Politics Plus

Have you ever felt so tired that you could not sleep?  That was me yesterday.  Nevertheless, I have three articles for you.  I’m current with replies, and assuming I can sleep today, will be back tomorrow.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:57 (average 4:25).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From MoveOn: The NRA Is On Thin Ice, And Here's How You Can Tell

Sadly, telling a Congress Critter (no relation) not to take money is like telling a bear not to shit in the woods.

From NY Times: House Republicans, shrugging off rising pressure from President Obama, are resolutely opposing new tax increases to head off $85 billion in across-the-board spending reductions, all but ensuring the cuts will go into force March 1 and probably remain in place for months, if not longer.\Despite new calls from the White House on Wednesday to enact a combination of tax increases and cuts to postpone the so-called sequester, the House is moving forward on a legislative agenda that assumes deep and arbitrary cuts to defense and domestic programs — once considered unthinkable — will remain in place through the end of the year.

Republicans claim to want a 'balanced' solution between tax increases and spending cuts. They say we have already enacted the tax increases. However, they want more spending cuts right now that the level of the recent tax increases. Further more, for the last two years, we have had nothing but spending cuts. Thus the Republican notion of 'balanced' is an elephant on one of a teeter-totter, and an ant on the other.

From MSNBC: Junk in the trunk

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

Because they could not survive as just the party of the rich, the Republican Party sowed the wind. They opened their arms and welcomed extremists of all sorts, no matter how violent, no matter how hateful, no matter how bigoted, and no matter how well suited for a tinfoil hat. Now they are reaping the whirlwind, because the miscreants they sought to use and control have become the party's base, and they are nominating, and in many cases, electing their own instead of the establishment Republicans. Furthermore. Those establishment Republicans who remain are doing so only as long as they do the will of their rabid base. In my opinion, the party cannot survive in the long term, unless they abandon both their base and their billionaires and start fresh, a process that would put them out of power for several election cycles.

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Yesterday my COPD was much better, but I still could not get the sleep I needed.  I missed most of my daytime sleep listening to issues for a former prisoner, and watching the special and two wrong numbers messed up my evening sleep.  I still have this and one other article for you.  I’m current with replies.  I should be back to normal tomorrow.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 4:07 (average 4:32).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From MoveOn: Jon Stewart Paraphrases Marco Rubio: ‘Medicare Helps MY Mom, But F _ _ k You’

Where was the cheese when he turned water into whine? It’s also interesting to note that he is one of the people he describes as "takers".

From CNN: The shooting spree at Sandy Hook Elementary School may have been motivated by a desire by Adam Lanza to outdo Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian man who killed 77 people in July 2011, law enforcement sources told CBS Evening News.

And if you remember, Breivik had Koch Brothers financing and support to establish Tea Party in Norway, so Lanza was copying a Teabagger.

From Raw Story: ABC News host Jonathan Karl on Sunday suggested that Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) was guilty of hypocrisy because he slammed President Barack Obama for the automatic spending cuts in the so-called sequester — even though congressman had personally praised it in the past.

“Don’t forget it was the president who proposed the sequester, it’s the president who designed the sequester,” Ryan told Karl, adding that he had concluded that Congress was not going to be able to avoid the automatic cuts because Democrats refused to accept Republicans’ proposal for “smarter cuts in other area of government.”

“Congressman, I’ve heard you say this, and this has been a talking point for Republicans for a long time,” Karl interrupted. “But let’s look at your own words, what you said right after the law putting this in place was passed in August of 2011. These are your words. You said, ‘What conservatives like me have been fighting for for years are statutory caps on spending, literally legal caps in law that says government agencies cannot spend over a set amount of money and if they breach that amount across the board sequester comes in to cut that spending. You can’t turn it out without a supermajority. We got that into law.’”

As much as Lyin’ Ryan and the Republican Party try to blame the sequester on Obama, the truth is that Republicans insisted on it as a guarantee of spending cuts, before they would stop their terrorist blackmail of America’s good faith and credit that had already caused the devaluation of the US credit rating.

