Politics Plus

I’m writing for tomorrow, day 111.  It’s late, and I’ve had a hard time getting untracked today.  I don’t know why.  I just feel a bit lethargic.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:04 (average 5:46).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Fantasy Football:

Players, the live draft of our fantasy football league, Lefty Blog Friends, is Saturday at Noon Eastern, 11 AM Central, 10 AM Mountain, and 9 AM Pacific Daylight Savings Time.  You each get to keep up to two players from last year’s team.  If you do, they are your first and second round draft picks.  If you do not, you get the draft picks instead.  It’s a good idea to participate in a couple mock drafts now to get familiar with the procedure.  Pay attention to bye weeks so you don’t have multiple players at the same positions with a week off at the same time.  Enjoy!!

Short Takes:

From Daily Kos: Julion Evans passed away on July 26, 2014, after a battle with a rare disease called Amyloidosis. He had a large family and an even larger group of friends who wanted to come together to remember his life. His family booked a large church in Tampa, Florida. One day before the service, they were shocked to receive a call from the pastor, telling them the church was canceling after finding out Julion was gay and married to Kendall Caper, his partner of 17 years:

Republican Supply-side pseudo-Christian hatred of the LGBT community extends to the grave. Shame!

From PRWatch: The American Legislative Exchange Council, or "ALEC," met in Dallas on July 30 for its annual meeting. ALEC brings together state legislators and corporate lobbyists to vote on "model" legislation behind closed doors, before those bills are introduced in state houses across the country, stripped of their ALEC origins. As the Kansas City Star has noted, what happens at ALEC meetings "provides a preview for the next state sessions" in legislatures around the country.

What was on tap at ALEC this year? New bad bills, dirty energy, a new lobby shop, and the launch of a spin-off group targeting local governments. Here’s a roundup of last week’s ALEC coverage.

Click through to see what Republican legislators will be parroting nationwide. ALEC bills have one thing in common. When they pass, you get screwed.

From Huffington Post: Problem: Your right-wing brother-in-law is plugged into the FOX-Limbaugh lie machine, and keeps sending you emails about "Obama spending" and "Obama deficits" and how the "stimulus" just made things worse.

Solution: Here are three "reality-based" charts to send to him. These charts show what actually happened.

Dang! These are good enough to get you unfriended by Republican relatives!

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I’m writing for tomorrow, day 110.  I got a late start today, because I was tired from basking in the glow of the Orb and feasting on Seachicken.  I spent most of the day trying to make sense of the Iraq crisis.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:57 (average 5:40).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Media Matters: Anti-gay hate group leader Tony Perkins has appeared on Megyn Kelly’s shows more than all other Fox News programs combined over the past two years.

Tony Perkins is the president of the Family Research Council (FRC), an organization that was labeled an anti-gay "hate group" by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2010. He has called pedophilia "a homosexual problem," claimed that gay men "recruit" children into homosexuality, and endorsed a Uganda law that would have imposed the death penalty for homosexuality. His organization regularly produces anti-gay propaganda depicting gay people as abnormal, unnatural, and destined for "eternal damnation."

He’s also one of Megyn Kelly’s most frequent guests on Fox News. Kelly – who was once hailed as a harbinger of a "gay rights revolution" at Fox – has hosted Perkins more than all other Fox News programs combined in the past two years, according to an Equality Matters analysis. Hailed by Kelly as "a captain of the Religious Right," Perkins has become a familiar face to viewers of Kelly’s shows:

Barf Bag Alert!

This is so typical of the Republican Reichsministry of Propaganda, Faux Noise. To answer the question, she will not stop as long as the Republican Party wants to keep the support of homophobic pseudo-Christians.

From Daily Kos: Charles Koch’s August 5th op-ed in USA Today [Koch Suckee delinked] is laughable. He spills out his vision of a country that works for the biggest corporations and richest 1% (like himself & Koch Industries), all while claiming that his agenda will help struggling American families.

Here are the five major problems I see with Charles Koch’s op-ed:

(1) He quotes Martin Luther King, Jr. I’m actually usually a fan when conservatives quote Dr. King, because King’s message transcends partisan politics. Unfortunately, though, Charles Koch shouldn’t be allowed to do this. New research from the Center for Media and Democracy shows that Charles Koch was a member of the far-right John Birch Society, which strongly opposed racial equality and civil rights. Koch has supported groups that push voter suppression laws that make it harder for people of color to vote. Koch supports busting unions, despite the fact that Dr. King was a strong supporter of unions and was assassinated on a trip to Memphis to support union sanitation workers’ strike. Charles Koch does not get to co-opt Dr. King’s message to fit his own, because Charles Koch stands against everything Dr. King stood for.

That’s just one of the five reasons Koch’s op-ed is long on BS and virtually devoid of facts. Click Through doer the other four.

From Think Progress: Following orders from a federal judge to redraw the state’s voting district maps, since racial gerrymandering rendered the first draft unconstitutional, Florida’s Republican-controlled legislature unveiled revised maps this week.

But the new maps look quite like the old ones, especially the boundaries of the snakelike District 5, one of the most gerrymandered seats in the country. In his ruling earlier this summer, Federal Judge Terry P. Lewis said District 5 “does not follow traditional political boundaries” and “connects two far flung urban populations” without legal justification. His opinion chided lawmakers, saying districts containing “finger-like extensions, narrow and bizarrely shaped tentacles, and hook like shapes…are constitutionally suspect and often indicative of racial and partisan gerrymandering.”

The only way to honest redistricting is to take the process out of Republican hands. The day Republicans draw clean maps is the day the Stanley Cup series will be played in hell.

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May all Republicans follow his example.

I’m writing for tomorrow, day 109.  Oversleeping last night has thrown off my sleep schedule.  I feel like I need to sleep, but have been unable to do so, so I’m not as fresh as I’d like to be.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 4:15 (average 5:37).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Religious Ecstasy:

At the ends of the first quarter, the other gods hurled down thunder and lightning from Olympus in homage to the Holy Ellipsoid Orb.  Worshipers had to flee.  The service was what last year’s Super Bowl should have been.

Short Takes:

From Daily Kos: …Colt Thriemer and Thomas J Brown got into a fist fight at a Walmart Parking Lot.  There were several witnesses who say that the victim, Thomas Brown, was walking away afterwards to his car when Colt Thriemer shot Thomas Brown after retrieving a handgun.  Mr. Brown was shot 10 times at fairly close range both in the back while he was walking away and then when he turned towards Mr. Thriemer after being shot, apparently pleading him to stop.  Mr. Thriemer then fled the scene.

When he was apprehended, he did what all murderers do now in Florida: claim he was in "fear for his life".  The prosecutor agreed.

The prosecutor’s statement summed up all that is fucking wrong with Stand Your Ground:

"The Stand Your Ground Statue makes no exception to the immunity because Brown may have been walking away from Thriemer when deadly force was used."

That’s because the f_ing law was made by f_ing  imbeciles.  [emphasis original]

Of course the law was made by imbeciles. Republicans are.

From AlterNet: President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday slapped a one-year ban and restrictions on food and agricultural product imports from nations that have imposed sanctions on Russia over its defiant stance on Ukraine.

The decision marks yet another escalation in a furious diplomatic standoff that has seen Russia slip into growing international isolation and the onset of what some US media are calling a "new Cold War".

It also threatens to send the price of Russian food soaring and feed public discontent with an economic slowdown that analysts indirectly attribute to Putin’s perceived backing of pro-Kremlin insurgents fighting government forces in eastern Ukraine.

If any nation sanctioning Vladimir Putin (R-RU), aka GOP Pootie, has a shortage of foods, the US can help meet the need, especially if we stop paying farmers not to grow it.

From Crook and Liars: The hosts of Fox & Friends on Wednesday politicized the death of an Army general as a "touchdown for the Taliban" so they could score some points against President Barack Obama.

Barf Bag Alert!!

Yesterday I said they were doing this. This is how they are doing it. How disgusting they are!

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I’m writing for tomorrow, day 108.  It’s been a busy day with heavy house cleaning and a grocery delivery.  Tomorrow is a holy day in the Church of the Ellipsoid Orb.  The Holy Orb is rising on a new preseason of meditation.  I’m meditating in faith that my Broncos shall break the long fast with a communion meal of Pulverized Seachicken. 🙂

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:16 (average 5:06).  To do it click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Daily Kos: Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Rep. Mo Brooks, Republican of Alabama:

“This is a part of the war on whites that’s being launched by the Democratic Party. And the way in which they’re launching this war is by claiming that whites hate everybody else,” he said during an interview Monday with conservative radio host Laura Ingraham. "It’s part of the strategy that Barack Obama implemented in 2008, continued in 2012, where he divides us all on race, on sex, greed, envy, class warfare, all those kinds of things. Well that’s not true.”

Man, if it’s been waging a war on whites all this time, the Democratic Party is even less effective than I’d realized. Because whites are doing relatively well in this country. Sure, class warfare from above has been hard on the middle class, which was historically overwhelmingly white, so if you compare how middle-class white people are doing now to how they were doing 20 or 50 years ago, the picture is bad. But compared to non-white people? Whites are doing just fine, despite this alleged war on them.

Mo "Bubba Bagger" Brooks is projecting to blame Democrats for his own Republican racism.

From NY Times: The Obama administration is weighing plans to circumvent Congress and act on its own to curtail tax benefits for United States companies that relocate overseas to lower their tax bills, seeking to stanch a recent wave of so-called corporate inversions, Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew said on Tuesday.

Treasury Department officials are rushing to assemble an array of options that would essentially wipe out the economic incentive for the deals, Mr. Lew said. No final decision has been made.

“The question is, Can we do enough that it will materially change the economics of inversions so that companies will make different decisions?” Mr. Lew said in an interview. “The things we are looking at look to me like they could very materially change the economics of inversions.”

See How RepubliCorp Is Ducking Taxes. At the very least, Obama could disqualify such companies from government contracts and subcontracts.

From TPM: A third grade teacher in South Carolina called into Rush Limbaugh’s radio show on Tuesday to thank him for his children’s book, "Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims," which she used to teach her students about slavery and the Civil War.

ARGH! Limbarf as a teaching aid?!!?  I was unable to find out which school has such misinformed students. That teacher needs to be stopped, then fired, and then committed.

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