Month: January 2020

 

From Deborah Long at The Moderate Voice:

Sherrod Brown had it right with his slogan, “The Dignity of Work”. He was speaking directly to Trump’s disillusioned and infuriated voters. He didn’t speak down to them; he understood what they wanted and what they needed – good paying jobs. Joan C. Williams, author of “White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America” presents a compelling assessment of how the Republican Party led us to Donald Trump. In her 2016 essay entitled: “What So Many People Don’t Get About the US Working Class”, she retold this story, sent to her from a friend:

“The thing that really gets me is that Democrats try to offer policies (paid sick leave! minimum wage!) that would “help” the working class. A few days’ paid leave ain’t gonna support a family. Neither is minimum wage. WWC (white working-class) men aren’t interested in working at McDonald’s for $15 per hour instead of $9.50. What they want is what my father-in-law had: steady, stable, full-time jobs that deliver a solid middle-class life to the 75% of Americans who don’t have a college degree. [Now, about 66%] Trump promises that. I doubt he’ll deliver, but at least he understands what they need.”

Williams goes on to say: “I fully understand why transgender bathrooms are important, but I also understand why progressives’ obsession with prioritizing cultural issues infuriates many Americans whose chief concerns are economic”.

Today, ideas like: transgender bathrooms, opposition to tax-breaks for the 1%, breaking up the big banks, Russian espionage, or # MeToo, won’t make Donald Trump a one-term president because we’re drowning in identity politics and lack a unified message.

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• Green Eagle has a theory. American generals figured out how to trick our berserk POTUS out of his war. The weirdest thing about this weird idea is that, with my President, it is quite plausible.
   
• Frances Langum watches the continuing drama of Fox News, so you don’t have to. In this week’s episode, Geraldo scampers back onto the plantation. He had been pretty upset at my President, frightened during the imminent start of WW III. But now that it’s over, he’s ready to join in blaming Democrats for the entire thing. Seems Trump was distracted by impeachment.
   
• It is hard to avoid a suspicion that verges on certainty that my President initiated the crisis for political effect. Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger provides statistical evidence on two intertwined points. The public does not believe Trump claims that the killing of Soleimani made the United States safer. Any wag-the-dog strategy has not worked.
   
• Tommy Christopher notices a Fox News poll that has bad news for Trump, but points out that viewers curious about what it shows would likely miss it on Fox. They would get the full story by watching MSNBC.
   
• Andy Borowitz reports that Iran’s Ayatollah is mystified. Trump likes every dictator in the world except him.
   
• At The Moderate Voice, Evan Sarzin writes with empathetic skepticism about the money soaked Bloomberg campaign, attempting to answer: what makes Michael run? Does Michael Bloomberg really want to be your President?
   
• Jonathan Bernstein sees the Republican party resisting the tide of history on healthcare. Opponents of Medicaid expansion are retreating in some places, losing in others. If Obamacare is overturned in the lawsuit Republicans are pushing, they will pay at the ballot box. They are in that box.
   
• Universal health care is too complex to make work. Scotties Toy Box restates that argument in a single sentence, turning it into a compelling case for universal health care.
   
• Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara considers the question posed on quora. Why can’t libertarians name a single successful libertarian experiment in running a country? Michael dodges the question. Libertarians don’t try to run anything. They are against running things. A functioning government is, by definition, evil.
   
  So is there a country, any country, with no functioning government, one in which libertarianism prevails?
   
  We might try Somalia.
• Iron Knee at Political Irony catches the conversation as Lindsey Graham provides the compelling logic that makes him unworried about any threat to humanity posed by climate catastrophe.
   
• Infidel753 sees the most important developments of the recently departed calendar year: accelerating decline of religion, accelerating international action on climate.
   
• In The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, atheist Bruce engages with an evangelical pastor, answering sincere questions about personal history and previous faith.
   
• Vincent at A Wayfarer’s Notes is asked whether he believes in God, and decides a better question is: what does he believe in?
   
• North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz writes with familiarity and compassion about those living in grief, having lost a loved one. Well meaning folks compliment them on their strength in the face of pain. Those who maintain after that devastation, he says, are not paragons of strength or even virtue. Survivors just try to survive. I’m old enough to have gone through it a few times, and I have witnessed it as well. Pastor John is right.
   
• The good Christians of Beltrami County have voted to ban refugees. PZ Myers explains the effect on the weather. You know, a few of my out-of-state friends had unkind things to say about bigotry here in Missouri after the Republican state legislature erected a bust of Rush Limbaugh in the State Capitol rotundra (No I’m not kidding). But even Missouri is on record as welcoming refugees.
   
• Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit has a cheerful bit of child-rearing advice for when your kid won’t eat meat.
   
• M. Bouffant at Web of Evil joins in twitter combat. A free plant based meal is provided at the Golden Globes awards. Someone objects to typical Hollywood lack of choice. And our Web denizen points out the obvious, along with appropriate impatient insult.
   
• The Journal of Improbable Research goes all Crime and Punishment with one researcher convicted of fraud and another arrested for attempted murder. They were respectively sentenced to play the piano and accused of playing rock, poker, scissors with real weapons.
   
• Max’s Dad watches the new movie about desperate heroism in WW I. And he really likes and highly recommends 1917.
   

