Today's Beau

Republicans are unwilling to ease off their strangle hold on the Daddy State fantasy that all you have to do is say something to make it real.

So it's really not weird to hear them say, "the FBI is corrupt and nobody should put any stock in anything they say", and then turn around and tell us, "The FBI has a tape that can't possibly be anything but true" - because - you know - it's the FBI.

Daddy State Awareness

THE BASICS:

• The Daddy State lies as a means of demonstrating power.
• The lies have practically nothing to do with the subject of the lies.
• Lying about everything is a way to condition us - to make us accept the premise that they can do anything they want.

The goal is to dictate reality to us.

Stop wondering why the Republicans go on taking Rudy Giuliani's word for anything. It's not Rudy they're relying on - it's the simple concept that all you have to do is repeat the lie until it becomes a cultural constant.

"When legend becomes truth, print the legend."

Trump tried to pull that shit at least three times.

1. The Zelenskyy call: "I need you to do us a favor though." He wasn't looking for the Ukrainians to start an actual investigation. All he wanted was the headline. ie: "Ukraine To Investigate Biden"
2. The call to DOJ: "Just say you're investigating, and let my Republicans in congress do the rest."
3. The Georgia call: "...find me 11,780 votes." Again, he wasn't asking them to dig up the actual ballots. He just wanted to create the suspicion that the Georgia results were in question.

Every time, he just wants the appearance of impropriety. He pumps up the institutions' public image of rock-solid trustworthiness when he wants to cast shadows on his opponents &/or when he needs them to whitewash whatever shitty thing he's done. And when those institutions don't cooperate, suddenly they're corrupt and deep state and the worst thing ever. 

Daddy State Awareness Guide

7.   The law is my sword, but not your shield.

7a. The law is my shield, but not your sword.

Beau Of The Fifth Column

Press Poodles

Paranoid Mike says:

We are presented with a dilemma - the kind of dilemma SunTzu talks about in The Art Of War.

ie: Don't give your adversary a problem he can solve. Give him a dilemma that will work against him no matter what he chooses to do.

I can't help but think the plutocracy pushers are doing a lot of shit designed to give us that Damned-If-You-Do-And-Damned-If-You-Don't dilemma.

With a few exceptions, "The News" has left behind all sense of public service. It's a profit center, and the guys who own the Yacht-Buyers Club insist that their news division chiefs go on pretending there's a perfect balance between the extreme assholes (primarily on "the right") and the rest of us.

Competition is fierce, and the bean-counters refuse to believe they're doing a bad thing by pandering to the 10-20% of the audience who call themselves "independents" while actually being all but hardcore wingnuts who just don't want to admit publicly that they voted twice for Bush43 and then for Trump. "Fascists buy dick pills and panty liners too, y'know."

We know something's horribly wrong, but we have a hard time putting our finger on it.

ex: Count the number of times Katy Tur says, "Deeply divided" in any interview or political analysis she delivers on MSNBC.

While it's true - we are deeply divided - her phrasing strikes me as purposely ambiguous, and she never explains it so as not to invite the inference of Both Sides.

Yes we're deeply divided - like we're deeply divided on the Pros and Cons of Ass Cancer.

So, on that whole dilemma thing: 

I subscribe to WaPo and NYT, and I pay for MSNBC thru my Sling thing. Those three outlets comprise my main source of news. I pay for them, and I try to balance it all out with Reuters and AP and BBC - because I have the time, and I'm a bit of a politics geek.

A lot of people don't have the money or the time or the inclination to indulge the way I do, so they rely on picking up a few things from whatever source comes to hand, and after they get slapped down a few times for speaking up about something they thought they had a pretty handle on, only to be made to feel silly or stoopid or naive or whatever, they often retreat behind the Both-Sides shield: "They're all full of shit - you can't believe anything any of them says - etc etc etc"

Some will support a corporate model in the news because they support the basics of top-down authoritarian rule in business, even as they decry the same kind of tyranny in government, while they're advocating for "running government like a business". In fact, they'll parrot the Daddy State bullshit about how the government is "meddling" in the news companies' business by trying to hold them to account, "and that's the tyranny - corporate monopolies are the real victims here".

But the majority - people who are decent folks - people who make good friends and responsible citizens - they're the big squishy middle - the trend followers. Most of them won't get it, but will go along because they've been taught that popular = good.

(By 1974, the Ford Pinto was the best selling American-made care in the US)

Meanwhile, the minority of us who can afford the luxury of critical thinking are rendered politically impotent.

If we back away from the news, we're ceding the territory to the plutocrats.

If we back away from the politics - same thing.

If we raise our voices, then we're branded as the radical left and the Press Poodles can say we've shown their Both Sides crap to be accurate.

But the needle is moving a bit. I think if we keep at it, the needle will move some more, and then the dilemma is reduced to a solvable problem.

People who need a free press the most, are less and less able to afford it.

People who can afford it are using it to split the majority, keeping people siloed and isolated from each other.

This does not make for a healthy democracy.

It’s Not a Good Sign When People Who Don’t Pay for News Have So Little to Choose From

In a recently published profile of the former CNN executive Jeff Zucker, a tidbit of news caught my eye. Zucker, who has a venture fund with $1 billion to invest, is one of at least three suitors seeking to buy a controlling stake in Air Mail, a glossy media company catering to the jet set elite, founded by the former Vanity Fair editor in chief Graydon Carter. A recent weekly edition includes a profile of the caterer turned mercenary magnate who is a close ally (and possible competitor) of Vladimir Putin, an excoriation of new diversity rules for the Oscars and an article on Adele’s go-to rosé. It’s a frothy mix of European royals, luxurious fashion and salacious true crime, redolent of the Vanity Fair of yore. Air Mail has made quite a splash: It threw a star-studded bash with Warner Brothers in Cap d’Antibes that was the toast of the Cannes Film Festival last month. It is generally a fun read. I have been a subscriber for a while.

