Month: February 2018

 
From Green Eagle:

Well, I could not imagine anyone but the worst of right wingers using that sort of language about Hillary Clinton, let alone a widely known supposed progressive. In fact, it is as far as I can remember the most anti-woman comment that anyone ever made in my presence.

Okay, enough of my personal tale; now on to the point. We have all been distressed, I think, at the behavior of the Berniebots and Jill Stein supporters, and at their willingness to accept the 25 years of Republican smears directed at Hillary. I guess we are not all that surprised that they refuse to take one shred of responsibility for their falling for the Republican propaganda about Hillary, and for their very significant role in putting a miserably unqualified and corrupt Repubican in the White House for the second time in sixteen years. But (like many of us, I suspect) I mainly wrote this off as the attitude of polticial neophytes that just didn’t understand the damage that a Republican President could do, and failed to see their responsibility to the American people to elect a decent President who cared about poor people, sick people, anyone but the extremely rich. I guess I naively assumed that they would become more responsible as they saw the damage they did.

But what does it say to us when we see this same behavior at the very top of the “progressive” world, coming from people who certainly, somewhere deep inside, know the truth?

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From Yellow Dog at Blue in the Bluegrass:

And the representation in the population of privileged white conservatard men rises every day that working, patriotic Americans are railroaded out of the country.

With every lost immigrant, America gains more gun-crazed, racist and misogynistic assholes just panting for the chance to kill more ni**ers and cunts.

We are eating our seed corn.

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From Jonathan Bernstein:

If you blinked, you missed it, but there were actually two very interesting lessons to be learned from a brief flap on Thursday in which PolitiFact hired, then fired, former Democratic congressman Alan Grayson to be a “reader advocate.” Twitter exploded with complaints, and PolitiFact backed down. They’ll search for some other Democrat to pair with Republican David Jolly.

It seems that Grayson’s extreme partisanship, failure to respect the truth, and other poor behavior — including accusations of domestic violence and physically intimidating a reporter — have made him a rare point of partisan (and media) consensus.

Lesson No. 1: There’s nothing inherently conservative or Republican about radicalism, norm defiance, and other types of behavior that make Madisonian democracy difficult. I talk about Republican radicals quite often because there are a bunch of them in Congress who matter a lot, but that’s an artifact of all sorts of things, not something for which liberals (or centrists, or people at any other point on an ideological scale) are somehow naturally immune.

Lesson No. 2: The impulses may not be particularly Republican, but the two parties are very, very different.

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Wondering why a few conservative friends fail to be impressed.

• @bjork55 at Bjork Report is careful to redact the Nunes memo while keeping the essential purpose in a few words.
   
• Although it is partly based on dangerous disclosures of real life classified information, Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post is unimpressed with the Nunes fantasy memo.
   
• Since it turns out the Nunes memo is nothing, Dave Dubya at Freedom Rants releases the real thing with the Dubya Memo.
   
• nojo at Stinque notices a steadily growing hum. It is the non-legitimacy of those who administer our current government.
   
• tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors references new polling that confirms the tectonic shift. The party of law and order now hates law and order. It strikes me as an ironic, but natural, mutation of a political party that has become history’s largest obstruction of justice conspiracy.
   
• The Borowitz Report has published a verified video showing Donald Trump lying under oath.
   
• Anyone catch my President’s SOTU? I got into about 45 seconds of what seemed like dishwater before I had to switch to an ancient episode of I-know-not-what. He was doing a Trump impression of a hostage forced to read a random note. Jonathan Bernstein says that, by making the speech an hour of nothing, Trump missed an opportunity.
   
• T. Paine, at Saving Common Sense, has some fun at our expense. Wants to know if we would prefer to pay old “Obama rates” this year. During the Obama years, most folks were not aware their taxes had been cut by Obama. Or that the deficit had been slashed. Or that the Trump cut will be replaced by a hike in a few years, except for corporations and the very wealthy. Or that folks like my friend T. Paine were once quite angry about the deficit. In fact, my friend once had a running total of the national debt on his site. Through some odd coincidence, my friend’s national debt presentation disappeared once Obama was out of office.
   
• Green Eagle researches the research and discovers just how high the Republican deficit will be.
   
• PZ Myers brings some perspective to the Muslim conspiracy to infiltrate the GOP.
   
• Meanwhile, here in Missouri, our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit visits, at least in writing, and hears our Attorney General blame today’s sex traffic on the sexual revolution of the 1960s.
   
• Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara at Principled Perspectives produces the same old tired word salad in defense of the electoral college. It is a safeguard against majoritarianism. It is “intended to balance the power between the state and federal governments.” Actually the stated purpose, according to accounts of debates at the time, was to preserve slavery. I have had some thoughts on the topic.
   
• Joe Hagstrom at MadMikesAmerica says Mike Pence will never be President. He lacks the single quality Republicans have come to value most.
   
• Yellow Dog at Blue in the Bluegrass finds a Kentucky Chief of Police who directly orders his officers to shoot pot smoking kids, but only if said pot smokers are black.
   
• M. Bouffant at Web of Evil seems less than convinced by a religious conservative urging followers to never accept flu vaccines.
   
• The Journal of Improbable Research finds a New Zealand study proving your chances of getting into medical school drops substantially if your application uses apostrophes incorrectly.
   
• This week’s note in Trumpian ‘Alternative Facts’ comes from ABC News, casting a net into the flow of President Trump’s SOTU and coming up with a massive catch.
   

 
Although Jordan Thomas Cooper is a relatively recent history major, having graduated from the University of South Carolina in 2015, he is already making a name for himself in Republican politics as an African-American speechwriter for several southern political figures.
 
He believes black people will convert from the Democratic Party and become Republicans if school building are improved:

The reason blacks don’t vote for Republicans in general is because they think they’re racists. Blacks feel that Republicans are the cause of gentrification, mass incarceration of blacks, and the inadequate education of much of the black population. Blacks won’t think Republicans are racist anymore if all of the public schools are renovated and kept up to date.

Three of our readers react:

Infidel753:

I went to The Moderate Voice and read the whole thing. Please tell me this is some kind of parody.

Surely a major reason why most black people don’t vote Republican is that a lot of Republicans make it clear that they actually are racists — and there’s a lot more to that than bad schools.

Infidel writes with uncommon wisdom at his own site.

Dave Dubya:

People don’t care where they eat at and how the buildings look that they eat in. As long as the food is good and it’s clean there. That’s what matters the most. Furthermore, there is nothing that can beat a home cooked meal. Two main ideas of integration were about schools and voting.

This is the only time voting is mentioned. Voter IDs, longer lines, and restrictions on registration are not even mentioned. But at least, “there is nothing that can beat a home cooked meal”.

This swill was written by a Black Republican, so it’s no wonder that it makes no sense.

We have another well-qualified Secretary of HUD, obviously.

Dave’s views are are often found at Freedom Rants. His rants are usually very good.

Ryan:

Content of the piece aside, the writing is incredibly poor for a speechwriter and for someone who served such high-profile politicians. I suppose that they all share Trump’s mindset: the less qualified, the better.

Ryan gave up blogging a while back. Those who appreciate clarity and logic hope for his eventual return.

Have a safe weekend.

 
From Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged:

It seems that Trump and his allies don’t have a problem smearing the FBI to pretend that the investigation of the very real Russian involvement into the 2016 election and his very real (as in, he’s in the White House) benefit from the same, is about some partisan motivation. A telephonic glitch that affected the text messages of thousands of DOJ personnel that was eventually restored, was treated like a ghoulish deep state cover-up. A sarcastic joke between FBI associates about a “secret society” was treated as being quite sinister indeed. But these misleading stories bandied about by Trump fans are little compared to the dopey memo that Trump’s Congressional Renfield, Devin Nunes, wants everyone to see, and no one to see.

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From The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser:

As I wade through the neck-deep filth in the Evangelical gutter gathering information for the Black Collar Crime series, one common event shows up in story after story: that when these criminals are on trial or they are being sentenced for their crimes, their pastors are on hand to let everyone know that the predator pastor was a good person who did a bad thing. Often, these testifying pastors tell judges and juries that the criminal’s good works outweigh any bad that he might have done; that molesting and raping children or sexually assaulting church members is somehow atoned for by the church member’s or ex-pastor’s good works. These so-called men of God even go so far as to ask the courts to grant the convicted offender probation, promising that the child molester/rapist has turned over a new leaf and has crossed-his-heart-hoped-to-die promised that he will never, ever rape, molest, look at child porn, or take sexual advantage of woman. Why do pastors seem so willing to be character references for criminals?

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From Frances Langum:

On Monday’s show, Tucker Carlson couldn’t wince and wrinkle his brow fast enough to get Tim Ryan, D-OH, to go belly up with fear of his “why do Democrats hate America?” schtick.

So Tucker did what he often does when the schtick isn’t working — he ended the interview.

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