Wall of Coal

found online by Raymond

 
From Green Eagle:

In a an effort to help make the Trump administration a success, Green Eagle wishes to make the following proposal.

Why can’t we build the wall out of coal? This will allow Trump to keep his promise, and at the same time he will keep another promise by giving years of work to coal miners, digging up enough coal for a two thousand mile long, thirty foot high wall of coal. This is an eminently practical suggestion, as shown in the following photo from 1907…

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Abortion Numbers Climb in Wisconsin

found online by Raymond

 
From Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson:

According to a new report by the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, the number of abortions in Wisconsin increased by 3.7 percent in 2017 over the previous year’s total.

Heather Weininger, Executive Director of Wisconsin Right to Life, said the increase is not a surprise.

“After a brand-new, state-of-the-art abortion clinic opened in Milwaukee’s trendy Third Ward we should have all been on high alert that abortions were soon to be on the upward climb,” Weininger said in a statement Thursday.

Weininger said that despite the complaints by Planned Parenthood, access to abortion is not being restricted.

“For too many years, Planned Parenthood was seeing a decline in their revenue and they were ready at every turn to reverse the downturn in profits,” Weininger said. “For years we have heard Planned Parenthood saying the pro-life movement is limiting access to abortion. It looks like the abortion industry has gotten what it wanted: More unborn babies being murdered, and more women who will suffer the devastating consequences of abortion.”

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What About Farm Animals if We Stop Eating Meat?

found online by Raymond

 
From Infidel753:

It’s a question that deserves an honest answer. I don’t think any vegetarian is so naïve as to believe that an end to meat-eating would mean that all the billions of farm animals alive at the present moment would wander off into the wild to live carefree full lives there. There isn’t enough “wild”, and most farm animals are domesticated and probably couldn’t survive on their own anyway. If humans stopped eating meat, the animals that are now grown for food would cease to exist. There’s no way around that. They’re utterly dependent for survival on systems which humans would no longer have an incentive to maintain if the animals were no longer of any use to us.

But the horror of meat-eating lies in the fact that billions upon billions of animals, generation after generation of them, are constantly being produced solely to be killed, and in most cases to live stunted and miserable lives before being killed.

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MERRY CHRISTMAS From the Atheist Santa

found online by Raymond

 
From The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser:

Surprisingly, Christmas means more to me now and is more enjoyable than it ever was as a Christian. No dutiful sermonette before gifts are open; no boring reading from the Gospel of Luke; no verbose prayers reminding everyone that Jesus is the real reason for the Season. While some in attendance still believe in Jesus, others do not. What we all agree on, however, is the importance of family and of love. Oh, we don’t always like each other, and we can fuss with the best of them, but we never forget how blessed we are to have each other.

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Trump Tweets First Amendment Illegal, ‘Should Be Tested in Courts’

found online by Raymond

 
From Mark NC at News Corpse:

If it’s Sunday, this Donald Trump’s regularly scheduled Twitter tantrum. Like clockwork, the President is firing off nearly incoherent messages that attack his critics, lie about easily verified matters, and promote his favorite source of propaganda, and the PR division of the Trump White House, Fox News. It’s a display of desperation that only serves to make him appear more guilty and afraid of the coming consequences of his criminal acts.

Leading off Trump’s parade of polemics is a tweet that reinforces Trump’s long-held aversion to free speech and the First Amendment of the Constitution. We are all familiar with Trump’s denouncement of the press in Stalinist terms as “the enemy of the people,” and his projectile vomiting of invectives at journalists who have the audacity to report what he actually does and says. And now we have Trump literally threatening to legally censor the media for doing its job…

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A Note on FISA “Verification”

found online by Raymond

 
From Julian Sanchez:

Last week, former FBI Director James Comey testified before the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees in closed session. When, at Comey’s request, a transcript was released shortly thereafter, mainstream news outlets mostly yawned, finding relatively little new or noteworthy. But numerous Trumpophile outlets had a different reaction, seizing on Comey’s acknowledgement that the now-notorious “Steele Dossier” was still in the process of being vetted when Comey left in the Bureau. This provided an opportunity to revive a complaint about purported improprieties in the application for a FISA order to intercept the communications of erstwhile Trump campaign advisor Carter Page: The information provided in FISA applications must be “verified” before it is submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and here we have (the objection runs) an apparent admission that the information was not verified!

