Seldom Balanced – Usually Fair
From Max’s Dad:
This picture is all I ever needed to know about Brett Kavanaugh. His refusal to shake the hand of Fred Guttenberg, a man whose child was murdered by a 2nd Amendment enthusiast at Parkland School, is all anyone should need to know about Brett Kavanaugh. To be quite blunt, fuck Brett Kavanaugh and the unicorn he rode in on.
But now a woman has come forward to save the nation.
From Jonathan Bernstein:
Republicans put Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court decades ago despite Anita Hill’s credible claims of sexual harassment, and he is still a Supreme Court justice. Which means that if Republicans confirm Kavanaugh, the highest court in the land will be a living symbol that the law does not treat women as full citizens.
That’s simply unacceptable.
What I’d like Senate Republicans to say: They cannot know whether this accusation is true, false or somewhere in between. They do know such an act would disqualify Kavanaugh from this position and from any high office if were true. Kavanaugh (they believe) was otherwise a perfectly acceptable nominee. But the injustice to the entire nation of confirming him if the claim is true — and the message that confirming him would send if it is — outweighs the injustice to him personally if he has been wronged.
From Tommy Christopher:
Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) can’t seem to find time for his own constituents — but he did find time this week to accept an award from a group that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has officially designated as a hate group.
On Thursday, Nunes spoke at a dinner honoring him as the 2018 “Keeper of the Flame,” an honor bestowed upon him by the extremist anti-Muslim group “The Center for Security Policy.”
The SPLC notes that the organization is a “conspiracy-oriented mouthpiece for the growing anti-Muslim movement in the United States.” The group’s founder, Frank Gaffney Jr., has hosted white supremacist Jared Taylor on his radio show.
From John Pavlovitz:
Recently a group of Evangelical church leaders released a document called The Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel, which has since been electronically co-signed by 7,000 clergy members through America.
Following on the heels of last year’s Nashville Statement, it is yet another attempt by a group of Bible Belt Conservatives to lecture the rest of the nation on how to properly follow Jesus—as if Jesus himself wasn’t fit for the job, as if he needs their help.
I’ll let you read it for yourself, but here’s a spoiler alert:
Like it’s equally pompous brother from Nashville, it too is filled with sanctimony, self-righteous gas-bagging, and all kinds of Bible verse-footnoted religious-speak—designed to serve an iron-clad apologetic of a compassion-free Christianity.
From Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit:
So Manafort gets to keep something. On the other hand, once he finishes paying for his lawyers, he’ll probably have nothing much left. But he’ll still do less than 15 years (with good time), if he proves his worth to the Special Counsel’s people.
And then there is this:
It is a fictional lament from four decades ago. When our national leadership sees only winning and losing sides, we all lose.
From Infidel753:
With the coming of hurricane Florence, the Carolina coastline is about to get a nasty taste of the consequences of human misbehavior — and I’m not talking only about the greenhouse-gas emissions that drive climate change and consequent extreme weather events. There is also pig shit involved.
From The Onion:
“It makes me sick to think of these freeloading kids coming here by the thousands, living in 10-by-10 cells on the taxpayer’s dime while honest-to-God American citizens could be suffering behind those bars,” said Beardsley, adding that he sees no reason why the 3-to-13-year-old detainees could not simply go through the proper immigration process and be mistreated as American prisoners.
…
Beardsley also rejected as “liberal bullcrap” the idea that South and Central American refugee children were merely doing the prison time that American children don’t want to do.
From Shaun Mullen at The Moderate Voice:
At home, the abjectly corrupt Russian leader has been propped up by the historic ability of Russians to feel sorry for themselves, a trait that Putin vigorously stokes through a massive propaganda machine that depicts Mother Russia as beleaguered and misunderstood because of its myriad foreign adversaries.
But a punky economy, a festering war in Ukraine, mixed rural election results and election-related protest demonstrations in 38 cities last Sunday, as well as “the messiness of the democratic process” in general, as The New Yorker‘s Masha Gessen puts it, are conspiring to tank Putin’s popularity.