Month: December 2017

• John Scalzi at Whatever tries out Google Home Max and discovers, within the Google marketing strategy, an internal contradiction.
   
• nojo watches the sequel to Guardians of the Galaxy and becomes entranced by one brief dance by Baby Groot.
   
• Green Eagle deconstructs ham handed right-wing paintings by right-wing artist Jon McNaughton. I kind of like the one where Barack Obama crushes the Constitution while Lincoln, Washington, et all beg him to stop. Not much for subtlety.
   
• The Journal of Improbable Research has a study demonstrating that upper class folks are more likely to pilfer candy from babies.
   
• Yellow Dog at Blue in the Bluegrass presents a very brief historical case taxing the wealthy.
   
• My old friend, T. Paine at Saving Common Sense, used to define the national debt as a mortal threat to the republic. In fact he continually posted on his site a constant running total. That running total disappeared a while back and my pal is now in love with a tax cut that economists agree will dramatically accelerate that very debt.
   
• David P. Greenberg, at MadMikesAmerica watches members of my President’s cabinet on television, ponders the condition of our nation, and misses the good old days, when villains looked like villains.
   
• tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors shows us recently obtained internal FCC documents that demonstrate accusations against Obama on net neutrality were lies and the accusers knew they were lies.
   
• driftglass is delighted to see bête noire David Brooks flounder when finally getting factual pushback on his evangelistic message of both-sides-do-it.
   
• Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit watches in awe as my President’s new Ambassador to the Netherlands utters a falsehood, denies that he said it, is confronted by video, then denies that he denied it. Triple fake news?
   
• This week’s note in Trumpian ‘Alternative Facts’ comes from CNN, with 14 “did that really just happen” moments from 2017.
   

 
Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged begins with a conservative tweet:

We finally have a leader unafraid to boldly proclaim those two simple, beautiful words “Merry Christmas” https://t.co/smzbbfiEPv

— Kayleigh McEnany (@kayleighmcenany) December 9, 2017

And answers with a transparent fact:

Barack Obama was saying “Merry Christmas” all the time. He was. There was never a War on Christmas. Atheists even like Christmas–family and presents and eating too many cookies is nice!

She has video proof of Merrye Olde Obama:

She continues with an entertaining rant about the annual conservative accusation.

We happen to have a letter home, written by Trey from the battle zone:

Dearest,

I write to you from a trench my buddies and I dug along Candy Cane road. It has afforded the Elves and I adaquate protection from the Seasons Greetings of our enemies. The Battle of Tinseltown does not go well for us. I feel like the belief in this War on Christmas wavers every year.

Continue reading “Saturday Rate of Exchange: Letters from the War on Xmas”

 
From Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged:

Fox News’ very awful Jesse Watters had on the Trump Administration’s even more awful KellyAnne Conway, and together they managed to perform a duet on the theme of there being a coup attempt on President Trump, and how, boo hoo, everything was rigged against Trump from the very beginning. I love this kind of argument. Trump was trying to soften the blow of his possible loss in the election all through October 2016 by crying “Rigged!’ whenever he could. And then he won the electoral college despite losing the popular vote by 3 million votes, got sworn in, and is still in office. It doesn’t seems all that “coup-y”.

What has happened, though, is a recent obfuscation campaign on the part of Trump associates and supporters to detract from the Special Counsel’s investigation, claiming that the FBI investigation that it follows on was tainted by partisans. This strikes me as really weird. Comey was a Republican, Mueller’s a Republican, as of a year or more ago, we understood that the FBI has a lot of people who were not Friends of Hill. Since when was the FBI or law enforcement in general a hotbed of subversives who want to overthrow a Republican president?

Except when that president is engaged in a potential criminal conspiracy to undermine national security. See, I can get why law enforcement professionals would deeply care about that.

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From PZ Myers:

This is a good article about the alien bubble silicon valley is rolling around in. What shocked me most was this one incredibly stupid comment.

On his blog, Y Combinator president Sam Altman argued that political correctness was damaging the tech industry. “This is uncomfortable, but it’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about gay people if we want them to be able to say novel things about physics,” he wrote.

If it helps, Altman himself is gay.

No, it doesn’t help.

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From Infidel753:

Well, they did it. No longer can we say “the Republicans can’t get anything done”. The bumbling and duplicity of the process that passed tax “reform” has been amply described on many sites, and I’m not going to rehash it. The point is, they finally got a serious piece of legislation class warfare passed.

Why did they do it? Why did they go all out for an unpopular bill that hands the Democrats multiple talking points to use against them next year? For one thing, as we’ve all heard, some of their rich donors were threatening to cut them off if this didn’t pass; for another, they may have thought it would unite their fragmented base (which is frustrated by the lack of progress on the wall, ACA repeal, etc.), even if the rest of the country doesn’t like it. It could even be merely that the ideological imperative here was much stronger than with other issues — if there’s one obsession that holds all Republicans in thrall, tax cuts for the rich is probably it.

I’ve also seen a more Machiavellian idea suggested: Republicans can see the writing on the wall — demographics, Trump’s unpopularity, generic-ballot polls — and they know they’re doomed to massive losses in 2018 and 2020 no matter what they do. So they’re focused on pleasing the giant corporations and the ultra-wealthy to whom they might go for jobs as lobbyists or whatever after the voters have turfed them out, rather than pleasing their constituents.

My worst-case scenario is something a little different and more sinister…

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From The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser:

Much like their God, Evangelicals are obsessed with who does what with whom, where, why, and how, sexually. Violations of “Biblical” morality are met with cease-and-desist orders, and when that fails, people not practicing Evangelical-approved sex are threatened with God’s judgment and eternal punishment in the fire and brimstone of the Lake of Fire. Yet, Evangelicals will still, with a clueless straight face, profess to love everyone.

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Wondering why a few conservative friends fail to be impressed.

Worth the a few minutes it takes to click, listen, and view

 
From libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara:

The distortions in the way the Trump FCC’s rollback of the Obama FCC’s so-called Net Neutrality rules is being reported is disgraceful. For example, AP reported:

The Federal Communications Commission repealed Obama-era “net neutrality” rules Dec. 14, giving internet service providers like Verizon, Comcast and AT&T a free hand to slow or block websites and apps as they see fit or charge more for faster speeds.

No. The FCC didn’t “give” the ISPs anything. It restored the rights of ISP providers to manage content traffic on their own networks—the networks that they built—as they see fit.

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