Mueller Theatre, Trump Out-Foxed, Immigrants, Trump Jesus, Bernie

• Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged offers a realistic lament, that folks like … well … like me, I suppose, were too optimistic about Mueller’s putting a face and a voice to the Mueller Report. The media world has changed with technology. Everyone seems to be a theatre critic, losing the overarching view, focusing on the superficial.
   
• Okay, we do not consider Fox News as a dispassionate provider of factual truth. Scotties Toy Box presents a category by category contrast of coverage between two First ladies that is startling even to someone expecting it (which is to say me).
   
• News Corpse reports as my President gets angry, again, at Fox News because of “Fox Polls, which have always been terrible to me.” Perhaps this is not a marriage made in heaven after all? Nope. We dare not hope for so much.
   
• Iron Knee at Political Irony points out how hating immigrants is economically self-destructive, AND that this administration wants to end, not just illegal immigration, but all immigration. Actually, there is one large group of immigrants that my President is on record as wanting to encourage, having them skip to the head of any line, going past any legal requirements. Care to guess who?

• PZ Myers wonders why variants of the same story keep appearing. Yet another white American thinks you’re only allowed to speak English. This time the person being verbally attacked is a member of the US Air Force, guilty of using Spanish while speaking privately to someone by phone. Seems she had been given leave from her duties of defending the freedom of her critic.
   
• Andy Borowitz reports as President Trump orders Mike Pence to find the passage in the Bible where Jesus tells people to get the hell out.
   
• Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post walks through a bit of history to document how the Republican party started as the conscience of the country then, over time, lost its moral compass.
   
• It was kind of creative, certainly daring. An unfair comment by a Bernie critic leads a new Bernie ad: “Bernie Sanders makes my skin crawl.” Tommy Christopher offers an insightful critique, finding and numbering five ways the ad falls flat. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
   
• One characteristic that seems to afflict extremists is the inability to distinguish anyone who disagrees from those at the opposite insane endpoint of the political, or religious, or any spectrum. Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara believes Bernie Sanders will bring in a socialist utopia which is, as anyone should recognize, Chairman Mao’s totalitarian state.
   
  There are no gradations in Mr. LaFerrara’s binary world, no rheostats. The light switch is on or off, good or evil, free or slave. Mr. Sanders is not Ayn Rand. He must be Mao Tse-Tung. Can you feel the Bern?
   
• nojo learns from someone my age that the era of tortuous, but continuous, progress that began in the 1960’s, the slow elimination of once dominant racism, has been a mere aberration. And that America is now returning to its terrible norm. Yikes.
   
• Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson is usually thoughtful and provocative. Okay, not always. Seems Madison had an electrical blowout and lots of folks went without power for quite a while. James has some fun congratulating the city on achieving momentary independence from fossil fuels. Because every conservative knows deep inside that any damn liberal who favors clean, non-fossil fueled, power is really after a breakdown in all power of any kind.
   
  And I had clean forgotten that James is hilarious.
   
• Yellow Dog at Blue in the Bluegrass draws an economic lesson from working class hardship at a checkout line in Kentucky.
   
• Green Eagle quotes a host of headlines from conservative sites and slaps each author around until there appear pools of blood. Not exactly balanced, but not far from fair. My unbalanced opinion.
   
• In The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, Bruce buys the idea that most evangelism is not really about seeking converts.
   
• The Journal of Improbable Research discovers a study on charismatic leadership the results of which suggest that too much may reduce leadership effectiveness.
   

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