Politics Plus

I’m writing for tomorrow and enjoying another lazy day, except for some house cleaning, although my extended late night car nap last night is interfering with sleep today.  I hope you  had a great weekend and are ready to survive Monday.  Day 28.

Jig Zone:

Today’s took me 3:16 (average 5:09).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Daily Kos: RotaCare Tacoma, a free clinic serving some 150 people with chronic, serious illnesses like diabetes and hypertension in Washington state, closed its doors in January. This clinic closing, though, was a cause for celebration.

ObamaCare is working for people. RepubliCare worked for the grim reaper.

From Alternet: N.H. police chief calls Obama the n-word, refuses to apologize saying he meets his "criteria for such.”

Another week, another revolting old white racist raises his lizard-like head. Sometimes two a week. Donald Sterling hasn’t even exited the stage yet, when along comes a police chief in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, who was overheard calling President Obama the “effen n-word.” When residents demanded a retraction and his resignation, by golly, 82-year-old Robert Copeland up and refused.

His answer was this:

"I believe I did use the ‘N’ word in reference to the current occupant of the Whitehouse [sic]" Copeland wrote in an email to the residents, as quoted by local TV-station WMUR. "For this, I do not apologize—he meets and exceeds my criteria for such."

Chased down by a crowd and a reporter after the meeting demanding his head, Copeland called the reporter a “skunk.”

Wolfeboro has 6,300 residents, and 6,280 of them are white, including, coincidentally, Mitt Romney, who has one of his summer homes there.

Soon, no doubt, Copeland will go on the interview circuit to declare he is not a “racist” because he does after all have “criteria” for calling blacks racist terms, and also he is not a “skunkist.”

This is just one of the nine vilest Republican moments from last week alone. Click through for the other eight. Republicans are "skunkist" by definition.  I bet Little Lord Willard helped him get elected.

From Right Wing Watch: Operation American Spring took place today as Tea Party-inspired organizers gathered for a “gigantic, massive rally” of up to “30 million people” who claimed they will not leave Washington D.C. until President Obama resigns from office or is forced out in a coup.

The event followed in the footsteps of other right-wing demonstrations that likewise aimed to flood the capital with millions of supporters and disrupt commerce until Obama was ousted, only this time rally organizers guaranteed that a “verified” minimum of 10 million people would show up.

Attendees took turns speaking to the crowd, including one man from New Hampshire who said it was a “disgrace” that “only “four or five hundred people showed up” (by our count, just over one hundred people were present).

Just like Rove Rat on election day!!

Cartoon:

I’m writing for tomorrow and am feeling a bit tired from my cool cat binge of the last couple days.  It’s been a slow news morning, as most everyone in the mainstream are squabbling over things I’ve already covered, at least for now.  Nevertheless I am going to post two, counting this one.  Day 26.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:53 (average 6:32).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Upworthy: On a scale from 1 to 10 on the WTF meter, this is pretty much off the charts. Millions of kids are sitting in classrooms this school year where they could be taught inaccuracies about HIV and sex. Folks, it’s clear we are doing it wrong. I don’t know about you, but I think we owe it to kids to tell them the truth so they are not surprised by an unwanted pregnancy or an STD. Can’t we at least get on board with that idea?

Click through for a series of maps that demonstrate how Republican Supply-side pseudo-Christians have forced dogma over science in sex-ed.

From NY Times: The Obama administration’s legal team has told Congress that if Guantánamo Bay detainees were relocated to a prison inside the United States, it is unlikely that a court would order their release onto domestic soil.

In a nine-page, unclassified report delivered late Wednesday, the Justice Department and the Pentagon expressed confidence that existing law provided “robust protection of the national security.” It added that Congress could also take steps to further reduce any legal risk that detainees transferred to the United States could be released.

Under President Obama’s plan to close the Guantánamo prison, detainees who are deemed too difficult to prosecute but too dangerous to release would continue to be held in indefinite detention somewhere else. In Mr. Obama’s first term, his national security team considered sending them to a high-security prison in Standish, Mich., or Thomson, Ill., before Congress prohibited transferring them onto domestic soil for any reason.

