Last Call For Sort Of Shutting Down The Government

Sen. Rand Paul has a great idea, mainly involving not shutting down the government by the House GOP forcing defunding Obamacare, just the House GOP permanently delaying the insurance mandate, the exchanges opening, the subsidies for working class families, and everything else from actually going into effect.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said Sunday that Republicans should “stand up and fight” against ObamaCare, but warned that forcing a government shutdown over funding for the law is the wrong strategy.

"I don't think shutting down the government is a good idea, but I do think that we were elected, conservatives were elected, to try to stop this overreach, this government takeover of healthcare," Paul told "Fox News Sunday."

Paul said Republicans should use the desire to avoid a government shutdown to squeeze concessions out of Democrats, predicting that a spending bill that headed to conference committee could see a delay of the individual mandate or opening of the insurance exchanges.

"People want us to stand up and fight, I'm willing to stand up and fight," Paul said. "We should use the leverage of controlling one-third of the government. We don't control all of the government, but Republicans control the House of Representatives, they should stand up, use that power to at the very least make that law less bad, delay it, do something we can to protect the American public from the law."

So defunding the law and then threatening to shut down the government is unreasonable.  Defunding all the other stuff that makes the law possible and threatening to shut down the government, totally okay!

 

And so it goes with our principled Republican moderates.

Onward Christian Prophetic Minority

This WSJ profile of the Southern Baptist Convention's new political director, Russell Moore, is very interesting to me from a "know your opponent" standpoint.  I'm not a devout Christian by any means, or even religious, but the political strategy that Moore is pushing seems to be best described here as "pragmatic victimhood".  And if the notion seems odd to you that the Christian majority in the US is suddenly acting like an aggrieved minority, you've not been paying attention to the Religious Right's shell game in the age of Obama.

'The Bible Belt is collapsing," says Russell Moore. Oddly, the incoming president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission doesn't seem upset. In a recent visit to The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Moore explains that he thinks the Bible Belt's decline may be "bad for America, but it's good for the church."

Why? Because "we are no longer the moral majority. We are a prophetic minority."

The phrase is arresting coming from such a prominent religious leader—akin to a general who says the Army has shrunk to the point it can no longer fight two wars. A youthful 41, Mr. Moore is among the leaders of a new generation who think that evangelicals need to recognize that their values no longer define mainstream American culture the way they did 50 or even 20 years ago.

On gay marriage, abortion, even on basic religious affiliation, the culture has moved away. So evangelicals need a new way of thinking—a new strategy, if you will—to attract and keep believers, as well as to influence American politics.

The easy days of mobilizing a ready-made majority are gone. By "prophetic minority," he means that Christians must return to the days when they were a moral example and vanguard—defenders of belief in a larger unbelieving culture. He views this less as a defeat than as an opportunity.

It's not like ascribing fever-bright martyrdom to a group of religious fanatics is new in the history of the planet or anything, or even American history.  But in a decade they've gone from "We're the moral majority because this will always be a Christian nation" to "If you are a true Christian, you will fight this battle with us because America has lost its way".

It's a call to arms against the rest of the country.  The prophetic minority strategy makes Christians morally correct because they are being "persecuted" for their beliefs by a country that increasingly doesn't buy into their intolerance towards LGBTQ Americans, racial minorities, women, other religions, secular Americans, and even more liberal, inclusive Christians (of which I come from a long line of.)  And those who don't meet the standards, well, it's time to go after them.

His cultural revival plan is also to focus more on local churches. When the Supreme Court's decisions on gay marriage came down in June, Mr. Moore sent a message to pastors to help them talk with their congregants about the Southern Baptist opposition to the law. "We don't hate our gay and lesbian neighbors," he says, but redefining marriage on their behalf is another matter.

There are a couple of reasons why Christians are losing the debate over gay marriage, Mr. Moore says. One is that even many Christians don't have a real understanding of what marriage is. "We have embraced certain aspects of the sexual revolution," he says, like the "divorce culture."

Another is that many people assume "my marriage is my business"—why should they care if their neighbors marry someone of the same sex? Mr. Moore says the part of the marriage ceremony when the pastor asks if anyone knows of a reason why the couple should not wed is like a "vestigial organ." No one ever objects "except in romantic comedies," but there was a time when a couple's marriage decision was thought to be of church concern. He would like it to be again.

