Tweet, Twit, Twat

found online by Raymond

 
From tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors:

You know, even a dunce like me could help Tester counter this accusation by Ill Douche: “I want the VA to be led by a someone who can help our Vets, not a car wreck of a nominee who hands out addictive prescriptions like Nancy Reagan at a diet pill factory.”

You can thank me later, Sen. Tester.

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Kompromising Congress?

found online by Raymond

 
From Julian Sanchez:

In recent years we’ve discovered that even the parts of the government you’d expect to maintain the most secure computer networks—from the Office of Personnel Management to the National Security Agency—were embarrassingly vulnerable to being hacked and having highly sensitive data exfiltrated. So perhaps it shouldn’t come as much surprise that the United States Congress isn’t exactly a model of cybersecurity either: Earlier this month, we learned that the legislative branch’s Office of Compliance (OOC) had until very recently been storing its records of sexual harassment complaints and settlements on an insecure server operated by a contractor. In a blistering letter to the OOC written back in February, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) noted that the server had never undergone a cybersecurity audit, and charged that the office had failed to implement even “rudimentary defensive network-security best practices.”

Wyden’s focus in his letter was, understandably, on the threat this posed to anonymity of those who register complaints about workplace harassment. But at a time when “kompromat” has become a commonplace part of our political lexicon, many readers will naturally think of a very different sort of risk: For the most sophisticated network infiltrators, employed by foreign intelligence agencies, the real appeal of such data would be its potential for selectively embarrassing, or exercising leverage over, members of Congress and their senior staffers.

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Public Thinks Russia Has Compromising Info On Trump

found online by Raymond

 
From Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger:

Why does Trump regard Russia and Putin as friends when they very clearly aren’t? It has brought up the question of whether Russia possesses some kind of compromising information on Trump (such as the infamous “pee tape”, evidence of money laundering, or some other kind of chicanery). I believe they do possess some kind of information that Trump doesn’t want made public — and it looks like I’m not the only one thinking that.

A new poll shows that 53% of the American public believes Russia has compromising info on Trump, while only 35% say they don’t believe that. That’s a significant 18 point gap. And that is the opinion of both genders, all age groups, and the racial/ethnic groups questioned.

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Hang ’em High


 
There is no perfection in the human experience. Nobody is perfect. No-one is perfectly evil. Everyone is some complex combination of both good and bad, virtue and vice.

Most folks have at least an implicit belief in justice. We expect the good side to be rewarded, and what is evil to cost in some way. At very least, we believe both should be acknowledged. The colloquialism goes back to the middle ages: Murder will out.

The hope never dies. Justice will win in the end. Misdeeds will be uncovered and condemned. Most of us were taught the myth as children.

A photo makes the rounds:

Sometimes condemnation doesn’t seem like enough, but it’s all we’ve got.

This administration seems to turn that hope on its head.

Misbehavior gets rewarded. Virtue gets you hanged.
Continue reading “Hang ’em High”

Trump Benchmark, Fox Rant, Refugees, Wildlife, Traffic

  • This week’s note in “Alternative Facts” comes from the Jerusalem Post where scholar, journalist, and former Knesset member Susan Hattis Roleff accuses Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of lying nearly as much as the American President. Good God. Our national leader has become the international benchmark by which citizens of other countries measure the dishonesty of their politicians.
     
  • Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post runs through this week’s new horrors emerging from the madcap world of the Trump administration.
     
  • My President famously refuses ever to let alcohol touch his lips. Has to do with family history. You wouldn’t know it from a recent episode on Fox News. M. Bouffant at Web of Evil provides the video. Mr. Trump, calling in by telephone, sounds very much like the drunken uncle you never want to invite to a family gathering. He pretty much destroys at least some of the court strategy his legal team has been delicately constructing. Quite the reckless rant.
     
  • Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger goes to documented history. The US shamefully turned away a ship of passengers fleeing for their lives from anti-Jewish death programs run by Nazis in the 1930’s. Anti-refugee bigotry is nothing new to this country.
     
  • My long time friend, the very conservative T. Paine at Saving Common Sense, writes a narrative that is truly beautiful about the wonders he has experienced in nature and remarkably alarming in the dangers to that wonderment that he witnesses.
     
  • At The Onion, a disheveled Scott Pruitt tearfully confesses that, weeks ago, he spent the last funds of the EPA. Just blew it.
     
  • Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit comes to Missouri, right next door to Bellefontaine Neighbors (pronounced in these parts – no kidding – “Belle Fountain Neighbors”) to document that, very often, traffic ticketing really has nothing to do with highway safety.
     

The Look of the Future

found online by Raymond

 
From Infidel753:

The election of Trump was, deep down, a last-ditch effort to prevent the future, motivated by a deep resistance to change and difference. Trumpanzees are full of anxiety about the growing acceptance and visibility of gays, about the declining dominance of Christianity, about the millions who find that marriage and reproduction do not suit them, about the growing numbers and confidence of non-white and racially-mixed people, about technology that makes information and communication too hard to control, about the prospect of socialist (I use the honest word) reforms that will liberate the poor from the raw struggle for survival and ultimately undermine the dominance of wealth. To people who recoil from pluralism, people who want everything to be the same as themselves and the same as it always was, the future just viscerally looks wrong — and must be stopped.

It’s not always explicitly fear of the different, it’s more often an endless stream of half-stated objections and pearl-clutching disapproval, and it isn’t the wave of the future. Race-consciousness, religious fanaticism, befuddled anxiety about gay marriage, and suspicious hostility to science and expertise just don’t go with the world of the internet and nanotechnology and stem cells. They belong to two different universes, two mutually-exclusive realities. There are reasons why the great technological innovations that drive national power and wealth happen in New York and Massachusetts and California rather than in states that keep trying to put creationism in the schools; on a broader scale, there are reasons why they happen in the US and Europe and Japan rather than in Pakistan or North Korea or Saudi Arabia.

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White Shooter, Black Hero, White Presidential Silence

found online by Raymond

 
From North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz:

The shooting at a Tennessee Waffle House and its aftermath, say everything about this Presidency:

A white shooter with an assault weapon.
(Police using restraint when apprehending said white shooter.)
People of color brutally murdered.
A black, gunless hero saving strangers.
A silent white President.

It’s all been on full display:

No calls by FoxNews to ban angry young white guys.
No white evangelical televangelists taking to social media to condemn the evils of racism and the danger of gun proliferation.
Silence from the NRA’s normally rabid mouthpieces.
Nothing about the victims of color.
Not a damn word from GOP leaders.
Barely even any cursory “thoughts and prayers” for the dead.
No Presidential praise for the black man who saved countless lives without a weapon.

(By the way , his name is James Shaw Jr, Mr Trump.)

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DL Hughley on Trump’s Unprotected Sex

found online by Raymond

 
From Frances Langum:

“I watched Stormy Daniels say the President of the United States had unprotected sex with her.
If you’re a 60-year-old man and you don’t care about gonorrhea, how can you worry about North Korea?”

Host Nicolle Wallace wondered if “That’s the most disturbing part of that story? Not getting spanked by the magazine?”

No, Nicolle. Hughley is right:

“You’re 60 years old and you’re playing craps with your sexual organs? That’s a mistake young football players make!”

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Bevin to Get Rid of Pesky Teachers by Eliminating Public Education

found online by Raymond

 
From Blue in the Bluegrass:

Step One: Strip the state economy down to bedrock and turn the treasury over to corporations.

Step Two: ???????

Step Three: Profit!

And give the charter school contracts to the same corrupt contractors taking over the state prisons. Make that school-to-prison pipeline an express train.

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