Remember All That Republi-CON Doom and Gloom on Obamacare

UPDATE VI:  "Remember how much Republicans wanted to repeal Obamacare?

The Republican majority in the House of Representatives has voted more than 50 times to repeal the law. Conservatives have twice brought challenges to the Supreme Court — a court with powerful voices that often lean in their direction — only to be largely rebuffed both times. The last government shutdown was driven by Republicans who insisted on defunding Obamacare . . .

When it comes to meeting one of its most important goals — providing coverage to the uninsured — it is working extremely well."

Read the Washington Post, The success of the Affordable Care Act is a hugely inconvenient truth for its opponents, which notes that "the success of the ACA strikes at the heart of the dysfunction strategy employed extremely effectively by anti-government conservatives. This is the self-fulfilling-prophecy strategy that campaigns on: 'Washington is broken!' . . .

Never mind that those making that case are the ones doing the breaking."

UPDATE V:  So much for that Republi-con "Obamacare would destroy the economy" myth.

"In a 2011 press conference, John Boehner used the phrase "job killing" once every two minutes. Then in 2012 we had the best year of job creation since 2005. In 2013 we had an even better year of job creation. Then in 2014, we had an even better year, the best since 1999."

The article included this graph:

Read also, the Washington Post, Can someone please print this graph on a T-shirt?! Sharp decline in the uninsured since the ACA came online, which included this graph:

Read Vox, A chart that Obamacare's fiercest critics will have a hard time explaining.

UPDATE IV:  The "uninsured rate has dropped over four points since Obamacare went into effect a year ago — and that the uninsured rate, now at 12.9 percent, is at its lowest point since Gallup began to 'track the measure daily in 2008.'

Gallup describes its findings this way: 'The Affordable Care Act has accomplished one of its goals: increasing the percentage of Americans who have health insurance coverage.'"

Read the Washington Post, As GOP continues denouncing Obamacare as failure, uninsured rate falls yet again. 

UPDATE III:  It's the 2014 election, curious why you haven't heard more about Obamacare, because it is working.

Read Topix, Stunning Admission From This Republican Governor: Obamacare Helps People.  

UPDATE II:  "One of the many, many, many predictions of Obamacare failure made by conservatives is that insurance companies would systematically drop out of the exchanges. They made this prediction many, many, many, many, many times. The data is starting to come in and, guess what, insurance companies are joining the exchanges. Dan Diamond reports that, in every state that has reported information so far, the number of insurance companies competing in the exchanges will expand in year two."

Read New York Magazine, Today’s Obamacare Non-Train-Wreck News. 

UPDATE:  Saved by Obamacare:

"Dean Angstadt fells trees for a living.

He's a self-employed, self-sufficient logger who has cleared his own path for most of his 57 years, never expecting help from anyone. And even though he'd been uninsured since 2009, he especially wanted nothing to do with the Affordable Care Act.

'I don't read what the Democrats have to say about it because I think they're full of it,' he told his friend Bob Leinhauser, who suggested he sign up.

That refrain changed this year when a faulty aortic valve almost felled Angstadt. Suddenly, he was facing a choice: Buy a health plan, through a law he despised, that would pay the lion's share of the cost of the life-saving surgery - or die. He chose the former.

'A lot of people I talk to are so misinformed about the ACA,' Angstadt said. 'I was, before Bob went through all this for me. I would recommend it to anybody and, in fact, have encouraged friends, including the one guy who hauls my logs.' . .

Read The Philadelphia Inquirer, Once opposed to ACA, now a convert.

Angstadt  now realizes it was Republi-con lies repreated on Hedgehog News that almost got him killed.  

"All the disasters conservatives have predicted to date have failed to materialize. The website did not have to be rebuilt from scratch. The exchanges did not have to push back their start date. The administrative fix did not render the law unworkable. There has been no actuarial death spiral. Democrats have not called for repeal. All the disasters have simply been pushed further into the future. . .

[N]one of the things conservatives warned about happening have actually transpired. The evidence to date is completely consistent with the hypothesis of success. Costs and premiums have come in under projections, young people have signed up, insurers plan to expand their participation, and actuaries project stable premiums."


Read New York Magazine, Obama Declares Obamacare Victory.

Go, The Donald, Go, the Colbert Edition

UPDATE :  "Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal says the GOP front-runner is an "egomaniacal madman who has no principles" and who risks costing the party its chance to regain the White House. . .

The governor said: 'The silly summer season is over. It's time to get serious about saving our country. It's time to send Donald Trump back to reality TV.'

He called Trump a 'carnival act' and said rivals shouldn't be 'kissing up' to him."

Read MSN, GOP contender Jindal brands Trump a 'madman'. 

"Sometimes the easy jokes are the best ones, and Stephen Colbert’s first extended bit as host of the Late Show locked in on a very familiar target: the alpha-male, Oreo-boycotting presidential candidate known as Trump."

Read Slate, Colbert Kicked Off His Late Show Reign by Mocking Donald Trump. For Five Minutes Straight.

Or just watch:

Slavery, America's Original Sin

"[A]lthough 'The Civil War' may have ended with a surrender, the issues over which the war was fought are far from settled.

'I think in some ways, the subsequent films have convinced me only more certainly of our thing about the war, that it was the central event. Race is one of the things of American culture. I’ve taken a lot of criticism for saying that,' [documentarian Ken] Burns told me when we met in a New York editing studio in May. 'So, doing ‘Jackie Robinson,’ has echoes with Ferguson. Doing ‘Central Park Five’ has echoes back to Emmett Till and some of the realities of slavery. All of the way the Ferguson municipality behaved to its own citizens, its majority citizens, is not dissimilar to the way Jim Crow sharecroppers experienced the pernicious substitute for slavery: ‘Well, if we can’t own you, we have to pay you something, it won’t be very much, but we’re going to own every other aspect of you. And by the way now, since you’re no longer my property, I can kill you with impunity, because you’re not valuable to me.’ … And while there was no law that protected African Americans in slavery, and there were supposedly laws that protected them afterwards, they weren’t applied, and in many cases as we learn with chilling regularity, still aren’t applied.' . .

Burns doesn’t have much patience for narratives about the Civil War that suggest that its causes were anything other than race, pointing squarely at the South Carolina articles of secession: 'Is there the words ‘states’ rights’ in their articles of secession? No. Is the word ‘slavery’ there? Yes. Many times.'

'People say, ‘Oh, it’s about states’ rights.’ ‘It’s about agricultural economics.’ ‘It’s about political differences.’ ‘It’s about social differences,'' he said, running through the list of justifications. 'Yeah, the social differences based on a society that keeps people free or doesn’t pay their laborers. That pays for work or doesn’t pay for work. Right? That creates huge, different societal differences. And certainly it’s political, because as the equilibrium of power that the South had dominated in the presidency and in Congress is being challenged by new states that are increasingly less interested in slavery, they’re interested in taking their ball and going home. That’s the political reality. And the economic stuff? Yeah, they’re afraid that someone’s going to pass a law that’s going to deny them their single greatest wealth, which is the ownership of 4 million other human beings, in 1861 … Slavery is why the Civil War happened. And slavery is still this original sin that Americans have to figure out, somehow, how to transcend and overcome.”

And he’s sharply aware of the way these kinds of obfuscations persist in contemporary political discourse.

'So if the president wasn’t born in the United States, that’s another way of saying the n-word. If he’s Muslim, that’s another way of saying the n-word. All of these things are code, new racial code, for words that now have, at least in public, lost their respectability,' Burns continued, marveling at the way the end of the Civil War only forced white supremacist language and practices to mutate to fit their new circumstances.

Read the Washington Post, From slavery to Ferguson, Ken Burns sees an unfinished Civil War. 

The Business of Religion (And Birthers)

UPDATE IV:  "You can't fault Sheriff Joe Arpaio for lack of chutzpah. The guy continues to beg for campaign donations while his contempt of the federal court in the ACLU's big civil rights case Melendres v. Arpaio is costing us beaucoup bucks. . .