As a "prophetic minority," Mr. Moore thinks his most profound political task will be defending religious liberty from the assaults of a secular government. The cause is at the heart of his plan to fight the contraception mandate in ObamaCare. President Obama may have thought that religious employers would accept being forced to pay for contraception, the morning-after abortion pill or sterilization under the law. "But we are not adjusting to the new normal," Mr. Moore avers. "We are not going to go away or back down."

So yes, from this standpoint, they are a minority.  They are hardly aggrieved, however.  But that's how they want to play it, and that's the new political strategy:  everything that the Obama administration is doing is an "assault on the religious liberty" on those who say they are unfairly being persecuted for their proud intolerance.  The government cannot tell them to do anything that they don't believe they should have to do.  Decades of jurisprudence would say otherwise, but the basic plan is everything they don't like now violates the First Amendment's freedom of religion clause, and they will act accordingly.

So stand tall, anti-choicers, homobigots, and Talibangelicals.  Your right to shame, persecute, and harass those who don't meet your standards will be fought for tooth and nail.

What a nice religion to be based on the right to hate, not love, others.

ZVTS Takes The Fifth (Birthday)

Fifth birthday, that is.  I completely missed the fact we turned 5 years old this month (August 6th).

 

 

Here's hoping we keep going, in one form or another.  It's been a hell of a ride though, and it's been because of you guys.   Thanks for being a reader!

Last Call For Shutdown Countdown

If House Republicans really are buying this narrative, I'm going to enjoy hearing the words "House Speaker Nancy Pelosi" sooner than I thought.

House conservatives say grassroots support is building for their effort to risk a government shutdown to defund ObamaCare.

Conservatives who back the strategy said their spines have been stiffened by support at town-hall meetings.

“I have not heard, 'Don’t shut down the government over ObamaCare,'” Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-Ind.) said, referring to meetings with his constituents over the recess. “I have heard, 'This law is not ready for primetime, and we need to do anything we can to stop it.'” Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas) has held six events in his north Texas district so far in August and is leaning toward backing the shutdown threat.

He also said the federal government’s move this month to subsidize health insurance for lawmakers and staff required to enter ObamaCare’s exchanges is acting as an “accelerant” and “driving people into a froth” about shutting the government down over ObamaCare funding. 



“I'm hearing a lot of anger that is right beneath the surface, ready to erupt,” Burgess said. At one town hall, Burgess said support for the defunding threat was "virtually unanimous" when he asked for a show of hands. 



"Grassroots anger" will occur when the House GOP follows through on this mess and Grandpa finds out he may not be getting his Social Security check on time, Grandma may not be getting her Medicare reimbursement for this visit to the doc, Uncle Ted's delayed in getting his VA benefits, and Aunt Molly's not able to take the cousins to Yellowstone because the park's closed indefinitely.

But go ahead, guys.  Obama's already been re-elected, but guess how many House Republicans are facing re-election in 2014?

Why, all of them.

Roll the bones, boys.  Roll the bones.

Romney Goes Through The Reince Cycle

RNC chairman and 35 MPG highway sedan Reince Priebus just ran over Mitt Romney's immigration position, and Benjy Sarlin wonders if the wily(ish) head of the GOP truly understands the 55-gallon drum of lombrices that he's opened.

“Using the word ‘self-deportation’ — it’s a horrific comment to make,” Priebus told reporters, according to Business Insider. “I don’t think it has anything to do with our party. When someone makes those comments, obviously, it’s racist.”

Priebus has been working hard to push the party to the center on immigration ever since President Obama dominated the Hispanic vote in November. But his latest comments put him on dangerous ground.

For one thing, there’s nothing obviously “racist” about the phrase “self-deportation” itself. It was actually a pretty accurate description of Romney’s preferred policy as championed by Republican officials like Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. Their position was that if you pass state and federal laws to make life difficult for undocumented immigrants, then hopefully they’ll leave. You might disagree with the policy, but there’s nothing explicitly racial in Romney’s description of it.

But here’s where Priebus really runs into trouble. If Romney was “racist” in 2012, so was practically the entire Republican party. Romney’s position was such standard fare at the time that it made it into the RNC’s party platform—you know, the platform Priebus oversaw as chairman.

Oops.

Of course, an even bigger is the actually racist immigration positions of Republicans like Iowa's Steve King, who seems to think undocumented Latino immigrants are all drug dealers with huge calves.  But hey, Drive The All New Reince Priebus seems bound and determined to make sure that everybody blames the GOP when the immigration bill dies screaming in the House.

I don't have a problem with that.

