Author: Burr Deming

• Wow she’s good, and this does seem fitting after the photo op. Sarah Cooper channels Donald Trump as he explains how much the Holy Bible means to him. Much too personal to mention specific verses, however. The whole thing is good. You know… love the whole thing.
   
• Iron Knee at Political Irony is a bit fed up with the White House fantasy world of small petty lies in which Trump fires people he could not have fired, and tear gas is not really tear gas.
   
• My president wants very much to crack down on Antifa. PZ Myers wants to join up but wonders if he can qualify since Antifa is a description, not a thing.
   
• In Hackwhackers, Trump needs an economic revival to ensure his election, so he throws Dr. Fauci to the side and demands that workers ignore the coronavirus and report back to work NOW.
   
• In MadMikesAmerica, Bill Formby asks if we are heading for a revolution, as in Trump losing in November and finding some way to overthrow the election.
   
• Okay, so my president threatens to use the Insurrection Act of 1807 to deploy federal forces, in effect declaring martial law. Green Eagle takes a close look at that actual law, how it was enacted in 1807, how it was changed by subsequent amendments over time, and how it can apply to current protests. But there’s the problem with that last little bit. There isn’t any legal way to use it against the protests.

Continue reading “Sarah the Bible Trumper, Petty Lies, Antifa, Revolution, Economic Virus”

My President has had his photo op. An official video is released by the White House press office, documenting the dramatic walk to the front of the church accompanied by melodramatic music. Demonstrators have been forced from the intervening park. A priest has been removed from the church. The President is shown sternly waving the Bible, scowling for the cameras.

The White House is arguing that tear gas was not used to clear lawful protesters out of the way so Donald Trump could stage that dramatic walk to pose in front of the church. The debate spills into the comment section of our own site, where a conservative reader charges “leftists” with creating the tear gas fiction. Those leftists, presumably, include me.

It was actually not tear gas, the argument goes, but rather a combination of smoke canisters and what the Park Police are calling “pepper balls”.
If that seems like a debate over a trivial difference, it is.

Even that triviality seems to go against conservatives in general and the White House specifically. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have long had their own analysis available to the public. The substitute chemicals are, in fact, tear gas.

I am old enough to remember now obscure readings from the dim and distant past. In those youthful days, conservative icon William F. Buckley was in constant rhetorical war with fellow Catholics from the more liberal Jesuit order. He occasionally managed to introduce an acid taunt or two against his favorite adversaries even when debating fellow conservatives.

In the late 1980s, he took on Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia over a nuclear treaty. He managed to slip in a dig.

The Jesuits score off the exaggeration of their critics. Accuse them of killing three men and a dog, they will triumphantly produce the dog alive.

Clever. Shall we apply that here?

Conservatives are arguing, absurdly, that the violence against lawful demonstrators who were peaceably assembled involved pepper balls and smoke bombs rather than actual tear gas.

As if that matters.

Even at that, the exaggeration by “leftists” turns out not to be an exaggeration at all.

The White House, conservatives at large, and our loyal reader have triumphantly produced the dog.
But the dog is dead.

As is their mischievous little hair-splitting.
Requiescat in pace.

• We’re seeing on our television screens what certainly looks like a double standard. Tommy Christopher reviews the treatment of two reporters, both while on camera within a block of each other, as they separately encounter police.
   
• North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz suggests the secret ingredient in racism’s triumph is complicit white people.
   
• As a few of my brothers and sisters in Christ demand the right to worship in church, to endanger themselves, to imperil their families, to compromise the safety of their neighbors, to put the rest of us at risk, Nan’s Notebook wonders where in scripture it says God needs a church building. I, on the other hand, am reminded that siblings can be an embarrassment to the rest of the family.
   
  For me and most of my fellow believers, this is a very simple article of faith. God makes house calls.
   
