Month: August 2019

 
From Jonathan Bernstein:

If the party doesn’t want its rhetoric turning up in murderers’ manifestos, it has a lot of work to do.

The relatively good news from a terrible weekend was that several Republicans, including Senator Ted Cruz and George P. Bush (the Texas land commissioner and son of Jeb Bush) reacted to the mass shooting in El Paso with forceful words against white supremacy. A state senator in Nebraska went further, accepting his party’s role in accommodating bigotry and vowing he wouldn’t be silent. Both National Review and the Washington Examiner editorialized that President Donald Trump should call out white supremacy.

All that was welcome. (Alas, all we got about guns was more “thoughts and prayers,” as if there’s no possible public-policy response that could make any difference.) But we’ll see how serious Republicans are going forward. After all, this is the party that nominated Trump and that just recently failed to condemn his string of bigoted attacks on members of Congress. If they go back to the same type of rhetoric they’ve indulged in since President Richard Nixon’s southern-strategy campaign in 1968, then it’ll be apparent that they weren’t serious – and the consequences for the nation could well be horrific.

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From The Onion:

Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens

“This was a terrible tragedy, but sometimes these things just happen and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop them,” said Oklahoma resident Adam Lewis, echoing sentiments expressed by tens of millions of individuals who reside in a nation where over half of the world’s deadliest mass shootings have occurred in the past 50 years and whose citizens are 20 times more likely to die of gun violence than those of other developed nations.

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From Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger:

Why do they lie about it so much? Because they hate the program. They voted against it when it was passed decades ago, and since then, they have done their best to eliminate it. They know the program is among the most popular federal programs (because it works to keep millions of seniors out of poverty), so they have to lie about the program to try and get people to support their efforts to destroy it.

The latest lie, and perhaps the biggest, is that Social Security eats up too much of the federal budget — and to reduce the deficit and national debt, Social Security must be cut. That is simply not true.

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From PZ Myers:

I’d also add that 8chan is the holy scripture of its acolytes, a meandering screed that combines the mindless repetition of a manic prayer wheel with the ravings of the book of Revelation. Free Speech is its shibboleth.

Until law enforcement, and the media, treat these shooters as part of a terrorist movement no less organized, or deadly, than ISIS or Al Qaeda, the violence will continue. There will be more killers, more gleeful celebration of body counts on 8chan, and more bloody attempts to beat the last killer’s “high score”.

There’s a radical suggestion right there. If there were an online forum in which Muslim terrorists gleefully shared tales of glorious murder, urged each other to outdo each other in suicidal mass killings, and celebrated every time one of these incidents occurred, the FBI would be all over it, tracing communications and working to arrest the ringleaders. 8chan, though, is fueled by the frustrations of disaffected middle class white men, so no, nothing will be done. It will continue to fester and spread its toxins.

So, here’s my first radical suggestion.

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From The Propaganda Professor:

Back in 1955, the godfather of (neo)conservatism William F. Buckley launched the National Review, which he intended as an antidote to what he proclaimed was a “liberal bias” in the mainstream media. The belief in such a bias resonated richly (no pun intended) with his fellow wingers, and even began to take root among the gullible masses. Thirty-two years later, Buckley’s nephew Brent Bozell III shifted that narrative into hyperdrive by inaugurating Media Research Center, which is designed to be not just an alternative to the “liberal bias”, but a persistent watchdog to make the liberal media heel. Offering what has become a popular source of citation for right-wing pundits and politicians, MRC presumes to police liberals by calling out their liberalness whenever it appears in the media. Thing is, it ends up indicting itself more than the media or them librulz.

According to the gospel of Bozell and MRC, mainstream media is a lost cause. (Except for Fox “News”, of course.) Not only does it relentlessly push a liberal agenda, but that’s the reason it exists in the first place. The curious thing, however, is that Bozell has tooted from his stump on videos for PragerU, which emphatically distinguishes between liberals and leftists; it is the latter, insists Prager, who are the enemies of all that is holy, while liberals have more in common with conservatives — a clever ploy, you must admit, to incite further polarization.

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• Okay, my President attacks another African American Representative, House Oversight Chair, Elijah Cummings. At Mock Paper Scissors tengrain notes the greatest irony about the Trump tirade.
   
• Andy Borowitz finds a government subsidized structure near Baltimore infested with criminals and rats.
   
• Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit recalls a pithy comment that might apply to Republicans who remain party members for reasons other than race-based hatred.
   
• Dave Dubya relates a key segment, without commentary, of Mueller’s appearance before Congress, letting that testimony speak for itself.
   
• Jonathan Bernstein makes a better case than have I. Impeachment would be a horrible move that would significantly enhance the chances of Trump triumph in 2020. But continuous talk about impeachment and the crimes that would justify it provide a useful backdrop. The impeachment dispute in the House is vitally useful, especially if it never comes to fruition. 

Continue reading “Baltimore, Racial Repubs, Mueller, Impeach, 2020, Restore US, Boris”

 
From Julian Sanchez:

How does a Director of National Intelligence do a good job? Julian Sanchez discusses the new nominee for the job, Rep. John Ratcliffe.

– CATO Daily Podcast –
 

 
From Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post:

Vladimir Putin is a relic of the old communist Soviet Union, and climbed the ranks of the Russian secret police known as the KGB. He was born Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin in Leningrad in 1952, near the end of the murderous totalitarian Josef Stalin’s reign. His father served in, among other areas, the Soviet NKVD, which was involved in political oppression, while his mother served for a time in the Soviet Navy during World War II. Young Vladimir’s two elder brothers each died prior to his birth.

Steeped in Soviet ideology and methodslogy, Putin dutifully attended school and studied German, a language he is fluent in. He went on to study law at Leningrad State University, and entered the KGB (the notorious Soviet-era secret police), where he served as a foreign intelligence officer for 16 years. He resiged from the KGB in 1991 and entered politics. He moved to Moscow five years later and joined Boris Yeltsin’s administration. He became Yeltsin’s director of the ESB (the successor to the KGB), and eventually moved up to become Prime Minister, and, later, Acting President, when Yeltsin resigned in 1999.

Putin has adopted far too many Soviet-era machinations. For example, he has had zero tolerance for media critics, and, much like his predecessors, has arranged to have them be poisoned, mysteriously fall out of apartment windows to their death below, or be outright assassinateded by hired thugs. It is incredible how intolerant and uncivilized the Russian method of silencing press critics has been over the years. With no regard at all for freedoms of the press, Putin, too, has adopted the uniquely Russian way of making them disappear once they have become too critical or questioning. It is little wonder that Donald Trump has expressed admiration for this murdering authoritarian, as Trump hates the media as well.

The thought has occurred to me that dictator Putin has been coaching our naive and adoring president. Clearly, Trump’s hatred of reporters and his repeated meetings with Putin in secret, with no press people allowed in the meeting and no notes kept is not only unprecedented, but raises our eyebrows as well. So, too, are the numerous private phone calls between these thug-like leaders. We have seen Trump grow bolder and more defiant after these meetings and calls – could this uncooperative attitude by Trump be the direct result of Putin’s encouragement?

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From libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara:

If We’re Going to Place Blame, then Fossil Fuel Consumers are the Real Climate Culprits

But the fossil fuel companies are in business only to the extent that consuming citizens that McKibben and his anti-energy ilk claim to want to protect voluntarily buy their products. This is true of every industry. If a consumer buys a product, and uses it the way it is intended, then the consumer is responsible.

If a gun buyer kills someone, the buyer, not the gun manufacturer, is the guilty party.

If a drunk drives off in his car and kills someone, it’s the car buyer, not the car manufacturer, that is the guilty party.

If I dump old paint into a stream, it is I, not the paint company that sold me the paint, that is guilty of polluting.

Likewise, if we accept the Paris argument on its face, if I buy a tankful of heating oil for the oil burner that heats my house and supplies hot water, it is I, not the company that provided me the heating oil, who is guilty of causing the floods.

My question is, aren’t the consumers of fossil fuels at least as legally liable as the companies?

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