Month: March 2019

• Tommy Christopher watches FoxNews so you don’t have to, tuning in just in time to hear a guest shut down the spin on the Mueller Report: “You saying it on Fox doesn’t make it so’.
   
• Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit also watches Fox News and notices a remarkable change in opinion about Mueller.
   
• At the Borowitz Report William Barr has finished Moby-Dick and summarizes for us. There is no evidence of whales.
   
• Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged seems to feel the partisan summary of an unreleased summary of an unreleased report has met her low expectations. Her phrase was “seething with anticipatory disappointment.” Her reasoning is excellent, as usual.
   
• Charles Tiefer is a Professor of Law at the University of Baltimore. At The Moderate Voice, he explains the quasi-legal strategies Attorney General Barr and President Trump are likely to use, keeping the actual Mueller report hidden from view, so they can have a monopoly on telling us what is in it.
   
• Yellow Dog at Blue in the Bluegrass takes a look at the summary’s summary and suggests a new chant.
   
• News Corpse reports on Trump attempts to bar critics from television appearances. Turns out the case is inadvertently made that Trump surrogates should be banned.
   
• Jonathan Bernstein says that, even in victory, Donald Trump is showing weakness.
   
• Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post takes a look at the current cast in political influence and runs down the top Dirty Dozen.
   
• Frances Langum covers the Pennsylvania House where the first Muslim Representative was to be sworn in. One of my Sisters-In-Christ embarrassed the family by pointedly turning the prayer into a Christian tribal event. The Republican House Leader finally guided her off the stage.
   
• So legendary musician Scott Walker of Walker Brothers fame has died. Not the former governor. Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson is outraged to find lame mournful jokes from fans on Twitter about the wrong Scott having died. Forget the Mueller Report and Obamacare and pre-conditions. This is the sort of issue that keeps me up at night.
   
• driftglass can rightfully boast of not liking Glenn Greenwald when disliking Greenwald still wasn’t cool. On the other hand, I can make a similar boast. Just sayin’
   
• In The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, Bruce explores the occasional evangelical claim that Jesus was ultra-masculine. I do recall hearing about a preacher arguing against the existance of a “namby-pamby Jesus.” It is an entertaining piece.
   
• PZ Myers observes reports of yet another public personality characterizing atheism as an undeclared article of faith, this time with the added charge that atheism is inherently unscientific. Naturally, Professor Myers rips the poor devil apart.
   
• Max’s Dad goes to the theatre. The musical Come From Away is set on 9/11, the day of the attacks, as an unrelated flight is diverted to a small airport in Canada. Max’s Dad loves it.
   
• John Scalzi at Whatever got started late one day, so he came up with a terrific video from three and a half decades ago, Belly of the Whale by Burning Sensations.
   

 
From Bill Formby in MadMikesAmerica:

Every great civilization has to fall at some point in time in order to realize how fortunate it once was. Most do not commit suicide quite as quickly as we have, but they all do, eventually. Rome, Greece, the Egyptians, Spain, even England and France. To some degree I guess we are on the precipice of our downfall. I mean, Trump has not totally destroyed this great experiment yet but he is about to do so. He has shown us and the world that laws do not matter if one cons enough of the populace. After all, all a tyrant, dictator, or a king has is the belief of others that he is all powerful and everything he, or she, says is true.

Donald Trump has done a great job of brainwashing at least a third of the population of the American people. Some saw an opportunity to ride his coat tails to wealth. Others have saw an opportunity to be powerful and exert their hate toward others. There is no big secret here. It has been carried out numerous times throughout the history of mankind. Many of our forefathers ran from this but it has been with us all along.

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From Aaron Blake at the Washington Post:

On multiple occasions, both Trump and Pompeo have opted to blame the regime rather than Kim personally. And on Wednesday, Pompeo got testy about it.

When the president you serve speaks glowingly about strongmen, it makes your job as his chief diplomat more difficult. Yes, sometimes you have to deal with such leaders, but you also need to avoid legitimizing them. You may be on the verge of cutting a deal, but does that mean you give the autocrat a pass on humanitarian abuses — even ones directly involving the United States?

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been through this already with Jamal Khashoggi. Now he’s going through it with Otto Warmbier.

And on Wednesday, he got testy over it.

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From The Journal of Improbable Research:

If you comb your hair, you may have found yourself wondering how fast (in metres per second) your elbow moves as you do so. In which case, help is at hand – in the form of a recent paper published in the American Institute of Physics (AIP) Conference Proceedings.

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From North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz:

Recently my 13-year old was feeling nostalgic and asked to see some videos I’d taken of him as a child, so I rigged up the now long-antiquated camcorder through our TV, popped in one of the dozens of unlabeled mini cassettes from a shoebox and pressed play. It was my son’s 5th birthday, and he was first laying his eyes on the “big boy” drum set my siblings had chipped in on for him. He immediately sat down, grabbed the sticks and went to work with unbridled aplomb, and there was an explosion of laughter and cheers from behind the camera as we reveled in him. He was beaming there behind the drum heads, and I was beaming now, laying next to my son and watching this much younger version of himself.

I was lost in replaying the joy of that moment when I heard it: a sound that stopped me in my tracks. It was my father’s voice just off camera. He’s been gone for five years, but suddenly there he was, full-throated and laughing, talking to each of us in real-time. He wasn’t in the past in that scene—he was just alive. I didn’t have to try and recall what he sounded, like because he was speaking for himself. We were not a family living for years with this terrible attrition, we were whole again.

I thought I’d missed my father but I didn’t realize how much until I could hear him again.

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From Infidel753:

This week I finally looked it up. It is true. According to Business Insider, fast-food workers in Denmark do make a minimum of $20 per hour, more than twice what Americans in the same job do. The article points out that the cost of living in Denmark is 30% higher, but the effective difference is still enormous.

Is Denmark an outlier for some reason? I was able to find a few other comparisons.

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From Jon Perr at PERRspectives:

Well, more than two years into Donald Trump’s presidency, his ardent supporters do seem to be standing by him–not because of the pledges Trump made to them, but despite them. As his gymnastic reversal last week on cuts to Medicare and Social Security was just the latest to confirm, that many of Trump’s biggest promises would be broken was pathetically, even comically predictable when he made them.

Here, then, are the top 10.

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From The Onion:

‘Who The Hell Was I Working With Then?’ Asks Russian President

MOSCOW—Saying that he had been “totally blindsided” by the revelations from the recently released findings of the Mueller investigation, a shocked Vladimir Putin reportedly came to the realization Tuesday that he didn’t conspire with Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign after all. “What the hell? I worked so hard on this—if I wasn’t colluding with the Trump campaign, who the hell was I colluding with?”

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Podcast from Julian Sanchez:

Attorney General William Barr has released a brief description of the findings of Robert Mueller in his investigation into Russian meddling in U.S. elections. Many questions remain. Julian Sanchez comments.

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