Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Last Call For A Minimum Of Logic

New Hampshire Republican Congressional candidate Marilinda Garcia dismissed raising the minimum wage as a "wedge issue" by President Barack Obama's administration that actually wouldn't help people and instead is just a "petty, short-sighted type of little issue."

Garcia, considered a rising star among conservative Republicans, made the comments Monday evening during an interview with Chris Ryan on his Pints and Politics show on WKXL in Concord, New Hampshire. The comments were flagged by the opposition-research shop American Bridge. 
"I voted against increasing the state minimum wage when I was in the legislature," Garcia said. "It seems to be sort of a petty — not punitive is the wrong word — but kind of just a petty, short-sighted type of little issue that the President's administration decided to champion for a time to then use as a wedge issue." 
Garcia goes on to say that a minimum wage increase would be slight for the recipients but would be "catastrophic" for the job market. She also calls a hike "trite." 
"Every employer I've talked to says —about deals with the minimum wage says 'look I will literally be laying people off.' Now I ask you, is giving someone a dollar, $1.15 increase helpful or better for them than actually not losing that job to begin with?" Garcia continued. "So what you're doing is you're forcing people to choose between laying people off completely and losing their job or having a somewhat trite and meaningless wage —excuse me raise, and your wage that doesn't do in fact do anything to make your life more affordable, allow for the cost of living, help you heat your home, fill your car, and all these other —afford your healthcare— and all these things we're dealing with. So yeah, I'm opposed to raising it."

There's three problems with Garcia's argument: First, in a country where corporations continue to earn record profits, they have the money to invest back into labor costs. Her assumption that a raise in the minimum wage would have to immediately be compensated by firing people doesn't make fiscal sense.

Second, when multiple businesses increase wages for their lowest-paid employees, these employees have more money to spend into the local economy and all indications are that this is exactly what happens when there's a minimum wage hike.  More money in the economy means growth, and growth means there's more business coming in to pay for these wage increases.   Garcia doesn't make basic economic sense either.  Imagine that.

Finally, her argument doesn't hold water from an empirical standpoint either.  Washington State had up until recently the highest minimum wage in the country at $9.32 an hour.  If Garcia's correct, then Washington State's unemployment rate should be well above the national average.

It's not.  August 2014 it was 5.8%, below the country's 6.1% national average.  Meanwhile, states that had the federal minimum wage at $7.25 an hour like Kentucky and North Carolina have higher than average unemployment, NC at 6.5% and KY at 7.4%.  If raising the minimum wage is bad for the economy, then Washington State should have the worst unemployment in America.

It doesn't.  The argument is silly.

But so is the Republican Party.

These Victims Are Professionals

GQ's interview with George Zimmerman and his family simply isn't as awful as you probably think it would be.  Instead it's much, much worse, as if the Bluths from Arrested Development met the Duck Dynasty clan on the set of The Sporanos. Writer Amanda Robb visited the "most hated family in America":


The Zimmermans believe to this day that they will never be free, that they are hunted by millions of angry liberals, and they are all completely paranoid and armed to the teeth and ready to shoot to kill in order to defend themselves.


The interview is comically awful, because the Zimmermans are awful people. The Zimmermans have family codes for situations.  They fear pretty much 90% of America is trying to kill George and that they'll have to spend decades living like a bored family full of former mobsters in exile.  Most of all they want you to know they have guns.  Lots and lots of guns.

Oh, and George is still being a "concerned citizen" out there in Florida.  But the family of course fears he's a little jumpy on the trigger.

Trayvon Martin could not be reached for comment.

Cash Rules Everything Around Them

The annual list of Forbes's 400 richest Americans is out, and you'll be glad to know that President Obama's evil communist socialist anti-colonialist views and his massively overregulated uncertain business climate ended up making these Masters of the Universe about $270 billion last year.

Thanks to a buoyant stock market, the richest people in the U.S. just keep getting richer. That has made it harder than ever to join the ranks of the 400 wealthiest Americans. The price of entry to The Forbes 400 this year is $1.55 billion, the highest it’s been since Forbes started tracking American wealth in 1982. Last year it took $1.3 billion to score a spot. Because the bar is so high, 113 U.S. billionaires didn’t make the cut

Bill gates, still #1 at $81 billion.  Rich enough to every single person in America 200 bucks and still have $16 billion or so left over.

