Seldom Balanced – Usually Fair
From Yellow Dog at Blue in the Bluegrass:
How about someone really different? Someone who has been fighting for progressive Kentucky values her entire adult life? Someone who can light Democrats aflame and get the stay-at-home non-voters out to the polls with a vengeance?
Democrats of Kentucky, I give you Attica Scott.
From Robert A. Levine at The Moderate Voice:
Presidents Trump and Putin will be meeting in Helsinki, Finland on July 16 after Trump attends the NATO summit and visits England. This would normally be news, but the real news is the
extraordinary aspect of this meeting as Trump will be meeting Putin alone. There will be a Russian interpreter, but no other Americans present. To say these unprecedented arrangements are strange is to completely miss the possible ramifications. Trump has already gone out of his way to praise Putin and Russia, wants to have Russia rejoin the Group of Seven, called to congratulate Putin on his election, and wants to lift some of the sanctions on Russia. In fact, he has not utilized all of the sanctions on Russia that Congress enacted and asked Trump to impose. Since the time of his election, for some reason Trump has treated Putin and Russia extremely gingerly, as if he is afraid to upset Putin. Trump has also angered our allies by declaring that Russia’s absorption of Crimea by military means was reasonable since most Crimeans speak Russian.
But why is Trump meeting Putin alone? With no other Americans there, Trump will be able to emerge from the meeting free to say anything he wants about what transpired. No one will be able to contradict him. With no advisers in the room, Trump will be able to make any secret deals he and Putin want, even though Trump may not recognize that it does not benefit America and in fact damages the nation. Why is Trump omitting advisers and Russian specialists from the meeting? Why is there no American interpreter to tell Trump about some of the nuances of what is being said? Will there be a tape made of the meeting that will be released immediately afterwards so that its contents cannot be altered?
From Green Eagle:
This is in the news today:
“BREAKING: White House releases Executive Order to end competitive selection process for Administrative Law Judges, making them political appointees who can be fired at will.”
There is a lot of talk already about how this will destroy a great part of the independent judiciary, and let a fascist boor like Trump fire judges for ruling against him. I’ll leave that issue for now, and just comment on this: Can you remember back, say, two years ago when a President using an executive order for the most minor actions was absolute proof that he was a Communist would-be dictator? Now, apparently crushing the independent judiciary without recourse is a perfectly acceptable use of Presidential power.
From The Journal of Improbable Research:
The research team, from University of Colorado Boulder, US, determined that plants watered with Club Soda fared considerably better :
“Plants given carbonated water not only grew faster but also developed a healthier shade of green in comparison to plants given tap water. […] The nutrients in the Club Soda are like a double dose of essentials for plants.”
From North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz:
“I feel like I’m losing my mind.”
These words are a continual presence these days.
I hear them a couple hundred times a day, in one form or another.
I read them in desperate social media outbursts.
I find them in my inbox from friends and from strangers.
I hear them in my own head.
They are the symptoms of a shared sickness we now find ourselves afflicted with; a sprawling homegrown mental health crisis, the genesis of which can be traced to a single Wednesday morning in November. They are part of a growing national neurosis brought on by a continual assault on decency and sanity and goodness by those in power.
Mental health is a daily battle, even on our best days.
From Mock Paper Scissors:
Everyone it seems is convinced that as a practicing Catholic that he is going to tear up abortion rights and marriage equality, but what about the poor, over-regulated amusement park industry?
“[Judge Brett Kavanaugh] was also one of three judges who oversaw SeaWorld’s appeal of citations the company received because of the death of killer whale trainer Dawn Brancheau in 2010, when she was drowned and dismembered by a killer whale named Tilikum after a performance.
“…In a telling bit about who this man is and how he thinks, Kavanaugh argued in a dissenting opinion that those who train killer whales were basically no different than professional athletes and racing drivers; basically, their jobs were risky by design, so they deserved no such protection.”
Kavanaugh concluded that the Labor Department should not implement onerous regulations that to prevent trainers from being eaten in front of paying customers.
From John Scalzi:
Words or activity that would previously be confined to a select few — and would be expected to be private — can now be transmitted to a much wider audience, very quickly. This includes words and actions you might have reasonably expected would not be in the purview of the public at all.
