Sunday Roast: Moment of Zen

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The Watering Hole, Saturday, November 29, 2014: Debunking Right-Wingers Is Exhausting

Most weeks I like to check out the good people at Right Wing Watch to see what the loonies in Conservative World (where good times go to be publicly denounced as immorally anti-Christian) are up to, or down to, depending on your perspective. I have to tell you, it can be exhausting. And that’s from me, not the good people who actually delve into their world to report back to us so we may be properly warned. It just boggles my mind how distorted their view of Reality is. And thanks to a well-funded right-wing movement dedicated to ensuring their views are treated as being equally valid with more thoughtful, reality-based thinking, these people have had conferred upon them a credibility they should otherwise lack. Because they’re nuts. There’s no other explanation for it.

Take Dr. Ben Carson, for example. No, please, take him. Far away. While discussing race in America, conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt asked Dr. Carson if things were “going to get worse” before they get better, and he responded with a true statement followed by a false one. He said, “I actually believe that things were better before this president was elected. And I think that things have gotten worse because of his unusual emphasis on race.” The first part was true in the sense that things were not as bad in 2008 as they are now, but the second part is totally off base, and an indication of how conservative minds think. The president isn’t the one who emphasizes race in everything, at least not from the comments I’ve heard him make as president. (I’ve never read his books, so I can’t speak to how much he emphasized race before 2008.) But if he gets asked about it more often than the forty-two white men who preceded him at his job, maybe it’s because he can offer a point of view his predecessors lacked. And maybe it’s because racial incidents are on the rise since our nation elected its first black president. But to ascribe these things to President Obama’s “emphasis on race” is to totally twist the reality of the situation. Carson then lied to explain how he came to that conclusion. Referencing the Henry Louis Gates incident (in which a college professor was arrested for trying to break into his own home, when he was in fact trying to open a stuck front door), Carson claims Obama said that the police “always do this kind of thing”. Actually what Obama said was that the Cambridge Police acted “stupidly.” Referencing the president’s comments about how if he had a son, he would look like Trayvon Martin, how is that not taking a “balanced, objective look at things”? Is there some merit to the belief that if Obama had a son, he would be white? Why do conservatives feel the truth must be “balanced” with something? Like what, totally delusional thinking? Ever since the election of FDR, Conservatives have been trying to get their viewpoints treated as anything other than the selfish, greedy, me-first kind of thinking they represent. (You can read a partial transcript of Hewitt’s interview with Carson here, but then you might accidentally read my reply to some delusional Christian in the comments section.)

Now that you’ve taken Ben Carson away from me, take Representative Peter King (R-NY) with him. King, who is an ardent supporter of the Irish Republican Army (the first terrorist group I remember hearing about growing up), thinks that Officer Darren Wilson has been getting a totally bad rap just because he shot an unarmed young black man out of complete fear and didn’t even get indicted for it. So Wilson should get invited to the White House, so the president can thank him for doing his job. Yeah, Steve Benen (who wrote the article to which I linked) couldn’t believe it, either. But he has a link to video of the Congressman saying this. The problem with that suggestion, of course, is that it’s not the job of a police officer to kill unarmed people from down the street, nor is it the job of a prosecutor to find a way to prevent that cop from being charged with a crime for doing so, but that’s what happened in Missouri. I mean, it’s not as though Officer Wilson was visiting Washington, DC, and did the Secret Service’s job by stopping a White House intruder (by shooting him from down the street), so why should he be invited to the White House? In typical Conservative fashion, King wants to make heroes out of people who kill other people for no valid reason. (Face the truth. Officer Darren Wilson’s life was never in danger, he only thought it might be. And that should not be sufficient grounds to use deadly force.) Conservatives love to step up and support cops who kill people for not obeying orders, because in their warped minds, failure to obey a police officer is a capital offense, punishable by an immediate execution. IOW, do what you’re told or die.

And while you’re taking away Ben Carson and Peter king, please take away all those Conservatives who think the first Thanksgiving was a celebration of the Pilgrims’ triumph over Socialism. I’ll let the author of the article explain:

The storyline goes like this: The early settlers at Plymouth at first experimented with a system of collective ownership of farmland, which, as with their compatriots at Jamestown, led to widespread famine. When they eventually abandoned this system in favor of private ownership, farmers were more productive, the harvest was bountiful, and a feast was held in celebration. Pass the stuffing!

As usual when it comes to Conservative interpretations of reality, it’s completely wrong and misses the point entirely! The first Thanksgiving celebration for a bountiful harvest was in 1621. The Pilgrims abandoned their Collective Course strategy in 1623. And they didn’t do it because of widespread famine (which contradicts the idea that their first harvest was bountiful) but because they wanted to make more money. It’s true that one reason they abandoned the Common Course was because there were bachelors who didn’t want to work for the benefit of other men’s wives and families, and there were women who objected to washing the bachelors’ clothes. This had more to do with the fact that these early settlers were not all from one town in England, but from all over the country. This was also at a time when people rarely traveled more than ten miles form their homes.

Communal farming arrangements were common in the pilgrims’ day. Many of the towns they came from in England were run according to the “open-field” system, in which the land holdings of a manor are divided into strips to be harvested by tenant farmers. As Nick Bunker writes in 2010’s Making Haste From Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World, “Open field farming was not some kind of communism. All the villagers were tenants of the landlord.”

There was no local baron in Plymouth, but it was a commercial project as much as a religious one, and the colonists still had to answer to their investors back in England. It was this, not socialist ideals, that accounted for the common course. Bunker writes, “Far from being a commune, the Mayflower was a common stock: the very words employed in the contract. All the land in the Plymouth Colony, its houses, its tools, and its trading profits (if they appeared) were to belong to a joint-stock company owned by the shareholders as a whole.”

He continues: “Under the terms of the contract … for the first seven years no individual settler could own a plot of land. To ensure that each farmer received his fair share of good or bad land, the slices were rotated each year, but this was counterproductive. Nobody had any reason to put in extra hours and effort to improve a plot if next season another family received the benefit.”

The Pilgrims’ unhappiness with this arrangement was not a rejection of Socialism, but of the corporate rules under which they had to live. You’ll never hear Conservatives talk about the early European settlers in this country that way – as anti-corporation.

This is our daily open thread. Feel free to discuss anything you wish, but preferably not right-wing distortions of reality, thank you.

