GOP Reps Just Love to Hate

 Posted by at 11:28 am  Politics
Jul 102015
 

I have to admit that I have seen some decent behavior from some SC Republicans, because they were so shamed at having been caught turning a blind eye to the hatred of their rabid base, to do otherwise would be screaming their own guilt from the rooftops.  But as they righted a long overdue wrong, Congressional Republicans demonstrated that they still just love to hate.

0710GOPDixie[R]epublicans in Congress stumbled into the Confederate flag debate Thursday after Southern lawmakers protested a proposal to put new restrictions on displaying the banner on federal parklands, launching the party into a conversation many leaders would have preferred to avoid.

The uproar in the House rippled across Washington after an amendment banning Confederate flags — sponsored by a California Democrat, Rep. Jared Huffman — was attached [without Republican objection at the time] to an otherwise routine budget bill making its way through Congress.

Southern Republicans protested the Californian’s move and threatened to pull their support for the broader $30-billion bill, which funds the Interior Department and other related federal agencies, including the national parks.

House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield) tried to salvage the situation by putting forward a compromise by another Californian, the Interior Committee’s chairman, Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Corona).

But the compromise backfired and was seen as too weak by Democrats, who accused the GOP of protecting what many view as a racist Southern symbol of slavery…

Inserted from <LA Times>

Rachel Maddow covered the story very well.

Be advised that Agent Orange cannot have an idea get "firm in his head." He’s a limp Boehner. The racism that the Republican Party leadership routinely practices is not overt. It’s dog-whistle racism. Many Republican politicians, who are not overtly racist themselves, go along, because the Republican base is overtly racist, because the party adopted the Southern Strategy.  In, SC the grace displayed by the AME families shamed several Republican politicians into putting away their dog whistles, at least temporarily, because Republican hatred put them to shame.  But the party as a whole has not changed one iota.

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Open Thread–7/10/2015

 Posted by at 11:28 am  Open Thread, Personal, Politics
Jul 102015
 

I can’t express how happy I am to have a wide open window and my A/C set on fan.  It will take a couple days for the building to bleed off the heat.  Old masonry structures are like that.  TGIF!!

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 2:39 (average 4:22).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Fantasy Football Recruiting:

We may still need one new player for Lefty Blog Friends, our fantasy football league.  Viv and her Hillbilly Lefties are now onboard. We may have found our last player. For more information, click here.

Short Takes:

From Daily Kos: Yep, that’s what Jeb Bush said in a press interview with New Hampshire’s Union Leader. Unbelievable. People already WORK LONG HOURS, and we’re actually one of the most productive countries in that we work longer than any other industrialized nation in the entire world. Here’s the context in which Jeb Bush said his damning quote:

“My aspiration for the country and I believe we can achieve it, is 4 percent growth as far as the eye can see. Which means we have to be a lot more productive, workforce participation has to rise from its all-time modern lows. It means that people need to work longer hours and, through their productivity, gain more income for their families. That’s the only way we’re going to get out of this rut that we’re in.”

Call me crazy, but when we’re working up to 50 hours a week, and in many cases, more hours than that, and we’re not getting paid well in doing the work we do. Many people work long hours at the minimum wage level, and Americans work longer hours just to make the ends meet these days. The part-timers want to work full hours, but they can’t find other work, so they don’t often make ends meet without the assistance of government programs.

These are the facts, Jeb Bush, we already work damn hard, and we’re entitled to the right wages for our work. We should NOT be underpaid, we should NOT have our hours cut, we should NOT have our benefits cut so we work longer, and we should NOT be spending so much damn time at the office just to make ends meet.

Strike Three backtracked and said he was only referring to underemployed part time workers. However, the context in which he made the statement was as the means by which he intended to achieve economic growth of 4%/year. Increasing work for the underemployed could not possibly achieve even 1% growth, so either he’s lying about making YOU work more for less, and/or his entire economic plan is a lie. In my opinion, he’s lying about BOTH. Why? He a Republican, and he’s a Bush.

From Daily Kos:

Former President George W. Bush charged $100,000 to speak at a charity fundraiser for U.S. military veterans severely wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan, and former First Lady Laura Bush collected $50,000 to appear a year earlier, officials of the Texas-based Helping a Hero charity confirmed to ABC News.

And…

The former President was also provided with a private jet to travel to Houston at a cost of $20,000, the officials said.

It’s obscene that GW ChickenHawk is not donating his time to help the heroes that he maimed by using them as cannon fodder in his criminal war.

From Raw Story: [T]he anti-LGBT owners of an Oregon bakery were not fined for refusing to sell a wedding cake to a same-sex couple – they were ordered to pay $135,000 in damages for intentionally causing their would-be customers emotional distress.

The case has attracted widespread media attention since the couple first filed their complaint in January 2013, and that is largely through the efforts of Aaron and Melissa Klein, the owners of Sweet Cakes by Melissa.

After the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries handed down the order last week, Aaron Klein claimed the ruling was an example of the “persecution of Christians” in the U.S.

However, the ruling shows the bakery owners had made Laurel and Rachel Bowman-Cryer the victims of persecution and makes clear the payment was compensation for damages and not a fine or civil penalty.

I could agree that $135,000 would be a bit excessive as a fine, but the "Sweet Cakes" pseudo-Christian Republicans went beyond mere refusal of service. They published the lesbian couple’s address to make them a target for other gay-hating Republicans. I was targeted at home by peace-hating Republicans in 2003, so I know that $135,000 is not enough!

Cartoon:

0710Cartoon

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Republicans Plan to Defy EPA

 Posted by at 11:30 am  Politics
Jul 092015
 

I trust you are aware that the Environmental Protection Agency is implementing new rules to cut carbon emissions, as they are legally empowered to do.  Several Republican governors have stated that will employ Republicans’ favorite the deal with laws they don’t like.  They plan to break the law.

0709ClimateRulesAt least five Republican governors, including two presidential hopefuls — Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana — have indicated they may defy new federal rules that are part of President Obama’s climate change agenda. The rules — which are meant to reduce the nation’s carbon emissions and speed the transition to renewable energy and a low-carbon economy — require existing power plants to reduce their carbon emissions 30 percent by 2030 (from 2005 levels). This goal is to be achieved by federally-enforceable state plans submitted to the EPA.

The gubernatorial response follows Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell’s campaign, launched earlier this year, to get state governors to refuse to carry out the new regulations, which are slated to be finalized this summer.

In a March letter [Bought Bitch delinked] to the nation’s governors, Sen. McConnell issued a warning:

[S]ubmitting a plan exposes states to the real danger— allowing the EPA to wrest control of a state’s energy policy if they or any other federal agency becomes dissatisfied with a state’s progress in reaching federal emissions goals. As both the EPA and other environmental groups have noted, a state plan must be “federally enforceable.” The meaning of this language is clear: as the EPA sees it, a state-issued plan would give the agency broad new authority to control that state’s energy future — not to mention the ability to place the blame for future consequences squarely on the state itself.

…

Inserted from <Alternet>

Here’s a description of the plan, as it was explained over a year ago.

I can only hope the the EPA follows through by referring  The Fartfuhrer of Fitzwalkerstan, Squeaky Bobby, and the rest to DOJ for criminal indictments.

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Open Thread–7/9/2015

 Posted by at 11:29 am  Open Thread, Personal, Plus, Politics
Jul 092015
 

I have some good news today that will be better news tomorrow.  Today is forecast to be the last day of the longest and worst heat wave I remember in  36 years as an Oregonian.  Friday’s high is forecast at 82° and Saturday’s at 77°!  It’s taken much too long to end.

Care2 Cares:

Most of you know that I share the articles I post here at Care2.  One of their features are Butterfly Credits that you get for various activities.  You can then spend these planting trees, offsetting carbon, helping animals and other socially conscious things.  Because I had been there over 100 days in a row, I was getting 100 credits a day, just for showing up.  I don’t think I’ve missed a day since I went to the hospital in 2013… until Tuesday, when I was so sick.  That reset my daily credits to 1, requiring me to work my way back up.  I mentioned this in the card I sent friends yesterday.  Care2Support left the following comment on my profile:

Hey there, cool cat!  I’ll get your Butterfly Rewards Totals and Daily Streak back online for you today.  Hope you are doing well my friend!!

Thank You!  I am most grateful.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:14 (average 4:49).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Fantasy Football Recruiting:

We still need one or two new player for Lefty Blog Friends, our fantasy football league.  Viv ans her Hillbilly Lefties are now onboard. How about you?  For more information, click here.

Short Takes:

From Daily Kos:

According to Fuel Fix, Shell has discovered a ballast hole leak in the hull of their 22 year old icebreaker, the MSV Fennica.

The 22-year-old icebreaker has since returned to the port in Dutch Harbor and is being examined by marine experts, but it is uncertain how quickly the breach in its hull can be repaired and whether this will delay Shell’s hopes to begin drilling an oil well in the Chukchi Sea later this month.

The Fennica is just one of the 29 vessels in Shell’s Arctic fleet, which includes another icebreaker, the MSV Nordica, and at least two other anchor handlers tasked with helping to keep ice away from the company’s drilling site. But Shell’s contracted Fennica is unique in that it is carrying a critical piece of the company’s Arctic containment system: a capping stack designed to fit on top of a damaged well in case of a blowout or other emergency.

Shell spokesman Curtis Smith said the company does not believe the Fennica damage will delay the company’s planned Chukchi Sea operations.

“Any impact to our season will ultimately depend on the extent of the damage,” Smith said.

This is not good news for Shell. They had hoped that with the Obama Administration approving their permits to drill for oil in the Chukchi Sea they would finally be able to destroy the arctic ecosystem in order to make a buck for their shareholders. But problems have somewhat delayed their mission in the Arctic.

While I would certainly not want any fatalities, I’m sorry the damn thing didn’t sink!

From NY Times: Medicare, the federal program that insures 55 million older and disabled Americans, announced plans on Wednesday to reimburse doctors for conversations with patients about whether and how they would want to be kept alive if they became too sick to speak for themselves.

The proposal would settle a debate that raged before the passage of the Affordable Care Act, when Sarah Palin labeled a similar plan as tantamount to setting up “death panels” that could cut off care for the sick. The new plan is expected to be approved and to take effect in January, although it will be open to public comment for 60 days.

This is a good and necessary part of medical care. Patients will get to decide for themselves what heroic measures should be taken under what circumstances, with explanation of the terminology by their own doctors. When the death panel cries come from Republicans, as they surely will, remember one thing. The proposal to include this service originally came from a Republican, before they all became drunk on InsaniTEA.

From Alternet: A video of two gay men in Morehead, Kentucky calling the police after being refused a marriage license by Rowan County went viral last night, mounting over 327,000 views in less that a day.

 

It takes about 7 minutes before the action starts. You might want to jump ahead to that point.Denting them the license was illegal. The complete disrespect these Republicans showed while doing so is intolerable.

Cartoon:

0709Cartoon

I first posted this cartoon four years ago today.  It saddens me that it is still valid.\

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Obama Targets Segregation

 Posted by at 8:42 am  Politics
Jul 082015
 

When we think of segregation, we usually think of the South, where Republicans openly oppose anything that might taint what they consider the purity of the white race.  Many Americans do not realize that the problem is as bad in the north.  The law is frequently unenforced.  Barack Obama is working to change that.

0708projectWhen the Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968, it barred the outright racial discrimination that was then routine. It also required the government to go one step further — to actively dismantle segregation and foster integration in its place — a mandate that for decades has been largely forgotten, neglected and unenforced.

Now, on Wednesday, the Obama administration will announce long-awaited rules designed to repair the law’s unfulfilled promise and promote the kind of racially integrated neighborhoods that have long eluded deeply segregated cities like Chicago and Baltimore. The new rules, a top demand of civil-rights groups, will require cities and towns all over the country to scrutinize their housing patterns for racial bias and to publicly report, every three to five years, the results. Communities will also have to set goals, which will be tracked over time, for how they will further reduce segregation.

“This is the most serious effort that HUD has ever undertaken to do that,” says Julian Castro, the secretary of the department of Housing and Urban Development, who will announce the new rules in Chicago on Wednesday. “I believe that it’s historic.”

Officials insist that they want to work with and not punish communities where segregation exists. But the new reports will make it harder to conceal when communities consistently flout the law. And in the most flagrant cases, HUD holds out the possibility of withholding a portion of the billions of dollars of federal funding it hands out each year… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Washington Post>

Click through for more details.  I applaud this move and consider it long past due.

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Open Thread–7/8/2015

 Posted by at 8:41 am  Open Thread, Personal, Politics
Jul 082015
 

On Monday afternoon, I started to experience severe congestion.  I think I may have continued to treat myself with Ipratropium Bromide/Albuterol Sulfate longer than I needed to and dried myself out.  For over 24 hours, I was unable to cough up the junk that collects in my chest, and I could not lie down without severe coughing, so I could not sleep.  I called my helper friend.  She came, did the most hated task, helped me get to the shower, fed me and applied hot compresses to my chest and back.  I thought about going to the emergency room, but decided not to, because I was not actually running a fever and my pulse oximeter read 95%, so I knew my lungs were not seriously compromised, as they would be if I had pneumonia.  I was finally able to cough up the gunk at around 3 PM yesterday, and I slept ten out of the next twelve hours.  I’m still feeling week and tired.  Pardon my brevity.

Jig Zone Puzzles:

Yesterday’s took me 3:44 (average 5:19).  To do it, click here.  Today’s took me 3:19 (average 4:44).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Fantasy Football Recruiting:

We still need one or two new player for Lefty Blog Friends, our fantasy football league.  Viv and her Hillbilly Lefties are now onboard. How about you?  For more information, click here.

Short Takes:

From Alternet: John Oliver was off for the weekend of Fourth of July, or the “annual American tradition of reminding the sky who runs shit,” as the “Last Week Tonight” host more aptly called it. But that didn’t stop him from uploading a brief — emphasis on brief, because we’ll come back to that — web exclusive in the show’s absence.

It’s not uncommon for HBO to upload web exclusives to tide viewers over until the following week. What is uncommon: Oliver decided to cover 15 topics (“15 shallow dives”) in one minute instead of his usual 15-minute deep-dive.

 

Pure entertainment and a welcome break.

From Daily Kos: At the Washington Post, Prof. James Loewen writes that the reason so many people believe false things about the Civil War and the Confederacy is because many of our textbooks teach those wrong things to this day.

Teaching or implying that the Confederate states seceded for states’ rights is not accurate history. It is white, Confederate-apologist history. It bends — even breaks — the facts of what happened. Like other U.S. history textbooks, “Journey” needs to be de-Confederatized. So does the history test we give to immigrants who want to become U.S. citizens. Item 74 asks, “Name one problem that led to the Civil War.” It then gives three acceptable answers: “slavery, economic reasons, and states’ rights.” If by “economic reasons” it means issues about tariffs and taxes, which most people infer, then two of its three “correct answers” are wrong! No other question on this 100-item test has more than one “right” answer. The reason is not because the history is unclear, but because neo-Confederates still wielded considerable influence in our culture and our Congress until quite recently, when a mass of politicians rushed to declare the Confederate flag unsuitable for display on government grounds.

Loewen also reiterates a point that cannot be made often enough: Modern notions that the Civil War was fought over ephemeral notions of "states’ rights" or other high-minded considerations, as opposed to an unapologetic battle for the right to keep human slaves, is a product of segregationist forces in the civil rights era. It’s hardly a coincidence that so many memorials of the war date conspicuously to the days of George Wallace, rather than Jefferson Davis.

We study history to learn from the past and avoid making the same mistakes. Republicans distort history, because they know they are making the same mistakes, don’t care, and want to keep others from knowing.

From NY Times: From environmental and work force regulations to health care and contraception, congressional Republicans are using spending bills to try to dismantle President Obama’s policies, setting up a fiscal feud this fall that could lead to a government shutdown…

…The House and Senate appropriations committees are churning out annual spending bills, dropping the bipartisanship that has long characterized the committees. The bills adhere to strict overall spending limits imposed in 2011 that Mr. Obama has already said he will not accept.

Here we go again. Am I the only one reminded of a broken record?

Cartoon:

0708Cartoon

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13 Facts Republicans Hate

 Posted by at 12:55 pm  Politics
Jul 062015
 

The only way the Republican Reich has managed to stay competitive is by convincing uninformed, gullible fools that their bogus attempt to redefine reality is valid.  They get lots of help with this from the media.  The most powerful weapon to use against this Republican web of lies is a fact.  I found and article with thirteen that Republicans hate:

0706eagle

1. Conservatives opposed the Founding Fathers, the American Revolution and a lot of other righteous stuff as well.

By definition a conservative is one who wishes to preserve and/or restore traditional values and institutions, i.e. to “conserve” the established order. No surprise then that 18th century American conservatives wanted no part of breaking away from the British Empire and the comforting bonds of monarchical government. Those anti-revolutionary conservatives were called Tories, the name still used for the conservative party in England. The Founding Fathers? As radically left-wing as they came in the 1770s. The Boston Tea Party? The "Occupy Wall Street" of its day.

Some of the other "traditional" values supported by conservatives over the course of American history have included slavery (remember that the Republican Party was on the liberal fringe in 1860), religious persecution, the subjugation of women and minorities, obstacles to immigration, voter suppression, prohibition and segregation.  Conservatives started off on the wrong side of American history, and that’s where they’ve been ever since.

2. The United States is not a Christian nation, and the Bible is not the cornerstone of our law.

Don’t take my word for it. Let these Founding Fathers speak for themselves:

John Adams: “The government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.” (Treaty of Tripoli, 1797)

Thomas Jefferson: “Christianity neither is, nor ever was, a part of the common law.” (Letter to Dr. Thomas Cooper, February 10, 1814)

James Madison: “The civil government … functions with complete success … by the total separation of the Church from the State.” (Writings, 8:432, 1819)

George Washington: “If I could conceive that the general government might ever be so administered as to render the liberty of conscience insecure, I beg you will be persuaded, that no one would be more zealous than myself to establish effectual barriers against the horrors of spiritual tyranny, and every species of religious persecution.” (Letter to the United Baptist Chamber of Virginia, May 1789)

You can find a multitude of similar quotes from these men and most others who signed the Declaration of Independence and/or formulated the United States Constitution. These are hardly the words of men who believed that America should be a Christian nation governed by the Bible, as a disturbing fundamentalist trend today would have it be… [emphasis original]

Inserted from <Daily Kos>

I shared the first two. Click through for the other eleven.

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