FairAndUNbalanced.com

 
From Jonathan Bernstein:

Proceedings would ultimately let the president put the scandals behind him.

Democrats are again being tempted to move toward impeaching Donald Trump. It’s still the wrong call to make, at least so far. Yes, there’s a good case — a very good case — an extremely good case — that Trump has acted contrary to his oath of office and deserves impeachment and removal. With his attorney general pitching the preposterous idea that the president can just pull the plug on any investigation of his own actions, and with the president actively resisting normal congressional oversight, it’s clear that the House should be fighting back as strongly as it can. But for now at least, Republicans are not going to vote for impeachment, and so we’re talking about a partisan impeachment and a partisan acquittal.

That’s a path that has no advantages for Democrats before, during or after impeachment.

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• Green Eagle points out how difficult it is to keep track of the horrors created by this administration but gives a few highlights a good try.
   
• Max’s Dad produces the most passionate, creative rants I can find these days. This time he performs dull blade surgery on William Barr, Republicans, and limp Democrats with a snide aside at Senator Bernie. Don’t EVER get on the dark side of Max’s Dad.
   
• News Corpse follows the money as contributions to the Trump campaign are diverted to Trump family legal bills.
   
• Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post comments on the unique talent Mike Pence has developed: swallowing any individual personality he owns in order to avoid threatening Mr. Trump’s ego. in. any. way.
   
• At The Moderate Voice, Dorian Estuaro de Wind describes what may be at stake in the next election if Trump is not defeated. He spells the obvious best hope as Biden with a Joe.
   
• Jonathan Bernstein is skeptical about how much weight we ought to assign to Joe Biden’s surge in Democratic polls.
   
• PZ Myers reviews the sad tale of an alt-right devotee who realized too late how her life was being ruined. She does present some insights into what made these lost souls what they have become.
   
• So noted Christian apologist, Franklin Graham, excoriates gay Christian Pete Buttigeig for existing, and supports the Trump family. In MadMikesAmerica, Dr. Mark Bear thanks Dr. Graham for exposing to the world his own hypocrisy and that of those who follow in his path.
   
• North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz carefully explains to Dr. Graham why LGBTQ Christians don’t need his permission.
   
• Infidel753 quotes British philosopher, educator, and prolific author A. C. Grayling to rebut religious apologists who complain about aggressive hostility from atheists and secularists. It’s a fair quote, one which I and my fellow believers ought to read and take to heart.
   
• nojo records reflections on getting older by the minute. I’m walking alongside you, nojo.
   

 
From The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser:

Over the past twelve years, I have corresponded with numerous Evangelicals who find themselves in “mixed” marriages after their loss of faith. Having entered marriage according to the Biblical principle found in 2 Corinthians 6:14-18:

Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness? And what concord hath Christ with Belial? or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel? And what agreement hath the temple of God with idols? for ye are the temple of the living God; as God hath said, I will dwell in them, and walk in them; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you. And will be a Father unto you, and ye shall be my sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty.

these unbelievers find themselves at odds with still-believing spouses. “What will become of their marriages?” these former Evangelicals ask. Having grown up in a religion that condemns mixed marriages AND divorce, they fear the consequences of losing their faith. Many of the Evangelicals who contact me suffer in secret, keeping their deconversions to themselves out of fear of hurting their spouses, children, parents, and close friends. I know a number of atheists/agnostics who attend Evangelical churches every Sunday because they fear what might happen if they dared to testify publicly that there is no God.

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From our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit:

It’s the job of the Justice Department to defend the constitutionality of the laws that have been enacted. Congress enacts the law, the Executive enforces and defends the law, and the Court says what the law is. If any president disagrees with the law, the proper route is to go to Congress to change the law, not to slime its way into court and attack the law there.

Worse, how are we, as a people, supposed to know what conduct is illegal and what isn’t if the enforcement of the law is openly acknowledged to be up to the whims of the Executive branch? If ignorance of the law is no defense to breaking it, now we have to know what laws are effectively voided because the prosecutors are going to look the other way?

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From driftglass:

It did not go well.

