Month: December 2018

From Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit:

Bush was many things. His life showed that he believed in duty to his country and service to others. Against the wishes of his parents, he enlisted in the Navy when he turned 18. He was a pragmatist who not only despised ideologues, but he was willing to make a massive political sacrifice for the good of the nation.[1] The 1990 budget deal cost him a second term, yet it put the Federal budget on the bath to being balanced.[2]

Bush was an advocate of volunteerism. He believed in helping those who were less fortunate.[3] He believed in improving the environment.[4] He did not believe in bragging.

Contrast that, if you will, with the current President; a man who has three discernible motivations: Self-interest, vengeance and bigotry. It is patently clear that Trump and Bush had nothing but contempt for one another.

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From The Onion:

NEW YORK—Questioning what had become of common decency, passengers aboard a Brooklyn-bound F train expressed feelings of disgust Tuesday in regard to a pervert who wouldn’t stop staring at the masturbator in their subway car.

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From Infidel753:

The trigger for the new policy appears to have been a decision by Apple store to stop carrying the Tumblr app (no, I don’t know what that means, and I don’t care either) because of pornographic material on Tumblr, some of it genuinely nasty — well, on 440 million blogs, any kind of content you can imagine will probably exist somewhere. The fact that Tumblr is now indirectly owned by Verizon may also have played a role, though investors don’t seem enthused about the ban.

There are quite a lot of Tumblr blogs among my regular reading, none of which are primarily dedicated to sexually-oriented material, and most of which I have never seen post anything of that description at all. I spent most of Tuesday morning looking at those blogs, and on about three-quarters of them, the new changes were the main topic of discussion, the tone of which was a mix of ridicule and outrage. Much erotica is as creative as any other art form, and the new rules will destroy one more safe platform for sex workers already being forced by SESTA into more dangerous ways of working. Not a single blogger had anything good to say about the changes.

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From driftglass:

George Herbert Walker Bush dreamed of a certain kind of Republican party. The same Republican party which David Brooks has spent 30 years conning credulous Beltway chumps and cloistered intellectuals into believing existed just beyond the visible spectrum of mere mortals and vituperative, foul-mouthed Liberal bloggers. A party whose past is always glorious and whose renaissance is always just around the corner.

George Herbert Walker Bush’s dreamed of a GOP run as a gentleman’s farm: orderly and well-tended by old-money, patrician internationalists. Maintained by loyalty and noblesse oblige. But Bush 41 was also perfectly willing to countenance putting every monstrous trait that has come to define the modern Republican party in-harness to pull the plow and bust the sod of his gentleman’s farm.

And in the end, that’s what killed his dream.

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From The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser:

Spend enough time around Evangelicals and you will learn that not only do they talk to God, they also hear God talk to them. In any other setting “hearing” voices will land you in the hospital on a 72-hour psych hold, but if the voice being heard is GOD, then hearers of this silent utterance are considered sane, rational beings. Evangelicals believe God not only speaks to them through the words in the Bible, he also audibly, yet silently, speaks to them during prayer and meditation and at random moments throughout the day. Evidently, the Christian God is able to carry on millions of silent conversations with his followers at the same time. Awesome, right? Too bad, this same God is not very good at making sure everyone he is talking to is hearing the same message.

Evangelicals say they hear the voice of God, but often different Christians hear different things, often wildly contrary to what God told someone else. I noticed this particularly during church business meetings. Members were expected to pray and seek the will of God on the matter of business before the church. After, “hearing” from God, members were expected to be of one mind — Greek for “agreeing with the pastor.” As anyone who has ever attended a Baptist business meeting will tell you, unity of mind is rarely on display. If everyone is supposedly “hearing” the voice of God, why are there so many competing viewpoints? What color should we paint the auditorium, the pastor asks? Let’s seek God’s mind on the matter! You would think that God would tell everyone BLUE. Nope. God, ever the jokester, whispers to various members different colors, sowing discord among the brethren.

