Seldom Balanced – Usually Fair
From the Borowitz Report:
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Robert Mueller’s announcement that he would be offering Cyber Monday plea deals touched off hysteria among disgraced Trump associates desperate for the chance to score a drastically reduced sentence.
Moments after the office of the special counsel went live with its Cyber Monday Web site, Sing4Bob.com, thousands of Trump cronies flooded it with traffic, causing the site to briefly crash.
From Glenn R. Geist at MadMikesAmerica:
Florida. . . look, you’re already rolling your eyes in expectation, but no, this isn’t another expose on political corruption or public stupidity, it’s about crimes against English. Maybe it’s about crimes against reality too.
For at least a hundred years, the real estate business has defined Florida to what may be a unique degree and that “industry” if I can call it that has had a history of misrepresentation that some might call fraud although some of what might have been swampland proved to be quite profitable to those who hung on to their underwater and snake-infested plots of land now called Delray Beach or Boca Raton. Still, most of the buyers in the 1920s and later were eager to fall for the poetic nomenclature and fake stories about Spanish pirates and treasure and old maps and faux Spanish architecture.
Realtors, as they’re now called have long led the pack in dressing up the merchandise with creative English. They still do it and we still seem to fall for it. I live on the coast, like most Floridians, but I notice that the farther inland you go, the more you’ll find place names including nautical terms: cove, point, bay, etc. There’s a huge retirement living project being built near me called “Canopy Cove” Several miles inland, there are no nearby coves and having been clear-cut, hardly any canopy. Across the highway, there’s “Lost Lake” which is Realtor-speak for “Drained Swamp.”
But these things aren’t my complaint du jour.
From The Journal of Improbable Research:
If you want to understand burnt food—understand it better than most humans have managed to—this study by Nikolopoulos and Tzanetis is a good source of insight:
“TIME-ESTIMATES OF BURNT FOOD FOR A NONLOCAL REACTIVE-CONVECTIVE PROBLEM FROM THE FOOD INDUSTRY,” by C.V. Nikolopoulos and D.E. Tzanetis, Advances in Scattering and Biomedical Engineering, 2004, pp. 355-362.
For a less theoretical exploration, the place to go is (we remind you) The Museum of Burnt Food.
From Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger:
What is it that gives “great meaning” to the lives of Americans? There are some — those who want to convince you that the United States is a christian country — that would have you believe religion is the thing that gives people meaning in their lives. But that is simply not the case.
The Pew Research Center asked Americans what gave them meaning in their lives, and religion did not finish well.
From tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors:
Let’s pretend for a moment that we are an amoral, moronic president (Hi Donnie!) and by law, we are required to release a report on climate change that damns one of our key policies to hell. When do we release it?
Black Friday, silly! You know, the day after Thanksgiving when everyone—who is not buying their way into debt—is sitting in a Cheesecake Factory-like torpor from eating too much. Death, where is thy jolly old sting?
From News Corpse:
Whereupon, Payne interrupted Stockman and diverted him from a discussion about how badly Trump is managing the economy to some absurd speculations about an imaginary war between the U.S. and China. Clearly Payne wasn’t going to allow Stockman to educate the willfully ignorant Fox News audience about Trump’s foolish economic agenda. Payne thought it would be better to fear monger about a war that no sane analyst is predicting. And it went downhill from there:
Payne: It’s kinda harsh for you to call President Trump a madman.
Stockman: Oh, absolutely he is.
Payne: Because he’s fighting back against unfair trade, intellectual property theft, a country that’s building man-made militarized islands […] You don’t think that we should be pushing back against China?
Stockman: No. China is not a threat to us whatsoever. If they want to waste their money on sandcastles in the South China Sea, be our guest. […] China’s economy is a house of cards. They’ve got forty trillion of debt. It is the biggest speculative building spree in history. Without our export markets, without 4,000 Walmarts and everything else in America, their economy would collapse. They don’t dare threaten us.
So Payne successfully sidetracked the conversation from Stockman’s initial commentary that Trump is a “madman” who is “out to lunch” with regard to the economy. But only to get walloped by Stockman’s astute insight into the weakness of China’s position in relation to the U.S.
via The Moderate Voice:
To avoid any ambiguity, President Trump will be releasing a price guide of what crimes other countries can get away with and for what cost. Sneak preview: your tenth murder of a journalist is free!
— MAD Magazine (@MADmagazine) November 21, 2018
From nojo:
Many long national nightmares later, we have yet to escape this one, probably won’t for a couple years. But the days of utter hopelessness, the days of one elected branch of our government colluding with another to divest our republic of its sovereignty and our citizens of their liberty are coming to an end.
Nixon faced a House and Senate run by Democrats. Trump hasn’t had the pleasure of either.
We’re not there yet, and we’ve been worrying about what shenanigans might be pulled in the waning days of the 115th Congress, but the lame-duck session has yet to bear casualties. Meanwhile, Democrats are already squabbling over their incoming leadership, and—
Well, it’s refreshing, really. Familiar. Nice and messy, the way it was before the storm hit.
Politics as usual.
The problems laid bare over the past two years remain, of course — not just the traitors holding high offices, but the illegitimacy of those offices themselves, the very structure of our national government as a perversion of the consent of the governed. The ferocity of those who hold power to deny their own citizens the right to veto that power.
And, well, the citizens themselves, some 40 percent of them, more or less, the White Tribe that is the only tribe that matters in America.
From Dave Dubya:
Our First Amendment right to free speech is being reduced to the right of corporations and the wealthy to unlimited speech and influence. We the people need to speak out. Voting is our most important political speech.
Let us be thankful for what representation we have remaining, but we should also know this may not last either. We use it or lose it.
Our founding document, the Declaration of Independence tells us:
“That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.”
How’s that been working out? More Americans voted for Democratic senators, yet the Republicans hold the Senate. Only an amendment to the Constitution can remedy this inequality.
Democracy is being suppressed across the states as well.
In the state houses of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and North Carolina Democrats got more votes than Republicans. Republicans still control them. Voters in Michigan have had enough, and passed a ballot proposal to end partisan gerrymandering. The sooner the rest of the country follows this example the better.
The time has come to draw the line and speak the clear truth that few dare to utter.
From Yellow Dog at Blue in the Bluegrass:
Even their lies are pathetically obvious. They’re not even trying to hide that their goal is to eliminate everyone who is not white, male, straight, rich and republican.
The Trump administration has again approved new rules for some of Kentucky’s Medicaid population, requiring them to either get a job, volunteer in the community or go to school to keep their government-funded health coverage.
The Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services announced the approval on Tuesday, nearly five months after a federal judge blocked the state’s first attempt. State officials say the new rules can begin as soon as April 1 and will be phased in regionally over several months. They will require adults ages 19 to 64, with some exceptions, to complete at least 80 hours per month of “community engagement” to keep their health benefits. That includes getting a job, looking for a job, going to school, volunteering for community service or taking a job training course.
What’s the catch? Working people on Medicaid will have to verify their working hours every month. So, you’re struggling with three jobs and taking care of your kids but you have to drop everything and drive to the nearest Medicaid office – oh, you don’t have a car? Well you can call the Medicaid office – oh, you aren’t allowed to make personal calls at work so you can’t call during business hours? Well, you can go online … oh, you live in the 95 percent of Kentucky that has no reliable wi-fi? Well, guess you’re shit out of luck. And the Bevin-Trump plan is working like a charm.