DeSantis Doused, Putin Pummeled, Iran Rumble, Trump Specially Mastered

Too Cute for Words:

  • Martha’s Vineyard seemed like a good place to demonstrate the hypocrisy of the limousine liberal crowd. The right wing crowd could not imagine those leftist scolds being anything but horrified when actually confronted by all these Latin folk claiming to be refugees.
     
    And conservatives did scramble and shuffle to pretend that it didn’t backfire.


    Max’s Dad pulleth no punches, explaining with the sort of clarity that comes with laser focused fury, what went wrong for DeSantis in Martha’s Vineyeard and what the debacle revealed about cynicism and compassion.
     

  • Dave Columbo does Tucker doing Martha’s Vineyard:
    @davecolumbo Do you like the new haircut? #tuckerimpression #politics #political #politicaltiktok #politicalsatire #democrat #democrats #democratsoftiktok #fy #fyp ♬ Manke, honobo, everyday, funny, loop – arachang

  • Nojo has a suggestion.
    Since we’re now kidnapping human beings for sport, let’s just go for it…:
    More pranks to own the libs!
     
  • Iron Knee at Political Irony has suggested Ron DeSantis is like a Trump clone, but with intelligence. After the migrant stunt backfires and a previous voter fraud stunt backfires, maybe the intelligence factor had been exaggerated.
     
  • DeSantis explains he could not have been tricking or exploiting Venezuelan refugees because, he explains, he got them to sign a consent form.
     
    Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez explains how an explanation becomes evidence of guilt.

  • tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors reports as Jared Kushner, loyal Trump family member, is disturbed at the way DeSantis is using migrants as political pawns, ignoring that they are human beings.
     
    Jared speaks without intended irony, while falling into a kids-in-cages ironic ocean.
     
  • News Corpse brings us the latest Trump complaint about the search warrant that the FBI executed to find a ton of classified documents he had lied about. It seems they wore shoes during the search.
    Ruthless!
     
  • The Special Master mr Trump demanded to screen documents tells Trump attorneys they must explain which documents were declassified and how they were declassified so he can determine classification. In Hackwhackers lawyers respond with a sort of convoluted version of the fifth.
     
    Hackwhackers sees the dilemma. If they explain, then they admit he stole any documents their explanation doesn’t cover.
     
    And there is even more complication for them, poor saps.
     
  • Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged takes on one of the stranger defenses by Trump and company. The Mar-a-Lago stash of classified documents actually contained absolute proof that all accusations against Trump were false, just part of a global plot – or something.
     
  • The Hannity interview and mr Trump’s paranormal mental declassification techniques have inspired internet humor, and a serious side:


    Tommy Christopher has the text as Maggie Haberman points out the key admission. Trump eviscerated most of the defenses attempted by his own attorneys.
     
    The right to remain silent apparently has its limits in the Trump mind.

  • Ant Farmer’s Almanac surveys the documents taken from Mar-a-Lago and notices one previously unreported item.

  • Criminal liability for stealing top US classified documents, risking nuclear secrets, and putting human information sources into deadly danger have led the headlines, but are not the total of Trump legal issues.
     
    Frances Langum brings up the quarter billion dollar New York civil suit for fraud, four primary excuses Trump and company are fronting, and an interview with investigative journalist David Cay Johnston pretty much exploding each excuse.
     
  • In the Borowitz Report the nation is stunned to learn Trump may have committed fraud.
     
    Americans expressed shock and incredulity that one of America’s most successful and respected businessmen might have violated his own high ethical standards.
     
  • driftglass has a point to make! Today’s anti-Trump conservatives are only now dimly recognizing, and taking credit for, the drumbeat driftglass has been banging like…forever.
     
    I confess I’m a little uncomfortable with the feeling that this remains his primary message. Temporary allies, belated allies, unreliable allies, are allies still, especially when it comes to an Armageddon level battle to salvage democracy.
     
    Winston Churchill spoke about an impending alliance with the Soviet Russian dictatorship during the dark hours of World War II:
    If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.
     
  • Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson sees another instance of his party’s decline:

  • My long time conservative friend Darrell Michaels celebrates Constitution day with an advertising email he found in his inbox. It comes from a right wing educational group. So my uncritical friend finds it …well… educational.
     
    Oh Darrell.
     
  • The Propaganda Professor has the definition and knows the symptoms. He counts the ways you can know you might be in a cult.
     
  • M. Bouffant at Web of Evil has figured out an important difference between the elites of our two major political parties. It is a difference absent from other western countries.
     
  • Dave Dubya provides a brief glossary to Frank Luntz type definitions as used by today’s authoritarian right.
     
  • PZ Myers says you can’t really compare modern Trumpism with the Nazi Holocaust, but there is an unavoidable legitimate comparison.
     
  • Book burnings still happen occasionally today, sometimes even in this country. They became infamous during the Nazi ascendancy in Germany.
    At The Moderate Voice retired U.S. Air Force officer Dorian de Wind reviews published accounts of one courageous preservation of banned books. Amazingly it was accomplished by courageous Jewish children in a Nazi death camp.
     
    It is a source of continuing astonishment that one sometime candidate for book banning by today’s conservatives is The Diary of Anne Frank.
     
  • CalicoJack in The Psy of Life looks at the advertising approach of the anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project. The campaign is designed to convince ordinary Trump supporters they are being suckered by a grifter. Jack explains why the strategy will never work, but that an alternative approach might.
     
  • North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz asks readers what each of us would do to save America.
     
    We are reminded of past sacrifices. Assassination, lynching, bullets, clubbings, and more.
     
    Pastor Pavlovitz has a simpler request. An online link helps each of us register to vote. Then take a trip to your polling place to cast a ballot.
     
  • The expectation (hope?) of some analysts was that the abortion decision from SCOTUS would be intense, but fade a bit before the coming election.
     
    Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger brings the latest polling, compares it with last month, and finds that, sure enough, the opposite seems to be happening.
     
  • YellowDog Granny has a suggestion for men who want an abortion ban but also want sex. It involves an anatomical improbability: one of many wonderful suggestions.
     
  • The Washington Post says Matt Gaetz might not be prosecuted after all, mostly because of credibility issues with two main witnesses.
     
    The Palmer Report picks apart the Post report.
     
    Among the causes of skepticism:

    • The description of a anonymous sources seems to indicate that they are not at the center of the investigation.
    • The credibility-lack of one witness is contradicted by his continued role.
    • The other witness with credibility issues appears to be an accidental composite confusing two witnesses, one of which was an underage victim.

     
    So maybe wait until something is more solidly reported?

  • The Respect for Marriage Act will recognize the validity of same-sex and interracial marriages. If the Senate vote is postponed until after the November elections, enough Republicans promise their support to get it done. Scottie is somewhat more than skeptical. He explains why postponement is foolish to the point of betrayal.
     
  • Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit takes a look at how Ukrainian dominoes are falling against Putin’s aggression, as one thing leads to another.
     
    A former Ambassador to Russia agrees:

  • In Letters from an American, historian Heather Cox Richardson provides quick insights to several important stories. The first is that failures in Ukraine is forcing Putin to impose hardships on Russian people. So many Russian soldiers have quit, been disabled, or killed that one million, that’s 1,000,000, young men are being hunted down for military draft.
     
    Stories are circulating of men given only an hour to appear at recruitment centers, students being given draft notices while they were sitting in class, and workers taken off the job.
     
    Seems to be a consensus:


    As of a couple days ago reports are Putin is fed up with continued military failures, so he is cutting the military hierarchy out of the loop and taking direct control of the Ukraine disaster.
     
    Combining massive and growing protests with former allies spending their last moments of life learning how to fly, fear and loathing would almost have to be a growing fact of life between Putin and …well… pretty much everyone around him.
     
    So it’s getting easier for an active imagination, which is to say mine, picturing Putin fastidiously avoiding large windows in the upper floors of tall buildings.

  • Green Eagle opens history books for informative parallels to Ukraine:
    This failure is going to plague Russia for many years to come; however there is, I think, likely to be some massive fallout from Putin’s collapsed adventure that practically nobody has been talking about.
     