Still, it was jarring to see that this confection has so many suitors, checkbooks at the ready, at a time when the butcher’s bill in American journalism grows longer and longer. Last week, The Los Angeles Times announced it will reduce its newsroom staff by 13 percent, a month after the paper celebrated winning two Pulitzer Prizes. Last month, Vice, a company that once seemed like the invincible future of media, sought bankruptcy protection. BuzzFeed shuttered its Pulitzer Prize-winning news division. Insider slashed its staff by 10 percent earlier this year; its journalists are currently on strike. Hundreds of journalists from Gannett, the once mighty local news company, also staged a short strike last week after years of staffing and budget reductions. We’ve seen deep cuts at the major TV and cable news networks. MTV News closed its doors.

And last week, the pain hit close to home for me: Many of my former colleagues at Gimlet, the ambitious podcast studio where I worked from 2020 to 2022, lost their jobs. The pink slips landed shortly after the team won a Pulitzer Prize for an investigative podcast.

The loss of jobs in any industry, particularly one as central to protecting our democracy as journalism, is always worrying. But what makes these losses particularly troubling is what many of these news organizations have in common: They sought to make quality news for the masses that cost little to nothing to consume.

In an ever more unequal world, it is perhaps not surprising that we are splitting into news haves and have-nots. Those who can afford and are motivated to pay for subscriptions to access high-quality news have a wealth of choices: newspapers such as The Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times compete for their business, along with magazines such as The New Yorker and The Atlantic. Niche subscription news products serving elite audiences are also thriving and attracting investment — publications like Punchbowl News, Puck and Air Mail. The people who subscribe to these publications tend to be affluent and educated.

It bodes ill for our democracy that those who cannot pay — or choose not to — are left with whatever our broken information ecosystem manages to serve up, a crazy quilt that includes television news of diminishing ambition, social media, aggregation sites, partisan news and talk radio. Yes, a few ambitious nonprofit journalism outlets and quality digital news organizations remain, but they are hanging on by their fingernails. Some news organizations are experimenting with A.I.-generated news, which could make articles reported and written by actual human beings another bauble for the Air Mail set, along with Loro Piana loafers and silk coats from the Row.

I’ve been thinking about the problem of news for people who don’t pay for news since the last months of the 2016 presidential campaign, when I was offered a job as editor in chief at The Huffington Post, succeeding its namesake, Arianna Huffington.

Before that, I really hadn’t seriously considered leaving The Times, where I had worked for almost 15 years, mostly as a foreign correspondent. I had experienced firsthand the lengths The Times would go to report in some of the most far-flung and dangerous places in the world. My editors had sent me from the Himalayan peaks of Kashmir to the dense jungle of eastern Congo, from the desert scrub of Darfur to the sodden deltas of Bangladesh. They literally sent me to Timbuktu. Twice!

Still, I took the meeting. I knew that something had gone wrong with American journalism. Local journalism was in free-fall. Trust in the news media was reaching new depths. And most worryingly, the news organizations that were thriving were the ones that people paid for directly.

Then Donald Trump won the presidential election, and I felt that maybe in that moment there was work to do elsewhere. Maybe HuffPost, with its huge home-page audience, could be a vessel for testing this question that had been nagging at me: How can you make a quality news product for people who were never going to pay for news? What would it mean to create a news organization that saw itself not as writing about people who feel left out of the political, economic and social power arrangements, but for them? I took the job.

With its clever, large-format headlines and populist sensibility, HuffPost had the feel of a left-of-center tabloid, like The New York Daily News in its heyday. We would make news for everyone on the internet, for free. Corporate America, via digital advertising, would foot the bill. If this all sounds overly optimistic, if not downright naïve, well, it was. But what else could one do in those desperate postelection days but fuse dreams and work and hope for the best?

In a way, this plan represented a very old model of paying for quality journalism, one that began in 1833, when a young businessman named Benjamin Day had an idea. As Tim Wu wrote in his book “The Attention Merchants,” most of New York City’s newspapers at that time were priced at 6 cents — the equivalent of more than $2 today — a luxury good aimed at a tiny, wealthy audience. Day realized that he could make more money if he charged readers just a penny for his newspaper, and then sold their eyeballs to businesses who wanted to sell them stuff. His newspaper, The New York Sun, set the template for the news business in the United States for most of the next two centuries, even as new technologies such as radio and television transformed how news was distributed.

Capturing mass attention required access to expensive means of distribution: either a press and delivery trucks for print, or access to the public airwaves — which were licensed by the government — for broadcast. These costs allowed the news organizations that could afford them to corner the market on mass audiences, whose attention they then sold to advertisers. The handsome profits they reaped enabled investments in high-quality journalism, including high-risk and expensive endeavors such as investigative reporting and international coverage.

We all know what happened next. The internet, which initially promised to propel this old model even further by reducing distribution costs to near zero and creating the tools to sell ever more sophisticated kinds of advertising, instead created an economic crisis for journalism. Newspapers still had to produce their expensive print products even as the advertisements that paid for them gave way to much cheaper and more highly targeted digital ones. Paid classified advertising evaporated. Local news cratered, and even titans like The New York Times faced existential threats.

Meanwhile, the digital revolution brought a new crop of news organizations roaring to life, unburdened by physical production costs and powered by new forms of information distribution. HuffPost figured out how to reverse-engineer news articles that matched information people were searching for on the internet. Then social media arrived, and with it the opportunity to build huge audiences across people’s social networks, an art perfected by BuzzFeed. Sensing the opportunity for hypergrowth, venture capitalists piled into the media business, sending the valuations of these digital upstarts into the stratosphere. On paper, at least.

Powered by those dollars, some companies invested in quality journalism, just like the old-school newspaper publishers had when the market buoyed them. HuffPost won a Pulitzer in 2012. Vice News produced groundbreaking television coverage of the far right. BuzzFeed News invested deeply in investigative journalism and international reporting, and also won a Pulitzer. It seemed, for a time, that a new form of quality mass media was emerging on the back of new technology.

And then it all fell apart. Advertisers began cutting out the middlemen — publishers — and buying advertising directly from social media platforms, which offered what was sold as laser-sharp targeting of a company’s most desirable customers. And after Trump, who augured a new era of misinformation online and a ton of new headaches for social media companies, digital platforms largely fell out of love with news. The spigots that had gushed money-spinning traffic to new sites ran dry.

