SOTU Update

Katie Britt didn't just fuck up the performance - seems odd that a party so totally committed to performative bullshit would flop like that - anyway, she did what dog-ass Republican fascist-wannabes do practically all day every day: she flat-out lied by spinning a yarn that had no relation to the truth.

Katie Britt’s false linkage of a sex-trafficking case to Joe Biden

“We know that President Biden didn’t just create this border crisis. He invited it with 94 executive actions in his first 100 days. When I took office, I took a different approach. I traveled to the Del Rio sector of Texas. That’s where I spoke to a woman who shared her story with me. She had been sex trafficked by the cartels starting at the age of 12. She told me not just that she was raped every day, but how many times a day she was raped. The cartels put her on a mattress in a shoe box of a room, and they sent men through that door over and over again for hours and hours on end. We wouldn’t be okay with this happening in a Third World country. This is the United States of America, and it is past time, in my opinion, that we start acting like it. President Biden’s border policies are a disgrace.”

— Sen. Katie Boyd Britt (R-Ala.), in the Republican response to the State of the Union address, March 7

If you were watching Britt’s speech on Thursday night, you likely would have thought she was talking about a recent victim of sex trafficking who was abused in the United States and suffered because of President Biden’s policies.

If you did, you would have been wrong. Sean Ross, Britt’s communications director, confirmed that she was talking about Karla Jacinto Romero — who has testified before Congress about being forced to work in Mexican brothels from 2004 to 2008. (A viral TikTok by journalist Jonathan Katz first revealed that Britt was speaking about Romero.) In a phone conversation and a statement, Ross disputed that Britt’s language was misleading.

We disagree. Let’s take a look.

The Facts

Britt’s account of Romero’s experience was a centerpiece of her rebuttal to Biden’s address. The way Britt sets up the story, there is no indication that she is talking about a woman who was working in brothels in Mexico during the George W. Bush administration. This is how the passage unfolds.

• She first blames Biden for the surge of migrants at the border.
• Then she says she visited the border shortly after she took office. That would be 2023.
• At length, she details the story of an unnamed victim that she says she met on her trip. The implication is that the woman recently crossed the border — because of “sex trafficking by the cartels.”
• She strongly suggests that her abuse took place in the United States: “We wouldn’t be okay with this happening in a Third World country. This is the United States of America, and it is past time, in my opinion, that we start acting like it.”
• She ends by reinforcing that such alleged trafficking is Biden’s fault: “President Biden’s border policies are a disgrace.”

But Biden has nothing to do with Romero’s story. As she testified nine years ago, her mother threw her out of her house at age 12 and she “fell prey to a professional pimp.” She says she then spent the next four years in brothels before a regular client helped her escape when she was 16 years old. There is no indication in her story that drug cartels were involved, though Britt said that in the State of the Union response and has made a similar claim on at least one other occasion. Romero was never trafficked to the United States; instead, she says many men who paid to have sex with her were “foreigners visiting my city looking to have sexual interactions with minors like me.”

In a YouTube video, Britt features images of her hugging Romero during her 2023 trip to the border. “If we as leaders of the greatest nation in the world are not fighting to protect the most vulnerable, we are not doing our job,” she said in the video. The implication again is that this happened on Biden’s watch.

When Donald Trump was president, he regularly decried human trafficking that he claimed was happening at the border, including that “thousands of young girls and women” were being smuggled across the border for prostitution. In 2019, we investigated that claim and found no evidence to support it. Most human trafficking prosecutions generally involve legal border crossings, visa fraud and travel into the United States on airplanes. Victim organizations say there are relatively few cases that involve forced kidnapping across the border. This might be one reason Britt regularly cites a case that happened long ago and did not involve crossing the border.

Ross, Britt’s spokesman, said that Romero’s story was indicative of trafficking that is now happening at the border and that should be clear from Britt’s framing in the speech.

He said the reference to a “Third World country” was generic and was not intended to refer to Mexico, which he said is not a Third World country. Third World is a dated Cold War-era term previously used to refer to poor or developing countries. Global South, indicating low income and high poverty, is a more common expression today. Mexico is considered part of the Global South, though it is also a member of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

In a written statement, Ross said:

“The story Senator Britt told was 100% correct. And there are more innocent victims of that kind of disgusting, brutal trafficking by the cartels than ever before right now. The Biden administration’s policies — the policies in this country that the President falsely claims are humane — have empowered the cartels and acted as a magnet to a historic level of migrants making the dangerous journey to our border. Along that journey, children, women, and men are being subjected to gut-wrenching, heartbreaking horrors in our own backyard. And here at home, the Biden administration’s policies are leading to more and more suffering, including Americans being poisoned by fentanyl and being murdered. These human costs are real, and it’s past time for some on the left to stop pretending otherwise.”

The Pinocchio Test

In a high-profile speech like this, a politician should not mislead voters with emotionally charged language. Romero’s story is tragic and may be evocative of other Mexican girls trapped in the sex trade in that country. But she was not trafficked across the border — and her story has nothing to do with Biden. Britt’s failure to make that clear earns her Four Pinocchios.

Four Pinocchios

Phrase-ology

A new one for me: Articulate ignorance.

A good salesman can make himself sound smarter and more knowledgeable than he actually is. (I've known this for quite a while, but I never gave it a name. So thanks, NYT)

The ability to do that is a skill that has to be mastered in order to play at the upper levels. And just as with any other skill or power, it can be abused and misused to less than honorable ends. With power comes responsibility, and all like that there.

The Articulate Ignorance of Vivek Ramaswamy

As our nation continues its march to 2024, a year that will feature not only a presidential election but also potentially four criminal trials of the Republican front-runner, I’ve been thinking about the political and cultural power of leadership. How much do leaders matter, really? What role does corrupt political leadership play in degrading not just a government but the culture itself?

Let’s talk today about the specific way in which poor leadership transforms civic ignorance from a problem into a crisis — a crisis that can have catastrophic effects on the nation and, ultimately, the world.

Civic ignorance is a very old American problem. If you spend five seconds researching what Americans know about their own history and their own government, you’ll uncover an avalanche of troubling research, much of it dating back decades. As Samuel Goldman detailed two years ago, as far back as 1943, 77 percent of Americans knew essentially nothing about the Bill of Rights, and in 1952 only 19 percent could name the three branches of government.

That number rose to a still dispiriting 38 percent in 2011, a year in which almost twice as many Americans knew that Randy Jackson was a judge on “American Idol” as knew that John Roberts was the chief justice of the United States. A 2018 survey found that most Americans couldn’t pass the U.S. Citizenship Test. Among other failings, most respondents couldn’t identify which nations the United States fought in World War II and didn’t know how many justices sat on the Supreme Court.

Civic ignorance isn’t confined to U.S. history or the Constitution. Voters are also wildly ignorant about one another. A 2015 survey found that Democrats believe Republicans are far older, far wealthier and more Southern than they truly are. Republicans believe Democrats are far more atheist, Black and gay than the numbers indicate.

But I don’t share these statistics to write yet another story bemoaning public ignorance. Instead, I’m sharing these statistics to make a different argument: that the combination of civic ignorance, corrupt leadership and partisan animosity means that the chickens are finally coming home to roost. We’re finally truly feeling the consequences of having a public disconnected from political reality.

Simply put, civic ignorance was a serious but manageable problem, as long as our leader class and key institutions still broadly, if imperfectly, cared about truth and knowledge — and as long as our citizens cared about the opinions of that leader class and those institutions.

Consider, for example, one of the most consequential gaffes in presidential debate history. In October 1976, the Republican Gerald Ford, who was then the president, told a debate audience, “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration.”

The statement wasn’t just wrong, it was wildly wrong. Of course there was Soviet domination of Eastern Europe — a domination that was violently reaffirmed in the 1956 crackdown in Hungary and the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. The best defense that Ford’s team could muster was the national security adviser Brent Scowcroft’s argument that “I think what the president was trying to say is that we do not recognize Soviet domination of Europe.”

In a close election with Jimmy Carter, the gaffe was a big deal. As the political scientist Larry Sabato later wrote, the press “pounced” and “wrote of little else for days afterward.” As a result, “a public initially convinced that Ford had won the debate soon turned overwhelmingly against him.” Note the process: Ford made a mistake, even his own team recognized the mistake and tried to offer a plausible alternative meaning, and then press coverage of the mistake made an impression on the public.

Now let’s fast-forward to the present moment. Instead of offering a plausible explanation for their mistakes — much less apologizing — all too many politicians deny that they’ve made any mistakes at all. They double down. They triple down. They claim that the fact-checking process itself is biased, the press is against them and they are the real truth tellers.

I bring this up not just because of the obvious example of Donald Trump and many of his most devoted followers in Congress but also because of the surprising success of his cunning imitator Vivek Ramaswamy. If you watched the first Republican debate last week or if you’ve listened to more than five minutes of Ramaswamy’s commentary, you’ll immediately note that he is exceptionally articulate but also woefully ignorant, or feigning ignorance, about public affairs. Despite his confident delivery, a great deal of what he says makes no sense whatsoever.

As The Times has documented in detail, Ramaswamy is prone to denying his own words. But his problem is greater than simple dishonesty. Take his response to the question of whether Mike Pence did the right thing when he certified the presidential election on Jan. 6, 2021. Ramaswamy claims that in exchange for certification, he would have pushed for a new federal law to mandate single-day voting, paper ballots and voter identification. Hang on. Who would write the bill? How would it pass a Democratic House and a practically tied Senate? Who would be president during the intervening weeks or months?

