FairAndUNbalanced.com

 

From Brooke Binkowski:

From a few months ago, but worth returning for the snark – Burr

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From Tommy Christopher:

Fox News reporters leapt to the defense of their colleague Jennifer Griffin after President Donald Trump demanded her firing after she confirmed the key elements of a raft of stories in which Trump denigrated military veterans.

As part of a sustained barrage against a now quadrice-confirmed — by The Atlantic, The Associated Press, The Washington Post, and Fox News — set of stories about his denigration of dead, wounded, captured, and every other type of U.S. warfighter, Trump tweeted a demand that Fox News terminate Jennifer Griffin for her contribution to the fact pattern.

But several Fox News personalities fired back at that demand, on Twitter.

Fox News anchor Bret Baier led the way, followed by correspondents Trey Yingst, Bryan Llenas, and Richard Edson.

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From Green Eagle:

When I was living in England in the early eighties, I had several people ask me why, after all he had done, the seemingly minor affair of the Watergate break-in destroyed Richard Nixon’s career and cost him the most powerful job on earth. Here is the answer I came up with:

There were always two narratives about Nixon; Nixon, the great statesman and master politician, and, to be blunt, Nixon the crook. Just enough people were induced to believe the statesman story to project Nixon into the Presidency, and keep him there four years later.

What caused Watergate to destroy him was that the incident, minor or not, was simply incompatible with the statesman narrative, but fit perfectly into the crook story. This caused enough people to switch which tale they believed, that he lost all support, and had to go.

And this, I believe, may be the result of the current news about Trump calling American soldiers suckers and losers.

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From Cato’s Julian Sanchez:

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From nojo:

Westbrook Pegler, a name you may barely recognize at best, coined the term “bleeding-heart liberal” in 1938. The occasion was a bill before Congress, proposing an action he felt unnecessary.

Curbing lynching.

“I question the humanitarianism of any professional or semi-pro bleeding heart,” he wrote in his syndicated column, “who clamors that not a single person must be allowed to hunger but would stall the entire legislative program in a fight to ham through a law intended, at the most optimistic figure, to save fourteen lives a year.”

It’s not that Pegler was racist — heavens, no! — but that the bill pandered to “crowded northern Negro centers”.

That’s what he said, anyway.

It’s also what he said twenty-three years later, this time aiming at Freedom Riders in Jackson, Mississippi:

“It is a mocking comment on the mawkish generosity of the American character that the bands of insipid futilities of the type called bleeding hearts can invade one of the finest American cities and arouse a howling national uproar of indignation, disgust, pity and shame.”

Again, not racist! Just questioning their tactics! Just a coincidence that the tactics involve responses to white terrorism and oppression!

Pegler all but owned the term until the 1960s. Folks who have looked into this can find only one other significant early citation — Joe McCarthy in 1954, describing nemesis Edward R. Murrow as “a member of the extreme left wing, bleeding-heart element of radio and television”.

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From Deborah Long at The Moderate Voice:

“Donald Trump is the arsonist fireman; he sets the fire and then grabs a hose to claim that he put it out.” – Steve Schmidt, August, 2020

On January 20, 2017 Donald Trump said these words in his Inaugural Speech: “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now…We will seek friendship and goodwill with the nations of the world…. At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America.”

20,000 lies later, Americans might be able to un-cross their fingers in November and finally utter the words: “The Donald has left the building”. But he’s not gone yet. He still has time to realize his boyhood dream of world domination…his personalized version of Hitler Lite.

When Donald Trump’s play, “American Carnage” began, we were in the audience and saw his benevolent efforts to seek friendship and goodwill with a couple of nations of the world – namely the dictatorships of Russia and North Korea. And we sat with our hands folded as he declared his allegiance to Vladimir Putin, Mohammed bin Salman, and Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdo?an. But, in order to fulfill the centerpiece of his inaugural promise – to defeat American Carnage – Trump had to actually create it first.

And create it, he did. He manufactured hate and violence with his support for white supremacy and his MS-13 rhetoric. He stripped America of a functioning judiciary and a functioning congress, so that all branches of government eventually had to come to him. And he set literal fires in large urban cities to encourage rioting so that he can pretend to extinguish the blazes he had created with his own rhetoric. His final act will be to establish the justification for declaring martial law so that his own Praetorian Guard can whip America back into shape the old-fashioned way.