It turned out that I had arrived at the digital media party just as it started to wind down. It was almost impossible to sustain quality journalism with advertising alone. At HuffPost, we went through several rounds of layoffs in three years. Ultimately, I encouraged Verizon Media, which was then HuffPost’s owner, to sell the site to a company more focused on news. When it didn’t sell, I decided to leave. Less than a year later, Verizon all but paid BuzzFeed to take HuffPost off its hands.

HuffPost, with its big home-page audience, is less reliant on social media networks and has survived. It is smaller and less global than it once was, but it continues to employ talented and enterprising journalists who break news. But with all the layoffs, closures and bankruptcies it is hard not to feel that the old dream of digital news — lots of free, quality and diverse news from lots of different places — is mostly dead.

Instead, there are a few very successful media companies that charge people money for high-quality journalism. The best news organizations take their public service mission seriously, and do create news products that are free to all, like podcasts and email newsletters. Some have relatively porous paywalls, and even drop their paywalls entirely for coverage of major events involving public safety. But many surviving free consumer sites are cutting staff and focusing on aggregation — which is an important service, but not the same as investing in original journalism. Television news is dominated by talking heads as budgets for real news-gathering shrink. Cable news is in terminal decline in the age of cord cutting.

The current landscape means the mass audience that never paid for news and never will pay remains underserved, and that has big implications for the future of our country. Creating a shared reality was always the work of mass media. But our present and future look much more like the 1830s, with one class of people getting tips on summering in the South of France from Air Mail and everyone else reading whatever A.I.-generated aggregation the internet spits up.

For the better part of two centuries, news that was free — or at least felt free, owing to its reliance on advertising — was good business. But the advertising dollars that once underwrote ambitious mass journalism are now stuffing the pockets of technology billionaires. We’re all — even those of us willing and able to pay for quality journalism — the poorer for it.

Birds Of A Feather

We hear from "conservatives" all the time about how they consider themselves to be paragons of virtue, and others (the 'others du jour') are less worthy etc etc. We all know that tune, we all know it's bullshit, and we can all see examples of its bullshit-ness practically every day.

You could reasonably expect normal people to be shamed into better behavior, but these Daddy State assholes can't be - because they aren't fuckin' normal.

They are without honor, and so they can only be dealt with by rejecting them and their bullshit pronouncements outright, giving them no quarter and no audience. They have to be driven back - away from normal decent people. I was going to say 'back to the rock they live under', but that elevates them to the status of worms and blind venomous centipedes, and I have too much respect for lowly creatures to consider these assholes on a par with the creepy-crawlies.

Anyway - 

by way of

Married Putin Stooge Accused of Hiding Kids With Secret American Lover

Vladimir Solovyov is one of Russia’s top-tier propagandists, omnipresent on the airwaves of the state media and twice decorated by Russian President Vladimir Putin for his service to the Kremlin. He often derides the West as “satanic,” and refers to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a “holy war.” Scarcely a broadcast goes by without Solovyov calling for nuclear strikes against the United States and its allies.

As it turns out, the 59-year-old TV host might be hiding an explosive secret himself.

A bombshell report from Alexei Navalny’s FBK team on Monday, called “Vladimir Solovyov’s American secret,” claims that Solovyov—who is married with eight children—is suspiciously linked to another family.

While investigating properties in Russia with obscure ownership records, the Navalny group reportedly tied Solovyov to a villa in Sochi and an apartment in Moscow reportedly owned by 42-year-old Svetlana Abrosimova, a retired basketball player and U.S. citizen.

Records obtained by the team allegedly show that Abrosimova traveled to the U.S. with the Russian propagandist in 2016. Abrosimova reportedly stayed in the U.S. through 2017, during which she gave birth to twin girls. According to the investigation, Solovyov made almost monthly visits to the U.S. until Abrosimova and her newborn twins moved back to Russia in June 2017.

The details of the trips were reportedly gleaned from paperwork filed for a coronavirus test the pair took in November 2021, which listed them as sharing the same address. The document reportedly featured Solovyov’s passport details, including travel information. The Navalny team also concluded that the pair share a driver and have made several doctor’s visits together, including one where they filed paperwork for the coronavirus test.

Photos of the pair—including one where they are standing side by side and another where they appeared to be chatting to each other while seated at a sport’s game—were also published in the documentary investigation.

In the report, the Navalny team alleges that multiple anonymous sources close to the couple have confirmed that Solovyov is the father of Abrosimova’s two children. The twins reportedly share the middle name “Vladimirovna,” in what appears to be a derivation of the propagandist's first name. Solovyov’s daughter, Yekaterina, is likewise a citizen of the U.S.

Kremlin TV Star Erupts After His Son Is Accused of Dodging War

Solovyov did not immediately respond to a comment request from The Daily Beast about the allegations. Neither did Abrosimova.

During his shows, Solovyov often bemoans the loss of his Italian villas, but gleefully points out that he is yet to be sanctioned by the United States.

Given his patriotic fervor and theatrical desire for the destruction of the West, news that Vladimir Solovyov may be secretly nurturing an American dream of his own has many Kremlin critics blasting him as a hypocrite on social media.

The Navalany team investigation has also uncovered luxury homes in the same Sochi neighborhood where Ambrosimova reportedly lives, allegedly owned by General Sergey Surovikin and Andrei Patrushev, the son of Nikolai Patrushev, who serves as Secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation.

Stop wondering why American MAGA clowns can't bring themselves to support NATO and Ukraine publicly.

More from

Former Moscow Officials Reveal Why They’re Laughing at Putin Now

Outlandish rhetoric from Russian officials has turned the Kremlin into a laughing stock—with potentially serious consequences for Vladimir Putin, according to some former insiders.

Citizens of Russia have become the captive audience of a dystopian “comedy club” run by the government, according to some former Moscow officials.

And the Kremlin, it appears, is not in on the joke.

Russian President Vladimir Putin declared last week that beer in Prague, where a summit between Kremlin critics recently took place, contains “female sex hormones” and called the opposition officials who met there “half-wits.” On the same day, his best friend Nikolai Patrushev, head of the Russian Security Council and former KGB hardliner, warned of a deadly “radioactive cloud that is now moving towards Western Europe” from Ukraine.

