Learning

The Dems are not planning to "fight" by bending over backwards trying to be accommodating of a buncha crazed Berserker Republicans - not this time.

Because you can't do that with these assholes, and then expect to be accommodated in return.

They're assholes.

(pay wall)

Nonprofits With Ties to Democrats Plan Counteroffensive Against Congressional Investigations

The groups want to take pressure off the administration by pushing back in a more adversarial manner than President Biden’s team.

The Biden administration has added lawyers and communications staff members, while working with outside lawyers to prepare for an anticipated barrage of subpoenas.Credit...Tom Brenner for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — With Republicans in control of the House of Representatives, a loose network of groups allied with Democrats is planning a multimillion-dollar counteroffensive against an expected onslaught of oversight investigations into President Biden, his family and his administration.

The White House, which is building its own defense team, has quietly signaled support for some of the efforts by nonprofit groups with ties to some of the biggest donors in Democratic politics, according to people familiar with the groups.

The efforts appear intended to take pressure off the administration by pushing back in a more adversarial manner than Mr. Biden’s team on sensitive subjects, including the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, the administration’s Covid response and — perhaps most notably — the foreign business dealings of Mr. Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.

“The White House cannot be the sole nucleus for publicly responding to the onslaught of congressional investigations,” reads a memo from a nonprofit group called Facts First USA that has been circulating among major Democratic donors, members of Congress and others.

It lays out a $5 million-a-year “SWAT team to counter Republican congressional investigations,” including on issues that “may be too personal or delicate for the White House to be responding or to even be seen as directing a response” — an apparent reference to Hunter Biden.

David Brock, the Democratic activist behind Facts First, said his group “intends to work with the White House where appropriate but will make our own judgments.”

Another group, the Congressional Integrity Project, announced Wednesday that it intended to launch a multimillion-dollar “war room” to undermine investigations from the Republican-led House. People involved in that initiative, which was first reported by Politico, have previously worked with Mr. Brock’s team and have close connections to the White House and the Democratic Party.

The political arm of the Center for American Progress, the influential progressive think tank, is planning to cast the Republican investigations as “politically motivated revenge politics,” according to its chief executive, Patrick Gaspard.

The rush by some of the left’s leading figures to mount responses underscores mounting concerns that Republicans could use their investigations to damage Mr. Biden and other Democrats headed into the 2024 presidential election. The scramble also highlights an old Washington dynamic: When there is divided government, lawmaking tends to grind to a halt and Congress is dominated by oversight fights.

That is likely to be particularly true when Republicans take control of the House of Representatives next year with a majority that is slimmer than the party had hoped. In such an environment, it can be easier to win support for oversight investigations, which require less consensus than major legislative initiatives.

The battles could be turbocharged by new outside groups like Facts First, which is funded by “dark money” from donors whose identities can be kept secret. The ongoing law enforcement inquiries into two figures who loom largest in the oversight investigations — Hunter Biden, who is under investigation for tax-related violations and other issues, and former President Donald J. Trump — add another layer of intensity to the fight.

Mr. Trump declared his candidacy for the 2024 presidential election on Tuesday, even as he faces investigations related to his handling of classified materials, his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and his business.

While some in the party blame him for disappointing results in this month’s midterm elections, his allies in Congress have indicated that they intend to use the oversight investigations to damage Mr. Biden and avenge Mr. Trump.

Many of the planned oversight investigations align closely with Mr. Trump’s grievances, including accusations of politically motivated Justice Department investigations into him, criticisms of the Biden administration’s handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan and border policies, and claims about the business dealings of Hunter Biden and other members of the president’s family.

House Republicans have been working closely for months with outside groups affiliated with Mr. Trump and funded by anonymous cash to plan for the oversight.

Representative James Comer of Kentucky, who is in line to become chairman of the Oversight Committee, and Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, who is expected to be chairman of the Judiciary Committee, planned to hold a news conference Thursday morning on “investigative actions.”

The White House declined to comment.

But it has been gearing up for the oversight battles ahead as well, by compiling research on Republican arguments and the members of Congress making them, including trawling deeply conservative corners of the internet to build out a rapid-response database, according to a person familiar with the effort.

The White House also added lawyers and communications staff members, while working with outside lawyers to prepare for an anticipated barrage of subpoenas, as well as possible efforts to impeach Mr. Biden. An administration official said that additional personnel would be added to handle the inquiries in the White House and the agencies under Republican scrutiny, including the Defense Department, the Education Department, the Health and Human Services Department, the Homeland Security Department and the State Department.

“Republicans are going to launch baseless broadsides against the White House,” Eric Schultz, who handled the Obama administration’s response to congressional oversight investigations, said in an interview. “They already have been. Holding them accountable for their own word as a measure of their credibility, that’s entirely fair game.”

Hunter Biden will be assisted in the congressional investigations by Joshua A. Levy, who previously represented the opposition research firm Fusion GPS when it became the target of Republican congressional investigations.

Mr. Levy declined to comment.

Hunter Biden himself has mostly stayed quiet as Republicans have worked to make him into a boogeyman.

It is a void that Mr. Brock and Kevin Morris, a close adviser to Hunter Biden, are preparing to fill.

Mr. Morris, a Hollywood lawyer who has been helping Hunter Biden with financial and legal support, offered to collaborate with the Facts First effort during a meeting in September in Los Angeles with Mr. Brock, according to people familiar with the meeting.

Mr. Morris has assembled a team of lawyers, computer forensic experts and public relations professionals, according to a person familiar with Mr. Morris’s plans. They have discussed plans to go on offense against allies of Mr. Trump who targeted Hunter Biden, including those who disseminated or highlighted a cache of files with embarrassing information that appears to have come from an abandoned laptop.

Mr. Brock has far more political experience than Mr. Morris, but he also has a track record of bare-knuckle tactics that have drawn criticism on both sides of the aisle.

Once a self-described “right-wing hit man,” Mr. Brock switched sides and became an ardent supporter of Hillary Clinton, setting up a political action committee that coordinated with her 2016 presidential campaign to defend her against media scrutiny and attacks from rivals.

Over the last two decades, Mr. Brock built a network of nonprofit groups that are supported by some of the biggest donors on the left, and that play important roles in the Democratic Party’s ecosystem.

Mr. Brock is stepping away from his position as chairman of two of his main groups, Media Matters and American Bridge, to focus on Facts First USA, for which he will serve as president. It is in some ways modeled on the PAC he used to attack Mrs. Clinton’s rivals, and he left open the door to Facts First coordinating with the White House, the Democratic National Committee or other Democratic groups, including a potential Biden campaign, if the president declared for re-election.

“We’re an outside independent group,” he said, “and we hope that lots of people are willing to join the fight against Republican disinformation and conspiracy mongering, including the White House and all allied groups.”

His group, the Congressional Integrity Project and the White House seem aligned so far on one thing — targeting the Republicans driving the oversight.

Mr. Brock’s group and the White House are assembling research intended to cast Republicans involved in the oversight as hypocrites, pointing to those who defied subpoenas in the congressional investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

On That Email Thing

NYT (possible pay wall):

They have not brought a major scandal to the surface, at least not yet, and even won praise from some supporters like The Post’s editorial page, which said they showed Mrs. Clinton’s “sound policy instincts.” They’ve certainly not blown up the system, as might happen in a more closed, undemocratic form of government.

If repressive foreign governments want to make a regular thing of hacking into United States leaders’ email to undermine the country, and domestic politicians like Mr. Trump want to keep embracing that kind of “help,” then the news media may have to rethink how to handle it.

But so far, the hacks have only proved that the United States system knows how to process reality and can handle the truth, which should encourage our leaders to offer more of it.

So for that much, I guess, thanks, Vladimir Putin. Now, ready to share youremails?

There could be a lot more to "the emails" than I've seen - and fake lord knows I haven't seen a whole helluva lot, so I could be standing on the warning track way the fuck off in left field - but I've been wondering for a while why the emails are always and only about the Dems, and never the Repubs, and it seems most of the Press Poodles never make it clear that they include anything that could be considered exculpatory in any real way.

What we get is "Oooh, this could be dark and mysterious and horrible - it prob'ly isn't - but it could be, and that would mean the end of the world as we know it! But I'm afraid we'll have to leave it there and blah blah blah"

Gee - it's almost as if somebody wants us to think a certain way about something.

Politics brings out the liar in all of us, so all I can do is try to test each thing for "reasonable-ness" and follow what I can as far as I can.

But all this shit - it's a wonderment.

Today's Turnaround

The Backfire Effect

Posted by sofa king at Democratic Underground today:
(and pasted into this post in its all-together cuz it's awesome)

"But why would people so woefully lacking in the basic facts of an issue think they were the best informed? Social scientists call the effect, 'pseudo-certainty.' I call it, 'being a fucking moron.'" --Al Franken

The use of cognitive bias against the public can probably be traced back to the United States' foundation. Consider, for example, the rapier-like tact Americans used in the Declaration of Independence, directing all of their ire against Great Britain's slowly maddening King instead of the Parliament that they knew had wronged them. I think it is a classic example of misdirection, in the same family of dishonesty as mentioning Osama bin Laden in the same paragraph every time one mentions Saddam Hussein.

Last night, Mitt Romney made the most of a particular cognitive bias which we all need to know about. It is called the Backfire Effect. Here is a link to the paper.

People have a bad habit of clinging to disinformation, particularly if they are fed the disinformation first. If the disinformation is refuted, many of us simply give up trying to figure the problem out and default to the first thing we learned, and if the first thing we learned is crap, we believe the crap.
We are all vulnerable to some degree to the Backfire Effect, but there is a critical difference in the way the Backfire Effect works between conservatives and liberals, Democrats and Republicans.

The shortest version I can give is this: when a conservative lies and a liberal refutes the lie, conservative observers become more likely to believe the lie. This effect does not work in reverse--because liberals have better thinking skills, I say, but I'm biased. This is part of the reason why an alarming number of American doofuses are still shambling about thinking that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11, and why the vast majority of them are Republicans.

Up to now, Mitt Romney's biggest problem has been that he hasn't won over the right-wing authoritarians who make up the most important voting bloc in the Republican Party, and maybe in all of American politics. They are diligent voters and can be easily programmed with lies, fear, and racism, of which they are fed a steady diet by Fox News and AM radio. Almost one in four Americans fits the profile of a right-wing authoritarian.

Despite every effort, right down to nominating arch-conservative darling Paul Ryan, Romney just hasn't been able to convince them that he's their guy.

And why should they think so, when Romney gamed the nomination process, knocked off the conservative authorities they trust one by one, and silenced all dissent at the convention? He had to steal it from them before he can steal it from us, and they haven't easily forgotten.

Last night was Romney's last big chance. He's got the press and the pollsters pulling for him to make it a closer race, because it is to their personal, professional, and financial advantage. He has finally assembled the captive audience of right-wing authoritarians he needs to win over. All he needed to do was to finally, permanently, establish himself as a conservative authority, someone the conservatives can trust.

He needed President Obama to help him, by doing what every Democrat, including myself, wanted him to do: call Mitt a liar.

So Mitt Romney went out and did what he's best at. He lied his ass off. He changed a central plank of his platform at the debate in an attempt to draw out President Obama, to encourage the President to raise his voice and express outrage at such malicious dishonesty.

But President Obama wouldn't bite.

Instead, the President stuck to his own policy, his own platform, and pointed out only the most basic and agreed-upon flaws in whatever Romney's so-called plan is today (or rather, last night, because I'm sure he's walking back half of what he said right now). He tried not to show flashes of anger or disgust, as Al Gore so tragically did in 2000.

It was probably disappointing to all of us here to see the President steer away from direct confrontation, but it probably also sealed the election for him.

Consider what would have happened had the debate swung a different way.

Gov. Romney: "I'm not in favor of a $5 trillion tax cut. That's not my plan...."

President Obama: "That's bullshit. You've run on that all year."

Millions of Democrats would have stood up and cheered at that moment, to be sure, but it wouldn't have done a damned thing to change the political landscape because we're all already going to go out and vote for President Obama, and every other Democrat on the ballot. We're all registered now, right?

Just as certainly, a giant mob of tea-partiers would have been on their feet and whooping. That would have been the signal they needed, the sign from baby Jesus that Mitt Romney was the anointed one. They would have dusted off their IDs and registrations, and they would have come out and voted--at a higher frequency, unfortunately, than we do. Millions of our votes would have been canceled out.

We need to realize that right now an unusually high number of right-wing voters are far closer to reality than they usually are. They don't trust Mitt Romney, and they shouldn't, and it is to their credit that they do not in spite of the enormous psyops being run on them.

But we also need to acknowledge that these voters unfortunately tend strongly toward racism, and are highly motivated to vote against President Obama simply because he is a person of color. President Obama will never win their vote--but he might win their non-vote.

So that is why President Obama didn't "win" last night's debate. Because this debate wasn't about us. But do you know who is going to refute Mitt Romney's bullshit? We are. In the voting booth.

Where Credit Is Due

Jon Stewart is a fucking genius.

Political Judo

You take your own negative and project it onto your opponent.  It's worked for a long time because most people have short memories where this kinda shit is concerned - which is actually what Willard's campaign guy was talking about when he made that Etch-A-Sketch remark.

Well, Obama kicked off his 2012 campaign at Ohio State's basketball venue (I think), where, according to the wingnuts, "he was preaching to an empty room", or he "failed to fill the seats" or some such hokum.

Here's one view of what that empty room looked like:

Here's one more:

And here's a look at the adoring throngs that showed up for Romney's major economics address in Detroit earlier this year - this is the one the Repubs need us to forget about: