Politics Plus

I’m writing early for Day 21.  The temperature at my desk is 82°, and that feels almost chilly, but I’m still not up to that Monthly Report yet.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 4:53 (average 6:11).  To do it, click here,  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From NY Times: Egypt’s military officers removed the country’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, on Wednesday, suspended the Constitution and installed an interim government presided over by a senior jurist.

Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood is their equivalent of our Tea Party Similarly they promised jobs, but once in power focused on a restrictive social agenda that only their own faction wanted, not allowing other factions any input. Fortunately the military appears to have no desire to wield political power, long term.

From MSNBC: Despicable fee

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Bend over and grab your ankles, folks. Here comes a case of Bankster Butt!

From Crooks and Liars: A North Carolina state senator on Wednesday blasted fellow lawmakers for attaching draconian anti-abortion provisions to an anti-Sharia law bill and insisted that "the North Carolina Republican General Assembly" is "what we have to fear."

There is nothing scary about authentic Islam or authentic Christianity. Followers of both coexist in peace with mutual respect.  Extremists are another matter. There is no functional difference between the Taliban, Hezbollah, or Al Qaeda and Republican Supply-side pseudo-Christianity.

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I’m writing early.  Tomorrow is day 11.  Grrrr…  The Supreme Court has apparently kicked the can until next year on Affirmative Action.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:54 (average 8:00).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Fantasy Football:

We still NEED  two more players in our lefty league.  For more info. click here.

Short Takes:

From LA Times: The Supreme Court has agreed to hear an appeal from the Obama administration and decide whether the president may make temporary “recess appointments” to federal offices when the Senate takes a short break during the year.

The case is to be heard in the fall, and it is likely to yield an important decision on the constitutional powers of the president to execute the duties of his office in the face of Senate opposition. It could also have an effect on President Obama’s final years in the White House.

I’d rather nuke the filibastards with the nuclear option on the filibuster than leave it to the five fascist Injustices of SCROTUS.

From The New Yorker: A U.S. intelligence agency was so busy spying on three hundred million Americans that it failed to notice one dude who was working for it, a spokesman for the agency acknowledged today.

“I guess we were so busy monitoring the everyday communications of every man, woman, and child in the nation that we didn’t notice that a contractor working for us was downloading tons of classified documents,” the agency spokesman said. “It’s definitely embarrassing, for sure.”

Of course, no such statement was made, but it should be.

From NY Times: …Billed as Louisiana’s first atheist service and titled “Joie de Vivre: To Delight in Being Alive,” it was presided over by Jerry DeWitt, a small, charismatic man dressed all in black with slick, shiny hair.

“Oh, it’s going to be so hard to not say, ‘Can I get an amen?’ ” he said with a smile, warning people that this was going to be more like church than they might expect. “I want you to feel comfortable singing. And I want you to feel comfortable clapping your hands…

At last! Services for the atheist faith! 😉

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A win for the good guys!

The struggle continues into day four tomorrow.  I’m writing early, I’m here.

jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:05 (average 5:18).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From TruthDig: You don’t need me to tell you, but it’s a whole lot tougher leading a garage band than being a superstar. What you might not have known is just how much harder.

If you want an example of growing inequality, try the rock ‘n’ roll industry. Between 1982 and 2003, the share of concert income taken home by the top 1 percent of performers more than doubled, rising from 26 percent to 56 percent. The top 5 percent collected almost 90 percent of all concert revenues…

Dang! I did not realize that I’ve been listening to InsaniTEA. 🙁

From Christian Science Monitor: At the adolescent-unfriendly hour of 7:10 on this rainy spring morning in tiny Loachapoka, Ala., classes won’t start for another half hour in the public school. But already the science lab at Loachapoka High School is coming alive with the banter of 13 teens sloughing off backpacks and settling in to learn – not about chemistry or biology, but about faith…

Click through for a comprehensive and interesting article. I have no problem with using school facilities for religious purposes on the students’ own time, if and only if, those facilities are equally available to every religion, including the atheist faith. Otherwise, this practice violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

From Salon.com: Failed Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain warned attendees at the annual Faith and Freedom Conference that America is headed toward communism and socialism, and called for supporters to “take our country back” in 2014.

