FairAndUNbalanced.com

 
From News Corpse:

It must be extraordinarily difficult for the President of the United States to get through every weekend without being fawned over by his most devoted supporters and promoters: the weekday primetime hosts on Fox News (aka State TV). Donald Trump’s notoriously fragile ego needs constant stroking or it erupts in an explosion of nonsensical ravings and unbound hostility from his Twitter stronghold.

That’s the sensitive psychological condition that Trump found himself in on Sunday night when he unleashed a torrent of tweets bursting with self pity and anger at an unfair world that wasn’t sufficiently adoring. This hissy twit included an unexpected barrage of animus aimed squarely at Trump’s media confederates at Fox News. It’s not the first time, but it’s one of the most extended and shrill. And it’s a warning to Fox that if you dare to stray from Trumpian orthodoxy, you are officially guilty of betraying the cause of white-wing nationalism, and Trump personally. It’s Trump’s admission that he regards Fox News as his personal publicity shop. The substance of this tweetstorm is so profoundly disturbing that we can just let it speak for itself.

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From Jonathan Bernstein:

There’s a reason the House speaker keeps feuding with fellow Democrats. It’s her job.

Pelosi’s job is to work for, and protect, all the members of the House Democratic caucus. And the electoral incentives of relatively moderate members in tough districts will always weigh heavily in that calculation – especially when the more liberal members need those moderates to get their own priorities passed.

There’s a big contrast here between Pelosi and her predecessor, Paul Ryan. Ryan excelled at one thing: ducking blame. This made him entirely ill-suited for the role. Speakers sign up for scapegoat duty. The good ones – Pelosi, John Boehner, Tip O’Neill – have very few star moments, and lots of episodes where they take the brunt of abuse from their own party.

Why is that?

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From Infidel753:

It’s become routine for fundies to assert that extreme weather events (and other natural disasters) are punishments or warnings from God. This enables them to account for the increase in such events in recent decades while continuing to reject global warming — God is sending more of them due to the increased normalization of sins like homosexuality and abortion. (One might wonder why we weren’t getting hammered with daily hurricanes back in the days of slavery and the Indian genocide, but reading the Bible shows that God doesn’t consider such things sinful.) Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson notoriously attributed even the 9/11 attack to “the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians”. With hurricane season approaching, we can expect plenty more of this soon.

It seems odd, though, that hurricanes mostly hit the southeastern US, which is the most religious part of the country and the least tolerant of gays and abortion. Why doesn’t God send hurricanes to places like Los Angeles and San Francisco? It would be a more convincing message, since hurricanes don’t naturally occur there.

Veteran arch-wingnut Mark Taylor has come up with an “explanation” which I suspect we’ll be hearing a lot more of.

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From libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara:

Just prior to the Fourth of July, the national holiday was marred by the actions of a great American company, Nike. With a chance to defend America’s core principles, Nike caved to pressure to remove its sneaker line celebrating America’s Founding era because it featured America’s original flag. The Betsy Ross Flag features the 13 red and white stripes representing the original 13 colonies that collectively declared independence from England, and 13 stars organized in a circle, one for each state that then existed. Nike’s pulling of its Independence Day sneaker line is an act of corporate ignorance and cowardice.

According to Bloomberg, the flag symbol offended some people, including Former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick:

The design recently has taken another meaning for some Americans as far-right groups have claimed it as a symbol of their cause. It has also been criticized as evocative of an era when slavery was still predominant in the U.S.

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From Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post:

In recent times, we have been exposed to the vastly different outlooks of two separate Republian presidents on immigration: one, a confident, true leader who came of age during a time of war and depression, and the other, an insecure, mediocre, bombastic, spoiled-rotten, pampered, criminal rich boy who has never had to struggle his entire life. Their opinions on the value of immigrants and many other things could not be further apart.

Ronald Reagan grew up in modest circumstances and grew to adulthood in a time of grave crises for our country. Donald Trump grew up in the lap of comfortable luxury. Below is a transcript of Reagan’s farewell address to the nation in 1989. It was delivered from a mature and secure man, and it differs tremendously from the immature, hateful, anti-refugee and anti-immigrant paranoid rantings we hear constantly from Trump, as you will discover by reading Reagan’s speech below. You will easily understand why the British Ambassador just referred to Trump as being “inept, insecure, and incompetent”.

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From Dorian de Wind at The Moderate Voice:

Those who missed Trump’s 2019 Independence Day extravaganza, or who would like a do-over of this stirring event, can rest easier.

They’ll get another chance to relish it in 2020, 2021 and many, many more Fourth of Julys.

“Based on its tremendous success,” Trump says he has “made the decision to do it again next year and maybe we can say for the foreseeable future.”

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From Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger:

This is a failed economic theory, and always has been. Nothing trickles down. The bank accounts of the rich just get fatter — and the rest of America is left to suffer. Americans simply cannot feast on the table scraps left by the rich.

Now the International Monetary Fund (IMF) tells us what most of us already knew — that trickle-down economic theory does not work. It actually has a negative effect on economic growth, while giving more to the poor and working classes has a positive effect.

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From Frances Langum:

The White Power Hour with Tucker Carlson labels a plan to fight decades of housing discrimination “racism against white people.” Because of course, he does.

Tucker Carlson sang what will no doubt be a familiar Fox refrain by the time this election is over:

“What about WHITE PEOPLE?”

Talking with a completely unprepared Melissa Francis about Kamala Harris’s plan to reduce the wealth gap between black families and white families, Tucker squinted and said it was racist against white people.

And that was the segment.

Maybe if Melissa Francis had read one article about the plan (or knew anything about American History) she could have explained some details to Tucker…

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From tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors:

Speculating Wildly

The reports are talking about vast quantities of pictures (and it’s not clear to me other than the very young girls if anyone else is in these pictures). Why would a billionaire who presumably ran a sex trafficking ring keep pictures unless they are useful to him? It’s not a spank bank. I assume he could procure another victim anytime he wanted. So there’s something else going on here. Why would he keep vast quantities of incriminating evidence?

The speculation on Twitter (again, Twitter is the worst) is going in the blackmail direction, but I fundamentally don’t buy it. Epstein did not blackmail anyone, he doesn’t need the money.

But what if the pictures are insurance policy of a sort?

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