Trump Says Blacks Identify With His Indictments

recent op ed from one well known black conservative Clarence Page: On Trump’s befuddling hold on the GOP and the fizzling of the ‘Never Trump’ movement (msn.com) I’m so old that I can remember when moderate Republicans such as Colin Powell, former secretary of state, clung to hopes that Donald Trump might “grow” into the presidency. I don’t hear much talk like that nowadays with Trump leading the polls for the Republican nomination again and his remaining opponent Nikki Haley not expected to win even the primary this coming Saturday in her home state of South Carolina. […] That brings a cloud of gloom over what’s left of the “Never Trump” movement, the band of former Republican operatives in groups such as the Lincoln Project and Republican Accountability Project, who have been working since Trump’s 2020 election defeat to prevent his return to the White House. If there’s one thing Never Trumpers have proven, it’s that they’ve never come close to loosening Trump’s hold on the Republican base. “It’s now clear to me that we never had a chance,” my column-writing colleague David French recently wrote in The New York Times. “And the reason is equally clear: We did not truly understand our own party.” French’s confession was that it dawned on him only gradually that animosity — not support for core conservative values — was the prime motivator for today’s GOP. To me, that was a stunning observation, partly because it was so candid in a political world where candor so often is lost in a fog of excuses and sugar-coating. […] If David French and I have lost touch with what’s going on with the rank and file in our parties, Donald Trump appears to have the keen grasp of a master salesman. He gives the people what they want — or at least what they think they want after he sells it to them. Barack Obama offered us “the audacity of hope,” as he titled his autobiography. Trump offers us the audacity of a pitchman, with the entertainment value of a traveling medicine show mixed in. Viewed that way,… Read more »

one more ‘toon for the road

Attribution: Commander Bites GOP Impeachment by Rick McKee, CagleCartoons.com

the only thing that stops a bad guy  … is a good jury with conviction and damages in the millions 

WSJ: Jury Orders Ex-NRA Chief Wayne LaPierre to Pay More Than $4 Million Back to Gun-Rights Group (msn.com)

R.I.P. Flaco

“Flaco the Eurasian Eagle Owl Photograph by Brian Harnick – Fine Art America”

Flaco, New York City’s beloved owl, dies after striking building | US news | The Guardian

The Eurasian eagle owl named Flaco, which escaped New York City’s Central Park Zoo last year, has died after crashing into a building in Manhattan, officials said late on Friday.
Flaco went down after striking a building on West 89th Street and people reported the injured owl to the Wild Bird Fund (WBF), a statement from the Central Park Zoo said. WBF staffers soon found Flaco unresponsive and pronounced him dead at the scene.
Central Park Zoo officials said they went to pick up Flaco’s remains after being notified of his death by the WBF. The remains were then taken to the Bronx Zoo to undergo a necropsy.
The Central Park Zoo’s statement said its staff still hoped that the New York police department was able to arrest whoever vandalised Flaco’s enclosure on 2 February last year, allowing the owl to escape the place where he had been an exhibit for 13 years and live in the wild.
“The vandal who damaged Flaco’s exhibit jeopardised the safety of the bird and is ultimately responsible for his death,” the zoo’s statement said.
Flaco was rescued by the zoo in 2010, when he was less than a year old. He was reputed to be the only owl of his kind in the wild in North America, and there were widespread fears he ultimately wouldn’t survive for long outside captivity.
During the year and nearly three weeks he spent in the wild, he demonstrated the ability to catch rats in the park. And his ability to fly strengthened.
[continues]

david horsey ‘toon and op ed Theocracy comes to Alabama | The Seattle Times

One way to determine when life begins is to start at the end.
If death is the end of consciousness, then, arguably, life begins when a person becomes conscious. Clearly, a baby at birth is conscious. There is also a level of awareness in the womb. When does that begin? It may be impossible to pinpoint a fetal dawn, but it certainly is not at conception.
That is just one way to look at a contentious issue, of course.  A religious counter argument asserts that, at the very moment that sperm meets ova, a child of God comes into being. That theological view is the basis for a ruling handed down this week by the Alabama Supreme Court declaring that even a frozen blastocyst chilled in a nitrogen container is a living person with all the legal rights of any citizen of the United States.
[…]
You may think life is a matter of consciousness. Or you may think it is connected to the first stirrings of an embryo in the womb. Or you may simply think it is all pretty complicated. But it will not matter what you or I or anyone thinks or believes if the theocrats gain power. As in Alabama, they will use the law to impose their dogma on us all.