Yet Another Conservative

I've received several requests to comment on the Steve Scalise story so I guess I might as well say something. I've been reluctant, for the most part, because honestly this is nothing new (yet another conservative has a race problem? Shocking...not). This is one of those stories that has a whole lot of "merry go round" ishness to it. Republican is discovered to have ties to racist organization...people are shocked...other Republicans screech about race baiting, deny to the point of silliness, and blame the liberals (like they do for everything else)...round and round we go.

Most Democrats, including myself, will tell you that they have a much longer history of racism than do the Republicans. That's because, up until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the conservatives of today were southern Democrats. They simply switched parties and became Republicans (see: Nixon's Southern Strategy.  So, it's really not surprising that Scalise spoke at a meeting of neo-Nazis. Nor is it surprising that Louisiana Democrats are rallying to Scalise. If I were him, I'd tell anyone who is a southern Democrat to shut the fuck up.

The Daily Beast has an interesting piece on the folks who courted Scalise to come and speak at their little meeting. Check out this photo of their leaders...

Looks like some commenters from Kevin Baker's blog:)

Anyway, it's my view that Scalise doesn't really have much to worry about. His supporters and, indeed, a big chunk of the GOP base (especially in the South) would actually be more in favor of him speaking at a meeting like this. That's because many of them are dreaming of the South rising again and taking back what is rightfully their's.

Exactly what that is, I've never been able to quite figure out.

A Big Test For The Minimum Wage

This year, 21 states will be raising the minimum wage so we will finally get a broad look at how this action affects economies. My hope is that the following question will not be answered: will the rise in low-paid workers' salaries and their increase in spending in the economy (thus creating more jobs) outweigh any costs in slower job creation?

My answer is YES

Kicking Off The New Year With Positivity

I'd like to kick off the new year with some positivity. Check this out.

The rate of violent crimes in the United States has been cut in half during the past 20 years. That’s according to statistics released in November by the FBI. What surprises some criminologists is that the decline has persisted against the backdrop of two other trends long believed to lead to an increase in crime: The US prison population is dropping and the number of young adults, who are considered more likely to commit a crime, has risen.

But why is this happening?

Criminologists say the latest gains against violent crime appear rooted especially in improved law enforcement, rather than a drop in the number of teenagers and 20-somethings. The “community policing” movement has brought beat cops into closer ties with the neighborhoods they serve, for one thing, and a data-driven focus on crime “hotspots” has led to successful prevention efforts in high-risk areas.

Isn't this exactly how the United States is supposed to work? I find it very interesting that this flies in the face of what I see in the mainstream media...

Obama Can't Even Do That Right

We Need a New Word

The English language needs a new word. A word that describes an incident that is tragic and terrible, yet is completely predictable and preventable, the inevitable outcome of carelessness, stupidity, hubris and pride.

This word would be used to describe what happened in Idaho when a 29-year-old mother visited a Wal-Mart in Idaho. Her two-year-old pulled her handgun out of her purse and shot her dead.

We need this new word to replace the phrase "tragic accident" that everyone uses in these cases, to wit:

"It appears to be a pretty tragic accident," [sheriff's spokesman Stu] Miller said.

The victim's father-in-law, Terry Rutledge, told The Associated Press that Veronica Rutledge "was a beautiful, young, loving mother."

"She was not the least bit irresponsible," Terry Rutledge said. "She was taken much too soon."

What sheer nonsense. Of course she was irresponsible. She recklessly left a loaded handgun within the reach of a two-year-old, thinking a zipper would stop a child. She might as well have given the kid a burning kerosene lamp to play with, or a pit viper.

The grieving father-in-law is a victim of the foolish guns-everywhere-all-the-time mindset that results in the pointless deaths and shootings of thousands of Americans every year. To these people it's inconceivable that a two-year-old child would be able to master the intricacies of a zipper and a trigger.

But why does a woman wrangling four children at a Wal-Mart in Idaho think she needs to pack a pistol in her purse? Are there gangs of white supremacists roving the countryside? Do grizzly bears hang out in the Wal-Mart parking lot? It's not like she was going to make a drug deal in Leroy Brown's south side of Chicago.

What imminent threat was she defending herself from in Idaho? Practically speaking, if a mugger did sneak up on her in front of the Wal-Mart, did she seriously think that she could fish the gun out of a zipped compartment of a purse -- while holding a two-year-old, herding three other kiddies and being distracted by their incessant babble -- fast enough to deter him?

A tragedy is an avalanche inundating a sleeping hamlet. A tsunami wiping out an entire island. An earthquake devastating a city. Getting shot by a toddler isn't a tragedy, it's idiocy. If the kid had shot another shopper instead of the mother, by all rights she should have been charged with involuntary manslaughter and child endangerment. There's a sort of rough justice that she -- instead of her child or a completely innocent bystander -- died.

Every year hundreds of Americans get shot by a two-year-old, or a five-year-old with his birthday .22, or a nine-year-old with an Uzi, or a dropped pistol in the men's room, or by a gun jostled in purse, or a gun falling out of a waistband.

