Month: May 2020

• We’re seeing on our television screens what certainly looks like a double standard. Tommy Christopher reviews the treatment of two reporters, both while on camera within a block of each other, as they separately encounter police.
   
• North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz suggests the secret ingredient in racism’s triumph is complicit white people.
   
• As a few of my brothers and sisters in Christ demand the right to worship in church, to endanger themselves, to imperil their families, to compromise the safety of their neighbors, to put the rest of us at risk, Nan’s Notebook wonders where in scripture it says God needs a church building. I, on the other hand, am reminded that siblings can be an embarrassment to the rest of the family.
   
  For me and most of my fellow believers, this is a very simple article of faith. God makes house calls.
   
• In The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, Bruce reports on a Christian patriot who harasses an elderly woman at a local market for violating her freedom to yell in her face. The account is in the attacker’s words.
   
• A guy in Dallas goes on social media to threaten grocery workers whose job it is to tell him to wear a mask. Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit speculates on the professional future of this fierce fellow. Seems he soon lost his position with a law firm. Something about guns and hollow point bullets.
   
• So the extremely conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court says any stay-at-home order is unconstitutional. tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors watches folks crowd into bars. Now it’s two weeks later and some of those folks are crowding into hospital ICUs.
   
• Iron Knee at Political Irony looks at the deadly secret that Pennsylvania’s Republican legislators kept from everyone in the room and one Democrat’s reaction as he discovers that his and other families have been put into mortal danger. You thought this sort of plot twist only happened in movies about terrorists?

Continue reading “Minneapolis Standards, Racism, COVID Attackers, Christians, Deadly PA Secret”

 

From Hackwhackers:

Kevin Hassett, the allegedly humanoid economic advisor to the sociopath Donald “I Don’t Take Responsibility At All” Trump, had this surprising not surprising thing to say Sunday about reopening the economy:

“Our capital stock hasn’t been destroyed, our human capital stock is ready to get back to work, so there are lots of reasons to believe that we can get going way faster than we have in previous crises.”

This smug melon head is fine with people human beings “human capital stock” heading back into work spaces coronavirus petri dishes to get the economy heading in the right direction for Trump. What’s a few hundred thousand more unnecessary infections and thousands more deaths if you can get the cogs back working and making profits for the Republican donor class?! And it’s actually a lie that “our human capital stock is ready to get back to work”;

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From Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson:

Little protest from Archbishop Jerome Listecki

“I think early on, whether it’s the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, individual bishops in a state, should have been at least consulted,” Listecki said. “Should have been, at least, ‘Hey, this is what’s going on. We need your support in this. We need to do what we’re doing.’ And that was our part in it. So that’s where my difficulty is in it. We want to be good citizens.”

Other than that, at least publicly, silence.

Listecki didn’t have to give such a muted response to Evers’ orders while still protecting parishioners throughout the Milwaukee Archdiocese.

When Evers’ “Safer at Home” order was issued, Listecki should have protested that the 1st Amendment protected the Church from orders to close, and he would have been the “good citizen” the governor failed to be. In the same breath, Listecki could have closed the churches himself until the Archdiocese had a plan to deal with the pandemic – on his terms.

Instead, Catholics in the Milwaukee Archdiocese and elsewhere in Wisconsin have been left to wonder if this is the week they can drive through the church parking lot, maybe see a priest, or finally attend Mass in person.

Listecki was correct in waiving the requirement to attend Mass and even to close the parishes until a plan could be put into place. RightWisconsin has never said that the church doors should be flung open across the state without regard to the effects of the pandemic affecting our state. Unlike some voices on the right, RightWisconsin has been responsible in pointing out the dangers of the Coronavirus, especially the potential for spreading it at church.

However, Listecki closed the churches while conceding the state’s power over the Church itself, setting a horrible precedent. It’s that kind of passive acceptance of the state’s authority that leads government leaders to think they can actually fine churches for re-opening.

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From JoAnn Williams at Biased Unbalanced and Politically Incorrect:

You don’t want to live in a democracy where rules and regs are established for an orderly society.

You refuse to social distance or wear a mask. You don’t want to be deprived of your civil liberties. You demand business as usual.

Hauling a long rifle or an assault weapon to threaten elected officials doesn’t make your case; it just makes you stupid.

 

 

From News Corpse:

On Tuesday’s episode of Trump’s favorite morning lie-fest, Fox and Friends, co host Brian Kilmeade took a valiant stab at flagrant Trump-fluffing during a segment discussing the death toll of COVID-19 (coronavirus). Naturally, Kilmeade and the “Curvy Couch” potatoes were determined to downplay the catastrophic human consequences of Trump’s ineptitude. When addressing the magnitude of the pandemic’s destruction, Kilmeade launched into his propaganda spiel (video below):

“We definitely noticed the seriousness when almost 100,000 Americans die, but what I took from Dr. Siegel’s math was 0.3%, not even 3%, 0.3% — we’ve shut down an entire country for 0.3% of those who get it, lose their lives.”

