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October 03, 2015 12:10 AM UTC

Weekend Open Thread

  • 44 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

“Liars share with those they deceive the desire not to be deceived.”

–Sissela Bok

Comments

44 thoughts on “Weekend Open Thread

  1. From The Hill newspaper (October 2, 2015):  Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is maintaining his lead in the GOP race, according to a poll released by the Pew Research Center on Friday. The real estate mogul garners 25 percent of the GOP vote, followed by retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson with 16 percent support. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina are tied for third place with 8 percent. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) follows with 6 percent, then former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush with 4 percent.

    QUESTION:  It's October.  If Trump had 4 percent and Bush had 25 percent (and had been in first place for 4 months), wouldn't everyone say it's over?

     

    1. Sanders vs. Trump: That's what I think the general will look like. Huffpo has called it for Sanders.  And Sanders beats Trump by 4-16 points, according to RCP polls.

      Clinton also wins, but by a smaller margin.

      The GOP nominee will depend on whether women vote in the primary.

      Republican women still see Trump unfavorably, and less favorably the more he talks, although he is their "top pick" among the dismal selection of turds that have risen to the top of the bowl.

      In the 8/19 CNN/ORC poll, in the crosstabs, page 28, women see Trump unfavorably, 64% to 27%. Among younger voters, it's 63% to 19%. These are registered Republican voters. No one talks about this. Either people are too lazy to dig through the crosstabs, or they don't want to challenge the prevailing media narrative.  It certainly does look as though  Trump will win the GOP nomination.

      Trump has (probably) funded this whole stellium of "Women for Trump" groups, which extol his virtues.  Trump himself continues to claim ridonculously that he is "surging with women". Polls, however, continue to tell a different story, and Donald Trump has never had any problem buying the loyalty of individual women.

    2. In response to the Nurse's question, I have two thoughts: 1.  The race is not binary.  It is not Trump v. Bush.  As the clown car empties, the dynamics will change.  For example, I do not think that Trump is the second choice of Carson or Fiorina voters.  When they drop out, their supporters will not go to Trump.  2. To me, as interesting as Trump's lead is the fact that the leading candidates are Trump, Carson, and Fiorina.  In my opinion, each are deeply flawed candidates, none of whom has ever won an election for dog catcher.  

      1. That pretty much sums up the entire Republican field.  Deeply flawed candidates, with support from angry, disaffected voters that will only reluctantly switch their allegiance to the eventual party nominee.

        For decades, their candidates and representatives have proven to be big on talk, short on achievements (which were pipe dreams in any case).

        Republican voters have the misfortune of being granted their wish for "fresh voices" that will shake up the status quo.

  2. Where in the world is our brave, little truthsayer? Hiding for a couple of news cycles, hoping by Monday we'll have forgotten about Oregon and he can go back to peddling his doctored videos and platitudes about (his version of) 'life'? 

      1. Also, every single day that there's a shooting total in America that exceeds the number of deaths in Bengazi, let's mandate that H. Watson Gowdy III, or some other blathering amosexual Representative, hold a similar number of Congressional hearings to thoroughly investigate the matter??!!??

        1. We lose someone every ten minutes to epileptic seizures, a condition that could largely be addressed with CBD oil. Congress could end the prohibition easily; POTUS could end it with an EO, although that action could be removed by the same stroke-of-the-pen by the next POTUS.  In the time it took to write and post this, another one has left us. 

          Gowdy and his ammosexual friends are abhorrent. 

          We’re not rogue parents. There’s a lot of science behind cannabis, and it's extremely safe. There is literally not one documented death from cannabis. There are 50,000 who die every year because of epilepsy. In just the amount of time that it takes to do this interview — we lose someone every 10 minutes to a seizure-related death.

  3. Michael, you just made my day. They couldn't say you were violating their vaunted Second Amendment rights. If they did, we'd have all the "ammunition" we'd need to tear down waiting periods, notification laws building code restrictions, and all of the other petty B.S. the righties use to restrict women's health clinics.

  4. Can we stop pretending voter ID and concurrent measures are about protecting the legitimacy of the vote? Republicans love your right to support the gun industry. Hate your right to vote unless you're the "right" kind of voter.

    Kris Kobach, the worst Secretary of State in the nation, is now facing a federal lawsuit over his decision to suspend the voting rights of 37,000 Kansas residents. The lawsuit was filed byformer Kansas gubernatorial candidate Paul Davis:

    The state enacted a requirement that beginning in 2013, prospective voters must provide proof of citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate, when they register to vote – a policy Kobach championed.

    Since the law went into effect, nearly 37,000 voters have been left in suspended registration status. For perspective, Davis lost to Gov. Sam Brownback in the last election by fewer than 33,000 votes. Davis said he didn’t think proof of citizenship affected the outcome of the election.

