Almost Willing

Just had to get this hairball up.

I could give Alt-Spice the benefit, but it sticks in my craw really bad.  He's using a tactic that's pure propaganda when he makes shit up about how there was a terrorist attack in Atlanta carried out by a Muslim. And the fact that he didn't self-correct - he said the same thing on at least two different occasions - to me that means there's no mistake. It was deliberate. He had a conversation with somebody, and there was a decision made that had him telling us a flat-out lie.

Second, they're using the Pulse shooting in Orlando trying to justify the Muslim Travel Ban.  But that incident was a homegrown guy losing his shit and shooting a bunch of people - you know, like so many good Americans have done every year for fuck knows how long now.

Anyway, the Orlando shooter wasn't a refugee or an immigrant. He was born here. He was a citizen. But he was Muslim and when they use him as a false example, we're further smudging the line between What Is and What If.

And that sounds a whole lot like the Bannon administration is moving the anti-Muslim rhetoric even closer to a Corruption-Of-The-Blood kinda thing.

I hate this.

Today's GIF

Today's Tweet

Russian Propaganda Campaign Was Extensive. pic.twitter.com/seTjuSXzc8

— Tomthunkit™ (@TomthunkitsMind) February 9, 2017

Today's Pix

John Oliver

Rolling Stone interview:

Did you share the general shudder when Kellyanne Conway introduced the idea of "alternative facts"?  It's just a framing device, an ear-catching phrase, but it's nothing new. The content of what she's wrapping a bow on is something that everyone has been bearing witness to. We've had 18 months of feelings over facts. The only thing that's remotely new about it is the location that it's coming from.

Is interviewing her essentially pointless?  In general, it's very dangerous to keep the old campaign architecture around with this presidency, to have an eight-person panel on CNN debating whether or not he said something. "Did he or did he not do this thing we watched him do?" There's actually serious harm in that discussion. And, yeah. I really don't see the point of talking to Kellyanne Conway because her language jujitsu is so strong. You know she can look you in the eyes and tell you the opposite of what you just saw happen, and she will be more confident in her answer than you are in your question.

Today's Meme

Dear President Bannon

Let's do this.

JK Rowling

I guess you could say she has the courage of her bank account, but Rowling still has plenty at risk by standing up and speaking out.

Guess it's true what they say: you can lead a girl to books about the rise and fall of an autocrat, but you still can't make her think. pic.twitter.com/oB7Aq6Xz8M

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) February 1, 2017

Well, the fumes from the DVDs might be toxic and I've still got your money, so by all means borrow my lighter. pic.twitter.com/kVoi8VGEoK

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) January 31, 2017

Chicago Tribune

Rowling is a dedicated progressive.

She's a strong believer in welfare, which she relied on during a particularly rough period in her life. As she said during a 2008 Harvard commencement speech, "An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless . . . By every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew."

More recently, Rowling found herself in the midst of a Twitter battle surrounding Brexit, which she staunchly opposed.

Much of this now-seemingly-endless debate was absent during the height of the Harry Potter craze because she didn't publicly discuss her views until the publication of the final Harry Potter book. A year after it hit bookshelves, though, she gave 1 million pounds to Britain's Labor Party.

-and-

"Intolerance of alternative viewpoints is spreading to places that make me, a moderate and a liberal, most uncomfortable. Only last year, we saw an online petition to ban Donald Trump from entry to the U.K. It garnered half a million signatures," she said during the 2016 PEN America Literary Gala at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. "I find almost everything that Mr. Trump says objectionable. I consider him offensive and bigoted. But he has my full support to come to my country and be offensive and bigoted there. His freedom to speak protects my freedom to call him a bigot. His freedom guarantees mine."

I think what's important here is that "Liberals" who make it big are usually trying to reach back and help the next guy up as well.  "Conservatives" seem always to be trying to pull the ladder up after them.

Keith

No, dude -  Nixon leads it 55 - 11

Watch this video on The Scene.

45* is a perfect example of the classic Weak Salesman - throw enough shit and eventually something will stick.

The overall point is to overwhelm the filter system. We get tired of dealing with the shit storm and retreat.

To reiterate: This guy is no success story.  He's spent 40 years failing up.  He starts with $200 Million in the late 70s. He leverages the fuck out of it, basically borrowing so much that if he defaults, he takes the bankers down with him. So it's in their best interest to prop him up and help him make it work.  After several rounds, he doesn't even have to run his own business - the creditors are doing all the work and he gets to sit back and enjoy the ride.

History Does Not Repeat

...but it sure as fuck rhymes.

George Prochnik, The New Yorker

” These young men were clearly trained for attack, Zweig recalled. But after the crushing of Hitler’s attempted putsch, in 1923, Zweig seems hardly to have given the National Socialists another thought until the elections of 1930, when support for the Party exploded—from under a million votes two years earlier to more than six million. At that point, still oblivious to what this popular affirmation might portend, Zweig applauded the enthusiastic passion expressed in the elections. He blamed the stuffiness of the country’s old-fashioned democrats for the Nazi victory, calling the results at the time “a perhaps unwise but fundamentally sound and approvable revolt of youth against the slowness and irresolution of ‘high politics.’ “

In his memoir, Zweig did not excuse himself or his intellectual peers for failing early on to reckon with Hitler’s significance. “The few among writers who had taken the trouble to read Hitler’s book, ridiculed the bombast of his stilted prose instead of occupying themselves with his program,” he wrote. They took him neither seriously nor literally. Even into the nineteen-thirties, “the big democratic newspapers, instead of warning their readers, reassured them day by day, that the movement . . . would inevitably collapse in no time.” Prideful of their own higher learning and cultivation, the intellectual classes could not absorb the idea that, thanks to “invisible wire-pullers”—the self-interested groups and individuals who believed they could manipulate the charismatic maverick for their own gain—this uneducated “beer-hall agitator” had already amassed vast support. After all, Germany was a state where the law rested on a firm foundation, where a majority in parliament was opposed to Hitler, and where every citizen believed that “his liberty and equal rights were secured by the solemnly affirmed constitution.”