Danny Cardwell's picture

    Trump Has No Character

    "It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth...arrogance into humility…brutality into patriotism. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character."

    Joseph Heller Catch-22

     

    Truth, sometimes, is stranger than fiction. This quote, in some form or another, has been used to describe Donald Trump by a number of people. His performance in Helsinki and the subsequent press conference to clean up that mess is par for this presidency.

     

    Donald Trump had a complete meltdown less than 10 feet from Vladimir Putin. He proved once and for all that he is a Beta male using bravado to hide his insecurities. Watch the video again; his discomfort was visible. I wasn't surprised by his lying and scapegoating: he does that almost every time he's in front of cameras, but the timidity was stunning. He looked like a child with a disappointing report card.

    Michael Maiello's picture

    Service Guarantees Citizenship

    In the dystopian Starship Troopers an Earth at war with a race of sentient insects solves its military recruiting problems by tying military service with the right to vote.

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    Michael Maiello's picture

    "They're Not Sending Their Best..."

    Of the many foul things His Fraudulency has said about the asylum seekers who cross our southern border, one of the worst has been that they are "not sending their best" people.  It's an obvious slander and it's also just downright audacious for anybody comfortably in America to deny the obvious courage, skill and perseverance that it takes to journey from Guatemala, through Mexico and then into the United States.

    Ramona's picture

    Trouble at the Red Hen

    I've been thinking a lot about the Red Hen controversy--about whether Stephanie Wilkinson, the owner of the restaurant, should have told Sarah Huckabee Sanders to leave her establishment. No guesswork for me.  I'm on the side of Stephanie Wilkinson. 

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    Michael Maiello's picture

    The Politics of Personal Immunity

    Last night, Sarah Huckabee Sanders and entourage were booted from the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia by a co-owner who just couldn’t bring himself to serve a servant of the Trump Administration and boy was she mad about it and boy are the usual suspects, members of the namby-pamby D.C. press commentariat concerned about civility, too.  This on the heels of Trump adviser Stephen Miller and Department of Homeland Security Head Kirstjen Nielsen being heckled by fellow diners while separately trying to dine out on high end Mexican food.

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    Ramona's picture

    The Children are Lost and Someone Must Pay

    The stories coming out of Texas this week are horrific and heartbreaking. They're far past maddening and into territory where heads explode.

    No other way to put this: our government has been kidnapping refugee children and hiding them all across the country.

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    Ramona's picture

    Why It Means Something When De Niro Says It

    You could spend many wasteful hours going back through at least 30 years of my public utterances--blogs, essays, articles, comments--but you'll never find an F-bomb in any of them. That's not me. It's not my most hated word--that would be the C-word--but it's right up there.

    Ramona's picture

    Democrats, Get Fierce

    (Hi, Daggers, I'm so glad to see my name still up there with those other guys.  I've been hiding for a while, and I've missed you, but I see you're all still in fine fettle. I see, too, that Trump is still president. I guess that means retirement is out of the question?)

    President Roosevelt signing the Social Security Act, on August 14, 1935. Attending were: (L-R) Representative Robert Doughton (D-NC), Senator Robert Wagner (D-NY), Representative John Dingell (D-MI), Representative Joshua Twing Brooks (D-Pennsylvania), Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, Senator Pat Harrison (D-MS), and Representative David Lewis (D-MD). (Library of Congress)

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    Doctor Cleveland's picture

    What Kim Jong-Un Wants

    What does Kim Jong-Un want from this week's summit from President Trump? More than anything else, he wants what he has always wanted, like his father and grandfather before him: to split the U.S. off from its allies South Korea and Japan. The worst part is, he is already getting what he wants.

    Doctor Cleveland's picture

    Zero-Sum Trump and the Chumps

    I used to be close to a pair of senior citizens who'd retired from long, prosperous careers as bookies. And after a while I began to realize that, although they were both still extremely sharp, they were not especially good with money. They weren't catastrophes. They didn't go broke with bad investments. They just never did as well as they should have, almost never got the full value from a deal. They had both done very well in an illegal business, but they seemed weirdly unable to make an honest buck.

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    What WSJ knew & when: Avenatti dumps

    To:               Michael Cohen[mcohen©trumporg corn]
    From:          Keith Davidson
    Sent:           Thur 11/3/2016 7:31:38 Al

    Subject: Fwd. WSJ

    FYI

    Sent from my mobile device Begin forwarded message

    From: Keith Davidson <[email protected]>
    Date: November 2, 2016 at 3:43 :32 PM PDT
    To: "Palazzolo, Joseph" <[email protected]>, "[email protected]" <KElTil@kmdassociates_com>
    Subject: RE,: WSJ

    Joe,

    We spoke last week. At that time, I told you that I had never represented Donald Trump nor anyone adverse to him.

    Yet you persist to call anyone and everyone under the sun, (including my current clients with whom I have contractual relationships), and whom I am currently representing in litigation matters.

    I understand that you are attempting to report that I am representing "women from Donald Trump's past" and that I am "presumably seeking settlements_"

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    Danny Cardwell's picture

    My Latest for Faithfully Magazine

    When Jerry Falwell Sr. replaced Jim Bakker at his Praise The Lord organization following rape allegations and a hush-money payment to Jessica Hahn, he ultimately refused to defend him. Falwell Sr. publicly described Bakker as "the greatest scab and cancer on the face of Christianity in 2,000 years of church history." One generation later, Jerry Falwell Jr. has appeared on every major cable news network to defend the exact same behavior his father condemned...

    Read the rest at:

    https://faithfullymagazine.com/hypocrisy-conservative-evangelicals/

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    Michael Maiello's picture

    Michael Cohen and AT&T

    To me, the most striking thing about AT&T paying Michael Cohen for, I guess, “advice” about how the Trump Administration might handle the Time Warner-AT&T merger is what a waste of money it was.  If AT&T thought that Cohen could influence Trump in favor of the deal, it was money ill-spent.

    Silver Lining: the Skin I'm Not In

    Realizing AR/VR will make this appropriation "problem" mainstream everpresent  explosive inevitable or go away completely. With Second Life 15 years ago you could make your own avatars and virtual worlds, appropriating whatever you wanted to from whomever and whatever. With Augmented and Virtual Reality, you no longer have to build your own worlds an characters - these are just new skins and templates in various libraries and pulled real-time out of real life. I don't even need to see *you* as you want - I can make you into a Tongan warrior princess (Maiello) or an effete Broadway theater goer (Peter) or a pack of feral kidney-craving zombies (all of you). I can change these instantly, or choreograph you lip-syncing to Justin Bieber or baying at the moon or giving a spanking to Donald Trump while watching Shark Tank. You will no longer be in control of your own image - your $100 hairdo can be remodeled in a moment to a depression-era bowl cut. Not into tattoos? You are now, right on the _ _ _ _. Weight problem? I just gave you anorexia (and a skin disease - sorry, got a bit carried away).

    Bronze Medal: why can't I change my skin?

    Set off by Vogue & Gigi Hadid's "scandal" over a bronzed up photo shoot, I'm amazed by what we can or cannot do. I can go to a tanning salon or the Bahamas to get as dark as can be, put on Smokey Eye and that's presumably fine. I can go into plastic surgery and give myself tits, tighter abs, a smooth face, almond eyes with a pert nose, and of course do my hair style in whatever manner or color (presumably - maybe some are off limits). If I transition to a woman, people will be supporting my right to use other bathrooms and not be discriminated against, and gender and sexual preference is a matter of what I "identify" with. If I dress up as an outrageous transvestite woman as Rudy Giuliani did, I'd just be a good sport, showing solidarity with LGBTQ. The Village People could costume up as whatever as part of the fun. De Niro could tubby up superfat to play Jake La Motta, and Daniel Day-Lewis could get in line with the intricacies and nuances of Cerebral Palsy to play Christy Brown, while dressing drag was the key plot device in Academy winners Some Like It Hot and Mrs. Doubtfire.

    But as a high school girl discovered, it's not okay to put on a Chinese dress (unless willing to take 1000's of Twitter condemnations). As kids are discovering, it's not okay to be Pocahantas on Halloween. As Gigi Hadid found out, fake tans are only allowed so far before "appropriation" kicks in. Presumably Adam & the Ants could never regroup and keep the  Indian  Native American regalia. Rachel Dolezal discovered that "identifying as black" wasn't enough, even though she followed that up with action & involvement.

    Michael Maiello's picture

    Ross Douthat: Sexual Moronae

    Of course, Ross Douthat is writing about the "Incels," which are guys who can't get laid and then turn to the dark side of blaming women for their sexual failures and mostly ranting online about it. Spoiler alert for the cultural infinity wars: Ross thinks that lefties are equally to blame for the attitudes of men who think they're owed a screw.  Further spoiler alert -- like an incel waking from a deep sleep, Douthat is all wet.

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    Danny Cardwell's picture

    Money: Living Without Enough Of It

    Money can’t buy you love or solve all of your problems, but it can alleviate a lot of the stress we feel.

    Inflation is real! There are very few commodities or services that are the same price (or cheaper) now than they were just a few years ago. With all of the economic pressure we face, is it possible to responsibly plan for the future while enjoying the fruits of your labor?

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    Michael Maiello's picture

    Our Narrow Focus on Subsistence and Working for the Economy

    There are two pieces in the Times today, separated by the chasm of sections and seemingly unconnected, that to me tell and interesting story.

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    "Irony my Shirt": 18 months on

    It's 18 months past the stolen election, and we can itemize different ways it was stolen/cheated/rigged, even if all the testimony and indictments haven't come through yet. There's enough to piece together. Not just the politics, but the whole background of criminality and illegal hidden influence. And of course the successful effort to start tearing apart our government (put in place those determined to destroy what they're in charge of - hardly subtle).

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