Archives 2021 B

Aww! The actress Betty White passed away a few weeks short of her 100th birthday!

That's true, but Ben's comment lacks serious context. A look at the video made by Wen shows that she recommends certain kinds of masks. Regular old cloth is very porous and doesn't protect very well. There are many brands that are quite good.

Yeah, this is quite sad. VP Harris appears to be doing an entirely satisfactory job, but you'd never know that by the press coverage. She makes for an especially glaring contrast with the last VP, Mike Pence. Pence was put in charge of the committee for dealing with the coronavirus, but I found a piece from April 2020 that described Jared Kushner as being in charge! Did Pence get fired? No, Kushner came in, started giving orders and Pence just faded into the woodwork.

TFG has failed to show that fulfilling the request by the January 6^th Committee for his presidential records would be contrary to the public interest. In fact, the public has a very deep interest, overriding any presidential privacy considerations, in investigating the January 6^th attack on our democracy.

Update (19 Jan): Supreme Court agrees 8-1 that Congress has the superior claim to the presidential records.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene likes the wildly unconstitutional idea of not permitting people to vote for a period after moving from a liberal state to a conservative one. We don't lose or gain fundamental rights by moving from state to state.

Obama played golf once every 8.77 days as president. Trump, conversely, has been at a golf club once every 4.92 days so far.

A popular ranking of our presidents over the past 40 years (since Reagan). In descending order: Obama, Reagan, Trump, Clinton, younger Bush, elder Bush, & Biden.

...the problems inherent in a big tent. Basically, Democrats collect all voters who aren’t affirmatively in favor of a patriarchal, ethnonationalist, quasi-theocratic, authoritarian state.

So TFG's lawyer is essentially arguing that if the president breaks the law, Congress is unable to even investigate, meaning there's simply no solution. If the president shoots someone on Fifth Avenue in broad daylight, with dozens of witnesses, there's nothing anyone can do about it.
Erm, no. This is not an acceptable answer!

"Republicans failed completely in their Christmas predictions"
Lots and lots of dire predictions, none of which came true. Reminds me that in 2009 and up until the ACA/Obamacare was implemented in 2014, there were all kinds of predictions of economic disaster that the ACA would cause. None of the dire, awful predictions came true. Those scary predictions were promptly tossed into the "memory-hole."

Oh, good grief! The only thing connecting Hunter Biden to "his laptop" is that it contained lots of emails, photos and film clips that were clearly his. How were these obtained? Phones are easier to hack than computers are. If one of his phones was hacked or illicitly obtained, even for ten minutes, that would explain it. Nothing on "Hunter's laptop" can be considered evidence of any sort.

How did Steve Bannon’s radio show come “to occupy such a central place in the MAGA ecosystemv?” The piece examines that.

Ghislaine Maxwell (helper of Jeffrey Epstein) found guilty on just about all of the counts!

Allegedly, QAnon cares deeply about child sex-trafficking, but gee, for some strange reason, they don't appear to care very much about Maxwell. Very puzzling!

One interesting consequence of the new Texas law on abortion. A number of Texas men have been getting vasectomies!

Understand that vaccine opponents are a threat to us all. If you refuse to get vaxxed, that extends to pandemic.

Aww! Very sorry to hear that the former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has passed away!

Ooh! That'll leave a mark! Dr. Mehmet Oz was introduced to the public by Oprah Winfrey. Now, she won't endorse him to be the PA Governor!

I dunno, people were concerned about Dr. Oz winning in PA, but he just keeps %^$#ing up!

I think Gillian Turner is absolutely correct. Kyle Rittenhouse may have been declared to be officially innocent, but it’s a terrible idea to put him up on a pedestal.

For instance, Charlie Kirk, President of Turning Point USA, actually compared Rittenhouse to Christ!

A look at the vulgar insult delivered to President Biden over the Christmas holiday.

Former President Trump argues that he can't be held responsible if he makes a speech and those who hear the speech then commit acts of violence. Here's hoping that theory goes nowhere!

The founder of Daily Kos does a regular feature looking at Covid deniers. In the middle of this post, a denier asks 30 questions, which our blogger answers. I especially liked #7.

7. If public health is worth giving away medicine for free, why aren't medications being given away for free to treat other illnesses?

So Representative Jordan is "deeply concerned" about answering questions from the January 6th Committee (I read this as: "'OMG! They know how guilty I am!") and complains of them not understanding the full contest of one of his text messages. Well, there's a way he can explain this "full context,"' he can testify to the committee under oath!

So, many years after the US invasion and lengthy occupation of Iraq, how's Iraq doing? Erm, not an endorsement of US occupation.

Does the Fox News host specifically instruct people to assassinate Dr. Fauci? Ehh, not exactly. His instructions are couched in such a way that he can deny he really meant that.

See, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is correct when he says "We applied maximum economic pressure to Iran..." but he is not correct when he says "We brought Iran to its knees."
That's not true at all. Iran didn't make any concessions and in fact, were less inclined to make concessions in 2020 then they were in 2018.

Going through this thread, there are indeed concerns with the BBB bill, but at least 48 other Democratic Senators feel that the benefits outweigh the risks.

Good! The BBB bill has gone from being completely flat-lined to having a pulse. Still not up and walking around, still in the ICU, but alive.

Good news! TFG is now openly pro-vaccine! I’m sure he finally realized that he was killing off so much of his base of voters that he realized he was hurting Republican chances electorally!

In what I’m sure is not a coincidence, Biden praises Trump for quick production of the vaccine. Of course, without Biden’s energetic program of getting people vaccinated, having a great vaccine wouldn’t have done much good.

Heh! Problem here is that you can't just turn people on and off like machines. Can't go from an anti-vaxxer message to "vaccinations are good for you" without causing a lot of anguish, hate and discontent.

Manchin accused BBB backers of being ‘disingenuine,’ sunsetting social spending early to keep $$ down.

Well, Senator Manchin did not provide any compelling reasons to cancel any programs. He just kept complaining about the top line, the total expenditures. This is where at least 48 fellow Democratic Senators feel he has betrayed them. He now appears to be suggesting that Democrats should have canceled whole programs, just to please him and to convince him that they were serious about cutting expenditures. This is not the way to effectively bargain with anyone!

NY Times runs a piece on Manchin fighting climate measures. Good to have this brought to wide public attention, but the piece could very easily have run several months ago, before Senator Manchin pulled the plug on the Build Back Better bill!

Yeah, Representative Jim Jordan was a major supporter of investigations during the Obama Administration, very notably the four-year Benghazi one! Check out the utter lack of self-awareness here:

Jordan, with no hint of irony, replied to Bongo's anti-Jan 6 Commission rant, "This is nothing new for the Left but it's scary because it's the weaponization of government against their political enemies."

Sounds like an incitement to violence to me.
Don Jr.: "We've turned the other cheek and I understand sort of the biblical reference, I understand the mentality but it's gotten us nothing,"

Update (29 Dec): Don Jr. did us all a favor back on by showing us just what the White Evangelical Movement is all about.

Sarah Palin feels that because she's already had Covid, then she doesn't need the vaccine. Generally, that's true. Once you've had a disease, you don't need to be vaccinated against it because you've already developed the necessary antibodies on your own. Problem is, scientists have discovered that isn't true for Covid. Even if you've already had it, you still need the shot.

White House puts out a tough message on Omicron and the un-vaccinated. Essentially, the message gives Democratic voters permission to disregard the precious fee-fees of the people who don't enjoy being blamed for the continual drag on our medical resources.

Fox News is very upset that they’re being described (accurately) as a propaganda network.

Looks like the Build Back Better bill is pretty much dead.
Progressives were, of course, correct:

"We all knew that Senator Manchin couldn’t be trusted,” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), a leading member of the House progressive caucus, said on MSNBC soon after. “The excuses he just made, I think, are complete bullshit.”

Speaker Pelosi wonders: Is Senator Manchin really so incompetent that he can’t explain to the people of West Virginia what the Build Back Better bill is all about?

This confirms what I've been reading on the blogs. We made a good deal with Iran in 2015. Israel encouraged The Former Guy to dump the deal. They're now regretting having done that, but it's not clear the damage can be repaired.

As TFG is the Republican Party's largest draw and biggest fundraiser, they're pretty much stuck doing whatever he insists they have to do.

How does the press decide from day to day what to cover? Apparently, their go-to sources are all Republicans! Did the press really care about Critical Race Theory or were they simply writing about it because all of their Republican sources were talking about it? When the last election was over, the GOP lost interest in the story and wow! Amazingly enough, the entire press corps followed suit!

Woo hoo! Awesome stuff! Latest Spider-Man film is awesome! About two and a half hours, but it’s such a big story it needs that much time to tell it properly!

Ahh, “The wheels of justice turn slowly, but grind exceedingly fine.” People who made lots and lots of money by selling OxyContin face accountability.

The Fox News “comedian” (you know he’s a “funny” guy because he twists around his mouth a lot) advises more death. Vaccination may indeed be slightly less effective (he doesn’t cite any real science to back up this assertion) than actually catching the virus, but getting vaccinated won’t run the non-zero risk that it will kill you! We don’t know enough about Omicron to say it’s non-lethal.

Former CDC Director Redfield gives a very wordy answer, but essentially agrees with the assertion that the CDC was muzzled on his watch.

I agree with Senator Sanders. When it comes to human-caused climate change and a whole host of other issues, the Republicans are completely AWOL, they're doing nothing. But Senators Manchin and Sinema aren't any better. They're demonstrating arrogance by standing in the way of solutions.

If 1. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer dies (he's 83) and 2. The Senate goes to the Republicans in the 2022 midterms, we might have to wait until we either get a Republican president or until the Senate is back in Democratic hands. It cold be a long time before either happens!

The now-14 year siege of the Gaza Strip, home to some two million people, has turned it into “a place unfit for human life, in the words of former US President Jimmy Carter.”

Right. So TFG was basically talking like a mob boss. He spoke in a way that he could claim later was perfectly innocent, but his subordiantes understood his real meaing perfectly. Organized crime figures do this All. The. Time! This is standard, routine practice for them!

It's kind of amazing that Senator Manchin hasn't been able to agree to a plan to fix the filibuster as it's very obviously a broken instrument that doesn't work properly.
But what's truly amazing is that Senator Sinema doesn't appear to have the slightest clue as to how to even approach the problem! Her "solutions" are all over the map!

President tours Kentucky in aftermath of devastating tornadoes. Neither of the state’s senators accompany him. %#$@ing people!!! All politics, all the time!!! If they appear with him, political opponents would accuse them of getting soft on the Biden Administration.
More thoughts on Senator McConnell
BTW, military protocol holds that when a high-ranking person visits a ship or an area of responsibility, that lower-ranking people accompany him or her.

Senator Manchin says price tag for the BBB bill cannot exceed $1.75 trillion. Where in the $%#@ does he get such an arbitrary, completely BS figure?

Liberals believe in the 1930s economic theory of Keynesianism, conservatives prefer the 1970s theory of austerity. Problem is, no one ever proved that austerity was a better theory! The real proof of that is shown by the long-term reaction to Keynesian policies.

In the first of three videos, Sean Hannity says that he's a very consistent person, that he says the same thing in private that he does in public. If that were true, there would have been no story. The whole point of the story was precisely that his public and private statements were the exact opposite of each other!

Yeah, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham of Fox News, who texted White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in a panic that Trump was destroying his legacy on 6 January are totally not upset that their texts were revealed! Yeah, 'cuz it's all just a big, amusing joke, eh?

The Supreme Court agreed with the Texas law that made legal abortions impossible by relgating enforcement to citizens.The California Governor just put out a law on guns that is similarly sef-enforcing. His gambit is already paying off! A gun-rights group recognizes the danger that the Texas abortion law poses to gun rights and has concluded the abortion law is too dangerous to remain! And the idea is catching on!

Boo! Hiss! Biden Administration appears to be okay with expansion of Israeli settlements in the Palestinian West Bank. Keep in mind that ALL such settlements are illegal under international law, whether they were founded right after the Six-Day War in 1967 or just yesterday.

House voted to hold Trump’s former White House Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, in contempt.

Representative Liz Cheney uses very highly specific wording to refer to a highly specific criminal act that carries a heavy penalty of many years in prison.

Your day's example of "false equivalence." Are Democrats trying to establish a "one party socialist state?" Highly doubtful. Will Republicans, in the event of their winning control of either the House or the Senate in the 2022 midterm, call an end to the 6 January investigations? Very, very highly likely!
"One of these things is not like the other."

Yes, very interesting how Chris Wallace quit Fox News just before the 1/6 Commission came out with its expose of FN hosts and how they reacted to the attempted coup.

Very interesting September prediction last year by Glenn Greenwald, that if Trump just agrees to a peaceful transition of power after losing the 2020 election, that the “Resistance edifice...will collapse…” Well, very clearly, Trump didn't just leave peacefully, he’s still trying to overthrow our democracy, so now Democrats are “still babbling about The Insurrection^TM …”
I guess liberals just can’t win, no matter what we do.

Former Trade Adviser Peter Navarro can voluntarily accept “orders” from TFG, but if he says “Nah, I don’t feel like doing that,” there’s absolutely nothing Trump can do about that as they’re both just private citizens now.

So the US spent lots and lots of money in Afghanistan, but very little of it went to any “home-grown” industries, so after all that, they don’t have much.

"Constitutional Scholar Mike Huckabee: There's No Abortion 'Right'"
In a video at the end of this post, Elie Mystal explains why Mike Huckabee and the Fox News people are all wrong.
One point is that yes, ultrasound has been developed post-1973. Is that meaningful? No, because no technology can alter the date of viability, the date at which the fetus can survive outside the womb.

Strong vibes of the Roman Colosseum and the games that were played there under the later emperors.

An arena in South Dakota is holding a “Dash for Cash” where teachers get on their knees and fight for one dollar bills that they can use for classroom supplies while spectators watch and cheer.

Hmm. Is the Christmas tree a symbol of Christianity? Not really. Several different traditions went into making that tree a major symbol of Christmas, many secular and many from other religions.
Piece includes commentary on Senator Paul’s hypocrisy on federal aid for disasters.

Two new groups, Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion, are trying out new approaches to forcing governments to combat human-caused climate change. For me, one of the problems with the anti-Iraq War protests in the early aughts was that they were pretty exclusively composed of older white people. It’s good that anti-global warming groups are trying to be more inclusive.

The California Governor seeks to exploit the Supreme Court ruling that permits Texas to use private individuals to enforce anti-choice laws. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor tells in detail why Newsom's scheme is likely to succeed, presuming that the Texas scheme is not reversed.

Actress Kirstie Alley says she was blackballed from Hollywood because she supports Trump

Ehh, Kirstie Alley did a Star Trek movie in 1985, a run on Cheers that ended in 1993 and shows like Fat Actress and Scream Queens since then, so there really wasn't much of a career that she was pursuing anyway.

We’ve seen this a couple of time over the past two decades or so. Politicians in, say, Texas, denounce the federal government for supporting a bunch of lazy slackers who suffered a disaster in New Jersey. A few years later Texas gets hit with hurricanes and guess who has their hands out?
Past speech by Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky.

Rand Paul: "People here will say they have great compassion and they want to help the people of Puerto Rico, the people of Texas, and the people of Florida but notice they have great compassion with someone else’s money"

Yep, really nice words from Senator Paul as he completely ignores his past record and asks for federal help for the damage caused by tornadoes in KY. .

Chief Justice Roberts is no hero, despite his recent defense of the Supreme Court’s authority and legacy.

Chief Justice Roberts doesn't explicitly call for the Supreme Court to be expanded, but makes a strong case that it should be. Justice Sotomayer makes a more explicit case to do so. The good news is that a few members of Biden's commission to recommend changes are now much more favorable towards the idea!

California "fires a shot across the bow" of the Supreme Court's decision to allow a state to bypass federal legislation.

Michael Nesmith dies at 78 years old. Nesmith was artisticall active after The Monkees, but nothing he did quite matched up to his career with them.

"What does the Republican Party stand for besides ‘let’s go Brandon’?"
One thing I'd emphasize about the Republican agenda for 2022 and 2024 is that, for nine years, from 2011 to 2020, there were no infrastructure bills passed, even though both Obama and then Trump wanted one. It was only when Democrats gained control of all three branches that they could pass one. The press should make it clear that this was no coincidence.

President updates an old phrase to say: "all women and men are created equal.” Fox News is terribly upset!

The US is now officially considered a “backsliding democracy.” What we absolutely have to do is to get rid of the filibuster.

DC Court of Appeals rejects TFG’s motion to keep his presidential records away from the 6 January commission. Talk among the panelists is that they doubt the Supreme Court will pick up the case as the three new Justices will just look like owned and loyal members, with their abortion decision seriously delegitimizing the Court as it is, they’ll just look like complete sycophants if they revered the ruling.

Update (30 Dec): Supreme Court is still mulling whether or not to take TFG's appeal. In the meantime, Trump's case boils down to an assertion that he could, as president, shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, in broad daylight, with dozens of witnesses, and Congress can't even investiagte, let alone prosecute him.

Again, the Senate Minority Leader is trying to make church day care sound like a simple, obvious, straightforward issue. It isn't. It involves discrimination. Churches won't hire or teach just anyone. Describing critics as a "mob" is ridiculous.

Update (2 Jan): 1st page of results from Yahoo "qanon josh duggar" are all posts that mock QAnon for being silent about Duggar.

So essentially, Senator Manchin is saying here that he has not made the case to his colleagues that the BBB plan needs to be reduced. All his talking about it has failed to "move the needle." Maybe that's because his colleagues are right.

Woo hoo! The days of Louis DeJoy as Postmaster General are now numbered! He’s on the way out! I can’t imagine why he doesn’t just quit.

The Fox News Christmas tree was set on fire. Most likely the act of a single person. Does that compare to someone like Tucker Carlson broadcasting nice words and defenses of white supremacy or Laura Ingraham speaking favorably of the 6 January attack on our Capitol? Uh, hardly.

Does the RNC Chairperson blame Biden? Ha, ha, ha! Of course she does. everything is Biden's fault!

Of course the torching of the Fox News Christmas tree was a terrible thing. Still, the reaction here seems a little overly dramatized.

Ugh! The torching of the Fox News Christmas tree will now be "Benghazi 2.0?" As if the first one wasn't tiresome enough?
BTW, my suspicion that it was the work of a lone assailant is confirmed by Sean Hannity.
Good twist at the 2:45 mark!

Update (11 Dec): Seriously, the burning of the Fox News Christmas tree has been turned into a combination 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. Remember, it was a single, homeless, mentally disturbed man who did it.

"McConnell Complains BBB Won’t Let Daycare Centers Discriminate"
When the government denies religious institutions money, it's because religious institutions tend to discriminate as to who gets their services. As the blogger suggests, there might be ways around that, but McConnell prefers to destroy the whole idea of funding daycare rather than work with his colleagues to find a solution.
What this shows is that Senate Minority Leader McConnell's talents lie pretty exclusively in denying, delaying, blocking and preventing rather than any sort of building.

Y'see, the media tends to organize facts aroound a "narrative" that, more often than not, has very little to do with the actual reality of a situation. Supposedly, the narrative organizes the information we get, but reality is sloppy and the temptation is to force the facts to fit the narrative, even though the narrative may be seriously flawed. Hillary Clinton "funding private planes to fly out Afghan women and children who had no way out of Afghanistan" was a fact that clearly didn't fit into anyone's narrative, so the media simply didn't report it.

Rather interesting that the Trumpers have gone back 35 years to find a villain to compare today's liberals to.

"This group that wants to advance a Soviet Communist-style agenda.... We shouldn't be surprised that they're using Soviet Stalinist tactics to do it."

Some counter-programming/pushback to the “scandal” of VP Harris and her headphones. She prefers wired headphones as opposed to Bluetooth headphones that transmit signals through the air. Why she's being pinged as being concerned with national security is beyond me.

Representative Matt Gaetz warns us that if Republicans take control of the House, we'll see an absolute blizzard of subpoenas. I take these people absolutely, positively dead seriously!

This is distressing. I remember Meryl Streep starred in a movie about Julia Child in 2009. One thing I remember from reading about it was that Child was very, very insistent on testing every single recipe, cooking it and then eating it.
A pity that the test kitchen for the NY Times hasn't held itself to the same standard.

Heh! “Fox News owns the 75+ seniors, and MSNBC skews a more youthful (checks notes) 68:”

The story of Russia interfering in US democracy back in 2016 was never about them acting with a passive victim. It was always about Putin finding exploitable weaknesses.

“You probe with bayonets: if you find mush, you push. If you find steel, you withdraw” ― Vladimir Ilich Lenin

Apparently, Biden was hoping to use TFGs old, failed policy to squeeze some small concessions out of Iran before showing good faith by abandoning the anti-Iran sanctions. It may be too late to do that now. That strategic window may have closed.

Intelligence services set the date for the potential Russian invasion of Ukraine as early 2022. Russia is demanding that Ukraine not join NATO, which suggest that Ukraine and NATO members has made moves to do just that. What is not in question is that Russia has moved forces to their border with Ukraine.
How likely is it that Russia will invade Ukraine? US or NATO intervention to save Ukraine isn’t very likely. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken warns Russia that an invasion could be costly for Russia. True, the US is “dispatching sophisticated arms to Kyiv [Kiev].” Ukrainian troops were unready back in 2014, when Russia seized the Crimean Peninsula. Today “Ukraine’s military is battle-trained – and equipped with better weaponry…”

"Chuck Todd Grills Mike Braun On Abortions: 'What About The Liberty Of The Woman?'"
I'd give Chuck Todd maybe one out of three cheers on this. It was a good idea to raise the question of "What about the woman?" But by completely lacking any follow-up and by permitting his subject to slither away, Chuck blows it.
Also, I don't get all of this talk about different states wanting different solutions. The issue is the same everywhere. The only thing that's differs from state to state is the power of the male supremacy movement.

I was not at all impressed with the performance of Mike Pence as the VP under Trump. His "big job" was to head up the White House COVID-19 Response Team. As I recall, he was treated as a doormat by pretty much everyone. Trump appointed him as being in charge of responding to the coronavirus, but in April:

The void left by that absence is being filled by Kushner. As head of an ad hoc task force, Kushner is “working alongside government officials...

Where'd Pence go? He wasn't fired, he just sort of faded into the background. That's who set the standard that our current VP, Kamala Harris is being judged by!

Sigh! The Vice President refuses to use Bluetooth or anything else that transmits audio signals through the open air, preferring instead to use wires that go from the audio source directly to her ears. This is for the eminently sensible reason of making sure no one can listen in on her conversations. “Bluetooth phobia?” Why is this considered controversial? More on that.

Republicans, along with Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, are using inflation as an argument against the Build Back Better bill. This is a very poor argument.

"Israel Regrets Coaxing Trump To Pull Out Of JCPOA"
Yep! That was a terrible thing to have done! Just as with the ACA/Obamacare, Trump had absolutely no clue as to what to replace the successful program with. He just left the Iran nuclear deal of 2015 with no idea of what to do next.

Very thorough, comprehensive examination of the press coverage for both Trump and Biden for 2020 and 2021. 2020 has been regarded as the sixth worst year in human history*, but Biden’s been getting worse press coverage than Trump did.

*The five even-worse years are 1348 (European plague), 1944 (Nazi genocide), 1816 (extreme cold), 1644 (English Civil War), 410 (Sacking of Rome).

The blog Gateway Pundit allegedly defamed and endangerd the lives of election workers by blaming them for Trump's losss in 2020. The blog has long been known as totally unreliable and that it very frequently just makes stuff up. It’d be very nice to see them lose lots and lots of money over this.

Good grief, one autocrat to another! Speaker Pelosi asked Presidet Trump to talk to the Chinese President Xi about the Uyghurs being in Chinese concentration camps. Trump did so and later reported to the Speaker: "I talked to the president and he says the Uyghurs like being in those camps."

Representative Madison Cawthorn tries to draw an abortion analogy. In his telling, a woman takes a photo using a Polaroid camera. As she's waiting for the film to develop, a strange man approaches, tears the photo from her hand and rips it up. Problem: in abortion, it's usually the woman who decides to not develop the film/not bring the baby to term. There is no unknown stranger involved.

School shooting in Michigan. The shooter, Ethan Crumbley, sent all kinds of signals that he was in very bad mental shape and having violent fantasies about killing classmates. The parents apparently, just couldn't care less.

Update (5 Dec): Parents caught trying to flee to Canada. Apparently, they wanted to swim (Very bad idea as water was both cold and had a swift current) and also weren't aware that Canada would have promptly returned them.

Woo hoo! Attorneys that participated in the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump are on the hook for really big pay-outs!

Representative Jim Jordan engages in what we call “magical thinking.” As Ohio's new Covid cases per day rise above 5k for the third time since the pandemic started, he says "Real America is done with #COVID19"

You've got a real, live controlled experiment here. Tennessee and New York City have similar population numbers, NYC had zero Covid deaths the other day, TN is just an absolute disaster!

First off the Republican Party of today is, as the blogger explained in a book, a post-policy party. Second, what they can honestly say is that their actual governing agenda is really, really unpopular!

Problem is, the Cuomo brothers case is not something to be at all ambivalent about. The CNN reporter Chris Cuomo had a clear ethical obligation to either keep a good distance from his brother Governor Andrew Cuomo's problems or Chris needed to quit and go to work for his brother full-time.

The “working definition” [of antisemitism] shilled by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance has been highly controversial since it was published in 2016 due to its conflation of opposition to Israel and its racist ideology, Zionism, on one hand, with anti-Jewish bigotry, on the other.

Mark Meadows, the former White Houe Chief of Staff knew that TFG had Covid before Trump appeared at a Gold Star famiy event and before the first debate with Joe Biden. Meadows is just now telling us this in his book!

Progressives want Representative Boebert to be stripped of committee assignments.
BTW, unknown Republican Congresspeople have suggested that matters like the Boebert-Omar dispute should be left up to the House Minority Leader, but Kevin McCarthy has been very quiet on the issue, refusing to take a clear stand and trying to do...something behind the scenes. Sorry, but that simply isn't good enough. Boebet called Omar to apologize. Omar insisted that her apology be public, not just private. Boebert refused. Omar was right. Boebert's offensive comments were public and encouraged the voicemail that Omar then played at a press conference. There needs to be a public apology!

Aww! Representative Nancy Mace is my new sweetheart!
Yeah, yeah, she's a Republican, so like Representative Cheney, she disagrees with me on a whole host of issues, but she stands for decency in a way that Boebert, Gosar, Greene and others don't!

Speaker Paul Ryan left the leadership of Congressional Republicans just when that party had moved to the minority. Now, even if Republicans get the majority next year, Minority Leader McCarthy doesn't appear to have any authority over his own caucus.

Representative Boebert made a "cute" and "amusing" speech that led directly to the voicemail recorded by an angry, deranged caller that Representative Omar plays for us.

Woo hoo! Amazon workers get a re-do on a unionization vote they took back early this year!

When the blogger refers to "squatter-settlers," he's referring to about 475k Israeli settlers who have seized land within the 1967 border of the West Bank (Palestinian population in the West Bank is over 5 million).

TFG challenged the media to a public debate on whether or not he won the 2020 election. Why did they turn down the chance to debate him? Well, he’s had over a year to present any facts and has produced nothing. He’s a crank who isn’t worth debating.

Yeah, Chris Cuomo was a lot more involved in the legal defense of his brother the New York Governor then he let on to either the public or to CNN, his employer.

Yeah, Republican strategists seem to make up a really large proportion of the people who get quoted in the news stories of mainstream publications. Whose views are accepted as "conventional wisdom?" Well, who writes the stories?

Still courts he can appeal to, but this is very good news! Looks like TFG's appeal to keep his presidential records hidden was a real crash and burn failure.

Some GOP lawmakers have said Democrats shouldn't try to punish extremist members ... and should instead leave it to Republican leaders to police their own.

Nice idea, but in the Representative Gosar case, the House Minority Leader had over a week to take meaningful action and failed to do so. The lack of responsibility shown by Republican leadership is the real problem here.

Kyle Rittenhouse is discovering that, just as Bill Cosby found, that having a court find you innocent isn’t enough to exonerate you in the eyes of the public.

Representative Boebert suggested Representative Omar was a terrorist because she’s Muslim. Politico refers to how Democrats would deal with Boebert as “Dems’ dicey decision.” What? What’s “dicey” about it? Boebert made inescuable statements and she needs to be snctioned for them.
A complete run-down on the Boebert-Omar dispute.

Senator Tom Cotton say there was no “supply-chain” shortage when TFG was in charge. True. We just had different kinds of shortages! We had shortages of medical gloves, masks, gowns, shortages of Covid tests, there was a huge rush on all kinds of paper cleaning products, etc.

This is the conservative movement today. Greg Gutfeld on the Omicron variant: (words to the effect of) “Eh, so it’s deadlier. Whatcha gonna do, hah?”

Chris Christie learns that serving Trump and then turning on him doesn't get you any love on either side of the aisle. To the Trumpers: "You have betrayed Our Glorious Leader!" To liberals: "You were a bum to have joined him in the first place." Despite several TV appearances, his book is a complete flop.

Heh! After running a complete flop of a telethon back in August, Mike Lindell tried again, saying "After everyone sees the evidence I have, the Supreme Court will vote unanimously to put Trump back into office." Total number of watchers this time - about 90.

*Sigh!* Kevin Sorbo, who did good work as an actor in Hercules and Andromeda, asks why there are no Democrats on Mt. Rushmore. Erm, Thomas Jefferson was a Democrat.

Apparently, there is no "supply chain crisis" with the big box retailers. Which would mean the major media is wrong, Again!

Human-caused climate change is hitting Iran especially hard lately. In Isfahan, the Zayandeh Rud riverbed is dry enough to march in.

So how is the eight hour-long Beatles film? It covers the studio sessions for the Let It Be album. Our blogger liked it, but realizes your mileage may vary.

“...President Trump brought us vaccines in record time, which he made voluntary, not mandatory,…”

The vaccines were indeed produced at record speed because mRNA vaccines had been in development since 1987. First clinical trials for infectious disease (rabies) was in 2013. TFG was perhaps not completely irrelevant to its development, but Trump really didn’t do much of anything.
Under Biden, we’ve discovered that positive incentives to take the vaccine are pretty much useless. We’ve been far more successful with mandates.

Seriously! Vice-President Kamala Harris brought some cookware with her own money!!! Right-wingers are trying to turn that into a scandal!

Good! The anti-vaxxer Steve Cortes has been fired from Newsmax. One thing I will agree with in his video here is that the 6 January assault on the Capitol had absolutely nothing whatsoever in common with the George Floyd riots in the summer of 2020.

"I apologize to anyone in the Muslim community I offended with my comment about Rep. Omar." .

A true apology is not conditional. A true apology acknowledges the hurt that was done and attempts to right the wrong.

WaPo: "Rep. Lauren Boebert apologizes..." Instead of jumping to the conclusion that Representative Boebert really and truly apologized, why not ask the person she offended (Representative Omar) whether or not her "apology" was cosidered acceptable?

BTW, evidence continues to mount that Representative Boebert played a role working on the other side during the 6 January attack on the Capitol.

Amazing! Lara Trump (Wife of second son Eric) deliberately and consciously put this out! Baby cries, the mom drinks wine without paying attention.

Like it or not (*cough* Senator Joe Manchin *cough*), the coal industry is dying, and it’s for the same reason Blockbuster Video and Fotomat film developing died. There are simply better ways to fulfill our economic needs.

Yep! Where does the NY Times run the story about jobless claims being the lowest in 52 years? Why, page B3, of course!

Nebraska is acting like it's some sort of problem that their unemployment is so low! Hint: Plenty of immigrants who would love a job and would be willing to settle there!

Thanksgiving grew directly out of the Emancipation Proclamation. Thanksgiving was a plot! A plot, we say!, to boost spending during the Great Depression. Business loved it, Republicans hated it.

Dr. Scott Atlas has a book out. He has some bad things to say on lockdowns that appear to be pretty exaggerated. Doesn’t seem to consider paying people to stay home as a solution.
Very importantly, Atlas doesn’t appear to recognize that masks and social distancing were used by countries around China and suffered very few deaths as a result.
Masks work! Masks are not the only reason Asian countries have lower death rates from Covid than Western ones, but they certainly help.

TFG (who most likely doesn’t really care) sobbed great crocodile tears about birds dying in wind turbines. Fortunately, the problem is being addressed. One of the balancing problems is that painting blades black will help birds during the day, but may reduce visibility to airplanes at night.

Interesting take comparing the Trumpers to middle schoolers. They’re aware of the likely consequences of their actions, they just don’t care.

“We believe we got the vast, vast majority of American citizens out, something to the tune of 6,000 of them,” he said. “And we think it’s probably in the low hundreds that are still there. And there were also several hundred others that didn’t want to leave.”

Yes, there were roughly 200k Afghan helpers. We got 100k out, long after Kabul had been overrun and many hundreds more were extracted after even that deadline. Considering the situation that Biden inherited, I think he did a pretty damned good job!

Among other Trump policies, Bill Bennett defends how TFG handled the Southern border. Erm, there's a reason Susan Rice burned sage when she took over Stephen Miller's old office! That's because the policies Miller implemented were evil. Full stop.

It's been over a year since the 2020 election and critics have yet to show that any meaningful amount of fraud occurred. People who wish to launch yet another fruitless, meaningless investigation (After the Arizona scam) should be compelled to meet a very high burden of proof!

"Dollar Tree raises price point to $1.25, citing inflation."
Really could help to tell the full story here instead of simply quoting management. Dollar Tree is pulling in money hand over fist and it's CEO is very highly paid while employees are scraping by on food stamps..

Senator Sinema touts the BIF, the first infrastructure bill. Y’know, her approval rating might be in excess of its current miserably sad 26% if she wholeheartedly supported the BBB, the second infrastructure bill, instead of trying to weaken it all the time!

Very cool! After 43 years of wrongful imprisonment, Kevin Strickland is free at last!

Didn't know that NASA was officially keeping track of Voyager's progress in this manner. As of mid-December, Voyager is almost 18 light-hours away from Earth. It struck me several year ago that this was a good way to do it.

A deep dive into what the purpose of the Durham investigation is. Basically, it’s to try and popularize the description of various anti-Trump investigations as all being part of the “Russia hoax.”

Sweden’s International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance considers the US to be one of the world’s “backsliding democracies.” One of the seven listed major problems is extreme economic inequality, something left-wingers have been pointing to for decades.

Oh, good lord! After Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectine, now the QAnon people are convinced that hydrogen peroxide is the miracle anti-Covid cure!

"Alabama Rep Lashes Out At Colbert For Mocking His Hypocrisy"
So Representative Gary Palmer supported funding for a highway project in his district, but in general, thought the BIF, the bipartisan infrastructure bill, was largely a waste of money. Problem is, and what got him so irritated, in his tweet and in his three-paragraph statement, he never mentioned that he voted against the BIF!

Afghanistan might have serious food shortages this winter, due to foreigners not wanting to support a dictatorial, oppressive regime. Problem is, they're also ratcheting up their oppression of women! That's the problem when religion is tied too closely to government!

[Senator Sinema] will criticize her party for its complicity in setting unachievable, sky-high expectations, just like the Republicans who promised to repeal Obamacare...

But repealing the ACA/Obamacare was a horribly unpopular thing to promise! It was also clear from the outset that Republicans had nothing to replace it with.

What prevents Democrats from passing a $3.5 trillion bill (that is, by the way, enormously popular)? Their names are Senators Manchin and Sinema!

And another story in the genre of "People who are oblivious to their own role in the story."

What exactly is the "Trump standard?" Trump was not at all truthful, but hey, he was entertaining. So he gave worthless answers, but he'd chatter for as long as reporters wanted him to, as long as they were't expecting honest answers.

The blogger is correct that Chuck Todd just lets the accusation of antisemitism go right on by without challenge. Todd was derelict in his duty to correct misstatements like that right away as opposed to ignoring them or waiting to say something later.
But I also thought Republican Senator Kevin Cramer got his history wrong. The Founding Fathers did not intend for the Senate to be stopped up with all sorts of arcana like the filibuster. What they intended was more like what Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson did during their terms, which was to take energetic, uncompromised action and then to let voters decide at election time whether they liked the results.

Glenn Greenwald is a fellow who, back in the day, used to be a good blogger. He was also a lawyer, so I was disappointed to hear him make a serious error of fact within the first minute of his talk. He claimed that Rittenhouse's gun was "too small" to count for the gun possession law.
Eep! Wrong answer! The barrel of the AR-15 that Rittenhouse carried was a normal length. The law specified that it applied to "sawed-off" guns, not normal guns. The law did indeed fail to apply to Rittenhouse, but that's because the law was poorly written, not because Rittenhouse was in any way innocent.

Erm, the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan worked just fine. The BIF bill, the first of two infrastructure bills, was signed less than a week ago, so it's far from clear where these "failures" are.

For over 100 years, the total death toll from the Civil War was considered to be 620k. A recent study (2012) puts it as 750k. Total deaths from COVID-19 stand at over 771k. Death rate in states with Republican governors is three times as great as in states with Democratic governors. Over 385k of those US deaths were unnecessary. The simple wearing of masks cuts the death rate by almost half.

The Freedom To Vote Act has been held back by the filibuster. The filibuster (not in the Constitution nor formalized into any law) has to go! Now!

If Senator Sinema thinks having the filibuster will protect much of anything, she's depending on an extremely weak reed! The Democrats "went nuclear" and made an exception, Republicans followed suit a few years later. I doubt a single voter left either party in response.

The problem with the dry riverbed that used to be the Zayandeh Rud river in Iran appears to be both human-caused climate change and Iranian government intervention. The nearby city of Isfahan is about as populous as Houston, TX.

Build Back Better bill passes in the House!
Woo hoo! Yeah, notice that all of the cheering is on one side of the aisle!

Kyle Rittenhouse was declared innocent. Basic problem with the Rittenhouse case is the Stand Your Ground laws. If you’re the guy who’s left standing, it’s your word against that of the dead guy.

