Windows 10 Paranoia - Justified?

Click here for an article that claims Windows 10 is Big Brother.

Important Words From Dick Cheney

Dick Cheney says politicians can't protect the country with "warmth and friendliness and so forth." How do you know, Dick? You've never tried.

Give It Up, Jindal

Click here for an article by Andrew Rosenthal at The New York Times entitled "Insane Things Republicans Say: Bobby Jindal Edition."

Jindal wrote an open letter to President Obama on the eve of the president's visit to New Orleans on the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, urging him not to bring up the subject of climate change and its role in the ever-increasing number and ever-increasing violence of environmental disasters . He made the following moronic statement:

While you and others may be of the opinion that we can legislate away hurricanes with higher taxes, business regulations and EPA power grabs, that is not a view shared by many Louisianians.

Yeah, you're right, Governor: It's not a view shared by many Louisianians. Nor is it a view shared by many outside of mental wards.

The Donald and The Bird

I haven't been able to get the embed code for this video, but paste the following into your address bar to see The Donald and The Eagle. https://youtu.be/KDa-b8PXrPo

Read This, And Follow The Links!

Click here! The link is to an article at Crooks & Liars entitled "Your Weekly Guide To The Wingnutosphere: August 20, 2015. It's chock full of good stuff. Click, and follow the links.

Read This - Then Wash Out Your Mind With Soap

Click here, for an exercise in the macabre depths of right-wing America.

Harper's Canada - The New Yorker

This is the entirety of an article entitled The Closing of the Canadian Mind, by Stephen Marche, a writer for Esquire magazine who lives in Toronto, on August 14, 2015 in The New Yorker. The subtitle is Stephen Harper, the prime minister of Canada, is creating a legacy of secrecy and ignorance.

The prime minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, has called an election for Oct. 19, but he doesn’t want anyone to talk about it.

He has chosen not to participate in the traditional series of debates on national television, confronting his opponents in quieter, less public venues, like the scholarly Munk Debates and CPAC, Canada’s equivalent of CSPAN. His own campaign events were subject to gag orders until a public outcry forced him to rescind the forced silence of his supporters.

Mr. Harper’s campaign for re-election has so far been utterly consistent with the personality trait that has defined his tenure as prime minister: his peculiar hatred for sharing information.

Americans have traditionally looked to Canada as a liberal haven, with gun control, universal health care and good public education.

But the nine and half years of Mr. Harper’s tenure have seen the slow-motion erosion of that reputation for open, responsible government. His stance has been a know-nothing conservatism, applied broadly and effectively. He has consistently limited the capacity of the public to understand what its government is doing, cloaking himself and his Conservative Party in an entitled secrecy, and the country in ignorance.

His relationship to the press is one of outright hostility. At his notoriously brief news conferences, his handlers vet every journalist, picking and choosing who can ask questions. In the usual give-and-take between press and politicians, the hurly-burly of any healthy democracy, he has simply removed the give.

Mr. Harper’s war against science has been even more damaging to the capacity of Canadians to know what their government is doing. The prime minister’s base of support is Alberta, a western province financially dependent on the oil industry, and he has been dedicated to protecting petrochemical companies from having their feelings hurt by any inconvenient research.

In 2012, he tried to defund government research centers in the High Arctic, and placed Canadian environmental scientists under gag orders. That year, National Research Council members were barred from discussing their work on snowfall with the media. Scientists for the governmental agency Environment Canada, under threat of losing their jobs, have been banned from discussing their research without political approval. Mentions of federal climate change research in the Canadian press have dropped 80 percent. The union that represents federal scientists and other professionals has, for the first time in its history, abandoned neutrality to campaign against Mr. Harper.

His active promotion of ignorance extends into the functions of government itself. Most shockingly, he ended the mandatory long-form census, a decision protested by nearly 500 organizations in Canada, including the Canadian Medical Association, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce and the Canadian Catholic Council of Bishops. In the age of information, he has stripped Canada of its capacity to gather information about itself. The Harper years have seen a subtle darkening of Canadian life.

The darkness has resulted, organically, in one of the most scandal-plagued administrations in Canadian history. Mr. Harper’s tenure coincided with the scandal of Rob Ford, the mayor of Toronto who admitted to smoking crack while in office and whose secret life came to light only when Gawker, an American website, broke the story. In a famous video at a Ford family barbecue, Mr. Harper praised the Fords as a “Conservative political dynasty.”

Mr. Harper’s appointments to the Senate — which in Canada is a mercifully impotent body employed strictly for political payoffs — have proved greedier than the norm. Mr. Harper’s chief of staff was forced out for paying off a senator who fudged his expenses. The Mounties have pressed criminal charges.

After the 2011 election, a Conservative staffer, Michael Sona, was convicted of using robocalls to send voters to the wrong polling places in Guelph, Ontario. In the words of the judge, he was guilty of “callous and blatant disregard for the right of people to vote.” In advance of this election, instead of such petty ploys, the Canadian Conservatives have passed the Fair Elections Act, a law with a classically Orwellian title, which not only needlessly tightens the requirements for voting but also has restricted the chief executive of Elections Canada from promoting the act of voting. Mr. Harper seems to think that his job is to prevent democracy.

But the worst of the Harper years is that all this secrecy and informational control have been at the service of no larger vision for the country. The policies that he has undertaken have been negligible — more irritating distractions than substantial changes. He is “tough on crime,” and so he has built more prisons at great expense at the exact moment when even American conservatives have realized that over-incarceration causes more problems than it solves. Then there is a new law that allows the government to revoke citizenship for dual citizens convicted of terrorism or high treason — effectively creating levels of Canadianness and problems where none existed.

For a man who insists on such intense control, the prime minister has not managed to control much that matters. The argument for all this secrecy was a technocratic impulse — he imagined Canada as a kind of Singapore, only more polite and rule abiding.

The major foreign policy goal of his tenure was the Keystone Pipeline, which Mr. Harper ultimately failed to deliver. The Canadian dollar has returned to the low levels that once earned it the title of the northern peso. Despite being left in a luxurious position of strength after the global recession, he coasted on what he knew: oil. In the run-up to the election, the Bank of Canada has announced that Canada just had two straight quarters of contraction — the technical definition of a recession. He has been a poor manager by any metric.

The early polls show Mr. Harper trailing, but he’s beaten bad polls before. He has been prime minister for nearly a decade for a reason: He promised a steady and quiet life, undisturbed by painful facts. The Harper years have not been terrible; they’ve just been bland and purposeless. Mr. Harper represents the politics of willful ignorance. It has its attractions.

Whether or not he loses, he will leave Canada more ignorant than he found it. The real question for the coming election is a simple but grand one: Do Canadians like their country like that?

Republicans: Democrats Leading Us To Holocaust And/Or Slavery!

Click here for an article at Daily Kos by Jon Perr entitled "The Holocaust, slavery, and the Republicans' routinely repulsive rhetoric." Here's a taste:

As a review of recent right-wing rhetoric shows, for today's Republicans, Obamacare, the national debt, tax hikes on the rich, abortion, federal regulation of for-profit colleges, gun control, social safety net programs, marriage equality, torture detainee rights, and just about everything else conservatives hate are little different than Hitler's slaughter of 6 million Jews or America's original sin.

CPAC: Annual Conservative Funhouse

Click here for an article by Lou Dubose, editor of the Washington Spectator, entitled "A Republican Party Held Captive By Its Radical Base." He characterizes CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) as a right-wing Brigadoon (title of a 1954 film about a miraculously blessed village that rises out of the mists every hundred years for only a day, so that the village would never be changed or destroyed by the outside world:

After four days of immersion, 8,000 to 10,000 participants depart, convinced that anthropogenic climate change is a hoax; government warnings about BPA plastic bottles are a plot designed to create hysteria to drive the public into the arms of the Nanny State; and that Rand Paul is a viable candidate for the presidency of the United States.

His conclusion?

The Republican Party is at war with itself.

It appears to be losing.

Remember Iran/Contra?

Click here for an article entitled "Summary of Prosecutions" in the Iran/Contra affair.

Ronald Reagan Revisited

Click here for an article by Peter Bienart in Foreign Policy magazine entitled "Think Again: Ronald Reagan," with the tagline "The Gipper wasn't the warhound his conservative followers would have you think." he demolishes three of today's favorite tropes: "Ronald Reagan was the ultimate hawk"; "Reagan banished the Vietnam Syndrome"; "Reagan frightened the Soviet Union into submission"; "Conservatives loved Reagan"; "Reagan was tough on terror"; and "George W. Bush was a Reaganite."

Donald Trump - Mainstream Republican?

Click here for Paul Krugman's take on The Donald, an NYT article entitled "The Face of the Base." Update: Here's a quote from Krugtron the Invincible, in an interview on Bloomberg TV:

"So he's a belligerent, loudmouth racist with not an ounce of compassion for less fortunate people," Krugman said, not pulling any punches. "In other words, he's exactly the kind of person the Republican base consists of and identifies with. It's clear that the very things that Upper West Side New Yorkers find detestable about him are exactly what endear him to the Republican base, which is basically people who see in him everything - even the big red face and the yelling - that makes him their kind of guy."

A New "Henri"

I haven't seen Henri in a while. I'll have to check to see if I've missed some.

Obama's IRS "Scandal" Debunked

Click here for a comprehensive explanation of the IRS non-scandal; conservatives were dreadfully aggrieved that they were being picked on by Obama's evil tool, the IRS. (HINT: not true.) The link is to a Salon article originally published in the Washington Spectator by Karoli Kuns.

Changing With The Times, Donkey And Elephant

I get pretty sick of reading on right-wing websites that the Republicans are the party of Lincoln while the Democrats are the true racists -- the party of slavery, Southern rebellion, the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow, and all the rest of that unsavory baggage. It's true, of course -- but irrelevant. The racists simply switched sides in the 1960s, out of disgust with what they saw as the backstabbing actions of President Johnson, who passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Nixon, counseled by Lee Atwater, welcomed the bigots to the GOP -- the Southern Strategy -- ushering in the last 50 years of Republican racism. (Shockingly, there are 300,000 registered members of the vile website Stormfront: Does anyone seriously believe that even one of those 300,000 votes Democrat today? I didn't think so.)

Anyway, things were different before the turbulent '60s. The platform of the Republican party under Eisenhower was pretty similar to that of today's Democrats; the most reactionary force in Congress was the Democratic senator from South Carolina, Strom Thurmond. Click here for the Wikipedia entry, "Civil Rights Act of 1957." Here are the opening paragraphs:

The Civil Rights Act of 1957, Pub.L. 85–315, 71 Stat. 634, enacted September 9, 1957, primarily a voting rights bill, was the first civil rights legislation passed by Congress in the United States since the 1866 and 1875 Acts.

The Civil Rights Act of 1957 was also Congress's show of support for the Supreme Court's Brown decisions.[1] The Brown v. Board of Education (1954), eventually led to the integration of public schools. Following the Supreme Court ruling, Southern whites in Virginia began a "Massive Resistance." Violence against blacks rose there and in other states, as in Little Rock, Arkansas, where that year President Dwight D. Eisenhower had ordered in federal troops to protect nine children integrating a public school, the first time the federal government had sent troops to the South since Reconstruction.[2] There had been continued physical assaults against suspected activists and bombings of schools and churches in the South. The administration of Eisenhower proposed legislation to protect the right to vote by African Americans.

Democratic Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, an ardent segregationist, sustained the longest one-person filibuster in history in an attempt to keep the bill from becoming law. His one-man filibuster lasted 24 hours and 18 minutes; he began with readings of every state's election laws in alphabetical order. Thurmond later read from the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and George Washington's Farewell Address. His speech set the record for a Senate filibuster.[3] The bill passed the House with a vote of 285 to 126 (Republicans 167–19 for, Democrats 118–107 for)[4] and the Senate 72 to 18 (Republicans 43–0 for, Democrats 29–18 for).[5] President Eisenhower signed it on September 9, 1957.

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.