Politics Plus

I’m writing for tomorrow, day 36.  This is the only article, because I’m still down.  I’m waiting for store to door to deliver groceries, so I can eat and go back to bed.

Late note: No pass for funding bill without stripping Republican blackmail for Banksters and theft of Apache land.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 4:48 (average 4:28).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Daily Kos:

Following the release of a 6,700-page report on American torture practices, Fox News was very upset. The network’s hosts and guests assailed the notion of transparency, attacked the report’s release as political, talked about Jonathan Gruber, and generally insisted that Americans should not know what our government is doing when it comes to torture. But leave it to Outnumbered co-host Andrea Tantaros to really put the Fox News position on torture in terms anyone can understand:

"The United States of America is awesome, we are awesome," she said. "We’ve closed the book on it, and we’ve stopped doing it. And the reason they want to have this discussion is not to show how awesome we are. This administration wants to have this discussion to show us how we’re not awesome."

"They apologized for this country, they don’t like this country, they want us to look bad. And all this does is have our enemies laughing at us, that we are having this debate again," Tantaros continued.

There’s the party line from the liars at the Republican Reichsministry of Propaganda.

From NY Times: The release of the Senate report on the graphic torture of terrorism suspects by the Bush-era Central Intelligence Agency led to calls at the United Nations and elsewhere on Tuesday for criminal prosecutions and caused an international explosion on social media, including online jihadist exhortations for retaliation.

The State Department warned American citizens in at least two countries where the torture and abuse took place — Thailand and Afghanistan — that they could be confronted with anti-American hostility.

Publicity about the report, the United States Embassy in Bangkok warned on its website, “could prompt anti-U.S. protests and violence against U.S. interests, including private U.S. citizens.”

In Geneva, the United Nations Human Rights Council’s special investigator on counterterrorism and human rights, Ben Emmerson, said he welcomed the report and commended the Obama administration for having resisted political pressures to suppress it.

We have a treaty obligation to prosecute the leaders responsible. The word is reacting to our failure to keep our word.

From The New Yorker: Former Vice-President Dick Cheney on Tuesday called upon the nations of the world to “once and for all ban the despicable and heinous practice of publishing torture reports.”

“Like many Americans, I was shocked and disgusted by the Senate Intelligence Committee’s publication of a torture report today,” Cheney said in a prepared statement. “The transparency and honesty found in this report represent a gross violation of our nation’s values.”

“The publication of torture reports is a crime against all of us,” he added. “Not just those of us who have tortured in the past, but every one of us who might want to torture in the future.”

Geez, Andy! Straight news again?!!?

Cartoon:

I’m writing for tomorrow, day 34.  I’m still down sick.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 5:40 (average 5:40).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:From Daily Kos:

Politico declares in a headline, "House sends Obama message with immigration vote." Well, yes they did, but it might not be a message on immigration at all, as some key paragraphs in the story reveal. The message behind that vote is that the Speaker John Boehner has no more control over his members now than he did before the election…

…Just like those 50-plus Obamacare repeal votes. Yes, the House Republicans demonstrated once again that they’re really good at voting on "messages" to President Obama, but not so good at doing stuff. This is all too reminiscent of the march toward the shutdown just over a year ago, where they were whipped by Sen. Ted Cruz into making a meaningless statement on Obamacare defunding and doing something really stupid.

The message they’re really sending to Obama is that Boehner still isn’t capable of leading, and that for the next two years the House is going to be as fucked up as it has been for the past four.

Will they stop with mere stupidity or pass through to TEAbuggery?

From Alternet: Rick Santorum: Separation of Church and State is a Communist Idea.

Sure hope Rick Santorum runs for president again. This theocracy booster told listeners that the words separation of church and state do not appear anywhere in the U.S. Constitution. You know where they appear?  “It was in the constitution of the former Soviet Union,” Santorum said in a conference call with members of right-wing pastor E.W. Jackson’s STAND America.

Whoa!

Someone needs to do some time-traveling quick to inform the Founding Fathers that the amendment they drafted into the Constitution is a commie plot to separate us from Jesus!

This blatant lie from Rick "Google My Name" Santorum is just one of last week’s five worst Republican Moments. Click through for the other four.

From Alternet: The 2012 and 2014 elections were the most expensive in American history and were financed largely by corporate money. So why are American companies so eager to put up so much cash for political influence? Because it pays. A lot.

A report issued last month by the Sunlight Foundation, a government accountability group, found that for every dollar the nation’s most politically active companies spent on political influence, they received $760 from the government in the form of federal business and support. In total, the yearlong study reported that 200 of the country’s top campaign donors spent $5.8 billion on political lobbying and campaign contributions between 2007 and 2012 and received a whopping $4.4 trillion in return.

By contrast, the federal government paid the nation’s 50 million social security recipients $4.3 trillion during the same time period.

Dang!  Welfare for the rich is the most expensive thing we do.

Cartoon:

I’m writing for tomorrow, day 32.  It’s official.  My annual winter flu has hit.  My COPD is severe, and I’m running a fever.  The cartoon describes how I feel, so this is the only article.  Yesterday Providence Home Services stood me up.  Apparently they forgot to put my order on the delivery truck  They finally delivered it this afternoon, after three fights with their Customer Disservice department.  When they told me they didn’t know why it hadn’t occurred to them to call me, when they discovered my order, I suggested that they have all the competence of the US Congress.  This is the only article.  Tomorrow is a holy day in the Church of the Ellipsoid Orb.  My Broncos are worshiping with the Bills, but it won’t be televised locally.  Our local CBS affiliate thinks we’d rather have paid programming, because the damn Seachickens are on the other network at the same time.  ARGH! 🙁

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:57 (average 4:48).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Daily Kos: Subsequent to a previous report from Lawrence O’Donnell, the Missouri Attorney General has confirmed with "Last Word" that instructions given the Michael Brown grand jury describing the police "use of force" laws was incorrect and misleading.

Video from Program

If you believe it was not intentional, contact me about buying my alpine ski resort in Florida.

From YouTube: Weekly Address: Ensuring Americans Feel the Gains of a Growing Economy

Where was this speech BEFORE the election?

From Think Progress: As voters across Louisiana head to the polls today to cast their runoff ballots for senator and a handful of local races, voting rights organizers across the state and country are drawing attention to policies and practices that make it more difficult for Louisianians to vote.

Volunteers from the Election Protection Network, who will be on the ground Saturday to monitor voting issues during the runoff, report concerns stemming from the state’s long history of voter suppression and problems that have surfaced in recent years.

Recently, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and other national voting rights groups took Gov. Bobby Jindal’s administration to court over a statewide practice that prevented many low-income, minority Louisianians from registering to vote. Just last month, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled partially in their favor, finding that Louisiana violated the National Voter Registration Act by failing to provide voter registration services at the state’s public service agencies — such as the departments where residents can sign up for Medicaid and food stamps. Attorney Natasha Korgaonkar with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, who worked on the case, told ThinkProgress that the lawsuit targeted two state agencies and the Secretary of State who were all knowingly preventing public service recipients from easily registering to vote.

I’m sure we’ll learn of Republican criminal “irregularities”, but think Landrieu might have won, had she not shot herself in the foot, which was in her mouth, when her head was up her own butt.  Late update.  She got her ass kicked.

Cartoon:

I’m writing for tomorrow, day 30. My COPD is still acting up.  Tomorrow is a grocery delivery day and an O₂ delivery day.  I may be scarce.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 4:18 (average 5:17).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Daily Kos:

One can only imagine Hooks Independent School District board member Chris Harris won’t be working for the district much longer after he posted the image above. The image has rightfully garnered a lot of attention, not the kind Mr. Harris was likely hoping for when he posted it.

He’s since apologized, but it may be too late:

Harris posted messages saying in part that he realizes what he posted was inappropriate and offended people. He went on to say he’s deeply sorry and not a racist.

According to Superintendent Thompson, Harris’ future with the school district  will be up to the school board members.

"They govern me. That is who I answer to," said Thompson. "They govern each other. It is in their hands."

That Republican is not a racist. The Pope is not Catholic. Bears never, ever shit in the woods.

From The New Yorker: On the heels of an initiative to provide police departments with body cameras, there is growing support for a plan to supply grand-jury members with eyes, advocates for the plan said on Wednesday.

“Body cameras are an important part of the solution,” said Harland Dorrinson, who is lobbying Washington to equip grand juries with the sense of sight. “But I strongly believe that if you take video evidence and add eyes, the combination would be unstoppable.”

Some critics of Dorrinson’s proposal say that it does not go far enough, and that in order to process information sent from their eyes grand juries would also need to be fitted with working brains.

For once I disagree with Andy. When Grand Jurors make garbage decisions, it’s because prosecutors feed them garbage.

From NY Times: A federal appeals court on Wednesday struck down a 2011 Florida law requiring drug tests for people seeking welfare benefits even if they are not suspected of drug use, a measure pushed by Gov. Rick Scott in his first term in office.

The three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in Atlanta, ruled that the law, one of the strictest in the country, was an unreasonable search because Florida officials had failed to show a “substantial need” to test all people who applied for welfare benefits. Applicants were required to submit to urine tests, a measure that Mr. Scott said would protect children of welfare applicants by ensuring that their parents were not buying and using drugs.

“The state has not demonstrated a more prevalent, unique or different drug problem among TANF applicants than in the general population,” the panel said in its unanimous decision, using an acronym for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.

Rick Scott is going to hate this because he founded the company getting rich off of doing the drug testing.  He claims he no longer owns it, which is true.  Now, his wife does.

Cartoon: