I’m about to leave to get the results of my MRI, so I’ll put in the Puzzle and the Cartoon now to save me time later and finish this when I return.
I’m back. The MRI showed deterioration in my rotator cup, so my doctor is referring me to an osteopath to determine what treatment I need. It was a very long day and I’m shot. Hugs!
Jig Zone Puzzle:
Today’s took me 3:33 (average 4:40). To do it, click here. How did you do?
Cartoon:
The class warfare perpetrated by the 0.1% and their representatives, the Republican Party, has been a central theme of the 2016 campaign, even as it’s just getting started. Rather than deny that it exists, the Republican party is trying to redefine it. To that end, they are employing the Republican Reichsministry of propaganda, Faux Noise. Their spin is that Democrats are committing class warfare against poor, defenseless billionaires.
Remember all that wailing and gnashing of teeth we’ve seen from Faux "news" in recent weeks over President Obama rightfully calling them out for routinely demonizing those living in poverty and calling them a bunch of lazy moochers that don’t want to work?
It seems that Fox’s Neil Cavuto was shameless enough to complain about President Obama over the weekend on his Saturday show, and then turn right around on his weekday show and allow Ben Stein to give Jon Stewart, this blog, and Media Matters some more material for our archives of Fox and their poor-shaming.
Cavuto started out the segment with Stein with another of their Fox "news" ALERTS saying Warning, warning!!!! Hillary Clinton said the deck is stacked for the rich, and so did Bernie Sanders… so OMG!!!!! Hillary is a dirty f**kig hippie Socialist now!!! The horror!!
Which is what Neil Cavuto and his buddy Ben Stein believes is "class warfare" against those poor downtrodden rich people…
Inserted from <Crooks and Liars>
Here’s the video. Barf Bag Alert!!
They are presenting a false choice. Their alternatives are letting the deserving rich keep what they earned, or squandering it on undeserving masses who will just waste it.
The truth is that that most of the very rich who actually earned their money appreciate that they did so on the shoulders of the entire nation and recognize that their continued success requires a strong middle class. Sadly, they are few, and most wealth is concentrated in the hands of people who inherited it. Since they depend on the government to provide them favorable treatment that transfers even more wealth from the poor and middle classes to them, they are the true underserving welfare recipients now. On the other hand, Democrats want to spend money on projects like infrastructure, education and research. These are designed to grow the entire economy for everyone, rich and poor alike, making America a place where both entrepreneurs can succeed, and none need suffer from hunger.
Of course I’m still buried with work to do. I’m waiting for Store to Door to deliver groceries. Tomorrow I have an appointment to get my MRI results. It’s with my doctor that moved across town, so I’ll be gone most of the day. Expect a Personal Update at most.
Jig Zone Puzzle:
Today’s took me 2:39 (average 5:13). To do it, click here. How did you do?
Short Takes: (all Kos to save me time)
From Daily Kos: Bill O’Reilly is a terrible, dumb, vicious, hypocrite. Now you might add wife-beater to that litany of the obscenities that come to mind when O’Reilly crosses your radar. Gawker is reporting that, according to documents from O’Reilly’s recently lost custody case against his ex-wife Maureen McPhilmy, O’Reilly is not just a vulgar verbally and mentally abusive, bullying type—he’s also a physically assaulting type of bully:
According to a source familiar with the facts of the case, a court-appointed forensic examiner testified at a closed hearing that O’Reilly’s daughter claimed to have witnessed her father dragging McPhilmy down a staircase by her neck, apparently unaware that the daughter was watching.
O’Lielly must have a Republican reason for such a Republican crime. Could it be that she demanded to wear shoes?
From Daily Kos: Today the Arizona legislature did what no other state in the nation has been mean-spirited enough to do: they cut lifetime welfare benefits to one year for everyone — adults and children, the physically and mentally disabled. Most states have a five-year limit, while thirteen others impose a two-year cutoff. Texas (of course) has a flexible limit that can be as short as one year, but even children are exempt in the Lone Star State. Not so for Arizona! We’re Number 1!
As a result, the Arizona Department of Economic Security will drop at least 1,600 families — including more than 2,700 children — from the state’s federally funded welfare program when the budget year begins in July.
It does not matter to Arizona Republicans that the federal government is paying for the aid. What does is that they get to starve hungry children.
From Daily Kos: Wired put together a very interesting piece on the renewable energy company Vortex. They are now field testing bladeless wind energy turbines.
Instead of capturing energy via the circular motion of a propeller, the Vortex takes advantage of what’s known as vorticity, an aerodynamic effect that produces a pattern of spinning vortices. Vorticity has long been considered the enemy of architects and engineers, who actively try to design their way around these whirlpools of wind. And for good reason: With enough wind, vorticity can lead to an oscillating motion in structures, which, in some cases, like the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, can cause their eventual collapse.
Wooo Hooo!!! Some good news for a change!!
Cartoon:
The attackers were the people the Republican Party embraced and supported, as part of their Southern Strategy.
