Last Call

This should be the point where I post some elaborate April Fools' joke about me selling the blog to raise money to go to New York and profess my undying love for Jennifer Rubin or something, but I got nothing right now other than I hope you didn't buy your kids baby animals for Easter.

Pet horror stories are a staple of the post-Easter season in the United States, day animal control and rescue officials. The Easter holiday brings out the duckling, chick, and baby bunny lovers in people. They make an impulse buy, the recipient goes wild with joy for a day, but the honeymoon soon ends and parents scramble to surrender the animals.

Animal rescue staff, traditionally inundated with calls from regretful parents following Easter, are asking consumers to stop and think before buying an animal for Easter, and with good reason.

If, and it’s a big if, the animal doesn’t die from all that Easter excitement, now there’s a growing and soon-to-be mature duck, chicken (worse, a rooster), and rabbit on your hands.

A pubescent rabbit is not one to cuddle. Females are prone to running in circles, lunging, and grunting, says Anne Martin, shelter director for House Rabbit Society’s headquarters in Richmond, Calif. And if you purchased a male? “The boys will spray urine ... all over the place,” says Ms. Martin, who owns six rabbits and adds that a mature rabbit is a fantastic pet. But they can be quite alarming for a new pet owner whose supplier did not warn them.

Suppliers are also known for selling bunnies that have been taken away from their mothers too soon, says Mary Cotter, vice president of the House Rabbit Society.    

Ducklings and chicks have their own drawbacks, says Susie Coston director of the Farm Sanctuary shelter.

Like bunnies, ducklings and chicks are extremely fragile. If a child plays with them like a toy instead of fine china, they are likely to die from over-handling, Ms. Coston says.

And that's not a joke.

Shooting Yourselves En El Pie

The post-2012 election GOP "Latino outreach" continues to be one of the most miserable political relations failures in history, and the latest component of this house of cards is the fact that a big chunk of the Latino electorate sees Obamacare as something that directly benefits the Latino community, something that the GOP wants to take away.

Latinos, who have the lowest rates of health coverage in the country, are among the strongest backers of President Obama's healthcare law. In a recent national poll, supporters outnumbered detractors by more than 2 to 1. Latinos also overwhelmingly see guaranteeing healthcare as a core government responsibility, surveys show.

Yet congressional Republicans continue to make repeal of the 2010 Affordable Care Act a top agenda item and have renewed calls for deep cuts in health programs such as Medicaid, which are very popular with Latinos.

"Obamacare is a colossal mistake for our country," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said recently in a speech on the Senate floor. "It needs to be pulled out by its roots."

Republican National Committee spokeswoman Alexandra Franceschi expressed confidence that Latinos would ultimately recognize that the law raises costs and burdens businesses. "We're going to do a better job explaining why this law is negatively affecting all Americans, including the Hispanic community," she said.

And I'm sure it will be successful.  Note the red states with the largest Latino populations are now quickly trying to embrace Obamacare's Medicaid expansion, states like Texas and Florida.   Latino voters don't think Obamacare is a "colossal mistake".

But they think Republicans are.

Good luck with that, GOP.  Meanwhile, keep on confusing Hugo Chavez with Cesar Chavez and using vulgar racist terms while vowing to block immigration reform yet again. (and that's just the last couple of days.)  Also, vow to repeal a law that two thirds of Latino voters approve of in Obamacare, and go ahead and block gun control legislation that 84% of Latinos support.

Then ask yourselves why Latinos vote Democratic.  I can't imagine why.

Ashley, Alison, And The Turtle, Part 4

The Ashley Judd sage continues here in the Bluegrass State as Judd campaign adviser and former state Treasurer Jonathan Miller takes to the Daily Beast to say that Big Dog isn't responsible for Judd being pushed out...but KY Blue Dogs who duped the press (and apparently bloggers like me) into thinking he was involved are very much responsible for her decision not to run.

The past several weeks had seemed like a dizzying blur of false testimony, as the national media seized any morsel of news or gossip to sate its ravenous appetite for Ashley Judd stories. As the actress contemplated whether to move back to Kentucky and challenge Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, I was alternating with Congressman John Yarmuth as witness for the defense against a steady stream of salacious recriminations.

The prosecution was assisted in nearly every article by the same handful of Democratic professionals railing against the prospects of a Judd candidacy, promoting instead the potential Senate candidacy of Kentucky’s young Secretary of State, Alison Lundergan Grimes. While many may legitimately believe that Grimes is the better candidate, many of those who have been quoted impugning Judd, or have done so on background, also have personal motives: some stand to profit from a Grimes campaign, some may have been trying to redress perceived “disses” by the actress, and some may be aiming to keep Grimes out of the 2015 gubernatorial race, where she could undermine their preferred candidates.

Miller claims that Judd never uttered the phrase "I have been raped twice, so I think I can handle Mitch McConnell" because he was at the dinner where she was supposed to have said it.  I believe him here, and that false charge has Mitch McConnell's grimy fingerprints all over them. 

But then Miller says this:

The second Big Lie involved the Big Dog. The national media began to press the narrative that former President Bill Clinton was trying to force Judd out of the race in favor of a Grimes candidacy because Grimes’ father, Jerry Lundergan, had been a longtime Clinton supporter and had helped Clinton win Kentucky twice in the 90s.

There’s no doubt that the whole Lundergan family had developed a deep bond with the Clintons ever since Jerry emerged as Hillary’s loudest Kentucky supporter in her 2008 presidential bid. And just because, as a Clinton campaign staffer in 1992 and an administration official in 1996, I don’t remember Lundergan’s involvement, it doesn’t mean he didn’t help the former President win Kentucky on those occasions.

But I can personally attest to one prominent Kentucky supporter of the Clinton/Gore reelection campaign: Ashley Judd. Indeed, that’s where we first met. And Judd’s close relationship with both Clintons continued through Hillary’s 2008 bid, when the actress campaigned with Bill in Texas. He later returned the favor by providing the cover squib for Judd’s 2011 memoir, All That is Bitter and Sweet.  So it’s not surprising that Ashley informed our Louisville dinner group that the former President had privately urged her to run against McConnell, offering his complete support for her prospective campaign.

ABC News ultimately cleared up the record, but by then the narrative was set—the most popular national figure for Kentucky Democrats was opposed to a Judd candidacy, providing further oxygen to the anti-Ashley conflagration.

So at this point, we have at least one Judd supporter who says the Clinton/Judd split was manufactured and sold in order to get her out of the race.  Here's my question:  if that's true, why didn't Clinton say anything?  The one guy who could have put Miller's claim to rest was the Big Dog himself, and indeed if that's the case, President Clinton would have had every reason in the name of Dem party unity to nip this in the bud.  Instead, silence.

The problem is while Judd may have been a Hillary backer in 2008, Jerry Lundergan was a far bigger one across the board.  What raises my alarms that this may be miller's sour grapes is his ending:

But pity Alison Lundergan Grimes, the primary beneficiary of the anti-Ashley putsch. Like most Judd supporters, I hope Grimes runs, defeats McConnell and enjoys a long and successful career in Washington. But there are two other equally plausible—if not more probable—scenarios: One, Grimes gets drubbed by McConnell, whose ruthless, take-no-prisoners campaigns have ended the political careers of four of his last five opponents. Or two, Grimes opts out of the race for another campaign, leaving McConnell with no serious opponent.

All the while, I imagine McConnell sitting back, watching the antics with his sly, tight grin, enjoying how a small group of Democrats duped the so-called liberal media into creating the false narrative of a Democratic civil war. Only a master politician could get so damn lucky.

Yeah, first, those aren't the words of somebody trying to make a logical argument against the Clinton hose job.   Second,  if it's a 'civil war' it ended in about a week and was totally one-sided.  Judd rolled over hard, fast enough I might add that I think she wasn't ready for the hell that Mitch was going to unleash upon her.

Luck had nothing to do with it.  If anything, this piece seems a bit self-serving on Miller's part.

