Trump Calf, COVID, Biden, Tucker, Rush, QAnon, GOP Violence, Texas Cold, Pain

  • Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged argues that the Golden Calf figure of Donald Trump, largely sponsored by a Christian group, was not exactly an idol dedicated to a perceived god. Conservatives see Trump more as a mascot.
     
    I dunno. I doubt the theory holds up. But she makes a brief, cogent, and entertaining argument.
     
    I confess, my first thought was about the collective conservative abandonment of yet another commandment, that second little bullet point on the tablets carried from the mountain by Moses. I have had similar thoughts before.
     
  • Dave Dubya offers a well targeted character analysis of a former president and submits for our consideration a warning.
     
  • In Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson considers how we got to half a million American fatalities and a crippled economy and reviews current efforts by Republican legislators to sabotage COVID relief efforts.
     
  • We see so much death and wish we had had better policies. North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz suggests one reason for hope: a President who understands tragic loss.
     
  • John Scalzi at Whatever takes a quick peek at the first month of the Biden administration. In the Capitol Building, we have the usual knife fight. At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, we have a largely quiet, almost unnoticed, national repair worker laboring to fix four years of damage and neglect.
     
  • CalicoJack in The Psy of Life explains current national politics, with Biden, Trump, Cruz, and more, this way: we are in the middle of one of the most fascinating natural experiments in modern American history.
     
  • News Corpse watches Tucker Carlson insist QAnon does not exist because he can’t find their website, and helps out with links to those who manage to quote or defend the not-so-nonexistant movement, including Tucker himself.
     
    A philosophical question occurs to me. Can a fish find evidence of water?

  • Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson covers a local county branch of the Republican party as they consider, then reject a call to renounce political violence. James then warns about and mourns about the sad decline of what once constructively drove the state GOP.
     
  • This has been happening a few hundred times around the country. It’s a small percentage, but the FBI is still at work. M. Bouffant at Web of Evil is a bit gleeful as one of the would-be-assassin Capitol Trump rioters wears a company jacket to the insurrection, then returns home to an unpleased employer, loses his job, and gets arrested. Bad day at Black Rock.
     
  • In another episode of Tales from the Coup, tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors brings us a Cap insurrection love story gone bad. When you’re trying to assassinate federal officials, don’t call in the middle of the violence to insult your ex.
     
  • Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara wants us to disregard an editorial contrasting Texas-in-the-dark with safeguards protecting New Jersey, because the author openly believes in human-caused climate change as opposed to libertarian type denial.
     
  • Tommy Christopher covers those progressives who want Vice President Harris to go into ethics territory that even ex-Vice President Mike Pence avoided. Pence would not try to nullify Senate rules on counting electoral votes that went to Biden. Harris will not try to nullify Senate rules on raising the minimum wage.
     
    The Senate could overrule the Senate parliamentarian, but won’t. The minimum wage has nothing to do with revenue and is therefore not eligible for passage by a simple filibuster-proof majority rule, known to policy wonks as reconciliation.
     
    There is a backup plan. Make the minimum wage a separate bill and make it eligible for reconciliation. How (I hear you ask)? Minimum wage involves revenue if a bill puts an extra tax on large corporations that don’t pay a minimum wage.
     
    You don’t have to violate rules if you change the rules. So abolish the filibuster.
     
    You don’t have to violate rules if you make constructive policy fit the rules. So pass the minimum wage as a revenue bill.
     
  • At The Onion, the Republican party goes to disenfranchised communities with a new plan: Ballotless voting. Vote, but not in a form that will count.
     
  • Name one country where a 70% tax rate worked. Ever. A noted conservative demands an answer. Scottie, in Scotties Toy Box, thinks of an example with which most of us will be familiar, then moves on to results of conservative policy. Texas, anyone?
     
  • driftglass is rendered mute by the explicit cynicism in career advice offered by David Brooks.
     
  • nojo pauses the celebration at the death of Rush to suggest the unfairness of attacking someone who can no longer reply, then concludes with an intelligent version of aw what the hell!
     
  • Almost, not quite, 2 months in, Frances Langum has an early front-runner for worst person in 2021.
     
  • In The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, Bruce suffers from a continuously painful medical condition. He endures thoughtless comments even from well-wishers. We do try to be wise. But we sometimes say the wrong thing. We must still make the attempt.
     
  • In the everlasting debate between philosophy and science, Professor PZ Myers becomes a solid admirer of MC Hammer.
     
  • So can wrapping influence how a product is perceived? Answer seems obvious. The Journal of Improbable Research finds a study that goes a little deeper. How users appreciate a purchased product may be shaped by how hard they work to unbox it.

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