All together the 400 wealthiest Americans are worth a staggering $2.29 trillion, up $270 billion from a year ago. That’s about the same as the gross domestic product of Brazil, a country of 200 million people. The average net worth of list members is $5.7 billion, $700 million more than last year and a record high. An impressive 303 of the 400 saw the value of their fortunes rise compared to a year ago. Only 36 people from last year’s list had lower net worths this year. Twenty-six people fell off the list; another six people died, including businessman and Tampa Bay Buccaneers owner Malcolm Glazer.

And of course, Obama's making it so very hard to join this list.  Obamacare is destroying the medical industry, you know.

There are 27 newcomers to the Forbes 400, including Elizabeth Holmes the youngest woman on the list, and the youngest self-made female billionaire in the world. Just 30 years old, the Stanford University dropout has built blood testing company Theranos into a firm that venture capitalists have valued at $9 billion. She owns 50% of it.

So hard out here for a pimp.  We should probably cut Social Security just in case.


Monday, September 29, 2014

Last Call For The Brothers Very Grim


And these two charming gentlemen have spent hundreds of millions on Republicans for the Senate in 2014, and millions more lobbying Congress to help them make even more money.  These are the guys who really run the country.  They're also one of the largest polluters in America, dumping 2 million metric tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every single month.

But hey, America.

House Of Pain, Con't

A grim reminder that most likely the GOP will gain a few seats in the House in November, and the incoming people in January will be even more batshit insane than the current crop of Gohmerts, Bachmanns and other assorted lunatics already infesting the House GOP.

One nominee proposed reclassifying single parenthood as child abuse. Another suggested that four “blood moons” would herald “world-changing, shaking-type events” and said Islam was not a religion but a “complete geopolitical structure” unworthy of tax exemption. Still another labeled Hillary Rodham Clinton “the Antichrist.” 
Congressional Republicans successfully ended their primary season with minimal damage, but in at least a dozen safe or largely safe Republican House districts where more mild-mannered Republicans are exiting, their likely replacements will pull the party to the right, a move likely to increase division in an already polarized Congress. 
“Congressman Hall is a very genial and well-liked guy, and I hope that eventually I’m perceived that way too,” said John Ratcliffe, who in the Texas Republican primary defeated Ralph M. Hall, a 91-year-old with nearly 34 years in the House. But, he added: “The district that I will represent is far more conservative than most districts. Leadership will or should understand what the people in my district want — more conservative approaches and more conservative stands.”

More fights with President Obama.  More blanket opposition to anything Democrats try to do.  More shutdown threats over the debt ceiling, the budget, and everything else.  The GOP will only get worse because the voters voting in GOP primaries are all, well, your typical GOP primary voters.  They want Democrats eliminated from the country, period.

Where are the moderates?  Too busy being purged out of the party I guess.

“Obviously I’m interested in the House going forward with the Senate, and I think there are going to be a lot of challenges,” said Representative Spencer Bachus, Republican of Alabama, who will retire in January and likely be replaced by Gary Palmer, who has helped lead the Alabama Policy Institute, a conservative think tank. “A lot of the people who have sat down to solve problems are leaving, those like me that are concerned about the dysfunctionality.” 
As for their replacements, Mr. Bachus said: “I think they love their country every bit as much as we do. I think maybe they’re not as pragmatic.” Mr. Bachus is one of 26 House veterans who are retiring or running for the Senate or were defeated in the primaries.

They love "their" country alright, and the people like them in it.  Everybody else?  Well, you know the drill.  Block them, punish them, hurt them, and there's always Second Amendment Remedies(tm).

2014 will bring a new batch of crazies.  And that will only get worse as the GOP gets worse.

A Black And White World














You're better than this, Jazz.


Sunday, September 28, 2014

Last Call For Obama's Mea Culpa






Sunday Morning Read: The Service's Dirty Secret














Saturday, September 27, 2014

Name Dropping 101







Either would be a solid choice.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

Friday, September 26, 2014

Last Call For General Insurrection

Over at Crooks And Liars, Karoli catches the GOP in the act of fomenting military rebellion against the President in his role as our nation's top military commander.



There's a difference between "I disagree with the President's actions against ISIS" (which is perfectly reasonable dissent and an absolutely vital and necessary component in a representative democracy) and being an elected member of Congress, freely admitting to going over the chain of command to directly influence foreign policy (by advocating for military personnel to resign and/or disobey the orders of the Commander-in-Chief). This is pretty much the textbook definition of treason as Karoli points out.


