- While we debate whether the fair minded universe is more likely to defeat Trump and Co. by getting our folks to vote or by getting Trump supporters to change their minds, M. Bouffant at Web of Evil watches Trump voters as they are interviewed in a diner and makes an obvious choice.
- On the other hand, Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger has polling data and presents it well. My President is losing support from the most reliable part of his base. Perhaps M. Bouffant will want to reconsider.
- Yellow Dog at Blue in the Bluegrass is giving out Trump-Speak decoder rings.
- Remember back when President Trump was caught on television worshiping at the feet of the Russian leader? Stinque finds it remarkable, although not surprising, that the outrage faded so quickly. America’s Attention Deficit Disorder.
- Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit notes the widely accepted fact that our President is loyal to Putin, but has a different theory about why.
- Green Eagle explains how Donald Trump could have headed off the turn-around by Michael Cohen, who is now spilling the Trump-beans, and why he didn’t.
- My conservative friend T. Paine, at Saving Common Sense, suggests a shifting standard among those of us on the left. We are disturbed by Russian attempts to influence US elections, even though there is no credible evidence they changed the result. Yet we tolerate migrant workers voting in San Francisco school elections.
- driftglass beats up Glenn Greenwald, after GG slams everyone else over transparency then gets caught deleting tens of thousands of potentially embarrassing tweets. Five years ago, I suggested a different reason to despise Mr. Greenwald: one not calculated to generate much agreement from some friends.
- Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson worries, then tries to convince himself not to worry, as a conservative Milwaukee talk radio station is sold to a liberal group. The punch line – at least I thought it was humorous – comes at the very last sentence, as a possible additional reason is revealed for the angst of James.
- Professor PZ Myers considers freedom of speech, fire in a crowded theatre, and a domain provider willingly hosting racist calls to violence.
- At The Onion, a panicking Mark Zuckerberg holds press conference explicitly welcoming Armenian genocide deniers to facebook.
- Irritating music has an effect on heart rate. The Journal of Improbable Research finds research demonstrating that reducing the length of exposure to music that subjects loath does not mitigate the effect. To test the study, I listened to a Trump speech. Yeah, the research bears out.
- In The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, Bruce quotes Clarence Darrow proposing a logical reason that atheists may be kinder than those of us who believe.
- This week’s note in Trumpian “Alternative Facts” comes from the BBC noting a pointless lie about an event to which the reporter is an actual witness, goes on to the major re-editing of a transcript, then finds my President summarizing his approach with a near quote from Orwell. Actually, the transcript re-editing was blown off by the White House as a clerical error, right up until the official video which was identically altered.
- One last thing: I came across what I have always thought was one of the funniest casual conversations on Johnny Carson. It’s from long, long ago, and I’m pretty old. Your mileage may vary.
8 thoughts on “Trump at Prayer, Trump-Speak, Despising Greenwald, Radio Tales”
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Apparently, your “conservative friend T. Paine” would rather wait until there is actual evidence, evidence that he believes and not just fake news, that Russian interference in our election “changed the result”, not just attempted to change the result. It strikes me that his attitude is like not wanting to shut the barn door, let alone not even closing it a little bit, until you have conclusive evidence that the horses have left the barn and are not hiding in a dark corner somewhere.
But then it appears to me that T. Paine believes that the current election outcome is preferable to the other most likely outcome, so interference isn’t that big a deal, and we should really get back to investigating those missing Clinton emails, figuring out what really happened in Benghazi, and finding Obama’s long lost birth certificate.
That’s all it is. It’s pretty much impossible to imagine T. Paine being OK with Clinton as president if Russia had helped her instead, especially if, like Trump, she (1) lost the popular vote and (2) only won the electoral vote by virtue of razor-thin margins across 3 swing states. I also doubt that he would have any tolerance for the arguments that conservatives have used to defend all of these things (along with denying Garland consideration) if liberals used them.
Paine, being a “principled conservative” and “not a Republican,” was supposed to be a reliable ally against some of this, but he isn’t at all. The same is true of the handful of Republicans in Congress who occasionally speak out against Trump, but do nothing. It’s clear that conservatives only really care about power, so they will support just about anything that lets them get and keep it.
If atheists really are kinder than Christians, I don’t think that it has much to do with consciousness of the universal brevity of human life. That sounds more like a post-hoc justification of kindness from people who are already kind. In reality, it could just as easily lead people to care only about themselves.
