It's never been very clear what BO actually knows when he is off a teleprompter, but he is certainly convinced that the rest of the country's intelligence level would make "The Jerk" look like a genius in comparison.
Oh, yes, there are ALL SORTS of good reasons why BO voting for a filibuster as a Senator was not "divisive", "partisan", "obstructionist", etc. He just couldn't come up when asked without a teleprompter feed!
Hey, it was "THE PARTY (D)" doing the filibuster! Those are the GOOD GUYS!
But this is the Supreme Court. And it’s going to get some attention. And we have to ask ourselves as a society a fundamental question: Are we able to still make this democracy work the way it’s supposed to, the way our Founders envisioned it? And I would challenge anyone who purports to be adhering to the original intent of the Founders, anybody who believes in the Constitution, coming up with a plausible rationale as to why they would not even have a hearing for a nominee made in accordance with the Constitution by the President of the United States ,,,
Ah yes, Mr "Constitution"! Let the EPA make and enforce laws over the objections of congress, shove through healthcare "reform" as a "tax", decree your own immigration policy by executive order and use the IRS to attack the Tea Party. I'm sure I'm missing some -- besides, the BO Court itself treats the Constitution as used toilet paper already!
As the article says, this act is WAY past old! 'via Blog this'
Most of the thoughts in this column have been flitting through my head, the author saved me the time of trying to write them. Not sure if I would have come up with the "War Games" reference, I love it!
He suggests that the key to "not playing" is for all the Republicans to utter the following:
“We believe it is the obligation of the next president of the United States to nominate a successor to Justice Scalia. Such a dramatic shift in the balance of the court, so close to an election, should carry with it the voice of the people.”
Democrats are MUCH better than this, partially because the media helps them -- how often to do hear the exact same lines about "war on women", "income inequality" or "anti-science". At least in this battle we won't hear the old shibboleth about "balance on the court"!
Conservatives have a TERRIBLE tendency to be direct and truthful. These are of course VIRTUES in the real world, but they are awful disadvantages in politics. The idiotic Mitch McConnell statement about "not nominating" is a great example. True, helpful to the nation, and direct -- and politically disastrous!
In Springfield, Illinois, last week, President Obama commemorated the ninth anniversary of his bid for the White House. He admitted that one of his “few regrets” was his inability “to reduce the polarization and the meanness in our politics.”
I do feel that God REGULARLY gives BO GIGANTIC object lessons in potential humility and repentance -- call ISIS the "JV team" and they immediately take over huge sections of the mideast, say "red line" and they cross it right away and you have to get help from the adult in the room, Putin! Utter "we have ISIL contained" in the AM and that very afternoon (here) ISIS attacks in Paris!
Now this ... lie that your "regret" is "polarization and meanness" when you are the main instigator of it, clearly relish it, and a couple days later God calls home one of the greatest jurists in history who is kind, loving, brilliant, and loved by even the hard left winger Ruth Ginsburg! If BO actually wanted to reduce "polarization and meanness", as Jonah points out, it would be EASY!
Obama could prevent all this strife. He could say he will leave this appointment up to his successor. Or he could appoint a conservative during the Senate recess (Sen. Ted Cruz, anyone?) who would serve only until the end of the following session. That would preserve the power balance on the court for the time being.
Anyway, I think the Republicans need to go ahead and fake like they are going though the process -- hold hearings, say a lot of stuff about what kinds of issues this is going to be critical in -- presidential decrees on Climate Change, immigration, guns, and who knows what. Rulings on the forced funding of government unions, etc, etc.
Then of course have a big dramatic vote in "September" where the Republicans would have SOME fairly unusual level of control on the messaging, where the candidate is rejected -- with a lot of rememberance of of Bork.
But, it is unlikely that they can pull that off, and it is unlikely they can stick to message.
They don't play politics well, and they don't NOT play politics well. That is why the ONLY conservative approach is to REDUCE the size and intrusion of politics in all our lives, which is the principle the country was founded on.
Yes, Slick Willie -- only the prudish right wing sorts care about such prurient details,. Oh sure, she claims that her life was threatened, but nobody but "the vast right wing conspiracy" would even give such things the time of day!
