Politics Plus

I’m writing early again for Day 22, and the temperature at my desk has actually dropped to 78°.  I even put on clothing!  Sadly, the temperature is slated to start going back up again today. 🙁

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 4:12 (average 6:10).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Fantasy Football:

The live draft for our fantasy football league is at 11AM PDT (2PM EDT) on  Sunday July 28.  We still NEED  two more players in our lefty league.  For more info, click here.  Let me know right away, please.

Short Takes:

From PR Watch: Wall Street billionaire Pete Peterson’s "astroturf supergroup," the Campaign to Fix the Debt, won’t have much to celebrate this Independence Day weekend after missing its goal of achieving a "Grand Bargain" on austerity by July 4, 2013.

The Center for Media and Democracy exposed the Campaign to Fix the Debt as the most hypocritical corporate PR campaign in decades. The list of corporate CEOs pushing for a "Grand Bargain" on the deficit include some of the worst tax dodgers in the nation — such as GE and Honeywell — who are secretly using Fix the Debt to push for even more tax cuts. One goal is the implementation of a “territorial tax system” that would exempt certain firms from U.S. taxation of their offshore profits.

Obama knew that Republicans would never accept a plan that required 1% vulture capitalists t6o give back a small portion of the ill gotten gains they received from Republicans transferring wealth to them from the poor and middle classes. Nevertheless he continued to insist in just that, despite the mistaken belief on the left that he was selling us out. He knew, as I said repeatedly at the time, that he would never have to deliver on cuts to the big three in return for a grand bargain.

From Crooks and Liars:

American Prospect reporter Jamelle Bouie received a toxic email from a typical Tea Party conservative reacting to an article Bouie wrote about the fatigue associated with systemic racism. Bouie’s troll cited statistics about how the welfare state had forced Jamelle’s "people" into more illegitimate births and posed false comparisons to prove white supremacy. Among other things, the writer asked this:

You are surprised that GOP conservatives don’t turn toward your viewpoint, yet can you say your own people are not neck deep in family and academic failure over the past few decades?

Bouie decided to go beyond a bit of Twitter mockery and try to have a real conversation with the guy. He got his telephone number from the email address on the email, and called him. What ensued was about 30 minutes of the guy talking at him instead of with him, but it seems to have been enlightening.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I think the term Chris sought was white nationalism. While the TheoCon and InsaniTEA wings of the Republican Party may not care about the NeoCon, CorporaCon and PlutoCon wings, the continue to goose-step behind their 1% agenda, because the 1% are footing the bill to implement the pseudo-Christian and racist legislation TheoCons and Tea Baggers want.

From Daily Kos: The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday that, seasonally adjusted, the private sector added 202,000 new jobs in June while government shed 7,000. The official unemployment rate remained steady at 7.6 percent.  The private sector has now added more jobs than it has lost for 39 consecutive months.

A net gain of less than 200,000 jobs is still insufficient for robust jobs growth, and underlies, once again, that during a slowly recovering economy is the wrong time to cut public sector jobs. Obama and the Democrats have tried to implement policies that would foster more robust jobs growth, but Republicans have sabotaged them.

Cartoon:

I’m writing early for day 20, and the inside temperature has finally dropped below 80°.  I’m not sufficiently recovered to take on the Monthly Report, but I do have more articles today.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me  3:22 (average 5:07).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Alternet: A San Diego protester who faced over a decade in jail for drawing anti-bank slogans in chalk was acquitted yesterday by a jury. The victory for 40-year-old Jeff Olson, who was inspired by Occupy Wall Street, came despite the prosecutor’s zeal for imposing a heavy jail sentence on him for the misdemeanor charges.

He was prosecuted for drawing chalk slogans outside Bank of America locations from April to August 2012 that read, “Shame on B of A” and “No thanks big banks.” He also drew a picture of an octopus reaching for dollar bills.

Bank of America had contacted the city’s attorney to urge the prosecution.

Olson faced 13 years in jail for drawing the chalk slogan, and also faced the possibility of a $13,000 fine–an unusually harsh punishment for graffiti. But the jury was convinced of Olson’s innocence–and agreed with the San Diego mayor, who called the prosecution “stupid.” Olson was acquitted despite the fact that his lawyers were hamstrung by the judge’s decision not to allow them to argue that Olson’s actions were constitutionally protected.

Right on, Jeff Olson!! The prosecution was stupid, and the judge had his head so far up his butt that he could see the bottom of his tonsils. The jury cared more about the Constitution than the fascist five Injustices of SCROTUS!

