It’s All Unfair, but Let’s Not Fiddle Around With the Electoral College

found online by Raymond

 
From Michael Kinsley:

The smooth and yet dramatic reversal in direction that followed the transfer of presidential power in 2016 is a tribute to American democracy. Especially when you consider that twice in the past five presidential elections — that is, almost half the time — the majority turned over power to the minority (in straight who-got-more-votes terms). How many other nations could pull that off?

But smoothness isn’t everything. The constitutional rules for electing a president are almost comically complex, potentially involving both houses of Congress in different capacities, the entire Cabinet, 50 state legislatures and a two-thirds vote of the people running food trucks along Pennsylvania Avenue. And in the end, we’ve got a government run at almost every level by people whose philosophy of government most citizens voted against. Talk about the silent majority! Every morning we wake up to discover that some corner of government has been taken over by zealots of the right. Trump has been peacefully handed the keys to the car by folks who think he can’t drive and shouldn’t be on the road.

So the election of 2016 — another Republican “victory” on a technicality — still sticks in many a blue craw.

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Right-Wing Corpse-Dancers

found online by Raymond

 
From our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit:

Republican Senate candidate Kelli Ward and her campaign think the McCain family may have released a statement about ending the late senator’s cancer treatments to interfere with her bus tour.

Because McCain’s fight against cancer and decision to let go was all about Kelli Ward… or so that troll of a candidate thinks.

One has to be a Trump-grace narcissist to think of that.

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You’ll Believe God is a Woman

found online by Raymond

 
From The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser:

While fundamentalist evangelical Christians are outraged over the notion that their God might be a woman (because, God forbid, complementarianism, y’all), they are focusing more on “God is a woman” than on a woman communicating her desires to her partner and promising to fulfill the partner’s desires in return. They are focusing on the outrage that their deity may be portrayed as a woman, someone who is commanded in the Pauline epistles to submit to the husband’s authority and to remain silent in church. They aren’t focusing on Ariana Grande’s encouragement of women to communicate with their partners as equals.

From my perspective, if some Evangelical teenagers listen to this song, I hope that the message of equality gets through to them.

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I Could Have Told Them This Experiment Wouldn’t Work

found online by Raymond

 
From PZ Myers:

When I was in high school, and also part of college, I spent my summers working in a wholesale nursery as a menial laborer. It was all stoop labor — “there’s 10 acres of pots of kinnikinnick, go weed them all” — and of course once you finished it all, you’d start over again because a new crop of weeds was sprouting. So I spent long days in the sun, bent over, scraping popweeds out of containers. It’s not a job I’d wish on anyone, but it’s partly how I paid for college.

Now I’m reading that, in 1965, the US government had a brilliant idea for replacing those darned Mexicans who were doing all that farm labor: pay high school students to do it for minimum wage. Thousands of students took the offer.

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Trump Forced to Back Down on His Disrespect for McCain

found online by Raymond

 
From Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger:

I did not always agree with the political stances taken by Senator John McCain (R-Arizona), but I respected him. He was honest, and I believe he tried to always do what he thought was best for the country — and he served heroically in our military. He deserved full honors on his passing. And I think most Americans of all political persuasions agree with that.

Unfortunately, the present occupant of our White House is a small-minded man who cannot put aside his personal grudges to honor a man who served his country. He thought he could continue to show his disrespect for Senator McCain after his death.

It was bad enough that instead of giving a tribute to the senator from his own party (as other politicians of both parties did), he did a two-sentence tweet of condolences to McCain’s family, then repeated that in an Instagram sporting his own picture (instead of McCain’s). His staff had written a tribute of McCain for Trump, but he refused to give it.

But perhaps the most disrespectful was Trump premature raising of the White House flag.

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Because The Hewitt Cyborg Cannot Process Basic Human Emotions…

found online by Raymond

 
From driftglass:

From Raw Story:

Hugh Hewitt claims Trump just forgot to fly flag at half staff for McCain: ‘It’s an egregious oversight’

Conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt opined that the White House had not flown its U.S. flag half staff on Monday because of a simple “oversight.”

The White House on Monday broke protocol by fully raising its flag less than 48 hours after the death of Sen. John McCain (R-AZ).

During a panel discussion on MSNBC, host Craig Melvin wondered why President Donald Trump had not issued a proclamation to keep the flag lowered….

Craig Melvin wonders why President Stupid had not issued a proclamation.

Do you know what I wonder? I wonder why MSNBC is still putting Hugh Hewitt in front of a camera and asking his opinion about anything.

Actually, that’s not true. I don’t wonder at all.

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