As New Times has previously reported, the price tag for Arpaio's defense in Melendres and the cost of the subsequent reforms imposed by the court after Arpaio's May 2013 loss will be more than $50 million by the end of fiscal year 2016, money that comes straight out of the county's general fund."

Read the Phoenix New Times, Arpaio Begs for Money While His Lawyers Make Bank in Melendres.

UPDATE III:  "Televangelism is still allowing preachers to amass staggering—often tax-exempt—wealth by robbing their congregation’s most vulnerable members blind."

Read Slate, Praise Be to John Oliver, Who Started a Church Just to Expose Televangelists.

And watch:

UPDATE II:  Read CNN, How passing the plate becomes the 'Sunday morning stickup'. 

UPDATE:  "Over the past two years, Arpaio has raised nearly $5.5 million for his next election in November 2016, according to his campaign-finance reports filed with Maricopa County. . .

Arpaio boasts a fundraising list of more than 250,000 active donors in all 50 states, with the average contribution being $44.26, according to Willems. . .

If Arpaio's campaign coffers exceed $10 million, that would be more than in some congressional races.

'He's made a national reputation for himself. He has capitalized on raising funds nationwide, which many sheriffs cannot do,' Noble said."

Read The Arizona Republic, Arpaio campaign gets $5.5 million from donors past 2 years.

Proving once again the old saying -- a fool and his money are soon parted.

"Pastor Creflo Dollar has spoken to God, and God wants him to buy a $65 million private jet. His congregation, thus far, has obliged his every whim."

Read The Daily Beast, Jesus Wants Me to Have This Jet.

He's not the only 'pastor' who shears his sheeple.

The Republi-CON "Less Goverment, More Freedom" Myth, As Told By the Story of Gefilte Fish

"While combing through the most recent Hillary Clinton e-mail dump, a certain, seemingly non-political, but potentially highly controversial message stands out. . .

The subject line, meanwhile, says only: 'Gefilte fish.' . .

[So] why the leading Democratic presidential candidate sent an e-mail with gefilte fish in the subject line while she was serving as secretary of state. "

Read the Washington Post, The story behind the funniest e-mail Hillary Clinton has ever sent.

It seems that under a so-called 'free-trade' agreement Illinois fish was subject to an import tax on entry to the 'Promised Land, and then-Illinois Rep. Don Manzullo, a Republican, "was fretting over the potential tax."

No doubt as a favor to wealthy constituent.  

The story is a sad commentary on politics and power.

The Donald's First Campaign Ad

From the Washington Post, This fake Donald Trump campaign ad is just about perfect:

"By now, Donald Trump has taken plenty of heat for not really, you know, taking positions on issues. And in true Trump form, he doesn't really see the need to do that. He'd rather just say that he'll Make America Great Again and call it a day. And heck, it's working so far.

But how might that translate into his campaign ads? Below, 'Jimmy Kimmel Live' imagines what Trump's first commercial might look like -- and to quote Trump, it's pretty great."

Watch:

Tea Party Hypocrisy

Ten different government organizations -- including the U.S. Forest Service, Okanogan County Emergency Management, the Air Force (whose Fairchild base is being used as a mobilization center), The Washington state government, whose governor requested a federal emergency declaration to help facilitate firefighting, The Obama administration, which issued that declaration, and Utah, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, and California that are contributing resources for use in Washington -- mounted a "large-scale coordinated response" to fight a fire that threatened homes.  That effort saved the home of a Okanogan, Washington man named Brad Craig.

He thanked them wearing a t-shirt that said "Lower Taxes + Less Government = More Freedom."

 Can you say hypocrite!

Read Slate, Washington Man Wearing Anti-Government T-Shirt Thanks Firefighters for Saving His Home.  

America's Addicition to Oil, and Support of Middle East Dictators

UPDATE II:  Now would be a good time to increase the federal gas tax by $1/gallon, so that we don't become complacent about the real cost of oil.

"We are witnessing a historic fall in the price of oil, down more than 50 percent in less than a year. When a similar drop happened in the 1980s, the Soviet Union collapsed. What will it mean now? . .

Many American experts and commentators have hoped for low oil prices as a way to deprive unsavory regimes around the globe of easy money. Now it’s happening, but at a speed that might produce enormous turmoil and uncertainty in an already anxious world."

Read the Washington Post, From Russia to Iran, the consequences of the global oil bust.  

UPDATE: Why not increase the federal gas tax by $1/gallon?

"The beauty of the tax — as a substitute for a high world price — is that the incentive for fuel efficiency remains, but the extra money collected at the pump goes right back into the U.S. economy (and to the citizenry through the revenue-neutral FICA rebate) instead of being shipped overseas to Russia, Venezuela, Iran and other unsavories.

Which is a geopolitical coup. Cheap oil is the most effective and efficient instrument known to man for weakening these oil-dependent miscreants.

And finally, lower consumption reduces pollution and greenhouse gases. The reduction of traditional pollutants, though relatively minor, is an undeniable gain. And even for global warming skeptics, there’s no reason not to welcome a benign measure that induces prudential reductions in CO2 emissions.

The unexpected and unpredicted collapse of oil prices gives us a unique opportunity to maintain our good luck through a simple, revenue-neutral measure to help prevent the perennial price spikes that follow the fool’s paradise of ultra-cheap oil.

We’ve blown this chance at least three times since the 1980s. As former French foreign minister Jean François-Poncet said a quarter-century ago, 'It’s hard to take seriously that a nation has deep problems if they can be fixed with a 50-cent-a-gallon' — 90 cents in today’s money — 'gasoline tax.' Let’s not blow it again."

Read the Washington Post, Raise the gas tax. A lot.

Would you support a $4/gallon gas tax?

Read the Washington Post, Can Americans handle the truth about gas prices?

I Have a Question!

From an email:

Why isn't the number 11 pronounced onety-one?

If 4 out of 5 people SUFFER from diarrhea...does that mean that one out of five enjoys it?

Why do croutons come in airtight packages? Aren't they just stale bread to begin with?

If people from Poland are called Poles, then why aren't people from Holland called Holes?

If a pig loses its voice, is it disgruntled?

Why is a person who plays the piano called a pianist, but a person who drives a race car is not called a racist?

If it's true that we are here to help others, then what exactly are the others here for?

If lawyers are disbarred and clergymen defrocked, then doesn't it follow that electricians can be delighted, musicians denoted, cowboys deranged, models deposed, tree surgeons debarked, and dry cleaners depressed?

Do Lipton Tea employees take 'coffee breaks?'

What hair color do they put on the driver's licenses of bald men?

I thought about how mothers feed their babies with tiny little spoons and forks, so I wondered what do Chinese mothers use, toothpicks?

Why do they put pictures of criminals up in the Post Office? What are we supposed to do, write to them? Why don't they just put their pictures on the postage stamps so the mailmen can look for them while they deliver the mail?

Is it true that you never really learn to swear until you learn to drive?

If a cow laughed, would milk come out of her nose?

Whatever happened to Preparations A through G?

Why, Why, Why do we press harder on the remote control when we know the batteries are getting weak?

Why do banks charge a fee due to insufficient funds; when they already know you're broke?

Why is it that when someone tells you that there are one billion stars in the universe you believe them, but if they tell you there is wet paint you have to touch it to check?

Why doesn't Tarzan have a beard?

Why does Superman stop bullets with his chest, but he ducks when you throw a revolver at him?

Why did Kamikaze pilots wear helmets?

Whose cruel idea was it to put an "s" in the word "lisp"?

If people evolved from apes, why are there still apes?

Why is it that, no matter what color bubble bath you use, the bubbles are always white?

Is there ever a day that mattresses are not on sale?

Why do people constantly return to the refrigerator with hopes that something new to eat will have materialized?

Why do people run over a string a dozen times with their vacuum cleaner, then reach down, pick it up, examine it and then put it down to give the vacuum one more chance?

How do those dead bugs get into the enclosed light fixtures?

Why is it that whenever you attempt to catch something that's falling off the table you always manage to knock something else over?

Why, in winter, do we try to keep the house as warm as it was in summer when we complained about the heat?

