How to Real Estate, Kenosha, Inspiring Kids, Insult the Troops, Trump Jaws

  • I missed this a couple months back. My president was at a roundtable talk with religious leaders about police reform. He went into a sort of trance-like ramble about weather emergencies, the pandemic, and the price of oil. When he got to healthcare he diverted into a bewildering riff on how lowering health care cost is just like real estate: thus presenting the wonderful Sarah Cooper with a great opportunity to explain how to real estate.
     

  • At The Onion, a conspiracy theorist is worried his credibility will be undermined by Trump retweeting him.
     
  • In Hackwhackers, the candidates’ visits to Kenosha are contrasted.
     
  • In Scotties Toy Box, the inspiration to young people by President Trump is compared to the inspiration provided by President Obama.
     
  • The Moderate Voice reviews the Lincoln Project television ad that threw Trump into a twitter rage. Kind of got under the ole epiderm.
     
  • driftglass re-imagines the movie Jaws and discovers that the entire plot is different when the mayor is Donald Trump.
     
  • Vixen Strangely, at Strangely Blogged, reviews my president’s remarks about those who died or were maimed or who suffered as prisoners of war in America’s armed forces. She recalls Trump hugging our national flag and his swearing a patriotic oath to protect our nation. She suggests that his is the kind of patriotism patriots should despise.
     
  • Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit reviews the denials. The Atlantic quotes my president mocking those who wear the uniform. He angrily insists he didn’t say it. It is confirmed by The New York Times. Fake news. Associated Press finds confirms the quotes in separate sources. Another denial. And now more sources confirm with the national security correspondent for Fox News? Fox News?
     
    The latest WH spin is that, by calling dead soldiers suckers, my president was only wondering, in a sort of grateful awe, how anyone could be so heroic.
     
    Strikes me as kind of a stretch.

  • Green Eagle proposes that the Atlantic story about my president sneering at troops, mocking war dead, wondering how to keep disabled veterans from joining in military parades is all the surface of a much deeper Trump truth. And that deeper truth is not about the military.
     
  • In Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson notes that Trump doesn’t like his job, hates Washington, and prefers Florida. So why is he doing so many shady things to get elected?
     
  • Only Trump can save America from what is happening in Trump’s America. Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger condenses the Trump campaign narrative to one sentence and one matching image.
     
  • Andy Borowitz reports as my president angrily blasts supporters who only vote once.
     
  • nojo is getting weary of the bad half of the endless parlor game of maddog scenarios of Trump losing in November but refusing to leave. Each scenario has been answered by a reasonable explanation of why that can’t happen. He’s really tired of all those reasoned responses about Constitutional safeguards: Trump can’t violate all those rules because, well, there are more rules against those violations. So nothing to fear.
     
  • Nan’s Notebook contains comments made at a small anti-mask “Cruise for Trump” rally. Nan is in saddened wonderment at what she hears.
     
  • Jonathan Bernstein tells us what to expect on election day. There will be many more absentee ballots than normal and much less certainty. But there is no reason to panic. I dunno. Seems like he’s given us two good reasons.
     
  • Iron Knee at Political Irony rearranges the letters in “Republican National Convention” and discovers a secret message. Look, I know it’s been endlessly repeated, but so is the book of Revelation. People still use their secret decoder rings to find hidden messages there.
     
  • Seems office holders in Georgia are at it again. tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors reports that the latest independent audit shows about 200,000 voters wrongfully removed from voting rolls for moving but not changing the addresses on their registration records. Turns out they hadn’t moved at all. tengrain advises all of us to check our registrations because – well – the GOP is everywhere.
     
  • When a Republican quotes the wit or wisdom of a one-time prominent Democrat, watch out. It may be a thoughtful conservative. So the late NYC Mayor Ed Koch once reflected after losing an election. To wit:
     
    “The people have spoken … And they must be punished.”
     
    Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson watches an attempt by fellow conservatives to recall Democratic Governor Tony Evers. He criticizes Republican silence on the effort. The GOP should vigorously oppose the recall. Why? It is hopeless in practicality and stupid politically. Most important, it is, plain and simple, real wrong. Besides, in the last election, the people have spoken. You know the rest.
     
  • You can always trust scientists, right? I mean, THEY are the real experts. So a couple of physicists put together a worst case model of COVID on a college campus and got the governor to listen when they promised it would be safe to resume in-person classes.
     
    PZ Myers explains how that exercise produced 800 unexpected cases of the virus at the Urbana-Champaign campus in Illinois.
     
    So it turns out that asking a couple of experts is not good enough. You have to ask the right kind of experts, and physicists are not epidemiologists. Don’t feel bad, fellows. If a couple of dentists got hired to build a space station, they might put real people into danger as well.
     
  • Does this really need explaining? Again? The ever patient North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz carefully spells out the difference between hating police brutality and hating the police.
     
  • Julian Sanchez joins in a Cato podcast on the recent decision by a federal court that an NSA metadata program is unconstitutional. Julian knows the issues and explains them well.
     
  • Dave Dubya observes that, with control of a few definitions, and a couple of historically tried and true smear tactics, conservatives become incontrovertable experts on anything they choose, especially racism. Incontrovertable. That means never to be questioned. Ever.
     
  • In The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, Bruce goes from the movie Mars Attacks! to the Old Testament to demonstrate that God is one vengeful, intolerant, savage character.
     
  • John Scalzi at Whatever went to see the latest Bill & Ted effort: the grown up version of the series. He thought it was terrific. He tells why with no spoilers.