Tuesday, November 24, 2015

Scattershooting World War III, and more important topics

-- "World War III" is trending again on Twitter (mostly because some dude has predicted apocalypse in June, and also because people are reTweeting 'WWIII is trending on Twitter').  But there is trouble:


I wonder if I have time to eat breakfast before we all go up in a flaming mushroom cloud.  Please be reminded, via Ted Rall, that everybody has the blood of innocent victims on their hands.

People in the West wonder where the Islamic State will strike next after the Paris attacks. Some commentators wonder aloud whether ISIS would strike a hospital, ignoring the irony that the U.S. blew up a hospital in Afghanistan recently.

-- While we wait for The End, Killer Mike had lunch yesterday with Bernie Sanders...


... and endorsed his candidacy for president at an Atlanta rally.   Egberto thinks it's a big deal, and certainly it is.  There's still a lot of ground to cover between now and, oh, Super Tuesday in March.... if you believe that the polling has not excluded a lot of millenials.

Maybe it has and maybe it hasn't.  If the polls get flipped on their ear by massive numbers of young and minority voters turning out for Sanders, then our political revolution may finally have arrived.

I'm still skeptimistic, but have a bit more hope today.

-- Worth repeating: Poor white voters aren't voting Republican; they're not voting at all.  First Draft with a little more (caustic) insight.

Nobody is talking to them. Nobody. I’m goddamn sick of hearing the condescending crap that poor white people vote against their own best interests. NO THEY DON’T. They don’t vote, period, because nobody has made them a priority. Not Republicans and not Democrats who are trying to act like Republicans, not for the last 40 years at least. Nobody has given a shit about these people since RFK and we’re gonna sit here and talk about how they’re just too dumb to know they’re going to get screwed? Thank you, no.

Where exactly are they supposed to get their information, by the way? If these people have been abandoned by politicians they’ve also been abandoned by news organizations that are supposed to be making a good faith effort to inform them. Who covers poor communities? I used to do it and I’ll tell you who does it: No one. Unless there’s a shooting, a convenient lesson to package up as a cautionary tale for scared rich suburbanites, no one covers the poorest communities in America. There’s no advertising to be sold there, no subscriptions, and certainly nobody there is signing up for the newest hyperlocal app, so fuck those places and those people, they don’t deserve the news.

This ignorance isn’t about anything other than we threw these people out and we get mad that they don’t care about what we care about. It’s nonsense. When is the last time a presidential candidate spoke to them? When is the last time a campaign put resources where it never had before and got poor people to vote? When is the last time anyone fought for them?

Democrats and/or Greens: this is your wakeup call.  Don't hit the snooze.

-- Five Republican presidential candidates will receive 60 minutes of equal time -- in exchange for Trump's SNL appearance -- during Black Friday weekend.  Via Ballot Access News and Rick Hasen, the blog linked in the excerpt below (and streamed via RSS feed into the right hand column).

Arizona's Politics is learning details on how NBC and its affiliates are giving equal time to five of Donald Trump's GOP presidential rivals, in response to his November 7 "Saturday Night Live" hosting gig. The requesting candidates -- none of whom are among those closest to him in the current polls -- will receive their 12 minutes of free airtime spread out in small chunks this coming Friday and Saturday.

A reliable source with knowledge tells Arizona's Politics that the time will be allocated on the NBC affiliates in the three earliest-voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. Each candidate will receive network commercial and promo time during primetime hours on "Black Friday" and Saturday, November 27 and 28, as well as during SNL on the 28th.

There are five settling candidates: Ohio Gov. John Kasich, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, former NY Gov. George Pataki, and former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore.

With each receiving slightly more than 12 minutes of unfiltered airtime, NBC's tab will run to approximately 120 30-second spots. No word yet on how the candidates will be using their 12:05.

Hilarious.  What will they do for Bobby Jindal, I wonder?  I suppose the front-runners will wait to get theirs later.  Update: More here, and indicating Pataki hasn't agreed to the terms, though NBC has offered the same settlement the other four took.  Which suggests the leading candidates -- and Jindal -- weren't part of the original complaint, and won't be granted any free airtime.

-- Fort Bend-area state representative and disgraced Democrat Ron Reynolds has been sentenced to a year in jail for soliciting legal clients via paid recruitment.  AKA ambulance-chasing.

According to the Houston Chronicle, which first reported the sentence, Reynolds was escorted out of the Montgomery County courtroom by deputies and taken to jail after jurors returned the sentence.

The charges stem from a 2013 sting that nabbed Reynolds, who was initially charged with felony barratry, and seven other Houston-area attorneys accused in an "ambulance chasing for hire" racket. According to prosecutors, the attorneys enjoyed the services of a four-time felon named Robert Ramirez Valdez, Sr., who would scour police reports for the names of accident victims and persuade them to sign on for legal representation. Prosecutors claimed that Valdez, who testified against Reynolds last week, was paid on average $1,000 per client referred to Reynolds' Bellaire law firm.

While the other attorneys accused of using Valdez, who's currently serving a five-year prison sentence for his part in the scheme, struck plea deals with prosecutors and avoided jail time, Reynolds insisted on taking his case to trial. He was convicted on six counts of misdemeanor barratry last year, but a judge tossed the conviction and ordered a retrial after a juror on the case claimed her decision was influenced by the fact that other attorneys had already admitted to being involved in the scheme. 

He's appealing.  Let's see if the voters in his district can get him replaced in the statehouse with someone who is less dumb and less corrupt.  Which is the same thing as saying 'not a Republican'.

-- "Why Turkey is So Awful, and How You Can Make It Better".  You still have time, Chef.
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