The statistics on sanity say that one out of every four persons is suffering from some sort of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they're OK..? (then it's you!)

REMEMBER, A day without a smile is like a day without sunshine!

Go, The Donald, Go!, Cont.

UPDATE IX:  The articles say it well.

Read the Washington Post, Donald Trump and the Cattle Car Caucus and GOP candidates tiptoe around Donald Trump’s xenophobic demagoguery.

Then read Vox, Donald Trump’s appalling reaction to a hate crime committed in his name.

UPDATE VIII:  "There’s a certain demographic in this country — it’s unseemly to mention the specific population by name — that has no sense of personal responsibility.

I don’t know whether their problem is cultural or biological. But these people refuse to acknowledge any bad decisions they have ever made, or the many times others have bailed them out. They want everyone else to pay for their failures, and sometimes even their successes.

By now I think you know which deadbeats I’m talking about: the people running for president.

I’m not saying they’re all bad; there are a few personally responsible outliers to cherry-pick from an otherwise mooch-y bunch. But, as a whole, this group is unusually adept at ducking deserved blame, claiming unearned credit and hoovering up O.P.M. (Other People’s Money). . .

[B]y far, the leader of the personal responsibility deadbeats is Donald Trump, a welfare queen if there ever was one.

This is a man who has proudly “used the laws of the country to [his] advantage.” That means racking up hundreds of millions of dollars in tax abatements — that is, government subsidies — to finance his real estate empire. That means using “government’s incompetence as a wedge to increase his private fortune,” as one former New York City tax auditor put it. It means borrowing lots of money that he never paid back, because it was discharged in four (corporate) bankruptcies, which he now looks back on with pride.

That means trying to use eminent domain to seize an elderly widow’s property so he could build a limousine parking lot, or pressuring a city to condemn several businesses so he could buy the land on the cheap to build a 'combined amusement park, shipping terminal and seaport village and office complex.' That means slapping his name on all sorts of other projects he had relatively little involvement in and then swooping in to take credit when things went well — or suing to have his name removed when things went badly.

None of this is illegal, of course. But it’s also maybe not the track record of someone who wants to lead the party that has fashioned itself the party of personal responsibility, of freedom from government dependence, of the makers rather than the takers. Yes, Trump’s been 'making,' but that making has been enabled by a fair amount of taking, too. . .

To be sure, there’s a long and storied American tradition of shunting responsibilities, and costs, onto other parties (most creatively, though not exclusively, through the tax code). So maybe this crop of candidates is just what we deserve — if not exactly what we need. "

Read the Washington Post,  The 2016 field is full of deadbeats — and maybe it’s just what America deserves.


Again I ask, why are Republi-cons such suckers for snake oil salesmen?

UPDATE VII:  The appeal of politicians such as Trump and Putin "is partly their brash self-confidence. They don’t explain the mundane details of national revival; they just assert it. Think of the character Harold Hill in 'The Music Man.' He promised to give River City a marching band, even though he couldn’t play music.

Putin, like Trump, seems to understand that power and showmanship are inseparable, especially for a nation that is traumatized by military and economic losses. It’s a confidence game. 'Within the system, Mr. Putin has developed his own idealized view of himself as CEO of 'Russia, Inc.' In reality, his leadership style is more like that of a mafia family Don,” write Fiona Hill and Clifford G. Gaddy in their book, 'Mr.?Putin: Operative in the Kremlin.' . .

Trump is more nakedly self-promoting than Putin, with a vanity and braggadocio that would embarrass a Russian (or, indeed, almost anyone). Trump’s Web site promotes him as “the very definition of the American success story,” gliding over his four corporate bankruptcies. He seems to enjoy it when commentators deride him as an uncouth lout and rabble-rouser, underestimating the power of his message. His blunt comments speak to a nation that’s sick of political double-talk. . .

What’s surprising about Trump is that he has attracted such a wide following. He’s Reagan without Reaganism, running a campaign nearly devoid of ideas. Americans have had flirtations with demagogues, from Father Charles Coughlin in the 1930s to Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. But the bullying authoritarian personality — the Putin style — usually doesn’t work here. This summer has been an exception, but history suggests that it won’t last."

Read the Washington Post, Is Donald Trump an American Putin?

P.S.  I don't agree with the final conclusion that Trump is a demagogues like Coughlin or McCarthy because, as noted before, unlike most politicians Trump doesn't need to win the election, he has a real life.

UPDATE VI:  Love him or hate him, The Donald understands "the way really life works" and how to negotiate and deal.

A "key advantage that Trump has is that he is unconstrained by the norms of running for office. He doesn't need to spend time raising money because, however much he actually has, it's in the billions -- hundreds of millions of which are liquid and with millions more coming in regularly. He doesn't need to actually win, because he's already accomplished -- and employed. He doesn't need to worry about what he says because so much of his appeal to voters is centered on his not caring what the repercussions are.

All of which means that he's unconstrained by campaigning. He doesn't have to prove his chops to you; he's a billionaire. . .

Trump is also introducing something else new to the campaign process: An explicit reliance on personality. Much of what we do when we choose a candidate is to try to use past actions to predict future behavior. But we're bad at that, both because we can't help but blend our desired outcome into our analysis, and because past action is actually a bad way to predict the future."

Read the Washington Post, Donald Trump’s surprisingly savvy analysis of American politics.  which also notes that "[w]hen people are considering candidates, most will review top-line policy positions, if they compare policies at all. This is why we have political parties: so that we can have a cheat sheet for what people stand for without having to do a lot of reading and becoming experts in particular issues."

UPDATE V:  "If you’re a Republican, you may be telling yourself that this will get sorted out eventually, and your party will get itself a real nominee. And you’d be right. But by the time that happens, the party will have spent months tying itself in knots. The voters Trump represents will be only more convinced that their party is, in the words Trump himself might use, a bunch of total losers."

Read the Washington Post, Bad news, Republicans: Donald Trump is practically bulletproof.

UPDATE IV:  Can the Republi-cons "keep the crowded field from turning into a Trump-incited mob" tonight?!

Read Politico, How Jeb and the GOP Got Trumped.

UPDATE III:  Scott "Walker’s [recent] encouragement of the Muslim myth was another case of a dynamic that could be problematic for the eventual Republican presidential nominee: Saying zany things is rational strategy.

Chris Christie talking about his wish to punch a teachers union in its collective face? Ted Cruz saying the Obama administration is becoming the 'world’s leading financier of radical Islamic terrorists'? Mike Huckabee talking about Obama marching Israelis to the 'door of the oven'? Rand Paul declaring that highly taxed people are 'half-slave'? Or Donald Trump, who still doesn’t know whether Obama was born in America, insulting everything from Mexican immigrants to John McCain’s war record?

They may sound crazy — but they’re crazy like a Fox.

Paul, the libertarian candidate in the GOP field, explained the Trump appeal on CNN: 'This is a temporary sort of loss of sanity, but we’re going to come back to our senses and look for somebody serious to lead the country at some point.'

He’s right about the insanity part. But it may not be temporary. The gap between those who vote in GOP primaries and the rest of the electorate is growing.

This Republican sliver of the electorate, growing isolated and angry, is inclined toward exotic views. Trump, rather than causing the insanity Paul speaks of, is exploiting it."

Read the Washington Post, The GOP field’s calculated crazy talk.

UPDATE II:  "Trump’s appeal is pure style. His emptiness makes him a perfect vehicle for rage. He is angry about everything that makes you angry — because that is why he chose his views. He is a megaphone of resentment against elites and foreigners who are ruining our country, taking our jobs, raping our women or eating our lunch. And he promises to fix it all.

'I don’t care what his actual positions are,' says supporter Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks. 'I don’t care if he says the wrong thing. He says what’s on his mind. He gives honest answers rather than prepared answers.'

This is the cult of spontaneity taken to its logical conclusion. In choosing a president, policy positions are held to be irrelevant. Only authenticity matters. And Trump, who has changed his entire political worldview to capture the political moment, represents the brand of authenticity. Whatever his opinions, he delivers a very genuine Blank You .

