Vote Suppression

People with power use their power.  Sometimes to get more; sometimes to keep what they have; sometimes just to make sure we all know who has it.

From Balloon Juice, here's a pretty good rundown:

(from the Pennsylvania voter ID law)

All photo IDs must contain an expiration date that is current, unless noted otherwise. Acceptable IDs include:
• Photo IDs issued by the U.S. Federal Government or the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania:
•Pennsylvania driver’s license or non-driver’s license photo ID (IDs are valid for voting purposes 12 months past expiration date)
•Valid U.S. passport
•U.S. military ID - active duty and retired military (a military or veteran’s ID must designate an expiration date or designate that the expiration date is indefinite). Military dependents’ ID must contain an expiration date
•Employee photo ID issued by Federal, PA, County or Municipal government
•Photo ID cards from an accredited Pennsylvania public or private institution of higher learning
•Photo ID cards issued by a Pennsylvania care facility, including long-term care facilities, assisted living residences or personal care homes

All the "liberal" complaining about this really doesn't look like a standard conspiracy theory.  This looks a lot like Repubs (who hold governorships and who control state houses in OH, PA and FL) are cooking up ways to tamp down on some pretty significant voter demographics that are known to lean towards voting for Democrats.  I know that's a bunch of equivocation, but while there's practically no similar efforts in places where Dems hold power, and the fact that these laws are almost exclusively being jammed thru in battleground states, AND that there's practically no evidence of anything even close to the level of Voter Fraud these restrictions are aimed at preventing, we still have to make sure we're not just stampeding over the cliff, saying all Repubs are power-mad assholes who want a lockstep totalitarian dictatorship.  The thought has crossed my mind - in fact it's crossed my mind often enough to have worn several easily followed trails into it.  I'm just not ready to point and yell, "J'acccuse", that's all.

One thing I really don't like about this is that the Press Poodles seem not to be looking closely at it at all. As if glossing over it or ignoring it helps their Horse Race approach by working to make Obama's lead look narrower than it is.  One tho't on that: because it's too one-sided, reporting on it would make 'em look biased, so until they can come up with something the Dems are doing that they think can "balance it out", they'll continue looking past it.

Today's Pix

What About The Women?

If abortion is illegal, what should happen to a woman who breaks that law by having an illegal abortion?

Beware The 9th Of July

Per snopes.com, this is a real thing and you should prob'ly check it out.

via Better Business Bureau's website:

Scammers in Estonia infected computers worldwide with malware that turned off virus updates and redirected consumers to fraudulent websites. When the FBI busted the scam ring last November, they set up clean servers to replace the ones running the scam. Victims have been redirected to those new servers ever since, usually without any knowledge they’d been infected in the first place.

While this appears legit, there's always that chance it's a good enough hoax to fool everybody.  But what I find truly delicious is that there's probably a whole big bunch of rubes out there who'll believe this is some kind of nefarious attempt on the part of Obama and Eric Holder to spy on the 'Merikun people.

I'm seriously considering planting the seeds on facebook (eg) that "consevatives" should avoid this at all costs, especially if they own any guns, or have ever searched for anything online concerning weapons, ammo, or anything that could be construed as survival gear, etc, etc.  And if they've visited any websites the gubmint might consider rightwing, whoa boy - better not go near this thing.

Could be loads of, but I'm likely too late for all that - what're you willing to bet that some wingnut's already put out the alarm?  Be afraid, Conservative Pussies - be very afraid.

Yo, Rubes...

...this is your guy?

From Mother Jones:

The Stericycle deal—the abortion connection aside—is relevant because of questions regarding the timing of Romney's departure from the private equity firm he founded. Responding to a recent Washington Post story reporting that Bain-acquired companies outsourced jobs, the Romney campaign insisted that Romney exited Bain in February 1999, a month or more before Bain took over two of the companies named in the Post's article. The SEC documents undercut that defense, indicating that Romney still played a role in Bain investments until at least the end of 1999.

So let's see some of what we got here:

• Romney made a boatload of dough disposing of "humans" (ie: living, fertilized embryos).
• Romney, as MA Gov outsourced a consumer call center in India to the tune of $160k/month
• Romney scratched tens of thousands of jobs as he and his partners pocketed millions of dollars - a lot of which came from the pension funds of the people who'd spent their entire adult lives working for and building those companies.

