FairAndUNbalanced.com

 

From libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara:

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos:

We’ve heard shrill calls to ‘cancel,’ to ‘forgive,’ to ‘make it all free.’ Any innocuous label out there can’t obfuscate what it really is: wrong.

The campaign for ‘free college’ is a matter of total government control. Make no mistake: it is a socialist takeover of higher education.

DeVos speaks the truth.

It’s not an overt takeover, of course. And that’s not what she meant. Government agents are not going to come in, kick the administrators out, and literally install government administrators in their place. It’s actually much more insidious than that, because the control takes place largely behind the scenes. But make no mistake. It’s government control. Making college “free” means the government will have to pay colleges directly. With the responsibility to pay comes the responsibility, and power, to set conditions for both the college and the student. “Who pays the piper, calls the tune.”

So, how does DeVos’s opponents respond? One opponent, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, fires back with:

“Tuition-free public college is a dangerous socialist takeover of higher ed, as opposed to the far superior capitalist takeover of higher ed, which reliably buries millions of Americans in trillions of dollars in debt & graduates them into low paying jobs without good healthcare.”

This self-described socialist is apparently ignorant of the difference between socialism and capitalism—or wants deliberately to deceive us on the true natures of both.

Capitalism logically cannot “take over” higher education, or any other industry, because its government is limited in the scope of its power. Capitalism is by definition individual self-governance and determination under a government limited to protecting the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and property of all individuals.

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From Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged:

It doesn’t even seem that long ago that Sidney Powell was deemed even a little bit too out there for Rudy Giuliani (just short of one whole month, in fact). And now Donald Trump is entertaining the idea of unloosing the Kraken as a special counsel to investigate voter fraud. It’s kind of funny because it wasn’t even that long ago that Trump had a voting integrity commission that was disbanded because it never found any voting fraud. But on they go, into the (alleged) breach….

It should probably be bigger news, however, that Trump also entertained Ms. Powell’s client, the recently-pardoned Michael Flynn, who, like Lin Wood or the My Pillow guy, has been arguing in favor of martial law so that Trump can get a do-over in the swing states that he lost. I don’t believe there is an armed do-over clause in the Constitution, and Flynn has been singing in the key of batshit for so long it’s hard to believe anyone does listen to him–but there are people who do! And Trump is apparently being one of them!

This almost makes Rudy Giuliani’s request for DHS to commandeer the voting machines look sane. I mean, it’s not. But it almost does.

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• @momwino98 tries very hard to explain why cornflakes were invented:
   
  
   
• Iron Knee at Political Irony draws an unfortunate holiday-in-the-night-of-COVID parallel as one phrase has a tragic double meaning.
   
• tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors has news on how our madcap Trump administration can screw up everything but a lightbulb. State officials are being told that up to 40 percent of scheduled vaccines will not be delivered after all.
   
  Pfizer has warehouses filled with millions of ready to go doses, but can’t get the okay from federal authorities to ship. I can only speculate, but my guess is that nobody has explained to Trump and company that vaccines can’t work without vaccinations.
   
• Yikes. It’s documented. Trump COVID policies, the downplay of risks, the denigration of simple protective masks, the mega-spreading events, the lack of preventative action were not a series of simple myopic bumblings. Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged reacts to recently revealed memos showing deliberate, directed policy. No longer a conspiracy theory, this administration actually ordered policies calculated to get as many unsuspecting people infected as fast as possible.
   
  The internal memos confirm the horror: a deadly experiment testing a Darwinian construct. As the amateur theory went, several million deaths would have been in the past and forgotten by accountability time. A sort of survival game. The fittest would survive and the world would go on. Modeled after the black death plagues of the middle ages that wiped out large sections of Europe, it would be herd immunity: curing through culling.
   
• So Vladimir Putin’s cyber-intelligence people have successfully penetrated every computer on every desk of pretty much all of the executive branch, including the military, the State Department, and agencies in charge of our nuclear weapons.
   
  Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit listens carefully to my president’s outraged reaction ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑ outrage against those supporting accurate election counts. Nothing about the Russian cyber attack campaign. She draws one obvious conclusion.
   
• In Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson details the attack and the horrific damage to national security. Contrasting reactions show President-elect Joe Biden taking on the role of a responsible Commander-in-Chief, and Donald trump taking on the role of ‑well‑ whatever he plays these days.
   
• John Scalzi at Whatever sees Biden winning and winning until everyone is tired of all that winning. To those who insist it isn’t over for my president, John has a message involving a crudely expressed description of a common biological urge.

Continue reading “Flakes, Vax Held, Hack, Trickle Downed, Trump Bounced, Dr Jill, Barr None”

 

From Jonathan Bernstein:

The president has appointed orthodox Republicans to the federal bench, not cronies.

Still, one of the few things that most Republicans care about intensely is the nomination and confirmation of orthodox Republican judges. And that’s what Trump gave them.

