Month: November 2020

• Vincent at A Wayfarer’s Notes brings us G.K. Chesterton from over a century ago to guide us through these tough times.
   
• In Scotties Toy Box, it turns out lots of folks around the country are nuts. Lots of those nuts are violent nuts. And enough of those violent nuts are here in Missouri to cause the resignation of a health official dedicated to saving their lives. A county health director talks about science and facts, so she and her children are threatened. Nice
   
• JoAnn Williams speculates on the predictable consequences of not wearing a mask. Suppose you die. Well, you may have a right to risk your life, right? How about the others you cause to die?
   
• In Nan’s Notebook, we find a few common sense steps we can take to contain a vicious pandemic beyond just wearing a mask.
   
• John Scalzi at Whatever has serious doubts that, even after COVID, he could ever again be a hugger.
   
• @momwino98 is a parent still adjusting to having a youngster attend virtual school from home.
   
• In Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson notes a grim milestone. A quarter of a million American deaths while my president is solely dedicated to subverting the election in which the voters turned him out.
   
• As explanations go it’s a bit complex, but Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson brings it off. James goes to the state’s past elections to demonstrate the difference between a miscount and a tallying error. There are checks, cross-checks, and counter-checks on tallies. Tallying errors are spotted and corrected right away because they throw everything out of balance. Conclusion: Minor clerical errors have already been spotted and corrected. SOooo…. Donald Trump can recount as much as he wants. Wisconsin still goes to Biden.
   
• Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged, watches as what the Trump team is calling their elite strike force dives ever deeper into weird conspiratorial waters.
   
• At The Onion, Rudy Giuliani goes to court to present his absolute best evidence of mail-ballot irregularities. That would be best. Okay, it’s satire. But it’s close.

Continue reading “Violent Anti-Science, Mask & Beyond, Ex-Hugger, Remote School, Election”

 
From The Propaganda Professor:
 

On Nov. 3, North Carolina Republican Madison Cawthorn became, at age 25, the youngest person ever elected to the U.S. Congress. And how did he rise to this historic occasion? Like this:

Yep, that was his first official tweet as a newly elected member of Congress. And while some of his fellow GOPers upbraided him for this classless, puerile utterance, others cheered him on. After all, this kind of behavior is not exactly out of the ordinary for Republicanoids these days — just look at how many retweets and likes this post got.

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From Iron Knee at Political Irony:

That’s right, she is seeing patients who are dying of Covid-19, but they believe the propaganda, misinformation, and outright lies spewed by Donald Trump and the right-wing media, that their last words before they die are that the pandemic is a hoax and that they will be fine. Their last breaths are not used to talk to their loved ones, or to get their affairs in order. Instead, they are angry and in denial about being told they have contracted Covid-19.

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From The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser:

In the early 1960s, my dad packed up Mom and me, along with my younger brother and sister, and moved us to California. Dad was certain that California was a land of rainbows, and that a pot of gold awaited him in the Golden State. Three years later, as broke as when he arrived, Dad moved us back to Bryan, Ohio. In fact, Dad was so broke that he had to trade his pocket watch for a tank of gas in Illinois — just enough fuel to get us to Bryan.

We lived in several houses in California, one of which was a sprawling ranch house on a hill in Chula Vista. One day, my grandmother, Jeanette Rausch, and her daughter, Marijene, came to visit us. While Grandma and Mom were talking, my siblings and I went outside to play; “play” being climbing in the front seat of Grandma’s car.

I was sitting on the driver’s side of the car, and my sibling were next to me. I am sure both of them would say that it was no surprise that Butch (my family nickname) was in the driver’s seat. I was ALWAYS in the driver’s seat; the boss; the “man” in charge.

I had not yet shut the driver’s side door when I decided — as ornery six-year-old boys are wont to do — to grab the column shifter and put the transmission in neutral. Much to my youthful surprise, the car began rolling down the hill.

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He was just joking! With officials from several states
about breaking the law
 

So… he was making a clever “how about you find a way to throw out legal ballots” joke and the GA Sec of State was just too dim to appreciate the humor? That’s what we’re going with? https://t.co/TfW1Ku1KAs

— Julian Sanchez (@normative) November 17, 2020

Officials in charge of counting didn’t get the joke.
No sense of humor

 
From News Corpse:

There are many things for which Donald Trump will be remembered. They include being impeached for his complicity with Russian election interference, caging children and separating them from their parents, wasting billions of dollars on a fake border wall that Mexico will never pay for, alienating allies, and driving the economy into a persistent recession. Wait, that aint all.

Trump has also presided over the despoiling the environment, skimming millions of taxpayer funds for himself, wantonly violating innumerable laws, humiliating the nation with his hostile and infantile behavior, and, of course, being responsible for the deaths of a quarter of a million Americans due to his ignorance, incompetence, and deliberate mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic.

That’s quite a legacy. But it is apparently not enough for Trump. He is using his final days in the White House to purposefully undermine respect for the most fundamental American principles. Rather than accept the obvious and decisive defeat that he was dealt by President-elect Joe Biden, Trump has chosen to malign democracy with repeated assertions that the election he so deservedly lost was “rigged” by an implausible cabal of Democrats, Republicans, press, tech companies, civil servants, and even members of his own administration whom he appointed.

Not surprisingly, Trump’s bitter and selfish defiance of reality has resulted in an attitudinal shift among his weak minded cult followers and Fox News junkies. The consequences have been affirmed in a new poll by Reuters/Ipsos. And Trump is so proud of the findings that he featured it in his Wednesday morning tweetstorm:

Needless to say, literally everything Trump alleged in that tweet is verifiably false. Some of it was even stipulated as false by his attorneys in one of the many court cases he’s filed.

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From Frances Langum:

All of a sudden, runoff Republicans Kelly Loeffler and David Purdue have to “attract the anti-Trump Republican” in Georgia? Make me laugh.

What’s are corrupt Republicans like Kelly Loeffler and David Purdue supposed to do?

On the one side, Donald Trump is still the god-king of the MAGA set.

On the other side, he’s LOST the election, his Twitter feed is a complete embarrassment, and the fact that his toadies are trying to throw out votes in Georgia doesn’t endear him to those proud of their conservative Republican Secretary of State.

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Come on – Nobody knows what ‘opacity’ means…
 

Update from U.S. district court in Williamsport, Pa., one of the Trump campaign's last stands:

GIULIANI: “I’m not sure what 'opacity' means. It probably means you can see.”

JUDGE BRANN: “It means you can’t.”

— Dan Zak (@MrDanZak) November 17, 2020

…except for lawyers and grammaticians

Giuliani insists he is one, clearly is not the other.

It gets worse: much, much worse.

This, too, appeared to confuse Giuliani, who asked if the judge was inviting him to file the retooled third version of the lawsuit that he’d promised earlier.

“This is a brief in opposition to their motion to dismiss,” Brann replied.

“Oh!” Giuliani said. “Oh, sure, absolutely.”

The latest episode of The Three Stooges in Court

“Mr. Giuliani is talking about another case, not the case before your honor,” Aronchick said.

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Best we could come up with:
All illegal aliens

Private to Giuliani:
Make sure the judge doesn’t look too closely

Note from Burr:
I may be old, but I’ll never be too old to be immature.