StupidiNews!

• Severe turbulence is being blamed for injuries to several passengers on a United flight from Denver to Billing, Montana on Monday evening.
• Tops on the agenda at this year's summit of North American leaders in Mexico: Canadian PM Steven Harper asking President Obama to approve the Keystone XL pipeline.
• Multiple car bomb attacks are responsible for 24 deaths in Baghdad as violence against Shi'ites in the country is on the rise.
• A roof collapse at a South Korean resort has killed ten and injured dozens at a college party held in the complex's gym.
• The first casualty in the Comcast/Time Warner Cable proposed merger may be Nexflix's deal with TWC over providing the streaming service on settop boxes.

Last Call For Bunker Mentality

After last week's debt ceiling fold, the House GOP has hunkered down and turned out the lights on passing anything.  Robert Costa:

After a tumultuous week of party infighting and leadership stumbles, congressional Republicans are now focused on calming their divided ranks in the months ahead, mostly by touting proposals that have wide backing within the GOP and shelving any big-ticket legislation for the rest of the year.

Comprehensive immigration reform, tax reform, tweaks to the federal health-care law — bipartisan deals on each are probably dead in the water for the rest of this Congress.

“We don’t have 218 votes in the House for the big issues, so what else are we going to do?” said Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), an ally of House Speaker John A. Boehner. “We can do a few things on immigration and work on our principles, but in terms of real legislating, we’re unable to get in a good negotiating position.”

Added Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster who works closely with party leaders: “It is an acknowledgment of where they stand, where nothing can happen in divided government so we may essentially have the status quo. Significant immigration reform and fundamental tax reform are probably not going to happen.”

Surprise!  Back to permanent obstruction and blaming Obama.  Sure worked in 2012, didn't it?

“It’s over, it’s finished after the debt ceiling,” Nunes said. “In the House, we’ve got 30 guys who don’t want to support anything, ever, unless it balances the budget next year.”

So you're going to vote for the guys that will do nothing for America in 2014.  OK.

Always The Victim

Everything you need to know about CNN's Chris Cuomo and his interview with Trayvon Martin killer George Zimmerman is summed up in this exchange:

Cuomo: What was the miscarriage of justice?

Zimmerman: The fact that two law enforcement entities stated that I had acted within the laws of our nation, in self defense.

Cuomo: You don't think it was about the law?

Zimmerman: I know it wasn’t, yes.

Cuomo: And what does that make you? How do you, how does that make you feel?

Zimmerman: Like a scapegoat.

Cuomo: A scapegoat for?

Zimmerman: The government, the President, the attorney general.

He will claim he is the victim until the end of time.  It's all Obama's fault.  It's all Eric Holder's fault.  They made him shoot and kill Trayvon Martin, you see.

It's always Obama's fault with these guys.

Karl Rove Is Still Wrong About Everything

Karl Rove is convinced that Democrats are afraid of Chris Christie.

Democrats are raising a fuss about the closure of the George Washington Bridge because they are afraid of Gov. Chris Christie's (R) chances in 2016, according to former President George W. Bush adviser Karl Rove.

“The reason the Democrats are doing this is because Gov. Christie is a strong potential candidate in 2016 and they’re going to try to smother every Republican presidential possibility they can,” Rove said on “Fox News Sunday.”

“They know that this race in 2016 is going to be difficult for the Democrats, hard to get a third term, particularly after the two terms of Obama.”

Meanwhile, Rand Paul and Mitt Romney keep going on teevee bringing up Monica Lewinsky.  You know, because the economy was so awful when Clinton was President, especially compared to the mess Bush made of it and that Obama's still trying to dig out of with no help from the GOP.

Seems like it's the GOP who is afraid if the best they have is stuff from 15 years ago on Big Dog.  They've got no plan for the economy, no plan for tackling climate change or immigration, no plan for anything other than "We hate Obama, so we'll hate Clinton too."

Scared kids.

StupidiNews!

