Category: Uncategorized

 
From David P. Greenberg at MadMikesAmerica:

Here’s the best part of the “Plaid Shirt Guy” story. A little background. Trump was giving one of his many taxpayer-subsidized campaign rallies. So, behind him is this guy in a plaid shirt. He’s not Maga-ing. He wears no hat. He holds no sign, and he’s not only not cheering, he’s clearly not buying what Trump has to sell.

Well, along comes one of Trump’s Leni Riefenstahl wannabes, and she kicks the dude and his three friends off the dais and replaces ’em with four hard-Magas. It was four college-age kids, no signs and no tee-shirts, replaced by 4 women, all in full regalia.

In an interview later, “PSG” stated that before the rally, they were specifically told they had to “appear enthusiastic.” So, again. Before his rallies, Trumpers are told if they want to stand behind Trump on teevee, they have to “appear enthusiastic.” And apparently, if they fail to do that, a Leni Riefenstahl wannabe will kick them out of the rally.

But here’s the best part.

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• Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post has harsh words about proposed Justice Kavanaugh and his snub of the parent of a victim of gun violence. Apparently, it was deliberate.
   
• My conservative friend, T. Paine at Saving Common Sense, hops on the truly dumb remark by Andrew Cuomo (America was never that great?) to excoriate the left for running down the USA. Oh geez! This liberals-are-anti-American business may get tired to folks like me, but it never gets old for Mr. Paine.
   
  Okay. My view.
   
  What Mr. Cuomo got wrong, what my friend gets wrong, what Mr. Trump (MAGA) gets wrong, what they all fail to see is that America has been great, not in fact, but in trajectory. While the moral universe bends in Dr. King’s long, long arc toward justice, America has moved in jagged jumps back and forth. Overall, hard won gains have predominated amid brutal sacrifice.
   
  Patriots have no need to whitewash the past or particularly want it back. I wrote a little about this after Mr. Trump managed to get a majority of electors. We who miss the direction must battle to get it back for our country.
   
• Robert Levin, at The Moderate Voice, gets specific as he contemplates the long term downward trajectory of the Republican Party.
   
• Andy Borowitz reports that Mike Pence is blasting the New York Times for printing an anonymous anti-Trump opinion piece and vows never to write an opinion piece for them again.
   
• Frances Langum listens as President Obama goes to Urbana to ask this: How hard can it be, saying Nazis are bad?
   
• Yellow Dog at Blue in the Bluegrass reacts as a military hero running for election as a Democrat finds herself swiftboated by Kentucky Republicans.
   
• Green Eagle takes a look at the informal Justice Department tradition of never making legal moves against candidates within 60 days of an election, and asks why that should apply to non-candidate Trump.
   
• Neil Bamforth, in MadMikesAmerica, wonders if Putin’s hitmen are still walking the streets of London. Neil suggests that the assassins Russia has been sending have been sloppy, sometimes hitting unsuspecting citizens of Britain.
   
• In The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, one-time pastor, current atheist, Bruce response acerbicly to a Christian who asks if Bruce was ever born again.
   
• PZ Myers mulls over, and is mystified by, arguments about whether Jesus actually existed. He wonders why it matters to those on his side of the religion divide.
   
  As a committed Christian I am somewhat the captive of dogma, I suppose. But I wonder about the debate for other reasons. If we accept that the Apostles existed, and that several died grisly deaths, it strikes me as possible but unlikely that they willingly died for what they knew to be a hoax.
   
  It is more plausible that they did not exist, and that one madman named Paul just made them up. After all, most non-Jewish followers met only Paul and would have no way of knowing. Still, that strikes me as far fetched.
   
  I can see a reasonable view that those disciples fell victim to a magician’s tricks, or that the miracles were a series of myths that grew organically over years as the life of Jesus was retold.
   
  Professor Myers points out that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, especially given the lack of contemporaneous records about most life in the provinces. But sometimes evidence kind of emerges from the dust. For example, I would find it shattering if conclusive evidence developed that Jesus did indeed exist, but that he died running from Gethsemane with a Roman spear in his back.
   
• Max’s Dad had never seen Metallica and paid a breathtaking amount for his first time. He says something like: Wow! It was worth it. His explanation is, as always, entertaining.
   

 
From Infidel753:

I wasn’t prepared for the sheer stupidity of some drivers.

There are apparently people to whom driving is a grimly-urgent game whose object is to be ahead of, rather than behind, as many other cars as possible. People jump from lane to lane through dangerously-small gaps trying to get in front of each other, tailgate, honk furiously in frustration when a move in the game fails, speed up to cut off people properly signaling a lane change or trying to merge onto the freeway, and vroom off with an aggressively flatulent-sounding burst of acceleration when a gap in one lane offers a chance to get a few spots ahead.

And usually that’s all that’s at stake — a chance to get one or two car-positions further ahead than they would otherwise be. You’re driving up your blood pressure and stress hormones, and everyone else’s, for the sake of an advantage of a few seconds. What on Earth is the point? It’s as if people feel that getting in front of another car rather than behind it is a test of their manhood. I can’t help thinking of those primate intimidation displays to assert dominance which find echoes in so much of human behavior.

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From Political Irony:

Apparently, this is not the first time that Donald Trump has had a funeral problem. Most of us know that Trump was not invited to the funeral of Barbara Bush. Nor was he invited to the recent royal wedding in the UK.

But it goes back even farther. Back to the funeral of Fred Trump, Donald’s father. Apparently when the son eulogized his father, he spent most of his time talking about himself and his successful real estate projects.

And then there was the funeral of Roy Cohn, lawyer to Joe McCarthy and later longtime mentor to Trump.

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From The Onion: