One Law For The Poor, None For the Rich

"Teen Kills 4; Judge Lets Him Off Because He is Rich!" from the Daily Kos - read the story here.

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Daily Kos toots its own horn -

“Even CNN says we're awesome”

"This is what CNN said in their post-mortem on filibuster reform:

What was known as the nuclear option yesterday is known as the Reid Rule today. Time will only tell* if the Reid Rule is productive or destructive. But we'll leave that to the historians.

As for how it became the Reid rule, it took a coordinated and sustained effort from an unlikely place—progressive activists on the blogosphere.

Daily Kos was the first group to start organizing for filibuster reform, way back in 2010. People called us crazy when we did.

Well, three years and an astonishing 900,000 actions later, we made filibuster reform the mainstream Democratic policy position—and we won a vote on it on the floor of the United States Senate."

[*FOOTNOTE for CNN: The expression is "only time will tell".  How much are your writers paid?]

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Wall Street and the Shutdown

I'm a little late posting this comment on an Open Thread in the Daily Kos - but it's still funny, and to the point....

“CHEERS to friends in "buy" places. Oh, Wall Street, you're so adorable because you're so predictable. On Day 1 of the government shutdown, stocks soared on the confidence that this is no big deal. But when Day 2 rolled around and rainbows hadn’t yet popped up over the horizon, they were selling off their shit faster than Ron Popeil. Lord only knows how twitchy they'll be today. Meanwhile, big business, realizing they've been sleeping with a lunatic, is running into the arms of the boring but not crazy Democrats.”

It comes from this Link:  http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/10/03/1243944/-Open-thread-for-night-owls-A-few-kind-words-for-Mr-Cheers-Jeers

Wigging Out: Michele Bachman And Other Nuts

Picture of The Week (so far) -

The leaf is on the fig tree, the squirrel is in the woodshed, the nuts are in the Congress.

(The caption came from the Daily Kos, not from me.)

The Kos's writer, Hunter, tells us:

"Leave it to Michele Bachmann, who I will remind all of America is still an actual member of Congress and not a crazy person with 20 cats who calls C-SPAN every evening to inform the hosts as to what legislative ideas her cats have given her today, to take this new theory to its only logical conclusion: the End Times are upon us.

"This happened and as of today the United States is willingly, knowingly, intentionally sending arms to terrorists," she said. "Now what this says to me, I’m a believer in Jesus Christ, as I look at the End Times scripture, this says to me that the leaf is on the fig tree and we are to understand the signs of the times, which is your ministry, we are to understand where we are in God’s End Times history.”"Rather than seeing this as a negative, we need to rejoice, Maranatha Come Lord Jesus, His day is at hand," Bachmann added. “When we see up is down and right is called wrong, when this is happening, we were told this; these days would be as the days of Noah.”

So it's the best of all possible news, America: it's the apocalypse! Praise the secret Muslim Barack Obama for unleashing it!" 

Read the whole article, here.

Good News for Texas - But Will the Dimmocrats Pay Attention?

Wendy Davis, Texas's glamorous, pink-sneakered, Olympic Filibusterer has announced that she will run for Governor of Texas, following in the admirable footsteps of Ann Richards....

Ann Richards ran well, but did the Harley?

The Daily Kos this morning brought us the

"... huge news from Texas—Wendy Davis just announced her campaign for governor.

Can you chip in $3 to help elect a pro-choice Democrat the next governor of Texas?

Over 76,000 Daily Kos community members signed the petition to draft Wendy Davis for governor. This afternoon, she finally announced that yes, she is taking the plunge.

Let's be clear from the very start: This won't be an easy battle. This is Texas, after all. The state has the lowest voter participation in the country, and you know who those non-voters are: young voters, Latinos, Asians, African Americans, single women—the very people that Democrats depend on to win. As I'm fond of saying, if our voters turn out, we win.

Wendy Davis could be the person to activate our core voters, accelerating the demographic trends that will eventually make Texas purple, and then blue, whether Republicans like it or not.

But that won’t happen without the grassroots.

Turn Texas Blue: Chip in $3 now.