Truth is stranger than fiction -- although Hillary certainly DOES do a LOT of fiction!
Here is Bill Murray in "Caddy Shack" showing us how we ought to respect "barking like a dog"
The cause of the subprime crisis was a Carter era program called "The Community Reinvestment Act" designed to give home loans to people that couldn't really qualify. What could go wrong with THAT? A bit more on that here ...
So Hillary the dog barks just as untruthfully as she talks, but what does one expect of a dog? If you can't stomach the whole tape (and it IS hard), the woofin is at the end!
Was there ever any doubt she was a REAL (linguistic definition) Bitch ?? !
Since we live under the rule of bureaucracy, reading the whole linked article is probably worth it, though it is longer than it needs to be.
Bottom line, in the machinations of BOcare, MNsure and Minnesota Care, the "asset test" for MNsure was taken away because there is none for BOcare and you are REQUIRED to purchase health insurance by law now.
But Minnesota failed to add a form to the tall stack of forms that lets you know that they are putting a lien on any assets you have for the cost of your "free insurance".
My Dad is in a nursing home for at least awhile -- got to sit through a discharge from one facility under Medicare and into another where a "supplemental" was involved. Stacks of papers, lots and lots of questions -- the wheels of government grind the lives and fortunes of us all, but they make sure they gather a lot of data while they do it.
Freedom has never been free -- and the cost of tyranny is still infinite.
We have no respect for even the dead -- be they babies torn from their mother's womb, or great jurists that come along only once ever few decades. Scalia was a mind and a spirit so far above the "average" that all those scurrying about braying nonsense about "replacing him" are cast in clear light as mental pygmies!
There is no "replacement" for Scalia! There wasn't for Reagan, for Churchill, for Einstein, or for other such giants. An infinite God gifts us with a few great men, and when they pass, we need to have a reasonable time to bless the gift and mourn the loss. We live in a fallen world that is temporal because it is fallen. Scalia understood that -- in his very soul. The most important thing that happens here is infinitely less important than anything that happens in the spiritual realm! I wrote a bit about Scalia here, and there is a link in that post to an excellent interview with him. One little quote from that interview ...
Isn’t it terribly frightening to believe in the Devil?
You’re looking at me as though I’m weird. My God! Are you so out of touch with most of America, most of which believes in the Devil? I mean, Jesus Christ believed in the Devil! It’s in the Gospels! You travel in circles that are so, so removed from mainstream America that you are appalled that anybody would believe in the Devil! Most of mankind has believed in the Devil, for all of history. Many more intelligent people than you or me have believed in the Devil.
I'm not sure that the interviewer was convinced that there were currently or certainly in the past, any people more intelligent than him. Maybe Einstein -- but that is probably just a sop to false humility. It is left wing dogma that "all are equal" -- removal of standards and hierarchy enables them to replace all the wonderful complex relationships of family, friendship, community, nation and religion with raw unmitigated power. A day listening to NPR is enough to convince anyone with a shred of faith in God left that the Devil is alive and well and having a field day!
Where do Republicans get such ham handed disgusting politicians as Mitch McConnell? Kentucky I guess. He needed to say something nice about Scalia, that was all. Let BO make the first move! Sure, I'd assume that he will nominate someone too far left to be a replacement that a Republican controlled Senate should accept. SUPER ... drag out the confirmation hearings and reject them in "August"! Then it WILL be too late!
I got to listen to a lot of NPR yesterday. When a nation has been destroyed it has no memory or attention span. I must have heard the "precedent" of Justice Kennedy being confirmed in an election year 20 times. I maybe heard the name Bork twice, but it wasn't connected with the Kennedy confirmation. The Democrats owned the Senate and they forced Reagan to accept a very moderate justice that is now a "swing vote" after rejecting Bork in one if not THE battle that soured politics in the US to it's current sorry state. I answered my own question -- we get guys like McConnell because we have made politics into the most dishonorable profession possible!
The nations memory goes as it is destroyed because memory becomes tragic and painful. When a Republican is making a nomination -- even when they are in control in the Senate, the media spends much time and ink on the extremely important issue of "balance in the court" and "no litmus tests" and the CRITICAL importance of "Stare Decisis" (precedent). For NPR and the NY Times, these STRONG principles are most holy when a Republican is making a nomination!