It’s a crazy, illegal, unworkable idea on every level. But that kind of fantastical thinking is par for the course for Ramaswamy. This year, for instance, he told Don Lemon on CNN, “Black people secured their freedoms after the Civil War — it is a historical fact, Don, just study it — only after their Second Amendment rights were secured.”

Wait. What?

While there are certainly Black Americans who used weapons to defend themselves in isolated instances, the movement that finally ended Jim Crow rested on a philosophy of nonviolence, not the exercise of Second Amendment rights. The notion is utterly absurd. If anything, armed Black protesters such as the Black Panthers triggered cries for stronger gun control laws, not looser ones. Indeed, there is such a long record of racist gun laws that it’s far more accurate to say that Black Americans secured greater freedom in spite of a racist Second Amendment consensus, not because of gun rights.

Ramaswamy’s rhetoric is littered with these moments. He’s a very smart man, blessed with superior communication skills, yet he constantly exposes his ignorance, his cynicism or both. He says he’ll “freeze” the lines of control in the Ukraine war (permitting Russia to keep the ground it’s captured), refuse to admit Ukraine to NATO and persuade Russia to end its alliance with China. He says he’ll agree to defend Taiwan only until 2028, when there is more domestic chip manufacturing capacity here in the States. He says he’ll likely fire at least half the federal work force and will get away with it because he believes civil service protections are unconstitutional.

The questions almost ask themselves. How will he ensure that Russia severs its relationship with China? How will he maintain stability with a weakened Ukraine and a NATO alliance that just watched its most powerful partner capitulate to Russia? How will Taiwan respond during its countdown to inevitable invasion? And putting aside for a moment the constitutional questions, his pledge to terminate half the federal work force carries massive, obvious perils, beginning with the question of what to do with more than a million largely middle- and high-income workers who are now suddenly unemployed. How will they be taken care of? What will this gargantuan job dislocation do to the economy?

Ramaswamy’s bizarre solutions angered his debate opponents in Milwaukee, leading Nikki Haley to dismantle him on live television in an exchange that would have ended previous presidential campaigns. But the modern G.O.P. deemed him one of the night’s winners. A Washington Post/FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll found that 26 percent of respondents believed Ramaswamy won, compared with just 15 percent who believed Haley won.

The bottom line is this: When a political class still broadly believes in policing dishonesty, the nation can manage the negative effects of widespread civic ignorance. When the political class corrects itself, the people will tend to follow. But when key members of the political class abandon any pretense of knowledge or truth, a poorly informed public is simply unequipped to hold them to account.

And when you combine ignorance with unrelenting partisan hostility, the challenge grows all the greater. After all, it’s not as though members of the political class didn’t try to challenge Trump. But since that challenge came mostly from people Trump supporters loathe, such as Democratic politicians, members of the media and a few Trump-skeptical or Never Trump writers and politicians, their minds were closed. Because of the enormous amount of public ignorance, voters often didn’t know that Trump was lying or making fantastically unrealistic promises, and they shut out every voice that could tell them the truth.

In hindsight, I should have seen all this coming. I can remember feeling a sense of disquiet during the Tea Party revolution. Republican candidates were pledging to do things they simply could not do, such as repealing Obamacare without holding the presidency and Congress or, alternatively, veto-proof congressional majorities. Then, when they failed to do the thing they could never do in the first place, their voters felt betrayed.

There is always a problem of politicians overpromising. Matthew Yglesias recently reminded me of the frustrating way in which the 2020 Democratic primary contest was sidetracked by a series of arguments over phenomenally ambitious and frankly unrealistic policy proposals on taxes and health care. But there is a difference between this kind of routine political overpromising and the systematic mendacity of the Trump years.

A democracy needs an informed public and a basically honest political class. It can muddle through without one or the other, but when it loses both, the democratic experiment is in peril. A public that knows little except that it despises its opponents will be vulnerable to even the most bizarre conspiracy theories, as we saw after the 2020 election. And when leaders ruthlessly exploit that ignorance and animosity, the Republic can fracture. How long can we endure the consequences of millions of Americans believing the most fantastical lies?

Welcome To Florida

W elcome

T o

F lorida

Oy, Breitbart

These guys can barely tell the truth without lying. Then they use it to bash women in general, and pump up the guys.

Like - "Time to macho up, fellas. Go get the womenfolk under control. Tell 'em to get their minds right and vote the way they're supposed to."

Here's Breitbart on double spin cycle.

Exit Poll: 68% of Unmarried Women Favored Democrats in Midterm Election

Sounds pretty reasonable, right? Like they're acknowledging the facts, and telling the Republicans to get their heads outa their asses.

But... 

Sixty-eight percent of unmarried women favored Democrats in the U.S. House midterm elections compared to 31 percent who favored Republicans, according to exit poll data.

In comparison, 52 percent of unmarried men favored Republicans over 45 percent who favored Democrats.

Overall, 59 percent of unmarried voters supported Democrats compared to 39 percent who supported Republicans, whereas 58 percent of married voters supported Republicans compared to 41 percent who supported Democrats.

For married men, 59 percent said they supported a Republican candidate compared to 39 percent who supported a Democrat, while 56 percent of married women supported a Republican candidate compared to 42 percent who supported a Democrat.

Overall, 59 percent of unmarried voters supported Democrats compared to 39 percent who supported Republicans, whereas 58 percent of married voters supported Republicans compared to 41 percent who supported Democrats.

And a coupla kickers, where they jumble up the numbers so they can pretend something that happened didn't happen at all, or maybe it happened but it doesn't mean what everybody knows it means: that the dog-ass Republicans are lyin' sacks of shit who shoulda won big but got stomped - by a buncha stupid girls and woke beta pussy-lickers.

Married men and women each made up 30 percent of the respondents (60 percent), while nonmarried women made up 23 percent of the respondents, and nonmarried men made up 16 percent.

Furthermore, 55 percent of women without children favored Democrats compared to 44 percent who favored Republicans. However, 57 percent of male voters with no children favored Republicans compared to 45 percent who preferred Democrats. Women with no children made up 39 percent of the respondents, while men with no children made up 33 percent.

Even women with children were more likely to support Democrats over Republicans by 51 percent to 47 percent, while men with children broke for Republicans over Democrats by 54 percent to 42 percent.

The exit polling data also showed that abortion was a major driver in motivating women to vote Tuesday.

Thirty-three percent of women said that abortion was their most important issue, with 77 percent of those respondents supporting Democrat candidates compared to 22 percent supporting Republican candidates. The next most important issue for women was inflation at 28 percent, followed by crime, gun policy, and immigration, which were all equal at ten percent.

So really, they're trying to get this to point everybody back to a nice comfortable place where they can believe the culture war is on their side - ie: things are better when people are married and settled, and therefor in a position that makes them more malleable and coercible: "You need to stay right there and toe the line - you can't take chances. Nice little family you got there - be a shame somethin' bad should happen to it."

Conform and be dull.

It also always ends up pointing directly at the women. Because there's always that kernel of misogyny and dominionism disguised as protective altruistic chivalry. But it's really the same old shit about "all those unmarried baby-murdering sluts who need to be taken in hand by some big strong men."

BTW: Numbers don't lie. But these assholes lie with numbers all the fuckin' time.

Today's Beau

Justin King - Beau Of The Fifth Column

"It was always a lie. The whole thing was always a lie. And it was a lie meant to rile people up."

--Dan Crenshaw R-TX02

GOP Congressman Dan Crenshaw says election deniers know they’re lying

The representative from Houston said fellow Republicans admitted behind closed doors that the 2020 election wasn’t stolen, and he warned that such messaging could dangerously mislead voters.

Members of Congress who contested the 2020 election results admitted behind closed doors that they know their cause is false, U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Houston, said on his podcast published Wednesday, offering his sternest rebuke yet of his party’s rejection of President Joe Biden’s win.

Speaking with former congressional candidate and election reform advocate Nick Troiano on his podcast, “Hold These Truths,” the Texas Republican said fellow members of his party were merely trying to signal their disapproval of former President Donald Trump’s loss but knew there was no real mechanism to overturn it. Still, he warned that messaging could dangerously lead to voters losing faith in the electoral process.

“It was always a lie. The whole thing was always a lie. And it was a lie meant to rile people up,” Crenshaw said, deriding some of his peers as “political personalities” rather than “politicians.” He did not name the members he was referring to.

“People just need their last hurrah. They just need to feel like they fought one last time,” he added. Other members told him, “‘Trust me, it’ll be fine.’ And I was like, ‘No, it won’t! That’s not what people believe and that’s not what you’re telling them.’”

Trump has been widely expected to run for office again in 2024, and Axios reported Friday that the former president could formally announce his bid on Nov. 14, shortly after the midterm elections.

Crenshaw was among a handful of Texas Republicans to vote against GOP objections to the results of the 2020 presidential election. Although the objections delayed the certification of the results, culminating in the violent attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the effort was always doomed to fail with a Democratic majority in the House.