This ain't the guy, Repubs.  His foreign policy team is almost all NeoCon retreads, and his economic guys are all the boneheads who got us into this mess to start with.  Pick somebody else.

Connections

Bank of Credit and Commerce Int'l (drug money laundering scandal)
The First Gulf War
Big Tobacco
Fracking

What's the common thread?  Hill & Knowlton

The Sky Is Pink

It seems pretty important that we get this one right.


THE SKY IS PINK from JFOX on Vimeo.


And BT-fuckin'-W, it's time to consider something I've been proposing for a very long time on how to make sure these corporate buggers are telling us the truth about the effects of their operations on any given local water supply (eg).  Once a month, the whole executive committee plus one of their family members have to show up and drink a full glass of water straight from the tap of a homeowner selected by his/her neighbors.  Let's see how long it takes to clean this shit up.

Ed Note

We got slammed pretty hard by the storms last Friday.  We're OK, but electrical power is a problem.  We bought a generator during the monster snow storm of 2009(?), so I can power the fridge and the computers and a couple of window AC units.  We're far better off than lots of our neighbors, but there's very little about this whole thing that doesn't suck.

One thing - Americans behave like spoiled children the majority of the time, but when the real shit happens (like 80mph Derecho winds that knock the crap outa the power grid), people tend to rally together in a weirdly self-sufficient way.  I don't know how to describe it.  Like I said, our situation is considerably better than most, but when I offer the neighbors refuge in our relatively cool family room, they've all thanked me kindly and said more or less, "we're doin' OK for now" or "maybe take you up on that in a day or two" etc etc.  It just feels a little odd; like people don't wanna admit they're struggling with it or something.  I dunno.  Weird.

Anyway, even tho' I've got power for the PC, the DSL's been up and down the whole time, and blogging isn't a big priority right now.

Grandstanding

This is about as bad as it gets.

via Little Green Footballs:

The Justice Department announced today that the House Republicans who voted to find Eric Holder in criminal contempt are a bunch of grandstanding buffoons.

Not in so many words, of course: Justice Department Won’t Pursue Case Against Holder.

So Darrell Issa makes a big show of "investigating" Fast & Furious, building up a head of steam that finally explodes on Eric Holder in a dramatic vote to hold the AG in Contempt of Congress - knowing the whole damned time that NOTHING WILL COME OF IT.

The vote itself may have given us a wee peek at how "seriously" everybody was taking the thing: YEAS = 95, NAYS = 14.  Keep in mind the entire House of Reps voted on this piece of shit, and there were 324 NO VOTES.  435 Representatives, and almost 75% of 'em either registered NO VOTE or skipped the little charade altogether.

“The longstanding position of the Department of Justice has been and remains that we will not prosecute an executive branch official under the contempt of Congress statute for withholding subpoenaed documents pursuant to a presidential assertion of executive privilege,” says Deputy Attorney General James Cole in a letter to the House speaker, John Boehner.

The letter notes that during the Reagan administration, DOJ took the position that the contempt statute could not constitutionally be applied to an official who asserts the president’s claim of executive privilege. That policy was first articulated in a memo written by Ted Olson when he was at DOJ in 1984.
Cole writes that the position has been asserted several times since then, most recently during the Bush administration in 2008.

He concludes by saying that the Justice Department has determined that Holder’s response to the House committee subpoena “does not constitute a crime” and the Department will not refer the matter to a grand jury “or take any other action to prosecute the attorney general.”

It's all just a fucking game with these assholes.

Everybody Pays

Here's WIllard talking with DumFux Cavuto about having just signed the Romneycare bill into law in 2006.

Highlites = 2:00, 4:00, 5:30.

"We already have universal healthcare..."



When it comes to Obamacare, it's not hard to accept the notion that "conservatives" aren't against the policy - they're against Obama.  That makes a kind of weird political sense to me here in 2012.  What I really don't get is that so many people are so adamantly opposed to something that brings a solid benefit to them, and fits with the "stand on your own feet" approach (Individual Mandate), AND which fits the Competitive Markets model.