Politics Plus

Day 88.  I’m rushing to get my articles written and posted before services begin on this highest holy day in the Church of the Ellipsoid Orb.  Your sacrament will be served by Chickens and Cheats.  I’ve already collected all the data I’ll needed for tomorrow’s Monthly Report, so I’ve been working my kitty butt off all morning.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 4:18 (average 5:41).  To do it click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Daily Kos: “If I could conceive that the general government might ever be so administered as to render the liberty of conscience insecure, I beg you will be persuaded, that no one would be more zealous than myself to establish effectual barriers against the horrors of spiritual tyranny, and every species of religious persecution.”

– George Washington, letter to the United Baptist Chamber of Virginia (1789)

This is just one statement by one of our founding fathers that contradicts the lies we hear from Republican Supply-side pseudo-Christians, as they attempt to overcome the separation of church and state out founding father had the wisdom to incorporate into our Bill of Rights. Click through for a bunch more.

From NY Times: If this state had an official color, it would most certainly be red. Football fans here don scarlet sweatshirts each game day, red meat is a dietary staple and, for decades, Republican presidential candidates filled Nebraska’s borders on the electoral map with their party’s hue.

But in 2008, a Nebraska quirk injected a drop of blue into that sea of red, in the form of a single, lonely electoral vote for the Democratic presidential candidate.

Nebraska is one of just two states, along with Maine, that do not award all their electoral voters to the statewide winner. And that meant that in 2008, Barack Obama picked up an electoral vote from the congressional district around Omaha, even as Senator John McCain trounced him across the rest of the state.

One electoral vote — out of five in Nebraska and 538 nationally — might seem trivial, but Republicans do not see it that way. It was the first time since Lyndon B. Johnson beat Barry Goldwater in 1964, when Mr. Obama was a toddler, that the state awarded any votes to a Democrat.

So this year, a longstanding proposal to change the state’s Electoral College system to winner-take-all may finally reach the Republican governor’s desk, amid a renewed push by conservative lawmakers hoping to have new rules in place for the 2016 presidential election.

I don’t have a problem with this, but I will point out the hypocrisy that in states like California that are blue in Presidential elections, Republicans are trying to do the exact opposite and split the electoral delegation.  I prefer it not be split, because split delegations would allow Republicans to Gerrymander the electoral college.

From LA Times: TransCanada Corp., the Canadian company behind the Keystone XL pipeline, filed eminent domain proceedings against an estimated 90 Nebraska landowners Tuesday to secure the right to build the controversial project across their property.

How impolite of them!! We need to build a border fence to defend ourselves from these illegal TransCanada immigrants, until Canadians defeat Harper, and Canuckistan becomes Canada again. 😉

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I’m writing for tomorrow, day 67.  I’m still quite tired, after yesterday’s outing, but it was worth it.  The pain in my foot is completely gone and will be for a couple months, when the cyst will be growing back.  Today is a holy day in the Church of the Ellipsoid Orb, and I will be meditating, but tomorrow is my main concern, because my Broncos are entertaining the Colts in the late service.  May big horses overwhelm little ones.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 4:59 (average 5:46).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Media Matters: Fox News contributor and radio talk show host Erick Erickson declared that "the terrorists won in Atlanta" after right-wing media falsely claimed that Atlanta’s anti-gay fire chief was terminated for his religious beliefs.

On January 6, Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed dismantled conservatives’ claims that Fire Chief Kelvin Cochran was fired over a book that he wrote which contains anti-gay remarks, explaining that Cochran’s lack of judgment in distributing the book to his employees, and not following instructions regarding his month-long suspension over publishing the book without notice to the city, is what led to his termination.

On January 7, hours after a horrific terrorist attack against staffers of the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris that left 12 people dead, Erickson wrote [fascist delinked] a blog post that likened the LGBT community to terrorists for objecting to the former Atlanta fire chief’s book, and stated that "the terrorists won":

The Bottom line is this Republican hatemongers don’t get to use freedom of religion as an excuse to violate others’ legally guaranteed rights.  However, comparing LGBT Americans to the French terrorists is beyond obscene.

From The New Yorker: President Obama’s plan to offer Americans two years of college for free has come under fire from congressional Republicans, who are calling it a blatant plot to make Americans smarter.

The G.O.P., which has benefited from the support of so-called “low-information voters” in recent years, accused Obama of cynically trying to make people smarter as a way of chipping away at the Republican base.

“You take low-information voters and give them information, and pretty soon they’re Democrats,” Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said.

Andy is right. It’s one of those socialist, Kenyan conspiracies!!

From Daily Kos: Last week Jon Stewart had an "impromptu theme" of social injustice. In one his skits he enumerated all the black males that were killed by police recently. In the process of his enumeration he had a bad call. It turned out according to the coroner’s report that Dante Parker died from from drugs in his body and not from police action. This was according to San Bernardino County District Attorney Michael Ramos.

 
Fox News just has to be right once by ewillies

Jon makes an excellent point in a hilarious manner.

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I’m writing for tomorrow, day 52.  This is the only article, because I found very little content that I have not already covered.  However, I had the Christmas dinner mess to keep me occupied.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 2:45 (average 4:40).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From NY Times: …They are, roughly speaking, the home equity loans of subprime auto. In these loans, which can last as long as two years or as little as a month, borrowers turn over the title of their cars in exchange for cash — typically a percentage of the cars’ estimated resale values…

…More than 1.1 million households in the United States used auto title loans in 2013, according to a survey by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation — the first time the agency has included the loans in its annual survey.

Title loans are an increasingly prevalent form of high-cost, short-term credit in subprime finance, as regulators in a number of states crack down on payday loans.

For many borrowers, title loans, also sometimes known as motor-vehicle equity lines of credit or title pawns, are having ruinous financial consequences, causing owners to lose their vehicles and plunging them further into debt.

A review by The New York Times of more than three dozen loan agreements found that after factoring in various fees, the effective interest rates ranged from nearly 80 percent to over 500 percent. While some loans come with terms of 30 days, many borrowers, unable to pay the full loan and interest payments, say that they are forced to renew the loans at the end of each month, incurring a new round of fees.

Click through for an in depth exposé of how super-rich Republican vulture capitalists, having been driven in disgrace from the sub-prime housing market, are now preying on gullible poor and middle class borrowers through title equity loans.

From SPLC: It has been quite the year at Hatewatch. We’ve identified those who hide in anonymity while financing the racist right. We’ve kept you abreast of events that have plotted the course of the antigovernment movement as it tries to make headway into the mainstream. And we’ve documented in detail the fallacies spread far and wide by major anti-LGBT leaders, especially as they move to advance their agenda abroad.

Before we take a break, we thought we’d give you something of a year in review—the posts on Hatewatch in 2014 that were the most pivotal in understanding the future of the radical right. But don’t worry, Hatewatch will return on Jan. 1, 2015 with more impactful coverage and analysis.

Click through for their year in review, because the SPLC does such fine work. They are an excellent resource.

From Crooks and Liars: Politico writer Jennifer Epstein is quite concerned about how often the President and First Lady attend church.

“The president’s Christian faith is not connected to or dependent upon anyone else’s beliefs about him, any particular policy issue, any moment in the news cycle or anything else,” DuBois said. “The president’s faith existed long before the While House and will continue after he closes the door to the White House for the last time.”

Critics say that wouldn’t be readily apparent from watching his public comings and goings. After disavowing his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, and leaving Wright’s Chicago church during the 2008 campaign, Obama was widely expected to seek out a church in Washington that he’d attend with some frequency. Instead, he’s attended Sunday services only occasionally, visiting a patchwork of congregations 19 times in all since taking office, according to a POLITICO analysis of White House pool reports.

Evidently Epstein and her employer have failed to discern the difference between religion and faith.

I can really identify with this, because I have attended church zero times in the same time period. Is the true Christians the Republicans who attend church several times a week, but practices racism, intolerance and greed, or the people who try to reflect what Jesus taught, whether or not they reject organized churches?

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