• In The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, Bruce reports on a Christian patriot who harasses an elderly woman at a local market for violating her freedom to yell in her face. The account is in the attacker’s words.
   
• A guy in Dallas goes on social media to threaten grocery workers whose job it is to tell him to wear a mask. Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit speculates on the professional future of this fierce fellow. Seems he soon lost his position with a law firm. Something about guns and hollow point bullets.
   
• So the extremely conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court says any stay-at-home order is unconstitutional. tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors watches folks crowd into bars. Now it’s two weeks later and some of those folks are crowding into hospital ICUs.
   
• Iron Knee at Political Irony looks at the deadly secret that Pennsylvania’s Republican legislators kept from everyone in the room and one Democrat’s reaction as he discovers that his and other families have been put into mortal danger. You thought this sort of plot twist only happened in movies about terrorists?

Continue reading “Minneapolis Standards, Racism, COVID Attackers, Christians, Deadly PA Secret”

Sarah Cooper tells it:

• What’s a Libertarian to do? You can’t very well devote Memorial Day to honoring those who died for our freedoms, then denigrate their sacrifice. Yet Ayn Rand, the founder of the libertarian movement, had only contempt for sacrifice of any kind, promoting instead the innate virtue of selfishness.
   
  Michael A. LaFerrara rises to the challenge. He insists those who died that we may be free were not actually sacrificing anything at all. They each had a personal stake in their personal freedom, so they were engaging in the purest form of egotism. They were actually the very model of complete selfishness.
   
• Near the corona-beginning, couple guys at the car repair place told me not to worry about the grandkids. Youngsters can’t get the virus and aren’t going to die. Some are still saying that. M. Bouffant at Web of Evil digs into the relationship between kids and COVID and discovers they can and some do.
   
• Scotties Toy Box asks us to remember long, long ago, before the pandemic, when blue lives mattered.
   
• The bright side is that 99.98% will survive this so called “pandemic”. We’ve all heard that, in some form, from one Trumpster or another. Right? nojo takes a slow and steady scalpel to the argument they are holding until there is nothing left on their hands but blood.
   
• John Scalzi at Whatever acknowledges that Ohio is officially ending stay-at-home rules and opening up. He explains why he will stay in for another month. Me too.
   
• Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson invites a guest writer, local religious leader Jerry Bader, to offer a “faith-based perspective” on wearing masks.
   
• Dr. Mark Bear, in MadMikesAmerica, discusses, from a Christian perspective, our mutual obligation not to harm each other’s health and suggests that an angry correspondent is incorrect in thinking that God is his personal property.
   
• JoAnn Williams at Biased Unbalanced and Politically Incorrect is impatient at one side-effect of pretty much every crisis: the loonies that come out of hiding. She is especially testy with one true believer who can’t picture Jesus with a mask on.
   
• tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors officiates as America votes on why why Mr. Trump does not want to be photographed wearing a mask. Maybe it’s because Jesus was never photographed with one?

Continue reading “Memorial Day, COVID, Blue Lives, Kids, Jesus Unmasked, Trump Cure, Portrait”

• At least it doesn’t involve injections of household cleaning products. The Journal of Improbable Research discovers a beginning study by two Canadian universities on the potential treatment of COVID-19 with an extract from marijuana.
   
  I didn’t have the heart to snark about why there are no solid results yet. I drilled down a little into the links, then drilled through the research jargon. If all the dots connect and it works, it will break down one enzyme and prevent it from combining with all the others to allow the coronavirus to enter cells.
   
• Up to about 10 years ago, the Christian Science church embraced a rigid anti-medical dogma. The practice of medicine is a fraud because all illness simply reflects a lack of fervent faith. I noticed a few news stories in 2010 explaining that faith leaders were ready to modify that tenet a bit and allow medical treatment. But then it dropped off my radar. No idea how it stands now.
   
  I’m reminded of all that by some of the Trump faithful. Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit carries news of a barber who defied stay-at-home orders and opened shop. After all, the pandemic is just a hoax meant to make the president look bad. Seems the barber is now testing positive for the virus.
   
  Back when I was a teen, satirist Tom Lehrer talked about 1965 – “…it has been a nervous year and people have begun to feel like a Christian scientist with appendicitis.” Which might just describe militants who get sick. Don’t know about their grandparents.
   
• Max’s Dad is funny and eloquent when he rants. This time he is pretty much fed up with the bully boys from the Michigan Militia, the governor of South Dakota who is bullying the Lokota Nation into accepting the virus, folks who refuse requests to pre-order before showing up at an ice-cream parlor then scream at employees and close the place, and an anti-social-distance hairdresser in Dallas who turns out to be a scam artist, ripping off donors to the cause. Title of the piece: Mean People Suck! Well, yeah.
   
• Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara says closing a business for violating a stay-at-home order violates the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Besides, those business owners are not defrauding their customers. And aren’t those customers just as guilty of safer-at-home violations? Hey! Equal protection, folks! Sheesh.
   
• Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson watches as the state Supreme Court rules against the Governor’s safer-at-home order, then offers advice to fellow conservatives: Just wear the mask, already.
   
• Nan’s Notebook goes to market and celebrates that big deal, because she finally was able to get a mask.
   
• JoAnn Williams at Biased Unbalanced and Politically Incorrect describes the Son of God to a pastor who refuses to wear a mask to protect others because he can’t picture Jesus wearing one.

Continue reading “COVID-19, Weed v Virus, Protesters, Replace Fauci, Too Many Tests, Socks”

• Sometimes mainstream press becomes so anxious about avoiding criticism for lack of balance, reporters forget to tell the unbalanced truth. tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors takes Politico to task for a report on Obama’s fading accomplishments. tengrain’s title says it: Politico Sees The End of an Era, But Cannot Say Why It’s Ending.
   
• 75 years later, M. Bouffant at Web of Evil remembers the day the Thousand Year Reich ended, 988 years early.
   
• Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post goes after my president’s facial expressions. It’s petty but it is entertaining, at least to my very active juvenile sensibilities.
   
• Jonathan Bernstein looks at Trump activism in dealing with COVID-19 and sees … well … nothing. “The president still shows no sense of urgency in dealing with the pandemic, and Senate Republicans are along for the ride.”
   
• News Corpse kind of … well … gloats, actually, at Donald Trumps pain at one poll in particular. Americans trust CNN more than their president.

Continue reading “Balanced News, Nazis Down, Trump Face, Trump Trust, Trump Worries”

• Tommy Christopher suggests that a campaign season is a tough time to test the proposition that an accused sexual predator may be entirely innocent and that a politically motivated accuser may be making things up. “If Biden’s accuser is lying,” says Tommy, “then maybe people need to hear a liar be called a liar.”
   
  I dunno. Maybe the thing is to deny the accusation if not true, avoid name-calling, show gentle respect, encourage investigation, let the facts speak. Otherwise, keep silent.
   
  You know… be the non-Trump, be the non-Kavanaugh.
  Be the contrast.
   
• In Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson takes us through the desperate measures Republican strategists are considering. Candidates should stop defending their president and just get local. Trump’s campaign should proclaim that he is the very best of the very worst – because he is horrible, but Democrats are double horrible plus one.
   
  Heather reviews all that and why none of those fine plans will work.
   
• Jon Perr at PERRspectives slams Donald Trump, then slams him again and again, without saying anything. At least not saying his own words. He simply quotes a President from before I was born. And quotes him again and again.
   
• Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger has the latest poll results. The November election is close very close. Biden edges Trump, that’s the good news. But it’s by only one point.
   
  Hold on! That’s not nationwide. It’s a state poll in wait… where?

Continue reading “Biden & Accuser, Ballots, It’s Close, 1918, Very Fine People, Pence Pants, Masks”