Apr 172015
Apr 162015
Here are the results of our “Bye Bye Leg Hound” poll. Politics Plus Polls are not scientific, because those who respond are not balanced according to demographic categories. Therefore, we do not accurately reflect the makeup of the US population. Nevertheless, our polls are usually factually accurate, and more often than not, they reflect thinking or will of the national majority.
Our Polling Host no longer allows us to copy and paste your comments made when taking the poll. To read them, click here.
I voted mostly good. My first ever introduction to Care2, many years ago, was putting up a petition on their petition site for the Democratic Party to dump the Nevada Leg Hound from the post of Majority Leader, because he has a tendency to hump a few Republican Legs, begging for votes, whine, roll over, and play dead. I created this graphic for it.
The good side is that Democrats have an opportunity to chose a MAJORITY (hopefully) Leader that will stand firm against Republican sedition, all the time, not just occasionally, and NOT Chuck Schumer (DINO-NY)!!
The bad side is that Sheldon Adelson will have a good chance to buy the seat for a Republican.
The new poll is up. Please vote.
Apr 162015
Spring is sproinging!! Today I have the first of six forecast sunny days with a high over 70°. It’s definitely time for some kitty basking.
Jig Zone Puzzle:
Today’s took me 2:59 (average 4:32). To do it, click here. How did you do?
Short Takes:
From Upworthy: When a man asks people to translate a hate message he’s received, their response is unforgettable.
This video illustrates how people naturally react to the hatred Republicans embrace. Here, Republicans continually bombard people with media designed to make them fearful of others in a way that evokes such hatred.
From Daily Kos: Fargo, North Dakota, coffee shop owner Joe Curry does not appreciate the 56 North Dakota legislators who voted against a bill that would have protected LGBT people from discrimination. Curry put up a sign:
"Ban effective immediately. The listed Men & Women are now banned from entering this establishment.* This is based solely on age, gender, race, beliefs, color, religion & disability."
That asterisk points to this statement:
"Unless accompanied by a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transexual, Queer, Intersex or Asexual person."
Curry’s coffee shop is the Red Raven Espresso Parlor. His intention is not to discriminate.
Kudos to Joe Curry. I would love to have coffee un the Red Raven!
From Alternet: Shred Safety Nets. Christie thinks he’s being bold by giving a big speech on the safety nets for the elderly and poor. “Democrats believe entitlements are a sacred cow that cannot be honestly discussed, perpetuating a dangerous fantasy to the American people,” he said. As noted above, Christie’s solutions are not honest as they would push millions into poverty. Like the others, he doesn’t touch fair tax increases to fortify social insurance programs or greed in the health care system. And that takes him to attacking Obamacare. “There is no question that America would be better off with a market-oriented, more flexible, more pro-consumer-choice health care system than the one that was jammed down our throats by this President,” he said. All of the GOP 2016 wannabees not only want to repeal it, on tip of cutting safety net spending because of their obsession with the federal debt. None are asking what people need.
This is just one of eight nightmare scenarios that will come to pass if Republican campaign speeches become reality. Click through for the other seven and to see what life would be like under a Republican Reich.
Cartoon:
Apr 152015
This is today’s only article, because an unusual situation has me running behind. This morning I was awakened by a bang on my door. I woman who lives on the floor could not breathe well, and was trying to use an Advair dispenser. I tried to help her, but saw that she had no doses left. I called 911, notified building staff, and cared for her until help arrived. I was pleased that the EMTs arrived in under 15 minutes. I lay back down to rest for just a few minutes, and slept a couple hours past the time I planned to arise. Today is a grocery delivery day, and I’m waiting for Store to Door to arrive.
Jig Zone Puzzle:
Today’s took me 2:55 (average 4:33). To do it, click here. How did you do?
Short Takes:
From Upworthy: When a self-proclaimed "white redneck" starts a video with "white people are racists," it’s hard not to listen.
He looks like Bubba Bagger. He sounds like Bubba Bagger. But there is nothing Republican about him.
From Daily Kos: 1. You want to finance the wealthy?
You think the banking bailout wasn’t enough for the elite? They need tax breaks to invest more in the developing world so their companies become more profitable? Pleas give them tax cuts to do so.
Do you want to decrease unemployment overseas, give corporations tax cuts and breaks to finance their move to the land of cheap labor of their choice? So what if the workers are to young or kept in dormitories and the conditions resemble those of forced labor. You really want that stuff to be so cheap that you can afford it on the unemployment line? Well then:
Vote Republican
2. You believe victims of crime are whiners?
Two wrongs make a right?
Women who are raped and become pregnant should be forced to carry the baby of a crime?
That those complaining of sexual and moral abuse at work are just lazy and have no right to be treated equally at the workplace?
