Short (Mostly) and Sweet (Sometimes) Takes on Today's News: "'A Culture Broken by Brutally Powerful Men' Is an Eloquent and Precise Diagnosis of Our Current Context"

The charges against the Bundys, who led an armed standoff at their ranch in 2014, have been dismissed by a federal judge https://t.co/QoiQFDh38F

— The New York Times (@nytimes) January 8, 2018

“Siri, define “White Male Privilege”...” https://t.co/phB5hCyqyx

— John Kovalic (@muskrat_john) January 8, 2018

I've culled these tasty tidbits from my reading of the news online today, and am offering them to you as amuses-gueules in the hope that you may be tempted to click and read some of the links:

Nancy Buirski, "How a story of rape, race and justice became revolutionary": 

White people are responsible for what happened to black people and we are complicit if we don't do something to try to heal that.

Sam Fullwood III,  "'Fire and Fury' hoopla ignores the white privilege that enables Trump's dysfunction": 

[T]he racial stink swirling about this president doesn’t begin or end at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Fred Clark citing Oprah Winfrey, "On the horizon":

"A culture broken by brutally powerful men" is an eloquent and precise diagnosis of our current context, and of our perennial context.

Andrew Desiderio, "Secret Pro-Life Meeting With Mike Pence Killed Obamacare Fix—For Now":

Pro-life groups held a behind-closed-doors meeting with VP Mike Pence shortly before the bipartisan compromise deal to patch up Obamacare went down in flames.

Peter Montgomery, "Trump-Backing 'Apostle' Joins 'Intimate' Dinner With Mike Pence""

Amedia says God told him to start POTUS Shield in the hours after Trump's election victory. The name not only refers to President of the United States, Amedia has said, but also to the Prophetic Order of the United States that God is using the group to bring to fruition.   

"One of the greatest ironies of the history of Christianity is that its leaders constantly gave in to the temptation of power...even though they continued to speak in the name of Jesus, who did not cling to divine power but emptied himself and became as we are." ~Henri Nouwen

— Katelyn Beaty (@KatelynBeaty) January 6, 2018

Charles Pierce, "Why Do the Koch Brothers Want a Convention of States?":   

The final victory of movement conservatism would be a return to Gilded Age economics tied to a rebooted Confederate States of America.

Robert Reich, "Seriously, How Dumb Is Trump?": 

He conned 62,979,879 Americans to vote for him in November 2016 by getting them to believe his lies about Mexicans, Muslims, African-Americans, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and all the "wonderful," "beautiful" things he’d do for the people who'd support him.

“If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”

― Zora Neale Hurston pic.twitter.com/t8u66JKo0E

— Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) January 7, 2018