Down the drain

Well, here we go again….the Republican dominated Arizona legislature is flirting with yet another unconstitutional law.  The Senate passed along party lines a law that would permit private businesses the right to refuse services based on their religious beliefs (of hate and intolerance) about LGBT people.

Why is it that many conservatives simply do not understand the nature of Religious Freedom in this country?  You have the right to believe whatever you want, to talk about those beliefs and to practice your religion without interference by the government.  Notice I said “government”, not everyone else, just the government.   Private individuals violating others rights is a mixed bag and one would have to look at the 200+ years of legal jurisprudence to tell what has been considered acceptable and what has not.

The argument being made in support of this bill is the same as the argument made in favor of discriminating against African Americans.  Here’s what they used to say.

Black people cannot eat in my restaurant because the Bible says so.

Now they’re saying…

LGBT people cannot eat in my restaurant because the Bible says so.

What if my religion said that men are stupid, lowly and sinful creatures who deserve death as punishment for their wickedness.   Do I get to refuse to worship with them?  Yes.  Can the government force me to worship with them?  No.  Can I say and write all kinds of horrible things about them?  Yes.   Do I get to refuse to serve them at my restaurant?  No.  Do I get to refuse to rent a place to live to them?  No.  Do I get to charge them more than other customers?  No.  Do I get to give them worse service or less value for their money?  No.  Legal precedence and this country’s values say that this is simply not acceptable.

It was an ugly sentiment back then and it’s just as ugly now.  We don’t get to discriminate against people just because our religion tells us to.  So if this bill passes the Arizona House, then the ACLU or NAACP or someone will file a lawsuit (and rightfully so) and our hard earned taxpayer money will be poured down the drain, once again, in defense of another patently stupid and unconstitutional law.

Why can’t our legislature focus on governing instead of making hateful laws?  Although we have plenty of problems that need to be tackled they’d rather pander to their foaming at the mouth base and waste what little financial resources we have.  Congratulations Arizona!   You voted them in and they’re screwing you over again.

The lawyers waiting to swoop in and make bank off the crappy decisions made by Republican Lawmakers.

PS: This pic is of three buzzards that I discovered sitting on a light post outside of my office the other day. An animal had probably died or was in the process of dying in the empty field across the street and they were biding their time. I’ve seen buzzards in AZ before but usually circling high up in the sky in rural areas. This is the first time I’ve seen them hanging out in a relatively urban area.

It ain’t no island getaway

The Guantanamo Bay detention facility will remain open because Congress says so in the latest Defense spending bill (ht JM Ashby at BobCesca.com).   Our The stupid twats and despicable lawmakers  are saying that the Administration is not allowed to transfer the detainees to American soil for criminal prosecution.  The far left will be blaming the President for not closing it in spite of the fact that he legally can’t do so–actually, they’ve been doing this for years so it will only continue, just in greater volume.  And the right will be crowing about how he has broken yet another campaign promise.

First of all, Congress is afraid that these “baddest of the bad, and worst of the worst” will break out of Federal Max security prisons.  This so dumb it beggars belief.  I’m very familiar with those facilities and their security procedures.  This is not and never will be a concern.  We’ve kept MUCH more dangerous people in those facilities with nary a problem.

Second, the idea that this country accepts the denial of habeas corpus rights to detainees (technically we don’t call them prisoners, which is exactly what they are, war prisoners) so long as they aren’t on our soil is a distinction without a  difference.   Out of sight means out of mind I guess.  In WWII the prisoners were kept in camps right in our cities.  As a child my father used to go talk to Italian war prisoners through a prison camp fence in Charleston, SC.  It makes it much harder to deny these people justice when we don’t have to see their suffering.

Third, the fact that these people are even considered detainees or even war prisoners was and is a colossal mistake.  We should have treated them as criminals, arrested them as such and prosecuted them as such.

Unfortunately, since so many of the detainees rights have been violated and FSM knows how much of the evidence against them has been obtained (i.e., via coercion plus unreliable or secret sources who are unavailable or unable to be present at trial for testimony) the odds of actually getting a conviction in an honest criminal court might be impossible. So all that poisonous fruit will come back to haunt the prosecutors. I blame effing Bush and Co. If they’d handled this properly in the criminal courts to begin with, we wouldn’t be worried about all this kind of crap. I consider myself an expert on our Criminal Justice system (I’m also Queen of the world in my own tiny mind but I digress) and the choice to use military force against Al Qaeda, essentially a criminal enterprise, will go down as one of the worst mistakes in U.S. history. And how often do you see anyone on the teevees or press making this larger and crucial point. We used to be a gold standard in liberty and due process (at least compared with the majority of nations) but not anymore and it’s all because of the idiotic, never ending “war on terror” and the bullshite of renditions and Guantanamo. We STILL haven’t learned the big lesson here and we never will at this rate.

Okay, rant over.

Thoughts on the Day

Some quick thoughts on news items I heard today yesterday….(so sue me, I’m slow to post lately)

1. You know how waiters approach you and say, “Hi, My name is Kelly and I’m going to be your server today. How is your day going?” Well, I hate it. Call me a curmudgeon (really, it’s okay, I can accept that label) but I don’t give a damn what their name is because I’ll never remember it anyway. And I don’t want to make chitchat with them. I don’t do small talk very well so I don’t bother with it. I only want a waiter to be quick, attentive, efficient and quiet. Well there’s a new application of current technology out there that let’s you order via your phone and text your waiter when you want him/her to come over to your table. A waiter was quoted as saying something like, they “might as well replace us with robots”. Okay!  Sounds good to me.  I’m all for it if it means I don’t have to know your name or talk about the weather with you.
2. The city of Detroit has been officially allowed to go bankrupt, including the ability to cut pensions in spite of a state constitutional provision that forbids it. Unfortunately, no word as to what creditors will be given precedence–the banks or the thousands of city workers whose pensions have not been funded. Correct me if I am wrong but I thought a bankruptcy judge could specify ‘who gets paid first’? It’s shameful to think that banks making millions, if not billions, in profit would get money before city workers who spent years if not decades toiling away thinking that they would some day be able to retire and now cannot. If the judge does not put them first, those people will have to rely on others and/or work until the day they die. That just sucks.
3. As I’ve written about many times before, Arizonans hate to pay taxes but they still have the nerve to be upset when public services go unprovided. Sometimes it bites us in the ass like it did when Sheriff Joe failed to investigate over 400 felony cases for the City of El Mirage some involving murder, rape and molestation of children. Now we have another scandal. Six thousand CPS (Child Protective Services) cases have been neglected–as in not touched at all. The Governor having been informed of this created a task force to review all of those cases to see “if the kids are safe”.   Ironically the acronym for the task force is CARE–hah!  Maybe she should have cared BEFORE?!?!  CPS is not at fault. They are extremely underpaid, understaffed and under-appreciated. If some of those kids have been harmed, and the odds are good that they have, I want to know. And I want it rubbed in the face of every Arizonan who refuse to pay their taxes.  Liberty in a Capitalist society is only for those that “Have”.  The “Have Nots” are just SOL.  Their liberty is the freedom to suffer without assistance and without hope.  I wonder if those abused and neglected kids can smell the liberty right now–that is, if they’re still among the living.
4. The price of milk in the U.S. may double and worse yet, become extremely scarce. And milk won’t be the only commodity that this will happen to…ANY product made with milk and many other basic staples that come from farming. Why? Because the U.S. Congress, held hostage by crazy, foaming at the mouth Republicans who want to take yet more money away from the food stamp program, sucks balls. They’ve failed to pass a Farm Bill–a very basic thing BTW. We need to get some rational adults into office who actually want to make government work for the American people.
5. And speaking of crazy people, there’s this guy. He is openly advocating treason on Fox Television. Maybe he’s just crazy like a fox because you know he’s making bank off this stunt.  I like to call it Entrepreneurial Hatemongering ^TM As Bob Cesca says:
   

   Indeed, this sort of harrowing armed revolt and assassination fetishization generates a not insignificant revenue stream. It’s become its own subsidiary of the conservative entertainment complex, as David Frum called it. Located just adjacent to the anti-Obama conspiracy theory section of the store, the violent-overthrow cosplay shelves are loaded with highly potent crazyswag. For a price. Read the crazy, but subscribe first. And don’t forget to bulk-purchase the hastily-assembled ghost-written book.

