If you’re wondering how I put up such a normal Open Thread on a travel day, I admit to a bit to trickery.  I am writing this article, in its entirety, on Wednesday morning, before leaving on my volunteer trip.  I will upload it to the blog as a draft, so the only things I have to do in Salem are do the puzzle and update the time taken to do it.  Slick, huh?

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 4:32 (average 5:22).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From TPM: Earlier this month, Bob McDonnell became former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell. On Tuesday, he became indicted former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell.

Just days after he left office, the Republican and and his wife, Maureen McDonnell, were charged in federal court with more than a dozen counts related to the tens of thousands of dollars in gifts and loans they accepted from a wealthy Virginia businessman. (The ex-governor maintained on Tuesday that he had done nothing illegal.)

The fact that the McDonnells were under scrutiny from prosecutors was no secret. Stories about the investigation, and the relationship between the McDonnells and the businessman, Jonnie Williams, had been appearing in the press for months. We knew (thanks in large part to stellar reporting from The Washington Post) about the Rolex, and the Oscar de la Renta dress, and the Ferrari joyride, and the golf outings. But the 43-page indictment filed on Tuesday did reveal numerous new details about the scandal, and confirmed several other points which had been fuzzy or in dispute.

Click through for the details of Gov. Ultrasound's indictment. It is a shocking revelation of standard operating procedure for Republican politicians, and it may even be a window to what's ahead for PIGnocchio.

From Think Progress: It seemed like all anyone in Washington could talk about on Tuesday was Ezra Klein’s departure from the Washington Post. But another journalist’s new job caught my eye: Stephen Moore, the Wall Street Journal’s notorious economics columnist, joined the Heritage Foundation as its “chief economist. [InsaniTEA delinked]”

Moore’s hiring cements the emerging case that the Heritage Foundation, far from being a traditional think tank, has become a Tea Party lobby with a big research budget. It also tells us a lot about the real role that economic thought plays in a movement obsessed with its opponents’ supposed economic ignorance [Faux Noise delinked].

This isn’t Moore’s first dance at Heritage — he was a fellow there during the heyday of the Reagan Revolution. But as chief economist, Moore will wield far more influence over the direction of Heritage’s economic research than he did thirty years ago.

My bold prediction: this will end in terrible embarrassment. Moore is much more conservative activist than journalist. In 1999, he founded the Club for Growth, one of the hardest of hard-line conservative PACs, and served as its President until 1999. Moore, who had described [Propagandist delinked] his goal in founding the Club to be creating “the tax cut enforcer of the party,” called [InsaniTEA delinked] the Club’s birth “the defining moment of his career.”

That's a trip from Murdoch's Faux Print to DeMint. It will mean even more TEAbuggery from Heritage Foundation, and Murdoch will surely find an equally deranged 1% class warrior for his propaganda rag.

From Salon.com: The NOAA’s annual State of the Climate report is in, and it confirmed what anyone who’s been paying attention probably noticed: 2013 was one for the record books.

We ended the year with a globally averaged combined land and ocean surface temperature .62 degrees Celsius (1.12 degrees Fahrenheit) above the 20th century average, tying with 2003 as the fourth warmest year since record keeping began in 1880. This means that global temperature was above the 20th century average for the 37th year running, and that all 13 years of the 21st century officially rank among the 15 warmest in recorded history.

That's no surprise to me, because I have noticed a distinct change in Portland, Oregon, since I first moved here over 30 years ago. Summers are hotter, and winters are colder than they were then. There are more frequent extremes in both directions.

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And the Rockefeller Group and other vulture capitalists sure are paying for it!!

I’m writing for tomorrow and am running way late, because I overslept.  That’s a good thing, in light of the week ahead.  On Wednesday, I leave for Salem for organizational meetings with prisoners, outside board members and officers of my volunteer organization.  I will be returning Friday.  Getting ready has involved a pants-load of paperwork and updating my notebook computer, which I had not turned-on since I was in the hospital last spring.  I hope to post at least personal updates from there.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:05 (average 5:16).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From The New Yorker: A support group for mayors bullied by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie held its first meeting today at the Prudential Center arena, in Newark.

Organizers of the gathering pronounced themselves pleased with the turnout, as bullied officeholders from all over the state filled the eighteen-thousand-seat venue.

The support group was the brainchild of Carol Foyler, the bullied mayor of Sea Ridge, New Jersey.

“All of these mayors have their own painful stories to share,” Mayor Foyler said. “We wanted to give them a safe space to do that.”

The event was interrupted fifteen minutes in, however, when power to the Prudential Center was abruptly cut off, plunging the arena into darkness…

LOL Andy!! I would not be surprised!

From NY Times: The reality of rising American inequality is stark. Since the late 1970s real wages for the bottom half of the work force have stagnated or fallen, while the incomes of the top 1 percent have nearly quadrupled (and the incomes of the top 0.1 percent have risen even more). While we can and should have a serious debate about what to do about this situation, the simple fact — American capitalism as currently constituted is undermining the foundations of middle-class society — shouldn’t be up for argument.

But it is, of course. Partly this reflects Upton Sinclair’s famous dictum: It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. But it also, I think, reflects distaste for the implications of the numbers, which seem almost like an open invitation to class warfare — or, if you prefer, a demonstration that class warfare is already underway, with the plutocrats on offense.

