- Frances Langum examines the Senator’s options as she watches Lindsey Graham wriggle around his blind support of all things Trump. Options? Seems there are none.
- So the evidence grows daily that Putin really did put a death bounty on the heads of American troops. My president insists it’s all a hoax, but more details come out to substantiate the kill payments. In Hackwhackers yet another detail: a key contact is identified, an Afghan middleman who helped make sure the right bounties were delivered after killings were verified.
- Cato’s Julian Sanchez observes the Trump-Putin-Bounty scandal and asks an obvious question. If Trump didn’t know about reports that Russians had put a bounty on the lives of American soldiers, and that’s why he did nothing about it, why has he done nothing since the rest of us began reading about it?
- In Scotties Toy Box, the third cartoon down makes the same point. The other graphics are worth extending the visit.
- In Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson detects a pattern. Trump apologists are saying the president was not aware of the Russian bounty for the killing of each US soldier and was not aware earlier of the corona virus. Trump doesn’t like to read, so it won’t matter what’s found in the presidential daily briefings. Especial!y since…
…everything that went wrong was all because of inadequate briefings by a negligent CIA analyst. The analyst downplayed the pandemic in January. Then, in February, she neglected to mention the Russian bounty at all. So my president had no responsibility for anything, right?
- Andy Borowitz summarizes the scattered confetti of desperate excuses put out by Trump defenders for my president’s ignorance: Trump did not read the bounty briefs because he was busy not reading the coronavirus briefs.
- Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara makes the controversial claim that all that stay-at-home lock-down stuff was unnecessary. Instead, an aggressive system of contact-tracing would have worked. He’s right of course, had it been done soon enough, combined with aggressive testing and selective isolation of the infected. Too bad my president did not consider any of that or anything else when it could have counted.
- Nan’s Notebook gathers accounts from readers of the inconveniences, travails, and other stories about the hardships of the pandemic.
- This just isn’t right. Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson becomes angry when a local business is turned down for coronavirus related government help explicitly because the owners were spotted at an anti-lockdown rally. Explicitly is meant literally.
- This is worth a play:
- News Corpse is in awe at the comically inept Trump election campaign.
- More and better gimmicks, clever gambits, and creative insults won’t work. Jonathan Bernstein comes up with the one secret way, the one Trump and his staff have never considered, that would fix his presidential campaign.
- JoAnn Williams at Biased Unbalanced and Politically Incorrect suggests that a great hidden issue in Texas this November, after a summer of failing air conditioning and lack of internet access, will be years of legislative neglect of the Texas power grid.
- nojo reviews predictions from last fall, selecting the darkest, most dystopian, and compares them to what has happened so far this year. They turned out to be adorable in their naive optimism.
- A sort of on-our-side conspiracy theory called The Storm has been floating around right wing fringes for while. It involves a counter-coup of sorts long planned by Trump, involving arrests and executions. Green Eagle visits sites and compiles the targets: Trump political enemies, political critics, those not sufficiently loyal, pundits, and notables.
Joyful word on conspiracy sites is the targets have all been arrested, many executed. Romney, Obama, both Clintons, John McCain (you thought he had merely died?), Britney Spears, all of them. The list is impressive. An interesting backup story is also published to account for those on the list who were jailed or executed, but can still be seen walking around free.
- Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged acknowledges that we don’t like to mimic right wing conspiracy theorists, seeing strange plots behind numerical coincidences. But there are too many instances of the same 4 numbers as well as symbols that have an eerie resemblance to historical artifacts.
- Ever try to post on the internet and get flummoxed by obscure methodology that some designer assumed everyone would understand? Ever wish you could rant about it with clarity? Infidel753 shows us how, after unfortunate experiences with the new improved Blogger dashboard. Entertaining for any of us who have encountered New-Coke software. The most important part of software is the user.
– Podcasts –