From Crooks and Liars: AMERICABlog’s Gaius Publius reminds us the demolition of public education is not a byproduct of a declining economy — it’s something the elite have wanted to do for a long time:

In our Deadlines post — “America faces more than a dozen deadlines, all caused by billionaires and wealth transfer“— we noted that public education was in a crisis of privatization from which it may never recover (some editing and added emphasis below):

Number 15 on the list is “Destruction of public education.” Does that really have an end-point? If so, what does it look like? Extrapolate the charter-school / “for-profit school funded with public money” process — which is, again, both uni-directional and accelerating — to its end-point and you get a two-tiered school system with a sloppy middle.One tier is an aging, decrepit, under-funded, useless-for-education factory-school system for the middle and lower classes (most of the country). The other tier has bright shiny (private) charter schools for the billionaires and their millionaire administrators and friends.

A good example of this bifurcation is the charter school that Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel sends his children to, in which music and the arts are taught, which he supports at the same time he’s destroying public school funding for the poor and middle class of his own city.

…

I can see the effects of the decay already. When I was a kid, I learned how to think in school. Today is about passing a test and what to think, and the product is often functionally illiterate. Kudos to the many teachers fighting to hold the line against Republicans and sold-out Corporate Democrats like Rahmbo.

From Think Progress: The world experienced unprecedented high-impact climate extremes during the 2001-2010 decade, which was the warmest since the start of modern measurements in 1850 and continued an extended period of pronounced global warming. More national temperature records were reported broken than in any previous decade, according to a new report by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO News Release).

A picture is worth a thousand words.

Cartoon:

The low temperature at my desk last night was 84°.  At 11:45 AM, it is now 96°.  The Weather Service Dangerous Heat Advisory has been extended until Tuesday 9 PM.  I have collected the data for a Monthly Report, but am too wrung out to write it, so this will be tomorrow’s only article.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 2:49 (average 4:32).  To do it. click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From NY Times: Is life too easy for the unemployed? You may not think so, and I certainly don’t think so. But that, remarkably, is what many and perhaps most Republicans believe. And they’re acting on that belief: there’s a nationwide movement under way to punish the unemployed, based on the proposition that we can cure unemployment by making the jobless even more miserable.

Consider, for example, the case of North Carolina. The state was hit hard by the Great Recession, and its unemployment rate, at 8.8 percent, is among the highest in the nation, higher than in long-suffering California or Michigan. As is the case everywhere, many of the jobless have been out of work for six months or more, thanks to a national environment in which there are three times as many people seeking work as there are job openings.

Nonetheless, the state’s government has just sharply cut aid to the unemployed. In fact, the Republicans controlling that government were so eager to cut off aid that they didn’t just reduce the duration of benefits; they also reduced the average weekly benefit, making the state ineligible for about $700 million in federal aid to the long-term unemployed.

As usual, Paul Krugman could not be more spot-on.

From Alternet: A Belgian diplomat told the New York Post [Murdock delinked] that he and his family were kicked out of the Metropolis Country Club in White Plains, New York after his wife was breast-feeding their child. He said they were treated like “terrorists.”

36-year-old Tom Neijens, the first secretary of the Belgium Mission to the UN, went to the country club in June with his wife, 34-year-old Roseline Remans. They arrived for lunch, even though they weren’t members of the club. They were nonetheless granted permission to dine there.

But when Remans began to breast-feed her her daughter Luka, the trouble began. A female manager allegedly came up to the family and reportedly said, “Please leave immediately, you are disturbing the members.” Remans was told to finish breastfeeding in the bathroom.

Dang! If Republicans are so offended by breasts, than why do they keep watching the low-cut blondes at Faux Noise? Exploitation must make breasts OK for them.

From Crooks and Liars: According to troglodyte Heritage Foundation President and former Sen. Jim DeMint, lots of women are just thrilled to be forced to have an ultrasound prior to being allowed to have an abortion. And in wingnut world, they’re totally free as well. What a deal! What woman would want to pass that up?

Apparently you’re not allowed to have a discussion on cable television about either gay marriage or abortion without letting the likes of right-wing hate mongers like DeMint and his buddy, con-artist Ralph Reed come on the air and lie to the viewers as they did here.

The deaths to which DeMint refers are not happening now, but will if Republicans are allowed to return women to the coat hanger days. DeMint is also lying that they are free. This is like telling black people that taking away their right to vote is doing them a favor.

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