I’m writing for tomorrow, day 148.  Yesterday’s change in schedule did me in totally.  By the time Midnight arrived, my face was hovering over the keyboard.  I had a decent night’s sleep, so I’m feeling half-human again.  I was most pleased (not to mention relieved) with the Broncos’ win.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 4:04 (average 5:22).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Liberals Unite: Friday night in a live show, Bill Maher talked about the polarization currently in this country. He said that the main reason for this polarization was Fox News.

Was the Republican fool outmatched or what?

From Upworthy: This video is chock-full-o hilariously absurd questions, right? The questions sound absurd because it’s strange to ask them. Lesbians are asked these questions all the time.

Personally, I have been "guilty" of telling gay and lesbian people that I support their rights. On the other hand, with Republicans trying so hard to take those rights away, perhaps LGBT folks need all the "guilty" supporters they can get.

From Daily Kos Elections Digest: NH-02: Well, the Club for Growth sure drafted quite the piece of work up in New Hampshire. State Rep. Marilinda Garcia, who just won the GOP primary to take on Democratic Rep. Annie Kuster, absolutely loves to holler about how awful Obamacare is, which is exactly what you’d expect from a cookie-cutter tea partier nominated with hefty Club support. Only the local public radio station just managed to get Garcia to choke pretty hard on those cookie crumbs:

But when asked about her own health care coverage, Garcia demurred.

Garcia: "I… that’s my own issue."

NHPR: "So you don’t want to say?"

Garcia: "No that’s fine, I don’t need to share everything."

NHPR: "I bet it will come up again. Probably that’s something the media will want to know, with you making health care an issue in your campaign."

Garcia: "My constituents talk to me so I am not here running on my own issues. I am expressing what they come up with."

NHPR: "Is it fair to say you are not getting your health care through Obamacare, through the (federal) exchange?"

Garcia: "I don’t need to talk about that. Thank you."

Oh! Oh, but you do! You do need to talk about that, Rep. Garcia, because if you’re trashing our current health care system, you need to explain what your alternatives are. And if your personal "alternative" is, in fact, Obamacare, then your would-be constituents deserve to know. Garcia’s campaign claimed after this disastrous interview that no, she’s not covered under the Affordable Care Act, but if that’s the case, why couldn’t she just explain that at the time? And has she provided any proof? No, this one’s not going to go away quite as readily as Garcia wishes.

Republicans figure that they deserve the benefits, but YOU don’t.

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Because the Republican Party was not in charge, the crew and passengers did not starve to death on the way.

I’m writing for tomorrow, day 146.  My day was thoroughly screwed up by another fire in the building at 4 AM.  An idiot left his apartment with food cooking on the stove and it caught fire.  It was actually on my floor, but I was never in any danger.  A firefighter was about to carry my walker down the stars for me, while I walked, when another came up and and told us it was already out.  I tried to go back to sleep, but could not, and I’ve been behind the eight ball all day.  Tomorrow is a Holy day in the Church of the Ellipsoid Orb.  My Broncos are worshiping with the Chiefs and the service will be televised here, so I’ll be spending much of tomorrow in Holy meditation.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 2:42 (average 4:47).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Daily Kos: Tired of seeing disgraced and discredited war hawks like John McCain and Dick Cheney dominate media coverage of the crisis in the Middle East? Then you’ve got to see Stephen’s segment last night.

Nostradumbass!! Perfect!! Let us remember that the agreement to withdraw US forces from Iraq, when we did, was negotiated by Bush, not by Obama.

From American Bridge PAC: American Bridge is releasing a new web ad today highlighting Scott Walker’s failed economic record.

The governor was once considered a frontrunner for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, and his reelect was supposed to be a walk through the park en route to bigger and better things. Nobody is looking past November now, with Walker locked in the political fight of his life, and desperately trying to create the narrative that he’s led a triumphant comeback in the Badger State.

But that story is undermined by reality. The truth is that Walker rammed through an extreme overhaul of the budget that slashed education funding, attacked public employees, and gave massive tax cuts to the wealthy, all under the promise of job creation and balancing budgets. Well Wisconsin is last in the midwest in job growth and facing a $2 billion budget shortfall.

They certainly have the Fartfuhrer of Fitzwalkerstan perfectly pegged. Click through for more.

From The New Yorker: Amid some confusion as to whether it had, in fact, declared war on ISIS, on Friday afternoon, the White House attempted to clarify matters by vowing to use “every synonym for war at our disposal.”

After the Secretary of State John Kerry asserted that the United States was not at war, only to be contradicted later by the White House’s statement that it was, the White House spokesman Josh Earnest held a press conference to state that “no synonyms for war have been taken off the table.”

“Yes, this is a war,” Earnest said. “But it is also a conflict, a campaign, a struggle, a fracas, and, if you will, a melee.”…

Andy is right. We should call it what it is.

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I’m writing for tomorrow, day 144.  I’m still quite tired after my prison trip and busy day yesterday, so I’m relaxing today and cooking a cross rib roast, before the heat sets in.  I thought I had PT tomorrow, but I was mistaken.  It’s not until next week. 🙂

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 4:37 (average 6:26).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Crooks and Liars: Shameless Sean is at it again. In these days of stress before the November midterms, he’s ramped up the hate and the tea party rhetoric to a dull roar. But you know what you can’t hear over the din? Sean’s voice telling viewers that he has a business relationship with folks he’s interviewing on his television show.

You may recall that Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing radio hosts (like Mark Levin) are beneficiaries of wingnut welfare. Organizations like FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity, and the Tea Party Patriots prop up Hannity et al in order to keep the messaging machine fed with plenty of fresh hate.

So be it. The problem is, you don’t get to receive wingnut welfare on the radio side and then interview your benefactor on the cable side without some disclosure of the business relationship, which Hannity ‘forgot’ to do, thereby making (even bigger) liars of Fox News…

Barf Bag Alert!!!

Making bigger liars of Faux Noise is like making infinity further away. This is Republican Propaganda at it’s worth, paid for by the 0.1%

From AlterNet: A Republican state senator in Georgia sparked a dispute with a pastor in his district after complaining about early voting being implemented in a predominantly African-American neighborhood,  the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

“I would prefer more educated voters than a greater increase in the number of voters,” state Sen. Fran Millar (R) wrote  on his Facebook page. [GOPig delinked] “If you don’t believe this is an efort [sic] to maximize Democratic votes pure and simple, then you are not a realist. This is a partisan stunt and I hope it can be stopped.”

The exact opposite is true. This Republican wants to make it more difficult for informed voters to get to the polls, because they will vote against his party. Disenfranchising voters is the partisan stunt!  Get out the vote!!

From Right Wing Watch: One of the very first posts we ever wrote about the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer highlighted a column he wrote calling for Muslims to be banned from serving in the military. That was nearly five years ago and now Fischer is finally getting around to calling for atheists to be banned from serving in the U.S. armed forces as well.

Responding to a situation [pseudo-Christian delinked] in which an airman was denied his request to re-enlist in the Air Force because he refuses to take an oath containing the phrase "so help me God," Fischer asserts [pseudo-Christian delinked] that atheists should be prohibited from serving in all braches of the military because "there is no place in the United States military for those who do not believe in the Creator who is the source of every single one of our fundamental human and civil rights"…

If only Christians get to serve in the military, then Republican Supply-side pseudo-Christians need not apply.

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I’m writing for tomorrow, day 142.  The plan is to write before I leave for prison, crash when I come back, and post these whenever I wake up.  I have not seen my guys in over a month.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 4:25 (average 5:12).  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:

Watch out for the big footed one who took down the winner of last year’s playoffs!  Those who wish to follow our league, may do so here.

Short Takes:

From Daily Kos: Hardly a bastion of liberal thought, A Forbes magazine article says Obama not only outperformed conservative hero Reagan, but also has reduced the national debt.  Here’s the last paragraph of the article: 

Economically, President Obama’s administration has outperformed President Reagan’s in all commonly watched categories.  Simultaneously the current administration has reduced the deficit, which skyrocketed under Reagan.  Additionally, Obama has reduced federal employment, which grew under Reagan (especially when including military personnel,) and truly delivered a “smaller government.”  Additionally, the current administration has kept inflation low, even during extreme international upheaval, failure of foreign economies (Greece) and a dramatic slowdown in the European economy.

Forbes has obviously joined a Socialist, Kenyan conspiracy.

From The New Yorker: CNN kicked off its coverage of the latest royal pregnancy on Monday by simulating the journey of Prince William’s sperm to Kate Middleton’s egg.

Holding two plastic models of the Windsors’ reproductive cells, the CNN host Don Lemon offered viewers a dramatic re-creation of the path taken by the royal spermatozoon.

The CNN president Jeff Zucker praised the demonstration, calling it “the perfect way to kick off our twenty-four-hour coverage of this story for the next nine months.”

What Andy isn’t telling you is that, if this was a black couple, The Republican Reichsministry of Propaganda, Faux Noise, would be covering it as porn, because Kate has worn shoes since conception.

From Crooks and Liars: As Karoli already discussed last week, Fox is now moving the goal posts on their BENGHAZI!!!! "scandal" and whether there was a "stand down order" given by Hillary Clinton — and as she already noted in her post, they couldn’t even manage to make it through Bret Baier’s show hyping their upcoming special over the weekend without one of the guests killing their conspiracy theory before it got off the ground.

That didn’t stop Fox’s Greta Van Susteren and her fellow host Sean Hannity from piling on with their latest bit of outrage on the subject. Apparently someone at the White House called Van Susteren and asked her if she could get her cohort Jennifer Griffin to please quit lying about the stand down order.

Now that Fox has moved the goal posts from their original story and the lie they kept repeating that Hillary Clinton gave a stand down order that delayed any rescue attempts at the consulate, they’re claiming that Griffin’s reporting was vindicated.

Never mind that it was the CIA officer in charge of the Benghazi mission security who gave the order because he was trying to get to get the local Libyans to back up their security team. Facts don’t matter much when you’ve got a narrative to sell.

Barf Baq Alert!!

There is a spectrum of truth ranging from absolute truth at one end to the Republican Reichsministry of Propaganda, Faux Noise, at the other.

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