I would attribute any difference in kindness instead to something much simpler: freedom from religious tribalism and dogma. If you’re raised to look down upon others for morally irrelevant characteristics or to be loyal to yet another subgroup and suspicious of all others, then you’re primed to be unkind, even if not to everyone.
Of course, many religious people are not raised that way and a religion-free upbringing hardly guarantees kindness, so it’s not that simple. Then there’s the question of how to measure and compare kindness in the first place. How many kindness points do you get for helping out in your community but supporting policies that harm gay people vs. hating no one but not helping anyone either?
Johnny Carson was wonderful. NONE of the late night “comedians”/hosts can hold a candle to him.
Now that the important stuff is out of the way, I wanted to make note of a few corrections that Mr. Deming may want to make for the sake of accuracy. It has been brought to my attention that articles I have posted on my site over the last three weeks were inaccurately reviewed on Fairandunbalanced. I know… I was equally shocked upon hearing this!
1.) In my article regarding Trump meaning what he said, I compared Burr’s President to my old high school teacher, Mr. Mueller. Burr must have only skimmed the article as he thought I was referring to John Kerry’s doppelganger Robert Mueller. It would have made for a twisted article indeed if I had made the analogy of Trump to the man that is using all of his concerted objectivity and integrity to bring his presidency down.
http://savingcommonsense.blogspot.com/2018/07/trump-he-meant-what-he-said.html
2.) My next article was regarding the Left’s outrage about Trump not being “tough on Russia” when so many Democrats have made their adoration of the previous U.S.S.R so widely known in the past. Nowhere in the article did I refer this mindset to Mr. Deming. Evidently he assumed I did with his retort. I assume there are still a few remaining Democrats that have not overly imbibed of the leftist Kool Aid to know the difference. http://savingcommonsense.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-democrats-hypocrisy-on-russia.html
3.) Finally, Mr. Deming inaccurately implied that my story on San Francisco’s giving local voting rights to illegal aliens, particularly for school board votes, was a matter of me being duped by Sean Hannity’s lies. Nope. The smug and obnoxious Hannity was not the source for my story, but rather an ABC affiliate, as I stated in my article. Mr. Deming is a busy man and must have been skimming rather than reading again.
All of these are minor things, and I certainly do not assume malice on the behalf of my friend, Mr. Deming. I simply wanted to correct that record.
I will now return you all to your regularly scheduled leftist gnashing of teeth. Cheers! 🙂
The last article assumed you had been misled by Hannity, rather than that you made up those falsehoods yourself:
“…he is understandably confused. He is an honorable man whose attention has been captured by those who are without honor.”
Burr is on a vacation trip. I’m sure he’ll appreciate you correcting that error.
That is a bit harsh.
I’ve known T. Paine via internet for enough years, sharing and receiving enough support through occasional tough times to form a sound judgment of character. I don’t much care who misinformed my friend. The reason I am sure he did not invent the misinformation himself is that I am certain he could not have. That being said, my sound opinion does not absolve him from not checking his unreliable sources before unintentionally spreading what turned out to be lies. And, no, his article was not about school board elections. He used the words “all city elections.” In that he was at least more accurate (less inaccurate?) than Mr. Hannity. He did omit much of the same truthful information.
I do appreciate my friend’s belated and vain attempt to separate me from the strained, weary accusation he issues against those like me. “Fellow travelors” is the prefered phrase, as I recall. The notion that those who are repulsed by Mr. Trump formerly adored (my friend’s word) the communist Russian empire should have been buried with Joe McCarthy. One need not have adored the USSR to see that Mr. Reagan endangered the world’s nuclear balance with Star Wars which, upon completion, would have provided the US with first strike capability, and could have, during attempted construction, provoked a preventative strike. One need not have loved communism to have supported President Obama, or to have defended Mrs. Clinton from what was an easily disproven charge, unsupported from the beginning and discredited within minutes.
I don’t back away from our long-term friendship, and I don’t absolve my friend from false arguments or unfounded attacks.
Ignoring that sort of thing is not what friends do.
TP,
“Finally, Mr. Deming inaccurately implied that my story on San Francisco’s giving local voting rights to illegal aliens, particularly for school board votes,…”
Since “we” are correcting the record, let me contribute the following. Not “particularly for school board”, ONLY for school board, and only for 4 years.
And, furthermore, it was voted for by the people. It was not mandated by the government.