FairAndUNbalanced.com

 
From The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser:

Back in the days of my youth, the Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) churches I attended banned their members from going to indoor and outdoor movie theaters. Their logic went something like this:

• By attending movies, you were supporting evil, immoral Hollywood.
• By attending movies, you might cause other Christians to think poorly of you. What if they saw you leaving a multiplex theater that offered G-rated and R-rated movies? They could wrongly assume that you were watching an R-rated movie and not a God-approved G-rated movie. This would lead to you having a bad testimony in the eyes of other believers.
• By attending movies, you could cause spiritually weaker Christians to stumble. If these spiritually immature believers saw you attending a movie, they would assume that it was all right for them to watch a movie too. And their spiritual immaturity could result in them watching non-G-rated movies.

This same logic was applied to watching television and eating in restaurants that served the Devil’s brew, alcohol.

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From Iron Knee at Political Irony:

I was pleasantly surprised by Elizabeth Warren’s policy announcement.

Yes, I know that this was done in the context of announcing her formation of an presidential exploratory committee, but let’s ignore for a moment whether or not she would make a good president (I’ve seen more than enough of that, given that it mostly consists of name calling).

Ironically, Warren is essentially a defender of capitalism to me. Like Warren, I am a “capitalist to my bones” (I’ve started a number of companies and served as a CEO). But unlike the far right and some large corporations, I understand the important role that government plays in supporting free capitalism. For example, Warren and I agree that monopolies are an anathema to vibrant capitalism. Free competition is destroyed by companies that are “too big to fail” (and, as Warren put it, “too big to jail”).

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From The Onion:

In a year where cruelty, deception, and unfettered corruption controlled all three branches of the U.S. government, The Onion’s flawless reportage and above-reproach journalism in 2018 exposed the dark underbelly of society and provided a beacon of hope that human civilization would finally and mercifully come to an end soon. Here, then, are the landmark moments of the year as reported with singular veracity by America’s Finest News Source.

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From Jonathan Bernstein:

We’re now well into one of the longest government shutdowns in U.S. history. The problem this time? It has never made sense for President Donald Trump to force a shutdown over funding for his border wall. So assessing what will come next is, well, difficult. As budget maven Stan Collender puts it in his own analysis: “this is Trump; logic won’t necessarily be the guiding force.”

What Trump has been doing so far is, as political scientist Dave Hopkins points out, following the lead of the House Freedom Caucus. But Freedom Caucus radicals don’t have plans for either policy gains or public-relations wins. What they care about is proving that they’re True Conservatives by differentiating themselves from mainstream Republicans. In practice, that means finding irrational but tough-sounding tactics to endorse.

That’s this shutdown in a nutshell.

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From Joe Hagstrom at MadMikesAmerica:

Consistency is overrated. That may be a big reason we Republicans love Trump. He is consistently inconsistent.

He speaks of love when we all know he hates Mexicans. His hatred of children is evident by his putting the notorious child hater Betsy DeVos in charge of their education. Yet he loves his daughter Ivanka so much he said he’d date her if he could.

His recent firing of General Mattis is a grand example. I actually had no idea who he was till Trump put him in charge of the Department of Defense. But I admire Trump’s reasoning. It had nothing to do with qualifications or direction. Trump liked Mattis’ nickname: Mad Dog.

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From Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit:

I went to a local Petco to buy a bag of cat food. There was a guy at the register who was buyng a big bag of Purina-something dog food. The clerk informed the customer that, come May, Petco won’t be carrying Purina dog food because the food has too many artificial ingredients to suit the CEO’s sensibilities (my take on it).

Slick move, guys.

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From Dave Dubya:

“Conservative” used to mean adhering to family and tradition, valuing personal responsibility, a work ethic, and basic human decency. Liberals share these values as well, but for the moment, let us allow them to hold their claim.

Where conservatives and liberals really diverged was in tolerance for Constitutional regulation of commerce, taxes, and the general welfare, but more critically, an aversion to change and suspicion of the new and unfamiliar.

That was the chink in their armor. Conservatism was about to be transformed into Con-servatism. All that was needed to recruit and exploit conservatives was someone to tell them who to fear and who to blame.

Anger and hate would follow.

Today’s Con-servatism is the result.

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From North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz:

2018 has been one long decade.

If I could sum up the past twelve months in a single word, it would be fatigue. Most of us aren’t as much sprinting to the finish line, as we are being dragged across it. We’re exhausted from the big and the distant stresses: from waking up every day for 365 days and pushing back against predatory politicians and toxic systems and corrupt legislation and human rights atrocities and Presidential Tweet tantrums and acts of treason. (Yes, that kind of sustained urgency will wear you out if your heart is working and your mind is right.)

But we’re tired from doing something else too, something far more personal.

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From Frances Langum:

There’s a long tradition on Fox News of creating some sort of “attack on our values” nonsense to make it seem as if bad libruls are taking away “our” Christmas/flag/freedom/gas guzzler and “we” have to fight back!

In the middle of the Trump Shutdown it’s especially important to create outrage among the idiots still watching Fox News in the age of Trump Russia.

So here’s Pete Hegseth, impelling on-air child props to say the Pledge of Allegiance, then gets this ahole James Robbins on to explain how the left is being mean to the country and doesn’t love Murica.

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From PZ Myers:

And he’s getting worse, taking a big fat dump on his former fans. He’s gone full on Dennis Miller, throwing out bullying conservative crap.

He bemoans how younger people will tell him, in relation to gender identification, that he has to use specific pronouns preferred by the person. “They’re like royalty!” he said. “They tell you what to call them. ‘You should address me as they/them, because I identify as gender-neutral.’ Oh, OK. You should address me as ‘there’ because I identify as a location. And the location is your mother’s cunt.”

I listened to a chunk of it, and seeing it written down does not communicate the full awfulness of it. He affects a stereotypical ‘effeminate’ gay voice when he’s stating what those terrible young people are saying. It’s cheesy, low humor that isn’t even creative — people have been making these same stupid pronoun jokes for decades.

The closest he comes to topicality is to complain about the Parkland shooting survivors. How dare they complain about getting shot at?

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