Last Call For A Bunch Of GOP Ash Holes

Republicans are pretty dumb, but Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell is such a purveyor of The Stupid that it's actually giving me a migraine.

Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell is trying to get a restraining order to block the ashes of an Ebola victim's possessions from being buried in Louisiana. 

Caldwell began the process after news broke that the ashes of the possessions of Thomas Eric Duncan, the only man to die of Ebola in the United States were to be buried at a Louisiana landfill. “We certainly share sadness and compassion for those who have lost their lives and loved ones to this terrible virus,” Caldwell says, “but the health and safety of our Louisiana citizens is our top priority.” 

Reportedly, six truckloads of potentially contaminated possessions were incinerated in Port Arthur, Texas. Those ashes were supposed to be making their way to a landfill in Carlyss, Louisiana. 

The Attorney General's office expects the application to be filed on Monday, and they are also sending a letter to Texas state and federal officials, along with various private contractors, demanding additional information about the handling of the Ebola infected ashes.

Dear moron: the incinerated ashes of inanimate objects are not a viable source of Ebola infection. You cannot get Ebola from a truckload of burnt, cremated, incinerated non-human remains.  That's "You can get AIDS from a toilet seat!" level of stupidity, only if the toilet seat was also on fire and buried in a landfill.

Do you know what diseases you can get from a truckload of incinerated personal objects? Nothing, because it has been incinerated, you gigantic bloviating bowl of Kellogg's Idiot  Flakes. What exactly do you think is going to happen, that the ashes are going to rise up out of the goddamn bayou as an Ash Golem and then give everyone Ebola in their shrimp etouffee while infecting an army of undead Ebolagators that bite people in half and then give them Ebola because being bitten in half by an undead alligator is not bad enough so ha ha ha screw you now you have Ebola too?  Does this qualify me as the next Attorney General down there now?

Please stop being Louisiana's Attorney General immediately.  They deserve to be represented by someone who isn't a mouth-breathing pinecone-brained paint-chip eating lummox named "Buddy".

GOP Minority Outreach, Con't

If you're losing as a North Carolina Senate candidate going into the final stretch, just be like Thom Tillis and bring up slavery and how Democrats want to take more money from awesome white people and give it to them.

House Speaker Thom Tillis, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in North Carolina, once released a statement that said federal and state governments had "redistributed" "trillions of dollars over the years" — amounting to "de facto reparations."

That argument by Tillis, who is running to replace Sen. Kay Hagan (D-NC), came during anexplanation he offered on his website for why he supported a joint resolution expressing the North Carolina general assembly's regret for slavery. In his explanation for voting for it he tried to rebuff the idea that supporting that resolution would be a "slippery slope to reparations." 

"This resolution acknowledges past mistakes and frees us to move on," Tillis wrote. "The following summarizes my perspective on concerns raised by some citizens who criticized the decision to support the resolution." 

Tillis then went on to accuse a "subset of the democrat majority" that's kept pushing reparations. He warned that that subset would continue to do so as long as they are in the majority. Republicans took control of the General Assembly, for the first time in a century, in 2010. 

"This measure does not obligate legislative members to provide reparations. A subset of the democrat [sic] majority has never ceased to propose legislation that is de facto reparations and they will continue to do so as long as they are in the majority," Tillis said. "Federal and State [sic] governments have redistributed trillions of dollars of wealth over the years by funding programs that are at least in part driven by their belief that we should provide additional reparations."

Which is why Tillis is so eager to end those programs.  Trillions, you know.  Democrats have "redistributed trillions" as "reparations" so we paid for your troubles and it's high time we stopped doing so, dagburnit.

But please tell me again how Democrats are running the "nastiest campaign ever" and how only Democrats need to be "disqualified" for not answering real questions.

More People Voting Is "Voting Fraud" To Republicans

Never forget that the Republican party is fully committed to make sure as few people are allowed to vote as possible, because low turnout from mostly older, wealthier voters keeps Republicans in office.  Whenever anything comes along that makes things easier for the Great Unwashed Masses to vote, it's of course inviting "voter fraud", as National Review's John Fund whinges about.