So again I ask you what other President has had to put up with House or Senate members from the opposite party bragging about how they've met in secret with generals, during wartime, and that they tried to talk them into rebelling?

Lincoln, maybe?

Makes a person think, yes?

The Fabulous Fed Fail Follies

ProPublica and This American Life have teamed up for a pretty depressing story of former Federal Reserve examiner Carmen Segarra.  Her job in 2011 and 2012 was to take a look at infamous banking giant Goldman Sachs and figure out why the Fed missed their involvement in the subprime mortgage meltdown.

She was fired for doing her job, and the recordings she made were devastating.  Her boss, Columbia University finance professor David Beim was brought in to figure out what went wrong.  New York Fed President William Dudley, who brought both Beim and Segarra in, wanted answers.  He just didn't want to do anything with those answers.


Segarra was fired for not being nice enough to the Masters of the Universe.  Oh, but it gets worse, as the recordings show Segarra was at a meeting where fellow investigator Michael Silva recounted the infamous day the financial system "broke the buck" during Lehman Brothers' last death throes.


The Fed tried to convince big trading houses like Goldman Sachs to step up and backstop the system back then. They laughed.


Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner had to drag the big banks like Goldman Sachs kicking and screaming before they would help, and they made huge profits when they did.  The story goes on to detail several more recordings Segarra made, and the intense pressure Segarra was under to drop anything that might embarrass Goldman Sachs.

Pointing the finger at Eric Holder for failing to prosecute is one thing, but Tim Geithner, William Dudley, and the Fed completely dropped the ball on this mess.  It never should have happened.

Welcome To Tyson's Corner

I'm surprised it took this long, but astrophysicist and Cosmos host Neil DeGrasse Tyson is under attack from the right, and as usual conservatives don't miss an opportunity to be racists jerkwads. Jameson Parker at Addicting Info:

This past week, Sean Davis, writing for The Federalist, ran a series of increasingly nitpicky articles accusing Tyson of misquoting or misstating some of the quotes or anecdotes he uses in his popular lectures. Some of the criticisms were valid, like one in which Tyson wrongfully attributed a quote to George W. Bush, but most were simply of the “Well, technically…” variety. For a man who conducts hundreds of interviews and lectures a year, expecting him to not make one or two mistakes when speaking — oftentimes extemporaneously — is pretty harsh. 
Despite the inanity of the accusations, conservative pundits and readers flocked to the allegations, basking in the chance to take Tyson down a few pegs. They didn’t mind blowing it out of proportion, either.

And let's keep in mind the bozos at The Federalist are about one step above NewsMax or World Net Daily when it comes to credibility.

According to the article, Tyson has a slide that has two quotes that he uses to make a point about the general lack of scientific literacy in American society. 
Tyson attributes one to a “newspaper headline”:

Half the schools in the district are below average
In another, he says a politician once said:

I have changed my views 360 degrees on that issue
Then the audience typically laughs, because as the late, great George Carlin once said, “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” Then further realize the dumbest are on, say, the House Committee for Science, Space and Technology. The point is, American society needs help. We are clueless and let’s get science back into the mainstream. 
But Sean Davis wasn’t laughing. He spent time running down those quotes and after a few days a-googlin’, he couldn’t find where the exact quotes came from. He found similar quotes or stories, but not the exact quotes, and so he wrote a massive article accusing Tyson of being a fraud and questioning his reputation as a scientist. Then he wrote several more that essentially rehashed the same complaints.

And poof, overnight, Neil DeGrasse Tyson is now a "serial plagiarist" and "discredited former scientist", because Sean Davis says so.  This of course unleashed a torrent of comments from the right about how Tyson is in fact an "affirmative action hire" and is apparently not worthy of everything that he's had bestowed upon him.

The issue is not "Hey, Tyson didn't quote this person verbatim!" any more than it is "Hey, President Obama saluted these Marines incorrectly!"

It's only a controversy if a famous black person does it.


Thursday, September 25, 2014

Last Call For No Holders Barred

While I agree with everything Steve M. wrote today about the GOP complaining that appointing Eric Holder's successor during the lame duck session after the elections would somehow be "unconstitutional" I think the bigger picture here is that the massive, massive disrespect shown by Sen. Chuck Grassley and others is truly awful.




