Praising Trump for Failing to Screw Over the Innocent


 

The shocking incident of October 5, 2017 could be traced back one month earlier to September 5.

On that Tuesday morning, there was an extra bounce in the step of the Attorney General as he took to the podium. He barely suppressed a smile as he began his announcement. The glee was apparent.

I am here today to announce that the program known as DACA that was effectuated under the Obama Administration is being rescinded.

Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions has a history. He is not particularly against illegal immigration. He advocates severe cut-backs on all immigration, legal or not.

But the October incident, and the announcement that came before it, were not about all immigration. The DACA program was about those whose parents brought them to this country as small children. They are, in all meaningful respects, American. On average, they were 6 years old when they arrived. They know no other language. They know no other country. And General Sessions was announcing the government’s intention to ship them to lands in which they will be strangers.

The Attorney General conflated opposition to this move with opposition to any borders at all, a position held by pretty close to … well … nobody.

To have a lawful system of immigration that serves the national interest, we cannot admit everyone who would like to come here. It’s just that simple. That would be an open border policy and the American people have rightly rejected it.

The October incident that came a month later, and the Sessions announcement itself, were not about open borders or admitting everyone who would like to come here.
Continue reading “Praising Trump for Failing to Screw Over the Innocent”

Please Stop Giving Trump Supporters a Stupidity Pass

found online by Raymond

 
From North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz:

Ignorance is not a compelling argument.

A friend recently offered a theory that I hear all too often from seemingly reasonable adults right now: Trump supporters are somehow victims of the partisan media/Religious Right Church alternate reality that they’ve been raised in and are still captives of. They’re surrounded by fake news and false stories, and so they aren’t bad people—they just aren’t seeing what we are seeing. We need to be more understanding.

I’m sorry but this isn’t an acceptable justification.

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Leftover Crow

found online by Raymond

 
From nojo at Stinque:

Two weeks into his presidency, we made a bold prediction: Donald Trump would resign before the year was out. Or, as we colorfully put it: President Pence would be pardoning turkeys this Thanksgiving.

Sure, we hedged it: 50/50 chance, we said. But honestly, that was more about the timing than the event itself. We were sure the job would grind him down within a year.

That it hasn’t is not a testament to Donald Trump’s fortitude. Instead, we failed to take into account his laziness. We thought he would he would be miserable in the Oval Office. And, by all accounts, he is.

He’s just never there.

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David Brooks: Controlling The Future By Butchering The Past

found online by Raymond

 
From driftglass:

America: The Redeemer Nation

— in which the administration of Abraham Lincoln is re-imagined as extended exercise in Both Siderism as filtered through a highly redacted version of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address.

From Mr. Brooks:

Slavery, Lincoln says, was not a Southern institution, it was an American institution, weaving through our common history for 250 years. The scourge of war, which purges this sin, falls on both sides. Lincoln fought any sense of self-righteous superiority the Northerners might harbor.

What Mr. Brooks doesn’t bother to mention is that Lincoln had the freedom and flexibility to be generous and speak of reconciliation precisely because he had spent the previous four years destroying the Confederacy. Killing their armies. Sinking their ships. Burning their crops. Laying waste to their cities. This is the central fact of the presidency of Abraham Lincoln besides which all others recede into footnotes.

Less than two months after Mr. Lincoln was elected, the secession of the South and the formation of the traitor Confederacy had begun over the issue of slavery.

A month after Mr. Lincoln was sworn into office, Confederate artillery opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor over the issue of slavery.

And four years later, on the day Mr. Lincoln delivered his stirring Second Inaugural, the bloodiest war in American history was slowly drawing to a close. The Confederacy had been smashed, what remained of its shattered armies were in a state of endless, slogging retreat. And one month after Mr. Lincoln delivered his Second Inaugural, Robert E. Lee surrendered his Confederate Army to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House in Virginia.

Less than a week later, Mr. Lincoln would be assassinated by Confederate sympathizer, John Wilkes Booth.

And yet, in Mr. Brooks’ Both Siderist version of America history, the explicit causes of the Civil War and its aftermath hardly exist at all.

