We're gonna build a henhouse. I build the best henhouses. And we're gonna make the foxes pay for it! (Glenn)

Brexit (4) (Maud)

What we like about Ted Cruz

Lets get this in briefly. We hated Ted Cruz, and still do. But now we've found something we like about him. His reasons for not endorsing Donald Trump. He's not going to endorse a person, he said, who's insulting his father, or his wife. I wouldn't do so either, by the way. And the Republican Party---the party of family values---is all aflutter. Of course.

Trump Trump

Here are a few lines from Frank Rich, our favorite we-told-you-so artiste, about Donald Trump, in a Q&A:

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Donald Trump's renewed call for a ban on Muslim immigration after the Orlando shooting not only drew condemnation from President Obama and Hillary Clinton, but appears to have deepened the gap between Trump and Establishment Republicans: Paul Ryan responded with a statement of support for Muslims, while Mitch McConnell and John Cornyn have refused to talk about their party's candidate to the press. Will there be any fallout for Trump within the GOP?

No. We’ve just passed the first anniversary of Trump’s declaration of his presidential campaign, and the dynamic within the GOP has never changed. We know the drill: Trump says something outrageous or hateful. A few GOP leaders timidly say that what he’s said is racist, misogynistic, “not what the Party of Lincoln stands for,” whatever. Then those leaders fall back in line. The dynamic will not change now, and for a simple reason. The GOP elites are frightened of Trump and frightened of their own party’s voters, who overwhelmingly supported Trump in the GOP primary.

What Trump has been saying post-Orlando, it should be added, is not inconsistent with what many other Republican politicians have been saying for years. When he claims that Obama is secretly allied with terrorists, he is echoing Sarah Palin’s charge that Obama was “palling around with terrorists” when she was on the GOP ticket in 2008. When Trump purports that failing to use the term “radical Islamic terrorism” is tantamount to surrender, he is following a time-honored Republican script. (I would hope that when he trots it out in a debate Clinton will ask him whether “radical Christian terrorism” should be applied to the fringe Christians who have, among other acts of terrorism, murdered abortion doctors or bombed abortion clinics.) Trump’s hate campaign against all Muslims, smearing an entire religion for its fanatics, is also nothing new in the GOP. It’s of a piece with the 2010 Rudy Giuliani–Fox News–led campaign against the so-called “Ground Zero mosque” (which was, in fact,a proposed cultural center, and not at Ground Zero).

Even so, Trump doesn’t care that his Muslim ban wouldn’t have stopped Omar Mateen, an American citizen born in New York. Nor did it matter to him that his Mexican wall would not have thwarted the Indiana-born federal judge Gonzalo Curiel. Spewing bigotry is its own reward for Trump. We have to hope that the American electorate will end his political career in November. But surely, a year in, there’s no point in hoping that feckless Republican elites can or will do anything to stop him.

Continues here: Frank Rich

Guess who...

Lucifer in the flesh --- that's how John Boehner, former Speaker of the American House of Representatives, a staunch Republican, called him during an event at Stanford University yesterday.

And Boehner continued: I have Democrat friends and Republican friends. I get along with almost everyone, but I have never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life.

What America has come to

This is real folks, this is not a bad dream

Let's keep up the good work!

Why God doesn't exist

Feed the hungry Facebook beast

Christmas dinner. Left to right: Bill, Leo, Jenni, Stefan, Stefan's girl friend, Michael, Uwe's girl friend, Uwe (Chang is taking the picture)

And your habitual "fragment," Michael, how about a "fragment" ? Right, Michael is working on a new, longer version of the Rilke-ghost story. Michael and Chang have met the ghost already in Duino---apparently provoking his appearance by means of a Google translation of one of his poems---and now they are summering in Bürchen, and Rilke is buried nearby. Fragment:

Years later. We’re now summering in Bürchen, Valais, Switzerland, in the chalet of a friend, our own house is rented to holiday makers, as usual. Bürchen is great, 1,600 meters up on the Alp, and so much cooler than the muggy summer-Riviera. There is only one minor problem: Rainer Maria is buried nearby, yes, Rilke, in Raron, a small, historical town right beneath Bürchen down in the valley, barely three klicks as the crow flies. We’ve avoided Raron so far, but Chang is playing the social networks and has to feed the hungry Facebook beast. His Korean followers can’t get enough pictures of snow-topped mountains and timber-studded Swiss chalets, and the 24 hour news-cycle dictates daily posting. We’ve ravaged the entire countryside already---natives of many cultures believe that you steal their picture when you take their photo---along those lines we’ve grabbed photons until nothing seems to be left of the Valais save Raron. 

“Do you believe in ghosts?” Chang asks. Of course we don’t. And it’s a sunny, wonderful day, and Rilke is interred in a vault on the southern side of the Burgkirche, which itself is built on a rock hundred meters above the floor of the valley. The views would be fantastic, and a light breeze would play with the pages of the tourist guide that tells about the local Rilke-wine and the XII-century town hall next to the church. A Rilke Pfad leads up there. Half-way there’s a bench. “Remember the bench?” Michael asks. We sit down. And now Michael has a really bad idea. He googles for “Rilke translations,” and the first entry connects to a learned, well-written article by a certain Majorie Perloff. 

“Wer, wenn ich schriee, hört mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen”…wasn’t that the first line? “Here,” I say to Chang, “there you have it, various ways to do this, ‘Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders,’ or ‘Who, if I cried out, would heed me amid the host of Angels’...”. Chang, predictably, is not really interested, but you see it coming. “Oohh,” the wailing begins, “ohhoohoo.” Talking about hubris.

We've interrupted our broadcast...

...to pen a longer version of Rilke's Ghost, and this is the first thing we found:

(Note that Postmodernism is also banned)

Defining the "Republican" party

Here's an entire article by Brian Beutler that appeared in the New Republic a few days ago. It contains the best definition of today's Republican Party (or GOP) we've seen in quite some time. Indulge us:

If you’ve been following Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy and his effect on the Republican primary closely, you were perhaps beset Monday by a strange sense of speechlessness—one born less of ineffability than of tedium.

Trump’s plan to prohibit Muslim immigration into the U.S. is indeed extreme, but to students of the Trump phenomenon and conservative politics more broadly, it was neither unexpected nor the source of any new or profound lesson.

While closing the country to foreign Muslims altogether is a radical idea relative to our founding ideals and current policy, it is but an incremental step relative to the outer bounds of legitimate debate in the GOP primary. Republican presidential candidates have supported discriminating against Muslims in our refugee policy, and opposed the very notion of a Muslim-American president, all without subjecting themselves to universal condemnation. The most surprising part of the latest Trump story is that it proves a Republican candidate can take Islamophobia too far for his party’s tastes.

Thanks God (Tristan Verran)

...So, Thanksgiving in the good ol' 'US of A' is that special time of year when it's actually OK to openly celebrate the mass migration of a group of religious fundamentalists who invade the country and then murder all the locals...

We mourn the victims

A victim outside the Bataclan concert hall in Paris on Friday night

“A body fell on me—it emptied blood on my legs. . . . My neighbor, a man of about fifty, was shot right in the face, in the head. Bits of brain and flesh fell on my glasses,” one blessed escapee from the theatre recollected. “I tried to keep my eyes on the floor, it was an immense flood of blood.” Another concertgoer, named Célia, recounted, “I saw the assailants clearly. I think there were four. Their faces weren’t hidden. All very young, in their twenties. Not especially handsome, but not at all devilish looking. They wore big tunics, one beige, and two all in black. The one in the beige tunic had a short beard. They were all Middle Eastern types but spoke French without any accent.” And another survivor remembered one of the attackers saying, “You have killed our brothers in Syria, now it’s your turn,” while they fired at the crowd. It was a non-stop fusillade, and a gunman shouted, “The first person who moves his ass, I’ll kill him.” Célia added, “My cell phone was lit because I was going to film parts of the concert, but I didn’t have it out. Good thing, because those who took theirs out were killed immediately.”

(Eyewitnesses, quoted in an article in The New Yorker)

Guns don't kill people, I kill people --- with guns (Cathy U.)

Recently, my father and I discussed the shootings in Oregon, and I wondered how many more mass shootings it would take before we finally decide we need stricter gun control.

 My father: He got those guns legally, you know.
 Me: And if we had stricter gun control, maybe he wouldn't have been able to get them. 
 My father: Yeah, it's a tough deal. I don't know what we could do to make it better. 
 Me: Maybe stricter gun control? 
 My father: And I don't know why we have so much trouble with mass shootings compared to other civilized countries.
 Me: Uh, I think it's because of their stricter gun control laws.
 My father: Yup, it's just a problem that can't be solved.

"I'm going deaf, and also: I can't hear you! Neiner, neiner, neiner."

 And here's the clip that justifies the headline:

This post (minus the clip) appeared first on Cathy's U.'s site: Hollywood Hates Me

Sunday school (Glenn)

("GOP" means grand old party, and refers to the American Republican Party. The elephant is their mascot)

Why Conservatives are wrong --- because they are always wrong (2)

Let's not forget:

Ku Klux Klan

For anybody born after 1970: this was a Southern Lynch Brigade in full armor.

And, yes, God's word worked to protect them (we quote):

"After two non-consecutive terms as governor, Bilbo won a U.S. Senate seat campaigning against “farmer murderers, corrupters of Southern womanhood, [skunks] who steal Gideon Bibles from hotel rooms” and a host of other, equally colorful foes. In a year where just 47 Mississippi voters cast a ballot for a communist candidate, Bilbo railed against a looming communist takeover of the state — and offered himself up as the solution to this red onslaught.

Self-explanatory

And here are a few words from today's decision, composed by Justice Anthony Kennedy:

"No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right."

"From their beginning to their most recent page, the annals of human history reveal the transcendent importance of marriage. The lifelong union of a man and a woman always has promised nobility and dignity to all persons, without regard to their station in life. Marriage is sacred to those who live by their religions and offers unique fulfillment to those who find meaning in the secular realm. Its dynamic allows two people to find a life that could not be found alone, for a marriage becomes greater than just the two persons. Rising from the most basic human needs, marriage is essential to our most profound hopes and aspirations."

"The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times. The generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all of its dimensions, and so they entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning. When new insight reveals discord between the Constitution’s central protections and a received legal stricture, a claim to liberty must be addressed."

The pitcher goes to the well until it breaks

Westboro Baptist Church

The hate group, normally obsessed with homosexuality, has accepted the offer of free tickets to Irak and stage their show in ISIS territory. That should solve a few problems.