The bizarre propaganda lines—apparently meant to evoke fear among Russian exiles of cognitive decline by way of drinking beer, or death via the enriched uranium supplied to Ukraine by the West—fell flat. Putin's remarks were widely mocked on social media, while experts at Russia’s own State Atomic Agency said that “the story with the approaching cloud is somehow exaggerated.”

The outpouring of ridiculous rhetoric in Moscow has gotten so out of hand that some former Kremlin insiders have resorted to creating memes inspired by the words and actions of Russian officials.

How Killer Birds and ‘Evil’ Forces Helped Putin Sell His War

That includes Putin’s former speechwriter, Abbas Galyamov, who put together photos of Putin drinking beer in response to the “female sex hormones” remarks, captioned with the sentence: “The president knows what he is talking about.”

Galyamov worked as a speechwriter for Vladimir Putin from 2008 to 2010, later taking on positions in the regional government and the Russian federal election agency. He made the decision to leave Russia in 2018, when he says he became disillusioned by “the fascistization” of the regime.

In an interview with The Daily Beast, Galyamov elaborated on his affinity for making jokes about the Kremlin—and the privilege of being able to do so.

“There is much less respect for them now than before,” he told The Daily Beast. “If not for the political repression, all Russians would have thought of them as inhumane and mocked them.”

The Best Medicine

Though men like Putin’s ideologist, Vyacheslav Volodin, have long been feared across Russia, critics appear to have become increasingly bold in their public mockery of them.

In a push to get more Russians to learn Chinese earlier this month, Volodin said that the English language, which is taught in every Russian school and university, is “dead”—triggering yet another wave of jokes.

- more -

Daddy State Awareness

THE BASICS:

• The Daddy State lies as a means of demonstrating power.
• The lies have practically nothing to do with the subject of the lies.
• Lying about everything is a way to condition us - to make us accept the premise that they can do anything they want.

The goal is to dictate reality to us.

Daddy State Awareness, Rule 1

House Republican Report Finds No Evidence of Wrongdoing by President Biden

After months of investigation and many public accusations of corruption against Mr. Biden and his family, the first report of the premier House G.O.P. inquiry showed no proof of such misconduct.

So sad

After four months of investigation, House Republicans who promised to use their new majority to unearth evidence of wrongdoing by President Biden acknowledged on Wednesday that they had yet to uncover incriminating material about him, despite their frequent insinuations that he and his family have been involved in criminal conduct and corruption.

At a much-publicized news conference on Capitol Hill to show the preliminary findings of their premier investigation into Mr. Biden and his family, leading Republicans released financial documents detailing how some of the president’s relatives were paid more than $10 million from foreign sources between 2015 and 2017.

Republicans described the transactions as proof of “influence peddling” by Mr. Biden’s family, including his son Hunter Biden, and referenced some previously known, if unflattering, details of the younger Mr. Biden’s business dealings. Those included an episode in which he accepted a 2.8-carat diamond from a Chinese businessman. G.O.P. lawmakers also produced material suggesting that President Biden and his allies had at times made misleading statements in their efforts to push back aggressively against accusations of wrongdoing by Hunter Biden.

But on Wednesday, the Republicans conceded that they had yet to find evidence of a specific corrupt action Mr. Biden took in office in connection with any of the business deals his son entered into. Instead, their presentation underscored how little headway top G.O.P. lawmakers have made in finding clear evidence of questionable transactions they can tie to Mr. Biden, their chief political rival.

It has not stopped them from accusing the president of serious misconduct.

“I want to be clear: This committee is investigating President Biden and his family’s shady business dealings to capitalize on Joe Biden’s public office that risks our country’s national security,” said Representative James R. Comer, Republican of Kentucky and the chairman of the Oversight Committee. He emphasized that the president — not just his son — would be the target of his investigation, which he said would now “enter a new phase,” in which he would subpoena specific financial information based on material learned through bank records.

Federal prosecutors have examined Hunter Biden’s international business activities as part of a criminal investigation. But the only charges they are considering, according to people familiar with the case, are unrelated to his work abroad. They include tax charges related to his failure to file his tax returns over several years, and a charge of lying about his drug use on a federal form he filled out to purchase a handgun.

To date, Mr. Comer’s committee has issued four bank subpoenas, obtained thousands of financial records and spoken with several people he describes as whistle-blowers. Mr. Comer has also hired James Mandolfo, a former federal prosecutor who has experience investigating foreign corruption, to oversee the inquiry.

Here’s what we know so far.

Businesses connected to Hunter Biden received more than $10 million from foreign companies, some with criminal ties.

The House Oversight Committee report focused on payments made to companies connected to Hunter Biden from businesses and individuals in Romania and China. Bank records obtained by the committee show the receipt of money from a foreign company connected to Gabriel Popoviciu, who was the subject of a criminal investigation and prosecution for corruption in Romania.

In 2015, Mr. Popoviciu retained Hunter Biden, who is a lawyer, while his father was vice president, to help try to fend off charges. That effort was unsuccessful and, in 2016, Mr. Popoviciu was convicted on charges related to a land deal in northern Bucharest, the Romanian capital.

A Shanghai-based company, State Energy HK Limited, that was affiliated with CEFC China Energy sent millions to Robinson Walker LLC, a company associated with Mr. Walker, who then made payments to Hunter Biden and other Biden family members.

Hunter Biden had cultivated a business relationship with Ye Jianming, the founder of CEFC, who has been investigated by the Chinese authorities on suspicion of economic crimes. In 2017, Mr. Ye gave Hunter Biden a 2.8-carat diamond as a thank-you for a meeting.

“What would they be bribing me for? My dad wasn’t in office,” Hunter Biden told The New Yorker in 2019, adding that he gave the diamond to his associates. “I knew it wasn’t a good idea to take it. I just felt like it was weird.”

CEFC had hoped to invest in a liquefied natural gas venture in Louisiana, but that deal ultimately flopped.

Representatives of Hunter Biden characterize his business offerings at the time as providing legal and consulting services.

The payments came at a time when Hunter Biden’s life and finances were spiraling amid his drug addiction, and after the death of his brother, Beau Biden, from brain cancer. Hunter Biden had begun a romantic relationship with his brother’s widow. His business partner, Mr. Walker, and his uncle James Biden were pursuing international business work.