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He was subsequently convicted and sentenced to over 24 years in prison.

Yesterday my COPD was severe, and it kept me from getting the sleep I need.  Therefore I am limiting my blogging today to this Open Thread.  I’m current with replies.  I should be back in the saddle tomorrow.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Yesterday’s took me 4:06 (average 5:06).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From MoveOn: The 4 Words Our President Spoke That Resonate Now More Than Ever

Republicans do not want votes on gun control. They want to kill it by preventing it from coming to the floor, so that they do not create a record of their support for the gun industry and their stance against America.

From NECN: On Saturday, Congressman Ed Markey was at a packed event in Beverly, Mass., while Congressman Stephen Lynch was out in the central part of the state.

Both men are vying to win the Democratic primary leading up to the special election to fill Massachusetts’ U.S. Senate seat vacated by now Secretary of State John Kerry.

A recent poll by public radio station WBUR showed Markey beating Lynch by just seven points among likely Democratic voters – a closer margin than many might expect, since Markey has been in the Congress since 1975.

Markey has asked for a total of six Debates, but at deal has not been reached at this point.

The teachers union has endorsed Markey, and all agree that unions will be important voting blocks.

The primary will decide the seat, because every known Republican has said ‘Buk-buk-buk-buk!’. I like Markey and consider Lynch a likely DINO.

From Americans United: In his Republican response to the State of the Union this week, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) touted “school choice,” a euphemism for vouchers.

“We need to give all parents, especially the parents of children with special needs, the opportunity to send their children to the school of their choice,” Rubio said.

The next day, the Florida senator rolled out his “Educational Opportunities Act,” a neo-voucher bill that lets corporations and individuals donate money to “scholarship granting organizations” that pay for tuition at private schools. The donors get a dollar-for-dollar tax credit – for corporations up to $100,000 and for individuals up to $4,500 – and private schools, most of them religious, get a windfall of new money.

Here’s how this would work. Parents make a donation to an organization who then issues a scholarship to their own kids. The parents then get a 100% tax credit for what amounts to their kids’ tuition. In short, taxpayers would finance their kids’ indoctrination in Republican Supply-side pseudo-Christianity. It’s funny that Rubio, hypocrite that he is,  isn’t concerned with the millions this program would add to the deficit. He probably plans to blame Obama.

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But Republicans seem to gave forgotten about this.

If feels good to have a full set of articles today.  I’m current with replies.  Tomorrow appears routine.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:45 (average 4:55).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From MoveOn: If Corporations Were Honest: How Exxon Feels About Our Children

I don’t think Exxon hates them, per se. It’s more that, in their lust for profit, human suffering is not important enough to be considered. It is sad that they own a political party.

From LA Times: Faced with regular barrages of gunfire, officers confronting suspected killer Christopher Dorner lobbed incendiary tear gas into the cabin where Dorner allegedly was holed up, said law enforcement officials with knowledge of the situation.

The cabin caught on fire and authorities believe Dorner was burned inside. [now confirmed]

I hate to say this, but it’s hard to think of many high publicity, barricaded fugitives that were not burned out by authorities, beginning with Black Panthers in the 1960s. Incendiary tear gas should not be used.

From NY Times: Mr. Rubio is a rising star, to such an extent that Time magazine put him on its cover, calling him “The Republican Savior.” What we learned Tuesday, however, was that zombie economic ideas have eaten his brain.

In case you’re wondering, a zombie idea is a proposition that has been thoroughly refuted by analysis and evidence, and should be dead — but won’t stay dead because it serves a political purpose, appeals to prejudices, or both. The classic zombie idea in U.S. political discourse is the notion that tax cuts for the wealthy pay for themselves, but there are many more. And, as I said, when it comes to economics it appears that Mr. Rubio’s mind is zombie-infested.

Paul Krugman could not be more spot-on. The ‘Republican Savior’ demonstrated that he could not even pass Bottle Feeding 101.

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