How Is Obama's Scorecard Looking?

Click here for an article by Dylan Matthews at Vox entitled "Barack Obama is officially one of the most consequential presidents in American history."

Hint: Obama's scorecard is looking pretty good.

A Republican Problem

Click here for an NYT article by Timothy Egan entitled "A Refuge for Racists." The first paragraph:

In one of the little acts of subversion that creeps into “The Simpsons” every now and then ["The Simpsons" is a Fox show], a helicopter from Fox News was shown in 2010 with a logo, “Not Racist, But #1 With Racists.”

Republicans jump up and down and scream that their party is not racist, and yet the GOP harbors white supremacists and Stormfront members (believe me, no one in those two groups votes Democratic). Egan points out that Dylann Roof was inspired by the Council of Conservative Citizens. Here are the first few lines of the CCC (like KKK; get it?) entry in Wikipedia:

The CofCC was founded in 1988 in Atlanta, Georgia, and then relocated to St. Louis, Missouri. The CofCC was formed by various Republicans, conservative Democrats, and some former members of the Citizens' Councils of America, sometimes called the White Citizens Council, a segregationist organization that was prominent in the 1960s and 1970s. Lester Maddox, former governor of Georgia, was a charter member.

Here's the first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry on the above-mentioned White Citizens Council:

The Citizens' Councils (also referred to as White Citizens' Councils) were an associated network of white supremacist organizations in the United States, concentrated in the South. The first was formed on July 11, 1954[1] After 1956, it was known as the Citizens' Councils of America. With about 60,000 members across the United States,[2] mostly in the South, the groups were founded primarily to oppose racial integration of schools, but they also supported segregation of public facilities during the 1950s and 1960s. Members used severe intimidation tactics including economic boycotts, firing people from jobs, propaganda, and occasionally violence against civil-rights activists.

The article goes on to say:

Unlike the Ku Klux Klan, which had revived for a time, the WCC met openly and was seen as "pursuing the agenda of the Klan with the demeanor of the Rotary Club."

At a large Council meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, during the civil rights crisis of the 1960s, this mimeographed flyer was distributed:

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary to abolish the Negro race, proper methods should be used. Among these are guns, bows and arrows, sling shots and knives. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all whites are created equal with certain rights; among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of dead niggers.

Back to the Council of Conservative Citizens: Egan points out that its leader, Earl Holt III, has donated over 60,000 to at least (I think) 34 Republican politicians, including 2016 presidential hopefuls Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum and Rand Paul. Republican politicians were not ignorant of the open racism of the CCC when they accepted those donations; Holt's donations on behalf of the Council put him in the top 1% of Republican donors.

After Dylann Roof's slaughter of nine African-Americans in Charleston, South Carolina, Hillary Clinton gave a powerful speech excoriating the extreme racist element; you won't catch any of the Republican wannabes giving such a speech, because the hardcore Southern racists are a key part of their base.

Krugman: Hooray For Obamacare

Click here for the latest article by NYT columnist and Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman. Here are some of the highlights (and these are snippets -- click on the link for more:

The Affordable Care Act is now in its second year of full operation; how’s it doing?

The answer is, better than even many supporters realize.

Start with the act’s most basic purpose, to cover the previously uninsured. Opponents of the law insisted that it would actually reduce coverage; in reality, around 15 million Americans have gained insurance.

But how good is that coverage? Cheaper plans under the law do have relatively large deductibles and impose significant out-of-pocket costs. Still, the plans are vastly better than no coverage at all, or the bare-bones plans that the act made illegal. The newly insured have seen a sharp drop in health-related financial distress, and report a high degree of satisfaction with their coverage.

What about costs? In 2013 there were dire warnings about a looming “rate shock”; instead, premiums came in well below expectations.

What about economic side effects? One of the many, many Republican votes against Obamacare involved passing something called the Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act, and opponents have consistently warned that helping Americans afford health care would lead to economic doom. But there’s no job-killing in the data: The U.S. economy has added more than 240,000 jobs a month on average since Obamacare went into effect, its biggest gains since the 1990s.

Finally, what about claims that health reform would cause the budget deficit to explode? In reality, the deficit has continued to decline, and the Congressional Budget Office recently reaffirmed its conclusion that repealing Obamacare would increase, not reduce, the deficit.

And he finishes with these two paragraphs:

Now, you might wonder why a law that works so well and does so much good is the object of so much political venom — venom that is, by the way, on full display in Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissenting opinion, with its rants against “interpretive jiggery-pokery.” But what conservatives have always feared about health reform is the possibility that it might succeed, and in so doing remind voters that sometimes government action can improve ordinary Americans’ lives.

That’s why the right went all out to destroy the Clinton health plan in 1993, and tried to do the same to the Affordable Care Act. But Obamacare has survived, it’s here, and it’s working. The great conservative nightmare has come true. And it’s a beautiful thing.

SCOTUS Rules Same-Sex Marriage Is A Right

And the wingnuts' heads explode. Here's the entirety of a front-page Red State article by streiff:

Civilization was nice. It had a nice 5-6000 year run. Kind of neat to be alive to see it end.

Interesting Fact

In a recent analysis, Vocativ, an investigative and deep web news outlet, found that fatal police shootings in the United States outnumber all criminal gun homicides in 30 other developed nations.

Click here for an article by By Bryan Schatz at Mother Jones entitled "There’s an International Standard for Cops and Deadly Force. Guess How Your State Ranks."

As the Guardian recently reported, police in the United States kill more people in days than other countries do in years.

Robert E. Lee, Southern Hero?

Click here for an article dated April 14, 1866, in the National Anti-Slavery Standard by Wesley Norris:

My name is Wesley Norris; I was born a slave on the plantation of George Parke Custis; after the death of Mr. Custis, Gen. Lee, who had been made executor of the estate, assumed control of the slaves, in number about seventy.

Warning: It's not pretty.

SCOTUS's ACA Decision - Video

Must watch!

Which Party Wants To ... ?

Which party wants to block legislation regulating predatory for-profit colleges?

Click here for an editorial in The New York Times entitled "Predatory Colleges Find Friends in Congress."

The rules were inspired by data showing that students in for-profit schools account for only about 12 percent of college enrollment, but nearly half of student loan defaults. Other data has shown that graduates of for-profit institutions are more likely than graduates of other institutions to carry debt of more than $40,000 when they leave school. Predatory schools are all the more problematic because they target veterans, minorities and the poor.

The rules cover about 5,500 career training programs, some of which award college degrees but most of which award certificates. To comply, a training program would have to show that, on average, the annual loan payments of its graduates amount to less than 8 percent of their total income, or less than 20 percent of their discretionary income, after the cost of basic necessities like food and housing.

A program that failed to satisfy these criteria for four straight years would lose federal funding. Funding would also be denied if, over two years of a three-year period, the average loan payments exceeded 12 percent of total earnings and more than 30 percent of discretionary earnings. Programs nearing these thresholds would have the further obligation of giving students and prospective students advance warning that they are at risk of losing their federal grants and loans — and might need to find some other way to pay for college.

The rules cover both for-profit and nonprofit programs. But the Department of Education estimates that 99 percent of the 1,400 programs that would probably fail under the new standard are run by for-profit schools.

Which party wants to ... ? Surprise, surprise: It's the Republicans.

SCOTUS Upholds Obamacare - Republican Reaction

So government subsidies will enable poor people to have health insurance? The horror, the horror ... It's the end of freedom in America, and a Republican president must be elected to correct this terrible injustice -- at least, according to these guys: Click here for an article in The New York Times by Alan Rappaport entitled "Republicans Cite Health Care Ruling in Pushing Candidacies."

Obvious anagram (h/t Charlie Pierce) Reince Preibus, chairman of the Republican national Committee:

“Today’s ruling makes it clear that if we want to fix our broken health care system, then we will need to elect a Republican president with proven ideas and real solutions that will help American families,” said Chairman Reince Priebus. “Hillary Clinton supports big government mandates and expanding the government’s reach into our health care system, maneuvers that have made our health care system worse off.”

Krugman's reaction: "Just to put this out there, and let my 60s roots show: Hey, hey, ACA, how many lives did you save today?"

UPDATE - Response by Mississippi governor Phil Bryant:

Today's decision does not change the fact that Obamacare is a socialist takeover of health care forced down the throats of the American people without proper review, and it does not slow the massive and unprecedented transfer of wealth that is at the heart of the subsidy system. Make no mistake—Obamacare is not about helping those in need or improving health care delivery. It is about destabilizing our health care system, ceding more control to centralized government and replacing individual liberty with government dependence. It is incredibly troubling to me that a majority of United States Supreme Court justices—including, again, the Chief Justice—have found yet another way to uphold a portion of this disastrous law. Those who voted in the majority have set a dangerous precedent of blatantly disregarding the plain language of a bill as enacted by Congress. Mississippi was right, as were numerous other states, not to willingly entrench Obamacare by establishing a state-based exchange, and I will continue to resist any efforts that attempt to shove Obamacare deeper into this state. Republicans know there is a better way, and I call on Mississippi's congressional delegation to immediately renew its efforts to repeal and replace this train wreck of a law."

UPDATE 2 - From Barbara Morrill at Daily Kos, a collection of comments by the Republican presidential hopefuls on the SCOTUS decision:

Jeb! Bush: "This decision is not the end of the fight against Obamacare."

Ted Cruz: "You the teenage immigrant washing dishes are paying illegal taxes right now today because of President Obama's deception, because of the IRS's lawlessness and because of the Supreme Court's judicial activism, violating their oaths of office ... I remain fully committed to repealing every single word of Obamacare."

Marco Rubio: "Despite the Court’s decision, ObamaCare is still a bad law that is having a negative impact on our country and on millions of Americans. I remain committed to repealing this bad law and replacing it ..."

Scott Walker: "Republicans must redouble their efforts to repeal and replace this destructive and costly law."

Rand Paul: "This decision turns both the rule of law and common sense on its head." Today's King v. Burwell decision, which protects and expands ObamaCare, is an out-of-control act of judicial tyranny ... repeal ObamaCare, and pass real reform ...

Rick Perry: "While I disagree with the ruling, it was never up to the Supreme Court to save us from Obamacare. […] It’s time we repealed Obamacare and replaced it ...

Chris Christie: "This decision turns common language on its head. Now leaders must turn our attention to making the case that ObamaCare must be replaced."

Bobby Jindal: "President Obama would like this to be the end of the debate on Obamacare, but it isn’t. […] Now that the Supreme Court has ruled, the debate will grow. Conservatives must be fearless in demanding that our leaders in Washington repeal and replace Obamacare with a plan that will lower health care costs and restore freedom."

Lindsey Graham: "Today’s decision only reinforces why we need a president who will bring about real reform that repeals Obamacare and replaces it with a plan that expands consumer choice, increases coverage, delivers better value for the dollar, and gives states more control, without stifling job creation.

Ben Carson: "Those of us who pledge to repeal #Obamacare must redouble our efforts and not waste time and energy mourning today's #SCOTUS ruling."

Mike Huckabee: "Today's King v. Burwell decision, which protects and expands ObamaCare, is an out-of-control act of judicial tyranny. […] As President, I will protect Medicare, repeal ObamaCare, and pass real reform that will actually lower costs, while focusing on cures and prevention rather than intervention."

Is The ACA (Obamacare) Working?

Click here for an article in The New York Times by my favorite columnist, Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman, entitled "Most of the Way With Obamacare." He examines how the ACA is doing, not in the states with Republican administrations struggling to overturn or frustrate the law, but in those which have implemented it as it was intended.

There are three issues that, I find, most reporting on the program’s progress tend to ignore. The first is that the ACA was never intended to cover everyone – undocumented immigrants aren’t eligible, yet account for several percent of the population. Second, because signup isn’t automatic, there will always be some leakage, some eligible people who fall through the cracks. Finally, of course, a large number of states are refusing to expand Medicaid and in general trying to obstruct the law.

So it seems to me that to evaluate the program we should (a) look at states that have implemented the law as it was intended to work and (b) compare with a realistic benchmark.

The results are pretty encouraging!

Free Speech: Stormfront?

Click here for an article at the "Hatewatch" blog of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Scary stuff:

Almost 100 people were murdered over the last five years by registered users of Stormfront, the largest racist Web forum in the world, according to a report released today by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The forum in effect acts to nurture budding killers and give them moral support, the report says.

And according to Jessie Daniels, a professor at the City University of New York, in an article at The New York Times, registered users of Stormfront have grown from 124,000 in 2008 to over 300,000 today. That's a lot of hate!

"Why Don't The Poor Rise Up?"

Click here for an article at The New York Times entitled "Why Don't The Poor Rise Up," by Thomas B. Edsall. The final paragraph:

The answer is that those bearing the most severe costs of inequality are irrelevant to the agenda-setters in both parties. They are political orphans in the new order. They may have a voice in urban politics, but on the national scene they no longer fit into the schema of the left or the right. They are pushed to the periphery except for a brief moment on Election Day when one party wants their votes counted, and the other doesn’t.

Hmm; "one party wants their votes counted, and the other doesn't"? Which would be Republican and which would be Democratic, do you suppose?

Was The Civil War About Slavery?

Note: This subject is fully and ably covered by Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic; click here for his article, "What This Cruel War Was Over." Over the years, various revisionists have argued that slavery was not the sole or even a major reason for the secession of the South -- economics, unfair restriction of trade, states' rights, and unfair taxation are reasons given. Those may indeed have been factors, but South Carolina, where the first shots of the war were fired at Fort Sumter, leaves no room for doubt in its "Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union," published on December 24, 1860.

Click here to read that document. (The word "slavery" -- or "slave" or "slaves" or "slaveholding" -- occurs 16 times.)

Here's part of the declaration:

The ends for which the Constitution was framed are declared by itself to be "to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity."

These ends it endeavored to accomplish by a Federal Government, in which each State was recognized as an equal, and had separate control over its own institutions. The right of property in slaves was recognized by giving to free persons distinct political rights, by giving them the right to represent, and burthening them with direct taxes for three-fifths of their slaves; by authorizing the importation of slaves for twenty years; and by stipulating for the rendition of fugitives from labor.

We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.

For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the common Government. Observing the forms of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that Article establishing the Executive Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.

This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.

On the 4th day of March next, this party will take possession of the Government. It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States.

The guaranties of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost. The slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy.

Sectional interest and animosity will deepen the irritation, and all hope of remedy is rendered vain, by the fact that public opinion at the North has invested a great political error with the sanction of more erroneous religious belief.

UPDATE: Here's an excerpt from a companion piece, "A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union":

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin…

Click here for a link to a document consisting of the declarations of Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia.

UPDATE: Here's another piece, from Louisiana's declaration:

As a separate republic, Louisiana remembers too well the whisperings of European diplomacy for the abolition of slavery in the times of an­nexation not to be apprehensive of bolder demonstrations from the same quarter and the North in this country. The people of the slave holding States are bound together by the same necessity and determination to preserve African slavery.

And another, from Alabama:

Upon the principles then announced by Mr. Lincoln and his leading friends, we are bound to expect his administration to be conducted. Hence it is, that in high places, among the Republi­can party, the election of Mr. Lincoln is hailed, not simply as it change of Administration, but as the inauguration of new princi­ples, and a new theory of Government, and even as the downfall of slavery. Therefore it is that the election of Mr. Lincoln cannot be regarded otherwise than a solemn declaration, on the part of a great majority of the Northern people, of hostility to the South, her property and her institutions—nothing less than an open declaration of war—for the triumph of this new theory of Government destroys the property of the South, lays waste her fields, and inaugurates all the horrors of a San Domingo servile insurrection, consigning her citizens to assassinations, and. her wives and daughters to pollution and violation, to gratify the lust of half-civilized Africans.

And here's Texas:

...in this free government all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding states....

UPDATE, AUGUST 15, 2015: Colonel Ty Seidule, professor and Head of the Department of History at the United States Military Academy at West Point:

Was the American Civil War fought because of slavery? More than 150 years later this remains a controversial question.

Why? Because many people don't want to believe that the citizens of the southern states were willing to fight and die to preserve a morally repugnant institution. There has to be another reason, we are told. Well, there isn't.

The evidence is clear and overwhelming. Slavery was, by a wide margin, the single most important cause of the Civil War -- for both sides. Before the presidential election of 1860, a South Carolina newspaper warned that the issue before the country was, "the extinction of slavery," and called on all who were not prepared to, "surrender the institution," to act. Shortly after Abraham Lincoln's victory, they did.

Click here for the video.

"On Not Canonizing The Gipper"

Click here for Michael O'Donnell's excellent review of a book by H.W. Brands entitled "Reagan: The Life." The book glorifies Reagan; O'Donnell doesn't accept that approach. A quote:

And substantively, Reagan does not warrant mention in the same breath as Roosevelt. Not by miles. Domestically, Roosevelt saved the nation from an existential threat (the Great Depression), while Reagan merely steered it out of a funk (the 1970s). Roosevelt enacted structural reforms to protect the most vulnerable members of society, from the unemployed to the infirm to the elderly. Reagan systematically set about dismantling those reforms and deregulating the economy, leaving everyone to fend for themselves. Reagan also forged the unholy alliance between the Republican Party and the evangelical right: a marriage that continues to infect the United States with intolerance and anti-science thinking. The government-is-the-enemy mind-set that pervades the right today comes to us from Barry Goldwater via Ronald Reagan. As our roads, bridges, and schools fall apart around us, we have them to thank.

Krugman On Race In America

Click here for yet another excellent article, entitled "Slavery's Long Shadow," by NY Times columnist, Princeton professor and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman.

Words Of Wisdom From Ben Carson (?!)

Click here for an op-ed in USA Today by Ben Carson, longshot Republican presidential candidate. I agree on almost nothing with Ben Carson, but I agree with him on this.

I didn't think any of the Republican candidates would risk alienating their racist right-wing fringe with such a statement; I was wrong. At least one did. Will there be others? No, there won't.

Oh, wait -- I should mention that Mitt Romney has at least gone as far as -- several days ago now -- saying that South Carolina should take down the Confederate battle flag from the state Capitol, a position he has consistently taken since at least 2007.

Extreme Wingsuit Compilation

Click here for a series of wingsuit jumps.

Take Down The Flag In South Carolina?

Here's a post by Michael Hill at the League of the South website:

Everywhere leftists are calling for the removal of the Confederate battle flag, especially at the State House in Columbia, SC.

We in The League of the South agree that a flag should be taken down. Not the most recognizable historic flag of the South but the flag of our occupiers for the last 150 years. Yes, the one to the far right over there! That ugly gridiron now stands for multiculturalism, tolerance, and diversity–the left’s unholy trinity. It also stands for Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner, Rachel Dolezal, and every other fraud and pervert who is held up as an example of “courage” in 2015 America. It represents the homosexual agenda, open borders and Third World immigration, a culture that is an open sewer, perpetual war for perpetual profit, among many other enormities.

In sharp contrast, our beautiful battle flag stands for the heroic effort our people made 150 years ago to avoid the fate were are experiencing today. And, God willing, it will be the banner that flies over the fight that gains us our liberty in the 21st century!

Obama On The Charleston Shootings

The right claims Obama is dividing the country and fomenting race problems. Listen:

I’ve had to make statements like this too many times. Communities like this have had to endure tragedies like this too many times. We don’t have all the facts, but we do know that once again innocent people were killed because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun. Now’s the time for mourning and for healing, but let’s be clear: At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence doesn’t happen in other advanced countries. It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency. And it is in our power to do something about it. I say that recognizing that the politics in this town foreclose a lot of those avenues right now. But it’d be wrong for me not to acknowledge it. And at some point, it’s going to be important for the American people to come to grips with it, and for us to be able to shift how we think about the issue of gun violence collectively.

In Your Heart, You Know He's Nuts

Barry Goldwater campaign commercial from 1964: "In your heart, you know he's right."

The Right Wing Replies To Hillary's Speech

This is a continuation of my last post, "Hillary Clinton's Bold Statement On Race." I said that I wanted to see the right-wing reaction to Hillary's speech at the U.S. Conference of Mayors. Click here for a Breitbart response by Katie McHugh, in an article entitled "Hillary Clinton Denounces White Privilege, Calls for Taking Guns From ‘Those Whose Hearts Are Filled With Hate.'" Here's her first sentence:

In an emotional speech that heaped scorn and blame on America for failing to pass gun control measures while it supposedly perpetuates racism, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton said white Americans need to “question our own assumptions and privilege."

McHugh heaps more scorn on Hillary and makes the usual right-wing point that the killer's motives were "unclear," and perhaps not race-based at all. Yeah, right.

Eric Owens, at the execrable Tucker Carlson's site, The Daily Caller, reacts to Hillary's speech with a post entitled "Hillary Clinton Chides America For Racism, Lives In Town With 1.9 Percent Black Population."

Is that the best you've got, Tucker? (I noticed, but didn't bother to read, an item where Carlson suggested on Fox News that as long as Obama supports gun control, his Secret Service contingent should go unarmed. Typical Tucker.)

Hillary Clinton's Bold Statement On Race

Click here for an article by Karoli at Crooks & Liars entitled "Hillary Clinton: America's Long Struggle With Race Is Far From Finished." It's about a speech Clinton gave to the U.S. Conference of Mayors soon after the murders of nine black people in a historic black church in Charleston, S.C. There are presently 16 Republican candidates for president: You won't hear a speech remotely like this from any of them. Follow the link to the article, or listen to the speech here:


I decided to check out the right-wing sites to see how they would spin Clinton's speech. First stop, Red State, a blog edited and run by prominent far-right commentator Erick Erickson. I was distracted by the first headline: "Hillary Clinton: Self-aggrandizing Grifter," by the appropriately named Red State front-page blogger, streiff. It was an attack on the Clinton Foundation, making the preposterous claim that 90% of the Foundation's money is spent "on things like salaries, travel, etc. rather than actually doing something useful."

This is a lie, but it has considerable traction with the far right. It is thoroughly debunked by FactCheck.org in this article -- at Newsmax, of all places! This article is a rebuttal of essentially the same anti-Clinton charges made by Republican dark-horse presidential candidate Carly Fiorina. According to the article:

The bottom line, according to the online information watchdog FactCheck.org: "Fiorina is simply wrong."

Fiorina is referring only to the amount of money donated by the Clinton Foundation to outside charities, ignoring the fact that most of the Foundation's charitable work is performed in-house.

The independent philanthropy watchdog CharityWatch analyzed Foundation funding and concluded that about 89 percent of it went to charity — higher than the 75 percent considered the industry standard.

Streiff's article is mostly about how Condoleeza Rice and Hillary Clinton received speaking fees from a particular children's charity; Rice was paid less and donated half back to the charity. He finishes with this delightful paragraph:

This is the irony of how women are viewed and treated in the Democrat party. When you have a truly accomplished woman like a Condoleeza Rice or a Sarah Palin [!] who works hard, often against significant resistance, and succeeds without any federal agency weighing in to smooth the way they are demonized and ridiculed. Then you get a unremarkable, though obvious vicious and grasping, harpy like Hillary Clinton whose position in the world is due solely to having occasional sex with Bill Clinton… which doesn’t differentiate her from a lot of other women… and she is a role model and a spokesman for women’s issues. The woman is an accomplished grifter, we can give her that. Of course, grifting is easy when you are devoid of shame, ethics, or a sense of propriety. But she is an utter failure at every other venture she has attempted in this life."

He seems nice.

Click here for an article by Jonathan Rauch at The Atlantic entitled "This Is Not Charity" for some more depth on what the Clinton Foundation actually does.

Anti-Government Extremists Much Worse Threat Than Muslims

Click here for an article in The New York Times by Charles Kurzman and David Schanzer entitled "The Other Terror Threat."