The Watering Hole; Friday November 28 2014; Immigration

“. . . emotions of xenophobia — hatred of foreigners; nativism; the policy of keeping America ‘pure’ (that is, of preferring old immigrants to new) — continue to thrive.” ~President John F Kennedy

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Fox News Hosts: Immigrants Kids Are Getting School Lunches So ‘Your Kids Are Getting Shafted’

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Earlier this month, while plowing through some old folders and some old files on an old hard drive in an old computer, I ran across a whole pile of interesting old ‘stuff’ in the form of old essays that I had, 10 to 15 years ago, written and contributed/posted to various internet discussion groups and blogs. What strikes me about many of them this day is the fact that with a simple change of embedded names, dates, etc., the subjects/topics/contexts remain virtually unchanged.

It was just shy of ten years ago, for example, that the following “discussion” on immigration was taking place. As a long time Arizona resident, I wrote a post in response to a blog post whose topic concerned  southern Arizona’s so-called “Minuteman Project” and its gun-toting “heroes” that had, at that time, begun hanging around in southern Arizona in order to save the USA from all those illegal Mexican lazy bums. It was on April 03 2005 that I contributed the following essay — my personal view of and my personal involvement in the (observed) realities of “illegal” immigration and the consequences thereof. What follows is the verbatim transcript.

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I’ve lived in Arizona since 1962. During those 43 years I’ve traveled to Mexico uncountable times, both on the border and into the interior; I’ve enjoyed the close friendship of many dozens of people — from both sides of the border — who are today referred to with a sneer as “mexicans” (lower case intentional).

Twenty years ago I was a watermelon grower in the Gila Bend area, and the great majority of my harvesting crews were from Mexico, “illegals” in the current vernacular, and a finer and harder-working, more honest and trustworthy group one could never find anywhere. During harvest, at least once each week the Border Patrol would happen by and gather up most of the crew and return them to Mexico; the next morning (or at worst, on the second morning) they’d be back, a little worse for the wear but nonetheless ready to work. We paid them a fair wage, in cash, always under a two-way ‘gentlemen’s’ agreement: we wouldn’t screw them, and they wouldn’t screw us. They worked hard and were completely reliable; meanwhile, they provided us with an address in Mexico to which we promised to send their earned wages should they be hauled away and not return. On one occasion, only one, we did indeed have to send a man’s earnings to the address he had provided us. And we did. He made it back the following year, made it a point to thank us, then went back to work — this time for a higher wage than the previous year and in a better position.

Those were, in a sense, the remnant of the good-old-days; since then, laws have been passed making employers into criminals if they should hire, knowingly or unknowingly, “mexicans” who are here illegally. More recently, a gathering fever has infected Arizona, a fever I’ve not seen since the racism that infected much of America in the fifties and early sixties. There is an unreasonable and perhaps unconscious sense of fear (that’s the polite word — hatred may be more to the point) rustling through society which has resulted in efforts designed to keep “mexican” laborers out of the US. And those efforts have, in effect, caused a tremendous and probably proportional increase in illegal border crossings. Every year, dozens of innocents — men, women, children — die of exposure as they attempt to cross the desert on foot, unprepared; hundreds, perhaps thousands more, pay human traffickers — coyotes — money to deliver them to the US. Coyotes are, without a doubt, consummate scum who care nothing about humanity, only about profit (they’re probably republicans, in other words). Often, bodies of murdered “mexicans” are found in remote desert areas, shot and killed by coyotes because their payment was not there on demand, or was insufficient. Meanwhile, *legal* (I’ve lately come to hate that word) “mexicans” are also victimized in the same way, usually because they agreed to pay the coyote to bring a family member to the US but then came up short when payment was demanded.

The coyote process works, however; scarcely a month goes by where, in the greater Phoenix area alone, a collection and distribution point (usually what appears to be a private home) is not discovered along with its hundred or more occupants — illegals waiting to be distributed elsewhere. These places are, metaphorically, what wholesale produce warehouses are to a supermarket chain. In a more down-to-earth context, however, they’re parcel to an emerging slave trade.

Meanwhile, the percentage of “brown-skinned” Hispanics continues to grow, and grow, and grow. I can’t recall offhand the specific estimates, but it’s likely not too long (a decade, give or take) before “white” will be a minority in many Southwestern states, and if trends continue unabated, “white” will, one day in the foreseeable future, become a minority “race” in the US. That scares the shit out of a lot of people, and brings forth the worst traits of even otherwise seemingly decent folks: overreaction to trumped-up fear — always the Repug’s motivational tool of choice.

Last November, Red-state Arizona passed a referendum which was couched in an “honorable” protect-America-from-illegal-immigration-$$-expense pretense, but which really grants legal permission to harass by virtue of profiling (let them greaser fuckers know who’s in charge here in Amerikuh).

And, of course, last but by no means least, out come the gun nut vigilantes, the fruitcakes for whom a gun is little more than a pecker-extender, a deadly weapon which helps (in their own dementia) portray them as “Real Men” rather than the cowards they truly are. Sometimes I wonder: if gun ownership could somehow be (gender)-restricted to that small percentage of males who are happy and satisfied with the size of their schlong, would all the gun companies go broke within the year?

Probably not, but the NRA’s membership would fall off to nothing, and in the process a huge portion of the Repugs financial base would fall into the toilet — where it belongs.

Let’s recognizing this emerging fruitcake posse for what it really is: the American equivalent of the German Sturmabteilung — the SA, brown shirts, storm troopers — those paramilitaries that Hitler found most useful and used accordingly. In other words, WAKE UP America!

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Later that same day — April 03 2005 — a response was posted, one that I felt was ‘worthy’ of immediate comment. Here, then, is my response to commenter who called himself “SmirkySmirk. His comments are highlighted in red.

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SmirkySmirk:
I have been a SoCal resident since 1982 and during that time have witnessed a steady meltdown of the economic, educational and social landscape: formerly pleasant areas of town are now crime-ridden, drug-infested, gang polluted ghettos-this phenomenon is growing and spreading now to other areas; elementary schools are overcrowded to the point of bursting, where housing historically the greatest number of students per classroom-and growing (moreover 2/3 of the 5th grade children in the SF Valley school district B system do not speak English- typical and in some areas of Los Angeles County the incidence of non-English speaking children is much higher); wages have been decimated in parts of SoCal since the 1980s (many laborers are working for well below the state and federal minimum wage- I personally knew dozens in my area working for $4-$6/hr. and there is no reason for me to believe their plight was unique); and finally a subject I rarely hear addressed in debates on illegal immigration but equally relevant- the impact of illegal immigration on the critical housing shortage in Southern California that has led to exorbitant rents in even the seamiest parts of town; furthermore, the delivery of healthcare, particularly in Los Angeles, is in acute crisis with many shelters closing due to shortfalls caused in large part by the burden of low payed illegal immigrants overtaxing the system.

