Author: Raymond

 
From Dave Dubya:

What’s the message here? I really didn’t want to click CNN’s link worded, “Voter on Ocasio-Cortez: She’s ridiculous”.

Hmm, I think I see where this is going. I mean, what could possibly give me the notion that corporate media has a corporate bias?

Cynicism and curiosity got the best of me, and I clicked. It was a three minute segment on Erin Burnett’s program.

At the link, CNN posted the headline saying, “Moderate voters Skeptical of Ocasio-Cortez”.

OK, we’ve transitioned from just “voter” to “moderate voters” in a rural area of Pennsylvania that Trump won.

Imagine my shock.

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From nojo at Stinque:

• The dog ate it.
   
• The shark ate the dog that ate it.
   
• Zombie John McCain ate it.

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The Special Counsel’s investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. As the report states: “[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

– Page 2, Attorney General re: The Special Counsel’s Report,     March 24, 2019

The Special Counsel therefore did not draw a conclusion — one way or the other — as to whether the examined conduct constituted obstruction. Instead, for each of the relevant actions investigated, the report sets out evidence on both sides of the question and leaves unresolved what the Special Counsel views as “difficult issues” of law and fact concerning whether the President’s actions and intent could be viewed as obstruction. The Special Counsel states that “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

– Page 3, Attorney General re: The Special Counsel’s Report,     March 24, 2019

 
From Green Eagle:

Today’s example- nothing but another routine action by our President:

“The United States says it was one of three countries to vote against a U.N. resolution condemning the glorification of Nazism…”

And why would that be?

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From Infidel753:

The Trumpanzees are angry people. Depending on the individual, they’re angry about blacks and women who no longer “know their place”; at education and expertise, which they themselves do not have; at social changes like secularism and the growing acceptance of gay equality; at any manifestation of foreign culture or language or ideas, which remind them that the world out there is much bigger and more complicated than they can mentally process; at technological change which renders old ways of making a living irrelevant while the internet turns younger people away from old prejudices and certainties. Despite the power held by Trump and other Republicans in their name, they feel put-upon and disrespected. And because so many of them have guns, their anger often stirs fear.

Indeed, fantasies of some future explosion of violence in which they will emerge triumphant are very common on wingnut blogs and discussion sites. From decades-old dreams of a “day of the rope” when enemies (such as Jews, government officials, and “race-mixers”) would be hanged en masse, to present-day rumblings of a second civil war which their overwhelming superiority in guns would turn into an easy slaughter of “libtards” and other broad categories of people they loathe, they picture themselves as the massively stronger side of America’s national divide, awaiting only one more provocation to burst their restraints and annihilate us in a hailstorm of cleansing ammo. Such fantasies are actively encouraged by the worst of the Republican leadership, including you-know-who.

Don’t be fooled. And don’t be scared.

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From Elizabeth Bear at Whatever:

John Scalzi: Sometimes you think a book is going to go one way, and then it goes another, and that turns out — perfectly fine, actually! Elizabeth Bear had a bit of that experience with her new novel Ancestral Night. Here she is to explain the zigs and zags.

Ancestral Night had a hard time getting born.

It’s not the book’s fault. It’s possibly the author’s fault—or possibly the fault lies in the stars. The world kept changing radically on me while I was writing it, you see—personally, politically, and profoundly. And as I and everything around me underwent those changes, the book wound up changing too.

I had originally envisioned something much more along the lines of an epic space opera with multiple points of view and a lot of focus on the politics. The politics were the big idea around which the world was built, after all. The idea of a massive, multi-species, basically benevolent but imperfect post-scarcity bureaucracy devoted to maintaining peace and the well-being of its citizens, however imperfect it could sometimes be in implementation, was appealing in 2014. I feel like it’s even more appealing now, frankly: it would be nice to believe in functional governments again.

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From Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger:

Yes, there is a pattern. White nationalists, white supremacists, KKK members, and other racists and bigots love Donald Trump. They love him because he won’t criticize them.

Why? There are a couple of reasons. First, he couldn’t afford to do that. His approval numbers have been upside-down since he was sworn into office. He can’t afford to anger any of his base — and a large portion of his base are the racists.

But perhaps the most important reason he won’t criticize them is because he is a racist and white nationalist himself. He has a long history of this. It started back in the 1970’s, when the federal government admonished him repeatedly for refusing to rent to Blacks. And it has continued to this day as he tried to ban muslims from entering this country, and wants to build a wall to keep Hispanics from entering. His only reliable policy is his racism and xenophobia.

And he’s not going to change.

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From PZ Myers:

A teenaged boy — I’d say he even looked “angelic” — slapped the back of the despicable Fraser Anning’s rotten head with an egg. He was a brave young man. Not only did he give Anning a small taste of what he deserves, but he stood his ground as the Australian senator punched him twice, and as his crack team of thugs wrestled the unresisting assailant to the ground and put him in a chokehold. You never know, he might have a second egg somewhere, or a high capacity egg magazine, or an assault egg. You can’t be too careful.

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From The Borowitz Report:

Betsy DeVos Suggests That Bribing Colleges Helps Students Learn Math

The Secretary of Education suggested that, rather than keeping children in the dark about the bribes that enable their college acceptances, “Parents should sit around the kitchen table with their kids and work on some fun math problems together.”

“Let’s say it’ll cost Amber seventy-five thousand dollars to get into Stanford, and it’ll cost her twin brother Dylan seventy-five thousand to get into Georgetown,” she said. “How much money total will their parents have to wire?”

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