FairAndUNbalanced.com

 
From Jonathan Bernstein:

Republicans put Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court decades ago despite Anita Hill’s credible claims of sexual harassment, and he is still a Supreme Court justice. Which means that if Republicans confirm Kavanaugh, the highest court in the land will be a living symbol that the law does not treat women as full citizens.

That’s simply unacceptable.

What I’d like Senate Republicans to say: They cannot know whether this accusation is true, false or somewhere in between. They do know such an act would disqualify Kavanaugh from this position and from any high office if were true. Kavanaugh (they believe) was otherwise a perfectly acceptable nominee. But the injustice to the entire nation of confirming him if the claim is true — and the message that confirming him would send if it is — outweighs the injustice to him personally if he has been wronged.

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From Tommy Christopher:

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) can’t seem to find time for his own constituents — but he did find time this week to accept an award from a group that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has officially designated as a hate group.

On Thursday, Nunes spoke at a dinner honoring him as the 2018 “Keeper of the Flame,” an honor bestowed upon him by the extremist anti-Muslim group “The Center for Security Policy.”

The SPLC notes that the organization is a “conspiracy-oriented mouthpiece for the growing anti-Muslim movement in the United States.” The group’s founder, Frank Gaffney Jr., has hosted white supremacist Jared Taylor on his radio show.

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From John Pavlovitz:

Recently a group of Evangelical church leaders released a document called The Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel, which has since been electronically co-signed by 7,000 clergy members through America.

Following on the heels of last year’s Nashville Statement, it is yet another attempt by a group of Bible Belt Conservatives to lecture the rest of the nation on how to properly follow Jesus—as if Jesus himself wasn’t fit for the job, as if he needs their help.

I’ll let you read it for yourself, but here’s a spoiler alert:

Like it’s equally pompous brother from Nashville, it too is filled with sanctimony, self-righteous gas-bagging, and all kinds of Bible verse-footnoted religious-speak—designed to serve an iron-clad apologetic of a compassion-free Christianity.

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From Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit:

So Manafort gets to keep something. On the other hand, once he finishes paying for his lawyers, he’ll probably have nothing much left. But he’ll still do less than 15 years (with good time), if he proves his worth to the Special Counsel’s people.

         And then there is this:

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• This week’s note in Trump ‘Alternative Facts’ comes from the Baltimore Sun as my President blames the independently revised death toll in post-hurricane Puerto Rico on a liberal conspiracy.
   
• tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors notes one television personality who agrees with my President that the tragic number of dead in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria is only a plot by Democrats trying to make his performance as president appear to have been less than exemplary.
   
• Author John Scalzi urges those in the path of Florence to take precautions, since “if you drown, Trump will probably say that you did it just to make him look bad.”
   
• North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz sees many in the path of Hurricane Florence refusing to evacuate because they fear the Trump administration’s cruelty in weaponizing once trusted immigration agencies.
   
• Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara has an opinion about efforts by Facebook to ban fake accounts and to fact check news items with notifications about verifiably false information. He’s against both.
   
• M. Bouffant at Web of Evil has an example of verifiably false news and, when it is not accompanied by any fact check warning, the sort of tragedy that can result.
   
• Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post fact checks information, in part by checking sources. He provides several that he considers reliable, including liberals, conservatives, and those between.
   
• Reacting to the now famous NY Times anonymous editorial, Jonathan Bernstein argues that thwarting Trump from within the administration is not anti-democratic.
   
• nojo at Stinque carefully considers the heroic anonymous op-ed writer and concludes that there is no hero in that administration and that America’s best hope is to get rid of them all.
   
• Tommy Christopher is impressed as former CIA officer Evan McMullin sandblasts Trump sycophant Rep. Devin Nunes and endorses his election opponent.
   
• Green Eagle walks through ever increasing complexity of celestial planetary charts of epicycles within epicycles prior to the development by Copernicus of a much simpler sun-based view of the solar system, then applies all that to Trump voters. An entertaining education.
   
• The Journal of Improbable Research covers a study of a sample composed of 440 scientific researchers and finds that the highest quality of work comes from those who smile most.
   
• Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson writes about efforts by his one-time high school in preparing students for life. He comments that the school seems to be doing a better job of preparing students for prison and gets a lot of blowback over it. So he writes about those damn liberals who can’t seem to get the point.
   

 
From Infidel753:

With the coming of hurricane Florence, the Carolina coastline is about to get a nasty taste of the consequences of human misbehavior — and I’m not talking only about the greenhouse-gas emissions that drive climate change and consequent extreme weather events. There is also pig shit involved.

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From The Onion:

“It makes me sick to think of these freeloading kids coming here by the thousands, living in 10-by-10 cells on the taxpayer’s dime while honest-to-God American citizens could be suffering behind those bars,” said Beardsley, adding that he sees no reason why the 3-to-13-year-old detainees could not simply go through the proper immigration process and be mistreated as American prisoners.

…

Beardsley also rejected as “liberal bullcrap” the idea that South and Central American refugee children were merely doing the prison time that American children don’t want to do.

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From Shaun Mullen at The Moderate Voice:

At home, the abjectly corrupt Russian leader has been propped up by the historic ability of Russians to feel sorry for themselves, a trait that Putin vigorously stokes through a massive propaganda machine that depicts Mother Russia as beleaguered and misunderstood because of its myriad foreign adversaries.

But a punky economy, a festering war in Ukraine, mixed rural election results and election-related protest demonstrations in 38 cities last Sunday, as well as “the messiness of the democratic process” in general, as The New Yorker‘s Masha Gessen puts it, are conspiring to tank Putin’s popularity.

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From PZ Myers:

If you can’t trust the Sun/New York Post, who can you trust? This is their summary of a science article.

Drinking young people’s blood could help you live longer and prevent age-related diseases, a study has found.

Blood factors taken from younger animals have been found to improve the later-life health of older creatures.

The study, published in Nature, was conducted by researchers from University College London (UCL), who said it could reduce the chances of developing age-related disorders.

Gosh, that sounds like fun, so I clicked through to read the source.

I was so disappointed.

It’s a review article titled “Facing up to the global challenges of ageing”, and it’s not about wealthy vampires bleeding young people dry at all. It’s also not a “study”.

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