What I object to is people reacting to immigrants with unjustified and implacable hatred for what is the failure of the Federal government to do its job. What I object to is business getting a free pass on a problem they have created by transferring the cost of maintaining their underpaid, undocumented workers onto the shoulders of society.

Oh, and I also object to anyone turning a purely economic issue into a humanitarian one and accusing the opposition of odious racial motivations or inhumanity for objecting to illegal immigration.

The problems of illegal immigration will never be solved via vigilante posses, nor will they be solved via a modern day “Maginot Line” of contiguous military security. There is no necessity, either, of opening the borders for all of Mexico and Central America to move north into the US. But none of that’s to say or suggest that there aren’t solutions amenable to all concerned.

The big problem began in the sixties with the elimination of the Bracero program during the Lyndon Johnson administration. That program allowed Mexican nationals to come to the US and work, to send their money home, and to return home after their work stint was completed. The program was, indeed, plagued by employers who treated the workers effectively as slave labor, but that was a problem addressable by means other than slamming the door.

The solution, of course, will take place naturally if and when the economies of the US and Mexico come into a sort of equilibrium, whether by a declining US standard or an elevating standard in Mexico (illegal immigration along the Canadian border isn’t much of a problem, for perhaps obvious reasons). Equilibrium between Mexico and the US is a long way off, however, at least if the gap is to be closed by Mexico attaining par prosperity — there are way too many political and cultural roadblocks in Mexico for that to happen in the short term. OTOH, the US is in a position to assist AND to reduce its border problems at the same time by resurrecting some form of the old Bracero program, this time in a way which denies practices of exploitation. That is, in fact, the one suggestion Bush himself made during his first four years that I could agree with.

Of course, we could nuke the place I suppose, but both that and an impermeable armed border sound a little rash.

Why am I not surprised that someone who has profited so much as yourself financially from illegal immigration are also an advocate for it. Can’t find US citizens to do the work? Don’t give me that crap! Pay A DECENT WAGE AND BENEFITS and you will have droves of Americans lining up at your door to work for you. But, you’re right, I’m sure Americans probably would not work for the pittance wages you paid illegals to do the work.

I’ll ignore your presumptions of profit and dismiss them as coming from someone who knows nothing about farming. Beyond that, I’ll guarantee you that any decent farmer would happily pay a “living wage” as you call it, to each and all of his employees AND would happily add a full benefits package as well. All he would ask would be that he still be able to market his (perishable!) crop quickly and at a decent profit. I suppose you and yours would joyfully and willingly pay ten or twenty bucks a pound, give-or-take, for fresh produce? Hey, people pay that much for fresh tuna, right? Why not for broccoli? I give up, why not?

Let me ask you a question, did you provide your employees with health care and a living wage?

Nope, but that part wasn’t terribly concerning — for a small operation, margins are also too thin to provide “the bosses” with health care. As for a living wage, what is that, exactly? Is that a salary paid to one who works in an air conditioned and cushy office, a wage that goes up annually without regard to production or accomplishment (yes, I’ve worked in corporate offices too), or is it whatever accrues when one works in his fields for 12-15 hours a day, 7 days a week and hopes the markets will pay enough for him to get his costs back plus make a small profit? My instinct suggests that you’re probably damned fortunate to have a supermarket handy where you can buy your food at a reasonable price, that if you’d have to grow your own you’d be on a diet.

Or did you just expect the taxpayers to pick up the tab with subsidies to YOUR EMPLOYEES?

I look at it this way: if the taxpayers can pick up, among other things, a “defense” tab that totals more each year than the next ten or fifteen countries combined, if taxpayers are willing to reduce the taxes on those who can best afford to pay them to the tune of a hundred billion a year, give-or-take, such income shortfall to be added to an already balooning deficit, then what the hell difference does it make if they subsidize someone who works for a living too? Sorry for the smart-assed answer (not really), but that was a stupid question.

There are some very serious issues on the table surrounding illegal immigration. And dismissing concerns of those opposed to it with calumniating epithets of “racist” and “hatemonger” is a red herring that has no place in the debate over the true merits and demerits of illegal immigration. In fact, if I were Boardnanny, I would delete your post as the kind of dung that were only worthy of flowing from the pen of a troll.

I didn’t use a pen. Meanwhile, you’d be much better off if you’d take some time to investigate realities and then maybe work to delete instead the undercurrents of racism and hate that are parcel to the anti-immigration movements in the Southwest. Whether you choose to see or acknowledge them or not, they’re here and they’re becoming pervasive. And, they accomplish nothing but to further the polarization, to exacerbate the problem.

I agree with you that something must be done. But unless it’s an enlightened approach that takes the CAUSES into effect AND addresses them directly and responsibly, the result will be roughly the same as pissing into the wind.

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As I said up top, not much has changed in the ensuing decade. Reaction to Obama’s executive actions on immigration (forced, essentially, by Congressional inaction on the matter, by Speaker Boehner’s obtuse refusal to consider ANY legitimate options to address the continuing problem) remain every bit as vitriolic as were SmirkySmirk’s responses to my attempts at rationally addressing the humanitarian aspects of the immigration issue overall. Near as I can tell, the bottom line that has come to define far too much of this country is the embedded attitude of White Superiority along with commensurate fear and hatred of any other race/ethnicity. Those attitudes have persisted since before the US gained independence; my suspicion is they’ll continue to persist well after our independence is sacrificed upon the altar of oligarchic greed.

Katrina Vanden Heuvel: GOP ‘Driven By Know-nothing Nativism’ And Was Never Going To Reform Immigration

OPEN THREAD

Watering Hole: Thursday, November 27, 2014 – The Day for Turkey

For many of us non-vegetarians, today is the big “turkey day” of the year.  Some of us, spend this day with family and friends, some of us spend this day by ourself, and some of us spend this day giving and helping others.

No matter how you spend the day, turkey is often the highlight of the meal.  Even vegetarians enjoy a Tofurky.  Personally, I’m not much of a fan of Tofurky.  To each their own   🙂  .

At our place, when the meal is done, Mr. Nonewhere starts working on the beginnings of turkey soup.  It is cold and damp in the Northwest and in the Northeast of this nation.  I understand that it gets cold and damp in other parts, too (hee, hee).  Nothing warms the inners like soup in the winter and turkey makes a great soup starter.  So to help you with some recipe ideas, here is a link to some yummy turkey soup recipes.

This is our Open Thread.  Speak Up and let us know how your day is going.

The Watering Hole, Wednesday, November 26, 2014. Yeah…Right…

President Obama, utilizing the authority granted to the President under the Authorization to Use Military Force in 2006, declared the Republican Party to be “Unlawful Alien Enemy Combatants”. This determination, made by the President alone, is unassailable under the Act. Under the sweeping powers, initially given to President Bush, anyone the President determines to be an ‘unlawful alien enemy combatant’ is subject to immediate arrest and indefinate incarceration in Guantanamo.

Speaker of the House John Boehner was heard to exclaim “He can’t do that!” as a black bag was slipped over his head and he was whisked off the floor of the House of Representatives shortly after calling for a vote on the impeachment of President Obama.

Moral of the story: be careful of what you vote for; you may get it.

Oh, open thread.

The Watering Hole, Tuesday November 25, 2014 Environmental News and Food Politics – Special Thanksgiving Edition

Ever fret over your Thanksgiving table presentation? Here’s a little flea market chic to lift the spirits of you and your guests.

 

Happy Thanksgiving

The Watering Hole, Monday, November 24th, 2014: “Black Friday”

We didn’t have “Black Friday” when we were kids–hell, when I was a kid, we didn’t even have a mall in our area until I was in high school. Personally, I hate shopping on any day, let alone on a day when I would have to push my way through crowds of (shudder) “people.”

Although this Cracked.com article is from 2011, it’s got some interesting historical information and some tips if you’re one of the crazies folks who like going Christmas shopping on Black Friday. Here’s a few excerpts from “5 Black Friday Myths the Media Wants You to Believe”:

Actually, Black Friday wasn’t the biggest shopping day of the year until the advent of online shopping. Before that, it was rarely even in the top five…So why was the media paying so much attention to the fifth-biggest shopping day of the year? Well, partially because it’s a slow news day.”

“Black Friday finally did become the top revenue earner in 2003 by giving people who would rather stay home with their family a way to get at the deals…So the story that the media had been reporting for years that Black Friday is the biggest shopping day of the year finally came true, and suddenly they want to complicate it with a bunch of other days when you have to remember to wear riot gear to the mall.”

Myth #3, “Black Friday is the Day After Thanksgiving”, isn’t, as the author admits, really a “myth”, but in a sideways manner allows the author to elaborate on the history of Thanksgiving Day:

“Thanksgiving originally didn’t have a set date. George Washington proclaimed the first one on November 26, 1789, but the dates and even months changed for almost a century. Abraham Lincoln gave it a regular berth in 1863 as the last Thursday of November. It never occurred to Honest Abe that November sometimes has five Thursdays, and that this would create a problem down the road.

One of those Novembers with five Thursdays happened in 1939, when the United States was recovering from the Great Depression. At that time, waiting until after Thanksgiving to start the holiday shopping season was seen as almost holy, but Thanksgiving fell on the very last day of the month. A short number of Christmas shopping days, starting on December 1, could hurt the recovering economy. That’s why President Franklin Roosevelt had to put Turkey Day in its place.

A presidential proclamation was issued moving Thanksgiving to the second-to-last Thursday of November. Thirty-two states went along with FDR and issued the same proclamation, while the other 16 states said “fuck that.” For two years, a third of the U.S. celebrated Thanksgiving on the last Thursday of November, while the other two-thirds of the country celebrated it on the second-to-last Thursday. For family members living in opposing states, this was a very short, lethargic version of the Civil War.”

Enjoy reading the rest of the article, particularly the captions under the photos. Heh.

This is our daily open thread, so go ahead and talk about anything.

Sunday Roast: Turbulence & Van Gogh

Wrap your head around this one!

Although it makes a weird sort of sense, to me anyway, that a mind in the midst of extreme suffering might perceive things in a different way than a calmer mind.  It is rather simplistic, but thinking about it that way feels good.

Let’s not neglect the gobbledygook math thing…on second thought, let’s do.

And now, a beautiful quote from one of my favorite episodes of Doctor Who, Vincent and the Doctor.

The Doctor:  Between you and me, in a hundred words, where do you think Van Gogh rates in the history of art?

Curator:  Well… um… big question, but, to me Van Gogh is the finest painter of them all. Certainly the most popular, great painter of all time. The most beloved, his command of colour most magnificent. He transformed the pain of his tormented life into ecstatic beauty. Pain is easy to portray, but to use your passion and pain to portray the ecstasy and joy and magnificence of our world, no one had ever done it before. Perhaps no one ever will again. To my mind, that strange, wild man who roamed the fields of Provence was not only the world’s greatest artist, but also one of the greatest men who ever lived.

Can anyone doubt that Vincent van Gogh is my favorite artist?

This is our daily open thread — Get on with it.

The Watering Hole, Saturday, November 22, 2014: This Week in Paranoia: Facts vs. Freakery on Obama’s Immigration Reforms

President Barack Obama announced earlier in the week that he would later be announcing several reforms to the immigration system, largely because Republicans have been reluctant to pass anything in the House to address the issue. So, as he has said many times before in an ultimately failed effort to spur the House to pass the bill the Senate sent them, the president said that if Congress failed to act, he would. They didn’t, so he did, and now they’re totally freaking out. They’re claiming they now have grounds for impeachment (actually, some of them said this before he made the official announcement, based on nothing more than their own imagination about what the president would actually say) because the president is trying to ignite a civil war, and that citizens must resist “by any means necessary” any attempt to grant amnesty to illegal immigrants, and that it’s all part of a plot to not only guarantee millions of future Democratic voters, but to turn the United States into a Third World country and because now there will be all kinds of voter fraud (you just know it.) None of these fears are reality-based.

The calls for impeachment really crack me up because they were coming before the president’s announcement, and many were citing the president’s proposed amnesty for illegal immigrants as the primary charge against him. Former Florida Congressman (and current “Where Are They Now File” resident) Allen West told Newsmax, “It will be the president saying, ‘You know, I want to violate the Constitution and grant amnesty to people who are here illegally.'” Family Research Council President and Anal Sex Expert Tony Perkins said, in his very roundabout way, “What the president is about to do on amnesty is essentially tell, using his authority as the chief executive, the president, to the executive branch, Homeland Security, immigration, not to enforce the law, which is a violation of his oath to uphold the law.” Eagle Forum founder and former female Phyllis Schlafly thinks that amnesty by executive action constitutes a high crime or misdemeanor.