Abbe Lowell, a lawyer for Hunter Biden, said in a statement that House Republicans had revealed nothing new in their report.

“Today’s so-called ‘revelations' are retread, repackaged misstatements of perfectly proper meetings and business by private citizens.” Mr. Lowell said.

President Biden has falsely denied his son had ties to Chinese businesses.

None of the payments detailed in the report went to President Biden himself, nor has Mr. Comer’s investigation produced any evidence that Mr. Biden ever took a corrupt action in connection with his son’s business dealings.

But Mr. Biden has made several false or misleading statements about the matter.

During the 2020 presidential debate, Mr. Biden claimed that no one in his family had received money from China.

“My son has not made money in terms of this thing about — what are you talking about, China,” Mr. Biden said, turning the charge on his opponent, President Donald J. Trump. “The only guy who made money from China is this guy. He’s the only one. Nobody else has made money from China.”

This year, Mr. Biden also claimed that it was “not true” that family members received more than $1 million from a Chinese firm.

Aides to Mr. Biden said he was speaking colloquially and was pushing back generally on claims that his administration had been corrupted by Chinese money.

Presidents’ families have long made money off the family name.

During his news conference, Mr. Comer acknowledged that Hunter Biden would have been far from the first relative of a president or vice president to try to make money off the family name.

He invoked Billy Carter, the brother of former President Jimmy Carter, who visited Libya and received a $220,000 loan; and Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law whose firm has received hundreds of millions from Persian Gulf nations.

“This has been a pattern for a long time,” Mr. Comer said. “Republicans and Democrats have both complained about presidents’ families receiving money.”

However, Mr. Comer has conceded that he has no interest in investigating Mr. Kushner’s conduct.

Officials allied with Mr. Biden played a role in wrongly discrediting Hunter Biden’s laptop.
The report from Mr. Comer came as a second Republican-led House committee is investigating a related issue. The House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday released a report about a letter from 51 former intelligence and security officials in 2020 that questioned materials — substantial portions of which were later verified as authentic — from a laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware repair shop and suggested they might be part of a Russian disinformation campaign.

The Republicans argue that the letter influenced the public to discount the materials on the laptop, which contained evidence of Hunter Biden’s drug use and sex life, which they believed would harm his father’s electoral chances against Mr. Trump.

The Judiciary Committee report detailed the role played by Antony J. Blinken, now the secretary of state and then a Biden campaign official, in spearheading the letter, and said a C.I.A. employee had been involved in soliciting at least one signature for it.

The intelligence officials maintain their letter stated they had no evidence of a Russian disinformation campaign, and that they were merely stating an opinion.

Mark Zaid, a lawyer who represents seven signatories to the letter, said on Twitter that the report merely proved that “private citizens lawfully exercised 1st Amendment rights” and added that there was not “even one falsehood” in the letter.

“I know of no signatory who retracts a single word,” Mr. Zaid wrote.

It's classic. Spend months on DumFux News spouting off about the Biden Crime Family, then spend lots of time and money and effort finding nothing to support your suspicions, and then issue your findings, claiming to have found all kinds of shady shenanigans on the part of every relative of every American politician since the dawn of the republic - and so "we've proven what a scum that Biden guy is - and his demon spawn too!"

Some things:

• "Everybody does it" is a way to tear down government in general, which is what the basic plan has been for a long time. So when their latest Blockbuster Investigation du Jour fizzles - as they always do - the fallback position is "Both Sides", and they know they can count on the Press Poodles to run with it (as the NYT just did) 
• They need to gaslight the shit outa the rubes. ie: "The fact that there's no evidence of wrongdoing is itself evidence of wrongdoing, because it just goes to show you how diabolically clever those guys are"
• GOP accusations are confessions (Daddy State Awareness Guide, Rule 1) - because they can't believe it's possible for anyone to live his life while not breaking the law

This stoopid shit ends only when we smarten up enough to vote these fuckers out. So let's do that.

Today's Tweet

Jon Stewart says it better than I can.

It’s pick-a-side time, and it’s pretty obvious which side is for the American people.
pic.twitter.com/QLYoxqo2KY

— Ryan Shead (@RyanShead) March 25, 2023

Another Shoe

It's raining shoes. Again. Or Still. Or something.

It's going to take years to sort thru all of the shit that we haven't dealt with over the last several decades. Some of which we've just kinda needed to ignore because it made us feel a little paranoid. Some of which we've been manipulated into feeling weird about. Some of which just seemed too "political thriller" -ish - and dammit, maybe I've been watching too many old movies about intrigue at the palace.

We get lulled into a belief that democracy is something we get to have, instead of something we have to do. And suddenly, our little experiment in self-government is looking pretty shaky.

ie: "Suddenly" over the last 40 years or so

If we learn nothing else, let's hope we're learning how toxic fake news is - how toxic the politics of faking news can be - and which outfits are putting out all that fake news, and which politicians are lying to us about which news is the fake news.

It makes my head hurt, and I've been into the politics thing for a good long time - so I have some sympathy for people who just wanna live their lives without having to worry a whole lot about it. I don't have a lot of patience with them, but I do understand the desire to go about your business and trust that things will work out.

Anyway, the worse it gets on one side, the better it can be on the other - if we can figure out which side it's best to be on.

Fox News producer alleges sexism, coached testimony, in new lawsuit

Abby Grossberg, who alleges discrimination and a hostile workplace, says she was ‘coerced, intimidated, and misinformed’ while preparing for her deposition in the $1.6 billion Dominion defamation case.

On the eve of a key hearing in a defamation lawsuit against Fox News, an employee who was deposed in the case sued the company, alleging that its lawyers coached her to shift blame for decisions to air Trump allies’ false claims of election fraud.

The lawsuit from producer Abby Grossberg came late Monday, hours after Fox sought a restraining order to keep her from disclosing in-house legal discussions.

Grossberg’s suit could create an opening for Dominion Voting Systems — which is also suing Fox, for airing unfounded claims that it rigged the 2020 election — to question the credibility of her testimony and that of other Fox employees deposed in the matter.

