I’ve wilted.  This is my only article today.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 2:48 (average 4:15).  To do it, click here. How did you do?

Short Takes:

From NY Times: Warren Hinckle, the flamboyant editor who made Ramparts magazine a powerful national voice for the radical left in the 1960s and later by championing the work of Hunter S. Thompson and helping introduce the no-holds-barred reporting style known as gonzo journalism, died on Thursday. He was 77.

The cause was complications of pneumonia, his daughter Pia Hinckle said.

Ramparts was a small-circulation quarterly for liberal Roman Catholics when Mr. Hinckle began writing for and promoting it in the early 1960s. A born provocateur with a keen sense of public relations, he took over as the executive editor in 1964 and immediately set about transforming Ramparts from a sleepy intellectual journal to a slickly produced, crusading political magazine that galvanized the American left.

RIP Warren. Back in the day, I used to read every issue of Ramparts.

From Alternet:

Here are 12 examples [of Rump Dump Racism] cited by Clinton.

1. Deeply Insulting African Americans: Trump’s remarks show he has no appreciation for black culture or achievement, Clinton said, but instead utters one ugly cliche after another. “In just the past week, under the guise of ‘outreach’ to African Americans, Trump has stood up in front of largely white audiences and described black communities in such insulting and ignorant terms. ‘Poverty. Rejection.  Horrible education. No housing. No homes. No ownership. Crime at levels nobody has seen.’ ‘Right now,’ he said, ‘you walk down the street and get shot.’ Those are his words.”

2. Racist then, racist now: Trump has a decades-old history of mistreating and stereotyping blacks, Clinton said, starting with his refusal to rent New York City apartments to them. “When he was getting his start in business, he was sued by the Justice Department for refusing to rent apartments to black and Latino tenants,” she said. “Their applications would be marked with a C—C for ‘colored’—and then rejected. Three years later, the Justice Department took Trump back to court because he hadn’t changed… And the pattern continued through the decades. State regulators fined one of Trump’s casinos for repeatedly removing black dealers from the floor. No wonder the turnover rate for his minority employees was way above average.”

3. His racist lies don’t stop: Before the 2016 presidential election, Trump was at the forefront of the right-wing effort to discredit President Obama’s legitimacy by questioning his national origin. “Let’s not forget that Trump first gained political prominence leading the charge for the so-called birthers,” she said. “He promoted the racist lie that President Obama is not really an American citizen; part of a sustained effort to delegitimize America’s first black president. In 2015, Trump launched his own campaign for president with another racist lie. He described Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals. And he accused the Mexican government of actively sending them across the border. None of that is true.”

I shared three. Click through for the other nine.

From Crooks and Liars: This is unreal. Kellyanne Conway graced the set of The Rachel Maddow Show last night. Among other things, Rachel asked about the "pivot" away from a total ban on Muslims to an "extreme vetting" of those entering the United States.

As usual, Rachel had clearly done her homework. The "extreme vetting" that the Trump campaign correctly identifies as originating during the Cold War, was vetoed by Harry Truman, passed as an override by Congress anyway, and then found unconstitutional. By all modern legal measures, the similar Trump proposal would also be found unconstitutional.

No matter how many times Rachel said it’s unconstitutional, Conway ignored her and circled back to her talking points. Like other Republicans, Trump’s Rectumites don’t care about the Constitution.

Cartoon:

The heat wave has returned to Portland with a vengeance, and we are under an Excessive Heat Warning until Friday evening.  Today is a grocery delivery day, and late this afternoon, Wendt will be here to pamper and polish the TomCat.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:40 (average 4:37).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From NY Times: Horseback riders, their faces streaked in yellow and black paint, led the procession out of their tepee-dotted camp. Two hundred people followed, making their daily walk a mile up a rural highway to a patch of prairie grass and excavated dirt that has become a new kind of battlefield, between a pipeline and American Indians who say it will threaten water supplies and sacred lands.

The Texas-based company building the Dakota Access pipeline, Energy Transfer Partners, calls the project a major step toward the United States’ weaning itself off foreign oil. The company says the nearly 1,170-mile buried pipeline will infuse millions of dollars into local economies and is safer than trucks and train cars that can topple and spill and crash and burn.

But the people who stood at the gates of a construction site where crews had been building an access road toward the pipeline viewed the project as a wounding intrusion onto lands where generations of their ancestors hunted bison, gathered water and were born and buried, long before treaties and fences stamped a different order onto the Plains.

Kudos to the Sioux. I endorse their protest wholeheartedly.

From Daily Kos: Officials in Sarnia, Ontario were surprised last night to find approximately 1,500 Americans illegally floating into Canada.

They were participating in the annual Port Huron Float Down, during which people simply float down the river on rafts, inner tubes and other flotation devices from Port Huron, Mich.

High winds pushed them to a number of points along the Canadian shore. They had to be rescued by Sarnia police, the OPP, the Canadian Coast Guard, Canada Border Service Agency and employees from a nearby chemical company Lanxess Canada.

Likely story. Probably a bunch of Justin Trudeau fans trying to get a glimpse.

If Harper’s Harlots still ruled Canada, they would have lured those terrorist wetbacks into portapotties, locked them in, and trucked them back to this side of the border.

From TPM: In a lawsuit filed Monday, former Fox News host Andrea Tantaros alleges that ex-network boss Roger Ailes was far from alone in making unwanted sexual advances during her tenure there. Tantaros alleges that network heavyweight Bill O’Reilly and former Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) also contributed to a culture of “misogyny” at the conservative news network.

Tantaros’ suit comes after Ailes resigned from the network amid mounting allegations of sexual harassment and retaliation, first made by fired host Gretchen Carlson in a lawsuit filed in July (Ailes strenously denied those allegations through his lawyers). Tantaros’ lawsuit names the network’s newly appointed co-president, Bill Shine, public relations czar Irena Briganti, and two other high-ranking executives, along with Ailes, whom the complaint labels as a “predator.”

This is boggles the mind. Tantaros always lies. Ailes always lies. We have an oxymoron between morons!

At the time, Nero (R-RO) explained that there was no such thing as volcanic climate change.