35,000 walrus need no 'proven proof'

It may offer small consolation but  I did want this entry to let you know that  humans are not the only stressed-out creatures on the planet today. Thanks to this remarkable AP photo that arrived via ThinkProgress, we learned that some 35,000  walrus sought solid ground  on a beach in northwest Alaska, driven landward as rising temperatures melted their ice base offshore. (Note the inland bulge from the sea)

Probably won't convince Alaska's Sarah Palin, the state's leading climate change denier that worrisome things are happening that are easily viewed from her front porch. After all, as she has reminded us, it snowed in Alaska last year, so where's the proof of global warming?

There was some of that gibberish in a debate involving the Republican Senate candidate in Iowa, Joni Ernst.  She did fuzz up her thoughts by saying she believed climate was changing but added that she was at a  loss to know what caused it, or whether human beings had anything to do with it.

As she noted earlier,  "I have not seen proven proof".

Good grief.  What is "proven  proof"?  Is it the same as "true facts"?  

As I have written before, when this generation of pols passes on, it  will leave no intellectual history behind for all of those who come later.

Husted: The federal courts are subversive

Thanks to Secretary of State Jon Husted, we've finally gotten to to the bottom of his maddening but  failed plans to restrict voting in Ohio.  It is based in the sort of hollow patriotic fervor that once affected the old House Un-American Activities Committee when we went to bed each night in fear of a Commie hand bursting through the mattress to seize our buttocks.

Like Republican Senate candidate Josh Mandel, who with straight face referred to Sen. Sherrod Brown as "un-American",  Husted spread the subversive field to include the several courts that turned down his appeals of an early-voting case filed against him by the Obama Administration.  ThinkProgress reports that Husted appeared at an election law symposium at the University of Toledo to denounce the courts (which included the U.S. Supreme Court)  as 'un-American".  He figured the courts had no business  imposing its ideas on Ohio's ability to run its own elections.  Take that Antonin Scalia!

The Toledo Blade, which first reported the event,  noted that Husted's opinion was "not shared by many who sttended the syposium."

That is a growing truth about many of Husted's opinions these days.  But embarrassing though it may be to reasonable  Ohioans, we're stuck with him at least until 2014.

A satisfied media accepts the Husted Hustle

They had me going for a moment. The vigilant Ohio urban newspapers, I mean. When Secretary of State Jon Husted delivered his mandate that all voting hours should be uniform, who besides cynical pests like me  could challenge the political correctness of the Husted Hustle?

The Plain Dealer's editorial follow-up to his ruling concluded  that the decree was, um,  "acceptable".  After all, it said, "What Husted has ordered may not completely satisfy anyone, but  it at least  treats everyone equally." Of course.

That's after it opined that it would have been "preferable " if Husted had "included a week end or two" for early voters."  Shucks, he didn't.  And isn't that at the  heart of the problem?

Not fully dismayed, the PD's closing argument meekly ended: "Imperfect though it may be,  this solution will suffice."  Imperfect?

Down in Columbus, the Dispatch's editorial declared: "Vote for fairness".  The paper didn't waste time in sharing its satisfied view, beginning the editorial with...

"Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted has struck a fair compromise by standardizing  early-voting hours throughout the state." Whoopee! Compromise!  Who could complain?

Meantime, the Beacon Journal conceded that the ruling "has not pleased everyone and even recalled that in 2008 the early voting proceeded "smoothly."  However, it  said Husted has "leveled the field for early voting hours."

What the editorial writers  didn't level about was the ugly  source of this year's election scandal.   None of the papers bothered to mention  that the Republicans had set out early to suppress minority voters.  African-Americans,  in particular.  And they slyly confiscated a  system that worked four years ago and found an "acceptable" way to fix it to increase their party's chances against President Obama.    'Tis a fact that was buried in much of the latest round of editorial page coverage, where outrage was replaced with studious defenses of a political plot that can't be remedied by uniform voting hours.

But wait!

Over the week end Plunderbund, ThinkProgress and other sources reported more evidence that the GOP mission all along was to shrink the black vote.

That word came not from those awful libs  but from  Doug Preisse, the Franklin County Republican chairman and member of the board of elections.    In an email to the Dispatch, he conceded:

"I guess I really actually feel we shouldn't contort the voting process to accommodate the urban - read African-American - voter turnout machine.  Let's be fair and reasonable."

Lets.

This is the same perp who, according to the Dispatch, said claims of unfairness were "bullshit. Quote me."

In fairness,  I will.

Right-wing pols won't say the sea also rises

WEEKEND'S YUCKY LEFTOVERS:

If you need  more evidence of Republican madness, we offer this bit of loopy censorship from Virginia's  legislative ranks. A study of the shoreline commissioned by the House of Delegates included references to the recent "rise of sea levels," which were excised by right-wing pols, one of whom described them as  "liberal code words".  ThinkProgess reports that State Del. Chris Stolle, an apparent student of Orwellian Newspeak,  preferred to describe  rising sea levels as the consequence of "recurrent flooding".

 The word from down there is that  Norfolk and Virginia Beach are spending $6 million annually  to "elevate roads, improve drainage and help homeowners raise their houses" while the U.S. Naval base at Norfolk is spending "hundreds of millions to replace piers to withstand rising water."

Oh, the term  "climate change" also is tabu in the once-proud  land of Thomas Jefferson.   My liberal response : "What don't you understand about the words "Glub, glub...?".  


(Psst!  These are the paleopoliticians who keep assuring us that they  are the ones who will make things better!)


