Motley Moose – Archive

I have a friend with whom I have philosophical discussions on myriad issues the latest being the celebration of Christmas and how most if not all traditions were co-opted from various pagan traditions way before Fox News officially declared there to be a war on Christmas.

A week ago this fried, Jacki, mentioned an online comment she read, and responded to, where the writer declared that no one was going to take “Christ” out of “Christmas tree” for her.  Damnit!  (I added that last part.)  Jacki said she felt compelled to clarify the history of the Christmas tree for this poor put-upon woman but has few illusions it got past the outrage.

The woman’s comment, and Jacki’s response, has been in line with a lot of what I’ve been thinking about regarding the holidays and how I want to celebrate the season.  And one conclusion I’ve come to is that a bunch of us are enormous hypocrites and that the “War on Christmas” began long ago.

Says the governor of the state that just executed its 500th inmate.  Says the man whose state is on course to execute up to fifteen people this year.

Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications, held an on-the-record conference call yesterday and the White House posted a transcript.

This is what the Administration thinks it knows:

… Today, at the President’s direction, we have pulled together a revision of our intelligence community assessment that we have provided to Congress and we are now updating the public now.  I’ll just draw your attention to a few elements of that assessment in our response.

First of all, our intelligence community assesses that the Assad regime has used chemical weapons, including the nerve agent sarin, on a small scale against the opposition multiple times in the last year.  Our intelligence community has high confidence given the multiple independent streams of information associated with their reporting.

The intelligence community estimates that 100 to 150 people have died from detected chemical weapons attacks in Syria to date.  I would note that that casualty data is likely incomplete, but that is what we’ve reviewed through our investigation.

This is clearly a small portion of the catastrophic loss of life in Syria that now totals more than 90,000 deaths.  But as we’ve consistently said, the use of chemical weapons violates international norms and crosses red lines that have existed in the international community for decades.

I’d also note that we believe that the Assad regime maintains control of chemical weapons within Syria, and we have not seen any reliable reporting or corroborated reporting indicating that the opposition has acquired or used chemical weapons. …

That fiendish Obama has been working across the aisle again:

A self-described conservative Republican who is a manager in the Internal Revenue Service office that targeted tea party groups told investigators that he, not the White House, set the review in motion, the top Democrat on the House watchdog committee said Sunday.

Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., released a partial transcript of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform interview with the unnamed manager in the IRS’ Cincinnati office. In it, the employee said the extra scrutiny for tea party groups’ tax exempt status was an effort to be consistent in reviewing applications and not driven by politics. http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_n…  

Updated to add additional info:

In an official interview transcript released on Sunday by Democratic Representative Elijah Cummings, the manager said he and an underling set aside “Tea Party” and “patriot” groups that had applied for tax-exempt status because the organizations appeared to pose a new precedent that could affect future IRS filings. http://www.rawstory.com/rs/201…  

On June 7, 1965 The US Supreme Court issued a ruling overturned an 1879 Connecticut law that provided:

any person who uses any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purposes of preventing conception shall be fined not less than forty dollars or imprisoned not less than sixty days.  

snip

any person who assists, abets, counsels, causes, hires or commands another to commit any offense may be prosecuted and punished as if he were the principle offender

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/suprem…

48 years ago ~ in my lifetime (I was about three weeks old when the ruling came down) it was a criminal offense for married couples in Connecticut to practice birth control.  It was a criminal offense to provide married couples with birth control.

I so glad we’ve come a long way.

“Could Costco make more money if the average wage was $2 or $3 lower?” Richard Galanti, Costco’s chief financial officer, mused in an interview with Businessweek. “The answer is yes. But we’re not going to do that.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…  

Imagine that … a company that recognizes that paying decent wages takes priority over corporate profits.  The shock to me, having known that CostCo paid more, was just how much CostCo on average does pay.

Every so often debate rages anew over the appropriateness of team mascots.

After a lot of pressure the University of Mississippi, Ole’ Miss, went from Col Reb:

to Rebel Bear, in honor of William Faulkner, after seven years without any mascot:

Currently Congress has a bill before it to force the Washington Redskins to change their identity

based on the fact that under trademark legislation passed in 1946, a corporate “mark” can’t be disparaging of a people or group.

I searched Photobucket for pictures of “moose” and came across this one:

Surprise!  John McCain didn’t do an about-face and vote “no” on cloture to move Chuck Hagel’s SecDef nomination forward because of any lingering questions regarding Benghazi.  He’s not really looking for more information on Hagel’s financial records like Ted Cruz.  Nope.  He finally told the truth to Fox News and … WAAAHHH!

Today’s big story is about a gun …

That is the President of the United States skeet shooting in August 2012.  The photo was released by the White House because certain people on the Right had questioned whether the President lied when he said during a recent interview that skeet shooting was done “all the time” at Camp David.