Politics – Page 1150 – Politics Plus

Open Thread–2/10/2014

Posted by TomCat at 1:02 am Open Thread, Personal, Politics

Feb 102014

I’m writing for tomorrow, and my COPD is still severe. It’s been a slow day for news, so I’m just going to kick back and enjoy being ice bound. Portland is, for all intents and purposes, shut down. The MAX transit train is not running. Buses are barely running on very few routes. Even cabs are operating for emergencies only. I have not heard a siren in over a day. Four or five a day are average. Looking out the window from time to time, I have see only three moving cars. Two of those were moving sideways. So I hope you enjoy this article and a look at the box, where I bury Republicans.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 4:27 (average 5-14:). To do it, click here. How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Daily Kos: We can’t say Seymour Hersh didn’t warn us. It’s looking like the IRS Inspector General, J. Russell George, a Dubya appointee, is the ultimate stay-behind. In the middle of last year, he was caught meeting exclusively with Issa and his Goposaur gang to drum up phony IRS scandal claims. Well now, he’s been caught doing the exact same thing, but regarding an IRS ‘audit’ of the Affordable Care Act.

Thank goodness for Rep. Elijah Cummings and Rep. Gerald Connelly, who wrote the ‘honorable’ IRS IG a letter, which they cc’ed to Issa, and is posted in full…

How many times have I warned against Republican moles? They are temporary political appointees from the failed Bush Regime, who burrowed into "nonpartisan" career positions throughout our government, before we evicted Potomac Pinocchio from the White House. Now they devote their time to sabotaging our nation, while YOU pay their salaries. Click through to read the letter.

From Alternet: Ben Shapiro: Liberalism killed Philip Seymour Hoffman.

The terrible disease of addiction and a potentially lethal batch of heroin emerged as the leading theories of what killed actor Philip Seymour Hoffman last weekend.

But there is something far more insidious going on, as it turns out. And thank goodness conservative thought leader Ben Shapiro shared his deep thoughts [propaganda delinked]on the tragedy, by helpfully pointing the blame where it really belongs. It’s those damn liberals again. They’re killing everybody.

“…his self-inflicted death is yet another hallmark of the broken leftist culture that dominates Hollywood, enabling rather than preventing the loss of some of its greatest talents,” Shapiro wrote in the National Review.

The math, or the logic, goes something like this. Hoffman was a liberal. He died of a drug overdose. Therefore, liberalism causes drug abuse and death. Liberalism quickly devolves into “libertinism” and a “penchant for sin,” Shapiro argued. No one in Hollywood has any spirituality, principles or standards.

Except maybe the scientologists. We’re not sure where they fit in with Shapiro’s cosmology.

This is just one of the offerings from Republican psychopaths in the last week alone. Click through for the other nine.

From Crooks and Liars: It was just a couple of weeks ago that Glenn Beck had a weirdly lucid and suspiciously self-aware moment and admitted to Megyn Kelly that he realized that he had been contributing to tearing the country apart and that wasn’t who we were.

That was so two weeks ago, apparently.

Because Lonesome Rhodes Beck is back to scaring the crap out of his pea-brained listeners, telling them that if they dared to disagree with global warming, abortion or Obamacare, they would be rounded up and placed in internment camps, just as Justice Antonin Scalia warned this week [propaganda delinked]:

Barf Bag Alert!!

Both Beck and Scalia are engaging in projection. They are accusing Obama of intending to implement a purely Republican plan. While it’s true that internment camps have been built in the US, it was Halliburton that built them under contract from the Bush Regime.

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Robert Reich on Republican Class Warfare

Posted by TomCat at 12:13 am Politics

Feb 092014

Because it is an election year, Republicans are trying to sell the lie that they really care about America’s poor and middle classes. At the same time they are doing everything they can to eliminate the safety net for the poor and force the middle class into poverty. The more they deny class warfare, the more they practice it. Few people are better at explaining this than Robert Reich.

