Category: Uncategorized

 
From Tommy Christopher:

“The president very much wants to give this speech, it sounds like, from the Lincoln Memorial, and you write ‘The presidents starring role has the potential to turn what has long been a non-partisan celebration of the nation’s founding into another version of a Trump campaign rally,” Camerota said, and asked “I’m just wondering, Josh, I mean what kind of speech would he give?”

“Would he give a presidential speech, or would he give one of these sort of foaming at the mouth speech that we sometimes see at the rallies where they clamor, you know we heard it just last week, where people in the crowd clamor for violence?” she added.

“Well, I think his advisors themselves don’t know what he’s going to say before he gets up there,” Dawsey said.

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From Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger:

Beto O’Rourke was one of several Democrats I was considering supporting for the 2020 presidential nomination. Unfortunately, that is no longer true. His recent statement in New Hampshire has me upset, and I can no longer consider supporting him.

During a house party in Lebanon (New Hampshire), Beto was asked if he would support every candidate of the Democratic Party. His answer was extremely disappointing. He refused to pledge to support every Democratic candidate, saying:

“I can’t take a pledge to support every single Democrat in the country. I need to know about them first, right? Would you want me to make a blanket commitment about people I know nothing about, who I’ve never met?”

That is unacceptable.

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From Neil Bamforth at MadMikesAmerica:

It’s not looking too good is it? The majority who went to the ballot box voted to leave the European Union but we haven’t. It matters not whether you agree or disagree with Britain leaving, the ballot box said we should so, for democracies sake, we should have done, and as quickly as possible. Then, almost three years later, we could have been debating whether it had worked or not.

It might have been disastrous for us, or it might not have been. Democratically, we deserved to find out.

Had it been disastrous, then fine. We could have tried rejoining with our tails between our legs. Embarrassing it might have been, but democracy would have at least been served.

The division regarding Brexit is purely because it never happened.

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From Frances Langum:

In a Fox News op-ed, Bush’s former press secretary tells presidential candidates they should definitely do Fox appearances, but “pull your punches” on Fox hosts.

It’s a desperate plea…with conditions attached?

In a Fox News website oped (Fox link) Perino informs the 20+ Democratic contenders that they MUST come on Fox for the ratings. “You can’t beat Fox News. Literally, you can’t beat it.”

But she also warns Democrats not to attack Fox.

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From Mock Paper Scissors:

Nothing is normal right now, but I checked and it is STILL illegal for any US campaign to solicit anything of value from a foreign person, entity, or government. And our failed media, instead of sounding an alarm is pontificating whether or not it is a good strategy and how well it will play in Possum Hollar? FFS, this is the same Villager cocktail party circuit that treated the Bill Clinton-Loretta Lynch tarmac meeting as a five-alarm scandal.

Or why isn’t this story competing for top billing for the biggest story:

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From The Borowitz Report:

“He can’t understand why they are suddenly obsessed with this baby,” one aide said. “He thinks he should be the only baby that people are thinking about, and this new baby is driving him nuts.”

According to the aide, Trump even threatened to slap new tariffs on China in the hopes of stealing attention away from the baby, but to no avail.

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• At our favorite Wisconsin conservative site, RightWisconsin, State Senator Patrick Testin rails against discriminatory abortion. He points to Iceland as eradicating Down’s Syndrome by forcing potential parents toward abortion. A number of sites do indeed carry the story.
   
  Only one problem. It isn’t true. It took me under a minute to research it. I wonder why neither a state legislator, nor his staff, nor the staff at my favorite Wisconsin conservative site, none of these folks, could find time in their busy schedules to verify the tale before printing the story or, in the case of the good Senator, sponsoring actual legislation.
   
• Pennsylvania State Representative Brian Sims gets between anti-abortion protestors and the pregnant women they are trying to bully. Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged has mixed feelings. She loves his courage and caring, and has serious reservations about some of his tactics. This strikes me as Vixen wisdom, not reflexive bothsiderism.
   
• Tommy Christopher brings us an interview with a 12 year old on the recent school shooting in Colorado. He heard the distant shots seeming to come closer and prepared himself to go down fighting.
   
• Green Eagle runs through published arguments about the word shall in the law that mandates the Treasury Department to hand over Trump tax returns to Congress. Green Eagle has a novel suggestion about applying administration definitions to re-define NRA arguments about strict gun control. On the other hand, we all COULD maybe respect plain language after all.
   
• This is for those of us who have not read all 448 pages of the redacted Mueller Report, and who keep hearing my President proclaiming his exoneration. Dr. Mark Bear, at MadMikesAmerica, quotes a few passages to demonstrate compellingly that exoneration does not mean what Mr. Trump thinks it means.
   
• Frances Langum documents the ever so incremental move of my President from claims of no obstruction to essentially no obstruction.
   
• Andy Borowitz reports that Attorney General William Barr was unable to get his food order filled at Arby’s when he could not give any direct answers to a bewildered employee at the drive-thru window.
   
• Jon Perr at PERRspectives runs through, in some detail, how dangerous conservative lawlessness, and dishonest testimony about it, is not confined to Mr. Barr or this administration.
   
• nojo puts together a series of quotes, mostly by conservatives about the need for democracy elsewhere, to demonstrate the fall of democracy in America.
   
• Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger takes a quick look at the only two Presidents in the past 40 years who have reduced the deficit.
   
• tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors walks us through the clumsy Trump attempts at negotiations as he trips over his shoelaces into a trade war.
   
• This week’s note in Trumpian “Alternative Facts” comes in a video hosted by the Dallas Observer as a teacher encounters controversy in grading a math quiz.
   

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From Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit:

Our esteemed president believes that “freedom of the press” means that the press is free to write laudatory stories about him. The core of his political calculus is to attack press freedom. His press secretary’s main job is to reinforce his lies with a dead-eyed look of someone who knows that their soul has long ago been sold on the cheap.

Among the major Anglophone countries, which proclaim themselves as beacons of freedom, press freedom is only “satisfactory”. After a few more years of this miserable excuse for a leader, press freedom in the U.S. will probably be downgraded.

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From author John Scalzi at Whatever:

RIP Medical Debt is a non-profit organization that buys up the medical debt of people who can ill afford it and then forgives it — wipes it off their slate forever. And because RIP buys that medical debt for pennies on the dollar, every dollar they spend to buy that debt wipes out up to $100 of medical debt someone else owes.

The way the US does health services is bluntly awful and needs to be reformed drastically. But until that happens, forgiving the medical debt of people who can’t service it themselves seems like a decent thing to do — and if every dollar that goes to that wipes out a multiple of that debt, so much the better.

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