Seldom Balanced – Usually Fair
From John Pavlovitz:
The Jesus these Christians need, is the Jesus of the Gospels; the one who gets all up in your personal business, the one who turns over tables in the sacred temples of your greed and hypocrisy, the one who demands that you give half a damn about the poor and the hungry around you—enough to give all that you have for their care.
From Tommy Christopher:
At the 2016 Golden Globe awards show, award factory and national treasure Meryl Streep delivered an impassioned speech in which she blasted President-elect Donald Trump for mocking disabled reporter Serge Kovaleski. Trump characteristically reacted by attacking Streep on Twitter, and once again lying about the well-reported fact that he crudely imitated Kovaleski’s appearance and bodily movements caused by a congenital disorder.
The episode prompted a stunning, if obvious, revelation from Trump senior advisor and incoming White House Counselor Kellyanne Conway.
From John Scalzi:
First, and in case you missed me talking about it on Twitter yesterday, I have a piece up at the LA Times site (a version of it is also in the Sunday newspaper) about getting creative work done in the Trump years — some advice about how to keep focus when it’s likely to be a challenging time for the creative class. Note that this advice generally probably also works for people working in professions generally considered “non-creative” as well, but I’m working with what I know here.
From tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors:
Coats is a member of the secretive The Fellowship, that strange group of alleged Xristians on C-Street. It’s sort of the Opus Dei of the Y’all Qaeda’s Congressional set, but it seems to be a mixture of Elmer Gantrys and True Believers.
You may remember when the group came to light when infamous momma’s boy, big-haired, Jeebus-loving adulterer and all around GOP sex-lizard, the sheep with a secret sorrow, Senator John Ensign of Nevada was banging a wife of a staffer and they intervened… by getting his momma to pay off the staffer.
From Joe Hagstrom at MadMikesAmerica:
For all the whining liberals do about how evil and hateful we republicans are towards the poor, one would think we skewer and grill them. Then again, if they weren’t all dirty and diseased from lack of health care we probably would.
My good friends in the State of Missouri just threw a monkey wrench at the liberal naysayers though. It’s generously raising the state’s minimum wage a nickel. This means a full time minimum wage worker will be getting an extra $2 a week to help pay bills and save for a rainy day. And we all understand, or should if we have any sense, how to stretch a dollar.
From Jonathan Bernstein:
For years, I’ve said that Republicans could simply rename the Affordable Care Act and its various components — so we might have, for example, “Ronald Reagan Freedom Insurance Choices” instead of the current Obamacare marketplaces.
The reasoning is that while Republicans have hated “Obamacare” as a symbol of the president they can’t stand, few of them are particularly upset about the law itself.
From driftglass:
How the hell had this happened?
The party that believes in science and facts. In civil rights, tolerance and equality. In education and a living wage. The party that pulled the country back from the brink of economic disaster. Saved the auto industry. Insured 20 million new people. You know the list. And yet the worst people in America running the loudest, lyin’est, most bigoted nutcase imaginable stuck one right in our ear.
Beat us on our own turf, in no uncertain terms and in front of the whole world.
And here’s the thing. We don’t lack for speakers and bloggers and podcasters who have been warning for decades about exactly this threat — the dangerous lunacy that the Right was turning loose upon the land. There are plenty of us who took the threat seriously.
From Max’s Dad:
When another fraud named Rick Scott (Medicare Crook-Fl) ONLY speaks with a Clown Elect about yet another mass murder committed by a madman with a gun and ignores the guy still in office it is very clear that the disrespect and outright racism will never stop.
What is going on?
Well we know the House Republicans, led by a widow peaked Bro with a disdain for everyone but himself, attempted to do away with the Ethics office cuz they were so concerned the non partisan office was catching too many of them scamming the system. Whether molesting pages or taking bribes or torching the family values they all say they believe in, the Ethics office was picking on these creeps too much. So instead of reining in the behavior, why not just get rid of it? But the Bro of the House didnt count on a fact they ignore.
From The Moderate Voice:
France, America’s main ally in continental Europe, seems headed towards political disarray as the world braces for the upheavals likely to be triggered by Donald Trump’s presidency.
The disrupter could be Emmanuel Macron, a 39-year-old maverick politician who founded a new political party called En March! just 10 months ago. His party is thought to have only 100,000 “sympathizers”.