41 states are now refusing to give Trump Administration their voter information.

Donald Trump and Kris Kobach, getting ready to do some voter suppressing.

Courtesy of CNN:

Forty-one states have defied the Trump administration's request for private voter information, according to a CNN inquiry to all 50 states. 

State leaders and voting boards across the country have responded to the letter with varying degrees of cooperation -- from altogether rejecting the request to expressing eagerness to supply information that is public. 

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, vice chairman of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, which President Donald Trump created by executive order in May, sent a letter to all 50 states last Wednesday requesting a bevy of voter data, which he notes will eventually be made available to the public. 

The order came months after Trump claimed without evidence that millions had voted illegally in the 2016 presidential election. When states began to express concerns about the legality of his administration's efforts to investigate voter fraud, Trump called them out on Twitter on Saturday, questioning whether they were hiding something.

Well it's nice to see that most states are standing up to this oppressive administration.

Let's face it giving Trump and his cronies our personal voter information would surely have been used to suppress the vote and alter the outcome of elections all across the nation.

And any president who came to power by way of interference in our election systems by a foreign power is certainly not going to give up the White House without using every dirty trick in the book.

Donald Trump melting down on Twitter? Must be Saturday.

Okay these are really all over the place so I will just present them one at a time, since there does not seem to be a unifying theme.

Word is that @Greta Van Susteren was let go by her out of control bosses at @NBC & @Comcast because she refused to go along w/ 'Trump hate!'

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 1, 2017

Or perhaps MSNBC just insisted on journalist standards that Greta simply could not meet.

Numerous states are refusing to give information to the very distinguished VOTER FRAUD PANEL. What are they trying to hide?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 1, 2017

What are they hiding? Well perhaps the personal information of their citizens, so that it cannot be weaponized against them.

How about that?

I am extremely pleased to see that @CNN has finally been exposed as #FakeNews and garbage journalism. It's about time!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 1, 2017

I have my own issues with CNN, but they most certainly have NOT been exposed as "fake news."

The only people who believe this are the extreme Right Wing who have never really watched CNN in the first place.

Crazy Joe Scarborough and dumb as a rock Mika are not bad people, but their low rated show is dominated by their NBC bosses. Too bad!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 1, 2017

Yeah not "bad people," just dumb and crazy.

Considering the source they should take this as a compliment.

You know speaking of dumb apparently European intelligence agents don't have much confidence that Trump has the brain power to deal with Vladimir Putin during their upcoming meeting.

Courtesy of the Daily Beast:  

Moscow believes its leader, ex-spy master Vladimir Putin, can extract major concessions from President Donald Trump when the two meet for the first time next week, European officials tell The Daily Beast. 

The officials say their intelligence indicates Putin thinks he can outmaneuver Trump at the G-20 summit, playing on promises of cooperation on areas like counterterrorism to win concessions like a reduction in the raft of sanctions against Russia. 

“When you meet Russia, don’t give anything away for free,” one Western official warned, echoing the fears of many European diplomats ahead of next week’s Trump-Putin meeting on the fringes of the G-20 in Germany. 

Their misgivings highlight concern that Trump’s inexperience and Putin’s ability to flatter will slowly degrade the U.S. alliance with Europe over time, and boost Moscow back to near-superpower status while extracting no changes to its aggressive, expansionist behavior.

I think it is blatantly obvious that Trump has been compromised by Putin, and I have no confidence that Trump will even bring up the fact that Russia hacked our election.

I'm just worried that by the end of the meeting Trump will have unconditionally surrendered the country to Putin.

Assuming of course that he has not already done that.

The states with the highest and lowest church attendance. Where is your state?

Courtesy of Gallup: Slightly more than half of Utah residents say they attend religious services every week, more than any other state in the union. Residents in the four Southern states of Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Arkansas are the next most likely to be frequent church attendees, with 45% to 47% reporting weekly attendance. At the other end of the spectrum is Vermont, where 17% of residents say they attend religious services every week.

Here is a list of the states with highest church attendance.

 And here is the list of states with the lowest.

As you can see Alaska is on the list of the states with the lowest attendance. 

And trust me that is not for lack of opportunity, The only thing that outnumber churches in Alaska are liquor stores and bars.

I know that Sarah Palin's radical religious rhetoric has people confused about Alaskans, But trust me the vast majority of us avoid church like the plague.

Now if they had an open bar.......

Number two? But..but..we have Sarah Palin.

Courtesy of Mandatory:

We used the three loveliest sounding STDs - chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis - and added up infections per 100,000 residents, meaning the higher the number is the more of a chance you will catch something when you bring someone home from the bar. Here are the official rankings for the sluttiest states in America.

Okay maybe this time I wish Alaska were further down the list.

