- This week’s note in Trumpian ‘Alternative Facts’ comes from Indiana in The Statehouse File where John Krull dissects the lies in Donald Trump’s attack on war hero John McCain.
- Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post sees a pattern in the number of Trump villains who are American heroes.
- Jon Perr at PERRspectives has a few words of friendly advice to his Republican friends about the temptation to join President Trump in casting Democrats as anti-Jewish.
- Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit finds an immigration scandal about anchor babies that our President is not likely to find objectionable.
- Dana Bash at CNN is awestruck by how Kellyanne Conway has managed to prevail in the male-dominated world of Trump politics. driftglass goes to history books to find a fitting parallel.
- A host of critics have been saying that the White House is currently filled with evil minded, unqualified, simpletons. tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors confesses that staffers like Ivanka, Jared, and others are are proving us haters wrong. Okay, so there is a touch of sarcasm at work.
- News Corpse reports on rumblings within Fox News offering the faint possibility that the network might stop functioning as Trump’s private Pravda.
- Jonathan Bernstein explains why a possible promise by Joe Biden to serve only a single term would be a sure loser.
- M. Bouffant at Web of Evil may have found a distant relative of Beto. Well, everyone is related to Adam, right? Maybe Republicans will find a way to use this free oppo-research.
- Iron Knee at Political Irony educates us on what socialism meant in the 1950s.
- I’m getting to the age where I can relate more and more to correspondence between elderly folk. At Margaret and Helen, Helen Philpot writes to her friend Margaret with some profane and furious wit about the way conservative Republicans think, speak, and vote on abortion rights.
- In Wisconsin, Republicans lost the election for governor, so a lame duck Republican session was convened to strip powers from the incoming governor. Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson sympathetically covers Republican anger as that session is ruled to have been illegal, since it was convened in violation of the Wisconsin Constitution. James also covers, again with sympathy, a campaign for a Wisconsin Supreme Court judge who will preserve the state constitution from rampant liberals. I suppose it’s my demented left-wing bias, but I think I perceive a possible inconsistency.
- Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara tries once more to defend the electoral college with arguments that contemporary documentation tells us did not play a part in the Constitutional Convention debate, at least that part on how to choose the President. It was all about preserving slavery. At least Mr. LaFerrara did not misrepresent James Madison as some have done.
- Dave Dubya points out that the violent threat of ISIS is not even close to its end, since it has taken the form of white nationalism.
- North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz suggests that, of everyone who embraces, rejects, derides, or ignores Christianity, white evangelicals form the the one group that does not get Jesus at all.
- Vincent at A Wayfarer’s Notes has a dream about a woman or ghost or something or someone surrendering herself to an undefined whatever. She morphs into Theresa May trying to deal with Brexit. As lucid an analysis of whatever the hell is happening as any, I suppose.
- In research not at all intended to relate to Brexit, The Journal of Improbable Research takes a look at an actual study involving random folks asked to back way up to take a photo to see if they would look back to keep from tripping.
- Vagabond Scholar celebrated St. Patrick’s Day with a bevey of songs from Ireland.
Category: Uncategorized
There Is Just No Bottom to the Trump Administration’s Degradation
From Green Eagle:
Today’s example- nothing but another routine action by our President:
“The United States says it was one of three countries to vote against a U.N. resolution condemning the glorification of Nazism…”
And why would that be?
Wingnuts, Rage, and Guns
From Infidel753:
The Trumpanzees are angry people. Depending on the individual, they’re angry about blacks and women who no longer “know their place”; at education and expertise, which they themselves do not have; at social changes like secularism and the growing acceptance of gay equality; at any manifestation of foreign culture or language or ideas, which remind them that the world out there is much bigger and more complicated than they can mentally process; at technological change which renders old ways of making a living irrelevant while the internet turns younger people away from old prejudices and certainties. Despite the power held by Trump and other Republicans in their name, they feel put-upon and disrespected. And because so many of them have guns, their anger often stirs fear.
Indeed, fantasies of some future explosion of violence in which they will emerge triumphant are very common on wingnut blogs and discussion sites. From decades-old dreams of a “day of the rope” when enemies (such as Jews, government officials, and “race-mixers”) would be hanged en masse, to present-day rumblings of a second civil war which their overwhelming superiority in guns would turn into an easy slaughter of “libtards” and other broad categories of people they loathe, they picture themselves as the massively stronger side of America’s national divide, awaiting only one more provocation to burst their restraints and annihilate us in a hailstorm of cleansing ammo. Such fantasies are actively encouraged by the worst of the Republican leadership, including you-know-who.
Don’t be fooled. And don’t be scared.
The Big Idea: Elizabeth Bear – Ancestral Night
From Elizabeth Bear at Whatever:
John Scalzi: Sometimes you think a book is going to go one way, and then it goes another, and that turns out — perfectly fine, actually! Elizabeth Bear had a bit of that experience with her new novel Ancestral Night. Here she is to explain the zigs and zags.
Ancestral Night had a hard time getting born.
It’s not the book’s fault. It’s possibly the author’s fault—or possibly the fault lies in the stars. The world kept changing radically on me while I was writing it, you see—personally, politically, and profoundly. And as I and everything around me underwent those changes, the book wound up changing too.
I had originally envisioned something much more along the lines of an epic space opera with multiple points of view and a lot of focus on the politics. The politics were the big idea around which the world was built, after all. The idea of a massive, multi-species, basically benevolent but imperfect post-scarcity bureaucracy devoted to maintaining peace and the well-being of its citizens, however imperfect it could sometimes be in implementation, was appealing in 2014. I feel like it’s even more appealing now, frankly: it would be nice to believe in functional governments again.
Trump Won’t Criticize White Nationalists Because He Is One
From Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger:
Yes, there is a pattern. White nationalists, white supremacists, KKK members, and other racists and bigots love Donald Trump. They love him because he won’t criticize them.
Why? There are a couple of reasons. First, he couldn’t afford to do that. His approval numbers have been upside-down since he was sworn into office. He can’t afford to anger any of his base — and a large portion of his base are the racists.
But perhaps the most important reason he won’t criticize them is because he is a racist and white nationalist himself. He has a long history of this. It started back in the 1970’s, when the federal government admonished him repeatedly for refusing to rent to Blacks. And it has continued to this day as he tried to ban muslims from entering this country, and wants to build a wall to keep Hispanics from entering. His only reliable policy is his racism and xenophobia.
And he’s not going to change.
The Hero We Needed
From PZ Myers:
A teenaged boy — I’d say he even looked “angelic” — slapped the back of the despicable Fraser Anning’s rotten head with an egg. He was a brave young man. Not only did he give Anning a small taste of what he deserves, but he stood his ground as the Australian senator punched him twice, and as his crack team of thugs wrestled the unresisting assailant to the ground and put him in a chokehold. You never know, he might have a second egg somewhere, or a high capacity egg magazine, or an assault egg. You can’t be too careful.
DeVos Says Bribing Colleges Was a Teaching Opportunity
From The Borowitz Report:
Betsy DeVos Suggests That Bribing Colleges Helps Students Learn Math
The Secretary of Education suggested that, rather than keeping children in the dark about the bribes that enable their college acceptances, “Parents should sit around the kitchen table with their kids and work on some fun math problems together.”
“Let’s say it’ll cost Amber seventy-five thousand dollars to get into Stanford, and it’ll cost her twin brother Dylan seventy-five thousand to get into Georgetown,” she said. “How much money total will their parents have to wire?”
Elizabeth Warren Calls For Ending Electoral College
From Frances Langum:
It’s a no brainer, as technology allows for faster counting and reporting of votes, and the existence of “swing states” means everyone else gets ignored in a general presidential election.
There should be plenty of Republicans who like this idea, as well, particularly the nanosecond Texas turns blue. At that point, it will be nearly impossible for any Republican to win the Electoral vote.
New Zealand Mosque Massacre
From Neil Bamforth at MadMikesAmerica:
It was so clearly only a matter of time. The only surprise is that it happened in New Zealand. I suppose, possibly, that shouldn’t entirely be a surprise, as New Zealand are renowned for their diversity. New Zealand is extraordinarily accepting of other cultures and so forth. They are, quite conceivably, considered about the safest haven refugees can find anywhere on the planet—until now.
In fairness to New Zealand, the maniac responsible is actually Australian although it appears, there will be other maniacs involved who may possibly be New Zealanders. We must await events to discover this.
Forty-nine Muslims were slaughtered at Friday prayers. Another forty-something is in hospital in various conditions.
There are, frankly, no words to describe the horror.
Why Baptists Let President Trump Sign Their Bibles
From The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser:
Many people were upset over Trump signing his name on Bibles. “Is he the author of the Bible?” one man rhetorically asked. Of course not, but neither are the men this man thinks ARE the authors. Most of the books of the Bible are written by unknown authors. Of course, this fact is not preached from Evangelical pulpits. Preachers mustn’t ever say or do anything that would cause parishioners to doubt that the Bible is the inspired, inerrant, infallible Word of God.
Those upset over Trump “defacing” the Word of God are ignorant of Evangelical Baptist church culture. It is not uncommon for Bible owners to write inside their Bibles: the date/time/place they were saved, the date/place they were baptized, and their life verse.