Friday, February 17, 2017

Friday afternoon roundup

This is beautiful and glorious: Senate confirms Scott Pruitt to head the EPA . . .

 . . . although the agency's employees who worked the phones trying to convince the Senate not to confirm the guy that is now their boss probably don't see it that way.

In the fevered imagination of the Associated Press, the government was about to call out 100,000 National Guard troops to round up illegal aliens. But in the real world, that's not the case. As of 4:08, though, it was still the top trending story on Twitter.

One of the towering intellects of the last century, Michael Novak, who for years held the George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion, Philosophy and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute, and who wrote such magnificent books as The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, Will It Liberate? (an examination of liberation theology, written during the 1980s, when that school of thought was at peak prominence throughout Latin America) and No One Sees God, an unflinching look at the challenges presented by a life of faith, has passed away at age 83.


David Marcus at The Federalist looks at a phenomenon that speaks volumes about one side in the post-American civil war: The Left regarding Teen Vogue as a viable - indeed, valuable - news source.

Dem activists are none too happy with Organizing For America:

It is difficult to overstate just how enraged state Democratic activists and leaders are with Organizing for Action (OFA), the political and community-organizing army that grew out of Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns.
The nonprofit, which functions as a sort of parallel-Democratic National Committee, was founded to mobilize Democratic voters and supporters in defense of President Obama’s, and the Democratic Party’s, agenda. Instead, the organization has drawn the intense ire, both public and private, of grassroots organizers and state parties that are convinced that OFA inadvertently helped decimate Democrats at the state and local level, while Republicans cemented historic levels of power and Donald J. Trump actually became leader of the free world.
These intra-party tensions aren’t going away, especially now that OFA “relaunched” itself last week to protect the Affordable Care Act, boost turnout at congressional townhalls, and train grassroots organizers gearing up for the Trump era.
“This is some GRADE A Bullshit right here,” Stephen Handwerk, executive director of the Louisiana Democratic Party, wrote in a private Democratic-listserv email obtained by The Daily Beast. Handwerk was reacting to news of OFA’s post-election retooling, which was shared “without comment” to the group of state-level Dems by Crystal Kay Perkins, executive director for Texas Democrats.

“It also to me seems TONE DEAF—we have lost over 1,000 seats in the past 8 years… all because of this crap,” Handwerk continued. “Let’s get through the next two weeks—but then we gotta figure this out and keep the pressure on. WOW.”
Speaking of the Freedom-Hater party, post-America's largest teachers' union, the National Education Association, endorses Keith Ellison to head the FHer National Committee


1 comment:

  1. Going off topic somewhat: setting aside the wonderful confirmations, the President continuing to "campaign", and an ecstatic stock market which might be shorting. It is a good day.


    Benjamin Franklin mentioned this:

    “Franklin made only a few changes, some of which can be viewed written in his own hand on what Jefferson referred to as the ‘rough draft’ of the Declaration. (This remarkable document is at the Library of Congress and on its Web site.) The most important of his edits was small but resounding. He crossed out, using the heavy backslashes that he often employed, the last three words of Jefferson’s phrase ‘We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable’ and changed them to the words now enshrined in history: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident.’

    I just think of Franklin wandering through Philadelphia with a wheel barrow of full of paper at dawn through the business district. He did not need the paper he was advertising his industry.

    "Chicken Run" would be a great expanded production I guess?

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