If we construe this as a complaint that Page was monitored on thinner evidence than should be required for protracted surveillance of an American citizen, that complaint may well have merit, though we would need to know the full contents of the application—much of which remains redacted—to say with any confidence. But if the objection is procedural—an argument that the FBI violated its own requirements—then the complaint is simply wrong, and based on a basic confusion about what FISA “verification” means.

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Israel has become a sacred cow – Guess what I think of such beasts

found online by Raymond

 
From Professor PZ Myers:

Unbelievable. The state of Texas requires people to affirm a loyalty oath to Israel in order to be employed in education.

A children’s speech pathologist who has worked for the last nine years with developmentally disabled, autistic, and speech-impaired elementary school students in Austin, Texas, has been told she can no longer work with the public school district after she refused to sign an oath vowing that she “does not” and “will not” engage in a boycott of Israel or “otherwise tak[e] any action that is intended to inflict economic harm” on that foreign nation.

This is an attempt by lawmakers to coerce citizens to hold certain political views. It’s an odious law and a disgrace to any country that tries to enforce it. But it’s not just Texas…

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Trump’s Tall Tale About Catching ’10 Terrorists’ at Border

found online by Raymond

 
From Tommy Christopher:

That thrice-repeated claim was self-evidently suspect, given the fact that such an apprehension would undoubtedly have made national news, or at least some kind of DHS press release. As it turns out, DHS couldn’t back Trump up either, as The Daily Beast‘s Erin Banco reports:

Instead, DHS would only say that it apprehended, on average, ten “known or suspect[ed] terrorists” per day who attempted to enter the country “by air, sea, or land” from October 2017 through September 2018.

Just to be clear, that’s an average of ten “known or suspected” terrorists, not terrorists, who tried to enter the country anywhere by any means, not at the southern border.

In fact, according to the most recent reporting from Trump’s State Department, released in September, the number of terrorists entering the United States via Mexico is a whopping zero per ever…

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Howie Kurtz: Melania Is Most Bullied First Lady In History

found online by Raymond

 
From Frances Langum:

Howie Kurtz sat down with Laura Ingraham on Thursday, during a time when she would run commercials except so few advertisers want to be associated with her bigoted propaganda, even for Fox.

And Howie slung a doozie: “Melania is subjected to a particularly brutal kind of treatment and mockery… No other modern First Lady has been treated like this.”

We’re talking about the first lady who starts “be best” campaigns by while babies are put in cages, who wore an “I don’t really care, do u” jacket to the border, who plagiarized Michelle Obama’s convention speech, and who disappeared from the White House with “kidney issues” only to return to public life with a brand new set of mammary “kidneys” and her husband is still president? Imagine any Democratic First Lady…

Oops I forgot BIRTHERISM.

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Our Lonely War On Pronouns Continues…

found online by Raymond

 
From driftglass:

…because both Republicans and the Beltway media never stop trying to diffuse responsibility for their catastrophes by “we”-ing the rest of us into their shame circle.

As you probably know, we here at the DGBG Productions (driftglass blog, The Professional Left Podcast, etc.) have been waging a long, lonely war against the promiscuous use “we”, “us”, “The American people”, “The Congress”, “Washington D.C.” and any other language deployed by the media and by Republican politicians in the service of pretending that somehow everyone and all institutions are collectively and equally culpable for explicitly Republican cowardice, Republican barbarity, Republican racism and Republican sedition.

Or that, conversely, the energetic and resolution opposition to explicitly Republican cowardice, Republican barbarity, Republican racism and Republican sedition is something that “we” are all in together. That, for example. stripping tens of millions of Americans of their health care in order to pay for tax cuts for plutocrats with something up with which “the American people” would not put.

No, no and no.

Because other than geographically, there is no such critter as “the American people”. This is the unhappy truth which the Beltway media damn well knows but would rather pull its own head off rather than speak aloud, which is why the word “we” has been so brutally abused by everyone with something to hide.

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