How Can I Miss You When You Won’t Go Away?

Ezra Klein: ‘Why Democrats Still Have to Appeal to the Center, but Republicans Don’t’

Cartoon by Pat Bagley for the Salt Lake City Tribune

 From the New York Times:

Put simply, Democrats can’t win running the kinds of campaigns and deploying the kinds of tactics that succeed for Republicans. They can move to the left, and they are, but they can’t abandon the center — or, given the geography of American politics, the center-right — and still hold power. Democrats are modestly, but importantly, restrained by diversity and democracy. Republicans are not.

Read the full article.

Amanda Marcotte: ‘Impeachment Trial Should Remove Any Lingering Doubt: Republicans Are Beyond Redemption’

 From Salon:

...[A]s I watched the impeachment trial Wednesday, which featured the first day of Democratic House members arguing before the Senate in favor of removing Donald Trump from office, I was struck by the fact that Democrats were making a flawless case. Their evidence is overwhelming. Their arguments are airtight. The rhetoric was pitch-perfect. It was a tour de force of Enlightenment faith in the power of rhetoric and reason. Rep. Adam Schiff kept morphing, before my eyes, into Atticus Finch, as portrayed by Gregory Peck.

But let’s not forget how To Kill a Mockingbird ends: Atticus loses his case and his innocent client, Tom, is killed. No matter how perfectly Democrats argue their case, Republicans plan to acquit Trump and their voters will be ecstatic about it. 

Our problem isn’t the Democrats and their “messaging.” Our problem is the Republicans. Justice has no place in a society run by people who care only about domination and the will to power. 
Read the full article.

Sean Illing: ‘How Misinformation Overwhelmed Our Democracy’

 From Vox:

We live in a media ecosystem that overwhelms people with information. Some of that information is accurate, some of it is bogus, and much of it is intentionally misleading. The result is a polity that has increasingly given up on finding out the truth. As Sabrina Tavernise and Aidan Gardiner put it in a New York Times piece, “people are numb and disoriented, struggling to discern what is real in a sea of slant, fake, and fact.” This is partly why an earth-shattering historical event like a president’s impeachment has done very little to move public opinion. 

The core challenge we’re facing today is information saturation and a hackable media system. If you follow politics at all, you know how exhausting the environment is. The sheer volume of content, the dizzying number of narratives and counternarratives, and the pace of the news cycle are too much for anyone to process. 

One response to this situation is to walk away and tune everything out. After all, it takes real effort to comb through the bullshit, and most people have busy lives and limited bandwidth. Another reaction is to retreat into tribal allegiances. There’s Team Liberal and Team Conservative, and pretty much everyone knows which side they’re on. So you stick to the places that feed you the information you most want to hear.

Read the full article.

A girl has been kicked out of her Christian school, it is alleged, merely because she was wearing a rainbow-themed shirt and eating a rainbow-themed cake outside of school grounds.  Given that the dispersion of multicolored light in water droplets is now considered inherently homosexual, the Bible will surely be rewritten so that God sent Noah some sign at the end of the flood other than a rainbow. Maybe free tickets to Guys and Dolls, ’cause that’s not gay at all.

Tom Hooper’s ‘Cats’: A Mesmerizing Misfire

Tom Hooper’s Cats doesn’t work, but it doesn’t work in intriguing ways. It’s like someone put Ken Russell, Busby Berkley, and Chuck Jones into a food processor and poured the results into a cat dish. Not entirely appetizing, but not indigestible either.