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Looks like the graphics team at Fox News is sending a subliminal message… pic.twitter.com/5kUNayKN0J

— Richard Garza (@richardrgarza) December 2, 2018

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From Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged:

As for me, I still simmer over 1988. This was the first presidential election I paid attention to, occurring after Iran-Contra, and in some way, my innocent soul thought Republicans should have been over, for at least this round. How in the world does a country accept Bush was “out of the loop” as a former head of CIA, and not think his principal job in taking office in the White House was to tidy up loose ends? I was all of sixteen and livid at the “pledge of Allegiance” nonsense and the entire crock of referring to Dukakis as an “ACLU card-carrying liberal” as if sticking up for the Bill of Rights was something to sneer at. Stupid wedge issue content (and maybe not the most competent campaign waged by Dukakis and Bentsen) dictated a win, and a pardon for several folks who participated in that debacle of literally extralegally arming a country that we considered a supporter of terrorism, to also extralegally support a faction in a war that wasn’t any of our business. And cite the reason for these pardons as “patriotism”.

I still to this damn day don’t know what American principles or interests were served by this thing.

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From Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson:

Republicans in the legislature are getting some heat for their plans to have an active post-election session to settle some issues before Governor-elect Tony Evers can take office.

Some of the rhetoric from the Democrats, of course, is ridiculously overblown.

Democrats have been suffering from a politically convenient self-inflicted amnesia concerning the events of 2010 when, after Governor Scott Walker defeated Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, Democrats actually tried to ram through public employee contracts in the waning days before the new governor’s inauguration. The new contracts would have tied the hands of the incoming governor who ran on a promise of making public employees contribute to their health insurance costs and pensions in an effort to bring state spending under control. Democrats even pulled Rep. Jeff Wood (I-Bloomer) out of rehab to cast the deciding vote in the Assembly, just months after they voted against expelling him following his fifth arrest for operating under the influence, a record even for the Wisconsin legislature.

Democrats have also forgotten how former Governor Jim Doyle actually tried to make it impossible for Walker to cancel the contracts for so-called “high speed” trains that Doyle purchased without legislative approval. The Obama Administration and the Doyle Administration also conspired to try to make the so-called “high speed” rail project (that wasn’t faster than a car) between Milwaukee and Madison impossible to cancel.

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From Jonathan Bernstein:

President George H.W. Bush’s first paragraph – the most important thing he accomplished in his life – was the successful conclusion of the Cold War. It may seem somewhat less impressive these days, given the path Russia has since taken and the various strains on Europe, from Brexit to immigration.

But make no mistake: When Bush took office in January 1989, there were more ways that things could’ve gone wrong than anyone today can readily imagine. Civil war between nuclear-armed factions within the Soviet Union? Desperate attempts by the Soviets to keep control over Warsaw Pact nations? Europe fracturing along any number of fault lines? Instead, Bush and other responsible world leaders managed to avoid the nightmare scenarios, and the world arrived within four years at a post-Soviet order in which the primary U.S. interests of peace and stability in Europe were almost entirely preserved.

Achieving that took preparation, sound judgement and courage, including the courage both to refrain from action under pressure and to act when necessary. It’s a seriously underrated performance. The truth is that every Cold War president contributed to what turned out to be an overwhelmingly successful foreign policy (just as all of them made mistakes along the way), and other than Harry Truman, Bush deserves more credit than anyone.

Other than that? There’s plenty of room to argue about Bush’s other choices as president, whether it was in China, Iraq, Panama or, domestically, in reacting to a recession or managing budget politics.

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From News Corpse:

Fox News said that their boycott was a reaction to how Twitter handled a protest at the home of Fox’s primetime host Tucker Carlson. The protesters were demonstrating against Carlson’s fervent advocacy of white nationalism and his incendiary and racist views on immigration. Carlson later claimed that protesters had “cracked” his front door, but the police found no evidence of that. What appears to have set off Fox News is a video that someone posted on Twitter that showed a protester’s sign with Carlson’s home address on it. So Fox demanded an apology and the removal of the video.

Well, Twitter complied with both of those demands, and also suspended the account of SmashRacismDC, the group that organized the protest. But it’s been nearly a month and Fox News still hasn’t posted a single tweet. And it isn’t just the main Fox News Twitter account. Fox and Friends, Fox News Research, Fox Business, Fox News Insider, Fox News Politics, and Tucker Carlson himself have all ceased to tweet. Perhaps most surprisingly, the account of Fox Nation is also dark, even as it launches its new incarnation as a subscription streaming service this week.

The boycott apparently doesn’t extend to individual Fox News hosts. Carlson’s fellow primetimers Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham are both still tweeting. But the exodus of the network’s primary Twitter feeds for this extended period of time is still curious. There is no indication of when the Twit-fast will end, or what will trigger the conclusion. But in the meantime, Fox news is neglecting a significant method of disseminating their right-wing, pro-Trump propaganda.

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