Today's Driftglass

Ode The The Low Information Voter

Because I know you are so very very busy

That you have no time to know anything at all

I will keep this brief.

I know you are far too busy driving Chinese toys and 

Cigarettes and

Pressboard furniture across the continent 

To pay attention to anything

Except double-clutching and yellow lines, and

The radio,

Which is playing Hannity and Rogan and Savage and Levin and Beck and 

Shapiro and

Kirk and 

Savage and

Prager and 

Larson, and, of course,

The game, and

Maybe you have just enough time to stop off in that Ohio diner and 

Tell to the New York Times foreign correspondents 

Permanently stationed there

About the caravans of illegals and

The price of eggs and 

Shoplifting in San Diego and yet

You are also a single mother

Raising nine kids and

Working nine jobs who

Has no time to think about anything except

Making correct change and getting the order right, and

Who is up and who is out on the Masked Singer, and

Can you believe the bullshit judging on Dancing the the Stars, and

Dropping in on focus groups to explain about how tariffs work, and

The illegals making houses so expensive, and

Why Kamala Harris cannot be trusted,

(Did you know that she slept her way to the top, and

Her father is a communist!) and

You remember hearing something about January sixth or

Maybe it was the seventh, whatever, 

You're not exactly sure what, but

Strangely you are also 24 and a dude and have no girlfriend,

Which is fine, really, fine, because you are just crazy busy all the time

With...stuff like Call of Duty and GTO and Diablo 4, and

Your shitty job where customers ask the stupidest questions, and

Bitch about everything like you're Mr. CVS, and

How come fucking Joe Biden will pay off those rich college fuckers bills, but

Won't make weed legal in your state, and

Someday you're going to be making real money with MMA

Because you practice your moves in your garage, but

It's hard to relax when everything is so fucked up, like, uh, like,

Y'know the price of stuff and crime and shit, and 

What we need is a badass MMA guy to kick some ass because,

Respect, gotta have respect,

Chicks go for that like magnets, and

You remember hearing on Twitter something about 

COVID being a scam, and somehow 

You're also a retired couple, living well, but 

You hear all these things,

On the news, and

It's all so bad,

So, so bad,

Never been so bad,

Sure you're doing ok, but out there, just over the horizon,

The country is in ruins, and

Unemployment has never been higher, and 

DEI caused the California wildfires, and 

What's going on on college campuses which is just shameful, and

Inflation is out of control, and 

Crime gangs run the Blue cities, and,

The government is giving all our money to moochers and foreign wars, and

Everyone knows Biden was being controlled by you-know-who, and

Do your own research because everything is out of control, and 

It's never been this bad before

Ever.

The Bamboozlement Of Innocents

She was bargaining on Facebook.

She asked friends with dead relatives.

She scored some in parking lots.

Another Shoe

Why there's no reason to believe a conspiracy fantasy when it requires total secrecy on the part of lotsa people.

Like they say:

Three people can keep a secret -

as long as two them are dead.

Today's Quote

One of the saddest lessons of history is this:
If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth.

It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.

--Carl Sagan

Another Day Another Swindle

Bloomberg:

President Donald Trump, his company and three of his children must face a class-action lawsuit in which people claim they were scammed into spending money on fraudulent, multilevel marketing ventures and a dubious live-seminar program.

U.S. District Judge Lorna Schofield in Manhattan ruled Wednesday that the case can go forward with claims of fraud, unfair competition, and deceptive trade practices. The decision likely opens the door for the plaintiffs to start gathering evidence from Trump and his company, including documents and testimony.

Schofield dismissed federal racketeering claims, eliminating allegations that could have netted triple damages for the plaintiffs.

A group of four people claims the Trumps ripped off thousands of aspiring entrepreneurs by promoting two bogus multilevel marketing ventures and the live-seminar program that promised to teach Trump’s “secrets to success” in real estate. They’re seeking to sue on behalf of a nationwide class of people they claim were also cheated.

They sued in October using the names Jane Doe, Luke Loe, Richard Roe and Mary Moe, claiming they feared Trump’s habit of criticizing opponents on Twitter and exposing them to potential retaliation by his followers. Schofield let them remain anonymous at least until her decision on the Trumps’ motion to dismiss the case. She’ll likely revisit the question now that she’s ruled.
The fire hose of shit will never stop spewing until we can get Congress to step up and put an end to it.

The Big Giant Distraction

"...they hate - our country." 

I don't know how it gets any clearer than that. A very American brand of casual racism is embedded in that statement. And the fact that he said it that way - casually and without self-consciousness - shows it to be deeply embedded in Lindsey Graham's heart.

Tim Wise at Medium:

For years people have debated whether Donald Trump is a racist.

For some, the answer was always an obvious yes. When you launch your campaign by calling Mexican immigrants rapists and drug dealers, claim a Mexican American judge can’t fairly adjudicate a lawsuit against you because of his ethnicity, call African nations “shitholes,” and suggest we need more immigrants from Norway and fewer from Haiti or Central America, you’ve earned the title. To say nothing of soft-pedaling Nazis in Charlottesville, of course.

The evidence of Trump’s racial bias is clear; it stretches back decades and is available for all who are willing to see.

But for others, the charge was unfair. Not only Trump supporters, whose denial is at least understandable but even those who are critical of him.

“Well,” they would aver. “Maybe it’s not fair to call him a racist. I mean, we don’t know what’s in his heart.”

But as Amanda Marcotte explained after watching the always execrable Chuck Todd inquire into the aortic nature of Trump’s prejudice, the question of whether one is a racist “in their heart” is a bizarre one:

Let us imagine for a minute a person who loves, say, the Philadelphia Eagles as much as Trump loves racist language and actions. He tweets about the Eagles regularly, often using all-caps. He buys season tickets and attends every Eagles game he possibly can. He’s been talking about the Eagles and watching their games for decades. He feels elated when they win and crushed when they lose. He wears his Eagles logo hat all the time.

Would anyone look at that man and ask, ‘But wait — is he an Eagles fan in his heart?’

Marcotte’s point was simple, though it is often missed. Racism may be a noun, but it functions as a verb. It’s about what one does, not merely what one is.

Meanwhile, here's the thing: the air is filled with chaff and the water is slick with chum. 

Whatever it is they don't want us to see might be getting closer and clearer.

All this shit hit the fan on the day of Jeffrey Epstein's bail hearing, at which it was revealed that he had a Saudi passport - with a fake identity - plus a bugout stash of diamonds and dollars. They also found 100s if not 1000s of pictures of underage girls.

And -

CBS News:

ABC News:

Attorney Brad Edwards, who represents Epstein accuser Courtney Wild and several other alleged victims, claims that Epstein's 13-month jail sentence -- the result of a plea bargain with federal prosecutors in Florida -- failed to prevent the money manager accused of sexually assaulting numerous underage girls from having "improper sexual contact" with young women.

Mother Jones:

As Mother Jones noted during the 2016 presidential election, Trump was known to pay particular attention to Epstein during his Florida pool parties. “He threw a party one night just because of Epstein,” former beauty pageant promoter George Houraney said of Trump. “He said, ‘The other guys aren’t coming, but I don’t care because Jeff’s coming.’”

The video’s emergence comes as more women come forward to allege that Epstein sexually abused them. In recent days, prosecutors have also revealed that several suspicious items, including a fake passport with a Saudi address and Epstein’s photo and “piles of cash,” were uncovered in Epstein’s Manhattan home.

Remind me again why everyone freaks out about Joe Biden putting his hands on someone’s shoulders?pic.twitter.com/TV9F0IaXkO

— TDP (@TDPattillo) July 17, 2019

What remains now is that we're being asked - again - to dismiss what we see, and believe only what they tell us.

But also, there's the probability that all of this smoke indicates only a little fire where 45* is concerned. He may be perfectly happy to let the speculation run wild so that when the "truth" is revealed, and it's less horrific than what we're being encouraged to imagine, it plays out as "what was the big deal here?" even though it may well be a big fucking deal - because yes, having sex with children is a very bad thing and it is in fact a big fucking deal.

A president who hangs out with guys who have sex with children is a big fucking deal. 

And the fact that possibly more than a few of this president's buddies were involved in having sex with children is a big fucking deal.

Trafficking in children for guys to have sex with - is a big fucking deal.

And the attempts to cover it all up is a big fucking deal.

Today's Tweet

Because it always ends up being about the voters - Republican's efforts to the contrary notwithstanding.

Well said: “They sold their souls for political power — and the check bounced.” @jmeacham on @JoeNBC, commenting on how Pennsylvania went for Trump in 2016.

— Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) March 27, 2018

 

Bamboozle Me, Baby

Ben Carson went to Phoenix - and the obvious reason was to be exploited as "my African-American".

WaPo, Philip Bump:

And, as simply as that, a law was likely broken.

There are a lot of ways in which the federal government could be used to reward political friends and allies, of course, appointments being just one example. But the power of the government can also be leveraged to political advantage. Imagine a candidate who appeared at a campaign rally to be endorsed by the heads of each branch of the armed forces, for example. That would carry a lot of weight.

In 1939, Franklin Roosevelt signed the Hatch Act into law, a measure meant to preserve the impartiality of public servants. “The law’s purposes,” the Office of Special Counsel’s website explains, “are to ensure that federal programs are administered in a nonpartisan fashion, to protect federal employees from political coercion in the workplace, and to ensure that federal employees are advanced based on merit and not based on political affiliation.​​​​”
Add it to the list. 45* cares nothing about these little-people rules.

Obeying the law?
Ethics? 
Honorability? 

That shit's for suckers - which is exactly why I call 'em rubes. They support 45* because he embodies their fantasies of having the power to live outside the norms, ignoring the simple fact that those norms - those rules - are there to protect them from Daddy State assholes like 45*.

Today's Tweet

The big bamboozle

To recap: Trump is threatening a government shutdown unless his fellow Republicans fund border wall he promised voters Mexico would pay for.

— Matt McDermott (@mattmfm) August 23, 2017

No Way Out

No good way anyway.

If the Repubs continue to go it alone (against the polling) on a variety of issues they've decided they need to pursue based on their arrogant assumption they can continue bamboozling the rubes, then they lose the broader popular support they have to have. Especially if they keep fuckin' up the  Healthcare thing.

If they decide to negotiate with the Dems, then they're in danger of the hardcore base assuming they've caved, and they'll lose primaries to more radical candidates, who're more likely to lose in the general.

Which makes me think they were really counting on not having to pay a political price for all their fuckery, which makes me think we have to keep pushing back hard against GOP Voter Suppression efforts in the next 15 months or so.

Worth Repeating

From way back in March - Alcee Hastings gettin' after 'em.

The take-away quote comes up at about 6:50.

"I don't have to be nice to nobody when you're bein' nasty to poor people"

Debate-Watcher's Tip: When Red Team Guy starts bitchin' about the Blue Team Guy's "tone", it means Red Team Guy knows he's losing so he has to tamp down on the visceral enthusiasm that the audience will pick up from Blue Team Guy's passion or outrage or whatever.

It's also about stalling - you need a little time to regroup so you can get back on offense.

The GOP has since come out with We-Don't-Fuckin'-Care 4.0, and let's be clear - there's not much that's changed because this is not about healthcare or coverage or looking out for people. They want their fucking Tax Cuts.

If you further weaken Da Gubmint by decreasing its revenues, people will feel the pain (of shitty roads and shitty water quality and poisoned food, and poverty creep, etc) and eventually, they'll agree to practically any level of Fuckery just on the remote prospect of relieving some of that pain.

And it makes no difference who gets fucked over, as long as enough people get fucked over enough - they have to make us tap out so we'll give the Plutocrats everything they want, including ownership - or at least control.

The National Privatization Festival has picked up some speed, and they need financing for their coming acquisition spree - have you priced a National Park lately?

These assholes are selling themselves as Reformers, but their motivation is no different from that of any other radicals who always ride in promising Bread-n-Freedom, and delivering neither.

But there's an extraordinarily shitty little twist.

"Government should be run more like a business" is cover; it's a dodge; it's nothing but chaff.

With the interjection of the Russians, we've put people in power who honestly believe Mobsters are justified in the way they operate because after all, the Mob is private enterprise patterned after the government.  

So why not take that next step?

"Government is like the Mafia - so let's be honest and run it that way".

And hey, relax - it ain't personal. It's just business.

Today's Bamboozle

45* knows he can feed dis-information to the rubes directly, so most of them won't ever hear anything that runs counter to what he needs them to hear - what they already believe anyway - which is what he continues to reinforce, and why he's working so hard trying to freeze out traditional corporate media.

Vox:

What you’re looking at is a massive cut in Medicaid spending. In 2026, the Better Care Reconciliation Act would cut Medicaid spending by about $160 billion, and end Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid to low-income Americans.

As my colleague Sarah Kliff writes:

The Senate bill begins to phase out the Medicaid expansion in 2021 — and cuts the rest of the program’s budget too. The Senate bill would end the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid to millions of low-income Americans. This program has provided coverage to more Americans than the private marketplaces

It would also cut the rest of the public insurance program. Better Care would also limit government spending on the rest of the Medicaid program, giving states a set amount to spend per person rather than the insurance program’s currently open-ended funding commitment.

Ultimately, the Congressional Budget Office projects 15 million people would lose coverage with the repeal of Medicaid expansion.

So it’s incredibly misleading for the president to claim that Senate Republicans are increasing funding for Medicaid.

This is pretty typical of the Faux Conservative crapola they've been peddling for a long time. It's a variation on one of their favorite themes - "tax revenue goes up when tax rates come down".  So it follows that the rubes will internalize this new crapola and adopt it as part of their catechism - "cutting Medicaid funding now increases Medicaid spending in the long term."

Yeah, OK. And the best way to fill a bath tub is to open the drain and turn one of the faucets off.

A smiling hyena will still eat your children

These people have no soul and no honor.

Balls

I'll go ahead and call this Leadership - cuz that's what it is.

And hey "conservatives" - if you still think guys like 45* are the ones talkin' plain English and gettin' down to bidness wid it, then you're admitting to being the rubes I've been saying you are for a very long time now.

Stop volunteering for The Big Bamboozle.

Today's Tweet

Comey just confirmed both political parties were hacked in 2016 by Russians—but that only Democratic info was released.

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) March 20, 2017

Take a candidate we've been conditioned to dislike - for a good 25 years now - and just play up everything negative even more. Hammer on it night-n-day. It's especially effective when "the dirt" just happens to include the magic word "email", which of course links nicely to the more recent negative inferences about Hillary that were set in place over the last 5 years or so.

Eventually you can move the needle enough to make a difference.

Because advertising works. The world is being run by some pretty smart people (current POTUS notwithstanding), and smart people don't spend $500 Billion a year on shit that don't work.

Today's Bamboozle

I need to smack myself in the head with this whenever I think I'll watch a game on TV on any given Sunday, because no - I won't.  I'll watch commercials and replays and people standing around not doing jack shit.

I'll spend more time watching video of something the players did a few seconds before than I'll spend watching the players actually doing what I'm watching on video.

Average length of NFL game: 3:12:00

Average time the ball is actually in play: 0:11:00

Number of commercials: 100+

They Never Go Away

Authoritarians are always there.  And they're forever trying to pull the same shit.

In this case, we can look at Voter Fraud and Intimidation and violence against the innocent perpetrated by Democrats at the direction of the Clinton campaign - as hypothesized by none other that Carter Page.

For anybody who's been paying attention, we know that when you're dealing with 45* and his minions, every accusation is a confession.

A piece by Jon Schwarz at The Intercept:

CARTER PAGE, briefly a foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, sent a peculiar, rambling letter this week to the Department of Justice, asking it to review “the severe election fraud in the form of disinformation, suppression of dissent, hate crimes and other extensive abuses led by members of Mrs. Hillary Clinton’s campaign and their political allies last year.”

Page is reportedly one of several targets of a counterintelligence investigation by the FBI into possible links between Trump associates and Russian officials.

This move - fuck with the election, and then proclaim loudly that the election's been fucked with - is straight out of the School of the Americas training the CIA used to provide for people in Central and South American countries in order to get "our guys" into power and keep them there.

You may recall, it was widely presumed that Manuel Noriega was a prize pupil, and became such a sore spot that Poppy Bush felt compelled to invade Panama in an effort to clean up a mess he helped create.

But anyway. It should seem really clear now that the initiative to investigate voter fraud is a setup. Once they splash the inevitable hyped up scary scenario across DumFux News and Breitbart, and it bounces around in the echo chamber for a while - even though it'll be practically nothing but unsupported assertions and rumors the states will have all the "justification" they need - cuz hey, it's coming from the FBI so it's gotta be official - and the Voter Suppression efforts will balloon.

And those new restrictions will include (buried in the amendments language) the legal structure to wipe those 3 million Hillary voters off the rolls.

Now, those last coupla paragraphs are almost pure speculation. Obviously, I think there's a better than even chance I'm right about what's coming (or what they intend to try), but that's not evidence. So grains of salt, even when you're here reading your favorite blogger's outstandingly noble and awesomely righteous bullshit.

We Were Warned

"When we were kids, we were all afraid of the dark. And when we grew up we weren't afraid anymore, but it's funny how a big lie can make us all kids again."

High School Bully Intimidated By The Theater Kids

Hamilton won a fight against the Vice President - historically, this has not been the case.