 
From The Propaganda Professor:

It seems nobody is very happy with Facebook these days. And heaven knows, there is plenty of reason for the disenchantment. The social media titan has become a contemporary Frankenstein story, a case of technology that began with benign intentions but morphed out of control and has become a destructive monster — or more like a massive army of destructive monsters. What was once a channel to keep people in touch with each other and facilitate the sharing of experiences and information has become a seedy and devastating conduit for disinformation that seriously threatens whatever is left of democracy.

The following meme, which has made the rounds repeatedly, is a good indication of the kind of malfeasance that takes place regularly on Facebook:

Have you ever known a Muslim to say they were “offended” by the American flag? Have you ever known a “liberal” to say such a thing? But the people who share this meme accept both propositions as indisputable fact; thus, the meme stirs up hatred toward two groups simultaneously — under the pretext of shoring up patriotism. And quite often, the false information passed along consists of more specific misrepresentations of fact — i.e., relating a phony incident in which some Muslim supposedly disrespected the flag. (Meanwhile, social media and regular media have ignored or glossed over the fact that an American sailor who died trying to stop the gunman at a navy base in Pensacola was himself a Muslim.)

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From Dr. Mark Bear at MadMikesAmerica:

All Is NOT Well When A Thug Occupies the Oval Office

So forgive me for pointing out how questionable it becomes when those of us who do not support the man’s POLICIES point out how this all began with him only for the conservatives in our respective networks to speak out on the commendable skills of the fire-putter-outer when he started the danged fire in the first place.

I am so tired of hearing from folks how I “need to “learn what it means to be an American,” or “that I need to support this President because our troop’s lives are – arguably so – at risk. I support our military. I support our country.

What I don’t support is the blatant hypocrisy which is appearing all over social media and brought to my doorstep via email or messenger.

I also do not like it when the current occupant of our Oval Office acts like a thug with world affairs telling Iraq, should they demand we leave, they will be paying, or worse, his Tweet sent out after those two missile strikes saying “All is Well,” when our troops are sitting in the line of fire.

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From tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors:

…letting advertisers lie to customers on Facebook is super-cool

Even Twitter, sewer firehose that it is, says that political ads designed to mislead have no place on their platform, and because Twitter claims that they do not have the resources to fact check everything, instead they are banning all political ads. Google has announced something similar; even Pinterest has a technical solution to make mis/disinformation impossible to find on their platform if it ever makes it on: they add it to their key words list to block and to make it unsearchable. D’uh!

“Suckers,” Faceberg didn’t say.

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From driftglass:

It Has Been a Decade Since Russell King Posted His Open Letter to Conservative Americans

If you’ve haunted these precincts for awhile, you may remember Russell King’s “America Dad” post. It was herculean labor, packing a payload of links and proofs that should have been sufficient to blast the Right in half and sink it to the bottom of the Marianas Trench.

Everyone linked to it. Everyone sent to along to everyone they knew. It went so viral that it overwhelmed the server where it was stored and was eventually it was mirrored on other sites to help share the traffic load. Here is one such that’s still up and running:

Russell King’s ‘Open Letter to Conservative Americans’
BY VERN NELSON – MARCH 25, 2010

All the clowns were accurately named and shamed. All the sin and treason and impregnable ignorance and suffocating hypocrisy of the Right (which we had all been writing about piecemeal for years) were gathered together, sorted out and nailed to the nation’s cathedral door is exquisite, irrefutable detail

To this day I still go back to it and admire it as the Bayeux Tapestry of take-downs of Conservatives and their Republican party,

But here’s the thing.

It didn’t alter the trajectory of the GOP one iota. And it did not move the needle on the pathological Both Siderism of the American political press one scintilla.

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From Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged:

Soleimani was a murderer, because he caused a lot of people to be killed. The strike that killed Soleimani was an assassination because it specifically targeted him, and we are not in a declared war with Iran. He was, also, quite factually, a high-ranking government official in Iran. That’s the problem. That would be an entire predicate for Iran to treat the strike (an assassination or killing of a high-ranking government official whose job was to arrange for others to die) as an act of war, None of these things are contradictory to the other things and all are actually true.

We really need to take a moment to let the media (as in, Chris Cillizza) know that maybe, just maybe, we are not going to play by 2016 rules and let stories fly that try to depict a candidate as having contradicted herself when she just happened to make separate factual statements that don’t conflict one another at all.

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From nojo:

“If you’re old,” the tweet requested Thursday night, “please attach a link to your 2003 take on the invasion of Iraq to your 2020 take on Iran.”

We are old, but we wouldn’t be blogging for another five years, so we have no links to offer.

But we remember.

We remember the run-up, desperately seeking sources — mainly printed — that would see the situation clearly, not feeling rushed by the incessant we must invade now chants being issued by our nation’s illegitimate leadership.

We remember the futility of opposition, our liberal leaders running scared that they wouldn’t be seen as sufficiently willing to beat the shit out of anyone arbitrarily designated our enemy.

We remember the hubris, the certainty that we had but to snap our fingers — and drop a ton of bombs — to bend the world to our will.

We remember the night the bombs dropped, thinking don’t fuck this up.

And we remember the museum.

The bombs dropped March 15, 2003. Combat was declared over — MISSION ACCOMPLISHED — five weeks later, on May 1.

The Iraq National Museum was looted April 10.

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From The Onion:

“While there are by no means any drastic changes for the worse in any given 24-hour period, we have observed a measurable and steady decline in each passing day,” the report read in part, specifically noting gradual but perceptible declines in personal wealth, food quality, the overall love shared by humanity, and the warmth of sunlight.

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