“Fear stokes anger, which then stokes more fear.” — David Brooks, the Faith and Humility reporter for the Acela Corridor Pantograph

“Fear is the path to the dark side…fear leads to anger…anger leads to hate…hate leads to suffering.” — Yoda, The Phantom Menace

Because Mr. Brooks doesn’t fear privation of any kind — because in his rarefied world of extraordinary privilege the idea of starvation, or homelessness, or losing his job, or losing his health insurance, or losing his country are completely alien to him — for him, the idea of “fear” itself exists only as a free-floating abstraction.

For Mr. Brooks, fear is not a key survival-emotion honed by millions of years of human evolution, but an entity unto itself. Like the glowing, red alien flashlight-special-effect thingy in Star Trek’s Day of the Dove — a malevolent spirit which hovers above all of us, making us fight for no good reason but its amusement.

Mr. Brooks makes this breathtakingly stupid claim for the same reason Mr. Brooks makes all of his breathtakingly stupid claims: because Mr. Brooks has spent the last 15 years relentlessly clawing his way up to the exalted position of the Pope of the High and Holy Church of Both Sides Do It. And as the Pope of the High and Holy Church of Both Sides Do It, Mr. Brooks is driven with the implacable zeal of a fanatic to false-equivalence the shit out of every issue, under all circumstance, in every venue he has available.

In this case, that means using his New York Times column to indiscriminately bulldoze everyone’s fears — legitimate or real — down to the same level of folly.

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From Tommy Christopher:

Trump Pick Stephen Moore Makes Unbelievably Cringeworthy Defense of His Racist Obama Joke

“By the way, did you see, there’s that great cartoon going along?” Moore said. “A New York Times headline: ‘First Thing Donald Trump Does as President Is Kick a Black Family Out of Public Housing,’ and it has Obama leaving the White House. I mean, I just love that one. Just a great one.”

In an excerpt from an upcoming episode of PBS’ Firing Line with Margaret Hoover, Hoover asked Moore about the joke, and after playing the clip for him, let Moore perform the news equivalent of an extended sad trombone.

“So, you know, that is a joke that I always made about, you know, Obama lives in, you know, the president lives in public housing,” Moore began, deploying the solid strategy of defending a racist joke by saying you make that racist joke all the time.

“But I didn’t mean it like a black person did,” Moore continued, despite the fact that the joke literally says “kick a black family out of public housing.”

“I just meant that, you know, you know, being in the White House, you know, for example, when I was working with a lot of women in families who were involved in the education voucher program, you know, here in DC, and people would say, well, you know, and these were blacks who would say, you know, why does Barack Obama get to send his kids to any school that he wants to and we can’t?”

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From Dave Dubya:

Third parties and voters choosing not to participate in elections

I get it. People get frustrated. We seem to have two kinds of candidates, disappointing and horrible.

It should be obvious that the most horrible are always Republicans. As I’ve repeatedly emphasized, the Republican Party is at war with representative democracy, which means they want to suppress voters and voting rights.

The more people who turn out to vote, the more Republicans lose.

The Right has made this tactic abundantly clear.

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From The Journal of Improbable Research:

The 30+ years since the launch of Super Mario Bros. have given ample opportunity for scholars to study the game’s possible influences in academia and society at large.

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From libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara:

New NJ Beekeeper Regs Show Why Government Should Focus on Punishing the Guilty, Not Regulating the Innocent.

Certainly, everyone has a right not to be harmed (or their property) by neighboring operations, based on the principal of property rights. But neither should a person be interfered with by government for engaging in legal activities on his own property that harms no one else. Why punish the innocent?

And that’s the dirty little secret of government regulation; the punishing of the innocent for the wrongdoing of the guilty. A good poster child for this premise is Sarbanes-Oxley, the giant financial regulatory bill passed after the 1999-2000 Enron accounting scandals. Enron, Worldcom, and a few other companies defrauded investors—and were prosecuted under pre-existing laws. Yet Congress and President Bush passed Sarbanes-Oxley, allegedly to “prevent” future fraud but which in reality burdened the thousands of companies that didn’t cook the books with new regulations—in effect, punishing the innocent many for the wrongdoing of the few.

We see this pattern time and again. Somebody does something wrong, and regulations reign down on an entire industry or sector.

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