Cash or Charge

The Donald Gets An Endorsement!

Donald Trump has received his first official endorsement.

Sarah Palin endorses Trump for president

Whew...thank goodness...I was worried he wouldn't get any endorsements:)

Another Man-Made Katrina, Courtesy of a Republican Governor

During the 2012 election campaign Republican hit men produced a video about how the United States would fare under Obama, and how it would look in 2016. It depicted America as a dystopian wasteland where no one had jobs, which were destroyed by Obamacare and environmental regulation.

Of course, that didn't happen. The economy has been steadily adding jobs, despite dire predictions that increased access to health care would trash the economy. The stock market has been flat, but that's mostly due to plummeting oil prices, which is mostly due to reduced Chinese demand and overproduction by greedy oil barons who were too blind to foresee that their mad rush to frack every damned hole in the ground till it bled crude would lead to excess supply, bankrupt themselves.

On the other hand, we have some indications of what would have happened if Mitt Romney had been elected president and carried through on Republican promises to slash environmental and clean water regulations. Because such an experiment was carried out by a Republican governor in Michigan in 2013.

Back then Flint, Michigan was going broke. It was in such bad financial shape that the state took over and Governor Rick Snyder appointed Michael Brown as Emergency Manager to run the city. To save a hundred bucks a day, the water supply was switched from Detroit's system (which gets water from from Lake Huron), to the Flint River. The water from the river was four times more corrosive, and Snyder's Department of Environmental Quality did not take measures to mitigate the corrosion.

Immediately the people of Flint complained that the water smelled and tasted terrible. It was brown and disgusting. Flint's mayor, Brown and Gov Snyder insisted there was nothing wrong with the water.

Further testing showed that the acidic river water was eating away at lead pipes in the city's water system, increasing lead levels in the water. Lead and other heavy metals are highly toxic, and causes permanent brain damage in children. For months the governor denied the evidence, stonewalling long after it was obvious children in Flint were suffering mental retardation from lead in the water.
Last week Snyder finally admitted that he had poisoned Flint's water. He asked President Obama to declare a federal disaster, begging the federal government to bail him out.

The damage Snyder's penny-pinching caused to the Flint water system will cost $5 billion to repair.

For years now the Republican Party has been calling for eliminating most of the EPA's clean water and clean air regulations. They describe these regulations as job killers. Some GOP presidential candidates have called for the EPA to be abolished completely.

Some of these "job-killing" regulations that the EPA put in place include the ban on lead paint and leaded gasoline. These sources of lead in the environment were more insidious that Flint's toxic water, because you can't see or taste the lead in the air.

Other regulations Republicans want to eliminate require coal power plants to reduce emissions of heavy metals like lead and mercury, as well as sulfur dioxide and CO2, which cause acid rain (killing forests and fish) and climate change.

There have been many calls for Snyder to resign. In an interview Snyder admitted that the Flint water debacle was his Katrina.

Republicans claim to be pro-life, but every time there's a choice between the health and welfare of living, breathing human beings, and the profits of the oil, gas and coal industries, Republicans side with King Coal and the oil barons.

The EPA isn't entirely blameless in this. An EPA official learned about the high lead levels in February, 2015, but it wasn't announced to the public immediately. Was EPA waiting for further testing to confirm the finding, afraid of causing public panic before they were sure? Or did they want to cover their asses because of Republican criticism of their entire clean water program?

What this episode shows is that -- far from the Republican assertion that the EPA is overstepping its bounds -- the EPA isn't acting aggressively enough protect the American public from the hazards of tainted air and water.

The Republican Lack of Foreign Policy Savvy

Iran released five American prisoners over the weekend. This was the result of years of negotiations, conducted mostly by John Kerry, but made possible by the nuclear deal that finally reached the final "implementation" stage.

True to form, Republican candidates for president proved they have no talent for foreign policy. Marco Rubio said it set a "dangerous precedent," and put Ronald Reagan forth as an example of how to negotiate for hostages. Ted Cruz said we released nuclear terrorists. At his most ridiculous, Donald Trump claimed credit for the release, implying that miraculous things just spontaneously happen every time he opens his yap.

The release of the prisoners on implementation day was predictable. The Iranians like to link releases to significant dates. After they took US embassy personnel hostage in 1979, they released them on the day Ronald Reagan was inaugurated in 1981.

