Facts? What Facts?

And now for a little good old fashioned Press Poodle on Press Poodle violence.

Another Warning

Nicolle Wallace helped give us Sarah Palin.

Before that, she helped Bush43 lie us into invading Iraq. There are prob'ly plenty more examples, but those are a couple of the ones we're allowed to know about.

After all that, if Trump is too much for a Nicolle Wallace, that has to mean something pretty big.

Wallace suggests she might not be on the air if Trump wins

MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace said she might not be on the air if former President Trump wins the election this fall.

Noting the annual White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner was held over the weekend, Wallace said “behind the levity, though, there was something darker. A darker undercurrent, if you will, and a point that the president had to make — and it was more profoundly serious.”

“Because at this exact time next year, depending what happens in November seven months from now, we can’t say for certain that there would even be a White House correspondents’ dinner, or even a free press, or even a White House press corps,” she added.

Wallace continued, adding that “this time next year I might not be sitting here.”

The comment came after she played a clip of President Biden toasting members of the press during the annual dinner. She said while she’s seen the toast “many times,” it felt different in 2024.

Her comments, first highlighted by Mediaite, echoes several leading pundits on MSNBC, who regularly critique the former president and his allies.

Trump has for years railed against the left-leaning network over coverage he says in unfair to him. He recently suggested that if were to be elected again this fall, he would have the federal government investigate Comcast, NBCUniversal’s parent company, over what he called “treason.”

Social Media Politics

It's a time-honored thing -

• "My pamphleteers will destroy you!"
• "I'll use my newspaper to destroy you!"
• "I'll use my radio broadcast to destroy you!"
• "I'll use my cable TV show to destroy you!"
• "I'll destroy you with my vast reach on TwiXter and Instagram and whatever!"

I don't know what it'll take to break this fever, but it's been broken in the past and it'll be broken again.

But we have to hang on, and we have to remember to behave like honorable people.

James Lankford Says 'Popular Commentator' Threatened Him Over Immigration Bill

The Oklahoma Republican has faced major right-wing backlash for seeking a bipartisan compromise on immigration.

WASHINGTON ― Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) said Wednesday that an unnamed media personality promised to “destroy” him for seeking a bipartisan compromise on immigration.

Lankford said in a Senate floor speech that a “popular commentator” told him four weeks ago that he would face negative consequences if he pushed forward with drafting a bipartisan immigration bill.

“If you try to move a bill that solves the border crisis during this presidential year, I will do whatever I can to destroy you, because I do not want you to solve this during the presidential election,” Lankford said he was told.

The Oklahoma Republican spent months drafting a compromise immigration bill with Sens. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.). The resulting legislation, unveiled Sunday, would limit asylum and parole while making it easier for authorities to deport migrants, including a requirement that the Department of Homeland Security deny all entries when daily border crossings reach certain thresholds.

The bill includes no pathways to citizenship for any undocumented immigrants, something Democrats usually push for in bipartisan immigration deals. Instead, Democrats asked for military assistance for Ukraine.

However, the deal blew up in Lankford’s face thanks to opposition from former president Donald Trump, who urged Republican senators to kill the legislation, as well as a lot of conservative commentators ― including the unnamed but presumably prominent right-wing media personality that allegedly threatened Lankford.

“By the way, they have been faithful to their promise and have done everything they can to destroy me in the past several weeks,” Lankford said in his floor remarks.

Lankford declined to name the commentator when HuffPost asked.

The package failed in a Senate vote on Wednesday afternoon, thanks mostly to Republican opposition.

A variety of prominent Republicans inside and outside Congress have falsely claimed the Lankford bill provides “amnesty” for undocumented immigrants. Lankford said he’s repeatedly told people that’s not true, but that it’s been hard to break through.

“For some reason, we still believe everything we read on the internet,” Lankford said.

Opinion

It seems pretty important that at least some of the Press Poodles are behaving more like the Newsy Bulldogs we need them to be by speaking very openly and explicitly about the prospects of MAGA fucking things up on purpose, and with malice of forethought.

