Month: February 2018

Wondering why a few conservative friends fail to be impressed.

• This week’s note in Trumpian ‘Alternative Facts’ comes from vox where, in a single week, the Nunes memo exposed the anti-Trump conspiracy, previously secret FBI emails showed that Obama engineered a cover up of the Clinton email scandal, and Mark Warner met secretly with Steele to conspire on the dossier. Turns out that each story was debunked, but vox explains that truth no longer matters in Trump world.
   
• driftglass doesn’t much care for Kevin Nunes, and he makes me laugh explaining why.
   
• At The Moderate Voice has accurately summarized the philosophical underpinnings of today’s Republican Party.
   
• Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger has discovered polling data on whether government does enough to help Americans.
   
• M. Bouffant at Web of Evil links to efforts by religious leaders, this time Mormons, to cover up a domestic violence scandal. And a prediction that feminism will undo 10,000 years of recorded history. Which might be pretty good except, as he points out, recorded history doesn’t go back that far. I dunno. Do we count cave graphics?
   
• Maybe market forces work? Jon Perr at PERRspectives documents corporate efforts to drive down health care costs while improving care for their employees. Health industry stocks went down at the news.
   
• Once more into the breech. Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara at Principled Perspectives tries again to defend the corrupt electoral college system of selecting Presidents. This time it’s that the founders realized that the passions of the majority need to be tamed. Actually, that was an argument for the Bill of Rights. The main argument for the electoral college was the need to preserve slavery.
   
  Choosing by electors makes about as much sense as choosing a mayor by counting how each street voted. Whoever wins on the the most streets becomes mayor. Did we ever get a more dispassionate result when the electoral college chose differently than the voters? Was Benjamin Harrison a taming of passion? George W? D-D-D-Donald Trump?
   
• In The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, Bruce pretty much rejects friendship with those with whom he has nothing in common and who he suspects have only evangelistic motives. Well, yeah. It can be kind of drag to be around those who see you as a target.
   
• North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz suggests that Jesus of Nazareth has been banished from conservative evangelical Christianity, but offers hope that progressive Christians are saving Jesus from extinction.
   
• Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit provides a most entertaining video of a frustrated car thief. Poor guy gets his due. Narration is great. Oh puhLeeeze watch this.
   
• I kind of like science fiction, but I get irritiated when some important answer is suddenly provided by technological magic. I would, at least, like a story to present a premise, then build on it. Infidel753 takes a look at a common theme, outer space aliens who visit earth. He examines several possible reasons anyone from a distant world would bother with ours, and rejects each one. What would aliens want here?
   
• John Scalzi at Whatever buys a new guitar, gets ticked at someone’s reaction, and provides a lesson in common courtesy. His advice? Don’t be a dick.
   

Barry Goldwater was an avid photographer. He got started as a kid when his mother showed him how to use a box camera. It became a lifelong passion.

He took pictures all over Arizona. Tens of thousands of photographs. He documented the ordinary life of native Americans and became an advocate. He took pictures of vast desert vistas.

When he was in Washington, he became a loud conservative voice. He was a bitter opponent of John F. Kennedy and what he stood for.

And they became close friends.

Kennedy was a frequent guest at the Goldwater home. Goldwater’s wife and kids later reminisced about Jack Kennedy’s visits. Barry and John enjoyed each other’s company.

In those days, political opponents could become good friends without betraying core principles. Ted Kennedy was sometimes seen sitting with elderly segregationist John Stennis of Mississippi, occasionally laughing softly together at some inside joke. Politicians back then were even known to enjoy ironic humor.
Continue reading “My Conservative Friend’s Funny Pictures”

 
From Max’s Dad:

My father spent 45 years in the stock game. From stock broker to account executive to financial planner he always said all those titles were bullshit. I’m a salesman he’d proclaim, almost proudly. The other two things my old man said in his 45 years pushing stocks on a daily basis was “stock market goes up, stock market goes down” and of course, “I was just about to call you” whenever one of his panicky investors would call and interrupt his newspaper reading.

The stock market plunged the last two days after Wall Street realized we have a goddamned maniac running the country. Just a warning. To those of us versed in history, we know, that when Republicans get control and cut taxes to the rich and run up the debt what inevitably happens is 1929, 1987, 2007 and perhaps 2018.

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From Tommy Christopher:

Criticism of Donald Trump’s outrageous accusation that Democrats were “treasonous” and “un-American” for not applauding his State of the Union address left his spokesperson flat-footed and lashing out at Trump’s critics.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was clearly unprepared to respond to criticism of Trumps’s inflammatory and offensive attack.

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From Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post:

Our society and culture are literally built on lies – look at the plethora of lying TV, radio, magazine, and newspaper ads we are exposed to numerous times each day! Even a major TV network – Fox “News” – lies repeatedly to smear political opponents. One of their main commentators, Sean Hannity, is a chronic liar. The only thing that differs occasionally are the severity and extent of the lies, but, especially at Fox, they are ever-present!

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From The Journal of Improbable Research:

Imagine that you’re just about to sign an important contract – would you prefer it to have been precisely drafted, or would you be happy for it to be “optimally vague” ?

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Wondering why a few conservative friends fail to be impressed.

 
From Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson:

Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin (D) received bad news last week when her net approval rating placed her in the bottom ten of U.S. Senators, according to Morning Consult last week.

“Sens. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin and Claire McCaskill of Missouri, who are both seeking re-election, remain the least popular Democrats in states carried by Trump, with voters split down the middle over their job performance,” according to Morning Consult.

McCaskill is frequently listed as the number one target for Republicans heading into the 2018 election cycle.

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From Frances Langum:

Last night Lawrence O’Donnell highlighted this op-ed in the Washington Post by former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, in which Gerson lambasted the Republican Congress for not standing up to Donald Trump.

Why can’t Republican legislators see the personal damage this might cause? Trump has made a practice of forcing people around him to lower their standards and abandon their ideals before turning against them when their usefulness ends. His servants are sucked dry of integrity and dignity, then thrown away like the rind of a squeezed orange. Who does Trump’s bidding and has his or her reputation enhanced? A generation of Republicans will end up writing memoirs of apology and regret.

What a terrible punishment for the crime of supporting Donald Trump. Your memoir will have regrets and apologies and a publishing contract with Regnery Press and you’ll get interviewed by Chris Matthews about “Lessons Learned.”

No shaved heads through the streets of Paris? Why the hell not?

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