FairAndUNbalanced.com

 

From Vixen Strangely Strangely Blogged:

Because Trump is not actually the president of the entirety of America, having abdicated on several fronts (such as national security against Russia and coronavirus, from the looks of things) and not actually caring about more than the interests of himself at most with some overlapping with a <50% quantity of other Americans at best, I find it useful to look at Trump's remarks Friday night regarding “Americans” versus “them”:

“Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children. Many of these people have no idea why they are doing this, but some know exactly what they are doing.”

“They think the American people are weak and soft and submissive. But no, the American people are strong and proud, and they will not allow our country, and all of its values, history, and culture, to be taken from them.”

Does he not know that the people taking up space to correct the public record are mostly American citizens? Does he not understand they are confronting a whitewashed history with a history truer in color to the original cut? They aren’t wiping out history; they are gifting us with a perspective that was under-recognized. They aren’t defaming heroes; they are demanding we see historical figures, not on pedestals, but in the full context of their actions.

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From our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit:

What is pretty evident, by now, as more and more data comes out that shows that people of color are being sickened and killed by the coronavirus than whites, the less and less Trump is interested in doing anything to slow the rate of the pandemic. You can bet the farm that if the coronavirus was more severely impacting white people, that Trump would have nothing else on his mind. But ever since the first data came out about the racial disparities of the victims of the coronavirus, Trump turned away.

Instead of concerning himself with matters associated with the pandemic, Trump is laser-focused on preserving the statues of dead traitors and of ensuring that the Flag of Treason continues to be displayed. Trump is running the most overtly race-baiting campaign for the presidency since George Wallace, if not Strom Thurmond. When he addresses the pandemic at all, he lies about the number of cases, he claims that there would be no pandemic if there was no testing and he lies that 99% of the people who get the virus don’t even get sick.

Trump’s turned his back on Texas, Florida (his new home state), and Arizona. If cases are rising in your state, don’t look to either Trump or Jared the Prince of Merde for help. Trump’s decided that he can write off a few hundred thousand dead Americans as the cost of his getting reelected.

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.@realDonaldTrump has a loyalty problem. pic.twitter.com/BcuBMCptUP

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) July 7, 2020

 

From Hackwhackers:

Twit Tweet:

As a further sign that mentally unstable demagogue and bigot Donald “Very Fine People” Trump is doubling and tripling down on white supremacy for his despicable campaign, there’s this tweet from him this morning:

Thwap:

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From Jonathan Bernstein:

Since it’s the Electoral College that matters, shouldn’t we should stick to a handful of potential tipping-point states?

State surveys have two big problems: A larger percentage of them are from lower-quality outfits, and there just aren’t enough of them. Remember, polls will be wrong for two reasons.

Some aren’t designed well; it’s like flipping a weighted coin that will average, say, 6 heads out of every 10. But even the best polls are subject to random error, just as if you flip a normal coin 10 times you can easily get 4 or 6 heads; you’ll sometimes get 3 or 7 heads; and you’ll even get more extreme results once in a while.

The power of polling averages is that it essentially corrects for random error, but only if there are enough surveys in the pot. So given the choice, I’ll stick with the far more plentiful national polls to get a sense of what’s happening. Especially since more of them tend to be high-quality efforts.

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From Sarah Cooper:

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From Ant Farmer’s Almanac:

Darwin Awards Halts 2020 Nominations, Grants All Humanity a Participation Trophy and Calls It a Day

“Naturally, we’d figured on giving the big 2020 prize to U.S. President Donald Trump,” said Darwin Awards spokesman Elijah Radcliffe, “But, he couldn’t have done it alone and, as we expanded the scope to include all who’d enabled him and aided and abetted his rise, well, it just kept going and finally just roped in pretty much everybody. To that end, the whole of humanity has earned itself a participation trophy,” adding listlessly, “So, congratulations, I guess?”

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From libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara:

The First Amendment prohibition that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” must be understood in its full context. The Framers understood freedom of CONSCIENCE as the foundational principle, and used “freedom of religion” and “freedom of conscience” interchangeably. Not everyone believes in religion or God or prayer. The government’s purpose is to secure every individual’s unalienable right to freedom of conscience, be they religionists, theists, deists, agnostics, atheists, people of faith, people of reason, believers in God, many gods, or no god, believers in “Fathers in Heaven,” or no Heaven.

It’s true that, as the article observes, “prayer isn’t [necessarily] religion.” But it IS a belief. The following “or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” means to be free of government coercion on behalf of anyone else’s beliefs. The government should never impose ANY belief system on anyone.

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From The Propaganda Professor:

Passive/ defensive denial is ignoring evidence about climate change or racism, etc. because they threaten your belief system. Proactive denial is making a deliberate effort to persuade other people to ignore such evidence.

If you want a good glimpse of denial in action, tune in to the Twitter feed of Dr. Kevin Kruse, professor of history at Princeton University. No, no, Professor Kruse himself isn’t the one guilty of denial; he’s incredibly well-informed and well-documented, and he has provided, in concise Twitter threads, some very substantial mini-courses in history that soundly shatter some of the revisionist myths. But the denial comes from his detractors who pop up in his feed and insist that, no matter what kind of sound documentation he presents, he’s wrong because he just is. Some of the attackers advise him to read a history book — apparently quite unaware they’re talking to a man who writes history books.

One of his most frequent attackers is right-wing pundit and former convict Dinesh D’Souza, who has written an embarrassingly inept revisionist book that tries to make the claim that fascism is a leftist movement. (It’s essentially a rehashed and watered down version of a similarly embarrassing book by Jonah Goldberg of National Review infamy.) That’s one of the tropes he keeps lobbing at Professor Kruse — another being that the Southern Strategy is a myth, and that the two major political parties are still essentially the same as they were 150 years ago. Professor Kruse has not only swatted down these false claims but absolutely crushed them with a mountain of irrefutable documentation. And yet, no matter how hard D’Souza gets slammed against the wall, he keeps coming back for more punishment. While he and his fans proclaim that he has “owned” Kruse.

As a rule of thumb, the more frequently someone denies something — particularly without being prompted– the more certain you can be that the allegation is true. (See: NO COLLUSION, NO COLLUSION, NO COLLUSION!!!) No matter how overwhelming the facts may seem to be, you can make them all vanish in a puff just by uttering the magic words “Wrong!” or “Bullshit!” or “Fake New!”. And of course it goes without saying that your denials carry much more weight and substance if you put them in ALL CAPS, WITH LOTS OF EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!!!

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The outermost fringes of American right-wing militancy has something in common with early Christianity. They rely on codes.

Neo-Nazis are in a position to understand the below-ground messaging of my president and his supporters.

Continue reading “Trump and the Code of 1488”