MAGA partisans grasp these stakes with perfect clarity. One well-known Trumpist operative has been frantically warning that a liberal majority on the Wisconsin state Supreme Court would spell doom for “election integrity.” That’s MAGA code for saying it would complicate efforts to illicitly subvert a MAGA loss in 2024. And it’s true: If liberals control the court, that will be largely out of reach.

Greg Sargent isn't exactly the epitome of a leftie looney, although he fits the wingnuts' description pretty well.

What catches my eye is not so much his willingness to call the MAGA shit for what it is - and not equivocate on it - but the fact that something this straightforward made it past the editors at a news outlet that has a 40-year tradition of being a very Both-Sides-y kinda joint.

Maybe I'm overstating it, but this is not normal, and it carries a measure of hope that doesn't come along all that often in USAmerica's Commercial Establishment Press.

Opinion
This sleeper race could wreck MAGA’s 2024 dreams

Wisconsin looms large in the MAGA transformation of American politics. Of the three “blue wall” states that Donald Trump flipped in 2016, Wisconsin was the toughest for Democrats to take back in 2020. Winning there — more than Michigan or Pennsylvania — is the most likely starting point for Trump or another MAGA presidential candidate to assemble an electoral majority in 2024.

That’s why a race for Wisconsin state Supreme Court — Election Day is April 4 — has extraordinarily high stakes. A Democratic win would deal a big blow to the MAGA movement’s 2024 hopes, underscoring its dramatically weakened hold on must-win territory once dominated by Trump. That outcome would give liberals a 4-3 majority on a court that could thwart any rerun of Trump’s 2020 effort to overturn his loss by legal chicanery.

The conservative candidate for the court seat — Republican lawyer Daniel Kelly — has sterling MAGA credentials. He was reportedly involved in discussions about a “fake electors” scheme to overturn Trump’s loss in the state. Last year, he helped lead “election integrity” events that suggested the state’s 2020 voting was suspect.

In private polls, Kelly is trailing the liberal candidate, Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewicz, and Democrats are outspending Republicans in the race. A liberal court could overturn a state abortion ban, so Democratic ads are highlighting Kelly’s support from anti-choice groups, hoping abortion can deliver another win after driving many 2022 victories.

But this race is also about the future prospects of MAGA — on multiple levels.

A loss for Kelly would effectively constitute a third strike for MAGA in the geographic heart of the movement’s effort to transform U.S. politics. Trump’s 2016 Rust Belt victories were driven by supercharged margins among non-college-educated White voters disproportionately concentrated in that region, which hinted at a long-term MAGA-driven realignment of the electoral map.

But since then, not only did Joe Biden win back Wisconsin (and the other “blue wall” states) in 2020, but in 2022 Democratic Gov. Tony Evers triumphed over a Trump-backed GOP candidate. While GOP Sen. Ron Johnson was reelected there in 2022, Evers’s clear majority win provided vivid evidence of MAGA’s waning influence.

A third Democratic triumph in Wisconsin would suggest the MAGA transformation is proving far less durable than its proponents hoped. Wisconsin has a slightly higher percentage of blue-collar White people than either Pennsylvania or Michigan, so another win would be a big morale booster for Democrats heading into 2024.

“The whole Trump-MAGA strategy is to run up the score with rural voters and White voters without college degrees,” Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler told me. “That describes most voters in Wisconsin.” What’s more, Wikler added, “MAGA can’t win in 2024 without the Badger State.”

MAGA partisans grasp these stakes with perfect clarity. One well-known Trumpist operative has been frantically warning that a liberal majority on the Wisconsin state Supreme Court would spell doom for “election integrity.” That’s MAGA code for saying it would complicate efforts to illicitly subvert a MAGA loss in 2024. And it’s true: If liberals control the court, that will be largely out of reach.

To be fair, one of the court’s current conservative justices did not side with Trump’s efforts to overturn results in 2020, notes election law expert Richard L. Hasen. So even a one-seat conservative majority might not do its worst. But if 2024 comes down to Wisconsin, the pressure would be intense to greenlight dubious efforts to overturn a loss, and a conservative majority joined by Kelly would be “much more risky,” Hasen said.