Most Americans are on a downward escalator. Median household pay is dropping, adjusted for inflation. A smaller share of working-age Americans are in jobs than at any time in the last three decades.

Only 113,000 jobs were added to the U.S. economy in January, on top of a paltry 75,000 in December.

We need a new WPA to rebuild the nation’s crumbling infrastructure, a higher minimum wage, strong unions, investments in education, and extended unemployment benefits for those who still can’t find a job. When 95% of the economic gains go to the top 1%, the middle class and poor don’t have the purchasing power to keep it going…

Inserted from <Robert Reich>

The included video could not be embedded, nut I pound a version that can.

Republicans are working to form a permanent Republican Reich, made up od 1% masters and 99% slaves. Listen to Robert Reich, not the Republican Reich.

Open Thread-2/9/2014

Posted by TomCat at 12:12 am Open Thread, Personal, Plus, Politics

Feb 092014

I’m writing for tomorrow, struggling with my COPD, watching snow, and enjoying Olympic coverage. The US and Canadian women’s teams won their first ice hockey games. The figure skating prelims have been elegant. A young Russian girl turned in the best short program I’ve ever seen. A European team swept the 5K individual speed skating, but I just can’t remember which one, or whether they have any speed skating history. 😉

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:51 (average 4:42). To do it, click here. How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Daily Kos: Billionaire Sam Zell today:

"I guess my feeling is that he’s right," Zell said when asked by Bloomberg’s Betty Liu how he felt about Perkins’ stance [which was that minor criticism of the 1% equaled the Kristallnacht by the Nazis]. "The 1 percent are being pummeled because it’s politically convenient to do so."

Zell then said the problem is that all non-rich are just jealous that they don’t have the same work ethic that the country’s wealthiest do.

"The problem is that the world and this country should not talk about envy of the 1 percent. It should talk about emulating the 1 percent," he said. "The 1 percent work harder. The 1 percent are much bigger factors in all forms of our society." [emphasis original]

The big irony here is that the fool actually believes that the money earns, not him, entitles him to evade paying for the things we all built, without which, his money could not make more money for him.

From Right Wing Watch: This week, President Obama nominated five people to federal judgeships in Florida and New Jersey. Three of these nominees are already judges; two are accomplished attorneys. But what is more relevant to the right-wing Liberty Counsel is that, according to the American Family Association’s OneNewsNow, “among the nominees are four African Americans, one of them homosexual.” (That’s not actually true: one of the nominees is African American, one is Latino, and three are white).

Liberty Counsel head Mat Staver told OneNewsNow [pseudo-Christians delinked] today that these judicial picks show “ideological bankruptcy” on the part of a president who is “destroying the judiciary.”

"So he gets a black man, who is a practicing homosexual, and now he wants to put this individual in an appointment for life on the federal bench," Staver lamented, referring apparently to Darrin P. Gayes, a state circuit judge in Florida who Obama nominated to a federal district court.

At no point in the article does Staver or OneNewsNow touch on the nominee’s qualifications, other than to note vaguely that “all five nominees are considered liberals.”

Black, gay and librul?!!? Republican Supply-side Jesus must be cringing in his grave!!

From Crooks and Liars: Last weekend, Gov. Chris Christie’s office circulated an email to friends and supporters slamming David Wildstein, the former Port Authority official at the center of the George Washington Bridge scandal.

Now, citing two people familiar with the matter, a report by Politico.com today claims that aides never ran the memo by Christie — who is entangled in a widening scandal that he says a renegade deputy chief of staff and others are responsible for — and that the governor didn’t read it himself before it went out.

If you actually believe that PIGnocchio did not know everything that was in it, before it went out, even if he didn’t "read" it himself, I’d like to sell you the George Washington Bridge. Since a traffic study revealed some minor delays, I can give you a discount.

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Kudos to Cheryl Maas!

