100, Incompetence, US Survival, What ISIS Hopes, Santuary

  • This Week In Trumpian ‘Alternative Facts’, the Houston Chronicle explores the first 100 days, with a special focus on my President’s strained relationship with the truth.
     
  • Every two or three months, MyCue23 comes out of wherever he hibernates and produces a wonderful bit of wisdom at Random Thoughts. The seasons change and MyCue23 emerges to fascinate. This time, he explains why the first 100 days of our new national order are an artifice, why 100 is not a magic number, and how Donald Trump could become a great President but won’t.
     
  • Stinque, in a burst of optimism, believes the country may survive anyway. Hope springs from a combination of Trump incompetence and indolence.
     
  • There is a flip side to that logic. Jon Perr at PERRspectives is happy that ISIS seems to be going down for the count, getting tossed out of one geographic area after another, losing sources of finance, faced with a shrinking number of combatants as followers die and die and die, and leadership in flight, abandoning followers to their fate. Perr notes the only refuge that’s left: the hope offered by clumsy Trump policy and counter-productive presidential bluster.
     
  • Yay-y-y-y-y! Margaret and Helen, “Best Friends for Sixty Years and Counting,” are finally back. Helen sees the election of our President as a signal that Oh Shit. The rest of the country just became Texas. She ponders a nation in which joking about assaulting women is no longer disqualifying.
     
  • Let’s get this straight. Part of what sanctuary cities want is to give even undocumented immigrants protection from crime. That means victims can call police without being turned over to immigration enforcement, so crimes get reported and solved.
     
    The Trump administration doesn’t buy it. Anyone with whom police come in contact had better be here legally. Period. Otherwise my President wants heavy penalties against those cities.
     
    Hard nosed, heartless, and kind of dumb. The very flower of contemporary conservative thought, excluding those conservatives who are my friends, or whom I know and kind of like, or whom I admire at a distance. Or T. Paine who is in a class by himself: qualifies as a conservative, one I like, one I admire, and who is also a long time friend. But other than those … you know.
     
    The Trump administration has established a propaganda agency. Victims can report crime committed by any immigrant here illegally, so President Trump can publicize the atrocities and put fear and loathing into the hearts of us vulnerable voters. All other crimes will go through routine channels, without special publicity. Thus all immigrants will get tarred for the crimes of any.
     
    Tommy Christopher finds a Trump wrinkle. The new web site guarantees that victims may call without fear. If callers are not in the country legally, they will not be investigated and deported.
     
    My President has established a sanctuary web site.
     
  • Newsweek asks if the more famous new First Daughter is actually the new Hillary Clinton. Frances Langum asks a few colleagues to be sure, and answers Hell NO! Seems like an emphatic certainty.
     
  • The Big Empty joins sensible folks in banging heads on hard, hard wooden tables as otherwise sensible Senator Elizabeth Warren manages to become “troubled” by the very idea of President Obama making a lot of money.
     
  • Yellow Dog at Blue in the Bluegrass doesn’t much like the idea of big tent ideological openness in the Democratic party. Democrats should share core principles. All core principles. And the list of those principles is long, very long.
     
  • The Moderate Voice points to a couple of points of light for Democrats. Republican held congressional districts in Virginia and Illinois may go Democratic. Main sign, at the moment, is the ease with which Democratic candidates are recruited. Okay, so it’s not what you’d call definitive, but we take hope where we find it, right?
     
  • Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara at Principled Perspectives is for a woman’s right to an abortion but against a woman’s right to abortion services. Well, he has read everything put out by the late Ayn Rand.
     
  • Infidel753 finds a great video from a popular cable drama that dovetails eloquently with his own disdain for lazy shortcuts in logic. A fictional news anchor blasts our most beloved patriotic cliches. Highly entertaining.
     
  • Vincent at A Wayfarer’s Notes has been undergoing a difficult medical odyssey. I have to wonder if that informs his confrontations with the Bible, visiting evangelicals, and personal spirituality.
     
  • A close friend has issues with organized Christianity. She sees religion in general, and churches in particular, as a scam whose purpose is to impose control over those who can be manipulated.
     
    North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz sees the extension of that manipulation to the internet, with an additional purpose: misogyny. Conservatives are telling unauthorized Christians that, in the eyes of God, they have no right to write.

Lets not forget. My President has proclaimed tomorrow as “Loyalty Day.”

9 thoughts on “100, Incompetence, US Survival, What ISIS Hopes, Santuary”

  1. Re: Michael LaFerrara

    Mental gymnastics. Women have the right to an abortion. Legislation making it difficult to acquire those legal services goes against the spirit of the ruling. It’s the same thing when Governments enforce Blue Laws. Alcohol is legal, but some places the government keeps you from acquiring it on Sundays. Legislation that keeps those services out of a community or closes down a facility that provided those services are just simply anti-capitalist. For a staunch advocate of capitalism, Mr. LaFerrara is going out of his way to put blinders on to support the government interfering in the market place.

    There is a legal need in the community. Someone comes in to provide those legal services to fill that need. Money is exchanged for those services. That need is now legally satisfied. The most basic of Supply and Demand.

    He also seems to have a fundamental misunderstanding of how money raised through taxes is actually used. A price to pay for being part of a society is that some of the money that gets raised through taxes goes to things that other members of society may benefit from bt not you. We can’t possibly benefit personally from every government expenditure. I’m not in the military, so I can’t get VA Loans or use TriCare health insurance. I’m not old enough to use Medicare. When my child has graduated from public school, I’m not going to demand lower taxes so I don’t have to pay for other kids going to school. It is an understood fact that we’re paying into the coffers to pay for services others may benefit from. Also if you’re not an actual member of the legislature, you don’t get a firm say on where that money gets spent. Run for office, Mr. LaFerrara. Turn that trolling internet newspaper comments sections into actual policy.

    Tax money that goes to helping women with access to medical care is not ‘denying to others the right to choose how to spend their own money.’ That’s not how this works. That’s not how it has ever worked.

  2. On the Yellow Dog post: “Democrats should share core principles. All core principles. And the list of those principles is long, very long.”

    I find almost nothing on his list to disagree with, though (in fact, the only thing is that I don’t rule out the death penalty in a few cases). In particular, in the context of the current kerfluffle, it needs to be affirmed that defending the right to abortion is a core value, a litmus test, whatever you want to call it. Trying to set that issue as lower in importance than economic issues is categorically wrong and must be forcefully rejected.

    And Yellow Dog’s list is only 17 items. That’s not really “long, very long”.

  3. Thank you Burr,

    What does this post mean to you?
    How does it impact you?
    What do you believe it should mean to the rest of us?

        1. Burr,

          You should probably get someone over at Breitbart to read what you’ve written and have them filter and reframe it for Majormajor’s benefit.

  4. Reading comprehension is such a “failed liberal notion”. Who needs literacy in the age of Trump?

    If only there were some far Right media to comfort the whiny ones in need of attention, and tell them what to think…

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