Month: February 2021

This golden statue of Trump at CPAC is a perfect metaphor for the state of the GOP https://t.co/yPNe1kvVMd

— Vox (@voxdotcom) February 26, 2021

• Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged argues that the Golden Calf figure of Donald Trump, largely sponsored by a Christian group, was not exactly an idol dedicated to a perceived god. Conservatives see Trump more as a mascot.
   
  I dunno. I doubt the theory holds up. But she makes a brief, cogent, and entertaining argument.
   
  I confess, my first thought was about the collective conservative abandonment of yet another commandment, that second little bullet point on the tablets carried from the mountain by Moses. I have had similar thoughts before.
   
• Dave Dubya offers a well targeted character analysis of a former president and submits for our consideration a warning.
   
• In Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson considers how we got to half a million American fatalities and a crippled economy and reviews current efforts by Republican legislators to sabotage COVID relief efforts.
   
• We see so much death and wish we had had better policies. North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz suggests one reason for hope: a President who understands tragic loss.
   
• John Scalzi at Whatever takes a quick peek at the first month of the Biden administration. In the Capitol Building, we have the usual knife fight. At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, we have a largely quiet, almost unnoticed, national repair worker laboring to fix four years of damage and neglect.
   
• CalicoJack in The Psy of Life explains current national politics, with Biden, Trump, Cruz, and more, this way: we are in the middle of one of the most fascinating natural experiments in modern American history.
   
• News Corpse watches Tucker Carlson insist QAnon does not exist because he can’t find their website, and helps out with links to those who manage to quote or defend the not-so-nonexistant movement, including Tucker himself.
   
  A philosophical question occurs to me. Can a fish find evidence of water?

Continue reading “Trump Calf, COVID, Biden, Tucker, Rush, QAnon, GOP Violence, Texas Cold, Pain”

 

Stephen Miller: Far-right,
anti-immigration
policy advisor to Donald Trump

Chief Architect of:
Travel ban
Turning away desperate, legal refugees
Pulling migrant children away from parents

 
Wisdom from Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez
 

I can’t even summon a smartass joke for this. It’s both self-evidently hilarious and too obscene to actually laugh at. https://t.co/qQC2Lk1IIA

— Julian Sanchez (@normative) February 25, 2021

 

From Imani Gandy & Jessica Pieklo at Rewire News Group:

Jessica Pieklo: Like Imani said, it targets Trump, Giuliani (who in my circles we call him a paisan of shame, we don’t claim him), the Oath Keepers, and the Proud Boys, and said that they incited a riot designed to prevent Representative Thompson and others from carrying out their constitutional duty in certifying the election.
 
So this is a really super targeted lawsuit. And it’s so sexy.

Imani Gandy:  It’s so sexy, and it’s literally the reason that the KKK Act was passed. Right? Because white folks, listen, you all tend to get a little bit buckwild sometimes. Not all of you (hashtag not all white people) but you all have been pulling a lot of nonsense related to elections since slavery and the reconstruction, including violence and intimidation.
 
Like straight up. “Oh, Black guy, you want to vote? How about I hang you from a tree instead and send that as a message to your family?” This is serious, serious stuff, while white folks have picnics under the hanging bodies of Black folks.

Jessica Pieklo: “Let’s play some badminton while that’s going on.”

Imani Gandy:  Right, exactly. “A little croquet never hurt anyone.” So this is a bear.
 
I’m very excited about this lawsuit.
 
I’m particularly excited about the fact that it’s a civil lawsuit and not a criminal lawsuit. So that means the burden of proof for the claims is lower. In the criminal lawsuit, you’ve got go beyond a reasonable doubt. In a civil lawsuit, it’s just preponderance of the evidence, which just basically means a little bit more than a majority.

Jessica Pieklo: More likely than not.

Imani Gandy:  More likely than not. Where beyond a reasonable doubt is like: you got to be like 99.9% sure. Preponderance of the evidence, 51% is fine.
 
Oh, and it gets even better than that.

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Homeless person: Spare some change?
Me: *gives him some change*
Homeless person: Thank you. Get home safe.
Me: You too pic.twitter.com/v8mfGLmisP

— Sarah Cooper (@sarahcpr) February 25, 2021

 

From David Robertson at The Moderate Voice:

Cruz complaining about a lack of respect must have Rodney Dangerfield turning over in his grave.

Cruz might not be in such trouble now if his wife were Edith Bunker instead of Marie Antoinette.

The latter woman allegedly said, “Let them eat cake.” Heidi said (paraphrasing) “Let’s go to the Ritz-Carlton in Cancún!”

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From Nan’s Notebook:

…those who follow the conservative/Republican point of view tend to be very deeply emotional individuals.

As many have expressed here and elsewhere, whenever the subject of Trump and/or his policies has arisen in a conversation, the discussion often devolves into little more than insults and verbal abuse from the Trump supporter.

(Regrettably, on occasion, these exchanges have resulted in lost or strained friendships and/or damaged family relationships.)

However, as many will attest, such incidents are not limited just to the topic of Trump. Discussions that include Democratic vs. Republican points of view frequently devolve into angry words and name-calling as well.

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From Infidel753:

I should start this post by putting in a word or two for Joe Manchin, who has been getting a lot of flack lately. On a couple of issues, he’s raised legitimate points.

The money being spent on sending covid-19 relief checks to the entire population would be better spent if it were targeted to those with the greatest need (I made a similar point here last year). A person like myself still doing a regular job from home, whose income is unaffected by the pandemic, doesn’t need to get $2,000 in free money from the government, and a person out of work struggling to pay several months of rent and health insurance needs a lot more than $2,000 to actually get out of that hole. It would make more sense to take the same money and funnel it entirely to people in the latter category so we could give, say, $12,000 to each unemployed person, while not wasting money on people like me who still have a normal income.

Similarly, while I fervently support raising the minimum wage to $15 to bring the US more into line with developed-country norms, Manchin has a point that in less-developed parts of the US, $15 might be too high for the local economy to absorb in the same time frame that the more-developed regions need to have it. Perhaps the federal minimum wage could be indexed to the cost of living in each state in some way, or incentives created for each state to raise its own minimum wage to an appropriate level. It’s a legitimate issue.

This being said, the position he and Sinema have taken against eliminating the filibuster is a potentially crippling problem.

The filibuster isn’t an issue for the Biden covid-19 relief plan because that’s being passed via reconciliation. However, at the moment, it appears that not one Republican senator will vote for it. This is legislation which is supported by 83% of the US public (obviously including a lot of Republican voters) and which Standard and Poor says would hugely benefit the economy. If not one Republican senator will vote for that, what are our odds of getting ten of them to support voting-rights protections or a healthcare public option or reining in the Supreme Court? Obviously pretty much zero.

And the Democrats need to get at least some of these things done — in twenty months. That’s the time from now until the 2022 midterm election.

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From Reductress:

The average citizen takes one look at those big, grey eyes and automatically gives him the benefit of the doubt. Any loving father would take his daughters to Mexico within 24 hours of them asking, even though international flights typically require quarantine periods during the deadly pandemic he’s allegedly fighting, right? Wrong. This is called Pretty Privilege and it has dangerous consequences.

Ask yourself: ‘If Ted Cruz wasn’t drop dead gorgeous, would I take an issue with the fact that he abandoned the state he represents to visit the country he wants to put a wall around?’

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He left the right person to run Texas
 

UNFAIR
the carping at Sen Ted Cruz, taking his family to Cancun. And AG Ken Paxton for taking his wife to Utah

They didn't just fly away, leaving Texas freezing in the dark with no water. They first made sure relief was in capable hands:

AOC is in charge, working hard for Texas https://t.co/ZJAw6zgP45

— Burr Deming (@BurrLand01) February 23, 2021

 

From Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit:

That’s been the COVID-19 death toll in this country, so far. That’s more than the American combat deaths in World Wars I and II. That’s more than killing everyone in Winston-Salem, NC twice over. That;s about the toll if everyone in Ft. Lauderdale, FL; Newport News, VA; and Pasadena, CA all died. As the BBC observed, if there was a minute a silence for every individual who perished in this pandemic, it would take into 2022 before everyone who has died so far was honored.

It didn’t have to be this way.

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