Most Liked News Blogs (3,095)

Today in USA Today;



(continued in my first comment below)

Satire from The Borowitz Report

Twitter’s Servers Burst Into Flames After Attempting to Fact-Check All of Trump’s Tweets

By Andy Borowitz

May 28, 2020

SAN FRANCISCO (The Borowitz Report)—Servers belonging to the social-media platform Twitter burst into flames on Thursday, after the company attempted to fact-check all of Donald Trump’s tweets.

“We knew that fact-checking Trump’s tweets was going to put a strain on our system,” Jack Dorsey, the C.E.O. of Twitter, said. “We had no idea that it would result in columns of fire shooting forty feet into the air.”

Reportedly, an explosion in the server fact-checking Trump’s tweets about Joe Scarborough ignited a blaze that quickly spread to a server furiously vetting his tweets about Barack Obama.

Fire trucks rushed to Twitter headquarters to extinguish the inferno, which San Francisco officials called the largest fact-checking-related fire incident in the city’s history.

While no one was injured in the conflagration, Dorsey quietly shelved plans to fact-check all of Donald Trump, Jr.,’s tweets.


Andy Borowitz is a Times best-selling author
and a comedian who has written for The New Yorker since 1998.
He writes The Borowitz Report, a satirical column on the news.



Well, Trump's pants have been on fire in Politico for years.
I suppose it was just a matter of time, before the winds of change
spread the flames elsewhere.

From CNN;



(continued in my first comment below)

from the NY Times ...
States Are in Crisis. Why Won’t Trump Help?

Federal support for cities and states was a core part of the New Deal. The president is tearing it apart.

By Lizabeth Cohen

Dr. Cohen is a professor of history at Harvard and the author of “Making a New Deal.”

April 29, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ET

When most people think of the New Deal, they think of the enduring institutions it created — above all, the web of agencies and programs that has provided the social safety net, such as it is, for life in the United States since the 1950s. A national retirement system, public housing, collective bargaining, unemployment insurance, the minimum wage — all had their origins during the Great Depression.

More important than any specific benefits, however, was the way that the New Deal recast the structure of American federalism. Washington stepped in to address a crisis that states and local governments were failing miserably to meet on their own, overwhelmed by tremendous need and limited by the resources and powers at their disposal.

New Deal federalism has shaped American governance for almost a century, and it has played a vital role in our country’s success. Now, with the Covid-19 crisis wreaking havoc across every state in America and the president unwilling to hold up Washington’s end of the bargain, that system may be falling apart.

For all the New Deal’s achievements, the American welfare state would never live up to the fuller protections provided by some European nations and our neighbor Canada. And there were glaring flaws in the programs that were created, such as excluding agricultural and domestic workers from the minimum wage guarantees of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 and refusing to pass anti-lynching legislation. Both of these failures were partly attributable to the fragile coalition of Southern Democrats and Northern liberals that made the New Deal possible.

Still, the New Deal’s programs, enhanced by the Great Society’s addition of Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s and President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act in 2010, made the United States on the eve of the Covid-19 pandemic a far more benevolent place than it had been when the Great Depression hit in 1929.

New Deal federalism likewise made it easier for the states to respond to challenges and emergencies. But in exchange for federal resources, states accepted the federal government’s expectations and regulations. That relationship has substantially contributed to historic levels of economic prosperity and notable progress toward greater class and racial equality across regions.

Many of the landmark programs originating in the New Deal and the postwar era were built on this system of governance, with great success. Social Security has reduced poverty among older Americans. Intervention by the U.S. Justice Department helped the struggle to register African-American voters in the South and to integrate public accommodations nationwide. And the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 provided a legal basis for accountability, even if challenging to enforce.

The expansion of federal authority took place under Republican and Democratic presidents alike. When the variation in workplace protections state by state left some workers more endangered than others, the federal government under President Richard Nixon created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to set national standards for safety.

And faced with wildly unequal welfare benefits across the states, the government instituted the uniform, federally funded Supplemental Security Income program in the early 1970s. Federal consumer protection and clean air and water legislation in the 1960s and 1970s protected citizens in all states, however friendly their local leaders were to mass marketers or polluters.

Continued on next page

Michigan's attorney general, Dana Nessel, pre-warned Trump in writing to make sure to wear a mask when visiting any Michigan factory, specifying that it was a legal requirement and also his moral obligation to protect factory workers.

In Trump's defense, he wore a mask and goggles during most of the tour.
However, in violation of Michigan law, he took off that equipment before being questioned by reporters,
while still at that factory, because he "didn't want to give the press the pleasure of seeing him in a mask". Meanwhile all the factory executives wore such masks.

So, the AG ruled, that he is no longer welcomed back into Michigan.
She say that it's obvious, that "Trump doesn't care about anyone, other than himself".
"It's disappointing" and she "is embarrassed to have him as president".

The Right Sends In the Quacks - Covid-19 highlights the conservative reliance on fake experts.

By Paul Krugman Opinion Columnist April 20, 2020

Over the past few days there have been noisy, threatening demonstrations at various statehouses demanding an end to Covid-19 lockdowns.

The demonstrations haven’t been very big, with at most a few thousand people, and involve a strong element of astroturfing — that is, while they supposedly represent a surge of grass-roots anger, some of them have been organized by institutions with links to Republican politicians, including the family of Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education.

And polls show that an overwhelming majority of Americans — including half of Republicans — are more worried that restrictions will be lifted too soon than that they will be kept in place too long.

But the demonstrators have received huge favorable coverage from right-wing media; Donald Trump called them “very responsible people”; and they were praised by White House economic adviser Stephen Moore, who compared them to Rosa Parks.
That last bit caught my eye, and not just because some of the demonstrators were waving Confederate flags. The grotesqueness of the comparison aside, why are we still hearing from Stephen Moore?After all, Moore — whom Trump tried but failed to install as a member of the Federal Reserve Board — isn’t just a bad economist with a history of misogynistic outbursts. More to the point, he’s a quack, with a long history of misrepresenting or inventing facts to support his ideological agenda.

Among his greatest hits was a number-filled screed about the relationship between tax cuts and jobs — framed, as it happens, as an attack on yours truly — in which not a single number was remotely close to the truth.

On second thought, however, Moore fits right in. One thing the coronavirus has thrown into sharp relief is the centrality of quackery — confident pronouncements on technical subjects by people who have no idea what they’re talking about — to the whole enterprise of modern conservatism.
We know, for example, that Trump’s call for an early end to the economic lockdown was inspired in part by the writings of Richard Epstein, a conservative legal scholar who decided that he understands epidemiology better than the epidemiologists and confidently predicted that Covid-19 would kill no more than 500 people. (It’s currently killing four times that many every day.)

Or consider how Fox News responded to the unwillingness of Dr. Anthony Fauci to do what it wanted, and support an early reopening of the economy. To provide an alternative view, the network turned to … Dr. Phil, whose expertise, if he has one, is in pop psychology.

Now, much of this is familiar to anyone who has followed the debate, such as it is, over climate change. Faced with the overwhelming scientific consensus that man-made climate change is real and frightening, the right has long promoted the contrarian views of a handful of quacks — some with actual scientific credentials, but generally in fields other than climate science, and with a shared unwillingness to accept evidence that challenges their preconceptions. And there’s a strong overlap between organizations that promote climate denial and those that promoted virus denial.

But why is there such a close alliance between modern conservatism and quackery? One answer is that a political movement that demands absolute loyalty considers quacks more reliable than genuine experts, even if those experts currently support the movement’s policies.

As I’ve noted in the past, there are quite a few serious economists who also happen to be conservative, but they have been largely frozen out by the G.O.P. in favor of people like Moore. Why? Because serious economists might turn out to have principles, rejecting outlandish policy claims or changing their views in the face of evidence. And we can’t have that.

continued on next page

The woman in this video is Dr. Oxiris Barbot, the Commissioner of Health of the City of New York since 2018.

When this woman was appointed, the Democrat communist – and I don’t use that word casually, he secretly honeymooned in Cuba, praised Fidel Castro and supported the radical left Sandinistas in Argintina and unabashedly defends those moves to this day – Bill De Blasio, the failed Mayor of New York City touted appointing Dr. Barbot Health Commissioner with great pomp and circumstance introducing her with about 10 seconds of talking about her qualifications and 2 hours of gushing about how she was a woman, the first Hispanic and the first Puerto Rican to hold that position.

I guess they couldn’t find an Hispanic Puerto Rican lesbian. Racists? No. Homophobes? Apparently.

I wish I had more time to develop this topic, but must tend to other things.

Suffice it to say that the far left loons in the Democrat Party are more concerned with what people have between their legs, what color their skin is, what nationality they are and who they like to have sex with then their ability to do the jobs to which they are appointed or their accountability for the consequences of their own behavior. They somehow confuse this lack of rational judgement with some mixed up notion of "Social Justice."

There was a time when you could laugh it off and attribute it to the apparent childhood psychosis these Democrats must have suffered. But no more. It is getting Americans (and people all over the world) killed.

And by the way, at the same time De Blasio and his catastrophically incompetent health commissioner Barbot were telling soon to be dead New Yorkers to ignore the threat, President Trump was cutting off travelers from China to the sounds of these same people (and the rest of the Democrat Party) calling him a racist and a xenophobe.

New York had five times the cases and deaths from this virus than the next most deadly state and more deaths than any other entire country in the world. I wonder how many of those lives could have been saved if the Mayor of NYC appointed the Health Commissioner on the basis of their ability rather than their hormonally and pigmentally correct credentials.

No, this isn't about a comic book

It's also not about a TV show.

It also has little to do with any Wuhan virus source.

The truth is, that some people refer to me as Batman.
No, not because I wear a black cape.
It has a lot more to do with, that I have batted leadoff on lots of baseball & softball teams.
I often have the highest batting average on my teams.
Thus, some people call me batman. OK, enough on the reason for that part of the blog title.

In reality this blog has more to do with Robin.
And it's not because a previous girlfriend's name is Robin, even though that's true.

It has to do with a current house 'guest'.
On my front door porch light a robin has built a nest.
She very tolerant of me going in & out of the house.
When I open the front door, she flies to a nearbry small tree and gives me a "chirp chirp".
It's not an aggressive nor angry expression. It's more like a "hello".
She's never flown at me, or made any angry, nor aggressive moves.
It's like she understands, that we share this property.

There was one across the street at my neighbor's house last year, that used to attack the couple who live there and their dog. Since they knocked that nest down, mine might even be the same bird.

Whenever I go in or out of the house, I talk low and gentle to her.
i.e. "Hello moma bird. How are you today ?"
When I do, she stops chirping and tilts her head, as if she is listening and trying to understand what I'm saying. If I walk to my car in the driveway, she will often follow and then fly into a tree near the car and chirp.

If I come back home later, she is often in the nest and we look eye to eye to each other, sometimes for a minute or so, perhaps 2 feet from each other and she doesn't fly at all until I open the front door. That happened again moments ago.

I went out today to check out the tulips & hyacinths I planted (they are doing great) and to inspect the veggies I planted. Spinach, radishes and leaf lettuce were all up last week. Today I noticed that scallions are now coming up.

For the first time, I also saw papa robin today. He flew into a tall tree and just watched me go into the house. Looking in the direction of the nest, while she was in the short tree more nearby me,
No chirping from him. I'm guessing if I made a move towards the nest, I might have been attacked by him.
The enforcer robin. I wouldn't be right to attack Batman.



(Not my photo)

Yesterday in THE New York Times;



(continued in my first comment below)