Last Call For Soulless Lumps Of Basalt

Whenever I think to myself "Boy, Republican politicians really can't get any worse" invariably somebody proves me wrong within minutes. Charles Johnson:

Republican presidential candidates are competing to see who can say the most heartless, reprehensible things today about the gun massacre at Oregon’s Umpqua Community College. 

First, Ben Carson blamed the victims for not defending themselves. 

Yeah, Ben Carson is a bit of a douchebag.

He'd also be your next President if America voted today, too.  Keep that in mind.  Meanwhile, Bobby Jindal is on the rise from 0% in the polls too.

And now, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal (a creationist like Ben Carson), has issued a statement at his website that actually goes a step further into awfulness: We Fill Our Culture With Garbage, and We Reap the Result.

And Jindal just goes off the rails and careens into the wall here.

Now, let’s get really politically incorrect here and talk specifically about this horror in Oregon. This killer’s father is now lecturing us on the need for gun control and he says he has no idea how or where his son got the guns. 

Of course he doesn’t know. You know why he doesn’t know? Because he is not, and has never been in his son’s life. He’s a complete failure as a father, he should be embarrassed to even show his face in public. He’s the problem here. 

He brags that he has never held a gun in his life and that he had no idea that his son had any guns. Why didn’t he know? Because he failed to raise his son. He should be ashamed of himself, and he owes us all an apology.

Now however you feel about the killer in Oregon, the fact of the matter remains is a father has outlived his son, one of the great tragedies that can occur, and yes, the son murdered nine people and then took his own life.  But for Jindal, a man running for President, to say something so heartlessly callous just for the shock value of scoring publicity while his presidential and political aspects wither like his soul?

I've thought some terrible things about Republicans, but never that they were just unfit to be in human society.

Jindal needs to resign from this planet, let alone the office of Governor of Louisiana.

The Great Jobs Debate In Kentucky

Republican cockfighting enthusiast Matt Bevin squared off against Democratic AG Jack Conway in the second of three debates ahead of next month's gubernatorial election here in Kentucky, and things got ugly, fast.

During the debate, Bevin accused Conway of not doing his duty last year when he chose not to appeal a ruling by late U.S. District Judge John Heyburn overturning Kentucky’s gay marriage ban, all the while calling for Rowan County Clerk to issue marriage licenses as a federal judge has ordered. 

“It’s easy for you to sit here and say that indeed, she should follow the law … but frankly, you did not follow the law when you cried before the cameras and refused to uphold the constitution of this state,” Bevin said. 

Conway defended his decision saying that it was his duty under the law to decide whether to appeal based upon the chances of winning the appeal. “I did my job, Matt,” he said. “You may not have liked the way I did, but I did my job.” 

Bevin claimed the state has lost 71,000 jobs since Conway became attorney general, and he laid that at Conway’s feet.

Bevin of course is full of nonsense.  Even if employment was somehow the domain of a state's attorney general to worry about, five minutes on Google and I come up with this chart:

Jack Conway took office in January 2008, Kentucky at that point had 1,860,600 people employed. Kentucky certainly lost more than a 100,000 jobs two years later.  But since then, the state has not only added those jobs back, it caught up to that January 2008 number in July of last year.  The preliminary August jobs number in Kentucky is 1,895,700 jobs.

Which means Kentucky has actually added 35,100 jobs since Jack Conway took over as Attorney General.

Bevin can't even lie correctly.  Idiot.

No Sporting Chance

We've all seen those TV and online ads for internet daily fantasy sports leagues where people can win millions of dollars, but mostly end up throwing away good money after bad.  Turns out whenever you have that kind of money involved, somebody, somewhere is going to rig the game.

A major scandal is erupting in the multibillion-dollar industry of fantasy sports, the online and unregulated business in which players assemble their fantasy teams with real athletes. On Monday, the two major fantasy companies were forced to release statements defending their businesses’ integrity after what amounted to allegations of insider trading, that employees were placing bets using information not generally available to the public.

The statements were released after an employee at DraftKings, one of the two major companies, admitted last week to inadvertently releasing data before the start of the third week of N.F.L. games. The employee, a midlevel content manager, won $350,000 at a rival site, FanDuel, that same week.

“It is absolutely akin to insider trading,” said Daniel Wallach, a sports and gambling lawyer at Becker & Poliakoff in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. “It gives that person a distinct edge in a contest.”

The episode has raised questions about who at daily fantasy companies has access to valuable data, such as which players a majority of the money is being bet on; how it is protected; and whether the industry can — or wants — to police itself. 

And when it's this easy to cheat and win, of course people are going to do it.

The leagues have been swelling in popularity, their advertisements blanketing football game broadcasts.

The industry has its roots in informal fantasy games that began years ago with groups of fans playing against one another for fun over the course of a season. They assembled hypothetical teams and scored points based on how players did in actual games.

But in recent years, companies, led by DraftKings and FanDuel, have set up online daily and weekly games based on a similar concept in which fans pay an entry fee to a website — from 25 cents to $1,000 — to play dozens if not hundreds of opponents, with prize pools that can pay $2 million to the winner. Critics have complained that the setup is hardly different from Las Vegas-style gambling that is normally banned in the sports world.

On Monday, DraftKings and FanDuel released a joint statement that said “nothing is more important” than the “integrity of the games we offer,” but offered few specifics about how they keep contests on the level.

The only surprising thing about this story is that it took this long for people to get caught.

StupidiNews!

• The Nobel Prize in Chemistry has gone to a team of three scientists from Turkey, Sweden, and the US for their work on mapping out how cells protect and repair DNA.
• New analysis finds that the 500 largest companies in the US are keeping some $2.1 trillion offshore in order to avoid paying $620 billion in corporate taxes yearly.
• Doctors Without Borders is calling for an independent international investigation of the bombing of their hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, calling the incident a war crime.
• US and Russian military forces are trying to work out coordinated joint airstrikes against ISIS militants in Syria in talks starting today.
• Time Warner Cable is openly apologizing to customers after years of the lowest-ranked customer service in the industry, promising to not act "like a cable company" in the future.