Author: Burr Deming

• Green Eagle provides a 34 second read that summarizes the third and fourth day of the GOP diatribe. By the way, it helps if you know that Cthulhu is a gigantic entity worshiped by cultists, in shape like an octopus, a dragon, and a caricature of human form, which I got from Wikipedia, thus sparing myself reading anything by H. P. Lovecraft.
   
• Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger points to a lack of a Republican platform this year as consistent with the Trump convention theme. With no other unifying message, the convention was designed to antagonize the opposition. The gathering and contained speeches were not a presentation of principle. They were little more than a performance of provocation. Let’s own the libs! Tiresome.
   
• Jonathan Bernstein points out that Trump botched his big speech, but nobody will care.
   
• At Margaret and Helen, Helen listens to the GOP convention and writes to her friend. Taking in the rhetoric can lead to unnatural acts involving bleach, light bulbs, and language. Yikes.
   
• Tommy Christopher collects twitter laughter about the over-the-top convention screech by Kimberly Guilfoyle.
   
• M. Bouffant at Web of Evil searches deep into his heart and finds a lonely place that might sort of almost feel sorry for a convention presenting member of the Trump family.
   
• In The Borowitz Report, Trump darkly warns that a Biden presidency would mean regular mail service and sports.
   
• In Hackwhackers a Trump speech maker makes reference to a Jimmy Stewart movie role, so Jimmy Stewart’s daughter speaks for the family, stomping all over Trump and convention hypocrisy.
   
• The old joke has an old farmer helping a census researcher with the area’s death rate. The farmer says it’s one per person. Frances Langum reports as Jim Acosta asks a senior White House official about the wisdom of cramming an audience of supporters shoulder to shoulder without protective masks during a dangerous pandemic. The answer from the White House is it doesn’t really matter. Everybody is going to catch this thing eventually.
   
  So it’s one death per person. Now THAT is cold.

Continue reading “Unconventional Convention, No There There, Guilfoyle Screech, Blown Speech”

Sure, 180,000 Americans have died from coronavirus on Trump’s watch, but six years ago today, President Obama wore a tan suit. Happy Tanniversary, Barack! pic.twitter.com/fqEVrQeh3H

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) August 28, 2020

I never entirely agreed with Republican principles as I understood them.

When I was a toddler, they were the party of civil rights. That was the main reason my grandparent and parents were enthusiastic Republicans, at least at that time. I would have been as well, had they allowed twelve year old kids to vote.

The libertarian wing of the party had taken hold by the time I was a teenager. It was called classic conservatism in those days. The emphasis was on militant balancing of the federal budget, limited government, and elimination of the social safety net. The exaggerated embrace of states’ rights was part of the same ideological package. So was your right to sell your house to whomever you wanted – or to refuse to sell to anyone you disliked for any reason.

The flirtation with what was euphemistically called “racial conservatism” seems inevitable in retrospect. White racial resentment of black progress spilled into anger at any hint that somewhere, somehow, some undeserving black person might be getting away with something.

What were classic conservatives to do? Turn away those who wanted many of the same things, but for the wrong reasons?

The surrender to temptation came in increments.

Ideological conservatives would not tolerate racist talk, but they often did deny that racism existed, except in very rare cases. This allowed many to condemn civil rights agitators for stirring up trouble over imaginary wrongs. Racism was an artifact from the past, a mere rhetorical cudgel: an unfair weapon in a contrived war of words.

Throughout it all, conservatives made valiant efforts to advance their clear principles. Until those principles eroded, melted away by the alliance many denied.

Every four years political parties have reaffirmed the values by which their existence is justified. Political platforms are usually disregarded by political campaigns and ignored by office holders between elections. But they are valuable within themselves. They are a mechanism by which political parties affirm to the faithful that they stand for something, and that the something for which they stand is worth fighting for, is worth voting for.

This year has been a special year in that regard. We watched as the slow erosion became a meltdown.