It’s bad enough when Trump and his media sycophants purposefully lie to spread their disinformation, but these remarks are pitifully stupid. Let’s begin with the fact that 100,000 deaths is actually about 6% of the total population of infected persons in the United States (1,700,000). So Kilmeade is only off by 2,000%.

What’s more, Kilmeade’s argument is that, because the death toll is so low (according to his fractured math), the nation shouldn’t be subject to restrictions intended to impede the spread of the coronavirus. He is even suggesting that there should never have been such restrictions in the first place since the risks were so minimal. We’ll set aside for now that Fox News regards 100,000 deaths as trivial. Apparently none of the deceased were members of their families. But he actually believes that the mortality rate would be the same even if there were no restrictions at all from the start.

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From Michael John Scott at MadMikesAmerica:

Donald Trump just can’t keep his finger off the Twitter Trigger. He uses the media giant to insult people, make spurious and inane observations about global policy, and to actually affect national policy by pulling that Twitter Trigger.

Much of what he writes would lead to the average American being banned, but not Donald Trump. He is Twitter gold. For the first time, however, the Twitterators actually did something about the Idiot-in-Chief’s more bizarre claims. Did they ban him? No. Did they chastise him?

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From The Onion:

“Every single loss of human life that can be directly attributed to my actions is one too many,” said Trump, telling reporters that each case of a citizen succumbing to Covid-19 was a singularly devastating event with untold impact on his likeability numbers.

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From Frances Langum:

So Steve Doocy tries to make a “fair and balanced” case for the two candidates going into November 2020. Basically to fill the segment with some meaningless election/Covid talk.

He points out that many voters vote based on how they feel on Election Day, and we are months out from that.

See if you can spot the difference on how he discusses the two candidates. Balanced? Ya think?

DOOCY ON TRUMP: Of course the Trump team is banking on some sort of [economic] bounce back. A comeback. And so that becomes the argument. “Look, we were hit by this coronavirus, which we have never seen in our lifetimes, President Trump…did what he did…and helped us dig out. Do you trust him enough to help guide us to a complete recovery, whatever that’s going to look like, or…

DOOCY ON BIDEN: …you got the Biden team, saying, look, this guy did not handle the pandemic right, he mishandled the economy, Joe Biden, given what he and Barack Obama did in the recession of 2009, is better suited going forward.

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From libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara:

Steve Politi’s Cold Collectivist Attack on Two NJ Gym Businessmen Points to Broader Danger to Our Liberty

Driving is risky, too. We don’t ban driving. We establish traffic laws to minimize the risks, ticket or remove drivers who violate those rules of the road, and then leave people free to go about their travel as long as they follow the rules, each according to his own rational assessment of the risks within the context of all of his other values.

Government’s role in a pandemic is essentially no different. We all know the “social distancing” rules. Is it proper for the government to set voluntary standards in a pandemic? I believe yes. And the government should make available all relevant knowledge as it becomes known. Then it is up to people to be free to make their own choices. Yes, the government can and should hold people who are sick with COVID-19, and know it, accountable. People who are sick should be placed on mandatory quarantine. People should be required to get tested when possible. The proper purpose of government is to secure our individual rights. Just as it is a violation of rights to punch someone in the nose, so it is a violation to knowingly and deliberately infect another with a dangerous infectious disease. Such people should be prosecuted for assault.

But individual rights are not Politi’s concern, so he doesn’t even factor in individual rights. In reply to a Facebook comment by Frank Trumbetti, the other co-owner of Atilis Gym, “We truly believe that if we don’t do this, in the end, we will have zero rights and no say in what happens,” Politi lectured “He might want to read up on how a democracy worksnext time he’s on the treadmill.” [my emphasis]

Politi does seem to know “how a democracy works.” But he might want to read up on how the American concept of government works. The primacy of liberty rights, not voting, is the foundation of Americanism. We do not live in a majority rule–i.e., mob rule–nation. Democracy holds that there are no inalienable individual rights; that a political official can dictate anything, as long as he is elected. A constitutionally limited republic, the American concept, holds that individual rights supersede, and are protected from, any electoral outcome. Democracy is a manifestation of totalitarianism. Politi provides concrete proof of this truth. He says Murphy’s emergency actions are “how a democracy works.” He’s absolutely right: authoritarianism is precisely “how a democracy works.” But that is not how America’s government is supposed to work.

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