MSNBC quoted this piece last night, saying that "Stand Your Ground" laws threatens to encourage people with guns to shoot first and/or more accurately.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy asks: “Are we better off today than we were 10 months ago? No.”
Actually, I would say that the US as a whole is very considerably better off! We have a president who actually takes the job seriously. Biden doesn’t treat the work of the presidency as something that interferes with his golf game or that gets in the way of his delivering harangues.

McCarthy went on and on and on for over eight hours! He was apparently trying to show he coud be he Speaker.

Why on earth does the US still have troops in Syria? What possible legitimate purpose could they be fulfilling?

Seriously, was any of the BBB bill “hidden” or were you simply too lazy to read and research the bill? Weisman is an NY Times correspondent.

"Matt Gaetz Claims Wile E. Coyote Will Be Indicted Next"
But Wile E. Coyote doesn’t resemble any actual person. The anime figure that the representation of Paul Gosar “killed” was very highly and specifically made to resemble Representative AOC. If the figure had just been a generalized, representative Congressperson and had that figure not resembled an actual, living Representative, there would have been no scandal.

There may have been liberals who enjoyed seeing Kathy Griffin holding up Trump's severed head, but she took s lot of grief for that and was tossed out of polite society for quite awhile. None of the other people listed were ptted on the back for how they attacked Republicns, eithe. No, there's no equivalence between Griffin/Trump and Gosar/AOC.

Tch, tch, tch! What is our “Our Failed Mainstream Media” to do? They’ve got this narrative of our president being doomed! Doomed, I tell you! But the economic news is so good!

Senator Manchin is really not impressing any of his Democratic colleagues with his fears about the Build Back Better bill causing inflation.

The guy who wrote the latest Trump-scandal book of the day, Johnathan Karl, shows himself to be an amazingly naïve, trusting soul.

National Review argues that if daycare is subsidized, so should other forms of childcare like nannies. Uh, no. Nannies run at a minimum of at least $32k a year. If you have a nanny, it's because you're wealthy and don't need any form of government subsidy.

So, finally, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy speaks up about Representative Gosar's hateful video, in which Gosar is depicted killing a co-worker, Representative AOC. McCarthy's statement was extremely short and underwhelming.

Huh! First Tribal Summit at the White House since the Obama Administration was held virtually. They hope to do it live next year. Results.

Do Republicans want payback for Trump's impeachment? Heck yeah! I still think this was one of the motivations for the Clinton impeachment. Republicans felt they had to avenge the threatened impeachment that drove Nixon out of office.

Job still just half-done, this is the signing of the BIF infrastructure bill, not the BBB, but yeah! Very cool! TFG couldn't even get an infrastructure bill started in four years and Biden got one out in under a year!

Axios is calling the busting of the primary Steele Dossier source the most egregious press failure evah! Our blogger reviews many vastly more serious ones over the past half-decade.

"Rittenhouse's mother: It was his life or the shooting victims' lives"
Except, of course, for the fact that Rittenhouse, with the assistance of his mom, knowingly, consciously and deliberately placed himself in a dangerous situation where "fight or flight" became necessary.

Are health decisions to be made by private companies or by individuals or by the state or the federal government? Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton can’t make up hi mind on the issue.

When Transportation Secretary Buttigieg claimed that the design of the road to Jones Beach was specifically engineered to keep Black people out, the blogger remarks that this was well-known back in the 60s.

Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn suggests the United States should be a theocracy.

Hmm, I suppose they technically count, but I have a really, really hard time putting Project Veritas into the same category of "free press" that requires First Amendment protections.

We were “the most prepared nation in the world” to deal with a pandemic, but TFG was in charge, so our death rate went through the roof!

As people pointed out at the beginning of the pandemic, science and authoritarianism are not compatible. TFG had to crush the science of how to survive the pandemic because objective facts could not be permitted to co-exist with his continual gaslighting of the American people.

In Kansas, anti-vaxxers are showing up to municipal meetings wearing yellow stars, portraying themselves as having equal footing with Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

Interesting stuff! Movie about Diana, Princess of Wales, after she had been in the palace for a decade. Like a beautiful bird in a gilded cage who’s so desperately tired and bored of it all that she keeps flying against the bars and breaking her wings.

Absolutely %$#@ing hilarious! The comedian Jimmy Kimmel takes real clips of Representative Boebert talking, shows them to passersby and tells them they're SNL clips, Then asks if SNL was being too mean! And yes, when he had gotten their comments, then he told them that was actually the Representative talking.

Thomas Hartmann does a good job with some leading questions for Newt Gingrich, then hitting Gingrich with (words to the effect of): “If poor people who get regular welfare checks produce rotten kids, how about 'trust fund babies' who are born into wealth?” Gingrich is slick and immediately comes up with all sorts of conditions that don’t apply to poor kids but essentially makes it clear that yeah, kids born into wealthy families aren’t any better than kids born into welfare families.

I read a lot of military history when I was young and noted that great generals and admirals tended to come from at least reasonably wealthy backgrounds. Napoleon Bonaparte was a Sicilian aristocrat, Erwin Rommel’s father headed the local government council, Horatio Nelson’s grandfather commanded a ship, Hannibal of Carthage was the son of a general, Chester Nimitz’s grandfather owned a hotel. During my own time in the Navy, I was much more impressed by those who came from the middle class than I was by those who came from an impoverished background. I agree with Hartmann that it’s better for everyone to have a reasonably decent life to start off with.

Heh! The Former Guy weeps bitter, salty tears over the passing of the BIF (the first, smaller infrastructure bill).

Yeah, this is quite bizarre. The Former Guy claims to have an "Envoy Ambassador" who is making agreements with other countries. Saw a piece earlier that says that the agreement he claimed to have made does not exist.

Very important aspect of environmental policy is that it has everything to do with class issues.

OMG!!! "School board members in Virginia are literally recommending that we burn books"

Hey, remember that brave, young, pro-education, Afghan woman, Malala Yousafzai? Yep, she just got married!

Judge rules that current president can decide on whether or not Executive Privilege applies. TFG is outta luck! Awesome quote: "Presidents are not kings. and Plaintiff is not President."

A very, very good and necessary ruling! This is not a ruling that, in the opinion of the judge, needs any further litigation. Nothing holds the Archives back from turning over all of the materials right away.

The WaPo publishes a profile of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell with an interesting statement that McConnell is increasingly seen as a Trump stooge "not a leader with his own vision.” Erm, what "vision" has McConnell ever represented? His entire toolkit consists of blocking and delaying what Democrats want to do. That's it.

Gosar defended the video as "just a cartoon.'" Actually, though, cartoons showing real people can land you in jail. Possession of cartoon child pornography showing a close likeness to an actual child is illegal in the US and the law is even broader in the UK.

Representative AOC answers Representative Gosar over his deranged and violent fantasies concerning her. For complaints about Gosar, the @GOPLeader and your own Representative are the ones to talk to first. If Kevin McCarthy fails to act, then it’s up to @SpeakerPelosi.

Problem with Senator Hawley's J'accuse is that yes, the left insisted that people had to stay home during the pandemic before we had vaccines to y'know keep people alive! The second is, what does he think the Build Back Better bill is all about? If the government spends lots of money, that will result in lots of jobs! We discovered that in the 1930s and it's never been shown to have been wrong!

Jeanine Pirro and Eric Trump are saying Biden is incompetent. Erm, Eric's daddy couldn't get an infrastructure bill passed in four years! Biden got one passed in under a year!

Federal judges have a thorny question to consider when they sentence military veterans who stormed the U.S. Capitol. Do they deserve leniency because they served their country or tougher punishment because they swore an oath to defend it?

Not a difficult question at all. As a military veteran myself, I vote in favor of more punishment! Vets have to live up to higher standards!

The crew here first mentioned that Aaron Rodgers was taking monoclonal antibodies. Cool. I’ve heard those were effective. But then they said Rodgers was taking Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine. Those are quack cures! It’s all very fine and well to check many sources, but if you don’t have a relevant background in what you’re researching, you can’t distinguish between quacks and serious professionals!

I don't do my own hair. I have a hairdresser for that. I don't do my own housecleaning. I have a house-cleaner for that. I don't do my own medical research. I have a doctor for that!

Good! Aaron Rodgers loses his contract to be a spokesperson for a healthcare company!

Dowd uses the term "woke." This is a very excellent point! Do the journalists using “woke” as a description really know what they’re talking about?

Maureen Dowd hasn’t changed over the years. She likes her men big and tough and manly. If they’re wannabe fascists? Eh, whatevuh!

TFG: "If [Democrats] would spend half of that energy fighting China, Russia, Iran and even the European Union..."

Wow! So The Former Guy's idea of foreign policy success is to battle...erm...pretty much everybody! Gee. We lost such a great leader when he lost this past November! /snark

The Eternals movie wasn't bad. Having read the comics, I can assure y’all that the movie and the comics are only sort of related. Gemma Chan/Sersi really doesn’t resemble the comics version at all. Angelina Jolie/Thena is reasonably close and other characters are in-between.

The two infrastructure bills, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill gets passed by the House. The Build back Better bill is going to wait for a CBO score.

And yes, this is very true. The very term “Infrastructure Week” became a punchline under TFG. A really sad one.

Senator Joe Manchin says the US is a "center-right" country. I questioned this when he first said it. Yes, when people identify themselves ideologically, they always use vague, mushy, unclear terms. In terms of spcific issues and the people we vote for? No, I don't see a "center-right" country at all!

BREAKING: The teenage son of Virginia Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin twice tried to cast a ballot on Election Day despite being underage,

Keep n mind that election integrity has been a major deal for the Governor-Elect of Virginia!

[By t]he time the NYT realizes that you have to fight fire with fire rather than some mythical Bipartisan Nirvana the world will be left in ashes and mud.

Just finished watching MSNBC's Civil War. It's quite good. They look through the eyes of students to see what's been going on since the actual battles. At one point, a politician asks with a bit of a smirk "What do they wants me to do about it? Slavery was ended a long time ago." The answer is made very clear over the next few minutes. Stop glorifying the Confederacy. Stop romanticizing the "Lost Cause." Take down the statues of Confederate generals on horseback. This would not be a final answer, but it would be a good start.

Israel recently announced that six peace and human rights groups were actually terrorists. It then produced a classified report demonstrating all of the evidence. That report has now been completely discredited.

I agree with Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, Senator Manchin thinks the country is center-right, probably because his home state of West Virginia is center-right, not because Manchin knows any public beyond his own. Problem is clearly that Manchin enormously overestimates how smart and informed he is. He clearly believes he's "cracked the code" of politics when he clearly hasn't got a clue.

I feel really bad for the women of Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover, but still think the US was making things worse every month we remained. These poor women are between a rock and a hard place.

"America's story is at stake in the fight over critical race theory"
Right. Because back during the 1930s, when Gone With The Wind was made, the Civil War was taught in a way that sympathized with the South. We realize today that the South didn't deserve any sympathy.

Ooh! That could be cool! Gal Gadot/Wonder Woman wants to diversify her public image a bit, she's in talks to play the evil queen in a live-action Snow White!

The 6 January conspirators rented a hotel room with a large common area that they used for planning. With that and related travel expenses, they spent $225K. Problem for any claim of Executive Privilege is that they charged the Trump campaign and not the administration. That makes their claim much harder to defend.

A large part of the Virginia Governor's race was about Critical Race Theory (CRT), a subject that is only taught in colleges. By describing it as something that parents of school-age children were legitimately concerned about, the media surrendered to the propagandists.

Virginia's Governor's race was a loss to Democrats, but plenty of other winners of Tuesday’s election.

Wow! Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell packs two outright lies and two deceptive half-truths into a single 61-word paragraph about voting rights! That's gottta be a gaslighting record!

QAnon believers crowd the Dealey Plaza in Dallas TX, believing that JFK Jr. will appear and become Trump’s vice-president.

MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace takes a look at the WaPo’s report on 6 January attack on the Capitol. They calculate that 187 minutes passed before the then-President Trump called the attack off.

We just have no idea what Senator Manchin stands for or what his goals are. No one will ever consider making any sort of deal with him again because he’s completely blown all of his credibility.

Meaning: Trump's tactic was entirely successful. By constantly attacking the FBI, he caused them to adopt a defensive crouch and to be silent when the nation really needed them to speak up.

Elle Mystal is Justice Correspondent for The Nation. Mystal has thoughts on how men Justices relate to women, both lawyers and fellow Justices, during Supreme Court oral arguments.

NY Times keeps presenting Republican partisans as though they were just ordinary swing voters. As this keeps happening over and over again, this is clearly deliberate, undertaken with malice and forethought.

Update (30 Nov): CEO of Walmart Thanks Biden Administration for successful efforts on resolving supply chain problem .

A jury has found Kyle Rittenhouse not guilty on all counts in his murder trial connected to the shootings of three people during unrest in Kenosha during the summer of 2020.

The philosophy of “other people’s money” is that it ignores the Keynesian idea that money very dynamically goes back and forth. Even in a Medieval context, wealth is more in harvested crops than in gold and jewels. Growing crops is a repeated activity. Produce in excess of what is needed for survival is what wealth really consists of. A stable society that regularly produces an excess becomes a powerful one.

Awfully generou of her, considering that the “negotiations” essentially consisted of Sinema or Senator Manchin holding a gun to the head of the hostage (that is, they suggested thay'd refuse to vote for the final package) and demanding that certain portions of the Build Back Better plan be removed.

WaPo goes out of its way to not understand why the attack on the Capitol on 1/6 happened.

Ahh! So nice and refreshing to read about a US President getting along with foreign leaders! These two discussed serious subjects in detail.

Huh! The internet goes as far back as ‘69? Makes sense that it took into the 80s to start to become a thing and started getting popular in the 90s.

"Fox News falsely blames Biden for legal fallout over Trump immigration policy"
Wow! Incredibly heartless, vicious monsters first tolerated Trump’s hateful treatment of migrants who came to this country because their lives were at risk in their own country. The Biden Administration has taken on the many legal cases that were initiated by the Trump Administration’s despicable actions and negotiated reasonable settlements. Of course Republicans are furious and bad-mouth the kids ad their parents who were separated from each other some more!
BTW, I don’t understand the assertion that US authorities “didn’t know who the parents were.” The parents were with their children. There was no reason whatsoever to have separated them in the first place.

Yep! I completely, absolutely, 100% agree with Senator Manchin on this! If we want a liberal agenda, we need to elect more liberals so that we can make his vote irrelevant!

BTW, one of the problems is that in the late 1800s, Republicans founded a number of big, but relatively empty states in order to push back against the Southern states in Congress. Today, those empty states give the Rs an outsized advantage.

Zuckerberg says a “killer use case” of the metaverse is wearing augmented reality glasses when you are interacting with people in real life that allow you to continue text messaging people without people in real life noticing

This reminds me of a scene in an Isaac Asimov SF novel. Our hero confronts the villain. A confederate of our hero whispers into our heroes earpiece. The villain suddenly punches the hero, knocking the earpiece out of his ear. How did the villain know our hero was listening to an earpiece? Our hero cocked his head! That indicated to the villain that he was listening to instructions. Perhaps some people could do what Zuckerberg describes but I really doubt most people could.

...in Hawkeye’s latest trailer, you can see how quickly the two archers shrug their shoulders and decide that they’re better off working together.

Senator Mitt Romney posts a phot showing how closely he and Senator Kirsten Sinema are working together. They apparently thought the photo was humorous.

TFG had a letter published in the Wall St. Journal claiming the election was rigged. The following day, they published a fact-check piece in another part of the paper. This is a total waste of time! If you're going to correct somethig, you need to do it on the same page or within the same TV presentation.

Update (30 Oct); Heh! No middle ground! You either support Our Glorious Leader or you oppose him! Trump blasts the WSJ for having run the fact-check piece.

"Congresswoman, what I can tell you is that there needs to be both a demand and a supply for clean energy…"

EEP! Wrong answer! There is a demand for "energy," period! We would prefer that it be clean, but energy is what we want.

Representative AOC takes a deep dive into the BIF (The first of two nfrastructure bills). The text of the bill is publicly available, but reporters need to publicize it!

Conditions in meatpacking plants in May 2020 were well...about what a lot of people thought they were at the time. It’s good that a subcommittee is examining those reports, though.

Various people on the right wing have argued that BLM actions after the brutal murder of George Floyd amounted to a "Civil War" and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has argued that $1 Trillion in damages were caused (insurance claims amounted to $1 to $2 billion). and that Representative AOC enabled them all. Our blogger goes into great detail on those charges.

Not a fan of Dr. Birx at all, I think she's at least derelict in her actions during 2020, but yeah. She noted at the time that if two similar metropolitan areas had different policies, like mask mandates, that would make a difference in the Covid death rate of 10 to 15 percent.

Personally, I stopped supporting Julian Assange when the Democratic National Committee emails were released in 2016, as that struck me as a non-journalistic, entirely political act.
Issue in this piece is whether US prison conditions are so hard that Assange's life is at risk. Seems kind of doubtful.

The Senate is a suit & tie kinda place. Was Senator Sinema basically saying “eff y’all” by wearing a blue jeans outfit while presiding over the Senate for the day? One blogger in another piece suggested she’s showing off lesbian culture.

Facebook took down an ad that made a plainly false claim. Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and two other Republican senators complained. Problem is, Mark Zuckerberg initially ruled in favor of the false claim.
Facebook needs federal regulation and probably to be broken up.

Is the press corps "soft" on the current Press Secretary Jen Psaki? Are they disinclined to ask her tough questions? I'd say that dimwits like Peter Doocy provide liberals with all sorts of comedy as their toughest questions are turned against them and they're made to look like idiots.
At the end of the interview, Sean Spicer complains that the Biden Administration has people in it that aren't qualified. Bwah-hah-hah! As though Jared and Ivanka were the slightest bit qualified to be where they were!

There are 5k discovered exoplanets (planets outside our solar system) and 28 million light years away, an exoplanet outside of our galaxy. Diameter of our own galaxy is estimated to be 100k to 200k light years.

We told you! When Texas turned against abortion, we said it wouldn’t be long before other “deviant” behavior was tackled as well.

Generally, paying attention to the views and arguments of both sides of a dispute is a good thing. But liberal critics (of which I'm one) have noticed that many press outlets have taken "BothSides" to a ridiculous extreme. Vaccine resistance is an example of that. The number of anti-vaxxers is under 5%, but the media is now insisting that we should sympathetically consider their deranged nonsense.

Mike Lindell promises that he's really got the evidence now, that the Supreme Court will unanimously declare that TFG has to be returned to office, etc. If that sounds familiar, it's because he said the same thing back in August and produced bupkis.

Update (29 Nov): Bwah-hah-hah!!! Lindell's telethon was a complete, utter and absolute flop! Fellow figures the audience for Lindell on YouTube was about 90 people.

Heh! A pro-Trumper makes the case that the head of the RNC is the culprit that made Lindell look like an idiot!

Billionaires with grand visions of new cities dancing in their heads. Meanwhile, the state pf Mississippi has a 20% poverty rate, meaning the rich guys could improve on what’s already there instead of building something all-new, fancy and glamorous.

Where were these oh-so-helpful billionaires during April of last year, when food lines were stretching for miles? Yes, it was wonderful that the government purchased excess food that farms couldn’t sell as the restaurants were all closed down and then distributed the excess food to those in need, but it sure would have been nice to have had the billionaires pitching in to have set up new food lines so that the few that were operating wouldn’t have been so crowded.

