- News Corpse provides thoughtful insight contrasting how we saw the world, and how the world saw us, before and after 9/11/2001, then applies that to this season’s decisions.
- Bob Woodward documents each moment as Trump says troops who were killed are losers and those who weren’t are suckers. Woodward has the recordings. Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit documents that Trump cares even less about the heroes who risked everything responding to the 9/11 attacks 19 years ago. She has the receipts.
I’m old so I get confused. Does he think of those first responders as losers or suckers?
- In Scotties Toy Box, my president didn’t tell us that the pandemic was real and that it was dangerous, only because he didn’t want to cause a panic. Scottie, for some reason, seems a bit skeptical. Damn liberal Trump Derangement, no doubt.
- Frances Langum watches Fox News so you and I don’t have to go into therapy. This week the line is: There is nothing wrong with Trump trying to keep the nation from pandemic panic, just like in 9/11/2001, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani kept everyone calm.
So a very unpanicked Frances calmly explains a few minor differences. Like Rudy held no press conferences insisting the attack never happened, and was just a hoax. Fox News. Lord, save us from the heathens.
- The Onion snaps the photo as my president finds a novel way to ensure that nobody in California panics as they are engulfed by flames.
- At jobsanger, we learn that, in talking about dead, wounded, and healthy troops, my president didn’t mean what we think he meant.
- Ant Farmer’s Almanac lists what books we’ll want to be reading after November 3, depending on who wins.
- North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz explains why candidate Trump needs to appeal to white fear.
- In MadMikesAmerica, Bill Formby argues, compellingly, that Donald Trump will go down, not so much as a failed President, but rather as the successful leader of a bizarre cult.
- Damn, I’m old. I can still remember a time long, long ago when law enforcement authorities prosecuted accused rapists, rather than defended them.
Andy Borowitz notes that Attorney General William Barr will intercede in court, and defend Donald Trump in a private lawsuit by E. Jean Carroll, who has accused Trump of rape.
Borowitz reports the Department of Justice has also agreed to pick up Trump’s dirty laundry.
- U.S. intelligence officials are warning that Russia is again attempting to revive discredited accusations against Joe Biden that briefly bounced back last year to entangle Donald Trump.
In case you are curious about what those discredited accusations might be, you can go to RT, the Russian broadcast center, controlled by Putin through his appointees.
OR you can avoid having to wait through hours of RT video propaganda. Simply read Unabashedly American, where my conservative friend Darrell Michaels repeats one of the Russian smears word for word as if it’s true. At the heart is a brief transcript of a portion of a public interview by Biden in front of a live audience. He had been sent by the American government, at the request of our allies, to explain to Ukraine officials that, unless they got active in reopening investigations into ongoing corruption, international support would vanish. RT has been hawking a chopped version of this as evidence that Biden was actually trying stop investigations.
Sadly, my friend falls for it. Hard.
- Some folks REALLY don’t trust recovering Republicans. This is epic. Take your time reading it. driftglass finds a book from a century and a half ago, meets a series of Never-Trumpers and associated liberals, and figures out that time did not begin in 2016. Entertaining, but it should have started with Call me Ishmael.
Favorite sentence: Honestly I’d table-tapped harder than that when teaching my niece how to signal for another card in blackjack. I enjoyed it.
- My president is all about voter fraud. Democrats might try to win by voting twice. Republicans would refuse if you told them to vote twice. So he. tells. them. to. vote. twice.
Actual election fraud takes the form mostly of backroom manipulation of voting totals, and voter suppression techniques to make casting a ballot just inconvenient or scary enough to discourage legitimate voters from throwing the rascals out.
Jonathan Bernstein takes a close look at fraud by individual voters, examines the evidence, listens to experts, and considers detailed studies. Turns out the chances of voter fraud are about the same as being struck by lightning twice in a day then killed by a polar bear in London. Okay, okay, those are my words, not his. Election fraud does occur. Voter fraud is extremely rare.
- I love a good rant: an intelligent, creative, venting rant without the inhibition sometimes forced upon a writer by mercy. That’s why I read Max’s Dad, who sometimes turns the rant into a ruthless art form. This time he’s semi-serious, as he examines a proposal by Ben Sasse to clean up the Senate. Mostly it’s how to insulate Senators from re-election worries. Oh yeah, that’ll do it.
OH! He also notes the actual reason the Senate exists at all. It isn’t what my generation was taught in class.
- PZ Myers has some fun with off-the-wall pontifications about antifa and Black Lives Matter from two experts on both:
Pat Robertson and Michele Bachmann.
It strikes me as a little unfair to take the excessive rhetoric from two of the most extraordinarily excessive rhetoricians and treat them as representative of … well … anything.
So I get a little saddened by my long-time conservative friend Darrell, who uses the same tactic against BLM. I get downright depressed when I read Pat Robertson’s buffoonery as exhibited by Professor Myers for derision and amusement and realize that some of it is nearly identical to what my friend regards as proven fact in comments made here.upend the capitalist structure
destroy America
anti-family
anti-capitalist MarxistTo borrow from Adlai Stevenson in 1952 (I think):
I’m too old to cry, and it hurts too much to laugh.
Okay, I exaggerate. I’m allowed. I can laugh.
- Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson writes approvingly about a state Supreme Court decision putting a temporary stay on health authority closures of school classrooms because of the pandemic. The heart of the case has to do with the technical wording of statutory authority. But, in addition, the court points out that kids are less likely to catch COVID and die from it. Although not mentioned by James, the court also reasoned that parents should be trusted to make that decision because they care just as much as anyone about their own kids. I looked up that part.
I dunno. School attendance is usually compulsory. Perhaps that is not true in Wisconsin?
Kids are considered carriers of the deadly virus, putting at risk everyone with whom they or their parents come into contact.
I might be willing to trust my health to James’ judgment. My own neighbors seem like good folk and their kids are well cared for. I might trust them as well.
I don’t want to trust everyone.
- Infidel753 sees one after-pandemic effect as a probable decline of cities. Or their necessary reinvention in order to exist. Well considered, as always.
- The sky don’t lie. M. Bouffant at Web of Evil often wanders about the city streets surrounding his California residence taking interesting photos. This week, as wildfires obscure pretty much everything, he takes a few startling shots of the sun. That’s the sun?
- In The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, atheist Bruce is implored by a Christian correspondent to avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater. His response cracks me up. I wrote in to say so.
- The Journal of Improbable Research has big news for those deranged folks who want to run faster. Exercise – gah! This technique involves a a new sort of device researchers at Vanderbilt University call a variable stiffness spring. Has to do with using kinetic energy before hitting the ground… or … something. The headline references putting a spring in one’s step. After groaning, be thankful they didn’t discuss walking on air, or hitting the ground running. You can substitute your own variably stiff pun.