The Trump candidacy has revealed a huge attitudinal division in American life. Some of us have found it appalling that he should gain any traction in presidential politics. It seems as if World Wrestling Entertainment has conducted a hostile takeover of CNN. . .

I know that incivility is immoral and dangerous to democracy. People of faith in particular are called to speak and act on the assumption of shared human dignity. This does not rule out vigorous disagreement, but it forbids the cultivation of contempt and the issuing of threats.

I know that Trump is encouraging political fantasies. He is not preparing people for difficult choices, on, say, entitlements; he is assuring them that our problems could be easily solved if elites were not so corrupt. And he is wrong. Our problems are not easy."

Read the Washington Post, A GOP led by Donald Trump will fail, and deserve it.

UPDATE:  "How could Thursday night in Cleveland fail to be one of the most entertaining political spectacles we’ve seen in a long time? . .

Maybe Trump will somehow self-destruct in the debate. But who among his rivals is more skilled at projecting a persona on television? Trump knows how to filibuster and won’t hesitate to turn an inconvenient question back on the questioner. Even if he brings nothing to the lectern but bombast, he might emerge unscathed. 

The question becomes whether the others go after him. Perry, if he makes it to the big dance, surely will. But what about the rest? Will they throw proper punches, legal under Marquess of Queensberry rules, against an opponent who kicks, bites and gouges?

And how will the non-Trump candidates seek to present themselves in the most positive light? Will Walker refute Trump’s allegation that Wisconsin is 'doing terribly,' or will he just brag about his victories over organized labor? Will Bush break into Spanish? Will Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), drowned out of late, try to crank up the volume? Will retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson again compare the Affordable Care Act to slavery?

Can Mike Huckabee come up with an even more offensive Holocaust analogy for the Iran nuclear deal? Can Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) remind voters that, you know, he’s still in the race? Will Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) help Mr. Trump with his jacket and ask if he’d like a glass of water? Will Kasich make himself the flavor of the month? Will New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie punch somebody?

Going out on a limb here: This promises to be fun."

Read the Washington Post, Christmas comes early this year — the gift of a Trump-fueled GOP debate.

So how does The Donald do it?

He play "to people’s fantasies."

Read the Washington Post, I just binge-read eight books by Donald Trump. Here’s what I learned.

In other words, he's a con man, ergo, he is the lead Republi-con candidate.

Did You Know That Early Christians Were Communists?

In "a practice of early Christians, reported in the Book of Acts in the New Testament . . . people in a community handed the church ownership of all their possessions. The church then gave each member of the community the use of enough property to provide for the needs of their families.

It was, in effect, a religious form of communism."

Read the Washington Post, Someone once tried Ben Carson’s Biblical tax plan. 

Fear, Anger, and Hatred = Violence, Again, Cont.

UPDATE II:  "Three men were arrested in Gaston County, North Carolina after allegedly amassing an arsenal and making their own bombs out of fear that the government was about to enact martial law, the Asheville Citizen Times reported.

Federal investigators said two of the suspects, 50-year-old Walter Eugene Litteral and 30-year-old Christopher Todd Campbell, voiced their skepticism regarding the Operation Jade Helm military training exercises, which conspiracy theorists believe is the prelude to a military takeover. . .

Reports of the arrest came on the same day that two men allegedly opened fire on a “Jade Helm 15 training site in Mississippi."

Read Raw Story, Anti-‘Jade Helm 15' nuts arrested in North Carolina after hoarding weapons and making bombs. 

Read also the Washington Post, How federal agents foiled a murderous Jade Helm 15 retaliation plot, which notes:

"The men had a deadly plot to lure government forces into a trap, federal officials say, and were amassing a stockpile fit for war.

There were Kevlar helmets and body armor, pipe bombs and handmade grenades, large amounts of gunpowder and dozens of rounds of ammunition for a military-grade sniper rifle. . .

Specifically, they told the informant that the Jade Helm exercises planned in five states were a cover for the government’s plot to impose martial law."

UPDATE:  "On one level, the affair in Bunkerville can be seen as a vestige of Old West range-war mentality, opportunistically remixed with overtones of the militia movements of the early 1990s and an identity-politics firestorm that’s very 2014. But as a transaction between the state and citizens decided not by rule of law, nor by vote or debate, but rather by the simple presence of arms, Bunkerville is deeply troubling. Guns publicly brandished by private individuals decided the outcome. For all Bundy’s appeals to constitutional justification, what mattered at the end of the day was who was willing to take the threat of gunplay the furthest.

Bunkerville is simply the next step in a trend that has been ramping up for some time. Since the election of Barack Obama, guns have appeared in the public square in a way unprecedented since the turbulent 1960s and ’70s — carried alongside signs and on their own since before the Tea Party elections, in a growing phenomenon of 'open carry' rallies organized by groups like the Modern American Revolution and OpenCarry.org, and in the efforts by gun rights activists to carry assault weapons into the Capitol buildings in New Mexico and Texas . . .

Toting a weapon in a demonstration changes the stakes, transforming a protest from just another heated transaction in the marketplace of ideas into something else entirely. It’s bringing a gun to an idea-fight, gesturing as close as possible to outright violence while still technically remaining within the domain of speech. Like a military 'show of force,' this gesture stays on the near side of an actual declaration of war while remaining indisputably hostile. The commitment to civil disagreement is merely provisional: I feel so strongly about this issue, the gun says, that if I don’t get my way, I am willing to kill for it. As Mao understood, the formal niceties of political persuasion are underwritten by the very real threat of harm. 'Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.'

On the contemporary stage, those bearing guns in protest are most likely to be white, right-leaning, and rural. As the historian Adam Winkler has documented, this represents a more or less direct reversal of the upheavals of the late ’60s and ’70s, when Republican politicians pursued new gun control legislation in response to armed protests by urban African-American leftists. Today, it is those most sheltered from actual state violence — from the day-to-day reality of police brutality — who also feel most threatened by the state, most free to threaten violence against hypothetical violations, and most entitled to opt out of civil discourse by reaching for their weapons. Our racial double standards for who can safely gesture at political violence are enormous. At least before his racism became public, Bundy and his supporters could point assault weapons at federal agents and be lionized as 'patriots' by a United States senator and celebrated on Fox, whereas a single New Black Panther standing near a polling station while holding a billy club prompted calls on that same network for former Navy SEALs to show up in force and 'fight back.'"

Read The New York Times, What Do Guns Say?

"On Sunday, Jerad and Amanda Miller, a married couple, allegedly killed two police officers in an ambush at a Las Vegas pizza restaurant and then murdered another person in an adjacent Walmart. During the attack, the couple reportedly stated that their attack was part of a "revolution," according to Second Assistant Sheriff Kevin McMahill.

The Millers appear to have been motivated by extreme far-right views. The couple left a flag at the scene of the crime with the words "Don't Tread on Me," a Revolutionary War symbol used by some anti-government extremists.

They also left a swastika at the scene, though McMahill cautioned to reporters, 'We don't necessary believe that they are white supremacists or associated with the Nazi movement. We believe that they equate government and law enforcement ...with Nazis.' . .

The attack in Vegas is far from the only incident of violence by the American far right. According to data collected by the New America Foundation, right-wing extremists have killed 37 people in 16 violent incidents, in the United States since the 9/11 attacks. That number is more than the 21 people killed by militants motivated by al-Qaeda's ideology in the United States in the post-9/11 era.

Although a variety of left wing militants and environmental extremists have carried out violent attacks for political reasons against property and individuals since 9/11, none have been linked to a lethal attack. . .

Countering violent extremism cannot simply be a demand placed on Muslim communities to prevent jihadist violence. In the decade since 9/11 right-wing extremists have demonstrated their ability to be just as deadly as their homegrown jihadist counterparts.

Moreover, killings like the ones of the two police officers in Las Vegas on Sunday demonstrate the need to move beyond the view that the only threat of terrorism or extremist violence comes from radicalized Muslims."

Read CNN, Right-wing extremists strike again.

