Author: Raymond

 
From Neil Bamforth at MadMikesAmerica:

That is one of my many problems with religion. The bit after you die is a particular puzzle for me.

I’m not great in crowded places as a rule. I get ‘people claustrophobia’. It’s all those sweaty armpits and things.

Billions and billions of humans have died since we first got here. Billions and billions of souls in eternity, squashed together without anywhere to live. Homelessness in heaven and hell must be at epidemic proportions.

Religion makes about as much sense as standing in a public place in ‘middle America’ and announcing that God doesn’t exist and Jesus was a nutter or, to maintain balance, standing in the middle of Islamabad and declaring Mohammed was a pedophile.

Not only would you be extremely nuts to do such a thing, you would, shortly afterwards, find out whether there is an afterlife and just how crowded the place is.

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From Deborah Long at The Moderate Voice:

“Now, Here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” – Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking-Glass

Yesterday, Adam Schiff, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, finally spoke the truth: The strategy employed by Donald Trump and his Republican toadies in Congress is not “OK”. Schiff’s speech should be seen as a watershed moment in our recent political history – a statement of truth where two rivers of thought are emphatically separated. Schiff’s exceptional speech was in the tradition of Joseph Welch, chief counsel for the US Army when it was under investigation by Senator Joe McCarthy during the Senate Army-McCarthy Hearings of 1954. Welch’s famous words were: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.…. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?”

Schiff said to the president and his Republican committee members that their refusal to protect the interests of the United States for the last two years is immoral, unethical, unpatriotic, and corrupt. Finally.

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From Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged:

I don’t think allegations about Biden are exactly of a “Me too” nature–they are “me too-ish”. What he does physically regarding people isn’t sexual in nature, but it is gendered. It is more avuncularly affectionate than many people are with their natural uncles, but it isn’t nephews he’s showering with noggin smooches and careless kuniks. It’s the nieces he’s loving to pieces, and that is possibly an unconscious bias, but one that has to be recognized. We’ve discovered lately that Congress has been stupid about sexual harassment, so many years after Sen. Packwood’s scandal, and it’s been in a somewhat smoochy and gladhandy environment an older politician like Biden might have formed his ideas about good touch and not so good touch. And those ideas might be as outdated as rumaki and Jello salads. It isn’t intentionally harmful in his case–it just isn’t really good.

So is this disqualifying? Well, not exactly? It’s not so much “bad wrong” as “different culture” wrong, where people have a more clear sense of touch they don’t want and so many human resource department manuals all over the country have defined things like these interactions as being so much “nope” here in 2019.

Is it something Biden can overcome…

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From PZ Myers:

Poor man. His empire of lies is falling down around his ears. He can’t even sell his hokey ‘supplements’ (he was making $20 million a year off that nonsense!) because he’s finally been banned from all the social media sites he needed to peddle snake oil. His lies have been killing people, though, so my sympathy is non-existent.

Jones, who tells his viewers that his wild claims are based on “deep research” and high-level government sources, admitted that he actually relies on anonymous internet message boards and random emailers. Unable to justify his past conduct, an uncharacteristically subdued Jones blamed “psychosis.”

The deposition, filmed March 14 and published online last Friday, was released as part of a lawsuit filed by Scarlett Lewis, the mother of a child murdered in the Sandy Hook massacre. Lewis, one of several parents currently suing Jones, says that she has been a target of harassment as the result of Jones’ repeated claim that Sandy Hook was a “hoax” and no children died.

Jones accused grieving parents of being paid actors complicit in a far-reaching government conspiracy — and many people believed him. Throughout the deposition, Jones expressed little remorse.

Last week another Sandy Hook parent who faced harassment, Jeremy Richman, died in an apparent suicide.

How can one lone crank like Jones have so much impact on people?

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From Frances Langum:

A whistleblower comes forward: Trump overrode the security clearance process for twenty-five officials, including his own National Security Adviser. Feel safe yet?