Something to remember:

First, Trump's shit-flinging is about covering up the Big Bamboozle.  This is a heist-in-progress.  So let the comics make fun of it (I can sure use a good laugh on a frequent basis), but we need to remind each other to look for the story behind the story, which is something a guy like Meyers does pretty well - but wouldn't it be nice if The Press Poodles could do a bit more of that for us?

Second - Pence may play Mr Gracious and mumble a few niceties like "that's what democracy sounds like", but never forget that a smiling hyena will still eat your children.

Don't trust this bunch any farther than you could spit one of 'em.

Sleight Of Hand

Trevor Noah and Trump's Muslim Registry

Trump flings shit, and while we're all either ducking it or normalizing it or cleaning it up, don't forget to watch what else is happening.

Distract-and-Divert is a very important element of Divide-and-Conquer.

While we're busy worrying about who's being appointed to Trump's Cabinet, let's not stop looking for what's going into Trump's pockets.

Presto Change-O

How could the pollsters have gotten it so wrong?

You call a jillion registered voters, and they tell you they're ready to go, and they shake out like: Hillary's up by 5 points or Hillary's up by 8 points or 2 points or whatever.

But then, on the big day, it goes in the shitter and nobody can figure it out - it must be because those Black Voters Under-Performed (and don'tcha just love that kinda language?  "We lost - let's blame the Black People!")

"No, man, it was those stoopid fuckin' Protest Voters!"

"It was because Hillary's a lousy candidate and she failed to connect with blah blah blah - it never woulda happened with Bernie...I told ya so, man".

Fuck that noise.  Fuck all that noise.

Plus FL, NC, PA, and MI
All GOP-dominated, all rat-fucked for the same result
If they let everybody vote, they lose https://t.co/64fbP4H1Td

— Mike Roberts (@eVilleMike) November 10, 2016

How many voters showed up in Florida only to get turned away because of Voter ID or some such?

How many were a little skittish about it in the first place and finally decided just to stay home because they were afraid of being hassled?

Then Virginia (not enough to swing it, but holy fuck did they come close)
Then North Carolina (kind of a toss-up anyway, but she was trending)
Then Pennsylvania - fuck
Then Michigan - fuck
Then Wisconsin - fuck!

I wonder what the arithmetic looks like if you convert the final Polling Numbers for those states into an actual number of votes (X), minus Trump's margin of victory (Y), and compared that difference to the numbers of Registered Voters who turned out, but were denied their right to exercise the franchise.

And what the fuck is up with this apparent rash of No Vote at the top of the ticket?

Where did Kellyanne Conway send Trump in the last coupla weeks of his Scampaign®? 

What the hell was he doing in places that "Hillary had all sewed up"?

The pollsters weren't all that wrong.

There was no massive Bradley Effect.

Plenty of Black and Latin Voters turned out, and Women did their thing for her.

Hillary didn't blow it, and "Those Shitty Little Millennials" didn't blow it for her.

A combination of 
Voter ID Laws 
+ Fewer Polling Stations 
+ Purging Registration Rolls 
+ SCOTUS ruling against The Voting Rights Act
+ Rumors of Fraud and Rigged Elections
+ Threats of intimidation
+ Fliers and Text messages directing people to wrong or non-existent precincts
+ That world-famous Voter Apathy here in USAmerica Inc.
+ etc etc etc
= President-Elect Trump

This looks to me like a perfectly legal rat-fucking of the highest possible order, having been well-targeted and executed down to the last tiny detail - which includes knowing how to play the Electoral College Game.

And it keeps working for as long as voters have to be spoon-fed by the candidates; for as long as we can't be bothered to figure shit out for ourselves; for as long as we insist that we have to be inspired and uplifted by some Great Leader Of The New And Awesomely Stupendous and Tremendous Movement - for as long as we're not willing to hold this system to the standards laid out by the guys who wrote up the original instruction manual for us.  There's some pretty good shit at the end of the first paragraph.

It may sound like I'm being nostalgic; yearning for some golden age that never really existed. I'm not. There may never have been an election that was perfectly Free-n-Fair, and there may never be one. But can't we try to make the next one a bit "more perfect" than the last one? And the one after that?

PS) Hillary got the most votes. A lousy candidate with a bad message and a clunky disconnected style doesn't get the most votes. Don't fucking forget that.

PPS) This is fucked up and complicated - and since it didn't suddenly get all fucked up and complicated yesterday, we're not gonna un-fucking-complicate it by tomorrow.

We got Rat-Fucked, and now we get to wonder if the rubes will ever become aware that the Big Bamboozle is back in full swing.