FairAndUNbalanced.com

From the President’s remarks at the Boston Marathon memorial:

It was a beautiful day to be in Boston — a day that explains why a poet once wrote that this town is not just a capital, not just a place. Boston, he said, “is the perfect state of grace.”

And then, in an instant, the day’s beauty was shattered. A celebration became a tragedy. And so we come together to pray, and mourn, and measure our loss. But we also come together today to reclaim that state of grace — to reaffirm that the spirit of this city is undaunted, and the spirit of this country shall remain undimmed.

Wondering why a few conservative friends fail to be impressed.

From Shaun Mullen at The Moderate Voice:

Will we look back on this week as the beginning of the end of the Trump presidency? If that is the case — and I’m somewhat skeptical it is despite the pronouncements of a goodly number of pundits — will Trump’s fall have more to do with the rampant corruption surrounding Michael Cohen and his own family business than Kremlin collusion?

Possibly. Any way will suffice so long as it’s the highway, but it is a pisser that all that rot has been hiding in plain view for many years.

Way back in the late 1990s — you know, when Bill Clinton was getting spit roasted for having sex with that woman and lying about it — tens of millions of money-laundered dollars were flowing into Trump’s luxury developments and Atlantic City casinos from Russians, many of them mobsters.

It is not an exaggeration to say that dirty Russian money saved Trump, if only barely.

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From Andy Borowitz:

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—One week after lambasting the F.B.I.’s raid on Michael D. Cohen’s office as a “fishing expedition,” Sean Hannity said that he “totally forgot,” when he made those comments, that Michael D. Cohen was his lawyer.

“When I called the raid on Michael D. Cohen’s office a ‘fishing expedition’ last week, it completely slipped my mind that my lawyer is, in fact, Michael D. Cohen,” the Fox News host told his viewers. “My bad.”

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From Jonathan Bernstein:

Agnew resigned on Oct. 10; the court ruling that precipitated the tapes crisis between Richard Nixon and Archibald Cox came down on the 12th, the same day Gerald Ford was nominated for vice president; and Nixon fired Cox on Oct. 20.

What’s striking is Drew’s analysis — which I think reflects the conventional wisdom of the time — of Nixon’s reaction to Agnew’s growing legal troubles before his resignation. The vice president, she says, was a favorite of Republican conservatives:

The President appears to be trapped by, and somewhat frightened of, the Vice-President. Reporters’ conversations with with White House staff members confirm this. The President is said to be worried that the Vice-President will turn his constituency against the President … Richard Nixon selected Spiro Agnew as his running mate in 1968 in order to build a certain constituency, and kept him on the ticket in 1972 because Agnew had succeeded in doing so. Now that Nixon is in trouble, he needs Agnew’s constituency.

Drew went on to say that Agnew “appealed to the anger and discontent in America” and “articulated grievances” against the news media and others. All true — except it turned out that when Agnew resigned in disgrace, it wasn’t “his” constituency at all. He was just borrowing it, and once he resigned, Agnew immediately faded into irrelevance while the constituency marched on.

It wasn’t his. It wasn’t George Wallace’s. It wasn’t, and isn’t, anyone’s — not even Ronald Reagan’s. It’s certainly not Sarah Palin’s. And I’m fairly sure it’s not Donald Trump’s, either.

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From Infidel753:

I assume many readers have read or heard of Ursula Le Guin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (summary and discussion here, full text here). The story describes a utopian city whose continuing good fortune somehow depends on keeping a single child in perpetual misery. Most of the inhabitants accept the situation rather than give up the happiness and prosperity this bizarre bargain affords them; others, unable to stomach it but apparently powerless to change it, simply leave Omelas — walk away.

Most present-day humans live in Omelas. Most present-day humans eat animal flesh in various forms, a practice important enough to them that they would not consider giving it up, even though they are at least vaguely aware that the industry which supplies this food inflicts enormous suffering on countless millions of self-aware creatures.

I started “walking away” almost a decade ago, starting with renouncing pig flesh after learning that pigs are much more intelligent (and in that sense more similar to humans and more capable of suffering) than the other animals we commonly use for food in the West. Eventually I gave up eating meat entirely, motivated less by abstract moral arguments than by simple abhorrence. Knowing that the differences between humans and other self-aware animals are quantitative rather than qualitative, I knew that their suffering also is fundamentally similar in kind to our own.

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When the most sinister White House figure was a pretend pirate.

Wondering why a few conservative friends fail to be impressed.

 
From Frances Langum:

Congressman Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY) shows his collegues how you do an interview with Tucker Carlson. Stick to the issues, don’t get sidetracked by Tucker’s nonsense, and slip in those FACTS that Fox News viewers aren’t supposed to hear on this network.

Fox News continually announces that Mueller has been going on “too long,” and has found “nothing.” Now Tucker Carlson is horrified that the president’s sex life and lying to the FBI are somehow felonies, the height of hypocrisy given the Clinton years. And yes, Maloney brings that up, too.

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From tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors:

Tiger Beat on the Potomac (thanks Charlie!) tells us:

“Donations to Donald Trump’s campaign operation surged to $20 million during the first three months of the year, new campaign finance filings show, in the wake of Republicans’ December victory in passing sweeping tax reform legislation.”

So before you get depressed that he’s winning on the donation front, we must ask ourselves what’s a grifter like Comrade Trump doing with all that loot?

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From PZ Myers:

I think the death of Art Bell put me in a time warp. Here’s an interesting story about an army fellow who actually was listening in on Art Bell’s broadcasts while looking for Russkis. He makes the same point I did, that he really was an enabler for the alt-right and wackaloon conservatism.

Once I learned what had happened, I could no longer listen to those favorite talk radio shows anymore. Alex Jones was not simply a funny or stupid clown now. I understood that he was not simply sharing airwaves with disturbed people and utter fanatics, he was borrowing their silly ideas, and listeners who would not otherwise accept anti-Semitic or racist material learned to accept the narrative frameworks of those ideas through him.

As Jones made it okay to believe in this alternate reality, Art Bell made it okay to believe whatever you liked, often on the same station at a later hour. Vampires and werewolves? Ghosts and goblins? Area 51 cover-ups of alien bodies and interstellar spacecraft? Subterranean lizard people controlling the banks? Maybe some of them were real, or maybe all of them were real.

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From Yellow Dog at Blue in the Bluegrass:

People sign these authoritarian contracts thinking it will keep out people who don’t live the way the existing owners prefer.

But first they came for the pit bulls ….

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