Your 2016 Worst Kasich Scenario

I have no idea what either Ohio GOP Gov. John Kasich or the Columbus Dispatch has been smoking, but this isn't happening under any circumstances.

Gov. John Kasich awoke to a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal yesterday that not only mentioned him as a possible White House contender for 2016, but as someone who could “rebrand the Republican Party.”

After that piece, Kasich’s press office announced by 11:30 a.m. that Kasich would lead a national push to produce a federal balanced-budget amendment.

And about an hour after that, in a speech to the Franklin County Republican Party, he said the Affordable Care Act is “not Obama’s plan; it’s Hillarycare.”

It was quite a sequence ... but for a governor seeking re-election next year or of someone thinking bigger?

Hillary vs Kasich?  So the Republican 50-state strategy is "give 50 states to Hillary?"  C'mon, guys.  First of all, Kasich has the charisma of a moldy couch.  Second, he just signed into law one of the most ridiculous abortion laws in the country.  Third, Ohio is completely controlled by the Tea Party, and fourth, the Tea Party is about to force an unconstitutional fetal heartbeat abortion ban bill that would end all abortions after just six weeks.  If Kasich signs that, he's done.  If he doesn't sign it, he's done.

And as the Plunderbund crew reminds us, there's a reason number 5.

[Friday] morning, the July jobs report came out. The good news? Ohio gained 5,300 more jobs as private sector gains (+9,100) but lost 3,300 in the public sector (losses employment in federal and local government outpaced gained in state government). 3,100 jobs were lost in construction last month which has seen 6,300 lost jobs since last July. Roughly half of the private sector gains last month came from the typically low pay/low benefits leisure and hospitality sector. Ohio’s job gains in July only erased less than 59% of the jobs lost in June.

That’s all the good news. The rest is bad news. Ohio’s unemployment rate stayed at 7.2% as the unemployment rate nationally dropped .2% last month. The only “miracle” in Ohio’s economic news last month is that Ohio’s unemployment rate didn’t go up. But over the past twelve months, Ohio’s unemployment rate hasn’t moved. Like, at all. And the trendlines over the past months strongly suggest there’s far greater pressure that will drive Ohio’s unemployment rate up than down.

For the THIRD consecutive month in a row, the number of unemployed Ohioans grew. In July, three thousand Ohioans joined the rank of the unemployed. That means there are 1,000 more Ohioans unemployed today than there were a year ago. Although the CES survey of employer’s payrolls showed a gain of 5,300 jobs, the LAUS survey of households (which actually determines the State’s unemployment rate) showed 14,000 fewer Ohioans reported being employed, so there is a disparity between what company payroll records are reporting to what Ohio households are saying.

So no, John Kasich is not going to be the 45th President of the United Anygoddamnthing.  Trust me on this.

Last Call For State Of De Nile

It's difficult for me to agree with Reuters columnist David Rohde here:  it's time for Washington to pull the plug on Egyptian military aid after this week's massacre for sure, but it's not a failed foreign policy approach from the Obama administration that's responsible for the Middle East mess over the last 12 months, either.

Tepid rationalizations that the United States has “limited leverage” in Egypt or that the Arab Spring is “failing” do not change a basic fact: An U.S.-funded “ally” has carried out one of the largest massacres of protesters in a decade.

It is time for Obama to cut off U.S. aid to Egypt. Ending assistance will not curb the behavior of Egypt’s increasingly autocratic military ruler, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. Nor will it ease that country’s political divide or reduce ant-Americanism. But it will say that the United States actually stands for basic international principals.

And if Rohde had stopped here, we'd be in agreement.  Of course, blaming President Obama then becomes just as much of a copout as Rohde accuses Obama of taking.

Wednesday’s killings and events in the Middle East over the last few weeks point to an alarming trend for the Obama White House: Its drone and surveillance-centric approach to counterterrorism is failing. A grim reality is emerging for Americans. The George W. Bush invasion-centric approach to countering militancy failed. And so is the cautious, middle of the road Obama strategy.

From massacres in Cairo to prison breaks across the region, the United States is more hated and less secure. At the same time, al Qaeda affiliates are gaining fighters, propaganda victories and recruiting tools.

The message the White House sent to young Islamists in Egypt this week was clear: What jihadists have been telling you about American hypocrisy for years is true. Democratic norms apply to everyone but you. Participating in elections is pointless. Violence is the route to power. Wherever he is hiding in the mountains of Pakistan, Ayman al Zawahiri is likely pleased.