The result has been a determined campaign of statistical obfuscation. At its cruder end this campaign comes close to outright falsification; at its more sophisticated end it involves using fancy footwork to propagate what I think of as the myth of the deserving rich.

For an example of de facto falsification, one need look no further than a recent column [Murdoch delinked] by Bret Stephens of The Wall Street Journal, which first accused President Obama (wrongly) of making a factual error, then proceeded to assert that rising inequality was no big deal, because everyone has been making big gains. Why, incomes for the bottom fifth of the U.S. population have risen 186 percent since 1979!

If this sounds wrong to you, it should: that’s a nominal number, not corrected for inflation. You can find the inflation-corrected number in the same Census Bureau table; it shows incomes for the bottom fifth actually falling. Oh, and for the record, at the time of writing this elementary error had not been corrected on The Journal’s website…

Click through for the rest of this fine Paul Krugman editorial. The WSJ, aka Faux Print, gets their talking points the same way as the Republican Reichsministry of Propaganda, Faux Noise.

From Daily Kos: The first numbers on the body count from the Republican sabotage of the Affordable Care Act are just now coming in. Last week, an analysis from Harvard’s Theda Skocpol revealed that states that both set up their own health care exchanges and embraced the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid are racing toward their enrollment goals, while the reddest of red states which refused to do either are barely moving the needle for their uninsured populations. Now, a George Washington University study shows that states that also passed laws limiting the ability of health care "navigators" to advise customers have severely compromised their residents’ ability to gain access to health care.

I find it despicable that so many Republicans are working so hard to prevent their constituents from obtaining health care.

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I had mixed feelings at the time, because I had opted to go to jail, if drafted.  Therefore, my actions could only be seen as protest, and not dismissed as cowardice. I bore some resentment towards those who ran. It was my good fortune that the call never came. Since then, I’ve moderated that view and come to be thankful that they were not destroyed by that war, like so many others were.

I’m writing for tomorrow, preparing for my two day trip for prison volunteer work this week, and getting ready to meditate upon the Ellipsoid Orb.  By this time this is posted I will be either a Fantabulous Feline or a Pissed Pussycat.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:14 (average 4:41).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Religious High Ecstasy:

Short Takes:

From CREW: Campaign contributions follow power, and special interests aren’t subtle about currying favor with the powerful.

New research by CREW shows after control of the House flipped in 2010 Democratic committee chairmen demoted to ranking members saw campaign contributions plummet from industries their committees oversee. Conversely, Republican ranking members who assumed House committee chairmanships in the wake of the shift saw a corresponding increase in contributions.

CREW’s analysis also found 80% of the chairs and ranking members included in our study reported receiving a growing share of their campaign contributions from industries overseen by their committees. This trend raises questions about whether committee leaders are overly dependent on the campaign contributions of those over which they have regulatory authority.

In 2011, CREW released its first Funds for Favors report, which analyzed campaign contributions to the chairmen and ranking members of ten House committees. Our analysis, which included data from the 1998 through the 2010 election cycles, revealed that as members’ power and seniority increased, the industries they were responsible for regulating steered more and more money into their campaign coffers. This new edition of the report compares campaign finance data from the 2010 election cycle to the 2012 election cycle, and shows industries are continuing to shower campaign cash on lawmakers who oversee them. Both editions of the report rely on federal campaign contribution data provided by MapLight.

Under no circumstances should members of committees, let alone the Chairmen and Ranking Members, be permitted to receive campaign contributions from the companies they oversee and/or lobbyists for those companies. This must be true for both parties despite the fact that Republicans are more inclined to offer quid pro quo.

From Daily Kos: On Wednesday this week, Robert Reich — labor secretary under President Clinton — was a guest on CNN’s "Crossfire" for a segment that asked the question "who’s blocking good-paying jobs?"

Again, S.E. Cupp was nothing but a huge example of why we can’t have nice things.

Once again, Robert Reich owned the Republican Reich.

From Alternet: Nancy Grace: People on pot shoot, stab and strangle each other.

Nancy Grace made it extremely clear, in case anyone did not know, that she has never smoked, or known anyone who smoked marijuana this week. How did she do this? By hysterically claiming without a scintilla of evidence that marijuana is highly addictive, and that it causes people to go on bloody killing sprees.

Her guest, Mason Tvert of the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP), tried to inject some reason into the conversation, by pointing out that “marijuana’s addictive properties have been found to be actually pretty mild compared to alcohol and tobacco, and even caffeine.”

Grace interrupted him to say: “So you — you are admitting it is addictive.”

Oohhhhh, madame prosecutor! Gotcha!

When Tvert again tried to reason with her by saying that potsmokers are not so unlike people who might have a cocktail at the end of the day to unwind, she could not resist interrupting again. (Where are your manners, Nancy Grace? Honestly.)

“The reason I’m against legalization is that I’ve seen too many felonies — felonies,” she said. “I mean people on pot that shoot each other, that stab each other, that strangle each other, that kill whole families — wipe out a whole family.”

So, we’ve established that Nancy Grace views "Reefer Madness" as a Ken Burns documentary.

Never has there been a greater gulf between the character of a person and the meaning of their last name. She should change her name to Nancy Mercylessness. This is just one of ten nutty, nasty Republican statements from last week alone. Click through for the other nine.

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