Author: Raymond

 
From Jonathan Bernstein:

No president in at least a century has had a greater need to win over new voters. Yet Trump doesn’t even try.

Let’s get one thing out of the way: There’s nothing wrong with President Donald Trump designating Tuesday night’s rally as his “official” campaign kickoff. Trump is unusual in that he formally launched his re-election campaign at the beginning of his presidency, and in holding an endless series of political rallies. But the only difference here between Trump and other first-term presidents is one of strategy. They’re all running for re-election from day one, and many (okay, practically all) of their public appearances are staged with that in mind.

That’s mostly a good thing. Presidents should work hard to be re-elected in their first term. It introduces healthy incentives: Smart presidents will lead with an eye toward winning over new voters and thus strive to govern responsibly. So there’s nothing wrong with Trump overtly campaigning from day one, or with arbitrarily designating one of his rallies as the beginning of a new phase of that campaign.

No, the question is what Trump has accomplished with all of his non-stop electioneering. And the answer to that is pretty simple: Bupkis. Nada. Nothing.

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From author John Scalzi:

I woke up this morning and checked Twitter and discovered that Neil Gaiman had told me to take a hike — or more accurately, he had tagged me as someone he challenged to walk 2,000 steps by Refugee Day (which is June 20th) as part of #StepWithRefugees, to raise awareness of the roughly one billion miles refugees, in aggregate, walk each year to try to find safety. 2,000 steps is roughly a mile, so the idea is something akin to walking a mile in someone else’s shoes.

So I got out of bed and took that walk, and of course, because such a public challenge by Neil requires documentation, made a video of my morning perambulation.

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From Michael John Scott at MadMikesAmerica:

It was just before Friday turned into Saturday that Twitter gained a new account, and not one to be proud of, much like Donald Trump’s.

It appears the infamous murderer OJ Simpson can now be counted among those who tweet, and his very first (and so far only) post has already raised eyebrows.

Simpson posted a short video announcing his entry online, and it included what Inquisitr calls a “cryptic message.” The convicted felon cheerfully tells his viewing audience, almost exactly 25 years to the day his ex-wife, Nicole Brown-Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman were murdered:

“Coming soon to Twitter, you’ll get to read all my thoughts and opinions on just about everything,” “It should be a lot of fun. I got a little getting even to do.”

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From driftglass:

Today’s inciting incident was Harvard’s revocation of Kyle Kashuv’s admission to their university based on some incredibly racist and antisemitic (h/t Yastreblyansky) things he wrote when he was in high school and which have only recently come to light.

For Kyle Kashuv, this means he has once again joined the billions of human beings on Earth who won’t being going to Harvard. Sad! After all, Harvard is a Privilege Factory with more money than God and Mark Cuban (it is frequently referred to as a “hedge fund with a university attached”) and when it comes to admissions it can do pretty much whatever it wants to do.

But for David Brooks, this is his nightmare scenario.

The nightmare of a Conservative who had made his way into one of America’s most elite Privilege Factories —

Most of the famous Parkland students lean progressive and support gun control laws. Kashuv leans conservative. He’s appeared on conservative media, got to meet Donald Trump and lobbied for the STOP School Violence Act, which would create an annual $50 million grant to schools for training programs and reporting systems. He became a student face for the gun rights crowd.

— only to find himself suddenly kicked out because of things he had written in the past.

The nightmare that someone other than a few nobody Liberal bloggers might actually take a look at the shit David Brooks has actually written over the decades — the saccharine schlock, the incompetently researched/cherry-picked propaganda, the hypocrisy, the venomous hippie-punching and the interminable Both Siderism.

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From Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara:

Climate catastrophists have degenerated into hysteria. When we’re told to tow their political line or the world will end in, it is obvious to me that they’re essentially admitting that their arguments are hollow. Case in point, a recent New Jersey Star-Ledger editorial, Trump, climate change, and our Orwellian future. The editorial was published as a response to a bout of severe weather in New Jersey and elsewhere:

The usual warnings have been fast and furious since last week. Tornadoes strafed the national beltline — through Kansas, Ohio and Pennsylvania, even reaching Northwest Jersey — and raised the yearly death toll to 38. Floods are inundating Oklahoma, Arkansas and Iowa. The Gulf Coast region shudders with the start of another hurricane season.

Tornadoes, floods, and hurricanes–Oh My! Tornadoes in NJ, oh my–except that tornadoes are not uncommon in NJ. We’ve gotten to the point that routine weather events are peddled as “proof” of climate change, which is automatically assumed to mean impending disaster.

So President Trump decided this would be a good time to stifle research on the long-term impact of climate change, notably the catastrophic events that will result from it.

Get that? “Will”–not may. In fact, Trump’s policies on climate and energy are among his best. He’s trying to adjust our government’s policies to the actual facts, not the mythologies of the Leftist political climate establishment.

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From The Onion:

Sources confirmed Lex Feldman, a longtime partner at Creative Artists Agency, has already begun shopping the project billed as “a classic tale of good vs. evil” and set to star President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Also attached is John Bolton, the adviser best known for his work on the Iraq War, which was met with immediate acclaim in both American and British markets.

According to reports, the war will feature high-tech sequences of an oil tanker on fire in the Persian Gulf intercut with Americans huddled around televisions and radios, their mouths agape as they realize the only way forward is to invade a powerful nation of 85 million people.

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From The Borowitz Report:

Replacement for Sarah Sanders Disqualified After Telling Truth

According to the White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, the candidate got high marks in his job interview by demonstrating “utter disregard and contempt for press freedoms.”

“We then had him do a practice press briefing in which he was relentlessly abusive, obnoxious, and insulting,” Mulvaney said. “We were all, like, ‘This is our guy.’ ”

But after a thorough examination of the candidate’s job application, “a troubling series of truthhoods emerged,” Mulvaney said.

“It turned out that he was telling the truth about his education and previous employment,” the chief of staff said. “It was a pattern of honesty that we found deeply disturbing.”

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From North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz:

Trump Derangement Syndrome.

This is the go-to insult hurled by current supporters of this President; a catch-all bit of gaslighting designed to malign the emotional state and mental faculties of decent, rational human beings who push back against his legislative assaults on marginalized people, who are sickened by his boundless cruelty, who bear witness to his complete lack of accountability under the law, who accurately note the naked hypocrisy of his professed Christian supporters.

Accusing someone of TDS is now a MAGA Nation standby; a quick and convenient slur allowing them to sidestep factual information, mask their refusal to have meaningful debate, and to avoid culpability in defending a man whose very Twitter feed testifies that he is not at all well.

Peak in at any given hour (whether the middle of the night, early in the afternoon, or before the sun is up) and you’ll immediately find yourself immersed in the nonsensical, grammatically-challenged, all-caps ramblings of a man whose immaturity, impulsiveness, and paranoia would disqualify him from jobs at schools, bowling alleys, and summer camps—let alone helming a nation.

It’s all on display in unhinged, 280 character bursts…

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From Infidel753:

The Trump administration today announced that it blamed Iran for attacks on two tanker ships in the Gulf of Oman. The Iranian regime has categorically denied being involved. This follows a case last month in which four ships were attacked near the Strait of Hormuz, which the US government also blamed on Iran. This follows a long-standing pattern of escalating saber-rattling by the Trump administration against Iran, beginning with Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from the nuclear agreement negotiated by Presidents Obama and Rouhani, despite the fact that international observers agreed that Iran was adhering to its side of the deal.

It may be of some value here to recall the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, which led to substantial escalation of US involvement in the Vietnam conflict. Official reports at the time claimed that several North Vietnamese patrol boats had attacked the American destroyer USS Maddox “on the high seas”, followed a few days later by a second attack on the Maddox and another US ship. As we now know, the Maddox had in fact opened fire first, and the clash happened within the 12-mile limit which North Vietnam claimed as its territorial waters, while the second attack never happened at all (false radar images were mistaken for enemy craft which were not actually present). Nevertheless, President Johnson and pro-war elements in his administration presented the incident to the US public as a pretext for escalating US involvement, leading to the protracted bloody mess which dragged on wearily until 1975, at staggering cost.

There is a lesson from the Gulf of Tonkin incident and from all the other lies and deceptions fed to the public during that war. It’s the same lesson offered by the official hysterics and falsified evidence which were used to whip up support for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. That lesson is: when it comes to leading this country into war, the establishment lies.

They lie. They simply lie. It’s what they do.

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