I’m feeling about the same, and I’m still doing all the things I need to do to care for myself.
Jig Zone Puzzle:
Today’s took me 4:24 (average 5:38), To do it, click here. How did you do?
Cartoon:
Mar 162015
Mar 152015
I’m still feeling horrid. My fever is starting to come down, but my COPD is severe. In addition to my normal meds, Nameless, I’m following all the standard precautions and staying in bed, plus using my nebulizer with an Ipratropium Bromide and Albuterol Sulfate Inhalation solution. Hot green tea also helps. My Wellness Formula vitamins arrive tomorrow.
Jig Zone Puzzle:
Today’s took me 5:05 (average 6:23). To do it, click here. How did you do?
Mar 142015
I still feel horrid.
Jig Zone Puzzle:
Today’s took me 4:24 (average 5:26). To do it, click here. How did you do? I might have dome better, were I not CATatonic.
Cartoon:
Mar 132015
I have a cold or the flu. I’m running a fever and have nasal congestion in addition to severe COPD. I got it from chilling myself outside a bureaucrat’s office. On the other had, it could just be what I get for turning 67 on Friday the 13th. Obviously, this is today’s only article. Some of the material is slightly outdated, but, as bad as I feel, it’s the best I can do.
Jig Zone Puzzle:
Today’s took me 3:22 (average 4:52). To do it, click here. How did you do?
Short Takes:
From The New Yorker: Stating that “their continuing hostilities are a threat to world peace,” Iran has offered to mediate talks between congressional Republicans and President Obama.
Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, made the offer one day after Iran received what he called a “worrisome letter” from Republican leaders, which suggested to him that “the relationship between Republicans and Obama has deteriorated dangerously.”
“Tensions between these two historic enemies have been high in recent years, but we believe they are now at a boiling point,” Khamenei said. “As a result, Iran feels it must offer itself as a peacemaker.”
He said that his nation was the “logical choice” to jumpstart negotiations between Obama and the Republicans because “it has become clear that both sides currently talk more to Iran than to each other.”
He invited Obama and the Republicans to meet in Tehran to hash out their differences and called on world powers to force the two bitter foes to the bargaining table, adding, “It is time to stop the madness.”
I’m afraid it won’t work Andy. Some terrorists are just too far gone for Iran to be able to help.
From Media Matters: Sean Hannity lectured criminal defense and civil rights attorney Tamara Holder about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s impact on women’s issues, telling Holder, "let me educate you."…
…Hannity’s lecturing became so egregious, his female producer challenged him, asking if he was treating Holder this way because she is a woman:
If women follow the advice Hannity is giving, they will have nothing to do with him.
From Daily Kos: Six years too late, media call congressional Republicans ‘traitors’
Now Republicans are claiming they were just being "cheeky". That’s the truth, if the cheeks in question are the ones, between which their heads are inserted.
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Mar 122015
i feel horrid.
Jig Zone Puzzle:
Today’s took me 3:53 (average 4:24). To do it, click here. How did you do”
Cartoon:
Mar 112015
My 7:15 appointment was set back to 9:00, and the notification was sent too late for me to get it. I had to wait outside in the weather for 1 3/4 hours. I don’t feel well. Hopefully I’ll be better tomorrow.
Jig Zone Puzzle:
Today’s took me 2:51 (average 4:36). To do it, click here. How did you do?
On the way home, I noticed that trees are blooming much too early.
Mar 102015
I’ve been up since about 4:00 AM, working on necessary tasks. I’m waiting for Safeway. They will be delivering my groceries sometime within the next four hours. I have to stay up, until they get here. Today is the last of the 70° days, but I can’t bask until I put my groceries away, either. Tomorrow’s appointment will take all morning, so figure on a Personal Update only.
Jig Zone Puzzle:
Today’s took me 3:50 (average 6:00). To do it, click here. How did you do?
Short Takes:
From NY Times: Some Republicans in Congress are calling for cuts to the Census Bureau’s budget that would impair the agency’s already strained ability to gather basic data.
An accurate census is essential to determining the correct number of representatives from each state, the effectiveness of voting laws and the allotment of federal aid to states. In fact, information from the census and other surveys by the bureau is crucial to anyone — policy makers and businesspeople, researchers and citizens — who wants to understand the United States, assess where it is headed and influence its course on the basis of hard data.
The White House has requested a slim $1.5 billion for the bureau for fiscal year 2016. Much of that would be for the 2020 census, the planning of which is already behind schedule because of previous budget cuts. Next year is critical for the testing of data-gathering technology; Congress’s failure to provide timely financing to try out hand-held computers before the 2010 census forced a last-minute reversion to paper forms, which proved costlier than an orderly roll out of the computers would have been.
Congress looks set to make the same mistake again.
There’s no mistake about it! With the Census Bureau starved tor funding, the people who will fall through the cracks, because they are not counter are the poor. Those are the people Republicans want to be under-represented.