“A liberal court would make it much less likely that lawsuits meant to disenfranchise voters or subvert election results would get a serious hearing,” Hasen told me.

To the surprise of many observers, Democrats won in 2022 by running as defenders of both abortion rights and democracy, enabling them to defeat election-denying candidates across the country. That combination proved to be Kryptonite to MAGA among swing voters, including in Pennsylvania and Michigan.

In addition to running ads on abortion, Democrats in Wisconsin are also putting big money behind a spot that is entirely about the threat to democracy posed by conservative domination of the state Supreme Court. A win there would once again show the potency of that joint message — against MAGA candidates in particular.

Yet even if Democrats prevail, it would be folly to be overly confident that MAGA’s efforts to realign the region are fully extinguished. As Ronald Brownstein notes for the Atlantic, Democratic performance among non-college White people in 2020 and 2022 improved only marginally relative to 2016, so relying on educated voters alone won’t keep the “blue wall” states in the Democratic column.

But when it comes to MAGA’s dreams of retaking the Rust Belt in 2024 — or even of stealing the election in Wisconsin if the GOP candidate can’t win fairly — a Democratic victory in April would make those hopes a whole lot dimmer.

Tea Leaves And Crystal Balls

Information travels at the speed of light, while the systems of government still proceed with all the alacrity, grace, and speed of the average tectonic plate.

There's lots of space to fill on lots of webpages and cable shows, and lots of ads to put in front of lots of people, and lots of demand for lots of opportunity to sell everything from ankle socks to Zyrtec and back to anal beads.

So it seems like we get lots of fairly high-paid fortune tellers "journalists" who try to see into the future and guess what's going to happen, presumably because we're out here expecting our favorite news hounds to pre-inform us so we can - what, exactly? So we can look smarter than average during the argument at the bar next Wednesday? So we can smile knowingly and pretend we had it all figured out ahead of time and that gives us some kind of bragging rights?

I'm not saying we shouldn't know stuff about what's going on. And I'm not saying we shouldn't try to be a little prepared for whatever shit's being rolled down the hill in our direction.

It's just that sitting around waiting for the next shoe to drop can give us a way of rationalizing a tendency to read far more into every little detail than is necessary.

That can be good - checking small things is never a bad idea. But it can have a very negative effect when it builds an expectation that's not realistic, or when you catch one small thing that you don't tag as purely speculative, and then misremember it later as fact, which ends up contributing to general feeling of justice denied, which in turn can give us reason to walk away from something we should be paying a lot of attention to.

Ain't politics a bitch.

Little-Known Lawyer, a Trump Ally, Draws Scrutiny in Georgia

A special grand jury looking into election meddling interviewed Robert Cheeley, a sign that false claims made by Donald J. Trump’s allies loom large in the case.

ATLANTA — At a Georgia State Senate hearing a few weeks after President Donald J. Trump lost his bid for re-election, Rudolph W. Giuliani began making outlandish claims. “There are 10 ways to demonstrate that this election was stolen, that the votes were phony, that there were a lot of them — dead people, felons, phony ballots,” he told the assembled legislators.

After Mr. Giuliani’s testimony, a like-minded Georgia lawyer named Robert Cheeley presented video clips of election workers handling ballots at the State Farm Arena in downtown Atlanta. Mr. Cheeley spent 15 minutes laying out specious assertions that the workers were double- and triple-counting votes, saying their actions “should shock the conscience of every red blooded Georgian” and likening what he said had happened to the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.

His comments mostly flew under the radar at the time, overshadowed by the election fraud claims made by Mr. Giuliani, who was then Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, and by other higher-profile figures. But Mr. Cheeley’s testimony did not end up in the dustbin. He was among the witnesses questioned last year by a special grand jury in Atlanta that investigated election interference by Mr. Trump and his allies, the grand jury’s forewoman, Emily Kohrs, said in an interview last month.

