FairAndUNbalanced.com

 
From Max’s Dad:

You cannot possibly keep up with this shit. This nation’s descent into irrelevance continues. WE are becoming that asshole neighbor who has no brains, no couth yet has 400 guns and yells a lot at anyone who comes near his lawn. Yeah everybody knows it isnt going to end well for this cretin, but he’s so out of his mind, and he’s armed, so you just go out of your way to avoid him. God Bless America! Please, soon.

1) Mike Pompeo is a bigoted Kansas nitwit. The man makes a disastrous Secretary of State like Rex Tillerson look like Jefferson. Yet the Senate, including a bunch of Democrats, still stuck in the belief that a Trump voter would actually vote for them if they just voted for enough brain dead bigots to satisfy their stupid, approved this balloon headed shithead to represent American values abroad. Ya know, bigotry, homophobia, anti-Islam beliefs, all those American values. Pompeo will take his Jesus based bullshit abroad to turn the State Department even more irrelevant, which may be the mission in the first place. Diplomacy is a lost art, just bomb the fuck out of anyone who gets in your way and say America Fuck Yeah! The only problem with this idiotic belief is eventually the whole world hates your guts. That’s when the road to bring down the Block Bully becomes easier. We need friends.

2) Joy Ann Reid is a national treasure. She may or may not have made tweets offensive to the LBBTQ community in her distant past. Obviously that was not cool. Joy Reid apologized for that today. So lets not eat our own again because of imperfection. Joy Reid is a lot like a lot of people. What she believed as someone who didnt know the people she looked down upon became old news. When she found out that the people she looked down on were all around her the views changed. This is called learning and progressing. Its called changing your mind. Changing your mind is strength, not weakness. Some day perhaps Trumpers can try it. Perhaps neanderthals like Mike Pompeo can try it.

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From Glenn Geist at MadMikesAmerica:

“. . . and forgetting long-passed mischiefs, we mercifully preserve their bones and piss not upon their ashes.”

-Thomas Browne-

Stephen Foster’s songs and ballads earned for him an honored place in the music of the United States,” or so says the Encyclopedia Britannica, but that must have been written some time ago before America got “woke” as they say in le nouveau dialecte. His name is now mud because of course, according to our new standards, he’s a racist, as of course am I, as a secular humanist of European extraction. His statue in Philadelphia, the city of brotherly but ephemeral and conditional love, is now being removed from public view.

Having died in 1864 with the war still on and the ink on the Emancipation Proclamation still wet, he spoke the English of the time. He grew up in the United States that included slave states and he spoke the same American English that every other American spoke and that included words we don’t use today out of respect for those enslaved people. I’m pretty sure Washington and Jefferson, as well as the Abolitionists, didn’t balk at common usage of the time.

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From Jon Perr at PERRspectives:

And what noble cause and lofty principles inspired this bestial, bloodthirsty cruelty? Why were Dangerfield Newby’s ears cut off as trophies after John Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid of 1859, as were the ears, nose, and genitals of Sam Hose during his torture and dismemberment in 1899? Why did Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest butcher hundreds of surrendering black Union troops at Fort Pillow in 1864 and white militiamen slaughter 100 African-Americans in Colfax, Louisiana, who were merely trying to safeguard the results of the local elections there in 1873? As Jane Coaston recently explained (“Confederate Memorial Day: when multiple states celebrate treason in defense of slavery”), Alabama Confederates like Stephen F. Hale made no secret of the obvious in December 1860:

What Southern man, be he slave-holder or non-slave-holder, can without indignation and horror contemplate the triumph of negro equality, and see his own sons and daughters in the not distant future associating with free negroes upon terms of political and social equality, and the white man stripped by the heaven-daring hand of fanaticism of that title to superiority over the black race which God himself has bestowed?

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From Tommy Christopher:

Trump has overseen a drop in America’s standing as a safe place for a free press. And his Justice Department has gone so far as to remove a section on the “need for a free press” from its manual.

On Sunday, BuzzFeed reported that it has been tracking changes to the DOJ’s “US Attorneys’ Manual,” after Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein ordered a review of the document. BuzzFeed noted the removal of an entire subsection entitled “Need for Free Press and Public Trial.”

Prior to its removal, that section said that “careful weight must be given in each case to the constitutional requirements of a free press and public trials as well as the right of the people in a constitutional democracy to have access to information about the conduct of law enforcement officers, prosecutors and courts, consistent with the individual rights of the accused.”

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From Jonathan Bernstein:

When the media reports on climate change, it’s usually built upon the scientific community’s consensus on the issue. Partisans and pundits might reject that consensus, but the media tends to put the evidence first and the politics second. That is precisely how the press should cover what could be the nation’s next gigantic story.

President Donald Trump may not fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller or Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. But if he does, the critically important story would be the president versus the rule of law and the basic structure of the American republic, not Trump versus the Democrats (or however he’ll frame it).

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From nojo Stinque:

Somehow we had grown up thinking truth was something to be valued, that facts trumped fantasies. Somehow we were under the impression that this was a value we shared with other sentient beings who lived under our flag, that of course everyone was interested in the truth, that of course we all wanted to know the facts at hand.

And then, as we cast our first national vote, Americans elected a charming liar as President, and the wheels started coming off.

It was a few years later that we found an expression for it: “aggressive ignorance”. We’re fine with ignorance as such — we’re all born with it — but while some of us feast upon the world we’re born into, many others do everything they can to avoid it. They live a lie, they enjoy living a lie, they insist upon living a lie, even when the truth is made available. They don’t want to hear it. They don’t want to see it.

And there are enough of of them to take the rest of us down with them. Just look where we are now.

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From North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz:

Comedian Michelle Wolf stepped to the podium at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner and verbally eviscerated everyone: The President, The Press, Mike Pence, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Kellyanne Conway.

MAGA Nation, unsurprisingly lost their collective minds.

By their wild histrionics, you would have thought she murdered a crowd filled with concertgoers with an arsenal of high-powered weapons. (Actually, that probably would have been cause for less indignation.)

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From PZ Myers:

Remember Kevin Williamson, the pundit who tweeted that women who get abortions should be executed by hanging, and lost a job at The Atlantic over it? I’m not sure what should be done with such horrible people, but not being hired as an opinion writer ought to be the least of it. But guess what the Washington Post has done? They’ve given him an opportunity to write on their opinion pages! A one-time thing, I hope, because I’d rather just see him vanish.

But no. Now he gets a prominent space to rehash his ugly views. I’m going to go find a puppy to kick so I can get space where I can write more about puppy-kicking.

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From Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit:

One of the side-effects of a war between adversaries with first-world comparable EW gear will be a loss of the GPS network. Whether it will be world-wide or localized to the combat area(s), whether the GPS constellation itself will be disrupted is a matter of speculation.

But what will also likely happen is a disruption of the global air traffic system. The short-sighted beancountrs in the FAA have been pushing the decommissioning of a large chunk of the VOR network and shutting down VOR/DME -based approaches.

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From Frances Langum:

There are many Republican lies that float about in the media, and one of the most frequently spouted by Republicans (apart from “both sides do it”) is that Democrats don’t have any policies, they just hate Trump.

As Driftglass said on last week’s Professional Left Podcast, we don’t just hate Trump. We hate that he’s destroying the policies we supported. We Democrats are pro-EPA, pro-women’s rights, pro-human rights, pro-science, pro-Emoluments Clause.

And yeah, the fact that Trump is against all those things and also a colossal liar and likely criminal, yeah we kinda hate him. But it’s based on policies as well as a personal dislike of the guy.

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