FairAndUNbalanced.com

• Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post presents his annual bad list, this time named Santa’s Donald of the Year.
   
• At Vagabond Scholar, Batacchio presents his annual Jon Swift Roundup list of best blog posts from all over the net, as chosen by bloggers. By some oversight, FairAndUNbalanced was missed, but nobody is perfect. It’s a great gathering of great thought expressed in great writing.
   
• North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz writes with powerful empathy about enduring the Christmas absence of a lost loved one. He suggests one ray in the terrible darkness.
   
• Max’s Dad expresses his own wonderfully caustic holiday cheer and acerbic best wishes for the coming year.
   
• The Propaganda Professor brings combat news from the holiday front as the War on Christmas is briefly interrupted by a ruthless attack on Thanksgiving.
   
• tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors finds a safe sanctuary in the midst of the annual fundamentalist War to Enforce Holidays.
   
• Scotties Toy Box includes in his collection of cartoons and memes a brief, accurate, tick-tock of the Ukraine-related impeachable offense.
   
• Lots of impeachment talk about who is playing chess and who is playing checkers. Frances Langum looks over strategy and decides my president is not playing chess, and is not playing checkers.
   
• It took some doing. Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit reports as a Democratic governor manages to give Donald Trump competition for this year’s low in pettiness. Has to do with weddings.
   
• Green Eagle finds multiple stories repeated on multiple right-wing sites about multiple indictments of multiple leftward lawbreakers who funneled multiple foreign contributions to multiple top Democrats. Problem is the multiplied story does not exist outside the rightwing bubble. Green Eagle traces the fiction to one creative site. Such is the current state of contemporary conservatism.
   
• Biden somewhat gently forced Trump ex-presser Sarah Huckabee Sanders to apologize after she ridiculed his childhood struggle against stuttering. Tommy Christopher has the video of an earlier, little known encounter as Biden counsels a youngster facing the same struggle.
   
• John Scalzi at Whatever watches and really likes The Rise of Skywalker promising no spoilers in his review.
   

 

From Infidel753:

The church of Trump

Our country’s conservative Christians have not only sold their souls, but sold them extraordinarily cheaply. Trump is to theocracy as Gilderoy Lockhart was to sorcery. Yes, he’s packed the courts with anti-abortion wingnuts and done what he can to undermine gay equality and the separation of church and state, but he’s never made much pretense of being a Christian and has never lived his life in conformity with the Christian taboo system, while his general blundering and incompetence limit his effectiveness as an autocrat. Granted, fundies have a long history of excuse-making and closing ranks around money-grubbing, sexually-abusive church leaders, but their hypocrisy is no less blatant just because it’s an old habit. Making idiotic analogies with Cyrus the Great doesn’t help. It’s no wonder young people are running away from religion faster than ever.

But our country’s conservative Christians have chosen their side, and have made it clear that dissent within their ranks will be ruthlessly denounced. They are with Trump all the way.

They are the church of migrant family separation and “very fine people”.

They are the church of systematic scapegoating of Latinos and Muslims.

They are the church of “pussy grabbing”, mockery of the disabled, cruelty to the families of the honorable dead, and potty-mouthed toddler-level name-calling.

They are the church of Leviticus 20:13 which has utterly forgotten Leviticus 19:33-34.

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From Dorian de Wind, Associate Editor, The Moderate Voice:

Part of Trump “having a good time” at a Michigan rally — while Congress was impeaching him –- was an attack he launched on the widow of David Dingell Jr., the longest-ever serving member of Congress in our Republic’s history. That is, in addition to desecrating the memory of Dingell himself, a World War II veteran now resting at Arlington National Cemetery.

A vicious attack to which Mrs. Dingell, now a Michigan U.S. Representative, dignifiedly responded:

My husband earned all his accolades after a lifetime of service. I’m preparing for the first holiday season without the man I love. You brought me down in a way you can never imagine and your hurtful words just made my healing much harder.

(A tone-deaf, inured White House reflexively defended Trump’s suggestion that Dingell may be in hell as just a Trump counter-punch.)

So, let’s review the recent history of these “badass women” who would dare to help impeach a president.

