Politics Plus

Today was a miserably wet day out and of course I had 3 waterphobic cats to get to the vet's for their annual exam.  They love their vet very much and were purring and rubbing up against him.  Winnie, my ginger, took the lid from the treats jar and almost got his head stuck in the jar.  The good news: they are all very healthy!    The bad news: they have all put on weight.   Primo, my tuxedo is now 15.05 kg (33.11 lbs), Winnie is 13.1 kg (28.82 lbs), and little Annie is 11.45 kg (25.19 lbs) . . . that is 39.6 kg (87 lbs) in my bed each night!  Is it any wonder that I was almost dumped on the floor a few nights back?!  They were already on reduced rations so we will see what happens with reducing them a bit more.  Apparently they are middle aged now . . . the boys turn 8 in mid April . . . so part of the problem is likely a slowing down of their metabolism.  My vet says they have fattened up with love (no, I don't over feed them).  Tomorrow is physio again so, as my stepfather would say, I'll be peddling my ass for another 40 minutes.

Short Takes

Alternet — Every candidate in the GOP presidential race is running on the same economic platform: slash taxes, slash spending, slash regulation. It’s the Republicans’ special formula, guaranteed to spark prosperity and opulence for all. …

Deregulate the private sector, shrink taxes for everybody, but especially corporations and the rich. America has been here before. These ideas are not new. Throughout the 1920s, they were policy.

An excellent article that puts historical context around current Republican economic platforms.  Republicans just love their St Ronnie!  Interesting how Republicans don't want to acknowledge the cause and effect of the 1929 stock market crash and the depression.  It is laws like the original Glass Steagall that made a big difference.

CBC — The federal government discriminates against First Nation children on reserves by failing to provide the same level of child welfare services that exist elsewhere, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal has ruled.

Cindy Blackstock, executive director of the First Nations and Family Caring Society, along with the Assembly of First Nations, filed a complaint against Ottawa with the Canadian Human Rights Commission in February 2007.  …

Before final arguments were heard in October 2014, during which the tribunal heard from 25 witnesses, the federal government had racked up $5.3 million in legal fees.

A great ruling!  In February 2007, Stephen Harper was Canada's Prime Minister.  He ws not one to act on or coöperate in any way for the benefit of First Nations.  But to be fair, previous governments, both Conservative and Liberal, did not handle First Nations issues well at all.  It is past time that changed.  I watched a brief statement by Charlie Angus, MP Timmins-James Bay, earlier as he recounted how there were some 89 Aboriginal kids on suicide watch a few years ago and the federal Conservative government in concert with the Ontario provincial government fired all the social workers leaving the kids and their families in dire straits.  And of course trust the fiscally conservative Stephen Harper, like US Republicans, to spend money legal issues that should never have been done.  Imagine the good that $5.3 million could have done for First Nations kids.

Huffington Post — The Canadian government has fired off a pre-emptive strike before American lawmakers hold a hearing in which the northern neighbour's Syria refugee policy will be on the hot seat.

It sent a note to members of a powerful U.S. Senate committee that has scheduled a meeting next week titled, "Canada's Fast-Track Refugee Plan: Unanswered Questions and Implications for U.S. National Security."

The U.S. Senate homeland-security hearing is, for the Trudeau government, an unwanted flip-side to the praise it received from progressives and foreign media outlets last month when the prime minister personally greeted refugees at the airport.

This will be far less laudatory, judging from the list of witnesses invited to testify before the committee next Wednesday: most have already publicly challenged Canada's plan to quickly accept 25,000 refugees.

Here comes the American paranoia over Muslims from the Republican dominated Congress and it is directed at Canada.  The Canadian Ambassador to the US declined to testify "…citing a long-standing practice of avoiding appearances in that partisan domestic political chamber."  Partisan is an understatement!

My Universe — 

I just came back from visiting my mother, and all is fine.  When I awoke this morning, it was a bloody miracle that I had not literally rolled out of bed onto the floor.  My three furbabes were lying across the bed and had pushed me towards the precipice of the bed.  Tomorrow is physio and a day that perhaps I can catch up on some chores.  My student has an appointment elsewhere so I won't be teaching.

Short Takes

CBC — In her solipsistic return to the campaign trail last week, Sarah Palin blamed President Barack Obama for the fact that her military reservist son punched his girlfriend in the face, then drunkenly threatened to kill himself with an assault rifle before winding up under arrest, facing criminal charges.

Track Palin had been "fighting for you-all, America," shouted his mother in Oklahoma, suggesting that her son's time in Iraq eight years ago left him with PTSD.

"It is now or never, for the sake of America's finest, that we have that commander-in-chief that will respect them and honour them!"

The audience roared.

Ah geeeee buttercup!

Palin then explained that the better commander-in-chief would be Donald Trump, her pick for the Republican presidential nomination.

Veterans, you see, would never punch their girlfriends or need to be handcuffed by police if Trump was president. They'd feel his deep respect, and calm down and be more nurturing.

I know, we're all getting tired of Sarah Palin.  But CBC senior correspondent, Neil Macdonald, has a way of getting to the truth in a succinct way, laying waste to her BS.  Too bad the Republican base, intoxicated by fear, won't hear the truth.

Alternet — The Republican Party’s “serious people” wing has issued an anti-Donald Trump manifesto in the vaunted conservative journal, National Review. The piece is filled with irony, humor and blunt assessments of how the GOP is crumbling from within. But it’s all there, confirming everything that’s been said about what Trump represents and how he has exacerbated the Republican Party’s identity crisis.  …

A dictator who will make Obama’s executive orders seem quaint.

“Equally troubling is his idea of the presidency — his promise that he’s the guy, the man on a white horse, who can ride into Washington, fire the stupid people, hire the best people and fix everything. He doesn’t talk about policy or working with Congress. He’s effectively vowing to be an American Mussolini, concentrating power in the Trump White House and governing by fiat.”

— David Boaz, Cato Institute executive vice president

To paraphrase Elizabeth Barrett Browning, "How do I hate thee?  Let me count the ways."  This is the 2nd of "18 Reasons Why Donald Trump Is a Vulgar, Two-Bit Caesar, According to America's Conservatives".  To make things worse (or maybe not) from a conservative point of view, the RNC has folded its tent dealing with Trump.  The party would appear to be imploding on itself so I read earlier this week.  Click through for the rest.  If nothing else, it gives progressives a chuckle.  But don't be lured into complacency, he's dragging a lot of low information, disaffected conservative voters along with him.

Mother Jones — In the summer of 2010, she [Jane Mayer] published a pathbreaking, in-depth piece, headlined "Covert Operations," which chronicled the rise of the Kochs' ideological network—dubbed the "Kochtopus"—and the efforts of the publicity-shy libertarian brothers to guide the burgeoning tea party toward policies that favor Koch Industries. The article depicted the Kochs as secretive bankrollers waging a war against President Barack Obama and opposing environmental safety measures. The Kochs were enraged by the story. A lawyer for their company complained; David Koch called the story "ludicrous." But the New Yorker saw no reason to correct anything. And the kerfuffle seemed to die down. Or so Mayer thought.

The Kochtopus

Click through for the rest of Mayer's fight against the Kochtopus.  The article she wrote in 2010 that angered the Kochs, "Covert Operations" is a long but interesting piece.

My Universe —

What an enjoyable lunch I had with my lady friends.  We met at a 12 week programme in the fall of 2014, and following my suggestion, we have met once a month for conversation and lunch since the end of the programme. After today's lunch, I was feeling very good, more confident . . . I was told by 3 people that I looked like I had lost weight.  Inside I was doing handsprings!  Then at my local bookstore, a clerk told me the same thing.  I had to laugh later though because I realised I was sitting straighter and walking taller.  Now, if I only knew it was true . . . I do not have a scale.

Short Takes

Robert Reich — Why did the white working class abandon the Democrats?

The conventional answer is Republicans skillfully played the race card.

In the wake of the Civil Rights Act, segregationists like Alabama Governor George C. Wallace led southern whites out of the Democratic Party.

Later, Republicans charged Democrats with coddling black “welfare queens,“ being soft on black crime (“Willie Horton”), and trying to give jobs to less-qualified blacks over more-qualified whites (the battle over affirmative action).

The bigotry now spewing forth from Donald Trump and several of his Republican rivals is an extension of this old race card, now applied to Mexicans and Muslims – with much the same effect on the white working class voters, who don’t trust Democrats to be as “tough.”  

All true, but this isn't the whole story. Democrats also abandoned the white working class.

Click through to see how, in Reich's opinion, Democrats abandoned the white working class.  He makes some very valid points.

Crooks and Liars — A pictoral essay.  Isn't this the truth!  Although in my mind, Kagan, Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer would be good to add some diversity.

The SCOTUS Dream Team

Politico — Senator Ted Cruz invoked President John F. Kennedy's name and legacy in a campaign appearance the other day, arguing that if he were alive today, Kennedy would be a Republican. Specifically, he said Kennedy “would be tarred and feathered by the modern Democratic Party.  …

Cruz described the Kennedy campaign as one for tax cuts, limited government and tough talk against the Soviets.

And yet, accepting the nomination of the Democratic Party in 1960, Kennedy said this: “There may be those who wish to hear more—more promises to this group or that—more harsh rhetoric about the men in the Kremlin—more assurances of a golden future, where taxes are always low and subsidies ever high.” But he admitted he wasn’t that candidate. He outlined his vision for a New Frontier—a platform of challenges rather than promises, an appeal to public interest over private comfort. Clearly, Cruz hasn’t read that speech.

JFK Jr must be rolling in his grave at the audacity of Ted Cruz dragging his name and legacy into the Republican mud!

Washington Post — Stephanie Czech Rader was the daughter of Polish immigrants, uneducated laborers who settled in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., in the early 1920s and barely spoke English. Her immersion in Polish language and culture proved critical to her success, against daunting odds, as a U.S. spy in Europe after World War II.

Recruited to the Office of Strategic Services and the Strategic Services Unit of the War Department, precursors to the CIA, she was officially employed as a clerk at the U.S. Embassy. In reality, she was undercover, an agent whose flawless Polish accent and mannerisms allowed her to move around the Soviet-dominated country with relative ease.

She faced near-constant hazard anyway. Conditions in Warsaw were bleak and dangerous.   …

Mrs. Rader did not embody the cliches of Hollywood espionage. She was a chemistry major who glided into the shadows, hardened to spycraft but only up to a point.

“They gave me a gun but I never carried a gun,” she said. “What the heck was I gonna do with a dumb gun?”

I ran across this obituary and found Rader's story compelling.  In a Daily Beast story, author Shane Harris noted:

… pushing through a Legion of Merit recommendation that was approved by Rader’s senior officers in 1946. The War Department, though, thought she should get a lesser award.

Rader perhaps had two strikes against her. First, she was a woman. Second, she was a member of the newly formed Office of Strategic Services, the United States’ first central intelligence service and the precursor to the CIA. 

Harris is likely correct . . . being a woman was likely a prime reason for not receiving the Legion of Merit.  I hope this folly willed be rectified.

Huff Post — Adorable kitties are getting sanctuary inside a mosque in Turkey this winter.

Big-hearted imam Mustafa Efe lets stray cats shelter from freezing cold temperatures inside the Aziz Mahmud Hüdayi Mosque in Istanbul, according to local English-language newspaper Daily Sabah.

I make no secret about it . . . I adore cats!  So I wanted to share this story of stray cats given shelter, and more importantly, love.  The videos are cute.  They might even be rated CO — Cuteness Overload!  Are you up to it?

My Universe — 

I believe cats to be spirits come to earth. A cat, I am sure, could walk on a cloud without coming through.  —   Jules Verne