It's not clear what Rubio was talking about when he used Reagan as an example. If Rubio was saying that Reagan negotiated with the Iranians before he was inaugurated, then Rubio was admitting that the rumors are true about Reagan's future CIA director cutting a deal with the Iranians to delay releasing the hostages until after the 1980 presidential election was over and Reagan was president (the October Surprise). This theory contends that Reagan rewarded Iran for the hostage release by selling Iran hundreds of missiles in 1985, during the Iran-Iraq war.

Or was Rubio referring to Reagan's negotiations for the release of hostages in Lebanon?

[U]nder the Reagan administration, White House officials later tried to arrange the sale of arms to Iran in the hope of winning the release of U.S. hostages in Lebanon. The profits from the sales were then illegally diverted to the Contra rebels fighting to overthrow the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Discovery of the arms-for-hostages deal led to several congressional investigations. Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North was convicted, but his sentence was overturned on appeal. Reagan publicly denied knowing about the operation by his staff. 

Reagan repeatedly negotiated with terrorists, often with the assistance of Israel, the darling of the Republicans in all things terrorist. Yet Israel has performed dozens of prisoner swaps with Hezbollah and Hamas over the years, even giving up prisoners accused of terrorism in exchange for the corpses of Israeli soldiers.

Cruz says that the prisoners released to Iran in exchange for the American were "nuclear terrorists." The fact is that they were charged with violating economic sanctions against Iran. Those sanctions have now been dropped, in exchange for Iran turning over 98% of its nuclear material and destroying a huge number of centrifuges used to refine uranium.

Since those sanctions have been dropped, the Iranians being held were accused of activities that are not illegal now. Does it make any sense for our government to waste money prosecuting something is no longer a crime?

Also, the men Iran took prisoner were well aware of the danger they faced visiting Iran. All are of Iranian extraction. They all knew Iran has no freedom of the press or of religion, and has equated journalism with espionage for decades. While these men seem like innocent victims and pawns to most Americans, they knew going in that the Iranian government perceives their activities to be dangerous and subversive. But they accepted the risk because they believed in what they were doing.

Trump's self-congratulations for the hostage release are absolutely preposterous. He looks like a two-year-old pointing into a potty chair, proudly crowing, "I made a poo-poo!"

It's not just the Republican presidential candidates who are clueless. The Republican Party as a whole condemned the president when the Iran deal was made months ago and Jason Rezaian wasn't released. To anyone familiar with the way the Iranians work, it was clear that the journalists were being held as bargaining chips -- an extra incentive to the United States, to be cashed in when we made good on our part of the nuclear deal.


The behavior of the Republican Party indicates that they are either completely ignorant of foreign relations, or in their thirst for partisan advantage they don't give a damn about hurting the interests of the United States and its citizens.

Either way, they've shown yet again that they're not competent to run the country.

Still Dreaming...

Every year, I put up a post on Dr. King's day about how far we have come in terms of civil rights. This year, I honestly can't do that. In the last year, we had a racially motivated act of violence that belonged in the 1930s not 2015. We had the front runner for the GOP nomination call for an ethnic group to be banned from entering the country.

And we had the stark reality of a deeply biased criminal justice system that continues to disproportionally target young, black males. Dr. King's mission is never more needed than it is today.

One of the biggest impediments we have right now is that we seem to have trouble admitting that there still is a problem. There are many people in this country (and, yes, most of them are conservatives) who think any or all of the following:

1. Blacks play the victim too much.
2. Racism is a thing of the past.
3. Race baiting occurs more often than racism itself.
4. Our criminal justice system isn't racist. Blacks just commit more crimes.
5. Black Lives Matter folks are criminals and probably terrorists.

All of this BS has one chief theme: A DODGE OF RESPONSIBILITY.  Synonymous with the age group (adolescents) they so often behave like, people who continue to have this view of the world don't have the balls to own society's problems, especially this ever present and ongoing one. Perhaps the biggest challenge we have today is destroying every one of the myths listed above. Certainly, it won't be easy. We know from all of the various neurological studies out there that people let emotion drive reason and are often not rational.

If Dr, King were alive today, he would be marshaling his forces and directing them in efforts similar to Black Lives Matter. In fact, I think he would have been one of the main people sitting in protest on I-94 in Minneapolis. Even in the age of social media, peaceful, civil disobedience still has an enormous impact.

He would also argue against the passivity that the digital age has created. Social media can be a powerful tool in support of spreading one's message. But it also can be a distraction or worse. Dr. King once said

We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

As we remember Dr, King's legacy today in 2016, these are the words we need to embrace.

A Sharp Rise

Take a look at the mass shootings in this country over the last 50 years.