And we are now back in our seats for the final act.

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From Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American:

The administration has refused to answer to Democrats in Congress, ignoring subpoenas with the argument that Congress has no power to investigate the executive branch, despite precedent for such oversight going all the way back to George Washington’s administration. Just last week, a federal appeals court said that Congress has no power to enforce a subpoena because there is no law that gives it the authority to do so. This essentially voids a subpoena the House issued last year to former White House counsel Don McGahn, demanding he testify about his dealings with Trump over the investigation into the ties of the Trump campaign to Russia. (The decision will likely be challenged.)

On September 4, U.S. Postal Service police officers refused Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) entry to one USPS facility in Opa-Locka, Florida and another in Miami. Although she followed the procedures she had followed in the past, this time the local officials told her that the national USPS leadership had told them to bar her entry. “Ensuring only authorized parties enter nonpublic areas of USPS facilities is part of a Postal Police officer’s normal duties, said Postal Inspector Eric Manuel. Wasserman Schultz is a member of the House Oversight and Reform Committee.

And finally, democracy depends on the peaceful transition of power. Trump has repeatedly suggested that he will not leave office because the Democrats are going to cheat.

So we should definitely worry.

But should we despair? Absolutely not.

Convincing people the game is over is one of the key ways dictators take power. Scholars warn never to consent in advance to what you anticipate an autocrat will demand. If democracy were already gone, there would be no need for Trump and his people to lie and cheat and try to steal this election.

And I would certainly not be writing this letter.

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• I missed this a couple months back. My president was at a roundtable talk with religious leaders about police reform. He went into a sort of trance-like ramble about weather emergencies, the pandemic, and the price of oil. When he got to healthcare he diverted into a bewildering riff on how lowering health care cost is just like real estate: thus presenting the wonderful Sarah Cooper with a great opportunity to explain how to real estate.
   
• At The Onion, a conspiracy theorist is worried his credibility will be undermined by Trump retweeting him.
   
• In Hackwhackers, the candidates’ visits to Kenosha are contrasted.
   
• In Scotties Toy Box, the inspiration to young people by President Trump is compared to the inspiration provided by President Obama.
   
• The Moderate Voice reviews the Lincoln Project television ad that threw Trump into a twitter rage. Kind of got under the ole epiderm.
   
• driftglass re-imagines the movie Jaws and discovers that the entire plot is different when the mayor is Donald Trump.
   
• Vixen Strangely, at Strangely Blogged, reviews my president’s remarks about those who died or were maimed or who suffered as prisoners of war in America’s armed forces. She recalls Trump hugging our national flag and his swearing a patriotic oath to protect our nation. She suggests that his is the kind of patriotism patriots should despise.
   
• Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit reviews the denials. The Atlantic quotes my president mocking those who wear the uniform. He angrily insists he didn’t say it. It is confirmed by The New York Times. Fake news. Associated Press finds confirms the quotes in separate sources. Another denial. And now more sources confirm with the national security correspondent for Fox News? Fox News?
   
  The latest WH spin is that, by calling dead soldiers suckers, my president was only wondering, in a sort of grateful awe, how anyone could be so heroic.
   
  Strikes me as kind of a stretch.

Continue reading “How to Real Estate, Kenosha, Inspiring Kids, Insult the Troops, Trump Jaws”

 

On canceling a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery:

“Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.”

Donald Trump, November 10, 2018

From The Atlantic:

In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.

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From Frances Langum:

An update to our story from Pennsylvania. State GOPs are sending absentee ballot applications to people who never lived in their state. It smells very fishy

On August 25, I wrote here about a mailer my father received in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The mailing was from the New Hampshire Republican Party, and contained an application for absentee ballot from New Hampshire. My father has never lived in New Hampshire.

A New Hampshire reporter followed up on the mailer and the Attorney General of New Hampshire issued a cease and desist to the New Hampshire GOP to stop these mailings.

Turns out the same mailing is being sent out of state in Georgia.

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