The fact that Mr. Cheeley was called to appear before the special grand jury adds to the evidence that although the Atlanta investigation has focused on Mr. Trump’s biggest areas of legal exposure — the calls he made to pressure local officials and his involvement in a scheme to draft bogus presidential electors — the false claims made by his allies at legislative hearings have also been of significant interest. Mr. Giuliani has been told that he is among the targets who could face charges in the investigation.

“He did testify before us,” Ms. Kohrs said of Mr. Cheeley in the interview.

His appearance left such an impression that Ms. Kohrs began reciting from memory the beginning of Mr. Cheeley’s remarks at the State Senate hearing. Asked if his testimony to the special grand jury had been credible, she said, “I’m going to tell you that Mr. Cheeley was not one that I’m going to forget.”

Mr. Cheeley did not return calls for comment for this article, and he was not present when a reporter visited his office on Wednesday in the Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta. The fact that he testified before the special grand jury was not previously known.

In an interview in January, he remained steadfast in his belief that President Biden had not won the election fairly. “If we lose confidence in the integrity of the elections, we won’t have a country much longer,” he said at the time.

Mr. Cheeley, who is little known outside Georgia, has a long track record as a plaintiff’s attorney and has been involved in lawsuits brought against Ford, General Motors and other automakers. More recently, his legal work has delved deeply into politics. He is a lead lawyer on one of the last pro-Trump election lawsuits that is still standing, an effort to review tens of thousands of 2020 ballots that are being kept in a Fulton County warehouse.

He has also represented one of the fake electors who tried to circumvent Mr. Biden’s narrow victory in Georgia. And he was a lawyer for David Perdue, a Republican former United States Senator, during Mr. Perdue’s unsuccessful run for governor last year.

Mr. Cheeley appeared at the State Senate hearing on Dec. 30, 2020, the last of three legislative hearings that month about the election at which Mr. Giuliani appeared in person or remotely. In each of the hearings, Mr. Giuliani and other Trump allies laid out a broad array of baseless allegations that the election had been stolen.

John C. Eastman, another Trump lawyer, for example, erroneously claimed at one of the hearings that as many as 66,000 “underaged individuals” were allowed to register in Georgia. A review by The New York Times found only about a dozen Georgians on the 2020 voter rolls who were listed in state records as having been 16 at the time, but even those cases appeared most likely to be data-entry errors.

“We talked a lot about December and things that happened in the Georgia legislature,” Ms. Kohrs said of the special grand jury’s deliberations.

Ms. Kohrs, who gave a brief flurry of interviews last month but has not publicly commented since then, said that the special grand jury had recommended indicting at least a dozen people. Its recommendations were delivered in a final report in January, most of which remains sealed. The report is now in the hands of Fani T. Willis, the district attorney for the Atlanta area, who has been leading the investigation for the last two years.

Ms. Willis will make her own decisions about who, if anyone, she will seek to indict, and will then need to go before a regular grand jury to secure those indictments.

Georgia has laws against making false statements in official settings. Those who testified falsely before the legislature “may also face liability under Georgia’s conspiracy to commit election fraud statute,” said Norman Eisen, who served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the first Trump impeachment, and who co-wrote a report by the Brookings Institution, a left-leaning research organization in Washington, examining the Georgia case.

Conspiracy charges could be considered for Trump allies who spoke at hearings and other official events, “to the extent their statements and other conduct were part of the larger Trump-led scheme to interfere in the election in the state,” Mr. Eisen said. Ms. Willis has also, according to interviews and court records, weighed the possibility of bringing racketeering charges, which could be broadly applied.

After hearing from a number of nonpartisan elections experts, as well as witnesses like Mr. Cheeley who believe the election was stolen, the grand jurors unanimously found that there was no evidence of significant vote fraud in Georgia in the 2020 election, according to a portion of their final report that was publicly released.

Surveillance footage from State Farm Arena after the 2020 contest shows some election workers running ballots through scanners more than once, leading Mr. Cheeley to claim at the December 2020 hearing that the workers were double- and triple-counting votes from Atlanta, a Democratic stronghold. “One man, one vote, just went out the window at the State Farm Arena,” he told the lawmakers, while talking over video clips.