6. Finally, FL is in the news yet again. They continue to set the standard for how to rig elections by limiting who gets to vote. Once again, changing the rules at the last moment, Governor “Gollum” Scott is ordering the county election officials to close down hundreds of drop-off sites used for absentee ballots. According to a Pinellas County official 42% of the county’s absentee ballots were left at drop-off sites in 2012. That’s significant. Absentee ballots help primarily those who cannot, for a number of reasons, physically make it to the polls in the increasingly tiny window of time being allowed–which means the poor, elderly, women, minorities and you know who they tend to vote for. There is some hope though…some county election officials are openly defying the governor (as they did when he tried to illegally trim thousands of Floridians off of the voting rolls in the last election).

I think that’s more than enough misanthropy for today. Cheers!

When even mortification isn’t enough

The President, like every other President, wants to be as effective as possible in his second and last term because he doesn’t have another election to win. As a result he can turn his entire focus towards the progressive agenda on which he initially campaigned in 2008/2012. And in order to make it stick, to leave a real, lasting legacy, he should have already gotten started on that agenda. Although, he did get an early start with healthcare there are many other things that need to be done ¹. Unfortunately, the GOP and approximately 27% of the country ² absolutely, positively hate and/or fear him have been actively engaging in obstructionism from the very beginning ³.

This is purposeful obstruction has manifested itself in a variety of ways. The most obvious methods have been the House Republicans blocking debate on (much less voting on) meaningful legislation and blocking the President’s nominees. FFS they blocked debate on withdrawal from Afghanistan, jobs bills during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, and now Immigration Reform. They don’t even want to talk about the issues unless it’s on TV and in front of the stenographers we used to call journalists. Since there is nothing the President can do about the legislative stalemate going on right now, nothing will get through Congress for the remainder of his second term. This leaves the President with only one option–using the Constitutional powers of the Executive. This is not that unusual as every President uses those powers to various degrees to enact their agenda and reinforce their legacy.

The Republicans knew that this would be his only option so they’ve been obstructing that as well. Blocking nominees to head Executive Agencies and Judicial Appointments is a big deal because some of those positions have been vacant for years ⁴. And such a vacancy really hurts the effectiveness of the agency AND has a lasting effect on what policies can and will be implemented.  And if you doubt that they’ve been willfully and abusively blocking nominees, check out this chart below or this one.

From Ezra Klein article, The Washington Post

Well, after years of this bullshit Senate Dems and Moderate Republicans finally said enough is enough and they changed Senate Rules to say that a simple majority vote in the Senate is enough to stop a Filibuster on a nominee ⁵. Before the rule was they needed 60 votes to stop a Filibuster. Of course, the right and the DC Press Corps are weeping about the loss of comity and “the horror, the horror”.

In truth no such comity ever existed, so these “centrist” journalists need to STFUSD. They’ve been bemoaning the lack of collegiality from the President’s Inauguration up to the present without ever acknowledging that the Republicans NEVER wanted to compromise and NEVER would. The President could have put on a hair shirt, crawled on his knees from the White House to the Capital, periodically flagellating himself and they STILL wouldn’t have accepted him with any decency, much less compromise with him. In point of fact, they probably would have found fault with his method (e.g., “he didn’t wear his flag pin”) as an excuse for their refusal. Furthermore, if the recent government shutdown and flirtation with defaulting on our debt didn’t make that plain as day to the DC Press Corpse ⁶, then they are not only blind, but deaf and dumb as well.