Perhaps the most hard-fought Senate race this year will be Colorado’s showdown between Democratic senator Mark Udall and Republican congressman Cory Gardner. The RealClearPolitics average of polls in the race shows Gardner holding a lead of 1.3 percentage points. The outcome may determine control of the U.S. Senate, and the margin of victory could be less than the 11,000-vote margin by which Democratic senator Michael Bennet was reelected in Colorado in 2010.

But there is a significant difference in this year’s Senate race. In 2013, a new Democratic state legislature rammed through a sweeping and highly controversial election law and convinced Democratic governor John Hickenlooper to sign it. The law, known as House Bill 1303, makes Colorado the only state in the country to combine two radical changes in election law: 1) abolishing the traditional polling place and having every voter mailed a ballot and 2) establishing same-day registration, which allows someone to appear at a government office and register and vote on the same day without showing photo ID or any other verifiable evidence that establishes identity. If they register online a few days before, no human being ever has to show up to register or vote. A few keystrokes can create a voter and a “valid” ballot. ​Once a ballot cast under same-day registration is mixed in with others, there is no way to separate it out if the person who voted is later found ineligible. Other jurisdictions that have same-day registration, such as Washington, D.C., treat the vote as a provisional ballot pending verification. Colorado immediately counts the vote.

There's only one problem with Fund's tirade:  he's factually incorrect on many of the details as The Moderate Voice's Kathy Gill points out.

First, polling places have not been abolished! 

Voters can choose to mail their ballots back to the county clerks, drop ballots off at early voting centers, or complete them at the polls on Election Day. 

Like Washington state, Colorado runs a limited number of polling locations. So I was wrong, initially: this system should save counties money and the election day headaches related to running many polling centers. That doesn’t stop some people from grumbling about how they preferred the old days … but preferring an old system doesn’t mean that the new one is less secure.

Second, in order to register online in Colorado, you must have a Colorado driver’s license. 

So what that “no human being ever has to show up”? One hopes that signatures are checked against the one on the driver’s license for confirmation of identity. They are in Washington. If not, then shame on Colorado for administrative incompetence. Since Republican Secretary of State Scott Gessler (failed candidate for governor) opposed the new law, if he didn’t push for regulatory implementation that allowed for identity confirmation, then he’s incompetent. 

Besides, in the 2012 presidential general election, 74 percent of Coloradans voted by mail ballot. Safeguards in place then should work just fine two years later.

Third, same-day voter registration must be done in person, so please, where is the risk of their being found ineligible?

Gill goes on to point out a number of fallacies in Fund's dumpster fire full of outright lies.  The information on Colorado's vote by mail is readily available, but Fund actively chooses to tell bald-faced lies about it, to delegitimize Mark Udall's re-election.  This is how Republicans work: there's no possible way a Democrat could ever win an election fairly, so the problem is always "massive voter fraud" that never seems to materialize.  But of course, "everyone knows" Democrats must have to cheat, bribe, and steal in order to win because "real Americans" vote GOP.  So voter ID laws that are really all about disenfranchising those people are common practice in keeping red states red.

Fund doesn't even try to hide his lies here.  And this passes for intellectual honesty among conservatives.

If you have to keep people from voting in order to win, your policies may not be so hot, yes?

StupidiNews!

• UK lawmakers in the House of Commons have voted to recognize Palestine as a state in a non-binding resolution, joining Sweden's government who did the same two weeks ago.
• A Pentagon report finds global climate change is a "threat multiplier", affecting naval bases, troop deployment, and budgeting now rather than in the future.
• The International Energy Agency sees growth in demand for oil sharply lower in 2015, which could push oil prices below the point where US fracking is profitable.
• President Obama is urging world health leaders to take the threat of Ebola seriously as cases are now showing up outside of West Africa.
• Online data storage service Dropbox is the latest company to be hit by hackers who may have made off with as many as 7 million usernames and passwords.