    The abiding, unreported, likely effect of demonstrated weakness is long term and far reaching.
     
  • At The Onion the FBI suspects foul play as the U.N. mysteriously disappears after criticizing Russia.
     
  • Iran has apparently been an intensifying pressure cooker for a while. Infidel753 has the evidence. With the death of a young woman, apparently beaten after being arrested by morality police, protests are escalating.
     
    Key passage:
    This is not a medieval country being ruled by a regime natural to it. It’s a fairly modern society in which the religious-reactionary minority (a class that exists in many countries, including ours) are organized and empowered and rule over everyone else by brute force.
     
  • Bruce Gerencser got me to thinking this week. A Baptist pastor wrote to explain that he had listened to a podcast featuring Bruce. The pastor was impressed by the wisdom right up until he discovered Bruce was an atheist.
     
    One small part of how Bruce answered reminded me of a long, long ago experience.
     
    Bruce writes:
     
    What possibly could an Evangelical-preacher-turned-atheist say about God/Jesus/the Bible/Christianity that is wise or valuable, right? Instead of focusing on the message, people such as Langley focus on the messenger. Instead of wrestling with the question: is what Bruce says true? all they see is my atheism (or liberalism, socialism, humanism, pacifism). Because I am not part of their in-group, my words have little to no value.
     
    My own experience:
    It may have been as long as 50 years ago. Time takes its toll. I was riding a St. Louis bus. A stranger, an old man, started up a conversation. He was estranged from his family, his loved ones.
     
    He wanted to choose a different path and, perhaps, make up for some of his past. But he had grown old, and there simply was not enough time left for him.
     
    I didn’t know what to tell him. So I vacantly spoke the only phrase that came to my thoughtless mind.
     
    It’s never too late. And I was instantly embarrassed at my flip response.
     
    He regarded me thoughtfully for a few moments as if suddenly glimpsing a strange sort of insect.
     
    The bus was coming to a stop. He stood, reached out, and shook my hand.
     
    This is my stop. I want you to know you’re right. You may have changed my life. I’ll give it a try.
     
    What it was has been a mystery to me. When that memory comes back to me, it brings me to a sort of Paul Simon approach to faith, at least as I choose to take it:
    The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls…
     
    Which is to say that even my immature responses over the years might have provided inadvertent hope.
     
    Wisdom is wherever you can find it.
     
    I am a committed Christian.
    Bruce is an atheist who is, for me, a continuing source of wisdom.
    I hope he would not be offended that I regard him as a frequent prophet.
     
  • Nan’s Notebook asks readers to speculate about the who and what
    of the real Jesus.
     
    Can we at least reject what seems a too common view?

  • In Happiness Between Tails da-AL draws an analogy with food. Readers generally see non-fiction as a kind of civic duty nutrition and fiction as a sort of fun time dessert.
     
    da-AL begs to differ, and has an insightful example: an exquisitely told love story.
     
  • Sarah Cooper has an idea for a murder plot so to speak. And I wonder if this is somehow inspired by a Trump interview.

  • John Scalzi at Whatever is asked about cursive writing and is triggered into a rant.
     
    For myself, I stopped cursiving (Is too a word!) when a manager remarked: Wow! You write like your hand is mashed!
     
    I do have to admire an author writing about cursive who hasn’t used it in literally decades.
    But, then, I’m elderly and have an affection for obscure unintentional humor.
     
  • Imani Gandy and Jessica Mason Pieklo of Rewire News Group will begin videocasting in a few days. Worth a 96 second promo:
  • Clickbait lifehacks are always available with Reductress: like how to improve your memory without having to remember your childhood.
     
  • @whiskeywhistle98 has an idea of what she wants to be:
    @whiskeywhistle98 It’s only fair that I get to be a witch to all the kids besides my own…#witch #tiktokmom #fyp #foryourpage #fall #haunted #crazy ♬ original sound – Leah Rudick

  • SilverAppleQueen has cats who know how to share a spot of sunlight.
     
A few tweets I thought worthy:

This sort of thing happens too damn often

And I’m allowed a few of my own:

– Podcasts –
 

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