These same idiots are using the term “Nuclear Option” for this change to Senate Rules. Truth of the matter is the real Nuclear Option has been the 5 year-long obstructionism and purposeful lack of governance being perpetrated by conservatives. But you won’t hear that from our supposedly centrist press corpse. Instead the right will market it as the Presidents fault, as just another abuse of his power ⁷ and another sign that he’s the Antichrist ⁸ and the stenographers posing as journalists will amplify that message.

Notes:
1. IMHO healthcare will be his most important legacy akin to the introduction of Social Security by FDR. A couple of generations down the road, historians will marvel at how much it helped. Mark my words because I plan to still be here and I WILL be telling conservatives “I told you so”.

2. It’s no coincidence that this number is the same for both the hard-core conservative base AND the percentage of the U.S. population that routinely vote against their own best interests and are consistently wrong on all major issues–the “crazification factor”.  Read the 

3.   We all suspected way back in 2010 that it was a concerted group effort when Mitch McConnell became Minority Leader in the Senate but we just found out that they planned to do this even before President Obama was even elected. 

4. Some judicial nominees have been waiting since 2011 and Richard Cordray  was finally accepted after a 2 year wait to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, you know that new bureau that the GOP hated and didn’t want to even exist….

5. Of course, when and if a Republican President is elected Republicans (if they have a simple majority vote will also be able to use this rule to their advantage…..I’m willing to risk it if it means we can move forward.

6. ht Doug J over at Balloon-Juice 

7. Here’s the link 

8. No link to this filth in the text of my post but if you really want to read about it, here 

What is an apology anyway?

60 Minutes, a once respectable investigative TV news show, has “jumped the shark” by airing a story about Benghazi based on the word of a lying liar.  They apologized for using the guy for the story and admitted they made a mistake. They didn’t retract the whole story in spite of the fact that the ENTIRE segment and the supposed controversy that makes the story newsworthy is no longer based in fact.  In other words, it’s a non-story.  Just  as liberal bloggers and the liberal press have been saying all frigging along.  If you want a laugh, you can see Jon Stewart skewer the 60 minutes “apology”.

The other aspect of this matter is that South Carolina’s long suffering drama queen of the Senate, Lyndsey Graham, is blocking the President’s nominations because he believes the Benghazi controversy is real.  In fact he used this 60 Minute story as his reason to block a vote on the nominees even AFTER the main and only witness was found to be lying.

This is how the right wins.  They create nontroversies that they push and push and push on the Internet until they make enough noise to catch the attention of the mainstream media, who then turns around and amplifies the story without first passing it through any real journalistic investigation, and then the average American becomes aware of the nontroversy and tunes into TV news.  Any corrections that come after the fact, do not and never will have the same effect (see 24 hour rule definition below) as the original story.  Politicians latch onto the nontroversy as a political tool and use that as cover for their real purpose, which is to ensure that government doesn’t work (particularly government run by a Black Islamic Soshulist Usurper).  This in turn provides support to one of the pillars of their belief system that government is part of the problem and never part of the solution.  Americans believe the nontroversy and they lose faith in government.  The average American doesn’t have the time, the training and/or the inclination to research these stories on their own. They totally depend on The Fourth Estate and that dependency, which used to make us strong, is now weakening us.  Not because the concept is faulty but because The Fourth Estate is not doing its job.  This is how they win and the rest of us lose.   As I’ve said many times before…shitty journalism and the Right’s ongoing attempts to sabotage government functioning will kill this country in the end.

_________________________

*From Bob Cesca over at The Daily Banter:  “The 24 Hour Rule: 1) A wild claim is made via a news article, most often The Guardian, about the U.S. government or related entities. 2) The article sparks wild fits of outrage. 3) Then, within 24 hours, a mitigating detail is added, undermining or totally debunking one or more of the central claims contained with the article. Related quote: “A lie can travel half-way around the world before the truth gets its pants on.””