FairAndUNbalanced.com

• Max’s Dad listens to the reaction of a rare non-rally crowd to our beloved president and remembers sports boos from decades past.
   
• Dave Dubya describes his own reaction to my President’s reaction to the reaction of a non-MAGA-hat crowd to seeing his image: baseball booing.
   
• In The Borowitz Report, President Trump has an explanation. World Series fans wanted to lock him up in the White House for doing an excellent job.
   
• About that World Series:
   
  Tommy Christopher reports on how Nationals team member Sean Doolittle seems to have wanted to join his teammates on a celebratory trip to the White house to meet the President. Doolittle spent some time thinking over his own efforts and experiences and decided, “I just can’t do it.”
   
• Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged shows us a tweet from Pastor Robert Jeffress, “The effort to impeach President Trump is really an effort to impeach our own deeply held faith values”, then breaks the ethereal bubble with a penetrating question: When did extortion become a deeply held faith value?
   
• So now Republicans are reverting to Mulvaney-lite: that quid pro quo is, by definition, attaching eligibility requirements to assistance. It happens all the time in foreign aid. Totally legal and appropriate.
   
  Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit takes a moment to teach our conservative friends how extorting for political smears is not the same.

Continue reading “World Series Boos and Blues, God, Gaetz, Overconfidence, Balance”

 

From Jonathan Bernstein:

Protest is an important part of democracy, and that includes raucous and pointed protest. This is not a plea for civility. It’s an argument that the content of protest matters. Communications scholar Jennifer Mercieca put it this way: “Chanting ‘lock him up’ feels good, but it’s also an act of desperation that says that you don’t believe in the rule of law.”

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From North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz:

In Hong Kong and Lebanon and Barcelona and elsewhere, people are reminding us that there is a cost to freedom, a price to be paid for fighting injustice, there is collateral damage to pushing back against tyranny. There is more required than a few keystrokes and a new status update. We need to get into the trenches and put skin in the game. We need to incarnate our convictions.

In the face of unprecedented corruption and human rights violations and legislative overreach, Americans are going to need to sacrifice more than two-inch space on our timelines.

We’re eventually going to have to show up.

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From The Propaganda Professor:

One day, I was talking to a fan of Ben Shapiro’s about his cringe-worthy book The Right Side Of History, which argues that the purportedly peerless “greatness” of Western Civilization can be directly attributed to its embrace of “Judeo-Christian” values. When I mentioned that this thesis cannot be supported by the facts, she replied, “name one country that’s greater”. It was a very blatant deflection, which is the 9th in our series of propaganda props.

A deflection is an attempt to divert focus away from one issue and turn it toward something else. In psychology, it’s symptomatic of an abuser. In politics, it really isn’t much different. In the above incident, there are at least two major problems. First, this individual was expecting me to stack up the accomplishments of some single nation against the entirety of Western Civilization. But more important, she was suggesting that I was impugning the “greatness” of the latter (and apparently of the United States in particular). While I consider it crucial to define “greatness” and delineate the criteria used in determining it, my point was simply that the “greatness’, however defined, of Western Civilization can not be attributed to its religious affiliations.

Deflection is a particularly fascinating tool, because it encompasses several notable variations. Let’s look at some of the most common.

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

Trump, a draft dodger himself, basks in the achievements of men and women who risk their lives for duty, honor, country – some will say misappropriates them.

Trump surrounds himself with our heroes and, literally wrapping himself around the flag, he says he loves them.

That is, until one of them puts his oath to support and defend the Constitution ahead of blind loyalty to the commander in chief and his trampling of same.

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From News Corpse:

In a tsunami of hysterical tweets, Trump has singled out Schiff for his harshest criticism. Trump has repeatedly asserted, without evidence, that Schiff is corrupt. He’s said that Schiff is a liar, a lowlife, a disgrace, and a fraud. Trump has called Schiff a traitor who should resign or be impeached. And he has tagged the congressman with another of his infantile nicknames – Shifty Schiff – that drips with anti-Semitic undertones. This is not the behavior of a calm or confidently innocent man.

In the month of October Trump has tweeted about Schiff 104 times. That’s an average of about 3 1/2 times per day. Those Schiff-focused tweets included references to many of Trump’s other familiar obsessions such as the whistleblower (22 times), Nancy Pelosi (18), the Ukraine phone call transcript (14), and impeachment in general (24). On Tuesday the 29th alone Trump posted 44 unhinged tweets, of which 10 (23%) were about Schiff. For contrast, Trump posted only a single tweet about the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and that was only to complain that Democrats were trying to make people forget about it. But considering the volume and content of Trump’s tweets, you have to ask who is really trying to make people forget.

A few common themes keep popping up in Trump’s Schiff tweets. One is that Trump is deeply concerned about the whereabouts of the Intelligence Community whistleblower. Who cares? The whistleblower’s complaint was fully corroborated by Trump himself on national TV. This is Trump’ss way of trying to belittle the complaint and to intimidate others from coming forward with the truth. But the parade of witnesses coming to Congress prove that this tactic isn’t working.

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From tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors:

I’m not sure that it is a lack of empathy or if it is a lack of imagination.

They don’t worry about mass shootings in the school, or their kid being shot for the crime of being black with Skittles, or their daughters being denied opportunities because, well, women might decide to have a family someday, or worse: asking for it because they are wearing fashionable clothes.

They cannot imagine getting the phone call to ID the body in the morgue.

It doesn’t impact them. Until it does.

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From Frances Langum:

When will this end?

Once again, blabbermouth Don’s piehole spews out classified tactical information that the US Military would prefer was not broadcast on cable news worldwide.

Republicans in the US Senate are complicit in allowing this breaching of both our national security and safety of our troops to continue.

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From driftglass:

Mika Hears a Who … And Hates It

After four years of bigots and imbeciles bellowing their paranoia and derangement at carefully staged Trump Hate Rallies being aired live on teevee, the general public got a chance to spontaneously let the Mad Republican Tyrant know that they disapproved of his mad Republican tyranny…

…using the mad Republican tyrant’s own words…

…taken from the mad Republican tyrant’s own Hate Rallies.

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From PZ Myers:

Watchmen

I had never heard of the Kirk-Holden War before. This was a real war in North Carolina, in which the Ku Klux Klan declared war against the state, the army was called in, and the KKK won, dictating terms to the government…terms that included allowing no Northern intervention in how they “regulated” elections, where “regulation” included murdering black elected officials. One outcome of that kind of action was that the victors celebrated by erecting Confederate monuments all over the place. Our country supported the oppression of a democratic majority! It still is.

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