I don't think this should come as a surprise to anyone.

97 of 100 poorest counties in America are in Republican states. Conservative policies don't work. #UniteBlue pic.twitter.com/Sn3l0X5l11
— TruthtoConservatives (@ToConservatives) July 28, 2014

Just in case you think this is way off click here.

When it comes to economics the Republicans are idiots, and yet they continue to sell the meme that it is THEY who are good at managing money.

A recent study by the National Bureau of Economic Research shows that economies almost always grow faster under a Democratic President than  under a Republican one.

Yeah, no shit Sherlock.

Thirteen states raise minimum wage, and gain more jobs. Why do facts hate conservatives so much?

Courtesy of Philly.com:  

Maybe a higher minimum wage isn't so bad for job growth after all. 

The 13 U.S. states that raised their minimum wages at the beginning of this year are adding jobs at a faster pace than those that did not, providing some counter-intuitive fuel to the debate over what impact a higher minimum has on hiring trends. 

Many business groups argue that raising the minimum wage discourages job growth by increasing the cost of hiring. A Congressional Budget Office report earlier this year lent some support for that view. It found that a minimum wage of $10.10 an hour, as President Obama supports, could cost 500,000 jobs nationwide. 

But the state-by-state hiring data, released Friday by the Labor Department, provides ammunition to those who disagree. Economists who support a higher minimum say the figures are encouraging, though they acknowledge they don't establish a cause and effect. There are many possible reasons hiring might accelerate in a particular state. 

"It raises serious questions about the claims that a raise in the minimum wage is a jobs disaster," said John Schmitt, a senior economist at the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research. The job data "isn't definitive," he added, but is "probably a reasonable first cut at what's going on." 

So to sum up Obamacare is NOT a job killer, raising the minimum wage is NOT a job killer, and despite conservative attacks to the contrary President Obama has been steadily increasing jobs in this country since he took office.  But just not fast enough to make them happy of course.

And while we are poking holes in Republican talking points perhaps it is a good time to point out that trickle down economics do not work, lowering taxes does not increase jobs, and big businesses are not humanitarian organizations dedicated to making their employees lives more enjoyable.

You help the employee earn a decent wage, you help build business,  energize the economy, and move more Americans out of poverty.

New analysis determines that states with lax gun laws have a higher percentage of gun deaths. In other news apparently water is wet.

Courtesy of the Violence Policy Center: 

States with weak gun violence prevention laws and higher rates of gun ownership have the highest overall gun death rates in the nation, according to a Violence Policy Center (VPC) analysis of new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. 

Meanwhile, states with the lowest overall gun death rates have lower rates of gun ownership and some of the strongest gun violence prevention laws in the nation. However, even in these states the human toll of gun violence remains unacceptably high and far exceeds the gun death rate in most Western industrialized nations. 

The five states with the highest per capita gun death rates in 2011 were Louisiana, Mississippi, Alaska, Wyoming, and Montana. Each of these states has extremely lax gun violence prevention laws as well as a higher rate of gun ownership. The state with the lowest gun death rate in the nation was Rhode Island, followed by Hawaii, Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey. Each of these states has strong gun violence prevention laws and has a lower rate of gun ownership.

Why is Alaska always on these bad lists?

Look before all of you sad little gun fetishists start to panic, nobody wants to keep law abiding citizens from owning a gun. 

I completely understand that Viagra is expensive, loud noises frighten you, and that you have the muscle mass of a quadriplegic, so without your arsenal of bang sticks you feel lost, impotent, and confused.

However there are people who are careless with firearms, emotionally ill equipped to handle them, or mentally deranged and possibly homicidal, and surely everybody would agree that these people should not be trusted to own or handle instruments of death that can kill even fathers of newborns from all the way across the street.

We just want to send our children to school knowing hey are safe, attend a movie without having to wear a flack jacket, and shop in the mall without scanning the food court for armed assailants.

In other words we just want to live in the America that existed before the NRA started pushing gun ownership like that creepy guy in the van hands out free samples of meth to the neighborhood children.  (The first taste is always free.)

In my opinion our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, outweighs the right of ammosexuals to walk around feeling like a bad ass.

Religion can be both a shield and a bludgeon. Used to protect those who seek safety beneath its banner, and then used to shatter the bodies of those deemed unworthy of such protection.

"It is the church and not the state, to which the teaching of woman’s inferiority is due ; it is the church which primally commanded the obedience of woman to man. It is the church which stamps with religious authority the political and domestic degradation of woman. It is the church which has placed itself in opposition to all efforts looking towards her enfranchisement and it has done this under professed divine authority, and wherever we find laws of the state bearing with greater hardship upon woman than upon man, we shall ever find them due to the teachings of the church."  (Source)

The other day somebody commented on the Bill Maher thread that people should simply respect each person's faith and leave it unchallenged.

The answer to that of course it NO.

At least not as long as their belief system is the sole reason cited by those who want to oppress or judge others, and keep them from accessing the life, liberty, and happiness promised to us all in the Declaration of Independence.

If your religion seeks to gain dominance over those who do not agree with its tenets, then it ceases to be a personal choice and instead becomes an overarching threat which must be met with suspicion, investigation, and perhaps even aggression.

20 states threatening to secede after President Obama reelection. Aww, did somebody get their widdle feelings hurt?

You know this weekend my daughter flew down to Georgia to spend the winter with her mom and her sisters, since much of the movie work she has been doing up here will dry up until spring.

We had a great last couple of days together, attending the new James Bond movie "Skyfall" and getting take out from the newly opened Olive Garden here on our side of town. (I loved both the movie and the food by the way.)

And then the next day, Sunday she flew dout of here around 4:00 P.M. our time.

I kid you not, she was in Georgia no more than eight hours before I received THIS text:

"Oh my god. what am I doing here? These people are fucking crazy!"

That statement was accompanied by this link:  

It's been less than a week since the nation re-elected President Barack Obama, giving the Commander in Chief another four years in office. Unsurprisingly, the election's outcome didn't please everyone. But rather than simply deal with the results, however, thousands of Georgians have decided that they would rather secede from the United States. 

Yes, you read that right. Political blog Georgia Tipsheet - run by occasional CL contributor James Richardson - pointed out this morning that over 6,000 people have signed two similar petitions. Both have asked for the Obama administration to allow the Peach State to leave the United States so that it could form its own independent government. 

Seriously? I guess so much for that whole bipartisan approach to working together for the good of the country thing, right?

Now as most of us know Georgia is in NO position to run their own government, and this is clearly nothing more than a very public temper tantrum by a group of  dipshits that simply cannot handle the idea that they just had their asses handed to them in the election.

However before you mock Georgia as a state full of whiny little bitches, perhaps you should read this:

Louisiana became the first of the (as of now) 50 united states that managed to collect enough signatures to have their petition for secession added to the White House’s website last week, and so far they’ve had no problem finding company. A petition asking for the government to “Peacefully grant the State of Louisiana to withdraw from the United States of America and create its own NEW government” garnered more than 14,000 signatures since going live on November 7, and so far 19 other states have managed to attract similar success. 

According to the terms of participation on WhiteHouse.gov, the website for the executive branch of the United States will make any petition searchable if it can collect 150 signatures within one months’ time, and collecting 25,000 signatures will necessitate an official response. So far Texas seems to be in the running to be the first state to receive a response from the commander-in-chief, with 21,777 signees asking for secession since their petition went live on November 9, barely 48 hours after US President Barack Obama claimed a victory in his bid for re-election. 

In all, 20 states have so far broken the 150 signature threshold, mostly sticking closely to the script included in the first petition published by “Michael E” of Slidell, LA, who quotes the Declaration of Independence in his plea to once again separate the public from a power that, according to thousands of residents, doesn’t represent what is best for the people anymore.

You know part of me wants to simply say "good riddance" and let these assholes TRY and form their own country without the monetary support from Uncle Sam, ESPECIALLY since many of them take more in government money than they pay out in taxes. However of course that is not really an option, and besides my daughter would be trapped in one of those southern fried cuckoo's nests.

Besides I imagine that this reaction to Obama's reelection is much like when a small child threatens to hold their breath until they pass out. The best thing to do is call their bluff because they have to breathe eventually, and besides we know that, even though they have covered their mouths with their hands, they are actually faking it and still breathing through their noses.

God this country is just chock full of ignorant people. I just hope those Georgia inbreds don't get any of their stupid on my kid.

Another very good jobs report for the President.

Courtesy of CNBC:  

In a sharp turnaround, most states saw their unemployment rates drop in September. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 41 states saw their jobless figures decrease, and only six saw them rise. Three report no change at all, including the state with the lowest unemployment rate in the nation, North Dakota, holding steady at three percent. 

This is a big change from the month earlier, when most states — 26 — reported an increase in unemployment. 

The states with the highest unemployment continue to be Nevada (11.8 percent), Rhode Island (10.5 percent), and California (10.2 percent), but all three figures were down from the month before.

Of course the Right Wing is already trying to spin these new numbers as no big deal, or claiming that the REAL numbers are worse than reported, but of course that is because they are in a panic and simply CANNOT accept that Romney's main selling point, his fake ability to create more jobs, is no longer resonating like it once did.

And remember Romney is the guy who recently said "Government doesn't create jobs" all while running for a government position from which he swears that HE will create more jobs.

Oh yeah, THAT makes a lot of sense!