Wednesday, May 25, 2016

Last Call For A Bathroom Break

Republicans have decided that the social issue hill to die on in 2016 is which bathroom schoolkids use to go to poop.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and officials in 10 other states on Wednesday filed a lawsuit in federal court resisting the Obama administration’s guidance that instructs schools to let transgender students use bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity. 
Among the defendants in the case, filed in federal district court in Northern Texas, are the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S Department of Education. 
The guidance issued to public schools on May 13 instructs publicly funded education institutions to allow transgender students use facilities consistent with their gender identity in a wide range of setting — from restrooms and dorms, to sports teams.

So this is really a thing now, red states are now suing to stop trangender people from being treated as human beings by the government.  Hey, superb work, Christians.  So, let's check the list of usual suspects, shall we?

The state of Texas is the lead plaintiff and was joined by Alabama, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Utah and Georgia, plus the Arizona Department of Education and the governor of Maine.

Schools districts from Texas and Arizona also joined the suit, which names the U.S. government and a host of federal agencies and officials as defendants.

Ahh, good ol' red states.  What would we do without you making sure Americans are miserable Puritanical losers?

Dear lord I cannot wait for that ninth Supreme Court justice to be appointed so we can smash these idiots in the mouth for years to come.

The Third Degree In 2016

I've talked about a possible conservative third party challenge to Trump, and I've even entertained Bernie Sanders breaking off and joining Jill Stein over in Green land, but as Clare Malone over at Five Thirty Eight reminds us, there already is a serious third party candidate on the ballot in November, and Libertarian Party mainstay Gary Johnson is polling in double digits in a three-way race.

At the moment, he’s probably most often confused with that plumber who fixed your running toilet last month or your spouse’s weird friend from work who keeps calling the landline, but he’s neither — he’s the former governor of New Mexico, likely Libertarian candidate for president, and he’s polling at 10 percent in two recently released national polls against Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. 
A Morning Consult survey published Tuesday and found Clinton getting 38 percent of the vote, Trump 35 and Johnson 10, with 17 percent undecided. A Fox News poll conducted from May 14-17 showed Trump leading over Clinton, 42 percent to 39 percent, but Johnson at 10 percent as well. Lest you think this is some fluky May development, a Monmouth Universitysurvey conducted in mid-March — while the political universe was still busy wringing its hands over the Republican nomination — found that in a three-way race, Clinton would get 42 percent, Trump 34 percent and Johnson 11 percent. 
Given that Trump and Clinton are sporting historically high negative ratings, Johnson’s polling makes a fair bit of sense; Gary Johnson is neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton. He might not win a state, but he could make some noise.

This seems like it could maybe turn into another Ross Perot moment.  Maybe.  Still a long shot.


The most serious third-party candidate in recent memory was Ross Perot, who third-wheeled his way onto the political stage in 1992 and 1996, eventually taking 19 percent and 8 percent of the national vote in those respective years. In May of 1992, Perot, a former businessman, was polling gangbusters; a Gallup poll found him at 35 percent and an NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey had him at 30 percent. Perot entered the race in February of that year, a few weeks after the county was initiated to the first of Bill Clinton’s sex scandals, and in the midst of a tough economy for President George H.W. Bush — plenty of voters were looking for other options. Four years later, he was still polling well for a third-party candidate, but not nearly at his 1992 levels: May polls (not to be confused with maypoles) had Perot at 17 percent (ABC/Washington Post), 12 percent (NBC/Wall Street Journal), and 10 percent (Gallup1). 
But that was the ‘90s, back before most of us in the interior of the country had ever even seen an avocado let alone mashed it up on toast. How have third-party candidates polled recently? Johnson ran as the Libertarian candidate in 2012, and won about 1 percent of the national vote, becoming the most successful Libertarian candidate ever; in polls done in May and June of 2012, he was polling at 2 percent. Bob Barr, the Libertarian nominee in 2008, also polled at 2 percent in the late spring of that year. 
It must be noted that Johnson is not yet the Libertarian nominee. The party will be holding its nominating convention this weekend in Orlando, where he will face Austin Petersen, a young party operative, as well as former fugitive millionaire businessman John McAfee, who was once called“extremely paranoid, even bonkers” by the prime minister of Belize. 
Given that this is 2016, no result should be ruled out.

The point is there are people out there who have no intention of voting for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, and if they start seeing Johnson as a viable alternative, it's possible that he could get enough votes to swing a close state or two. As 2000 showed us, you don't need more than a few thousand votes in the right state to change the course of an election and of history.  Even if Johnson doesn't get 10% of the vote, 1% of the vote could be enough in places like Florida, NC, and even Ohio.

It wouldn't be the first time in American history.

North Carolina Goes Into The Crapper, Con't.

The Charlotte Chamber of Commerce is raging mad at NC GOP Gov. Pay McCrory and the state's GOP lawmakers as so far the state's idiotic HB2 "bathroom bill" has cost the state $285 million in lost business...

...and that's just Charlotte.

Mecklenburg County has suffered an economic blow of $285 million and a loss of as many as 1,300 jobs as a result of House Bill 2, a new Charlotte Chamber report says. 
The report also says inquiries about new economic development are down 58 percent since lawmakers passed the bill in March, and client visits down 69 percent from last year. 
“We have said all along that the economic loss has been real, the risk of further loss is great, and this is potentially catastrophic to our economy,” Chamber President Bob Morgan said. 
The report was distributed to Charlotte City Council members and some lawmakers. The council voted 7-4 Monday night against considering a repeal of the city ordinance that prompted lawmakers to pass HB2.

That toll is expected to climb higher if the law stays in place, too.  $285 million in lost business and 1,300 jobs is nothing to sneeze at, and that's not counting any other of North Carolina's other 99 counties that have lost business and jobs because of NC Republican bigots.

That's the kind of losses that look bad to lawmakers, and look even worse to voters around election day.  Hopefully my home state will finally kick these idiots out of office in November, starting with McCrory.
Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/politics-government/article79503287.html#storylink=cpy

StupidiNews!