• The co-pilot of an Ethiopian Airlines flight bound for Rome hijacked the plane and flew to Geneva seeking asylum, where he was arrested without further incident.
• UN investigators are referring North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to the International Criminal Court for a possible war crimes tribunal.
• Ukrainian opposition leaders are pushing President Viktor Yanukovich to accept limits on powers in exchange for defusing the 3-month long series of protest that have the country at the brink.
• EU leaders will need more time to decide on carbon emissions targets for 2030 as a final decision next month is now expected to be postponed.
• Australian police are testing laser grid mapping at crime scenes in order to get more accurate analysis of locations, the type of laser measurements used at cultural monuments.

Last Call For The Painless Abyss

"Do these people sound like credible and competent standard bearers?"

--Jennifer Rubin, on the Rand Paul wing of the GOP, presumably just before her computer imploded into a black hole and tried to swallow Earth in order to spare humanity and reality.

Bonus Verbatim Stupid:

"There is, to be frank, a clownish like quality to the far right’s antics. They seize upon flaky candidates to challenge mainstream Republican candidates, while ignoring Democratic incumbents whose presence allows Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to rule the Senate roost. They seem to have learned little from the shutdown debacle."

Sluuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuurp.  Pop.  And other black hole noises.

The Race For Justice

This weekend's verdict in the trial of Michael Dunn, the white Florida man who went to trial after he shot and killed 17 year old black teen Jordan Davis for playing his music too loudly in a nearby car, shows just how far we have to go in America in bending that arc towards moral justice.

After four days of deliberation, the jury in the trial of Michael Dunn, a Florida man who shot a teenager to death in a parking lot during a dispute over loud music, said it could not agree on whether Mr. Dunn had acted in self-defense or was guilty of murder.

The jurors did find Mr. Dunn guilty of three counts of second-degree attempted murder for getting out of his car and firing 10 times at the Dodge Durango sport utility vehicle in which Jordan Davis, 17, was killed. Three other teenagers, the subjects of the attempted murder charges, were in the car but were not struck. Mr. Dunn continued to fire at the car even as it pulled away. On the attempted murder convictions, he could be sentenced to 60 years in prison.

Judge Russell L. Healey declared a mistrial on the count of first-degree murder, which applied only in the death of Mr. Davis. The jury also failed to reach agreement on lesser charges that are automatically included in jury instructions. Those were second- and third-degree murder and manslaughter. Prosecutors are free to move ahead with a new trial on the murder charge, if they wish.

Now let's think about this.  At least one juror rejected all charges for Dunn for the killing of Jordan Davis: first, second, third degree murder, and manslaughter.  The attempted murder of the other three was apparently something they agreed upon, but the actual murder is what allowed Florida's "Stand your ground" laws to go into effect, and at least one juror agreed that the killing was self-defense because they were black teenagers in that car with loud music.

In other words, Michael Dunn's actual crime was failing to kill all four black boys.  If he had actually killed all of them, he would have walked under SYG.

Ta-Nehisi Coates responds:

I insist that the irrelevance of black life has been drilled into this country since its infancy, and shall not be extricated through the latest innovations in Negro Finishing School. I insist that racism is our heritage, that Thomas Jefferson's genius is no more important than his plundering of the body of Sally Hemmings, that George Washington's abdication is no more significant than his wild pursuit of Oney Judge, that the G.I Bill's accolades are somehow inseparable from its racist heritage. I will not respect the lie. I insist that racism must be properly understood as an Intelligence, as a sentience, as a default setting to which, likely until the end of our days, we unerringly return. 

And so it goes.  You can kill an unarmed black boy in Florida because he's black and then claim you felt your life was in danger.  All it takes is one juror of your peers to agree.

Sometimes You Come Up Snake Eyes

Snake-handling preachers are still a thing here in Kentucky and the Appalachians, the National Geographic series "Snake Salvation" is all about Kentucky snake handler pastors Jamie Coots and Andrew Hamblin and their families, and it seems Jamie Coots diced with the devil one time too many this weekend.

Paramedics were called to Coots’ church about 8:30 p.m. Saturday to check on a report someone had been bitten by a snake.

By the time they arrived, Coots had gone to his home nearby. The ambulance crew and firefighters went to his home, where they found him suffering from a snakebite on his right hand, according to a news release from Middlesboro police.

The emergency responders told Coots about the danger of not going to the hospital, but he refused to go, police said.

The emergency crews left the house at 9:10 p.m. Authorities received a call less than an hour later indicating Coots had died, according to police. Coots was pronounced dead at his home.

Apparently Coots had survived snake bites before.  This time he wasn't so lucky.  Kentucky's had laws on the books against snake-handling in church for decades, but they never get enforced because of religious freedom reasons.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2014/02/16/3092068/jamie-coots-well-known-snake-handling.html#storylink=cpy

Seems to me a just and kind deity wouldn't make you risk you life with poisonous snakes, nor would they then require you to not seek medical treatment and then die painfully.  But then again, people will do a lot of things for faith, the truly good, the truly bad, and the outright dangerous.

Chattanooga Hardball Wins, Workers Lose

The UAW unionization vote at the Tennessee Volkswagen plant has gone down in defeat.

In a defeat for organized labor in the South, employees at the Volkswagen plant here voted 712 to 626 against joining the United Automobile Workers. 

The loss is an especially stinging blow for U.A.W. because Volkswagen did not even oppose the unionization drive. The union’s defeat — in what was one of the most closely watched unionization votes in decades — is expected to slow, perhaps stymie, the union’s long-term plans to organize other auto plants in the South.

Or end those plans.  That's what happens when state and federal politicians make open threats against the livelihoods of workers in this economy:  the workers say "Wait a minute, I want to keep my job.  If I vote for the union, I become a target, my family becomes a target.  I don't want that."

A retired local judge, Samuel H. Payne, announced the vote results inside VW’s sprawling plant after officials from the National Labor Relations Board had counted the ballots. In the hours before the votes were tallied, after three days of voting at the assembly plant, both sides were predicting victory. 

The vote this week came in a region that is traditionally anti-union, and as a result many said the U.A.W. faced an uphill battle. The union saw the campaign as a vital first step toward expanding in the South, while Republicans and many companies in Tennessee feared that a U.A.W. triumph would hurt the state’s welcoming image for business.

What Red State Republicans mean by "welcoming image for business" is "how many tens of millions of tax dollars will it take to buy your thousands of jobs?"  Sure, that means we don't have the tax base to afford working schools, roads, infrastructure and safety, but at least we didn't lose the plant to Mexico.  Would have been a shame if you had unionized, and we drove VW out of business as a result.

Plus we kept them damn Yankees out of the state.  Next stop from our friends at the GOP:  the quiet pride and dignity of a $4 an hour job.

An Embarrassing Wealth Of Insanity

Last time we checked in with Silicon Valley billionaire Tom Perkins, he was shouting how the 99% were worse than Nazi Germany by daring to make him pay taxes.  Now he's decided that the best way to "fix" America is to drop this silly "one person, one vote" crap and let the rich rule.

Tom Perkins suggested Thursday that only taxpayers should have the right to vote -- and that wealthy Americans who pay more in taxes should get more votes.

The venture capitalist offered the unorthodox proposal when asked to name one idea that would "change the world" at a speaking engagement in San Francisco moderated by Fortune's Adam Lashinsky.

"The Tom Perkins system is: You don't get to vote unless you pay a dollar of taxes," Perkins said.

"But what I really think is, it should be like a corporation. You pay a million dollars in taxes, you get a million votes. How's that?"

The audience at the Commonwealth Club reacted with laughter. But Perkins offered no immediate indication that he was joking. Asked offstage if the proposal was serious, Perkins said: "I intended to be outrageous, and it was."

Which is funny, because if you think about it, that's pretty close to how the system works now.   The rich have bought our politicians and the politicians in turn do everything in their power to keep all the voting power with the rich while disenfranchising everyone else.

Perkins may have thought he was clever or outrageous, but that misses the point that America is already set up like this, by and large.  And that's how they like it.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• Scientists at the University of Texas has made a pair of human lungs from grown tissue, representing a possible breakthrough step forward in organ transplantation.
• The Treasury Department has issued guidelines for banks to handle the accounts of legalized marijuana dealers in Washington and Colorado.
• Results of the unionization vote at the Volkswagen plant in Tennessee are that the vote failed, pending appeal from the UAW over "outside influences"
• The Obama administration has promised drought-stricken California farmers millions in government assistance and relief.
• French scientists have discovered evidence that both aspirin and red wine may contain compounds that help prevent the formation of cancerous cells.

Last Call For Wage Enslavement

With Democrats wanting to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, and Republicans wanting to get rid of it altogether and declaring that somehow businesses will actually pay more than the current minimum wage if there is none, it's nice to see the business community say "No, we really are going to exploit American workers as much as possible, and we're going to start with the desperate, long-term unemployed that we've created over the last six years."

Enter Bloomberg News columnist Michael Strain, who has a "solution".

The fate of the long-term unemployed is arguably the most immediate social and economic challenge facing the U.S. today. How have our leaders in Washington responded to it? 

The left wants to extend the maximum duration of unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed. This is helpful, but not nearly sufficient. And President Barack Obama recently held a meeting with chief executives urging them not to discriminate against this group -- maybe a little helpful, maybe not. If anything, the right has been worse -- with a few notable exceptions -- offering its usual menu of tax cuts, less federal spending and less regulation.

Society owes these workers better -- creative public policies to help increase their chance of staying in the labor force. They want to work; they want to earn their own successes, to help the economy grow, and to support themselves and their families. But they can’t, in large part because they happen to be alive and working during a once-in-a-generation economic downturn.

Now, if you stopped the article there, you'd still be in reality.  But that's no fun.  We need to go straight to Freakonomics land!

We know that despite Obama's plea, many companies will look at their job applications with skepticism given their long unemployment spells. An employer may be concerned that workers' long periods of joblessness will negatively affect their future job performance. Will a worker be able to tool up, learn the job and be productive in a reasonable time? Perhaps he has personal problems? Perhaps she has been unemployed for so long because she keeps blowing her job interviews? With about three unemployed workers for every job opening, companies can afford to be choosy.

Fundamentally, we are talking about risk. Because of the federal minimum wage, the company knows that it has to take at least a $7.25-an-hour chance on a worker. If we knocked the minimum wage down to, say, $4 an hour, we would significantly mitigate employers' risk from hiring a long-term unemployed worker. Allowing employers to pay this group of people 45 percent less than other minimum-wage workers provides a strong incentive for businesses to give the long-term unemployed a shot.

Awesome.  Hiring people at $7.25 an hour is too risky, and we have a readily available supply of long-term unemployed to exploit here, folks.  Let's pay these dregs of society $4 an hour, because if they were actually worth something, they'd have a job by now.  But wait, there's even more glibertarian nonsense!

Of course, we can’t just lower the minimum wage for the long-term unemployed to $4 an hour and leave it at that. Society must have as a goal that no one who works full time and heads a household lives in poverty. This policy would have to be paired with an expanded earned-income tax credit, or with more straightforward wage subsidies -- federal transfer programs that supplement a worker’s labor market earnings with tax dollars.

Specifically, he wants the federal government to pay the other $4 an hour.  So see, they'd be making $8 an hour.  Liberals if you don't love this plan you're all awful hypocrites who hate the poor!

Bonus points for paying for it by eliminating the mortgage deduction.  We need to make housing even more unaffordable and drive up rents for MOAR PROFITS.

Super bonus points for this:

Michael R. Strain is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

Of course he is, darling.  Of course he is.

Legalizing Discrimination In Kansas

There's no other way to put this, other than Kansas Republican bigots are trying to enshrine the right to discriminate against LGBTQ, taxpaying Kansans using the excuse that "it's offending my religious freedoms."

Denying services to same-sex couples may soon become legal in Kansas.

House Bill 2453 explicitly protects religious individuals, groups and businesses that refuse services to same-sex couples, particularly those looking to tie the knot.

