Governor Chris Christie has found who is responsible for the political closing of the George Washington Bridge, which stranded thousands of people and held up police and emergency vehicles: It’s Anybody But Him.
“Not it!” he said at the press conference today. “Oh, sure, I hired all these people, some of whom were completely unqualified for their jobs. But you can’t hold me responsible for the things done by people who directly answered to me, can you?”
I mean, what did people expect him to do? Investigate it once it came to his attention? Look into it in some way and punish those involved? No, certainly, everyone clearly would rather that the media do the job, through sources and emails and phone calls and lots of investigations. Why should a Governor have to, you know, walk down the hall and ask someone?
No, what people expect from the Governor is to laugh it off and sarcastically say, “Unbeknownst to anyone, I was working the cones” as if this was not a serious thing that placed people’s lives in danger.
Hey, you never know. Maybe in a few years, working the cones will be his next job.
The thing about being a political commentator and being a TV weather reporter is that both can be wrong 50% of the time and yet still keep their jobs.
The difference is that the weather people are trying to be as accurate as possible. 
Political reporters don’t always care.
Mostly this is because some political reporters are in reality propagandists. They have no interest in the truth; getting people to agree with their already decided-upon conclusions outweighs any desire for accuracy or even honesty. The ends justifies the means.
Rush Limbaugh is the Poster Boy for this. Like many of his pals in the right-wing media collective, he has no qualifications for the position whatsoever other than a loud mouth and a desire to never do any research. His latest lie is that the “Polar Vortex” is another one of them there liberal conspiracies out to convince people of climate change.
So it’s nice to see Al Roker — someone who, unlike Limbaugh, is actually qualified to talk about climate — aim for facts. (You remember facts? They used to help convince people of the truth.)
On the Today show, he literally told Limbaugh and all the doubters to “stuff it.” Roker pulled out his old college textbook ‘The AMS Glossary of Meteorology’ from 1959 which used the term. “Rush Limbaugh claims the Polar Vortex is a creation of a left-wing, liberal media conspiracy,” he tweeted. “It’s Meteorology 101. No political agenda.”
And that’s the silly thing — that this is a political issue at all. It isn’t, and it shouldn’t be, any more than evolution should be a political issue.
“The good thing about science,” says Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, “is that it’s true whether you believe it or not.”
“This is a democracy!” cried the religious person on the Fox News interview. He then went on to explain that since 90% of the population agrees with him that therefore it was OK for them to force their religion on the other 10%. 
Yeah, you know that 1st Amendment? It only applies to the majority view.
Ah. This is apparently a new definition of democracy for which I was unaware.
The discussion was about a bunch of Satanists who are demanding equal time in Oklahoma. The Christians placed a Ten Commandments display on public property. The Constitution demands that the government take no preference concerning religion. Therefore, the Satanists get to put up their silly goat-head statue.
Many religious people, of course, are only in favor of freedom of religion when it’s their own religion. In a recent debate on Fox News, they tried their best to deny the 1st Amendment applied. David Silverman, head of American Atheists (and a friend of mine), tried to point out that the law demands that you allow them to place their own displays. And then he had to once more clarify to the idiots that atheism is not Satanism. “They’re all bunk to me,” he said.
There is a very, very simple solution to all of this. Simply get your religious statue off of government property. Then they don’t have to give “equal time” to Hindus and Satanists and Atheists and Pastafastarians.
Let’s try to simplify this.
If the planet’s temperature goes up a few degrees, that means more water evaporates from the ocean. The ocean covers 3/4ths of our world, so that’s a lot of water. When there is a storm then, it is often gigantic. Hurricanes can be much worse than before, and snow storms can be huge. 
Will this happen every single time? Of course not. But when you look at enough numbers, the answer is clear.
It’s like tossing a coin. If it comes up heads 90% of the time, it’s probably a trick coin or something is unbalanced. You don’t look at the 10% of the time it comes up tails and say “Aha! Look, it came up tails. That proves you’re wrong. The coin is balanced.”
We’ve had record heat the last few years, with summers pushing the temperatures to record levels. In fact, it was just a few weeks ago that we had record warm December days, remember? Further, in Australia, where it’s summer now, they are experiencing record heat waves. Despite all this, at no time has a climate change denier said, “Wow, I guess I was wrong.” But have a cold spell and suddenly they’re all saying, “See? There’s no global warming!”
Ridiculous. If you bring up the record heat, they say “Well, that’s one example; it doesn’t prove climate change.” Then they turn around and use one example to try to deny it.
Sorry, guys, but I’m going to believe the vast majority of climate scientists as opposed to a bunch of people who have no experience in it and who claim that all the scientists are part of some huge conspiracy. Apparently, they believe that the scientists are operating under Underpants Gnome logic:
Step One: Make up data to make people think there is climate change.
Step Two: ????
Step Three: Profit!!!
A few days ago, I wrote about how the GOP is trying to get rid of the Tea Party crazies that are driving the party into the ground. They’ve lost a bunch of races they should have won because the party has nominated people so far out of the mainstream that even Republican voters couldn’t stand them. 
But it’s their own fault, and they should have seen it coming.
Support for the GOP is at an all time low, partially because they are associated with these people who refuse to compromise, spout nonsense as if it were facts, and whose sole purpose is to get people to hate our own government as much as they do. Admittedly, support for both parties and the President is at an all-time low, but it’s not surprising that support for government is at its lowest when a large segment of one of the parties has “hate the government” as its goal. These people should realize that hatred for the government includes them.
The Republicans only have themselves to blame for their condition, because of gerrymandering.
Over the past fifteen years or so, the GOP has managed to redraw the state lines in the most ridiculous way to create as many safe districts as possible for them. By diluting Democratic votes, they were able to guarantee majorities in states where they did not hold the majority. Here in Pennsylvania, for instance, more people voted for Democrats in the last election yet more Republicans were elected because of the strange way the districts were drawn.
So if you are a Republican politician in a district that is safely Republican, you shouldn’t have to worry, right? Wrong.
The problem is with primaries. Hardly anyone votes in primaries, where the parties choose their candidates. You’re lucky if you get a 20% turnout in a primary election. That’s 20% of registered voters, not 20% of the eligible voters.
And who votes in primaries? Just those people who really really care about politics. And if you really really care about politics, chances are you are much more conservative or much more liberal than the average voter.
So primaries give us the more extreme members of each party. Then if you gerrymander to remove even the moderates of your own party, you end up with a voting electorate that is at the very edge of political thought — the extremes of the extremes.
These extremes on the right are represented primarily by those who identify themselves these days as “Tea Party” members. And they think that anyone who does things like compromise in order to accomplish anything are traitors and not Real Americans — even very conservative members of their own party.
So they run “Real Americans” against the incumbents. Incumbents get scared and refuse to challenge them and sometimes take their extremist views in order to stay elected. And ultimately, the extremists win the primary either by electing their own favorite or by forcing the incumbent to come to their side.
However, once the fall election comes around, their numbers don’t increase. Moderate voters (that is, the majority of Americans) turn away from these extremists and elect Democrats instead.
In some districts these extremists still get elected in the fall election, and then they go to Washington and shut the government down, which hurts the reputation of the rest of the Republican party. It drives their poll numbers down and ultimately hurts all of them.
And it’s all their own fault for gerrymandering districts in the first place. Unfortunately, we are all suffering because of it.
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