There are at least three things obviously wrong with these allegations. First, at the time each of these people made these remarks, the president had not actually announced his plan, and when he did, it didn’t include amnesty. The right wing is really afraid of that word – “amnesty.” They talk about it all the time as if granting it to millions of people whose only crime was in the way they entered the country would bring about the end of the United States of America. They talk about it it as if it’s the worst abuse of power a president could commit (including, apparently, lying us into a costly, unnecessary war). They talk about it as if it’s the most un-American thing a president could do. So their fears about amnesty are unfounded because the president wasn’t proposing any. Second, it is actually totally within the president’s constitutional authority to grant amnesty to millions of people who entered the country illegally. The president can grant amnesty to anyone he or she desires. The president can also selectively enforce the law and decide which laws won’t be as aggressively prosecuted as others, since there isn’t enough funding to enforce all the laws anyway. It doesn’t mean a succeeding president can’t prosecute if the statute of limitations hasn’t expired, so it isn’t the same as amnesty, which would deny prosecution later. By the way, the president’s oath says he will faithfully execute the office of president, not “uphold the law.” Executing the duties of the president sometimes involves deciding when to prosecute someone and when not to. Former President George Herbert Walker Bush granted amnesty to former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger for his criminal role in the previous administration’s plan to sell arms to terrorists in exchange for hostages. (A plan which, for the record, Bush later wrote in his memoirs that he was the only one who knew everything that was going on with the arms-for-hostages deal to raise money to illegally give to rebel fighters in Central America.) And third (speaking of Reagan), former President Ronald Reagan granted amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants. Care to comment on that example of un-American activity by a president, Right Wing? If you like some facts to chew on, check out this great post at PoliticusUsa.

That’s just the crazy people talking about impeaching the president for executing a constitutional authority he actually has but didn’t actually use. Check out the link to see who thinks we’re headed for civil war, how the vote is getting rigged while simultaneously increasing voter fraud. And the good people at Think Progress (with whom I’ve had many exchanges over the years) have found other people going similarly crazy over Obama’s use of executive authority (which he is constitutionally required to do.) There’s a lot of sadly misinformed people out there, and some of them are members of the Legislative Branch in our Federal Government. I think you should be very concerned about that. You can start by looking at your own state legislatures, where many of these people got their start. To undo Republican gerrymandering, we have to take back the state legislatures by 2020, so we can control the drawing of Congressional District maps, which is the only way we’ll ever take back the House of Representatives. And we have to get rid of electronic voting, which can easily be rigged and manipulated, and very likely has in some key races in recent years. It is not secure, and it can easily change election results to anyone in power who wants to stay there. Paper ballots are the best way. They don’t take that long to count, and the results can easily be verified and re-counted as needed. Only then can we restore Democracy to America.

This is our daily open thread. Feel free to discuss crazy paranoid right wingers serving in our government, or any other topic you wish to discuss.

Music Night, November 21, 2014

If you’re old enough and spent any time as a folkie, you’re probably familiar with Ian & Sylvia, extremely popular Canadian folk singers from the 60s. In 1969 they formed one of the first and best real country rock bands — which was, as always, a shock to many of their fans. Great Speckled Bird’s eponymous LP was brilliant and influential, and it dropped from view almost immediately. Somehow I ended up with a copy back then (1970) and fell in love. Over the years I forgot about them for the most part and the record went along with 500 or so vinyl LPs earlier this year when I gave them to a good home. There were one or two limited edition CDs, long out of print, but I’m about to drop nearly $30 for a used copy from Japan. (In the video’s comments someone claims that their French is atrocious but what do I know?)

The Watering Hole; Friday November 21 2014; Autumn’s Passing

Autumn has disappeared. It vanished suddenly on Tuesday November eleventh — exactly one week beyond the moment that a majority of we the people voted to hand over their hopes and dreams to giant corporations and the giga-rich (another story for another time, perhaps) — when the errant global-warming-induced Arctic Cold Front slammed into the nation’s midsection and blew the gentle temps of mid-autumn southward until they disappeared somewhere to the south of the Gulf of Mexico.

Anyway — in the interest of finding a near optimal method of (gradual) recovery from my recent medical dilemma, I spent much of October and early November (till the climate crash) walking a LOT — always in pursuit of idyllic Autumnal moments here, at the foot of the Colorado Rockies Front Range (everything looked a lot more impressive in real life than in these shrunken photographs; still, it seems worth a try, so here goes).

First, from a perfectly calm and idyllic day, October 24, a Canadian Goose enjoying his sojourn in splashing and feathered soliloquy:

Ah, the joys of wing flapping and splahing whilst standing on a mud bottom in one’s home lake!

Next up and just a few hundred yards further along the shore’s margin, a patch of autumnally-tinted trees with doubled visual impact courtesy of their reflections in the glassy waters at their feet:Made me wonder, upon ‘reflection’ (sotospeak) — what if reflection, rather than reality, was existence’s real thing? What then? Hmmm; I will think on this. Meanwhile, a closer view of the central portion of the above reality seems kind of interesting when it’s flipped upside down. It’s a bit fuzzy, of course, but the rippled “brush strokes” seem to suggest something almost what — Claude Monet-esque?

Maybe?

Onward to the idyll of November 8th; same lake, similar trees, less color, less leaves, but same vivid reflections —

Fascinating. Here’s an isolated view of the reflections only; (Lessee; November 8th, only six days shy of November 14 and Claude Monet’s 174th birthday . . . ??)Makes one look forward to returning on THIS year’s November 14, just to see if . . . maybe . . . !!

But . . . these are new and different times. The man-caused Climate Change is (sigh) forcing severely altered weather patterns everywhere. And so it was that on the evening of November 10, the following signal was forwarded to me; it arrived circa 6:15 PM from high over the Front Range of the Rockies. The first signal — the view from my front stoop — looked just like this:

Funny how a bunch of really high (those tee-tiny mountains stand at around 12,000 feet, so . . . ) and vibrantly-colored clouds can signal a forthcoming but RAPID temperature drop that will approach 75 degrees F, but that was, indeed, the message therein embedded. Just over 24 hours later, the local temperature had dropped to nearly fifteen below zero, Fahrenheit. A day later, there were six inches of snow on the lake shore; the colored Monet leaves had been blown into at least the next county, and the geese — well, they don’t mind, really. They’re from Canada, after all, and are probably more accustomed to cold and ice than I’ll ever be. Maybe I’ll go out there and check one of these days. Or maybe not!

Adios, Autumn.

OPEN THREAD

Watering Hole: November 20, 2014 – Brain Waves

Can you read my mind?  Some people can.

This is our Open Thread.  Speak Up!

The Watering Hole, Wednesday: Hump Day, November 19, 2014

Welcome to deregulation  2.0. Republicans are giddy at the prospects of controlling both houses of Congress. Only one thing is certain, come January 2015: Congressional gridlock will be a thing of the past. Staffers and aids will be working overtime this Christmas season, drafting bills to deregulate everything from the workplace to how many peanuts must go into a jar of peanut butter.

That makes this next bit of news even more alarming. Yet, as serious as this is, it has gotten no mention in the mainstream media. So, once again, we at The Zoo bring you this exclusive.

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. (Amendment XIII to the Constitution of the United States of America)

Thanks to three-strikes laws and drug laws falling disproportionately on the poor and minorities, the for-profit prison industry thrives on slave labor. [note: since this post was wrintten on Sunday, this story broke about prison labor in California.] But come January, there will be a seismic shift, as the Republican-led Congress moves to rid the nation of all laws that enforce the 13th Amendment. Not only will owning a slave no longer be a criminal offense, Republicans plan on stripping the jurisdiction of the federal courts to hear cases where someone claims a violation of constitutional rights under the 13th Amendment.

The move is expected to be hearalded as a major blow to terrorism. “They hate us for our freedoms” President Bush observed. By deregulating slavery, terrorists will no longer have a reason to hate us.

OPEN THREAD

The Watering Hole, Tuesday November 18, 2014

Michael Pollan Talks Turkey

Something to get us ready for the T-Day. Thank goodness that there were farmers who kept alive heritage breeds and seeds. Quality is coming back to our food system, a little at a time. And the Slow Food Movement has been one of the biggest influences on healthy farm to table eating.

Health in every slow bite.

A Narragansett heritage breed turkey

The Watering Hole, Monday, November 17th, 2014: Mixed Bag

Just a few articles from last week that I found interesting, and in case you missed them:

From Daily Kos, a very succinct [but limited] summary of some of President Obama’s accomplishments, in the form of a “letter to the editor” from a frustrated Canadian, who wraps up with: “When you are done with Obama, could you send him our way?” The blogger who posted the LTE at Daily Kos, Leslie Salzillo, ends (in part) with:

“…half of America was blinded by the half-truths FOX ‘News’ and Conservative talking heads fed them, because you know, if you tell just enough truth mixed in with a bucket of lies, it causes confusion. And that can lead to a bad case of the FuckIts.”

[Hmm, is a “bad case of the FuckIts” related to “someone’s got a case of the Mondays” from Office Space?]

Ms. Salzillo then posted a line by Robin Williams (sigh), speaking to Canada:

“You are a big country.
You are the kindest country in the world.
You are like a really nice apartment
over a meth lab.”

Raw Story had a couple of items, including this story about how former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales [spit] feels about possible executive action by President Obama on immigration. The President may “…defer the deportations of up to 5 million undocumented immigrants who have children who are in the U.S. legally”, according to the article by David Edwards. Gonzales, appearing on CNN,

“…argued that the president should be focused on securing the border because of a “nightmare scenario” where terrorists infiltrate into the country through Mexico…

“Now, 99 percent of the people that come across the border are not terrorists,” he admitted. “They are coming over primarily to seek a better life. But I do think that it is legitimate in today’s world to do what we can as a government to secure the border.”

Apparently Gonzales has not read up on President Obama’s work to secure the southern border. According to The White House:

“Today, the Border Patrol is better staffed than ever before, having doubled the number of agents from approximately 10,000 in 2004 to more than 21,000 in 2011. More than 2,200 Border Patrol agents man the Northern border, a 700 percent increase since 9/11. More than 21,000 Customs and Border Protection Officers, including 3,800 along Northern Border, manage the flow of people and goods at our ports of entry and crossings.”

If I were Alberto Gonzales, and therefore needed something to fear, I’d be a whole lot more concerned about our porous northern border [no offense, dycker!]: twice the length of our border with Mexico, the U.S.-Canadian border only gets 2,200 Border Patrol Agents out of 21,000? And that piddly number is a 700% INCREASE since 9/11? Oy!

Sorta-kinda related – well, it reminded me of the Dubya days, appointing buddies whose former careers were in direct opposition to the purpose of the departments or Cabinets they were asked to head – but I digress:

Also from Raw Story, losing Oregon Republican Senate candidate Dr. Monica Wehby must have some set of “Thatchers” (Stephen Colbert’s name for ‘lady balls’) on her. After campaigning on the ‘repeal Obamacare’ platform, she allegedly called Oregon’s Democratic Governor John Kitzhaber to offer “…her expertise and interest in health care reform…”, according to the article by Tom Boggioni.

“According to multiple sources, Wehby asked about the job opening as director of the Oregon Health Authority (OHA) which administers the ACA…”

I liked this part:

“Prior to the election, Wehby’s campaign was rocked by allegations that many of the policy prescriptions posted on her campaign website were plagiarized, including one for reforming healthcare.
Wehby removed the alleged plagiarized portions, leaving the web pages blank.”

Heh, smooth move, “Doc.”

This story gets curiouser and curiouser, as the ‘fine hand’ of Karl Rove is in the background. Dr. Wehby “…was accused of taking wording from a survey conducted for Crossroads, a group run by Karl Rove, for her health care plan.”

I haven’t had time to read the Crossroads survey, but I think that it could be worth taking a look at, even just to see what Karl’s millions and minions have been up to.

This is our daily Open Thread…go ahead, talk amongst yourselves.

Sunday Roast: Day at the beach

A trainer took a bunch of dogs and a cat to the beach, and a good time was had by all.

What?  You can turn down the sound.  😛

This is our daily open thread — Enjoy!

The Watering Hole, Friday November 14 MUSIC NIGHT

I don’t think we ever lead off with psycho-billy before. Here’s the Baboons.

 

 

 

 

 

The Watering Hole; November 14 2014; The American Politic

The American Politic changed dramatically on November 4, 2014. It was, for many, a rather severe letdown from this time six years ago, a time when the prospects for a national rebirth — in the aftermath of the absolute disaster of the Dubya Bush regime — stood tall and shone as brightly as Lady Liberty’s torch. Things were looking better than they had in a generation! There was a Democrat majority in the Senate, a Democrat majority in the House, and a presumed Progressive Democrat in the Oval Office! Shades of the 1930’s, the beginning of the most Progressive era in U.S. history with a President who was NOT afraid to shout his fascist opposition — remnants of the group that had been in charge during the crash of ’29 — into the ground! Remember FDR? Remember how he spoke the peoples’ truth to his seditious counterparts? Here are a small handful of Rooseveltian quotes that serve to point out his ambitiously PROGRESSIVE attitude:

“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”

“A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned how to walk forward.”

“Out of this modern civilization, economic royalists [have] carved new dynasties . . . It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction . . . And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man . . .”

“These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.”

“Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power!”

“Unhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people. The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of a private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.”

“In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for.

Koch Brothers, anyone? Citizens United? Karl Rove? In the aftermath of the George W. Bush years, the power of money has been elevated — elevated to the point where the government has, indeed, become purchasable by the highest bidder, to be no longer in the charge of we the people. And now, beyond even THAT atrocity, the Republican Party has, since November of 2008, dedicated itself to but One. Single. Goal. No matter the consequences, Obama MUST FAIL! Their obvious and deeply-embedded Hatred reminds of a comment by FDR who, facing an almost identical attitude in 1936, said this:

“We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace – business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

“They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

“Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.”

One wonders, today, if only Obama had . . .

But he didn’t. He’s tried negotiation. He’s tried reconciliation. He’s even tried, on some issues, submission. The result? Republican congressional landslides in both off-year elections. Big Money and the LIES they purchased won. In 2014, in fact, there was a Republican Senatorial landslide sufficient to guarantee that NOTHING of interest to we the people will get done for AT LEAST two years. The entire congressional task will, in fact, remain the same as it’s been since circa 1980 when Saint Reagan grabbed hold of the reins of government and initiated the slow and ponderous conversion of a Peoples’ Democratic Republic to a nation governed by a NEW system, one which, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.

I do hereby and therefore acknowledge and bow to the latest version of America, the version envisioned and legally purchased by all those old enemies of peace – business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. I further acknowledge that NOW is the time that We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity must therefore agree to stand by, to wait and see how (if ??) everything — ummm — comes out.

So to speak.

OPEN — ummm — THREAD

(Sotospeak)

Watering Hole: Thursday, November 13, 2014 – Sleep , Too Little, Too Much

Sleep, ah, wonderful sleep.  Not getting enough or getting too much sleep can have adverse effects on the body.

Excessive food cravings during the day can be the result of insufficient sleep where as over sleeping has been linked to heart disease, diabetes and even early death.

Since sleep effects our circadian clock, it can cause Circadian Rhythm Disorders.

You can read about some other things that you might not know about sleep HERE.

This is our Open Thread.  Speak Up about anything.

The Watering Hole, Wednesday, November 12th, 2014: Hump Day!

I don’t know about anyone else, but I could use a laugh as this week just grinds along. So here’s a few places to start.

First: Luckily, I never go to a Walmart, so I don’t have to fear becoming one of the infamous “People of Walmart.” (I’m much more likely to start a subset, “People of the A&P.”) I found that one can click on any state to see the indigenous Walmart folk. I clicked on New York and found some of my “neighbors” with whom I will never rub elbows, like this one:

Only in NY – well, not really
(photo courtesy of peopleofwalmart.com)

Next: A couple of amusing articles from cracked.com: “Why Every Christian Movie Bombs in a Mostly Christian Nation” is worth checking into, if only for the “Bibleman” poster shown in the article; and this one by Luke McKinney, entitled “6 Tips for Angry Internet Commenters”, had me laughing from the opening line: “IT LOOKS LIKE YOU’RE CALLING SOMEONE HITLER ON THE INTERNET! Would you like some help with that?” BTW, the “6 Tips” are given by a Caps Lock key.

Third: I didn’t go through all of them, but “The 40 Funniest “This is Not Going to End Well” Photos of All Time” seems promising. This one certainly grabbed my attention:

“This is Not Going to End Well, #5”

Let’s wrap up with some ‘awww’s: While they may not be the absolute “Top 20 Cutest Puppies Ever”, they’re puppies, so they can’t help but be cute.

This is our daily open thread – have some laughs, and/or talk about whatever…

The Watering Hole, Tuesday November 11, 2014 – Environmental News and Food Politics

Evolution

Ok, it is only a theory, and it has many holes in it, but if they start filling the holes with observable fact, does it become less of a theory and more of a science? Or is it just easier to say DOG made it in six days and shut down all this funding to pointy-headed intellectuals?

From the oceans to the land and then back to the ocean: One more piece of evidence on how species evolved

 

Evidence that a sophisticated God fine tunes creation through evolution?

The Watering Hole, Monday, November 10th, 2014: Mitch Makes Plans

Today I’m just going to throw a few topics out here, good, bad, or meh…

A few excerpts from yesterday’s Washington Post article by Lori Montgomery and Robert Costa, headlined (rather lengthily) “GOP crafts narrow agenda for new Congress, seeking unity, Democratic votes”:

“Within hours of solidifying their control of Congress, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John A. Boehner were quietly laying plans for a series of quick votes in January aimed at erasing their obstructionist image ahead of the 2016 elections.

Considering the previous unfortunate efforts of the Republican Party to slap a different varnish on their tarnished image, I can only cringe wondering what kind of Mr. Clean Magic Eraser(tm) “quick votes” these two have in mind. What would they deregulate first? IOW, what will be the Rs’ first BS “repeal this job killer” meme in 2015? And are Boehner and McConnell, while “seeking unity”, keeping an eye on their own far-right-flank tea-nut gallery? Megalomaniac Senator Ted Cruz (R-PlanetTexas) is not one to allow the limelight to stray far from him, and is already making obstructionist noises. Boehner and McConnell are fools – yes, I could stop right there, but – if they think that Cruz is going to bow to their so-called “leadership.”

“First up: Action on long-stalled bills with bipartisan support, including measures to repeal an unpopular tax on medical devices and approve construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline.

Whoa, tortoise, whoa! [gets out baseball bat, “I said WHOA!”] Why you sly bastards! First, Boehner and McConnell know damn well that repealing the medical devices tax, however unpopular it may or may not be, will undermine one of the sources for funding the PPACA, aka Obamacare. Boehner has been shown by FactCheck.org to have been lying about the negative effect that the Medical Device Tax would have on jobs. Repealing the Medical Device Tax is just one way that the Republicans would start to unravel the PPACA without actually repealing the act itself.

Now let’s get to “approve construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline.” It seems that everyone, except the few people/companies who stand to gain from the construction of the pipeline, is against that. This is definitely an example of the incredibly ballsy, obviously and provably false claims that the project would be a “job creator.” Temporary American jobs, yes; a few (50 or so) permanent American jobs, yes; but nowhere near the thousands that the pipeline’s proponents would have us believe. There are so many good arguments against the Keystone XL, it’s truly amazing that any politician is still promoting it; unless, of course, well-funded interests are funding them.

There’s loads more from the WaPo article, but there’s also more information in the New Republic’s article called “This is How the New GOP Senate will try to Dismantle Obamacare”, by Jonathan Cohn.

So far everything points to the Rs major obsession for the past several years – if they can’t repeal the ACA, they’ll just kill it with a thousand cuts.

This is our daily open thread – talk about whatever you want.

Sunday Roast: Play some music, Zoosters!

I haven’t seen all y’all post much music lately, so I’m giving you a chance to pick up the slack today.  😉

This is our daily open thread — Don’t be throwing stuff at me!

The Watering Hole, Saturday, November 8, 2014: That Was No Mandate

If you’ve been paying any attention to right wing media this week (and I hope for your sake you’re well paid to do so), you’ve been hearing the “M”-word thrown around a lot – “Mandate.” Conservatives running the gamut from Hannity to Ingraham to Limbaugh to Rove (okay, maybe that’s not the whole gamut; maybe it’s just B-flat to C-flat) have been claiming that the Republican gains in Congress Tuesday night represent a mandate to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (commonly referred to as “the reason so many people have health insurance when they couldn’t get it before, or, “Obamacare” for short.) Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, they’ve been telling a lot of lies to make their point.

Writing an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal (I won’t link to it since it’s subscription, but the MMFA article has one), Karl Rove claims that the results proved Americans’ “disgust with a six-year liberal experiment.” Yet just one week before, the very same publication ran a story saying the ACA was not a major issue with voters, and that only eight percent of voters rated it the most important issue factoring into their vote. Laura Ingraham just flat out said the election results indicates that the country hates Obamacare, wants to repeal it and replace it with something else. Again, this is an opinion not supported by the facts. A recent Rasmussen poll indicated only 39% support for repealing the ACA, and the last time I looked, 39% was less than half. Sean Hannity also reached the delusion that the election proved Americans hate the ACA (conservative Americans do, but they hate everything, don’t they?), and suggested that even if Obama vetoes a bill to repeal the ACA, they should try to go after it piecemeal, as if the president won’t notice provisions in all these bills reaching his desk trying to roll back some of his signature legislation. (Logic doesn’t work on Hannity, so he assumes it doesn’t work on anybody else, either.) And Rush Limbaugh tried to claim that opposition to Obama’s policies was the will of the people and that, “There is no other reason why Republicans were elected yesterday.” Actually, Rush, there’s the little-mentioned matter of severe Gerrymandering on the part of the Republicans. If not for that, they could not have won control of the House this decade. It is, in fact, the single biggest reason we need to get Liberals and Progressives to get out and vote every single year, ESPECIALLY in their statewide elections. We need to turn state legislatures blue before the 2020 census so they can redraw the districts in a way that better reflects the will of the people in those districts. Only about 36% of the electorate turned out to vote this year, and low voter turnout almost always favors Republicans.

And that’s another reason this was no mandate. Less than 40% of the nation showed up to vote. You cannot claim that these 40% spoke for the entire nation, or that the results of their votes reflect some misguided notion that Americans want Republican policies to govern. They don’t. If anything, conservative policies (and the candidates that support them) are more of a turnoff to voters than liberal ones. Two states and the District of Columbia put pot legalization on the ballot and it won in all three. Californians passed sentencing reform for non-violent low-level crimes. New Jersey voters passed bail reform, to make sure only the dangerous ones are held on bail pending trial. And voters in Washington “both approved a measure to close a loophole in firearms background checks, and rejected a competing ballot initiative that would have narrowed the state’s gun laws.” These are not policies that a Conservative Congress would support, and it’s difficult to predict how they’ll pass legislation preserving the will of the people in those states, given how much Conservatives say they favor States’ Rights. It will also be interesting to see how a Republican-controlled Congress deals with the will of the voters in the nation’s capital who want to legalize pot given that the Constitution grants the Congress sole legislative authority over the District. Especially since our once pot-smoking president can veto any attempt by the GOP to thwart the People. Assuming he’s not too drunk to do it. I know I’d start drinking after a night like that if I were him.

This is our daily open thread. Have at it.

The Watering Hole; Friday November 7 2014; Elections Have CONSEQUENCES

Here’s the new Republican reality as detailed in a Mission Statement by GOP spokesman Rush Limbaugh:

“Individual Republican candidates won, and they won big. They won in a wave landslide running against Obamacare. The national Republican brand or image didn’t say a word, which makes the mandate that they have all the more incredible. It is rare that a political party running for office in a midterm election, not standing for anything, ends up with a mandate. And they have one. And it is the biggest, and perhaps the most important mandate a political party has had in the recent era. And it is very simple what that mandate is. It is to stop Barack Obama. It is to stop the Democrat Party. There is no other reason why Republicans were elected yesterday.”

Republicans were not elected to govern. How can you govern with a president that disobeys the constitution? How can you govern with a president that is demonstrably lawless when he thinks he has to be? The Republican Party was not elected to fix a broken system and to make it work. The Republican Party was not elected to compromise. The Republican Party was not elected to sit down and work together with the democrats. The Republican Party was not elected to slow down the speed the country is headed to the cliff, and go over it slowly. The Republican Party was elected to stop before we get to the cliff. And that’s the mandate.

The reason for the electoral mandate is simple: Immediately after Obama was first elected in 2008, the US economy was in a shambles, bordering on depression, even collapse. Since then, and IN SPITE of Democrat opposition, the Republicans in Congress have managed to get the economy growing at a robust 3.5 percent rate! Because of Republicans, deficits have been cut in half! The stock market is at record levels! The price of gas is less than three bucks a gallon! Ten million more Americans now have health insurance! Unemployment is under six percent for the first time since Obama was elected! There’s only one case of Ebola in the United States, and the victim is on the road to full recovery!

Still, victorious Republicans have serious issues with Obama. As Matt Drudge pointed out in a post-electoral tweet, “The reality is, Obama is going to do whatever he wants anyway. He will not be stopped, and I doubt very highly Republicans will arrest him.”

Maybe Limbaugh’s notion is the best one after all, all things considered. Maybe the sole mission remains to simply stop Obama and the Democrat traitors dead in their tracks and in the process kill such anti-American and unconstitutional communist-socialist nonsense as minimum wage, Social Security, Medicare, corporate taxes, welfare handouts to lazy bums, birth control, immigration reform . . . the Obama subterfuge and nation-destroy agenda list is endless.

Better we stop all this “We the people” horse hockey and work instead toward what REALLY counts, toward what will make America GREAT once again !! Like ever-higher corporate profits! Like tax reform ! YES ! Reaganomics reborn !! Lower taxes on the top 1% ! Halt government spending on everything but war ! Stop the EPA and tree-huggers everywhere from interfering with money-making pipelines, coal mines, and drill rigs ! Turn over ownership of public lands to the Koch Brothers ! YEAH !!.

America’s New Dawn has arrived!! (detailed below)

The Morning Sun Illuminates the New Republican America

In the Words of Emily Dickinson,
A Summation of the Newly-Elected American Reality

After great pain, a formal feeling comes —
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs —
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round —
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought —
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone —

This is the Hour of Lead —
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow —
First — Chill — then Stupor — then the letting go –

!! U.S.A. !!

R.I.P.

OPEN THREAD