Author: Raymond

 
From North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz:

This week as I giddily watched a small army of superheroes on-screen, laying aside their petty squabbling, past disagreements, and warring egos in order to defeat a delusional madman with contempt for half the planet, because they understood the moment and the stakes—I thought about the moment before us.

American Democracy is in the endgame now.

Our leaders are woefully failing us, our checks and balances are nonfunctioning, and our systems of protection have been compromised. We need to stop warring with one another because that has always been the supervillain’s game: get the good guys to turn on each other, divide and conquer, focus them on the wrong fight.

Progressives have a cancel culture, purity problem and if we don’t get over it—it’s going to destroy us.

– More –
 

 
From News Corpse:

There is nothing more pitiful than a criminal who is caught red-handed in the commission of his crimes and tries impotently to convince everyone that he’s innocent. That’s the sorry state in which Donald Trump has found himself as he unleashed his regularly scheduled Sunday Morning Tweetstorm.

The flurry of panic-stricken whining from Trump included a some embarrassing missives aimed at a variety of trivial targets, mostly intended to act as distractions. They included a swipe at the Kentuky (sic) Derby wherein the President, who famously cheated in order to win, came to the defense of a horse that cheated and was subsequently disqualified. He also announced his nomination of Mark Morgan to head Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Trump had fired Morgan in the first few days of his administration because he was an Obama appointee. But now he’s been rehired after sucking up to Trump at least forty-nine times on Fox News. And Trump also made the painfully idiotic claim (again) that China was paying the United States for tariffs. Any first-year economics student knows that tariffs are paid by the importer (the U.S. company) and passed on to American consumers.

But without question the dumbest outburst of his morning rant was a pair of tweets attacking special counsel Robert Mueller…

– More –
 

 
From PZ Myers:

In my years of science communication, sometimes contentious, there was one thing everyone agreed on: tell a story. Data dumps don’t work. Use a narrative hook, get the audience engaged, lead them through the whys and hows and leave them with some resolution, a conclusion, and maybe something to leave them asking for more. Every successful communicator knows this through and through.

(You can also go too far this way, though: many TED talks are terrible because they’re all narrative fluff and not enough plausible, substantive content.)

So. Yesterday my wife and I drive off to Sioux City, Iowa to a Bernie Sanders rally. We got in with a crowd of enthusiastic supporters, we got good seats up front, we got handed our Bernie signs. We listened to the band, we listened to the warm-up speakers (they were all fine), and then the main act, Bernie Sanders, appeared to wild applause.

He was good. I agreed with his position on every danged thing. But…

There was no story here. None at all. We got shotgunned with blipverts.

– More –
 

 
From Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post:

Barr is typical of what one would expect in a Trump attorney: undying devotion and loyalty in all matters. He also plays attorney word games to split legal points into a myriad of time stalling points. Trump has oftrn stated that he wants a Roy Cohn-type to help him in his legal matters, which shows how much of a thug Trump is, for Cohn was convicted and imprisoned on perjury charges long ago, and Trump, being both a mobster-in-chief as well as a liar-in-chief, prefers these types of persons to represent him. It also explains why he has kept Rudy GiuLIEani around him as a spokesperson. Rudy may once have been an honorable pracricing prosecuting attorney, but those days have long since passed, and today, he, too, is a partisan hack who has little trouble spouting lies just to stay in the public spotlight and be noticed by the media.

Jay Sekulow, a multimillionaire White House attorney, is part of Trump’s defense tram which is doing all it can to delay any further investigation of the mobster-in-chief, including stalling and dragging its feet on working with any further congressional oversight committees.

But the absolute worst of the bunch is acting counsel Emmet Flood, a savvy veteran D.C. attorney who has represented Bill Clinton during his impeachment ordeal as well as DICK Cheney on a civil suit. He is the perfect attack dog for Trump, and has mocked and belittled the Mueller Report as being a mere “law school exam paper”.

– More –
 

 
From The Onion:

SAN FRANCISCO—Stating that he cannot allow rival property owners to gain a competitive advantage, Bay Area landlord Jeremy Lubbock acknowledged Friday he had added a noncompete clause to his leases that bars tenants from living anywhere else within 90 days of vacating an apartment.

