Seldom Balanced – Usually Fair
From Professor PZ Myers:
Do you know why Minnesota is overrun with jihadists? Do you? DO YOU?
This is why Minnesota is being overrun by Jihadists. People like this pic.twitter.com/Kj7oUtniSp
— Jacob Wohl (@JacobAWohl) February 23, 2019
Chevys with bumper stickers, that’s why.
From Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged:
I don’t think it’s wrong to say that the NRA has evolved from gun safety and education and being a general proponent of second amendment rights, to being a political monster that supports the Republican party (or is just very necessarily supported by Republican candidates because you can’t be a real Republican if you aren’t NRA cleared, so…) and that NRA rhetoric has gotten very…extra in the digital age. But the connection between the group that explicitly supports the second amendment seems to thrive on its connection to the folks that think they have reasons to stockpile weapons, and that’s really concerning. Call it the “Chekhov’s gun” of politics–you show people being really concerned about using weapons and buying loads of them in the first act, and you should be expecting them to use them, eventually.
The reason this is exceptionally egregious right now, though, is that the same weapons-stockpiling formerly anti-government violence-oriented types are gravitating to pro-government so long as it’s their sort of folks–and the violence they want to bring isn’t really good for democracy or peace.
From Infidel753:
What Ilhan Omar did earlier this month — invoking an old anti-Semitic trope about shady rich international Jews manipulating politics behind the scenes with money — was at least as bad as posing in blackface, as Northam did. And it was contemporary, not from 35 years ago, representing her current views rather than some juvenile stupidity which intervening decades of maturity might have washed away. Pelosi and the rest of the party leadership were right to come down on her like a ton of bricks about it. This once again draws a clear line between Democrats, who will not and cannot tolerate such bigotry in their ranks, and Republicans, who almost never condemn the constant barrage of bigotry of all kinds from their own, notably from Trump himself.
Omar’s apology was unequivocal, and I’m willing to cut her some slack on this, especially since she came to the US in 1995 as a refugee from Somalia and may have been genuinely unaware of some of the history of anti-Semitic propaganda memes in the West. But if she ever does anything like this again, the leadership must force her to resign. We are not the Republicans.
From Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson:
In a statement on social media on Friday, Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Green Bay) questioned both the national emergency declaration by the president and the budget compromise which passed with little deliberation.
“Why do we have a Congress?” Gallagher asked on Facebook and Twitter. “Presumably we have a Congress to deliberate, debate, and legislate. When it comes to border security, Congress has done none of these things.”
Gallagher continued with a criticism of the budget compromise.
“The appropriators released a 1100+ page omnibus bill after midnight today,” Gallagher wrote. “We suspended (i.e. violated) the rules to vote on it less than 24 hours later with no real deliberation or debate. And obviously the bill does not solve the border security problem, it merely punts it to the 2020 election, meaning the problem will only get worse.”
About the declaration of an emergency at the border, Gallagher had a warning for his fellow conservatives:
From driftglass:
It turns out that while Carl Sagan’s parable of two antagonists, each with a fistful of matches, in a locked room awash with gasoline —
— might have been an accurate and memorable way to describe the need for nuclear arms control during the Cold War, it doesn’t work at all when it comes to modern American politics.
Because in modern American politics it turns out that while there are indeed two antagonists stuck together in a locked room awash with gasoline, one of the antagonists — the Republican Party — actually wants to burn the building down.
In fact, they spend all their political and media power to flick lit matches into corners filled with terrified women and children. With migrants and minorities. With the old and the infirm. With our most stalwart allies and with our constitution.
And they laugh about it. Let that sink in.
From libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara:
Free market advocates have often used the watermelon analogy–”green on the outside, red on the inside”–to describe the relationship between the Environmentalism movement and socialists. As the theory goes, socialism was supposed to bring prosperity to all while capitalism collapsed into a perpetual cycle of the rich getting richer while “the masses” got poorer. When the reality was that as the rich got richer, the general standard of living, even for the poor, soared, socialists faced a crisis. The crisis was deepened when it became clear that the poverty of the socialist countries was “achieved” by brutal, repressive tyrannies.
But they didn’t give up their socialist dreams. They came up with a new mantra to advance socialism–Environmentalism, originally called Ecology. The new playbook claimed that all of this capitalist prosperity was ruining the Earth. The original culprit was pollution, a very real problem. But rather than give up on capitalism, Americans cleaned up the pollution, but largely kept the capitalism. The prosperity and industrial progress continued on a progressively cleaner path. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the crisis reached its climax.
The socialists then turned to climate change, the ultimate environmental catastrophe. “It’s climate change” can be trotted out to explain every bad thing, from routine extreme weather, to corporate bankruptcies, to terrorism. In order to save the planet’s climate, draconian central planning–i.e., socialism–must be imposed on all economic activity..
There is plenty of evidence to back the watermelon analogy.
From Frances Langum:
Kellyanne Conway falls head first into the “Is that the house you robbed?” trap.
Speaking with Chris Cuomo on Tuesday, Kellyanne Conway gave the game away:
Chris Cuomo: “[Trump] and others have lied about Russia-related matters, and I don’t know why.”
Kellyanne Conway: “Not me. I have no exposure.”
No exposure? Exposure? Who said anything about exposure?
From Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger:
A couple of days ago, he was again bragging that he had been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. He said the Japanese prime minister had nominated him for his meeting with Kim Jong-Un of North Korea (even though that meeting accomplished nothing other than to increase Kim Jong-Un’s standing on the world stage).
But there’s another part to that story that Trump won’t tell. It now comes out that the Japanese prime minister only nominated Trump because the U.S. government (i.e., the Trump administration) asked him to do that.
From Tommy Christopher:
On Sunday morning’s edition of MSNBC’s AM Joy, host Joy Reid played a clip from Wallace’s contentious interview with Miller, in which Wallace asked for a single example of another president using a national emergency to secure funds that Congress had denied.
“He couldn’t name one, Jonathan,” Reid noted, incredulously. “Shouldn’t he have prepped himself with at least one example?”
“That’s the thing, it’s like ‘Oh my God the teacher got me, I have no answer,” Capehart said.
“I mean, I always make fun of Fox News and call it, you know, state media for Earth Two and everything, but God bless Chris Wallace,” Capehart continued.
From The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser:
J.D. Greear, current president of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) said:
Having an SBC database places pastors in an investigative role that we do not have the expertise or objectivity to fill. Managing the database alone poses significant problems. In fact, pushing for any kind of ‘internal investigation’ from a church level has proven to be one of the main problems in cases of abuse within the church.
We best protect by leaving investigation to people qualified to fulfill that role. The most effective thing we can do right now is educate pastors about the problem and the resources to deal with it and hold them accountable for doing so. [Since this quote, Greear has been calling for training videos, but still no database.]
And therein lies the reason Southern Baptist, Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB), and other “independent” denominations/churches will NEVER fix their sex abuse problem. Greear SHOULD be calling for the immediate establishment of database that lists every pastor, deacon, Sunday school teacher, youth pastor, choir director, children’s church pastor, evangelist, and congregant who has been accused of, arrested for, convicted of, or imprisoned for a sex crime, using their position of authority to sexually manipulate a woman, or any other crime that makes them unfit to be a church leader (or a Christian, for that matter). Instead, he hides behind the notion that pastors/churches are unqualified to “investigate” such claims. And I agree. All allegations of sexual misconduct or criminal behavior should be immediately reported to law enforcement, and not to the pastor or other church leaders. This does not, however, negate the necessity of having a database.