“This train is running full speed down the tracks towards socialism and towards communism,” Cain said, The Washington Post reports. “Yes, I said it. Before we stop it and reverse it, we got to slow it down. That’s what we do in 2014.”

Like most Republican Supply-side pseudo-Christians, Mr. 9-9-9 displays complete ignorance. Socialism and Communism are mutually exclusive. Under actual Communism, there is no state. It will have withered away, no longer needed. Under actual Socialism the government owns all the means of production. Neither comes even close to describing the Republican Welfare state handed down by the Bush Regime: Vulture Capitalism.

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Republicans celebrate the day by counting how many they can violate.

Yesterday my COPD was more severe, leaving me sleepless.  I’m still down.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 4:24 (average 4:32).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From NY Times:

For more than two years, European leaders have pushed a cocktail of fiscal austerity and structural reforms on troubled countries like Portugal, Spain and Italy, promising that it will be the tonic to cure their economic and financial ailments. All the evidence shows that this bitter medicine is killing the patient.

Portugal’s highest court recently ruled against cuts to the wages and pensions of government employees. Protesters in Spain have picketed the homes of lawmakers to demand better treatment of homeowners behind on their mortgages. And frustrated Italians cast such a large vote for an anti-establishment movement that the country still does not have a new government more than a month after its national elections.

From the beginning, it was clear that economic austerity (cutting government spending and public benefits) and structural reforms (relaxing tough labor laws and privatizing state-owned companies, for example) could not be accomplished simultaneously during a deep recession. And that painful reality is playing out with no end in sight…

The one European group that have profited from austerity is the 1%, and that goes a long way to explaining why Republicans still demand these same policies that Europe have proven catastrophic.

From The Grist: Solar power and other distributed renewable energy technologies could lay waste to U.S. power utilities and burn the utility business model, which has remained virtually unchanged for a century, to the ground.

That is not wild-eyed hippie talk. It is the assessment of the utilities themselves.

Back in January, the Edison Electric Institute — the (typically stodgy and backward-looking) trade group of U.S. investor-owned utilities — released a report [PDF] that, as far as I can tell, went almost entirely without notice in the press. That’s a shame. It is one of the most prescient and brutally frank things I’ve ever read about the power sector. It is a rare thing to hear an industry tell the tale of its own incipient obsolescence…

Click through for much more. Such an occurrence could destroy the Koch Brothers and other billionaire polluters. No wonder Republicans want to hang onto 19th century technology.

From CNN: President Barack Obama said he ordered the "full resources" of the federal government to respond to the Boston bombings on Monday, and that he also called for increased security around the United States as necessary.

"We still do not know who did this or why," he said from the Brady Press Briefing Room, cautioning people against jumping to conclusions. "But make no mistake, we will get to the bottom of this, and we will find out who did this, we’ll find out why they did this."

Any individuals or groups responsible for the "senseless" bombing, he added, will "feel the full weight of justice."

"The American people will say a prayer for Boston tonight," he said.

Notably absent from his remarks was the word "terror," though federal investigators are classifying the bombings as a terror event. It is not clear if it’s from a domestic or foreign source, a federal law enforcement official with knowledge of the investigation said…

There has been a cry from the extreme right that Obama is covering up for Muslims, by not calling the bombing ‘terrorist’, but assuming it was Muslim without evidence is absurd, and unless the motivation was political, it was not terrorist. Now, if I were a pseudo-Christian hatemonger, desiring to kill a few libruls for Republican Supply-Side Jesus, I might consider an attack in the city where the original tea party took place on Patriots Day, which is also infamous to TEAbuggerers as tax day. I’m not saying that’s what happened. I am saying that there are enough possible scenarios that extremists should shut up with their accusations until we have evidence to determine what happened and why.

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