Politics Plus

I’m writing for tomorrow.  What’s unusual is that tomorrow is almost here.  Today was a rough one.  Because I had a two hour wait for the lift bus to pick me up, I spent over an hour of it in the dollar store next door.  Between too much time in my feet and the thoroughly uncomfortable chairs at the medical imaging place, I was hurting big time by the time I got home.  All I could do was crawl into bed.  So I’m rushing now to finish this on time, and it is tomorrow’s only article.  Day 8.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:03 (average 4:15).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From NY Times: It is, in a way, too bad that Cliven Bundy — the rancher who became a right-wing hero after refusing to pay fees for grazing his animals on federal land, and bringing in armed men to support his defiance — has turned out to be a crude racist. Why? Because his ranting has given conservatives an easy out, a way to dissociate themselves from his actions without facing up to the terrible wrong turn their movement has taken.

For at the heart of the standoff was a perversion of the concept of freedom, which for too much of the right has come to mean the freedom of the wealthy to do whatever they want, without regard to the consequences for others.

Start with the narrow issue of land use. For historical reasons, the federal government owns a lot of land in the West; some of that land is open to ranching, mining and so on. Like any landowner, the Bureau of Land Management charges fees for the use of its property. The only difference from private ownership is that by all accounts the government charges too little — that is, it doesn’t collect as much money as it could, and in many cases doesn’t even charge enough to cover the costs that these private activities impose. In effect, the government is using its ownership of land to subsidize ranchers and mining companies at taxpayers’ expense.

It’s true that some of the people profiting from implicit taxpayer subsidies manage, all the same, to convince themselves and others that they are rugged individualists. But they’re actually welfare queens of the purple sage. [emphasis added]

Paul Krugman did it again.  We the people should get paid a fair price for the use of our land. We should end the subsidies to these millionaires Krugman calls "High Plains Moochers".

From TPM: Win or lose — and they’ll probably lose — Democrats hope this week’s Senate showdown over raising the federal minimum wage reaps them benefits in November’s congressional elections.

Whether they’ll get an Election Day payoff is uncertain.

In a Senate vote expected Wednesday, Republicans seem likely to block the Democratic measure, which would gradually raise today’s $7.25 hourly minimum, reaching $10.10 as soon as 2016. Even if the bill, one of President Barack Obama’s top priorities, somehow survives in the Senate, it stands little chance of even getting a vote in the GOP-run House.

Who would the proposal most directly affect? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women and young people make up disproportionate portions of the 3.3 million people who earned $7.25 or less last year. Both groups traditionally skew Democratic, and the party would love to drive them to the polls in November as it battles to retain Senate control.

I fully expect the Republicans to give us another issue, along with the ACA, both of which can be used to hammer them.

From Think Progress: Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) told George Stephanopoulos Sunday that she left the Republican Party in the mid-90s because it was tilting the playing field in favor of Wall Street.

Warren has quickly become a populist hero to liberals. Stephanopoulos, host of ABC’s The Week, noted something in her background that “might surprise” her supporters: the fact that she has voted Republican in the past, and was a registered Republican in Pennsylvania from 1991 to 1996. Warren said she left the party after that because she felt it was siding more and more with Wall Street

I do so wish she was willing to be the first woman President.

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Many were executed for crimes far less heinous that those committed by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, etc.

I’m writing for tomorrow and am getting some housework done.  Tomorrow I have a medical appointment for X-Rays to determine whether or not I need an MRI for my bad back in addition to physical therapy.  I will be gone several hours, so I may have little or nothing to post on Tuesday.  Day 7.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 2:46 (average 4:30).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Daily Kos: Jeb was the one responsible for Stand Your Ground. Compared to the incompetent, tone-deaf, and outright corrupt Rick Scott, Jeb looks good in comparison.  But Rick isn’t responsible for the most violent mistake in our state history (just for expanding it and now hiding it from public records).  Bush turned Florida into an NRA meth lab, allowing them to draft awful bills like SYG and then celebrate passage with them.  ALEC would then bring it to the rest of the nation.  No one here asked for SYG; in fact, most of us fought against it–including law enforcement.  There was not one instance in our entire state history that Jeb could point to where someone who shot in self-defense was prosecuted.  But we did warn of the consequences.  The media ran several stories saying it was a license to hunt and kill.  Democrats in the FL House and Senate correctly predicted catastrophe if the bill passed.  The blood of its many victimes [sic], including 26 children, are on Jeb’s hands.

This is just one of five things we didn’t know about Jeb Bush. Click through for the other four. Personally, I need to know only one thing: Bush!

From Alternet: Cliven Bundy: If I’m racist, it’s MLK’s fault.

Further demonstrating his tenuous grasp on both logic and reality, Bundy elaborated on his deep thoughts on race on CNN later in the week. He was very taken aback that people found his musings on whether black people might be better off as slaves offensive, and so he sought to clarify them, or find someone else to blame. Oddly, he figured it was Martin Luther King Jr.’s fault, for not finishing “his job.”