Yeah, and this is where Rohde goes off the cliff.  The real problem here is that we've built up so much blowback in the Middle East since Reagan that taking a caution approach amounted to watching everything come back on us with explosive force, and then trying to clean up the mess.  We're blaming Obama for 35 years of ridiculous foreign policy, of which he's been in charge for 5.

The situation in the Middle East is insanely complex.  It's not "pro-Morsi vs. anti-Morsi" forces in Egypt, it's dozens of factions with multiple relationships.  Dumping it all on Obama is not only unhelpful, but wrong.  The approach we're taking is working, it's just that the problems the previous administrations put us in have been so awful, the damage will continue to reverberate for decades.

So no, this isn't Obama's fault.  He can do some things in particular, like ending Egypt's military aid.  But let's be realistic here.

House Republicans Will Never Learn

No, America, the latest House Republican scheme to take the country hostage will fail just as miserably as it did last time.

Even as their hardliners refuse to let up, senior Republicans have all but conceded that they won’t end up defunding Obamacare in a continuing resolution to keep the federal government open after the money runs out on Sept. 30. And even if they do shut down the government, top Republicans observe, it won’t actually stop Obamacare. The strategy makes little sense.

But House Republican leaders are taking so much fire from conservative advocates that they’re weighing a more dangerous gambit: taking the United States’ ability to pay its bills hostage to advance the party’s goal of disrupting and dismantling the Affordable Care Act. The country’s borrowing authority is set to expire later this fall and senior Republicans made a series of promises to their members in January that appear likely to culminate in a showdown.

GOP leaders don’t see a way to persuade their members to lift the debt ceiling without extracting ideological concessions. So a strategy they’re considering, first reported in the conservative news outlets National Review and Washington Examiner, is to pass a two-month continuing resolution to keep government funded at existing levels until, roughly, the debt limit is reached. Then they would offer a sequester replacement in exchange for delaying or defunding Obamacare in order to avoid economic disaster.

A House Republican leadership aide described this plan as an option, but cautioned TPM that no decisions have been made yet. “I do, however, expect that the President’s health care law will certainly come up — in some form or fashion — in the debt limit debate,” said the aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal strategy.

Let me repeat this for those of you who don't remember the last time:  Republicans will fold on the debt ceiling.  They will fold because the hedge fund titans and the Sheldon Adelsons and the other big money GOP donors will not allow the debt ceiling to collapse and the US to default.

These people have money, and they have access.  They will call up the Republicans and they will say "If you default on the debt and crash our economy again, I'll use what money I have left to fund your opponent."  The Republicans will listen very, very closely when that happens.

And just like last year, they will fold.

...on the other hand, Steve Benen has a point:  Orange Julius is the most incompetent House Speaker in modern American history, and Republicans are 100% sure any economic damage cause by messing with the debt ceiling will be perceived as wholly Obama's fault.

So they will fold...the question is after how long, and how much damage will it cause in the meantime?

Unskewed All The Way To Disaster

So we know that in 2012, conservative polling groups had a, shall we say, tenuous relationship with reality.  The question now becomes if Republicans are willing to buy the results of another poll, this time from GOP SuperPAC Heritage Action for America, and its advice that conservatives should shut down the government.

Heritage Action for America – one of the conservative groups leading the charge to pressure Republican lawmakers against voting to continue government spending unless they can defund President Barack Obama’s health care law – said its new poll of likely voters in 10 relatively competitive congressional districts showed that forcing such a shutdown would not be fatal for the GOP in 2014.

The fight over whether to shut down the government in this fall's battle over spending for the next fiscal year and relent somewhat on the implementation of Obamacare reflects the internal strife between the party's conservatives and more pragmatic party establishment.

The poll, which was conducted by Basswood Research from Aug. 7-8, also found that 28 percent of respondents in the 10 districts would blame Republicans for a shutdown over Obamacare, while 22 percent would blame Obama himself, and 19 percent would blame Democrats in Congress. Seventeen percent of respondents would spread blame among all three groups.

The poll also found that almost 60 percent of respondents would support a “temporary slowdown in non-essential federal government operations, which still left all essential government services running" in order to extract an agreement from the president to at least slow health care reform’s implementation.

Heritage Action's pitch is simple:  shutting down the government will hurt Obama as much as it will hurt the GOP, plus it'll force the President and Democrats to abandon Obamacare.

"Americans – including 57 percent of independents in ten critical congressional districts – favor defunding Obamacare," said Michael Needham, the CEO of Heritage Action. "House Republicans should be much more concerned with the fallout of failing to defund Obamacare than with the imaginary fallout of doing so."

Heritage Action's pollster, Jon Lerner, added: "There is no present evidence that a move to defund Obamacare, and the potential of a partial government shutdown, would harm Republican prospects of holding the House majority.  In fact, the very same voters who are critical to keeping the majority – independents in potential competitive districts – hold highly negative views on Obamacare and strongly favor slowdown in implementation or outright repeal of the law."

So, if you believe that  3 out of 5 Americans want the Republicans to actually shut down the government in order to blackmail the President, then by all means guys, force that shutdown.  I'm sure that the Romney landslide in 2012 proves how reliable GOP pollsters and pundits are at testing the mood of the people...

StupidiNews!

• Recently declassified CIA documents admit for the first time that Nevada's famous Area 51 exists, but that it's mainly a boring military aerial reconnaissance testing facility.
• A leaked internal audit of the NSA has found thousands of accidental violations of agency privacy policy rules over the last five years.
• HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has announced recipients of grants for promoting the Affordable Care Act through the agency's Navigators program.
• Samsung will get the jump on Apple by introducing the Galaxy Gear wristwatch on Sept. 4, which will allow Android smartphone users to surf the web, get emails, and make calls.
• The White House is confirming that rooftop solar panels will be reinstalled this week, making good on President Obama's 2010 promise to do so.

Last Call For Hyped Error Loop

The cursory math on Elon Musk's overhyped Hyperloop project doesn't even begin to add up. Whatever Nathan Stark fantasies the guy is entertaining, he needs to go back to the drawing board.

Musk's proposal won't actually get riders to the downtowns of Los Angeles or San Francisco. It can only carry around 10% of the capacity of the California High-Speed Rail. Additionally, it will bypass other population centers, like Bakersfield, Fresno, and San Jose.

Building a truly workable Hyperloop, if it's feasible at all, will be significantly more expensive than Musk claims. It might even be more expensive than the California HSR project. And Musk's proposal leaves a lot of questions unanswered.

How did he come to his construction cost estimate in the first place? Musk argues that the Hyperloop is cheaper than HSR because it's elevated, saving on the cost of building at grade and reducing local opposition. But bridges are far more expensive than building tracks at grade. And just because the footprint is limited to a big pylon every 100 feet doesn't mean that the environmental impact analysis process will be any easier or that the public will be any more receptive.

Other issues, like seismic stability, are simply glossed over. He claims that by elevating the Hyperloop tracks, they will be more stable than ground-running HSR. Clearly he's unfamiliar with the Cypress Street Viaduct. That's one reason that the California High-Speed Rail Authority insists on crossing all faults at grade.

Musk also claims that his giant steel tube will be okay with the only expansion joints at the Los Angeles and San Francisco ends. They'll just be really big. That's a significant engineering issue that cannot simply be ignored, at least not if Musk is in any way serious about this proposal.

He's not. If he was, he would have immediately thought of the most obvious cost overrun source: the cost of the land to build the tube pylons on.

Consider some of the major factors for why California’s $68 billion high-speed rail system has gone over budget. In many cases, local communities have demanded extra viaducts and tunnels added to the project that weren’t strictly necessary. Other towns, meanwhile, have insisted they not be bypassed even in cases where it would be cheaper to do so. Would the Hyperloop be immune from these sorts of political pressures and tweaks?

What’s more, California’s high-speed rail project has had to grapple with the high costs of acquiring more than 1,100 parcels of land, often from farmers resistant to sell. The Hyperloop would try to minimize this problem by propping the whole system up on pylons, shrinking its footprint, but it can’t escape the land problem entirely. As Alexis Madrigal points out, Musk’s proposal seems to assume it’s possible to buy up tens of thousands of acres in California for a mere $1 billion. That’s awfully optimistic.

I hear Hyperloop, I think "Springfield monorail".

Huckleberry Hounded From The Right

Mitch The Turtle isn't the only Republican senator facing a primary challenge from the Tea Party.  In South Carolina, Lindsey Graham officially has a third challenger, State Sen. Lee Bright of Spartanburg, breathing down his neck, and Bright opened up with a nasty broadside to enter the race Tuesday.

The Johnny Volcano and Huckleberry Hound show went on the road to Egypt earlier this month (and that really didn't go very well) to assess the situation on the ground, and that's gotten Bright up in arms:

“During the (congressional) recess, when I would hope that he would be around folks in South Carolina, getting their feelings on so many issues that affect their lives, he has instead chosen to take his time to be a community organizer for the Muslim Brotherhood and that concerns me,” Bright told supporters in a conference call. “He needs to spend more time listening to what the brothers in South Carolina have to say.”

Ouch.  A hint delivered by squeaky toy mallet to the back of the head, no less.  Graham has his hands full anyway with two other challengers in his clown car, Talibangelical and perennial also-ran Richard Cash and Nancy Mace, the first female graduate of the Citadel, both of whom make Graham look like Al Franken by comparison.  Sadly, Lee Bright may be the real threat to Graham and an even worse Senator than any of the others involved in this mess.

Lindsey may be South Carolina's huckleberry, but for how long?

Turtling Up On Obamacare

Mitch McConnell is in an ugly spot.  On the right is fire-breathing Tea Party businessman Matt Bevin, who's apparently running for Mitch's Senate seat on a platform of "Well I would have shut down the government by now."  On the left, Alison Lundergan Grimes is waxing the turtle and happily taking over as the pragmatic, dynamic young centrist.

And Mitch?  Well, this turtle is stuck in the middle of the highway.

A government shutdown would not prevent the Affordable Care Act from being funded, Kentucky's senior senator said Tuesday.

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has refused to publicly take a side as some members of his party lobby for shutting down the federal government.

"The problem is the bill that would shut down the government wouldn't shut down Obamacare," McConnell said. "Most of it is permanent law and not affected by that. It also wouldn't stop the taxes. Taxes that are going in on medical devices, taxes that are going in on health insurance premiums."

McConnell, who is also the GOP leader in the Senate, spoke to a group of healthcare workers Tuesday at Baptist Health Corbin, a hospital in southern Kentucky.

During the meeting, McConnell told audience members, "I'm for stopping Obamacare, but shutting down the government will not stop Obamacare."

Oh, but it gets worse for Mitch.

But McConnell admitted there are parts of the ACA he supports.

"There are a handful of things in the 2,700-page bill that probably are okay," McConnell said. "But that doesn't warrant a 2,700-page takeover of all American healthcare."

I'm betting Team Bevin will have a field day with that one.  Again, the school of thought is that Tea Party pressure from Bevin will make a shutdown significantly more likely, as Bevin's main criticism is that in the end, McConnell always folds to the hated Kenyan anti-colonial baby-eating Obama.

Mitch didn't do himself any favors against Bevin Tuesday. Bevin's reaction:  Mitch doesn't have the balls to defund Obamacare.



Bevin's right.

Or is he?

StupidiNews!

• More than 400 people have been killed and another 3,500 injured as the Egyptian military's bloody crackdown against supporters of ousted President Morsi continues into its second day.
• California's Supreme Court unanimously refused to stop same-sex marriages in the state as opponents demanded narrowing the ruling allowing marriages only to the original plaintiffs.
• Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced that June's DOMA ruling allows for full military benefits for same-sex couples as long as they are married.
• A federal judge in Oklahoma has cleared the way for a Republican legal challenge to Obamacare's tax laws for businesses.
• Google has confirmed an Android OS vulnerability that was used in a recent $5,700 Bitcoin heist.

Last Call For Clowning Around: The Follow-Up

When this story broke, and the flow immediately turned to the clown I wondered why nobody seemed to pay any attention to the guy talking throughout the video.  The Laverne to his Shirley, as it were.  Turned out nobody said anything because they were trying to figure out how to handle the fact that it was local superintendent, Mark Ficken.

First, a story broke in which Ficken said he feared for his job.  Then an update was released saying he had been fired and an investigation had been launched regarding his behavior.  Ficken says he was unfairly blamed, and his lawyer says it was merely a matter of words of caution.

Of course, you can watch the video here.  As a whole, the incident is disgusting.  It's in poor taste, and it was completely unnecessary.  It was just plain dumb.  But another hidden lesson here is don't just play along, or you may pay the consequences.  Ficken didn't do much besides keep it going, so I don't see why he is crying about how unfair his experience has been.

Just another drop in the bucket, but a shame nonetheless.

[Zandar here.  Seems our Missouri rodeo act has a standing invitation to perform in Texas thanks to professional birther nutjob racist asshole Rep. Steve Stockman. Keep up the minority outreach, fellas!]