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They may be "on our side" for now, but the rat-fucking Never-Trumpers who put these things together will be right back to pulling this shit on us at their earliest opportunity.

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camycamo4

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Today's Explainer

Matthew Cooke - A Message To Republicans

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With "dialog" that we all know is prob'ly pretty close to transcriptional.

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Republican Voters Against Trump:

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From LindseyMustGo:

Ramping Up

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Pony Up

Whatever else you wanna say about Mike Bloomberg, the guy's putting his money where his mouth is.

There's a good probability (in my little brain) that he's mostly hedging his bets. He's trying to short-circuit the kind of backlash that makes the pendulum swing wildly away from the nice well-ordered environment that plutocrats need to foster - the kind that still eats everybody who hasn't scrambled into the upper echelons, but eats them at a slower pace than what a guy like 45* is pushing for.

Bloomberg (et al) can't afford to let Trump push too many of us into Bernie's Revolution.

What I hear from Bloomberg is: "Yes, I'm a top-down authoritarian, but I'm pretty gosh darned benevolent about it."

Which is kinda weird, cuz that's what I used to complain about when I referred to the Dems in the 90s, when it first really started to look like the parties were losing their differentiating features.

"Vote for Democrats - we're slightly less asshole-ish than those other guys."

Anyway, it appears Mike is going to put some of that $60,000,000,000 to "good use".

WaPo, Greg Sargent:

It has long been an open question whether Mike Bloomberg would actually make good on his promise to spend lavishly from his fortune to defeat President Trump, should he fall short of the Democratic nomination. Now he’s fallen short — he dropped out on Wednesday — and we have our answer.

It’s a resoundingly good one, as The Post’s Michael Scherer reports:

Former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg has decided to form an independent expenditure campaign that will absorb hundreds of his presidential campaign staffers in six swing states to work to elect the Democratic nominee this fall.

The group, with a name that is still undisclosed because its trademark application is in process, would also be a vehicle for Bloomberg to spend money on advertising to attack President Trump and support the Democratic nominee, according to a person familiar with the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

It seems clear that Bloomberg believes he can make himself useful by using his fortune to rattle Trump, to get in his head, causing him to make mistakes or, better yet, perform even more spectacular meltdowns than usual.

The Real Blitz Is Coming

The firehose of bullshit we've had to endure since about 2011 is part of a deliberate attempt to make us question the very existence of truth - and it's going to get worse.

McKay Coppins, The Atlantic:

The story that unfurled in my Facebook feed over the next several weeks was, at times, disorienting. There were days when I would watch, live on TV, an impeachment hearing filled with damning testimony about the president’s conduct, only to look at my phone later and find a slickly edited video—served up by the Trump campaign—that used out-of-context clips to recast the same testimony as an exoneration. Wait, I caught myself wondering more than once, is that what happened today?

As I swiped at my phone, a stream of pro-Trump propaganda filled the screen: “That’s right, the whistleblower’s own lawyer said, ‘The coup has started …’ ” Swipe. “Democrats are doing Putin’s bidding …” Swipe. “The only message these radical socialists and extremists will understand is a crushing …” Swipe. “Only one man can stop this chaos …” Swipe, swipe, swipe.

I was surprised by the effect it had on me. I’d assumed that my skepticism and media literacy would inoculate me against such distortions. But I soon found myself reflexively questioning every headline. It wasn’t that I believed Trump and his boosters were telling the truth. It was that, in this state of heightened suspicion, truth itself—about Ukraine, impeachment, or anything else—felt more and more difficult to locate. With each swipe, the notion of observable reality drifted further out of reach.

- and -

What I was seeing was a strategy that has been deployed by illiberal political leaders around the world. Rather than shutting down dissenting voices, these leaders have learned to harness the democratizing power of social media for their own purposes—jamming the signals, sowing confusion. They no longer need to silence the dissident shouting in the streets; they can use a megaphone to drown him out. Scholars have a name for this: censorship through noise.

We ain't seen nothin' yet.

Here's a link to a 2014 piece in The Atlantic, about some beta-testing that Putin was doing.

At the NATO summit in Wales last week, General Philip Breedlove, the military alliance’s top commander, made a bold declaration. Russia, he said, is waging “the most amazing information warfare blitzkrieg we have ever seen in the history of information warfare.”

It was something of an underestimation. The new Russia doesn’t just deal in the petty disinformation, forgeries, lies, leaks, and cyber-sabotage usually associated with information warfare. It reinvents reality, creating mass hallucinations that then translate into political action. Take Novorossiya, the name Vladimir Putin has given to the huge wedge of southeastern Ukraine he might, or might not, consider annexing. The term is plucked from tsarist history, when it represented a different geographical space. Nobody who lives in that part of the world today ever thought of themselves as living in Novorossiya and bearing allegiance to it—at least until several months ago. Now, Novorossiya is being imagined into being: Russian media are showing maps of its ‘geography,’ while Kremlin-backed politicians are writing its ‘history’ into school textbooks. There’s a flag and even a news agency (in English and Russian). There are several Twitter feeds. It’s like something out of a Borges story - except for the very real casualties of the war conducted in its name.

The invention of Novorossiya is a sign of Russia’s domestic system of information manipulation going global. Today’s Russia has been shaped by political technologists—the viziers of the system who, like so many post-modern Prosperos, conjure up puppet political parties and the simulacra of civic movements to keep the nation distracted as Putin’s clique consolidates power. In the philosophy of these political technologists, information precedes essence. “I remember creating the idea of the ‘Putin majority’ and hey, presto, it appeared in real life,” Gleb Pavlovsky, a political technologist who worked on Putin's election campaigns but has since left the Kremlin, told me recently. “Or the idea that ‘there is no alternative to Putin.’ We invented that. And suddenly there really was no alternative.”

The point is that we're on the receiving end of some truly and amazingly scary shit.

And the question is: do your neighbors - and some of your wackier family members - have what it takes to resist the sophistication and the insidiousness of it? Have they already been sucked into it?

How may Bernie Bros are being manipulated in the same ways?
How will the means and methods described in these articles be adapted to, &/or adopted by, the campaigns of our own homegrown candidates?

In a D&D fight, the Chaotic Neutral character has a bit of an edge, but it's offset by the powers of a Lawful Good character.

In the real world, it's a lot worse because the good guy is expected to follow rules that the bag guy is free to ignore.

How You Do It

I've seen this phenomenon play out in a coupla different ways in my experience. And in one very important instance, it came into very sharp focus for me.

I don't need to recount the details here, but it involved my sales-y struggles with a very powerful clinical academic who was always busting my chops about my product and my company's founder "trading on his standing in the medical community, trying to leverage money out of his colleagues..." 

My partner/assistant - a strong-willed woman - just looked at him with a slightly cocked eyebrow at the end of one of his rants, and said - "Oh c'mon, Steve". And that was kinda the end of the fight - actually it was the end of the war, as the good doctor became very cooperative thereafter.

She "mommed" him.

Sometimes, it's basically as "simple" as a woman just standing up and saying, "Stop - what you're doing is bullshit - get real".

Sometimes, it has to be pretty forceful.

And I don't know why it seems like it works for a woman when it almost never works for a man.

But I'll say it again: Women will help us save ourselves if we can figure out how to keep our mouths shut and stay the fuck outa their way.

A Slight Hint Of Movement

The fuckery of Cult45 is not really the point, except as it provides cover for the radical right's project to dismantle the American republic and replace it with a plutocratic regime.

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

--George Orwell

Know your history:

Today's Tweet

It never ends - the fuckery just goes on and on and on.

This is a real radio ad currently running in Arkansas in support of Republican Congressman French Hill on radio stations targeted to the African American community. I don't even have words to describe it. pic.twitter.com/vpzt1nGPlc

— (((Ben Tribbett))) (@notlarrysabato) October 18, 2018

WaPo

After a racist ad discouraging black voters from backing the Democrats went viral, the Republican Party’s attempts to win one of the left’s most influential voting blocs likely got harder. But the truth for the GOP is that the ad isn’t the main reason blacks aren’t backing conservatives in the midterm.

Black Americans for the President’s Agenda, a super PAC, released a radio ad in support of U.S. Rep. French Hill’s (R-Ark.) reelection campaign warning black Arkansans that Democrats winning Congress could reverse the clock to the days of Jim Crow and state-sponsored segregation.

Think Progress

A shockingly racist radio ad from a super PAC calling itself Black Americans for the President’s Agenda went viral on Thursday evening. The spots, running on radio stations popular with black voters in Arkansas and Missouri, urge black women to back Republican Rep. French Hill in Arkansas’ 2nd congressional district, Republican Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley in his U.S. Senate campaign, and GOP candidates in general.

Their factually inaccurate argument: if Democrats accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual predation without evidence, black “men and boys” will be subject to “race verdicts, life sentences, and lynchings when a white girl screams ‘rape!'”

The donors bankrolling this committee, however, appear to be rich, conservative ideologues, not the actual “Black Americans” they claim to be.

Git Some

A Repub like Joni Ernst is touted as one of the boys when she talks about castrating hogs - kinda funny how that slips right by all the rubes (and more than a few Dems) as they shit on Hillary for being "such a bitchy little ball-busting cunt" 

Ed Note: sorry not sorry - I've seen that posted as a comment on this very blog

Anyway, while Ernst enjoys her status as a GOP Lady-Token-du-Jour, Dems are out finding women who don't need to back-slap with the guys to demonstrate their bona fides.

These are women who can bring it.

Abigail Spanberger VA-07

Elaine Luria - VA-02

Chrissy Houlahan - PA-06

Gina Ortiz Jones TX-23

MJ Hegar - TX-31

Amy McGrath - KY-06

Mikie Sherrill - NJ-11

Elissa Slotkin - MI-08  

Telling us about how their service inspired them to run for office this year.

Whoa Momma

You're not necessarily an idiot just because everybody says you're an idiot, but one of things you have to consider is the possibility that you're an idiot.

Gonna needs lotsa ice for that kinda burn.

David Brill (D) AZ04

Trae Crowder

The Liberal Redneck nails it again - especially the part about "both sides".

And here's the Brian Kemp ad he mentioned (Poe's Law applies - this is not a parody):

Today's How-To

A political ad from MJ Hegar, running for US Rep in TX-31:

This is how ya do it, guys. Distinguished Flying Cross - with Valor.