- This Week In Trumpian ‘Alternative Facts’, the Houston Chronicle explores the first 100 days, with a special focus on my President’s strained relationship with the truth.
- Every two or three months, MyCue23 comes out of wherever he hibernates and produces a wonderful bit of wisdom at Random Thoughts. The seasons change and MyCue23 emerges to fascinate. This time, he explains why the first 100 days of our new national order are an artifice, why 100 is not a magic number, and how Donald Trump could become a great President but won’t.
- Stinque, in a burst of optimism, believes the country may survive anyway. Hope springs from a combination of Trump incompetence and indolence.
- There is a flip side to that logic. Jon Perr at PERRspectives is happy that ISIS seems to be going down for the count, getting tossed out of one geographic area after another, losing sources of finance, faced with a shrinking number of combatants as followers die and die and die, and leadership in flight, abandoning followers to their fate. Perr notes the only refuge that’s left: the hope offered by clumsy Trump policy and counter-productive presidential bluster.
- Yay-y-y-y-y! Margaret and Helen, “Best Friends for Sixty Years and Counting,” are finally back. Helen sees the election of our President as a signal that Oh Shit. The rest of the country just became Texas. She ponders a nation in which joking about assaulting women is no longer disqualifying.
- Let’s get this straight. Part of what sanctuary cities want is to give even undocumented immigrants protection from crime. That means victims can call police without being turned over to immigration enforcement, so crimes get reported and solved.
The Trump administration doesn’t buy it. Anyone with whom police come in contact had better be here legally. Period. Otherwise my President wants heavy penalties against those cities.
Hard nosed, heartless, and kind of dumb. The very flower of contemporary conservative thought, excluding those conservatives who are my friends, or whom I know and kind of like, or whom I admire at a distance. Or T. Paine who is in a class by himself: qualifies as a conservative, one I like, one I admire, and who is also a long time friend. But other than those … you know.
The Trump administration has established a propaganda agency. Victims can report crime committed by any immigrant here illegally, so President Trump can publicize the atrocities and put fear and loathing into the hearts of us vulnerable voters. All other crimes will go through routine channels, without special publicity. Thus all immigrants will get tarred for the crimes of any.
Tommy Christopher finds a Trump wrinkle. The new web site guarantees that victims may call without fear. If callers are not in the country legally, they will not be investigated and deported.
My President has established a sanctuary web site.
- Newsweek asks if the more famous new First Daughter is actually the new Hillary Clinton. Frances Langum asks a few colleagues to be sure, and answers Hell NO! Seems like an emphatic certainty.
- The Big Empty joins sensible folks in banging heads on hard, hard wooden tables as otherwise sensible Senator Elizabeth Warren manages to become “troubled” by the very idea of President Obama making a lot of money.
- Yellow Dog at Blue in the Bluegrass doesn’t much like the idea of big tent ideological openness in the Democratic party. Democrats should share core principles. All core principles. And the list of those principles is long, very long.
- The Moderate Voice points to a couple of points of light for Democrats. Republican held congressional districts in Virginia and Illinois may go Democratic. Main sign, at the moment, is the ease with which Democratic candidates are recruited. Okay, so it’s not what you’d call definitive, but we take hope where we find it, right?
- Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara at Principled Perspectives is for a woman’s right to an abortion but against a woman’s right to abortion services. Well, he has read everything put out by the late Ayn Rand.
- Infidel753 finds a great video from a popular cable drama that dovetails eloquently with his own disdain for lazy shortcuts in logic. A fictional news anchor blasts our most beloved patriotic cliches. Highly entertaining.
- Vincent at A Wayfarer’s Notes has been undergoing a difficult medical odyssey. I have to wonder if that informs his confrontations with the Bible, visiting evangelicals, and personal spirituality.
- A close friend has issues with organized Christianity. She sees religion in general, and churches in particular, as a scam whose purpose is to impose control over those who can be manipulated.
North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz sees the extension of that manipulation to the internet, with an additional purpose: misogyny. Conservatives are telling unauthorized Christians that, in the eyes of God, they have no right to write.
Lets not forget. My President has proclaimed tomorrow as “Loyalty Day.”