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Wachs Discovers Women Deserve Respect Too

found online by Raymond

 
From Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson:

As for Wachs’ complaint that Walker can’t be ignorant “of sexual harassment and assault all across the country,” how ignorant is Wachs? Has Wachs issued one statement criticizing Sen. Al Franken (D-MN)? Or is Wachs content to wait like his fellow Democrat Sen. Tammy Baldwin to see what the Senate Ethics Committee decides about her financial contributor?

Or Rep. John Conyers (D-MI)? Is Wachs going to believe all women who complain of sexual harassment, or is he going to disagree with his fellow Democrat Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) that because Conyers is “an icon” he gets the benefit of the doubt?

Let’s even ask where was Wachs during the 2016 campaign when Hillary Clinton was the Democratic nominee? She was President Bill Clinton’s chief enabler, including the handling of the “bimbo eruptions” as the 1992 Clinton campaign called complaints about the former president’s behavior. Did Wachs support Hillary anyway? Did he support Clinton in 1992? Or 1996? Or during the impeachment? Did Wachs believe all of President Bill Clinton’s accusers, or did he get a pass from Wachs?

(Question: As Democrats re-discover sexual harassment, will their new fondness for monument toppling extend to the Kennedys at Arlington National Cemetery?)

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The British On Holiday

found online by Raymond

 
From Neil Bamforth at MadMikesAmerica:

Quite why adding extraneous ‘y’s and ‘o’s to shouted words would make it any easier for the bemused Greek waiter remains, to this day, a mystery to me.

Of course, things have improved greatly since those halcyon days. Most Greek waiters learned to speak English. Probably on the grounds that they realized the British would never learn Greek and their ear drums were still vibrating from my mothers loud requests for tea with milko and sugero.

According to this survey in 2007 – and I do hope things have improved since then – The Brits cheery notion that it’s people were considered a shining beacon of hope and goodness was somewhat delusional.

In 2007 at least, most hoteliers thought the Brits were arrogant, badly dressed, untidy, loud, drunk and nowhere near as nice as the Japanese. Surely they were mistaking us for Germans?

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Atlantic Off-Shore Drilling: Who Really Benefits?

found online by Raymond

 
From libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara:

“Drilling for oil is a risk-reward proposition — all of the risk is put on the backs of our shore communities, and all of the reward goes to Big Oil.”

This is patently untrue.

The oil companies obviously take risks in spending $billions with no guarantee of success. They are also responsible for cleaning up their messes, and must spend $billions should an accident occur. They and their employees can even be held criminally liable through criminal neglect laws. Just ask BP.

We should be thankful for the oil companies’ “insatiable thirst for more profit.” That’s a good thing.

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The ‘Singing Cymbal’ Controversy

found online by Raymond

 
From The Journal of Improbable Research:

…from a CERN teaching resources video (2014).

“Use a cymbal or metallic plate that can vibrate freely. Use a flash, for example from a camera, hold it close to the plate and flash. You will hear a low tone.

Physics: The moment of the photons are transferred in an inelastic collision to the atoms of the cymbal. This can also be used as an example of energy conversion.”

Not so fast, say Thomas R Moore, Samantha Collin and Nikki Etchnique of the Department of Physics at Rollins College in their paper ‘The singing cymbal : Is it really photon momentum?’

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Support Professional Journalism, They Said

found online by Raymond

 
From PZ Myers:

It’s more important than ever, they said. We need to subscribe to the staid, sober journalistic outlets to counter the flow of crap, they said. We’ve got to keep the flow of information going — an informed citizenry is the heart of a democracy.

So I’ve gone back and forth on whether I ought to subscribe to the New York Times. It certainly is professional journalism, but I’m still bitter about their weasely “he said, she said” coverage of creationism from ten years ago, and their dishonest backing of the Iraq War through their lying reporter, Judith Miller, and their utterly execrable opinion pages — Friedman? Brooks? Christ.

And then I think about how Donald Trump hates them, which is certainly a point in their favor. And that they do publish some excellent work — Carl Zimmer, for instance. And that yeah, good journalism costs money, and I ought to contribute, not to the corporate edifice that is the NY Times, but to the principle that we ought to support a healthy journalist class for the good of the country.

And then they go and…

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