It’s even worse than we thought. This press release from Elijah Cummings’s committee is on fire:

[Press Release]

Today, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, the Chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Reform, revealed that a whistleblower who currently works inside the White House Security Office sat for a confidential, on-the-record, day-long interview with Democratic and Republican Committee staff to relay grave concerns about the dysfunction she has witnessed over the past two years, highlight the dangers these actions present to national security, and implore the Committee to immediately conduct independent oversight of these matters.

The revelation came in a letter Cummings sent this morning to White House Counsel Pat Cipollone announcing that the Committee is moving forward with compulsory process since the White House has refused to produce a single piece of paper or a single requested witness over the many months since the Committee launched the investigation.

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From Tommy Christopher:

CNN host Brian Stelter lit into Fox News over a series of missteps — including the Fox & Friends banner that proclaimed Donald Trump had cut off aid to “3 Mexican countries” — and told his viewers “I don’t know what’s going on over there.”

On Sunday’s edition of CNN’s Reliable Sources, Stelter teased a segment by noting that “The only network that actually is apologizing for something this week is Fox News. I’ll show you what they’re apologizing for in just a moment.”

After the commercial break, Stelter noted that “If President Trump was watching Lou Dobbs the other night, he heard that foreigners may kill millions of Americans.”

He then played a clip from Fox host Lou Dobbs‘ Fox Business Network show, in which Dobbs claims that “tens of thousands, perhaps millions of Americans” stand to be murdered by immigrants. His intro was accompanied by the first of several priceless reaction shots…

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From Jonathan Bernstein:

Cooperation with the party’s mainstream works a lot better than picking fights with the leadership.

The verdict is in: Three months into her term, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez isn’t the forerunner of an emerging House Freedom Caucus of the left, no matter how many people have speculated that would be the case.

Conservatives are quite correct to dislike, or at least oppose, AOC. Her policy preferences aren’t just different from theirs; she is an honest-to-goodness leftist, which sets her apart from most mainstream liberal Democrats in Congress.

Her approach however isn’t remotely similar to the one House Freedom Caucus members took with their fellow Republicans. She treats mainstream liberals as allies with whom she will often disagree, not as the enemy.

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From Iron Knee at Political Irony:

And then proves it.

Alex Jones of Infowars is being sued by several parents of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre for spreading conspiracy theories claiming that the massacre was staged using actors. He also claimed that the children who died “never existed”.

In a deposition posted to YouTube, Jones defends himself by claiming that “a form of psychosis” brought on by the stressful nature of his job caused him to spread lies and unsubstantiated conspiracy theories.

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From Bill Formby in MadMikesAmerica:

Every great civilization has to fall at some point in time in order to realize how fortunate it once was. Most do not commit suicide quite as quickly as we have, but they all do, eventually. Rome, Greece, the Egyptians, Spain, even England and France. To some degree I guess we are on the precipice of our downfall. I mean, Trump has not totally destroyed this great experiment yet but he is about to do so. He has shown us and the world that laws do not matter if one cons enough of the populace. After all, all a tyrant, dictator, or a king has is the belief of others that he is all powerful and everything he, or she, says is true.

Donald Trump has done a great job of brainwashing at least a third of the population of the American people. Some saw an opportunity to ride his coat tails to wealth. Others have saw an opportunity to be powerful and exert their hate toward others. There is no big secret here. It has been carried out numerous times throughout the history of mankind. Many of our forefathers ran from this but it has been with us all along.

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From Aaron Blake at the Washington Post:

On multiple occasions, both Trump and Pompeo have opted to blame the regime rather than Kim personally. And on Wednesday, Pompeo got testy about it.

When the president you serve speaks glowingly about strongmen, it makes your job as his chief diplomat more difficult. Yes, sometimes you have to deal with such leaders, but you also need to avoid legitimizing them. You may be on the verge of cutting a deal, but does that mean you give the autocrat a pass on humanitarian abuses — even ones directly involving the United States?

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been through this already with Jamal Khashoggi. Now he’s going through it with Otto Warmbier.

And on Wednesday, he got testy over it.

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