FairAndUNbalanced.com

 

Moonlight Breakfast is a band I really wanted to like.

The have a great story. They’re a Romanian band who met in Bucharest in 2011 and had five rehearsals before a huge concert at a popular resort. They’re hard to classify, which is one reason I’d like to like them. Are they jazz? Soul? Electro? Alternative pop? Something else?

My Baby was about being hurt and taking on the power to move on. I tried to like it. Really.

A couple of other songs, and I gave up.

Then I stumbled across this. It’s a nothing song about a young woman wanting to drive her boyfriend to where they can be alone. The words don’t really matter. The casual, effortless music is it’s own point.

Now I can like them.

For real.

Here are some words.

• nojo expresses the frustration of patriots, and does it more eloquently than anyone else, at the numbingly repetitive nature of Trump scandals and the lazy collaboration of the press.
   
• News Corpse reports as the current White House occupant heaps furious heaps of fury on Fox News for allowing some personalities to openly criticize him.
   
• Pretty much every US adult with even the dimmest awareness knows our President betrayed a vulnerable ally made up of fierce fighters who risked everything to help the US destroy a common enemy. Infidel753 reviews what happened with more knowledge and insight than ordinary mortals, and predicts with startling clarity the long term impact on our nation.
   
• Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post has never liked my president. But he is especially angry as Mr. Trump leaps from election fraud and caging children all the way to abetting genocide.
   
• Michael John Scott of MadMikesAmerica goes around the world and through the ideological spectrum for reactions to President Trump’s nonsensical defense of his abandonment of our Kurdish allies to the tender mercies of Turkey: that Kurds were not part of the Normandy invasion.
   
• At The Moderate Voice James Gelvin points to an underreported aspect to the developing genocide enabled by Trump: a remarkable democratic experiment by the Kurds.
   
• tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors relates the latest adventures of Senator Graham, angry as all hell about Trump’s betrayal of the Kurds to Turkey’s aggression … until we find out about his true feelings as expressed to someone he thought was an official in Turkey during a prank phone call. Interesting that the call was arranged by Russians with ties to Putin’s spy network.
   
• Scotties Toy Box tells us which refugees might be able somehow to make it over Trump’s wall, if it actually gets built.
   
• Iron Knee at Political Irony explains the weirdness of my President by channeling Rod Serling.
   
• At The Onion, Donald Trump has a plan to flee from government oppression.
   
• Tommy Christopher of Mediaite interviews Dan Abrams of … well … Mediaite to recount how two associates of Rudy Giuliani have been arrested after lunching with him. The Mediaite associates speculate on how he must be feeling right now.
   
• Green Eagle considers how Rudy’s buddies were apprehended at the airport, trying to leave the country before they could be arrested, and asks the most obvious question that would immediately occur to a skeptical mind.
   
• Jonathan Bernstein looks at history and current polling and suggests that the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination is not a two person race.
   
• Frances Langum has a cool story to tell. The Federal Election Commission chair can’t do much of anything because Trump won’t appoint new members so a quorum is a mathmatical impossibility. She sometimes goes semi-public, refusing to comment on specific cases but quoting applicable law. This ticks off a Congressman who sends a threatening letter. What she does next is perfect.
   
• Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson once explained his everlasting hostility toward President Trump. Now he never seems to miss an opportunity to prove himself wrong, even portraying a Republican Senator’s awkward refusal to answer a simple question about my President as heroically challenging the narrative. But sometimes integrity parallels contemporary conservativism: as when James blasts the NBA for surrendering free speech to Communist China.
   
• I sometimes hear from my brothers and sisters in Christ, in one form or another, some version of Pascal’s Wager. It has always struck me as fundamentally dishonest to attempt to gin up something that might pass for belief, not because you genuinely think it is true, but out of fear just in case. In a particularly vicious form of this rhetoric, Bruce Gerencser finds himself threatened by an angry evangelical who warns him that since he says bad things about God, God will get him. Don’t tug on Superman’s cape, so to speak, by saying you don’t believe in the planet Krypton.
   
• driftglass offers a brief overview of his use of Facebook.
   

Trailer for the new documentary, Liberty: Mother of Exiles

The poem by Emma Lazarus, the poem that was placed at the base of the Statue of Liberty is movingly, powerfully read by:

Big Freedia,
Wayne Brady,
Charo,
Jessica Chastain,
Andy Cohen,
Whoopi Goldberg,
Cyndi Lauper,
Monica Lewinsky,
Lizzo,
Courtney Love,
RuPaul,
Regina Spektor

 

From Dave Dubya:

The Big MAGAt had this to say in a 2015 interview with Steve Bannon, then chairman of Breitbart News.

