Politics Plus

I’m writing for tomorrow, and it has been a difficult day.  I hate to give you Midwesterners and Easterners bad news, but polar weather is on the way.  I know, because it froze my butt, when I went to the doctors, and it’s gong to be frigid here for the rest of the week.  Temperature extremes set off my COPD.  The doctor had to do extra digging in my foot, but the pain was no worse than walking on it already was, and when it heals, it won’t hurt for a while.  So it was already a bad air day, but right after I returned there was another fire in the building.  Someone must have thrown a lit cigarette down the garbage chute.  I was never in any danger, as firefighters responded in less than five minutes.  They did not even need to evacuate me, but there was just enough smoke in the hallway, where I waited by the stairs, that it set off my COPD even worse.  Therefore, I’m afraid I don’t even have Short Takes for you today.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:00 (average 4:03).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Cartoon:

I’m writing for tomorrow and hurrying to have time for a nap before the game.  It will be over by the time this is posted, so you can judge my emotional state by the notice below.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:45 (average 4:42).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Ultimate Religious Agony:

Republicans stole my team.  They did not even show up.  :-(  Meanwhile the Seachickens excelled at all the Republican skills: deception, obstruction, sabotage, and theft. ;-)  Seriously, had they been playing any other team in the AFC, I would have been for them.  They won, because they deserved it.

Short Takes:

From Daily Kos: …"Regarding U.S. same-store sales for the company’s fourth quarter, ending Friday, Wal*mart said it expects sales, excluding fuel, to be “slightly negative” to its earlier guidance of flat sales at Wal*mart stores "

Why are those sales negative?

Chief financial officer Charles Holley said Wal*mart saw a greater-than-expected negative impact from reductions in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps. The cuts went into effect on Nov. 1. [Faux Noise delinked][emphasis original]

Then it provides some right wing political cover by also blaming storms…

The Walton Family are pretty good about goose-stepping with their 0.1% cronies and their Republican lackeys, and when it comes to SNAP they are leaving their most important concern unsaid. SNAP subsidizes Wal-Fart payroll for the majority of their employees. Cuts in SNAP increase the pressure to pass realistic minimum wage laws. So I don’t expect them to keep providing political cover on this issue for long.  This also proves that Republican claims that cutting SNAP would not hurt the economy were lies.

From Think Progress: Herbert Smulls was in the middle of a phone call discussing his attorneys’ final efforts to save his life when he was reportedly seized by prison guards, hauled into an execution chamber, and injected with a toxic cocktail of drugs. At the time of his death, an appeal was pending before the United States Supreme Court asking the justices to halt his execution. Andrew Cohen lays out the timeline:

At 10:11, the final lethal injection protocols were initiated. By this time, the 8th Circuit had rejected all of the claims before it—over another pointed dissent from Judge Bye—leaving only an active appeal before the Supreme Court. At 10:20 Smulls was pronounced dead. Ten minutes later, at 10:30, the Supreme Court notified the lawyers that Smulls’ final stay request had been denied at 10:24. This means that Missouri began to execute a man 13 minutes before it was entirely sure it could do so. Smulls was pronounced dead four minutes before the Supreme Court finally authorized Missouri to kill him.

As Cohen notes, “[j]ust imagine what we’d be talking about today if the justices had granted Smulls’ stay request four minutes after he was pronounced dead.” At the very least, Smulls’ appeal held enough merit that a United States Court of Appeals judge would have granted the stay.

The Republicans running the State of Misery [typo intentional] are so pro-death, that they don’t even wait for the Republican Injustices of SCROTUS to reject an appeal. This has nothing to do with Smulls or what he deserved. This is about who WE are. When the state straps down a defenseless person and kills him for revenge, that is murder.

From Right Wing Watch:

Remember two years ago when the Susan G. Komen For the Cure foundation abruptly dropped its grants to a Planned Parenthood breast-cancer screening program, setting off a national outcry, and prompting the resignation of the Komen official reportedly behind the decision?