Vote Republican.
Here are just two things voting Republican will help you get. Click through for the other eight.
From The New Yorker: With a stop in Iowa on Tuesday, the Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton officially embarked on a nineteen-month marathon of looking concerned.
Sitting with patrons at Jones Street Java House, in Le Claire, the former Secretary of State listened intently, sipped from a cup of coffee, and nodded her head at appropriate junctures, flawlessly reënacting a brief scene from her first campaign video.
After about twenty minutes of virtually nonstop displays of empathy, a Clinton aide said, “we decided to shut it down.”
“Hillary is staring down nineteen months of sipping coffee and nodding her head,” the aide continued. “We want to make sure she paces herself.”
Andy is probably more accurate that we want to consider. We need to pressure her to make the kinds of commitments on issues that we can live with.
Cartoon:
Apr 142015
Here is the sixty-eighth article in our Republicans on Parade series, featuring individuals who personify what the Republican Party has become. Today’s honoree is RNC Member Tamara Scott. She is so honored for the Republican way in which she addresses people with different religious beliefs.
Last year, the Religious Right largely celebrated the Supreme Court’s decision in Town of Greece v. Galloway, in which the court ruled that municipalities can open meetings with sectarian prayers as long as minority faiths aren’t excluded and attendance isn’t mandatory.
But the protections for minority religions don’t seem to have completely sunk in for everybody in the movement, as was made clear last week at a Republican presidential forum hosted by the influential Iowa conservative group The Family Leader. As we noted earlier, the message at the forum centered on claims that conservative Christians are losing religious liberty in America, but that didn’t stop The Family Leader President Bob Vander Plaats from warning that a Wiccan prayer at the Iowa statehouse that morning might cause God to withdraw His blessing from America.
Tamara Scott, an Iowa member of the Republican National Committee [GOP delinked] who is also a lobbyist for The Family Leader, struck a similar note in her remarks to the forum, saying that the Wiccan prayer and the invocation delivered by a Muslim imam the previous day showed the need to teach Christian-nation history in public schools.
Scott joked that she had prayed for a storm to greet the Wiccan woman that morning, before telling the audience that the non-Christian prayers at the statehouse showed that “when we’re not willing to defend our God in the public square, we shouldn’t be surprised when others try to replace Him.”…
Inserted from <Right Wing Watch>
Barf Bag Alert!!
As an authentic Christian, I welcome and honor your beliefs, no matter what they are (or aren’t), with one exception. I will not honor intolerance to others’ beliefs. This women exemplifies that intolerance with her Republican Supply-side pseudo-Christian bigotry.
Apr 142015
When I dug into my corporate reporting for my volunteer group, I discovered I have until mid-May to get that done, so I decided to blog instead, in addition to delving into the mess I need to tackle for grocery delivery day tomorrow.
Jig Zone Puzzle:
Today’s took me 2:38 (average 4:30). To do it, click here. How did you do?
Short Takes:
From Daily Kos: South Carolina wants to be able to continue to ban gays and lesbians from marrying each other. They want to do that so much that they filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court that they should continue to be able to do so. In it, they make an "originalist" argument that if the Constitution is read just as its drafters understood it, gays can be discriminated against because women can be discriminated against. Mark Joseph Stern at Slate has all the crazy.
Here’s the gist of South Carolina’s fascinatingly sexist argument. The state wants to prove that the 14th Amendment—which guarantees "equal protection of the laws" to every "person"—was not intended to displace state marriage laws. And what did those laws look like at the time? One major feature: In many states, married women were not permitted to own property or enter into contracts and had no legal existence apart from their husbands. According to South Carolina, the framers of the 14th Amendment explicitly preserved the rights of states to deprive married women of the ability to function independently from her husband. This right to deprive married women of basic liberties, South Carolina argues, is enshrined in the 10th Amendment and is not at all undercut by the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equality.
Were SCROTUS (Republican Constitutional VD) to agree with this brief, not only would gays become the subjects of continued discrimination, but also, "barefoot and pregnant" laws would sweep those states, where Republicans have complete control.
From The New Yorker: Hillary Clinton has followed up the official announcement of her candidacy with a new campaign ad featuring nothing but kittens.
The sixty-second spot stars an assortment of kittens—tabbies, calicoes, Siamese, and a dozen other breeds—in a variety of adorable vignettes.
At various points in the advertisement, the kittens are shown playing in a sock drawer, tangled up in yarn, and chasing a duckling.
Clinton herself appears only in the final seconds of the ad, saying merely, “Hi. I’m Hillary.”
Andy, I certainly hope my kitty cousins are not exploited in such a shameful manner. Wouldn’t it be better to portray the kittens using Republicans as a cat box? I might get in on that action myself!!
