Politics Plus

I’m writing for tomorrow, and actually feeling awake.  I think I’ve caught up my sleep deficit for now.  Late this week I’ll begin a program of physical therapy.  It turns out that my bad leg is from degenerative arthritis of the back and hip.  I also blew out my left shoulder again and cannot lift my arm above horizontal without intense pain.  The following week is my two day trip to Salem to complete my institution specific training for increased volunteer access in the prison.  So I have busy times ahead.  It’s a slow weekend for material, but I found some.  Day 35.

Late Update:

I spent several hours trying to fix the similes in the graphic editor without success.  It appears that, for security reasons WordPress has disables several of the features of that plugin for all but administrators (me).  I found another editor that is not as full featured, but I’m hoping it will give more features to more people.  However, that will have to wait for another day.

Jig Zone:

Today’s took me 3:19 (average 5:32).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Bernie Sanders: Flashback: Republicans Block VA Benefits

Republicans in February blocked important legislation from Sen. Bernie Sanders to improve veterans’ access to health care among other things. Only two Republicans, Sens. Dean Heller and Jerry Moran, voted for the veterans benefits bill, which was endorsed by every major veterans organization.

What pathetic excuses! General Shinseki gave an order, expected it to be followed, and did not follow-up to make sure VA bureaucrats, with decades of experience falsifying numbers, were complying.  That was certainly a major error on his part, but the problem is not his fault. The problem of Republicans thanking our veterans by gutting VA funding goes back to Saint Ronnie Ray Gun.  Republicans are long on support for the troops as long as that support does not extend beyond using them as cannon fodder to foster economic imperialism. But providing them with flack jackets and safe vehicles, and taking care of them, when physically or emotionally maimed in battle, is more sacrifice than Republicans are willing to make.

From NY Times: For more than a decade, researchers across multiple disciplines have been issuing reports on the widespread societal and economic damage caused by America’s now-40-year experiment in locking up vast numbers of its citizens. If there is any remaining disagreement about the destructiveness of this experiment, it mirrors the so-called debate over climate change.

In both cases, overwhelming evidence shows a crisis that threatens society as a whole. In both cases, those who study the problem have called for immediate correction.

Several recent reports provide some of the most comprehensive and compelling proof yet that the United States “has gone past the point where the numbers of people in prison can be justified by social benefits,” and that mass incarceration itself is “a source of injustice.”

That is the central conclusion of a two-year, 444-page study prepared by the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences at the request of the Justice Department and others. The report highlights many well-known statistics: Since the early 1970s, the nation’s prison population has quadrupled to 2.2 million, making it the world’s biggest. That is five to 10 times the incarceration rate in other democracies.

I could not agree more. The best way to be tough on crime is to be stingy with prison and long on community rehabilitation.

From Alternet: Ann Coulter defends Pat Sajak’s right to be an absolute idiot by being an absolute idiot herself.

“Wheel of Fortune” gained a new fan in Ann Coulter, who just couldn’t agree more with Sajak on climate change and liberals being Nazis and to blame for everything. Coulter helpfully pointed out the humor in Sajak’s tweet to CNN’s Erin Burnett and then she upped the ante, because… she was on TV, and saying outrageous things is her brand. “We all have to believe in global warming, we all have to believe in immigration — either lots of immigration or even more immigration,” Coulter said. “We have to believe that Trayvon Martin was killed by a brutal racist, and if you don’t you get called all of these crazy names that Sajak is referring to.”

(Note: Even George Zimmerman’s former neighbor, a longtime white supremacist now admits Zimmerman is a racist.)

But back to Pat and Ann. The liberal thought police, who for some reason believe in science, are so mean, Coulter says. They compare climate change deniers to "Holocaust deniers." She also, totally inexplicably, said dealing with climate change would lead to genocide.

Here’s where Coulter parts company with Sajak. He should not have said he was “just kidding” in her view. She is not kidding when she asserts her multitude of ignorant positions, nor will you ever catch her being the least bit funny. Or human, for that matter.

This is just one of seven absurd Republican statements from last week alone. Click through tor the other six. As for Coultergeist, it isn’t Halloween yet.

Cartoon:

The cartoon assumes the service person was single.

I’m writing for tomorrow.  It’s safe to drink Portland water again, without treating it with alcohol. ;-)  I’m surprised that I functioned at all yesterday, as tired as I was.  Today, I still am a bit foggy.  It can be difficult to find interesting material on a holiday weekend.  Day 33.

Late (early) update:

I overslept again.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 2:55 (average 4:45).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Daily Kos: In April, the Mustang, Oklahoma school board announced they had voted to to implement a Bible course developed by the president of Hobby Lobby, Steve Green.

Daily Kos user ProgLegs shared the news report:

Mustang will be the only public school district in the state to pilot the program.  Green hopes the course, which teaches about the "narrative, history, and impact" of the Bible, will be in "hundreds" of schools in 2015 and thousands the year after.