In a survey we conducted with the Police Executive Research Forum last year of 382 law enforcement agencies, 74 percent reported anti-government extremism as one of the top three terrorist threats in their jurisdiction; 39 percent listed extremism connected with Al Qaeda or like-minded terrorist organizations. And only 3 percent identified the threat from Muslim extremists as severe, compared with 7 percent for anti-government and other forms of extremism.

ISIS was just cranking up when the survey finished; thus the reference to Al Qaeda. The article notes that since 2000, 25 law enforcement officers have been killed by right-wing extremists; none by Muslims.

Since 9/11, an average of nine American Muslims per year have been involved in an average of six terrorism-related plots against targets in the United States. Most were disrupted, but the 20 plots that were carried out accounted for 50 fatalities over the past 13 and a half years. In contrast, right-wing extremists averaged 337 attacks per year in the decade after 9/11, causing a total of 254 fatalities.

The New Populism - May 22, 2014

Click here for a speech by Bob Borosage.

Florida Healthcare Subsidies For Me, But Not For Thee

Click here for an article at The Seminole Democrat blog entitled "FL GOP kills Medicaid AND refuses to stop their $8 gold packages. HERE'S WHAT WE DO."

The big guns in the Florida state legislature -- 17,589 people, including the governor, cabinet, various management-level employees, and their staff -- get medical insurance subsidized by the state. The cost to Florida taxpayers for this little perk? $1 million a month. The cost of medical insurance for the chosen few? $30 per month for a family, or $8 per month for an individual.

Other state employees pay $180 per month for a family, $50 per month for an individual.

The average cost, to the average person in the state of Florida for medical insurance, is $1,347 per month.

Meanwhile, about 700,000 low-income Floridians are stranded in the state’s “coverage gap,” in which they make too much money to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to qualify for tax credits on the exchange. Governor Rick Scott refuses to accept the Obamacare solution, whereby the federal government would pay 100% of the cost of expanding Medicade to subsidize health care insurance costs for those 700,000 people, falling to 90% over time.

Google Photos (From Bob Rankin)

Click here for a Bob Rankin article on Google Photos.

Pendulum Motion

Krugman Hits It Out Of The Park (Yet Again)

Click here for an article at Salon by entitled "Paul Krugman condemns 'compassionless conservatism': Politicians don’t know how Americans actually live."

Sample quote: 

I am not, or not only, talking about right-wing contempt for the poor, although the dominance of compassionless conservatism is a sight to behold. According to the Pew Research Center, more than three-quarters of conservatives believe that the poor “have it easy” thanks to government benefits; only 1 in 7 believe that the poor “have hard lives.” And this attitude translates into policy. What we learn from the refusal of Republican-controlled states to expand Medicaid, even though the federal government would foot the bill, is that punishing the poor has become a goal in itself, one worth pursuing even if it hurts rather than helps state budgets.

Go to it for the link to the Krugman article in the NYT.

"Corruption Is Legal In America" - A 5-Minute Video

This video is taken from a post by Gaius Publius at Hullabaloo, a video portrayal of a Princeton study:



And he adds this George Carlin video (WARNING - NSFW (Not Safe For Work).

Iraq Wasn't A Mistake - It Was A Crime

Click here for Paul Krugman's take on the newly emerged discussion of the Iraq war -- a decade too late.

MoDo Gets It Right

Click here for what I think is Maureen Dowd's best column in years: "He is Heavy. He's My Brother." Commenting on Jeb's tough week of trying to escape his brother's legacy of the Iraq war, she pretty much rips W. to shreds. The intelligence wasn't wrong: It was manufactured in the White House and the Pentagon. Her final paragraph:

And consider this: Jeb hasn’t even been asked any questions yet about W.’s dark contributions on waterboarding, the deficit and the near-total collapse of the American economy.

Iraq: The "Faulty Intelligence" Lie

Click here for an article in The American Prospect by Paul Waldman entitled "The Myth of 'Faulty Intelligence.'"

Words Of Wisdom From Eisenhower

“Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes that you can do these things. Among them are a few Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

Where Have All The Flowers Gone?

Coffee's Good For You!

Click here for an article in The New York Times by Aaron E. Carroll entitled "More Consensus on Coffee's Benefits Than You Might Think."

Climate Change - Act Now

Click here for an article by Bill McKibben at HuffPo entitled "The Next Decade Will Decide What the World Looks Like for Thousands of Decades to Come."

The next 10 years will be decisive when it comes to the planet's future—what we do (or don't) will play out over geologic time.

It could, if we set our minds to it, be the decade when the planet's use of fossil fuels peaks and then rapidly declines. We've built a movement that, for the moment, is starting to tie down the fossil fuel industry: from the tarsands of Alberta to the (as yet unbuilt) giant new mines of Australia's Galilee Basin, the big players in coal, gas, and oil are bothered and even bewildered by a new strain of activist. They're losing on the image front: when the Rockefeller family, the Church of England, and Prince Charles have begun divesting their fossil fuel stocks, you know the tide has turned.

And with it comes the sudden chance to replace that fossil fuel, fast and relatively easily. Out of nowhere the price of solar panels has fallen like an anvil from a skyscraper, dropping 75 percent in the last six years. Renewable energy is suddenly as cheap or cheaper than the bad stuff, even before you figure in the insane monetary cost of global warming. So in Bangladesh they're solarizing 60,000 huts a month; the whole country may be paneled by 2020.

That rapid change wouldn't be enough to stop global warming—we're already seeing drastic changes, as anyone living through California's drought can attest. We'll continue to see record-breaking years (like 2014. And like 2015 so far). We'll have to deal with record flooding. The ocean will grow more acidic. But maybe, if we really ratchet up the transition we'll avoid a challenge of civilization-scale.

Or, of course, we could change slowly, the way the Koch Brothers would like. (And for that matter, most political leaders). We could do nothing out of the ordinary, and wait three or four decades for solar power to replace fossil fuel. It would rattle the fewest cages in the short run.

And in the long run it would, by most of the computer models, condemn us to four or five degrees Celsius of global warming—enough to take the world utterly out of the rhythms of the Holocene, enough to call into question our ability to grow sufficient food or find sufficient water.

The next decade is decisive because trajectory counts for so much; if we bend it now, we may slide the car to a halt with just the front tires hanging off the cliff. But if we sail on for a few more years, it's pretty clear we're fast and furiously going airborne—that's what happens when, say, Arctic permafrost starts to melt in earnest, releasing clouds of methane.

So it's not too much to say that the next decade will decide what the world looks like for thousands of decades to come. We all get front row seats—but we can all be actors too, if only we'll join the growing movement to do something about it.

Vitai Lampada - Sir Henry Newbolt, 1897

Vitai Lampada

THERE'S a breathless hush in the Close to-night -
Ten to make and the match to win -
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play and the last man in.
And it's not for the sake of a ribboned coat,
Or the selfish hope of a season's fame,
But his Captain's hand on his shoulder smote
"Play up! play up! and play the game!"

The sand of the desert is sodden red, -
Red with the wreck of a square that broke; -
The Gatling's jammed and the colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And England's far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of schoolboy rallies the ranks,
"Play up! play up! and play the game!"

This is the word that year by year
While in her place the School is set
Every one of her sons must hear,
And none that hears it dare forget.
This they all with a joyful mind
Bear through life like a torch in flame,
And falling fling to the host behind -
"Play up! play up! and play the game!"

Pre-9/11 Intelligence Failuree

Click here for a Charlie Pierce article at Esquire Magazine entitled "Old Spy's Tale: A 9/11 Fable Lives Again."

Charlie tells us that, contrary to Marco Rubio's lies, there were plenty of opportunities to monitor a 9/11 hijacker named Khalid al-Mihdhar in San Diego.

Louie Gohmert (sigh)

Click here for an article by Hunter at Daily Kos entitled America's Dumbest Congressman weighs in On 'Jade Helm.' Who owns the distinction of being known as "America's Dumbest Congressman"? Louie Gohmert, of course! It's a good article describing the wingnut paranoia over a U.S. military exercise which designates certain areas as "hostile" -- including the state of Texas. Gohmert:

Once I observed the map depicting ‘hostile,’ ‘permissive,’ and ‘uncertain’ states and locations, I was rather appalled that the hostile areas amazingly have a Republican majority, ‘cling to their guns and religion,’ and believe in the sanctity of the United States Constitution. When the federal government begins, even in practice, games or exercises, to consider any U.S. city or state in 'hostile' control and trying to retake it, the message becomes extremely calloused and suspicious.