The party of fiscal responsibility became one in which taxes are slashed for the wealthiest while expenses are driven upward.

The party of limited government puts children in cages and clubs protesters for the sake of presidential photo ops.

The party of civil rights has completed the process of repudiation even of the pretense. Voter suppression and the violation of basic liberties is now very much in the open. Democracy itself is seen as a partisan issue.

Many of us have waited with curiosity, wondering what sort of alternate facts, what manner of pretzel logic, would be shone in this year’s quadrennial statement of principle. And now we have an implicit acknowledgment, unexpected but truthful after a fashion. The statement of principles, the Republican platform, has been reduced to this: We don’t know what Republicans stand for, and we don’t know who to ask.

The RNC has unanimously voted to forego the Convention Committee on Platform, in appreciation of the fact that it did not want a small contingent of delegates formulating a new platform without the breadth of perspectives within the ever-growing Republican movement;

The Republican National Committee (RNC) (pdf)

You don’t need a decoder ring this year. There are no dog-whistles in that sentence.

What is on the list of Republican principles? What do they stand for?

According to Republicans:

Nothing we know of.

Nothing at all.

• Frances Langum gets the humor. Steve Bannon jokes publicly about ripping off We Build the Wall enthusiasts, then actually does rip them off, in exactly the way he laughed about doing it. Yachts, anyone?
   
• At News Corpse, Trump dimly recalls meeting Steve Bannon sometime in the distant past but doesn’t remember any fraudulent fundraising effort called We Build the Wall. NewsCorpse senses something is missing here and checks it out.
   
• M. Bouffant at Web of Evil just can’t believe what’s being aired as my President appreciates the support of QAnon lunatics.
   
• The Borowitz Report brings the angry reaction of my president to Biden’s pro-empathy acceptance speech. He demands that Biden apologize to the nation’s sociopaths for the insult.
   
• A crazed conservative pastor comes up with proof that Democrats are all worshipers of Satan. If you look at the 5 pointed star in the convention logo sideways, it looks like a pentagonal sign popularly associated with Wicca. Wow! That certainly settles it! Then tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors messes it all up by thoughtfully providing a similar display that is precisely 50 times worse. Anyone who guesses what it is gets to stay and clean the erasers.
   
• Tuesday was a hell of a day. In Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson notices that, on the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, my president manages to trip over Susan B. Anthony, Michelle Obama, COVID-19, and the US Postal Service. Tough Tuesday.
   
• driftglass yields time to Humphrey Bogart who makes the case against Trump.
   
• At The Moderate Voice, a long ago immigrant from Ecuador who defended our nation as an officer in the US Air Force, teaches my president about five words and cognitive testing.
   
• A few days ago, Max’s Dad watched my president semi-gloat to a loyal audience that New Zealand, the so-called success story in the fight against COVID-19 with zero cases in over three months, was suddenly experiencing a massive explosion of new cases. Seems New Zealand was desperately trying to track down the source of those 9 new cases.
   
  That would be nine.
   
  Mr. Trump recently shrugged at 170,000 US cases with “It is what it is.”
   
• Okay, so Trump’s last discovery of a sure cure for COVID-19 was a dud. Who could have known? But Green Eagle has great news. My president has discovered a new for-sure cure! He is pushing for approval by the Food and Drug Administration right away! Experts are alarmed. They insist there is no scientific indication it works, and it does cause heart problems. But those experts are always raining on parades. And it IS endorsed by the my-pillow guy.
   
  Besides, a lot of us who listen to our leader just want this pandemic hoax to end so we can stop injecting household cleaning products.
   
• North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz presents Christians with Christian logic. If, as we believe, God exists, then science comes from God. Science presents us with knowledge that we can use to save lives. So we also must know that God wants each of us to wear a mask. So wear the damn thing!
   
• Iron Knee at Political Irony takes a brief look at Corona deaths and then at mail-in voting fraud and breaks the brain of a hypothetical Trump supporter.
   
