Health Repeal Repealed, Trump Trumped, GOP Agonistes

  • Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara at Principled Perspectives takes on the difficult task of casting liberal triumphs that have earned approval from contemporary libertarian conservatives – abolishing slavery in the US, advancing the rights of women, ending Jim Crow – as pro-Enlightenment, while casting liberal victories that conservatives hate – Social Security, Medicare – as regressive anti-enlightenment.
     
  • Andy Borowitz brings a startling report of an able-bodied senior citizen who refuses to do anything but watch television, yet receives three free government meals every day. Oh come on, you know who it is.
     
  • nojo at Stinque comes up with an inspired rant, thanking extreme conservatives for destroying the healthcare repeal effort, even if their motivation was that repeal was not harsh enough. Says nojo, “bless their shriveled hearts”.
     
  • Frances Langum narrates as healthcare repeal goes down and MSNBC host Joy Reid, serving as a panelist, stomps all over a conservative’s feeble effort to blame Democrats for lack of bipartisan cooperation.
     
  • This was almost lost in the chaos of the aborted vote day. Jon Perr at PERRspectives reported on the last minute problem the CBO had in scoring the Republican plan to repeal healthcare. In the fast shuffle to make it harsh enough to please conservatives, it no longer met the non-partisan definition of health care.
     
  • In looking at why the Republican repeal of healthcare failed, tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors finds one answer in a century and a half of technology. Repeal was defeated by the telephone.
     
  • At MadMikesAmerica, Bill Formby has figured out what Republicans do not care about.
     
  • There is some talk of buyer’s remorse among Trump voters, especially those who may resent efforts to take away their health coverage. Max’s Dad speculates about one other single individual who may regret throwing the election to Donald Trump and who is doing something about it.
     
  • Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged, didn’t see anything particularly startling in news that Trump folks could have been caught up in legal wiretaps of other governments just after the election. Congratulatory calls seem innocuous. But that was before the weird, jerky reaction of Rep. Devin Nunes, all by itself, raised legitimate suspicions of those contacts.
     
  • This week in Donald Trump’s ‘Alternative Facts’, the Baltimore Sun reports on how a Trump falsehood got weird. Moments after our wayward President went to Twitter and stated that the FBI director was saying what the FBI director was not saying, the FBI director directly told the American people that the statement transmitted by the President moments before was just not true.
     
  • Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post notes the Trump policy of shrinking the press corps to only that small chorus willing to carry administration tunes.
     
  • Dave Dubya thinks a suggestion by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson might be a worthy answer to Trumpism.
     
  • Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson suggests that Milwaukee violates constitutional guarantees of equality by not providing taxpayer funded bus transportation to religious schools. A plain reading of the First Amendment seems to me to prohibit Congress from providing anything respecting an establishment of religion. Additional post civil war amendments extended those prohibitions to state and local governments.
     
    Traditional conservative argument relies on a bit of gaslighting: the First Amendment doesn’t really say what it says. So I’m especially interested in how James answers the Bill of Rights. Sadly, he doesn’t seem to think that objection worth answering, or even mentioning. At least not here.
     
  • In The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, Bruce dutifully reports on yet another instance of Christian criminality. In this case, an evangelical pastor commits insurance fraud to pay for his drug habit. Hypocrisy is always newsworthy, as I see it. Christians traditionally seek some variation of scriptural immunity by regarding all humanity as sinful. Our pastor prays aloud that God’s word might break through “the sins and contradictions in my life.” A beloved friend explains why she will never attend worship. “I will not participate in organized hypocrisy.” My answer is always the same. “That’s not fair – – – we’re not organized.”
     
  • My excellent friend, conservative T. Paine at Saving Common Sense, has a friend who voted for Obama, then Hillary, and who now considers how to protect his home. T. Paine makes helpful suggestions which his liberal friend playfully muddles. Which demonstrates the complete failure of contemporary liberal thought, or the humorous side of T. Paine’s friends, or maybe just that T. Paine is a glass-is-full wit on his own.
     
  • Vagabond Scholar brings us angry Irish ballads about violence, death, and English occupation.
     
  • The Journal of Improbable Research covers an event at the University of Oslo. The Luxuriant Hair Club for Scientists (LFHCfS) has announced their choice for Woman of the Year. Apparently, Dr. Anneleen Kool, who has conducted botanical research on how Vikings used plant life, also has lots of hair.
     

Breaking News: Racists Want You to Stop Calling Them Racists

found online by Raymond

 
From PZ Myers:

Sam Altman, a gullible Silicon Valley entrepreneur with no sociological qualifications, sent himself on a self-appointed mission to talk to Trump supporters. This was an “interesting and helpful experience”, he says, although I’m fed up with attempts to puzzle out what Trumpkins have to say, so it was the opposite of interesting to me, and he fails to explain what’s “helpful” about yet another set of rationalizations. In particular, his “TL;DR summary” of the various conversations is just self-serving extortion, and no, I neither accept this claim nor am I going to obey this suggestion.

“You all can defeat Trump next time, but not if you keep mocking us, refusing to listen to us, and cutting us out. It’s Republicans, not Democrats, who will take Trump down.”

We’ve been listening. We’ve been listening a lot. And it’s the same old crap that justifies mocking them. Like this quote:

“Stop calling us racists. Stop calling us idiots. We aren’t. Listen to us when we try to tell you why we aren’t. Oh, and stop making fun of us.”

But…they are racists! This is a racist comment:

“I’m so tired of hearing about white privilege. I’m white but way less privileged than a black person from your world. I have no hope my life will ever get any better.”

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When in Doubt, Lie

found online by Raymond

 
From Iron Knee at at Political Irony:

Pretty much every day or so a new tie between the Trump campaign and the Russians appears. Documents from a lawmaker in the Ukraine link Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort with money laundering for Viktor Yanukovych, the deposed former Ukrainian president who was propped up by Moscow and is now wanted on corruption charges but is hiding out in Russia. Manafort worked for Yahukovych for almost a decade.

So how does the Trump administration respond to this? Do they defend Manafort against the charges?

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A Land Gone Mad

found online by Raymond

 
From Green Eagle:

We know now that even the right wing FBI and all of our right wing intelligence services (because right wing is what they have always been) admit that the spies of a foreign dictator were major factors in the election of the man who criminally sits in the White House (well, except on the weekends, when we pay $3 million so he can play golf.)

Hey, so what?

In the entire history of this country, for almost two and a half centuries, if anything like this had happened, this man would be out of the White House and in jail by now, if he had not already faced execution.

But this time around? Who cares?

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Pants on Fire

found online by Raymond

 
From Capt. Fogg at The Swash Zone:

It was ages ago, during the Gore Vs Bush contest that Al Gore quoted some figure – lets say it was 4.5%. After the debate the Bush people sprang up to tell us “Gore Lied! He Lied” the figure was closer to 4.6% apparently. Such is the joy in finding error in an opponent, all sense of proportion evaporates along with the ability to see how ridiculous you are. In politics degree doesn’t matter. A mistaken prediction of insurance cost is right there with selling missiles to Iran and conducting a secret illegal war and training death squads to kill nuns. All that matters is Who, not what.

This joy sings loudest in the hearts of liars. Barack Obama once said there were more black males in prison than in university. Not quite true, but didn’t the headlines howl with outrage. It’s happening now that Obama has left the building. It’s important to portray him as the purveyor of frequent and grievous lies. Books and articles are appearing to distract from Trumps Treasons and felonies, rapes, thefts and frauds by telling you Obama is a liar. He’s just as bad so don’t criticize Trump.

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Donald Trump’s Secret Identity

What is past is prologue. At least that’s what Shakespeare cautions.

I can feel the disproving glance of my long dead English professor even now. In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a Donald Trump character is using his personal history, his own Art of the Deal, to rationalize the murder he is about to commit.

The past is prologue. Look where the past has led me! I have no responsible choice. God has given me no choice but to take this opportunity.

We look to history because we don’t have much else to guide us. And there isn’t much from the past that could have prepared us for Donald Trump. The Information Age has blossomed from a new sort of mustard seed.

Aggression in the good old days was at least immediately identifiable. Hitler wanted Poland. Mussolini wanted Ethiopia. Armies marched. Ethnic populations were rounded up for extermination. Everyone pretty much could see it happen.

Now, democracy is overtaken by internet trickery. Republican websites come at us from former Soviet satellites. Conservative fake news is authored deep in the burping bowels of what once was Putin’s KGB and becomes the basis of Trump administration dogma.