From Alternet: Google could launch an effort to keep trolls and bad information at bay, with a program that would rank websites according to veracity, and sort results according to those rankings. Currently, the search engine ranks pages according to popularity, which means that pages containing unsubstantiated celebrity gossip or conspiracy theories, for example, show up very high.
New Scientist’s Hal Hodson reports on the proposed Knowledge-Based Trust score:
The software works by tapping into the Knowledge Vault, the vast store of facts that Google has pulled off the internet. Facts the web unanimously agrees on are considered a reasonable proxy for truth. Web pages that contain contradictory information are bumped down the rankings.
Google has recently implemented a kind of Knowledge-Based Truth score lite with its medical search results. Now, doctors and real medical experts vet search results about health conditions, meaning anti-vaxx propaganda will not appear in the top results for a “measles” search, for instance.
Even though the former program is just in the research stage, some anti-science advocates are upset about the potential development, likely because their websites will become buried under content that is, well, true.
I fully hope Google does it. It would be catastrophic for the Republican Reichsministry of Propaganda, Faux Noise, and the entire Republican bubble machine.
From TPM: Even if Obamacare tax subsidies survive in the Supreme Court, a future president may have a lawful way of unilaterally blocking them, legal experts say.
The justices met privately on Friday, two days after contentious oral arguments, to cast their votes in King v. Burwell, a case about whether the text of the Affordable Care Act allows the Internal Revenue Service to provide tax subsidies to Americans in three-dozen states who buy insurance on the federally-run exchange.
There are three ways the justices could rule: 1) They could side with the plaintiffs and say the law unambiguously forbids the subsidies, in which case no president can provide them; 2) They could side with the government and say the law unambiguously authorizes the subsidies, in which case no president can deny them; 3) They could say the statute is ambiguous and therefore defer to the agency that implements it — in this case, the IRS — under the longstanding legal theory of "Chevron deference."
If Obamacare subsidies survive — still an "if" — it’ll likely be because the justices find the law ambiguous and defer to the agency. That’s the basis on which the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, from which the Supreme Court took the case, upheld the federal exchange subsidies.
If that does turn out to be the third option, that’s all the more reason why Republicans must be denies the White House until pork is kosher.
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Mar 092015
This week is turning out to be quite busy already. Wednesday, my normal grocery delivery day from Store to Door, I have an appointment I cannot change, so I have to get groceries from Safeway.com. They are coming tomorrow, moving prep for that to today. The kitty basking weather is winding down. Only 58° forecast today.
Per Nameless’ Request:
i-feet.
Jig Zone Puzzle:
Today’s took me 3:11 (average 4:86). To do it, click here. How did you do?
Short Takes:
From NY Times: For all his partisan animus toward President Obama, it is still shocking to see the Senate’s majority leader, Mitch McConnell, urge the nation’s governors to undermine the Obama administration’s efforts to regulate power plant emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas responsible for global warming.
Mr. McConnell, a Kentucky Republican who seems to hold Mr. Obama personally responsible for what has been the decades-long decline of coal jobs in his state, expressed his defiance in an op-ed article [Bought Bitch delinked] Wednesday in The Lexington Herald-Leader.
The administration has proposed regulations aimed at limiting emissions. Mr. McConnell urged the governors not to cooperate with a joint rule-making process aimed at developing final regulations under which Washington will set emissions targets while giving states flexibility to implement them. Sabotaging this process, he says, will give the courts time to find the plan illegal or give the Senate time to figure out a way to block it. “Without your support,” he said, the administration “won’t be able to demonstrate the capacity to carry out such political extremism.”
Bought Bitch Mitch is pursuing a plan that won’t help coal jobs. Mechanization is replacing many. There are few left, because coal can’t compete. Fracking has provided a surplus of unnatural gas, and the Saudis are flooding the market with cheap oil to forestall a shift to green energy. The liar is trying to protect profits, not jobs.
From Alternet: The U.S. economy is picking up steam but most Americans aren’t feeling it. By contrast, most European economies are still in bad shape, but most Europeans are doing relatively well.
What’s behind this? Two big facts.
First, American corporations exert far more political influence in the United States than their counterparts exert in their own countries…
…The second fact is most big American corporations have no particular allegiance to America. They don’t want Americans to have better wages. Their only allegiance and responsibility to their shareholders — which often requires lower wages to fuel larger profits and higher share prices.
Of course the Reich on the left, Robert Reich, is right about the Reich on the right, the Republican Reich, which is wrong by definition. Click through for more than this tiny taste about how RepubliCorp is screwing YOU.
From Crooks and Liars: Last Week Tonight’s John Oliver didn’t hold back when discussing the racist emails being sent by the Ferguson, MO police department and court officials which were discovered during the Department of Justice investigation of racial prejudice in the city’s police and judicial system.
It amazes me that Oliver can be so funny, while being spot on about racism at it’s worst.
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