• So President Trump will be visiting a restaurant in Virginia? At The Onion, alarmed restaurant officials are creating emergency plans in case Trump refuses to leave.
   
• Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger brings an analysis that gives us an 85% chance of a Biden Presidency. It occurs to me that it would be close to your chance of surviving a game of Russian Roulette. Anyone comfortable with those odds? How about, instead of pulling that trigger, we all vote?
   
• Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara objects to a study of Trump appeals to white fear. Eddie Glaude of Princeton University says that it is an appeal to apprehension about change: “It’s all rooted in this panic about the place of white people in this new America.” Michael is indignant. The professor should realize that no group should have a special place in American society! In my home we call this missing the point.
   
• Scotties Toy Box carries the angry reaction of a public performer to being fired, just for criticizing Dolly Parton. I mean, who can’t benefit from a little constructive criticism? Like “freak titted” or “slut” or “old Southern bimbo”? We can be glad he had the tiny bit of good sense to use a euphemism when he got around to calling her “a BLM Lover”. Her endorsement of Black Lives Matter is what set the guy off. Why should a performer lose his job just for that? For some reason, Scottie seems unsympathetic.
   
• Dave Dubya is kind of proud at successfully getting banned by a self-described Proud Boy, who nonetheless insists he is not a racist. Dave provides highlights of the beating Proud Boy was getting in print before Proudy ran away.
   
• Republican Senator Martha McSally is in election trouble in Arizona. She pleads with conservatives to sacrifice a few meals to give her some recovery funds. Cato’s Julian Sanchez reacts with a much more entertaining response than “Huh?”
   
• In The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, we discover the biblical truth. The Bible does not order us never to judge. And, interestingly, Christians who believe that we are told not to judge, spend much of their salvation doing lots and lots of just that.

Infidel753 writes with an interesting observation about the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, the amendment formalizing and guaranteeing the right of women to vote.

Incredible, in a way, that this was only a century ago. So many things we take for granted now came surprisingly late in history.

I had written about conversations with my grandmother about her experiences as an adult in those days.

Those of my generation have been privileged, in our own way. We are the last to have actually met and spoken with eye witnesses to, participants in, and victims of, history that most of humanity can only know from history books and video documentaries. As a society, we live with slight transmutations of many of the same issues. Our collective imagination puts us farther from history than a real perspective would permit.

Our discussions often went past written history to daily life. My grandmother talked with me about the excitement in the schoolhouse in which she and her cousin taught after she managed to obtain the schedule of a local doctor. The two teachers lined their pupils at the front of the one-room building so they could all watch as he drove by, witnessing the first automobile they had ever seen. My grandparents explained road construction in those days, including regularly spaced dips in roads at steep hills, dips into which wagon wheels fit, allowing horses briefly to rest.

I do not believe I ever met anyone who experienced slavery in the old south. But I do know that former slaves from pre-Civil-War days were alive and telling their stories as I was growing up. The children of slaves had their own stories. An elderly woman told me there were two places she never wanted to go: Hell and Mississippi. An old man talked with me about the harshness of treatment that greeted a young black passenger of a train when he objected to segregated seating. The old man chuckled at the absurdity of challenging the awesome violent power of white supremacy.

And, of course, a rare living witness came to the nation in the mid-1950s. I may have seen the television program. I was too young to understand the significance until later. I’ve got a Secret was hosted each week by Garry Moore, who would introduce a series of guests to a celebrity panel. Members of the panel would each ask a few yes-or-no questions and try to guess the secret.

One guest in 1956 was 95 year old Samuel J. Seymour. The studio audience was stunned. As a youngster, he had been taken to Ford’s Theater, where he saw the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He watched, with the limited understanding of a child, as the great man was gunned down. He was still alive to talk on national television about the terrible moments as he witnessed them.

We are not that far removed from the glory and shame of our history, the role played by those who some of us have met, from whom we have learned.

