Politics Plus

I’m writing for tomorrow, and feeling quite exhausted after being up all night recovering my computer.  The file that trashed it got through my firewall, while I was on Care2.  The management of Care2 is in no way at fault.  Nobody can maintain a site of that size and complexity without an occasional security glitch, and for the volume of traffic they have, they do an excellent job.  So fell victim to either a random hacker or a Republican hacker.  Given the pain I cause them, I suspect latter, but have no evidence to prove it.  Tomorrow is a High Holy Day in the Church of the Ellipsoid Orb, and my Broncos will worship with the Patriots for the AFC Championship and a trip to the Super Bowl.  You can guess what I shall be doing.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:00 (average 5:06).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From TPM: On MSNBC’s “Up with Steve Kornacki” this morning, Hoboken, N.J. mayor Dawn Zimmer offered an extraordinary account of her dealings with the administration of Governor Chris Christie concerning federal Hurricane Sandy relief aid. She described an effort by top state officials – the lieutenant governor and a cabinet member – to coerce Hoboken’s city government into fast-tracking approval of a proposed redevelopment project by withholding Sandy aid from the government and residents of her city. That project, she says she was told, was “very important to the governor.” And if she worked to get it approved, “the money would start flowing to you.”

It just so happens that the proposed project in question is situated on three blocks of land owned by the Rockefeller Group, a client of the law firm of Wolff & Samson. That firm was founded by Christie confidante David Samson, a former state attorney general who Christie tapped to head his transition team in 2009. In 2011 the governor appointed Samson to become the chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, where he remains today.

Here are two of the videos from Steve’s show

There can be no excuse here. PIGnocchio is using Sandy relief funds to blackmail Mayors to favor billionaires. This is a crime.

From Raw Story: A federal judicial panel revealed on Friday that a former federal judge’s email suggesting President Barack Obama’s mother had sex with a dog was one of hundreds showing “disdain for African Americans and Hispanics,” the Billings Gazette reported.

The March 2013 report from the Judicial Council of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals traced Richard Cebull’s proclivity for sending racist and sexist material back to 2008. Cebull, a former U.S. District Court Judge, was appointed by former President George W. Bush.

The probe discovered that Cebull violated the second and fifth canons of the judicial code of conduct barring judges from political activity, as he sent several emails “related to pending legislation or an issue that could come before the courts, such as immigration, gun control, civil rights, health care or environmental matters.” Other messages contained “inappropriate jokes relating to sexual orientation,” particular “disdain” for undocumented Latino immigrants, “certain faiths,” and “liberal political leaders.” Other emails focused on “sexual topics and were disparaging of women.”

This is what we get when we do not exercise our right to vote or waste our votes on third party Presidential candidates.

From Alternet: Food stamp recipients will have their grocery store humiliation compounded by having to  show a photo ID in order to buy food if Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) gets his way.

Under a bill Vitter introduced Wednesday , beneficiaries of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) would be denied their food if they are unable to show a photographic identification card at the register. For millions of low-income Americans who don’t have an official photo ID and can’t necessarily afford to buy one, Vitter’s bill would mean being cut off from their primary food source.

Diaper Dave strikes again.

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I’m writing for tomorrow and running late, because I overslept by several hours.  That’s a good thing.  I’m not going to push myself to return to full time blogging for a week, because I have to spend two nights in Salem next week for prison volunteer work and our annual organizational meeting for it.  While I’m slightly improved, I want make sure I don’t knock myself back down before then.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 2:55 (average 4:25).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From MSNBC: Hope fades for long-term unemployed

International readers, try Googling this in a day or two. I could not find it anywhere else. Jeff Merkley and Oregon are leading the way against Republican class warfare.

From NY Times: The Air Force said on Wednesday that 34 officers responsible for launching the nation’s nuclear missiles had been suspended, and their security clearances revoked, for cheating on monthly proficiency tests that assess their knowledge of how to operate the warheads.

At a news conference, Deborah Lee James, the secretary of the Air Force, said the officers, at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, either knew about or took part in texting answers to the routine monthly tests.

Eleven Air Force officers — including two accused in the Malmstrom cheating scandal, as well as one other nuclear missile officer — have also been the focus of suspicion in an illegal drugs investigation, defense officials said.

Although the Air Force has been plagued in recent years by scandals, the current revelations are particularly alarming because they involve America’s nuclear arsenal, where errors could be catastrophic.

One of Obama’s biggest mistakes has been to leave Bush’s Republican officials in most key positions involving military oversight. The military needs higher quality oversight, especially since the Bush Regime purged the competent officers who opposed his military fiascos, resulting in a military leadership culture in which extreme ideology trumps even minimal ability. Clearly it’s long past time to clean house.

From Right Wing Watch: Far-right columnist Erik Rush has come to believe that efforts to impeach and remove President Obama from office are unlikely to succeed, so he is now is calling on “military personnel” to “lend their support to an effort by Congress to remove the president through methods other than impeachment.”

In a WorldNetDaily column [World Nut Daily delinked] today, Rush doesn’t specify the extra-constitutional means he hopes to use to oust Obama, but he does regret that such a move is “less likely than it otherwise might have been given the widespread purge that has taken place within the military.”

Previously, Rush has called for Obama’s ouster “by any means necessary,” and repeatedly advocated executing the president.  [emphasis added”]

The Republican Party has an endless supply of seditionists ready to commit treason, and the party leadership refuses to denounce their efforts. Some Republican members of Congress even attend their functions.

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I’m writing for tomorrow and feeling both ill and exhausted, because I has to unpack and stow a grocery order.  In the old place, I would not have been capable of doing it.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 4:28 (average 5:25).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Daily Kos: New Yorker Cover = Bridge-gate Perfection

I could not have said it better!

From NY Times: F.B.I. investigators do not believe Internal Revenue Service officials committed crimes in the unusually heavy scrutiny of conservative groups that applied for tax-exempt status, a law enforcement official said Monday.

Prosecutors for the Justice Department who have been overseeing the case have not made a decision about whether to file charges against the officials — although that would seem unlikely given the F.B.I. investigators’ conclusion, according to the official, speaking anonymously because he could not talk on the record about a continuing investigation.

Despite an admission by the I.R.S. that it inappropriately targeted conservative groups, by searching for groups with the words “Tea Party” or “Patriots” in their names, many legal experts and law enforcement officials say they do not believe that the scrutiny broke the law. Some members of Congress had called for the Justice Department to investigate the tax-collecting agency. The Wall Street Journal was the first to report Monday that criminal charges were unlikely.

I.R.S. documents show the agency gave the same scrutiny to some liberal groups, using the key words “Progressive” and “Occupy.”

The IRS was just doing their job, in light of the Republican rule that misinterpreted the original law by substituting "predominantly" for "exclusively". No group engaging in any politically activity at all should qualify for the 501(c)(4) status that allows secret fundraising.  Although this always has been a non-issue, Republicans continue to offer the lie to deflect from their own REAL scandals.

From Think Progress: On Monday evening, House and Senate negotiators unveiled a bill that fills in the details of the budget agreement reached at the end of last year. If passed, the appropriations bill doles out specific funds to a huge variety of government programs. It now heads to the House and Senate, where it will likely be voted on Wednesday in the former and before the weekend by the latter.

A second round of sequestration cuts would have taken place if Congress hadn’t reached a deal and would have been even more damaging than the reductions in 2013, but instead lawmakers increased spending to partially undo the automatic cuts. But until yesterday’s bill, it wasn’t clear which programs would get complete relief and which would still have reduced budgets. Here’s how the negotiators handled some of the programs that suffered from sequestration last year…

Click through for the details. While there are things in this bill that progressives will not like, I think we won more than we lost in it. The Republicans did not get any of their poison pills like defunding ObamaCare or cuts to earned entitlements, and funding was restored for some of the neediest Americans, albeit not to the levels I want to see. It’s certainly a major improvement over the automatic cuts that the Republican sequester will mandate, if this does not pass.

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A High Holy Day in the Church of the Ellipsoid Orb!

I’m writing very early for tomorrow to sleep all I can before my Broncos’ worship in the Church of the Ellipsoid Orb with the evil Chargers.  I’m still feeling horrid.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:34 (average 4:16).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Religious Ecstasy:

Wooo Hooo!! 🙂

Short Takes:

From The New Yorker: At a hastily called press conference today, Chris Christie revealed that he only became aware that he was the governor of New Jersey in the past seventy-two hours.

“Unbeknownst to me, some people I thought I could trust were secretly working to elect me governor of this state,” a visibly stunned Christie told reporters. “I have acted swiftly and fired them all.”

While asserting that he had terminated all of the people who were involved in the scheme to elect him, he said that, if he finds additional conspirators, “I will deal with them accordingly.”

Christie struggled to explain how he remained in the dark about being governor, a position he has held since 2010: “I guess I’m just not much of a detail person. People think I’m a micromanager. I’m not. If a bunch of people are going behind my back and plotting to make me the governor, that’s not the kind of thing I pick up on.”

That’s only slightly less absurd than his real BS.

From Raw Story: The U.S. Supreme Court announced on Friday that it is preparing to hear a challenge to an Ohio law prohibiting candidates and political groups from making false statements in campaign advertising. According to Huffington Post, anti-choice group the Susan B. Anthony List maintains that Ohio’s False Statement Law stifles their right to free speech.

In short, the question before the Court is whether Republicans have the Constitutional right to lie in their campaign ads. This case could prove most interesting.

From Robert Reich: The U.S. economy created a measly 74,000 new jobs in December, and a smaller percentage of working-age Americans is now employed than at any time in the last three decades (before women surged into the workforce).

What does this have to do with the fact that median household incomes continue to drop (adjusted for inflation) and that 95 percent of all the economic gains since the recovery started have gone to the top 1 percent?

Plenty. Businesses won’t create new jobs without enough customers. But most Americans no longer have enough purchasing power to fuel that job growth.

That’s why it’s so important to (1) raise the minimum wage at least to its inflation-adjusted value 40 years ago — which would be well over $10 an hour, (2) extend unemployment benefits to the jobless, (3) launch a major jobs program to rebuild the nation’s crumbling infrastructure, (4) expand Medicaid to the near-poor, (5) enable low-wage workers to unionize, (6) rehire all the teachers, social workers, police, and other public service employees who were laid off in the recession, (7) exempt the first $20,000 of income from Social Security payroll taxes and make up the difference by removing the cap on income subject to the tax.

I fully support all seven of Reich’s proposals.

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