Snap! Democratic Congressman Destroys Tucker Carlson

found online by Raymond

 
From Frances Langum:

Congressman Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY) shows his collegues how you do an interview with Tucker Carlson. Stick to the issues, don’t get sidetracked by Tucker’s nonsense, and slip in those FACTS that Fox News viewers aren’t supposed to hear on this network.

Fox News continually announces that Mueller has been going on “too long,” and has found “nothing.” Now Tucker Carlson is horrified that the president’s sex life and lying to the FBI are somehow felonies, the height of hypocrisy given the Clinton years. And yes, Maloney brings that up, too.

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The Grift That Keeps On Grifting

found online by Raymond

 
From tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors:

Tiger Beat on the Potomac (thanks Charlie!) tells us:

“Donations to Donald Trump’s campaign operation surged to $20 million during the first three months of the year, new campaign finance filings show, in the wake of Republicans’ December victory in passing sweeping tax reform legislation.”

So before you get depressed that he’s winning on the donation front, we must ask ourselves what’s a grifter like Comrade Trump doing with all that loot?

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Time Travel into the 90s

found online by Raymond

 
From PZ Myers:

I think the death of Art Bell put me in a time warp. Here’s an interesting story about an army fellow who actually was listening in on Art Bell’s broadcasts while looking for Russkis. He makes the same point I did, that he really was an enabler for the alt-right and wackaloon conservatism.

Once I learned what had happened, I could no longer listen to those favorite talk radio shows anymore. Alex Jones was not simply a funny or stupid clown now. I understood that he was not simply sharing airwaves with disturbed people and utter fanatics, he was borrowing their silly ideas, and listeners who would not otherwise accept anti-Semitic or racist material learned to accept the narrative frameworks of those ideas through him.

As Jones made it okay to believe in this alternate reality, Art Bell made it okay to believe whatever you liked, often on the same station at a later hour. Vampires and werewolves? Ghosts and goblins? Area 51 cover-ups of alien bodies and interstellar spacecraft? Subterranean lizard people controlling the banks? Maybe some of them were real, or maybe all of them were real.

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Other Opioid Crisis

found online by Raymond

 
From Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit:

I got a taste of this when I had a surgical procedure recently. The doc gave me a prescription for a dozen Percocet tablets. From the reaction at the pharmacy, you’d have thought that I was asking for the limb of one of their children.

I know people who have severe back pain and other chronic pain issues. Mostly, the doctors are basically telling them to suck it up, stay home and suffer in silence. Because the doctors are afraid that some badged-up, gun-toting Federal beancounter is going to compare the number of patients, the number of prescriptions and pass judgment without a care as to what maladies are afflicting those patients.

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Dog Years of a Presidency

found online by Raymond

 
From North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz:

By nightfall, after weathering another turbulent day here, I felt disproportionately older than I should have.

I know I’m not alone.

This exhaustion is a national epidemic.

This fatigue has become commonplace here now.

In this Presidency, America is living dog years.

We’re all aging unnaturally rapidly, friends.

This is what happens when every day is packed to bursting with real and manufactured crises; with perpetual legislative assaults, with relentless nonsensical Twitter rants, with continually cycling bad news stories designed to heighten our urgency.

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Public Gives A Resounding “NO” To Firing Of Mueller

found online by Raymond

 
From Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger:

Donald Trump has thrown a giant temper tantrum, both in appearances with the press and on twitter, after learning that his attorney had been served a search warrant and had documents in his possession seized (presumably that involved his connections with Trump). Part of his tantrum has been that he thinks the investigation being done by Robert Mueller is unfair, and nothing more than a “witch hunt”.

This has revived the possibility that Trump may try to fire Robert Mueller. We know he wanted to do that last December, and was talked out of it by cooler heads in the White House. But many of those “cooler heads” (both among White House advisors and his attorneys) are now gone — fired by Trump in an effort to get rid of people who did not agree with him. There may not be enough people left right now with enough sway over Trump to keep him from firing Mueller.

But if he did that, he would be getting himself in deep trouble. Many in Congress would see that as a bridge too far. Even more important is the opinion of the general public.

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