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From News Corpse:

The impeachment controversy has sparked as epic battle between Pelosi and the Senate’s GOP majority leader, Mitch McConnell, who has already announced that he has no intention of conducting a fair hearing and will be “taking his cues” from White House lawyers. In the meantime, new evidence has already emerged that appears to be profoundly damaging to Trump:

That’s right. Less than two hours after Trump got off the phone with President Zelensky of Ukraine, he ordered the Defense Department to withhold military aid to a country that was being invaded at the time by Russia. The order included a directive to keep it quiet due to it’s “sensitive nature.”

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From PZ Myers:

Welcome to Trump’s America, where bigots can run over kids on the sidewalk.

The girl was walking to Indian Hills Junior High when a vehicle drove onto the sidewalk, ran over her and left the scene, the release said. Officials say the girl was able to return to school one week after the incident, according to CNN affiliate WOI-TV.

During her interview with detectives, Poole Franklin, a Des Moines resident, said she was the driver and intentionally struck the girl because she “was a Mexican,” police said. Poole Franklin then “made a series of derogatory statements about Latinos,” police said.

I’m glad the girl is physically OK now, but you have to wonder how safe she’s going to feel about using public sidewalks from now on.

There’s still one thorny question to resolve…

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From libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara:

Can non-Christians celebrate Christmas? Many do, and why not? I’m an atheist and I have no problem celebrating Christmas, even though it has no religious significance for me.

What’s great about Christmas is that it is both a religious holiday, being based upon the birth of the Christian icon Jesus, and a secular holiday as well. That makes it a holiday for everyone.

How can I say that? I am indebted to philosopher Ayn Rand for resolving that seemingly contradictory proposition.

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From Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged:

I’m posting a screencap (click to enbiggen) because she’s bound to delete it after a long-enough period of roasting, but it really does appear that Sarah Huckabee Sanders tweeted an impression of a stutter during tonight’s Democratic debate, and then, instead of apologizing when being called out for it, tried to explain that her critics are the dumb ones for not understanding that what she was saying was, Biden doesn’t make himself understood very well.

Because she’s a nasty piece of work, of course, which might have been part of her home training. But also because even though she isn’t still Trump’s press secretary, she still sounds just like him. A hurtful asshole, in other words.

Biden responded without calling her an asshole, which is better than me, I guess.

Although I feel like it’s implied.

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From The Onion:

Terrifying Inferno Every Time He Closes His Eyes

WASHINGTON—Clarifying controversial remarks he made about the deceased Michigan lawmaker last night, Donald Trump told reporters Thursday he can confirm the late congressman John Dingell is in hell because of the window into a terrifying inferno the president sees every time he closes his eyes.

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From nojo:

Impeachment was always going to go down in flames. We knew that going in. It would pass the House, die in the Senate. Some argued that the certain futility made the exercise pointless, perhaps even prone to backfire.

Our attitude has been: Go down fighting.

What makes impeachment futile, what makes any advance on almost any front almost impossible, is the structure of our government, the enduring system of misrepresentation. The Founders preached that a legitimate government only exists with the consent of the governed, but what they created precludes that.

The House comes closest to representing the citizens of America, but gerrymandering and suppression tip the scales, sometimes profoundly. The Senate is a farce of democracy — Los Angeles County counts more citizens than 41 states. The Electoral College has twice this century chosen a President who lacks a majority of votes cast, and is on track for a third. A minority President and Senate have now appointed one quarter of lifetime federal judges, and two Supreme Court justices.

Changing any of this would require assent from the people who benefit from it.

That’s what we face. That’s what allows tyranny to take hold in America — it already has. It’s built in. We’re lucky as a nation that tyranny has taken this long to manifest itself, for purportedly representative government to veer so afar from the wishes of its citizens.

But it has, and here we are.

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From Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger:

Donald Trump likes to brag about what a great economy the U.S. has. He tells us that it is the best economy this country has ever had, and it’s due to his actions since assuming office. But he’s either living in a dream world, or just lying to make himself look better.

The truth is that the economy is great for some Americans — the rich. But it’s not so great for the middle class, and it’s downright terrible for the poor. The GDP is rising (although not nearly as much as Trump promised) and the unemployment rate is low. But most of the benefits of the growing economy is going to the rich. Wages for middle class Americans remain stagnant, and the poor struggle to make ends meet (because too many of the jobs being created are low-wage jobs with few benefits, and don’t pay a livable wage).

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