Sometimes mainstream press becomes so anxious about avoiding criticism for lack of balance, reporters forget to tell the unbalanced truth. tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors takes Politico to task for a report on Obama’s fading accomplishments. tengrain’s title says it: Politico Sees The End of an Era, But Cannot Say Why It’s Ending.
75 years later, M. Bouffant at Web of Evil remembers the day the Thousand Year Reich ended, 988 years early.
Jonathan Bernstein looks at Trump activism in dealing with COVID-19 and sees … well … nothing. “The president still shows no sense of urgency in dealing with the pandemic, and Senate Republicans are along for the ride.”
Tommy Christopher suggests that a campaign season is a tough time to test the proposition that an accused sexual predator may be entirely innocent and that a politically motivated accuser may be making things up. “If Biden’s accuser is lying,” says Tommy, “then maybe people need to hear a liar be called a liar.”
I dunno. Maybe the thing is to deny the accusation if not true, avoid name-calling, show gentle respect, encourage investigation, let the facts speak. Otherwise, keep silent.
You know… be the non-Trump, be the non-Kavanaugh.
Be the contrast.
In Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson takes us through the desperate measures Republican strategists are considering. Candidates should stop defending their president and just get local. Trump’s campaign should proclaim that he is the very best of the very worst – because he is horrible, but Democrats are double horrible plus one.
Jon Perr at PERRspectives slams Donald Trump, then slams him again and again, without saying anything. At least not saying his own words. He simply quotes a President from before I was born. And quotes him again and again.
Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger has the latest poll results. The November election is close very close. Biden edges Trump, that’s the good news. But it’s by only one point.
Hold on! That’s not nationwide. It’s a state poll in wait… where?
If he had paid more attention to a couple of memos, he would have been in politics a whole lot longer.
Harry Hughes broke what was becoming a tradition in Maryland. It undoubtedly had been going on long before Spiro Agnew was caught. It probably ended with a man whom I regarded as a political hero, a couple of Governors before Harry Hughes.
There was no apparent political benefit, and a whole lot of political cost, when that courageous Governor fought against doctors and hospitals, when he worked to overcome legislative indifference, to establish the nation’s first shock trauma unit. Lives have been saved everywhere you look since then.
And that was not all.
Marvin Mandel stood tall against the tide that was running strong in those days. He had become governor when Governor Spiro Agnew became Vice President Spiro Agnew. Mandel defended legislators as they were attacked by the former governor who had come just before him. Spiro Agnew waged a scorched-earth political war against anyone who criticized him or his boss, Richard Nixon.
Agnew attacked critics like Maryland Senator Joe Tidings as RadicLibs a clever combination of Radical and Liberal. So Senator Tidings couldn’t just be wrong on policy issues, he was in league with dirty hippies: unpatriotic, long-haired protestors against the war in Vietnam.
Mandel campaigned for re-election as Governor as Tidings campaigned for re-election to the Senate. Joe Tidings, Mandel said, was an important member of his team. Tidings lost while Marvin Mandel won in a landslide.
When Spiro Agnew turned out to be a crook, it was blatant as all hell. When he had been governor of Maryland, he literally was getting literal envelopes stuffed with literal cash in exchange for state contracts. When he became Vice President, he still got envelopes stuffed with cash, right there in the White House, right up until he was caught. He resigned as Vice President and pleaded no-contest to being a crook.
Okay, calling the pandemic “Chinese Virus” is pretty much racist by not-so-subtle implication. tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors brings us the writings of new Health and Human Services spokesperson Michael Caputo. They bring anti-Asian racism to a much more explicit level.
So here’s the new narrative: My president wasn’t really suggesting everyone try injecting themselves with household cleaning products. He merely wanted the idea carefully researched. You know… set up a control group, and another group into whose veins you inject Clorox. Then see what happens. News Corpse speculates what might be behind this and other presidential suggestions.
PZ Myers is a little ticked off at the wheedling coverage by the NY Times of the Lysol-Gate presidential briefing. He compares Times headlines with those of Fox News, and cannot tell the difference.
Manufacturers are issuing urgent warnings. Despite President Trump’s suggestion, people concerned about the COVID-19 virus should not inject household cleaning products into themselves.
Reckitt Benckiser, the maker of disinfectants Lysol and Dettol, released a statement Friday that its products cannot be injected or ingested to combat coronavirus after President Trump suggested the possibility during Thursday’s task force briefing.
What Trump said: “I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets inside the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that.”
News Corpse watches and finds what President Trump has to say to Americans who are scared about coronavirus. It is that the reporter asking what he has to say to those who are scared is a bad reporter for asking the question.
In the midst of crisis, Jonathan Bernstein contrasts the public utterances of our current president with those of another. A frightened nation responded those decades ago.
In Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson investigates reports that 5 US Senators used advance knowledge of coronastocks to benefit. She clears three off them – blind trusts or documented unrelated trading. The other two are actual crooks.
PZ Myers documents how, years ago, Senator Susan Collins was able, all by herself, to kill just-in-case funding of pandemic flu preparedness – including medical masks. Even Joe Lieberman couldn’t talk her out of her extreme position. So it turns out Susan Collins is more evil than Joe Lieberman. That’s pole vaulting over a very high bar.
Personal note: I have begun investing time in physical therapy after a spectacular expressway accident. Seems the human body is not properly constructed for hanging from a seat belt while traveling upside down on the freeway. My thanks to the passersby who extracted me.
She was a civil rights activist when activism was physically dangerous. When human bodies were decorating poplar trees. When they were being found in earthen dams. She was a major participant in the history of central Illinois. She was a founding member of the NAACP in Sparta. Picket lines were often her part-time home, and the after school home of her children.
I was privileged to speak with her many times over the years. When my loved one and I occasionally visited over weekends, I would rise before sunrise for coffee and conversation. She told me of the world of her youth.
Each time we left for home, I would kiss her forehead and ask her to take care of herself. That she was the only mama I had now. And she would smile and tell me she was proud of me. Proud of me.
My wife, her daughter, pretty much moved into her mom’s house, caring for her 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, during her final months of suffering.
She was laid to rest yesterday. Hundreds attended the funeral. The ceremony went a little long – people personally touched by this compassionate woman briefly spoke. The number was impressive.
It is hard for me to imagine a world without Margaret Anderson in it.
In my heart, there is, for the moment, a huge crater where Sparta used to be.
Iron Knee at Political Irony goes to some detail to show how Rudy Giuliani, in addition to being kind of a crazed jerk, has, through sheer technical incompetence, become a national security risk.
Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged takes a close look at sentencing in the Roger Stone case, including Presidential interference, and concludes that truth still matters.
Max’s Dad doesn’t much mind Warren’s war part of the debate, but doesn’t much like the debate itself and how the moderates most likely to beat Trump are aiming at each other.
nojo is losing hope. We should have already learned this lesson from elections past. When confronted with a choice between uncomfortable and evil, voters choose evil every time. And Democrats seem to be choosing uncomfortable ‑ ‑ ‑ again.
North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz says that, when it comes to saving our country, it is not enough to trust in God. God demands more.