Politics Plus

I’m writing for tomorrow, day 163.  It’s a busy day, and I have much to do.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 4:46 (average 5:43).  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:

Since my best players have returned from a bye week, I hope to do better.

Short Takes:

From Rolling Stone (Hat-Tip Daily Kos): [T]he enormity of the Koch fortune is no mystery. Brothers Charles and David are each worth more than $40 billion. The electoral influence of the Koch brothers is similarly well-chronicled. The Kochs are our homegrown oligarchs; they’ve cornered the market on Republican politics and are nakedly attempting to buy Congress and the White House. Their political network helped finance the Tea Party and powers today’s GOP. Koch-affiliated organizations raised some $400 million during the 2012 election, and aim to spend another $290 million to elect Republicans in this year’s midterms. So far in this cycle, Koch-backed entities have bought 44,000 political ads to boost Republican efforts to take back the Senate.

What is less clear is where all that money comes from. Koch Industries is headquartered in a squat, smoked-glass building that rises above the prairie on the outskirts of Wichita, Kansas. The building, like the brothers’ fiercely private firm, is literally and figuratively a black box. Koch touts only one top-line financial figure: $115 billion in annual revenue, as estimated by Forbes. By that metric, it is larger than IBM, Honda or Hewlett-Packard and is America’s second-largest private company after agribusiness colossus Cargill. The company’s stock response to inquiries from reporters: "We are privately held and don’t disclose this information."

But Koch Industries is not entirely opaque. The company’s troubled legal history – including a trail of congressional investigations, Department of Justice consent decrees, civil lawsuits and felony convictions – augmented by internal company documents, leaked State Department cables, Freedom of Information disclosures and company whistle­-blowers, combine to cast an unwelcome spotlight on the toxic empire whose profits finance the modern GOP…

Click through for the rest of this inclusive exposé on the evil brothers Republicans love to … nevermind.

From Slate (Hat-Tip Daily Kos): Many of the police officers present during protests that followed the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, did not wear nametags and refused to identify themselves to members of the public when asked, a practice that is prohbited by law in some places and by department policy in many others. Per a Department of Justice letter sent to Ferguson police on Tuesday, Ferguson officers are in fact required to wear identification by the department’s own regulations. The DOJ instructed officers to begin following this requirement immediately. From Reuters: 

… the Justice Department said its investigators had observed Ferguson police officers not wearing, or obscuring, their name tags on their uniforms, a violation of the police department’s rules.

"The failure to wear name plates conveys a message to community members that, through anonymity, officers may seek to act with impunity," the letter said.

The Justice Department then reiterated the identification requirement in a second letter to Ferguson police (whose main purpose was demanding that officers stop wearing "I Am Darren Wilson" solidarity bracelets):

It further was reported to us that some officers affirmatively displaying these bracelets had black tape over their name plates. The practice of not wearing, or obscuring, name plates violates your own department’s policies, which we advised you earlier this week when we requested that you end the practice imrnediately.

The second letter is dated Friday.

Indict the pigs! (I use this not a generic term for police officers, but an insult to these racists, who should not be wearing the uniform.)

From NY Times: The Supreme Court on Monday blocked an appeals court ruling that would have restored seven days of early voting in Ohio.

The Supreme Court’s order was three sentences long and contained no reasoning. But it disclosed an ideological split, with the court’s four more liberal members noting that they would have denied the request for a stay of the lower court’s order extending early voting. Dale Ho, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, said the court’s action “will deprive many Ohioans of the opportunity to vote in the upcoming election as this case continues to make its way through the courts.”

The ruling, which reflected a partisan breakdown in many court decisions nationwide on voting issues, saw the five Republican-appointed justices uphold the voting restrictions enacted by the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature in February. The new limits removed the first week of Ohio’s 35-day early voting period, in the process eliminating the only week that permitted same-day registration, a feature most often used by minorities.

The Fascist Five Injustices of SCROTUS (Republican Constitutional VD) just took another bite out of Democracy. Only Democrats can occupy the White House until these totalitarian bastards are gone!

Cartoon:

I’m writing for tomorrow, day 161.  I’m also waiting tor the Church of the Ellipsoid Orb, although today’s will be lesser meditations, since my Broncos have their bi week.  I also have a busy week upcoming.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:57 (average 4:33).  To do it, click here.  How did you do.

Short Takes:

From Daily Kos (Hat-Tip JL A from Care2):

Mother Jones offers up a short bio of likely new House Republican Glenn Grothman, the notorious Wisconsin state senator who won the Republican primary and now looks to be a shoe-in in the hard-right 6th district. Think Michele Bachmann without the charm, or Steve King without Steve King’s kind and gentle demeanor. Anyway, he is a terrible person and that a bunch of people in one Wisconsin district are actually willing to vote to send this specimen of underripe humanity off to govern us all makes a good case for quarantine.

In January, Grothman proposed rolling back a Wisconsin law requiring employers to give workers at least one day of rest per week. He told the Huffington Post the existing state law was "a little goofy" and his proposal was about "freedom." "Right now in Wisconsin, you’re not supposed to work seven days in a row, which is a little ridiculous because all sorts of people want to work seven days a week," he said.

