FairAndUNbalanced.com

 
From Andy Borowitz of The Borowitz Report:

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Calling it “the least I can do for my country,” the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said on Saturday morning that she would lie for free during the government shutdown.

“Now more than ever it’s important that the stream of falsehoods and distortions from this White House continues to flow in a steady and uninterrupted fashion,” Sanders said. “To achieve that, for the duration of the government shutdown I will be lying on a pro-bono basis.”

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From Yellow Dog at Blue in the Bluegrass:

“I’m eliminating 70 programs and cutting essential services 6 percent, but I’m not telling you which ones until after you approve it.”

The only answer to this arrogant rubbish is a loud raspberry and screaming laughter.

Any legislator who falls for this fiduciary and political crime should be run out of Frankfort on a rail.

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Wondering why a few conservative friends fail to be impressed.

• @bjork55 at Bjork Report suggests the not-so-secret real reason for the shutdown.
   
• Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit discovers a working stereotype that she applies to every Trump political appointee.
   
• Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post marks the first anniversay of the Trump administration with a fervent prayer that the nation be spared another.
   
• At Stinque, nojo has developed a truly hilarious account of the Stormy-Donald encounter. Almost like nojo was a greatly amused fly on the … uh … fly.
   
• M. Bouffant at Web of Evil doesn’t seem to think most of America will be sexually aroused at the mental image of Trump in his underwear chasing after a porn star. I can testify that I intend to spend the whole rest of the day not thinking about that.
   
• My old, true friend, T. Paine at Saving Common Sense, publishes 31 reasons to love Israel. They go from technical accomplishments and historical achievements to the most petty things conceived by mortal imagination. I confess to a failure of awe. I think it’s enough that Jews, as religious and ethnic group, have faced enough existential threats to justify a special homeland. That would be true even if Israel had not produced a more effective treatment for acne. That was my friend’s reason number 29. Really. Acne.
   
• Yellow Dog at Blue in the Bluegrass speculates on why a Republican lawmaker in Kentucky would push to legalize marijuana. Is he … well … selling in?
   
• Vincent at A Wayfarer’s Notes likes songs by Randy Newman because they appeal to those who can appreciate being the targets of intelligent mockery.
   
• The Journal of Improbable Research finds a study on whether we can know that cooking is complete by throwing spaghetti at a wall.
   
• This week’s note in Trumpian ‘Alternative Facts’ comes from AP, as German linguists declare a word meaning “alternative facts” to be a non-word.
   

As 2017 wound down to its unlamented end, President Trump announced that the US embassy in Israel would be moved to Jerusalem, a holy site for 3 Abrahamic religions: Christianity, Islam and Judaism.

The move is almost universally considered to be a sudden gift to Islamic extremists, who immediately cast it as one of many unprovoked attacks in a continuing clash of civilizations.

Early this week, we linked to a well considered post by David Anderson at The Moderate Voice. He suggests that assigning blame or credit to an American “Israel lobby” is a mistake.

Responsibility rests with Christians.

Infidel753, who writes for his own site, responds. He begins by complimenting a good post, then provides a comment that is better.

Good post. Ironically, the growth of violent Islamic extremism in the Middle East since the 1990s, like the growth of militant Christian fundamentalism in the US since the 1970s, is essentially a conservative reaction to increasing secularism in both societies, especially among the younger generation. In both cases the religious hard-liners, alarmed at seeing “their” people turning away from age-old traditional religious taboos and prejudices, reacted with an all-out effort to re-assert control and re-impose the old ways.

The shift of Middle Eastern terrorism from a nationalist campaign focused on territory to a religious jihad expressing age-old hatred for non-Muslims in general and Jews in particular, has made it both more intransigent and also, because it has become resistant to compromise, less likely to succeed. Nationalists can sometimes reach compromises with fellow nationalists in the opposing nation, but people who believe they’re doing God’s will don’t compromise.

The two reactionary religious extremist movements, in the US and in the Middle East, continue to lash out at each other, provoke each other, feed each other. Trump’s Jerusalem move, the “Muslim ban”, and the various ill-considered military operations in Muslim countries (such as the Iraq invasion) help jihadists to demonize the US in the eyes of more mainstream Muslims. Jihadist terrorist attacks and persecution of Christian minorities in the Middle East help American fundamentalists to demonize Islam. The cycle will probably continue, at varying degrees of intensity, until advancing secularism (in both regions) reduces the extremists to impotence and/or moderates regain firm political control.

 
Satire from The Borowitz Report:

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald J. Trump demanded on Thursday that the poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty be revised immediately to exclude nations he considered “shithole countries.”

Speaking to reporters, Trump said that the poem as it currently stands “is basically an open invitation that says, like, if you come from a shithole country, welcome aboard.”

“I don’t know the entire poem, but it’s something like ‘Give us your tired, your poor, your yadda yadda yadda,’ ” he said. “We could keep all that but then put in, right at the end, in big letters, maybe, ‘except if you’re from a shithole country.’ ”

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From Jon Perr at PERRspectives:

If nothing else, Republicans over the past few weeks have delivered an important civics lesson to the American people in general–and Democrats in particular. Facing a growing mountain of irrefutable evidence that the incompetent, out-of-his-depth GOP president of the United States has been enmeshed in a network of ties to Russian business and government interests that put American institutions and democracy itself at risk, the GOP rallied not to the nation’s defense, but Donald Trump’s.

The signs of the expanding counterattack are everywhere. For weeks, special counsel Robert Mueller and senior career personnel at the Justice Department and FBI have been under assault from Republicans in both Houses. Calls to investigate Mueller and “purge” the FBI were followed by the specter of GOP Sens. Lindsey Graham and Chuck Grassley referring Russia dossier author Christopher Steele for charges over unspecified lies made to unnamed government investigators. (The transcript of the Fusion GPS Senate testimony released by California Democrat Dianne Feinstein suggests both why Grassley broke his promise to publish it and the smear campaign underway against Steele.) Meanwhile, the Trump White House and its allies are ramping up their attacks on Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of State who left government service in 2013. The Republicans’ misdirection campaign includes the assignment by FBI agents to probe the 2010 Uranium One non-scandal, supposed “pay to play” influence peddling by the Clinton Foundation, and, of course, “her emails.”

The message from the GOP’s best and brightest is unmistakable.

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From Brotha Wolf at The Intersection of Madness and Reality:

It’s great not to be alone when dealing with crap. Other people know what you’re talking about and often sympathize.

If you’ve ever been in a forum or thread about racism, you may have seen that one clown that demands of proof of racism. Evidence is presented from articles, excerpts from books or books themselves, videos, charts, data, statistics, graphs, scholarly writings from academia, stone tablets, whatever. You’ve given the doubter everything and anything you can find to make him/her see that you’re not lying.

To the doubter, that’s not enough. Nothing you can give enough. You’re just wrong.

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