In a federal civil suit, filed in the Southern District of New York, Grossberg alleges that she was “isolated, overworked, undervalued, denied opportunities for promotion, and generally treated significantly worse than her male counterparts, even when those men were less qualified than her,” and that she was retaliated against after she complained.

Her suit also details claims that she was subjected to “vile sexist stereotypes.” It describes a male senior producer scolding her for sharing too much information with Maria Bartiromo, the popular opinion host for whom they both worked at the time. The senior producer and another male executive described the host in terms such as “menopausal,” “hysterical” and “a diva,” Grossberg alleged.

A spokesperson for Fox called Grossberg’s suit “baseless,” saying, “We will vigorously defend these claims.”

Grossberg’s account of a sexist environment at Fox News echoes stories shared by several female employees in 2016 and 2017, when powerful network co-founder Roger Ailes and prime-time star Bill O’Reilly were forced out by allegations of sexual harassment.

But it is the producer’s allegations that Fox lawyers “coerced, intimidated, and misinformed” her as they prepped her to testify in Dominion’s $1.6 billion defamation suit that are poised to further complicate that roiling legal battle.

A little-known staffer at Fox News for the past four years, Grossberg this month emerged as a key behind-the-scenes player at the center of the blockbuster case. Dominion argues Fox knowingly aired spurious claims that it rigged its voting machines in favor of Joe Biden; Fox argues that it was simply reporting on newsworthy claims made by a sitting president.

Both sides are appearing in Delaware Superior Court on Tuesday to argue for the judge to rule in their favor — probably the last major hearing before the case is expected to go to trial next month.

Grossberg was subpoenaed by Dominion last year to discuss her work on televised segments in which Bartiromo and guests discussed far-fetched and unproven claims of election fraud. But in her deposition prep sessions, the producer claims, Fox lawyers “were displeased with her being too candid” and took extra time “to make sure she got her story straight and in line with [Fox’s] position.”

She said she was urged to give generic answers such as “I do not recall” and discouraged from offering explanations of how Bartiromo’s understaffed team was unable to keep up with warnings from Dominion about false statements they had aired.

By giving what she calls “false/misleading and evasive answers” that she said were encouraged by Fox’s legal team, Grossberg says she put herself at risk of committing perjury, while “subtly shifting all responsibility for the alleged defamation against Dominion onto her shoulders, and by implication, those of her trusted female colleague, Ms. Bartiromo, rather than the mostly male higher ups at Fox News.”

Fox lawyers, in their request for a restraining order, said Grossberg’s plan to share details from her conversations with lawyers was “a transparent attempt to gain leverage over Fox News.” They also wrote that Grossberg “proved unable to perform adequately” after a recent promotion and that she had been issued a written warning.

Late Monday, a company spokesperson said that Fox “engaged an independent outside counsel to immediately investigate the concerns raised by Ms. Grossberg, which were made following a critical performance review.”

In an interview with The Washington Post late Monday, Grossberg’s attorney, Parisis G. Filippatos, called Fox’s restraining order an “attempt to chill her,” adding that “her suit will reveal the truth, not the selected version of sanitized events that Fox is famous for.”

Fox placed her on leave Monday from her current job as a booker for Tucker Carlson’s prime-time show, he said.

Grossberg also filed a defamation suit against Fox in Delaware Superior Court that claims the company induced her to make statements in her deposition that made her look “inept” and harmed her reputation.

Details of Grossberg’s suits were first reported late Monday by the New York Times.

In Grossberg’s September deposition, Dominion lawyers asked her about the circumstances surrounding a Nov. 8, 2020, appearance by Trump-affiliated attorney Sidney Powell, who told Bartiromo on air that there had been “computer glitches” during the election and “fraud … where they were flipping votes in the computer system or adding votes that did not exist.”

Grossberg defended the decision to air claims like those that Powell was promoting, according to segments of her deposition made public this month. “We bring on people and they give their opinions,” she said. “Maria asked questions. The guests responded and gave their points of view, and it was up to the audience to decide.”

She told Dominion’s lawyers that the fraud claims were aired because her production team “thought the public deserved to hear what the current administration was saying.”

Grossberg first gained public notice in February, when Dominion filed a widely publicized brief that described one of its lawyers asking Grossberg if it’s important to correct falsehoods uttered on the show — and Grossberg replying, simply, “No.”

This, Dominion argued, was more evidence that Fox staff knew Trump election-fraud claims were false but did not convey that to viewers.

In fact, Grossberg said in her suit, she did not want to give that answer, but “she had been conditioned and felt coerced to give this response that simultaneously painted her in a negative light as a professional.”

After “writers at prominent media outlets called Ms. Grossberg’s ethics as a journalist and her professional judgment into question,” she alleges, she suffered anxiety and stress.

While Grossberg’s testimony and internal emails were cited prominently in briefs that Dominion has filed in its defamation suit, Fox’s lawyers made only a single, fleeting reference to her in their own defense filings, in which they cited an email of Grossberg’s to demonstrate that Bartiromo “reached out to sources and conducted research into the President’s claims.”

But Fox representatives have cited Grossberg’s testimony in communications with journalists to dispute some of Dominion’s legal claims.

Earlier this month, exhibits were unsealed showing that Powell had forwarded Bartiromo an email from a Minnesota artist that spun theories about an elaborate vote-flipping scheme and supposed connections between Dominion and top Democrats, as well as bizarre claims about murder and time-travel. Dominion lawyers have sought to draw a connection between this email — which its own author deemed “wackadoodle” — and the election-fraud claims that Bartiromo and Powell discussed on the air.

Fox spokespeople, though, countered this argument in an email to reporters by pointing to Grossberg’s explanation, drawn from her testimony: “We never used [the email.] So this is just all hypothetical really. … This isn’t something that I would use right now as reportable for air.”

According to Fox’s complaint, first reported by the Daily Beast, the network’s lawyers advised Grossberg in meetings before her deposition that “they represented Fox News and not her in her individual capacity” and that their discussions with her “were subject to the attorney-client privilege” and must be kept confidential.

The complaint stated that Fox first realized Grossberg intended to share details of those conversations when the company received a draft of Grossberg’s potential legal filing against the company last month.

Grossberg, the complaint stated, told the network that she was not subject to the company’s attorney-client privilege.