Oh well.  Guess you lose on this one, Chuck.


We cannot allow.  Exactly who are you to tell the President what he can and cannot do?  Sit the hell down and shut the hell up.  I am so bloody tired of this nonsense.  You get zero say, madam.  Zip.  Stuff it where the sun don't shine.




Nope.  100% Constitutional.  Nothing you can do about it.  You lose, sir.  Good day.  Enjoy your replacement.

Of course, the point is to raise so much outrage that our "liberal media" starts actively questioning whether or not President Obama should just resign because, well, you know that anyone that one appoints won't have credibility.

Optics, you know.

Pay To Play The GOP Way

Looks like some GOP intern screwed up, and CREW and the NY Times got their hands on the donor's list for the PAC for the Republican Governors Association, the Republican Governors Public Policy Committee.  The results are depressing:

Other documents detail, in part, what they got in return. 
Board members received two tickets to “an exclusive breakfast with the Republican Governors and members of their staff”; three tickets to the Governors Forums Series, where “a group of 5-8 governors discuss the best policy practices from around the country on a particular topic”; and a D.C. Discussion Breakfast Series, among other events. 
If they bump up to Cabinet Membership — $100,000 annually or a single payment of $200,000 — contributors also receive two invitations to “an exclusive Gubernatorial Dinner,” an “intimate gathering with the Republican Governors and special Republican V.I.P. guests” at the Willard InterContinental Hotel in Washington. 
Political finance experts say the practice apparently laid out in the documents is not illegal, and probably not unusual. In hundreds of pages posted on the web, the Republican governors group put it down in black and white. 
“It’s not that you don’t suspect this, but here you see these companies paying the governors for access,” said Melanie Sloan, executive director of CREW. “Americans all think it’s pay-to-play politics. This is what confirms it.”

Now, two things here.  One, don't kid yourself, Democratic governors are doing this too.  The donors are different and the price tags are probably similar, but the honest fact is Democrats do pay for play like Republicans do.

Two, all politicians are for sale and will be until we get the billions in cash  out of the system. These corporations are the only constituents that your governor, your representative, your senator, your mayor, and your city council or county commissioners care about.

BREAKING: AG Eric Holder Resigning, Sort Of

Eric Holder apparently stepping down, but will wait to resign until a successor is named.

Which, thanks to SCOTUS, cannot be done until after the elections when the Senate is back in session.  Expect the GOP to stall until January, when they'll have more seats in the Senate.  If they have 51 and control of the Senate, I can't see anyone Obama would appoint as getting confirmed.

Effectively, Holder may remain until the end of President Obama's term if that happens  I  mean, do you expect anyone Obama would pick would get through a confirmation hearing if the GOP's in charge?

Senate control always was important, but is even more so now.

Dennis The Menace Returns

If there's one person in the Democratic party more ridiculously obnoxious than Ralph Nader, it's Dennis F'cking Kucinich, who I am now convinced is running for the Dems' 2016 nomination on the platform of "Let's indict Obama the War Criminal".


And while Congress really should debate Syria and hold a vote, they're too busy campaigning to care. Also, we have tried diplomacy with Iran and it's making progress, but Congress tried to kill that too. Look, I'm less than happy about us bombing ISIS targets in Syria. The best we can hope for is that it forces ISIS to the negotiating table, and even I think that's not going to happen.

Here's the real problem:  John Boehner refuses to hold a vote on authorization for Syria until the next Congress is in session.

But Mr. Boehner believes a post-election, lame-duck session is the wrong time for such a weighty decision. “Doing this with a whole group of members who are on their way out the door, I don’t think that is the right way to handle this,” he said. 
I would suggest to you that early next year, assuming that we continue in this effort, there may be that discussion and there may be that request from the president,” he said.

So complain all you want to about Obama not having permission from Congress, when Republicans in Congress refuse to even debate it.


Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Last Call For Orange Not So Crushed






Boehner, sadly, isn't going anywhere.

The Modern GOP Poll Tax








Had enough Second Amendment remedies yet, America?

We're Number One!

America in fact leads the developed world in something, and it's jobs!

Percentage of low-paying jobs, that is.