Yesterday it was made clear multiple times that BOTH Hillary and BS would demand that any nomination they made would absolutely vote to overturn Citizens United!
Well, we got no class, and we got no principles ! Perhaps we need to replace the old national anthem with this ... more appropriate to what we are now!
I used to love the Adam's cartoon strip, "Dilbert" when I worked at IBM. It was almost spooky how well he understood the typical mindless inanity of modern corporate life. He understood it because he was an engineer at AT&T and at least smart enough to make "Mensa" ... so maybe not a genius, but smart.
He opens with the following:
It isn’t unusual for members of the public to hate politicians. For example, lots of people hate President Obama. Some of that hatred is because of his policies, some is because of racism, and I assume there are a few other reasons. But I have never seen anyone who was literally afraid of him on a visceral level.
Trump, on the other hand, actually scares people. I have seen people’s bodies twist up and go into full panic at the thought of him being president. I’m talking about actual, literal, bodily fear, as if a monster is already in house and you don’t know where it is hiding. Even professional members of the media feel this fear.
And yet I feel none of that fear – not even a trace amount. To me, Trump looks like the safest candidate in the history of presidential elections, and I don’t even share his politics on a number of topics. So I have to ask myself why I have zero fear of Trump while so many others are in full panic mode. Should I be more afraid?
Adams never seems to "figure it out" in the column ... as an intelligent engineer, he is trying to be logical. Fear may have a logical basis, but it is only an emotion.
People that hated W or hate BO are not afraid that either of them would directly take them on and cut them down to size if they tried to heckle them. People DID fairly regularly scream things at W, and I'm not sure he ever took on a heckler.
If you hate Trump, unless you have a BIG ego and lots of skills, loud voice, etc, it is nearly certain that if you took your hatred up against him, he would chew you up and spit out out like used sunflower seeds! So they feel fear!
The other aspect I think is that Trump is an "unknown". I certainly was very concerned about what BO would do, and unfortunately those concerns proved to be largely founded -- BOcare, gigantic debt, disregard for the Constitution. loss of US stature around the world, terrible economy, and awful decrease in number of Americans working. I'm concerned about Trump, but policy wise, mostly because he is unknown.
I strongly dislike Trump because he is obnoxious, has no conservative credentials that I can identify, is more concerned about himself than anything else, and he coarsens an already nasty US political stage.
The column is a worthy read though -- Adams is not the only very intelligent person that I know that is excited about and backing Trump. I think their hopes are FAR too high, in a very similar way to the hopes that the Obama Zombies had in '08.
The linked column is unfortunately a very worthy read. I don't watch the debates, I read the analysis. As created and typically executed for the Republicans, they are made for TV spectacle, not reasoned exchange with ideas rather than egos at the center.
When a nation is destroyed, EVERYTHING gets destroyed -- especially if it is a nation founded on IDEAS. I'm sure the Trump supporters feel completely justified in the Star Wars "release your anger" approach to this election. Conservatives are human, so we ALL understand that feeling ... the problem is that is the DARK SIDE!
It's short, just read it, this is the closing.
On a day when an American lost a great patriot — a Supreme Court justice who defended the Constitution and upheld its vital principles until the very day that he died — it was particularly sad to see the hijacking of constitutional conservatism in a race that is quickly degenerating into a dangerous farce at the very time when the nation so desperately needs principled, courageous leadership. Dear candidates, if you can’t win, step aside. If you can win, step up. Otherwise, we are lost.
Suppose that headline might get some attention? It was 5 Law Enforcement Officers ... never mind.
There are about 21M black men in the US, with about half of them (49%) being aged < 34 ... so 10.5 million. If 5 of them had been shot it would be 5 out of 10.5 million.
There are something a bit less then a million police officers ... 900K is a common number. So the 5 officers shot is 5 out of a million (I'm being generous here). One doesn't have to be much of a statistician to arrive at "10x the problem".
Of course if the young black men were the headline, the outcry would defy imagination.