StupidiNews!

• As the US sends F-22 Raptor stealth jets to participate in joint military exercises with South Korea, the country is warning the North that any attack will be met with a "strong response".
• Washington state's plan to tax legalized marijuana sales may not be profitable as medical marijuana sales mean users could get pot for less.
• The "haircut" for depositors in Cypriot banks above 100,000 euros could be as high as 60%, according to the country's Finance Minister.
• The Louisville Cardinals advanced to the NCAA basketball Final Four after star Kevin Ware shattered his leg in a double fracture, winning 85-63.
• California parolees and sex offenders with GPS monitors are routinely disabling them according to a new LA Times investigation, and the state has no money to jail them.

Last Call

Former Reagan economist David Stockman goes off the deep end into Doomsday Prepper territory, and the New York Times is happy to run with it.

So the Main Street economy is failing while Washington is piling a soaring debt burden on our descendants, unable to rein in either the warfare state or the welfare state or raise the taxes needed to pay the nation’s bills. By default, the Fed has resorted to a radical, uncharted spree of money printing. But the flood of liquidity, instead of spurring banks to lend and corporations to spend, has stayed trapped in the canyons of Wall Street, where it is inflating yet another unsustainable bubble. 

When it bursts, there will be no new round of bailouts like the ones the banks got in 2008. Instead, America will descend into an era of zero-sum austerity and virulent political conflict, extinguishing even today’s feeble remnants of economic growth. 

In other words, Stockman is now predicting America's collapse and a Second Civil War.  And of course it will be all Obama's fault. 

 Instead, the White House, Congress and the Fed, under Mr. Bush and then President Obama, made a series of desperate, reckless maneuvers that were not only unnecessary but ruinous. The auto bailouts, for example, simply shifted jobs around — particularly to the aging, electorally vital Rust Belt — rather than saving them. The “green energy” component of Mr. Obama’s stimulus was mainly a nearly $1 billion giveaway to crony capitalists, like the venture capitalist John Doerr and the self-proclaimed outer-space visionary Elon Musk, to make new toys for the affluent. 

Less than 5 percent of the $800 billion Obama stimulus went to the truly needy for food stamps, earned-income tax credits and other forms of poverty relief. The preponderant share ended up in money dumps to state and local governments, pork-barrel infrastructure projects, business tax loopholes and indiscriminate middle-class tax cuts. The Democratic Keynesians, as intellectually bankrupt as their Republican counterparts (though less hypocritical), had no solution beyond handing out borrowed money to consumers, hoping they would buy a lawn mower, a flat-screen TV or, at least, dinner at Red Lobster.

Nowhere does Stockman take responsibility for quadrupling the national debt under Reagan.  In the end it's GOLD WEED END THE FED Paultard nonsense, only with a veneer of minor credibility.  That veneer gets eaten through by the acid about halfway through the screed.  It was all doom the second we went off the gold standard, which has been the case for generations now.

Nonsense is boring.

Here's Your Spirit Of Easter

Meanwhile, the NRA's official magazine is warning that only NRA's armed members that "only you can save our guns" and instructing armed gun owners to "stand and fight" against "King Pinocchio" Obama.




There's a word for wanting a bunch of armed people to "stand and fight" the President. It's not a very nice one.

Victim Mentality

Josh Marshall has the right of this:

Over the last few days, as the emerging national marriage equality consensus has become more clear, a number of social conservatives have begun suggesting they are now in a new and oppressive climate in which they’re no longer able to speak their minds about the immorality of homosexuality or why laws should discriminate against gays.

Or, to put it more bluntly, they say they’re losing their right to calls gays gross and weird.

Every single 19th century counter-attack by the right against the modern, 21st century left is based along these lines.  "Reverse discrimination" is nothing new, but today's conservatives use it constantly.  The war on women's reproductive rights is really the war on lost white men, robbed of their right to bully others, and emasculated by having to perform duties that should "traditionally belong" to women.  The antagonism towards African-Americans is to try to balance the scales because obviously racist black voters go 95%+ for black Democrats like Obama.  Hatred for Latinos is all about them taking jobs from good white men and bringing crime along with them.  Always white men are the victims.