But Georgia’s Republican leaders, including Gov. Brian Kemp, have repeatedly said that there was no conspiracy to steal the election.

“The standard operating procedure on a high-capacity scanner is that if there is a misread, you take that batch, press a button, delete that batch, and take that batch and put it back in again,” said Gabriel Sterling, the chief operating officer in the office of the Georgia Secretary of State, in an interview. “We also know, if there had been multiple scans, there would have been a lot more votes than there were ballots.”

As Mr. Sterling, a Republican, once put it: “It’s not like this is an ‘Ocean’s Eleven’-level scheme that was put together in the middle of the night.”

There has been no shortage of sparring over the investigation, including a number of social media posts from Mr. Trump tarring it. The vitriol is likely to grow more intense as Ms. Willis nears her decision over indictments. Last weekend, Mr. Trump hailed Republican state lawmakers for seeking new checks on the power of local district attorneys, who are elected in Georgia.

“They want to make it easier to remove and replace local rogue prosecutors who are incompetent, racist or unable to properly do their job,” he wrote on Truth Social, commending lawmakers for acting “boldly, fairly, and fast!”

Today's Non-troversy

Jennifer Rubin has been among the best cheerleaders for the worst of "conservative" excesses in the past.

She has since become one of the best allies of the Resistance, acknowledging her mistakes and her failings, and saying straight out that she got some of it very wrong when she was so very Pro-GOP.

To the point: recently, there's been a a bit of a manufactured dustup regarding the absence of Biden Press Conferences.

For myself, I don't really care about that. I think it's understood that a president does those things as a way to peddle his wares directly - look at the gob-smacking backyard circus act that Qult45 put on with all the self-awareness of a flatworm. 

The real exchange happens at the the daily briefing with the the White House Press Sec'y (Jen Psaki as of now), and at any of the department-level pressers when there's news at hand and things we need to know about.

So anyway, Jennifer Rubin, WaPo: (pay wall)

Opinion: Want a formal presidential news conference? Reporters need better questions.

Many media outlets have been pestering the White House for a formal presidential news conference. The premise that such a setting is the only one that can fully inform the public — as opposed to questions at other presidential appearances or during one-on-one interviews — is weak at best.

If daily briefings with the White House press secretary are any clue, collective questioning from the White House press corps can be replete with dumb, repetitive or superficial questions. In light of the utterly ineffective news conferences during the last administration (assuming the goal was truth-telling) and the inability of reporters to follow up on one another’s questions, I fail to see what is so special about a group news conference as opposed to a tough interview (e.g., the interviews the former president had with Fox News’s Chris Wallace or Axios’s Jonathan Swan).

Badgering the White House to use the word “crisis” rather than finding out what is happening at the border does not constitute serious journalism, nor does expressing incredulity when they are told President Biden does not want to respond to his disgraced predecessor. The job of a tough reporters is not to try to get the president to say a magic word or to confess that he is lying about not paying attention to something. Such behavior is performance art.

That said, the president should answer questions (in whatever format) on a regular basis. And the media should ask probing questions designed to elicit information and hold him accountable for rhetoric and actions. They might try some of the following:

• Had the Republicans made a counteroffer to your rescue plan in the $1 trillion range, would you have been willing to negotiate? Could the package have been $1.5 trillion and have the same result?
• How much debt is too much debt?
• How much of an infrastructure bill should be “paid for”?
• Should we raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations for the sake of tax fairness?
• What are you going to do about the attempt by Republicans to roll back voting rights? Will you support a modification of the filibuster if there is no other way to protect voting rights?
• How do you work with governors who refuse to follow basic guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, thereby risking more lives?
• Does the U.S. exit from the Iran nuclear deal and imposition of China sanctions give you leverage? If so, how do you intend to use it?
• How do you reach tens of millions of Americans who are fed a daily diet of conspiracies and propaganda?
• What guarantees can you give workers in carbon-based occupations that a shift to a green-energy economy will not leave them worse off?
• Did you consider personal sanctions on Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman? Why did you not sanction him directly?
• You are trailing other presidents in the number of confirmed nominees. Should we cut back on the number of political appointees or the number requiring Senate confirmation?
• What reforms for the federal judiciary would you consider?
• What will you do to address the situation at the border? Can we work in the home countries of migrants to keep unaccompanied minors from setting out on a journey to the United States?
• Is student debt forgiveness a subsidy for wealthier Americans?
• What role can the federal government play in reducing polarization and creating a common sense of purpose?
• Republican politicians resist the idea of “implicit bias” and deny “systemic racism.” How would you explain these concepts to the American people?

Real journalism, as practiced by real journalists - what a concept.

Oh Those Crazy Rich Guys

Let's just agree that sometimes, the whole Reign Of Terror thing seems like a pretty good idea.

But at least I can say Jeff Bezos seems to be taking his stewardship responsibilities seriously.

That doesn't make him the good guy in the overall drama of How These Rich Pricks Ate My Democracy, but it scores him a few points. I'm just not going to praise him for being less than a complete asshole. The guy works hard, and he's done some good things, but when just a few people win dominance over too much of our economy, it always ends up up being very bad for everybody.

Here's the take on Jeff Bezos vs David Pecker via The Medium:

Something unusual happened to me yesterday. Actually, for me it wasn’t just unusual — it was a first. I was made an offer I couldn’t refuse. Or at least that’s what the top people at the National Enquirer thought. I’m glad they thought that, because it emboldened them to put it all in writing. Rather than capitulate to extortion and blackmail, I’ve decided to publish exactly what they sent me, despite the personal cost and embarrassment they threaten.

AMI, the owner of the National Enquirer, led by David Pecker, recently entered into an immunity deal with the Department of Justice related to their role in the so-called “Catch and Kill” process on behalf of President Trump and his election campaign. Mr. Pecker and his company have also been investigated for various actions they’ve taken on behalf of the Saudi Government.

- and -

Here’s a piece of context: My ownership of the Washington Post is a complexifier for me. It’s unavoidable that certain powerful people who experience Washington Post news coverage will wrongly conclude I am their enemy.

President Trump is one of those people, obvious by his many tweets. Also, The Post’s essential and unrelenting coverage of the murder of its columnist Jamal Khashoggi is undoubtedly unpopular in certain circles.

(Even though The Post is a complexifier for me, I do not at all regret my investment. The Post is a critical institution with a critical mission. My stewardship of The Post and my support of its mission, which will remain unswerving, is something I will be most proud of when I’m 90 and reviewing my life, if I’m lucky enough to live that long, regardless of any complexities it creates for me.)

I think the main point that comes of this is that we'll be able to concentrate a lot of fire on the truly shitty practice of Politically Weaponizing The Press. 

We need to get back to understanding how damaging Yellow Journalism is, and I find it hard to believe I'm the only one who seems to remember learning about this shit back in high school.

Be Afraid

...because if you're not afraid, you might start acting like you're free.

From NYT OpEd:

On Secrecy And Security

...and good government.

JFK, American Newspaper Publishers Association, April 27, 1961:

"We decided long ago that the dangers of unwarranted and excessive concealment of pertinent facts far outweigh the dangers which are cited to justify it."

"Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions."

"Even today, there is little value in ensuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it."

"And there is grave danger in an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment."

This was mostly about trying to have a conversation about where to draw the line.

And drawing lines is what the whole thing is about to begin with - because compromise; you don't get everything you want; checks and balances, ya big dope.

An awful lot of our little experiment in self-government depends on the honor of the people we put in office.

We fuck it up sometimes, and we elect Huey Long; Dick Nixon; Warren G Harding; Joe McCarthy; Rob Blagojevich; Tom Price; Billy Tauzin - the list goes on forever - but we turn it around and we get it back on track, and the way we do that is by taking our responsibilities seriously enough to insist on making the system of Checks and Balances work, and to hold ourselves accountable for it.

