Seldom Balanced – Usually Fair
From Earth-Bound Misfit:
This country is defined by our liberties, freedoms and civil rights. Without those, we are nothing more than a collection of assholes with the military and economic power to back up our assholishness. In effect, we’d be no different from being a more powerful variant of Putin’s Russia.
That Trump’s base would be so willing to trash our constitutional if Trump said so suggests that to them, the Constitution is a meaningless piece of paper.
From Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger:
Ohio’s House District 12 is still too close for most news agencies to call (thanks to outstanding provisional ballots), but the Republican candidate (who leads by less than one percentage point) looks to be the likely winner. Regardless of which candidate wins, the same two candidates will face off again in November.
Many Democrats had their heart set on winning that race, and the loss was disappointing. But they should also be encouraged by the result. They came within 1 point of taking a district that was rated a +14 for Republicans — and which Trump had carried by 11 points in 2016.
It continues a trend that has happened since 2016 that has Democrats cutting sharply into Republican advantages. That is illustrated in the chart above (from fivethirtyeight.com). It shows that in the races so far, Democrats have seen a shift of between 3 and 23 points in their favorite. The average shift toward Democrats is 16 points.
The Democrats currently have 193 seats in the House of Representatives. They would need 218 seats to take over the House — an increase of 25 seats. Can it be done?
From The Borowitz Report:
Harland Dorrinson, a spokesman for the Ohio Republican Party, told reporters on Wednesday that if the G.O.P. ekes out a win, it will have been worth all of the Russian currency the Party threw at the race.
“You can talk ground game all you want, but, at the end of the day, you can’t buy TV and radio ads without rubles,” he said.
From Tommy Christopher:
Trump ‘loves’ this anti-union law, but voters didn’t.
Trump won the state of Missouri by almost 20 points in 2016, but this week voters in that state rejected an anti-union law that Trump championed, and they did so by a crushing margin.
On Tuesday, a referendum on a so-called “Right to Work” law in Missouri was defeated by a nearly 2-to-1 margin.
From Jon Perr at PERRspectives:
If nothing else, Donald Trump is a one-of-a-kind occupant of the Oval Office. His jaw-dropping corruption, staggering incompetence, mind-numbing policy ignorance, puerile penchant for payback, and unprecedented deceit put the Trump presidency in a class by itself.
Nevertheless, Trump’s courtiers, sycophants, and water-carriers have tried to elevate his leadership to a place among the greatest figures in human history. Liberty University President Jerry Falwell, Jr. was not alone in comparing Donald Trump to King David, who “may have committed adultery and arranged the death of his mistress’s husband in battle, but despite these considerable failings he had still retained the full favor of God.”
After Trump announced his decision to move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, Benjamin Netanyahu joined American evangelicals in declaring Trump a 21st century version of Persian King Cyrus, who 2,500 years earlier “proclaimed that the Jewish exiles in Babylon can come back and rebuild our temple in Jerusalem.” And no Republican president can last long without the inevitable comparison to Ronald Reagan.
From PZ Myers:
After that blustering buffoon badgering bison, it would be nice to see a thoughtful man behaving competently. How about this? Mark Levy was one of 21 pilots flying WWII aircraft in a British airshow, when the engine on his P-51 conked out, and he had to sputter to a landing in a cornfield. And best of all, there’s full cockpit video of the whole thing! You get to watch these magnificent old planes flying in formation, and then crisis as the engine begins to fail (and you know the pilot is going to be fine).
From Dave Dubya:
Trump made his intentions, and his authoritarian tactics, clear: “I do it to discredit and demean you all, (News media) so when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you.”
Journalists who report his lies and the truth he denies, are accused of being the “enemy of the people”. This is the lowest depth any president has ever sunk to in the history of the nation. It is down at the very bottom, along with supporting Putin’s disinformation campaign by siding with him against two bi-partisan Senate committees, the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI and the CIA.
“What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”
This Orwellian “Ministry of Truth” tactic is at the heart of his war on facts, the press, and dissent.
Now Trump’s fascistic attacks on the press and First Amendment are agitating his thug followers into a growing menace.
Angry mobs shout their anger, hatred and insults at newsmen covering his rallies, as he raves from the podium that they are “horrible, horrendous people.”
There is only one fitting word for all this hate, blame and false accusation from a would-be tyrant.
From North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz:
I’ve tried appealing to their sense of decency, to their capacity for compassion, to their faith in Jesus.
I’ve quietly endured thousands of their racist outbursts and homophobic rants on Twitter and at neighborhood picnics and across the Thanksgiving dinner table—in the hopes that I could find some vulnerable place beneath their fear to access later.
I’ve tried buoying pep talks and firm tough love and expressions of kindness and straight-talking challenge and attempts at affirmation.
I’ve tried discussing theology, tried sharing stories of oppressed communities, tried to offer facts in the face of a million lies generated by their President, tried to show the lessons History has already taught us about the slope we’re currently sliding precipitously down.
They have all failed to reach fertile ground.
Nothing has worked.
It’s all been fruitless.
I think it’s time to stop saying that we need to understand these people. I think we do understand them…
From tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors:
Former White House communications director Hope Hicks got onboard Air Force One at the Morristown, New Jersey, airport, which is near the Trump Bedminster resort where the President is staying.
From The Journal of Improbable Research:
Dr Suki Finn who is a postdoctoral research fellow in philosophy at the University of Southampton, UK, poses a question in a recent AEON magazine article : ‘Is a hole a real thing, or just a place where something isn’t?’ Pointing out that:
“[…] a better understanding of where holes lie on the material/immaterial and thing/nothing divides should fill a gap in our knowledge of reality.”
And, to clarify, uses the special example of the doughnut (‘donut’ US)