Year after year, the major oil companies and other corporate energy giants have been spending $millions to sell people on the myths that burning fossil fuels does not contribute to global climate change, and that global climate change does not exits. They have bought the entire Republican Party to assist them in propagating those myths, and to slash regulations that limit their pollution. The oil giants know better, and now we have proof that what they sell is not what they believe.
Royal Dutch Shell has been accused of pursuing a strategy that would lead to potentially catastrophic climate change after an internal document acknowledged a global temperature rise of 4C, twice the level considered safe for the planet.
A paper used for guiding future business planning at the Anglo-Dutch multinational assumes that carbon dioxide emissions will fail to limit temperature increases to 2C, the internationally agreed threshold to prevent widespread flooding, famine and desertification.
Instead, the New Lens Scenarios document refers to a forecast by the independent International Energy Agency (IEA) that points to a temperature rise of up to 4C in the short term, rising later to 6C… [emphasis added]
Inserted from <The Guardian>
Hat Tip and Photo Credit: Daily Kos
This is the future Big Oil and the Republican Party plan for YOU.
How can I describe an MRI. Though painless, few painless experiences are more unpleasant. It’s like being shut in a coffin that is being assaulted with 1,000 jackhammers. For 30 minutes I had to be absolutely still, while every fiber of my being told me to squirm. It felt like hours. I’m waiting for Store to Door to call for my grocery order. Tomorrow is a grocery delivery day. Thursday is an all day excursion to get the MRI results. ARGH!
Jig Zone Puzzle:
Today’s took me 3:41 (average 5:20). To do it, click here. How did you do?
Short Takes:
From MoveOn: 10 Ideas to Save the Economy: Tame Wall Street
The best way to stop Wall Street malfeasance from costing you your job or life savings is to finally break up the too-big-to-fail banks.
How many times have you seen me say, over the years, "Too big to fail = Too big to exist”? This is the fourth video in this Robert Reich series. Please click through to MoveOn, and forward it from there.
From Daily Kos: As the Amtrak derailment showed (again), the refusal to spend on infrastructure literally kills. Also, infrastructure spending: (i) is necessary and unavoidable (failure to timely spend on infrastructure increases the deficit in real terms), (ii) improves the gross domestic product and competitiveness, and (iii) is an obvious source for increased employment, particularly in currently hard hit segments. Moreover, infrastructure spending remains unambiguously popular. Indeed, infrastructure spending historically has had bipartisan support.
So, why are modern Republicans ideologically opposed to infrastructure spending today?
John Oliver’s 21 minute video clip is hilarious, but he doesn’t really answer the question. Click through for answers. I have an answer of my own. Every penny Democrats sent making repairs needed to save people’s lives is a penny Republicans cannot give to a billionaire.
From NY Times: Surprise! It turns out that there’s something to be said for having the brother of a failed president make his own run for the White House. Thanks to Jeb Bush, we may finally have the frank discussion of the Iraq invasion we should have had a decade ago.
But many influential people — not just Mr. Bush — would prefer that we not have that discussion. There’s a palpable sense right now of the political and media elite trying to draw a line under the subject. Yes, the narrative goes, we now know that invading Iraq was a terrible mistake, and it’s about time that everyone admits it. Now let’s move on.
Well, let’s not — because that’s a false narrative, and everyone who was involved in the debate over the war knows that it’s false. The Iraq war wasn’t an innocent mistake, a venture undertaken on the basis of intelligence that turned out to be wrong. America invaded Iraq because the Bush administration wanted a war. The public justifications for the invasion were nothing but pretexts, and falsified pretexts at that. We were, in a fundamental sense, lied into war.
Click through for the rest of this fine Paul Krugman editorial. As obvious as the facts seem to us, Republicans will rewrite this history, until their lies become accepted as common knowledge, unless we keep reviewing and broadcasting the truth.
Cartoon:
Any more their salaries are tiny, compared to their corruption benefits.
I slept poorly. I’m writing most of this before I leave, because I’ll be much too tired to do much with it after I return from my MRI. The next paragraph will be what happened.
It was painless and noisy. I returned home exhausted.
Jig Zone Puzzle:
Today’s took me 3:42 (average 4:42). To do it, click here. How dod you do?
I’m going to let my kitty cousin go first.
Almost every week, Republicans join a competition to see who can say the most outlandish things, and in the process, they push the envelope on just how idiotic InsaniTEA can become. I trust that you will believe it, when I tell you that last week was no exception.
Hateful right-wing pundits: Homosexuality was a factor in the Amtrak crash.
Homosexuality is the reason for floods, hurricanes, and of course, 9/11. You might as well tack on the Amtrak crash this week to its long list of accomplishments. When it came to light that the engineer on the train was a supporter of gay rights, and possibly gay himself, that was all the opening the haters needed. Anti-gay haters like Chuck C. Johnson and the editors of WorldNetDaily [World Nut Daily Delinked]immediately jumped aboard that runaway train of thought, citing dubious statistics about higher rates of mental illness in the gay community.
Not to be outdone, the American Family Association’s ever level-headed governmental affairs director, Sandy Rios, told her radio listeners that the engineer’s sexual orientation was probably “a factor” in the crash.
Rios said, per RightWingWatch:
“Now I am not saying, I am not inferring to those of you that are gay rights activists and like to monitor this show, I’m not inferring that this accident happened because he was gay, but I do think it’s an interesting part of the story and you can bet it would be edited out,” Rios said. She then suggested that the engineer could have possibly been “going through some confusion that has to do with the very core of who they are,” and mentioned the story of an airline pilot who “put his entire plane at risk because he had an emotional, angry outburst to something that happened,” which she says was related to hormone therapy he was receiving.
Rios added: “I don’t know, but I think it is something to be discussed and I think it’s a factor and I doubt you will hear it anywhere else.”
We wish we could ignore this dangerous nonsense. But we can’t.
Inserted from <Alternet>
Every time Republicans murder people by cutting funding that would have saved their lives, they find a way to blame it on Obama, black people, gay people, immigrants, poor people, women or another group they target for discrimination. This only the fifth of five idiotic Republican moments from last week alone. Click through for the other four.
For different functions I have five different email accounts: one for this blog, one for my volunteer work, one for research, one for most business, and one for secure banking that has on other online presence at all. I had to set up the last two on my notebook, because I have a new ISP. But for the first three, my main computer has them configured as IMAP accounts, but on the notebook, they were still configured at POP3. I have a king size mess on my hands, and most of my research material just went up in smoke. AGuess what I’ll be doing most of today? ARGH!! Tomorrow, I’ll be gone most of the day getting my MRI, so expect a Personal Update at most.
Jig Zone Puzzle:
Today’s took me 4:27 (average 6:32). To do it, click here. How did you do?
Short Takes:
From Daily Kos: While Wisconsin Governor and likely Republican presidential candidate Scott Walker is a favorite among business leaders looking for favors and wealthy Americans keen on slashing government to the bone if they can shave a quarter-point off their effective tax rates, among the evangelical crowd he’s a bit of an also-ran. What’s he done for them lately?
So Walker is off to do some fence-mending and appropriate knee-bending.
Next week, the Wisconsin governor will travel to Capitol Hill to hold a private meeting with influential evangelical leaders, some of whom are expressing deep reservations about his track record on issues near and dear to them. Pointing to his past statements, and even his hire of a top campaign aide, they are openly questioning whether his views on abortion and gay marriage align with theirs and whether he’s willing to fight for their cause.
There may once have been a time when there was more to having religion than an obsessive policing of other people’s sex lives, perhaps there was a bit of caring for the sick or feeding the poor or loving thy neighbor in there, toward the back, but no more. Support all the wars you want, give your personal thumbs-up to the death penalty and to state-sanctioned torture, tell impoverished Americans or people without health insurance that you’re very sorry for their plight but you’ll be dead in the cold ground before your government does a damn thing for them—it’s all fine. But you’d better have the right opinion on abortion and keeping the gay people in line.
I have no doubt that the Fartfuhrer of Fitzwalkerstan will goose-step with the Republican Party’s most rabid Supply-side pseudo-Christian hate mongers.
From Common Dreams: Today’s verdict does not reflect the values of the majority of people in our Commonwealth. The ACLU of Massachusetts has been disappointed from the start that the federal government sought the death penalty in Massachusetts, which has rejected capital punishment. The last execution in the state of Massachusetts took place in 1947. Even in this case, Massachusetts opposition to the death penalty has been reflected in public opinion polls, in the pleas of religious leaders, and in statements by victims’ families and survivors. In a Boston Globe poll conducted this April, Massachusetts residents—by a four-to-one margin—overwhelmingly opposed the imposition of a death sentence for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Massachusetts religious leaders voiced their opposition to seeking his execution. Victims’ families and survivors in this case asked that federal prosecutors take the death penalty off the table and, instead, accept a sentence of life in exchange for no possibility of appeal or parole…
This statement came from the MA ACLU. I agree. I certainly will not argue that Dzhokhar is not a monstrous person, who "deserves" the death penalty. In this case, the death penalty is working exactly as it was designed to work under ideal circumstances. However, the most important objection still remains. Whether or not we strap this man down and kill him is not about who he is or what he did. It’s about who we are and what we are doing. By imposing the death penalty our federal government makes is all just like Dzhokhar.
From Think Progress: For thousands of years, religious people have gathered together in houses of worship to sing songs, celebrate sacred rituals, and lift up prayers to God(s) on high. And on July 1, a new religious group in Indiana intends to do just that — but with a lot more emphasis on the “high” part.
A little more than a month from now, the newly-formed First Church of Cannabis is scheduled to hold its first official gathering, where worshippers plan to test the limits of new religious freedom laws by “filling up” the sanctuary with marijuana smoke while observing a sacrament.
“It’s going to be a standard service,” Bill Levin, the group’s leader and self-proclaimed “Grand Poohba and Minister of Love,” told ThinkProgress. He explained the ceremony will last around 45 minutes, complete with music and teachings, but will conclude with an unusual benediction: “At the end of the service … we will enjoy cannabis, because it’s how we enjoy life.”
This is clearly a false religion. I have no problem with them getting high, but the source of all blessing is the Church of the Ellipsoid Orb. May the Orb shine its holy light upon you! 😉
Cartoon:
