The Saturnalia Wish List of 2013

One of the ongoing wishes of previous Saturnalias had been for a job, and thank ye Ring-Bringer Parading the Skies, I received one here in Bartow Library yay and yes and woot. :)

But 'tis the season for the asking of presents, and into this I have a wish list for the Anno Domino (or Common Era to all you pagans) of 2013:

1) A wish that 2014 sees the end of Rick "Medicare Fraud" Scott's Reign of Error upon the state of Florida.
2) A wish that 2014 sees the end of the GOP Reign of Fraud from the US Congress as Democratic voters turn out to keep the Senate Democratic and drive out the "Crash Government" Republicans of the House.
3) A wish that I finally get the g-dd-mn motivation to finish the handful of writing I've been working on the last five freaking years!  /headdesk
4) Not so much a wish as it is a even higher motivation to f-cking lose some 30-50 pounds here!  My back can't take much more of this being over 300 lbs... oy

So there you have it, O Saturn.  ...so I guess I gotta leave some honey-wine out tonight to sate your thrist at the house shrine?

Ongoing Reports From The Long October

I'm trying to come up with some poetic-sounding names for the Shutdown Showdown of 2013, and right now "The Long October" is about as good as I can think of a name.

Because for the most part we're now expecting the current Shutdown to merge into the scheduled Debt Ceiling crisis set for October 17th, simply because the House Republicans are driving the nation off the cliff (via Jonathan Chait at the New York):

...Last Tuesday, House Republicans shut down the federal government, demanding that Obama abolish his health-care reform in a tactically reckless gamble that most of the party feared but could not prevent. More surreal, perhaps, were the conditions they issued in exchange for lifting the debt ceiling later this month. Lifting the debt ceiling, a vestigial ritual in which Congress votes to approve payment of the debts it has already incurred, is almost a symbolic event, except that not doing it would wreak unpredictable and possibly enormous worldwide economic havoc. (Obama’s Treasury Department has compared the impact of a debt breach to the failure of Lehman Brothers.) The hostage letter House Republicans released brimmed with megalomaniacal ambition. If he wanted to avoid economic ruin, Republicans said, Obama would submit to a delay of health-care reform, plus tax-rate cuts, enactment of offshore drilling, approval of the Keystone pipeline, deregulation of Wall Street, and Medicare cuts, to name but a few demands. Republicans hardly pretended to believe Obama would accede to the entire list (a set of demands that amounted to the retroactive election of Mitt Romney), but the hubris was startling in and of itself.

The debt ceiling turns out to be unexploded ordnance lying around the American form of government. Only custom or moral compunction stops the opposition party from using it to nullify the president’s powers, or, for that matter, the president from using it to nullify Congress’s. (Obama could, theoretically, threaten to veto a debt ceiling hike unless Congress attaches it to the creation of single-payer health insurance.) To weaponize the debt ceiling, you must be willing to inflict harm on millions of innocent people. It is a shockingly powerful self-destruct button built into our very system of government, but only useful for the most ideologically hardened or borderline sociopathic. But it turns out to be the perfect tool for the contemporary GOP: a party large enough to control a chamber of Congress yet too small to win the presidency, and infused with a dangerous, millenarian combination of overheated Randian paranoia and fully justified fear of adverse demographic trends...

We're basically unable to do anything about the current Shutdown: the Democrats are attempting to force a vote on the House floor for a "clean Continuing Resolution" using an obscure mechanism called a "discharge petition", but to pull it off they seemingly need more than 17 Republicans to commit publicly to vote for it.  And while there's a solid number of anonymous House Republicans complaining about the Far Right taking their own party hostage during these "negotiations", only two of them have been brave up to stand up... because if anyone else did so they'd be primaried within a heartbeat.

Molly Ball at The Atlantic makes the observation that Republicans are the one voting bloc that refuses to compromise (the poll is linked from her article):

Republicans, it seems, are different: They value compromise far less and principle far more than other Americans. In refusing to give ground, then, Republican politicians are reflecting their base's priorities.

This result helps explain more than just GOP intransigence, it seems to me. It also helps explain the parties' mutual incomprehension. Since Democrats value compromise by such an overwhelming margin, they assume their opponents do too. But Republicans, it turns out, are wired a bit differently.

Andrew Sullivan makes the observation that the Republicans aren't so much refusing to compromise, it's that they can't accept the reality of the situation and are grasping at anything:

They say they want to reverse what they see as the end of American freedom because of the dawn of public subsidies for private insurance policies, based on a Heritage Foundation idea and implemented by their last presidential nominee in his home state. Okay, so how about running a campaign for Congress and presidency that explicitly promises to repeal Obamacare entirely? Oh, yes, they already did that and lost. How about upping the ante and making it explicit in the campaign that this is the very last chance to end Obamacare and save America? Oh, yeah, I forgot. They did that too. So what do they want? I’m not sure they even know.

Even though there's another poll, this time on approval ratings for the parties involved - Obama, Democrats in Congress, and Republicans in Congress - and showing why this is still a serious problem for Republicans continuing this path to self-destruction:

Problem with that poll is while the numbers show the Republicans in trouble with Americans overall (at 70 percent disapproval), the House GOP are only worried about the Americans (Tea Partiers) in their gerrymandered districts (and yes, the gerrymander is one of the things at fault here), and most of them are in the 24 percent bracket still approving of their hostage-taking BS.

This is going to be a Long October after all.

I only hope this won't interfere with trick-or-treating... 'cause if our kids can't trick-or-treat due to an economic collapse then we are going to see some SERIOUS street riots led by kids dressed up in superhero costumes and wielding plastic pirate swords.  CANDY OR DEATH!  CANDY OR DEATH...!

The Republicans' Real Problem If They Can't Pass This Immigration Bill

It's not that the Republicans will lose favor even more with the growing Hispanic population - a voting bloc the GOP is convinced could lean conservative enough to their side - if they fail to pass the bill the Senate just signed off on.  It's not like there's a lot that would convince ethnic voters to side wholeheartedly with a party that just succeeded in shredding voting rights for said ethnic voters.  Like Conor notes over on The Atlantic:

It's true that there's a nativist element in the Republican Party that talks about illegal immigrants as if they are sub-human. There are, as well, other Republicans more restrained in their rhetoric, but who give off the impression that they aren't huge fans of Hispanic immigrants. This definitely alienates Hispanic voters, but it is unclear to me that the passage of immigration reform would win over these people -- whether a reform bill passes or not, that element will still exist in the Republican coalition. So long as the questionable rhetoric continues, so will the mistrust...

If the bill passes, there won't be a huge surge of Hispanic voters over the Republicans: the party would at least retain a sizable portion of that vote (a lot more than the 1-2 percent of Black voters still voting Republican... yeah the last polling showed close to ZERO percent but I'm pretty sure there had to have been a few Blacks who went Romney... why I don't know, but I digress) and have a more diverse base of voters for the next Presidential cycle.  But what would happen if the GOP House - with a sizable number of Far Right congresspersons who aren't huge fans of "illegals" and "freeloaders" - failed to take up the issue, to pass a similar bill that would get worked out in committee and sent to the President for a signature?

They'll still be in the same leaky boat in terms of Hispanic outreach, obviously, but the real damage will be to the Republicans' credibility as a functioning political party.  It's not just the Hispanics they'll be losing, it will be the good-sized middle-of-the-road voters, the moderates or non-ideologue voters.

Even with all the obstructionist efforts the GOP has pulled since retaking the House in the 2010 midterms, there was at least this perception that the Republicans were, well, doing things.  They'd at least tried to present some ideas in terms of budgeting and government oversight (albeit obsessed with tax cuts and deregulation as the CURE FOR EVERYTHING), they at least looked the part of a political party.  Perception means a lot in politics: looking competent is more valuable than actually being competent.

But this would be the break with that perception, a huge one.  There's been media buzz about the GOP fracturing ever since the earlier vote in the House for Hurricane Sandy relief that ended up passing without a majority of Republican votes.  The House is now presented with a bipartisan Senate bill (as close to bipartisan as possible: it passed a Cloture vote, which is damn near miraculous this day and age), and a bill on immigration reform that the media (and thus the nation) perceives as a must-pass for the Republicans.  If they can't even get this out of committee, the perception of party dysfunction would be overwhelming to everyone outside of the Tea-Party, anti-immigrant, anti-government crowd (and the Tea Party wingnut faction is not as big as the Fox Not-News commentators think it is).

There's not even a guarantee Speaker Boehner could pull off an attempted "poison pill" bill, something on immigration that would be so anathema to the Senate Democrats that the compromise committee that works on fixing disparate Senate-House bills would refuse to deal and thus give Boehner the excuse to blame the libruls.  The wingnut faction of the House is so opposed to immigration they may refuse to vote on anything close to reform... and if there's enough of them, Boehner won't be able to get a floor vote on it, even with that poison pill.  The blame will end up entirely on the GOP House. (if Boehner does get a bill passed with that poison pill, there's still no guarantee he'll be able to claim the Democrats killed it if the two houses can't agree).

The perception in politics will no longer be that "Congress is dysfunctional" because after all the Senate got something done.  The perception will be "The Republican Party is dysfunctional."  And while the Far Right won't be surprised or angry about it - after all, it's the kind of Party they want - whatever is left of the Center-Right and Moderate GOP voters (the RINOs that haven't fled yet) could well walk away.

The thing that always upsets me as an independent voter is that there's been enough middle-of-the-road, non-party-affiliated voters over the last 10 years who gave and still give the Republicans the benefit of the doubt.  Having been burned by the Norquists and Limbaughs and Breitbarts that have taken over the party, I just couldn't grok how any moderate voters, any non-wingnut voters, were still voting for the ( R ) bracket.  But one of the things about moderate voters isn't loyalty to a party, it's the desire to choose and vote for a candidate that creates and maintains an image of competency, of ability.  They'll vote for a Republican if that Republican looks capable of walking and chewing bubble gum at the same time.

But a Republican that's part of a House of Representatives that couldn't even pass a symbolically important immigration reform bill?  The perception of incompetence would be more destructive than the perception of that Republican being a hypocrite.

Despite the survival tactics that the Republicans use for midterm elections - the Congress-only, state Governor elections - that rely on low voter turnout and only the extremists voting, there's always the risk of playing it too close to the wire.  While the average (read: moderate) voters won't turn out for midterms, they could turn out in enough numbers to voice their discontent against the party with the most at stake (read: the ones running Congress).  During good years, the party in control tends to stay in control of Congress.  During bad years, during sessions where the majority party is viewed as incompetent, failing, broken... you get the turnover.  Look to 2006: the failure of leadership as the Iraq occupation turned sour was a major key to the Republicans losing to the Democrats in both houses.  Look to 2010: the session-long struggle to pass health-care reform made the Democrats look out-of-touch and unfocused (even if they still passed it: perception, remember, counts for a lot), letting the Republicans retake the House.

The Republicans may have an advantage with gerrymandered districts that favor them despite the larger vote totals for Democrats, but a good number of those gerrymandered districts are stretched thin and more vulnerable than they seem.  Get enough moderate Republicans and NPA voters disgruntled, get a Democratic candidate in one of those districts who can walk and chew gum, and you could well see a 51-48 victory for that Democrat.

The only things saving the Republicans at the moment are those gerrymandered districts and the possibility they can (and will) rewrite state voting laws to block all the voters they hate.  But fail at this vote, fail to maintain even a semblance of competency... the Republicans can suffer even with the voters they hope would be on their side, the ones they'll let past the vote-blocking.

Try to remember this about the moderate/centrist voters: they vote for competency, not ideology.  An incompetent Congress will lose those voters regardless of geography or gender or race.  And there's more of us moderate voters than the wingnuts will admit.  Count on it.

Shorter Translation of Obama's Speech on Counter-Intel, Gitmo and GWOT

David Weigel at Slate broke it down pretty succinctly, but I can bring it down to one sentence.

"We as a nation are not going to reclaim our moral standing in the world until we stop listening to the fearmongers and we start focusing on pragmatic resolutions such as upholding our international treaties, closing down overseas detention cells used to hide our transgressions, respecting the rule of law to free the innocent and convict those found guilty in open courts, improving our intel to locate and isolate those who promote terrorism across the globe, and getting Congress to do the job IT has to do by passing the legislation our nation needs to get this all done."

Okay, it's a bit wordy but I promised to get it down into one sentence.

I'm Calling It: Third Craziest Week In American History

UPDATE: The second bomber reportedly captured alive.  This is important.  Alive means we get answers.

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE (9:35 pm EDT): Andrew Sullivan at his Dish site linked an Onion article that is 5000 times funnier than what I wrote here but yeah, the sentiment's about the same.  Oh man, the Onion got that article out yesterday... Lord knows what Friday's crazy would have made that article...

As a student of history, moments like these stir the need to look back at other times to compare and contrast.  To be fair, there's been a lot of crazy days, and there's been weeks and months of bad/good/violent/weird things happening, but narrowing it down to the Craziest of the Crazy takes some doing.

For this week of April 15 - April 20 2013, this is the evidence at hand.

Monday April 15: the tragedy of the Boston Marathon Bombings.  The media and social media - Twitter and Reddit especially - go into overdrive covering this all week long.  It builds up in the background until late Thursday night.

Tuesday April 16: A Senator gets mailed a letter laced with ricin, a lethal poison that's favored by low-grade extremists, usually militia types.  Other letters - especially one to President Obama - get intercepted with ricin as well.  Authorities are quick to point out this has nothing to do with the bombings in Boston.

Wednesday April 17: A fertilizer plant in West, Texas (the comma is not a misprint) catches on fire and explodes, killing at least 14 (most of them volunteer firefighters).  Rumors of arrests or imminent arrest buzz about Boston.  An attempt to get a gun control measure setting near-universal background checks fails to clear a Cloture vote.  An arrest is made on the ricin letters: the suspect is a third-rate Elvis Impersonator with a conspiracy obsession.  (What does it tell you when a Elvis Impersonator attempting ricin terror attacks is the THIRD-most talked about story of the week?!)

Thursday April 18: Boston remains on edge as reports get louder that enough pictures and video have been found of the suspected bomber(s).  Obama comes to town to join in memorial services for the three killed on Monday.  That afternoon law enforcement releases official photos of the two men they suspect planting the bombs.  By 10:30 pm there's a shooting at the MIT campus, the bombers rob a 7-11, they carjack somebody, get chased out to Watertown - a suburban town west of Boston - where a prolonged shoot-out ends with one of the bombers dead and the other fleeing into the night.

Friday April 19: The entire nation is abuzz.  Boston goes into lockdown mode - people advised to "stay in shelter" - as a massive man-hunt for the second bomber gets underway.  News about the bombers get out: they're brothers, immigrated nationals from Kyrgyzstan but with Chechnya parentage, the oldest (the one shot) a wanna-be Golden Glove/Olympic boxer the other (19) a college student.  They'd been in the United States legally since 2002 when they moved here with their parents, having gained permanent resident/naturalized status.  As of 7:45 pm EDT, the 19-year old is still on the loose.  EDIT: Just as I post this, there's a shoot-out at a boat on the river in Watertown which may involve the second bomber.  May.  News is breaking constantly right about now...

So there you have it for this being the Third Craziest Week in U.S. History.  There's still Saturday to go...

My Number Two candidate is the week of October 14 to 19th in 1987: although it starts Wednesday and goes into Monday, it's long enough to count.  During which we had the Baby Jessica "down a well" saga, an increase in hostile action between the United States and Iran where the US Navy blows up two Iranian oil platforms, and the stock market crashes on one of its worst Black Mondays ever.

For the Number One... I have to go with the craziness that started on Tuesday September 11 2001, but in some respects that was one huge day and everything else that came after - invading Afghanistan, occupying Iraq, the use of torture and prolonged detention - one big ongoing thing.

I've had a fellow Horder on Anibundel's site - efgoldman - suggest the week of March 31 to April 6 1968, during which LBJ announced he will not seek a second elected term as President, Reverend King is assassinated which stirred nationwide riots, and a sporting goods gunpowder explosion killed 51 in Indiana.  Got to admit, that's a lot of stuff.  It might be Number One.

There's also the time period between July 1 to July 4th in 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, when Vicksburg fell and the Union army stood at Gettysburg.  But as part of a massive event like the Civil War itself it might not count: and such events are intense, but not truly crazy (albeit war itself a crazy and messy deal on its own).

I'd put it to all seven of my readers here: which week truly deserves the Craziest Week in US History title?  Is there another contender?  Please comment.  Seriously.  I live for commentary... :whimper:

In Boston

Tragedy on the streets of Boston today, echoing across the nation and the globe.

Why this happens, we've already figured out: there's a small group of assh-les on the planet either working in unison or individually who want to make themselves feel powerful by killing innocent people who have nothing to do with why said assh-les are truly powerless.

The trick is figuring out the How we can stop this madness from happening again.  Welcome to the sad truth of the eternal struggle of good people to stop evil from flourishing.

Take care of you and yours tonight, all.

Schadenfreude Update: It's Been Awhile Since I Griped About Florida Politics, So Enjoy

So here I was all wrapped up in the Bucs' Free Agency period (we still need a Cornerback, Dom!), when news comes out this morning about this:

The Lieutenant Governor of Florida (akin to a Veep) Jennifer Carroll resigned from office this morning.

Apparently it was a pretty sudden move.  There was reportedly a state-wide gathering of Chamber of Commerce leaders she had to cancel out on (although her staff reported she had nothing on her calendar for today).

This has been an ongoing investigation, although it hadn't been dominating the local news much.  She'd been embroiled in a reported charity program that operated Internet Cafes: that Tampa Bay Times article goes into better detail:

Carroll's connections to Allied Veterans of the World, a Florida nonprofit that operates a chain of Internet sweepstakes cafes as a pseudo-charity for veterans.  The cafes sell Internet time for entries into sweepstakes on devices that resemble slot machines.
This week, close to 60 people associated with the company were arrested on various charges, including illegal gambling, racketeering and money laundering.
Carroll owned a public relations firm that represented Allied Veterans, and while a member of the Florida House of Representatives, did work for the company.  (Personal Note: it is legal for state legislators to have outside jobs, as the legislature is deemed part-time and paid as such.  Whether or not conflicts of interest arise from those jobs is another matter...) She later filmed an advertisement promoting Allied Veterans while serving as lieutenant governor...

You might notice a few keywords in that report: calling the nonprofit a "pseudo-charity" is one, another is selling sweepstakes via machines "resembling slot machines".  The big keyword is "racketeering": that's a heavy-hitting criminal charge, something only the Feds can break out as a prosecutorial weapon.

The investigation into Allied Veterans started in 2009, law enforcement officials said Wednesday.  Investigators said that Allied Veterans tried to scheme and defraud the public and governmental agencies by misrepresenting how much of its proceeds were donated to charities affiliated with Veterans Administration...
While serving in the state House in 2010, Carroll introduced legislation to legalize sweepstakes games such as those in cafes operated by Allied Veterans.  Carroll later withdrew the proposed law, saying it was filed erroneously (Personal Note: she also has a bridge near around Brooklyn she'd like to sell you) and that she wasn't interested in legalizing Internet cafes, which operate in a legal gray area...

This is mostly a delicious slice of schadenfreude, I admit it.  I'm no fan of Rick Scott (did you ever notice?), so anything that embarrasses his administration is a big win in my raging biased opinion.

For Carroll to quit a relatively meaningless job - like most Veeps, the Lt. Gov just kinda sits there - is still a big deal: as a woman and African-American (she was the first Lt. Governor African-American for Florida, the closest to the governorship ever), she was a prominent part of a Republican Party having serious problems getting Blacks and women to vote for the party.

It's not my place to speculate on an ongoing criminal investigation... but what the hell, I will.  That Carroll resigned pretty much right after state law enforcement officials interviewed her for a few hours is a big sign that the investigators had something serious on her.  That she was tied to a potentially criminal enterprise really isn't enough to force a resignation: there have been politicians at every level tied to even scuzzier elements working in "gray areas" of business that never resigned simply because of associating with the "wrong" people.  Until actual charges are filed, if ever, we might not know just what it was that convinced Carroll she needed to leave office.

That said, I am curious as to what kind of deal Carroll's lawyers are going to try to get for her.  Which is where the fun stuff can happen: if Carroll is tied in deep with Allied Veterans and that pseudo-charity is involved in massive fraud, Carroll's going to need some red meat to trade out a harsh jail time for a few months of community service and a 50 dollar fine.  Having been inside Rick Scott's circle for a few years... having been inside the Florida Lege for a few years, dominated by a self-serving pack of Republicans enjoying gerrymandered safe seats... Carroll's bound to have picked up on a few juicy goings-on behind office doors... hehehehehehehh...

Inauguration Day 2013

Technically, Obama was sworn in to his SECOND TERM BEECHES on Sunday because the Constitution specifies it happens on January 20th no matter what... which caused a problem one year conflicting with a Super Bowl, which forced President Reagan to stave off the inauguration parties until Monday, so even though the Super Bowl is now in February and the games this Sunday were for the Conference Championships, Obama is carrying on a proud tradition of recognizing Americans' priorities (sports and beer).

Anywho, here's a Liveblog from the Washington Post if you wanna track that sort of thing.  I'm pretty sure the networks are covering it... no, the networks are still talking about Manti Te'o's fake girlfriend.  Again.

/headdesk

Anyways, baseball season is around the corner.  Go Rays!

It's a New Year. I Need Resolutions.

I hereby resolve for this year of Common Era Two Thousand and Thirteen that I will do everything in my power to increase traffic to this blog site.

Shouldn't be too hard.  I've finally paid notice to the statistical trends on my blog and found out that my most popular entry has been the Iran Day Six article.  And that was because it had pictures that came up in search engines under "funny" "Iran" "pictures".

Shouldn't be too hard to do that, either.  I got a bunch of captioned photos already on my I Can Has account:

also

also wik

Gonna have to make more of them by hand, though.  I Can Has website dumped their political funny caption maker.  Sigh...

Another way I can uptick the blog traffic is to do a regular series of articles.  I'm thinking of writing up entries on Presidential Character - the personality tracker developed by James David Barber - much like I did pointing out what Character a President Romney could have been.  It'll be tricky coming up with Character profiles for a lot of the One-Termers of the 19th Century... but I'm damn sure Millard Fillmore is gonna be a doozy when I get some research on him done!

Also, my other New Year's resolution: get some writing done and e-published!

See ya.