These aren't tragic accidents: they are the entirely foreseeable and preventable consequences of people who are not competent to carry or use firearms succumbing to paranoia and fear promulgated by the gun industry. These people have been brainwashed into thinking that their lives are in imminent danger unless they have the ability to shoot anyone they don't like the looks of.

It's terribly sad that this young mother died. It's even sadder is that hundreds more men and women and children will be shot next year in almost exactly the same way, and no one is going to do a damned thing about it.

And that's a real tragedy.

Big Things President Obama Did in 2014

Despite having to deal with the adolescents in Congress, the president accomplished some big things in 2014. Among them...

• Sweeping changes to immigration enforcement
• Actual progress on climate change 
• Remaking the federal courts for a generation 
• Beginning to transform U.S. relationships with Iran and Cuba 
• Greater protections for federal contractors

Hmm...must be why his approval ratings are on the rise...actually doing something and solving problems as opposed to stomping your feet and foaming at the mouth about wacky, ideological nonsense seems to be a better path.

Will the new Congress (controlled entirely by the GOP) follow suit?

War Crimes?

Protected!

My liberal friends like to complain an awful lot about the "raping of the land" and how government is ineffective in protecting it. Yet this recent piece from CSM states otherwise.

Since 2012, more than half a million square miles of land have come under protection. Now more than 15 percent of terrestrial and inland water areas around the globe are under protection, toward a United Nations target of 17 percent by 2020, according to a recent report by the UN Environment Program. 

I'd say that's pretty impressive. Why are they complaining so much?

Good Words

The Police Aren’t Under Attack. Institutionalized Racism Is.

Amen

All That Kenyan Socialism

White People Aren't That Crazy Anymore

I've always loved Chris Rock. I think he is every bit a comedic genius as Jerry Seinfeld or Bob Hope. The intelligence in his wit is a big reason why I think this and a recent interview in New York magazine illustrates this quite clearly.

“Here’s the thing,” Rock said. “When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it’s all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they’re not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before.” 

“To say Obama is progress is saying that he’s the first black person that is qualified to be president,” he continued. “That’s not black progress — that’s white progress. There’s been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years.”

“You know, my kids are smart, educated, beautiful, polite children,” Rock said. “There have been smart, educated, beautiful, polite black children for hundreds of years. The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced. Let’s hope America keeps producing nicer white people.”

“We treat racism in this country like it’s a style that America went through,” Rock said. “Like flared legs and lava lamps – ‘Oh, that crazy thing we did.’ We were hanging black people. We treat it like a fad instead of a disease that eradicates millions of people. You’ve got to get it at a lab, and study it, and see its origins, and see what it’s immune to and what breaks it down.”

Yep. Pretty much.

Mitch Didn't Get His Christmas Wish

Christmas Eve Tradition

Pop Quiz: Who Kills More Cops?

Boy, people sure do have short memories.

Remember this past June, when man and a woman entered a Las Vegas pizza joint and gunned down two cops having lunch? The shooters then went into a Walmart, killed another person and then committed suicide.

Remember this past September, when Eric Frein, a white, right-wing, anti-government survivalist, killed one Pennsylvania state trooper and wounded another?

Remember when an anti-tax whack job crashed a plane into an IRS building in his own mini-9/11 and killed a government employee a few years ago?

In 2010 Time reported on the rise of right-wing militias, some of whose members have plotted killings against entire police departments, notably in Michigan, Minnesota and Alaska. In most of these case the plotters were acquitted on the conspiracy charges, apparently because when white guys plan cop killings it's free speech, but when blacks and Muslims do it, it's terrorism.

The Anti-Defamation League has been tracking who's been shooting cops, and it turns out that right-wing nut jobs -- white supremacists and anti-government extremists -- have committed 90% of the ideologically motivated cop killings from 2009-2013.

But when people say that Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the rest of the right-wing hate machine incite this kind of violence against the police and the government, they look shocked, I tell you shocked, that anyone could possibly think what they've said might have incited anyone to violence, even when they mention "Second Amendment solutions" in the same sentence.

In the conservative mindset, whenever a black man, or a Muslim, or some other member of a minority does something awful, it's automatically a grand conspiracy, and all other members of that minority must be involved and must be responsible.

But when a right-wing conservative does exactly the same thing, it's because he's a kook, an aberration, or mentally ill. And then they start to rationalize it: you can't really hold that person responsible, they say, because of the terrible injustices that the Kenyan socialist communist dictatorship of the Obama administration has forced them to rebel against. They're just patriots watering the tree of freedom with the blood of their oppressors.

There's no excuse for the killing of two cops in New York by a black man. There's no excuse for the killing of two cops in Las Vegas by a white man and woman. There's no excuse for the killing of Eric Garner by cops in New York.

These acts were committed by the people who did the killing. Not the demonstrators. Not Fox News.

In 2012 Wade Michael Page killed six people at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin. He had mistaken them for Muslims because they wore turbans. Giuliani, Limbaugh and Fox News have been on a tirade against Muslims for years.

By Fox News logic, if black protestors are responsible for the deaths of the cops in New York, then Fox News and their conservative anti-Muslim ranters are responsible for the deaths of the Sikhs in Wisconsin.