The fallout of the debacle is still hurting Komen, which recently reported a 22 percent drop in income over the past year. But the decision to cut off grants to Planned Parenthood seems to be paying off for one person: Karen Handel, the former Komen vice president who was widely reported to have been the driving force behind split.

Now running for Senate in Georgia, Handel has released a campaign video touting her role in severing Planned Parenthood from Komen and fighting back against the “left-wing groups” and “liberal media” that criticized her.

Back when the news first broke that Komen had dumped Planned Parenthood, Handel denied that the decision was motivated at all by her anti-choice politics, despite reports from sources in the organization that said she manipulated its rules to cast Planned Parenthood out.

Barf Bag Alert!

Komen deserves ongoing NO DONATIONS boycotting, and Handel must be kept out of the Senate.

Cartoon:

H/T Carrie at Care2

I’m writing for tomorrow, feeling very tired, and running quite late, due to the time it took to gather the data for tomorrow’s Monthly Report.  This will give you an idea just how much work that is.  Because I do so much online I clean up my cookies and temporary Internet files several times per day.  I did so immediately before and after my data collection session.  I accumulated 329 Megabytes of temporary Internet files during the session.  Tomorrow is also the highest holy day in the Church of the Ellipsoid Orb.  My sainted Broncos will be worshiping to protect the divine Orb from the infernal Republican Seachickens (may they fall into the hands of KFC). ;-)  If you have to ask what I’ll be doing, you may want to stay away from IQ tests for the sake of your self esteem.  So don’t expect much on Monday, please.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:50 (average 5:23).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From The New Yorker: Responding to fresh charges that he knew about the controversial lane closures on the George Washington Bridge last fall, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie today asked for the public’s patience while he makes up a new story.

“Today you have heard some allegations that are shocking and explosive,” he told reporters at a hastily called press conference. “All I ask is that the people of the great state of New Jersey give me sufficient time to invent a new story that explains my way out of this.”

Governor Christie said that he had spent the past few hours in closed-door meetings trying to come up with a new narrative that absolves him of any guilt in the bridge scandal, but while he was definitely denying the allegations, “so far, we don’t have a winner.”

LOL Andy! Sometimes fact is funnier than fiction!

From Daily Kos: The crocodile tears are flowing at Politico where right-wing law prof Eugene Kontorovich tries to make the case for why early voting is a bad thing:

A single Election Day creates a focal point that gives solemnity and relevance to the state of popular opinion at a particular moment in time; on a single day, we all have to come down on one side or the other. But if the word “election” comes to mean casting votes over a period of months, it will elide the difference between elections and polls. People will be able to vote when the mood strikes them — after seeing an inflammatory ad, for example.

Voting then becomes an incoherent summing of how various individuals feel at a series of moments, not how the nation feels at a particular moment. This weakens civic cohesiveness, and it threatens to substitute raw preferences and momentary opinion for rational deliberation.

Because right-wingers value nothing more than civic cohesiveness and rational deliberation…at least when it means being able to corral voters into a single workday when their votes can most easily be denied, delayed and  frustrated by impossibly long lines, specious challenges and insufficient ballots.

Click through for even more. That Prof has his Doctorate in Bullshitology!!

From Alternet: The Latest Voter Suppression Catalog: North Carolina.

Until the Republicans took control of the governor’s mansion and Legislature in 2012, North Carolina pioneered some of the most progressive election laws in the South. Since then, the GOP has ressurrected the ghost of Jim Crow, narrowing options to register, to vote early, and to obtain a ballot on Election Day. Bill Moyers noted these abuses in a detailed report this month, but even he didn’t recite everything that’s gotten worse.

North Carolina’s GOP has also ended straight party voting in 2014, where a voter can pick all of a party’s candidates. Its governor won’t fill a vacant U.S. House seat held by a Democrat until November, instead of holding a traditional special election. The last time the state’s elections were this rigged was more than a century ago, legal scholars said.

This is just one of eight insidious Republican attacks your freedom by trying to steal elections they cannot win honestly. Click through for the other seven.

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