Author: Burr Deming

 

There is a common thread that runs through Donald Trump’s history, one that gives us the likely reason for his very specific hostility toward one segment of immigrants.

Perhaps investigators should have suspected something was wrong with the confessions. There had been a series of beatings and robberies that night. The teenagers had confessed to being there, either as secondary participants or as passive witnesses. The confessions had matched those incidents.

The beating, rape, and near death of the Central Park jogger had been especially brutal. It was a horrible crime. But the details of the confessions did not correspond with that crime, as they had with the others. And the time and location were off. Central Park is huge, one of the reasons it is famous. The perimeter is 6 miles long. At the time of that assault, teens were running wild in another part of the park, miles away. The confessions did not make a lot of sense.
Continue reading “What Colors Trump’s Hatred of Immigrants?”

• tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors displays the now famous cartoon that put into stark emotional terms the tragic moral obtuseness taking place on our southern border. Cartoonist Michael de Adder was immediately released by a publishing company, which now denies the illustration had anything to do with the timing. Coincidence is a powerful force.
   
• Yellow Dog at Blue in the Bluegrass watches as Pete Buttigieg sandblasts fellow Christians for hypocrisy, for going against the teachings of Jesus. I and fellow Christians are compelled to agree with him. Yellow Dog is having none of it. Saving Christianity from Christian conservatives serves to rescue Christianity from its own evil. The idea is that Christianity is intrinsically evil. Attempts at reform serve only to prolong and expand the evil.
   
• In related news, The Onion is on the scene as God orders all followers to swallow cyanide capsules in preparation for their voyage to Alpha Centauri.
   
• Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit reviews my President’s Fourth of July presentation and wonders why he couldn’t afford a fact-checker to tell him that the Continental Army, named after a great American Commander-in-Chief (huh?), did not attack airports. She brings brief samples of hilarious internet reaction.
   
  When I think of our great first Commander-in-Chief, the one after whom the Continental Army was named, I have to wonder: Just what would have been the reaction of President Continental?

Continue reading “Rio Death, Christian Evil, Cyanide Communion, 4th, Trump Blows It”

• Green Eagle reacts to a Supreme Court decision that may become as much an attack on democracy as is the ongoing subterranean campaign by Putin’s Russia.
   
• Subversion of democracy takes other forms as well. Bribery can work in a lot of ways. One involves campaign finance. Vote for bills that will benefit me and I’ll buy a lot of ads for you. Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara hears the argument, sort of, and is having none of it. It’s about free speech. And, after all, “Each of us is free to consider the issues and candidates before we vote.” Since dark money has no effect, why object to it? No harm, no foul.
   
  I don’t quite buy it. If dark money has no effect, what is purpose of providing it? Why hide it? And what is the harm in discouraging it through full disclosure?
   
• Interesting account at Scotties Toy Box. Twenty years ago, Anthony Breznican meets a friendly, low key photographer who does exemplary work. He discovers the man once saved a life after taking a tragic photo that changed the world and may have saved countless more lives.
   
  Two decades after finding that his brief companion was THAT photographer, he sees another horribly tragic photograph that we can only hope performs that terrible task again, saving other lives once more.
   
• North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz tells us, convincingly, compellingly, how America would be looking at migrants if they were white. I believe the record tells us exactly how those who represent us would react. And why.
   
• At Blue in the Bluegrass, Yellow Dog explains why both sides are the same. I suspect satire.

Continue reading “Supremes, Gerrymand, Dark Money, Migrants, Race, Both Sides, Kamala”

 

We treat some with fear and loathing. Others are a source of amusement.

The homeless in our midst and refugees from without, at least those who with brown skin, share one fatal attribute.

Coverage began with the voice of reporter Elle Thomas.

Talk about weird.

Viewers in Salt Lake City saw the amusing little story first, as they turned to KSTU news on Channel 13. The rest of us caught it online.

You know, this woman cracked open a cold one, literally thought she owned the place, and then things just kept on getting weirder.

Continue reading “Amusement and Fear at Strange, Ragged People”

• Scotties Toy Box posts a sentence and a link pointing to the most prominent of America’s current moral failings.
   
• Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged has the reaction we all should share. The national debate is over what to call the cages holding refugee children rather than the fact that those kids are denied soap, toothbrushes, and even sleep. Nope, we should argue over whether it’s fair to the Trump administration to call those conditions concentration camps for kids.
   
• Okay, we’re gonna bomb, bomb, bomb Iran, then we we’re not, and it all depends on which Fox personality last talks to my President. Green Eagle has a thank you for a lonely publication that treats the coming war with a bit of judicious skepticism.
   
• Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit reads the papers. On Iran, it seems our President managed to do the right thing but still manages to lie about it.

Continue reading “Trump, Migrant Kids, Iran, Collusion, Lies, Environment, Central Park 5”

 
Let’s see what’s in the news.
Here’s something from ABC.

Data from President Donald Trump’s first internal reelection campaign poll conducted in March, obtained exclusively by ABC News, showed him losing a matchup by wide margins to former Vice President Joe Biden in key battleground states.

Uh oh. That doesn’t sound so good. What will my President do?

OH, here’s NBC.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign is cutting ties with some of its own pollsters after leaked internal polling showed the president trailing former Vice President Joe Biden in critical 2020 battleground states, according to a person close to the campaign.

Sure enough, my President is in control:

Only Fake Polls show us behind the Motley Crew. We are looking really good, but it is far too early to be focused on that. Much work to do! MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 17, 2019

Mötley Crüe is supposed to be getting together again after all these years, but that’s probably not who @realDonaldTrump is talking about.

Either way, I’m glad we finally have a President who shares my realistic view of things.

When the weather feels too hot or too cold, I smash all our outdoor thermometers. The corner store knows me and keeps a supply of new ones on hand.

That noise in the car? I turn up the radio.
What you can’t hear won’t hurt you.
I broke the gas gauge a couple hours ago, so we’re fine on fuel.

I’m sure everything will be fine.

Just fine.

• The Borowitz Report has the story: Kellyanne Conway will soon be promoted. She will leave her post working for President Trump to begin a more prestigious job with Mr. Trump’s employer at the Kremlin. Okay, okay, it’s satire.
   
• Senator and Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren favors impeachment. Congressional Representative and Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi does not. Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post considers the arguments and sides with Warren. Jack, and Senator Warren, are wrong, of course. But you can’t say he doesn’t respectfully consider an opposing view from … well … me.
   
• North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz very much wants and needs to mourn the personal tragedies that afflict virtually everyone. As would most people my age, I empathize from personal experience with his pain at the death of a parent. He wants those for whom he cares to have the freedom to mourn normal, intense, losses that are part of human experience. But Reverend Pavlovitz finds himself, and those he counsels, devoting more and more of their grief to harm that is publicly directed at innocents, to damage inflicted on the country they love, by a renegade President. He wants room and time for more normal, private grieving.
   
• News Corpse looks into my President’s strange reasons for accusing his own former White House Council Don McGhan of criminal perjury.
   
• In Scotties Toy Box, Scottie is inspired by my President’s trip to the United Kingdom to bring us a fun fact about the Queen of England, Donald Trump, the rest of the Trump family, and the armed forces.

Continue reading “K-K-Kellyanne, Impeach, Grief, Trump v. McGhan, Fighting Queen”

• Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post counts the abundance of Democratic candidates and demands that we, as voters, do our civic duty and research each one. Or at least listen to town halls.
   
• Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara makes the case that the reasons many of us want open information about election funding (untraceable dark money, transparency) are actually “hollow catchphrases meant to equate free speech to some sinister underworld.” I’m so ashamed. How could we promote such distortions?
   
• At The Moderate Voice, Robert Levine says we don’t know for sure whether Putin has kompromat on my President. But we know for sure that Trump feels he owes, really owes, Putin. And we know that Putin has Trump in a subservient position.
   
• Iron Knee at Political Irony has come across a way to impeach my President without stumbling into the disadvantages Democrats anticipate.
   
• Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger discovers outspoken opposition to Trumpism from a surprising source. It comes from a while before he became President, in fact 19 centuries and 75 years before.

Continue reading “D-Day, Tiananmen, Democrats, Dark Money, UK, Ancient Trump Warning”