Seldom Balanced – Usually Fair
From Yellow Dog at Blue in the Bluegrass:
Kentucky repugs have solved the problem of school shootings: MOAR GUNS IN SCHOOLS.
Of course they know it will only make things worse. They don’t care. The lives of Kentucky kids are irrelevant next to the danger of gun manufacturers losing a single sale to a guy wearing a T-shirt that reads “I needs gunz to massacre kindergartners.”
Oh, and also babby jeebus.
From Tommy Christopher:
Republicans are throwing everything they can into resisting taking action on gun violence, but they are being stopped in their tracks again and again by citizens and journalists who have heard enough.
The responses from the right to Thursday’s horrific mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, have ranged from cowardly avoidance of the press, to offensive attempts at shifting blame away from gun violence, to absurd leaps of “reason” in order to avoid taking action on guns.
Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) delivered a prime example of the latter category Sunday morning.
And he was promptly humiliated for his trouble.
From Dave Dubya:
“I hope to represent the people of the United States, not the president,” Olympic skier Lindey Vonn said, “I take the Olympics very seriously and what they mean and what they represent, what walking under our flag means in the opening ceremony.”
Vonn added: “I want to represent our country well. I don’t think that there are a lot of people currently in our government that do that.”
For telling the truth, the MAGAts were quickly all over her, like lies, sleaze, and slime on Trump.
From nojo at Stinque:
“Millions of NRA members and not one has shot up a school,” we were actuallied on Facebook today. “That’s a fact.”
About five million, more or less. They pay their forty bucks a year to “help us defend your Second Amendment freedom whenever and wherever it comes under attack.”
Their money, along with that of weapons manufacturers, is funneled into politicians who work tirelessly to do nothing — or worse — to solve a problem that has killed 1.5 million Americans since 1968.
They are all accessories to murder.
We know of no other way to explain it.
From Julian Sanchez:
For the No. 3 lawyer at the Department of Justice to quit after just nine months on the job is, to say the least, unusual. Under the Trump administration, where the downright bizarre is so commonplace that the merely unusual barely registers, this is nevertheless an aberration worth marking, because it says a lot about the state of a Justice Department locked in a surreal conflict with its own president and his party, none of it good.
When United States Associate Attorney General Rachel L. Brand last week announced she’d be stepping down to take a job as a vice president at Wal-Mart, it made headlines primarily because it also meant passing on her role as heir apparent to embattled Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Tasked with supervising Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election following Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ recusal, Rosenstein has become an improbable target of invective from the very president who appointed him, from Republican legislators, and even from Political Action Committees. It seems clear that Trump is laying groundwork for his eventual removal, in hopes that Rosenstein’s successor—meaning, until her departure, Brand—might be more willing to carry out an order to fire Mueller. But her departure should be seen as a warning sign with implications not only for the Mueller inquiry, but the future of the Trump Justice Department as a whole. To see why, it’s helpful to appreciate two things about Rachel Brand.
From Jonathan Bernstein:
It appears that White House Chief of Staff John Kelly could be in his final days on the job as his mishandling of the Rob Porter situation blooms into a full-out scandal. He’s getting hit from all sides, much of it from those opposed to President Donald Trump, but plenty from those inside the White House, at least according to all the anonymous quotes out there.
Sure, Kelly has alienated a lot of people with his comments about supposedly lazy Dreamers, his attacks on a military widow and his defense of Robert E. Lee. But at the end of the day he is responsible for a process job — hiring, firing, coordinating, managing up and managing down. So it makes sense to measure him on how he’s handling those responsibilities.
From Pete Souza:
After meeting with families for hours, he sat alone in a classroom before attending a prayer vigil…
Wondering why a few conservative friends fail to be impressed.
Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara at Principled Perspectives tries again to defend the corrupt electoral college system of selecting Presidents.
Ryan has something to say about that:
LaFerrara and his kind are quick to appeal to the founders’ intentions and offer up problems with “rule by majority” (which is not really at stake here), but utterly unwilling to confront (1) the problems with systems like the electoral college, (2) whether or not the electoral college truly does what they claim it is intended to do, and (3) whether or not the electoral college functions as intended by the founders.
Here are some simple truths that utterly refute arguments like these:
The true test of the public’s opinion of the electoral college would come from a Democrat winning the electoral vote and losing the popular vote, but that’s unlikely to happen. Until then, we are stuck with the system because one of our two major parties is unable to be honest with itself or others about its own desires and arguments and cares about one thing above all: power.
Ryan is right. Every 4 years, our country recklessly gambles with our democratic republic.
Have a safe Presidents’ Day weekend.
