Month: August 2017

The sort of genuinely human moment seldom seen in recent months.

Wondering why a few conservative friends are less than impressed.

 
From Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger:

Our Founding Fathers knew that the representative democracy they created could not be sustained unless the people knew the truth, and they understood that could only be accomplished with a free and unfettered press. They thought this was so important that they included it in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

The Trump administration doesn’t agree. Trump has repeatedly attacked the press through lies and propaganda. He thinks the press should only report what he wants them to report. Now the Trump administration is going further, as Attorney General Sessions is threatening to use the power of the Justice Department to suppress our free press. This is a dark time for truth and democracy.

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From North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz:

Dear Trump Supporter,

For years you’ve been telling me that you don’t actually hate LGBTQ people; that in fact you quite love them—you just despise their “immoral lifestyle choices.” You’ve tried to make the case, that for you to be silent and to allow them to remain willfully in their sin would be the most unloving thing you could do.

Despite me letting you know how hurtful your words and how damaging your methods have been to LGBTQ people (and to their families and to outsiders watching from a distance), you insisted that you weren’t doing anything less than loving them as Jesus would.

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From (O)CT(O)PUS at The Swash Zone:

There is a sheet hanging in your closet
And a gun rack hanging in your truck.
You think the stock market has a fence around it.
The ASPCA raids yer kitchen…

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From John Scalzi at Whatever:

This next weekend Wonder Woman is very likely to crack the $400 million mark at the domestic box office, which in itself is a significant feat (only 26 other films in the history of cinema have managed it) but is particular good news for the Warner Bros. studio and its DC universe of films, after the critical failures of the two most recent DC films, Batman v. Superman and Suicide Squad, both of which Wonder Woman has now outgrossed…

… Well, sort of.

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Wondering why a few conservative friends are less than impressed.

• This week’s note in Trumpian ‘Alternative Facts’ comes from Foreign Policy Magazine, running through a half dozen false stories about Mexico.
   
• Yellow Dog at Blue in the Bluegrass marks the 100th anniversary of the NAACP Silent Protest Parade in reaction to open mass attacks by white supremacists on black residents during the summer of 1917.
   
• At The Intersection of Madness and Reality, Rippa thinks the new HBO show Confederate, presenting how America would look if the Confederacy had won the Civil War, is a great idea.
   
• @bjork55 at Bjork Report suggests the President’s only remaining option is to spark a civil war of sorts fueled by white resentment. The antidote? Massive get‑out‑the‑vote.
   
• North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz notices a common theme in Republican legislative strategy. They have dedicated themselves to repealing the legacy of strong, intelligent, popular, black man and takes a guess on which of those attributes is the obvious motivation. I don’t think the pastor’s point is that those aggressively attacking health care are motivated by Obama being intelligent.
   
• Infidel753 beats bigots at the wordgames they sometimes play. For example, with the word “bigot”.
   
• Stephan Miller’s White House press conference vocabulary got a lot of folks curious. tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors does a little digging and finds why a sub-section of white racists regard “cosmopolitan” as an insult.
   
• Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger notices a new asterisk added to Emma Lazarus’ poem on the Statue of Liberty.
   
• Oh for crying out loud. Scaramucci was fired before he started. In the name of simple humanity, do we have to surrender to our juvenile side and kick a guy when he’s down? Well… what the hell, lets! Frances Langum has a few cartoons that the New Yorker ought to have published and one that was.
   
• The Onion features our President’s new Chief of Staff, John Kelly, as he roots out Priebus sympathizers hiding in White House tunnels.
   
• In case you want to know what new agitprop Putin is ordering up for us to read, Iron Knee at Political Irony has discovered a site that tracks Twitter accounts linked to Russian influence activities online.
   
• Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post explores how to restore Democratic majorities in Congress.
   
• Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara at Principled Perspectives is dedicated to fighting for freedom, which he defines, at least in part, as a fight to repeal anti-discrimination laws.
   
• Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit celebrates a criminal conviction quite separate from the evil that the perpetrator committed. Poetic justice is not really justice, but it does provide some comfort. Hear that, OJ?
   
• John Scalzi at Whatever reviews research of robots from long, long ago.
   

How to Deny with Class When the Denial is True

In 1970, Mayor Carl Stokes gently rebuked an accuser.

Not quite half a century later, that rebuke stands in contrast with clumsy denials by Trump’s Interior Secretary.

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From Tommy Christopher:

Donald Trump’s period of mildly restrained behavior appears to be coming to a bitter end — in spectacular fashion. Trump suffered a string of humiliations on Wednesday when he was forced to sign a Russia sanctions bill that he didn’t want to sign and was then called out for his “impotence” by Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev.

As if his weak signing statement hadn’t gotten the message across clearly enough, Trump engaged in a little public diplomacy with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin on Thursday morning by attacking Congress:

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