    Kobach has moved forward with a new rule, set to take effect on Friday, that would remove a person’s name from the list if he or she failed to show proof of citizenship after 90 days. Kobach has said the policy will save county election offices money, but his critics accuse him of trying to purge the list.

    http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/10/01/1426679/-Federal-lawsuit-filed-against-Kansas-Secretary-of-State-for-massive-voter-registration-purge?detail=email

     

    Alabama has followed its voter ID requirement that went into effect last year with closing drivers license offices in eight of 10 counties with majority black voting populations. The voter suppression effect is complemented by raising the fee for driver license renewal from $23.50 to $36.25 earlier this year.

    Updated to include more information below the orange squiggle.

    According to John Archibald at al.com:

    Take a look at the 10 Alabama counties with the highest percentage of non-white registered voters. That's Macon, Greene, Sumter, Lowndes, Bullock, Perry, Wilcox, Dallas, Hale, and Montgomery, according to the Alabama Secretary of State's office. Alabama, thanks to its budgetary insanity and inanity, just opted to close driver license bureaus in eight of them. All but Dallas and Montgomery will be closed.

    Closed. In a state in which driver licenses or special photo IDs are a requirement for voting.

    Every single county in which blacks make up more than 75 percent of registered voters will see their driver license office closed. Every one.

    http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/10/01/1426654/-Alabama-Gets-Voter-Supression-Right?detail=email

    1. Southern Poverty Law Center, check your messages. This won't last. It's a lawsuit that writes itself, and the SPLC is based in Montgomery. Gotta send them some money.

  5. With a national, private prison industrial complex that is out-of-control, stories like these are refreshing…

    Harvard debate team loses to prison debate team

    The criminal justice system is staggeringly expensive. As a country we spend $212 billion dollars annually to apprehend, try, and incarcerate prisoners. In recent years, the United States has maintained a prison population of more than 2.3 million people, with the average annual cost of over $29,000 per person (in many states, including New York, the cost is much higher). And while America has the longest and most punitive sentencing structures in the modern world, 750,000 inmates are released each year. Nationwide, nearly 68 out of every one hundred prisoners are rearrested within three years of release, and more than half return to prison. Research indicates that these high and expensive rates of recidivism fall to less than 22% if prisons offer significant educational opportunity to incarcerated men and women. Among formerly incarcerated Bard students, less than 2% have returned to prison. The estimated cost per person, per year of the BPI program is a small fraction of the price of continuing incarceration. It saves tax payers money, while increasing public safety.

      1. Private prisons should be outlawed. There's no way a private for profit prison system can have anyone's best interests, not the public's, not the prisoners', as their primary goal. Prisons run on the bottom line, for profit principle can't possibly be anything other than hot beds of abuse. And then there are the charming arrangements between bought and paid for judges and for profit juvenile facilities to encourage the judges to keep feeding them children on the slightest pretext. We pay. The blood suckers profit.

        Another of the many examples of how the private sector does not do everything better to add to the horrific examples set by the contracting out of  the war in Iraq to profiteers.They threw away public funds at a rate even our admittedly wasteful military never dreamed of with no accountability while private sector construction workers built unlivable building projects, including showers that electrocuted our troops, and private sector mercenaries murdered civilians at will, having no interest in the American interest of winning hearts and minds and no loyalty to anyone but themselves.

        Prisons, military and government in general, especially including our legislative bodies, are areas where there should be no place for the profit motive as the decision making factor.

      2. Always a pleasure, skinny 😀 This particular story hit close to home for me as I'm in grad school at Bard.  Great small school filled with world-class thinkers  

        1. Don't know if I ever mentioned this but my brother lives in pueblo and teaches college freshman comp classes at the women's facility there. He knows they do better with an education.

          1. Don't you long for the day when we have enough money to give everyone a world-class education – and the Pentagon has to hold a bake sale to buy more bombs?

  6. Pope Francis May Fire Archbishop Who Set Up the Meeting With Kim Davis

    The Vatican also emphasized that the only one-on-one meeting that Pope Francis had during his time in Washington, D.C. was with Yayo Grassi, a gay man and former student of the Pope’s. But the Vatican appears to go one step further to make it clear that the Holy See in no way endorses Kim Davis’ bigotry.

    Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, who arranged the Pope’s meetings in Washington (including the one with Kim Davis), is expected to be held responsible for blowback resulting from the meeting with Davis. According to the New York Times, Viganò is “likely to be removed at the first respectable opportunity” if blowback from the meeting with Davis continues to build.

    1. Very good article on the phony nature of the originally circulated story including interviews with Grassi providing lots of background info on his relationship with the Pope and his insights into the Pope's character since the days when he was a favorite High School student, 50 year ago, of the man who would become Pope in today's Denver Post. Also prominent treatment of the story of the three, not one, jurors who did not buy was Braucher was selling.

      Once again, as with the doctored PP videos, the most dramatic of which do not, in fact, even depict anything taking place at a PP clinic, the "family values" Christian far right demonstrates that one of their favorite values is the value of lying, spinning, distorting and cherry picking to decieve. One can imagine this ends justify the means/deception as a virtue "value" being taught in Sunday schools across the nation. 

    1. I'm in England this week. A land without Donald Trump, where health care is a right, not a privilege, and ammosexuality is taboo and illegal. I'm watching David Cameron, the conservative prime minister, on BBC being interviewed and talking about his opposition world wide to capital punishment. This is a guy who believes that global warming is real and man-made and supported legalization of same sex marriage. Our right wing party could learn a few things from Cameron.

      1. Wow!  Keep your head down, it's hard to fathom just how incredibly dangerous it’s gotta’ be in a country where hardly anyone is permitted to carry firearms protection devices everywhere in public?!? …

  7. Heck, even Margaret Thatcher Milk Snatcher, Reagan buddy/ Rightie Goddess ( "she has the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe") was a proud and staunch supporter of National Health. Contemporary American Conservatism is a craziness unto itself.

    1. Quote was off by a hair. Here it is with attributiom. So French!

      "She has the eyes of Caligula but the mouth of Marilyn Monroe." French President Francois Mitterrand

  8. I hope certain Supreme Court Justices read this. At least the of course corporations aren't really people part:

    WASHINGTON, Oct 4 (Reuters) – Former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said in a newspaper interview published on Sunday that more corporate executives should have been prosecuted for their actions leading up to the 2008 financial crisis.

    Bernanke told USA Today that the U.S. Justice Department and other law enforcement agencies focused on investigating or indicting financial firms.

    "But it would have been my preference to have more investigation of individual action, since obviously everything that went wrong or was illegal was done by some individual, not by an abstract firm," Bernanke was quoted as saying.

    Bernanke, who presided over the U.S. central bank during the financial crisis considered the worst since the Great Depression, said it was not up to him to decide whether to prosecute individuals, noting: "The Fed is not a law-enforcement agency."

    "The Department of Justice and others are responsible for that, and a lot of their efforts have been to indict or threaten to indict financial firms," Bernanke added. "Now a financial firm is of course a legal fiction; it's not a person. You can't put a financial firm in jail." (my emphasis)

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bernanke-more-execs-should-have-faced-prosecution-for-2008-financial-crisis_5611a5d7e4b076812702677e

  9. Explain the Russian airstrikes in Syria. Is it a proxy war between us and Russia? Are we really targeting ISIL? Will the right wing be forced to dial back their man-crush on Putin?

    John McCain says that the Russians are hitting the same anti-Assad rebels that the CIA has funded and trained. He also got in the obligatory digs against Obama and Sos Kerry. McCain is calling this "naked Russian aggression".

    Fox Noise says that this helps Putin, thus complicating Fox's love-hate relationship with Putin. He's so much more manly than that wuss Obama. If only Obama would bomb some Muslims, the right wing could back our President, even though US airstrikes are apparently targeting Doctors without Borders and other hospitals.

    So Russia supports Assad. The USA is backing anti-Assad rebels. Supposedly, we're helping rebels target ISIS. (The image below is from Veterans Today)

    We're both bombing the crap out of Syria. Is this going to escalate into something uglier? And where are the money, power, resources, in this? What will our troops stationed in Kuwait do? What kinds of missions will they be asked to accomplish, and why?

    Jump in anytime, please. Help me make some sense of this.

     

    1. Making sense of it all is probably too tall an order to fill. One thing is certain. Since everyone knows that Putin supports Assad and his government (it's not like he doesn't say so frequently) nobody could have had realistic expectations that Russia wouldn't be doing exactly what it's doing; supporting the Assad regime against all its enemies including the anti-Assad moderate forces (such as they are) that we support, putting us in diametric opposition on that score. We want Assad out. They want him in. At least that's one thing that's perfectly clear.

      I'm pretty sure that, despite the Obama administration's protestations, this can't really come as a surprise to them. It's not like it takes a rocket scientist to figure that out. There's also no reason to think Putin will have any better luck controlling the situation, "winning" in any sense, than we do. Obama has more than implied he's banking on Russia getting mired in another quagmire there. But then, how about us?

      How about the refugee situation? How about the Kurds (for my money I'd give them whatever they want and to hell with wasting another cent or piece of equipment on any of the other players) and our relations with the Turks? How about Iran? Iraq? What policy or combination of policies is ever going to fix all of this? Besides turning back time to before before the Pottery Barn rule was not just broken but pulverized, not without assistance from Colin Powell himself, the guy who cited the Pottery Barn rule but aided and abetted Cheney/Bush in smashing a whole storefull anyway. To be a team player, I guess.

      So what really gives? What's the end game for us or for Russia and the path for either of us or anyone else to get there? I don't think anyone, including our administration, Putin's government or any of the international "experts" has a clue. If you find someone to make sense of it for you, the White House and Pentagon need to hear from that someone.

    2. If you're really interested, Charlie Rose did a show, last Thursday night (I think); an interview with a former CIA Deputy Director, and a French diplomat, on Putin, Syria, Iran, etc. Very enlightening …

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