Yes, the link is from CNN, it **IS** being covered, but looking at both CNN and Fox this AM, it isn't visible on either of their front pages, nor is it available on my supposedly "popularity based" Google News clipping service.
However, there is another interesting aspect here, as there commonly is in "conservative media". True conservatives are very aware that reality is not ideologically based! There are MANY sides, one of which was covered in a great article over at NRO in 2014 that I happened to recall ..
Imagine if I were to tell you there is a large group of government employees, with generous salaries and ridiculously cushy retirement pensions covered by the taxpayer, who enjoy incredible job security and are rarely held accountable even for activities that would almost certainly earn the rest of us prison time. When there is proven misconduct, these government employees are merely reassigned and are rarely dismissed. The bill for any legal settlements concerning their errors? It, too, is covered by the taxpayers. Their unions are among the strongest in the country.
No, I’m not talking about public-school teachers. I’m talking about the police.
The article DOES point out the fact that many / most officers are excellent, and why conservatives have a knee jerk response to support them for good reason (order vs chaos), but gives ample food for thought.
The nation was founded by brilliant and COMPLEX men. Men that knew that living, leading and thinking in the real world required assimilation of many views and paradoxes and seeing to apply timeless principles to their ordering while even considering "the human element" ... emotion, intuition and perhaps revelation.
Nothing ... or at best (worst?), very little, is simple. Humility an important place to start. I also often find that an "opposite shift of perspective ... black vs white, democrat vs republican, female vs male, atheist vs christian, christian vs muslim ... can help to clear the fog of bias and ideology.
There is Bipartisan agreement that current America is a disaster. BS carefully avoids who is at fault, but he is absolutely clear on how bad it is. Hillary isn't clear on anything other than she is woman so should get the job via affirmative action, the same way BO did. Here is Charles on the subject ...
But the starting point of the bipartisan critique is the social, economic and geopolitical wreckage all around us. Bernie Sanders is careful never to blame President Obama directly, but his description of the America Obama leaves behind is devastating — a wasteland of stagnant wages, rising inequality, a sinking middle class, young people crushed by debt, the American Dream dying.
Take away the Brooklyn accent and the Larry David mannerisms and you would have thought you were listening to a Republican candidate. After all, who’s been in charge for the last seven years?
Who indeed -- if you listen to BO or the media, it is either W or the evil Rs in congress.
The added factor is the Obama effect, the depressed and anxious mood of a nation experiencing its worst economic recovery since World War II and watching its power and influence abroad decline amid a willed global retreat.
The result is a politics of high fantasy. Things can't get any worse, we hear, so why not shake things up to their foundation? Anyone who thinks things can't get any worse knows nothing. And risks everything.
I think the point Sir Charles misses is that for the vast majority of relatively non-political Americans, they can't IMAGINE how it could get worse. Since '10, when the R's took over congress, the media and BO have been in full throat demonizing them -- but they returned them to power in '12 and '14 ... in '14 with the biggest R majority in the house in 75 years.
Sure the press gives BO all the support it can, but the economy sucks, America is obviously losing on the world stage on a number of fronts, and BO's constant scolding only really resonates with the 20% core Democrat zombies.
So "magic" sells better than "scolding" ... and certainly better than "4 more years" (Hillary), or "Something like the congress you see in the presidency (Rubio).
My hope at this point is for Cruz who DOES have some real plans -- but BOTH the MSM and the Republican establishment hate him, and he isn't Trump!
Cruz vs Sanders would give America the most choice we have had in a long time -- but I'm starting to think it will be Trump / Sanders ... dueling sorcerers!
So she wore the same top to go speak to Goldman Sachs. Is this like her SELECTING a bunch of e-mails off her server, claiming that NONE contained anything secret, and then having like 40 show up as TOP SECRET?
Is this the criminal returning to the scene of the crime to get caught, or is the the addicted shoplifter that just wants to pull it off again for the thrill?
I'm assuming that she IS a woman and is actually a mother. Given that, having been around women and having lived with one for over 30 years, are we to believe she pays no attention to what she is wearing when she goes on a nationally televised debate? I mean, she keeps claiming that women HAVE to vote for her, and Madeleine Albright even claims they will "go to hell" if they don't support Hillary! Is not paying attention to what you are wearing something a woman does?