Now new information has come to light that Hobby Lobby president Steve Green met privately with school board members, which appears to be a clear violation of the Oklahoma Open Meetings Act:

Authentic Christians respect the law. If their conscience demands they break it, they do so openly, standing ready to suffer the consequences for their protest, just as Jesus did. Republican Supply-side pseudo-Christians consider themselves above the law they demand everyone else follows, while they violate it themselves in secret.

From NY Times: A man who had shot to death his four young children, for reasons known only to him, sat in the wooden chair reserved for him at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. His body was strapped tight and his head was freshly shaved, to enhance the conductivity.

I could see him, but he could not see me. We sat perhaps 30 feet apart, on opposite sides of a one-way glass partition that separated those who would walk away that September night in 2007 from one man who would not.

The electric chair had not been used in Tennessee since 1960, a reflection of a nation’s discomfort with a procedure that had come to be seen as gruesome, if not cruel. But the condemned man, Daryl Holton, 45, had been given a choice between lethal injection and electrocution. To the dismay of prison officials, he had chosen the latter — again, for reasons known only to him.

Perhaps he preferred the quicker torture of feeling his eyeballs fry and pop out to the longer term torture of feeling like his body is on fire for several minutes. What does this say about those who debate how we torture people to death instead of joining the civilized world community that has evolved beyond such barbarity?

From TPM: Earlier this week Rep. Ted Yoho’s (R-FL) 2012 comments surfaced. "I’ve had some radical ideas about voting and it’s probably not a good time to tell them, but you used to have to be a property owner to vote," he told a cheering audience.

Alexander Keyssar, Stirling Professor of History and Social Policy at Harvard University and a member of the Scholars Strategy Network, weighed in on the multitude of reasons why Yoho (pictured, right) is just plain wrong:

Congressman Ted Yoho’s interest in re-imposing property requirements to vote is yet another sign of his party’s interest in rolling back two centuries of progress in American political life. Property requirements were, indeed, the norm for the first several decades of our history (as were gender and racial restrictions), but they were overturned almost everywhere by the middle of the nineteenth century.

Today’s Republican Party would like nothing better than kick both civil rights and voting rights back into the 1800s.

Cartoon:

How long must we wait before more Republican 1% criminals are convicted?

I’ve been writing for tomorrow in spurts, while preparing a chicken, rice, broccoli, beans, onions, and chili dish.  Beware downwind!! :-)  I’ve also been boiling water, as the city water is infected with e coli.  We have a boil water alert on until further notice.  In all the years I’ve lived here, that’s a first.  I’ve also cat napping.  I started this morning, and it’s now evening.  Yesterday’s prison meeting went quite well.  It was the second half of the annual banquet, and my role was quite similar to last month.  The pride my guys take in introducing their families just puts a smile on my face.  Day 32.

Late (early) Update: That last cat nap was a doozie!

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:38 (average 5:14).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Upworthy: Some of the best practical advice, or just one of those things that we all eventually learn? Either way … wise words, Louis.

He’ll never make the Republicans on Parade list.

From The New Yorker: In response to the international uproar created when he reportedly compared Russian President Vladimir Putin to Hitler, His Royal Highness Prince Charles today issued the following letter of apology to the Russian people.

My dear Russians,

Yesterday, it was reported that I compared your President Putin to Hitler. If by making this comment I have in some way offended you, I am deeply sorry. Adolf Hitler was one of the horrible villains in world history, and comparing President Putin to him was uncalled for.

What I should have said, and what I say to you now, is that this Putin chap can be a bit Hitlery at times.

Let’s take, for example, his penchant for taking territory that doesn’t belong to him and then adding it to his country and so forth. Would you call that behavior Hitlery or not Hitlery? From where I sit, it’s more like something Hitler would do than something he wouldn’t do, and so the verdict must be, yes, the chap is being rather Hitlery when he does that…

LOL Andy!! But you messed-up! GOP-Pootie is more like Mussolini. Hitler’s follow-on will be announced at the 2016 Republican Convention.

From Daily Kos: This might just be the most ridiculous thing Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has said during the entire 2014 campaign:

Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell says he would try to repeal the Affordable Care Act if he’s elected Senate majority leader.

But the veteran senator won’t say what would happen to the 421,000 Kentuckians who have health insurance through the state’s health care exchange.

McConnell told reporters Friday that the fate of the state exchange is unconnected to the federal health care law. Yet the exchange would not exist, if not for the law that created it.

If Mitch wants to say he’s for Obamacare repeal, he’s got to acknowledge what repealing Obamacare would really mean, and that includes dismantling things like Kynect, the new health care exchange created because of Obamacare.

Is it time to change his name to "Bought Bullshit McConArtist", or should we just keep "Bought Bitch Mitch"?

Cartoon: