Seldom Balanced – Usually Fair
From Andy Borowitz:
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Roy Moore’s defeat in Alabama’s special election means that the Texas senator Ted Cruz will easily retain his status as the most despised person in the United States Senate, congressional insiders confirmed on Wednesday.
According to those insiders, Cruz had been secretly hoping that Moore’s election would displace him from his unenviable position as the most vilified pariah in the upper chamber.
From Jonathan Bernstein:
The day after Alabama, Donald Trump is now the president in the most danger of losing renomination since Jimmy Carter in 1979.
He’s in this position despite campaigning against Roy Moore in the Republican primary, correctly saying that Moore would be a bad general election candidate. Then, the scandal that engulfed Moore after his nomination left Trump with no good choices. One can argue Trump made the decision that was best for his party and even his presidency.
But obviously none of it worked, and that fact alone will cause his party to start asking existential questions. How many Republicans in Congress and elsewhere are wondering this morning just how bad November 2018 is going to be? How many are asking the same question about November 2020? And is there anything they can do about it?
Wondering why a few conservative friends fail to be impressed.
From PZ Myers:
Last night, I stopped paying attention to the news when I heard, early in the returns, that Doug Jones was far behind Roy Moore in the Alabama election.
The last thing I read about it was Charles Pierce’s despairing description of a Moore rally.
You grow exhausted from the effort it takes to keep mockery at bay long enough to explain that what Moore and Bannon are selling is a dangerous blend of religious extremism and McCarthyite bombast, Roy Cohn in Torquemada drag. You grow exhausted by the effort it takes, over and over again, to remind yourself that there are good people in the crowd cheering this river of sludge and nonsense.
Finally, you give up. Roy Moore is a vehicle for collecting suckers, for liberating them from their responsibility as citizens in a self-governing republic, and anybody who thinks this waterheaded theocrat belongs in the United States Senate is a dupe and a fool. Finally, you don’t care if the people behind Roy Moore, and the people in the crowd in front of him, believe you are a member of the coastal elite or an agent of Lucifer. Finally, you grow weary of the smug condescension of religious bigots. Finally, you decide to put down the twin burdens of excusing deliberate ignorance and respecting the opinions of people who want to light the world on fire to kill their imaginary enemies. And you give up and tell the truth.
These people deserve what they get.
Then I went to bed.
From T. Paine at Saving Common Sense:
While congress should also be introducing legislation into where they are going to cut spending that is wasteful, redundant, inefficient, or not in line with our constitution, I think that the tax reform legislation that is going into reconciliation between the House and the Senate is pretty good thus far overall. First, despite our friends on the left’s predictable whining on the topic, the return of some of our tax dollars is a good thing. After all, this is NOT the government’s money. It is ours. If the tax reform stays pretty close to its current iteration, it will help spur the economy via corporate tax cuts that finally make the U.S. competitive on the global stage. (And it is not corporations that pay taxes anyway, but rather the consumers that do.) Further, the increase in deductions for children and in improved tax rates will help a vast majority of middle class Americans. No, my Leftist friends, the poorest half of Americans do not get a tax cut per se, as they do not currently PAY any income taxes.
From Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post:
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
– Sir John Dalberg-Acton –
It has been in the making for a long time now, but with the near-election of Republican-supported, accused pedophile Roy Moore two days ago to the U,S, Senate from the state of Alabama, the once-great party of Lincoln has all but ceased to exist. Sure, they still call themselves the Republican Party, but they do not resemble even one bit Republicans I have known since my earliest days near the end of the Eisenhower administration. Exen worse, they do not at all resemble the party that elected Lincoln back in 1860! They have increasingly shifted further and further rightward, to the point where they have now all but fallen off of the political table. Prudence and caution have been replaced by impulsive recklessness, nativistic jingoism, and pseudo-evangelism. All I can say to this is a very disgusted “good riddance!”
From Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson:
The news of House Speaker Paul Ryan’s impending retirement is, at the very least, premature. RightWisconsin just confirmed with a spokesman for Ryan that the stories about his retirement aren’t true.
“This is pure speculation,” Ryan’s spokesman said. “As the speaker himself said today, he’s not going anywhere any time soon.”
That hasn’t stopped the stories. Politico waited until the seventh paragraph to report Ryan’s denial, and they didn’t quote him until after the writers offered the opinion that Ryan couldn’t tell the truth about his future. Politico’s report has all the credibility of a baseball fan blog reporting a trade rumor, complete with a description of the unhappiness of the player.
Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara advocates a sort of educational voucher to parents of minor children, replacing all public elementary and secondary schools:
What we can do is redirect the dollars now spent on each child’s schooling by recognizing the moral right of parents to direct the course of their own children’s education through universal school choice. This can be accomplished by essentially giving the education tax dollars now spent on each child to the parents, to use according to their own judgement.
Dave Dubya, who also writes for Freedom Rants joins longtime reader and frequent commenter Ryan in responding:
Continue reading “Is Educational Freedom Just Giving Parents the Money?”
Burr is off for a few days. A close relative is the victim of a serious car accident. He expects to return next week.
