Month: October 2017

• This week’s note in Trumpian ‘Alternative Facts’ comes from Charlie Sykes as he explains to fellow conservatives how to maintain integrity and resist Trump fantasies while remaining true to conservatism. He seems to advocate a reversion of definition. Does conservatism really mean what it used to?
   
• The internet is a big, big non-place, so if Max’s Dad is not the best ranter on the net, it’s probably that I haven’t seen the best. This time he goes after a couple of Cleveland football fans (wrong team, wrong politics, wrong hats), a hard-to-understand court decision, a hyper-patriotic song, and a club owner, winding up with the dumbest chief executive ever.
   
• Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit gives a nutshell explanation to why the expansion of the Mueller investigation to include a couple of Democrats is not good news for Trumpsters.
   
• nojo at Stinque suggests that the most fun thing about the indictments just filed by Mueller in the Russia probe of our President is that we don’t know the names of the indicted.
   
• Donald Trump hosts Republican lawmakers, who stand and give him the clap. driftglass is not surprised when they privately express their concern with their addled President. Conservative columnist David Brooks blames society at large rather than the GOP for this President. Nope, says driftglass, it’s the Republican party.
   
• Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger brings us public reaction to President Obama’s observation that a President cannot govern by dividing people.
   
• Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara at Principled Perspectives has an honorable response to Trumpian proposals, echoed by occasional conservatives, to register all Muslims.
   
• Infidel753 educates us (as always) in the urgent need to support the Kurdish struggle for independence.
   
• Green Eagle finds a way to entertain us with the most boring news of the year. Mitt Romney-y-y-y-y.
   
• @bjork55 at Bjork Report has a brief Halloween political horror story. Okay, it’s more like a humorous political poster summarizing Republican policies. It made me laugh, then sadly shake my head.
   
• PZ Myers brings news of heavy smoke coming from a worn down warehouse filled with chemical waste. The smoke gently wafts over West Virginia bringing God knows what fresh hell to the lungs of residents.
   
• Conservative James Wigderson quotes a libertarian advocacy group to prove that occupational licensing costs jobs. Come on, James. Some studies are not really studies.
   
• M. Bouffant at Web of Evil has little patience for Mark Halperin and his sexual harassment issues.
   
• Yellow Dog at Blue in the Bluegrass has an opinion about taking down a statue honoring Jefferson Davis.
   
• The Journal of Improbable Research has found research comparing the effect on teeth in rats of floride in toothpaste vs chocolate and tea. You know what? I’m gonna spend the whole rest of the day not thinking about how they conducted that study.
   
• Iron Knee at Political Irony loves his new very time and energy consuming job and is skeptical about the significance of blogging. So he’s thinking of shutting it all down. It’s not too late to write and ask him to reconsider. Here is my reasoning.
   

 
In A Venn Diagram Explains Trump’s Hostility Toward Puerto Rico, Burr explored 3 possible explanations for President Trump’s hostility toward the American territory of Puerto Rico as Americans on that American island experience hardship and face as yet unreported death.

He concluded that the explanations were not mutually exclusive and that all are very likely true.

Among the reactions:

Dave Dubya::

I’m getting rather tired of explaining away the Trumpists as merely willfully ignorant. They embrace hate. They are abetting and embracing that evil.

Deplorables is exactly what they are. Just like their “very fine people” marching with Nazis.

Sixty thousand Puerto Ricans have moved to Florida. What are the chances these citizens will VOTE next election?

Burr Deming::

My imagination tells me there will be some effort to prevent them from voting.

Dave Dubya::

Voter disenfranchisement in Florida? Impossible. Republicans run the state. 😉

Jerry Critter::

“Only a gray sort of mixture represents an ugly possibility as life in an inherited bubble, intellectual laziness, and pure malevolence combine into an ugly, colorless core.”

The perfect description of our self-admitted sexual abuser of a president. He should be in jail.

What looks to be random trolling was included on the possibility that it represented an actual reaction:

Ed:

Hillary lost. Get over it.

And it did provoke a rational response:

Trey:

As always, we appreciate the reminder that some people willfully miss the point.

Have a safe weekend.

 
From The Onion:

EAST HANOVER, NJ—Utterly perplexed as to how they were chosen for the massive project, Nabisco executives reportedly were baffled Thursday after the Trump administration gave it a $200 million contract to rebuild Puerto Rico’s roads.

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From Dave Dubya:

While I have little use for their words, I sincerely hope the shamefully few voices in the Republican Wilderness resonate with our fellow Americans. Sadly, far too many are brainwashed by the propaganda of FOX(R), Breitbart, Hate Radio, and their ilk.

So today I’m letting the Republicans with relative courage take the greater share of my post.

If that isn’t “fair and balanced”, what is?

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From conservative T. Paine at Saving Common Sense:

My wife and I have had many discussions lately regarding Millennials, especially considering that we have six kids between us that fall into that generation.

For the sake of clarity I want to define the Millennial group of which I speak as the generation of people largely being born between approximately 1982 and 1997, give or take. You know who they are. They are the often times impatient, entitled, and lazy generation that largely grew up this way through no real fault of their own.

As a disclaimer, of course not everyone born to this generation exhibits these same characteristics, including most of my kids, but on the whole this does seem to encompass a majority of them. Further, even the Millennial generation themselves know and understand this.

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From Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post:

“Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In either event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth, whether about the president or anyone else.”
– Theodore Roosevelt –

Halloween is but 5 days away, and the current political scene in America is definitely scary. President Donald Chump is still supported by a huge majority of the Republican Party, despite having had NO legislative achievements to date. He has dominated headlines with his continual bluster, much of it found in his demented daily Tweets. The rest of the world correctly views him as being a crazy, unstable bully. He is so insecure and thin-skinned that he cannot allow even the slightest bit of criticism to go unchallenged. That is why he has taken it upon himself, using Twitter, to blast any and all who oppose him in the least. In has own party, Senators Bob Corker, John McCain, and Mitch McConnell have experienced his wrath via Twitter. His latest victim appears to be Senator Jeff Flake, whom Chump has been bludgeoning incessantly for a long time.

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Wondering why a few conservative friends are less than impressed.

 
From Jonathan Bernstein:

Congressional Republicans have been working on tax reform legislation. As usual, President Trump has stayed on the sidelines, with the exception of occasionally berating his party into getting something to his desk as soon as possible. But that changed on Monday morning, when he emerged on Twitter with an actual position: “There will be NO change to your 401(k). This has always been a great and popular middle class tax break that works, and it stays!”

Wait a second. Is this tweet actually … constructive?

I think so.

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From Human Voices:

“By Diverse means we arrive at the same end.” Thus begin the essays of Michel de Montaigne.

It’s both hopeful and ominous and also a warning against the intolerance that seeps through the capillaries of Facebook like rising damp. When it comes to any of the jihads or crusades or popular causes, there’s the the way, and only the way, the vocabulary, the rules and strictures of whatever group seeks or has seized power and those singing from a different hymnal are the enemy.Such groups themselves have become the cause they purport to represent.

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