So that outfit looks like: a). Something done by Kim Jong's tailor that he refused to wear. b). Something worn by a low budget humanoid alien on Star Trek c). Stolen from Austin Powers "Goldmember" wardrobe.
Add to it that she wore it to Goldman Sachs, which gave her $640K, and doesn't it HAVE to mean something? I mean, if a woman pulls out an unusual outfit that you have only seen her in once, doesn't she ALWAYS have a message?
My view ... she is letting us know she is lesbian and "wears the pants".
Thirty-one percent of teachers also said that they include both the scientific consensus position — that global warming is human-caused — but then also a “natural causes” position that contradicts it, thus presenting “both sides,” in the study’s words.
I've covered before how our current school systems were engineered to create at the start of the 20th century using principles from guys like Taylor and Dewey to make "compliant workers and consumers" for the industrial manufacturing world.
The fact that such people operate best in totalitarian systems was just a bonus!
The linked article is not "in your face", but it makes it pretty clear that there needs to be a national top-down agenda for getting our "numbers" up to "where they need to be" on Climate Change.
The study also found that most teachers are unaware of the strength of the scientific consensus about the human causes of climate change. The survey asked them “what proportion of climate scientists think that global warming is caused mostly by human activities?” For middle school teachers, 30 percent chose the option “81 to 100%,” which the researchers identified as the correct answer. High school teachers were only a little better, at 45 percent.
The highlight is the big "tell" that we are dealing with totalitarian ideology. In teaching "science", polls of how many people believe whatever would have been SCIENTIFIC SACRILEGE even back when I was in school. We were far too close to the Nazi politicization of science and Lysenkoism in the USSR, PLUS, we were a country GOING TO THE MOON! Things like going to the Moon require REAL SCIENCE, not political ideology.
The "correct answer" was 81-100% ... but the REAL answer is closer to 40%! However, the REAL PROBLEM is that we are doing "Family Feud Science" ( Survey Says!) indoctrination.
Which brings us to:
Teachers who espoused conservative ideological beliefs about government’s role in people’s lives tended to be more likely to present an “on the one hand, on the other hand” version of the climate issue in class.
I'd love to see that percentage ... I'm guessing it wasn't very high!
The ideology which may not be named as "ideology" because it is the dominant one we are soaking in ("liberalism"), is actively working to stamp out any presentation of an alternate view. Meanwhile that which is strongly labeled as "ideology" is in the business of presenting facts and alternatives and allowing for a public to think and make up their own minds!
**IF** we were ever to return to being a nation of freemen, one of the highest priorities would be to demand and constantly monitor so that our schools turn out INDEPENDENT, reality-based, CRITICAL THINKING students rather than mindless totalitarian ideological automatons!
The left is all up in arms because Ted Cruz and his wife are Christians and that affects their world view. The BO spokesman response to some comments:
Thomas Jefferson envisioned a wall of separation between Church and State. Ted Cruz envisions that wall being torn down entirely. He’s not judging, he just thinks people who disagree are wrong and bad.
How many times have we listened to BO pontificate about how anyone questioning Climate Change, his give nukes to Iran deal, his "red line", his JV team, his "you can keep your healthcare ..." ... my fingers are tired ... were "wrong, bad, misguided, partisan, foolish, lying, racist, etc" ???
So the almighty BO stands up and judges everyone on the basis if his worshipful intellect or intestinal gas, that is a thing of beauty, but if anyone wants to use Judeao-Christian values that are thousands of years old and are the entire basis for Western civilization, THAT is somehow against a letter that Jefferson sent to a Baptist church!
At least they didn't try to claim it is in the Constitution, THAT would be RICH, considering that they have shredded that so bad it basically doesn't exist!
You may be thinking "Onion", but no, this is government reality.
A former Minnesota bar owner and manager are each being charged with a felony for running “Spotted Cow” beer out of Wisconsin and selling it at their restaurant, the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office announced Wednesday.