Donald Trump is easy to photoshop into images from 75 years ago. For some reason, he proudly mimics the aggressive posture and stern scowl. He has become a beloved Benito to much of contemporary conservatism.

The reality is, at this stage, much more limited. Cell phones didn’t exist in World War II Italy. And it is not easy to imagine El Duce huddled over his personal ham radio as the rest of Italy sleeps. Would he really have devoted late night insomnia to sending forth tearful diatribes against imaginary insult?

Military technology and the largest economy in history does give President Trump the ability to hurt many more people. It is always possible that millions from decades ago will someday be compared to billions. But history, technology, and the democratic process has imposed constraints. And there is a quantum difference in magnitude. Hitler’s place in future textbooks is cemented by an evil so towering that our President’s tiny malevolence is made into a scale model of itself.

The world knew Hitler. And Donald, you are no Hitler.

History doesn’t seem to offer better choices. Nero? Caligula? The Borgia clan? Really?

Fiction may provide more fertile ground. Archie Bunker’s demented bigotry comes to mind. Walter White has been suggested. The rapid descent into pure evil is obvious, but White’s moral deterioration is aided by intellectual brilliance. The staggering intelligence that allows his survival also enables him to rationalize all he does. Our president seems closer in mentality to the loud drunk at a neighborhood corner bar.

The great internet blogger driftglass has joined a few others in suggesting Captain Queeg. The paranoia is certainly there, and the President’s riveting attention to trivial details.

Ahh, but the strawberries that’s, that’s where I had them. They laughed at me and made jokes but I proved beyond the shadow of a doubt and with, with, geometric logic that, that, that a duplicate key to the wardroom icebox DID exist, and I’d have produced that key if they hadn’t of pulled the Caine out of action. I, I, I know now they were only trying to protect some fellow officers…

…and the Captain’s voice trails off into prolonged silence.

Strawberries.

But Captain Queeg, as portrayed by Humphrey Bogart is a serious man who, over years, has incrementally fallen into his own strange universe. While President Trump seems also to have gone into another reality, it is difficult to see him as ever having been a serious individual. He propelled himself to national office by sharing with enough fearful voters a common hatred of vulnerable minority groups.

I have my own candidate, a fictional character that I think fits the strange individual who now occupies the White House.

Impatient, with an inability to focus for more than a few moments on anything other than self.

A real character in a position of power has no more concentration …

I don’t have to be told – you know, I’m a smart person – I don’t have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day for the next eight years.

…than someone from fiction

But get on with it!!

An individual prone to accusation

A fiery meeting in the Oval Office, where there were, quote “a lot of expletives.” In fact, we have video from outside the Oval Office which shows an animated conversation with Trump and his top aides.

coincides with a fictional counterpart

What do you know of this unfortunate affair?
Nothing!
Nothing whatever?
Nothing whatever!

A ruler who, in furious rage, accuses others for what goes wrong

We’re told the president accused his staff of fumbling the situation.

and a fictional ruler who reminds us of someone we see on the news

Off with their heads!!

The mercurial personality who currently holds office accepts as fact fanciful conspiratorial speculation with no evidence beyond what is confirmed by a fearful, trembling staff.

But there must be a verdict first.
Sentence first. Verdict afterwards!

We have walked with Alice through the looking glass.
We find ourselves ruled by a red-faced Queen of Hearts.

May God save us.
May God save the United States of America.


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After 60 Days Trump Still the Prez with the Lowest

found online by Raymond

 
From Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger:

The chart above (from Gallup Poll daily tracking) shows the job approval numbers for Donald Trump after 60 days in office. His numbers are growing worse — not better. Currently only 37% of the public approves of the job he is doing, while 58% disapprove.

Trump remains the least approved president after 60 days of the last seven presidents. He’s not only the only one of that seven to have a job approval below 50% — but is also the only one to have a net negative job disapproval.

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Sunday Morning Party Line

found online by Raymond

 
From driftglass:

And when Chuck Todd saw the breadth of his failure he wept for there no more equivalences to falsify.

Well, not quite.

As a cardinal in the High and Holy Church of Both Siderism, it is Mr. Todd’s most sacred duty to light the altar candles and speak the liturgy to Fake Centrism regardless of how patently ludicrous those rituals have become or how empty the cathedral may be. Because Mr. Todd is not in the business of speaking truth to the masses; he is in the business of speaking fairy tales to hie fellow cardinals. And so, this Sunday…

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