Last Call For Three Percent Short Of Sane

Our old friends the Three Percenters are back, and they're more than happy to tell everyone who will listen that they will protect us from The Scary Brown Beturbaned Horde.

The Three Percenters have expressed concerns about national security in waging anti-Muslim activities this year. It's unclear whether they've also been influenced by the provocative speech of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump following the deadly Paris attacks.

"We will interfere with every move they (Muslims) make towards taking over our country," Dallas protest organizer David Wright said in response to questions the Associated Press sent to his personal Facebook page. "We are ready to fight back if they come at us violently." 

Wright, who plans to protest Saturday at a different mosque, hasn't advertised the "Three Percenters" name in his activities. But he claimed membership in comments on Facebook and told the AP he was a leader in a Texas chapter. A second Facebook profile appends the Roman numeral "III" to his name, as do other Three Percenters, and features a black "III%" patch as a background photograph. 

The Three Percenters movement began in 2008, galvanized by President Barack Obama's election, followers and researchers say. The name comes from the disputed percentage of colonials who armed themselves and fought the British during the American Revolution. 

The number of Three Percenters is unclear partly because anyone can ascribe to the movement. The man credited as the founder has claimed 3 million on his blog. One national Three Percenters' Facebook group has about 12,000 members, including people from all 50 states. 

Followers appear to consist mainly of white, male, conservative gun owners who believe the nation has been pushed to a tipping point by socialists in government aiming to disarm them, strip their constitutional rights and take their property, according to groups that track anti-government movements.

Yeah, a group of folks calling for open, armed revolution against the government, but after seven years they haven't quite pulled the trigger yet on their national movement.  Go figure.

It's a lot easier to bully Muslims however, and these guys are all about standing outside mosques with AR-15s in open carry states and daring somebody to do anything about it, because they are manly, manly patriots.

I'm tired of these idiots, personally.  I wish they would either start their revolution or shut up, one or the other, so we can be done with it all.

Brokered Your Heart

As much as I respect WaPo's Robert Costa as one of the few sane and real journalist voices covering insane Republicans, even Costa has to at some point realize he's being mushroomed (fed crap and kept mostly in the dark) on this "brokered convention" nonsense.

Republican officials and leading figures in the party’s establishment are preparing for the possibility of a brokered convention as businessman Donald Trump continues to sit atop the polls in the GOP presidential race. 

More than 20 of them convened Monday near the Capitol for a dinner held by Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, and the prospect of Trump nearing next year’s nominating convention in Cleveland with a significant number of delegates dominated the discussion, according to five people familiar with the meeting. 

Weighing in on that scenario as Priebus and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) listened, several longtime Republican power brokers argued that if the controversial billionaire storms through the primaries, the party’s establishment must lay the groundwork for a floor fight in which the GOP’s mainstream wing could coalesce around an alternative, the people said. 

The development represents a major shift for veteran Republican strategists, who until this month had spoken of a brokered convention only in the most hypothetical terms — and had tried to encourage a drama-free nomination by limiting debates and setting an earlier convention date. 

Now, those same leaders see a floor fight as a real possibility. And so does Trump, who said in an interview last week that he, too, is preparing.

Because of the sensitivity of the topic — and because they are wary of saying something that, if leaked, would provoke Trump to bolt the party and mount an independent bid — Priebus and McConnell were mostly quiet during the back-and-forth. They did not signal support for an overt anti-Trump effort. 

But near the end, McConnell and Priebus acknowledged to the group that a deadlocked convention is something the party should prepare for, both institutionally within the RNC and politically at all levels in the coming months.

This is a 100% bluff in response to Trump's 100% bluff that he's going to run a third party campaign. Both Trump and the GOP establishment are full of crap here.  If the GOP leadership had some magic by-law that rendered primary/caucus votes to be null and void, they would have used it long before now.

This is all for show, because it keeps people interested, and those who back the GOP leaders in Washington will donate to the RNC, and those who don't will donate to Trump, and both sides win in this case.

Besides, Trump winning primary states is exactly what's going to happen.  Trump knows it so he won't drop out of the GOP side.  The GOP knows it so they can't cut him off yet.

It's a game, and Republicans are happy to play.  Sadly, so is our media.

Dispatches From Bevinstan, Con't

I'm not surprised by this Kentucky Medicaid poll finding by the NY Times in the least.

More than seven in 10 residents of Kentucky want their new governor, Matt Bevin, to keep the state’s expanded Medicaid program as it is, according to a new poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation. And more than half of respondents described Medicaid as important for themselves and their families, underscoring the program’s substantial reach in the state and the challenges Mr. Bevin may face if he seeks to scale back or modify it. 

Mr. Bevin, a Republican who took office Tuesday, is an opponent of the Affordable Care Act who earlier this year called for reversing the Medicaid expansion on the grounds that it was unaffordable for the state. He has since backpedaled to say he will seek changes requiring Medicaid enrollees to have “skin in the game,” such as by charging them monthly premiums. 

“I do not intend to re-enroll people at this same level going forward,” Mr. Bevin said in a news conference after his election. 

Yet the Kaiser poll, conducted Nov. 18 through Dec. 1, found that 63 percent of Kentuckians have a favorable opinion of their state’s Medicaid expansion. Support for the expanded Medicaid program was significant even among Republicans, of whom 54 percent said they would prefer to keep Medicaid as it is rather than scale it back to cover fewer people. Of respondents who voted for Mr. Bevin last month, 43 percent said they preferred keeping the program as it is now. 

“This is a very poor state and people here can’t even afford to buy food,” said one respondent, Daryl Tackett, 57, a Republican in Harrodsburg, Ky., who said he did not vote in the election. “I don’t want him to take the Medicaid away because there’s too many people that needs it.” 

Bevin will do it anyway, because the majority of the people who voted for him want to cut Medicaid, and the people who didn't vote for him don't matter. And people like Mr. Tackett here don't want him to take Medicaid away, but he sure as hell didn't bother to try to vote for Jack Conway in order to keep it, now did he?

I mean, what are the people who will be hurt by Bevin's promised massive budget cuts do in November 2019, vote?

What makes you think they would do that?  I'll tell you what there Daryl, maybe you should have voted.

StupidiNews!

• After nearly 48 hours of deliberation, jurors found former Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holzclaw guilty on multiple counts of raping poor minority women.
• Syrian opposition groups have come to the negotiating table to discuss peace as long as President Bashar al-Assad steps down as part of a political transition solution.
• The FBI is searching a lake in San Bernardino in connection with last week's deadly shooting, officials say the search could take several days.
• Time is running out for Congress to come up with a solution to Puerto Rico's debt crisis before January 1, as the island is running out of cash quickly.
• Online gaming service Steam is taking measures to deal with the hacking and pillaging of more than 75,000 user accounts a month for tradeable digital loot.