Politics Plus

Writing for tomorrow, I’m feeling somewhat drained, because the heat has interfered with my sleep.  Today is forecast in the high 70°s, and tomorrow will be cooler.  After taking a rest day today, I have a lot of housework to catch up this weekend.  Day 12.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:27 (average 4:39).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From NY Times: Jeb Bush’s increasingly serious and public examination of a run for president has shaken the ranks of establishment Republican donors and fund-raisers who had planned to back Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey in 2016, forcing many of them to rethink their allegiance to the embattled governor.

In private conversations that are now seeping into public view, some of them are signaling to Mr. Christie’s camp that, should Mr. Bush enter the race, their first loyalty would be to him, not to Mr. Christie, according to interviews with more than two dozen of them.

A Jeb Bush candidacy is my greatest worry for 2016, because “Strike Three” has the ability to mask is fascism and appear normal.  You’d never know that he was the architect of Stand Your Ground laws.

From The New Yorker: A broad-based coalition of millionaires converged on Washington today to defeat a bill that would have increased the minimum wage for American workers to $10.10 an hour.

Leaving behind their mansions and yachts, the millionaires were motivated by what they saw as an existential threat to the country, Mitch McConnell, a spokesman for the millionaires, said.

“This was an extremely diverse coalition,” McConnell said, noting that everyone from the rich to the very rich to the super-rich united to vote down the bill.

OK, Andy, I give up. Where’s the satire?

From Daily Kos: You can’t fool George Will. Scientists are just progressives who are looking to consolidate power in Washington.

“The whole point of global warming is it’s a rationalization for progressives to do what progressives want to do, which is concentrate more and more power in Washington, more and more Washington power in the executive branch, more and more executive branch power in independent czars and agencies, to micromanage the lives of the American people. Our shower heads, our toilets, our bathtubs, our garden hoses — everything becomes involved in the exigencies of rescuing the planet.”

Sounds like an open and shut case to me. Scientists from all around the world are in a global conspiracy to seize power in the United States. Perfectly logical.

   What? You want proof? George Will has proof!

Gwynne was the science editor of Newsweek 39 years ago when he pulled together some interviews from scientists and wrote a nine-paragraph story about how the planet was getting cooler.

   Ever since, Gwynne’s "global cooling" story – and a similar Time Magazine piece – have been brandished gleefully by those who say it shows global warming is not happening, or at least that scientists – and often journalists – don’t know what they are talking about.

   Fox News loves to cite it. So does Rush Limbaugh. Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., has quoted the story on the Senate floor.

That one article in 1975 was so brilliant, that it has managed to disprove over 33,000 scientifically researched papers written since.

Republican pollution pawns always have an excuse and a reason to believe that the obvious isn’t happening. The excuses are many. The reason is that profit trumps people in a Republican Reich.

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The New Oklahoma flag.

I’m writing for tomorrow, before leaving for my Urologist appointment.  Because the temperature forecast for today is an unexpected 88°, I know I’ll be in no shape to do anything when I get back.  Day 10.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 2:57 (average 5:31).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Upworthy: Am I crazy in thinking this is so obviously wrong? I really struggle to think how a person at any stage of this process is OK with sending a child to prison with adults.

This isn’t just crazy. It’s InsaniTEA.

From The New Yorker: The Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling offered a “total and remorseful” apology for his racist comments today, telling reporters, “Once I saw that Donald Trump was defending me, I knew I had done something horribly wrong.”

Sterling acknowledged that he had turned a blind eye to a mountain of criticism from basketball luminaries and national leaders, but said that seeing Trump defend him on Fox News on Monday had left him “shaken.”

Dang, Andy!!! Talk about a bad hair day!!

From Daily Kos: Eradicating Offensive Native Mascotry, a group of Native parents and their allies from across the country were alerted to Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin‘s daughter, Christina Fallin’s latest gaff when her band Pink Pony announced via Facebook "I heard Pink Piny [sic] was wearing full regalia tonight." Protestors led by Choctaw musician Samantha Crain staged a protest at the Norman Music Festival in Oklahoma and Native American’s reaction via social media was outraged as Fallin wore a Native American-style fringed shawl with the word "Sheep" on the back and performed a fake war dance while her boyfriend Steven Battles ridiculed the protesters and flipped them off from the stage.

There it is! Republican family values are learned in Republican families.

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I’m writing for tomorrow.  What’s unusual is that tomorrow is almost here.  Today was a rough one.  Because I had a two hour wait for the lift bus to pick me up, I spent over an hour of it in the dollar store next door.  Between too much time in my feet and the thoroughly uncomfortable chairs at the medical imaging place, I was hurting big time by the time I got home.  All I could do was crawl into bed.  So I’m rushing now to finish this on time, and it is tomorrow’s only article.  Day 8.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:03 (average 4:15).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From NY Times: It is, in a way, too bad that Cliven Bundy — the rancher who became a right-wing hero after refusing to pay fees for grazing his animals on federal land, and bringing in armed men to support his defiance — has turned out to be a crude racist. Why? Because his ranting has given conservatives an easy out, a way to dissociate themselves from his actions without facing up to the terrible wrong turn their movement has taken.

For at the heart of the standoff was a perversion of the concept of freedom, which for too much of the right has come to mean the freedom of the wealthy to do whatever they want, without regard to the consequences for others.

Start with the narrow issue of land use. For historical reasons, the federal government owns a lot of land in the West; some of that land is open to ranching, mining and so on. Like any landowner, the Bureau of Land Management charges fees for the use of its property. The only difference from private ownership is that by all accounts the government charges too little — that is, it doesn’t collect as much money as it could, and in many cases doesn’t even charge enough to cover the costs that these private activities impose. In effect, the government is using its ownership of land to subsidize ranchers and mining companies at taxpayers’ expense.

It’s true that some of the people profiting from implicit taxpayer subsidies manage, all the same, to convince themselves and others that they are rugged individualists. But they’re actually welfare queens of the purple sage. [emphasis added]

Paul Krugman did it again.  We the people should get paid a fair price for the use of our land. We should end the subsidies to these millionaires Krugman calls "High Plains Moochers".

From TPM: Win or lose — and they’ll probably lose — Democrats hope this week’s Senate showdown over raising the federal minimum wage reaps them benefits in November’s congressional elections.

Whether they’ll get an Election Day payoff is uncertain.

In a Senate vote expected Wednesday, Republicans seem likely to block the Democratic measure, which would gradually raise today’s $7.25 hourly minimum, reaching $10.10 as soon as 2016. Even if the bill, one of President Barack Obama’s top priorities, somehow survives in the Senate, it stands little chance of even getting a vote in the GOP-run House.

Who would the proposal most directly affect? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women and young people make up disproportionate portions of the 3.3 million people who earned $7.25 or less last year. Both groups traditionally skew Democratic, and the party would love to drive them to the polls in November as it battles to retain Senate control.

I fully expect the Republicans to give us another issue, along with the ACA, both of which can be used to hammer them.

From Think Progress: Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) told George Stephanopoulos Sunday that she left the Republican Party in the mid-90s because it was tilting the playing field in favor of Wall Street.

Warren has quickly become a populist hero to liberals. Stephanopoulos, host of ABC’s The Week, noted something in her background that “might surprise” her supporters: the fact that she has voted Republican in the past, and was a registered Republican in Pennsylvania from 1991 to 1996. Warren said she left the party after that because she felt it was siding more and more with Wall Street

I do so wish she was willing to be the first woman President.

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Many were executed for crimes far less heinous that those committed by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, etc.

I’m writing for tomorrow, resting up t6o recharge, and preparing to confront a mess in my kitchen area.  Politics Plus will be offline for approximately 30 minutes, sometime between 7 PM Sunday night and 3 AM Monday morning.  Our HSP will be doing a kernel upgrade on the servers.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:48 (average 5:52).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Christian Science Monitor: The Democrats face some challenging math in their quest to hold onto the US Senate. In all, 21 Democratic-held seats are up for election this November, versus 15 Republican-held seats. And political analysts deem far more of the Democratic seats vulnerable.

To take control of the Senate, the Republicans need a net gain of six seats. One already looks set to flip: the seat held by retiring Sen. Tim Johnson (D) of South Dakota.

Twelve other Senate races are seen as competitive – 10 seats held by Democrats, two by Republicans. Here’s the rundown.

We’re losing a couple good Democrats to retirement.  The rest are DINOs, but we need them to tip the balance.  Click through for an excellent analysis of the challenges we face to keep the Republican Party out of the driver’s seat.

From The Oregonian: Cover Oregon closed one of the sorrier chapters in the history of Oregon state government Friday when it opted to dump its troubled $248 million health insurance exchange in favor of the federal exchange.

The federal exchange doesn’t feature many of the bells and whistles Oregon officials had hoped to offer in their in-house system. But the federal exchange works and offers certainty that the Oregon exchange did not.

Actually that is good news for Oregon. The company they had hired, Oracle, really screwed the pooch with their substandard design performance.

From Politicus USA: Reckless coastal development is heading to Georgia, courtesy of the Nathan Deal administration. Naturally this marsh killing policy was announced on Earth Day.

If you’ve never been to Georgia, you’re missing out. Georgia’s 300,000 acres of tidal marshes are a source of huge pride in the Peach state, for good reason. Not only are fishing and shrimping a large source of recreational, family-owned businesses, but the state has always taken a much more protective stance towards its coasts and marshlands. The birds and the stunning scenery are a testament to past policies of preservation.

But it’s not just Georgians who benefit from the preserved and protected coast. The Center for a Sustainable Coast estimates that “Georgia’s tidal marshes are about a third of those remaining on the U.S. east coast…” You won’t see the kind of built up, destroyed coasts in Georgia that you will see in South Carolina.

Or rather, you wouldn’t see that in the past, but the Nathan Deal (R-GA) administration is doing what Republican governors do best (see Rick Scott’s similar actions in Florida, and Rick Snyder’s giveaway of public parks to corporations in Michigan) — selling out public land, interest and national treasures to big business.

The Center for a Sustainable Coast explained in a statement, “On Earth Day, Georgia’s Environmental Protection Division Director Judson Turner announced a radical policy change that will eliminate protective buffers along Georgia’s tidal marshes. This came as a result of a dubious reinterpretation of language in the 1978 Georgia Soil Erosion and Sedimentation (E&S) Act, used to protect waters of the state.”

This is how Republicans celebrate Earth Day!

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