Polls, Greenland, Wackiness, Orders, Economy, Indulgent Despair, Souls

• Negotiations often involve counter-proposals. Andy Borowitz explains Denmark’s offer to buy the United States.
   
• Frances Langum watches the chaos. Just when we thought forcing Denmark to sell Greenland was the dumbest Trump idea ever, a panel on CNBC explodes as my President “hereby orders” American corporations to stop doing business with China.
   
• Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post seems a little irritated at Mr. Trump for attempting to take credit for the continuing Obama economic recovery after the Bush bust.
   
• Ant Farmer’s Almanac posts the shortest, briefest, most concise piece ever, about my President’s mental condition.
   
• At The Moderate Voice, guest Deborah Long looks at my President and sees a Hermann Hesse character startlingly come to life.
   
• David Remnick suggests that, with each new Trump outrage, we still cannot afford to indulge in despair. It is a suggestion I made right after the 2016 election. If you can use a pep-talk, it can’t hurt.

• This is freedom, right? M. Bouffant at Web of Evil comments on a Pittsburgh Shell petrochemical plant’s special deal for union workers: go to a Trump rally, and behave yourselves while there, or stay home and lose a day’s pay. It’s every worker’s choice. What could be more fair?
   
• Jonathan Bernstein reports my President is very angry as Fox News polling tells him people just don’t like him.
   
• News Corpse takes a look at the efforts of Fox News to spin away the rapidly declining advertising support for a couple of their most extreme program hosts.
   
• Green Eagle notes a contrast in crowd size as Senator Elizabeth Warren holds a town hall (Holy MOLEY) and racist Congressman Steve King holds a town hall (eeg). Two photos give hope about the political divide.
   
• After Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker lost his re-election bid, a group composed mostly of his allies and former members of his administration got together to hire him into a new conservative reform organization. Well, a job is a job, right?
   
  Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson reports on a report from that very same Institute for Reforming Government. It seems the latest Republican tax cuts for the fabulously wealthy surely would have generated all the economic growth conservatives promised if only it had been done right and, importantly, had been done at a state level. So, as a tax failure, it’s actually a guide to success for faithful state legislatures of the future. Well, yeah, that’ll work for sure.
   
• From our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit, another very fine person ethnic-cleanses a trailer park, ordering out an interracial family for failing to tell him they were interracial. The husband is a combat veteran who defended – you know – the freedom of you and me and trailer park owners to be hopeless jerks.
   
• In the same tradition, in Scotties Toy Box, a city council candidate in Michigan promises to keep her community as white as possible. She also is against interracial marriage. If she fails to win, maybe she can help out some trailer park somewhere.
   
• Andrew Sullivan jeers at a woman for wanting, he thinks, to protect her son from partaking in conservative humor. Vixen Strangely, at Strangely Blogged, gently suggests that it isn’t about conservatism: a mother more simply wants to protect her son from becoming a monster.
   
• As a disgraced predator wriggles his way back into journalism, driftglass explains the real reason he does not care for Mark Halperin.
   
• Iron Knee at Political Irony notes the skepticism most folks have about the suicide of Jeffrey Epstein. He expresses well reasoned skepticism about the skepticism.
   
• North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz stands accused of having become too political, too angry, and too partisan. In fact, he has spent most of his religious life studiously avoiding politics. But now he finds much of Christianity becoming a shining shelter from morality where members of the flock can comfortably lose their souls.
   
• In The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, Bruce examines explanations we Christians tell each other and ourselves about suffering in our lives.

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