When the Gun Cult flaps their yaps about decrease gun violence, the above numbers show just how fucking tone deaf they are. No other country in the civilized world has problems like this.

We have these problems because domestic terrorists are holding our country hostage. If you support looser gun laws, you are offering aid and comfort to the enemies of national security. Gitmo is getting mighty empty these days and, considering we can't seem to close it, perhaps we should start putting some people in it who represent more of a threat than ISIL or Al Qaeda.

How about the gun bloggers first? :)

Memo To Next President: Tougher Gun Laws

With the United States now accounting for 82 percent of all gun deaths among 23 high income countries, I was please to note that a new Reuters poll regarding gun safety had this to say.

Sixty-three percent of Americans overall said they would like to see the next president push for stricter gun laws.

Even better...

Respondents from both parties support more research into the causes of gun violence, the poll showed. Nearly 80 percent of Democrats and 66 percent of Republicans said they would support the next president, who takes office next January after the Nov. 8 election, pushing for more research.

Even Republicans are shifting...

Republicans are split on efforts to tighten gun control more broadly. Forty-four percent of those polled said the next president should work to tighten federal gun control laws, while 49 percent were opposed.

44 percent? Wow! I had no idea the number was that high. This is fantastic news and gives me a great deal of hope!!

How The Clown Car Will Doom Republicans

Most of the US has laughed at the clown car that is the GOP primary field. How can anyone keep track of all the candidates? It has whittled down a little bit since the campaign season started but there are still 12 candidates running for the GOP nomination.

Donald Trump has been the consistent leader in the field much to the chagrin of many conservatives. A big reason for this is the conservative base is filled with adolescents who love Trump's now daily tantrums. Yet, as James Pindell of the Boston Globe notes, the reason for that is very simple.

There are too many fucking people running for the GOP nomination.

There are at least four candidates that are splitting up the "establishment" vote that would likely be ahead of Trump if it was only one candidate. Many thought that having a big field was great. It's always good to have more people to choose from, right?

Probably not:)

The NRA Rules!!!

The Greatest Response Ever

I've never been a fan of the "response" to the president after his SOTU...even when it was my party that did it. But Nikki Haley's speech last night in response to President Obama's final state of the union address was fucking fantastic.



What should be the future of the Republican party....

Victims of Background Checks

Emotional Wayne LaPierre Honors Victims Of Background Checks

“Because of our nation’s senseless gun control laws, this poor man with a known history of domestic violence was unable to procure an assault-style weapon, despite his desperate wishes to own and operate such a weapon,” said the visibly distraught lobbyist while gesturing towards a framed portrait of a middle-aged man, one of dozens of photos of victims displayed around the conference room.

Farewell, Starman...

Out of the Mouths of Babes

Aw, Maa...

For a long time I advanced the theory that the Republican Party wasn't a real party, but a coalition of special interest groups. It included the money-bag bankers and CEOs, anti-abortion evangelicals, gun nuts and racists. The wealthy Republicans didn't give a damn about abortion, guns or race. The anti-abortion activists didn't give a damn about tax policy, guns or race. The gun nuts didn't give a damn about business, abortion or race. And the racists didn't give a damn about anything. Yes, there was some crossover between the groups (especially the last two), but each group didn't care what the other groups did as long as each one got their hot button pressed.

That would work as long as these interests didn't come into conflict. But after the Great Recession, the fault lines in the Republican Party really started to show. The Tea Party was formed in response to the pain that the recession caused average white middle-aged Americans (AWMAAs), who were now losing their jobs left and right.

The policies that big business advanced had finally caused average white middle-aged Americans a lot of pain. Big business had always wanted free trade and lax immigration policies so they could keep labor costs down. For decades, businesses have been moved jobs overseas, mainly to Asia, and many that stayed in the US relocated to the South, where antipathy to labor unions further depressed wages of AWMAAs.

At this point many people fear the Republican Party is about to self-destruct:

The strains on Republicanism are driven home by scenes like the 1,500 people who waited two hours in 10-degree weather on Tuesday night to see Mr. Trump campaign in Claremont, N.H. And the 700 who jammed the student center of an Iowa Christian college the same evening to hear Mr. Cruz. These crowds were full of lunch-bucket conservatives who expressed frustration with the Republican gentry.

“The Republican Party has never done anything for the working man like me, even though we’ve voted Republican for years,” said Leo Martin, a 62-year-old machinist from Newport, N.H., who attended Mr. Trump’s Claremont rally. “This election is the first in my life where we can change what it means to be a Republican.”

The economic problems AWMAAs face are the same ones that their ancestors faced back in 1890s, the Roaring Twenties and the Depression, which were caused by corporate robber barons, income inequality, and economic malfeasance by the banking world.

These problems precipitated the formation of labor unions in the first half of the 20th century and the creation of a national social safety net in Social Security and Medicare. These paved the way to one of the most prosperous times in history: America in 1950s and '60s.

But starting in the late 1970s a lot of those advances were turned back. Big business, helped by well-intentioned Democrats like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, pushed the deregulation of various industries (trucking and airlines) and trade agreements (NAFTA), and Reagan waged all-out war on labor unions. AWMAAs started to lose their jobs to the Japanese, then the Mexicans, then the Chinese, then the Indians.

Some of these job losses were inevitable because of globalization. But American manufacturers took special glee in destroying unions and sending jobs overseas to cut costs. Businesses that couldn't export jobs looked to hiring foreigners who would accept lower wages, especially in the tech sector.

AWMAAs are now complaining that the Republican Party hasn't done anything for them. What they're really saying is that the Republican Party is an oligarchy run by CEOs, bankers and casino moguls who think the American public exists only to be milked for money.

Yet who do these angry AWMAAs think represents them? Donald Trump: a wealthy, money-grubbing casino mogul and real estate tycoon who got millions of dollars from his daddy. Exactly the kind of guy who caused their problems in the first place.

Wealthy elites like Trump and Ted Cruz (whose wife Heidi is one of the Wall Street bankers the Tea Party loves to hate) are pulling the same old tired bait and switch game wealthy fat cats always play. "Those rapists from Mexico and those terrorists from ISIS are the source of all your problems. Vote for me and I'll make you safe and get you a job."

Trump and Cruz are turning attention away from the real source of AWMAAs' problems -- rising income inequality -- and are goading AWMAAs into a jihad against immigrants. Trump is using poor immigrants as the scapegoats for the problems caused by wealthy elites like Trump. I'd use the Hitler/Jews analogy, but that's passe these days.

AWMAAs are mad because they feel they have no power and no say in the political process or in the economic discussion. Donald Trump, using his experience on reality TV, recognized this and is riling people up by mouthing their frustration.

Republicans always like to say that prosperity won't come from taking something from one person and give it to another. When they say this they usually mean taxing the rich won't help AWMAAs.

If that's the case, then taking jobs like picking strawberries and cleaning hotel rooms away from poor immigrants really won't help AWMAAs, who don't want those jobs in the first place.

Donald Trump is just a reality TV huckster. He doesn't represent anyone's interests but his own. Putting him in the White House will only exacerbate income inequality and make the lives of AWMAAs worse.

Because, once we kick out all the immigrants, who's going to pick the strawberries and clean the hotel rooms for slave wages?

Aw, maa... I don't want to clean that room.

Bigotry, Anger, Hate, Fear

As I have been saying for years, a political party filled with anger, hate, bigotry and fear.

Acting Out, Demanding Attention, Rejecting Curbs On Desires

The best summation of the Gun Cult I have seen thus far...and, honestly, conservatives in general...

Town Hall Frustrations

My initial thoughts on the president's town hall on gun violence are ones of frustration. While I am pleased that the issue is getting more attention and it appears that it's going to be a center piece to the 2016 presidential campaign, there are two core points that are not being addressed.

The first is illustrated in Taya Kyle's portion of this video. As Chris Mooney noted in his book "The Republican Brain," people let emotion drive their reasoning process and this was never more true than with the gun issue. I was hoping that Ms. Kyle would have learned the lesson that her husband and Nancy Lanza did not learn and that is that the gun culture creates a myopia. Neither Mr. Kyle nor Ms. Lanza used reason in their judgement regarding gun safety and allowed mentally ill people to operate firearms. The ideology of the gun rights activist (one devoid of reason and more rooted in paranoia and chest thumping emotion) is a chief cause of mass shootings and gun violence in this country.

Instead, Ms. Kyle spoke of needing a gun for protection and spoke of the hope of declining gun violence. The former is, of course, ridiculous as has been proven time and again by study after study. If you own a gun, you are more likely to kill/injure yourself or a loved one than protect yourself or a loved one. Believing the latter is, again, an emotional response driven by some sort of need for empowerment. The latter I found to be incredibly insulting to the families of the now weekly victims of mass shooting. How can anyone say it's getting better? This is especially befuddling behavior of someone who lost their own loved one to the myopia of gun rights ideology.

I think the president knows this because he's obviously an intelligent man. I get that saying something like this would be a bad PR move but it is the truth and we have to face the fact that this ideology is a threat to our national security.

My second frustration is that the NRA and other gun rights supporters are essentially getting what they want here: enforcement of current laws. Despite their faux protestations, they have successfully shifted the argument so far to the right, that "compromise" is something they've actually supported for years. They've been employing a political tactic that needs to be countered immediately.

Instead of allowing them to set the table with talk of totalitarian governments and dystopic futures (see: appeal to fear), gun safety advocates like the president should be talking about mandatory, minimum training, liability insurance, registration, and even altering the 2nd amendment so that only people who want to devote a considerable portion of their lives to community protection own firearms. These things may seem like a pipe dream now but gun safety advocates need to cease starting from a point of capitulation.

It's clear that the gun issue is going to have ongoing prevalence. I only wish that it wasn't due to the regularity of gun violence and our inability to accept what we need to do to solve the problem.

Here is the full town hall...

The Porn Theory of Guns

Conservatives have long rampaged against pornography, claiming that it causes "unnatural" urges in those who view it, warps young minds and forces them to commit unspeakable acts. The Duggar family claims sexual predator Josh Duggar was a porn addict, and porn caused him to molest his sisters and have an affair. In the minds of conservatives, it's not the suffocating and repressive conservative attitude that made sex a totally seductive taboo that caused Josh Duggar to obsess about it; it was porn.

Conservatives generally subscribe to the video game theory of mass shootings. In their minds, kids who play violent first-person-shooter video games are training to be mass murderers. They also claim that watching violent movies and TV shows are creating killers in droves. Despite the fact that the violence in most video games and movies is very unrealistic.

If that's the case, then simply owning a gun predisposes a person to committing gun violence. Gun owners regularly practice shooting targets with human figures depicted on them. They constantly think about killing people with guns. A person who buys a gun has already decided that they will kill someone. Many people say they feel a rush of power when they handle guns; some wax rhapsodic about how it feels to cut loose with a machine gun, spraying bullets across a target. (Watch most any episode of Mythbusters to watch the joyous fascination some people have with shooting up the scenery. Are endorphins being released in the brains of these people, in the same way that drugs release endorphins?)

One cannot deny that there's a connection between having a gun and shooting someone with it: no gunless person has ever shot someone. People are shot by people with guns 100% of the time. There's no question that having a gun makes you much more likely to shoot someone. The question is, does having a gun make a person more likely to want to shoot someone?

It certainly increases a person's bravado, if what people say on social media is any indication. How many times have you seen people respond to insults or threats on Twitter with something to the effect of, "Oh yeah? Say that to my face when I've got my .45" or "I'm not afraid of him, I'm a Second Amendment guy."

The statistics indicate it's likely the mere presence of guns increases the number of shootings, as was demonstrated when Australia passed stringent gun laws and the number of gun deaths plummeted. Corroborating data also comes from the United States:

Republican presidential candidates should look at the natural experiment that occurred when Missouri eased restrictions on buying handguns. The result was a 25 percent rise in the firearm homicide rate, according to a study in the Journal of Urban Health.

In contrast, Connecticut tightened regulations on buying handguns, and gun homicides there fell by 40 percent, according to the American Journal of Public Health.

This is something that scientists could research. Statistical studies could be first and easiest, looking into whether people who own guns commit more non-gun acts of aggression (though one could argue that this would merely prove that people who want guns are more violent in the first place). Behavioral studies could create social experiments to measure whether possession of gun increases aggression. Functional MRI brain scans could see whether guns activate the parts of the brain associated with aggression. Blood samples could be take from people who handle guns to test whether hormone levels associated with aggression have increased.

Many conservatives have long demanded we throw out the First Amendment and ban certain movies, video games and porn because they rot people's minds or induce them violence. If guns have the same effect, will they want to ban them too?

Nah. That's why they passed a law banning government research on guns. Because they already know what the data will show.

Wholesale Defeat

Looks like EJ Dionne is echoing yours truly.

Bullies are intimidating until someone calls their bluff. By ruling out any reasonable steps toward containing the killing in our nation and by offering ever more preposterous arguments, the gun worshipers are setting themselves up for wholesale defeat. It will take time. 

But it will happen.

The best part about it is they don't see it yet...:)

Time To Arrest the NRA for Domestic Terrorism

Check out this image recently tweeted from the NRA.

Bullets next to elected officials...fantastic. I'd say it's way past time we started rounding up these fuckers and putting them in jail. Isn't Gitmo still open?