- This week’s note in Trumpian ‘Alternative Facts’ comes from Odyssey: presenting a list of eleven alternate facts that are definitely true, along with moving reactions.
- Dave Dubya contrasts the honor and decency of old-line traditional patriot John McCain with more contemporary values of today’s conservatives.
- Max’s Dad notes that American hero John McCain provided moments of decency to an otherwise barren political world.
- Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post is inspired by John McCain to call for civility in politics.
- Jonathan Bernstein makes the case that, while Hurricane Maria was a disaster in Puerto Rico, Washington is still a disaster.
- After my President boasts that he is proud of how he responded to Hurricane Maria, Tommy Christopher covers San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz as she explains on national television that “The administration killed the Puerto Ricans with neglect.”
- Congress is considering replacing Obamacare with tax deductible Health Savings Accounts. The idea is attacked as more breaks for the wealthy. Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara objects to the objection. The wealthy are people, after all. The proposed tax cuts merely lets them keep money that was their own, after all. Fair is fair, after all.
- In his usual acerbic way, tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors contrasts the huge cost of Trump’s tax cuts for the rich and the upcoming military parade in honor of himself with the comparatively minuscule savings by eliminating a modest cost of living increase for public employees.
- North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz urges Christians to stop blaming God for their own LGBTQ hatred.
- Infidel753 has an entertaining list of common writing mistakes committed online. As a rule, those errors I commit are minor and nearly unnoticeable. What I notice in what I read are major distractions that I am sure make everyone crazy.
Category: Uncategorized
Sheriff’s Race Vote Totals Raise Questions About Software
From Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson:
Nobody will forget how Waukesha County became the center of the political universe when a former county clerk forgot to include the city of Brookfield’s votes in the vote totals for a Wisconsin Supreme Court race. But could we be facing a similar crisis this November in Milwaukee? Or elsewhere?
Jerry Bader of Media Trackers is reporting that the Milwaukee County Clerk’s office, through a software error in the WisVote program, managed to double the number of Democratic votes cast in the Milwaukee County sheriff’s race. The canvass showed the total votes cast in the Democratic primary as 219,300 but the ward-by-ward count showed only 109,473 Democratic votes for sheriff.
“Problems with the WisVote software are being blamed for the Milwaukee County canvass of the August 14 Democratic Sheriff’s primary showing almost exactly double the number of votes actually cast on Election Day,” Bader reported.
It’s All Unfair, but Let’s Not Fiddle Around With the Electoral College
From Michael Kinsley:
The smooth and yet dramatic reversal in direction that followed the transfer of presidential power in 2016 is a tribute to American democracy. Especially when you consider that twice in the past five presidential elections — that is, almost half the time — the majority turned over power to the minority (in straight who-got-more-votes terms). How many other nations could pull that off?
But smoothness isn’t everything. The constitutional rules for electing a president are almost comically complex, potentially involving both houses of Congress in different capacities, the entire Cabinet, 50 state legislatures and a two-thirds vote of the people running food trucks along Pennsylvania Avenue. And in the end, we’ve got a government run at almost every level by people whose philosophy of government most citizens voted against. Talk about the silent majority! Every morning we wake up to discover that some corner of government has been taken over by zealots of the right. Trump has been peacefully handed the keys to the car by folks who think he can’t drive and shouldn’t be on the road.
So the election of 2016 — another Republican “victory” on a technicality — still sticks in many a blue craw.
Normalizing Crimes Against Humanity
From Blue in the Bluegrass on increased hate crime:
These people are not bumbling goofs to laugh at. They’re not political incompetents in need of adult supervision. They’re not even anti-government idiots determined to burn the house down around themselves.
They are war criminals, turning their sick fantasies into atrocities.
Hearing “White Christmas” in White Noise [research study]
From The Journal of Improbable Research:
44 undergraduate students were asked to listen to white noise and instructed to press a button when they believed hearing a recording of Bing Crosby’s White Christmas without this record actually being presented.
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Right-Wing Corpse-Dancers
From our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit:
Because McCain’s fight against cancer and decision to let go was all about Kelli Ward… or so that troll of a candidate thinks.
One has to be a Trump-grace narcissist to think of that.
You’ll Believe God is a Woman
From The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser:
While fundamentalist evangelical Christians are outraged over the notion that their God might be a woman (because, God forbid, complementarianism, y’all), they are focusing more on “God is a woman” than on a woman communicating her desires to her partner and promising to fulfill the partner’s desires in return. They are focusing on the outrage that their deity may be portrayed as a woman, someone who is commanded in the Pauline epistles to submit to the husband’s authority and to remain silent in church. They aren’t focusing on Ariana Grande’s encouragement of women to communicate with their partners as equals.
From my perspective, if some Evangelical teenagers listen to this song, I hope that the message of equality gets through to them.
Overlapping Professions
When Your Name Is Too Rude for a Website’s Algorithm
I Could Have Told Them This Experiment Wouldn’t Work
From PZ Myers:
When I was in high school, and also part of college, I spent my summers working in a wholesale nursery as a menial laborer. It was all stoop labor — “there’s 10 acres of pots of kinnikinnick, go weed them all” — and of course once you finished it all, you’d start over again because a new crop of weeds was sprouting. So I spent long days in the sun, bent over, scraping popweeds out of containers. It’s not a job I’d wish on anyone, but it’s partly how I paid for college.
Now I’m reading that, in 1965, the US government had a brilliant idea for replacing those darned Mexicans who were doing all that farm labor: pay high school students to do it for minimum wage. Thousands of students took the offer.