Category: Uncategorized

 
From John Scalzi:

Steve Bannon and the New Yorker — Well, this was predictable enough, to anyone who wasn’t David Remnick: The New Yorker announced that Bannon would be the headliner of its upcoming “festival,” in conversation with Remnick, who is the magazine’s editor-in-chief. That didn’t sit particularly well with much of the New Yorker’s staff, or, more importantly in this case, many other participants of the festival, who all started dropping out rather than share the program with Bannon. Between those drop outs, staff disapproval and a wholly predictable backlash on Twitter, Remnick bowed to the inevitable and dropped Bannon from the program with a somewhat defensive statement. Bannon, of course, was gleeful about this, calling Remnick “gutless,” which is what Remnick deserves for inviting that fascist piece of shit to his festival of ideas in the first place.

As a former journalist, I can understand Remnick’s thinking on this one: He’d been angling to interview Bannon for a while, and the idea of getting that festering lump of white “supremacy” on a public stage where he couldn’t equivocate or finesse his way out of his shitty racist ideas seemed like a good one. The problem was that Remnick was thinking with his journalist brain and not his event coordinator brain. The event coordinator brain should have realized that inviting Bannon to a New Yorker-branded “festival of ideas,” complete with travel expenses and honorarium, was in effect paying Bannon to take on the New Yorker imprimatur for his ideas. It’s not reportage; it’s the New Yorker saying “these ideas are important enough that we paid to get them on our stage.” And note well that Bannon was meant to be the headliner.

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From Earth-Bound Misfit:

So McCain broke under torture. Everybody does. Unless you, personally, have experienced being tortured by North Vietnamese sadists, you have no right to judge McCain.

Therefore, if you’re one of the legions of right-wing trolls who have called McCain “Songbird”, you should be ashamed of yourselves.

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From Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger:

Corruption is nothing new in the Republican Party. They have long tied themselves to the rich in this country, and willingly traded their votes for campaign donations, sweetheart deals, and illegal payoffs.

They make promises to ordinary Americans at election time, but after the election they break those promises and go back to policies that favor the rich to the detriment of everyone else. They invented the Washington swamp, and love to wallow in it.

But since Trump moved into the White House, the GOP corruption has grown by leaps and bounds.

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From The Journal of Improbable Research:

Many are already accustomed to leaving the task of cleaning and drying the dirty dishes to a dishwasher – what if it were possible to do something similar with an infant in need of a diaper* change? A newly issued US patent granted to inventor Iman Farahbakhsh, of Quchan, Iran, explains the concept…

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From tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors:

My grandparents lived in Riverside, in what is now part of Nunes’ district, would never call themselves farmers, they were ranchers. Their ranch produced oranges. Maybe it is an Old California thing and no longer is true? Anyway, it grates on my 5th-generation Californian nerves to see Nunes’ occupation listed as Representative/Farmer in the central valley.

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From Jonathan Bernstein:

With August ending, it’s worth remembering that we are not, as we once would have expected, a year away from the Ames Straw Poll in Iowa. Nor are we looking back three years to the 2015 Ames Straw Poll. That’s because Republicans foolishly ended that event in 2015. And that might just be why Donald Trump won the nomination in 2016.

The straw poll was, to be sure, a ridiculous event. Candidates basically paid for votes. As many over the years noted, the straw poll didn’t do a very good job of predicting either the winner of the Iowa caucuses or the eventual nominee — as the final caucus winner, Michelle Bachmann in 2013, could tell us.

So why did it matter — or at least perhaps matter — that there was no straw poll in 2015?

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From nojo at Stinque:

We were right about the idea: Self-government doesn’t run by itself. The veneer of democracy is not the substance. We laugh at despots claiming 98 percent of an election, because we know the whole thing’s a sham, rotten to the core. We applaud the sight of voters — elsewhere — exercising their franchise, holding up their purple fingers, claiming their stake in the future of their nation.

We want to believe that’s how it works. We really want to believe that’s how it works here.

David Frum — yes, we know, but these are the times we live in — tweeted a photo this week, one of his lines tagged on a board. It’s a good line, a very good line, something close to what we’ve been saying a lot lately:

“If conservatives realize they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism, they will abandon democracy.”

And here we are.

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From John Pavlovitz:

As I watched McCain’s memorial service yesterday (as with some of the best funerals) life surprisingly and defiantly showed up in the face of death. Not unlike this country in the wake of 9/11, unity seemed to briefly return. It felt like mutual respect had been resurrected in America, if only for a few hours. Hope somehow felt tangible again, even in a time set aside for grieving.

It’s no small coincidence that this brief moment of national renewal happened in the physical absence of the current President. His non-presence was profound and powerful—reminding us how toxic America has become since he arrived, and how we are better off, more compassionate, and far closer to our shared greatness when not continually goaded into bitterness or exposed to ranting.

Supporters of this President will tell you that everyone at Senator McCain’s memorial service and all those expressing kindness this week, have just been “politically correct;” that it was all a symptom of their weaknesses and their inability to “tell it like it is.”

I think it was far more than that.

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• This week’s note in Trumpian ‘Alternative Facts’ comes from Odyssey: presenting a list of eleven alternate facts that are definitely true, along with moving reactions.
   
• Dave Dubya contrasts the honor and decency of old-line traditional patriot John McCain with more contemporary values of today’s conservatives.
   
• Max’s Dad notes that American hero John McCain provided moments of decency to an otherwise barren political world.
   
• Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post is inspired by John McCain to call for civility in politics.
   
• Jonathan Bernstein makes the case that, while Hurricane Maria was a disaster in Puerto Rico, Washington is still a disaster.
   
• After my President boasts that he is proud of how he responded to Hurricane Maria, Tommy Christopher covers San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz as she explains on national television that “The administration killed the Puerto Ricans with neglect.”
   
• Congress is considering replacing Obamacare with tax deductible Health Savings Accounts. The idea is attacked as more breaks for the wealthy. Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara objects to the objection. The wealthy are people, after all. The proposed tax cuts merely lets them keep money that was their own, after all. Fair is fair, after all.
   
• In his usual acerbic way, tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors contrasts the huge cost of Trump’s tax cuts for the rich and the upcoming military parade in honor of himself with the comparatively minuscule savings by eliminating a modest cost of living increase for public employees.
   
• North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz urges Christians to stop blaming God for their own LGBTQ hatred.
   
• Infidel753 has an entertaining list of common writing mistakes committed online. As a rule, those errors I commit are minor and nearly unnoticeable. What I notice in what I read are major distractions that I am sure make everyone crazy.