FairAndUNbalanced.com

 
From Jonathan Bernstein:

We can’t specifically connect individual actions to the overall political atmosphere, just as we can’t specifically conclude that a specific hurricane is the consequence of climate change. Perhaps the bigots in Kentucky and Pittsburgh would have acted anyway; perhaps in a different political climate, the attempted bomber would have found other targets.

What we can do, however, is face the climate honestly. And the truth is that people who watch the news within the Republican-aligned media, and listen to Republican politicians including the president of the United States, are being fed a nonstop diet of crazy conspiracy theories and phony scare stories.

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From nojo at Stinque:

America always turns into a bad-faith ethics seminar in moments like this. Where the conversation should be moral — and political — we jump to legal framing. Of course no one is responsible for the deeds of another. Any system of justice that cast implied blame would be heinous, and heinously manipulated. It is the man who sent the pipe bombs whose guilt must be proved in court, not the man who egged him on.

But the law is limited that way, and understandably so. The law is the state, and the state must be constrained.

We are under no such constraints.

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From Green Eagle:

The United States did in fact destroy about 1,000 nuclear missiles after this treaty was signed (the Soviet Union destroyed about 2,000.) But other than the financial loss, the treaty meant little to us because our supposed enemies, the Soviet Union and China, were well over 5500 kilometers from our missile bases, which were located in the middle of the United States.

The situation for the Soviets, however, was considerably different, as can be seen from a glance at this map …

In fact, the forbidden range for Russian nuclear missiles includes virtually all of Europe. And that is the point:

The U. S. abrogation of this treaty will allow Vladimir Putin to deploy nuclear missiles targeting the entire continent of Europe.

Let the NATO nations try to stand up to Russia then.

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From the Borowitz Report:

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald J. Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order stripping the children of immigrant mothers of their citizenship, thus disqualifying himself from being President of the United States.

The constitutional crisis came to light moments after the signing ceremony, when a fourth grader visiting the Oval Office on a school tour pointed out the far-reaching legal ramifications of the order.

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From The Onion:

“I condemn in the strongest possible terms the shadowy global cabal of Jewish people who, despite the fact that they control everything on Earth, weren’t even able to stop a single shooter,” said Trump in a press conference, adding that he didn’t understand why the worldwide Jewish conspiracy didn’t simply hypnotize the killer through the television or create a massive storm that would have stopped him from leaving his house.

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From Dave Dubya:

Make no mistake. This trend of domestic terrorism is the fetid fruit of Trump’s white nationalism, unleashed upon what is fast becoming a terminally diseased democratic republic.

Trump didn’t commit these crimes, but there is no doubt he inspired them. And he had help.

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From Earth-Bound Misfit:

As you can see, he delivered that statement with all of the empathy and feeling of someone reading aloud the side-effects of a prescription drug.

Trump owns this one. Neo-Nazis enthusiastically supported Trump in 16 and, when it was pointed out to him that prominent racists were supporting him, such as David Duke, Trump denied knowing anything about Duke or the various neo-Nazi groups. He hired staff members with ties to neo-Naz groups here and abroad. When the Tiki-torch Nazis were marching and chanting racist and anti-semitic slogans, the best that Trump could do was say that there were bad people “on many sides”.

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From Aaron Astor at The Moderate Voice:

One thing the more modern anti-Semitic version had in common with older religious anti-Jewish currents was a belief that Jews are dangerously stateless, culturally alien and obsessed with global financial domination. Anti-Jewish/Semitic theories could be deployed by various political/clerical elites to pit the peasants or working classes against Jewish “foreign exploiters” and “interlopers.” Jews couldn’t be trusted because they were “cosmopolitan”, and not wedded to the values of the nation in which they resided. While modern Zionism was a way to construct a Jewish form of nationalism in the face of this rising anti-Semitic current, its ultimate success did little to stem the tide of persistent anti-Semitism. Shock after the Holocaust lessened some of the most egregious forms of anti-Semitism in the West, but the theories of anti-Semites continued to percolate on the margins of Western discourse. They still do.

It comes as no surprise that recent iterations of “nationalism” have brought forth a resurgence of anti-Semitism. But we should be aware of how it manifests itself today. In the past, anti-Semites fixated on a handful of wealthy Jewish financiers like the Rothschilds. Today, it is George Soros. In the past, the fraudulent pamphlet called the Protocols of the Elders of Zion outlined a supposed “global” conspiracy, which Henry Ford dubbed the work of the “International Jew.” Today the term “globalist”, often attached to various Jewish media or cultural figures, does the same work.

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From tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors:

“Screw your optics, I’m going in.”

And thus Robert Bowers, the 48-year-old vicious anti-Semite and racist burst into the Tree of Life Synagogue in the Jewish community of Squirrel Hill and began shooting as Shabbat and other services were underway. He yelled, “All Jews must die,” as he began firing.

Eleven deaths later, and six still living victims in the hospital, our Prznint suggests that the solution is to have armed guards in synagogues. No one seems to have told him that 4 of the wounded were armed policemen, and that 2 of the policemen were on the SWAT team.

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From Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger:

America suffered another mass shooting on Saturday. This time it was in Pittsburg, where 46 year-old anti-semite Robert Bowers (armed with an AR-15 assault rifle and several handguns) shot 17 people (four police officers and 13 civilians) — killing 11 of them.

Sadly, this is not an unusual occurrence in the United States. While most mass shootings (where at least 4 people are shot) do not make the national news, they happen on an almost daily basis. In the first 300 days of this year, there have been at least 294 mass shootings. That’s 0.98 mass shootings per day — or about 29.4 every month. This doesn’t happen nearly as often in any other developed nation, and there is no rational reason why it should be happening here.

What is our government doing to stop (or at least reduce) these mass shootings?

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