What I had not anticipated about the cost of losing my faith was that it would no longer be possible to deceive myself. I could no longer make a pact with any higher being.
Amber Scorah, New York Times
Representative Justin Amash, the only Republican to publicly support impeachment, held a Town Hall event a few days ago in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and was asked by attendees to explain his support for removing Trump from office. Naturally, he cited the Mueller Report.
Cathy Garnaat, a Republican who supported Amash and the president said she was upset about Amash’s position but wanted to hear his reasoning. She said that she will definitely support Trump in 2020 but that Tuesday night was the first time she had heard that the Mueller report didn’t completely exonerate the president.
“I was surprised to hear there was anything negative in the Mueller report at all about President Trump. I hadn’t heard that before,” she said. “I’ve mainly listened to conservative news and I hadn’t heard anything negative about that report and President Trump has been exonerated.”
One hopes that an unseemly suspicion will trickle into Ms. Garnaat’s mind: Could FOX News be lying to us?
I am convinced that the only way to get the truth to the poorly-informed is to tell them frankly and unambiguously that we are not talking about ‘spin,’ we are not talking about plausible alternative interpretations of facts, we are talking about lies. Lies. L-I-E-S. FOX News lies to you. You are being played for suckers.
Anybody who has actually read the Mueller Report is aware that Attorney General Barr’s 4-page précis of the report is grievously misleading.
What do you know? It seems that much of the Congress hasn’t read the report.
Robert Mueller’s brief, eight-minute remarks on Wednesday about his investigation left the non-conservatives who closely follow his work fairly nonplussed. Mueller was simply reiterating things he had already written in his report. Conservatives, on the other hand, erupted in outrage.
What so vexed the right about Mueller’s curt affirmation of his previous conclusions? The answer, as we’ll see, seems to be that they believed their own propaganda about what Mueller had (and had not) found. Presented even briefly with reality, their minds have reeled in shock.
Mueller produced massive evidence that President Trump committed Nixonian-scale obstruction of justice in office.
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Trump, William Barr, and the Republican Party followed a strategy of systematically lying about this. Barr repeatedly suggested that Mueller, rather than being unable to charge Trump with crimes, simply didn’t have enough evidence of misconduct to make up his mind. By all indications, the conservative intelligentsia has failed to read the report and believes the misleading spin emanating from the president and his loyal attorney general.
I’ve been marveling for weeks that the report hasn’t created a greater stir, and have reached the same conclusion: After almost 2-years of relentless speculation and anticipation, few Americans have actually read the report; they’ve surrendered their understanding to the liars at FOX News, Breitbart, et. al.
A criminal sits in the Oval Office; that is a fact — and incontestable proof of it is at your local bookstore.
The Southern Baptist Convention has released an abbreviated version of its annual statistical report — and it’s another year of mostly bad news.
The number of state conventions is DOWN.
The number of associations within the states is DOWN.
The number of churches is DOWN.
The number of church-type missions (e.g., church plants) is DOWN.
The number of total members is DOWN.
The number of baptisms is DOWN.
Weekly attendance is DOWN.
Small groups attendance is DOWN.
Receipts are … UP.
For a few years church plants were running ahead of failures, with the result that the church count was up even as the membership was in decline, meaning SBC churches were cannibalizing each other; that couldn’t last forever, as this years statistics demonstrate.
But how can receipts be up as everything else declines? It’s difficult to know from the data so far released, but my guess is that the hardcore are digging deep. It’s been clear for years that sane people were leaving the denomination as it hardened into lunacy, and those who remain are probably digging into savings to keep that rickety mess standing.
Longtime readers know of my love of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It’s a beautiful area and, better, it has an amiable, laid-back culture vastly more congenial than the south. For years, I’ve cheerfully explained that it’s because there are only seven Southern Baptist churches — and three of them can’t find pastors. Well … bummer. Now there are nine Southern Baptist churches; mercifully, three of them are still unable to find a pastor.
Here’s a delicious irony for you: Heavy rains damaged access to Ark Encounter, the colossal make-believe Noah’s Ark used by Ken Ham to fleece the gullible.
Owners of a replica of Noah’s Ark are suing their insurers, saying the companies failed to adequately cover damage to the surrounding property caused by heavy rain.
The ark itself — a 510-foot wooden ship modeled after the biblical ark — made it through the rain just fine, a representative for Ark Encounter in Williamstown, Kentucky, told CNN. But the rainfall in 2017 and 2018 caused a “significant landslide” on the property, which undermined an access road leading to the massive wooden vessel.
As a result, the access road was unsafe to use …
I’ve no idea whether Ark Encounter served as its own general contractor on the project, or if it was turned over to some design-build firm, or what, but this is a type of failure that any competent soils (or geotechnical, my specialty) engineer would have investigated prior to site design. Interestingly, the story makes no mention of a suit against the engineers, so I’m guessing that none was consulted.
I’ve never been to Ark Encounter, and am not going to ever debase myself by going, but there’s a video tour here.