Perhaps someone should break it to Bundy that MLK was assassinated.

Just as oddly, Bundy thought that the thing that people found most offensive about what he said was that he used words like “black boys” and “Negroes,” as opposed to the whole “better off as slaves” bit.

Finally, he concluded, "We need to get over this prejudice stuff." This puts him in fine conservative company. Conservatives are very upset that people keep calling them racist for doing things like siding with Cliven Bundy, or blaming blacks for their own problems, or in the case of the Roberts Court, for saying that we live in a post-racial society where we no longer need affirmative action to make sure colleges are diverse and educational opportunities are afforded to all.

In other words, the conservative argument is this: Let’s not do the hard work it takes to make things truly equal between races. Let’s just "get over" the racism stuff. Say it’s over, and be done with it. If we just stop calling racists "racist," we’re good.

This is just one of seven absurd Republican follies from last week alone. Click through for the other six.  Republicans had already proved their racist intent when the only famous Bundy was Al.

From Huffington Post:

As he battles through a tight 2014 reelection campaign, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) believes himself to be a popular target.

The Los Angeles Times reported Friday that McConnell had some of his most pointed comments yet against Kentucky Secretary of State and Democratic rival Alison Lundergan Grimes, while setting himself apart from the rest of the 2014 GOP field.

From the LA Times report:

“I’m the only Republican running this year that every crazy liberal in the country’s heard of,” he said. “They’ll be sending their money — they already are — to my opponent. She’ll be arguing to all of you that she’d be a new face. And I agree, she would be a new face. But think about it this way: a new face for what? A new face for no change. A new face for the same majority, the same Senate, the same support for Barack Obama. A new face for the status quo.”

Dang!! I actually have to agree with Bought Bitch Mitch, up to a point. Alison Grimes would certainly be a new face. But considering how sick I am of Mitch’s smug leer, a new face would be great news! And while he enjoys some cheese with his whine, let’s replace every Republican face.

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At last!

I’m writing for tomorrow, resting up t6o recharge, and preparing to confront a mess in my kitchen area.  Politics Plus will be offline for approximately 30 minutes, sometime between 7 PM Sunday night and 3 AM Monday morning.  Our HSP will be doing a kernel upgrade on the servers.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:48 (average 5:52).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Christian Science Monitor: The Democrats face some challenging math in their quest to hold onto the US Senate. In all, 21 Democratic-held seats are up for election this November, versus 15 Republican-held seats. And political analysts deem far more of the Democratic seats vulnerable.

To take control of the Senate, the Republicans need a net gain of six seats. One already looks set to flip: the seat held by retiring Sen. Tim Johnson (D) of South Dakota.

Twelve other Senate races are seen as competitive – 10 seats held by Democrats, two by Republicans. Here’s the rundown.

We’re losing a couple good Democrats to retirement.  The rest are DINOs, but we need them to tip the balance.  Click through for an excellent analysis of the challenges we face to keep the Republican Party out of the driver’s seat.

From The Oregonian: Cover Oregon closed one of the sorrier chapters in the history of Oregon state government Friday when it opted to dump its troubled $248 million health insurance exchange in favor of the federal exchange.

The federal exchange doesn’t feature many of the bells and whistles Oregon officials had hoped to offer in their in-house system. But the federal exchange works and offers certainty that the Oregon exchange did not.

Actually that is good news for Oregon. The company they had hired, Oracle, really screwed the pooch with their substandard design performance.

From Politicus USA: Reckless coastal development is heading to Georgia, courtesy of the Nathan Deal administration. Naturally this marsh killing policy was announced on Earth Day.

If you’ve never been to Georgia, you’re missing out. Georgia’s 300,000 acres of tidal marshes are a source of huge pride in the Peach state, for good reason. Not only are fishing and shrimping a large source of recreational, family-owned businesses, but the state has always taken a much more protective stance towards its coasts and marshlands. The birds and the stunning scenery are a testament to past policies of preservation.

But it’s not just Georgians who benefit from the preserved and protected coast. The Center for a Sustainable Coast estimates that “Georgia’s tidal marshes are about a third of those remaining on the U.S. east coast…” You won’t see the kind of built up, destroyed coasts in Georgia that you will see in South Carolina.

Or rather, you wouldn’t see that in the past, but the Nathan Deal (R-GA) administration is doing what Republican governors do best (see Rick Scott’s similar actions in Florida, and Rick Snyder’s giveaway of public parks to corporations in Michigan) — selling out public land, interest and national treasures to big business.

The Center for a Sustainable Coast explained in a statement, “On Earth Day, Georgia’s Environmental Protection Division Director Judson Turner announced a radical policy change that will eliminate protective buffers along Georgia’s tidal marshes. This came as a result of a dubious reinterpretation of language in the 1978 Georgia Soil Erosion and Sedimentation (E&S) Act, used to protect waters of the state.”

This is how Republicans celebrate Earth Day!

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