Open Thread–2/8/2014

Posted by TomCat at 12:30 am Open Thread, Personal, Plus, Politics

Feb 082014

I’m writing for tomorrow, and I shall post just this article, because my COPD interfered with my sleep last night. I plan to watch a lot of the Olympic coverage. I have long been a fan of amateur sports, although I admit to frustration over the way pros have taken over some venues and even most “amateurs” are now pros. Nevertheless, there will be lots of moments worth seeing, even though I expect those dang Canadians to kick our butts more often than not.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:35 (average 5:26). To do it, click here. How did you do?

From My Window:

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The Winter Storm Warning has been extended through tomorrow night. Lots of places are colder and have more snow, but this is highly unusual here.

Short Takes:

From Mother Jones: There’s one main rule at the conservative donor conclaves held twice a year by Charles and David Koch at luxury resorts: What happens there stays there.

The billionaire industrialists and their political operatives strive to ensure the anonymity of the wealthy conservatives who fund their sprawling political operation—which funneled more than $400 million into the 2012 elections—and to keep their plans private. Attendees of these summits are warned that the seminars, where the Kochs and their allies hatch strategies for electing Republicans and advancing conservative initiatives on the state and national levels, are strictly confidential; they are cautioned to keep a close eye on their meeting notes and materials. But last week, following the Kochs’ first donor gathering of 2014, one attendee left behind a sensitive document at the Renaissance Esmeralda resort outside of Palm Springs, California, where the Kochs and their comrades had spent three days focused on winning the 2014 midterm elections and more. The document lists VIP donors—including John Schnatter, the founder of the Papa John’s pizza chain—who were scheduled for one-on-one meetings with representatives of the political, corporate, and philanthropic wings of Kochworld. The one-page document, provided to Mother Jones by a hotel guest who discovered it, offers a fascinating glimpse into the Kochs’ political machine and shows how closely intertwined it is with Koch Industries, their $115 billion conglomerate.

Click through for the complete list of Koch Suckers.

From NY Times: The Senate failed to move forward on a three-month extension of assistance for the long-term unemployed on Thursday, leaving it unlikely that Congress would approve the measure soon while undercutting a key aspect of President Obama’s economic recovery plan.

The Senate did not fail. The Republican Party sabotaged it. Every Democrat voted for it. All but four Republicans voted against it.

From Think Progress: With the 2014 Winter Olympics kicking off Friday, all eyes are on Sochi to see who will violate Russia’s ban on “gay propaganda.” This ambiguous law, purportedly designed to protect children from homosexuality, has been used to punish any positive messages about LGBT people; just on Friday, more than a dozen were arrested in St. Petersburg for a sign quoting the Olympics’ nondiscrimination ordinance (Principle 6).

The International Olympics Committee seems to have arranged a truce with Russia that the law will not be enforced during the Games, but has also discouraged athletes from making any political statements. A “speakers corner” has been set up for athletes, but it’s several miles away from any of the venues and President Vladimir Putin said this week that Sochi is “not the place” to debate gay rights.

Of the 2,500 athletes attending the games, only seven are openly gay, an improbably low proportion, but openly lesbian Dutch snowboarder Chery Maas has already flashed her unicorn rainbow glove for the camera . It remains to be seen how enforcement of the law will actually play out, but here are 10 attendees who are likely to violate the ban:

Click through for the list of athletes, who may have the courage to challenge GOP Pootie (R-RU) and his Republican War on the LGBT community.

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A New Republican Lie about ObamaCare

Posted by TomCat at 1:23 am Politics

Feb 072014

Given the rollout difficulties the Obama administration have had implementing the Affordable Care Act, critics with have the brains God gave a special-needs cockroach would latch onto that meme and keep hammering. Fortunately, the above description overestimates the intellectual acumen of the Republican Party by a wide margin. Were that not so, they would not come up with lies as easy to debunk as their latest, that ending “job lock” takes jobs out of the economy.

One of the best arguments for health-insurance reform is that our traditional employer-based system often locked people into jobs they wanted to leave but couldn’t because they feared they wouldn’t be able to get affordable coverage elsewhere.

