A Short Tutorial

Ali Belshi takes a whack at explaining Fake News

New On Comedy Central

This is kind of a variation on Colbert - on steroids - but I'm hoping they let Jordan Klepper get his feet under him and find his audience.

If they can keep it moving and not get too hung up in simple mockery, they might be making something pretty special. Fake Jesus knows they're not likely to run out of raw material any time soon.

Dumbass Charlie Rose

You may have discerned by now that I'm not a Charlie Rose fan.  My list of candidates for Worst Fucking Interviewer Ever is relatively short to begin with, but there's a long-running tie for the top spot between Chris Matthews and Charlie Rose.

Anyway, Mr Pierce at Esquire takes a look at that 2-man circle jerk on 60 Minutes:

How in the world could Rose have this guy on and not even mention the Mercers, the wingnut billionaire power couple without whose bankroll Bannon would be just another Alex Jones hawking brain pills and chemtrail remover? How could he let Bannon, who made his pile at Goldman Sachs and then made another pile in Hollywood, use the phrase “limousine liberals” without picking up a banana from the fruit bowl and throwing it at him? And how in the name of god could he hear Bannon say this without then picking up the phone and calling his bosses at 60 Minutes and telling them they by god better not send him out to interview anymore of these basket cases without a HazMat suit.

STEVE BANNON: --don't-- don't give me-- this is the thing of the leftists. Charlie, that's beneath you. America's built on our sys-- on our citizens. Look at the 19th century. What built America's called the American system, from Hamilton to Polk to Henry Clay to Lincoln to the Roosevelts. A system of protection of our manufacturing, financial system that lends to manufacturers, OK, and the control of our borders. Economic nationalism is what this country was built on. The American system. Right?

If there’s one thing the 19th century is known for, boy, it’s how we controlled our borders. That’s why all those Irish fleeing the Famine ended up in Madagascar. Yeesh.

20/20 Retrospective

The New Yorker, David Remnick

Donald Trump’s ascent was hardly the first sign that Americans had not uniformly regarded Obama’s election as an inspiring chapter in the country’s fitful progress toward equality. Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House, had branded him the “food-stamp President.” In the right-wing and white-nationalist media, Obama was, variously, a socialist, a Muslim, the Antichrist, a “liberal fascist,” who was assembling his own Hitler Youth. A high-speed train from Las Vegas to Anaheim that was part of the economic-stimulus package was a secret effort to connect the brothels of Nevada to the innocents at Disneyland. He was, by nature, suspect. “You just look at the body language, and there’s something going on,” Trump said, last summer. In the meantime, beginning on the day of Obama’s first inaugural, the Secret Service fielded an unprecedented number of threats against the President’s person.

And so, speeding toward yet another airport last November, Obama seemed like a weary man who harbored a burning seed of apprehension. “We’ve seen this coming,” he said. “Donald Trump is not an outlier; he is a culmination, a logical conclusion of the rhetoric and tactics of the Republican Party for the past ten, fifteen, twenty years. What surprised me was the degree to which those tactics and rhetoric completely jumped the rails.”

For half a century, in fact, the leaders of the G.O.P. have fanned the lingering embers of racial resentment in the United States. Through shrewd political calculation and rhetoric, from Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy” to the latest charges of voter fraud in majority-African-American districts, doing so has paid off at the ballot box. “There were no governing principles,” Obama said. “There was no one to say, ‘No, this is going too far, this isn’t what we stand for.’ ”

Woulda been nice if the Press Poodles had made slightly more of a point about how Repubs had "fanned the lingering embers" over the last 50 fucking years. 

It almost amazes me that everybody suddenly sees what's been going on. 

As always, driftglass finds a good example of how Poodles do their little poodling thing:

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(?)

How Do We Expect Less?

The bar is being lowered pretty much in keeping with 45*'s eroding approval numbers.

Baltimore Sun, Dan Rodricks:

Did anyone expect President Donald J. Trump to wax eloquent and consoling with regard to Charlottesville? Did we really think he would condemn the torch-bearing white supremacists who assembled there? Do a majority of Americans count on Trump to provide wisdom, guidance and inspiration in times of trouble?

No. No. And no.

Handed an opportunity to shock us with a display of principled leadership, Trump on Saturday could have distanced himself from the alt-right and white nationalists he empowered with his “Make America Great Again” campaign. But he did not come close to that. He never uttered any of the descriptors we use for people who carry Confederate flags and chant, “Jews will not replace us.”

Instead, he blamed “many sides” for the violence that erupted in Charlottesville.
“Many sides” presents a false equivalence, putting neo-Nazis on the same footing as those who stand against them.

I do believe we just heard a Press Poodle pointing out one of my pet-peeve Logical Fallacies (False Equivalence) when it comes to our Great Debate these days.

Sir John of Oliver

I think I understand the impulse to "keep a civil tongue in your head".  Taking steps to prevent rhetorical violence turning into physical violence is an important part of the foundation of American Democracy.

But when a legitimate news item has that violent rhetoric at its core, I think I'd prefer to hear it straight out.

That's why we're better served when the "news" is presented to us by John Oliver and Samantha Bee and Bill Maher, et al.

And that's why I bitch about having to rely on half-hour comedy shows to get something approaching the real story.

C'mon, Press Poodles - dial it up a little.

It's Not An Absolute

...but education counts for quite a bit.

Stanford - BA Public Policy
Rhodes Scholar
Oxford University - PhD Political Science

Dropped out of 2 colleges and a Vo-Tech school

1 college course (theology)

Dropped out after 2 semesters and a summer session

Like Dr Adler said: Your education often starts after your schooling is completed.

But when it's time to learn about something that's complex and weird and has 37 different angles and can't be shoehorned into a simple binary model - when you need to get the story from someone who's been thru some kinda program that isn't just OJT in the entertainment business - which of these people makes up the better, more logical choice?

Friday's Podcast

Talking about how The Overton Window has shifted - the dialogue regarding Healthcare is now focused on how we go about delivering on everybody's right to have affordable access to quality healthcare.  Adjust your rhetoric accordingly.

Episode 396 - Trusting in the process, but not the Republicans.

The Professional Left

(Shop their Amazon link)

An Atmosphere Of Animal Instinct

They seem to be inching closer to being able to blow through the chaff and zero in on reality, but still - this is a fairly decent example of Press Poodles poodling away.

C'mon, you guys.

You are NEVER going to understand any of this Trump shit until you ditch your Presumption Of Regularity.

Stop trying to shoehorn this bullshit into the normal set of rules you've been taught.

Take everything you think you know about covering "The US Presidency" and flush it down the crapper - do this every morning right after your post-pilates latté.

Trump has always said he cultivates an atmosphere of animal instinct - he wants to surround himself with killers (he's said as much when talking about raising his kids) - he expects everybody to operate on his level.

Lose your expectations of decorum and tradition and even common courtesy - these people have no soul and no honor. They will eat dead burnt babies to get what they want.

John Oliver

Again - comedy shows on cable TV are doing a better job of covering real problems than any of the "real" news shows anywhere else.

And just to keep it out there - notice how Boris Epshteyn looks and sounds like one of those old Soviet guys from the late 80s who spent way too much time and energy trying way too hard not to look and sound like one of those old Soviet guys in the late 80s.

Vox Explains

A Look Inside

Sean Spicer treats the WH press corps like a bunch of kindergarteners pic.twitter.com/skjUKe4lJK

— Mдтт Иegяiи (@MattNegrin) April 5, 2017

And again - why do we get better insight from half-hour comedy shows than we get from the Press Poodles?

Info And Academics

Spark at CBC Radio: (I have a hard time getting the embed thing to work sometimes, so if you don't see anything in the space below, just follow the link)



Here's the only infographic I've been able to find so far. It's supposed to show how the websites interlock, which Albright hypothesizes is driven by analytics and the bots that grab little bits of info about where you go on the web and uses that info to feed similar info to you.

eg: Use Google to search for widgets and you'll see ads for widgets the next time you go to Facebook.

Or follow a link to Breitbart on your Twitter feed, and guess what's going to pop up as a Promoted Tweet when you go back. And then, you'll start getting links to other similar websites on Facebook, and before you know it, you're in a silo.

There's not a lot there that's brand spanking new, but now we're getting some research that begins to prove out the problems of confirmation bias and propaganda in the Information Age. 

The Guardian:

Here’s what you don’t want to do late on a Sunday night. You do not want to type seven letters into Google. That’s all I did. I typed: “a-r-e”. And then “j-e-w-s”. Since 2008, Google has attempted to predict what question you might be asking and offers you a choice. And this is what it did. It offered me a choice of potential questions it thought I might want to ask: “are jews a race?”, “are jews white?”, “are jews christians?”, and finally, “are jews evil?”

Are Jews evil? It’s not a question I’ve ever thought of asking. I hadn’t gone looking for it. But there it was. I press enter. A page of results appears. This was Google’s question. And this was Google’s answer: Jews are evil. Because there, on my screen, was the proof: an entire page of results, nine out of 10 of which “confirm” this. The top result, from a site called Listovative, has the headline: “Top 10 Major Reasons Why People Hate Jews.” I click on it: “Jews today have taken over marketing, militia, medicinal, technological, media, industrial, cinema challenges etc and continue to face the worlds [sic] envy through unexplained success stories given their inglorious past and vermin like repression all over Europe.”

Google is search. It’s the verb, to Google. It’s what we all do, all the time, whenever we want to know anything. We Google it. The site handles at least 63,000 searches a second, 5.5 billion a day. Its mission as a company, the one-line overview that has informed the company since its foundation and is still the banner headline on its corporate website today, is to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. It strives to give you the best, most relevant results. And in this instance the third-best, most relevant result to the search query “are Jews… ” is a link to an article from stormfront.org, a neo-Nazi website. The fifth is a YouTube video: “Why the Jews are Evil. Why we are against them.”

The sixth is from Yahoo Answers: “Why are Jews so evil?” The seventh result is: “Jews are demonic souls from a different world.” And the 10th is from jesus-is-saviour.com: “Judaism is Satanic!”

There’s one result in the 10 that offers a different point of view. It’s a link to a rather dense, scholarly book review from thetabletmag.com, a Jewish magazine, with the unfortunately misleading headline: “Why Literally Everybody In the World Hates Jews.”

I feel like I’ve fallen down a wormhole, entered some parallel universe where black is white, and good is bad. Though later, I think that perhaps what I’ve actually done is scraped the topsoil off the surface of 2016 and found one of the underground springs that has been quietly nurturing it. It’s been there all the time, of course. Just a few keystrokes away… on our laptops, our tablets, our phones. This isn’t a secret Nazi cell lurking in the shadows. It’s hiding in plain sight.

 

The Media Cloud

Any surprises here?

Intercepted

Jeremy Scahill

Charlie Brings It

Charlie Pierce at Esquire

How many more of these whackadoo performance pieces does he have to present before somebody throws sand in the gears? If four Republican senators—say, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Ben Sasse, and Susan Collins—would agree to caucus with the Democrats under Chuck Schumer, the whole thing would grind to a halt until we could catch our breath and see if we really want to live in the madhouse of this president*'s mind for the next four years. Bold speeches in Munich and chest-thumping on Twitter won't cut it. It's put up or shut up time.

And, please, for the love of god, ye editors and news directors throughout the land, enough with the expeditions into the heartland to talk to people who helped bring this down upon themselves and on us. These folks have nothing new to say. They voted their id and their spleen and they're still on a high from that. Some guy in a café in Dubuque wants to say that he voted for this president* because he "tells it like it is," or because he thinks the steel mills are coming back? Can you watch that rally in Florida and believe that these opinions have any real merit?

hat tip = Karoli, Crooks & Liars

Fake And Alt-Fake News

Beware the double negative - and the triple and the fourple.

Don Lemon gets up and slaps back.

Yay Don. You are earning your way out of Press Poodle status. Ya did us proud right there, son.

driftglass

Nobody deconstructs David Brooks better than driftglass:

In case you hadn't caught on by now, Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times is not really a person.

Mr. David Brooks is a brand. Mr. David Brooks is a profitable multimedia Conservative corporation that specializes in one and only one service. Like a bank or insurance company or funeral home, Mr. David Brooks sells reassurance. He specializes in very high-dollar, high-influence clients. Addlepated university presidents, for example. CEOs. Political professionals. Beltway media assholes. Sclerotic, plutocrat shut-ins. And so on.

His job for the last 20 years has been to reassure his clients that no matter how fucking insane, obstructionist, incompetent, vicious, dishonest, seditious and pig-ignorant the Republican Party may appear to be on any given day, it's not really as bad as you think. In fact, the real Republican Party -- the secret Republican Party which operates behind a curtain that only Mr. David Brooks can peek and sets policy using a code only Mr. David Brooks can decipher -- is doing just fine.

Everything is under control.

And if there are evident cracks below the water-line? Well you can trust Me. David Brooks when he tells you that they're very tiny cracks -- inconsequential really -- and certainly weren't caused by the captain and crew of the USS Saint Ronald Reagan rammed the ship repeatedly into every fucking iceberg in the North Atlantic.

 

Jay Smooth