At 127 meters, the new yacht belonging to Jeff Bezos is a bit smaller than a Navy frigate (which are generally 130-150 meters long). A frigate is a bit smaller and less capable than a destroyer. Both are used as escorts and patrol craft.

What exactly is the point of this story? Is the NY Times trying to get us to sympathize with these ignorant, self-centered idiots?

Extensive piece on the shooting at the film set for Rust. Was the shooting Baldwin’s fault? Ehh, as an actor, no. But, as a producer, his being cheap was part of the problem.

Meet The Press is a relic of a lazy, low-stakes era. They bring on sides A and B, ask them both to state their positions, then wrap it all up and go home with no attempt to reconcile who's telling the truth and who's lying.

Back during the Reagan Administration, I agreed with a piece that said the word "terrorist" essentially just means "bad guy." It's a vague, fuzzy term that has the same meaning that "bandit" did back when the US was chasing down Pancho Villa (bad guy during the 1920s). Israel has now adopted the term for six human rights organizations.

With the filibuster, 41 senators, representing 21% of the population, can block legislation that the rest of us want.

Huh! Funny. Ya treat workers like disposable commodities, not caring whether they live or die and (*enraged splutter*) they up and quit on you!

When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.

Coal hit its peak in 2008. It's highly unlikely to ever return. Senator Manchin could follow the example of a previous West Virginia senator, Robert Byrd, and get piles of cash for his state to transition away from coal.

Five of Senator Sinema's aides quit over her refusal to support the Democratic Party. They confirm what a lot of us thought, that she's devoted to getting donor money, regardless of how that might hurt her constituents. Her response was a lot of gibble-gabble that effectively said nothing.

Senator Kyrsten Sinema in March of this year not only voted down an increase in the minimum wage, she very emphatically did so, using a highly theatrical thumbs down gesture. Now she’s calling attention to “women still do not get equal pay for equal work.” Kinda difficult to 1. Claim that women should be paid equal to men, while at the same time 2. Claiming that all wages need to be kept down!

The other members of The View sound as though they're talking from lived experience. When Condoleezza Rice talks about teaching about race so as to not make white children feel bad, she sounds like she's just repeating buzzwords that some PR guy told her to repeat.
For white children to not feel bad when taught about slavery, seems to me that's a "micro" issue, one that should be handled at the level of the individual classroom.

Right-wing anti-vaxxer Dan Bongino has challenged Cumulus Radio to fire him over his moronically idiotic stance that his vulnerability to Covid (and thus his capability of spreading it to others) is his own private, personal business. I've included the email address to Cumulus Radio below so that y'all can urge Cumulus to do the right thing.

Update (5 Nov): Not only did Cumulus Radio blink and keep Bongino on, he's now "...Creating Fund for Cumulus Radio Employees Who Lose Job Over Vax Mandate."

...she contributed to a toxic work environment and I think you let her off the hook. She pushed racism, disinformation, and she defended insurrectionists in Michigan.

There's no question that a majority of the House will vote to hold Steve Bannon in criminal contempt. But there's a potential long-term danger. If most Republicans do not vote to enforce their subpoena, then further down the road, they'll find that Congressional subpoenas are considered just political footballs, to be accepted or rejected as people see fit.

In a rare show of bipartisanship on the House floor, the committee's Democratic chairman, Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, led the floor debate along with Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, one of two Republicans on the panel. Still, the vote was 229-202 with all but nine GOP lawmakers who voted saying “no."

The effect of Senator Manchin’s veto on the US development of green energy is very bad in and of itself, for the entire world. But in market terms, China has long since decided on a green energy strategy, so US producers are going to fall behind in green technology.

It’s important to keep in mind that Manchin is not acting alone. The Republican Party, by refusing to take any role is passing the Build Back Better plan, makes Manhin and Senator Sinema far more powerful than they otherwise would be.

The world respects us once again. Under TFG, our approval rating crashed down to 30%. Under Biden, it’s climbed to 49%!

Woo hoo! Supreme Court reaffirms its ruling of 1905, that for the government to impose a vaccine mandate is perfectly permissible.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene was concerned by a poll she saw saying that nearly 10% of Republican Georgia voters were planning on skipping the next election if Georgia did not hold a "forensic audit" to reassure them that the 2020 election was conducted fairly. As the blogger says, the number of people who stay home in 2022 is probably exaggerated, "But they're not zero, either." So yes, Taylor Greene is right to be concerned.

Fox News guy loses it over DC Comics changing its Superman slogan from “Truth, Justice and the American Way” to 'Truth, Justice and a Better Tomorrow.”
Wonder Woman changed her costume from a very American star-spangled one to a plain red and blue one in 2016, specifically to be less American and more of an international figure.
Ehh, Fox News probably complained about that as well.

Sorry to hear this. My immediate thought on hearing that Colin Powell had died was of the multi-volume treatment on how to occupy Iraq after the victory. The younger George Bush and his people were so intimidated by the size of the report, they promptly filed it away.

And then there are those who aren't so star-struck by Colin Powell. This fellow is the one who tossed his shoes at the younger George Bush during a press conference in 2008.

An assessment. Yeah, I heard about them after his speech on how dangerous Iraq was, but I was very highly skeptical of the "mobile weapons labs" when I first heard about them.

Hoo boy! Now that Colin Powell is reported to have died of Covid complications, right-wingers are saying vaccines are useless! Keep in mind that people over the age of 65 need a booster shot. Powell was 85. Powell also had other physical problems that contributed to his death.
For instance, Powell had "multiple myeloma, or blood cancer."

Good piece, but I think they go overboard in blaming the recently-deceased Colin Powell for the Iraq War. Congress had, months earlier, authorized the AUMF, which then served as the functional equivalent of a declaration of war. Certainly there were members of the press who took Powell’s presentation as absolute proof positive that Iraq was a deadly menace that had to be stomped on immediately. Could Powell have resigned? Would that have prevented the war? The piece makes a strong argument that could have been the case.

Politico twists itself into knots trying to ignore that it's only Republicans who don't care abut vaccine mandates.

The actress who played Brienne of Tarth on Game of Thrones will play Lucifer on The Sandman. Lucifer did not have a very major role in the comic. They’re expecting to release that as a series in 2022.

Wow! The priorities on these people! Sure, it’s important for people to work at their jobs, but y’know, it also kinda helps if they survive and don’t catch Covid! Sure, the price of bacon is important, but so is y’know, not burning up the planet!

Both parents die of COVID-19, leaving four children orphaned. Yeah, this is a sad story, but the shot was free and as time went on and the lines shrank, became easier and easier to get quickly. I got mine in April and there were some crowds, but by June, the shot took maybe a half-hour or less out of your day

More on Senators Manchin and Sinema. Yeah, they fit the definition of “mercenary” pretty well: “serving merely for pay or sordid advantage: venal also: greedy.”

New York Magazine interviews Stephanie Grisham, the Press Secretary who never gave a press conference. I didn’t know this tidbit from her tell-all book:

Trump called her “to instruct her to defend the size of his anatomy after Stormy Daniels claimed he was penilely deficient.”

Uhhh, granted Grisham and Trump were both mature adults, but why on earth would she ever have seen his penis? Remember, she was working directly for the First Lady!

Ivanka was also doing her "my father" wants this and "my father" thinks that routine, making it impossible for staff members to argue a contrary view.

Grisham goes to describe the complete and utter cluster$%#@ that results when an administration tries to put together a major speech in just a few hours with no clear idea as to what they’re trying to say and no coordination between agencies.

Maggie Haberman: "Bill Clinton’s office calls him President Clinton too."
True, but Clinton is fully aware of the fact and accepts that he's no longer president. Trump? He sounds increasingly delusional, claiming to have mountains of evidence that he was cheated out of a second term. There is, of course, no such evidence.

Problem is that Supreme Court Justice Breyer doesn't mention that Obama should have appointed the successor to Antonin Scalia and Biden should have appointed the successor to Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The fact that they were both appointed by Trump has seriously unbalanced the Court. No, the current Court does not represent all Americans properly!

This is good to hear! Iran has long been involved in the war between Saudi Arabia and Yemen, though it’s never been clear that Yemen was so dependent on Iranian aid that it would collapse without it. Iran’s new president has resumed talks with Saudi Arabia after the last president transitioned out of office.

Kind of a problem with Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s thought that America should “have a national divorce.” If states like Texas were secure in the belief that most of their people would agree to join a rebellion, then why is that state so energetically pursuing voter suppression?

I’m confused. Are you not a journalist with access? Isn’t it your job to find this out and report it and not snark tweet?

Well, that's good! A Texas school superintendent realizes that...uh...no, there really aren't "two sides" to the Holocaust!

Senate Minority Leader McConnell uses the 1987 Robert Bork nomination to justify the 2016 embargo of Merrick Garland. Nope! Wrong answer! I paid close attention to the Bork nomination as it happened. I agree withe the blogger. Bork was "manifestly unfit" to serve on the Supreme Court.

Yeah, I'm not the slightest bit impressed by the Biden Administration on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. The conflict this past May has produced a real sea change in that issue that they don't appear to have really understood.

Ah. I had seen #LaurenBoebertIsSoDumb trending on twitter. That's why! Her question was: Are "edge" weapons (Bows and arrows, swords, knives, etc.) lethal? Of course they are. That's how people fought from well before the Egyptian pyramids were built and still do today. Problem is, guns today are considerably more lethal! There's also a big difference between kinds of guns! An AR-15 will kill vastly many more people than a six-round pistol will.

As with the whole problem over Democrats fighting over infrastructure negotiations, where Republicans had no role to play, journalists from mainstream media are heavily dependent of Republican sources. Why don't major newspapers quote Democrats on stories involving Democrats?

New UVA study finds...well...what a lot of people already knew. That the lynching of Black people and Confederate monuments were deeply related to one another.

This reporter shares my alarm at recent developments. A real problem is that with the press “They focus on optics and strategy rather than policy and people.”

After having done more than any other single person in America to degrade our democracy and to pave the way for Trump's authoritarianism, Senate Minority Leader McConnell is finding his star fading badly and his power dissipating.

Good thread for those thinking about Civil War II. It's a whole lot more complex than just who has the guns.

Twitter thread on Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and how he appears to see himself as just applying common sense while everyone else sees him as being very highly political.

When Biden took office,he promised to stop aiding Saudi Arabia in its war on Yemen. Has he? Ehh, to some extent, yes. Lots of ways the Saudis are still being assisted.

For the first time in 40 years, lunar rocks are collected and returned to Earth. They show that lava flowed only 2 billion years ago. The age of the Moon is 4.5 billion years.

Another broken aspect of US policy. This reminds me of reading that officers were rotated in and out of Vietnam every six months. It took an officer about four months to learn what he was doing and for the casualty rate for his unit to go down to what experienced officers usually had. As a result, units had competent leadership for only around four months a year. Sounds from this piece as though we'll soon have a gap of at least a year between the time a president takes office and when we have a fully-staffed foreign service team!

...Make America Great Again, Again PAC is now calling for 2020 election audits of all 50 states.

Complete and utter horsecrap! Months and months of investigations have shown pretty much zero irregularities and even less fraud. This is a completely fake "concern."
And yes, it's quite interesting that she's being filmed with a filter that makes he seem like a white person.

Why isn’t there a NY Times on the right wing? A fairly intriguing question that only someone who doesn’t understand right-wing media would ask. The NY Times is what I’d call “Conservative Democrat,” a paper that like politicians like Joe Manchin or a bit further back, like Joe Lieberman.

Ainsley Earhardt of Fox News is constantly citing the opinions or obsrvations of friends of hers. Very interesting just how many friends she has!

Former Representative Michele Bachmann thinks that because the government is enforcing vaccine mandates, that makes this the worst government of all time!

Representative Scalise complains that Democrats aren't working with Republicans on their big infrastructure bill. From 2011 to 2020, the Rs have held the House, Senate, Presidency or some combination or even all three. They never produced an infrastructure plan because they just didn't care! now they want to be treated as full partners, because...I dunno. Why DO they suddenly want to join in on the project?

“Facebook has suppressed content posted by Palestinians and their supporters speaking out about human rights issues in Israel and Palestine,” said Deborah Brown, senior digital rights researcher and advocate at Human Rights Watch.

It’s pretty obvious that Lindell (the MyPillow guy & conspiracy buff) is taking about clerical errors. I mean seriously? Really? Someone deliberately meant to type in that a voter is 850 years old?

Rather interesting to read Senate Minority Leader McConnell's letter to the President on the debt-ceiling "crisis." Reminds me that when the then-Secretary of State Colin Powell spoke in favor of going to war with Iraq, I had missed the speech and asked a family member if it was worth my time to review it. He said that the speech made sense if you had absolutely no other information on the issue.

Good! President Biden is not supporting TFG’s assertion of Executive Privilege!

I'd just like to know what Senator Manchin would do if we arrive at a stark choice between getting rid of the filibuster (or of doing a carve-out) or of permitting a disaster to happen to the world econmy by permitting American debt to be called into question. And y'know, other democracies appear to get by just fine without it. The House seems to work perfectly well without it.

Yeah, the CNN team is a bit too "BothSides" here. The really essential fact here is that the debt-ceiling "crisis" was entirely self-inflicted by the GOP. Senator Manchin is not a romantic hero, he has nothing to despair about and Democrats have nothing to thank Republicans for.

Senator Manchin’s overly dramatic reaction gets the attention of people. Why? Senate Majority Leader Schumer’s reaction was entirely understandable as the debt ceiling “crisis” was entirely unnecessary and reflected miscalculations on the part of the GOP. Seriously, this is theater criticism masquerading as news analysis.

Executive Privilege does not apply to Steve Bannon as he wasn't working in government on 6 January, he was a podcaster. He has absolutely zero legal protection from being subpoenaed.

The Houthis of Yemen have certainly committed war crimes, but as the Saudis are the invaders engaging in a war of aggression, the Saudi war crimes are more serious. Does Iran play a role, helping Yemen? Yes, but Iran’s role is quite limited. This is not a proxy fight against Iran.

One of the very deep and serious problems with Senator Manchin’s position is that, coal, like Fotomat and Blockbuster video of the 1980s, is that it's simply no longer a viable economic strategy. Like The Former Guy, Manchin is trying to revive a dead horse.

The younger George Bush and the people under him (Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, etc.) thought they were oh-so clever, manipulating the media to lie us into a war of choice. The long-term effect? A pretty permanent loss of trust. Trust in government/media went down by 10% and has never recovered. This is biting us in the ass as a nation as we're having a hard time convincing people to get vaccinated.

Well, that's pretty cool! People have been trying to develop a vaccine for malaria for over 100 years!

Aww! Poor Senate Minority Leader McConnell just can't win for losing! He made a really stupid gamble that Democrats would fold to a "trick" so that Republicans would have had an extra talking point for the 2022 mid-terms. When it was clear that Democrats wouldn't fold, he realized there were no good options and folded. Now Republicans hate him, too!

Senator Ted Cruz makes it even harder for Republicans to recover from their own "trick!"

Senator Manchin’s view on the filibuster has gone way over the edge into insanity. He’s literally saying he’s willing to risk the economy of the world rather than risk the loss of the filibuster.

School shootings are no longer news today, but these texts are truly heartbreaking!

Hell, sounds to me like a great argument foe eliminating the filibuster entirely!

Senator Manchin asks that both Senators Schumer and McConnell work together to solve the debt limit problem. Which essentially means that the fireman is asked to work with the pyromaniac because, y'know, both of them are honorable and because the pyromania just needs someone to, I dunno, listen to his frustrations or something.

Now, Fiona Hill’s memoir is one that I’m inclined to respect as she was never a Trumper. Saw her in an interview. She’s very smart about tyranny as she studied Russia for a long time.

Are “parents screaming about ‘critical race theory’ as just ‘angry and concerned parents’"? Obviously not, because Critical Race Theory is an astroturf campaign. None of these parents knows what CRT is except that it has something to do with Black people in schools.

Yeah, I ind Senator Manchin's arguments entirely unpersuasive. Why are we spending trillions ad trillions of dollars? Because we need to! There is a very real need for those dollars to be spent and the bogeyman of inflation isn't the real and present danger that Manhin thinks it is. Yes, senators should vote their conscience, but they also need to be team players!

The mainstream media has long seen the political parties in terms of Goldilocks and the three bowls of porridge. One's too hot, one's too cold, the one in the middle is just right. With the extremes of the parties, the Freedom Caucus and the Progressive Caucus, both being bad, they must be just two versions of the same phenomenon. As the blogger here points out, actually the two caucuses are very different.

This is nice. After reassuring us that Brett Kavanaugh would respect Roe vs Wade, Senator Collins is now on record as deploring the recent Supreme Court decision to gut Roe without actually repealing it. No indication of her apologizing for supporting Kavanaugh in the first place.

Senator Kyrsten Sinema makes lots of noise here about “trust.” Problem is, the President, the Speaker, the Senate Majority Leader and the whole Progressive Caucus were all under the impression that everyone was united over the proposal to sign both the big reconciliation bill, the Build Back Better plan and the smaller bipartisan bill, the BIF, at the same time. Moderate like Sinema and Senator Manchin suddenly and without explanation, decided they wanted the BIF to be passed immediately, which would mean progressives could not count on them to vote for the BBB plan. The piece here gives absolutely no reason whatever to feel that the moderates could have been trusted.

The NY Times imagines splits in the Democratic Party that simply don't exist. There is no solidly blue/safe seats vs purple/unsaf seats split. It's a few moderates who are the problem.

Is Senator Kyrsten Sinema the new John McCain? No. McCain stood up for regular people. Sinema stands up for wealthy corporations. Big difference!

Senator Marsha Blackburn says the Build Back Better plan is a bold leap towards socialism. Our historian points out that folks said the same thing about Eisenhower's interstate highway system

Whoa! Micro-apples, which can withstand conditions in Siberia. Maybe four to six would constitute a full, regular apple.

Newswoman Lara Logan (Fox News, of course) charges the UN with producing a step-by-step guide for foreigners to enter the US. In order for the guide to be effective, it would need to be available on paper and in multiple languages. Y'know, I somehow have the feeling that if this guide existed anywhere other than in Ms. Logan's head, she wuld have had a copy of it in her hand.

The two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian problem is a nice idea in theory, but many, many changes need to be made for Palestinians to have a working state of their own.

So the vote on the “roads and bridges” (the little infrastructure) bill has been put off until tomorrow. Seems to me the two moderate senators who are holding everything up (Manchin & Sinema) want to be trusted, but have given progressives absolutely no reason to trust them.

Whew! Katie Couric has some response to the Matt Lauer accusations that make it clear that she really needs to see a counselor of some sort about her reaction to those accusations before she puts them in a book!

So even though Senator Manchin gave a super-low figure for what he wanted to see in the big reconciliation bill, he spoke with West Virginian citizens who had paddled up to his yacht and agreed with all of the priorities in the bill! And the bill is super-popular in his home state, getting up to 70% approval! So it’s a mystery as to what his game is.

For the first time that our blogger can remember, the issue of how Israel treats Palestinians was raised in Congress. Unfortunately, there's a knee-jerk reaction on the part of defenders of Israel to equate, conflate and confuse criticism of the policies of the state of Israel with antisemitism.

The essential point made in this meme, that Nazi book-burning had highly specific targets, is accurate. The Holocaust Encyclopedia, contains a listing of the specific works that were targeted.

Huh! First Hope Hicks and now SD Governor Kristi Noem have been sleeping with Corey Lewandowski. What do they see in him? Beats the hell outta me! BTW, Hicks wasn't married, but both Lewandowski and Noem are. And yes, both have multiple children.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is clearly someone who has never had a serious conversation about meaningful issues with anyone outside of her own social circle. She has obviously never learned how to exchange thoughts with anyone she disagrees with. Subtitle to the piece:

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) on Tuesday defended her recent shouting matching with Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-MI) over the issue of abortion.

Just finished watching an episode of Batwoman*, a show where a bartender fights crime with the help of some capable assistants. Trying to decide who is in more of a fantasy world, Batwoman or Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch, who feels that women today can easily balance having children with any kind of career!

*Batwoman and Batgirl were both active in the 50s and 60s. By the time the Batman TV show started in the mid-60s, Batwoman was more or less gone. Batwoman was revived in the 2010s and made her way to the TV screen, where a Black woman has replaced the white one.

The Covid lab-leak theory always required very extensive proof. The “Occam’s Razor” idea holds that simpler theories are generally more likely to be true. The natural evolution theory of Covid is a lot simpler than a lab leak.

Okay, so it seems less than 1% of the workforce will refuse to get vaccinated. Sounds like a lot of opportunity for sensible people and good riddance to the "romantic rebels" who refused!

It’s terrible to have to fire large numbers of people for not being vaccinated, but again, when most people are faced with losing their jobs, most of them will do the right thing.

"Hannity And Gingrich Just Want The Country To Burn"
During the four years under TFG (The Former Guy), Democrats were completely frozen out of all policy-making. They were permitted to play absolutely no role whatsoever. Ya know why Republicans are frozen out today? Because they're boycotting any role in policy-making! Also, they lost the 2020 election! Democrats have a mandate to carry out their preferred policies!

The National Fraternal Order of Police is 100% correct here! Senator Tim Scott was in negotiations with Democratic Senators to reform police practices. Scott bowed with the utterly BS reason of the clunky phrase "Defund the Police."

Supreme Court’s approval rating is down to 40% now. With the Court having been constructed the way it has been (Thanks, Minority Leader McConnell), a majority on the Court is not a majority in the country!

This discussion thread demonstrates that the problems of the NY Times and its credibility is much deeper than any reorganization plan will fix.

When reading the Republican complaint about Biden here, please keep in mind that the Republican Party as a whole, decided in 2009 to adopt a posture of total, scorched-earth non-ccoperation with Democrats!

Conservative, Never-Trumper columnist Jennifer Rubin asks the right question. If the Build Back Better plan is so popular, why aren't Republicans supporting it? Rubin then asks why reporters keep expecting Biden to answer that!

Another right-wing Never-Trumper speaks out. Summary of Robert Kagan’s article that examines how TFG is leading America towards the abyss.

Okay, but according to Pew Research, the wealthy are pulling in 48% of the income. Middle income people made 62% of income in 1970 and in 2018, made only 43%.

No, I agree with Jake Tapper. Senator Toomey is full of #$@%. Raising the debt ceiling is not about future expenditures, it’s about money that’s already been spent. And yes, the Republican Party is threatening to default and yes, that would send the world economy crashing.
Did the economy take off after the tax cut? No, the economy continued to improve after Obama left office. The same trend lines continued at the same rate.

Conservatives see every liberal economic move, including of course, Biden's Build Back Better plan, as one more step on the road to socialism, never mind that we've been trudging on this road for 80 years now (Social Security was "The beginning of the road to socialism" don'cha know?). Any move to help regular folks is always seen in dire, apocalyptic terms.

Cool! The series "Sandman" (Dream and his siblings The Endless) will be on Netflix next year.

The PLO officially recognized Israel in 1993. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President in the West Bank (Hamas runs Gaza), has now given Israel one year to withdraw or he’ll withdraw that recognition and go to the “International Criminal Court, seeking a ruling on the legality of the occupation of the territory of the state of Palestine and deciding on the responsibility of the UN and the world in this regard.”

Former Representative Tulsi Gabbard claims that presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was “the only one using Russia to take down American politicians…” The blogger goes over the considerable evidence that was public at the time indicating that Gabbard was indeed an agent of the Kremlin.

For MSNBC's Chuck Todd to see Meghan McCain as anything but a nepotism hire, someone who never would have been hired on her own merits, says really awful things about Todd!

Chuck Todd of MSNBC permitted Meghan McCain to be on his show Meet The Press. McCain lied three times in a single sentence. The truth is that: 1. Biden explicitly ran on the Build Back Better plan. 2. The current proposed plan is far less expensive and 3. the plan is quite popular.
Score for Chuck - FAIL!

A more detailed rundown of all the lies packed into one paragraph that Meet The Press re-tweeted. That is, MTP compounded McCain's lies by mindlessly repeating them, this time under their own name!

Meghan McCain has a degree in art history. She has no experience as a political consultant, reporter, or anything else remotely relevant to "Meet the Press."

"CNN teams with GOP to concoct new Afghanistan drama"
So the question here is: Was the CNN story merely a hopelessly bungled, poorly written story or was it an attempt to try and gin up conflict? Was this an attempt to try and tag the Biden Presidency as having suffered a catastrophic failure?

Chairwoman of the Republican Party claims that the Arizona "audit" says: "Voters who may have voted in multiple counties..."
Note that it says "may." After all this time looking at a single county, they couldn't prove that? They couldn't nail that down in five months?

What the Republican Party is doing with the national debt is just plain, flat-out evil, period! They're holding the debt celing hostage so that they can win some politcal advantage out of it. If the US can't pay its debts, even for an hour, the result could be cataclysmic!

There is no “debate” on the debt limit “controversy.” There is no rational side saying that the US should default. Republicans are making a terrorist-type threat.

While reading my Bible in a park at sunset, a Muslim man a few feet away was conducting the Maghrib prayer.

We were both in the presence of God simultaneously, from differing traditions and paths. This shared moment was peaceful, reverent, and holy.

Illustrating a real philosophical problem with pregnancy choice, this person says:

“It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term; it’s whether a child should be allowed to live..."

The Keynesian economist Dean Baker has a good thread coming off of this post talking about how completely useless the "fiscally responsible conservatives" are.

As the blogger points out, the conservative/centrist Democratic model of negotiating with the GOP simply doesn't work. After several months of talks, Republican Senator Tim Scott simply blows off further talks on the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act.

And yeah, it's funny how Republicans only discover the virtues of bipartisanship when they’re out of power! When they’re in power, they somehow lose interest in the idea!

Many of the weapons acquired by either the Taliban or ISIS-K had originally been transferred to Afghanistan government custody, most of those acquisitions have been exaggerated for political reasons, a lot of them are too complicated for the Taliban to use, but a number of them, like night-vision goggles and communications equipment, are perfectly usable. A lot of safeguards were ignored.

Oh, $%#@ing lovely! The financial fate of the country now rests in the Senate Minority Leaders hands! That is, the debt ceiling "crisis" is nearing a deadline!

Really, really excellent speech by Representative AOC! We just ended a war, why is defense spending going up?

Heart-breaking story about a woman who refused a vaccination shot because she was very badly misinformed. Very interesting distinction between conservatives and liberals. Conservatives appear to get most of their information by word of mouth, liberals by reading things or via TV programs. One of the things this woman believes is that Biden “refers to VP Harris as President Harris.” What’s her source?

Why does this poor woman believe such crazy nonsense? Exhibit A: A woman named Bari Weiss claims that "Proof of a negative test is far more meaningful than proof of a vaccine..."
Erm, no. Proof of a negative test just means you're good for that particular day. You can still catch Covid in the very next hour. Being vaccinated means you're proofed against catching Covid for a while.

Democratic Senator Kyrsten Sinema apparently has a plan to become the next Senator McCain, a “maverick” who’s not beholden to either side. She’s doing well with the non-Trumpers who just want to get away from all the craziness, but very, very poorly with progressive Democrats. She needs both liberal Democrats and disaffected Republicans to win reelection. As a result, her political future looks very dark.

Again, the debt ceiling "problem" is a problem of "BothSides" and false equivalence! One political party is responsible for turning routine legislative task into a "crisis," but the other party is expected to solve the problem without the help of the other! The media can deal with complex problems where both sides are truly to blame. It just can't deal with a more straightforward "A is to blame, B is trying to solve the problem!"

Problem is, Stacey Abrams was talking about a real problem that actually existed! Republicans In 2020 talked about an entirely imaginary problem that existed only in their heads. This is a problem of “false equivalence.”

.@chrislhayes to Secretary of State Raffensperger on restrictive voting laws:
“What was the problem that law was trying to solve? You just told me about a great election. We know it was accurate. It got counted three times—Why would you look at that and say that’s a problem?”

Game on! The new Texas snitching/vigilante abortion law is now fully engaged with the first defendant and plaintiff now in place. Oh, and a cool little fun fact, the American public is 81% opposed to the Texas law! This is why the Supreme Court has been losing legitimacy lately!

The now-hard right-wing conservative Supreme Court thought they had complete freedom to tear apart the laws of the land. Their approval rating is dropping like a rock! Will that actually prevent further erosion in the laws? Ehh, we'll see.

Truly terrible what happened to Gabby Petito in Wyoming (23-year old blond white woman who was ultimately found strangle after several weeks), but 710 Native Americans went missing from 2011 to 2020.

Now that Roe vs Wade is critically wounded, the Supreme Court appears to be setting the stage for a coup de grâce and to finish it off.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has been bitterly critical of the Afghanistan withdrawal, but having been aware of the South Vietnamese withdrawal (I was 15 at the time), this was a really big improvement. I think Biden handled it about a well as it could have been handled.

Wow! That's incredibly sad! Just as many people in the US have now died from the COVID-19 pandemic as died in the 1918 flu pandemic!
BTW, US population was 100m then and 330m today.

Roughly 40 years ago, Griswold vs Connecticut established a right to sexual privacy. What a brief to the Supreme Court shows is that right-wingers consider that right to be a mere "judicial concoction." They don't want to just take away the right to abortion, they want to take away everything! Birth control, gay marriage, they wan it all banned!

Politician on Face The Nation says that the whole country went into shutdown. Nope. That never happened! In fact, the whole reason the coronavirus spread to the South is because they insisted on keeping everything open! If they had shut down, the virus wouldn't have been able to infect anyone!

Problem with voluntary measures to get people vaxxed is that you eventually hit a wall and voluntary measures don't work anymore. A competent governor will then undertake involuntary measures, mandates and requirements. The West Virginia governor can't bring himself to do that, so his state is a disaster!

Guaidó and company have also cheated the USA. In 2017-19 alone, USAID handed over though various NGOs an amount of $472 million for “Venezuelan humanitarian crisis” and for “democracy promotion”. To date, they do not have any clear idea at all where the money is or on what it has been spent.

Yeah, the movement Occupy Wall Street, now 10 years old, is a major reason people aren't willing to just say "Let's get back to normal." A major call today is "Let's do better than to just get back to normal!"

Kind of interesting. TFG begins his letter to the Georgia Secretary of State with "Large scale Voter Fraud continues to be reported..." and "I would respectfully request that your department check this and, if true, along with many other claims of voter fraud and voter irregularities,..."
Then he goes on to talk about "now proven facts" as though anything had been proven!
Also, it is not up to the Georgia SoS to check anything out. Yes, it is ultimately up to the defense to prove that allegations are false, but first, the prosecution has to make charges that are plausible, not just a bunch of "some guy says..." statements.

Maggie Haberman of the NY Times covers the story like it's some sort of %$#@ing sportsball event! Hey Maggie! How about covering how insane the letter is before you discuss the potential political impact?!?!?!

Marvel Comics has had a Pakistani super heroine for a number years now (Kamala Khan/Ms. Marvel, since 2013), but this is a live-action show with Arab characters that has generous doses of satire, poking fun at Arab stereotypes that were already bad before 9/11 but which have gotten worse since.

On the one hand, Don Jr. is entirely correct that the last drone strike in Afghanistan unnecessarily killed innocent civilians, on the other, the Trump Administration has absolutely nothing to be proud concerning drones.

One of the reasons the Afghanistan war had to end was that the US had greatly increased the use of drones in it and drones are an inherently messy, imprecise instruments. If we're going to do counter-terrorism, drones are not the way to do it.

Biden has less than a third of his national security team in place. These senators are holding up getting more people in. They're doing this consciously, deliberately, with malice and forethought. If the Republican Party was a responsible, functioning party, these senators would be disciplined.

"This is a unified Democrat government, engaging in a partisan reckless tax and spending spree.”

This is pretty much word for word, exactly what Democrats said about the GOP's 2017 tax cut! Democrats didn't have the right to put the kibosh on Republican plans then and Republicans have absolutely zero legitimacy to put the kibosh on Democratic plans now!

Rachel Maddow has often made reference to Democrats and Republicans living on “Earth 1” and “Earth 2,” two planets that appear to be reality, but they’re two separate realities. The ranking Republican from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee appeared to be a visitor from Earth 2. During a hearing about the US exit frm Afghanistan, Secretary of State Antony Blinken was questioned about a button that cuts off President Biden's microphone and informs him that he must leave the stage. There is no such button.

In 2018, we heard about “kids in cages,” because the Trump Administration decided to simply imprison and/or return migrants.* I recall that several members of the internal “resistance” to Trump looked at their nice, cushy, high-paying jobs and what it would cost them to make a stand and decided “Ehh, human rights are important, but…”

Members of the Trump cabinet were tragically remiss in their failure to invoke the section of the #25thAmendment …

Yeah, because the Trump minions were generally worthless at keeping Trump in check!

*The normal process was to find temporary hosts for the migrants, usually a relative, where about 98% of them would show up for their hearings.

For what possible legitimate reason would the former president be immune from the suit by E Jean Carroll? Clinton wasn't immune from the case by Paula Jones, heck, Clinton couldn't even defer the case until he had left office!

This is so sad because, although I had no personal connection to the Roman Catholic pedophilia scandal of 2002, this case of an Olympics coach abusing the young women who were his clients appears to have so many common elements with the 2002 scandal, especially the complicity of so many people who should have known better.

After gymnast Simone Biles and others testified about their sexual abuse at the hands of a team doctor, Senator Whitehouse asks if the FBI didn’t similarly screw up a similar investigation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh's actions concerning Dr. Ford.

Again, a Republican senator shows why the Senate is hopelessly broken. The Senate Minority Leadeer McConnell showed us through years of obstruction and abuse of the filibuster that the Senate really, really needs reform. Now Senator Hawley shows us that the ability of senators to hold up getting national security positions filled also needs reform.

View of the new Bob Woodward book concerning the military view of Trump’s state of mind. The right wing goes absolutely bananas over the actions of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

Blogger provides more detail on why General Milley felt it necessary to calm China down about the 6 January attack on the Capitol.

Beijing appears to have been alarmed that Trump might do something crazy to China as a way of holding on to power.

Woo hoo! Yes! Yes! Love it! Preach it, sister! A woman discusses the possibility of serious consequences if you catch Covid while vaccinated. She demonstrats that the odds are quite low.

What does it say about Trump that every time he hears condemnations of hatred and extremism, he instinctively assumes he's the target?

Good Heavens! There is such as thing as the “right wing miracle cure economy?” And that's driving the whole hydroxycloroquine/ivermectin bubble? Oh, and they’ve now moved on to a new “miracle cure."

“It makes no sense to me at all to take billions of dollars and pay utilities for what they’re going to do as the market transitions.”

The answer is that we want them to do it faster! We want the to do it now! Because we’ve wasted decades of time and we need to speed things up!

Good! We're getting a downturn in people catching Covid! If we get enough people vaxxed, that downturn could be permanent.

In the meantime, very sad that our ICU beds in some states (not just beds and equipment, but the trained personnel needed to utilize them) are just filled to capacity!

Well, yeah! Unfortunately for Supreme Court Justice Barrett, the "perception" that the Supreme Court is deeply partisan is a well-deserved one as it has been packed with partisan members for many decades now.

The question Amy Coney Barrett should be asking is not whether the public believes the court is partisan. The question is whether the public still believes the rulings of the court to be legitimate.

Right-wingers may scream "Tyranny" to their heart's content, but Biden's push to get everyone vaccinated is highly popular.

Heh! The other former and living Republican president, the younger George Bush, has apparently struck a nerve by comparing 9/11 to 1/6.

Disgraced fmr president George W Bush is using the 9/11 memorial to say Trump voters are the same as the radical jihadists who attacked 20 years ago

The scale of the federal government's response to 9/11 matched the scale of tragedy it caused.

Not if you count the invasions of Iraq and Afghnistan as part of the "response to 9/11." If you do, then the response vastly exceeded the provocation by many orders of magnitude!

There are a number of times when capitalism and good government are in sync. This appears to be one of those times. Corporation are fully on board with vaccine mandates because they recognize how positive they are while they can just say "We're just doing what the government tells us to do."

Nope. Sorry. Wrong answer. I paid close attention to supply issues where the federal government was supposed to supply states because that's something our government used to do uniquely well. Under Trump, the effort to supply states was a complete and utter cluster$%#@!!! Pemce himself was pretty much invisible most of the time.

It's difficult to see what the point of this show is. The woman being interviewed, and obviously any Trump supporter who views this, immediately dismisses any contrary information as coming from the "Deep State." Anyone who skeptically examines their news and who doesn't believe that, already knows that most Trump voters are simply unreachable. So who is this show trying to inform or convince?

Interesting piece on Robert E. Lee. Like many of his contemporaries, he wrote a tremendous number of journals, diaries, letters, etc. Unlike his contemporaries, his family has kept most of his writings under wraps. They’ve also hidden recollections and interactions with his immediate family members. Blogger also has interesting critiques of Lee as a general.

Texas Representative Dan Crenshaw goes ballistic about...vaccine mandates? Really? that's his idea of a civil rights issue?
Also, he feels that the Biden Administration should try persuading people to wear masks & get vaccinated instead of ordering them to. News Flash: They did try that for several months! It didn't work.

Exactly! If any moderate Democrat (Manchin, Sinema or anyone else) thinks that reducing the $3.5 trillion infrastructure package is going to win a single Republican vote, Not. Gonna. Happen!

Yeah, it sure is a nice idea that Americans are “done” with Covid, but...uhh...erm...we don’t get to vote on that. Covid will be done when it’s done, not when we’ve simply gotten tired of it.

As a history buff, I agree. TFG doesn’t understand the Civil War at all. Gettysburg was not a one-off. It was not just a single, unlucky defeat. It was the turning back of the high tide of the Confederacy.
Grant was actually a much better general than Lee was.

This right-wing piece asks the very good question of whether people would really quit their job rather than be vaxxed.
Works either way for me! Either they grumble and get the shot or they give up their job and an immigrant takes it! Conservatives Republicans who then go on welfare (or who refuse welfare on principle) will then have less money to give to candidates!

The investigation of the violent (and wholly unnecessary) clearing of Lafayette Square so the president at that time could get in a photo op has redactions? Why on earth was anything redacted?!?!?! What could this investigative report possibly contain that the American people shouldn't be fully informed of???

So Texas Governor Abbott is asked how the snitch/vigilante law affects rape survivors. His answer is essentially that it doesn't. Rape survivors get the same six weeks to have an abortion that everybody else gets. But, oh yes, he promises to get really tough with rapists!

Hmm. As Texas goes backwards on women's rights, Mexico goes forwards. Mexico legalizes abortion just as Texas seeks to make it illegal.

According to Representative AOC, the problem with Texas Governor Abbott promising to eradicate rape is that he’s part of the problem as a participant in rape culture to begin with.

For anyoe listening to the hollering and screaming about vaccine mandates, the Supreme Court ruled on those a long time ago! In fact, it was 1905, over a century ago.

The Taliban of Afghanistan wishes to project a more moderate image to the world, but their new dress codes for women are definitely a “back to the old days” move.

The last paragraph in this piece is very telling.
Basically, former NJ Governor Chris Christie says that our federal system leaves many things up to the states.
Sure, there are legal differences between states, and as long as they concern relatively minor things like liquor or pornography, they're tolerable. When a legal difference concerns basic rights like say, slavery or in this case, abortion, then no. That has to be federalized. Congress was wrong not to just plain pass a federal law making abortion legal everywhere, the Supreme Court was right in 1973 and wrong in 2021.

Majorly effed-up piece from the WaPo. They actually appear to be congratulating Governors DeSantis and Abbott for causing a major amount of death among their constituents.
Thank Heavens their constituents see them for who they are!

As I so often ask “Where are the editors?!?!?!” Why did they let this piece of garbage through? The WaPo puts out an aimless, meandering piece on Covid that generalizes far too much.

Glenn Greenwald lumps MSNBC with many other "alternative" news outlets (Personally, I like Vox, Gizmodo and Slate), saying they're "wildly hated and distrusted."

Hmm, starting from February 2019, MSNBC has been consistently 89% to 96% "trusted." CBS, NBC and ABC, which I guess counts as "mainstream," were in the 70s until May 2020. They've been in the 80s ever since.

Alex Jones rants about human-animal hybrids in 2017. "... pig/gorilla/human hybrids who can talk"
Author of "Hillbilly Elegy" J.D. Vance says:

The conservative Democratic Senator Joe Manchin argued the other day that the economy was strong, so there was no need for Biden's $3.5 trillion plan. As the facts and numbers here show, ehh, the economy's is better than before, but is far from "robust."

"Afghan obsession — how the press missed the Texas abortion story"
The Texas “snitching” law aimed at anyone involved with an abortion came as a shock to most Americans as the Texas law was passed back in May. Afghanistan was and is a legitimately important story, but the media was so busy covering it that they completely neglected to cover the effective overturning of Roe vs Wade. The press needs to be able to "walk and chew gum at the same time."

September 2nd story at Fox News -
"MSNBC primetime largely ignores Afghanistan, focuses coverage on Texas abortion law"
Interesting Fox News story because yeah, by then, the Afghanistan story was pretty much over and the Texas "snitch" law story had become very important. Kind of interesting how MSNBC is being criticized for their news judgment here.

Wow! These Fox News hosts engage in a conspiracy-theory-palooza here! everything is a distraction from the e-e-eville plot of the Democratic president! BTW, I didn't have much patience for "It's Trump's plot to distract us from..." either, so I'm pretty bipartisan on that.
Two points: 1. The money people got to remain safe in their homes was for the very specific reason that the coronavirus made working in restaurants, etc., impossible.
2. There were no "undocumented" Afghans. Every single, solitary one had evidence that they worked with Americans during the past 20 years. None of them were just "Some guy named Ahmed."

Heh! "Hacktivists" have disrupted the Texas snitching site so thoroughly that the website provider (GoDaddy) has given them notice that they have to find another provider!

"The GOP's Afghanistan message machine"
First off this story annoys the hell out of me because a serious matter is treated as just an electoral game, as though nothing was really at stake here.
Second, it appears that Republicans want to use the Afghanistan withdrawal as another Benghazi-type "scandal" that, in reality, was handled about as well as it could have been handled.

Update (30 Sep): Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito feels that "shadow dockets" is an overly dramatic term designed to make Justices feel as though they're doing something wrong.

House Minority Leader McCarthy appears to be very, very concerned about the possibility of anyone seeing his phone records from 6 January!

Fox News points out that deaths from extreme weather events has declined from where they were many years ago. This is true. Weather forecasting has gotten a lot better. People waking up in the morning on Long Island back in 1938 had no idea they were about to be hit with a massive hurricane. Nowadays, we know about these things well in advance.

Fox News isn't stupid. They're staying well away from reporting on the Texas snitching/viglane law because they know full well how wildly unpopular the Texas law is.

Another two, Burkina Faso and Guinea, allow abortion in cases of incest and rape, which the Texas law does not, and Sudan allows it in case of rape.

The Senate Democratic centrists, and especially Senator Manchin, are not team players! A team player would express his reservations privately and would be very highly specific about what he's like to cut from the President's budget.

Sigh! This guy again (Manchin)! “Congress should hit a strategic pause on the budget-reconciliation legislation.” Why Congress should do any such thing is far from clear.
Heh! "Progressives Tell Manchin To Stick It" Progressives say "Hell, no!" on Manchin's "strategic pause."

Updte (1 Oct): Manchin still quite vague about wha he's like to cut from the $3.5 trillion bill. No one has any idea what Senator Sinema's objection is. "The problem was that the Senate hold outs weren’t negotiating at all."

ISIS-K regards the Taliban as a bunch of old, weak, soft wussies who are no longer up to the task of holding high the banner of radicalism.

Heh! Candace Owens is a Black woman who really enjoys telling Black people who complain about racism that they're hysterical or overly sensitive. So what does Owens do when a private company denies her a Covid test? Why, she hollers "racism," of course!

People who conducted the war in Afghanistan, talking about having "eliminated" the Taliban.
But the problem with doing that as part of the invasion is that the US had to replace it with a functioning government that the population felt did a better job than the Taliban did. They might have been and still are brutal, but the government the Americans gave them was highly corrupt and very little of the aid money was seen on the ground there. So getting rid of the old government is a bit more complicated than just sending in an army.

Wow! Sidney Powell just makes an awful witness on her own behalf! If I were a juror in her case, I'd just be like "Lock her up and throw away the key!" Maybe it's just me, but when Powell is informed that a voting machine company only worked in one county in one state, her reaction didn't persuade me that she knew that beforehand. It seemed that she was learning that for the first time. Overall, the reporter appeared to be a lot more up on the details than Powell was.

Yeah, I've long noticed that speaking for Black & Brown Americans, Native Americas, the LGBTQ, the handicapped, etc, means speaking for people who can contradict you and who can say "I appreciate your representing me, but..."
With the groups that conservatives defend , the unborn, the Founding Fathers, the persistently vegetative, etc., none of them can do that. Does that make conservatives caring and compassionate? Maybe, but they also don't have to worry about these groups speakng up to contradict them.

A majority of the Court was appointed by GOP presidents who took office after losing pop vote

What does the majority of the people feel about Roe vs Wade? By 58 to 32, they oppose repealing Roe.

The deadline has passed without objection by the Supreme Court. The Texas snitching/vigilante law is now in effect. Roe vs Wade is now been effectively repealed in Texas.

Very interesting that both Senators Collins and Sinema have maintained complete radio silence after the Supreme Court used stealth to effectively end Roe in Texas. Sinema is allegedly a liberal!

A Republican thought it was a terrible idea to withdraw from Afghanistan. What would her solution have been? We have no idea as she doesn't suggest anything.

The South Dakota Attorney General clearly needs to lose his driver’s license, permanently! He was awaiting trial for a fatal crash and then was caught speeding!

A Republican calls on Biden to resign over the Afghanistan pull-out. These people are utter, absolute, blithering idiots! As with Benghazi, the Biden Administration did the best they would with what they had and what they did was pretty danged remarkable. No one from the administration needs to resign. Hell, they don't even need to apologize!

Ha, ha, ha! Did Biden do as he did in evacuating Afghanistan because of media pressure? Oh, puh-leeze!!! Media preesure had absolutely zippo to do with the evacuation.

Good thread. Through the course of the media's normal operations, it has set up a really horrible set of incentives/disincentives that produce absolutely atrocious outcomes. A rational politician who's seeking to maximize his/her popularity via the media is better off using the Trump model rather than the Biden model.

Until we have a Covid vaccine for children, the best way to protect them is to vaccinate all of the adults the children come into contact with.

Florida Governor DeSantis being presented as a competent governor. Ultimately the reasons really aren't complicated, but are very highly dishonorable to the news profession.

Tucker Carlson’s guest is correct. Afghans who want to come to the US should be vetted first. The Biden Administration agrees with this as well and is vetting them. Will Afghans overwhelm US culture? Erm, there are fewer than a quarter-million of them in a country of over 300 million. I think we’re safe!

I only made it up to the rank of E4 in the Navy, but have to say I’m very unimpressed with what the retired Flag Officers here have to say. They completely fail to account for the ways in which The Former Guy compromised the mission of withdrawal from Afghanistan and utterly fail to suggest any reasonable alternatives.

Update (22 Sep): Four Representatives have filed Articles of Impeachment against Biden for not getting the withdrawal absolutely, perfectly right.

Good Lord! Where does this woman get her information?!?! She's a former Miss USA (CA) contestant and is a fan of Congressman Cawthorn, but somehow she's been persuaded that the pandemic is over. Obviously, she hasn't been to any nearby hospitals.

Over the past few days, I've criticized the NY Times and USA Today for covering opposition to President Biden's Afghanistan policies. The problem is, they're covering critics as though those critics were making intelligent, good faith complaints. As the blogger pointd out here, they're not. House Minority Leader McCarthy is making a complaint that essentially amounts to "What ever he's for, I'm against."

Kind of a problem here is that equipment that was lost to the Taliban by the Afghan national government and not by Biden is a sticky situation. I’m sure the equipment will be sold off, either to us or to other nations. Highly doubtful it will remain in the hands of that Taliban as they have few or no trained pilots, etc.

Good answer to a fairly stupid tweet. Not an utterly stupid one, just one that fails to appreciate levels of questions.Yes, Biden had to make an "All in or all out" choice.

The piece also looks at those two idiot Congresspeople who went to Kabul as a publicity stunt. This is partculrly infuriating:

By their own admission [the two Congressmen] shanghaied someone's rest cycle to give them a tour, but that was totally fine because that person "works at night" and therefore had nothing else they'd have rather been doing during the day

And yes, I completely agree with President Biden: “Biden saw no middle ground in Afghanistan between ending the war or endless escalation.”

It would take me several paragraphs to correct all of the Stephen Miller misinterpretations and outright fantasies here. Let's just say that yes, IF the situation even vaguely resembled what Miller describes, then yes, his recommendations would make sense.

More than 10,000 civilians in Afghanistan were killed and injured last year, according to a new United Nations report that details record-high levels of civilian harm in the ongoing conflict.

Senate Minority Leader McConnell says that US policy was "working!" Excuse me?!?!?! No, Senator McConnell! The policy wasn't working at all!!!

Seriously, there's not even any indication that it's designed to take away voting rightts!!! What is their major malfunction here?!?!?!

The problem here is that the reporter asks the Press Secretary what they coulda, woulda, shoulda done several months ago! And of course, it's a rather stupid idea. So yeah. Some reporters are just wasting everyone's time.

I find it absolutely horrifying that both USA Today and CNN seem to think it's perfectly normal for a political party to not "rally 'round the flag" in a situation that certainly calls for it! Just as in the Benghazi case, the Biden Administration didn't make any obvious errors.

In a “shadow docket” decision, the Supreme Court decides to end Biden’s eviction moratorium. A shadow docket decision is when the majority issues a decision on an unsigned piece of paper late at night and there has been no formal discussion about it.

Well, yeah, TFG shouldn’t have made the February 2020 agreement, then. He pretty much gave away the store then. How in the #$@% do you “keep” the Bagram Air Base?!?!?! How do you retain that patch of territory when the Taliban have taken the rest of the country?

See, here's the problem, when the boss suggests a crazy idea like "Let's hold Bagram Air Base without any troops against the will of the people who run Afghanistan," and he's just got a bunch of yes-men on his staff, of course they'll say "Great idea, boss!" If the House Minority Leader had people with some critical intelligence, they'd take him aside and introduce him to, y'know, reality!

I found this to a very highly persuasive point. No, it really wasn't possible to have been more clear that the US intended to leave Afghanistan. For anyone who could have left on their own, they had plenty of time to do so. Full list.

The House January 6 Committee sent out a massive documents demand. TFG is, of course, hugely annoyed and Executive Privilege will be central to his opposition to it.

The branch of the Islamic State known as ISIS-K attacked at the main gate to the airport and at a nearby hotel, killing 12 American servicepeople and wounding many others. ISIS-K opposes both the US and the Taliban, plus which it's in the interests of the Taliban for US personnel to have an uneventful last few days, so they are cooperating with the US in investigating and in trying to prevent further attacks.

Basically, ISIS-K is convinced that the Taliban are too soft, weak and decadent for the job of evicting the US from the Middle East. They’re the ones who were behind the attack today that took 13 American lives on Thursday.

Normally, when American service-people are attacked and die, that produces a "rally 'round the flag" effect. That didn't happen this time. Instead, we saw partisan bickering and squabbling. As with the Benghazi tragedy, it's far from clear what the Biden Administration could have done to have prevented ISIS-K from carrying out its attack.

"When President Trump was president, we didn't see crisis after crisis. You just didn't see it."

She's either engaged in some world-class gaslighting or else she's seriously delusional!

Two Congresspeople visited Afghanistan.
Imagine if these idiots had gotten hurt, killed, or captured by the people who are now in charge of Afghanistan?

Update (18 Sep): Over 7k cases and 2.1k deaths. Map indicates "High community spread" over pretty much the entire state.

Good! Racist robocalls that went out to tens of millions of Black voters with the intention of keeping them from voting smacked with a hefty fine!

So we're going to stick with the deadline of August 31st. Seems a do-able as the extraction of allied Afghans has been proceeding at a high rate. Good!

Some pundits are now trying to convince us that there’s some BS “middle position” that agrees we had to leave Afghanistan, but that there was some clean, neat, easy way to do so. Spoiler alert: There wasn’t.

Got an ad on this in my Facebook feed. Will 8 billion trees solve the climate crisis? Nah, we need to stop pouring multiple tons of carbon into the atmosphere all day, every day. Is a lot of trees a good thing that will help? Absolutely! Not only do they soak up some of that excess carbon, they provide shade that cools the ground and produces less heat to get trapped by the excess carbon.

Electric vehicles are very good and can ultimately save drivers some serious dollars over the long haul, but right now, they’re really only good locally and, as they take an hour or more to recharge, are really suited for rural or suburban homes where they can be hooked up at night. Providing charging stations is a high priority infrastructure item.

Oh, wow! The Cyber-Ninjas who are scheduled to explain what their "fraudit" has uncovered, just happened to come up with an excuse...er...I mean, a reason as to why they couldn't make their scheduled presentation today!

Our blogger draws connections between the "But Her Emails..." story and the current press feeding frenzy over Afghanistan.

The people from the former Trump Administration are now frantically trying to shoo people away from examining the February 2020 agreement that paved the way for the recent collapse of the Afghanistan army and government. Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley is annoyed that "everybody's wanting to go back and talk about Trump."
Well, yeah!

Erm, with what did you "pound the Taliban?!?!" In their February 2020 agreement, the Trump Administration gave up all of their meaningful levers of power! They had zero leverage over the Taliban after that agreement!!!

Why is the Senate so completely broken? Senator Cruz is, all by himself, holding up the nominations of dozens of key national security persons because he’s trying to get his way on one particular issue.

“We are applying to any country, not even choosing the country where our new lives will be. We will go anywhere kind enough to take us and we will start our life again.”

Update (15 Sep): "U.S. helped at least 36 citizens leave Afghanistan since Aug. 31 - State Dept"

Unfortunately, this isn't the slightest bit surprising. The Sturgis SD Motorcycle Rally last year was an epidemiological disaster, with COVID-19 being spread all through the region. Surprise, surprise, amazingly enough, the 2021 rally is just as bad.

...Trump would have gotten every single American, interpreter, and piece of equipment out of Afghanistan.

TFG made a deal with the Taliban to leave Afghanistan. That was in Febraary 2020. He could have then pulled translators (known to the Taliban as "collaborators") out of there at the rate of several thousand a month. Instead, the program for getting people out "slowed to a trickle." This was very much under Trump's control. He could very easily have gotten more people out.

Former Vice President Pence, former UN Ambassador Haley and the former Defense Secretary (for the last three months of the Trump Administration) offer revisionist histories of their roles concerning Afghanistan.

"Josh Mandel Praises Sick Waitress, Restaurant Faces Furious Backlash"
$%#@ing amazing! #$@%ing blithering idiot failed to realize that people should not come to work sick during a pandemic!!! It's not clear what the waitress was sick with, but whatever she had would probably not help anyone who was unvaxxed and exposed. The politician showed utter stupidity by not recognizing that.

From about two years ago. Clearly, Secretary of State Pompeo took a very rude, dismissive, “eff y’all” attitude towards Congress and the need for oversight. And no, “keeping them apprised” is not “working with” the Afghan government.

The Eternals won’t be in theaters until 5 November, but this the final trailer. One of the questions they answer is why they haven’t appeared before.

NY Times headline: "Biden Ran on Competence and Empathy. Afghanistan Is Testing That."
Terrible headline-writing from the NY Times. Why is "empathy" important here? President Biden is making a strategic choice involving resources and priorities. What can the US usefully do? Are there any truly satisfactory choices available?

This is a picture of a man lying on the floor, in agony, because he's caught the Delta Variant of COVID-19. He's waiting for a highly effective treatment that can only be used within a very short window of time, after one has caught Covid but before it has set in and has really taken effect.
Why is he on the floor? Because the facility where he has to wait doesn't have any spare beds because Florida is overrun with Covid patients.

When the FBI says they can’t find evidence that the “Stop The Steal” rally was organized, it sounds to me as though they were looking in the wrong places for the wrong things. For instance, perhaps they were looking for a travel office that mailed out bus tickets to people who couldn’t make it to Washington DC on their own. But looking at the large number of pro-Trump boat parades, I’d guess no such office was necessary.

The US exit from Afghanistan has become very, very different from the 1975 exit from Saigon. "The enemy gets a vote" is very true and Biden recognizes that it's true! His people are talking to their people and it's making a really crucial difference!

Sounds like a good plan. Talk to the Taliban and get people out vs “We’re too virtuous to talk to terrible people like you!” and then not get anyone out.

The problem with Marc Thiessen's thesis is to think that keeping a contingent of US troops in Iraq would have prevented the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS). There was no desire on the part of either Americans or Iraqis to keep US troops there. The problem in both South Vietnam and Afghanistan is that the US built a state that couldn't survive its first real challenge. Iraq survived the rise of ISIS because ISIS was far smaller and weaker than either the North Vietnames or the Taliban was. In both of the other cases, the US client state had plenty of guns and ammunition, but lacked the political cohesiveness and unity and shared, common goals that would have enabled them to carry on their fight by themselves. The US has no idea how to give that to others.

Several people have tried to claim that they foresaw the quick collapse of Afghanistan. Our blogger shows that no one actually foresaw it.

The State Department's method to keep that promise was the SIV program, which allowed interpreters and their families to resettle in the U.S. It's been plagued by delays and red-tape almost since its inception, and slowed to a trickle under the administration of former president Donald Trump.

Peter Navarro says: "We are going to have hundreds, perhaps thousands of terrorists, Islamic terrorists coming into this soil here in the flood of refugees."

Rather interesting, that after the Secretary of State, the UN Ambassador is arguably our top diplomat. But here we are, a former UN Ambassador (Nikki Haley) says that, as a matter of principle, she's against negotiations (in this case, with the Taliban)! SMDH!!!

After saying that dealing with the Taliban was like dealing with the Devil, yeah, it turns out she was pretty deeply complicit in dealing with just those folks.

Insane! There really are governors who seem really, really determined to see more of their population die from an easily preventable disease.

Did TFG achieve a rate of getting a million shots into people a day? Not even close. In all, his administration managed to get three million shots into people by the time he left office. Not terrible, but he failed to construct a good system for getting people their shots.

Yeah, the statement "Just find 11,780 votes" is not something that an honest person who truly believed that he had won the election would say!

From 2011 to 2016, the Republican House passed a bill to repeal the ACA/Obamacare 50 or so times. When in 2017, Republicans found themselves in charge of the House, the Senate and the Presidency, they realized that the bill they passed so often was completely unsuitable. It was just designed for propaganda purposes, not to be an actual blueprint for action.
I fear that if Republicans ever get the trifecta again, they'll suddenly realize that Senator Paul's budget proposal is worthless.

The younger George Bush needs to just STFU about Afghanistan. I could see at the time that the Bush Administration had not made a serious attempt to get Osama bin Laden through any sort of diplomacy, meaning I don’t think it was necessary to invade. Did Gee-Dubya figure that Iraq would settle down and then he could turn attention back to Afghanistan? If that was the plan, the guerrilla war in Iraq certainly made that an impossible plan to carry out.

Looking back at the NY Times and WaPo during the late 2002 to the early 2003 period, yeah. These two need to sit down and STFU. They are both way too guilty of enabling the Iraq War in the first place.

No, the policy in Afghanistan wasn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, “working.” The collapse of the Afghan army, like that of the South Vietnamese Army, was far too rapid and too complete to be explained by anything other than a hollowed-out force that would never have been able to stand on ts own.

Good speech by the president! He'll try to get as many Afghans who worked with Ameicans out as possible, they certainly deserve it, having risked their lives to work wit Americans. But no, no regrets about ending the war there.

Will there be any long-term political impact from the fall of Afghanistan? Will this be an issue in November 2022 or 2024? Doubtful. I recall that the WaPo columnists David Broder called for war with Iran in order to boost the economy, apparently oblivious to the fact that we were already at war with Iraq and Afghanistan (this was in 2010).

Why are there so many more migrant apprehensions this year? Border Report suggests:

The large number of expulsions during the pandemic has contributed to a larger-than-usual number of migrants making multiple border crossing attempts, which means that total encounters somewhat overstate the number of unique individuals arriving at the border.

Of course, Representative Jordan would have you believe that it’s due to Biden Administration incompetence/immorality/what have you.

Just watched a video where the former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo blames the Biden Administration for "losing" Afghanistan. This is a map from May 2020, a little over a year ago. The dark orange areas are areas of Taliban control. No, the Trump Administration would not have held onto Afghanistan had they won reelection. They were not prepared to allocate the resources necessary to do that.

Biden makes a very strong argument against "imperial overreach." Back in the 90s, I saw a right-wing ad that encouraged the US to protect the Christians of China. I thought "Now there's a strategy that will quickly bankrupt us!" Biden makes a similar argument concerning the Uighurs. Yes, what's happening to them is terrible, but we have no leverage and no way to reach them.

Could Afghanistan have been a success? Maybe, but the time to act was during the administration of the younger George Bush.

Which foreign countries have benefited/lost by the collapse of the Afghan government?

Erm, yeah. I was a member of the left 20 years ago and no one that I remember said "Al Qaeda and the Taliban are the good guys actually." That was simply never a thing.

Reporters describes Afghans fighting Americans with such dogged determination that you're just "How do we fight folks like this?"

Moreover, Western TV channels generally assumed to be biased towards Israel have had little choice but to host Palestinian activists if they want to be relevant and maintain their place in the ratings.

The blog post shows a video from six weeks ago with Governor DeSantis, y'know, taking a victory lap on how well Florida was prepared to open up schools in August. Oops! Problem is, even if no on saw the Delta Variant coming, it was still grossly irresponsible to not get everyone vaccinated!

Latest Census report is showing that the White population shrank by almost 10%, that the Latinos and Asians are growing. Blacks are about the same as they were in 2010. Both NRA membership and Protestant church membership are declining.

But if we don't pass the For The People (voting rights) Act, Republicans could dominate the House and/or Senate after the mid-term election!

Sensible decision by the new Supreme Court Justice (With no dissents from any of the other Justices). She came out in favor of institutions being able to mandate masks.

Update (9 Sep): Rachel Maddow shows that the judicial system has favored those who want to protect public health. The anti-vaxxers have zero chance of winning any cases.

Hmm, yep. Looks like the remaining “friendlies” in Afghanistan will need protection on their way out. As I said a while ago, this pull-out would be like when Americans left Vietnam in 1975. Now, as of 13 August, it's turning out pretty much that way.

"Marjorie Taylor Greene responds to COVID surge: 'We can't live forever'"
Ugh! The stupid! It's just...wow! Why is COVID-19 again raging across America? Well, people who didn't think they needed the vaccine because their Glorious Leader the Former Guy suggested it was no big thing now that Biden was getting it out to people.
As to the Delta Variant (which would be a much smaller problem had everyone been vaxxed), according to Representative Greene not causing hospitals to be jammed full of Covid patients, what's the color of the sky in her universe?

Yeah, I'm happy that the Governor of Arkansas is regretting that he opposed a mask mandate, but I'm kinda like "Well, what did you expect, you %$@#ing idiot?!?!?!"

Allegedly, Israelis intelligence assess that Iran can be threatened into surrendering its civilian nuclear program. Erm, what do you guys think The Former Guy was spending four years trying to do?!?!?!?!
Nah, Israel wants a war with Iran, but like Wimpy in the 1930s comic strip Popeye, they're calling "Let's you and him fight!"

Lindell claimed George Soros created the Deep State in Germany in the 1930s. As the judge pointed out that "would have been a remarkable feat for Soros, who was born in 1930."

Mike Lindell's bluff is getting called. Even Steve Bannon is wondering where the evidence is.

"Five Points On Mike Lindell’s Dumpster Fire ‘Cyber Symposium’ Election Fraud Event"
Good grief, what a cluster$%#@!!! Major problem is that Lindell promised computer people that they could look at computer "packets," which contain addressing information, which would allegedly prove that information was sent off to China. He wouldn't provide the packets but just figured everyone would just, y'know, take his word for it.

"Dominion lawsuit sheds light on OAN's election fraud math 'expert'"
Interesting piece, pointing out that no, there was nothing mathematically strange or odd or unusual about the 2020 election. The fellow pictured here is called a mathematician in the chyron, but is not, in fact, a mathematician.
Good 19-minute video at the end.

Yeah, the Republican senator's defense of the former president is...wow! Really? Is that the best they've got?
Yes, a president should have some confidentiality when it comes to discussions with his aides, but not when it comes to them planning criminal matters!

Why are liberals almost always right about danged near everything? Well, the fact that we aren't really all that concerned about what's good for us personally is a big factor in that. When we fought to end slavery, for instance, we did so even though there was no pay-off in it for us.

Florida is being absolutely ravaged by COVID-19 and the best their senator can do is to say: "If you feel comfortable, get the vaccine,"

Yeah, the then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo received some pricey gifts from foeign countries. American officials aren't supposed to keep such gifts, they shoul be handed over to the State Department. Pompeo did indeed do that but gee, for some reason, the guy in charge of the State Department can't tell us why State just sorta lost track of the items!

"Rand Paul Wages 'War Against The CDC' In Bizarre Rant"
A few months into the pandemic, I looked up COVID-19 deaths by country. Asian countries had far lower rates than the US or European countries. Why do you think that is, Senator Paul? There was no vaccine then. The only tools they had were social distancing and masks. Yes, the science IS quite clear! Masks work!

Doctor/Senator Rand Paul just lost his medical license for saying what the Republican Party had adopted as their midterm strategy. He claimed that masks don't work, which is exactly what his party is now saying. The CNN author is far too "BothSides" here and presents an extremely one-sided issue as one that has two legitimate sides. One of the subtitles reads:

Why is "terrible" put in quotation marks?!?! The GOP message is a terrible one that threatens the health of people who take them seriously!

...retained the Republican political strategist Arthur J. Finkelstein, mentor to such luminaries as Roger Stone and Paul Manafort.

Is government debt anything like household debt? Ehh, sort of. Households buy cars and houses and many other things on credit. Very few can put money for a car up in one payment. Heck, lot of smartphones are on a payment plan. Government must also maintain armed forces and should invest in science regardless of how wealthy we feel. So the household comparison doesn't mean as much as Senator Scott thinks it does.

Conservative Democratic Senator Kyrsten Sinema defends the filibuster. In my view, her argument is a weak one. She feels the filibuster is needed to defend important policies. But the defense of the ACA/Obamacare didn't depend on old, arcane Senate traditions. It depended on regular people, who realized how important it was, to lobby those who were trying to repeal it. And frankly, when all is said and done, if an issue is really important, a Senate majority can simply repeal a part of the filibuster. Witness: a Republican majority repealed the ability to filibuster Supreme Court nominees.

Well, That's a pleasant surprise! The Wall St. Journal and the lefty blogs are in complete agreement! The finances for the joint Democratic and Republican infrastructure bill are a complete mess. Naturally, the WSJ reports that the group has put out a press release to ignore what the CBO says about their plan. Ha, ha, ha!

Lazy journalism 101. CNN lumps 4 governors into 1 graphic. Gavin Newsom of CA is suffering a baseless recall effort that's far more noise than substance, Cuomo (NY) sexually harassed women, DeSantis (FL) and Abbott's (TX) policies have actually killed many thousands of people in their states! Lumping together the last two makes sense, but the first two have nothing in common with the last two!

Gymnast Simone Biles and singer Taylor Swift team up for an awesome video of a little over one minute.

The ice cream company Ben & Jerry’s refuses to sell it’s products in the occupied Palestinian West Bank. This has inspired right-wingers to engage in what they call “cancel culture.” I guess cancel culture is okay as long as you’re doing it for the correct cause.

While the gun-toting couple, the McCloskeys, were pardoned from aiming guns at peaceful protesters who were simply marching past their home, 62-year-old Kevin Strickland, who has spent 43 years behind bars, still waits for a pardon! This is a fellow who everybody associated with his case says is innocent!

Update (1 Sep): Prosecutor says he didn't have time to prepare for an evidentiary hearing for Stickland, so Strickland's hearing is delayed.

Good messaging from the Biden Administration. We need to appeal to the regular people, but irresponsible governors are definitely fair game!

Maricopa County Board rejects GOP subpoena: 'The Board has real work to do and little time to entertain adventure in never-never land."

Update (18 Aug): "But the Senate must be in session to introduce and pass a contempt resolution, and Fann didn’t even issue the subpoena until 26 days after the 2021 legislative session adjourned..."

Florida Senator Rubio makes fun of the Defense Secretary wearing lots of protection against Covid. Florida is right now undergoing a massive Covid infection, driven in large part because Florida's governor spent the last few weeks taking victory laps instead of seeing to it that people there got vaccinated. Hopefully, Rubio's amazingly tone-deaf performance will boost the candidacy of Val Demings, who is running to replace him.

Very puzzling. Tenants need to pay rent, landlords need to receive that rent, the government has allocated billions to cover that rent, yet only a fraction of that money has been spent. No one seems to know why.

"Good grief — Washington Post marvels at all the things Trump 'got right'"
Back in the day Fox News had the slogan "Fair and Balanced." Fairness is always good, always appropriate, there's never a good time to be unfair. Balance? Ehh, not so much. In fact, the media if often over-balanced, seeking false balance when there's no true balance to be had. This helps the bad actors far more than it does the good actors. The WaPo engages here in a false balance that helps the wannnabe fascist dictator look reasonable and respectful of democracy.

Did Trump start any new wars? No, but that's a damned low bar! He permitted the Saudi Arabian war against Yemen to continue without any hindrance. Yes, he finished off ISIS by following the Obama strategy, but got Iraq all riled up with the aerial assassination of the Iranian General Qasem Soleimani. He never did get the US out of Afghanistan. Yes, he made peace between Israel and uh, a few countries that had never been at war with Israel to begin with. Nah, no Nobel Prize for The Former Guy.

The United Church of Christ is a liberal denomination formed out of several Protestant denominations. The UCC rejects

“Christian Zionism," a movement within Evangelicalism that sees the foundation of Israel and the establishment of Jewish squatter-settlements in the Palestinian West Bank as presaging the return of Christ.

The UCC supports “Palestinian civil society’s call for boycotts, divestment, and
sanctions…”

"Texas Surpasses New York's Death Totals From COVID"
Yep! "Callous disregard for life" sums it up pretty well. It's not like we don't know how to protect people, it's that the people in charge of Texas just don't give a $%#@!!!

So the blogger begins the post by showing us a clip from five weeks ago with Florida Governor DeSantis doing a victory lap, talking about how great his state was doing as far as Covid was concerned.
Now, DeSantid appealing to Florida to please get their vaccine shots. Had he been doing that five weeks ago, Florida would be in much better shape!

Later, at a press conference, "she is ready to help those forced to flee or are under pressure."

America can have the filibuster, a Senate tradition that was not part of the original Constitution and not the result of any sort of formal legislative process or we can have the For The People Act and a better democracy. This is not a “both-and” choice. This is an “either-or” choice. Can’t have both.

The best way to know if someone is vaccinated is who they voted for. If they voted for Biden, they’re probably vaxxed. If for Trump, then probably not. So Don Jr. imagines forcing liberals to get vaccinated! Kind of some weird thinking there.

Re-upping this: From the Arkansas Times: Gubernatorial candidate Sarah Sanders thinks

Is the new Georgia Voter ID law truly fair and are "free voter IDs" really what they appear to be or is the law another segregation-era "separate but equal" kind of thing where the "equal" was more in theory than in practice? The office that was supposed to issue the free IDs ran out very quickly, so it was more like segregation than like a new era.

At the same time, the WaPo wrote up a piece about what Trump got right (Actually a pretty unimpressive list).

1. Corporations and corporate power are not always bad things. Big corps like Google and Facebook are leading the way in encouraging vaccinations.

2. The Republican Party just more and more resembles the Jim Jones death cult. They just seem to want more death!

Are people with children better or more mature and responsible than people who don’t have them? First off, Republican Senators Lindsey Graham and Susan Collins are both childless. Also, I knew some sailors who had children and who were “unsat.” Those sailors just didn’t like working and were generally lazy and disrespectful. I also knew many sailor parents who were “sat," mature, responsible, etc., so it’s ridiculous to generalize.

Fu Manchu was created in 1913 and was the subject of a whole series of novels. Manchu was Shang-Chi’s father in the Marvel Comics series. From the movie preview, it looks as though Manchu didn’t survive to make it into the Shang-Chi movie.

Texas' Rep. Dan Crenshaw, another grievance performer from the right, joined FoxQ' Tammy Bruce to direct Americans to refuse to adhere to any new CDC mask guidelines.
The medicine Republicans are prescribing for their constituents is to just ignore the Delta variant.

People defending the Former Guy’s tax returns don’t have a legal leg left to stand on. They really never did. Just as the President has great power when it comes to foreign affairs, so Congress has great power when it comes to investigations.

Many years ago, I went to a march in New York City. I took a picture of an attractive woman who was clearly dressed for a performance and wore a gold-colored outfit. I would have looked better if she had gold slippers to match, but she had heavy hiking boots instead. Priorities. She very sensibly put the health of her feet above her performance. Same for Simone Biles. She wants to perform well, but she recognizes good priorities. Do we "celebrate" that? No, but we recognize it and honor it.

I realized at the time that my concern for the art treasures of Iraq that were lost to either nameless looters or to just destruction was something that had to take second place to the destruction of Iraq overall. The real problem was that the planning of the 2003 invasion by the younger George Bush and the recently deceased Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld only went up to the occupation of Baghdad. By their complete failure to plan for the preservation of bureaucracies and museums, they did immense damage to historical treasures.

Might Bush and Rumsfeld have been pursuing a “shock doctrine” that was intended to produce a more compliant population? Naomi Klein makes a strong case that the destruction in Baghdad was entirely deliberate.

“What's the difference between Democrats and Never Trumpers?" Well, in the case of Cheney and Kinzinger, the differences are overwhelming: these two House Republicans believe in democracy, and recognize the threat the former president poses to our system of government, but on matters of policy and governing, Democrats, Kinzinger, and Cheney have very little in common.

The blogger examines the proposed funding mechanism for the bipartisan infrastructure bill. It's very seriously unsatisfactory, especially when you consider that the 2017 tax cut produced pretty nothing for non-millionaires.

How they're paying for it is a mixture of stealing from COVID-19 relief and vaporware.

For Israel, the problem with Ben & Jerry's refusing to sell their ice cream within the occupied West Bank is that it highlights the Constitutional basis for the BDS movement. As the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 to 1956 showed, you can't force people to purchase a product that they have a moral objection to.

How desperate is Representative Mo Brooks (R-AL) to defend his conduct on 6 January? Brooks gave a speech from the same stage that the then-President Trump would use to incite the crowd to attack the Capitol. Brooks
claims he

...was acting as a federal employee, and the law shields officials from personal liability so long as they're acting within the scope of their office.

1. Speaker of the House controls the Capitol Police along with the Senate Majority Leader. She does not control the National Guard.

2. Very, very interesting that Representative Greene gets the date wrong for the pipe bombs, the pipe bombs were found on 6 January, not the 5th.

As I've said many times, the NY Times is a very tone-deaf paper when it comes to politics. The fellow mentions the CDC and then proclaims: "This is some serious nanny state stuff..."
I trust them on many things, scientific subjects especially, but when they talk about politics, I ignore them.

Martin Shkreli was the owner of the one and only, single copy of a Wu-Tang Clan album. He sold it to pay off his fines. It had to have sold for at least $7.4 million as it was said to have paid his fines in full.

No question that Afghan women will be very hard-hit by a Taliban take-over. But the title of the book below suggests that the US can't do much about it.

"Five Takeaways From The First Jan. 6 Committee Hearing"
Points 1-3 were very understandable. Point 4 was very highly interesting, that many of the terrorist rioters were carrying concealed firearms, and that Capitol Police recognized that and that they feared that starting a gunfight would end in their being mowed down. Point 5 is also quite interesting.

Tucker Carlson of Fox News compares apples to oranges when he contrasts Capitol Police Officer Michael Fanone being beaten to the point where he suffered serious trauma to some person committing arson at a Washington DC church last year.

Seems pretty clear that Representative Jordan is trying really, really hard to neither lie nor to say whether he spoke with the former president on J6. Jordan needs to be on the witness stand!

Yep! The former president can claim all he wants that China is to blame for COVID-19, but his actions left the US and the world far less prepared than they should have been. The Republican House and Senate, of course, did absolutely nothing to try and compensate for Trump's failure as president.

Ken Bennett, Arizona's former Secretary of State, shared data about the Arizona “fraudit” with officials of the election. Turns out the so-called “audit” reached a conclusion very close to what Arizona officially reached prior to 6 January, when the election results were turned in to Washington DC. Good news? Not for the people trying to “prove” that Trump actually won!

Hmm. Yeah. Don't think "The Taliban agrees with me" is quite the slam-dunk, mic-drop argument this guy seems to think it is!

"Vaccine opponents appear increasingly confused about HIPAA"
HIPAA does not offer 5th Amendment-like protection against people asking about your vaccination status! What it means is that if you make your health informaton known to a health care provider, that provider can't reveal anything wthout your permission.
There are many people and institutions that have a legitimate interest in knowing what your vaccination status is. Nope, can't hide behind HIPAA.

Concerning disputes about the Olympics: Look, whether women’s athletic outfits are too sexy or not sexy enough, guys...just, seriously! As a guy myself, just let it go! You want to look at sexy women, that’s what Hollywood is for! There are women in show biz who deliberately and consciously want to look sexy! Let everybody else just focus on the practicality of their outfits.

Representative Banks proves that he's hopelessly biased and has no buiness being on th 1/6 Commission. He says that he is very interested in the role of the Capitol Police and the Speaker of the House during 6 January. He doesn’t appear to be at all concerned with what other actors may have been/not been doing. For instance, the National Guard was missing from the scene for several hours. Why? How closely was the President watching the scene from the TV reports? Why didn’t he issue any condemnations? There’s very considerably more to the picture than just what the Speaker was doing.

Senator Pat Toomey charges Democrats with trying to keep the 6 January attack on the Capitol in the headlines by going ahead with their commission. He’s concerned about “partisan staffing.” This is called “Crying over spilled milk,” as the House Minority Leader could have appointed a more responsible set of people to be on the commission. Instead, he appointed a set of bomb-throwers.

[Senator] Rand Paul tells me re: Afghan allies seeking visas: “I think those who speak English and are our friends should stay and fight for their country,” Paul said.

This is the sort of weak-arse BS you get from someone who "never heard the sound of a shot fire in anger," never spent a day in uniform, etc.

The former president’s comments are getting increasingly delusional. "I came up with the vaccine." Uh, no. He may have approved giving money to people who did, but he most certainly played no role whatsoever in actually developing the vaccine.

There have been a few justified complaints about women’s sports uniforms at this Olympics. Namely, they’re usually excessively skimpy. Women can wear a bit more and still have the freedom of movement needed to compete. Laura Ingraham of Fox News thinks they should just all shut up and focus on just playing the game.

First, check out Miami CBS saying that Covid cases for Florida under Governor DeSantis have jumped way up. After a peak in January and a bump in April, they're on the rise again. Next, listen to Sarah Sanders, promising more of the same for Arkansas if she's elected Governor there. Yep, she sees DeSantis as a role model!

Jordan’s project will star Val-Zod, first introduced in 2014 as a Kryptonian from Earth-2 in DC Comics’ vast multiverse who took on the mantle of Superman after the Kal-El of his reality was killed in an invasion of Earth-2 by Darkseid and his army of Parademons.

"Poll: Most in GOP see voting as a 'privilege' that can be limited"
This is troubling because mandates and legitimacy have always been very important throughout history. If legitimacy doesn't come for a democratic society through majority votes, then where does it come from?

Yea, quite difficult to feel any sympathy here. This guy built a three-mile section of wall and now appears to be stuck with having to pay for it out of his own pocket.

Yeah, I think the "Reasonable Beltway Pundit Class" is among the most useless groups ever. Senator Kyrsten Sinema has really just destroyed her own appeal among Democrats in her state and been applauded by those pundits for doing so.

"Remember when Politico said DeSantis 'won the pandemic'”?
This is very sad because it was absolutely crystal clear at the time that the mainstream media was wrong and that Florida Governor DeSantis was not dealing with Covid successfully! Why they ever thought he was a success just utterly baffles me.

What the $%#@?!?! 45 Palestinian college students make a solidarity visit to a family whose home in Turmus ‘Aya had been destroyed by the Israeli army the previous week. 45 students were arrested, an outrage in itself, but 15 of the students remain in detention!

This sounds to me like best of both worlds for Democrats. The Speaker made an offer, the Minority Leader made an unacceptable counter-offer, she rejected only part of his counter-offer and now he's taken it all off the table. Woo-hoo! Win-win!

Erm, it's hardly the fault of Speaker Pelosi that Minority Leader McCarthy decided to appoint a group of crazy bomb-throwers to the 1/6 Commission. Why is she being blamed for making the commission politically irrelevant?!?!?!

My Congressperson is correct. Speaker Pelosi did exactly the right thing with the 1/6 Commission and Minority Leader McCarthy's "I'm taking my ball and going home" tantrum.

Yeah, very poor headline from the WaPo. The 6 January investigation didn't "fall apart." The investigation has a quorum and a Republican member. They can carry on. The only thing that "collapsed" is the ability of the House Minority Leader to appoint people to the commission that weren't at all serious about , y'know, actually investigating!

95% of Arizona Dems approve of Biden & 75% of Mark Kelly but only 42% approve of @SenatorSinema

Early during the Trump Administration, there were a couple of strange things happening in the Middle East that didn't make any sense at the time. Turns out, they were happening because of people putting profit ahead of good policy.

Maybe it's just the focus of the news, but sure seems like the focus this year is of men telling women what they can't do, can't wear, etc. Maybe there are a few women in management who are agreeing and enabling, but sure smells like rampant sexism to me.

...dead people voting, illegals voting, nonresidents voting, minors voting, people with seven ballots voting.

[Brandi] Love, a self-branded “conservative porn star” who is a contributor to The Federalist, found herself besieged by the combination of white supremacists and moralizers...

More on conservative free speech hypocrisy. Conservatives complain, on a platform that is accessible to the general public, about being suppressed and silenced.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy just gave America the middle finger by choosing as all of his 1/6 Commission members, people who voted AGAINST creating the Commission in the first place.

Was it the president’s latest attack on state voting law reforms, which he bizarrely called “the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War”?

Yeah. Gee. Who in their right mind would ever complain about "voting law reforms?" What's up with the president, huh? Y'see, in order to understand what the columnist is saying, you have to have some background on the issue.

Former AG Bill Barr was way too much of an enabler to try and pretend now that he had any sort of distance between him and TFG.

It’s kind of ridiculous to say that Facebook comment are being “monitored” as such comments are public to begin with! Press Secretary Jen Psaki, very accurately, calls Peter Doocy’s question on that “loaded and inaccurate,”

"It is difficult to conceive of a case with a more compelling public interest demanding public disclosure and public scrutiny," Judge Michael W. Kemp wrote at the end of a seven-page decision.

Senator Manchin appears to want to try a tactic that didn't work the first time. In 2012, there was a school shooting where a large of very young children dies. Democrats worked hard to come up with a plan that was sufficiently pared-down that Republicans would pass it, Manchin and Senator Pat Toomey were the final two people to work on it. Even that skinny, watered-down bill failed to pass. Manchin doesn't appear to have learned anything from that.

The same people who screamed fascism about people going door to door offering them free vaccines....

The AZ audit came up with nada so now they want to interrogate voters door-to-door.

Ah yes, I recall the "scandal" of the "Ground Zero Mosque" in 2010. Mainstream Media made it sound as though it acted like the Eye of Sauron, dominating the landscape. In reality, if you were at Ground Zero, it was quite difficult to find the Muslim-owned building as it was not only a block away, but was about the same size as every other building.
Why is Critical Race Theory a thing? Because the media is enabling it, just as they did with the "Mosque" in 2010.

The Israel Prison Service refuses to permit a mother (a political prisoner) to attend her daughter's funeral.

Ashli Babbit has become the Horst Wessel of today's Republican Party (Wessel was a Berlin Sturmführer who was killed by Communists in the early 1930s). What's really interesting is that the person who shot Babbit has not been publicly identified, but the Republican Party has fingered a Black person as the "culprit."

It’s nice that an aide to Ken Starr finally saw the light, but it took 20 years and quite a bit of damage was done before she woke up to it.

Hmm. Did the MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell say TFG would be restored to the White House on 13 August? Ehh, not really. He suggested that evidence would be produced that would be so overwhelming that everybody would want to restore Trump as president. He predicts now that the Supreme Court will rule 9-0 to put him back into office. I am prepared to be extremely underwhelmed.

Note: There is no Constitutional provision for reinstating a president. Very best case scenario is that Trump can run again in 2024, saying "I was cheated."

Updatr (12 Aug): Complete and utter bust! No evidence of any sort was presented.

"...I’m not sure turning him [George Floyd] into a deity and a role model for our children..."

Erm, who has done any such thing? Floyd may have been portrayed as a martyr to white supremacy, but no one has suggested he's a deity or a role model.

"State Republican chairs become the 'chief enforcers of Trumpism' "
During my tweens, I read a number of paperbacks on World War II. I was very aware of one thing that separated the Western Allies from the Nazis and the Soviets, the latter had what were called "political officers" or "commissars," people whose primary job was to see to it that ordinary soldiers were loyal to "Our Glorious Leader."
I looked at what Trump was doing in between his impeachment and before the coronvirus got so bad that he had to pay attention and found that working to build a corps of political officers was his main activity then.

It’s just truly amazing how Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota is trying to sell her COVID-19 policy as having been a good one! It was utterly disastrous!

As I said, Republicans have become a death cult. Guns can now be sold to people who are between 18 and 21.

Bill Cosby may be free on a technicality. That doesn’t mean that privately-owned comedy clubs have to let him perform there.

How does Florida Governor Ron DeSantis feel about citizens protesting their government? Wel-l-l-l, it depends. which government are they protesting? If people want to drive cars into liberal protesters, that's okay. If you're a liberal protester, then not so much.

Update (11 Aug): Unfortunately, we've since seen a massive upsurge in the Delta Variant of the coronavirus, so BW appears to have coincided with an extraordinarily fortunate window of time. The Sturgis, South Dakota Motorcycle Rally was a super-spreader event last year, causing a spike of COVID-19 all across the region. This year, it looks as though we'll see a repeat of the same as pretty much no one who attends will have been vaccinated.

Ben Carson claims that Black people had strong families under slavery. Strong families were not possible under slavery because families were broken up. All. The. Time! It was a regular thing to have husbands, wives, sons and daughters sold off.

Matt Schlapp doesn’t seem to understand the difference between potential fraud and between actual, proven fraud. He has proven absolutely nothing.

Yeah. Wow. Representative Boebert is spouting some awfully crazy stuff here. I just can’t grasp why people need to “make their own decisions” about a life-saving vaccine that’s already been administered to 159 million Americans or 48% of the population.

How credble is TFG when it comes to crowd numbers? Well, he estimated that on January 6th, he spoke to about a million people (His January 2017 inauguration crowd was under half a million) and NBC News reports that the initial rally estimate was for 10k people. The Park Service estimated that the crowd grew to 30k. It was a big crowd, but it was noshere near that big. The rest of his talk is similarly credible.

FBI’s got some pretty weird priorities these days. For instance, “’Abortion-Related Violent Extremists,’ described as including both sides of the abortion debate…” Never heard of a pro-choice killer? Neither have I, but the FBI is on the lookout for them as well as for anti-choice killers, which actually DO exist!

Back during the administration of the younger George Bush, Hamas did win the Palestinian election to control Gaza. They’ve been administering Gaza ever since. Why are we still calling them “terrorists?” Calling a group of people terrorists suggests that they're non-state actors, that they don't control any territory.

I appreciate this. President Biden asked nicely for this guy’s resignation. Andrew Saul, a Trump appointee to the podition of Social Security Commissioner, refused. Biden said “Fine. You’re fired.”

People like the Democratic Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrstem Sinema really have to begin to recognize that we are not dealing with a set of rational people on the other side of the aisle! Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert and pundits like Tomi Lahren are the public face of the Republican Party today.

This appears to have been the same problem Michael Flynn had in 2016. Flynn contacted the Russians, going outside ny official channels, and thereby came to the NSA's attention. If Tucker Carlson had also contacted the Russians, then it's highly likely the NSA would have vacuumed up those communications as well.

Stephen Miller: "No President in history has been dealt a better hand on day one than President Biden."

This on the "martyrdom" of Ashli Babbit is why I've never seen Mike Pence or Nikki Haley as the heirs to the Republican Party. Trump's party is a radical one that has no intention of following a moderate, policy-focused, realistic path.

"Honestly, right now, for the next 18 months, our job is to do everything we can to slow all of that down to get to December of 2022, and then get in there and lead," the Texan was recorded saying.

For the international community to assist Gaza in rebuilding is enormously complicated by the fact that Gaza remains under siege by Israel. All aid must pass through Israeli checkpoints, meaning Israel can arbitrarily attach conditions, such as the return of Israeli hostages, onto any aid that goes to Gaza.

Iceand finds that workers get just as much done in a shorter work week. Not surprising.
My sister worked for a company that occasionally expanded its hours in order to get more work done. She claimed that the tactic never worked. People would simply stretch out eight hours of work to fill ten hours.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones (1619 Project) put in for tenure at the University of North Carolina. UNC hemmed and hawed and fussed and fidgeted and finally said yes. By that time, Hannah-Jones said "Nah" and she and $20 million in funding is going to the HBCU Howard University.

The mega-donor who apparently created the mess with Nikole Hannah Jones and UNC, Walter Hussman, tried really, really hard to see that Hannah-Jones did not succeed.

Update (2 Aug): NC Republican Representatives Virginia Foxx and Greg Murphy both objected to Hannah-Jones getting tenure.

Do Republicans have more "fraiends cross the aisle" than Democrats do or do the two sides just not live in the same areas? Pennsylvania is allegeldly "Pittsburgh, Philadepha and Alabama in-between." I very rarely have reason to venture outside metropolitan Philadelphia.

Y’know, July 5^th of 20 years ago (2001) would have been a really good time to have let everyone in government know that there were warning signs of an imminent threat from al Qaeda!

Lots and lots of people (including myself) guffawed at the idea that Trump would pay Giuliani. Unfortunately for him, we were right.

I don't agree with Andrew Bacevich on his view that the younger George Bush was in any way innocent or unknowing about going to war with Iraq. Bush deliberately, consciously, with malice and forethought, insulated himself from any people or information that might have caused him to have any second thoughts. There were many people in the last three months of 2002 that wanted to have a serious conversation with him. Bush shut them out.

You guys really sure you want to stick with fossil fuels?!?!?! A mud volcano interacts with an oil-drilling platform to create what looks like a mini-atom bomb explosion.

Nuclear plants may have problems, but coal-burning power plants are the real danger as they pour carbon into the atmosphere, which traps heat, which leads places like in South-West Canada to reach baking temperatures. Lytton is North of Vancouver and it hit 122 degrees, just the other day.

CNN is doing here what the advice columnist Miss Manners calls "mind reading." They're making wild, unsubstantiated guesses as to what the motivation of the Vice-President may be in taking certain actions. They shouldn't word their guesses as flat assertions. They don't know this! They're just guessing.

A very sad observation about how some op-eds aren't grounded in any reality. It's instead all guesswork and speculation. A columnist from the NY Times wants to describe the Jim Crow Era without bringing in the concepts of "systemic" or "structural" racism.

The 2015 book Clinton Cash by Peter Schweizer laid out numerous examples of Clinton Foundation donations…

There have been no clear quid-pro-quo connections found in any of Schweizer's list of alleged transgressions.

After more than two years, an inquiry into the Clinton Foundation and Clinton’s tenure at State is nearly done—and there’s reportedly absolutely nothing to show for it.

That's pretty amazing! A black hole swallows a neutron star!
Smithsonian contributes their take on it.

Heh! "Net" jobs means that they're deducting the jobs that were lost during the crashes in the last years of the younger George Bush and Trump. But yeah, that means that Biden has created more jobs in six months than both Bushes and Trump did in 16 years.

The rather hysterical reaction to former Senator McCaskill stating (accurately) that 6 January was worse than Benghazi shows that, yeah, she defnitely stuck a nerve!

The Republican scorched earth, win-at-all-costs strategy that they’ve been using since 2009 is proving to be a very bad one at this time. Democrats in the House have a quorum and are moving on their 6 January commission. Representative Liz Cheney was smart enough to get on board early. The House Minority Leader is still floundering.

White House Correspondent Peter Doocy is constantly trying, desperately, to make a name for himself as the guy who embarrasses the Democratic president’s spokesperson. Press Secretary Jen Psaki is more than his equal though, constantly leaving him with pie all over his face.

When it comes to human rights violations in the struggle between Israel and Palestine, neither side has completely clean hands, both are guilty of violations. But the violations by Israelis are far worse and far more systematic than are those of Palestinians.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy makes it absolutely crystal clear beyond a doubt that he is very deeply disturbed that Representative Liz Cheney would accept a committee assignment from Speaker Pelosi without going through him first. Not that he's threatening her, mind you. He's just very deeply disturbed, that's all!

I rag on the NY Times a lot for being politically tone-deaf. NPR can be just as bad.

The pushback intensifies. Reminded me of when the Roman Empire started hiring mercenaries to guard their Northern borders. That was the beginning of their decline and fall.

Among other things, good reasoning as to why we’ll never know what the military knows about UFOs. Military doesn't want to give others too detailed a picture of our surveillamce capabilities and if we're missing things, we don't want others to know we can't see them.

What does the UFO report show? That we definitely need a dedicated agency that can take in all the reports and can assess them all for plausibility and figure out what, if anything, we need to do about them.

I guess I shouldn't be at all surprised that the two Democratic senators who have been doing the most to slow up progress on Biden's agenda (Manchin & Sinema) have also been taking money from big oil.

Phylicia rashad, who played Clair Huxtable in Cosby back in the day, says about Bill Cosby being freed: "FINALLY!!! A terrible wrong is being righted - a miscarriage of justice is corrected!"

No, there was no miscarriage of justice. He was guilty and got off on a technicality. Women who have been sexually abused are all despondent now as they see a wealthy, connected guy get off scot-free.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy appears to be pretty desperate to prevent anyone from the Republican Party from serving on the 1/6 Commission.

Hmm. So TFG is saying that if “The Wall” isn’t painted, it’ll just rust away on its own. Cool! Saves us the trouble of having to dismantle it!

Yes, it is true that Republicans have used better rhetoric on funding police, but they very clearly have favored actually defunding the police.

An examination of the latest ranking of US president by historians. Trump comes after the presidents who came immediately before and after the Civil War (41 out of 44), Reagan and Obama are 9 and 10. Grant has improved his standing whereas Jackson had declined.

2021 I	2019 II	2017	2014	2011	2008	2005
2020 II	2019 I	2016	2013	2010	2007
2020 I	2018	2015	2012	2009	2006