Politics Plus

I’m writing for tomorrow and am feeling very tired.  My helper friend has not shown in over a month, and today, I had to take on a lot of the housework I’ve had her doing, including the worst task known to mankind, laundry.  That took it out of me, so this article is all there is.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:06 (average 5:27).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Daily Kos: So it was that on  Sunday February 16, 2014, Meet The Press featured a segment where Bill Nye the Science Guy ‘debated’ Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn) over the recent string of severe weather events and Climate Change. There was a lot of pre-emptive disparagement here at Daily Kos and elsewhere, but watching the actual segment, it turned out to be better than I expected. (If you watch it several times, you get a better appreciation of the job Nye did – and how disingenuous Blackburn’s arguments really are.)

I fully agree with the author. Kudos to Bill Nye.

From Upworthy: Economist Ben Powell makes short work of the three standby anti-immigration arguments, leaving me with a ringing in my ears that sounds distinctly like the immortal "They took our jobs" chant from "South Park." They didn’t though. They really, really didn’t.

Republicans don’t want you to know these facts, because it debunks their lies.

From NY Times: Last week’s big business news was the announcement that Comcast, a gigantic provider of cable TV and high-speed Internet service, has reached a deal to acquire Time Warner, which is merely huge. If regulators approve the deal, Comcast will be an overwhelmingly dominant player in the business, with around 30 million subscribers.

So let me ask two questions about the proposed deal. First, why would we even think about letting it go through? Second, when and why did we stop worrying about monopoly power?

Click through for the rest of this excellent Paul Krugman editorial. I trust you will agree that this monopolistic deal must be stopped.

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I’m writing for tomorrow, and although my COPD is still severe, I did get more sleep and feel less drained.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:38 (average 5:33).  To do it click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Daily Kos: …So according to Cruz:

1. Republican politicians are a bunch of liars
2. Most Republicans were bluffing all along on the debt limit
3. Republicans think the GOP base consists of a bunch of gullible fools

I’ve gotta’ say, pretty hard to argue with any of that.

Dang!! I agree with Cruz!! Would someone please check me for fever?

From Alternet: Clarence Thomas: Funny, race never even came up in the 60s.

It’s always comforting when a lifetime member of the highest court in the land says something that leaves your jaw hanging agape.

Justice Clarence Thomas does not make a lot of public statements, but when he does, well, it makes you realize why he does not make a lot of public statements.

Thomas recently told a bunch of college students that race relations in America were better when he was a kid in the 1960s. Yes, he did. He said that.

“My sadness is that we are probably today more race- and difference-conscious than I was in the 1960s when I went to school. To my knowledge, I was the first black kid in Savannah, Georgia, to go to a white school. Rarely did the issue of race come up.”

Hmmm. Perhaps the subject of race did not come up because you could be lynched for bringing it up. Let’s see, it was the height of the Civil Rights Movement when Thomas was a kid. Segregation was pretty much the norm, throughout the south, and parts of the north—certainly in Georgia. and African-Americans who protested racial injustice put themselves in grave danger. But little Clarence Thomas was a happy little camper.

The real problem, Thomas continued, is that everyone is just too dang sensitive these days.

“If I had been as sensitive as that in the 1960s, I’d still be in Savannah,” he said. “Every person in this room has endured a slight. Every person. Somebody has said something that has hurt their feelings or did something to them — left them out.”

Yeupp, that’s all institutional racism is, Clarence. Just a bunch of black people getting their feelings hurt.

If my memory serves, Teabag Thomas was sure quick to play the race card, when he was confronted with his criminal harassment of Anita Hill. This is just one of seven deranged Republican comments from last week alone. Click through for the other six.

From Crooks and Liars: Hundreds of students formed a human wall around the basketball stadium at the University of Missouri on Saturday because the Westboro Baptist Church had pledged to protest gay football player Michael Sam.

After Missouri defensive lineman Michael Sam came out last week last week, anti-LGBT members of the Westboro church vowed to show up at Missouri’s game against Tennessee. But a group of students wearing "Stand with Sam" pins made the extremist group’s demonstration impossible by surrounding the stadium.

Anything that stymies these Republican Supply-side pseudo-Christians, as they spread their Republican gospel of hate, works for me. Kudos to those students.

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I’m writing for tomorrow and am feeling quite tired.  I normally sleep in two segments, one in the late afternoon and evening, and the other in the early morning, after I get the blog up, distribute links and eat.  At my new digs, the second coincides with high street noise from commercial activities below me.  I’m going to have to change my schedule.  I’m not sure how, but instead of forcing myself to get the blog up right after midnight, I’m going to make sleep the priority and get it up when I get it up.  I’m guessing that I’ll be doing more of my blogging during that high noise interval.  It will take some time for my body to discover the schedule that works here and adjust to it.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:28 (average 5:25).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Daily Kos: In the wake of the Citizens United case, critics of the ruling, which lifted prohibitions on direct campaign spending by corporations, raised the prospect of this allowing foreign nationals to influence US elections. Very serious people dismissed this trusting the our "robust" election laws would be up to the task of keeping foreign influence out of US elections. They were dead wrong.

In a first of its kind case, federal prosecutors say a Mexican businessman funnelled more than $500,000 into U.S. political races through Super PACs and various shell companies. The alleged financial scheme is the first known instance of a foreign national exploiting the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in order to influence U.S. elections. If proven, the campaign finance scandal could reshape the public debate over the high court’s landmark decision.

Until now, allegations surrounding Jose Susumo Azano Matsura, the owner of multiple construction companies in Mexico, have not spread beyond local news outlets in San Diego, where he’s accused of bankrolling a handful of southern California candidates. But the scandal is beginning to attract national interest as it ensnares a U.S. congressman, a Washington, D.C.-based campaign firm and the legacy of one of the most important Supreme Court decisions in a generation.

Matsura was able to evade US law by using a shell corporation in order to funnel the donations to US candidates.

At the time SCROTUS trashed the Constitution for their Republican corporate criminal masters, I said this was going to happen. Republicans seem to think that even foreign corporations are people with more rights than US citizens.

From NY Times: President Obama’s ambitious trade agenda appeared to fall further victim to election-year politics on Capitol Hill on Friday when Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., in a closed-door retreat with House Democrats, said he understood why they would not grant Mr. Obama the crucial authority he needs to conclude large trade deals with Asia and Europe.

This is one of those rare instances in which I fully oppose Obama’s policy, so I see this as good news.

From Think Progress: The dead of winter is a hard time for climate journalists. As snow falls from the sky, like it does and will continue to do every winter, climate deniers are given more fodder to make baseless claims. “It’s freezing outside and you’re whining about warming,” they say [propaganda delinked], as if a localized weather event were reflective of a long-term global climate shift.

Frustrating as it is, the inevitable increase in climate change trolling during cold season is at the very least beneficial because it forces us to remind ourselves of the long-term nature of climate change. Climate change does not manifest itself as one hot day, nor does it disprove itself with one freezing night. In fact, it is characterized by swaths of peer-reviewed data that have shown clear warming trends at every corner of the globe — not just outside our windows — over the last 125 years.

Nowhere does this fact manifest itself more than in a newly updated interactive map from the weekly science and technology magazine New Scientist. Titled “Our Warming World,” the map — published a year ago and updated last week with 2013 data — shows yellow, orange, and red splotches to illustrate just how much different areas have warmed up over the years, in some cases since 1881. The colors are relative to the average temperature between 1951 and 1980, a period New Scientist says is “the earliest period for which there was sufficiently good coverage for comparison” worldwide. It uses Surface Temperature Analysis data from the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

The map makes it crystal clear. Try it out.

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