FairAndUNbalanced.com

Comparisons to the original “Saturday Night Massacre” for anything happening in TrumpWorld already seem super-cheesy and done-to-death. I mean, what about Sally Yates, or Jim Comey, or maybe Andrew McCabe? Peter Strzok? Jeff Sessions? (And it sure looked like the end of the Mueller Report and Mueller’s own exeunt was stage-directed). All of these IG’s, lately? Basically, the one thing we can count on for sure about the Trump Administration is that it’s always Celebrity Apprentice decision time, and if you are doing some law enforcing (or even allowing some law enforcement or maybe thinking about it) that is inconvenient to Trump–you’re fired!

So the curious case of the resigned US Attorney who did not agree to resign, Geoffrey Berman, isn’t some great irregularity in the Trump system, or shouldn’t seem like much more than another flashing light amongst the Las Vegas strip of flashing lights. US Attorneys are sometimes removed, is all. Except–

Yeah, well but it’s the SDNY.

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Sarah Cooper Explains How to Lincoln:

• You want to change things? You need to vote, right?
  Jonathan Bernstein says voting is essential but it won’t work, at least not alone. You need to take it to the street: protests, activists, donations, reporters, and more.
   
• Back when he was in office, Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker pushed through a law that would cut health and retirement benefits for public employees and substantially reduce their right to collectively bargain. Fairly typical anti-union conservatism.
   
  Police unions were exempted. It was not an oversight. Busting police unions was not what conservatives had in mind.
   
  Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson says it’s time to expand the law and apply it to police. Bust them unions. They stand in the way of reform. You know – – like conservatives have always said about all unions.
   
• Since Aunt Jemima has gone the way of all syrup, the pressure is now on another brand. Ant Farmer’s Almanac finds that the parent company of Uncle Ben’s Rice will replace the current face on the box. The thought is that Ben Affleck is somebody’s uncle. Uncle Ben Affleck’s Rice.
   
  Okay, so they’re kidding. Satire. I knew it all along.
   
• Frances Langum sadly notes that simple human decency is not enough to get Mississippi to take that racist confederate symbol out of its state flag, but maybe basketball can succeed where virtue fails.

Continue reading “Voting Won’t Work, BLM, Aunt Jemima, Confederate Teaching, Juneteenth”

Trump: "I made Juneteenth very famous. It’s actually an important event, an important time. But nobody had ever heard of it."

Black people have been celebrating Juneteenth since 1865, but Trump learned about it last week and now he wants to take credit.https://t.co/IBpyCXM1wt

— Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) June 18, 2020

Jake Sherman, Politico

TRUMP on Juneteenth to @MichaelCBender : "It’s actually an important event, an important time. But nobody had ever heard of it.”

— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) June 18, 2020

Michael C. Bender, Wall Street Journal

New: In Oval Office interview with @WSJ, Trump says there "probably is some" systemic racism in the US, removing Confederate names from bases would further divide the county, and claims credit for popularizing Juneteenth:https://t.co/3WUrthMx0q

More to come…

— Michael C. Bender (@MichaelCBender) June 18, 2020

Kyle Griffin, MSNBC

Trump: "I did something good: I made Juneteenth very famous. It's actually an important event, an important time. But nobody had ever heard of it."

Aide says Trump WH put out statements on Juneteenth:

"Oh really? We put out a statement?…Ok, ok. Good."https://t.co/SCP0n3FfXe

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) June 18, 2020

Donald Trump (nee John Barron), White House

…of respect for this Holiday, and in observance of this important occasion and all that it represents. I have therefore decided to move our rally to Saturday, June 20th, in order to honor their requests…

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 13, 2020

Barack Obama, President of the United States (retired)
(Commenting on Juneteenth prior to President Trump making it famous)

On Juneteenth, we celebrate our capacity to make real the promise of our founding, that thing inside each of us that says America is not yet finished, that compels all of us to fight for justice and equality until this country we love more closely aligns with our highest ideals. pic.twitter.com/2XAKRuRrbG

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) June 19, 2019

They Want to Suppress the Truth in Unrighteousness

I always love it when Christians tell atheists, agnostics, and humanists the REAL reason they don’t believe. Instead of having to do a bit of intellectual heavy lifting, a Christian like Grant can dismiss a whole class of people with one wave of the proof text hand. According to Grant, the reason atheists read Bart Ehrman is because his writing appeals to their fleshly desires. Atheists are unwilling to hear and understand the TRUTH — “truth” meaning the Bible — so they seek out writers who reinforce their beliefs and opinions about God, Jesus, Christianity, and the Bible. Of course, Christians don’t do that, right? (that’s sarcasm, by the way).