In a democratic republic, the quality of our government is only as good as the work we're willing to put into it.

Today's Keith

It gets a little off into the weeds, but I'll take a Franz von Papen reference any day because it makes me go look it up and learn something new. 

Before his Machado madness, @RealDonaldTrump had already lost 10 points where it counts: among gamblers. Vol.12 pic.twitter.com/1c5uSFtt7D

— Keith Olbermann (@KeithOlbermann) September 30, 2016

Mr Rick Wilson

10 tweets from a guy who should be fully on board with the GOP nominee.  When a Political Operative total rat-fucking pimp like Rick Wilson bails on your candidate, you've got more than a small problem.

1/ How the actual fuck does anyone at the RNC have standing to act shocked that Trump is not doing the basics of campaigning?

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) June 16, 2016

2/ You can't elide over his utter dipshittery. No matter how much you try to act surprised, you own this. You're covered in his stench.

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) June 16, 2016

3/ History will be so cruel to you.

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) June 16, 2016

4/ Your off the record sniping and grumbling is no substitute for moral courage. That's so DC.

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) June 16, 2016

5/ You won't escape the stain. It's like a big, visible "No Ragrets" chest tat that will mark your careers forever.

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) June 16, 2016

6/ Go public. Man up. Show courage. Say what's in your hearts; he's insane. He's poison. He's doomed. He's killing the Party.

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) June 16, 2016

7/ None of you are good enough to spin the unspinnable ratfuck that is Trump. None of you can say, "I was just following orders."

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) June 16, 2016

8/ This weekend, people were lined up hundreds deep to give blood to the victims of Orlando. Your Cheeto Jesus was praising himself.

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) June 16, 2016

9/ There is no better Trump. There is not Presidential Trump. He is a vile stain on the this Republic.

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) June 16, 2016

10/ Your resumes will always read "Worked for a batshit crazy crypto-fascist who destroyed the GOP"

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) June 16, 2016

Today In Douchebaggery

Typical O'Reilly - tag BLM as "radical" and then invite the audience to link that little gem to "open season on cops".

From Officer Down Memorial Page:

Killed By Police - 2015

We can slice and dice the data a hundred different ways.  But the point is still that way too many people are being killed with guns.

Anyway - seems pretty clear to me that DumFux News is cobbling together the basic elements of their (mis)-Information Campaign for 2016.

So far, I guess we can count on:

• Planned Parenthood (cuz god loves babies, and y'all love god, so vote for a Gubmint that guarantees a steady supply of dirt-cheap labor and political scapegoats) 
• Black Lives Matter (this is the Black Panthers re-branded - gotta have some good old-timey race threat)
• Iran (cuz we can't afford to let a buncha ignernt fereigners control a supply of oil that rightly belongs to us;  what, you didn't really think your sons and daughters died for a fucking flag, didya? - and also too, Israel Uber Alles! - and also as well as too, we can't afford to let Obama win a big one in Foreign Policy)

Something else that's pretty clear: they won't stop pulling this crap unless it stops working.

A Little De-Programming, Please

From the film's website

As filmmaker, Jen Senko, tries to understand the transformation of her father from a non political, life-long Democrat to an angry, Right-Wing fanatic, she uncovers the forces behind the media that changed him completely: a plan by Roger Ailes under Nixon for a media takeover by the GOP, The Powell Memo urging business leaders to influence institutions of public opinion, especially the universities, the media and the courts, and under Reagan, the dismantling of the Fairness Doctrine.

Dear Mr President

It seems pretty simple - don't negotiate with hostage-takers.

Congress and the president are again at loggerheads on how to move forward as the government's money runs out at the end of the fiscal year this month and federal agencies are once again warning employees and preparing contingency plans for a closed government.

All this because Republicans are making demands in exchange for government funding and Democrats are saying "no way."