Obama continues to try to close the GOP Gulag at Gitmo. Republicans continue to sabotage those attempts.

From Robert Reich: Timothy Geithner’s new book about the financial crisis, “Stress Test,” is basically an argument that the Wall Street bailout succeeded. That’s hardly surprising, given that Geithner was in charge of the bailout when Treasury Secretary (as was his predecessor at Treasury, Hank Paulson), and so has an inherit interest in telling the public it succeeded.

Even so, the bailout clearly did succeed, if success means avoiding another Great Depression.

But another Great Depression might have been avoided if the crisis had been handled differently — for example, by allowing the bankruptcy laws to do what they were intended to do, and forcing the big Wall Street banks to reorganize under them.

In fact, the bailout was a colossal failure in several respects Geithner barely mentions in his book, or avoids completely:

Never let it be said that I don’t pick on Democrats, when needed. The three blind mice, Timmy "The Tool" Geithner, Ben "Bankster Butt" Bernanke, and Larry "Always Wrong" Summers, are Obama’s three worst appointees. He should never have listened to Hillary about them. Click through for Robert Reich’s analysis of what they should have done, but didn’t do.  The Reich on the left is right!

Cartoon:

I’m writing for tomorrow, and once again, tomorrow is almost here.  The heat wave arrived a day early, and although 80° is not suffering weather, it’s just warm enough to interfere with sleep.  The rest of the week will be worse with temperatures 90°s, but fortunately, maintenance will be installing my A/C by 11:00 AM.  Then I can be one cool cat and catch up on sleep.  Day 22.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 4:07 (average 5:54).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From NY Times: Everywhere you look these days, you see Marxism on the rise. Well, O.K., maybe you don’t — but conservatives do. If you so much as mention income inequality, you’ll be denounced as the second coming of Joseph Stalin; Rick Santorum has declared that any use of the word “class” is “Marxism talk.” In the right’s eyes, sinister motives lurk everywhere — for example, George Will says the only reason progressives favor trains is their goal of “diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism.”

So it goes without saying that Obamacare, based on ideas originally developed at the Heritage Foundation, is a Marxist scheme — why, requiring that people purchase insurance is practically the same as sending them to gulags.

And just wait until the Environmental Protection Agency announces rules intended to slow the pace of climate change.

Until now, the right’s climate craziness has mainly been focused on attacking the science. And it has been quite a spectacle: At this point almost all card-carrying conservatives endorse the view that climate change is a gigantic hoax, that thousands of research papers showing a warming planet — 97 percent of the literature — are the product of a vast international conspiracy. But as the Obama administration moves toward actually doing something based on that science, crazy climate economics will come into its own.

Paul Krugman has nailed InsaniTEA again. Click through for a great editorial.

From Upworthy: Unless You’re Ridiculously Wealthy, I Have A Feeling This Graph Might Make You Pretty Angry

Have your wages gone up in the past few years? Unless you’re really loaded, chances are they have not. So let’s take a look at how exactly they have been changing.

Click through for data and an interactive graph that demonstrates the effects of the Republican War on the Poor and Middle classes.

From The New Yorker: After claiming on Sunday that human activity does not cause climate change, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) suddenly found his ignorance credentials under attack by potential rivals for the 2016 Republican Presidential nomination.

“Now that Marco’s thinking of running for President, he doesn’t believe in climate change,” said Texas Governor Rick Perry. “To those of us with long track records of ignorance on this issue, he seems a little late to the rodeo.”

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) echoed Gov. Perry’s criticism, calling Rubio a “dummy-come-lately” on climate change.

“At the end of the day, I have faith that Republican voters can tell the difference between someone who’s truly uninformed and someone who’s just faking it,” he said.

Republicans always demand more than maximum ignorance.

Cartoon:

Texas was still fighting the Civil War a month after everyone else had stopped.