At a certain point during the civil rights struggle it ceased to be acceptable in mainstream political rhetoric to say that the government should privilege whites over blacks. It basically happened between 1965 and 1970. That obviously didn’t end the issue of race or racial discrimination or widespread racism. But, in public, it displaced it onto a different set of questions and policies, a different kind of rhetoric. Pity party notwithstanding, the folks who oppose full equality for LGBT Americans seem to realize that we’re on the cusp of a similar transition.

And all of this is happening in the space of a few short years.  It is overwhelming, but that's just because of all the pressure built up behind the dam when it broke, and now the forces of privilege are drowning in it.  We're all going to have to learn to get along eventually, but now we can at least start.

[UPDATE] And speaking of victim mentality, behold the screaming from our Christian brethren over today's Google Doodle celebrating March 31 as Cesar Chavez's birthday.  It's persecution of the Christian majority, I tell you!

Worked Over Something Awful

America, where pulling yourself up by the bootstraps is a bit difficult due to all the sharp bootstrap-cutting objects lying in your path.

A Tupelo woman hired earlier this month by a KFC was fired Monday after the franchise owner discovered she’s homeless.

Eunice Jasica has been staying at the Salvation Army lodge since early December after losing her job, her car and her home.

The nonprofit organization requires its residents to seek employment daily and, upon finding it, to pay for lodging and start saving for a place of their own. Jasica said she had been job hunting for months and was relieved to find work on March 11 at the KFC on North Gloster Street.

A document signed by that location’s general manager on March 12 confirms Jasica had been hired to perform “prep work” and would receive a paycheck every two weeks.

But when Jasica reported for duty Monday, franchise owner Chesley Ruff withdrew the job offer upon learning she lived at the Salvation Army.

“He told me to come back when I had an address and transportation,” Jasica recalled. “But how am I supposed to get all that without a job?”

Firing someone you hired because they don’t have a place to live when the entire reason they took the job was to be able to afford a place to live, and you don’t pay enough to afford a place to live?  I’m betting Chesley Ruff is a lifelong Republican.

Luckily, this story now has a better ending.

A woman fired from a KFC in Tupelo for being homeless has found a new job and an outpouring of support.

Eunice Jasica was tentatively hired Tuesday by On Time Transportation to shuttle Medicaid and Medicare patients to and from doctors’ appointments. She still must complete the final stages of her application process but should be on the job by early April, said the company’s office manager, Yolanda Baskin.

The much larger problem is America is largely designed to keep poor people poor, and ridiculously rich people ridiculously rich.

Respect Given, Respect Earned

I've had my problems with Chris Hayes in the past, but I am reminded by Ann Friedman at the Columbia Journalism Review (as Hayes moves forward to MSNBC's prime time 8 PM weekday slot next month) that the objective data from his year plus on his weekend morning show demonstrates his commitment to diversity when so many weekend show pundits and panelists are white men.

But earlier this month, after MSNBC announced it was giving Chris Hayes his own daily primetime news show, Media Matters published a chart that showed how his weekend show, Up with Chris Hayes, differed from its cable-news competitors: It wasn’t all white dudes. Specifically, 57 percent of the show’s guests were not white men. (Full disclosure: I have, in the past, been one of the non-dudes featured on said program.) To hear lots of journalists tell it, this is an impossible feat. So I called up Hayes to ask how he and his team created a shining oasis of diversity in a cable-news desert of sameness.

“We just would look at the board and say, ‘We already have too many white men. We can’t have more.’ Really, that was it,” Hayes says. “Always, constantly just counting. Monitoring the diversity of the guests along gender lines, and along race and ethnicity lines.” Out of four panelists on every show, he and his booking producers ensured that at least two were women. “A general rule is if there are four people sitting at table, only two of them can be white men,” he says. “Often it would be less than that.”