“I have a little conflict of interest because I have a major, major building in Istanbul. It’s a tremendously successful job. It’s called Trump Towers — two towers, instead of one, not the usual one, it’s two.”

As the blood spills from more innocents in Syria, the Tangerine Tyrant deflects from his greedy conflict of interest and “rationalizes” with this garbage.

“The Kurds are fighting for their land, just so you understand, and somebody wrote a very, very powerful article today. They didn’t help us in the Second World War, they didn’t help us with Normandy as an example, they mentioned names of different battles. But they’re there to help us with their land and that’s a different thing. In addition to that we—we have spent tremendous amounts of money on helping the Kurds in terms of ammunition, in terms of weapons, in terms of money, in terms of pay, with all of that being said, we like the Kurds.”

He got that lie about Kurds from another Breitbart white nationalist. Kurds really did serve with the British in the Second World War. Nobody in the Trump family “helped us with Normandy”, of course. Nor did any of them serve the US in any war, or in any other way.

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From libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara:

The ‘New American Socialists’ Dilemma: The Declaration is as much anti-Socialist as anti-Slavery

Whether working in the fields or the shipyards for money, how is that different, in principle, from Social Security or any like program, in which the government takes part of your work earnings in exchange for taking care of you in your old age, or in some other respect? Granted, partial slavery is not full slavery. Degree matters, in terms of tolerability. But if it’s only a matter of degree, it’s only a matter of time from partial slavery—the welfare state—to full slavery, socialism. That socialism is synonomous with slavery is a truth that the modern “new” socialists must squarely face up to.

But they can’t–or won’t. Why? Because America’s Founding Documents are as much anti-socialist as they are anti-slavery, and for the same reasons. 20th-21st Century socialism is as much a repudiation of Americanism as slavery was 154 years ago. With a “new” socialism on the rise in 21st Century America, modern Democratic Socialists have a powerful reason to minimize or evade the role of the liberal principles of Americanism in defeating Colonial and Confederate slavery.

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From PZ Myers:

Creationist Intelligent Design Without Intelligence or Design

Abby Hafer has pissed off the Discovery Institute. Good.

Hafer is a professor at Curry College who has done two horrible things: she helped draft a bill for the Massachusetts legislature that would require some rigor in what can be taught in public schools — specifically excluding the use of non-scientific materials for instruction in the classroom — and she has written about the lack of rigor in the Discovery Institute’s propaganda. Uh-oh. That’s a one-two punch that hits the DI right in the gut, so they’ve tried to counter it, ineffectively.

– More from Professor Myers –
 

 

From our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit:

Republicans have two conflicting electorates. Their batshit base supports Trump. The general electorate may not. So they can lose in the primary or lose in the general election.

Only one choice keeps their integrity from shredding like cheap fabric.

– More from Earth Bound Misfit –
 

 

From North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz:

Fearless Christians don’t legislate rights away from other human beings,
don’t see someone else’s gain as their loss,
aren’t fixated on the perceived dangers of those who don’t look, talk, think, believe, worship and love the way that they do.

Fear is a powerful drug.
It’s a fantastic political tactic.
It’s a wonderful manipulator.
It’s an effective motivator.
It’s a great rally speech or Sunday sermon.
But it’s a really lousy religion.

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From Max’s Dad:

Everything about this movie is disturbing from the dark Seven like city, to the Joker dancing down steps to pedophile Gary Glitters Rock N Roll Part 2, to the references to Taxi Driver and King of Comedy, to the violence and cruelty on both sides of the aisle.

I am dark. I enjoy dark cynical movies. So this one lives up to the darkness. Its creepy man. Phoenix is up to the task, maybe too up to the task. I thought it was great. But I’d hold off taking a date to this.

– Read the Entire Review –
 

 

From Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger:

Now he has come up with a fourth excuse, and this may be the silliest one of all. He says he didn’t want to make the call at all, but was talked into doing it by Secretary of Energy Rick Perry. I have never been a fan of Rick Perry, but I find this excuse ridiculous.

Perry’s aides say he did ask Trump to call the Ukrainian president to discuss making a deal about oil and liquified natural gas. He did NOT ask him to call to get him to investigate Biden. That was Trump’s own idea to help his electoral chances in 2020.

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