FairAndUNbalanced.com

• Professor PZ Myers takes a look at those Alabama state senators who voted for the abortion ban, along with what must be the most embarrassing argument for their restrictive law. Here in Missouri, a lawmaker seems determined to provide rhetorical competition. He later backs away from his reference to “consensual rape.”
   
• The Onion carries the harrowing story of a young woman walking alone at night and becoming aware she is followed by a slow moving pickup truck full of Alabama legislators.
   
• North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz asks white conservative Christians why they stop loving embryos once they are born. 

Continue reading “Alabama, Trump Exoneration, Cher, Bannon, Authorized Investigations”

 
From Jon Perr at PERRspectives:

But among the most disgusting frauds committed by Team Trump to sell his bogus claim that “our focus is on helping the folks who work in the mailrooms and the machine shops of America” was a particularly foul turd of a talking point lovingly polished by Treasury Secretary Mnuchin. This tale concerned the massive reduction in the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, a single cut responsible for $1.38 trillion in new red ink over its first decade. Trump’s “plumbers, the carpenters, the cops, the teachers, the truck drivers, the pipe fitters … the people that like me best” would win big, Mnuchin guaranteed in September 2017, because most of the benefits from a corporate tax cut flow to workers:

On Fox News, Mnuchin claimed that “most economists believe that over 70 percent of corporate taxes are paid for by the workers.” At an event in Kentucky, he declared that “over 80 percent of business taxes is borne by the worker.”

As it has turned out, the best estimate we have for how corporate America spent its $150 billion year 1 windfall from the GOP’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act shows that it didn’t plow 70-80% of the proceeds into higher wages and bonuses for its workers. According to Peter Cary and Allan Holmes of the Center for Public Integrity, the actual answer is 6%.

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From Dave Dubya:

“Total exoneration! No collusion!” The Trump Cult has been repeating these two lies about the Mueller Report.

The lies are being tolerated and even embraced by the ignorant masses, of course.

Unfortunately the ignorant masses are not only in the cult. Moderates are duped as well. And so are many liberals who have not actually read the Mueller Report.

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From libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara:

The basic feature of capitalism, which is integral to Americanism, is individual autonomy and self-governance, within the confines established by the same rights of others. Consequently, the individual needs the freedom of action, as defined by the principle of individual rights, to live by the judgement of his own mind without coercive interference from others, including others as government officials. For capitalism to function, one’s rights should never be at risk in any election.

Democracy is unlimited rule by electoral majority (or its elected representatives). The basic premise of democracy is that the elected government can do whatever it chooses to do to whomever it chooses based solely on the premise that it represents the “will of the people” as expressed by victorious factions in elections. There are no constitutional limits to government power except as determined by government officials, and thus no way to protect individual rights. When majority rule is the standard, there are no limiting principles to that rule. Democracy is the rule of mob might, not objective law. “Freedom” is basically government permission, and individual “rights” can be restricted or discarded any time the government can claim it is acting on the “will of the people: that is, there are no inalienable rights-which means, no rights at all. Democracy, properly understood, is a manifestation of totalitarian collectivism.

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From The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser:

Evangelicalism is dying. Oh, Evangelicals still make lots of noise and have a stranglehold on the Republican Party, but their grip on America is weakening and, in time, their hold will falter, leading to epic collapse. The Week reports:

While 63 percent of Americans over the age of 65 are white Christians, only 24 percent of those under the age of 30 are, a group far outnumbered by the 38 percent of young adults who are unaffiliated. Unless there’s some kind of dramatic Christian awakening that produces millions of converts, that means that in the future the ranks of Christians in general and white Christians in particular are likely to shrink.

This won’t happen any time soon, but that train is a coming, and nothing can stop it. Younger Evangelicals, in particular, are exiting their churches stage left, never to return. Those who remain tend to be more liberal politically, socially, and theologically, than their parents and grandparents. These cradle Evangelicals will, in time, seek out the friendlier confines of Liberal/Progressive Christianity.

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From Vixen Strangely:

Some of you readers are like me and can remember where I filched the phrase “catapulting the propaganda” from–that was from the Bush Administration. George W. Bush admitted he had to repeat things over and over again for the “truth” to set in in order to “catapult the propaganda”. That word “truth” is a pretty slippery commodity, but the idea of “catapulting the propaganda” pretty accurately described his Administration’s messaging. He let that moment of reality slip while talking about privatizing Social Security, but it more truthfully describes what happened regarding the use of repetition, changing justifications, and outright frauds to create a casus belli for the war in Iraq.

Now, here comes the Trump Administration, no strangers to repeating things that are inaccurate or unclear or perpetrating frauds, talking up the possibility of a threat of war with Iran out loud and in private (looking for their “slam dunk case” perhaps?). Even though our allies indicate that there seems to be no real urgent threat.

All I’m saying is, we have sure as hell been here before, and pretty damn recently, too.

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From Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson:

A proposed amendment to a bill to protect the lives of children who survive attempted abortions is dividing the state’s two pro-life organizations. The amendment, proposed by Sen. André Jacque (R-DePere), is intended to also hold the mother accountable if she participates in terminating the child’s life after the failed abortion.

“My amendment would ensure that SB 175 avoids exempting the mother of a born-alive infant from prosecution for the death of the child for their actions AFTER the child is born, including directing an abortionist to ‘finish the job’ as Virginia Governor Northam and many other prominent Democrats would seem to support,” Jacque said in an email to RightWisconsin on Tuesday.

However, Heather Weininger, the executive director of Wisconsin Right to Life, strongly disagrees with Jacque about the need for the amendment and does not support it.

“I want to be clear: Wisconsin Right to Life does not support Senator Jacque’s amendment. I personally spoke with him and told him we do not support this,” Weininger said in a statement Friday. “To say that if it was adopted the full pro-life movement could embrace saving babies born alive after failed abortions is a blatant lie.”

In an email to RightWisconsin, Weininger said the amendment wasn’t necessary to protect the child and does not shield the mother from charges of infanticide.

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From our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit:

Tariffs are a tax on Americans. Trump cannot be so stupid as to believe that the Chinese are paying the tariffs. So what he is doing is spreading another one of his Big Lies, knowing that his supporters will repeat it and that the mouth-breathing bobbleheads on Fox will obediently repeat it.

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From Robert A. Levine at The Moderate Voice:

What Trump doesn’t seem to understand is that the Chinese will be able to import agricultural products from other nations, particularly Brazil and Latin American countries, replacing US output. And once the trade war is over, the Chinese may not change their pattern of importing and may stick with their more reliable exporters who may in fact be cheaper. The American farmers may lose their Chinese market permanently because of Trump’s easy trade war. And our farmers are not really happy about being subsidized. They want their markets and want to get back to work farming.

The big sticking point in trade negotiations between the two countries is the Chinese government’s use of subsidies to businesses deemed important to their future economy. This is the way the Chinese government has always advanced their economy, stealing technology from the US and other nations then starting their own companies to produce the same goods. They appear to have been willing to cease intellectual theft, but not centrally planned state subsidies to businesses. The market doesn’t determine the winners and losers in the Chinese economy. The government does and supports what they see as vital industries with subsidies. And the government backed off on previous agreements the negotiators had made and refused to put any agreements into law.

One of Trump’s major mistakes was trying to negotiate with China on a one to one basis. If he had included allies in these negotiations, like the EU, England, Canada, Japan, and perhaps Latin America, he could have put much more pressure on China and forced them to make changes in their economy they were loath to make. But Trump said that trade wars were easy to win and now has screwed up the American economy and the public.

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From driftglass:

In New Hampshire, Joe Biden predicts that once President Trump is out of office, Republicans will have “an epiphany” and work with Democrats toward consensus.

Of course, as we out here in the Real World know perfectly well (and as I may have mentioned once or twice or 5000 times over the past 14 years) our political climate has been irreversibly wrecked by the Republican Party for at least the next generation, at this point the very best we can hope for is to contain their madness and mitigate the damage they can do. Which means the rest of us in the not-crazy majority need to start running hard against the entire Republican party as an entity and stop wasting our limited time and energy pretending that figuring out the Trump voter is some great mystery, and that once we crack their code and begin communicating with them in their native language something something “Bipartisanship!”

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