If they did end up booking a show that featured a majority of white men, they’d call it “taking a gender hit.” Hayes explains, “and then we’d be like, well, we have to make up for that either in the second half of the show or on the Sunday show.”

In other words: quotas. Hard quotas.

“The editorial decisions, the content we decided to pursue, also dovetailed with that,” he continues. “We had three Iraqis join us when we talked about the 10-year anniversary of the war. We did a full show about feminism. And so, part of it is that we weren’t talking about the Ryan budget every week. Often we were discussing topics on which there was a natural affinity between people of backgrounds different than the standard one that is often presented on television.”

And while some of his guests are maddeningly obnoxious, at least they tend to be outnumbered rather than making up the majority.  That's a huge deal, and considering the ratio of white men to everyone else on other weekend punditry roundups tends to be 2 to 1, the opposite is true on Up With Chris Hayes.

Here's hoping that tradition continues on his new show, All In...but my question is where's the praise for Melissa-Harris Perry?

StupidiNews, Easter Weekend Edition!

• Some 17 people are confirmed dead and dozens more trapped after the collapse of a 16-story building under construction in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
• A new study by the CDC has once again found no link between vaccinations and autism.
• Former South African president and international civil rights icon Nelson Mandela is "in good spirits" in a Johannesburg hospital, being treated for a lung infection.
• A US federal judge has dismissed a large portion of the lawsuits against major banks over manipulation of the world benchmark Libor interest rate.
• Swiss adventurer Andre Borschberg plans a flight tour across the US in his solar-powered plane beginning May 1.

Last Call

The Big Apple has just approved a citywide ordinance that will give paid sick days to thousands who don't get them...that is if companies decide 14 is a great number, and the real issue is mayoral candidate and current NYC City Council Speaker Christine Quinn's reaction.

The mandate will take effect on April 1, 2014, and will extend to include businesses with 15 or more employees a year later, under the accord, which was confirmed by Robin Levine, a City Council spokeswoman. It will also require all employers in the city to provide unpaid sick leave starting in 2014.

“The final outcome leaves out over 300,000 New Yorkers,” said city Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, a rival to Council Speaker Christine Quinn among five Democrats running for the party’s mayoral nomination. She had previously blocked efforts to bring such a proposal, backed by 38 of the 51 council members, to a vote.

The law, if adopted, will mean workers won’t have to fear losing a job because of illness. It will affect 1 million New Yorkers by 2015. A similar measure has won approval in Portland, Oregon, while others are pending in Massachusetts, Vermont and Washington state.

Quinn for three years resisted calls from a majority of the council to permit a vote on a bill that would have covered employers with five or more workers, saying it would impose too great a burden on small businesses while the unemployment rate remained at more than 9 percent. As a mayoral candidate, she has been criticized by de Blasio and others for her opposition to the measure. 

The loopholes are big enough to drive a truck through, frankly.   But good for Christine Quinn to at least recognize that half a loaf here is better than none.  When the nation's largest city instituttes a law like this, I'm only hoping more cities will follow.

Fueled Up, Ready To Go

The Obama administration is today having the EPA lay out major new rules for cleaner gasoline with less sulfur.  Big energy companies are screaming it will "dramatically" raise the price of fuel by 9 cents a gallon, the reality is it'll add less than a penny and be the equivalent of taking about 12% of the nation's 250 million plus cars off the roads in reducing emissions.

While gasoline sulfur itself does not pose a public health threat, it hampers the effectiveness of catalytic converters, which in turn leads to greater tailpipe emissions. These emissions — nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, carbon monoxide and fine particles — contribute to smog and soot, which can cause respiratory and heart disease.

The proposed standards were first reported by The Washington Post on Thursday afternoon and confirmed by the administration Thursday night.

The regulations are supported by environmental advocates, state regulators and even automobile companies, who would prefer uniform sulfur standards for fuel nationwide. But oil industry officials and their congressional allies say it will cost up to $10 billion to upgrade refineries and an additional $2.4 billion in annual operating costs.

Both public health advocates and the administration say the ultimate cost would be much lower because of provisions giving refiners flexibility in complying with the standards. The EPA estimates annual health benefits of up to $23 billion by 2030.

The agency surveyed 111 U.S. refineries and found 29 already can meet the sulfur standard or come close to it, 66 can reach it with modest modifications and 16 would require a major overhaul.

Time to invest those record tens of billions in profits back in your businesses and into the health of your customers, energy companies.  Of course, Big Oil knows it can jack up the prices whenever it feels like and they can continue being the most profitable companies on Earth, so I have no sympathy for them.

But the Obama EPA is doing the right thing here for all of us.  More of this, please.

Ohio Comes To Carolina

Back home in North Carolina, the Zandarparents inform me that new GOP Gov. Pat McCrory and the Tea Partified legislature are on a roll now that Democratic Gov. Bev Purdue is gone. She was the only thing standing between the Tarheel State and nonsense like this.

Two bills filed by Republican lawmakers seek to cut back early voting and eliminate same-day registration in North Carolina.

Senate Bill 428, filed by Sen. Jerry Tillman, R-Randolph, would cut the early voting period from two weeks to one and would eliminate same-day voter registration.

House Bill 451, filed by Rep. Edgar Starnes, R-Caldwell, goes even further. In addition to cutting early voting and same-day registration, it would also outlaw early voting on Sunday and straight-ticket voting.

To recap, Republicans are happily running in NC on "We want fewer people to vote, and fewer people to be allowed to vote." Nobody apparently sees the problems with this. They're not even trying to hide the fact that it's voter suppression anymore.

Democrats say such bills are intended to make it harder to vote and will disproportionately affect low-income, working and minority voters – groups that traditionally favor Democrats.

The Sunday ban, in particular, would affect popular "Souls to the Polls" voting drives at African-American churches.

"I think Sundays just should be – some things you just shouldn't do on Sundays, so I am just opposed to voting on Sunday," Starnes said.

You can practically see the hidden "those people" before the word "voting" in that sentence there. But again, Republicans are actively saying A) we make it too easy to vote in North Carolina, so we should probably put an end to it, because if you can't vote during banker's hours on a Tuesday, you don't deserve to be a part of the body politic.

Tillman said his bill isn't meant to be partisan, noting all voters would still have equal access to the polls.

Meanwhile, he said, keeping early voting sites open for two weeks costs money that could be better spent elsewhere.  "We're paying people for two weeks to run those election centers," he said. "Let's cut it to one week, and we can do the same thing. It's not to disenfranchise anybody."

Why should representative democracies spend money on stupid crap like "voting", anyway? GOP learned their lesson in Ohio, and that lesson is "if the minorities can vote, we lose." Gotta actively legislate the end of that, call it non-partisan, and say God didn't want you to vote on Sundays anyway, plus why are we spending money to hold elections? Let's take the difference and cut some taxes for some one percenters, and they'll create votes instead!

StupidiNews!

• North Korea's response to US B-2 Stealth bombers is to place rockets on standby to attack US bases, with Kim Jong Un declaring that it's time to "settle accounts" with the West.
• Maine may become the next state to legalize and tax marijuana, as at least 35 lawmakers are interested in giving the state revenue from sales of pot.
• The Mexican war on drug cartels moves to Reynosa, Mexico, the city of 600,000 is now ground zero for the battle between the Mexican army and cartels along the border with Texas.
• Harvard, Yale, and Columbia universities recorded some of the highest rejection rates in school history, with 7.3% or less of freshman applicants accepted this fall.
• Video game designer Jason Rorher has buried his latest creation somewhere in the Nevada desert, where it may take centuries to find.

Last Call

To recap, "GOP savior Marco Rubio" just signed up with Rand Paul to block all Senate gun control legislation.

Republican Sens. Marco Rubio (FL) and Jim Inhofe (OK) have signed on to a letter threatening to filibuster new gun legislation, according to Sen. Mike Lee's (R-UT) communications director. 

Sure.  This will help the GOP.