This worry was pronounced for people with pre-existing conditions but not limited to them. Consider families with young children in which one of the parents would like to get out of the formal labor market for a while to take care of the kids. In the old system, the choices of such couples were constrained if only one of the two received employer-provided family coverage.

Or ponder the fate of a 64-year-old with a condition that leaves her in great pain. She has the savings to retire but can’t exercise this option until she is eligible for Medicare. Is it a good thing to force her to stay in her job? Is it bad to open her job to someone else?

By broadening access to health insurance, the Affordable Care Act ends the tyranny of “job lock,” which is what the much-misrepresented Congressional Budget Office study of the law released on Tuesday shows. The new law increases both personal autonomy and market rationality by ending the distortions in behavior the old arrangements were creating.

But that’s not how the study has been interpreted, particularly by enemies of the law. Typical was a tweet from the National Republican Congressional Committee declaring that “#ObamaCare is hurting the economy, will cost 2.5 millions [sic] jobs.”… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Truthdig>

Chris Hayes explained this and pointed out why the misunderstanding of this report is so widespread.

For the most part, media has just parroted this Republican lie, by focusing on what Republicans are saying, but ignoring what the underlying CBO report actually said, leaving voters misinformed. Therefore, it’s up to people like us to make sure the truth gets out.

This is the truth. Eliminating “job lock” will have no effect at all on the number of jobs available. However, it will lower the unemployment rate, because many people leaving these jobs will not be seeking other work, and they will be replaced with people, who have been seeking work. So in the process, it will save taxpayers billions in unemployment benefits.

This also the truth. RepubliCare, the Republican alternative to ObamaCare, is nothing but returning healthcare to Big Insurance control, with even fewer restrictions than there were before ObamaCare was implemented. It does, however, offer the RepubliCare Death Benefit. Anyone who cannot pay gets to die for free.

RepubliCare

Open Thread–2/7/2014

Posted by TomCat at 1:21 am Open Thread, Personal, Politics

Feb 072014

I’m writing for tomorrow and feeling a bit better, but I’m still very tired. It’s 18° outside (mid-morning), and I’m glad to be where I am. I talked to a friend at the old building, and I understand the heat has failed there yet again. We are under a high wind watch and a winter storm warning, so as you can see below, I have big plans for today!!

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 4:13 (average 5:10). To do it click here. How did you do?

From The New Yorker: Bill Gates’s [sic] first day at work in the newly created role of technology adviser got off to a rocky start yesterday as the Microsoft founder struggled for hours to install the Windows 8.1 upgrade.

The installation hit a snag early on, sources said, when Mr. Gates repeatedly received an error message informing him that his PC ran into a problem that it could not handle and needed to restart.

After failing to install the upgrade by lunchtime, Mr. Gates summoned the new Microsoft C.E.O. Satya Nadella, who attempted to help him with the installation, but with no success.

That sounds like a routine Microslime installation to me!!

From Daily Kos: A beautiful, classy, succinct and totally brutal takedown.

Republicans think that Coke should reflect the views of Koch!

From Upworthy: I am guilty of seeing a label with a cute little barn, green packaging, maybe a few farm animals, and the word "natural" on it and thinking, "Yeah, this seems like the healthy option!" — all while blissfully ignoring the list of ingredients and reality. This dude breaks down why that needs to stop.

So that's where Republicans learned how to advertise candidates!! I have a question for the food mavens among you. Are there also scams involving "organic"?

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H/T Carrie at Care2

Republicans on Parade–2/6/2014

Posted by TomCat at 12:43 am Politics

Feb 062014

RepublicansOnParade3

Here is the thirty-ninth article in our Republicans on Parade series, featuring individuals who personify what the Republican Party has become. Today’s honoree is the The entire NRCC (National Republican Congressional Committee) for stealing donations from their opponents. I received this in email.

TomCat,

Now this is truly insane. The National Republican Congressional Committee is tricking would-be Democratic campaign donors into making donations to defeat the candidates they support — with Republican websites that look like they could easily be the campaign pages of Democratic candidates.