My grandchildren may one day be called upon to explain the events they witnessed, including the evils perpetrated with the acquiescence of so many of today’s adults.

Perhaps it is not too late to improve the account they might give when asked what their grandfather did about the horrors of the times in which he lived.

Ratified exactly 100 years ago today.

My grandmother and I talked about that day. She was teaching in Chemung County, New York, when the news came.

I asked her about her feelings when she heard about women’s right to vote being constitutionally guaranteed. She said it made her very happy, especially for a good friend who was a suffragette.

Seems like such a primitive time, and yet my life overlapped with that of a wonderful woman who lived it as an adult.

William Faulkner:

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

• Julian Sanchez, senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, does not care much for the Trump legal attack on TikTok and WeChat, international Chinese-owned internet media companies. Julian regards the national security rationale as pathetically thin, and the attack itself as self-destructive for the United States.
   
• James Dobson, my brother-in-Christ is a perpetual family embarrassment. He is firmly anti-LGBTQ rights, anti-same-sex-marriage, anti-liberal. I’m familiar with the pattern. I have family members with whom I have relationships that are mercifully distant and friends who believe that God loves them, accepts them, and shares their hatred of gays, Muslims, and Obama.
   
  Dobson goes a little further, adopting the apparent ethic that false witness in the service of the Lord is a duty on the battlefield of culture war. In The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, Bruce explains how Dobson valiantly makes the case for my president. Good Christians have a sacred duty to vote for Trump.
   
• Vixen Strangely, at Strangely Blogged, sees the weird flailings of a desperate candidate. So Trump now accuses of Biden of being against God? Well, nothing else has worked.
   
• Hackwhackers gets clarity, as a Trump advisor reveals how the administration views democracy. Larry Kudlow says that “voting rights” are a “liberal left wish list.”. The quotes are accurate and in context.
   
• John Scalzi at Whatever reacts with profane determination at post office sabotage as a form of voter repression. He’ll vote no matter what.

Continue reading “TikTok, Lie for the Lord, Defend God, Voting Rights, Going Postal, Kamala”

 

From Billboard:

In 2018, she renamed “Dolly Parton’s Dixie Stampede” to “Dolly Parton’s Stampede”

As soon as you realize that [something] is a problem, you should fix it. Don’t be a dumbass. That’s where my heart is. I would never dream of hurting anybody on purpose.”

The change came two years before the police killings of unarmed Black Americans like George Floyd sparked a reckoning with systemic racism in the United States — one that led country acts such as the Dixie Chicks and Lady Antebellum to change their names to similarly avoid glorifying dark chapters of history. Parton hasn’t attended any recent marches, but she is unequivocal in her support of protestors and the Black Lives Matter movement. “I understand people having to make themselves known and felt and seen,” she says. “And of course Black lives matter. Do we think our little white asses are the only ones that matter? No!”

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The amazing time traveling flu: 1918 to 1917 to 1945

 

From Politico:

In a sign that the Marxism tag might already be falling flat, Giuliani took his attacks a step further Thursday, falsely accusing BLM activists of being terrorists. “These are people who hate white people,” Giuliani said on Fox News. “These are killers.”

Some Republican strategists believe that the combination of early summer riots, the controversial stances of some BLMGN members, plus the mainstreaming of “defund the police,” have given them an opening to diminish Democrats’ current electoral advantage. Democrats and BLM organizers point to the polls, describing the GOP strategy as a nakedly racist last gasp that won’t gain traction outside the right-wing echo chamber.

“The average voter in that swing suburb is not thinking about BLM as [select] leaders of the movement,” said Jefrey Pollock, president of polling firm Global Strategy Group, who works with Democrats in swing House and Senate races. “They’re thinking about the larger conversation that is happening about African Americans and racial injustice.”

At the moment, more than 60 percent of Americans support the movement, according to recent polls. And 62 percent of white people say minorities are not treated equally in the criminal justice system — up 18 points since 2014.

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