Read also Mother Jones, The Chilling Anti-Government, Cliven Bundy-Loving Facebook Posts of the Alleged Las Vegas Shooters.

Without fear, anger and hatred, where would the Republi-cons be.

Mensa Puzzle

From an email:

Here's a puzzle that has confounded even the brightest among us.

You are on a Horse, galloping at a constant speed.

On your right side is a sharp drop off.

And on your left side is an Elephant traveling at the same speed as you.

Directly in front of you is a galloping Kangaroo and your horse is unable to overtake it.

Behind you is a Lion running at the same speed as you and the Kangaroo.

What must you do to safely get out of this highly dangerous situation?


See the comments for the answer.

Now take time to think it through.  Don’t jump to the answer just yet.  You can figure it out.

The Cost of a Living Wage

"A new study explores what kind of sacrifice it would take to help some of the country's lowest paid workers. The answer? Not much."

Read the Washington Post, What paying fast food workers a living wage would do to the price of a Big Mac.

Read also, the Washington Post, Americans are spending $153 billion a year to subsidize McDonald’s and Wal-Mart’s low wage workers.

And watch Slate, Would Walmart’s Prices Spike if They Paid Their Employees More?:



So how much would prices rise if workers were paid a living wage?

At Walmart, 1.4%.  And that Big Mac would cost .17 cent more.

Why Are Republi-CONs Such Suckers For Snake Oil Salesmen?

"[V]ery little of the $753,000 it spent from Jan. 1 to June 30, 2015, went directly to political candidates and committees. Instead, SarahPAC’s top expenditures largely helped fortify its own existence—or helped Palin personally. . .

Yet, during the first half of 2015, SarahPAC only spent $25,000 on candidate contributions—less than 4 percent of its overall expenditures.

Conservative Republican Reps. Louie Gohmert, Trey Gowdy, Raúl Labrador, and Ted Yoho are among the 43 candidates to receive SarahPAC cash so far this year, with most getting $500. The per-election federal limit is $2,700.

Palin’s PAC has never given more than a small fraction of its income away to the Republicans it supports."

Read Slate, Sarah Palin’s PAC Is Spending More on Hotels and Travel Than on Republican Candidates.

Read also, Cha-Ching, Baby, Cha-Ching. 

Her daughter also practices the con.  Read More Unbelievable Palin Family Hypocrisy. 

The Republi-CON Party of Angry White Men, "Steeped and Stewing in Right-Wing Xenophobic, Homophobic, Misogynist and Racist Hate"

 The man who opened fire in a Lafayette, La., movie theater [John Russell House] . . . was, by all accounts, a far-right ideologue. . .

Houser was steeped and stewing in right-wing xenophobic, homophobic, misogynist and racist hate. He was obviously crazy. It’s generally safe to assume everyone who commits mass murder is. But Houser was crazy and held some beliefs that were variations of more mainstream conservative beliefs. The roots of some of Houser’s political views are hard to distinguish from ideas espoused by many, if not most, of the candidates running for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. . .

And yet when white men shoot up movie theaters or black churches, they’re given the benefit of individuality. We don’t automatically assume that they represent some disease within all, or even a subset of, other white men. Even in the face of evidence such as espoused racist, misogynistic views and participation in organized hate groups, we still resist drawing any broader conclusions about any white men other than the shooter. Meanwhile, most mass shooters are white men. Communities of color or of minority religions, as a whole, are rarely given the benefit of the doubt of collective innocence. White men, and white people in general, always are. That white privilege extends even to white mass murderers shows just how insidious it is. . .

We habitually scrutinize the ideology behind black and Muslim violence while letting white men off the hook. . .

Sure, there’s more to discover about Houser’s particular motives and state of mind that night. But we know what prompted Houser. We know he is not an accident of a hateful, us-versus-them ideology, but an automatic, albeit unfortunate, consequence. You cannot plant the seeds of hatred and antipathy and then curse them when they grow beyond your control.

Spread misogyny and anti-immigrant nationalism and homophobia and anti-black racial bias, and they will take root. As a seed, Houser was downright rotten. But he clearly fell from a very dangerous and rotting tree."

Read the Washington Post, We blame minority groups for individual crimes. Why do white conservatives get a pass?

Read also:

The Washington Post, Shooters of color are called ‘terrorists’ and ‘thugs.’ Why are white shooters called ‘mentally ill’?

Slate, Men Kill Women in the U.S. So Often That It’s Usually Not Even Newsworthy and

Daily Mail, The pro-Hitler rants of Louisiana theater gunman who idolized Timothy McVeigh and called for lone wolf attacks on the 'failing filth farm' of America. 

In 2016, First Trump, Then Palin, Who Next Bozo?

"If Donald Trump takes the White House, Sarah Palin might have an invitation to join his team."

Read CNN, Sarah Palin serving in a Trump administration? 'I'd love that,' he says. 

The Republi-CON 'We Love the Military' Myth (They Don't Even Like Ordinary Citizens)

UPDATE:  "Tucked into a dusty corner of the Senate’s Highway Trust Fund bill — legislation that must pass before the fund runs dry on July 31 — is a zombie proposal to hire private debt-collection agencies to hound delinquent taxpayers on behalf of the Internal Revenue Service.

The IRS has actually tried outsourcing tax collection activities to private debt collectors before, at Congress’s behest. Twice, in fact, over the last two decades.

Both times, the experiment was a disaster.

Privatizing delinquent tax collections led to complaints from taxpayers who got harassed and bullied by an industry known for rampant harassment and bullying, articularly of low-income people who don’t know their rights. In one oft-cited case, a private debt collector made 150 calls to the elderly parents of a taxpayer even after the collection agency learned that the taxpayer was no longer living at that address.

Perhaps more important, at least from a fiscal responsibility perspective, both times the program was scrapped because it actually cost taxpayers money on net, despite assurances ahead of time of the huge bounty it would lasso in."

Read the Washington Post, The Senate’s wrongheaded IRS proposal.

Republi-cons only love their corporate benefactors.

"House Republicans are pushing legislation to block predatory lending protections for American soldiers, under pressure from the banking lobby."

Read The Huffington Post, House Republicans Want To Block Predatory Lending Protections For American Troops.

The Art of El Donald, He's Waiting for His Republi-CON Deal

UPDATE:  "There is nothing secret about the nativist views of Donald Trump, a dyspeptic business tycoon running for the Republican presidential nomination. His finger-jabbing speeches about Mexican rapists and murderers, flowing across the border “like water”, and American jobs being shipped to China have taken him to the top of most polls. More dismaying, his apparent popularity has unmanned more conventional presidential rivals, only some of whom have chided him for his bigotry. . .

The Trump surge has been startling. After all, lots of conservatives growl about immigrants changing America, and shops full of cheap Chinese goods, without enjoying such success. Mr Trump is funding his campaign himself, which means he has no need to flatter donors. Is it this outsider status as a non-politician that marks him out? Or perhaps the unfiltered quality of his rage?

The Trump technique involves confiding in unhappy Americans that they are victims of a plot—and a plot, what is more, that could be easily thwarted. In his telling, scheming foreign governments have outwitted a soft political elite in Washington and preyed on America’s openness and generosity. He is tapping into a political tradition with deep roots. The Know-Nothings are only one example. The “America First” movement of the early 1940s accused decadent Europeans and well-connected Jews of conspiring to drag America into a new world war. In the 1960s the John Birch Society saw communist cunning at every turn."

Read The Economist, El Donald. 

The article includes an interesting historical reminder, which I forgot if I ever heard:

"IT WAS a winter night in 1854 when nine men broke into the building site of the Washington Monument, stole a slab of marble and—according to a later confession—heaved it into the Potomac river. The stone, which once belonged to the Temple of Concord in Rome, was a gift from Pope Pius IX. The attackers belonged to an anti-Catholic political movement, nicknamed “Know-Nothings” on account of their strict code of secrecy. Their movement considered Catholic immigrants a menace to the republic. At its peak, followers included dozens of congressmen, some governors and an ex-president. The Know-Nothings feared that the papal stone was a coded call to arms, sent to spark an immigrant uprising. Their vandalism helped to halt the monument’s construction for years. To this day a change in stone colour, part-way up the obelisk, betrays that nativist moment."

"Mr Trump is in the real-estate business, an industry rife with red tape, in which a little political leverage can be worth a fortune. . .

You'd have to be astoundingly brazen to run for president, churning up toxic xenophobic sentiments, just to get the political leverage to win a huge tax break, or to build a casino or to stop somebody else's casino. But Mr Trump is neither a meek nor public-spirited man. And, astonishingly enough, he may have actually succeeded in putting the Republican Party in a corner.

If cutting a sweet deal is what Mr Trump was aiming to do all along, we might have to admit that he is more than the attention-seeking buffoon he appears to be. It may be that he is a attention-seeking, buffoonish genius.  In any case, Mr Trump has floated the possibility that he may try to wreck the Republican Party's presidential chances unless it coughs up a little 'fair' treatment, whatever that means. If the GOP doesn't think it can neutralise Mr Trump's threat of a third-party run by utterly demolishing his reputation, then they're going to have to consider a little fairness. Not a bad month's work for Mr Trump."

Read The Economist, Donald Trump's brazen genius.

Go Donald, Go! (FKA "Where’s the Donald?")

UPDATE XII:  "Whatever you think of Donald Trump, he’s now the hub around which the race revolves, and that only makes the rest of the candidates’ problem more acute. It’s hard enough to get noticed when you have 15 competitors, but when one of them soaks up so media attention, it becomes even harder. All that pushes candidates — at the debates, and elsewhere — to do something, anything, to get some notice. . .

The [upcoming GOP] debate could play out in a number of ways: candidates could attack Trump, or a few might go after Jeb Bush, hoping to become the alternative to the closest thing the race has to a non-Trump frontrunner, or something else entirely might occur. But if all of them are looking for someone to strike at, it could end up being a demolition derby — fun to watch, but not exactly the thing to inspire faith in the participants."

Read the Washington Post, The Republican demolition derby.

UPDATE XI:  "Republicans dreaming of shooing away Donald Trump may want to think twice.

By publicly rebuking the billionaire businessman for his inflammatory comments, the party may convince Trump to launch a third-party candidacy."

Read CNN,  GOP's nightmare: An Independent Donald Trump. 

Read also Vote Republi-CON, the Party of Fear, Anger, and Hatred in 2016!

But if The Donald runs as an independent, I just might cast my angry Republi-con vote for him. (Yes, I am a registered Republican.) 

UPDATE X:  For a great analogy and to better understand the Republi-con's dilemma with Trump, the Preschooler, read the Washington Post, You cannot fight Donald Trump with conventional weapons, which states in good part:

"If you attended preschool at any point in your life, you understand the problem with Donald Trump’s candidacy. You remember the one kid on the playground who makes everyone else’s recess hell.

'You’re out,' you say. 'You just got tagged.'

'No, I’m not,' he says. 'Nobody can touch me ’cause I’m made of fire.'

'No, you’re not,' you say. 'That’s not how the rules work.'

'Yes,' he says, 'Yes it is I made the rule that I’m fire and if I touch you you burn up and nothing you can do can undo it ’cause fire beats everything.'

'That’s not fair,' you say.

'And I touched you and now you’re out,' he says, and shortly afterwards the game ends in him winning, because that is the only way he will allow it to end.

Certain five-year-olds are impervious to rules. They won’t play nicely. They trample through your sandcastles. They arrogate sudden inexplicable powers to themselves which render them invincible and can therefore defeat you at a touch, or they announce that they can cross into your territory by special dispensation, or they simply refuse to stay tagged when you tag them.

'This won’t work if he doesn’t freeze when he’s tagged!' you complain, but — what authority do you have? The rules of games possess only as much authority as you allow them. There are no referees handing out red cards for Red Rover. You are in a state of nature unless the other kindergartners agree otherwise.

And this can be extremely frustrating when you are accustomed to playing by the rules. There you are, with Ted and Bobby and Carly, playing nicely, and then along comes Donald and announces that you aren’t playing Traditional GOP Primary Where Everyone Can Be Handicapped By Gaffes but instead King Donald’s Primary where everything everyone says has consequences except for what Donald says because Donald is made of fire.

He is the terror of the schoolyard for a reason. 'Can we play it my way?' you ask. No. You can’t. His way or no way at all. And now he’s got your favorite truck.

You can’t win against someone who refuses to admit that there are rules. Not only that, but you can’t declare him 'out.' If he wants to play with you, you’re stuck.

And this is the problem we’re running into now with Donald Trump. . .

We, as a public and as a media, are used to an election game that has, if not certain rules, certain — accepted formulas and traditions. It is supposed to be a kind of low-rent reality TV for people who couldn’t make it on real reality TV — proportionally more serious and less entertaining. If it is the GOP primary, the more it looks like Twelve Angry Men, the better. But the rules only exist by our mutual and silent agreement. So does the game itself, for that matter."

Read also Vote Republi-CON, the Party of Fear, Anger, and Hatred in 2016! 

UPDATE IX:  "How did America get to such a place that someone like Donald Trump can command a lead in the Republican primaries? Trump is the product of a deliberate Republican strategy, adopted by Richard Nixon’s people in 1968, to attract voters with an apocalyptic redemption story rather than reasoned argument.  It has taken almost 50 years, but we have finally arrived at the culmination of postmodern politics in which Republican leaders use words to create their own reality."

Read Salon, How did this monster get created? The decades of GOP lies that brought us Donald Trump, Republican front-runner.

UPDATE VIII:  Cruz will visit the Donald's "Manhattan throne to kiss his ring."

Read Slate, What a Trump-Cruz Alliance Could Mean for the GOP Race.

Here's hopin for a Cruz-Trump ticket in 2016 ;-). 

UPDATE VII:  "Trump has merely held up a mirror to the GOP. The man, long experience has shown, believes in nothing other than himself. He has, conveniently, selected the precise basket of issues that Republicans want to hear about — or at least a significant proportion of Republican primary voters. He may be saying things more colorfully than others when he talks about Mexico sending rapists across the border, but his views show that, far from being an outlier, he is hitting all the erogenous zones of the GOP electorate."

Read the Washington Post, Donald Trump is the monster the GOP created. 

UPDATE VI:  "There’s no world in which Donald Trump is a serious candidate for president. Republican elites don’t want him, Republican donors don’t want him, and if—through some cosmic fluke—he managed to win a major primary, every strategist and activist in the Republican Party would turn their aim toward him and his candidacy.

But just because Trump is an unqualified vanity candidate doesn’t mean he’s unimportant in the story of the 2016 GOP presidential primary. Unlike Chris Christie or Mike Huckabee—two vastly more legitimate candidates—Trump is popular with Republican voters. A new CNN national poll puts him in second place in the GOP field at 12 percent support—seven points behind the leader, Jeb Bush—while recent polls from Iowa and New Hampshire also show him with a second place spot in those crucial early contests. If Trump holds his position, he’ll be on stage with Bush, Scott Walker, and Marco Rubio when official debates start in August (he could even lose some support and still make the cut).

The obvious question is “Why?”—why does Trump have a hold on this thick slice of the members of the Republican base? The answer is, unlike the professional politicians in the race, Trump is—from his views on immigration to the “issue” of Obama's citizenship—one of them."

Read Slate, The GOP Base Loves Trump.  

UPDATE V:  "He has virtually zero chance of winning the presidential nomination. But insiders worry that the loud-mouthed mogul is more than just a minor comedic nuisance on cable news; they fret that he’s a loose cannon whose rants about Mexicans and scorched-earth attacks on his rivals will damage the eventual nominee and hurt a party struggling to connect with women and minorities and desperate to win."

Read Politico, Donald Trump bump terrifies GOP. 

UPDATE IV:  Let the show begin.

Read the Daily Mail, Donald Trump accused of hiring ACTORS for $50 each to pose as supporters at Trump Towers presidential campaign launch.  