What that meant, however, was that Trump’s judges weren’t cronies who were loyal to him while being indifferent to the conservative legal agenda. Quite the opposite. His three Supreme Court nominees are good examples: It’s likely that any other Republican president would’ve made the exact same choices. That’s also true for his circuit and district court nominees. Sure, to the extent that they’re partisan, they’ll rule in favor of policies that Republicans prefer. That’s what they tended to do before the election. And they would probably lean toward Trump if his post-election lawsuits presented them with plausible paths within the law. But they simply don’t share Trump’s total lawlessness — and most of them have longer-range goals in mind, not simply the preservation of Donald Trump’s administration.

All of which is yet another example of Trump’s fundamental weakness as a president.

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From Nan’s Notebook:

Christians will argue and stomp their feet and carry signs and march and threaten pregnant women at Planned Parenthood because they believe abortion is KILLING a human being.

BUT … they will gather in churches in large numbers to sing and worship their god … along with hugging their “brothers and sisters in the Lord.” While some may be wearing a mask, there are many who aren’t simply because they support a president who denies the seriousness of the current pandemic. AND who they believe is “god-anointed.”

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From The Propaganda Professor:

This kind of magical thinking is the very backbone of conservatism, which promotes tragically failed policies, practices and beliefs on the arrogant assumption that they’re going to pay off in spades somehow soon just because conservatives want them to, and dang it they deserve to have their way, always. Conservatism, in essence, is the unwavering conviction that what has never worked in the past will somehow go on working in the future. Pampering the rich will somehow induce them to share their wealth. Waging aggressive warfare will somehow lead to lasting peace. Killing killers will stop other killers from killing. Allowing corporations to indulge unfettered in rapacious behavior will cause them to act responsibly. Ignoring racism will cause it to magically disappear. Banning abortion will end it this time, even though that’s always failed miserably and horribly in the past. Pumping more guns into the population will somehow stop people from using them so much. No need to worry about our trashing of the environment, because any day now, Jesus will arrive on the scene to end it all. And any day now, we heard for four years, the White House Occupant is going to make an abrupt “pivot” and suddenly start behaving like an adult for the first time in his life. Any day. Just trust us.

This attitude brings to mind the “cargo cults” of certain Pacific islanders, and especially on the island of Tanna, built around a mythical (or quasi-mythical) figure known as John Frum. This cult, which apparently originated in the 1930s, is based upon the legend that the island was once visited by a westerner (perhaps an American serviceman) who brought the natives lots of goodies. (The name John Frum may have originated as “John from America”, which then became “John Frum from American”, and then just John Frum.) And now the people live in the hope and fervent certainty that someday he will return and transform their little enclave into a paradise. They have special festivals and ceremonies to honor him, with priests dressed in military-style uniforms and devotees marching in formation with bamboo “rifles”, and with pictures of anchors or the letters “USA” painted on their chests. Does this remind you of other cults and fanatical religious sects?

At the bottom of the food chain, adherents of these cults believe with all their minds and hearts and souls in the doctrines they’re being fed.

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He said this out loud?
 

Rand Paul rails on how Georgia was supposedly stolen — “but probably most importantly” absentee ballot applications being sent out for the Senate runoffs.

“I’m very, very concerned that if you solicit votes from typically non-voters, that you will affect and change the outcome.” pic.twitter.com/J1TPaN02Us

— Eric Kleefeld (@EricKleefeld) December 17, 2020

Taking Notes

He thinks that if people vote, Republicans will lose. I agree

“typically non-voters” Hmmm-m-m-m- Anyone care to guess his meaning?

 

From Frances Langum:

Trump Team lawyer Lin Wood is preaching sedition and violence again on Twitter. And Trump is retweeting that shite.

It’s not just the Banana Republic “throw your opponents in jail, lock her up” nonsense that Trump has endorsed for years, Lin Wood wants to jail state officials who simply counted and reported the votes cast by citizens in their state.

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From The Onion:

WASHINGTON—Explaining that he could no longer balance the duties of both roles simultaneously, William Barr announced plans Tuesday to step down as attorney general to pursue his true passion full-time as the “K-Street Strangler.”

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From Cato’s Julian Sanchez:

For election systems, that means ensuring that a voter‐​verified physical ballot—an auditable paper trail—exists for every vote cast. Manual counts of a sample of those paper ballots, known as risk‐​limiting audits, can then be used to confirm that the digital tallies are accurate.

Happily, many states have heeded the advice of experts in recent years, implementing routine audits and replacing direct‐​recording electronic, or DRE, machines, an antiquated technology in which touch screens record choices without creating a paper ballot for the voter to inspect. Yet several states that have done virtually everything right, many at the urging of Republican officials previously seen as Trump allies, have found themselves at the center of conspiracy theories.

Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Michigan have successfully replaced their DRE machines—meaning every voter either hand‐​marks a ballot or is presented with a printed paper record of their selections to verify—and implemented risk‐​limiting audit programs. In Pennsylvania, this involved a Herculean effort: As recently as 2018, the majority of the state’s voters cast ballots with no paper trail. Michigan, meanwhile, had a slight head start, approving a major initiative to update its voting equipment back in 2017.

In practice, these changes make electronic “vote rigging” on the scale necessary to shift the outcome of a statewide election highly infeasible, especially when the margin of victory is tens of thousands of votes. Multiple hand recounts in Georgia, unsurprisingly, turned up no evidence of digital shenanigans.

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