FairAndUNbalanced.com

• Infidel753 points out the growing use in mainstream internet forums of anti-Semitic symbols created by the far right. The idea is to indicate who is Jewish in a way that will be recognized only by fellow extremists. Infidel explains how to identify and battle sneaky rhetorical tactics. Call them on it.
   
• In The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, former pastor, current atheist Bruce puts a microscope to the argument by a noted Christian leader that Christians must abandon rational thinking.
   
• North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz struggles to be patient while explaining to evangelical Christians that, no, God did not grant to Mr. Trump the divine right to be President.
   
• Pollsters are finally beginning to ask the question. Tommy Christopher brings us the result. Voters are ready to take blowtorches and pliers to politicians who don’t stand up to Trump.
   
• Frances Langum looks at unfolding data and suggests that women are not ready to play nice in the 2018 elections. Trump may be a partial inspiration.
   
• Negotiation sometimes includes the discovery of common ground. @bjork55 at Bjork Report sees a head start for the Kim Jun Un-Donald Trump summit.
   
• At The Onion, Rudy Giuliani weighs in, relating how Kim Jong-un begged like a has-been-politician-turned-hack-attorney trying to get a job at the White House. Way to help out, Rudy! At least my President can be counted on to diligently prepare for the summit.
   
• Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit looks into her crystal ball and divines the future of Paul Manafort. We can hope such ability never falls into the wrong hands.
   
• This week’s note in Trumpian ‘Alternative Facts’ comes from The Baltimore Sun, plowing through the 7-day bumper crop, finally harvesting the 1814 White House roast. Oh Canada!
   

 
From tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors:

Hey! Michigan must feel left out! What with Washington’s Republicans having elected a White Supremacist to the GOP central committee, Michigan needed to do something to get back into the GOP Clown Car Driver’s Seat…

Michigan State Senate candidate Mike Saari argues men being attracted to 12-year-old girls is normal because it’s in the Bible.

Saari made headlines last February after making deplorable comments about the female judge in the Larry Nassar trial concerning the sexual abuse of underage gymnasts, at one point calling the judge a “feminazi” and making crude reference to her sex life.

Oh, dear.

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From Jonathan Bernstein:

Two memos from Donald Trump’s lawyers to Special Counsel Robert Mueller that assert broad presidential privileges, and a tweet from the president claiming that he could pardon himself, provide the case for an entirely unconstrained presidency. That’s not the whole story.

1. Presidents — and especially their lawyers — can claim anything they want, but that doesn’t make those claims true. Trump isn’t the first commander in chief who wanted to stretch the office far beyond what the Framers intended or the plain text of the Constitution can support. And his lawyers aren’t the first to make improbable cases about the presidency to prosecutors.

2. Even so, the claims of Trump and his lawyers are extraordinary. Presidents can obstruct justice: If they really could demand criminal investigations whenever they wanted, and shut down investigations whenever they wanted, they would truly be above the law even without the pardon power. The definition of what is legal would depend on what the president wanted at the moment, not on the bills he or she signed.

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From The Journal of Improbable Research:

The teabag composition initiative—or, to use its even more formal name, the TeaComposition initiative—aims to measure how fast teabags decompose in different settings.

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From Glenn R. Geist at MadMikesAmerica:

Samuel Johnson is a hard man to figure out, at least for me. Americans are fond of insisting that taxation without representation is tyranny unless it’s Puerto Ricans being taxed. Johnson insisted that the colonies had no right to direct representation – because they were colonists.

Of course, the out of context quote about patriotism being the last refuge of a scoundrel might be his most repeated trope and of late the very word has begun to stink as it has so many times int he past when it’s become a metonym for obedience to authority especially as concerns moral and ethical abdication.

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From libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara:

Economic inequality is indicative of capitalism’s greatest virtue; that people are free, through work and trade, to individually prosper as far as their ability, ambition, values, goals, personal circumstances, and moral character will carry them.

Prospering through work, no matter how great or modest the level of wealth, comes not to the detriment but to the benefit of others. Prospering involves trade, and trade involves a win-win outcome—the mutually beneficial exchange of value for value. It necessarily follows that personal betterment involves the betterment of everyone one trades with. The level of a person’s earned wealth correlates to the value added to the economic lives of others.

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From Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger:

I am a Dallas Cowboys fan. I have something good to say about the Philadelphia Eagles about as often as Philly fans speak well of the Cowboys — pretty close to never. But today is different.

Donald Trump had invited the Eagles players to the White House. For him, it was a photo op, and likely another event where he could denigrate NFL players for having the audacity to exercise their free speech rights. But he cancelled the event after learning that 10 (or less) players were going to attend the event.

Trump then tweeted that staying in the locker room was as disrespectful as kneeling to the country. His inference that those players were being disrespectful to the flag, our soldiers, and the country is patently ridiculous. The Eagles were one of only 7 NFL teams that had no player kneel during the anthem (or stay in the locker room).

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From driftglass:

Short answer: No.

Because if one spouse is hiding in the bathroom trying to defend the kids, and the other spouse is a MAGA Hat psycho who is gleefully coming after you with an ax, the marriage is over.

Longtime readers know that Mr. David Brooks The New York Times has a long-established habit using his column to to subtweet about the state of his marriage in the guise of of as shitty, ill-fitting metaphors about “relationships”. From me back in 2014:

At this point, guessing at “Why?” is a reflex, so of all the subjects available in the world, I had to ask myself why is Mr. Brooks — whose bread-and-butter has been pumping out horrid tripe about Fake Centrism, the sins of imaginary hippies and the merits of various crackpot Conservative economic schemes and military adventures — suddenly writing about grief and loss?

And if I had to guess, I’d guess because Mr. Brooks is currently going through a divorce, and that experience permeates everything.

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From Max’s Dad:

That evening I had baseball practice and while I sat in a car with two other teammates waiting for a field to clear, the kid I was sitting next to in the back seat cracked a bad joke about the shooting and the kid in the front seat, lets call him John, turned and sternly said at 9 years old to us “Its not funny!”. He was right. It wasnt funny.

I remember my Dad and my coach saying aloud, “I dont think he’s going to make it”. That crushed me. Dad, please, dont say that. I continued to pray while I stood out at first base taking grounders. Please God, no. Dont take him.

Senator Robert F Kennedy died the next morning.

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