FairAndUNbalanced.com

• This week’s note in Trumpian ‘Alternative Facts’ comes from CNN where Stephen Collinson suggests that the most disturbing fact about the most recent Trump lies is that the nation is too numb to be disturbed.
   
• Jon Perr at PERRspectives looks to the nearly inevitable next step after my President’s impetuous breaking of the anti-nuclear agreement with Iran.
   
• Frances Langum examines Trump Chief-of-Staff John Kelly’s latest stereotype of immigrants. One problem: too many are country, and country isn’t cool. At least some, we assume, are good people.
   
• @bjork55 at Bjork Report explains the hush money Trump must be trying to funnel if he’s smart enough to think of it.
   
• Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post REALLY doesn’t like Rudy and relays what a psychologist friend explains makes him a lot like Donald. Well, okay then.
   
• Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger illustrates the approach taken by Congressional Republicans as the House Freedom Caucus visits the Justice Department.
   
• Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit notices a seeming inconsistency in how much conservatives care about deficits.
   
• Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged reacts to Ollie, an actual illegal arms dealer, leading the NRA.
   
• North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz has helpful advice for people of color who might want to help frightened white folks. I confess to a suspicion: the good pastor may be writing with a bit of sarcasm.
   
• In The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, an ex-Christian objects to how we of the faith treat children of divorced parents.
   
• Infidel753 turns in a book review of science author Steven Pinker’s defense of science-based humanism. Pinker argues that the trajectory of the human condition over recent history has been generally upward because of science and reason.
   
• Vincent at A Wayfarer’s Notes, who has been afflicted by dangerously ill health, endeavors to document a rich and varied life.
   

 
From The Onion:

“Rudy, it’s always a pleasure to have you on ‘Mueller Tonight’—now, I wanted to really dig in and ask you about the President’s state of mind on April 11, 2017,” said Mueller, who leaned over his desk as Giuliani eagerly answered a series of follow-up questions concerning Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, and the Seychelles islands, stressing that the millions tuning in to watch the 8 p.m. primetime Fox News talk show “really appreciated” the former New York City mayor’s insight.

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From Cato’s Julian Sanchez:

Has the thorny problem of providing law enforcement with access to encrypted data without fatally compromising user security finally been solved? That’s the bold thesis advanced by a piece at Wired that garnered an enormous amount of attention last week by suggesting that renowned computer scientist Ray Ozzie, formerly a top engineer at Microsoft, had developed an “exceptional access” proposal that “satisfies both law enforcement and privacy purists.” Alas, other experts have been conspicuously less enthusiastic, with good reason. It’s worth saying a few words about why.

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From tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors:

What happened, you ask?

Citigroup imposed new gun control policies on its clients, like age restrictions and background checks, and Bank of America said it would stop lending money to clients who manufacture military-style assault weapons. It seems “Guns” was the safe word, and the Bankers didn’t honor it.

When Citigroup arrived at the Securities and Exchange Commission for what they expected to be a meeting about derivatives regulation (you know, the thing that destroyed the global economy), instead they got a lecture on guns, and no knobbers from their hookers.

It seems the bank’s new policy hadn’t gone over so well with the Republicans on the S.E.C. committee, who tore into them for straying into social policy.

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From conservative T. Paine at Saving Common Sense:

We’ve seen it pop up over the news repeatedly and unceasingly. The media is often duped and is complicit, if not actually members of the far left whiners complaining about the rest of us “not understanding” leftist supporters.

Oh, but we do.

When angry leftist snowflakes accuse me of being racist and opposing the Constitution, when they lie like calling me a White Nationalist, when they accuse and blame conservatives, resort to the race card and every race-baiting technique ever devised, and NEVER bring up the double standards and duplicity of their actions going on today, when they attack pro-life organizations as “racist hate groups”, when they claim that only innocent victims and not some numbers of violent protesters marched with BLM, when they are angered by the Congressional Freedom Caucus for even existing, when they constantly deflect and claim that we are blaming the former Black President, when they refuse to look at President Trump and realize that he is doing his constitutional job as commander in chief by trying to prevent potential Muslim terrorists from dangerous and unstable countries from entering America with his temporary ban until they are vetted and thus claiming he is a racist xenophobe because of this, all the while excusing the anti-colonialist, would-be-Marxist, Islamic-enemy strengthening idiot that preceded Trump into the White House, Etc. ad nauseum…. well, we do get it.

Yeah, if that doesn’t fit anti-constitutionalism and hate America first leftists, then it doesn’t exist.
I will not compromise with hate and lies. (Some on the left have become the very essence of hate and lies.) I will call haters and liars out for what they are going forward. There can be no common ground with this leftist extremism. It will never disappear, and it must be defeated by every generation. “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction,” so said the greatest president in my lifetime, Ronald Wilson Reagan, whom the militant left hates for restoring America’s prosperity, standing, and respect among the nations of the world.

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From Jonathan Bernstein:

From the perspective of presidential power, President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Iran deal seems to offer little upside and quite a bit of downside risk.

The move adds all sorts of uncertainties, but doesn’t appear to satisfy any significant demands from Trump’s coalition. And it inflicts further damage on the president’s professional reputation, which has already been shredded by some of his other actions. The combination stands to make Trump an even weaker president than he already is.

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From Green Eagle:

From the Washington Post:

“CIA nominee says she would obey her moral compass, not Trump, if told to carry out questionable activities”

Moral compass! The “moral compass” of someone who approved and carried out torture in the first place! The moral compass of someone who engaged in illegal destruction of evidence to hide that torture. That’s some moral compass you have there, lady.

“She resisted efforts by senators to get her to say whether she believed it was morally wrong to use techniques such as waterboarding on terrorist suspects.”

Her “moral compass” can’t tell her whether it is okay to torture people, but by God, she will rely on that moral compass. She wouldn’t ever engage in “questionable activities,” as long as we understand that those activities would have to be a lot worse than torture and destroying evidence before she would consider them questionable.

And that is good enough for Republicans.

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From PZ Myers:

Once upon a time, I would have assumed everyone would recoil in disgust at the murderous selfishness of incels, but I guess I was wrong. Here’s how Ross Douthat sees them:

One lesson to be drawn from recent Western history might be this: Sometimes the extremists and radicals and weirdos see the world more clearly than the respectable and moderate and sane.

What he’s setting up is the argument that maybe the incels are right, and that maybe everyone is owed sex to some degree, and he’s going to bring in an “authority”.

…it brings me to the case of Robin Hanson, a George Mason economist, libertarian and noted brilliant weirdo. Commenting on the recent terrorist violence in Toronto, in which a self-identified “incel” — that is, involuntary celibate — man sought retribution against women and society for denying him the fornication he felt that he deserved, Hanson offered this provocation: If we are concerned about the just distribution of property and money, why do we assume that the desire for some sort of sexual redistribution is inherently ridiculous?

After all, he wrote, “one might plausibly argue that those with much less access to sex suffer to a similar degree as those with low income, and might similarly hope to gain from organizing around this identity, to lobby for redistribution along this axis and to at least implicitly threaten violence if their demands are not met.”

Robin Hanson is also icky. He’s another example of how libertarianism is a corrupt ideology of greed that is destructive to the social contract. And he’s a tenured professor!

It’s a disquieting example of how what we might call hyper-misogyny has crept into academic discourse via sexually frustrated and clearly angry men who believe men are not only entitled to sex but entitled to sex with women they find attractive. It’s not lost on me by any means that the idea that women owe men sex is not at all new. But this is a new frontier in embedding these ideas into formal public policy proposals, particularly ones that ape the language of rights and equality in much the same way modern racists groups do.

That these people are making analogies to the redistribution of wealth is particularly odious. Such a comparison falls apart quickly, for a couple of reasons.

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From Dave Dubya:

We’ve seen it pop up over the news. The media is often duped by far Right whiners complaining about the rest of us “not understanding” Trump supporters.

Oh, but we do.

When Angry White Americans accuse me of hating America and opposing the Constitution, when they lie like White Nationalists, when they accuse and blame liberals, Blacks and Muslims, and NEVER bring up racist killings going on today, when they attack BLM as a “racist hate group”, when they agree “very fine people” marched with Nazis, when they are angered by the Congressional Black Caucus meeting with Nation of Islam and attack the Black President for being a racist, even after he denounced NOI’s racism, when they focus all blame on the Black President while praising the racist Birther that followed him for banning Muslim refugees, Etc. ad nauseum….

Yeah, if that doesn’t fit White Nationalism, then it doesn’t exist.

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From nojo at Stinque:

We grew up during the tail end of an era when it was reasonably feared that continuity of history, of history itself, would end with a blinding flash of light. But we were barely potty trained by the Cuban Missile Crisis, and didn’t start noticing the world until six years later. Nukes never possessed our fears, but gas crises were a real bummer. But that was fine, as such things go: You knew the future would be very different, but at least you still had one.

Too bad that didn’t last.

We date collective awareness of our collective fate to 1990, when SNL broadcast its “Global Warming Christmas Special”.

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