{"id":15716,"date":"2015-07-28T07:34:53","date_gmt":"2015-07-28T14:34:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=15716"},"modified":"2015-07-28T07:34:54","modified_gmt":"2015-07-28T14:34:54","slug":"open-thread7282015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2015\/07\/28\/open-thread7282015\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Thread–7\/28\/2015"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m hurrying to get today\u2019s articles up as early as I can, as later I\u2019m going to prison to do volunteer work.  Tomorrow is a grocery delivery day.  Portland us under a heat advisory.<\/font><\/p>\n

Jig Zone Puzzle<\/strong>:<\/font><\/p>\n

Today\u2019s took me 2:20 (average 4:56).  To do it, click here<\/a>.  How did you do?<\/font><\/p>\n

Short Takes<\/strong>:<\/font><\/p>\n

From PRWatch<\/a>: <\/font>At the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) 2015 annual meeting in San Diego, California, dirty energy companies and their supporters–including ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Duke Energy–continue to dominate the funding of activities, according to a list of conference sponsors obtained jointly by the Center for Media and Democracy and Greenpeace. At the top of the agenda, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker spoke to ALEC delegates over breakfast on Thursday. Walker is now campaigning on a promise to destroy the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) if elected President in 2016, a plan which was earlier debated by ALEC at its December 2014 conference and is in line with ALEC\u2019s long-term legislative agenda. At ALEC conferences and meetings, rhetoric against the EPA–and in particular the Obama administration\u2019s proposed Clean Power Plan to reduce carbon pollution–is frequently extreme.<\/font><\/p>\n

Click through for more, including a list of sponsors to boycott.<\/font><\/p>\n

From Daily Kos<\/a>: <\/font>Spot the difference<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Last year, a Nevada rancher who boasts that he doesn\u2019t \u201crecognize the United States government as even existing\u201d become a hero of Fox News pundits and other conservative commentators for refusing to pay grazing fees he owes the government.<\/p>\n

But when a black woman named Sandra Bland was forced out of her car and to the ground by a Texas police officer after she reportedly failed to signal during a lane switch and declined to put out a cigarette, Fox News thinks this is a time to lecture viewers on how to be respectful to law enforcement. Bland later died in police custody in what investigators ruled was a suicide. –<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

White men defending a criminal, facing down gubbmint agencies with many, many guns, good. <\/p>\n

African American Woman armed with a cigarette, bad. The policeman was being exposed to second hand smoke for crissakes!<\/p>\n

The contrast is absurd, intolerable, and Republican.<\/font><\/p>\n

From NY Times<\/a>: <\/font>His family called him unstable and violent, so John R. Houser was ordered by a judge to be taken against his will to a mental hospital in 2008. Despite that sign that Mr. Houser was mentally troubled<\/a>, he passed a background check and was able to legally purchase the gun he used last week to kill two people in a Louisiana movie theater, because that hospital stay was not defined by officials as an involuntary commitment.<\/p>\n

Dylann Roof, who is charged with shooting nine people to death in a Charleston, S.C., church last month, was also able to buy the gun he used in the massacre. He should have failed a background check<\/a>, federal officials said, because he had previously admitted to illegal drug possession. Yet because of a clerical error in South Carolina and the confusion that caused the federal authorities who examined his record, he was not stopped from his making his purchase.<\/p>\n

As these two cases show, the one system that gun rights and gun control advocates both agree on, the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, which is supposed to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people, is riddled with problems. While the system, in operation since 1998, has prevented more than 2.4 million sales, it still has major gaps, with spotty cooperation from the states and a narrow definition of who is considered too mentally ill to own a gun.<\/p>\n

Republicans work overtime to keep the system ridden with loopholes, because enabling criminal gun purchases maximizes gun industry profits.<\/font><\/p>\n

Cartoon<\/strong>:<\/font><\/p>\n

\"0728Cartoon\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m hurrying to get today\u2019s articles up as early as I can, as later I\u2019m going to prison to do volunteer work.  Tomorrow is a grocery delivery day.  Portland us under a heat advisory. Jig Zone Puzzle: Today\u2019s took me 2:20 (average 4:56).  To do it, click here.  How did you do? Short Takes: From […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,3,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15716","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-open-thread","category-personal","category-politics","category-35-id","category-3-id","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15716","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15716"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15716\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}