FairAndUNbalanced.com

 
From Tommy Christopher:

Guess What He Left Out?

“Go ahead and compare the way the Republicans have embraced Ronald Reagan through the years, as opposed to how these Democrats have, at least at that particular debate, gone after his legacy?” Doocy asked.

“We like Barack Obama, we elected him, and we felt better about ourselves, and we re-elected him, but we elected Ronald Reagan, he changed the world,” Wead said, citing Reagan’s handling of the Cold War.

“So Ronald Reagan changed the world,” Wead went on to say, adding “No one wants to go back to Obama, 16% unemployment for African Americans, but they like the legacy of Ronald Reagan and turning the world upside down.”

Wead’s argument leaves out a lot of arguably relevant facts, but the one fact that he directly cites is misleading in a couple of ways.

The first is that while the black unemployment rate did peak at 16.8 percent during the Obama administration — in March of 2010 — it declined precipitously for the remainder of his term, finishing at just 7.7 percent in his last month in office.

In related news, black unemployment was at 14.6 percent when Reagan took office, then rose to 21.2 percent by 1983, and was still at 11.8 percent when he left office, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

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From Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit:

A document, apparently posted shortly before the attack and believed to have been written by the man, espoused white nationalist and racist views. The tract called the attack a response to “the Hispanic invasion of Texas”.

The shooting was an act of terrorism. If you are not clear on that, imagine, if you will, that the shooter had been yelling “Allahu Akbar” as he killed people.

This Asswipe drove from Dallas to El Paso, to a Wal-Mart that is hard by the border, to kill Hispanics.

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From Dave Dubya:

The slaughter continues unabated. The body count racks up more double digit death tolls.

And the violence is unaddressed by the Party of Trump and the NRA. In fact, the racist Big MAGAt doesn’t see a growing problem with white nationalist domestic terrorism. In fact he has dismantled efforts by federal law enforcement to address domestic white nationalist terrorism.

This violence has only increased during this vile reign of evil. That evil flows from the hateful rhetoric from the White House, from the rallies that foment racist hate like the Nuremberg rallies of the last century.

The Big MAGAt asked, “How do you stop these people?” Someone replied, “Shoot them.” The Evil One chuckled and responded with, “That’s only in the Panhandle you can get away with that stuff.”

So…

Hell, yes, I blame Trump.

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From tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors:

Motivation for both shootings remains unclear (though the El Paso slaughter seems to point to white nationalism), but it doesn’t really matter. Wingnuttia is going to point to mental illness, video games, violent movies, rap music, all of which are world-wide phenomena and mass slaughter isn’t. And it must be a very strange mental illness that only falls to white conservative dudes. Go figure.

But mental illness, video games, and all the other distracting arguments fail to accomplish the goal of a mass killer. If you take guns out of equation, it solves the problem.

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From Jonathan Bernstein:

If the party doesn’t want its rhetoric turning up in murderers’ manifestos, it has a lot of work to do.

The relatively good news from a terrible weekend was that several Republicans, including Senator Ted Cruz and George P. Bush (the Texas land commissioner and son of Jeb Bush) reacted to the mass shooting in El Paso with forceful words against white supremacy. A state senator in Nebraska went further, accepting his party’s role in accommodating bigotry and vowing he wouldn’t be silent. Both National Review and the Washington Examiner editorialized that President Donald Trump should call out white supremacy.

All that was welcome. (Alas, all we got about guns was more “thoughts and prayers,” as if there’s no possible public-policy response that could make any difference.) But we’ll see how serious Republicans are going forward. After all, this is the party that nominated Trump and that just recently failed to condemn his string of bigoted attacks on members of Congress. If they go back to the same type of rhetoric they’ve indulged in since President Richard Nixon’s southern-strategy campaign in 1968, then it’ll be apparent that they weren’t serious – and the consequences for the nation could well be horrific.

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From The Onion:

Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens

“This was a terrible tragedy, but sometimes these things just happen and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop them,” said Oklahoma resident Adam Lewis, echoing sentiments expressed by tens of millions of individuals who reside in a nation where over half of the world’s deadliest mass shootings have occurred in the past 50 years and whose citizens are 20 times more likely to die of gun violence than those of other developed nations.

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From Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger:

Why do they lie about it so much? Because they hate the program. They voted against it when it was passed decades ago, and since then, they have done their best to eliminate it. They know the program is among the most popular federal programs (because it works to keep millions of seniors out of poverty), so they have to lie about the program to try and get people to support their efforts to destroy it.

The latest lie, and perhaps the biggest, is that Social Security eats up too much of the federal budget — and to reduce the deficit and national debt, Social Security must be cut. That is simply not true.

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From PZ Myers:

I’d also add that 8chan is the holy scripture of its acolytes, a meandering screed that combines the mindless repetition of a manic prayer wheel with the ravings of the book of Revelation. Free Speech is its shibboleth.

Until law enforcement, and the media, treat these shooters as part of a terrorist movement no less organized, or deadly, than ISIS or Al Qaeda, the violence will continue. There will be more killers, more gleeful celebration of body counts on 8chan, and more bloody attempts to beat the last killer’s “high score”.

There’s a radical suggestion right there. If there were an online forum in which Muslim terrorists gleefully shared tales of glorious murder, urged each other to outdo each other in suicidal mass killings, and celebrated every time one of these incidents occurred, the FBI would be all over it, tracing communications and working to arrest the ringleaders. 8chan, though, is fueled by the frustrations of disaffected middle class white men, so no, nothing will be done. It will continue to fester and spread its toxins.

So, here’s my first radical suggestion.

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From The Propaganda Professor:

Back in 1955, the godfather of (neo)conservatism William F. Buckley launched the National Review, which he intended as an antidote to what he proclaimed was a “liberal bias” in the mainstream media. The belief in such a bias resonated richly (no pun intended) with his fellow wingers, and even began to take root among the gullible masses. Thirty-two years later, Buckley’s nephew Brent Bozell III shifted that narrative into hyperdrive by inaugurating Media Research Center, which is designed to be not just an alternative to the “liberal bias”, but a persistent watchdog to make the liberal media heel. Offering what has become a popular source of citation for right-wing pundits and politicians, MRC presumes to police liberals by calling out their liberalness whenever it appears in the media. Thing is, it ends up indicting itself more than the media or them librulz.

According to the gospel of Bozell and MRC, mainstream media is a lost cause. (Except for Fox “News”, of course.) Not only does it relentlessly push a liberal agenda, but that’s the reason it exists in the first place. The curious thing, however, is that Bozell has tooted from his stump on videos for PragerU, which emphatically distinguishes between liberals and leftists; it is the latter, insists Prager, who are the enemies of all that is holy, while liberals have more in common with conservatives — a clever ploy, you must admit, to incite further polarization.

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