Politics Plus

I’m writing for tomorrow, day 84.  I’m feeling much recovered, but still sore and tired after yesterday’s volunteer meeting.  I’ll probably run out of gas, so I’m getting this done before that happens.  I thought the cravings were bad before the Chantix ran out.  Grrr!

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:09 (average 4:07).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Daily Kos: Oh, says Fox News. Oh, however could this have happened.

On the July 10 edition of Fox News’ Special Report with Bret Baier, Fox correspondent Mike Emanuel reported that "some prominent outside conservative voices have called for President Obama to be impeached" […]

While an on-screen image showed that Fox contributors Sarah Palin and Allen West were those "outside conservative voices" calling for impeachment, Emanuel dodged the uncomfortable truth that [those particular gawdawful] Fox contributors have been leading the impeachment that he reported on.

First off, the definition of "outsider" is stretched indeed, in you’re putting Sarah Palin and Allen West in those ranks.

This is typical of how the Republican Reichsministry of Propaganda, Faux Noise, creates news with which to BS sheeple. One of them says something. Another quotes the first as an undisclosed reliable source.

From NY Times: As Israel’s air war against Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters in Gaza entered its sixth day on Saturday, a pair of bombings threw the difficulties of the campaign into painful relief: Israel bombed a mosque, which its aerial photos indicated was harboring a weapons cache, and a center for the disabled, killing two residents and wounding three, as well as a caretaker.

A separate strike on the house of a police commander killed at least 18 people, the highest toll so far this conflict, bringing the total number of dead to at least 140, Palestinian officials said.

For every Israeli killed by individual Palestinian terrorists, Israel kills scores of Palestinians by bombing civilian areas indiscriminately, Hamas then responds with crude rocket attacks, which Israel then uses in an attempt to justify their treaty violation by pursuing a one-state solution through attrition.

From AlterNet: WMD, who cares?

Now that the Bush-Cheney Iraq war has reached its logical and easily foreseeable conclusion of turning an entire nation into a failed state and terrorist haven, we don’t care quite as much about weapons of mass destruction falling into the wrong hands. That’s especially true over at Fox News, which, along with the rest if the media, is downplaying a letter to the UN from desperate people inside Iraq that ISIS walked off with radioactive material.

Here’s Fox’s lead [Faux Noise delinked]:

Iraqi jihadists have grabbed 88 pounds of uranium compounds from a Mosul University science lab, but U.S. and international weapons experts are downplaying the possibility the deadly toxins could be used to make a so-called "dirty bomb."

The last line of the story: Earlier this week, Iraq’s U.N. envoy said that the government had lost control of a former chemical weapons facility near Baghdad to "armed terrorist groups."

Scary stuff and time to reiterate: Obama effectively helped rid Syria of its entire chemical weapons stock this year, without firing a single Tomahawk.

Note that the uranium is depleted uranium compounds, not the stuff one uses to make dirty bombs. This is just the last of five media failures to correctly inform Americans that benefit the Republican Reich. Click through for the other four.

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I’m writing for tomorrow, day 82, my first day without Chantix.  It’s early in the morning.  Street noise awakened me.  I feel very tired, but I dare not return to bed, lest I miss my physical therapy.  So I’m writing this now, since I know I will be unable to do so later.  It is the only article.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:13 (average 5:30).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Upworthy: Sure, we aren’t doing everything the civil rights movement set out to achieve in the ’60s, but goodness gracious, as long as there are 12-year-olds like this one, I know we’ll get there.

If you think it’s getting intense around 2:45, when she gets the Dixie cups, wait for the closing line of the whole thing. Emotions!

I guess some people are born not to become Republicans.

From The New Yorker: A new poll released Thursday reveals that a broad majority of Americans describe themselves as “deeply unhappy” to have been reminded that the former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin exists.

Palin’s call for the impeachment of President Obama, a ploy to remind people that she still roams the earth, appears to have backfired, the poll shows.