It passed the state's Republican-dominated House on Wednesdaywith a vote of 72-49, and has gone to the Senate for a vote.

Such a law may seem unnecessary in a state where same-sex marriage is banned, but some Kansas lawmakers think different.

They want to prevent religious individuals and organizations from getting sued, or otherwise punished, for not providing goods or services to gay couples -- or for not recognizing their marriages or committed relationship as valid.

This includes employees of the state.

Here's a hint, guys.  If your religion tells you that you have the right to treat your fellow humans as second-class citizens, you're missing the point of faith entirely.

On the other hand, these guys are clearly willing to see this go through the federal court system for 4-5 years because they figure by the time this gets to SCOTUS, a Republican president in 2018 will have replaced Ginsburg with another Alito, and they'll win. And even if that doesn't happen, all it takes is Anthony Kennedy deciding that religious freedom is more important than who you love.

That will motivate many, many such state bills enshrining bigotry into law and saying "We're ending discrimination by protecting the religious beliefs of Christians."

It's a pretty good bet, and you'll see more and more Republicans taking these odds. makes it more likely there will be a sweeping 5-4 SCOTUS ruling in their favor because they'll just have to act "for the good of the nation".

Love And Marriage

How appropriate that on Valentine's Day, I get to write about love.

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — Gov. Jay Nixon said Thursday that he supports ending Missouri’s same-sex marriage ban and thinks voters should have a chance to repeal an amendment to the state constitution that defines marriage as between a man and a woman.

In 2004, Missouri became the first state to enact a constitutional prohibition on gay weddings after the Massachusetts high court permitted gay marriage there. The measure was approved by 70 percent of the state’s voters.

This was a stupid and unnecessary thing, and it's time to fix it.  It was an overreaction.  The reality is, the state has no place in the personal lives of its citizens.  Citizens have no place in the personal lives of other citizens.  This was a gross overstep of government, and it's time to allow adults to enter a legal union with whomever they choose.  Our government's job is to serve the citizens, not pass moral judgments about which people deserve the service.  Period.

Jay Nixon and I don't always see eye to eye, but on this issue we agree.  This may come right after the ACLU applies some pressure, but Nixon has been clear about his views and has gone on record.  At times his delivery was a little lackluster, but he eventually got around to the right side of things.  Scoring major points from me, he admits he has revisited the issue and has adapted to fit what he knew was right.  His actions mirror his words.  The man is telling the truth.  It's important to take victories however they may come, and this is a major one.  This entire business was a cheap shot when it went in, and there is no legal justification for it whatsoever.  Jay Nixon surely sees a great chance to score points in the face of inevitable change, but I also give credit that he has actually done something while plenty of others stand by and remain silent.  He is upgraded from a C to a B in my book, and when it comes to Missouri and LGBT issues that's as good as it gets.

Someday, same sex marriage will be legal everywhere.  In the end our grandchildren will likely never know that it was probably because of the IRS that same sex marriage got the push it needed to become recognized in all states.  I find that hilarious.  It is by no means the only factor but it deserves an honorable mention in the collapse of stupidity.

Jay Nixon thinks the voters deserve another crack at doing the right thing.  I hope it works, and despite the fact that it won't matter in the long run I hope my home state can get on the right side of history.  This change is inevitable, and oh so rightfully it will come.  People can do the right thing here and usher in the change or they can make it as painful as possible.  Here's hoping for the former and bracing for the latter.

StupidiNews!

• A federal judge has declared Virginia's 2006 ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional, although a stay has been issued pending appeal.
• A Tennessee man has been charged with sending an explosive package to his in-laws house, which detonated and killed both of his wife's parents.
• The World Bank plans to boost lending to developing countries by $100 billion over the next ten years to finance infrastructure and fight poverty.
• Asia's biggest casino gaming company is eying its first casino resort in Macau, modeled on the famed French Palace of Versailles.
• Silk Road's latest web incarnation has once again been hacked as thieves made off with $2.6 million plus in Bitcoins.