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When Mitt Romney begins advising us on educational matters, I have a greater appreciation for my days  at tiny Third Ward School in Mt. Pleasant, Pa.   The classes were small and one-to-one help from some fearsome teachers was not uncommon.  A teacher didn't have to leave her seat in the front of the room to stare you down. Looking back, I can say it was a first class education, thank you, even when I shudder at the thought of  having to memorize great portions of Hamlet in English class.

But along comes Mitt to tell us that class size isn't important, and we don't need more teachers.   The Tea Party cheering section rose on cue with each of his empty utterances. But should any of us be surprised by  a fellow who sent all of his kids to exclusive private schools and attended a preppy one himself. Hearing Mittspeak, I hear a very wealthy man who has long been comfortably removed from  the rest of us.  So should he now be considered an expert on a subject with which he has no experience?

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House Majority Leader Eric Cantor says there will be no more legislation in the current  session. With a presidential election down the road, his search-and-destroy team will need the time to kick out President Obama.  Jobs bills will have to wait for the House Republican caucus, all of whom already have well-paid jobs, to carry out its scheme.   They may even shut down the government.   Cantor won't say what he has in mind to fill in the days between now and the election.  It may take a proctologist to  find out.

Florida: Where a decorated vet is told he can't vote

DO YOU KNOW  the fellow in the picture?

No? If not, you have a lot of company .  The election officials in Florida don't know him either.  That explains why, at the urging of the state's kookish Republican governor,  they have included Bill Internicola in the massive purge of people who want to vote this year in the never-ending GOP quest to smash fraud wherever it exists - or doesn't exist.

Let me tell you about  this designated victim of Gov. Rick Scott's hit list.  He's 91, a decorated WWII veteran (Bronze Star for bravery in the Battle of the Bulge) and  for the past 14 years has voted in Florida.

Not good enough for the state's flawed election bureaucracy - the same one that wiped a lot of voters in the 2000 presidential election  in which George Bush defeated Al Gore in the state by 537 votes  with help from the U.S.Supreme Court.

So here we go again.  While GOP officials scoff at references to their efforts as "voter cleansing", there is no reason to believe them for the Republican-led assaults on voter lists across the country that largely deny blacks and Latinos a visit to the voter booth. There was a time when the party prayed for bad weather  to keep certain voters from the polls;  that, plus poll taxes down south.

Internicola is the second case in this messy plot to reach the Net , largely exposed by ThinkProgress. By the way, it also noted that in the first five months of 2012,  three major newspapers - the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and USA Today - failed to mention a word about the scandalous behavior  in the  Sunshine State.  See how easy it is for me to be cynical.

 We mentioned in an earlier blog Maureen Russo, who has yet to be reinstated to the eligibility list  despite her valid profile.  So if your local Republican officials  tell you that there is no plot to deny selected voters their rights with the shopworn guise of good government,  let them scoff and sputter.  But don't believe them.  They are lying - which is one of the few things that they do well.

Heckuva-job Brownie is back, sort of

EXCEPT FOR PEANUTS, I don't pay too much attention to the comic strips in the papers anymore. Don't have to. A casual check of the day's news gives me enough laughs for one day. Which brings me to Mike Brown, who is in the photo with George Bush, the fellow with his arms crossed. The president is praising his FEMA director in the wake of the government's bungled response to Katrina: ''Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job." It still draws a laugh,.

Now, reports ThinkProgress. Brownie turns up at Fox News, the refuge of scoundrels, to complain about Obama's itinerary in Europe as tornadoes pounded the Midwest. Says Brownie: "He went to Ireland for God's sake to visit relatives. It's time to come home...in this case, the perception is that the president is detached. He's more concerned about raising a toast to the Queen. People have died."

As it has been said, people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Particularly in Brownie's case. He's not even running for president.

Beware the hermit crabs in the political class

THE LATE A.J. LIEBLING, the iconoclastic journalist and acerbic critic of newspapers, once described two Columbus papers housed under the same roof as "two hermit crabs living in the same shell." That also seems to be the crabby case now with the former Republican Party and its Tea Party proprietor that have been clawing the Obama Administration. In their meteoric rise, the TP's have shared time, space and manic attacks on their Democratic victims as well as bashing some of the programs that have been around for more than three-quarters of a century. For example, Social Security.

While many Republican pols find ways to lessen the political consequences of an all-out appeal for ending the program that has served countless millions of retirees, the Tea Partiers toss it into the same stew as, say, street cleaning or 4th of July fireworks. If it comes from the government (i.e., taxpayers) , it has got to go. Some of the very same pols even quietly deny that they are in accord with their Tea Party friends on all counts and that neither occupant of the shell really wants to deprive us of monthly Social Security payments. That's baloney, of course., that only the Fox News culture would have us believe.

I would excuse some Tea Partiers who only know what they heard from Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin. But if you want to know what they are really thinking, pay attention to Dick Armey, the former Texas congressman and bloated chairman of FreeomWorks, whose comfort zone is squarely in the Tea Party base. In an interview with ThinkProgress at a Tea Party rally in Chicago, Armey declared that Social Secruity was a "corrupt goverment practice" and a "pay-as-your-go Ponzi scheme."

Such damning seems to come easily for a person of Armey's means who would live very well, thank you, without those monthly checks. Trouble is, such calculated madness has taken root in a lot of people for whom Social Security, Medicare and other forms for federal assistance are literally keeping them alive these days. W hen the wealthiest among us pretend to empathize with folks living on the edge, what hope is there for a level playing field in this year's elections?