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

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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

45 thoughts on “The Watering Hole, Wednesday: Hump Day, November 19, 2014”

    • When someone suggests that we don’t need the USPS because UPS and others will take over the job, remind them that USPS frequently delivers items shipped by the private services in rural areas, UPS only delivers as far as the local post office.

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      • Yep, we order frequently a lot of things from Amazon, things not available in this rural corner of Colorado. Lots of it is delivered to the front door via UPS or Fed-Ex; some goes from either Fed-Ex or UPS to the Post Office.

        If the USPS was freed from idiotic political meddling and allowed to operate as it should, all would be well. BUT — the fascist assholes (like Ron Johnson, current example) have no goal other than to destroy everything good the Fed government does, and turn it over to the 1% so they can make more and more money. I’ve never seen a more seditious cluster of bums than the current Republican Party. They should all be arrested, tried, convicted, and sent to Guantanamo for good. Every last one of the bastards.

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        • From the “people are stupid department”.
          The United States Postal Service carries a major portion of FEDEX and UPS freight because, the USPS is less expensive, it reduces overhead for FEDEX and UPS and most importantly, it increases the profits for FEDEX and UPS.
          The people of the U.S. would rather believe that the post office is a fossil while in reality it was paid for by us and it works.

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      • The UPS truck used to come up my private road almost everyday and stop at one of my neighbor’s houses when I lived in Pennsylvania. We lived in a rural area but not rural like rural is in South Dakota or Wyoming.

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  5. Keystone XL redux:

    •The jobs that would be created in support of construction — those 13,000 goods and service jobs over two years — amount to about three-and-a-half days worth of jobs so far this year.
    •Over the two years, just over 16,000 job-years (42,000 minus the 26,000 indirect jobs) would be directly related to the project. That’s 8,000 jobs a year — just over what the economy has created each day in 2014.
    •Actual construction jobs, as Mufson notes, total about 2,000 over the course of two years. (Those 2,000 are part of the 8,000 above.) That’s as many jobs as are added to the economy every six-and-a-half hours or so.
    •Once the pipeline is built, it requires 50 long-term employees. The economy has added that many jobs in 2014 every 10 minutes and 9 seconds.

    With helpful graph:
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/11/18/how-the-50-long-term-jobs-keystone-xl-would-produce-compares-to-the-rest-of-the-economy/

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    • Yah butt — The Kochistas stand to make at least lotsa millions from it and they like to hep out alladem congress dudes that vote yea.

      Apparently like Colorado’s Dem Senator Bennet. He’s the one I wrote to this morning explaining why I’ll no longer support him, never again vote for him, and will work to convince every other Dem voter I run across to do the same.

      That pipeline clearly will benefit no one . . . NO ONE . . . save for the billionaires who will profit from it, all profit therein sucked from the blood of the land and the ordinary people who will remain forever victimized by the rampant greed that’s getting closer every day to becoming unstoppable.

      And then there’s this atrocity:

      Congress Commits an Act of War Against the Great Sioux Nation

      When Congress voted to approve the Keystone Pipeline they committed an act of war against the Great Sioux Nation. Apparently they completely forgot to check with the Sioux who live on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, who in February adopted tribal resolutions opposing the Keystone XL project. Or maybe Congress didn’t forget but rather chose to ignore them.

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    • None of the jobs projections I’ve seen re the Keystoned pipeline consider the amount of permanent jobs added by those who have to clean up leaks.

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  6. Surprise Surprise —

    Fox News invites pundit from oil-funded think tank to say climate scientists are in it for the money

    On the November 18 edition of Your World with Neil Cavuto, [Jonah] Goldberg argued that climate scientists have a conflict of interest reporting on climate change because they are “deeply invested in the whole industry of global warming” for their university programs. Goldberg also called climate scientists and advocates “people who are financially incentivized to go one way.” […]

    In 2007, The Guardian reported that AEI offered scientists and economists $10,000 to write articles that “emphasise the shortcomings” of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which found a 90 percent chance that human activity was causing global temperature increases.

    So there we go. The nice pundit from the think tank that offers oil company cash to anyone willing to dispute climate change says you can’t trust the world’s scientists on whether burning oil is damaging our climate, those people are just in it for the money. . . .

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    • I like these two recent stories, one took place in Oregon where a couple were held up at gunpoint by the victim’s gun and the guy in Washington that went to make a private sale and handed his loaded gun to the potential buyer who immediately rob the guy and stole his car. Guns and crime 😉

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    • I believe that would be against the Constitution of the United States. Those dumb turds in Mississippi don’t seem to realize that the US Constitution trumps their state Constitution. This is why Civics classes need to return to the school curriculum. Graduation from high school should require each student to be able to pass the US Naturalization exam.

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  11. Speaking of obviously uneducated Republican nutcases —

    Rep. Mike Kelly: Obama Dragging Us Into Civil War

    Rep. Mike Kelly reacted angrily today to President Obama’s indication that he will soon temporarily relieve some undocumented immigrants of the threat of deportation, telling Newsmax host Ed Berliner that such a move will push the country into an “internal crisis” not seen since the days leading up to the Civil War. Kelly told Berliner that House Republicans shouldn’t take impeachment off the table.

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  12. “Pastor Marty McLain, who describes his religious belief as deriving from a literal interpretation of the Bible, was given the opportunity to see how secular Scandinavia is by a documentary series called The Norden. The concept is simple: find narrow-minded Americans and throw them into countries like Norway, Sweden and Denmark and watch them have panic attacks.”

    Mission accomplished.

    https://richarddawkins.net/2014/11/american-bible-thumper-travels-to-scandinavia-freaks-out-after-discovering-how-secular-they-are/

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  13. The Institute for Economics and Peace’s latest Global Terrorism Index, which counted 10,000 terrorist incidents worldwide in 2013, most of them in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria and Syria. That compares to just 1,500 incidents in 2000. Why the dramatic increase? Duuuuuh:

    “The report suggests that U.S. foreign policy has played a big role in making the problem worse: “The rise in terrorist activity coincided with the US invasion of Iraq,” it concludes. “This created large power vacuums in the country allowing different factions to surface and become violent.” Indeed, among the five countries accounting for the bulk of attacks, the U.S. has prosecuted lengthy ground wars in two (Iraq and Afghanistan), a drone campaign in one (Pakistan), and airstrikes in a fourth (Syria).”

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/11/18/after-13-years-2-wars-and-trillions-in-military-spending-terrorist-attacks-are-rising-sharply/

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    • Snark alert!

      We can fix it if we just drop more bombs on wedding parties and invade a couple more countries. Heck! How many countries, at least important ones, can there possibly be? Just invade them all and bring God’s peace to the heathens and everything will turn our way. Eventually. For some reason.

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  14. From the

    First Church Of Polydeism

    If A Tree Falls In The Forest
    And Fox News Isn’t There to Cover It,
    Is It Still Obama’s Fault?

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  20. (oh damn, spit, double spit)…
    The daily crossword puzzle is a pleasure – except for today.
    One of the clues “Sarah of politics”…damn that is surefire way to take the joy out of working the puzzle!

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