From NY Times: One by one, four former Blackwater security contractors wearing blue jumpsuits and leg irons stood before a federal judge on Monday and spoke publicly for the first time since a deadly 2007 shooting in Iraq.
The men had been among several private American security guards who fired into Baghdad’s crowded Nisour Square on Sept. 16, 2007, and last October they were convicted of killing 14 unarmed Iraqis in what prosecutors called a wartime atrocity. Yet on Monday, as they awaited sentences that they knew would send them to prison for most if not all of their lives, they defiantly asserted their innocence…
…The judge, Royce C. Lamberth, strongly disagreed, sentencing Mr. Slatten to life in prison and handing 30-year sentences to the three others.
My only regret is that the top war criminals, Bush and Cheney, were not sentenced with them.
Cartoon:
Apr 132015
The first step in a climb to higher political office is often the office of District Attorney. It casts the politician in the role of protecting the community, and few things are more effective in that regard than the successful prosecution of high profile crimes. At the same time, leaving such a crime unprosecuted, or failing to get a conviction is almost guaranteed to snuff out a budding political career in it’s infancy. This gives prosecutors a built in incentive to push on to get convictions against people they know are innocent, using whatever means it takes to do it. Therefore it should come as no surprise that there are so many innocents on death row.
However much Americans may disagree about the morality of capital punishment, no one wants to see an innocent person executed.
And yet, far too often, people end up on death row after being convicted of horrific crimes they did not commit. The lucky ones are exonerated while they are still alive — a macabre club that has grown to include 152 members since 1973.
The rest remain locked up for life in closet-size cells. Some die there of natural causes; in at least two documented cases, inmates who were almost certainly innocent were put to death.
How many more innocent people have met the same fate, or are awaiting it? That may never be known. But over the past 42 years, someone on death row has been exonerated, on average, every three months. According to one study, at least 4 percent of all death-row inmates in the United States have been wrongfully convicted. That is far more than often enough to conclude that the death penalty — besides being cruel, immoral, and ineffective at reducing crime — is so riddled with error that no civilized nation should tolerate its use.
Innocent people get convicted for many reasons, including bad lawyering, mistaken identifications and false confessions made under duress. But as advances in DNA analysis have accelerated the pace of exonerations, it has also become clear that prosecutorial misconduct is at the heart of an alarming number of these cases.
In the past year alone, nine people who had been sentenced to death were released — and in all but one case, prosecutors’ wrongdoing played a key role…
Inserted from <NY Times>
There are actually two problems that need to be addressed here. We must eliminate the incentive for prosecutorial misconduct. I would like to see it made a felony, with at least a five year prison term and automatic disbarment. More important, lets gat civilized! State sponsored murder costs tax payers far more than natural life. State sponsored murder does nothing to prevent other murders. State sponsored murder prevents its victims from reforming and leading productive, socially useful lives behind bars. I know it happens. A couple of the guys who assist me in my volunteer used to be on death row and are now serving natural life.
Apr 132015
Now that I’ve finished my personal taxes, I get to do the same for my volunteer group, which involves far less money, but far more paperwork. I should have done al this a month ago, but took sick right before receiving the reporting forms. Therefore, today’s articles involve minimal research.
Jig Zone Puzzle:
Today’s took me 3:34 (average 6:48). To do it, click here. How did you do?
Short Takes:
From The New Yorker: The two major political parties’ unconscionable waste of money officially commences this weekend, as Democrats and Republicans will soon begin spending an estimated five billion dollars of their corporate puppet masters’ assets in an unquenchable pursuit of power.
The billions, which could be spent rebuilding the nation’s crumbling infrastructure, improving schools, or reducing the scourge of malaria in Africa, will instead be squandered in a heinous free-for-all of slander and personal destruction, alienating voters as never before.
The media will inevitably focus on the personalities of the bloated roster of narcissists lusting after the White House, but scant attention will be paid to the Wall Street bankers, industrial polluters, and casino magnates whose grip on American democracy will remain vise-like…
Andy forgot the satire. Everything here is factual.
From Daily Kos: A recurrent fear heard by the Christian right is if gay people are widely accepted, those who disapprove of homosexuality will be shunned and treated just like racists!
See talking point #4 copied directly from National Organization for Marriage:
“If courts rule that same-sex marriage is a civil right, then, people like you and me who believe children need moms and dads will be treated like bigots and racists.”
This classic is over two years old, but it turned out to be quite correct. Those who hate gays and those who hate blacks are treated exactly alike. They are embraced and supported by the Republican Party.
From Upworthy: Is your community thinking about opening its doors to fracking? Check out this video for some images that might make that decision crystal clear.
This says what needs saying!
Cartoon:
