Politics Plus

I’m writing for tomorrow, day 177.  Today is a Prison Volunteer day, so I’m writing early in the morning to complete my articles before I leave.  I’ll be returning home late this evening and will have missed sleep time.  The plan is to crash when I get home and upload the articles whenever I wake up, but since tomorrow is a grocery delivery day, don’t be surprised if I have nothing for Thursday.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 4:06 (average 5:04).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Fantasy Football Report:

Here’s the latest from our own Fantasy Football League, Lefty Blog Friends.

Scores:

Standings:

I got Sasquatched in the last minute of the last game. 🙁

Short Takes:

From Daily Kos: But looking back at all Republicans have done, they seem to have achieved one goal really well: convince Americans making just enough that if only those with not enough had less, they’d be doing much better. Put another way, they’ve trained a certain segment of the population to kick downwards. Instead of looking at a system that makes it difficult to survive, instead of looking at the portion of the population that keeps getting richer and richer, instead of looking at how many hundreds and even thousands of times those above them make than everyone else…they look at the people just below them, getting poorer and poorer. Republicans have instilled such a level of contempt in people for unskilled laborers and the poor, that they do the work of justifying paying them less than enough to survive for the party.

Bear in mind, we’re not talking about people who don’t work; we’re not talking about people who earn a lousy living, but a living. We’re talking about people who work hard, and do not earn enough for the basic necessities. And as far as Republicans are concerned, this is good enough: the unskilled laborer’s comfort, standard-of-life, independence, self-respect, health and ultimately life are worthy of only disdain. He is a failure by virtue of being unskilled, and as such deserves contempt. A cheap Big Mac is more important than the person making it being able to afford to pay his rent and put food on the table after working 40 hours a week.

This article does an excellent job of going on to explain how Republicans use lies to convince fools to act and vote against their own interest. Click through for the rest.

From NY Times: Against a backdrop of growing impatience across Europe with Israeli policy, Britain’s Parliament overwhelmingly passed a nonbinding resolution Monday night to give diplomatic recognition to a Palestinian state. The vote was a symbolic but potent indication of how public opinion has shifted since the breakdown of American-sponsored peace negotiations and the conflict in Gaza this summer.

Though the outcome of the 274-to-12 parliamentary vote was not binding on the British government, the debate was the latest evidence of how support for Israeli policies, even among staunch allies of Israel, is giving way to more calibrated positions and in some cases frustrated expressions of opposition to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s stance toward the Palestinians.

Kudos to the UK for calling out Butcher Ben. I bet our own Pat A had something to do with this. 🙂

From Upworthy: So, yeah. Beer is kind of amazing.

This video got me wondering why all that beer consumption did not spur any evolution in Bubba Bagger, who continues his devolution toward the swamp. Then it hit me, just like yeast is the ingredient needed to make beer, Bubba has a missing ingredient. Brain cells. 😉

Cartoon:

Vintage 10/2011

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: