Seldom Balanced – Usually Fair
From The Onion:
WASHINGTON—Wearing a leotard and chain-smoking as he pounded out the measures with his cane, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly screamed, “It’s step, twist, step, dammit!” at a group of Marines on Wednesday as they learned the choreography for President Trump’s upcoming military parade.
From Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged:
The last handful of days have been a little bit of heart-in-mouth time for some traders on today’s market, as record sell-offs have been occurring, causing as of just today the largest drop in points in the Dow’s history–which is not really saying a lot, yet. This probably is reminiscent for some of the point drop in September 2008, but that had been building for some time, and had a lot of other poor indicators–I don’t know if this is the same thing at all. I don’t think it’s directly ascribable to Trump, although he likes to take credit for the economy, so…
Job creation has slowed here in the US–but that’s not surprising as we are nearly at full-employment, and wages are going up, which did not just start happening in the Trump era, thanks, but when labor starts to have an edge, capital worries. As a wage earner myself, I like stronger wage and employment figures, and prefer my investments and pension plan to be about the long-term index, and I don’t yet see a problem there…
Except the deregulation thing.
A President who values freedom of the press:
Wondering why a few conservative friends fail to be impressed.
Louis XIV almost certainly never said it. The phrase was attributed to him by his enemies precisely because it would have been an outrageous thing even to think. The words are still easily recognized today.
L’Etat, c’est moi
I am the nation
When we hear modern echoes identifying an individual with the state, no matter how faint those echoes, we still take notice.
Members of the Congressional Black Caucus did not see much in Donald Trump’s State of the Union to applaud. So they didn’t.
Donald Trump reacted:
…even on positive news, really positive news like that — they were like death. And un-American. Un-American.
Failing to applaud my President is an insult to more than a mere individual. It is an insult to America.
I mean they certainly didn’t seem to love our country very much.
As it turns out, those African Americans, those Democratic members of Congress, were worse than un-American.
Can we call that treason?
The boisterous presentation, and the crowd reaction, may suggest the President was joking.
Of course. Or half joking. Or some other fraction.
He was not joking a few weeks before when, during a break from a golf outing, he spoke about the ongoing investigation into possible campaign conspiracies with Russia. He seemed explicitly to identify himself as a personification of the country. Any investigation into his own possible wrongdoing hurts, not him, but America itself. Here are his words:
Continue reading “Brownback’s Horrible Policies Might Save the Republic”
From tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors:
Unlike most conservative pols, Devin Nunes is not an ideologue, he’s an apparatchik. It’s all about the career. He’s decided for whatever reason he’s hitching his star to Comrade Stupid.
But Nunes’ fate could change in a heart beat. Let’s look at California for a moment.
California uses a jungle primary system in which all candidates in all parties run together and allows all voters to vote at once. The catch is that the top two vote-getters, regardless of party affiliation, go to the general election.
From PZ Myers:
Good news, everyone! In the future, we’ll have flying cars! And the world will be deeply multicultural, a melange of different ethnicities, all working side by side, with equal status. That’s the bright side of the science fiction universe in Netflix’s Altered Carbon.
Now the bad side. The key innovation in this story is the ability to upload and download minds. Everyone is walking around with a little disk in their neck that archives their mental state and memories continuously; some people also have a kind of brain wifi that allows them to periodically upload everything in their head to a remote backup. This means that if someone dies, they can just cut out that disk, insert it into a new body, and voila, you are revived! Unless someone shoots you in the neck, unfortunately; destroying the archive is Real Death. If you’ve got the wifi option, you can also restore from the last backup.
Wait, what’s so bad about that? It’s effective immortality! That’s where the series is most interesting, in exploring the consequences of radical new technology.
From Glenn R. Geist at MadMikesAmerica:
If you could somehow harness the immeasurable power of the sea, one of those things that actually is awesome after decades of that word’s erosion, you could do anything, destroy almost anything.
The mindless, angry sea: too frequently, somewhere on Florida’s Atlantic coast some ill-prepared and overconfident soul disappears forever, paddling off from the beach or motoring out of or into an inlet – and of course the sea, in its season comes ashore to visit, leaving only devastation.
Mankind is like a sea, dumb, implacable, destructive, but far more controllable. When it’s idiot rage comes ashore, our flimsy constructs, like reason, truth, justice, and progress hardly stand a chance.
I got a message this morning. Someone had posted a vicious, poorly spelled but confident diatribe against Obama and pro-Trump on a friend’s page – extolling the great success of Trump’s economic boom and I replied to it.
From nojo at Stinque:
Here’s how this plays out:
Nothing changes.
The Memo has been Released, it’s being used as toilet paper by anyone not in the Treason Tank, and none of that matters. It might as well be a blank Doctor Who psychic card, open to whatever interpretation an enterprising traitor wishes to give it. Does it provide grounds to fire Rod Rosenstein and get at Robert Mueller? Sure, why not? Nobody ever took it seriously, starting with its authors. The Memo exists as a propaganda tool.
But you already knew this. A year in, we have achieved Groundhog Day, and we know how this plays out. It already has. Many times.
Wondering why a few conservative friends fail to be impressed.
From The Borowitz Report:
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald J. Trump collapsed from exhaustion after approximately ninety minutes of pretending to be a human being with empathy, the White House doctor has confirmed.
“In all my years of practicing medicine, I have never met a patient as healthy and vigorous as President Trump,” Dr. Ronny Jackson said. “But the sustained effort of simulating compassion proved too much for someone who has never exercised that part of his brain before.”
