Let’s start with this: They don’t deserve any, and most people can connect those two dots. They lie, all the time, about everything, and dishonesty will cost you credibility. They’re incompetent; everything they touch goes bad (e.g., the deregulation that led to the 1980s and 2000s[...]
Archive for August, 2022
Why Venice is smaller than Bellingham
Venice, Italy (pop. 50,011) has lost 70% of its population, and now has barely half as many permanent residents as Bellingham, Washington (pop. 92,289 as of 2021), a city that has grown despite loss of the big and smelly toilet paper factory that used to be there. (The whole city smelled like sulfur[...]
August 10th, 2022 - 9:30 pm § in Misc.
A job that’s still very hard to get
Restaurant and retail jobs may go begging, but air traffic control jobs are very hard to land. The FAA will hire 1,500 controllers this year, but 57,956 people applied for those jobs, which means about 1 in 20 will be hired, and half of those will wash out in training. Actually the selection odds a[...]
August 10th, 2022 - 11:18 am § in Donald Trump
PHOTOGRAPHY: Fake Oval Office
Trump can’t give up being president, so he has an “Oval Office” at his Mar-a-Lago retreat (photo below), complete with a statue of himself (see story here). One thing that will never change: Trump’s towering ego and self-adoration. It’s the first place I’d go with[...]
August 10th, 2022 - 10:45 am § in Politics
Dealbreaker
Former Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, a Republican, says she’ll only endorse Kari Lake, the party’s 2022 nominee, if she stops lying about the 2020 election being “stolen” (see story here). That condition is a dealbreaker; Lake can’t stop peddling Trump’s election lies.[...]
August 9th, 2022 - 6:39 pm § in Law and Courts
Cancel the fruit festival or the zucchini gets it
“A vegan-hating New York man was arrested Tuesday morning after he allegedly made a series of death threats against an upstate fruit festival,” Daily Mail reported on Tuesday, August 9, 2022 (read story here). William Swift, 32, was charged in a Brooklyn federal court with “menacin[...]
August 9th, 2022 - 6:11 pm § in Donald Trump, News Media
Stupid talking point
“If they can do it to a former President, they can do it to you.” They sure can. All they need is a search warrant, and to get one, all they need is probable cause that I’ve committed a crime. Fox isn’t a news organization, it’s a talking-points factory, and they’[...]
August 9th, 2022 - 12:51 pm § in Misc.
Racist tortoise (video)
I’m curious why this creature hates black shoes. I can’t imagine tortoises are born anti-black; he (she?*) acquired it somewhere. Maybe someone wearing black oxfords stepped on him? (* When I was a kid, we had a pet turtle named “Mickey.” When he laid eggs, we renamed him [...]
Not Made In USA
Lions Not Sheep (website here) is a Utah company selling rightwing (I won’t call it “patriotic”) apparel. The company and its owner, Sean Whalen (photo, left; not the actor of the same name) were just fined by the Federal Trade Commission for cutting off “Made in China”[...]
How undemocratic is the Senate?
Twenty-five states have 84% of the U.S. population. Of the 50 U.S. senators representing those states, 29 are Democrats and 21 are Republicans. The other 25 states have 16% of the population. Of the 50 senators representing them, 29 are Republicans and 21 are Democrats. The 50 Democratic senators w[...]