Members of both parties have since advanced legislation to make objecting to election results more difficult, including increased thresholds for lawmakers to file an objection and clarifying the vice president’s role in certifying elections as purely ceremonial. The measures have so far enjoyed wide bipartisan support. U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, was the only holdout on the Senate Rules Committee to oppose the bill. Cruz continues to decline to say that President Joe Biden was legitimately elected, though he has come to terms with the current occupant of the White House.

Crenshaw has spoken frequently against members of his party who he said focus primarily on projecting conservative soundbites over serious legislating, calling them the “woke right.” That arm of the party, he said, will likely only keep growing with more hardline Republicans in toe with Trump running in favorable districts this year. Republicans are widely expected to win control of the U.S. House in the next Congress.

“This extreme willingness to say the most extreme things just to grab people’s attention and then the people’s willingness to believe some of it,” Crenshaw said on the podcast. “There just doesn’t seem to be a limit to how far some people are willing to go.”

There was no evidence of widespread voter fraud that would have undermined the reported results of the 2020 presidential election, and the Trump administration implicitly acknowledged Biden’s victory by kicking off, though belatedly, the presidential transition in mid-November that year.

The Big Brag

Insider:

Kyle Rittenhouse says he's going to Texas A&M and 'it's going to be awesome.' The university disagrees.

Kyle Rittenhouse said he would be attending Texas A&M University, during a podcast episode of "The Charlie Kirk Show" posted to YouTube on Saturday.

"I'm going to be going there, and it's going to be awesome," Rittenhouse said after donning a baseball cap with the university's insignia on it. "Beautiful campus, amazing people, amazing food."

A university official told the Dallas Morning News on Sunday, however, that Rittenhouse will not be in attendance.

"He has not been admitted as a student this summer or fall," Texas A&M spokesperson Kelly Brown said.

Rittenhouse had taken online classes at Arizona State University in 2021, but said he dropped them during the trial and wanted to resume them afterward. Students demanded, however, that he be expelled from the university after being acquitted of homicide charges.

ASU previously told Insider that Rittenhouse was no longer in attendance at the university.

Rittenhouse shot three people, killing two of them, during a protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2020. He argued in court that he shot the three individuals — Joseph Rosenbaum, Anthony Huber, and Gaige Grosskreutz — as an act of self-defense.

A jury found Rittenhouse not guilty of five charges, including first-degree homicide.

Today's Manchin Malarky

Joe Manchin is not as stupid as he has seemed these last several months.

Joe Manchin is however feeling the heat, and starting to crumble under the pressure.

Which makes Joe Manchin look kinda stupid.

Business Insider:

New study blows a hole in Joe Manchin's argument that the revamped child tax credit discourages people from working

A new study released Tuesday indicated that the revamped child tax credit hasn't kept people from working, blowing a hole in an argument championed by Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia as Democrats grapple with extending the credit as a key part of President Joe Biden's domestic agenda.

The analysis from researchers at the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University, Barnard College and Bocconi University found "very small, inconsistently signed, and statistically insignificant impacts of the CTC" on employment and participation and the workforce.

It relied on data from the monthly Current Population Survey from earlier this year as well as the Census Household Pulse surveys that were collected from April 2021 through August 2021, the second month that the child tax credit checks were sent.

The child tax credit was overhauled in Biden's stimulus law earlier this year. From July to December, families will get a $300 monthly benefit per child age 5 and under, amounting to $3,600 this year. The one-year measure provides $250 each month per kid age 6 and 17, totaling $3,000. Half of the benefit will come as a tax refund next year.

Families with little or no tax burden can also receive the federal cash now, a sharp change from how the credit was originally structured. The latest research challenges Manchin's assertion that federal aid will keep people from seeking work as he argues against the US economy slipping into an "entitlement mentality."

Some experts cautioned against drawing definitive conclusions early in the credit's rollout. Scott Winship, a poverty expert at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, wrote in a tweet that "research finds that the labor supply response takes years to fully manifest, not days or months."

A strong majority of Congressional Democrats support making the changes permanent in their safety net package, citing research that it could cut child poverty by up to half and particularly among Black and Latino kids. Early research has indicated that it helped feed 2 million kids in its first month and kept 3 million out of poverty.

But Democrats are running into resistance from Manchin who wants people to work as a condition to receive the credit.

The West Virginia Democrat has been the chief advocate for imposing a work requirement on the expanded child tax credit. He argues the generous federal assistance would keep people from working.

"There's no work requirements whatsoever," he told CNN on September 12. "There's no education requirements whatsoever for better skill sets. Don't you think, if we're going to help the children, that the people should make some effort?"

He doubled down a few days later, telling Insider that "tax credits are based around people that have tax liabilities."

Some Senate Democrats shot back, including Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, one of the architects of the expansion. "I think raising children is work," he told HuffPost.

Brown's comeback was OK, but it's a little outdated and misses the point. The Child Tax Credit is what allows a huge majority of parents' the "luxury" of rejoining the workforce.

Which shows up Manchin's "argument" as the usual conservative double bind claptrap:

without the tax credit, I can't afford to go to work

without the work, I can't get the tax credit

all done - gotta go

The Grift Everlasting

First, there's the Big Lie, and when that begins to lose its fresh and starchy appeal, you shift to the Big Stall.

With a little payback's-a-motherfucker thrown in through the side window.

VICE News:

Arizona Audit Delayed Because Cyber Ninjas Have COVID

Arizona Republicans’ election “audit” report will be delayed even longer, because the leaders of the team running it are “quite sick” with COVID-19.

The long-awaited farce of an Arizona election audit is ending in tragedy.

The Republican-controlled Arizona Senate was finally supposed to receive the report on its sham of an election fraud audit on Monday. But state Republicans announced that the report hadn’t been submitted—because the majority of the leaders of the conspiracy-minded Cyber Ninjas team that ran the so-called “audit” have caught COVID-19.

And right on cue, we get the stall:

“The team expected to have the full draft ready for the Senate today, but unfortunately Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan and two other members of the five-person audit team have tested positive for COVID-19 and are quite sick,” Arizona’s Republican senate president, Karen Fann, said in a statement Monday afternoon.

Here's the full statement as per a tweet from the aforementioned (and aptly named) Karen:

Fann said the senate had received “a portion of the draft report,” and will meet Wednesday to begin reviewing what they had received.

The report won’t be made public until Senate Republicans decide to release it after reviewing and finalizing its findings, a process that will now slip even further into the future.

Cyber Ninjas, a firm that had never conducted an electoral audit before, was given carte blanche to investigate whether widespread fraud stole the election from President Trump. Since then, it’s been chaos.

The company, whose owner had publicly floated false conspiracy theories that the election had been rigged against Trump even before it was hired, failed to follow basic auditing procedures, and spent nearly $6 million in outside funding from conservative backers on the monthslong slog of a process. The audit even banned its own monitor from observing the process, kicking former Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett out of the building for leaking data.

The audit’s official account was banned from Twitter for spreading lies and misinformation about the 2020 election. Logan recently appeared in a conspiracy theory-driven “documentary” about how the election was stolen from Trump. Cyber Ninjas refused to comply with a U.S. House probe of its investigation. The Department of Justice is investigating whether the audit has violated federal law.

But the audit has become a focal point for Trump and conspiracy theorists to argue the election was indeed stolen from him—and has inspired similar efforts in other states.

Now, the audit’s results will be delayed even longer.

What We Don't Know

Almost 4 months into this COVID-19 thing, and we're still in the fucking dark about the two main points:

1. Who has this shit?
2. When somebody gets this shit, what are their chances?

The Hill:

The novel coronavirus has killed more than 31,000 people in the United States and top health officials project about 60,000 Americans will die from COVID-19 by August, but two experts say the majority of deaths may have been avoided if social distancing measures were implemented just two weeks earlier than they were.

Epidemiologists Britta L. Jewell and Nicholas P. Jewell Tuesday wrote in an op-ed in The New York Times that 90 percent of coronavirus deaths in the U.S. could have possibly been avoided if social distancing began March 2, when there were only 11 deaths recorded in the nation. If such policies would have been put in place one week earlier, on March 9, the epidemiologists say there could have been a 60 percent reduction in fatalities.

“Whatever the final death toll is in the United States, the cost of waiting will be enormous, a tragic consequence of the exponential spread of the virus early in the epidemic,” the experts wrote.

NYT:

Coroners in some parts of the country are overwhelmed. Funeral homes in coronavirus hot spots can barely keep up. Newspaper obituary pages in hard-hit areas go on and on. Covid-19 is on track to kill far more people in the United States this year than the seasonal flu.

But determining just how deadly the new coronavirus will be is a key question facing epidemiologists, who expect resurgent waves of infection that could last into 2022.

As the virus spread across the world in late February and March, the projection circulated by infectious disease experts of how many infected people would die seemed plenty dire: around 1 percent, or 10 times the rate of a typical flu.

But according to various unofficial Covid-19 trackers that calculate the death rate by dividing total deaths by the number of known cases, about 6.4 percent of people infected with the virus have now died worldwide.

In Italy, the death rate stands at about 13 percent, and in the United States, around 4.3 percent, according to the latest figures on known cases and deaths. Even in South Korea, where widespread testing helped contain the outbreak, 2 percent of people who tested positive for the virus have died, recent data shows.

These supposed death rates also appear to vary widely by geography: Germany’s fatality rate appears to be roughly one-tenth of Italy’s, and Los Angeles’s about half of New York’s. Among U.S. states, Michigan, at around 7 percent, is at the high end, while Wyoming, which reported its first two deaths this week, has one of the lowest death rates, at about 0.7 percent.

Virology experts say there is no evidence that any strain of the virus, officially known as SARS-CoV-2, has mutated to become more severe in some parts of the world than others, raising the question of why there appears to be so much variance from country to country.

Under the best of circumstances, figuring this out would be a real bitch. It doesn't help when the people running a dozen or more countries are complete assholes who think their political careers are more important than the lives of those who keep them in power - and who put them in power in the first fucking place.

Swamp Thang

Insidious:

in·sid·i·ous

inˈsidēəs/

adjective

1. proceeding in a gradual, subtle way, but with harmful effects.

   
   

   "sexually transmitted diseases can be insidious and sometimes without symptoms"

   
   

   synonyms:

   stealthy, subtle, surreptitious, cunning, crafty, treacherous, artful, sly, wily, shifty, underhanded, indirect; informalsneaky "the insidious bond between big money and political decisions"

• treacherous; crafty.

Let's say you've spent 40 years bitching about Waste Fraud & Abuse, giving the other side (ie: Libruls) the time and opportunity to look into it and point out that while there's a good bit of chicanery here and there, for the most part, government works pretty well, and in a fairly honest and cost-effective way.

Now let's say you want to take advantage of lots of weird situational confusion, and you're openly ripping off the taxpayers for millions.

All you have to do is point out that the liberals have been saying there's no corruption in government - and they've been saying it for years (even tho that's not what they've been saying, but who fuckin' cares anymore) - anyway, now suddenly, those libtards are saying it's everywhere - and blah blah blah.

Call it The Inoculating Lie.

This Just In

...Cult45 is lying.

A coupla versions of Immigration Reform were passed (by the Democrats, if that's how your little ego wants it) - once in 2006, and again in 2013.

Somehow, both times, those rotten old Dems put something together in the Senate that wasn't killed by the filibuster.

Of course, it died in the House both times because the Republican majorities refused to take it up - they wouldn't allow a vote on the Senate versions, and they wouldn't conference with the Senate to try to work things out.

PolitiFact:

The Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006 passed in the Senate on May 25, 2006, along a 62-36 vote. The bill included provisions to strengthen border security with fencing, vehicle barriers, surveillance technology and more personnel; a new temporary worker visa category; and a path to legal status for immigrants in the country illegally if they met specific criteria.

Then-President George W. Bush commended the Senate "for passing bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform" and said he looked forward to working with both chambers.

But the bill was never taken up by the House. The House in December 2005 passed a separate bill with greater focus on border security and enforcement, the Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005. That proposal narrowed in on employment eligibility verification; immigration fraud; and immigration enforcement authority at state and local levels. It did not include a guest worker program or the legalization of immigrants.


The House passed its own version in 2006, but:

Lawmakers from both chambers never formed a conference committee to iron out the details in both bills and the proposals expired at the end of the 109th Congress.


So then, in 2013:

Backed by Democrats and 14 Republicans, the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act passed the Senate on a 68-32 voteon June 27, 2013.

The bill directed the Secretary of Homeland Security to submit two reports on border security strategy, including one on where fencing, infrastructure and technology should be used; authorized the use of the National Guard to help secure the border; called for an increase in the number of Border Patrol agents at the southern border, and other border security measures.

It also included provisions to allow immigrants in the country illegally to adjust their immigration status, if they met certain criteria.


- but -

...House Republicans again opposed the Senate immigration proposal, arguing that border security needed to be addressed first before legalizing the status of millions of immigrants.

"I’ve made it clear and I’ll make it clear again, the House does not intend to take up the Senate bill," then-House Speaker John Boehner said July 2013. "The House is going to do its own job in developing an immigration bill."

He reiterated his position in November 2013: "The idea that we’re going to take up a 1,300-page bill that no one had ever read, which is what the Senate did, is not going to happen in the House," Boehner said. "And frankly, I’ll make clear we have no intention of ever going to conference on the Senate bill."


So look, guys, if you're going to "reach across the aisle" only intending to grab the Dems by the collar so you can yank them over to your side - and then bitch about how unreasonable they're being when they won't give you exactly what you want - well, you should go fuck yourselves with that one instead.

Today's Tweet

Politicians keep telling us we don't trust the press - some politicians lie.

And I don't wanna name names or anything, but the name of the biggest lying-est sack of shit of 'em all kinda rhymes with Fondled Rump.

Is there any trust left in journalism?

Read more in #TheInsider: https://t.co/MANqAhfxmw pic.twitter.com/vOqq79bnzB

— PressReader (@PressReader) July 13, 2017

The Un-Poodling Of The Press

And thus it starts. Some of the Press Poodles have finally had enough, and they're actually calling some the liars on their lies - sometimes live, in real time, on the air.

Don Lemon smacks Jack Kingston:

Jake Tapper points out some of 45*'s malarkey:

And I'm hoping to be a little hopeful that maybe kinda sorta we're seeing the Poodles pushing back against the False Equivalence bullshit - bullshit, btw, that they've been pimping right along with assholes like 45* and his asshole acolytes like Jack Kingston.

Obviously, they're not there yet, but I'll give the 4th Estate a baby bulldog today instead of the usual rainbow poodle.

Way to go, guys. 

We are trying to be not so fucked(?)

Today's Bamboozle

45* knows he can feed dis-information to the rubes directly, so most of them won't ever hear anything that runs counter to what he needs them to hear - what they already believe anyway - which is what he continues to reinforce, and why he's working so hard trying to freeze out traditional corporate media.

Vox:

What you’re looking at is a massive cut in Medicaid spending. In 2026, the Better Care Reconciliation Act would cut Medicaid spending by about $160 billion, and end Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid to low-income Americans.

As my colleague Sarah Kliff writes:

The Senate bill begins to phase out the Medicaid expansion in 2021 — and cuts the rest of the program’s budget too. The Senate bill would end the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid to millions of low-income Americans. This program has provided coverage to more Americans than the private marketplaces

It would also cut the rest of the public insurance program. Better Care would also limit government spending on the rest of the Medicaid program, giving states a set amount to spend per person rather than the insurance program’s currently open-ended funding commitment.

Ultimately, the Congressional Budget Office projects 15 million people would lose coverage with the repeal of Medicaid expansion.

So it’s incredibly misleading for the president to claim that Senate Republicans are increasing funding for Medicaid.

This is pretty typical of the Faux Conservative crapola they've been peddling for a long time. It's a variation on one of their favorite themes - "tax revenue goes up when tax rates come down".  So it follows that the rubes will internalize this new crapola and adopt it as part of their catechism - "cutting Medicaid funding now increases Medicaid spending in the long term."

Yeah, OK. And the best way to fill a bath tub is to open the drain and turn one of the faucets off.

A smiling hyena will still eat your children

These people have no soul and no honor.

Outwardly Cranky

Gary, who graduated high school with a smokin' 2.0 GPA, is complaining loudly about how Majeed (a Neurologist) wants to steal his job.

Ever notice how a lotta these job-stealing immigrants are coming from countries where they help kids with the cost of college and shit?

I wonder if that might work here.

hat tip = Vicki W-E

Alt-Fact Barbie Rides Again

...asking the obvious question: "Are you stupid enough to swallow whatever I pull outa my ass today?"

And wouldn't it be nice if a producer at MSNBC would at least try to get Chris Matthews to stay awake long enough to hear these ridiculous "answers"?

Alex Wagner seems to be adapting, but there are way too many Press Poodles who are stuck in Old-Think Mode, trying to apply a set of analytical tools based on "Politics As Usual".

Here's the thing, kids:

Rudy Needs Work

So, Rudy Giuliani went off again, peddling his new and improved 9/11 crap about how there were no Extreme Islamic Terrorism Attacks in the 8 years before Obama and Hillary.

BTW, here's not-a-picture of Rudy as he's not walking around lower Manhattan not on 9-11-2001 as he's not trying to reassure New Yorkers about what horrible things have not happened during a GOP president's administration because, of course, history won't actually begin until Jan 20, 2009.

Can't believe anybody hasta do this.  What the fuck is wrong with these people?

And So It Goes

Remember all that bullshit last year about "The War On Cops"?  

It's open season on police - Blue Lives Matter - all those rotten brown people fomenting  violence against our noble officers blahblahblah.

Well, it was exactly the bullshit many of us said it was, and the FBI confirms it.

Via HuffPo:

The data contrasts with the claims from some conservative media outlets and police union bosses who have continued to peddle the narrative that officers are under siege. The past two years have seen a surge in police reform activism in the wake of Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri, and other high-profile instances of police killing civilians. But critics of this movement allege that groups like Black Lives Matter promote violence against officers, and have helped wage a “war on cops.”

And:

“The FBI statistics on police officer felonious deaths show that belief that the job is growing more dangerous, because of protests against police or because of the demand for reform to police practices, is simply wrong,” Harris wrote in an email. “Belief to the contrary may be sincere, but it has no basis in fact.”

Battling the endless parade of "conservative" crapola

Today's Larry

Gotta work pretty hard to find the funny sometimes, and sometimes, it's just not there to be found.

DumFux Lies

Jon Stewart ran a bit on last nite's show that everybody's been reposting - so why should I be any different:

The Daily Show
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Here's the Vine Video:

(click to pause)