With seventy-two per cent of respondents saying that they were “upset” or “very upset” to be reminded of her existence, Palin is one of three non-officeholders whose recent utterances have traumatized Americans.

Right-on, Andy! He is right about the other two, also. Click through.

From Daily Kos: Something tells me Rick Perry’s Immigration meeting with President Obama didn’t go as planned.

It looks as though Obama ate some of my chili and Perry just realized it!!

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I’m writing for tomorrow, day 80.  I’m feeling quite tired, because my groceries arrived late, and I had to stay up waiting for them.  They also woke mw calling with a question while they were shopping.  They did nothing wrong, but the timing cost me sleep.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 2:54 (average 4:22).  To do it click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Upworthy: Wouldn’t it be amazing if everyone took a stand? Maybe we can all take tips from these boys. A government report came out in France saying "teachers give preferential treatment to male students." So as a protest, the schoolboys deconstructed gender stereotypes in a very visual way. They were met by a counter-protest from an anti-same-sex-marriage group that was already hot under the collar about a new gender equality curriculum introduced in 2014. The curriculum includes teachings on LGBTQ tolerance and gender theory.

Can you imagine the hateful screams from Republicans, if the US had a gender equality curriculum that included LGBT tolerance?

From Daily Kos: One by one, the GOP’s talking points about President Obama’s management of the American economy have fallen by the wayside. Even before he first took the oath of office on January 20, 2009, Republicans were warning about the "Obama Bear Market." Instead, the Dow Jones has more than doubled in value in hitting record highs. Contrary to bogus Republican claims that the Obama stimulus program "did not create a single job" and "made the economy worse," the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and most other observers concluded his American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) boosted GDP, added millions of jobs and prevented "Great Depression 2.0." And with last week’s strong jobs report, the final GOP soundbite—that under President Bush "added jobs for a record 52 straight months"—has now been tossed into the rhetorical dustbin of history.

With word that the U.S. economy added a robust 288,000 jobs in June, the Obama White House noted that the private sector has added 9.7 million jobs over 52 straight months of job growth. If that 52 number sounds familiar, it should.

The "52 straight months" was a highlight of President Bush’s 2008 State of the Union address and has been faithfully regurgitated by Republicans ever since.

The job growth under Bush was slower than it has been in the last 52 months under Obama. The Republican growth was based almost completely on the bad debt created by Republican Banksters. The Republican crash at the end left a net job loss.  The last Republican lie I heard on their bogus record being broken is that Obama cooked the books.

From NY Times: Republicans chose Cleveland on Tuesday for their 2016 national convention, with the hope of appealing to Rust Belt voters who eluded them in the last two presidential elections, and an acknowledgment of the political value of ending the party’s nomination process sooner.

The city edged out Dallas after a review by the Republican National Committee that narrowed the field to the two finalists last week. Both cities aggressively courted party officials, with Dallas presenting cheerleaders and a parade of elephants, and Cleveland turning to the Browns’ first-round draft pick Johnny Manziel, a Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback. The choice must be ratified at a meeting of the full Republican National Committee next month in Chicago.

While each party lost the state where it held its 2012 conventions, Republicans believe holding their convention in a vital swing state will help them from an organizational and message standpoint.

Perhaps Texan Republicans are so divorced from reality that the party does not want them on display, during the event intended to convince middle America that Republican officials and candidates are not the seditious bastards that they actually are.  On the other hand, I think that the author missed one key point. In Cleveland, John Boehner (R-OH), aka Agent Orange, already knows where the best bar and hookers are, saving the party money on research.

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I’m writing for tomorrow, day 78.  I’m feeling much better, and I hope I have my sleep schedule back on track.  It’s early morning, so news is still slow, but I think I found an excellent theme for the day.  I have a lot of house work to do.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 2:44 (average 4:43).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From NY Times: …Some background: On the eve of the Great Recession, many conservative pundits and commentators — and quite a few economists — had a worldview that combined faith in free markets with disdain for government. Such people were briefly rocked back on their heels by the revelation that the “bubbleheads” who warned about housing were right, and the further revelation that unregulated financial markets are dangerously unstable. But they quickly rallied, declaring that the financial crisis was somehow the fault of liberals — and that the great danger now facing the economy came not from the crisis but from the efforts of policy makers to limit the damage.

Above all, there were many dire warnings about the evils of “printing money.” For example, in May 2009 an editorial [Faux Print delinked] in The Wall Street Journal warned that both interest rates and inflation were set to surge “now that Congress and the Federal Reserve have flooded the world with dollars.” In 2010 a virtual Who’s Who of conservative economists and pundits sent an open letter [Faux Print delinked] to Ben Bernanke warning that his policies risked “currency debasement and inflation.” Prominent politicians like Representative Paul Ryan joined the chorus.

Reality, however, declined to cooperate. Although the Fed continued on its expansionary course — its balance sheet has grown to more than $4 trillion, up fivefold since the start of the crisis — inflation stayed low. For the most part, the funds the Fed injected into the economy simply piled up either in bank reserves or in cash holdings by individuals — which was exactly what economists on the other side of the divide had predicted would happen.

Needless to say, it’s not the first time a politically appealing economic doctrine has been proved wrong by events. So those who got it wrong went back to the drawing board, right? Hahahahaha.

In fact, hardly any of the people who predicted runaway inflation have acknowledged that they were wrong, and that the error suggests something amiss with their approach. Some have offered lame excuses; some, following in the footsteps of climate-change deniers, have gone down the conspiracy-theory [TEAbuggery delinked] rabbit hole, claiming that we really do have soaring inflation, but the government is lying about the numbers (and by the way, we’re not talking about random bloggers or something; we’re talking about famous Harvard professors). Mainly, though, the currency-debasement crowd just keeps repeating the same lines, ignoring its utter failure in prognostication…

Paul Krugman is spot on! This is a small excerpt from the middle of an extensive article. Click through for a stunning exposé on how Republican choose what they want to believe over what they actually know in economics, just like they do in the physical sciences.

From Alternet: GOP lawmaker calls climate control biggest deception in history of mankind.

Similar to abortion foes, climate denialists are in competition for who can be more hyperbolic about the threat real science poses to mankind. Louisiana state Rep. Lenar Whitney (R) threw her hat in the climate denial ring this week when she released a campaign video accusing liberals, such as former Vice President Al Gore, of advancing "the greatest deception in the history of mankind" (manmade climate change) in a fiendish scheme to empower the executive branch and increase taxes.

Brilliant! Wish we had thought of that.

“A specter is haunting America,” Whitney warns ominously in the video. She goes on to claim, entirely inaccurately, that the planet "has done nothing but get colder each year” since the release of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth in 2006.

“Quite inconveniently for Al Gore, and for the rest of the politicians who continue to advance this delusion, any 10-year-old can invalidate their thesis with one of the simplest scientific devices known to man: a thermometer,” Whitney said, citing record sea ice in the Antarctic sector.

Yes, her argument is very much like that of a 10-year-old, who decides that because today is chilly, or it snowed last month, climate change is a hoax, scientists be damned.

As Huffpo points out, “Whitney’s own state is one of the most vulnerable regions in the country to climate change, with rising coastal sea levels estimated to submerge the Louisiana coastline by 2100.”

Speaking of physical sciences, there they go again! This is only the seventh of seven vile Republican statements from last week alone. Click through for the other six.

From Crooks and Liars: …Out of nowhere, Bob Schieffer dropped The Question. "I have to ask, Senators, how do you feel about being part of a Congress that doesn’t do anything?"

Suddenly the sounds of pins dropping could be heard across the nation. John McCain stepped up first, proclaiming his commitment to keep on fighting while respecting his colleagues in the House, but rapidly pivoted to the bogus argument that it’s all Obama’s fault because he ‘changes every law he doesn’t like.’

And speaking of conspiracy theories, McConJob and Lindsey Poo have their heads buried so far up that they can see their own tonsils from below.

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