Some Press Poodles (not a lot, but some) are actually talking about it in truthful terms, and have been willing to challenge the Repubs on occasion.  Again, not many and not often because most of our "journalists" are still completely hung up on their Fairness Bias, which makes them believe that if they quote somebody saying "the sun came up this morning", they're required to get a reaction from somebody with an opposing point of view - and you can straight-up count on the simple fact that somebody's just dying to get his own bad self on the TV so he can finally have that one shot at fame that his mama always told him he deserves.  Take a quick tour through your Program Guide and then tell me all about the huge differences between DumFux News and COPS and Chuck Todd and Gator Boys and Joe Scarborough and Honey BooBoo and Howard Kurtz - or any of the other "reality shows" polluting the air.

So anyway, in keeping with how the wingnuts like to do business - usually a variation on  "blaming the victim" - we have Repubs holding their breath and stamping their little feet to get what they want.  

And does anybody ever ask what they really want?  No - not really.  

Sometimes we hear a Press Poodle ask some random Repubs why they're threatening to blow the place up and they'll mutter the standard empty platitudes of "Fiscal Responsibility" or "We have a spending problem..." or whatever phrasing they've paid Frank Luntz to pull out of his ass today, but nobody ever asks them what any of it actually means in terms of policy; or what outcome they expect to achieve by that policy; and never mind if it means people could simply start to die in the streets if it doesn't work this time any better than it's worked the last 35 fuckin' years.

Repubs made huge strides in the 90s after Newt Gingrich taught them to keep repeating "failed liberal policies" over and over and over - when do we get the other side of that coin?

Today's Wingnut Media Bite

Ben Shapiro (of the epic fail "Friends of Hamas" incident) runs this:

...which leads Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs to ponder: "I think young Ben is honestly intimidated. Cowed, even. His dissent is being chilled. You can tell by the giant 73-pixel all-caps screaming headline."

That's the game these deep-fried-guano-for-brains-whiney-butt pussies play all the time.  Shapiro is so intimidated; Obama has everybody so flummoxed and shivery that...what, exactly?  If they weren't so afraid - so intimidated - they'd do something more than run their horseshit headlines in the eleventy-seven point fonts they're using now?  Like what?  What're they calling on people to do?

And when might we expect the Press Poodles to fucking call 'em on this?

The Dowager Pundit

The brilliance of Charlie Pierce:

It's past time for her friends, her family, or the spirit of JP The Deuce to descend on Our Lady Of The Dolphins and stage an intervention. Apparently, she believes that the president has a cauldron bubbling in the East Room from which he has loosed upon the land magic Kenyan Muslim Alinskyist spells that have stolen the souls of the American people. Either that, or it once again was two-for-one Harvey Wallbangers during Happy Hour at the Dowager Pundit's Club.

Further evidence of Charlie's brilliance is his link to No More Mister Nice Blog:

But that's not why I'm talking about Noonan. I'm talking about her because, in addition to believing that nonsense, she also believes that people aren't spending money in America at discount superstores because their animal spirits have been depleted by the evil Obama. I'm used to hearing right-wingers (and centrists) advance the (nonsensical) idea thatbusinesses aren't expanding because the confidence of CEOs has been undermined by "uncertainty" (there was Tom Freidman saying that again over the weekend, and here's David Brooks saying it again today) -- but now we're supposed to believe that poor and middle-class and lower-middle-class people aren't opening their wallets because of ... the national mood?

As opposed to not opening their wallets because, y'know, they're flat broke?

Todays' Quote, Too

From Alex Wagner on The Last Word (Friday?) - speaking of Sen Ron Johnson's somewhat limited capacity for reasoned thought:

"The reality is that basically, Ron Johnson is intellectual Kryptonite - you get too close to him and your brain cells die."

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Avalanche On Bullshit Mountain

Hey, Willard

...about that Book Of Mormon thing -



So, why have none of the Press Poodles asked Willard the question?  Why hasn't Willard had to do "the speech" thing - ala JFK and Obama - where he explains it all in nice neat language that settles it for everybody?  How come?

New Journalism

Andrea Seabrook left NPR a little while ago and has (finally) put up her first episode of DecodeDC.

You can go to Mule Radio and subscribe via iTunes or RSS for free.

And this is the tune playing in the background at the end of the piece: