Last Call For Not (Voting) In Kansas Anymore, Toto

Kansas's new Voter ID law is making things very difficult for thousands of Kansans trying to register to vote.  As part of the new law, anyone registering to vote after Jan 1 of this year must show proof of citizenship, either a passport of birth certificate.  If that sounds familiar, it's the same unconstitutional provision that was struck down by a federal court in Arizona's Voter ID law.

Lee Albee never thought signing up to vote would be so cumbersome.

Earlier this year, the Overland Park man registered to vote when he renewed his license at the motor vehicle office. It was supposed to be easy. It wasn’t.

Weeks later, the Johnson County election office notified Albee he needed to prove citizenship — with a birth certificate or a passport — if he wanted to register.

As it turned out, no one had asked him for those documents at the DMV office. Now he doesn’t have the time to follow up.

“They’re making it incredibly difficult,” Albee said. “It’s a pain in the tush.”

Albee is among 15,622 Kansans who had their voter registrations set aside until they can prove their citizenship under a new Kansas law that started this year. About 30 percent of those suspended registrations were in Johnson, Wyandotte and Leavenworth counties.

Most of the hiccups occur at the state’s motor vehicle offices, where drivers complain they aren’t being asked for citizenship documents when they register to vote. Almost nine in 10 of the voters who had their registrations suspended signed up to vote at the DMV.

If Kansas Republicans are trying to make things as difficult a possible for new voters to register, well, that's the entire point.  New voters -- young Americans just turning 18, new legal immigrants, people moving into the suburbs of Kansas City (like say, relatively blue Johnson, Wyandotte, and Leavenworth counties) -- tend to vote for Democrats.

As with Arizona, the ACLU is going right after the law.

The American Civil Liberties Union is threatening to challenge the law, saying it’s essentially identical to an Arizona law that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled was unconstitutional.

“What this law has done has made it very difficult for ordinary citizens to get registered to vote even though they’re citizens,” said Doug Bonney, chief legal counsel for the ACLU of Kansas and Western Missouri.

Meanwhile, Kobach is fighting back, filing his own lawsuit aimed at bringing the Kansas law into compliance with the Supreme Court’s decision.

Kobach said the law was written to ensure that it wouldn’t hinder people from registering to vote.

“There’s nothing difficult at all,” he said, “about proving your citizenship if you are a U.S. citizen.”

Except you know the cost for documents and the time to get them.   The hope is that new voters will give up, and grandfathered in Kansas Republicans will continue to vote Republican.  Can't have the state turning blue, you know.

Once again, Republicans seem to think the fewer people who vote, the better.  As long as the people voting are, of course, Republican voters.

United By Hatred

This Jonathan Martin NY Times article is a waste of page space, frankly:

The Congressional vote on whether to strike Syria will offer the best insight yet on which wing of the Republican Party — the traditional hawks, or a growing bloc of noninterventionists — has the advantage in the fierce internal debates over foreign policy that have been taking place all year.

Republican divisions on national security have flared over the use of drones, aid to Egypt and the surveillance practices of the National Security Agency, and the tensions have played out publicly in battles between Senator John McCain of Arizona, a former Navy pilot and Vietnam prisoner of war, and Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, a libertarian-leaning freshman. Mr. McCain memorably called Mr. Paul and his compatriots “wacko birds,” and Mr. Paul suggested that hawks like Mr. McCain were “moss covered.”

 

But those intermittent spats could pale in comparison with the fight over whether to attack Syria, an issue on which Mr. McCain, a former Republican presidential candidate, and Mr. Paul, a possible contender in 2016, will almost certainly be the leading spokesmen for their party’s two wings. 

No, Jon, just like every other time there's a "division" in the GOP, the question is always settled over question: "Which position hurts President Obama the most?"  That's all that matters to today's GOP.  There will be a very large effort to work with anti-war Democrats (some of which don't have much of a problem with the whole "hurt President Obama" thing either) to get a majority to kill this in the House.

Unless you somehow think Orange Julius is up to the task of putting together enough Republican votes for an Obama win, in which case you really, really haven't been paying attention.

It may pass the Senate.  It will go down in flames in the House.

Count on it.

Meanwhile In Egypt...

The whole Syria thing doesn't mean that Egypt's problems are on hiatus or anything, folks.  The military is still happily cracking down on the Muslim Brotherhood with ruthless efficiency on military and political fronts too.

A judicial panel set up by Egypt's military-backed government supported a legal challenge to the status of the Muslim Brotherhood on Monday, compounding a drive to crush the movement behind the elected president deposed by the army in July.

While short of a formal ban on the Brotherhood, which worked underground for decades under Egypt's previous military-backed rulers, the panel's advice to a court to remove its non-governmental organization status threatens the million-member movement's future in politics.

What better way to eliminate the MB as a political force then to revoke their status as a political party, especially when everyone's concentrating on Syria?  It's a rapid return to the bad old days in Egypt and it's looking like they'll get away with it, too.

I mean, what's the US going to do at this point?  Anything?  Should they?

We've got bigger problems now.

StupidiNews!

• At age 64, endurance swimmer Diana Nyad has finally completed her quest to become the first person to swim from Havana to Key West without a protective cage.
• After years of delays and cost overruns, the $6.4 billion eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge opened ahead of schedule last night.
• Despite two weeks of growing protests across Mexico, President Enrique Pena Nieto is vowing to carry out structural and political reforms and combat narco-terrorism.
• Microsoft will buy Nokia's mobile handset division for $7.2 billion to make its own Windows phone hardware as Sweden's one-time mobile giant officially exits the smartphone arena.
• E-book consumers could see refunds as much as $3.06 per book as part of the recent industry price-fixing settlement, expected to be finalized in December.

Last Call For Regime Change

So nice of the NY Times to give an op-ed page to the historically under-represented batshit crazy neocon perpetual war point of view of Vali Nasr and friends.

It is in America’s strategic interest, then, to take decisive action to mortally wound the Assad regime. Ensuring that Syria does not become a haven for Al Qaeda — a legitimate fear — would have to immediately follow.

Mr. Assad may be right to think the Obama administration does not want involvement in Syria, but the horrors of this war have effectively forced America into it. The risks of intervention are great, and success is uncertain, but doing nothing would be, at this point, far worse.

America should act decisively and in a timely manner, and based on a strategic vision that includes a way out of this war. That would impress American allies and adversaries alike. That is what the world needs and what Mr. Obama should focus on.

If "regime change over WMD" followed by "preventing the country from then becoming a terrorist stronghold" sounds familiar to you, it was the exact plan for our "success" in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Doesn't another decade-long war sound great to you? It does to the NY Times.  Why these jackasses are still getting play in the media I can't tell you, but here we are pretending like Iraq and Afghanistan never happened, or worse, that they were awesome and great and cool and we need to do it again.

Frankly such nonsense is unconscionable, but here it is anyway.

That's A Funny Way Of "Protecting People", Rand

So tell me, we still standing with Rand after statements like this?

The link between American interests and Syria is not clear, Sen. Rand Paul said on Sunday.

"I think the war may escalate out of control, and then we have to ask ourselves, 'Who is on America's side over there?'" host the Kentucky Republican asked David Gregory on NBC's "Meet the Press."

"I don't see American interests involved on either side of this Syrian war. I see [Bashar] Assad, who has protected Christians for a number of decades, and Islamic rebels on the other side who have been attacking Christians," Paul said.

In other words, A) Assad is the good guy here because he's killing Muslims, B) why would we want to stop him from killing Muslims?

Oh it gets better.

“I think the failure of the Obama administration has been we haven’t engaged the Russians enough or the Chinese enough on this,” the Kentucky Republican said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“The Russians have every reason to want to keep their influence in Syria, and I think the only way they do is if there’s a change in government where Assad is gone” but other current members remain, Paul said. “That would also be good for the Christians.” He noted earlier that Assad has protected Christians “for decades.”

The senator went on to say that a failure to do so could result in an Islamic state that could persecute Christians in the country. And Russia, he said, could have an influence on the country if they told the government “no more weapons.”

To recap, Captain Isolationist here is upset we haven't given the Russians and Chinese enough swag, and really as long as Christians in Syria are protected, the savage brown miasma of Muslim scum can all just eat sarin and die.

Scratch Rand Paul's surface and you'll always find an Islamophobic racist warmonger Republican.  Period.

StupidiNews, Labor Day Edition!

• Egyptian state TV is reporting that former President Morsi will stand trial for the deaths of protesters in clashes with police last December.
• Casts of artwork taken at Angkor Wat in Cambodia in the early 20th century has been rediscovered and will be put on display in Paris.
• Yemeni PM Mohammed Basindowa escaped an assassination attempt Saturday evening as his armored car came under gunfire in the streets of the capital, Sanaa.
• Nelson Mandela has been released from a Pretoria hospital to receive care in his own home, but is still listed in critical condition.
• With Samsung releasing details of a smartwatch this week, and a rumored Apple "iWatch" later this month, Google has been working on their own model for over a year now.

Last Call For Rising Core Temperature

Meanwhile, at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster site, things aren't going real well with the whole "containment" thing two years later.

Radiation levels around Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant are 18 times higher than previously thought, Japanese authorities have warned.

Last week the plant's operator reported radioactive water had leaked from a storage tank into the ground.

It now says readings taken near the leaking tank on Saturday showed radiation was high enough to prove lethal within four hours of exposure.

The plant was crippled by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

The Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) had originally said the radiation emitted by the leaking water was around 100 millisieverts an hour.

However, the company said the equipment used to make that recording could only read measurements of up to 100 millisieverts.

The new recording, using a more sensitive device, showed a level of 1,800 millisieverts an hour.

The new reading will have direct implications for radiation doses received by workers who spent several days trying to stop the leak last week, the BBC's Rupert Wingfield-Hayes reports from Tokyo.

In addition, Tepco says it has discovered a leak on another pipe emitting radiation levels of 230 millisieverts an hour.

Yeah, this seems like a bad thing.  Fukushima is leaking, containment has completely failed, and radioactive material has been getting into the ocean for two years now.  There doesn't seem to be any way to slow it down. either.  This stuff could burn for decades, guys.  By then, the damage to the Pacific rim is going to be devastating, not to mention to Japan itself.

The plant is just as lethal now as it was in 2011.  That's horrifying, but not shocking.  We'll keep up with this story as we have for the last 30 months.

Podcast Vs. The Stupid: Syria-s As A Heart Attack

Bon and I get back into the swing of things with a 30-minute PVTS show on Syria, President Obama, the GOP "response" and the passing of Sir David Frost.

Listen To Politics Progressive Internet Radio Stations with Zandar Versus The Stupid on BlogTalkRadio

You can download the episode here or look for it on iTunes.

A Necessary Touch Of Frost

British broadcasting legend Sir David Frost has died this weekend at the age of 74, according to his long-time home, BBC News.

Veteran broadcaster Sir David Frost has died at the age of 74 after a suspected heart attack while on board a cruise ship. 

A family statement said he had been giving a speech aboard the Queen Elizabeth on Saturday night. 

Sir David's career spanned journalism, comedy writing and daytime television presenting, including The Frost Report. 

Internationally, he will be remembered for his revealing interviews with former US President Richard Nixon. 

A statement said: "His family are devastated and ask for privacy at this difficult time. A family funeral will be held in the near future and details of a memorial service will be announced in due course."

Best remembered for his interviews 35 years ago with Nixon, Frost had a huge career with the BBC spanning five decades, a giant in his field, and a true gentleman.  Those interviews in 1977 were turned into a very good Ron Howard movie, Frost/Nixon.



Also, here's a clip of the first part of Frost's actual interview with Nixon.



It was television that gripped the world then, and is still fascinating to watch now.  Godspeed, Sir David.

President Obama Calls The GOP's Bluff On Syria

Republicans were all set to have the best of both worlds:  still getting a bloody-minded attack on Syria, and having 100% of the fallout be on President Obama's shoulders, while claiming everything up to and including an "impeachable offense" by his attacking Syria without the approval of Congress.

So this afternoon, President Obama called their bluff and said he will do what the American people and Congress want:  debate and vote on the measure on Capitol Hill.

In an afternoon appearance in the Rose Garden, Mr. Obama said he had decided that the United States should use force but would wait for a vote from lawmakers, who are not due to return to town until Sept. 9. Mr. Obama said he believed he had the authority to act on his own, but he did not say whether he would if Congress rejects his plan. 

“I’m prepared to give that order,” Mr. Obama said. “But having made my decision as commander in chief based on what I am convinced is our national security interest, I’m also mindful that I’m president of the world’s oldest constitutional democracy.” 

Going to war with the support of the people’s representatives, he added, “I know the country will be stronger.” 

The president’s announcement effectively dared Congress to either stand by him or, as he put it, allow President Bashar al-Assad of Syria to get away with murdering children. By asking lawmakers to weigh in, he is trying to break out of his box of isolation of the last week, in the face of deep skepticism at home and around the world about the strike. His decision indicates he does not want to go forward without Congress and the American public. 

So now  this becomes Congress's problem, more specifically the GOP's problem.  They will have to go on record on Syria and bear responsibility for its future, which is exactly what they were attempting to avoid.

President Obama has outsmarted them yet again...and he's listening to the American people, who want debate before any military action.  Now he looks like the reasonable grown-up in the room.

Your move, Republicans.

London Calling (Out Obama)

The inestimable Juan Cole handily sums up yesterday's UK House of Commons disaster as MPs voted down PM David Cameron's preliminary plan to use military force against Syria, and what it means for President Obama, the United States, Syria, and force as a tool.

The British members of parliament who debated whether to take action against Syria were obviously haunted by the mistakes of the Iraq War and determined not to repeat them.

The case of Obama and Cameron against the Syrian government has some holes, but it isn’t a bad case. But it involves murky allegations of weapons of mass destruction use by an Arab regime, and a unilateral Anglo-American shock and awe aerial attack. It looks way too much like Iraq, and there is no telling where it might lead. Britain is not very far from Syria and the repercussions of an attack could be significant. Britain also has a significant Muslim minority population that is die hard set against an attack on Syria.

The vote puts President Obama between a rock and a hard place. The formerly solid Anglo-American solidarity has been broken. Obama does not have the Arab League and he does not have the UN Security Council. He does not even have a consensus on the European continent.

Obama should pivot now and choose vigorous diplomacy over a military strike. The latter will now have no legitimacy in international law, and would not be supported even by the British parliament.

The duplicity of Bush and Blair has deeply injured faith in government, even on the part of members of government. Their use of the high-flown rhetoric of protecting helpless populations from tyrants and deflecting dire threats of WMD cheapened those endeavors and trivialized them They bent the sword of state and rendered it useless in any similar situation.

In a very real sense, the blown vote in the UK is the perfect excuse for the United States to reconsider action in Syria.  And yes, Bush and Blair made it now very difficult for future Presidents to deliver more than token military assistance, such as in Libya.  Here's hoping that President Obama considers the opportunity here to bring both sides to the table and end this war.

Last Call For The Black (And/Or Jewish) List

It's okay everyone, outdated concepts like racism and anti-Semitic hatred are over and stuff according to the Supreme Court and we don't need archaic relics like the Voting Rights Act and equal protection for those of different races or religions, so everything's fine, don't worry about things.

 Federal agents were tracking Ohio resident Richard Schmidt’s imports of counterfeit sports jerseys when they stumbled upon his arsenal of 18 guns, more than 40,000 rounds of ammunition, and bulletproof body armor. Besides the arsenal, he had lists of Jewish and black leaders in Detroit, MI. He is also an ex-felon who killed a Hispanic man and wounded two others 24 years ago.

Yet before December, no one even noticed that Schmidt, 47, was amassing weapons illegally, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Instead, federal investigators zeroed in on his sports memorabilia shop around September 2011, tracking his shipments of knock-off jerseys from China for over a year before they discovered the cache of firearms.

Schmidt plead guilty to federal gun charges and the counterfeit racket last month, and will be sentenced in October. But many connected to the crime are still scratching their heads over how an ex-felon with ties to white supremacist groups was able to get his hands on so many guns.

“I can’t tell you how he got all those guns and ammunition,” U.S. Attorney Steven Dettelbach told the Plain Dealer. “It’s not that I won’t tell you; it’s that I can’t. This is somebody who should never have had one gun, one bullet. But he had an entire arsenal.”

We don't need gun control either, apparently.  Can't stop a convicted killer from amassing a huge arsenal of firearms and ammunition, because it's just too hard, so why bother?  America!

Schmidt is technically banned from possessing a gun for the rest of his life. In 1989, he pulled a gun on three men during a traffic argument, killing one man and wounding the other two. He was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and served 12 years in prison.

Scott Kaufman, the head of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit, was spooked after discovering he was on Schmidt’s list. “For a convicted violent felon to amass an arsenal with 40,000 rounds of ammunition with no red flags popping up is problematic,” he told the Plain Dealer. “No matter where you stand on the gun issue, it makes you wonder. The moment I saw my name in this guy’s notebook, I freaked out.”

Why would anyone be freaking out?  He was just exercising his constitutional right to have multiple firearms and tens of thousands of rounds.  While being a convicted killer and felon.  And a white supremacist.  And an anti-Semite.  And a guy with a list of black and Jewish targets.  Just leave the guy alone already!

Pot Holder: DOJ Flips On State Marijuana Laws

In a huge shift on federal drug policy, Eric Holder and the Justice Department have issued new prosecutorial guidelines for marijuana-related offenses, which boil down to "as long as the states that have legalized pot keep it under control, we're good."

More than six months after Washington and Colorado passed ballot initiatives to legalize and regulate recreational marijuana, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said today he would not sue to block the implementation of the laws — at least not until he sees how the laws operate in effect. This announcement came as little surprise, after reports from earlier communication between DOJ and the governor.

More significantly, the Department of Justice also issued new guidance to prosecutors today calling for scaled back prosecution not just of users of marijuana, but also of distributors and growers complying with state law.

The guidance includes this passage:

Accordingly, in exercising prosecutorial discretion, prosecutors should not consider the size or commercial nature of a marijuana operation alone as a proxy for assessing whether marijuana trafficking implicates the Department’s enforcement priorities listed above. Rather, prosecutors should continue to review marijuana cases and on a case-by-case basis and weigh all available information and evidence, including, but not limited to, whether the operation is demonstrably in compliance with a strong and effective regulatory system.

So yes, big change from raiding large pot growers just because they are large pot growers.  This is a big step in the right direction for the Justice Department, and the second major signal this month that the US has al but admitted to losing the War on Drugs.

And it's about damn time.

Well, If Wingers Didn't Hate The IRS Before...

...they'll SUPER ULTRA HATE the IRS after today.

All legally married same-sex couples will be recognized for federal tax purposes, regardless of whether the state where they live recognizes the marriage, the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service said Thursday.

The federal rules change is one of many stemming from the landmark Supreme Court decision in June that struck down the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act. That ruling found that same-sex couples were entitled to federal benefits, but left open the question of how the federal government would actually administer those benefits.

“Imagine a pair of women who marry in Albany and then move to Alabama,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote at the time of the decision. “May they file a joint federal income tax return? Does the answer turn on where they were married or where they live?”

As of the 2013 tax year, same-sex spouses cannot file federal tax returns as if they were single. Instead, they will have to opt for filing as “married filing jointly” or “married filing separately.” The location of their marriage — as long as it is legal — or residence does not matter: a same-sex couple who marry in Albany and move to Alabama will be treated the same as a same-sex couple who marry and live in Massachusetts.

“Today’s ruling provides certainty and clear, coherent tax-filing guidance for all legally married same-sex couples nationwide,” Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew said in a statement. “This ruling also assures legally married same-sex couples that they can move freely throughout the country knowing that their federal filing status will not change.”

Three reasons why homophobic jackasses in the GOP are furious over this: One, well, the whole homophobia thing. Two, hey look, in one stroke, Obama's IRS are the good guys now! Reason number three comes from my friend Jeff Fecke:

The beauty of the IRS ruling is that a future GOP administration can't undo it without raising taxes.
— Jeff Fecke (@jkfecke) August 29, 2013

Checkmate.