GDP Revised Upward

Third Quarter GDP was revised upward to 5%, making this the strongest growth our economy has seen in 11 years.

“There is a positive feedback loop going on at the moment,” Mike Jakeman, global analyst for the Economist Intelligence Unit, said in a note. “Job creation is running at the strongest rate for 15 years. More people in work means more income, which means more private spending, which means more business investment, which means more hiring.”

Early estimates are lower, however, for the fourth quarter with numbers in the 2.5-3.0% range. Of course, none of this indicates the destruction of the economy by Obama that I was promised by conservatives.

As I always say (and they always deliver:)), I'm sure they can find something wrong...somewhere...there just has to be something...

Old Cold War Policies

Obama Fulfills Michele Bachmann's Campaign Promise

Remember when, briefly, Michele Bachmann was a frontrunner for the Republican nomination for president back in 2011? She reached that lofty height by promising 

Under President Bachmann you will see gasoline come down below $2 a gallon again. That will happen.

She and all the Republican whiners bitterly complained that the high price of gas was all Obama's fault.

Well, now gas is less than $2 in parts of the country.

But, strangely, I don't hear Bachmann and all the other Republicans singing Obama's praises for bringing gas prices down. Despite the demonic machinations of the EPA, the banning of fracking in New York, Obama's stalling on the Keystone XL pipeline, and six years of Kenyan socialist communist diktats, somehow, miraculously, gas is less than two bucks a gallon.

The price for crude is now less than the break-even point for many of the fracking wells across the country. But producers can't stop pumping, because they'll lose their leases if they do. That means many of them will start losing their shirts and going bankrupt. But the more they pump, the more they lose.

Drill, baby, drill!

Of course, the president has little or no control over the price of gas. It has to do with lower demand in China, a slow European economy, higher fuel efficiency standards in the United States, a generational shift away from cars in US driving habits, greedy American oil billionaires buying the governor of North Dakota, and Saudi Arabia having large reserves that still cost almost nothing to tap.

Low gas prices won't last long. They'll go up again, when this glut has been burned through, but if this fling with two-dollar gas lasts very long a lot of Americans will have bought cars that are too big. And then they'll start whining again when gas hits $4 a gallon.

On the plus side, low gas prices are putting the hurt on Putin. Several months ago Republicans were swooning over his manly actions in Ukraine. On Fox News Rudy Giuliani said, "He's what you call a real leader." Why? Because he invaded Ukraine and killed innocent Ukrainians. His terrorist shock troops shot down a Malaysian airliner, killing 298 people. Yeah, that's a real leader.

What does it say that so many Republicans had an unseemly mancrush over the Russian dictator who has run his country's economy into the toilet by invading foreign countries and basing his economic development policy solely on oil and gas drilling?

Now the ruble is worth half what it was, and Russia's central bank has jacked interest rates up to Carter-era levels. The Russian economy is in free fall. Bankruptcies are endemic. And the poor oligarchs can't afford to buy $100 million flats in London anymore!

But at least Putin doesn't wear mom jeans.

The "Power" of the Private Sector

The complete capitulation by theater owners and Sony to North Korea has left me somewhat puzzled. I thought that the private sector shit gold and any sort of government involvement inhibits from being all of the glory that they are entitled to be.

Yet here we have the president and the federal government once again riding to the rescue of sniveling buffoons just as we saw in 2008 when they collapsed the world economy. The first step will likely be some sort of counter cyber attack (which sounds really cool, btw) followed by some extra military exercises in the area. Yet I have to say that I'm very weary of North Korea and would like to see the president take a stronger stance with that stain of a country. They are a relic of a bygone time and, like Cuba, need to be brought into the 21st century and it's likely that it's going to have to be the hard way.

Obviously, this is a job for the federal government because it's quite clear that the private sector isn't up to it. I wonder what Ayn Rand's reaction would be...

Sony And The Caving

I still can't believe that Sony caved to...who?....cyber terrorists? Seriously, what kind of a message does this send? It's not just Sony, of course. It's also theater chains around the country who have decided to pull the film from viewing because they are worried about terrorist attacks. Where, exactly? Iowa?

I'm actually pretty disappointed in our nation today. I guess anyone on the internet who makes a threat about something is going to make us all shit our pants.

The President Does It Again

I guess Barack Obama is not going to go gently into that good night for the last two years of his 2nd term. Once again, a giant FUCK YOU to the old white men who continue to blather about communism (see: right wing bloggers).

What really cracks me up about conservatives' reaction to this is that they are calling it a loss. Of course, they don't really think this because they know that within a decade Cubans are going to be fiddling on social media as America's soft economic power exerts its hegemonic will on one of the few remaining nations that hasn't really joined the 21st century global marketplace. They will become "Americanized" to one degree or another just like the rest of the planet. Conservatives know this will end up being (gasp!) yet another success for the man their inferiority complexes simply won't allow a win so they're pissed off about it and waxing "ideological nonsense."

I look forward to what the next two years will bring. Let's remember that Barack Obama was a community organizer so his faith in improving lives comes from his heart and soul, not his ego.

And now his community is our entire country...indeed, the world...