K-K-Kellyanne, Impeach, Grief, Trump v. McGhan, Fighting Queen
The Borowitz Report has the story: Kellyanne Conway will soon be promoted. She will leave her post working for President Trump to begin a more prestigious job with Mr. Trump’s employer at the Kremlin. Okay, okay, it’s satire.
Senator and Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren favors impeachment. Congressional Representative and Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi does not. Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post considers the arguments and sides with Warren. Jack, and Senator Warren, are wrong, of course. But you can’t say he doesn’t respectfully consider an opposing view from … well … me.
North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz very much wants and needs to mourn the personal tragedies that afflict virtually everyone. As would most people my age, I empathize from personal experience with his pain at the death of a parent. He wants those for whom he cares to have the freedom to mourn normal, intense, losses that are part of human experience. But Reverend Pavlovitz finds himself, and those he counsels, devoting more and more of their grief to harm that is publicly directed at innocents, to damage inflicted on the country they love, by a renegade President. He wants room and time for more normal, private grieving.
News Corpse looks into my President’s strange reasons for accusing his own former White House Council Don McGhan of criminal perjury.
In Scotties Toy Box, Scottie is inspired by my President’s trip to the United Kingdom to bring us a fun fact about the Queen of England, Donald Trump, the rest of the Trump family, and the armed forces.
Poor Howard Schultz! It just doesn’t look like a good season for third party Presidential campaigns. Jonathan Bernstein thinks he knows why independent candidates will have such a hard time this year.
Libertarian Julian Sanchez of Cato Institute is on the radio again with unease about antitrust investigations into hi-tech giants. One small part of Julian’s concern seems misguided to me. He flirts with the idea that there is enough competition among advertising platforms to make radical moves unnecessary. As if the talk about breaking up technological mega-giants is about protecting poor beleaguered advertisers from high rates per click or something. Most of the discussion is on a higher plane.
Abe Lincoln famously asked how many legs a horse would have if you called his tail a leg.
“Selfism” is commonly defined as concentration on one’s own interests, which is also the common definition of “selfishness.” Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara objects to objections to objectivism, particularly objections to Ayn Rand’s embrace of what she called the virtues of selfishness. Michael says critics are confused. We just don’t understand the true meaning of “rational selfishness,” which, he explains, rejects “exploiting or sacrificing others to self” in favor of “non-sacrificial, win-win relationships based on trade.” I suppose you can dominate any debate if you are allowed to redefine words to mean whatever you choose, whatever will produce an imaginary win.
Lincoln’s answer, by the way, was four. If you call a tail a leg, it is still just a tail.
Jon Perr at PERRspectives listens as “today’s Republicans routinely compare slavery to Obamacare, gun control, the national debt, the social safety net, and just about any other political development they hate” and suggests that trivializing the horrific practice of owning human beings goes beyond tasteless rhetoric.
It does bring back memories of young single life. I would, of course, do all the dusting, vacuuming, washing dishes, throwing out trash, and so on. But it seemed like a terrible waste of time. I’d just have to do it all over again, six months later.
Creationist Ken Ham seizes on a new discovery of fossil fish as proof of Noah and the flood. PZ Myers knows something of scripture, and scolds Ken for not knowing his Bible.
The Journal of Improbable Research discovers a study on state-of -the-art visual analysis software, which seems still to be a work in progress. One example cited is an image of an elephant identified in a couple of passes as a horse and a cow. There really ought to be a political point here. Or at least some creative snark. But I’m old and I need a nap.