UPDATE III:  "Everyone thinks Donald Trump's candidacy will be a disaster for the Republican Party. But here are three ways his presence could actually help the GOP."

Read the Washington Post, Why Donald Trump will be good for the Republicans in 2016.

UPDATE II:  The Donald "can’t seem to stop himself. Trump’s announcement (from Trump Tower, ’natch) that he is seeking the Republican presidential nomination was a veritable festival of the first person. A search of the transcript finds that he uttered “I” 195 times, “my” or “mine” 28 times, “me” 22 times and “I’ve or “I’d” 12 times — for a grand total of 257 self-references."

Read the Washington Post, Donald Trump’s festival of narcissism.

Read also the Washington Post, The Trump clown show, which notes that "America has its share (maybe a larger share) of hucksters, con men, pranksters and the like who seek to grab their 15 minutes of fame. We should not be surprised when they show up in presidential races. And while Trump is a ludicrous figure with no chance to win, there are lots of other candidates who have an equally low chance (zero) to make it to the nomination. Still, it is worse having Trump there, since he obviously is using this opportunity purely as self-promotion and to air his obnoxious attitudes."

UPDATE:  "The world's most big-headed businessman is about to enter the 2016 election, and the GOP is in trouble".

Read Salon,  Donald Trump is about to prove what a joke the Republican Primary is. 

"[I]f I were a Republican presidential candidate, I would do everything in my power to get Trump taken seriously. Oh, I know in previous years he has hinted at a presidential run and then done nothing. But the man provides a utility that the party dearly needs: He makes the other candidates seem reasonable. . .

Trump’s most interesting quirk is his touching conviction that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. You may wonder about the religious fervor of some of the candidates — the ever-running Rick Santorum, for instance — or the suppressed isolationism of Rand Paul. But nothing approaches Trump’s birther belief.

It remains remotely possible that Trump fastened on the birther stuff just to get some attention. After all, he is in other respects both smart and canny. He has built an impressive real estate empire and presided over a long-lasting and evidently successful TV show. He is a billionaire, and his brand is either an icon or a narcotic: People flock to his buildings, positioning themselves so the name Trump can be seen in their selfies.

It’s possible that even in American politics one can go too far. Maybe Trump has soiled himself. Now, it is true that Obama’s birth certificate was a bit late in showing up, but why demand it and not, at the same time, John McCain’s? Could it have been Obama’s race? Or that his father was born in Kenya? Or that his middle name is Hussein? Could it, in short, be a reflection of prejudice? I mean, black man, white mother, Kenyan father, strange middle name .?.?. can’t you connect the dots? Trump can. Follow them long enough and you’re in the loony bin.

Trump’s birther obsession is both distasteful and more than a minor tic, like his flamboyant hairdo. When, for instance, Hawaii’s health director, Loretta Fuddy, died in the crash of a small plane, Trump tweeted: “How amazing, the State Health Director who verified copies of Obama’s ‘birth certificate’ died in plane crash today. All others lived.” Was he implying that Obama somehow killed her — maybe by drone? Who knows? Kenyans are capable of anything.

American politics sometimes seems to me to be a version of the movie “Animal House.” Every four years, some wholly unqualified person surfaces — usually in the Republican Party — and is swiftly declared some sort of political messiah. Last time around it was the ridiculous Herman Cain, pedigreed by right-wing pundits as the man we’ve all been waiting for, and before that the comedic Sarah Palin, a woman for whom the word unqualified is itself unqualified. This year, it could be almost anyone, but whoever it is, he or she (Carly Fiorina?) better pray that Donald Trump gets fully into the race. He’ll make everyone else look better."

Read the Washington Post, The GOP needs Donald Trump.

Enjoy Life, It Goes By More Quickly Each Day

Have you ever observed that time seems to be going by faster as you get older? . .

[Some theorize that] we perceive time by comparing it with our life span: The apparent length of a period of time is proportional to our life span itself.

We perceive our first few years to be much longer in duration than the years that come later -- as the graphic above this shows. If you measure your life this way, in "perceived" time rather than actual time, half of your "perceived life" is over by age 7. If you factor in the fact that you don't remember much of your first three years, then half of your perceived life is over by the time you turn 18, Kiener writes.

In mathematical terms, our time perception is logarithmic -- stretched out at the beginning and compressed at the end -- rather than linear, in which each year has the same length. If you don't know, or don't want to think about math, it's basically the difference between the graph on the left, which is how time proceeds according to calendars, and the graph on the right, which starts slow and then ramps up:

In mathematical terms, our time perception is logarithmic -- stretched out at the beginning and compressed at the end -- rather than linear, in which each year has the same length. If you don't know, or don't want to think about math, it's basically the difference between the graph on the left, which is how time proceeds according to calendars, and the graph on the right, which starts slow and then ramps up:

More recent theories about how we experience time draw on psychology and science. . .

One idea is that the passage of time speeds up with familiarity. As we get older, things become more familiar to us, and time slips by as a result. There is some evidence that we tend to remember events between the ages of 15 and 25 most vividly because we experience so many new things in that time. A related idea is that we can actually slow down our experience of time through paying attention to the present moment, what people call mindfulness.

This might seem depressing -- it kind of is. But it's also a reminder to savor our time and remember that it is precious."

Read the Washington Post, Why time really does seem to go faster as you get older.

The Test of The Republi-CON Myth of Expansionary Austerity, Greek Edition

UPDATE:  "It’s astonishing even now how blithely top European officials dismissed warnings that slashing government spending and raising taxes would cause deep recessions, how they insisted that all would be well because fiscal discipline would inspire confidence. (It didn’t.) The truth is that trying to deal with large debts through austerity alone — in particular, while simultaneously pursuing a hard-money policy — has never worked. It didn’t work for Britain after World War I, despite immense sacrifices; why would anyone expect it to work for Greece?"

Read The New York Times, Europe’s Impossible Dream.

As noted before, expansionary austerity is a Republi-con myth.

There was the limited experiment on Kansas that failed.

Now for the grand test, "[i]t could be a chapter in an economics textbook: What happens when severe austerity is imposed on an economy that’s already lost a quarter of its output?

Greece will find out how bad it could be."

Read Bloomberg, Greece Rewrites Economic Textbooks With Austerity on Austerity.

Read also, the Washington Post, Europe’s dirty little secret is Greece will never pay back its debt, which notes that "if Greece can't cut its way out of debt and it can't grow its way out of debt, its only option is to default its way out of debt. There are more and less painful ways of doing this. Least among them is for the two sides to work together, so both can keep getting at least some money from the other. That's a polite default, or a restructuring. And the IMF has suggested three ways that might work. Europe can either give Greece money every year; give Greece a pass on some of what it owes; or give Greece far more time to pay what it owes, with a 30-year grace period at the start. But in any case, Europe is effectively going to have to give—notice how that word keeps popping up—Greece money. It just depends on how they want to do it."

And here's a dirty little secret for you -- well not really a secret, just something Republi-cons would never admit -- the United States of America only works because of money subsidies/transfers from rich, prosperous states to poor, needy states and labor mobility from poor, needy regions to wealthy, prosperous regions.

Read The New York Times, The Problem With a Euro Fix: What’s in It for the Dutch? and the Washington Post, The four ways to end the Greek crisis, from Obama’s former top economist.

And in the U.S., it is the Blue states that are rich and prosperous; the Red states that are poor and needy.

Read Slate, How The US Currency Union Works—Endless Subsidies To Low-Productivity Areas.

Read also, Rich state, poor state, red state, blue state: What’s the matter with Connecticut?

Haters Gonna Hate, Hate, Hate, Hate, Hate Any Deal

UPDATE:  "'There are three groups of people in the world who are against the deal: War-mongering Republicans in the U.S., Netanyahu and hard-liners in Iran.'

[But g]ive Bibi some credit: It’s hard to imagine many politicians who could suffer a historic defeat on their signature political issue, be blamed for bringing it about, and still somehow benefit."

Read Slate, Bibi Netanyahu Was the Iran Deal’s Most Effective Salesman."