While there is humor to this story of beer-smuggling and a sense of state pride with New Glarus Brewery’s “Only in Wisconsin” sales stance, this is also a story of just how screwed up the alcohol wholesale market is. Since the repeal of prohibition most states have operated what is called a “Three-Tier Alcohol Distribution System.” Wisconsin is no different.
The REAL bottom line is "taxes and fees". The government makes A LOT of money from alcohol ... MN is #13 highest, WI is #40 ... bit of differential there!
I am a BIG believer in "States Rights" -- that one of the BIGGEST things our founders wanted to enable is the chance to have "50" (their number was less) separate laboratories of "what works and what doesn't" inside a very limited federal system.
SO ... I believe that states SHOULD be able to do different things. "Felony" sounds like wacko enforcement to me for CERTAIN ... make the punishment fit the crime. FINE them enough so it is cheaper for them to obey the law than not.
I believe states ought to have the right to regulate things like alcohol, drugs, commerce, etc in very different manners within their borders, and obviously, that means that there will be these kinds of issues. I consider that a reasonable price to pay to allow people to have choices beyond "leaving the country".
Oh, and BTW, you MIGHT look at that chart and assume liquor prices are cheaper in WI. You would not be wrong ... a case of Leinies runs like $13 a lot of places.
If you are not offended by the F word, and things that are "inappropriate" you might also check this out ... I'm embarrassed to find it funny, but it DOES have a good deal to say about WI. (you may want to enjoy it with a Brandy Old-Fashioned).
This is really big news in physics. Yet ANOTHER area that Einstein and his General Theory of Relativity have been proven right!
I like their little "story" that they introduce the detection with because unlike pseudo science like AGW, it puts this into context. Billions of years since the event, over 100 years in the making, false alarms, failures, big investments, and finally ...
Just over a billion years ago, many millions of galaxies from here, a pair of black holes collided. They had been circling each other for aeons, in a sort of mating dance, gathering pace with each orbit, hurtling closer and closer. By the time they were a few hundred miles apart, they were whipping around at nearly the speed of light, releasing great shudders of gravitational energy. Space and time became distorted, like water at a rolling boil. In the fraction of a second that it took for the black holes to finally merge, they radiated a hundred times more energy than all the stars in the universe combined. They formed a new black hole, sixty-two times as heavy as our sun and almost as wide across as the state of Maine. As it smoothed itself out, assuming the shape of a slightly flattened sphere, a few last quivers of energy escaped. Then space and time became silent again.
The waves rippled outward in every direction, weakening as they went. On Earth, dinosaurs arose, evolved, and went extinct. The waves kept going. About fifty thousand years ago, they entered our own Milky Way galaxy, just as Homo sapiens were beginning to replace our Neanderthal cousins as the planet’s dominant species of ape. A hundred years ago, Albert Einstein, one of the more advanced members of the species, predicted the waves’ existence, inspiring decades of speculation and fruitless searching. Twenty-two years ago, construction began on an enormous detector, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). Then, on September 14, 2015, at just before eleven in the morning, Central European Time, the waves reached Earth. Marco Drago, a thirty-two-year-old Italian postdoctoral student and a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, was the first person to notice them. He was sitting in front of his computer at the Albert Einstein Institute, in Hannover, Germany, viewing the LIGO data remotely. The waves appeared on his screen as a compressed squiggle, but the most exquisite ears in the universe, attuned to vibrations of less than a trillionth of an inch, would have heard what astronomers call a chirp—a faint whooping from low to high. This morning, in a press conference in Washington, D.C., the LIGO team announced that the signal constitutes the first direct observation of gravitational waves.
The biggest IMMEDIATE effect is just yet another confirmation of General Relativity as correct. The hope is that this is a new way of seeing the universe that we have now just barely established as "possible". Gravity waves are ripples in the actual fabric of the universe -- spacetime! All the other electromagnetic radiation -- light, radio, infrared, gamma, x-ray, etc travel through space. We now have a form of wave that might "illuminate" even dark matter.
We don't really know how gravity waves might be "used" -- but we now are pretty certain that they do exist! It MIGHT be that like telescopes, radio telescopes, etc gravity waves will in the future be one of the major ways that we observe the universe.