For example, the instigating action of Dawson’s piece, in which a passenger on a plane livetweeted an apparent “meet cute” between two other passengers in the row in front of her. The livetweeter, among other things, illustrated the tweeting with photos (with faces scrubbed but even so), noted the two people being tweeted about had active social media accounts, and did other things to make it easy (or easier) for the people following the livetweeting to suss out who these two people might be — and indeed, they were found online — at which point the Internet does what it does, for good and ill, and then it came for the original livetweeter.
None of these people, it should be noted, are public individuals — the meet cute couple certainly not, but also not the livetweeter, even if they later admitted hoping to get a writing gig (being a writer also doesn’t automatically make you a public figure). And also, the couple chatting away at each other almost certainly did not expect to have their private conversation documented by someone else, particularly in a way that made it possible for their identities to be discovered by total strangers. Now, you can argue whether or not a commercial plane qualifies as a public or private space, and we’d be here all day about that, but I think it’s reasonable to say that the two people chatting with each other believed their discussion would not leave the confines of their airline row. Thanks to this, neither of the two of them will likely think that again.
And the question (or a question, anyway) is where the proper line should be for things like this.
From Jonathan Bernstein:
The march toward civil rights also demonstrates why the vote is absolutely essential. The Democrats’ choice to move toward civil rights wasn’t just about Northern politicians gaining a conscience as they looked at white supremacy in the South. What mattered overall was black citizens moving north and starting to vote in their new cities.
What that shows is that the vote is what really matters — more, in some ways, than whether any particular vote is enough to swing an election (although it certainly helped that the black vote was often seen as a swing vote). Politicians try to represent their districts. But without the vote, constituents are largely invisible to their elected officials. Of course, it also mattered that some of those voters began electing black politicians, who then fought within the Democratic Party for what their constituents wanted — for themselves, and for other black citizens.
Democratic processes don’t always work in the U.S. But without the vote — and without robust political parties — they don’t have a chance.
From Jon Perr at PERRspectives:
It was a tough week for supporters of Donald Trump’s draconian policy of separating the families of undocumented immigrants at the border. (Those supporters are overwhelmingly Republican: a Quinnipiac University poll showed only 27 percent of all respondents–but 55 percent of GOP backers–endorse the practice.) It began when former CIA and NSA chief Gen. Michael Hayden posted an image of Auschwitz and remarked simply, “Other governments have separated mothers and children.” By Monday, the clashing sound bites vomited forth by the president and his DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen reduced the administration’s defense to something like this:
We are not separating families. Period. Except when we are, which is both Democrats’ fault and essential policy.
The United Nations was unimpressed. Having already declared the family separation policy a violation of international law, the UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees labeled Trump’s initiative “government-sanctioned child abuse.” By Tuesday, Trump was back on Twitter defending taking more than 2,000 children from their parents (many of them asylum seekers), while warning of the “animals” who will “infest our Country,” language which Bill Kristol noted “probably sounds better in the original German.”
By Wednesday, when Trump signed his scam masquerading as an executive order, some of the conservatives’ best and brightest had enough of the backlash. “Comparisons to Auschwitz are ludicrous and offensive,” Daniella Greenbaum protested, because they “will only serve to highlight how Trump and his policies are not quite as bad as they could be.” Ben Shapiro, the former Breitbart propagandist the New York Times elevated as a “provocative ‘gladiator'” for young conservatives, complained that “Nazi has become a stand-in for ‘thing I don’t like.’ And that means that everything you don’t like becomes ‘Nazi policy.'”
From Mock Paper Scissors:
“I take advantage of the laws of the nation because I’m running a company. My obligation right now is to do well for myself, my family, my employees, for my companies. And that’s what I do.”
Which brings us to todays news: he’s ripped off his chauffeur, too. Noel Cintron is joining the club, as it were, of people who are trying to get a fair shake from the purported billionaire by taking it to court. Cintron is accusing his former boss of failing to compensate him for about 3,300 hours of overtime pay he’s worked over the past six years; he would be suing for more, but the statute of limitations expired on the rest.