While Grant’s argument might have some merit when it comes to someone who never was a Christian, it falls flat on its face when it comes to people such as myself. I spent 50 years in the Christian church, and I was an Evangelical pastor for 25 years. I spent the majority of my life thinking the Bible was divine truth. Yet, here I am at age of sixty-two, an outspoken atheist and humanist. Could it be that the reason I no longer believe is because I intellectually found Evangelical claims about the Bible, God, and Jesus lacking?

Grant is upset because people such as I believe Bart Ehrman and not the gospel. In his mind, if one believes the gospel then everything else falls into place. Because I do not believe the Evangelical good news, that means I am an Ehrman fanboy. My recommendation of Ehrman’s books couldn’t be because I find them intellectually persuasive, right? Of course not. If I just believed the Bible — well actually if I just believed Grant’s interpretation of the Bible — then I would understand that Ehrman wants to be god in place of Jesus.

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After pleading with Xi for help in 2020 election

But Trump’s apparent desire to get along with Xi in hopes of a trade deal that would smooth the way for his reelection appears especially chilling in light of the fact that it might well have affected the administration’s response to the coronavirus that has now claimed at least 119,000 American lives—more than died in WWI.

In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, on January 15, Trump and Xi inked a trade deal that, among other things, required China “to increase purchases of U.S. products by at least $200 billion over 2017 levels, split into two tranches: $76.7 billion in 2020 and $123.3 billion in 2021.”

At the same time, news of the coronavirus was spreading. Trump praised Xi’s handling of the virus and claimed it had been contained. On January 22, he tweeted: “One of the many great things about our just signed giant Trade Deal with China is that it will bring both the USA & China closer together in so many other ways. Terrific working with President Xi, a man who truly loves his country. Much more to come!”

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Oh, dear. I read the intro to this video and was concerned about what horrific abuse this officer of the law experienced.

Stacey who has been a cop for 15 yrs went to @McDonalds
She paid for it in advance and this is how she gets treated for being a cop. Come on America. We are better than this.

Given that cops have been pepper spraying and shooting rubber bullets with wild abandon, and have been murdering black people for years, I braced myself for some terrible and nearly equivalent atrocity experienced by this woman.

It’s a bit of a letdown.

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Donald Trump treats pretty much everything as a PR problem. Why bother to actually, you know, govern? If there is bad news, he brands it as “fake news”, uses whataboutism, and attacks the source. If there is no good news, he just makes crap up and repeats it so much that at least some people believe it (typically his base).

For example, when video came out clearly showing 75-year-old pacifist protester Martin Gugino being violently pushed down by police, hard enough that he ended up in the ICU (police had claimed that Gugino “tripped and fell”), it was hard to call “fake news” — Gugino is white, was acting peaceably, has no police record. But that didn’t stop Trump, who tweeted “Buffalo protester shoved by Police could be an ANTIFA provocateur.” And said what happened “Could be a set up?”

There is no evidence linking Gugino to Antifa. In fact, the tweet was based on an article from far-right-wing site OANN that was written by a reporter who also works for the propaganda outlet Sputnik News, which is owned by the Russian government. In other words, there is more evidence that Trump is a tool of Russian intelligence than Gugino is part of Antifa.

But it gets worse.

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I listened to Princeton professor Eddie Glaude yesterday morning on MSNBC. He was talking about the inherent trap in debating the slogans of the day, and as is usually the case, I have to agree with him.

I was prepared to write another something about my dislike of the “White Privilege” trope and how it’s designed not so much to describe reality but to convey a negative emotion toward an entire race. As Nietzsche wrote: “Every philosophy conceals a philosophy” and I think that applies here.

I’m sure we all are aware that when we speak about the welfare of large numbers of people, it’s advantageous in general to be identified with the majority, but we know that applying such things to the specific and to the individual can be misleading. I’ve wasted many words and time trying to make the point that a great many people of European stock lead lives of quiet desperation from paycheck to paycheck and are often furious about being called “privileged.” Assuming that I point this out to people who don’t intend that result, means I lose.

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WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Arguing that “there’s something going on” with the nation’s sloping surfaces, Donald J. Trump has ordered Attorney General Bill Barr to launch a Department of Justice investigation into the United States’s vast collection of ramps.

“It’s something we’re looking into quite strongly,” Trump told reporters on the South Lawn of the White House. “Ramps have treated me very unfairly.”

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