Toon: Who says CONgress is afraid to act?

The Most Unhinged Responses to Obama’s Immigration Speech

On Thursday night, President Barack Obama announced the executive actions he was taking to potentially shield millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation. The president’s critics—including those in the Republican leadership who blocked the House of Representatives from voting on immigration reform—promptly took to their computers and furiously banged away at their keyboards.

There’s a broad legal consensus that Obama’s new policy directives are likely constitutional, particularly because they’re centered on prioritization and inaction. The crux of the new initiatives: the administration will focus the limited resources it has to fight undocumented immigration on efforts to deport those who pose a security risk or commit crimes, and downplay efforts to deport undocumented parents of children who were born or grew up here.

As is often the case in this great land of partisan party politics, a narrative quickly coalesced. Obama was instantly branded an “emperor” and a “king.” Let’s take a look.

Pat Buchanan wrote that things would never be the same: “Our rogue president has crossed an historic line, and so has the republic.”

“We have just taken a monumental step away from republicanism toward Caesarism,” Buchanan continued. “For this is rule by diktat, the rejection of which sparked the American Revolution.”

“Apparently, America now has its first emperor,” Sen. Jeff Sessions wrote in USA Today. “And he has issued an imperial order to dissolve America's borders.”

more

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2014/11/responses-obamas-immigration-speech

Half of Americans Think Climate Change Is a Sign of the Apocalypse

Snowmageddon, snowpocalypse, snowzilla, just snow. Superstorm Sandy, receding shorelines, and more. Hurricanes Isaac, Ivan, and Irene, with cousins Rammasun, Bopha, and Haiyan.

The parade of geological changes and extreme weather events around the world since 2011 has been stunning. Perhaps that's part of why, as the Public Religion Research Institute reported on Friday, "The number of Americans who believe
that natural disasters are evidence of the apocalypse has increased somewhat over the past couple years."

As of 2014, it's estimated that nearly half of Americans—49 percent—say natural disasters are a sign of "the end times," as described in the Bible. That's up from an estimated 44 percent in 2011.

This belief is more prevalent in some religious communities than others. White evangelical Protestants, for example, are more likely than any other group to believe that natural disasters are a sign of the end times, and they're least likely to assign some of the blame to climate change (participants were allowed to select both options if they wanted). Black Protestants were close behind white evangelicals in terms of apprehending the apocalypse, but they were also the group most likely to believe in climate change, too. Predictably, the religiously unaffiliated were the least likely to believe superstorms are apocalyptic—but even so, a third of that group said they see signs of the end times in the weather.



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http://m.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/11/half-of-americans-think-climate-change-is-a-sign-of-the-apocalypse/383029/

I guess that makes Koch Bro's and other polluters agents of Satan. I can go with that.

Mike Luckovich Toon- Executive Edict

Friday Toon Roundup 3: The Rest

War




Ferguson




Shopping



Environment

Friday Toon Roundup 2: Cosby and Manson

Cosby








Manson

Friday Toon Roundup 1: Immigration

Two Comcast customers nearly go insane fighting thousands in bogus fees

Although Comcast has been pledging for a while now to fix its legendarily awful customer service, little seems to have changed so far because nightmare stories of dealing with the company keep popping up on a regular basis. Two more such lurid tales have come to our attention this week that involve Comcast customers who have been doggedly trying to fight bogus fees that together total more than $3,000.

The first story comes to us via Consumerist and it involves a Comcast customer in Tennessee who moved to a new address that was just an hour away from his old place and who was told by Comcast that it would be able to deliver service to the new address. When it turned out that Comcast wasn’t actually able to service the new address, however, the company hit the man with $2,789 in fees for supposedly breaking his service agreement despite the fact that he didn’t actually cancel his service.

“I was just blown away,” the told Nashville’s WSMV-TV. “That’s way too much money for somebody like me to be able to pay.”

The good news is that once the man got his local news station involved, Comcast agreed to waive the fees because there were extenuating circumstances, a.k.a., its representatives told the customer that they could deliver him service when in reality they couldn’t.

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http://bgr.com/2014/11/20/why-is-comcast-so-bad-27/

Toon: Acting like King

Jason Collins announces NBA retirement in his own words

By Jason Collins
It has been 18 exhilarating months since I came out in Sports Illustrated as the first openly gay man in one of the four major professional team sports. And it has been nine months since I signed with the Nets and became the first openly gay male athlete to appear in a game in one of those leagues. It feels wonderful to have been part of these milestones for sports and for gay rights, and to have been embraced by the public, the coaches, the players, the league and history.

On Wednesday at the Barclays Center, I plan to announce my retirement as an NBA player. The day will be especially meaningful for me because the Nets will be playing the Bucks, who are coached by Jason Kidd, my former teammate and my coach in Brooklyn. It was Jason who cheered my decision to come out by posting on Twitter: “Jason’s sexuality doesn’t change the fact that he is a great friend and was a great teammate.”

Considering all the speculation about problems I might face within the locker room, Jason’s support was significant. It had been argued that no team would want to take on a player who was likely to attract a media circus from the outset and whose sexuality would be a distraction. I’m happy to have helped put those canards to rest. The much-ballyhooed media blitz to cover me unscrambled so quickly that a flack jokingly nicknamed me Mr. Irrelevant.

Among the memories I will cherish most are the warm applause I received in Los Angeles when I took the court in my Nets debut, and the standing ovation I got at my first home game in Brooklyn. It shows how far we’ve come. The most poignant moment came at my third game, in Denver, where I met the family of Matthew Shepard, a gay college student beaten to death in a 1998 hate crime on the outskirts of Laramie, Wyo. For the past two years I have worn number 98 on my jersey to honor his memory. I was humbled to learn that number 98 jerseys became the top seller at NBAStore.com. Proceeds from sales, and from auctioned jerseys I wore in games, were donated to two gay-rights charities.

more

http://www.si.com/nba/2014/11/19/jason-collins-retirement-nba