You’ll find even more TEAbuggery if you click through. Poor Fitzwalkerstan!!

From The New Yorker: A Republican Super PAC defended the broadcast, on Saturday morning, of an attack ad highly critical of Hillary Clinton’s newborn granddaughter, Charlotte, who was born on Friday.

The ad raises several serious questions about the newborn, at one point accusing her of being “related to Benghazi.”

In criticizing a one-day-old infant, the ad is believed to be the earliest political attack ad on record…

Andy may have detected a northward trend. A Kenyan baby scandal for the 2008 election to a Benghazi baby scandal for the 2016 election. Hopefully the Republican will no longer exist by 2024, but if they do they may scam voters with an Italian baby scandal.

From NY Times: Enrollment in Medicaid is surging as a result of the Affordable Care Act, but the Obama administration and state officials have done little to ensure that new beneficiaries have access to doctors after they get their Medicaid cards, federal investigators say in a new report.

The report, to be issued this week by the inspector general at the Department of Health and Human Services, says state standards for access to care vary widely and are rarely enforced. As a result, it says, Medicaid patients often find that they must wait for months or travel long distances to see a doctor…

…Twenty-seven states have expanded Medicaid eligibility since the passage of the health care law in 2010, and President Obama is urging other states to do so.

Most states hire insurance companies to manage care for Medicaid patients. In return for monthly fees, the insurers provide comprehensive services through networks of selected doctors and hospitals. Federal rules say managed-care organizations must “provide adequate access to all services covered,” but states can define what “adequate” means.

The Times is wrong to blame the Obama Administration for an entirely state demesne. I’m sure they would love to fix the problem, but the Republican House will go along the day after hell freezes over. Some red states have figured out that they can get the Medicaid money from the feds, while defining adequate services as preserving the RepubliCare death benefit.

Cartoon:

I consider this one too good not to resurrect it from last year.

I’m writing for tomorrow, day 159.  I’m back at home and thoroughly exhausted.  The bus home was over an hour late, getting to Salem.  The driver was new and had never driven that route before.  My “priority disability” seating was almost at the back of the bus sharing with a gent that makes even TC Lard Butt seem petite by comparison.  I was hanging on by half a cheek.  In Portland, the driver need passengers help to find the bus depot.  If I had been smart, I would have packed myself in the suitcase.  I’m pillow bound, but I’ll discuss the volunteer work in Sunday’s Open Thread.

Today’s took me 2:55 (average 4:34).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

ZZZZZZzzzzzzZZZZZZzzzzzz!

I’m writing for tomorrow, day 157.  When this posts I won’t be here.  I’ll be in Salem for prison volunteer work.  I’m uploading my articles this morning, set to post themselves shortly after midnight.  I know what the puzzle link will be.  Hopefully, I can get back in and edit in my time tonight.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 5:02 (average 5:18).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Daily Kos: …There were two important articles in Foreign Affairs, the quarterly journal and associated website run by the Council on Foreign Relations. Yeah, yeah, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilaterals and all the tin-foil hat stuff notwithstanding, the simple fact is that some very powerful and very influential people have paid some eye-popping amounts of money to be counted as members of the CFR. And Foreign Affairs has a long, and I would even dare say, proud and enviable, history of publishing important articles that signaled major shifts or developments in USA policies, such as George Kennan's July 1947 X article explaining the new policy of  "containment" of the Soviet Union… 

For the last couple of days, JL from Care2 and I have been trying to figure out a way to post a legal excerpt of this article that conveys its bottom line. Frankly, it's just too complex and convoluted to do so. However it's just too important not to share. Therefore, please just take my word that you owe yourself this read and click through.

From Upworthy: A special Upworthy partnership with the UN Climate Summit 2014. Made possible by Unilever Project Sunlight. Read more.

There are 45,000 wildfires per year in the southeastern U.S. alone, and since 2000, we've had eight of the worst years for wildfires. Now, of course, it's not just climate change that's causing this, but after you watch this video, you'll understand reason number gazillion for us needing to do something about what's happening to our planet.

Climate change may not be beheading Journalists like ISIL, but it's here, it's npw, and ultimately, it's even more deadly.

From TPM: The recurring image in the latest Republican campaign ads is a lone militant walking across a barren land with the black banner of the Islamic State group.

Six weeks to Election Day, the once back-burner issue of national security is suddenly at the forefront amid rising American fears and the U.S. military's expanded campaign to destroy extremists in Iraq and Syria. The GOP, more trusted by the public in recent national polls to deal with foreign policy and terrorism, is using the threat as a political cudgel against Democrats in several Senate and House races.

"Radical Islamic terrorists are threatening to cause the collapse of our country," Scott Brown, the former Massachusetts senator trying to unseat first-term Sen. Jeanne Shaheen in New Hampshire, says in a commercial. "President Obama and Sen. Shaheen seem confused about the nature of the threat. Not me."

Scott Brown and the Republican party, in addition to lying, are committing criminal sedition by trumpeting ISIL's intimidating propaganda against fellow Americans. How Shameful!

Cartoon:

Republicans would repeal all but #2.