Keep fighting,
Markos MoulitsasFounder and Publisher, Daily Kos"

Now the Daily Kos is a good source, and I often enjoy what they have to say, but I'm not advocating giving your hard-earned cash to the Dimmocrats - that's for you to decide, bearing in mind that John Stone-Face Kerry is at this very moment visiting Asia to sell a Corporate "Trade Deal" that has been described as "NAFTA on steroids", and Obama today achieves the landmark moment of having presided over the deportation of more illegal immigrants than his unspeakable predecessor G.W. Bush.

(Figure given on "Democracy Now".)

The "Washington Post" immediately commented that Wendy Davis will not win.  Why the hell they say that I don't know, bearing in mind that, first, Davis is charismatic, good-looking and a heroine to women for her stand (literally) on Reproductive Freedom in the benighted State. Second, Texas had a very popular and successful woman Governor in Ann Richards, who was defeated in 1994 by W., (probably after a "recount", I don't know.)

Ann Richards QUOTE:  "I get a lot of cracks about my hair, mostly from men who don't have any."

But the main reason I think Davis might have a good chance is that elections in this democracy are decided by who turns out.  With her face-recognition, feminist street-cred, and probable appeal to the young and ethnic minorities, she might do very well indeed.

And that's the lesson for the Dimms.  The reason that they got their asses handed to them in 2010, and possibly the reason we have this Tea Party nightmare in the House right now, is that President Backbone has failed, over and over and over, to live up to the promises he made in his campaigns, to bring us "Hope and Change".

What the students, the women, the progressives, and the ethnic minorities meant by Change, and what they thought Obama meant, was breaking the chains that tie our Government to Big Business, serving the People not the Bankers, the 99% not the 1%, taking care of "Us" not "Them".

If the Dimms would just find the guts to make that their guiding principle, they could be in power for a century.  Maybe standing up for Obamacare, and taking a first timid step towards a basic service that Britain (to name but one) has had since 1949, will prove to be a turning-point.

But I don't suggest you hold your breath....

Even the 1% Don't Like the Keystone XL Scam

This story was posted today at The Daily Kos.  I'm not entirely sure what to make of it....

"Unexpected environmental activism coming from the one percent: Billionaire investor Tom Steyer [founder of the hedge fund Farallon Capital Management LLC] said he is backing a four-part, $1 million advertising campaign aimed at convincing viewers the Keystone XL pipeline will hurt the economy and communities and should be blocked.

Here's his first ad:

As you'll see, Mr Billionaire doesn't seem to be concerned about the insanity of fracking for tarsands oil at all. He doesn't seem to worry about WHY oil should be transported by pipeline from Canada, all the way across the United States to the Gulf of Mexico, THEN refined, THEN shipped across the oceans to China and other markets. (Why not ship it from Vancouver?)

He doesn't even mention Pollution or Alternative Energy.

No, what bothers him, is that the energy dragged out of Alberta at such huge environmental cost (Fracking pollution is already proving a problem after the "Thousand-Year Storm" being experienced in Colorado right now.) will be used for the benefit of nations other than the USA.

There's more to this than meets the eye, Folks....

Snarky Former English Teacher Writes....

It's always an amusing game to check out exam papers from the schools of the past, so that we can all have a good "tsk, tsk" over how standards have fallen. The very worthwhile website Daily Kos is playing the game with this extract from an 8th-Grade test from 1912 Kentucky.

But hold on - Shock horror! Look carefully at the Spelling Test! What on Earth is an "eneeavor"?

The tragedy is that Daily Kos's writer, glooming and dooming about the terrible state of our education system, ain't doing too well on the literacy himself. In a pronouncement worthy of our former Moron-In-Chief, G.W. Bush, he accepts that "the names of some countries is different today than then".  EEK!

And his writing gets worse.  (I've sic'd all over this extract.)

(A Note, in case any children of the Texting Age are reading this: sic is Latin for "thus", and it means "this is exactly how the author wrote the material".)

"Many recent studies have indicated that American education has been lagging (sic) those of industrialized countries (sic) . The subliminal (sic) war on education via austerity and transfer of public dollars to for profit (sic) education (vouchers) makes the degeneration of the American education a continued slide to mediocrity." (Hmmmmm....)

Anyhoo, all that aside the article is quite fun; if you want to pit your wits against the children of Kentucky before World War One, you can do so here.

And in fairness, Kos does have some good stuff.  Only sayin'....