Today's Daddy State Bozo

"We are going to start killing people in Mexico who are killing Americans, because they are terrorists. We do it all over the world every night. We have all of the legal authority we need to go after these drug cartels if we change our laws.” --US Sen Lindsey Graham

A sitting US Senator is suggesting we make deadly incursions inside another country's sovereign borders, issuing death threats against the citizens of a foreign nation - a nation which is an important ally and trading partner.

Note: he makes a very Daddy State move, ie: "Let's change US law in order to make the crime of murdering Mexican citizens acceptable". And he does it after the operative phrase, "... start killing people in Mexico ..." which serves two purposes.

1. It gives him cover - he can rant and rave for the benefit of the MAGA gang, and still be relatively assured that nothing he tells them he wants to do will ever be done
2. It plants the seed - if the rabble raise a big enough stink, he can claim leadership on the issue.

Will there be consequences?

Hint: he has the magic (R) next to his name.

Geopolitics is a worldwide poker game

with more than 200 players.

They're all cheating,

and they all know they're all cheating.

The calculus is never simple.

Today In Stochastic Terrorism

Elmo is not stupid.

But like so many of his fellow travelers, he is malicious in his feigned ignorance.

He deleted that tweet shortly after he posted it, but the implied threat landed - it had the intended effect.

ie: Punish a few journalists by suspending their accounts, then threaten all the others in a vague, off-handed way, and then "retract" the threat to cover your ass.

I truly hope we don't start thinking we can all go back to sleep, believing the elections of 2020 and 2022 put an end to this Daddy State shit. It didn't.

These assholes will keep trying for as long as we allow them to roam free.

We have to stomp the GOP

until there's nothing left

but a greasy spot on the rug.

And even then,

don't start thinking it's over -

there will be a next time.

There's always a next time.

When They Tell You Who They Are

Really sick of the mealy-mouthed equivocation here. Either you stand with the US Constitution, or you don't.

This is not "Let's wait and see where it goes - maybe there's opportunity here".

Pick a side, assholes.

After way too fucking long, the Press Poodles have really started to come around. Not all of them, but a substantial majority have been willing lately to call these guys out.

"He put it in writing."

The biggest question this weekend was, how strongly will our media institutions stand up to Trump's call to terminate the Constitution?

As it turns out, responses are mixed.

This morning, this was on the front page of the Times website, but near the bottom: 'Trump’s Call for ‘Termination’ of Constitution Draws Rebukes.' The classic "view from nowhere." Above the fold: "One Dough, Six Cookies."

The Washington Post was better, if not by much. Above the fold under "Opinions," a Ruth Marcus piece called 'Trump’s call for suspending the Constitution is too dangerous to ignore." Further down the page: "GOP lawmakers largely silent after Trump suggests ‘termination’ of Constitution".

CNN.com has a less-than-prominent story today: Trump’s call to terminate the Constitution is a fantasy, but it’s still dangerous.

Many people don't pay much attention to weekend news. If you picked up the nation's two top papers today, or checked CNN's website, you wouldn't get any sense of urgency about the former president calling to overturn the Constitution to hand him the last election.

You have to hand it to Mika. She keeps pushing on Trump, every day.

"You have to evaluate that. you have to evaluate that, so you have to evaluate racism, you have to evaluate anti-semitism, core values of our country. you have to evaluate when they are trumped on, and you have to evaluate terminating the constitution," she said.

"There is no Republican. there is no one who can call themselves a conservative -- quite frankly, there's no one who can call themselves an American and still support Donald Trump. It's pretty simple. and Republicans, you know this, you're in a corner. He's put you in there. You are squished into that corner. The question is, are you going to man up and step out?

"Donald Trump has now told us that he's a traitor to the U.S. Constitution. He's a traitor to America."

She said she didn't know what else Republicans needed to stand up to Trump.

"People like Kevin McCarthy and Jim Jordan, and Elise Stefanik, and other leaders in this party who can't claim to actually, even Mike Pence can't really come close to saying it. He's getting closer, God bless him, better late than never. But the Constitution of the United States of America, he stated he wants to terminate the United States Constitution."

"How much stress on our system and on our democracy do we need to endure before we see that this man is a fascist, and that he has very, very bad intentions and Republicans, you are helping him by not stepping up and manning up and saying what is right and who you are and what you really are, what you stand for, and if you're not a Republican, and you're not a conservative, then you can go follow after Donald Trump. But if you are, then you need to walk away loudly. Today."

Daddy State Rising

I certainly did not invent any of the observational tools for detecting authoritarians and wannabe fascist rulers.

I am, however, very glad to see more people in the media finally coming around, and taking a harder bolder stance against some of this shit.

Barb McQuade (who is wicked smart and will always be a crush for me) breaks down the recent example of the push for Daddy State rule.

1. This post uses many basic old tricks. First, it states an outright lie, but suggests the claim has corroboration (“the revelation.”)
2. It signals membership in the tribe of the far-right by using its signature language (“Democrat party”). I’m one of you, and this is what we all think.
3. It suggests only two options, both of which favor the leader: declare Trump the winner now or have another election.
4. He wraps himself in the flag. He is the one who is being patriotic. The founders would have been on his side (no chance, btw). Tradition, symbols, USA!!! Cue the swelling patriotic music!
5. The money line - push people who are inclined to support him to an extreme end - it’s time for “the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” Once people start saying it out loud, it is no longer unthinkable.

Daddy State Awareness Guide

Press Poodle Lamentations

Karen Tumulty wishes us not to hold her shittiness against her.

Yes, we want plutocracy

we just had the wrong plutocrat

(pay wall)

Opinion
I’m sorry I said nice things about Glenn Youngkin

I’d like to take this opportunity to retract the nice things I said about Glenn Youngkin a few months ago.

In July, I wrote a column when reports began to surface that Virginia’s Republican governor, a fresh and sunny political newcomer with proven bipartisan appeal, was already thinking about running for president.

At the time, I expressed hope that Youngkin — or someone like him — would seek the GOP nomination in 2024. His stunning 2021 victory in blue-ish Virginia showed that there might still be room in the Republican Party for a different model of politician, one who could run as a unifying alternative to Donald Trump’s venomous brand.