– More –
 

 
From Infidel753:

We can’t afford to risk being divided by whatever objections anyone has to this or that candidate, including the objections I have — and I have several, to some of them. Getting rid of Trump is too important. The inevitable duds who show up in the comments every time a blogger writes a post like this, insisting it’s OK for them to vote third party because blah blah or they simply can’t support candidate X because blah blah or we’re doomed to lose if we choose someone too radical or someone too mainstream or too whatever — those people are AWOL on the D-Day of American democracy. Persuade them if you can — otherwise, forget them, write them off. The rest of us will simply have to work harder to compensate. The worst of the Democratic candidates, whoever you consider that to be, would be a thousand times better than Trump. Let’s get this done.

– More –
 

 
From Jonathan Bernstein:

Proceedings would ultimately let the president put the scandals behind him.

Democrats are again being tempted to move toward impeaching Donald Trump. It’s still the wrong call to make, at least so far. Yes, there’s a good case — a very good case — an extremely good case — that Trump has acted contrary to his oath of office and deserves impeachment and removal. With his attorney general pitching the preposterous idea that the president can just pull the plug on any investigation of his own actions, and with the president actively resisting normal congressional oversight, it’s clear that the House should be fighting back as strongly as it can. But for now at least, Republicans are not going to vote for impeachment, and so we’re talking about a partisan impeachment and a partisan acquittal.

That’s a path that has no advantages for Democrats before, during or after impeachment.

– More –
 

 
From The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser:

Over the past twelve years, I have corresponded with numerous Evangelicals who find themselves in “mixed” marriages after their loss of faith. Having entered marriage according to the Biblical principle found in 2 Corinthians 6:14-18:

Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness? And what concord hath Christ with Belial? or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel? And what agreement hath the temple of God with idols? for ye are the temple of the living God; as God hath said, I will dwell in them, and walk in them; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you. And will be a Father unto you, and ye shall be my sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty.

these unbelievers find themselves at odds with still-believing spouses. “What will become of their marriages?” these former Evangelicals ask. Having grown up in a religion that condemns mixed marriages AND divorce, they fear the consequences of losing their faith. Many of the Evangelicals who contact me suffer in secret, keeping their deconversions to themselves out of fear of hurting their spouses, children, parents, and close friends. I know a number of atheists/agnostics who attend Evangelical churches every Sunday because they fear what might happen if they dared to testify publicly that there is no God.

– More –
 

 
From our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit:

It’s the job of the Justice Department to defend the constitutionality of the laws that have been enacted. Congress enacts the law, the Executive enforces and defends the law, and the Court says what the law is. If any president disagrees with the law, the proper route is to go to Congress to change the law, not to slime its way into court and attack the law there.

Worse, how are we, as a people, supposed to know what conduct is illegal and what isn’t if the enforcement of the law is openly acknowledged to be up to the whims of the Executive branch? If ignorance of the law is no defense to breaking it, now we have to know what laws are effectively voided because the prosecutors are going to look the other way?

– More –
 

 
From driftglass:

It did not go well.

“Fear stokes anger, which then stokes more fear.” — David Brooks, the Faith and Humility reporter for the Acela Corridor Pantograph

“Fear is the path to the dark side…fear leads to anger…anger leads to hate…hate leads to suffering.” — Yoda, The Phantom Menace

Because Mr. Brooks doesn’t fear privation of any kind — because in his rarefied world of extraordinary privilege the idea of starvation, or homelessness, or losing his job, or losing his health insurance, or losing his country are completely alien to him — for him, the idea of “fear” itself exists only as a free-floating abstraction.

For Mr. Brooks, fear is not a key survival-emotion honed by millions of years of human evolution, but an entity unto itself. Like the glowing, red alien flashlight-special-effect thingy in Star Trek’s Day of the Dove — a malevolent spirit which hovers above all of us, making us fight for no good reason but its amusement.

Mr. Brooks makes this breathtakingly stupid claim for the same reason Mr. Brooks makes all of his breathtakingly stupid claims: because Mr. Brooks has spent the last 15 years relentlessly clawing his way up to the exalted position of the Pope of the High and Holy Church of Both Sides Do It. And as the Pope of the High and Holy Church of Both Sides Do It, Mr. Brooks is driven with the implacable zeal of a fanatic to false-equivalence the shit out of every issue, under all circumstance, in every venue he has available.

In this case, that means using his New York Times column to indiscriminately bulldoze everyone’s fears — legitimate or real — down to the same level of folly.

– More –