Last Call For The Zombie-Eyed Granny Starver Express

Just in case the "both parties are the same" folks are still reading ZVTS, here's House Speaker Crossfit Brad Paul Ryan to let us know exactly what a GOP Congress and president will bring us in 2017.

House Speaker Paul Ryan said on Thursday that Republicans next year will unveil a plan to replace Obamacare in its entirety, as part of a "pro-growth" agenda that he believes should also include cutting welfare programs and taxes. 

Ryan said even if President Barack Obama will not sign them into law in his last year in office, the Republican majority in Congress must produce proposals to demonstrate "what our ideal policy would be looking forward to 2017 and beyond." 

"Put together a positive agenda and take it to the American people," he urged members of his party. The most urgently needed action, Ryan said, was to replace the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, as Obamacare is officially called. 

"Next year, we are going to unveil a plan to replace every word of Obamacare," Ryan said in a speech at the Library of Congress, which his office billed as his first major address as speaker, a job he has held for a little over a month.

Yeah, no difference between the parties, we'll only kick 25 million or so people off health insurance and cut taxes for the wealthy again, because I'm sure with all that extra money they'll invest in raising worker wages, right?

And when like Kansas is showing us, when massive tax cuts fail to magically produce more revenues and we get back to racking up trillion dollar deficits...oh wait, we'll just have to cut trillions of dollars from Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security, and that will create "growth".

In graveyards.

You think America is bad now, wait until the real austerity starts under a GOP federal government.

What It Will Take To Win

Playing with 538.com's Swing-O-Matic electoral college calculator is actually very cool, but also pretty sobering.  It doesn't take much of a shift among non-college educated white voters for Republicans to win 2016 walking away.

In 2012 they voted 62% Republican, with a turnout of 57%, and Romney lost 332-206 in the electoral college.  College-educated whites voted for Romney 56% with a turnout of 77%.

If college-educated white voters shifted to the Republicans from 56% to 62% Republican, where non-college educated white voters where in 2012, you're looking at a GOP president.  Florida, Ohio, Iowa, New Hampshire, and Virginia would flip red and Republicans would win 276-262.

If non-college educated whites go from 62% to 67% GOP, Dems also lose.  In that case, Colorado, Wisconsin flip instead of Virginia and they'd win by an even larger margin, 282-256.

Should both happen, it's an absolute wipeout.  Dems would lose those states plus Pennsylvania, Maine, Nevada, and even Oregon and Minnesota.  It would be a 358-180 wipeout.

Black voters would have to turn out at 92% level and vote at Obama's 93% in order to eke out a 270-268 electoral win for the Dems in that case.

On the other hand, should Democrats pick up even slightly more of the white vote, it becomes total carnage for the GOP.  If non-college white voters were split 50-50, Dems would roll to a 404-134 win, and would even win states like South Carolina, Missouri, and Georgia.

So it can go either way, but it doesn't take much.

The Daily Grind

Lost in the noise of OMG MUSLIM TERROISM is the fact the New York Times finds that on average, there's been a mass shooting of four or more people in America every day in 2015.

Including the worst mass shooting of the year, which unfolded horrifically on Wednesday in San Bernardino, Calif., a total of 462 people have died and 1,314 have been wounded in such attacks this year, many of which occurred on streets or in public settings, the databases indicate. 

It is impossible to know whether the number of such shootings has risen in recent years because the databases go back only a couple of years. More data is available for mass shootings calculated by a different standard, one used by congressional researchers and other experts who study mass killings: four or more dead. But experts fiercely debate whether mass shootings by that more deadly standard have remained level or ticked up slightly in recent years. 

Nonetheless, the stream of shootings this year — including an attack last week on a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado that left three dead and a shooting in October at a community college in Oregon that left 10 dead, including the gunman — has intensified the debate over the accessibility of powerful firearms. 

Two databases that track mass shootings that leave four or more dead or wounded — shootingtracker.com and gunviolencearchive.org — depend on news accounts and are not official. Nonetheless, they give an indication of the widespread nature of such episodes. Since January, there have been at least 354 such cases in about 220 cities in 47 states, according to shootingtracker.com. 

In November, six people were killed, five of them shot to death at a campsite in East Texas; 17 were wounded in a shootout as a crowd watched the filming of a music video in New Orleans; and four died, including twin 5-month-olds, in an episode of domestic violence in Jacksonville, Fla. So far this week, five people were wounded Sunday morning in a shooting in Kankakee, Ill., and a shooting Wednesday, before the San Bernardino attack, left one woman dead and three men wounded in Savannah, Ga.

This is the cost to water the Tree of Liberty, they tell us. Four or five people killed in a mass shooting, and about 95 per day per year total.

StupidiNews!

• San Bernardino police say 14 are dead, 17 more injured as two suspects went on a rampage at a holiday party for state employees and were later killed by police.
• Florida's Supreme Court has signed off on new congressional districts ahead of the 2016 election after the court found existing districts to be unconstitutionally gerrymandered.
• South African paralympian Oscar Pistorious has been convicted of murder by South Africa's highest court, he was originally convicted of culpable homicide and now faces at least 15 years.
• British warplanes attacked ISIS targets within hours of a British parliament vote authorizing military force against Islamic State targets in Syria yesterday.
• NOAA weather forecasters say this year's El Niño in the Pacific is still gaining strength and could cause record winter warmth across the US.