"Conservative opposition to Obama’s expected deal with Iran is based on a critique of Obama’s peculiar failings. He is naive in the face of evil, desperate for agreement, more willing to help his enemies than his friends. The problem is that conservatives have made this same diagnosis of every American president for 70 years. They do not merely oppose this deal, they oppose all of them, because they believe evil regimes cannot be negotiated with. Their analysis of the Iran negotiations is not an analysis at all, but an impulse.

None of this is to say that the Obama administration has handled Iran the correct way. Even if it has, the agreement is unsatisfactory for the same basic reasons that every treaty with a brutal regime is unsatisfactory. The truth neither Obama nor his critics will acknowledge is that there probably isn’t any potential deal that can prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. On the other hand, bombing Iran is also unlikely to work, as is maintaining effective international sanctions for years on end. The least bad option will probably be, in the end, having to rely on deterrence to stop Iran. . .

But the conservative response to Obama’s negotiations is the expression of a pathological inability to grapple with the limits of military power at all."

Read New York Magazine, Conservatives Hate the Iran Deal Because They Hate All Deals.

Read also, Vox, The Iran deal began with George W. Bush, which notes that " the deal, so partisan today, follows a set of principles that even George W. Bush embraced."

Moreover, after the Republ-con's treason, no better deal was possible.

Republi-cons always prefer war for their selfish political reasons

The Republi-CON 'Mini Ice Age" Myth

Sunspot activity  have been observed and recorded for at least 400 year.

"Yes, numbers of sunspots can vary by that much [60%] or even more on an 11-year cycle, but the sun’s output—the total amount of energy we get—is extremely stable and only changes by about 0.1 percent, even in extreme sunspot cycles like the one [recently predicted in 2030] . . .

Past research suggests that an extreme decline in solar activity would lead to a shift of just 0.16 degrees Celsius globally—and even that is erased once a more typical solar cycle resumes in a few decades. . .

No matter what the sun does over the next century, we are not heading in to a new ice age. Why am I so sure about that? It may have something to do with the 110 million tons of carbon dioxide humanity is pumping into the atmosphere every single day. The resulting change to our global climate system is so huge, it overwhelms all natural atmospheric forces, including the sun. There is no other plausible explanation for global warming except us."

Read Slate, No, the Earth Is Not Heading for a "Mini Ice Age".

Read also, the Washington Post, News about an imminent 'mini ice age' is trending — but it’s not true.

Obama the Moderate and Republi-CON Extremism

UPDATE IV:  "One of the administration’s closest allies was Clarence Thomas."

Read Slate, Is the Supreme Court More Liberal Than Obama?  

UPDATE III:  "Obama has governed as a moderate conservative—essentially as what used to be called a liberal Republican before all such people disappeared from the GOP. He has been conservative to exactly the same degree that Richard Nixon basically governed as a moderate liberal, something no conservative would deny today. (Ultra-leftist Noam Chomsky recently called Nixon 'the last liberal president.')

Here’s the proof: . .

Cornell West nailed it when he recently charged that Obama has never been a real progressive in the first place. 'He posed as a progressive and turned out to be counterfeit,' West said. 'We ended up with a Wall Street presidency, a drone presidency, a national security presidency.'

I don’t expect any conservatives to recognize the truth of Obama’s fundamental conservatism for at least a couple of decades—perhaps only after a real progressive presidency. In any case, today they are too invested in painting him as the devil incarnate in order to frighten grassroots Republicans into voting to keep Obama from confiscating all their guns, throwing them into FEMA re-education camps, and other nonsense that is believed by many Republicans. But just as they eventually came to appreciate Bill Clinton’s core conservatism, Republicans will someday see that Obama was no less conservative."

Read The American Conservative, Obama Is a Republican. 

UPDATE II:  The problem says another political scientist "is radicalism and irresponsible behavior, not ideological extremism." 

Read the Washington Post, 'The Republican Party is severely dysfunctional, not severely conservative'.

UPDATE:  "The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges. . .

Today, thanks to the GOP, compromise has gone out the window in Washington. In the first two years of the Obama administration, nearly every presidential initiative met with vehement, rancorous and unanimous Republican opposition in the House and the Senate, followed by efforts to delegitimize the results and repeal the policies. The filibuster, once relegated to a handful of major national issues in a given Congress, became a routine weapon of obstruction, applied even to widely supported bills or presidential nominations. And Republicans in the Senate have abused the confirmation process to block any and every nominee to posts such as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, solely to keep laws that were legitimately enacted from being implemented.

In the third and now fourth years of the Obama presidency, divided government has produced something closer to complete gridlock than we have ever seen in our time in Washington, with partisan divides even leading last year to America’s first credit downgrade.

On financial stabilization and economic recovery, on deficits and debt, on climate change and health-care reform, Republicans have been the force behind the widening ideological gaps and the strategic use of partisanship. In the presidential campaign and in Congress, GOP leaders have embraced fanciful policies on taxes and spending, kowtowing to their party’s most strident voices.

Republicans often dismiss nonpartisan analyses of the nature of problems and the impact of policies when those assessments don’t fit their ideology. In the face of the deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression, the party’s leaders and their outside acolytes insisted on obeisance to a supply-side view of economic growth — thus fulfilling Norquist’s pledge — while ignoring contrary considerations. . .

No doubt, Democrats were not exactly warm and fuzzy toward George W. Bush during his presidency. But recall that they worked hand in glove with the Republican president on the No Child Left Behind Act, provided crucial votes in the Senate for his tax cuts, joined with Republicans for all the steps taken after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and supplied the key votes for the Bush administration’s financial bailout at the height of the economic crisis in 2008. The difference is striking. . .

And Mike Lofgren, a veteran Republican congressional staffer, wrote an anguished diatribe last year about why he was ending his career on the Hill after nearly three decades. “The Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe,” he wrote on the Truthout Web site."

Read the Washington Post, Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.

Remember, stupidity in the case of partisan extremism is no virtue.

"Placing blame equally on Democrats and Republicans for the stalemate over the debt crisis only encourages more bad behavior." Read The New York Times, The Centrist Cop-Out, which notes:

"Mr. Obama is in practice a moderate conservative.

Mr. Bartlett has a point. The president, as we’ve seen, was willing, even eager, to strike a budget deal that strongly favored conservative priorities. His health reform was very similar to the reform Mitt Romney installed in Massachusetts. Romneycare, in turn, closely followed the outlines of a plan originally proposed by the right-wing Heritage Foundation. And returning tax rates on high-income Americans to their level during the Roaring Nineties is hardly a socialist proposal.

True, Republicans insist that Mr. Obama is a leftist seeking a government takeover of the economy, but they would, wouldn’t they? The facts, should anyone choose to report them, say otherwise."

And the way to prove it is to call the Republi-CON bluff.

Admit It, It Was a Good Speech

"The president delivers his single most accomplished rhetorical performance, and it’s one you should watch rather than read."

Read the Atlantic, Obama’s Grace. 

More Unbelievable Palin Family Hypocrisy

UPDATE:  "Bristol Palin . . . is too busy giving lectures to hear yours."

So read Slate, A Short History Of Bristol Palin’s Lectures.  

Remember Bristol Palin, a high school drop out, unwed mother, and paid 'abstinence ambassador.'

(The abstinence 'charity' (a term used loosely as you will see) "took in about $1.7 million in donations and only gave $35,000 to groups trying to lower teen pregnancy rates.

Forty-six percent of Candie’s total expenses — $573,000 — went to Palin.

Only 6 percent went to anti-teen pregnancy programs.About $165,000 was paid to ABC for TV advertising."

Even for the Palins, this con strikes me as immoral.)

Well guess what.

"Bristol Palin, the eldest daughter of former Republican vice presidential candidate and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, announced today that she is pregnant for the second time, less than a month after calling off her marriage to Marine veteran Dakota Meyer."

Read the Daily Mail, Sarah Palin's daughter Bristol announces she's pregnant again just a month after cancelling wedding to Marine veteran.

 The article notes that "Bristol did not say who the father of the child is in her statement."