If you agree that this is absolutely outrageous, please join our petition to the NRCC right now demanding that they take down the fraudulent sites AND refund the donations that have come in through them.

Unless site visitors read the fine print on the landing pages and the donation forms, it’s very easy to see how they could think these web sites were those of the Democratic candidates.

As ThinkProgress reported yesterday:

Ray Bellamy of Florida says he was tricked by the page and accidentally made a donation to the NRCC. “It looked legitimate and had a smiling face of Sink and all the trappings of a legitimate site,” Bellamy told the Tampa Bay Times. The look-alike page uses the same colors as Florida candidate Alex Sink’s campaign, with the URL sinkrocongress2014.com. Once entering information, the person is redirected to an NRCC thank-you page.

The NRCC launched the mock sites to target Democratic candidates they say are “frauds,” but if this is some sort of lame attempt at satire it’s way off the mark. It’s nothing more than a dirty trick and it’s reprehensible.

They are making a mockery of democracy and they’re swindling people. Join the petition now and tell the NRCC to stop it immediately.

Thank you for all you do.

— Alex Hart, Online Team

Sources:

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/02/03/3242381/republicans-trick-voters-donating-democratic-candidates/

http://arizonaspolitics.blogspot.com/2014/02/warning-calling-them-frauds-national.html

Republicans have weakly claimed that this does not truly represent them, but I disagree. The NRCC is an official organ of the Republican Party. Kudos to PFAW!!

Open Thread–2/6/2014

Posted by TomCat at 12:43 am Open Thread, Personal, Politics, Religion

Feb 062014

I’m feeling better today than yesterday, but that isn’t saying a lot. There are things that I’d like to get out and do, but it’s cold enough to freeze the Obamaballs off a brass Nevada Leg Hound!!

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:01 (average 4:37). To do it, click here. How did you do?

Short Takes:
From Upworthy: A Whole New Way To Think About Stress That Changes Everything We’ve Been Taught

Before I learned to manage stress, I used to suffer from severe GERD. Because I learned to treat stress as something to energize me to take pro-social action to changer the things I can help change, to defer the things I can help change later, and to give the things I cannot help change into God’s care, I developed a cast iron gut. I can now eat super-spicy foods, even my own infamous, triple-burn chili, without heartburn, let alone acid reflux.

From YouTube: Bill Nye’s Debate Victory Lap on The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell

I have no trouble at all reconciling my own Christian faith with scientific fact. Ken Hamm and other Republican Supply-side pseudo-Christians misinterpret teaching through myth as historical fact, when it is not. For those who wish to watch the entire debate (2:45:33), here it is:

From Alternet: State Sen. Lee Bright: Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in South Carolina

In South Carolina, state Sen. Lee Bright is challenging veteran Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) for his senate seat. It’s difficult to find someone further on the loony fringe than this Club for Growth-endorsed candidate.

A member of the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary’s Board of Visitors, Bright has been a sponsor of the “Life Begins at Conception Act” for the past three years. In April 2013, Bright introduced a bill that would end all abortions in South Carolina. He has also sponsored bills that would criminalize the Affordable Care Act and bills that would exempt South Carolina from federal gun laws.

Bright has also called FEMA a "scam,” and has promised “to get rid of the IRS.” After seeing a video of IRS agents training with AR-15 rifles, Bright said, “They’re doing assault-weapon training, the Brown Shirts are next because that’s the enforcement for Obamacare. If you don’t have an IRS, you don’t have Obamacare. That’s the mechanism that’s controlling our lives for far too long.”

It gets worse. Bright believes federal income tax is something “designed by Nazi Germany,” and in a series of speeches to pro-faithful gatherings has promoted the idea of reigniting the Civil War. “If at first you don’t secede, try again” is one of his favorite applause lines. “If the 10th Amendment won’t protect the Second, we might have to use the Second to protect the 10th,” is another.

This is just one of five new Republican Supply-side pseudo-Christian nut-job candidates for the US Senate. Beware!! Click through for the other four.

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