In a new research note on inequality, Morgan Stanley economist Ellen Zentner included this fascinating chart showing that, among OECD countries, the United States has the highest proportion of low-paying jobs
The 2014 version of the OECD Employment Outlook report cited by Morgan Stanley defines low-paying jobs as those for which earnings are below 2/3 of a country's median income. According to the OECD analysis and the Morgan Stanley report, just over a quarter of jobs in the US fell in this low-paying category
In 2013, the median annual income in the US was $35,080, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Employment Statistics program. Under the OECD's definition, then, a low-paying job would earn less than about $23,390.

A quarter of US jobs pay less than $12 an hour, but why would we want to raise the minimum wage, Republicans say.  Why, we'll just drive out those low-paying jobs.  Who needs to support a family on $12 an hour anyway?  That's what second and third jobs are for, after all.


Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Last Call For Dinesh D'Felon








And yet the guy won't spend a day in prison.

Justice, huh?

Burning It Down In Kansas






When The Rats Are Away...








Monday, September 22, 2014

Serious Obama Derangement Syndrome

So the fellow caught by US Secret Service agents who jumped the White House fence on Friday?  Turns out that he had a pretty substantial pile of ammo and weapons in his car, and that he's had a couple of recent arrests.


Gonzalez carried a Spyderco VG-10 folding knife with a 3½-inch serrated blade in his pants pocket, according to an affidavit.

He allowed authorities to search his car, where police say they found more than 800 rounds of ammunition in boxes and magazines. They also found two hatchets and a machete in his car.



Friday was not Gonzalez's first run in with police. In July, he was arrested in Wythe County, Virginia, and charged with possession of a shotgun and a sniper rifle. He was also charged with eluding and evading arrest. In addition, police say they found a map with the White House circled.

In late August, Gonzalez was stopped while walking along the White House fence. He carried a hatchet and allowed police to search his car, where they found camping gear and two dogs. He was not arrested then.

OK, so this guy?  He needs some help, clearly.  He's a three-tour Iraq veteran, and he's obviously having some serious problems adjusting to being home.  His marriage broke up two years ago, and his family has said his mental state wasn't the best.

Needless to say, the judge at the arraignment Monday agreed that he was both a flight risk and a threat to President Obama.  Here's hoping that he can get the mental help he so clearly needs.

Our wars in the Middle East had, and still have, a cost.

The More Things Don't Change...

The corporate types on the right are convinced more than ever that this weekend's 300,000+ NYC climate change march represents the death throes of environmentalism.


Again, why do anything when you can always find a scientist who disagrees with the 97% of climate scientists who do believe we're in real trouble?

One reason the rhetoric has become so overheated is that the climate-change activists increasingly lack a scientific basis for their most exaggerated claims. As physicist Gordon Fulks of the Cascade Policy Institute puts it: “CO2 is said to be responsible for global warming that is not occurring, for accelerated sea-level rise that is not occurring, for net glacial and sea-ice melt that is not occurring . . . and for increasing extreme weather that is not occurring.” He points out that there has been no net new global-warming increase since 1997 even though the human contribution to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by 25 percent since then. This throws into doubt all the climate models that have been predicting massive climate dislocation.

The Cascade Policy Institute, oh man. Oregon's own state-sized version of CATO, one of those "free-market" glibertarian outfits that will never run out of corporate money to shill nonsense like this. Didn't you hear?  Global warming ended in 1997, stupid libtards!

Only it didn't, but that's okay, they found a guy who said it did.

So there's no problem.

To recap, conservatives believe the science can never be settled.

Bogged Down For Good

The NY Times is reporting that President Obama's "controversial" (to say the least) nomination of Michael Boggs to a federal judge position in Georgia is deader than dirt.

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, who leads the Judiciary Committee, told us it had become clear after talking to his colleagues that Mr. Boggs, under fire from Democrats for his conservative positions, could not win committee support. 
Mr. Leahy signaled that Mr. Boggs should withdraw: “He doesn’t have the votes.” 

The deal to put Boggs on the bench was actually a Republican requirement in order to win support to break the near-permanent hold Republicans were putting on judicial nominees.  That deal has broken down, so now Boggs is getting blocked by Democrats, and it's a good thing because Boggs was basically a conservative.

Considering Congress is now out of session until after the election, there doesn't seem to be any way to rescue Boggs at this point.  Roll Call has more on the Boggs saga here, but it's all but a moot point now.


Sunday, September 21, 2014

Last Call For Climate Of Change


I wouldn't count on it though. 








And idiocy like this.



So why bother?


But why bother?

Barack Obama Was Never Your Boyfriend







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