Seldom Balanced – Usually Fair
From Yellow Dog at Blue in the Bluegrass:
OK, who are you and what have you done with the Kentucky Republican Party?
The Republican Party of Kentucky has asked a state House candidate to drop out of the race after he posted several photos on Facebook depicting President Barack Obama and the first lady as monkeys.
From Frances Langum Crooks and Liars:
They were promised that Killary and that Kenyan in the White House would be de$$troyeed at 3am sharp! Benghazi! 9/11! Baby parts!
Apparently it was all a marketing test by the Ecuadorian Embassy refugee Julian Assange, to see just how many rubes with the word “deplorable” in their Twitter handle were willing to drink caffeine after dinner for the purpose of making libruls mad.
From Batocchio at Vagabond Scholar:
Banned Books Week is coming to a close. My archives have more extensive posts on the subject, but the American Library Association (ALA) has a neat piece based on a 2012 Library of Congress exhibit. It’s a list titled Banned Books That Shaped America.
From Tommy Christopher at the Daily Banter:
What makes this move by Jake Tapper so great isn’t that this talking point is so stupid, even though it is, or that his crushing of it was so masterful, because it was. It’s that Trump flack Sarah Huckabee Sanders shopped this same bit of idiocy all day on Friday, and Jake was the ONLY ONE who pointed out that she was denouncing Hillary Clinton for calling racists deplorable:
From libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara at Principled Perspectives:
Drugmaker Mylan is the latest pharmaceutical company to come under fire for it pricing policies. Mylan bought rights to the EpiPen in 2007. EpiPen is an epinephrine-filled auto injector that stops allergic reactions before the reaction can turn deadly. Since then, Mylan raised the price of EpiPen by some 400-500%.
While not mentioning Mylan by name, Rutgers University “senior policy fellow” Richard F. Keevey accused Mylan of “profiteering.” In a New Jersey Star-Ledger September 2016 guest column, A prescription to help reduce drug prices, Keevey noted “Recent actions by certain drug companies” which includes “significantly increas[ing] prices before [patent] expiration.” He then proposed a series of steps to restrict prices, including price controls and bans on direct-to-consumer advertising.
As I read this, I think “No good deed goes unpunished.” Note the focus only on price, with no credit for the life-saving benefits Mylan provides.
From driftglass:
There’s big money in liquidating America.
And CNN president Jeff Zucker is all about the money.
So instead of talking about the parade of grifters, dementors, creepy doll-eyed “Trump surrogate” pod people and “journalists” who are awakening from a 20 year coma to discover that — zOMG! — the Party of Lincoln has been taken over by grifters, dementors and creepy doll-eyed pod people, let us rather thank Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post for writing this story:
Jeff Zucker’s singular role in promoting Donald Trump’s rise
It is nothing which we dirty hippies have not known for a long, long time, but what a frosty glass of iced tea in Hell it is to have your deductions validated by an honest-to-Mike shoe-leather, newspaper reporting:
From Michael John Scott at MadMikesAmerica:
Shades of The Revenant: A Montana man was jumped on and bitten repeatedly by a charging grizzly bear on Saturday morning and Todd Orr survived by playing dead.
The injured, bleeding man began the three-mile trek back to his vehicle—and was attacked again within 10 minutes by the same bear.
From Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger:
Noam Chomsky is one of my heroes. I believe he is the leading voice in the United States for left-wing ideology. One might think that he would urge his followers to vote for the Green Party in the presidential election (since that is the farthest left of any of the political parties on enough ballots to have a theoretical chance of getting 270 electoral votes), but that is not what he’s saying. He thinks it would be a mistake for American leftists to vote for a third party this year — and he lists 8 reasons why that is true:
1) Voting should not be viewed as a form of personal self-expression or moral judgement directed in retaliation towards major party candidates who fail to reflect our values, or of a corrupt system designed to limit choices to those acceptable to corporate elites.
2) The exclusive consequence of the act of voting in 2016 will be (if in a contested “swing state”) to marginally increase or decrease the chance of one of the major party candidates winning.
From PZ Myers at Pharyngula:
What is this, Gender Pronoun Day?
Jordan Peterson, a professor at the University of Toronto, is railing against “political correctness”, generally a good sign that we’re dealing with a right-wing wackaloon, depending on what has gotten them wound up. In this case, it’s safe to say he’s an outraged wingnut, because this is what has got him upset:
Gender identity is defined by the Ontario Human Rights Commission as “each person’s internal and individual experience of gender. It is their sense of being a woman, a man, both, neither, or anywhere along the gender spectrum.” The commission defines gender expression as “how a person publicly presents their gender,” which can include behaviour and outward appearance such as dress, hair, make-up, body language and voice, as well as a person’s name and the pronouns they use.
Yes? Seems like plain old ordinary common sense to me — gender is complicated and messy, and a matter of personal experience as well as biology. All I should care about is how a person presents themselves, and I should respect that.
But no, not to Jordan Peterson! This is unadulterated crazy talk.
From The Intersection of Madness and Reality:
I currently live in North Carolina. By now, I’m certain plenty of people have heard of the latest state-sanctioned execution of another person of color; this time, a disabled Black man by the name of Keith Lamont Scott. We’ve been having protests here in response, and like usual, our rasclot of a governor McCrory is pretending he’s concerned about our state’s well-being while simultaneously throwing a bone to the corrupt cops as though they’re somehow the victims in this unending struggle. Such couldn’t be further from the truth when one considers the lengths he’s gone to absolve them from any accountability, which includes a law that will go into effect on the first of October, allowing them to release any footage they obtain (including dash and body cam recordings) at their own discretion, or not at all.