My favorite paragraph:

While godforsaken desert hellholes do tend to skew conservative all over the world, can't imagine why, I'm going to guess it's a coincidence. That said, one of the points of conducting such training exercises is that in a real conflict troops will probably be working in "hostile" or "uncertain" territory, and so the pretended-at map of the exercise ground probably has to mark out at least some area as "hostile" or it wouldn't be much of a war game, now would it. An exercise in which all areas are labeled "super-friendly" or "puppy playdate center" would be grand if the sitting president wanted to invade Lollipop Mountain, but as of now most such conflicts take place in blisteringly hot desert hellholes with poor infrastructure, heavily armed roving gangs of authority-defying nutjobs, and led by hostile theocratic regimes that think the American president might be the devil. If some group of military leaders considers all that and thinks "Texas?" you have only yourselves to blame.

Republicans Are From Mars, Democrats Are From Venus

Members of the two parties view the world in entirely different ways.

Here in its entirety is an article by Joan McCarter at Daily Kos entitled Republican voters once again consumed by fear and "values."

People who still self-identify as Republican live in a totally different world than the rest of us, one made up primarily of fear. At least that's the findings of the the new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. When asked to rank what issues were most important to them:

Republican primary voters' leading response was national security and terrorism (27 percent said it was their first choice).

That's followed by the deficit and government spending (24 percent), job creation and economic growth (21 percent) and religious and moral values (12 percent).

By comparison, the top priority for Democrats in the poll was job creation and economic growth (37 percent)—followed by health care (17 percent), climate change (15 percent) and national security and terrorism (13 percent).

As if Republican primary candidates needed more incentive to base their campaigns on fear and God and—never forget!—all the money the federal government spends on the poors.

America's Sheriff

Click here for an article at Daily Kos by Mother Mags entitled What county sheriff might spend $10 million to get elected? You guessed it: Arpaio.

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has cost the people of his county nearly $45 million in lawsuits that were filed by victims whose civil rights were violated—people who were unfairly harassed, illegally detained or arrested, tortured or even killed. Arpaio was charged by the Department of Justice with abuse of powers, and a federal judge ruled that his office engages in racial profiling. The former county attorney and most of the sheriff's senior staff have been disbarred or fired for their role in helping to build Arpaio's police state.

Currently Sheriff Arpaio is in the middle of a civil contempt hearing for ignoring federal court orders to cease his immigration patrols and turn over evidence. Previous to the hearing, Arpaio admitted his guilt and tried to block the contempt hearing by offering to donate $100,000 to a civil rights organization. The judge declined that offer and the hearing began last month. During the first phase of the proceedings, which continue next month, Arpaio revealed that his attorney had hired a private detective to investigate the judge's wife. You can't make this shit up.

Arpaio is running for sheriff again in 2016, when he will be 84 years old. He's raised $5.5 million in campaign funds in the last two years and has $2 million on hand, and contributions from wingnuts all over the country keep pouring in.

People often ask: How and why do voters in Maricopa County keep electing this blowhard? He costs you money and he's not a good lawman. But it matters little to his base that, in addition to the millions in lawsuits, his office misspent nearly $100 million on tanks and other toys. Nor does it matter that he mishandled hundreds of child sex abuse cases. The wingers don't care, they really don't.

Allan Grayson Supports The Buffett Plan For Trade

Conservative Repression In Spain

Click here for an article by the Editorial Board in the New York Times telling of a law just signed by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, leader of the conservative party which controls both houses of the legislature. The harsh austerity measures the government has embraced in the recent financial crisis have given rise to many large popular demonstrations in protest. Now peaceful protesters may find themselves subject of fines of at least 30,000 euro; even as much as 600,000 euro. (The opposition party seems poised to make large gains in the next election.)

Lincoln on Labor v, Capital

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed, Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration, - Abraham Lincoln

Fun With Electricity!

Creative Financing Must Be Rewarded!

From Daily Kos, Cheers & Jeers, by Bill in Portland Maine:

The Cliff's Notes version: Louisiana free-market capitalists push a Trojan horse into Maine in the form of a new law that "provides tax credits to investors who back businesses in low-income communities." The Trojan horse is greeted in the Maine legislature to thunderous applause. A struggling paper mill is targeted for "backing." In the dead of night, the free-market capitalists leap out of the Trojan horse, push the paper mill into bankruptcy, strand 200 now-unemployed employees in the low-income town of East Millinocket, and then feast on the spoils:

Sometime this year, the state of Maine will cut two checks worth a total of $2.8 million and mail them to out-of-state investors. Next year, it will send two more checks, worth $3.2 million, to the same recipients. It will repeat that process for the next three years until roughly $16 million of taxpayer money has been withdrawn from Maine’s General Fund.

…and given on a silver platter to the Louisiana carpetbaggers, who, of course, have no comment.

Wingsuit Video

Good Police Work in San Berdoo

Martin Freeman Ad For The Labour Party

I wonder if he could be talked into doing an ad for the Democrats?

Epistemic Closure

Wikipedia:  The term "epistemic closure" has been used in U.S. political debate to refer to the claim that political belief systems can be closed systems of deduction, unaffected by empirical evidence.

In an article at Daily Kos by Dante Atkins entitled "It's so hard to be an Obamacare-hating Republican these days," the author quotes Julian Sanchez:

One of the more striking features of the contemporary conservative movement is the extent to which it has been moving toward epistemic closure. Reality is defined by a multimedia array of interconnected and cross promoting conservative blogs, radio programs, magazines, and of course, Fox News. Whatever conflicts with that reality can be dismissed out of hand because it comes from the liberal media, and is therefore ipso facto not to be trusted. (How do you know they’re liberal? Well, they disagree with the conservative media!)

Atkins goes on:

Julian Sanchez, a CATO Institute fellow who specializes in the areas of privacy and surveillance, was perhaps the first to concisely distill the alternate reality that has been created by the continuously cross-referencing circle of conservative media outlets. Conservatives live in a bubble of epistemic closure in which narratives and ideas that feed a particular narrative are introduced, reinforced and then judged to be accurate simply by virtue of having been presented by the correct media authorities. It doesn't matter if whatever is being claimed has an actual basis in objective reality: once an idea that pleases the conservative id has taken root, it is mighty hard for truth to pierce the bubble of fantasy.

This is why President Obama can in the conservative mind be a Kenyan, a Muslim, a socialist, and a black liberation theologist all at the same time. It's why no amount of evidence can ever convince conservatism the climate change is real. It's why they view it as a fact that Obama is killing jobs and exploding the deficit, even as the facts are exactly the opposite on both counts. And it's also why the Affordable Care Act is simply known to be a disaster that is ruining lives, damaging employers, and constraining freedom, even as in reality it is reducing costs, saving lives, and making health insurance affordable for people who have gone far too long without it.

Police Dash Cam Video

Don't Worry - Be Happy!

Click here for a feel-good post at Vox entitled "26 charts and maps that show the world is getting much, much better," by Dylan Matthews. The last paragraph:

More of a visual learner? Then check out this interview with the Center for Global Development's Charles Kenny (author of The Upside of Down and Getting Better), who runs through a wide array of positive trends, from longer life expectancy to falling murder rates to increased beer consumption.

[Increased beer consumption is a good thing?]

A reasonable question for Santorum

This is Rick Santorum on the campaign trail for 2016, but listen to the mouth-frothing question that starts the clip. Remember when Obama was foiled in his attempt to nuke Charleston, SC, a year or so ago?

Hillary's horrible, terrible email scandal -- not so bad

Has there ever been a worse scandal than Hillary Clinton's email difficulties?

Well, in the first place, THE REGULATIONS SHE IS ALLEGED TO HAVE VIOLATED DID NOT GET ENACTED UNTIL AFTER SHE HAD LEFT HER JOB AS SECRETARY OF STATE.

In the second place, in 2007, when Bush's aides -- yes, Karl Rove, this includes you -- claimed that MILLIONS of their emails had been mysteriously lost, it was a media sensation for -- about 48 hours. After that -- crickets. I guess IOKIYAR.

Click here for an article by Eric Boehlert at Media Matters entitled "FLASHBACK: When Millions Of Lost Bush White House Emails (From Private Accounts) Triggered A Media Shrug."

Jeb's Foreign Policy Advisers - Venn Diagram

Click here for a John Amato article at Crooks & Liars entitled "Jeb Bush Hires Same Foreign Policy Experts That Lied US Into The Iraq War."

His campaign announced a list of 21 foreign policy advisers; 20 of them served in the administrations of Reagan, Bush I, and W. He's surrounded himself with the same neocon hawks who got the U.S. into this horrible foreign policy mess in the first place.

I was unable to copy the Venn Diagram originally published in the Washington Post showing the overlap of this crowd, so click here for a link to the WaPo article, including a more easily read copy of the diagram.

Dog Dancing!

Vox Interviews Obama

http://www.vox.com/a/barack-obama-interview-vox-conversation/obama-domestic-policy-transcript

February 5 - Happy Birthday, Adlai Stevenson!

[Lifted from Bill in Portland Maine of Crooks & Liars, Cheers and Jeers -- as was the previous post, the PuppyCam.] Some quotes:

"A hypocrite is the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree, then mount the stump and make a speech for conservation. " "I have been thinking that I would make a proposition to my Republican friends... that if they will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them."

And I love this:

We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft. We cannot maintain it half fortunate, half miserable, half confident, half despairing, half slave to the ancient enemies of man, half free in a liberation of resources undreamed of until this day. No craft, no crew can travel with such vast contradictions. On their resolution depends the survival of us all.

PuppyCam!

Broadcast live streaming video on Ustream

Click here for a PolitiFact article by Aaron Sharockman in the Tampa Bay Times (home of PolitiFact) entitled MSNBC, Fox, CNN move the needle on our Truth-O-Meter scorecards.

Takeaway: Fox News not only lies a lot (surprise, surprise), but it's lying more now than previously -- that is, since PolitiFact last did this survey, in September 2013. (MSNBC and CNN lie less, and are lying less then previously).

At Fox and Fox News, 10 percent of the claims we’ve rated have been True, 11 percent Mostly True, 18 percent Half True, 21 percent Mostly False, 31 percent False and nine percent Pants on Fire. That means about 60 percent of the claims we’ve checked have been rated Mostly False or worse.

At MSNBC, 44 percent of claims investigated were found Mostly False or worse; CNN was the best of the bunch, with 80 percent of claims found Half True or better.

The article includes a disclaimer of sorts: 

As we have said in the past, be cautious about using the scorecards to draw broad conclusions. We use our news judgment to pick the facts we’re going to check, so we certainly don’t fact-check everything.

PolitiFact is considered to be generally nonpartisan, but both left and right howl with indignation when a "fact-check" goes against them.

Don't Mess With Vincent (Tom Cruise, Collateral) -- No, Seriously, Just Don't.

Killer (no pun intended) scene from Collateral:

Tighten Your Belts, You Greedy Poors!

This article by Paul Krugman in the NYT is so short I'll reproduce it here. Entitled Paging Robert Burns, it links to Burns' poem, To A Louse, which includes the line: "O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us!" (And I love the Times tag line for the article: "O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us yada yada." I prefer "yadda, yadda, yadda," but ...)

This Bloomberg report from Davos is making the rounds:

Billionaire Jeff Greene, who amassed a multibillion dollar fortune betting against subprime mortgage securities, says the U.S. faces a jobs crisis that will cause social unrest and radical politics.

“America’s lifestyle expectations are far too high and need to be adjusted so we have less things and a smaller, better existence,” Greene said in an interview today at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “We need to reinvent our whole system of life.”

Later in the article: Greene, who flew his wife, children and two nannies on a private jet plane to Davos for the week …

The Super-Rich

Excellent Signature Lines

In his regular Cheers and Jeers column at Daily Kos, Bill in Portland Maine salutes some of the signature lines "(links, quotes, or other words of wisdom that automatically appear when you post a comment---you can create a "sig" at your user profile page)" of his correspondents. My favorites:

“It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing
he was never reasoned into” --Jonathan Swift

It's disturbing how much exercise and extra fries sound alike.

"Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass... it is about learning to dance in the rain." --Vivanne Grenne

In Honor Of Martin Luther King Day

Click here for an article by HamdenRice at Daily Kos entitled Most of you have no Idea what Martin Luther King actually did. King was born on January 15, 1929, and the official name for the holiday, celebrated on the third Monday in January, is Birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr.

HamdenRice says he learned from his father during an angry discussion that "Dr. King ended the terror of living in the south."

Many people seem to feel that King "gave that great speech," and "marched." Yes, he did, but he did so much more. Happy birthday, Dr. King.
 





 

Charlie Pierce on the Civil Rights Movement

Click here for Charlie Pierce's post on his blog at Esquire, entitled The Ownership of America: Selma And The Way We Look At America. I haven't seen the movie, but I'll be thinking of Pierce's opinions when I see it. This is Charlie's (sometimes quite lyrical) take on the Civil Rights movement.

"Education" in South Carolina

Click here for an article at Mother Jones by Hannah Levintova entitled South Carolina Law Would Make Kids Study Second Amendment for 3 Weeks Every Year.

If passed, the Second Amendment Education Act would require that three consecutive weeks of each year in elementary, middle, and high school be spent studying the second amendment. As Ian Millhiser at Think Progress points out, that's an enormous chunk of the school year, especially given that some South Carolina schools devote just two weeks to slavery and a week and a half to World War II.

The law would also require that every December 15—the day after the anniversary of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook school in Newtown—be designated "Second Amendment Awareness Day." To celebrate the occasion, schools will be required to hold mandatory poster or essay contests at every grade level, with the theme "The Right To Bear Arms; One American Right Protecting All Others."

The curriculum would require students from first grade and up to get into the weeds of constitutional scholarship on the Second Amendment. Students will be asked to study Supreme Court cases "including the United States v. Cruikshank, the United States v. Miller, the District of Columbia v. Heller, and McDonald v. Chicago." (The majority arguments in Heller and McDonald grew out of the push by pro-gun researchers to redefine the Second Amendment.) The bill also mandates that students learn about "the constitutionality of gun control laws," the causes of mass shootings, and "the impact of legislative reactions to gun violence on Constitutional rights and the impact on reducing gun violence, if any."

Here is the Second Amendment, in its entirety:

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

South Carolina ... sigh ...

Dogs In Cars - Miami

Golden Gate "Zipper Truck"

There have been 128 head-on collisions on the Golden Gate Bridge over the years, resulting in 16 deaths. Part of the problem is the "suicide lane," the center lane of the bridge which is reversed during the day, carrying an extra lane of traffic into San Francisco in the morning and out of the city at night, responding to rush-hour traffic.

The video shows a "zipper truck" that can move 3,500 barriers that weigh 1,500 pounds each along the length of the bridge in a matter of minutes.

Beware, World ... (John McCain)

Economic Recovery Despite Republican Obstructionism

Click here for an article by Jon Perr at Daily Kos entitled "Democrats saved the economy, Republicans tried to kill it."

It's a long article, with charts and graphs, but well worth the read. It's a comprehensive discussion of how the U.S. economy has performed during the Obama administration. It's the story of how, as Obama took control, the downturn was proving to be much more severe than had been forecast; how TARP, the stimulus, and the auto industry bailout slowly brought the economy back from the brink of disaster, as Republicans howled in anger over Obama's "destructive" programs; how the Republicans blocked and hindered economic progress at every turn, calling for cutbacks and austerity, predicting imminent catastrophe -- we're Greece, I tell you, Greece! -- which somehow never materialized.

Maher And Rushdie On Real Time

My apologies: It's hard to format a reproduction of blog comments.  Anyway, here's a comment by "Bung" from a Salon article on Maher's "Real Time" program with Salman Rushdie:

"My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state, for two reasons. For one thing, because it happens to be the larger component of international violence. But also for a much more important reason than that; namely, I can do something about it.

"So even if the U.S. was responsible for 2 percent of the violence in the world instead of the majority of it, it would be that 2 percent I would be primarily responsible for. And that is a simple ethical judgment. That is, the ethical value of one's actions depends on their anticipated and predictable consequences. It is very easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else. That has about as much ethical value as denouncing atrocities that took place in the 18th century."
Noam Chomsky

Which prompted this, from "Basho":

I couldn't agree more.  Excellent quote.

And this, also from "Basho":

Here's an idea:  If you want to know why Islamic terrorists do terrorism, why not just ask them.   Well, it's been done - thousands of times.  And what is their universal and consistent answer?  It's Abu Graib.  It's Guantanamo Bay.  [Might I add: It's Fallujah. It's drone strikes killing innocents in Pakistan and Yemen. It's the plight of the Palestinians.] They don't say it's because the prophet said, "Kill the infidel."

Just think about the videos of ISIS beheadings.  Remember the victims wearing orange jumpsuits - just like the ones tortured prisoners at Guantanamo wear?  

And how does ISIS recruit new fighters.  Do they read passages from the Quran?  No. They show pictures of Abu Graib and Guantanamo as well as pictures of innocent Muslims killed by drones.  We are dealing with blowback, not rotten apples from a bad orchard.

We all thought GW Bush was stupid when he said they kill us because they hate our freedom.  Isn't it also stupid for Bill Maher to say they kill us because their religion teaches they should.

This prompted a reply by "carlos gonzales figueroa":

Ok Why the children murdered in Pakistan by the taliban are responsible for Guantanamo?, Why the girls kidnaped by Boko Haram are responsible for Abu Graib? What you have to understand is that is violence is due to the teaching of the Quran and the Hadith, and even more bizarre, the main victims of this madness are Muslims that are considered hypocrites by the fundamentalists,

To which "Basho" replied:

My post is based on empirical fact.  Yours is based on a vulgar prejudice and a vile theory you and Bill Maher pulled out of your butts.  The Quran clearly states that violence is justifiable only in cases of self defense.  Read history:  Islam has had centuries-long peaceful co-existences with non-Muslims.  Also, there is nothing in the Quran to justify what Boko Haram has done.  It is simply a coincidence that they are Muslims.

About the Taliban:  I don't like them, but quite frankly, the people of Afghanistan would be better off under the Taliban than under our so-called "liberation" - just as the people of Iraq would have been better off under Saddam than under the mess we have created.  And we are far from innocent.  We murder innocent women and children by having someone in Virginia sit at a computer and push a button.  Our secular government kills from a distance; they kill up close.  Both ways are reprehensible.  And it was we who invaded their territory, not the reverse.  Sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.

You condemn fundamentalists and so do I. I would add that the New Atheists who post on Salon are - as a group - fundamentalists and purveyors of irrational  hate.    

Pablogonzales15 chipped in:
"God knows it did not cross our minds to attack the Towers, but after the situation became unbearable—and we witnessed the injustice and tyranny of the American-Israeli alliance against our people in Palestine and Lebanon—I thought about it. And the events that affected me directly were that of 1982 and the events that followed—when America allowed the Israelis to invade Lebanon, helped by the U.S. Sixth Fleet. As I watched the destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me punish the unjust the same way: to destroy towers in America so it could taste some of what we are tasting and to stop killing our children and women."
— Osama bin Laden, 2004
7 July 2005 London bombings
--------------------------
Your democratically-elected governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people all over the world. And your support of them makes you directly responsible, just as I am directly responsible for protecting and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters. Until we feel security you will be our targets and until you stop the bombing, gassing, imprisonment and torture of my people we will not stop this fight. We are at war and I am a soldier. Now you too will taste the reality of this situation.
                                  Mohammad Sidique Khan
Pakistan was attacked because under international pressure ( people who are far away and safe from taliban retaliation pakistan will face) they took on the taliban  guys jumping the afgan pakistan border. ( not there mess ) which po the taliban off and they started to attack pakistan civilans and military

This brought a reply from "akasidney":

Sure, that works.  And to stay in the same vein Maher uses in his quote of Cheney, I guess you'd argue that to find out the real reason we invaded Iraq would be to ask them... Cheney and Bush and Rummy and all the neo-cons "Why did you invade Iraq" and take their answer at face value.  See where I'm going with this?  And how silly your argument is?

To which "Basho" replied:

Poor analogy.  A better one would be asking ordinary Americans why they support attacks against Muslim countries.  They would say it is because of 9/11.  Both sides defend their homeland, their culture, their neighbors and friends.

I'm not naive enough to take Cheney, Bush, and Rumsfeld at face value.  I will concede that Bush called the invasion of Iraq a crusade and one of our generals boasted that our God is bigger than theirs - but in a way that proves my point.  Flaunting religion and claiming God is on your side is never the real reason for attacks.  It's just a technique to win over hearts and minds.

It seems to me "Basho" has some good points.

Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delauter

The Franklin News-Post is the newspaper of Franklin County -- "Serving The Land Between the Lakes - Philpott and Smith Mountain", published in Rocky Mount, Virginia. One of its reporters, Bethany Rodgers, wrote an article entitled "Shreve raises staffing, parking concerns" about Billy Shreve, a former councillor for Franklin County. Shreve expresses his dissatisfaction with the new council following an election in December 2014 in which he lost his seat. He complains, among other things, about lack of assigned parking spots for commissioners. The article includes the following sentences:

"Councilman Kirby Delauter, who is also a former commissioner, has joined Shreve in concern over parking for elected officials."

And later:

"Delauter, R-District 5, has asked Gardner to take parking spaces away from her government affairs liaison and her chief administrative officer and designate them for the council."

Those are the only mentions of Delauter in the article. But that was enough for Delauter to write the following on "social media" -- Facebook, I believe -- prompting a reply from Rodgers:





Okay; so far, so good. But Delauter replied:

"“Use my name again unauthorized and you'll be paying for an Attorney. Your rights stop where mine start.”

That prompted an editorial in the Franklin News-Post entitled "Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delauter":

Knowing Councilman Kirby Delauter as we do, we weren't surprised that he threatened The Frederick News-Post with a lawsuit because we had, he says — and we're not making this up — been putting Kirby Delauter's name in the paper without Kirby Delauter’s authorization. Attorneys would be called, Kirby Delauter said.

In fact, we spent quite some time laughing about it. Kirby Delauter, an elected official; Kirby Delauter, a public figure? Surely, Kirby Delauter can't be serious? Kirby Delauter’s making a joke, right?

Round about then, we wondered, if it’s not a joke, how should we now refer to Kirby Delauter if we can't use his name (Kirby Delauter)? Could we get away with an entire editorial of nothing but “Kirby Delauter” repeated over and over again -- Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delauter? OK, imagine we agreed because of temporary madness or something funny in the water that week, how would we reference "Kirby Delauter" and do our job as journalists without running afoul of our lack of authorization?

Blanks? Sure, we sometimes use hyphens in the case of expletives. Perhaps we could do that: "K---- D-------." Or, perhaps, "Councilman [Unauthorized]." We giggled a bit more than we should have when we came up with "the Councilman Formerly Known as Commissioner Kirby Delauter," which doesn't seem as funny written down in black and white and includes his name, which defeats the point. Maybe we should just put his initials, "KD," with an asterisk to a footnote (KD*), or refer to him as GLAT, the acronym for his campaign: "Govern Like A Taxpayer." We could even make it sound a little hip-hop with a well-placed hyphen: G-Lat. Speaking of, could we get away with "K-Del"? Or we could simply go with the Harry Potter-esque "He Who Shall Not be Named." (Cue the lightning strike and peal of thunder.)

Yet we could take the low road down even further and childishly mangle "Kirby Delauter" into references you, the reader, would still understand. "Sherbert Deluder," say. Or "Derby Kelauter." "Shirley Delaughter" (and don't call me Shirley). We found a great automatic online anagrammer that generated all kinds of alternatives and could make it a challenge for our readers to decode each time we have to reference the councilman: "Rebuked artily." That was a good one. "Bakery diluter" is just silly but does have a ring about it. "Keyed rural bit" was another that caught our eye as somewhat telling, because Kirby Delauter's pretty keyed up. We're sure there's a joke in "Brutelike Yard" somewhere.

Discernibly, though, Kirby Delauter's ignorance of what journalism is and does is no joke, and illustrates one disturbing aspect too prevalent in conservatives’ beliefs: That the media are all-liberal stooges hell bent on pursuing some fictional leftwing agenda. Generally this "fact" is bleated when the facts on the ground differ from conservative talking points. Take Councilman Billy Shreve's abstract, almost nonsensical defense of KD*: "I think media outlets are cowards and they hide behind the label of journalists and that's a bully pulpit to expand their liberal” agenda. Cowards? Tell that to the families of the 60 journalists killed in 2014, or the 70 in 2013, or the 74 who died in 2012, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. All in pursuit of the truth, or the most reliable version of it at hand in the most dangerous regions of the world.

Edifying as it may be to lapse into name calling -- and yes, we allowed ourselves a little childishness above and maybe a little bit below -- we need to make one serious point the councilman needs to hear and understand: We will not bow to petty intimidation tactics because a local politician thinks he can score political points with his base throwing around empty threats.

Legally, Kirby Delauter has no case.

And why? Here's how Washington Post blogger Eugene Volokh, who "teaches free speech law, religious freedom law, church-state relations law, a First Amendment Amicus Brief Clinic, and tort law, at UCLA School of Law," nicely sums it up:

“Uh, Council Member: In our country, newspapers are actually allowed to write about elected officials (and others) without their permission. It’s an avantgarde experiment, to be sure, but we’ve had some success with it." You know, that whole First Amendment thing.

That's why we're taking his threat with a pinch of salt. We've seen this behavior before (not just from Kirby Delauter) and it’s worth highlighting again. Bullying seems to be the only way Kirby "Don't say my name" Delauter feels he can lead. Only now, the target is not the public at hearings or occasional "punk" staff member, an arrogant, self-serving, whining middle school teacher or fellow "moron" commissioner, it's The News-Post. Instead of taking his job seriously like the voters demanded and the rest of the council seem to grasp, he's grabbing at distractionary shoot-the-messenger tactics that make a lot of noise but, to quote Shakespeare, a man who knew drama when he saw it, noise that "signifies nothing." Frederick County has big issues to tackle in 2015 and we have yet to hear Kirby Delauter sound out one single, sensible idea. He used the word "govern" in his slogan. Maybe he should apply that to his temper first.

Enough. Seriously. What's Kirby Delauter going to do? Sue everyone who's making fun of him on Twitter using the #kirbydelauter hashtag, or on Facebook? Boy, his attorney will be able to retire off that.

Reasonable men (and women) are required to move Frederick County forward. All Kirby Delauter is doing yet again is displaying his inability to control his temper, embarrassing himself, his district, the county and those who voted him into office. If he wants to govern like a taxpayer, he needs to respect the taxpayers whose money provides his paycheck, stop this silly, inflammatory nonsense, and get to work.

Aside from the title, that's 25 unauthorized uses of the name "Kirby Delauter." As an added bonus, the first letter of each paragraph spell out K-I-R-B-Y D-E-L-A-U-T-E-R.

When I first saw this story, I Googled "Kirby Delauter" and got about 14,000 hits. The next day, the same search brought up about 160,000 hits; just now, the number of hits is up to 435,000. I think Kirby Delauter has a lot more instances of unauthorized use of his name to worry about.

Nous Sommes Tous Charlie

“Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today. I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity. ‘Respect for religion’ has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion.’ Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.”  –Salman Rushdie

Say It, Bernie!

Courtesy of Meteor Blades at Daily Kos, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont writes Fight for Our Progressive Vision:

As I look ahead to this coming year, a number of thoughts come to mind.

First and foremost, against an enormous amount of corporate media noise and distraction, it is imperative that we not lose sight of what is most important and the vision that we stand for. We have got to stay focused on those issues that impact the lives of tens of millions of Americans who struggle every day to keep their heads above water economically, and who worry deeply about the kind of future their kids will have.

Yes. We make no apologies in stating that the great moral, economic and political issue of our time is the growing level of income and wealth inequality in our nation. It is a disgrace to everything this country is supposed to stand for when the top one-tenth of 1 percent owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent, and when one family (the Waltons) owns more wealth than the bottom 40 percent. No. The economy is not sustainable when the middle class continues to disappear and when 95 percent of all new income generated since the Wall Street crash goes to the top 1 percent. In order to create a vibrant economy, working families need disposable income. That is often not the case today.

Yes. We will continue the fight to have the United States join the rest of the industrialized world in understanding that health care is a human right of all people, not a privilege. We will end the current dysfunctional system in which 40 million Americans remain uninsured, and tens of millions more are underinsured. No. Private insurance companies and drug companies should not be making huge profits which result in the United States spending almost twice as much per capita on health care as any other nation with outcomes that are often not as good.

Yes. We believe that democracy means one person, one vote. It does not mean that the Koch Brothers and other billionaires should be able to buy elections through their ability to spend unlimited sums of money in campaigns. No. We will not accept Citizens United as the law of the land. We will overturn it through a constitutional amendment and move toward public funding of elections.

Yes. We will fight for a budget that ends corporate tax loopholes and demands that the wealthy and special interests begin paying their fair share of taxes. It is absurd that we are losing more than $100 billion a year in tax revenue as corporations and the wealthy stash their profits in the Cayman Islands and other tax havens It is a disgrace that hedge fund managers pay a lower effective tax rate than teachers or truck drivers. No. At a time when the middle class is disappearing and when millions of families have seen significant declines in their incomes, we will not support more austerity against the elderly, the children and working families. We will not accept cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, nutrition or affordable housing.

Yes. We believe that we must rebuild our crumbling infrastructure (roads, bridges, water systems, wastewater plants, rail, airports, older schools, etc.). At a time when real unemployment is 11.4 percent and youth unemployment is almost 18 percent, a $1 trillion investment in infrastructure would create 13 million decent paying jobs. No. We do not believe that we must maintain a bloated military budget which spends almost as much as the rest of the world combined and may lead us to perpetual warfare in the Middle East.

Yes. We believe that quality education should be available to all Americans regardless of their income. We believe that we should be hiring more teachers and pre-school educators, not firing them. No. We do not believe that it makes any sense that hundreds of thousands of bright young people are unable to afford a higher education while millions leave college and graduate school with heavy debts that will burden them for decades. In a highly competitive global economy, we must not fall further and further behind other countries in the education we provide our people.

Yes. We believe that the scientific community is right. Climate change is real, is caused by human activity and is already creating devastating problems in the United States and throughout the world. We believe that the United States can and must lead the world in transforming our energy system away from fossil fuels and into energy efficiency and sustainable energy. No. We do not believe that it makes sense to build the Keystone pipeline or other projects which make us more dependent on oil and other fossil fuels.

Let me conclude by relaying to you a simple but important political truth. The Republican right-wing agenda—tax breaks for the rich and large corporations, unfettered free trade, cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, nutrition and virtually every other program that sustains working families and low-income people—is an agenda supported by Fox TV. It is an agenda supported by The Wall Street Journal. It is an agenda supported by Rush Limbaugh and the 95 percent of radio talk show hosts who just happen to be right-wing. It is an agenda supported by the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable and much of corporate America.

It is not an agenda supported by the American people.

By and large, poll after poll shows that the American people support a progressive agenda that addresses income and wealth inequality, that creates the millions of jobs we desperately need, that raises the minimum wage, that ends pay discrimination against women, and that makes sure all Americans can get the quality education they need.

In the year 2015 our job is to gain control over the national debate, stay focused on the issues of real importance to the American people, stand up for our principles, educate and organize. If we do that, I have absolute confidence that we can turn this country around and become the kind of vital, prosperous and fair-minded democracy that so many want.