Category: Uncategorized

• This week’s international note in Trumpian ‘Alternative Facts’ comes from the Irish Examiner as the Trump administration coins an Orwellian phrase, calling child captive facilities tender age shelters.
   
• Frances Langum looks at the evidence. Trump immigration policy attacking little kids is very deliberate. My President apparently thinks my country as a whole enjoys this as much as does he.
   
• Tommy Christopher seems to regard with some skepticism the latest excuse for the Trump resistance to reuniting families torn about by … well … Trump. Seems there were too many hours devoted to Congressional Representatives who helped reveal the caging of those infants. Damn liberal interference!
   
• M. Bouffant at Web of Evil listens to, and reads, abusive threats of violence and suggests that 1) the mental illness at the source is generated by a political point of view mostly from 2) one side of the political spectrum.
   
• North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz marvels that Trump supporters are now indignantly demanding civility.
   
• Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post celebrates the unexpected political rise of Alexandroa Ocasio-Cortez
   
• It was one of the more absurdly petty of the many petty scandals. John Scalzi at Whatever takes a break from book reviews to perform a very funny 5 minute dramatic reading of a very funny column about whether Scott Pruitt can stay moist without the lotion he ordered EPA staff to run around town finding for him.
   
• tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors goes beyond newly announced Trump Communications Director Bill Shine’s protection of various sex predators at Fox. tengrain goes after the poor guy’s wife. Oh come on, tengrain! I thought the general consensus was to avoid attacking families!
   
  Wait. She said WHAT in public tweets about black people?
   
• Let’s see. A graduate student teaching an undergraduate class stopped a rant by a student against gay people because said rant had nothing to do with the classroom subject. Later, a conservative professor from another department disagreed. So far so good.
   
  The professor published a piece on-line attacking the graduate student. So farther so good.
   
  But the professor also published the name of the graduate student, contact information, and how to find her. After receiving a number of violent threats, the student left the college in fear for her well being.
   
  The college suspended the professor for publishing private contact information, potentially putting the student at risk. The professor sued and the issue went to court. The professor won because of academic freedom.
   
  Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson celebrates the decision as a conservative victory for freedom of speech over a liberal college that is intolerant of conservatives who dare to speak out. Well, that’s what he says.
   
  Okay, he doesn’t say quite all that. James is a very busy individual who must deal with all manner of important issues. He forgot to mention the part about publishing private contact information or that it was the sole reason for the suspension. Limitations of space, I would guess. Could have happened to any ideologue blinded by conservative passion.
   
• Jonathan Bernstein celebrates Wednesday’s Independence Day with a thoughtful piece about a bold gamble by James Madison.
   
• In The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, former pastor, current atheist Bruce considers how to advise secret doubters among the faithful. How can they find the courage to come out of the closet?
   
• The Journal of Improbable Research finds a statistical study on what most of us high school nerds have wondered once every decade or so. What happened to cool kids later in life.
   
• Infidel753 brings back his continuing, intellectually hilarious, series of words — and the meanings they would have if the spelling was consistently parsed. One I’ll try out on our pastor after tomorrow’s worship service – Preacher: One who makes you sore in advance.
   

Found at Neatorama

This was at her retirement party.

– More on Shirley Clements here –

 
From Max’s Dad:

Some man, whether mentally ill, a MAGA guy, or a guy with a beef, walked into a newspaper office and shot and killed 5 people doing their jobs. Since he was white and a narcissistic asshole he was taken alive. These people who were murdered, these journalists, were regular folks with families and goals and lives. They had a passion for telling you the truth. They were NOT the “enemy of the people” as our Dear Leader loudly exclaimed at one of his Klan rallies in South Carolina two nights before. They did not deserve to be “curb stomped” as failed actress and NRA loudmouth Dana Loesch said. The cheering from asshole Trumpers happy about people dying at a small newspaper in Maryland was disgusting. The dripping with sarcasm thoughts and prayers bullshit from Trump and his leech Pence made me want to wretch. These two wanna be strongmen would allow this to happen daily if their deep inner selves were allowed to bubble over like a fascist volcano and take power as they fantasize.

Do I really believe that? Goddamned right I do.

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From The Moderate Voice:

It’s really hard for me to feel optimism and pride in my nation while we engage in policies that will make future readers of history books shake their heads. While a majority of Americans believe the president of the United States is a racist and bases his policies on his racism, a large contingent still support him.

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From Green Eagle:

Ha ha, just kidding. In the wake of discovering that he is building concentration camps for children, Gallup reports that Republican support for Trump has fallen from 90% to 87%. This is an openly, proudly Fascist party, people, and anyone who can’t see that at the present time is deeply defective, morally and intellectually.

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From PZ Myers:

I don’t give a rat’s ass for Alan Dershowitz, but this is so symptomatic of how bad the NYT has become. It’s not just that a cranky old man (hey, where’s MY feature?) gets a sympathetic article, but that phrase: Martha’s Vineyard is the “epicenter of progressive values”? Martha’s Vineyard, vacation spot of the rich? If there’s any clearer picture of the delusions of the NYT and the Democratic party, this idea that Martha’s Vineyard matters, I’d like to see it.

But then, the NYT and the Democratic party have been ongoing oblivious catastrophes for years. Now a former executive editor has a few words to say about that.

I’m feeling about the NYT now like I did when my son cheated on a test in 10th grade. I loved him to death, believed he was a thoroughly wonderful young man, but he needed a course correction. So I left my desk at The NYT, where I was DC [Bureau] Chief, met his school bus and read him the riot act. He needed a course correction.

So does the NYT… it’s making horrible mistakes left and right.

This sums up her litany of complaints:

More narcissism: It’s always about us. Yikes. Distance is part of journalism’s discipline.

It’s that narcissism that allows them to think they are doing good by including a line-up of deplorables on their opinion pages, and printing complete garbage with a straight face.

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From The Onion:

“Our initial data showed that Americans are impulsive and tend toward willful ignorance—findings that are consistent with past research,” said Professor Spencer Dixon, who led the study on U.S. culture and society. “But what we were surprised and, honestly, a little delighted to find is that Americans’ short attention spans, simplemindedness, and inability to articulate a coherent idea can actually make them pretty lovable.”

“It’s hard to describe,” Dixon continued. “It’s just all these little quirks they have. And after a month or two of observation, they kind of start to grow on you.”

After thousands of interviews with citizens from every socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic background, the UNM researchers discovered that despite the tendency of many Americans to do the loudest, dumbest thing possible at any given moment, the populace is “in the end, pretty hard not to like” and in many instances “sort of charming, frankly.”

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From Dave Dubya:

What we have in the United States is not a democracy. When a minority seizes power over a majority, it also not a representative republic, founded on the consent of the governed. It is a corruption of the Founders’ dream, and for most Americans, a failed state.

This is what we have now. Consent of the governed has been replaced by the rule of an increasingly unaccountable minority.

First let’s get this straight. The Right needs to know this: The majority is NOT on their side. Although they are not losing morally or socially, there is a reason moderates and Left are losing politically.

The reason is clear.

Moderates and the Left are losing politically only because democracy is losing.

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From Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger:

Donald Trump based his campaign on trying to scare the public about immigration. He called undocumented immigrants rapists, murderers, and gang members, and warned of a crime wave if that immigration is not stopped. He has not mellowed. In the last few days, he has repeatedly said that the undocumented immigrants would cause much more crime if allowed to come to this country.

Trump’s xenophobic and racist base believe those lies — and they are lies (since statistics show that undocumented immigrants actually commit far fewer serious crimes than U.S. citizens commit). Fortunately, the U.S. public is not buying the repeated lies of Trump.

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From libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara:

Industry scientists may be biased? Fair enough. But why should we assume that the integrity of the fired scientists is beyond dispute? Scientists can just as easily be biased against business and free enterprise. Government policy should not be shaped by them, either. Statists always recoil whenever anyone considers unregulating, as if regulations are good, simply because they are government regulations. But what if the motive is anti-business or anti-prosperity?

That said, pollution is one thing. Climate change is something entirely different. Climate science has become the God of the Left’s environmentalist religion. Environmentalism is based on the faith-based notion that nature is inherently “pristine” and any human action that upsets some precarious and perfect “balance of nature” is by that very fact immoral and catastrophic. There is no evidence of that.

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