Bobby Kennedy!

found online by Raymond

 
From Max’s Dad:

That evening I had baseball practice and while I sat in a car with two other teammates waiting for a field to clear, the kid I was sitting next to in the back seat cracked a bad joke about the shooting and the kid in the front seat, lets call him John, turned and sternly said at 9 years old to us “Its not funny!”. He was right. It wasnt funny.

I remember my Dad and my coach saying aloud, “I dont think he’s going to make it”. That crushed me. Dad, please, dont say that. I continued to pray while I stood out at first base taking grounders. Please God, no. Dont take him.

Senator Robert F Kennedy died the next morning.

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Let Them Eat Someone Else’s Cake

found online by Raymond

 
From James Wigderson:

It’s bizarre that it came to this point. Even Andrew Sullivan, a gay writer who promoted same-sex marriage before much of the gay community accepted the idea themselves, wrote that he was opposed to making fundamentalist Christians violate their own religious beliefs.

“I would never want to coerce any fundamentalist to provide services for my wedding – or anything else for that matter – if it made them in any way uncomfortable,” Sullivan wrote in 2014. “The idea of suing these businesses to force them to provide services they are clearly uncomfortable providing is anathema to me. I think it should be repellent to the gay rights movement as well.”

But the movement has overtaken Sullivan and, as many on the other side of the gay marriage issue predicted, it’s not enough to allow for individual dissenters from the larger popular culture’s embrace of allowing same-sex marriage. If someone’s religious beliefs conflict with the desires of a same-sex couple to have their wedding recognized as legitimate by everyone, then the religious beliefs must lose to the prevailing liberal orthodoxy. And they’ll demand state power, in a totalitarian spirit, to back up their demand for recognition and acceptance.

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The message of feminism is WHAT??!?

found online by Raymond

 
From PZ Myers:

I finally got around to reading that Cathy Young op-ed about Jordan Peterson — I’ve been distracted, and the names “Cathy Young” and “Jordan Peterson” do not inspire enthusiasm. It was rather awful.

The whole thing can be summarized briefly as, “Gosh, Jordan Peterson is kinda goofy on some stuff, but he is exactly right when he bashes on feminism”. It’s about what you’d expect from Young, who is an anti-feminist in the same vein as Christina Hoff Sommers. There are lots of moments where I’m just flabbergasted at her biases.

For all his flaws, Peterson is tapping into a very real frustration: More than half a century after the modern feminist revolution began in the 1960s, we have yet to figure out new rules for partnership between men and women.

No, we’ve got no problems figuring out the rules, they’re easy. Treat women with the same respect you would men. She also glosses over the real problem, that women in the workplace are not there to form a “partnership”, especially not a sexual partnership, with their male colleagues. That’s the real problem, that some men are incapable of relating to women without assuming that their role as women is to be sexual…when it’s not. We don’t have an issue with men flirting with their male colleagues, yet for some reason it’s not possible for women to be present without sexual banter flying about, and when it happens, it’s all the woman’s fault.

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Employment- Trump and the Press Collaborate Again

found online by Raymond

 
From Green Eagle:

Here is the truth in plain view: A colossal explosion in unemployment was the result of the 2008 collapse of the economy, which was caused by Republican economic depredation. Within short order, actions taken under the Obama administration, which would never have been considered under any Republican, set the unemployment rate on a steep downward path, which it has continued to follow, at least to this point in the Trump administration.

The notion that Donald Trump, or any other Republican, deserves a shred of credit for this is patently ludicrous. And yet the mainstream press has collaborated with the Republican party and the rich sociopaths that own it, to tell just that story, which the American people are, in large part, accepting as the gospel truth.

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Trump-Russia: A Grand Unified Theory

found online by Raymond

 
From Ballard Burgher at The Moderate Voice:

Interestingly, contrary to many other Trump-Russia observers, Davidson does not think Trump started doing business with oligarchs from the former Soviet republics because they were his only financing option. He maintains that even after his string of personal bankruptcies Trump still had the opportunity to make the Trump Organization a legitimate financial player. However, he thinks Trump gravitated toward shadier deals because he lacked the temperamental qualities required for more legitimate global financial success on the scale that he aspired to.

Building an organization into a legitimate global financial entity is, to put it simply, a hell of a lot of work. There is a ton of due diligence. It requires real expertise in very complex and abstract business concepts as well as understanding of cultural and economic trends. It requires strategic planning and, above all, patience and persistence. Such a business structure also would involve multiple levels of accountability and loss of individual control. The payoff for all of that work is access to vast pools of capital in legal, above-board ways.

By all accounts, however, Trump possesses none of these qualities.

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Trump And Kim Jong-un Prepare To Meet At Summit

found online by Raymond

 
From Melissa Saunders at Anything Political:

It was said that Trump may be seeking a peace agreement to help put an end to the Korean War. This was considered a bad move as it was believed the best thing to do was focus on nuclear weapons.

“This is the way it’s supposed to go,” said Victor D. Cha. “The question is: Does Trump understand that this is what has been done in the past — that what he’s doing is not big-bang historic?”

Cha was the one who negotiated with North Korea during the Bush Administration.

“Trump is in a box,” Mr. Cha said, “because if this doesn’t go well, and he wants to go back to sanctions, the South Koreans and Chinese won’t go along.”

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Trump Makes Pence Watch Him Issue Pardons to See How It’s Done

found online by Raymond

 
From Andy Borowitz:

According to the source, Trump pardoned a number of disgraced political figures and former reality-show cronies for the sole purpose of training Pence in the art of issuing pardons.

After signing pardon after pardon while Pence looked on intently, Trump commanded the Vice-President to sign a “practice pardon” to prove that he “wouldn’t mess anything up,” the source said.

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Go Feck Yourself

found online by Raymond

 
From nojo at Stinque:

“Feckless” is one of those words you may have heard, maybe even used, but haven’t much thought about. If one can be feckless, what is it to have feck?

The part you know reads as expected: useless, incompetent, good for nothing. The part you don’t know is what’s lacking: effect. As for how you get from effect to feck — and thus the absence of effect — well, ask the Scots. We hear they’re good cussers.

As is Samantha Bee.

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Rituals

found online by Raymond

 
From Infidel753:

To many Americans in the future, Christianity will look the way Islam looks to most Americans today — a group with unfamiliar and bewildering beliefs and practices, largely represented in the popular mind by its extremist minority which holds intolerant, threatening, and frightening views. It’s hard to imagine them finding this appealing. Even today, the number of atheists who join a religion is tiny compared with the veritable stampede in the opposite direction. Whatever ground religion loses is, by the time the second generation arrives, lost to it forever.

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Trump DM’s Michael Cohen By Pardoning Dinesh D’Souza

found online by Raymond

 
From Frances Langum:

But this story is NOT about douchebag Dinesh.

It’s about Michael Cohen. And sending him a message to “stay strong” and not flip. (I don’t know how that works if Cohen is facing state charges in New York but maybe Trump forgot about that.) And on Stephanie Ruhle’s program, legal analyst Seth Waxman didn’t sugarcoat it:

SETH WAXMAN: Could this be any more transparent? His fixer for ten years is alleged to be involved in passing campaign contributions from others through to his campaign in the context of Stormy Daniels or passing Russian funds through, and then kind of out of nowhere, Mr. Trump pardons D’souza who is accused of doing just that. I can’t see this as anything other than trying to send information–Donald Trump to say “I will take care of you in the future, just stand by me.”

Add “abuse of power” to the impeachable offenses, folks.

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