Optimist that I am, I still hope that a tribune of sanity will emerge in the Republican Party. But the everydad in the fleece vest probably isn’t that guy. When a situation this week called for expressing a modicum of human decency, Youngkin — who frequently talks about his religious values — showed he could rival the former president at diving for the gutter.

As news was breaking Friday about the horrific attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, by an intruder in their San Francisco home, Youngkin happened to be campaigning in Stafford, Va., for Yesli Vega, the Republican running in a very tight race against Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger.

“Speaker Pelosi’s husband, they had a break-in last night in their house, and he was assaulted. There’s no room for violence anywhere,” Youngkin said.

Alas, he didn’t stop there.

“But we’re going to send her back to be with him in California,” the governor said. As the crowd cheered, Youngkin doubled down: “That’s what we’re going to go do. That’s what we’re going to go do.”

Set aside the fact that his joke, if that’s what you can call it, showed a lack of understanding of basic civics and geography. Pelosi is in Washington because she has been elected for the past 35 years by the voters of California. This has nothing to do with anybody in Virginia.

What made Youngkin’s riff not only tasteless but also dangerous is that he was not referring to some random act of “violence anywhere.” The attack on Paul Pelosi was a direct product of the toxic political culture — a culture that the governor was helping to cultivate for what he apparently sees as a political opportunity.

Evidence now indicates that the assailant who beat Pelosi with a hammer, sending the 82-year-old to the hospital with a skull fracture and serious injuries to his arm and hands, had broken into the Pelosi home because he was looking for the speaker herself. Nancy Pelosi has been demonized for years by Republicans, including in countless GOP campaign ads. The attacker’s reported shouts of “Where is Nancy?” were a chilling echo of the Jan. 6, 2021, rioters’ cries as they tried to hunt her down in the corridors of the Capitol.

Being a jerk about Pelosi is not the only Youngkin action of late that betrays who he really is and what he is willing to do in service of his ambition. During his campaign for governor, he managed a tricky balancing act on the election denialism that has gripped his party. He promised to put “election integrity” at the top of his priorities in office — indulging the lie that fraud is rampant — but also acknowledged Joe Biden’s 2020 victory and called the Jan. 6 insurrection “a real blight on our democracy.” And, notably, he kept Trump at a distance.

But more recently, Youngkin is being seen with the worst people in his party. A little over a week ago, he stumped in Arizona for GOP gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake, one of the loudest of those 2020 deniers and someone who has refused to say whether she will accept the results of this year’s election. He called her “awesome,” and she declared him a “total rock star.”

Asked on CNN about his plans to campaign with Lake, Youngkin replied: “I think that the Republican Party has to be a party where we are not shunning people and excluding them, because we don’t agree on everything.” In other words, Youngkin thinks it’s fine to undermine democracy in the cause of lower taxes and school choice.

The governor remains popular in Virginia, with a recent poll showing his approval at 55 percent and most of his constituents saying the state is moving in the right direction. But the commonwealth limits its governors to one consecutive term, which means, come 2024, he will be looking for a new job.

Youngkin may still have some room for redemption, though it is shrinking. He could start by apologizing for his crude joke. So far, all we’ve heard is a statement from his office condemning the violence against the speaker’s husband and saying the governor “wishes him a full recovery and is keeping the Pelosi family in his prayers.” Meanwhile, his turn toward full-bore Trumpism is likely to be for naught. There are plenty of others, including the original, who do it better — and at less cost to their own integrity.

The Brain Fog Of War

I'm pretty sure Mr Putin is not amused. But I do have to ponder on it.

First, Putin is not one to allow this to go unanswered - he either retaliates now (he may already have done so), or he puts it in his pocket for later, when he figures it's time to stomp on Pukhov.

But second, Putin could "let is slide" so he can use it to rebut criticism that he doesn't allow dissent.

Maybe (prob'ly) he's doing both. He's taken Pukhov to the wood shed - in secret - and he's playing Mr Stoic Tolerance for public consumption.

For guys like Putin there's no such thing as a negative or a positive - there is only leverage in pursuit of opportunity for advantage.

‘We all know they’re Iranian, but the government won’t admit it,’ Russian arms expert blurts out on live TV

Since last summer, multiple sources have reported that Russia was buying Iranian drones for the war in Ukraine. Russia’s Geran-2 drones (“Geraniums”) are none other than repainted Iranian Shahed-136 drones, now actively used by the Russian military in attacking the Ukrainian energy infrastructure. Still, both Moscow and Teheran are stubbornly keeping silent about this arms dealing. This makes the Russian arms expert Ruslan Pukhov’s recent TV blunder particularly curious.

Ruslan Pukhov, a pro-Kremlin Russian military expert appeared on a live “What Does This Mean” RBK TV show on October 19. Minutes before his appearance, the hosts Bogdana Prikhoda and Yury Tamantsev mentioned that the West is accusing Iran of supplying Russia with Shahed-136 and Mohajer drones. Pukhov then came on stage, greeted the hosts, and — without realizing that the mics were on — instructed them not to lean too much on the Iranian topic:

Let’s not rock the boat too much. I’m asking you, don’t — these Iranian things are just like the classic joke, “there’s an asshole but no such word,” yes? We all know they’re Iranian, but the government won’t admit it.

The hosts interrupted Pukhov, signaling that they were on air.

No one brings up the Iranian drones for the rest of Pukhov’s live TV appearance. He notes, instead, only that Russia must import weapons, given the current combat situation: “And there’s nothing embarrassing about it — we should rake in everything we can, yes?”

The RBK website and its social media often publish video-episodes of “What Does This Mean,” but the October 19 show is not available.

Ruslan Pukhov is a council member at the Russian Defense Ministry, and a co-founder of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies (CAST), which publishes the Russian Arm Exports journal. Recently, he figured in Ivan Safronov’s treason case as a prosecution witness.

Following his botched TV appearance, Pukhov told journalists that he doesn’t remember talking about Iranian drones. “Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t. I can’t remember, sadly. This was a while ago, and after COVID, I have brain fog.”

For the Daddy State, there is no losing - not when you make the rules, and you can change those rules at any time.