Onyx Lynx

• Christian political values?  Jesse Curtis (walk on) talks about them:

  I have three simple thoughts that it seems to me ought to help inform our vote. You might come up with a different list, but I'm increasingly struck by the extent to which our political system runs on the values of self-interest, nationalism, and incumbent wealth. I emphasize these three factors not for their comprehensiveness, but for the dearth of attention paid to them. Because these issues cut across partisan boundaries and structure the very terms of political debate, they are often overlooked. Too often, we rush into partisan debate without realizing that the mainstream positions of both parties are troubling.

• Mainline churches decaying?  Chris Hedges, reposted at AlterNet:

  The liberal church committed suicide when it severed itself from radicalism. Radical Christians led the abolitionist movement, were active in the Anti-Imperialist League, participated in the bloody labor wars, fought for women’s suffrage, formulated the Social Gospel—which included a huge effort to carry out prison reform and provide education to prisoners—and were engines in the civil rights and anti-war movements. Norman Thomas, a longtime leader of the Socialist Party of America, was a Presbyterian minister.
  
  These radicals generally were not embraced by the church hierarchy, which served as a bulwark of the establishment, but they kept the church vital and prophetic. They made it relevant and important to the oppressed, the poor and to workingmen and -women. Radicals were and are its hope.

• Department of One Man's Ceiling Is Another Man's Paper Tiger:

  "Look, Barack Obama has done incredible damage to the United States over the last seven years," young Marco said.
  
  Which damage is that, exactly?
  
  Would it be the "damage" that got nearly 18 million more Americans access to health insurance?
  
  Or is it the "damage" inflicted while the President ended two unnecessary wars?
  
  It's awful how much "damage" has been wrought by bringing down the unemployment rate to 5 percent instead of Mitt Romney's projected 6 percent. Cluck, cluck.
  
  Oh, I know! Perhaps he meant the "damage" caused as a result of Wall Street's greed and subsequent meltdown. Oh, wait. That happened under President Bush's watch, and was attributable to Republican policies passed while President Bill Clinton was in office. While they impeached, they stole.

13. He’s re-enforcing (the correct) stereotypes of conservatives.

“Trump’s brawling, blustery, mean-spirited public persona serves to associate conservatives with all the negative stereotypes that liberals have for decades attached to their opponents on the right. According to conventional caricature, conservatives are selfish, greedy, materialistic, bullying, misogynistic, angry, and intolerant. They are, we’re told, privileged and pampered elitists who revel in the advantages of inherited wealth while displaying only cruel contempt for the less fortunate and the less powerful… Trump is the living, breathing, bellowing personification of all the nasty characteristics Democrats routinely ascribe to Republicans.”

—Michael Medved, national radio show host

• Legendarily, there was one rule that Republicans actually followed when on the hustings; it had the unofficial name of the Eleventh Commandment:
  

  "Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican."

  (There was no such guideline on the Democratic side, not that it would have mattered.)
  
  Apparently the Republican "united front" has ceased to be.  (There are other samples scattered about, but this link was there today.)
• *Ahem*.
• Coates on Sanders on reparations;

  Sanders’s anti-racist moderation points to a candidate who is not merely against reparations, but one who doesn’t actually understand the argument. To briefly restate it, from 1619 until at least the late 1960s, American institutions, businesses, associations, and governments—federal, state, and local—repeatedly plundered black communities. Their methods included everything from land-theft, to red-lining, to disenfranchisement, to convict-lease labor, to lynching, to enslavement, to the vending of children. So large was this plunder that America, as we know it today, is simply unimaginable without it. Its great universities were founded on it. Its early economy was built by it. Its suburbs were financed by it. Its deadliest war was the result of it.
  
  One can’t evade these facts by changing the subject. Some months ago, black radicals in the Black Lives Matters movement protested Sanders. They were, in the main, jeered by the white left for their efforts. But judged by his platform, Sanders should be directly confronted and asked why his political imagination is so active against plutocracy, but so limited against white supremacy. Jim Crow and its legacy were not merely problems of disproportionate poverty. Why should black voters support a candidate who does not recognize this?

• DeVega on Coates on Sanders on reparations;

  Reparations for harms done to a people because of their race, ethnicity, religion or other markers of difference are not bizarre or unusual justice claims. They have firm standing under international law as has been seen with survivors of the Holocaust, in some limited cases with First Nations peoples in the United States and other countries, Japanese Americans during World War II, and victims of political violence in Latin America, Brazil, South Africa and elsewhere,
  
  While public opinion research is clear that white Americans are extremely hostile to reparations for slavery in the case of African-Americans, many white Americans actually support the idea of reparations in the abstract.

• Michigan.  Michigan.  Michigan. [ETA:  Michigan.]  Notice anything?  Hint:  It goes back at least as far as Gerald Ford.  Let me be blunt:  Would this have happened in Grosse Pointe?  Or Hamtramck?

• This episode has been way overblown by right-wing media, and here's why: We have a political party, the GOP, and its mouthpiece, Fox 'News,' who are rooting for any example of failure or embarrassment to our own country simply because they are not the current political party in charge. Therefore, any slight anomaly that occurs, no matter how small, will be blown completely out of proportion. You'd think these self-professed patriots would know how to at least appear to be good citizens, but we know their modus operandi. Their thinking resembles a middle school child, upset at losing, who won't let anyone play because he's taking his ball and going home.

• Notice anything missing from this rant? Like gladness and relief that our sailors were released unharmed? Where’s that love for our men and women in uniform that [Sean] Hannity flaunts when it's convenient?
  
  I’ll tell you where it is, subsumed by Hannity's lust for war with Iran. From a guy who never spent one minute putting his own flabby fanny on the line for this country.  [Emphasis added.]
  
  Meanwhile, the Great Chickenhawk attacked the Obama administration’s diplomacy – as if safe and sound sailors were some kind of bad outcome.
  
  Hannity should be ashamed of himself.

• Jill of Brilliant at Breakfast (*sob*) officially hangs up her keyboard.

  Everyone tells me they don't know how I'm still standing. I'd love to believe that I'm stronger than most people, but the truth is that I'm no different from anyone else. When life keeps hitting you, you bounce back because you don't have a choice. If you don't think you could, it's because you haven't been hit hard enough yet.
  
  I'm lucky. I've been able to keep my job and work remotely. A year ago I received a promotion and transfer to a new group where my manager is in Germany, where they don't believe in working 80 hour weeks. So my work/life balance has been somewhat better, and now will be even better because I won't be sitting in northern NJ traffic every day. My two little boy kitties, Eli and Sam, were great in the car and have adjusted beautifully to their new home. My sister has welcomed me into her circle and I am signing up for Meetup groups. It is the fresh start that just could not have happened in New Jersey, in a house too full of memories, too many of them about sadness and depression. Mr. B is now free of the emotional burdens that plagued him here and it is time for a young family to move into that house, now dressed up all pretty with a new kitchen, a nice deck, and a completely remodeled upstairs, and make better memories there.
  
  My weekdays will be spent in my home office that gets the morning sun through the trees in my front yard. When the weather gets nice, I can sit and drink iced tea on my screened porch, or take my laptop outside onto the patio. I am about 20 minutes or less from anything I might want to do. My neighbors are friendly, and I have no doubts that I'll be happy here.

   
• Lying liars who lie.
• More lying liars who lie.
• Toy wars.  Because we're all going to need a lot of comic relief this year,

• Natalie Cole, unforgettable singer
• Wayne Rogers, actor (M*A*S*H)