When you don’t vote, THESE PEOPLE, who do vote, get to determine how the rest of us live.

Lesson?  VOTE.  Get your neighbor to VOTE.  VOTE, VOTE, VOTE.

There’s a place for anger, and THIS is it.

Michelle Goldberg published a great piece today, one you’ve got to read.  A couple of her quotable quotes:

“Naturally, all this has led to lots of pained disapproval from self-appointed guardians of civility. A Washington Post editorial urged the protesters to think about the precedent they are setting. ‘How hard is it to imagine, for example, people who strongly believe that abortion is murder deciding that judges or other officials who protect abortion rights should not be able to live peaceably with their families?’ it asked.

Of course, this is not hard to imagine at all, since abortion opponents have assassinated abortion providers in their homes and churches, firebombed their clinics and protested at their children’s schools. The Roman Catholic Church has shamed politicians who support abortion rights by denying them communion. The failure to acknowledge this history is a sign of the reflexive false balance that makes it hard for the mainstream media to grapple with the asymmetric extremism of the Republican Party.”

And…

“But unless and until that happens, millions and millions of Americans watch helplessly as the president cages children, dehumanizes immigrants, spurns other democracies, guts health care protections, uses his office to enrich himself and turns public life into a deranged phantasmagoria with his incontinent flood of lies.”

There’s a time for anger – and THIS is it.

Manafort’s lawyers have filed papers asking that Donald Trump’s name not be used at all during his trial.

Paul Manafort is being tried for conspiracy against the United States, witness tampering, fraud, altering documents, and 30 other counts, not even including his daughter’s text message that said her father had people killed in Ukraine.  But, the mention that he and Donald Trump even know each other is hurtful to Manafort’s reputation.

Damn.  That’s low.

Plus, isn’t this kinda like being charged with arson but not letting the word fire be used at your trial?

This is the latest handy-dandy chart on political media bias put out by allgenearlizationsarefalse.com, home of mediabiaschart.com which rigorously studies media outlets for systematic bias.  Media outlets are charted on two axis, with the x-axis used as a measure of political bias with neutral in the center.  The y-axis scales from factual news at the top to inaccurate and fabricated at the bottom.  The developer of this chart is a patent attorney from Denver who also has a degree in English.  She uses both her legal skills and technical English skills to decode bias and then chart it. If you click on the pic, it will give you a bigger chart to see the detail.  Most interesting is the grouping of media outlets by characteristics of each’s reporting – the green box is News; the yellow box is Fair Interpretation of the News; the orange box is Unfair Interpretation of the News; the red box is Nonsense Damaging to Public Discourse.

Let’s look at who’s in the red box.  On the left are the obvious ones that no one I know reads or reposts since they are so biased.  But look on the lower right corner.  Look at that group.  From Fox News, to the Daily Caller, Newsmax, RedState, Breitbart, and the Blaze, these outlets make up the sources of “news” for the vast majority of conservatives.  This is how you get the arguments that “Bill Clinton passed a law in 1997 to separate kids from families” and “Barack Obama separated kids just like Trump”, or that immigrants are flooding the country when they’re not, or that Trump is the most accomplished president in history, when in fact he’s actively destroying what’s left of our democracy.  Even today, they are raging about “liberals attacking” Melania Trump for her tone-deaf fashion faux pax last week on her trip to south Texas.  Down is up, up is down, and the sun rises in the west.  This is why you can’t get anything accomplished through debating these folks.  They are so far out in right field that you’ll never get anything done trying to talk to them.

I highly recommend the posts on this blog describing the methodology of plotting the media companies in this light.  Oh, and go show it to one of your conservative friends.

Just don’t get splattered when their head explodes.

Here ya go —

1. You’re driving a 25 year old rusted out truck and your biggest problem is the NFL?

2. Uh, so maybe your anger about taking a knee isn’t really about supporting the troops.  And Honey, that there lynching business doesn’t have diddle squat to do with the troops.

3. Can’t get laid, huh?

No one, except for Trump and his billionaire Commerce Secretary, believe trade wars are a good idea.  For those in business, trade wars are often catastrophic.  Cue Harley Davidson, the largest US manufacturer of motorcycles, who just announced that THEY ARE MOVING MANUFACTURING OUT OF THE US due to Trump’s import tariffs on steel and Europe’s retaliatory tariffs against American motorcycles..  The tariffs are adding an additional cost of $2,200 PER MOTORCYCLE, or about $100 million per year.  This is why trade wars are stupid.

In general, companies are rational (when it comes to math, anyway).  If an outside force adds a cost, companies will look to immediately neutralize that cost.  The problem with motorcycles, as in other manufacturing, is that net margins are relatively thin.  Adding $2,200 in cost to a motorcycle puts the price of that motorcycle outside of the ability of many customers to buy, and Harley can’t afford to absorb.  Result?  Trump is accomplishing precisely the opposite of his stated goal of increasing manufacturing jobs in the US.  His stupidity is destroying jobs by the thousands.

And the invertebrates in Congress just lie there, doing nothing.