Author: Burr Deming

• What is the point of a fixed trial in which the outcome is predetermined? The hope of a different outcome? A mark in history? nojo suggests there is a point. It isn’t hope and it isn’t history.
   
• Jonathan Bernstein has a diverging view. The trial is a sham, but the cynics are wrong. The quality of impeachment oratory is important to history because it will affect the future of democracy.
   
• Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged reacts to the coarse and explicit threat allegedly communicated by the White House to potentially wavering Senators. Why no denial from Trump Team?
   
• Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger does his homework and illustrates in circular graphs public reaction to impeachment and trial.
   
• Green Eagle has his own criticism of high military leadership as he gets thoughtful and eloquent in response to my President’s dopes and babies tantrum.
   
• At Biased Unbalanced and Politically Incorrect, JoAnn Williams’ cat writes about the strange overweight human specimen appearing on the television.
   
• Tommy Christopher watches as Joe Biden gets visibly emotional, discussing who should be running for president instead of him.
   
• Infidel753 is a bit impatient with she who really ought to be President as Hillary contributes to the possible shattering of Democratic unity, attacking Bernie for shattering Democratic unity four years ago.
   
• tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors reports on the honorable former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, spotted in an American Airlines lounge, doing … huh?

Continue reading “Why Impeach, WH Threats, Polls, Military Tantrum, Trump and Cool Cats”

• Jonathan Bernstein goes into impeachment, explaining why Republicans should fear the unknown. Has something to do with a scary non-sound in the dark of the night: the shoe that hasn’t dropped.
   
• Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged looks through the Trumpy Ukraine‑gate claim of attorney confidentiality during the commission of a crime. She discovers that three-way-privilege is not always legal, even when it does not describe extra-marital fantasies. Nice touch, that.
   
  I confess to a little more skepticism since Robert Kardashian became one of O.J. Simpson’s lawyers a generation ago. He was hired specifically not to do a damn thing. Well… except to claim attorney‑client privilege about the garment bag full of evidence with which he had walked away as the murder was being investigated. What a friend!
  Bastard!
   
• News Corpse watches Sean Hannity become enraged on Fox News that evidence dares to emerge implicating him – Hannity his own self – in the force-Ukraine-to-smear-Biden conspiracy.
   
• Well, here’s something I didn’t know before. In MadMikesAmerica, Mark Bear talks about one possible reason Iran shot down a passenger jet, thinking it was part of a US attack force. An American newscaster told Iran, and anyone else listening to his broadcast, that six American long-range, subsonic, jet-powered strategic bombers were on the way to bomb specific sites in Iran:

  
  Powerful US military forces, they are in position tonight.
  We can report six B-52 bombers are on the way to the region.

  The newscaster went on to describe the targets: oil refineries, nuclear power generators, as well as political and religious leaders.
   
  Mark has the video of Sean Hannity providing that strategic information. I thought that sort of thing, if true, would be a military secret. If it was a lie, it was a dangerous lie, as the loss of an airliner proved.

Continue reading “Impeach, Triple Play, Hannity, Arrest in Iran, Kellyanne Losing It, Primary Fix”

• Green Eagle has a theory. American generals figured out how to trick our berserk POTUS out of his war. The weirdest thing about this weird idea is that, with my President, it is quite plausible.
   
• Frances Langum watches the continuing drama of Fox News, so you don’t have to. In this week’s episode, Geraldo scampers back onto the plantation. He had been pretty upset at my President, frightened during the imminent start of WW III. But now that it’s over, he’s ready to join in blaming Democrats for the entire thing. Seems Trump was distracted by impeachment.
   
• It is hard to avoid a suspicion that verges on certainty that my President initiated the crisis for political effect. Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger provides statistical evidence on two intertwined points. The public does not believe Trump claims that the killing of Soleimani made the United States safer. Any wag-the-dog strategy has not worked.
   
• Tommy Christopher notices a Fox News poll that has bad news for Trump, but points out that viewers curious about what it shows would likely miss it on Fox. They would get the full story by watching MSNBC.
   
• Andy Borowitz reports that Iran’s Ayatollah is mystified. Trump likes every dictator in the world except him.
   
• At The Moderate Voice, Evan Sarzin writes with empathetic skepticism about the money soaked Bloomberg campaign, attempting to answer: what makes Michael run? Does Michael Bloomberg really want to be your President?
   
• Jonathan Bernstein sees the Republican party resisting the tide of history on healthcare. Opponents of Medicaid expansion are retreating in some places, losing in others. If Obamacare is overturned in the lawsuit Republicans are pushing, they will pay at the ballot box. They are in that box.
   
• Universal health care is too complex to make work. Scotties Toy Box restates that argument in a single sentence, turning it into a compelling case for universal health care.
   
• Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara considers the question posed on quora. Why can’t libertarians name a single successful libertarian experiment in running a country? Michael dodges the question. Libertarians don’t try to run anything. They are against running things. A functioning government is, by definition, evil.
   
  So is there a country, any country, with no functioning government, one in which libertarianism prevails?
   
  We might try Somalia.
• Iron Knee at Political Irony catches the conversation as Lindsey Graham provides the compelling logic that makes him unworried about any threat to humanity posed by climate catastrophe.
   
• Infidel753 sees the most important developments of the recently departed calendar year: accelerating decline of religion, accelerating international action on climate.
   
• In The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, atheist Bruce engages with an evangelical pastor, answering sincere questions about personal history and previous faith.
   
• Vincent at A Wayfarer’s Notes is asked whether he believes in God, and decides a better question is: what does he believe in?
   
• North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz writes with familiarity and compassion about those living in grief, having lost a loved one. Well meaning folks compliment them on their strength in the face of pain. Those who maintain after that devastation, he says, are not paragons of strength or even virtue. Survivors just try to survive. I’m old enough to have gone through it a few times, and I have witnessed it as well. Pastor John is right.
   
• The good Christians of Beltrami County have voted to ban refugees. PZ Myers explains the effect on the weather. You know, a few of my out-of-state friends had unkind things to say about bigotry here in Missouri after the Republican state legislature erected a bust of Rush Limbaugh in the State Capitol rotundra (No I’m not kidding). But even Missouri is on record as welcoming refugees.
   
• Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit has a cheerful bit of child-rearing advice for when your kid won’t eat meat.
   
• M. Bouffant at Web of Evil joins in twitter combat. A free plant based meal is provided at the Golden Globes awards. Someone objects to typical Hollywood lack of choice. And our Web denizen points out the obvious, along with appropriate impatient insult.
   
• The Journal of Improbable Research goes all Crime and Punishment with one researcher convicted of fraud and another arrested for attempted murder. They were respectively sentenced to play the piano and accused of playing rock, poker, scissors with real weapons.
   
• Max’s Dad watches the new movie about desperate heroism in WW I. And he really likes and highly recommends 1917.
   

• So an important Iranian General is killed in Iraq at the order of the American President. Peter Nicholas, at The Atlantic watches Donald Trump tell the American people and the world at large why this is a good, very good, thing and why he did it for reasonable reasons. Then Peter explains, slowly and carefully, why nobody will believe Mr. Trump. Seems to have something to do with earned trust.
   
• As always, Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged has a thoughtful perspective on Qassem Soleimani. She explains why this killing differs from that of Osama bin Laden.
   
• Senator Lindsey Graham is “Very proud of President @realDonaldTrump acting decisively in the face of threats to our embassy in Baghdad.” So are we all… sort of. Frances Langum has the timeline. As the attack on the US embassy in Baghdad results in an angry crowd finally bursting through the fortified perimeter into the embassy grounds, my president is preoccupied with tweeting attacks on Biden during a day of golf. That’s … decisive. Makes me kind of wonder how much deliberation later went into the killing of General Soleimani. Okay, I’m not really wondering.
   
• Before that killing, the protests in Iraq has faded out. Green Eagle looks closely at that very temporary resolution, which hadn’t stopped until a sort-of-successful attack on the US embassy, and determines who exactly benefited from it all.
   
• Jonathan Bernstein makes a couple of pertinent political points touching on Trump’s impeachment. The process has not affected his popularity. One reason may be that his approval rating is already historically low. It isn’t that so many folks don’t like him. It’s that so many folks really, really don’t like him.
   
• Dave Dubya points to a few reasons this year’s election means more than most.
   
• M. Bouffant at Web of Evil reads Sinclair Lewis and predicts when and how fascism can come to America.
   
• MadMikesAmerica is hopeful about the 2020 election for reasons that supersede polling data.
   
• Scotties Toy Box provides a brief layperson’s diagnosis of my president’s mental, emotional, and ethical condition. All in a sentence, actually. I’ve had similar thoughts about my President.
   
• Author John Scalzi at Whatever has some thoughts on conservative efforts to keep citizens from voting and adopts a new personal project.
   
• Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson is at it again. Conservatives in the Wisconsin legislature passed a caging law. Caging is the discredited practice of sending postal cards to voters in minority neighborhoods and quickly disfranchising anyone whose card is returned as undeliverable. Those who move within the same neighborhood, the most common move, are still valid voters but they are declared ineligible and wiped off the books.
   
  Until recently, Republicans were found to have been guilty of abusing voters, and prohibited from using the practice anymore. In Wisconsin, a conservative group got a judge to order that voters numbering in the hundreds of thousands be taken off voting rolls immediately. James accuses the Wisconsin Election Commission of defying a lawful court order.
   
  Actually, the Commission is awaiting the outcome of an appeal by the Wisconsin Department of Justice and a separate federal lawsuit by the League of Women Voters. Both are on behalf of legal voters who would illegally be put through additional requirements to reapply for the right to vote. He briefly mentions the DOJ lawsuit toward the end of his piece, but only to say that it was not authorized through a vote by the Election Commission. The federal suit is not mentioned at all. An oversight, I imagine (My imagination is expansive).
   
  So, as conservatives see it, lawsuits to protect the rights of voters are not actually legal unless authorized by government commissions assigned to remove those rights. Such is the regard for citizenship in today’s conservative world.
   
• Jon Perr at PERRspectives totals the miracles provided to a grateful nation by the Republican party. Re-reading this a few times, I’m tempted to think it may be some form of satire. Just sayin.
   
• Seems fitting in an election year. Sometimes poetic justice leads to justice. Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit provides 3 sentences and a link about a reckless driver who helped solve his own crime. Police were left with little to investigate. If only voters would react to self-revealing criminal candidates that way. Oh come on. You do too know who I mean!
   
• At The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, Bruce points out to religious folk like me that facts ought to matter. He’s right, you know.
   
• driftglass does not have fond thoughts of Chuck Todd, and doesn’t seem dejected at network moves to shift him to a less prestigious time slot. But driftglass doesn’t much care for their reasoning.
   
• nojo reviews all the progress we’ve made during the decade, and is not at all pleased.
   
• The Onion celebrates the new year with a review of the dogs and cats who were sure you would be the one to adopt them in 2019.
   

• Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post presents his annual bad list, this time named Santa’s Donald of the Year.
   
• At Vagabond Scholar, Batacchio presents his annual Jon Swift Roundup list of best blog posts from all over the net, as chosen by bloggers. By some oversight, FairAndUNbalanced was missed, but nobody is perfect. It’s a great gathering of great thought expressed in great writing.
   
• North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz writes with powerful empathy about enduring the Christmas absence of a lost loved one. He suggests one ray in the terrible darkness.
   
• Max’s Dad expresses his own wonderfully caustic holiday cheer and acerbic best wishes for the coming year.
   
• The Propaganda Professor brings combat news from the holiday front as the War on Christmas is briefly interrupted by a ruthless attack on Thanksgiving.
   
• tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors finds a safe sanctuary in the midst of the annual fundamentalist War to Enforce Holidays.
   
• Scotties Toy Box includes in his collection of cartoons and memes a brief, accurate, tick-tock of the Ukraine-related impeachable offense.
   
• Lots of impeachment talk about who is playing chess and who is playing checkers. Frances Langum looks over strategy and decides my president is not playing chess, and is not playing checkers.
   
• It took some doing. Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit reports as a Democratic governor manages to give Donald Trump competition for this year’s low in pettiness. Has to do with weddings.
   
• Green Eagle finds multiple stories repeated on multiple right-wing sites about multiple indictments of multiple leftward lawbreakers who funneled multiple foreign contributions to multiple top Democrats. Problem is the multiplied story does not exist outside the rightwing bubble. Green Eagle traces the fiction to one creative site. Such is the current state of contemporary conservatism.
   
• Biden somewhat gently forced Trump ex-presser Sarah Huckabee Sanders to apologize after she ridiculed his childhood struggle against stuttering. Tommy Christopher has the video of an earlier, little known encounter as Biden counsels a youngster facing the same struggle.
   
• John Scalzi at Whatever watches and really likes The Rise of Skywalker promising no spoilers in his review.
   

• At The Onion, a prominent Christian magazine encounters controversy by suggesting that Trump does not belong in the Holy Trinity.
   
• Okay, so that primary Christian magazine, Christianity Today, actually calls for the removal from office of President Trump. North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz explains why Christianity Today is right.
   
• John Scalzi at Whatever has a few thoughts about impeachment. Democrats have been out to get President Trump for a while. So John wonders why Republicans didn’t make it bi-partisan, since Trump is a lawless, heartless, crooked, incompetent President and a malignant human being. Picky, picky.
   
• Jonathan Bernstein watches the impeachment debate and wonders why Republicans didn’t try harder to defend Trump.
   
• Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit finds what everyone wants to know about impeachment: What does Trump’s boss say?
   
• Max’s Dad conducts a close analysis of the recent 6-page response by my President to Speaker Pelosi, and finds within it a compelling argument that Donald Trump is a mad hatter.
   
• News Corpse thumbs through old news stories and finds another manifesto that resembles Trump’s 6-page diatribe.
   
• Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson offers uncritical coverage of Republican criticism of Nancy Pelosi. Seems Pelosi is caught in a contradiction, since Democrats say removal of Trump can’t wait, but now she’s going to wait.
   
  Well, my president has been caught trying to fix the 2020 election with an elaborate smear by a foreign government, and still continues trying to fix the 2020 election with a smear by a foreign government, which kind of explains the can’t wait part.
   
  And McConnell says he’s got the fix in, and promises no real consideration of the charges. So Nancy will wait to submit the articles of impeachment until the Senate reveals how they will conduct an actual trial. As opposed to a sham dismissal.
   
  James doesn’t include any of that reasoning, though. An oversight, I imagine.

Continue reading “Impeach, Christianity Today, 6 Pages, Why Not Bi, No Defense, Trump Boss”

• As impeachment lights up the night sky, Max’s Dad points to some important developments we’re missing here on the ground.
   
• So my president has admitted to siphoning off charity funds to pay business debts and has settled the case brought by the state of New York by paying $2 million dollars to 8 charities. Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit looks into the case and asks us to draw the obvious conclusion.
   
• driftglass scripts out a dialogue to illustrate why impeachable offenses that number in some multiple of ten gets reduced to two, and why a lost cause can be worthy of the fight.
   
• Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger explains his choice as most dangerous politician in America. Any guesses?
   
• The standard, though not universal, response from Senate Republicans who want to dodge discussion about Trump has been that they are potential jurors and therefore shouldn’t comment. tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors watches Mitch McConnell vow to coordinate the Impeachment trial with my President. Mitch boasts in advance that no Republican Senator will vote for guilt on anything at all. tengrain reposts a comment: What a country! In America, the jury tampers itself!
   
• Those repetitive low-logic tweets get tiresome quickly enough for most of us to ignore them. But News Corpse journeys through TrumpTwitter Land to analyze a developing pattern of panic and meltdown over impeachment.

Continue reading “Missing Offenses, Charity Fraud, Jury Tamper, He’s Melting, Trump Timed”

• Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit is delightfully acerbic at reports that my president cancelled everything and left the NATO summit in a huff because our allies were caught on video laughing at him.
   
• Andy Borowitz reports on the blowup at the NATO summit as national leaders challenge Donald Trump to a spelling contest in which he is required to spell “NATO”.
   
• North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz is asked what happens if Trump wins again. Pastor John answers in two ways. He explains what we must do if that happens. And he explains what we must do to keep that from happening.
   
• After the Boston Massacre of 1770, British soldiers who had killed civilians were arrested and tried for murder. They were successfully defended in court by future US President John Adams. At The Moderate Voice, Hart Williams recounts Adam’s final summary in that case in contrast with Bill Barr, Donald Trump, and today’s Republican Party.
   
• Republicans are embracing the propoganda of Russia’s government that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 US election. Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger sifts through the polls and discovers that voters are not buying it.
   
• Says something, I suppose, about the current state of political conservatism. Iron Knee at Political Irony reports on the retirement of US Senator Johnny Isakson (R-GA). Seems no Republican Senator can be found willing to replace him as chair of the Senate Ethics Committee. Nobody. Taunts practically invent themselves. GOP ethics have become toxic. It’s late. Seemed the most obvious.
   
• Scotties Toy Box decyphers why so many aging white conservative are okay with abandoning democracy in favor of being ruled by a Russian autocrat. There is a reason, a shameful reason, so many of my generation love our Uncle Vlad.
   
• A reporter demands that Speaker Pelosi explain whether she hates my president. tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors contrasts the reactions: sharp, angry reasoning by Nancy Pelosi and sniping insults by Donald Trump.
   
• Frances Langum watches Joe Biden’s righteously angry reaction at a Fox News devotee who accuses him of sponsoring unqualified son Hunter for a job. Why the Fox follower knows it’s true: “I see it on the TV.”
   
• Tommy Christopher covers the corporate agony as an obscure food magazine names Mitch McConnell as its Man of the Year. A large grocery chain with a similar name scrambles to deny and deny and deny McConnell’s own false claim that the food chain endorsed him.
   
• The Propaganda Professor runs through an entertaining summary of the checkered career of the self-proclaimed undercover exposer of liberals, James O’Keefe. Seems the fraud sniffer is largely fraudulent himself, making it up as he goes along. Still, he has harmed real people.
   
• Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara is alarmed by Elizabeth Warren’s proposal to penalize corporations when they deliberately lie to government regulators. Michael sees it as an attack on free speech. I dunno. People died and little kids got seriously sick from contaminated peanut butter during the self-inspection days of the Bush administration. Maybe corporate perjury laws could have prevented that.
   
• nojo contrasts professional reporting as he learned it as a youth in journalism class with how it is practiced today. It isn’t just Fox, although that is today’s epicenter of journalistic degeneracy. nojo takes on the mainstream, mostly for rigid presentation of both sides as equidistant from truth, as opposed to diligence in searching for that truth.
   
• Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson is understandably horrified by a shooting at the school his own kids once attended. He attacks Democrats for their reactions, that we should try to prevent such tragedies (“talking points about gun control”). James singles out one proposal that, as he points out, would not have prevented this single incident. So obviously, it and other proposals are not worth considering. But James does suggest “we find out all the facts…” So I guess we’re left with thoughts and prayers.
   
• This is a brief bit of truth. Green Eagle accurately explains that the Conservative Party in Britain has driven that nation to “economic and political collapse” but despairs at the irresponsible response by the opposition.
   
• Infidel753 has little patience with blogging trolls.
   
• In The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, his counselor decides that Bruce suffers from a lack of contentment. Bruce fumes for a bit, then rejects the concept … sort of. Frankly introspective, as always.
   
• Master of angry rant Max’s Dad goes to an old theatre, sits in an uncomfortable seat, twists his neck trying to see the screen, then falls in love with the movie. He begs readers to go watch The Irishman. Wow. Must be an extremely good movie.
   
• Author John Scalzi at Whatever writes about his adventure with narcotics police after a friend bakes bread made from 4,500 year old yeast and sends it to him. The bread is flagged by police canines as a large package of illegal narcotics. Nobody is harmed and the bread is never in any danger. A photo of one eventual sandwich is posted.
   

Just read the titles – Click for detail

The President’s Request for a Political Favor

The President Removed Anti-Corruption Champion Ambassador Yovanovitch

The President’s Hand-picked Agents Begin the Scheme

President Trump Froze Vital Military Assistance

The President Conditioned a White House Meeting on Investigations

The President’s Agents Pursued a “Drug Deal”

President Trump Pressed President Zelensky to Do a Political Favor

The President’s Representatives Ratcheted up Pressure on the Ukrainian President

Ukrainians Inquired about the President’s Hold on Security Assistance

The President’s Security Assistance Hold Became Public

The President’s Scheme Unraveled

The President’s Chief of Staff Confirmed Aid was Conditioned on Investigations

– More –
 

Just read the titles – Click for detail

An Unprecedented Effort to Obstruct an Impeachment Inquiry

Constitutional Authority for Congressional Oversight and Impeachment

The President’s Categorical Refusal to Comply

The President’s Refusal to Produce Any and All Subpoenaed Documents

The President’s Refusal to Allow Top Aides to Testify

The President’s Unsuccessful Attempts to Block Other Key Witnesses

The President’s Intimidation of Witnesses

– More –