Charlie Pierce

Charlie Pierce, Esquire Magazine:

The outrage against the piece was quick and volatile and, in truth, the story is a mess, as Fausset himself admitted in a very strange essay that ran virtually simultaneously to the story, the very existence of which leads the careful observer to conclude that the editors at the Times knew the story was a mess and told Fausset to cover the newspaper’s hindquarters.
The NYT's piece that sounded lot like normalization of America's Nazis drew a lot of fire (not undeserved IMO)

We regret the degree to which the piece offended so many readers. We recognize that people can disagree on how best to tell a disagreeable story. What we think is indisputable, though, is the need to shed more light, not less, on the most extreme corners of American life and the people who inhabit them. That’s what the story, however imperfectly, tried to do.

Every reporter has stories they wish they could have back. (It would be a shame if the inhabitants of this shebeen would Google some of the stuff I wrote about John Edwards back in the day.) But a newspaper is a collaborative effort. It is the job of editors to recognize when a story isn’t there—and especially so if, as Lacey claims, the story goes through multiple drafts and it still isn’t there, and especially so, as in this case, the paper has the reporter write an explainer about how the story wasn’t there. 

Pro tip, lads: if you send a guy out on a story like this in 2017, and he can’t come up with anything that Hannah Arendt didn’t say better in 1951, it really is time to move along. Anything else is flat dangerous. Ask Herbert Hoover if he'd like that speech back.

Fouling The Nest

WaPo:

The world generates at least 3.5 million tons of solid waste a day, 10 times the amount a century ago, according to World Bank researchers. If nothing is done, that figure will grow to 11 million tons by the end of the century, the researchers estimate. On average, Americans throw away their own body weight in trash every month. In Japan, meanwhile, the typical person produces only two-thirds as much. It’s difficult to find comparable figures for the trash produced by mega-cities. But clearly, New York generates by far the most waste of the cities I visited: People in the broader metropolitan area throw away 33 million tons per year, according to a report by a global group of academics published in 2015 in the journal of the National Academy of Sciences. That’s 15 times the Lagos metropolitan area, their study found.

With a sharp increase in the world population and many economies growing, we are producing more waste then ever. In Europe and the United States our trash is largely invisible once it’s tossed; in other parts of the world it is more obvious, in the form of waste dumps, sometimes in the middle of cities.

Dumps are a problem because they release methane, a potent greenhouse gas that traps heat in the atmosphere. Burning trash outdoors is also harmful, to the environment and people’s health.

Change is scary. Especially when the people in positions to make decisions have built their careers on doing things a particular way.

Nothing good happens quickly enough unless we figure out how to sell the corporations on making the changes - and do that without having to wait for the usual effects of pain and difficulty to motivate those decision-makers.

Today's WTF

Assuming we survive this full-on frontal assault against self-government (an obvious attempt to finish installing the mechanisms of USAmerica Inc) it's going to take a good long time to sort thru all the shit.

45* is:

• a foul-mouthed pussy-grabbin' lyin' sack o' shit - supported by Evangelical Christians
• a draft-dodging puffed-up tin-plated strutting martinet who claims the US military is hollow and ineffectual - supported by people in uniform almost across the board.
• a NYC huckster who's in bed with Crooked Rentiers on Wall Street and Russian money launderers - supported by farmers and millions of other plain old work-a-day people who're the first to get fucked over by his "policy" choices

This confusion as to why the good people are still down with the clown is global.

Julia Manchester, The Hill (eg)

The head of the Church of England, the archbishop of Canterbury, said in an interview on Sunday that he doesn't understand why President Trump enjoys such broad support among Christian fundamentalists. 

"There's two things going through my mind: do I say what I think, or do I say what I should say?" Justin Welby said in an interview with ITV. "And I'm going to say what I think."

"I really genuinely do not understand where that is coming from," he said of Trump's support among Christian fundamentalists.

Defending The Indefensible

Kyle Mantyla, RightWingWatch - here's a quick look and a clip from a radio talk show in Alabama:

Extremist anti-choice, anti-LGBTQ activist Flip Benham was among the Religious Right activists who gathered in Alabama last week to defend Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore amid multiple reports that Moore had pursued sexual relationships with teenage girls when he was in his 30s. Yesterday, Benham was interviewed by Alabama radio hosts Matt Murphy and Andrea Lindenberg on their “Matt & Aunie” show about the press conference and the allegations against Moore, and to say that the interview was a debacle would be an understatement.


These radio poodles are not exactly raving lefty loonies. So there's (apparently) some real resistance to this Roy Moore clown. And it'll be interesting to see how the exit polls shake out.

The Nazi Next Door

NYT put up a piece by Richard Fausset that everybody seems to think is "normalizing" Nazis. Kinda hard to disagree with that.

Here's a look:

HUBER HEIGHTS, Ohio — Tony and Maria Hovater were married this fall. They registered at Target. On their list was a muffin pan, a four-drawer dresser and a pineapple slicer.

Ms. Hovater, 25, was worried about Antifa bashing up the ceremony. Weddings are hard enough to plan for when your fiancé is not an avowed white nationalist.

But Mr. Hovater, in the days leading up to the wedding, was somewhat less anxious. There are times when it can feel toxic to openly identify as a far-right extremist in the Ohio of 2017. But not always. He said the election of President Trump helped open a space for people like him, demonstrating that it is not the end of the world to be attacked as the bigot he surely is: “You can just say, ‘Yeah, so?’ And move on.”

Nice try, NYT.  But you fucked it up. Again.

Here's a piece from James Hamblin at The Atlantic, mocking the Times as they just "put this out there and let you guys see for yourselves how awful it is that Nazis are just like everybody else":

“What can I say,” jokes Stevenson, as he sees me taking note of the spice rack. “I like garlic powder.”

We both chuckle. The shimmering evening sun glints off the porcelain saltshaker and casts a long shadow onto the linoleum. As I follow its path, his wife Stephanie appears in the kitchen doorway, an exasperated look on her face.

“You forgot to put the toilet seat down again,” she says, rolling her eyes and pulling her phone out of her back pocket. Stephanie is pretty. Her hair is saffron and flaxen, and she wears jeans also, and she has a wry smile.

Stephanie Stevenson is followed by a normal dog, who walks into the room with a slight limp, and Stephen pets it. He leans in.

“The Jews control all the money, and the world would be better off if they were dead,” he says, petting the dog. “Who’s a good boy?”

The question is rhetorical. I ask about the wallpaper.

Some people disagree with Stevenson’s political views.

“He’s a nice enough guy,” said the local grocer, Butch Tarmac, a registered Democrat. “He buys apples and pancake mix. I also like those things. But I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree on the bit about the one true race cleansing the soil and commanding what is rightfully theirs.”

Dreamtime Timeline

The bingo card is likely to expand by leaps and bounds - and I think we'll have plenty of candidates, cuz there's probably a whole battalion of these assholes we don't even know about right know. 

THREAD - Update on the next set of Mueller indictments.

1) Tea Pain has been preachin' to you lately about the importance of the Papadopoulos indictment. MSNBC now reports that PapaD turned on 4 other members of Trump Nat Security team.

— Tea Pain (@TeaPainUSA) November 25, 2017

2) Coincidentally, there are 4 sequentially numbered unsealed indictments in the D.C. federal court between the Manafort and PapaD indictments, except Tea Pain don't believe in coincidences.

— Tea Pain (@TeaPainUSA) November 25, 2017

3) Remember, PapaD was a "proactively cooperatin'" witness for Mueller, wearin' a wire. Another news report confirmed a member of Trump's Nat Security was caught lyin' to the FBI. Most likely more fruit from the PapaD arrest.

— Tea Pain (@TeaPainUSA) November 25, 2017

4) Let's do the math. Flynn has flipped and is providin' dirt big time on the big fish, particularly Jared Kushner. So the next round of indictments will look something like this...

— Tea Pain (@TeaPainUSA) November 25, 2017

5) ...The average American is a good, decent person that will not tolerate Trump's conspiracy with Russia. The national conscience will quickly turn against Trump.

— Tea Pain (@TeaPainUSA) November 25, 2017

6) Trump will naturally handle this pressure horribly and quickly turn the heart of the nation against him.

— Tea Pain (@TeaPainUSA) November 25, 2017

7) When Mueller blows his next Trumpet, hold tight, because things will start happenin' fast and furious. The Trump administration will self-destruct with a mighty noise. Mueller is about to chain the devil and cast him into the abyss. <eot>

— Tea Pain (@TeaPainUSA) November 25, 2017

Trae Crowder

"Happy holidays - sorry everything sucks."

InfoPorn

The Podcast



Sweeping Generalization Alert

The pizza guy is not really a pizza guy.
The lady plumber is not really a plumber.

What we see on way too many cable news shows is not news.
Those journalists on your TV machine are not really journalists.

It's not a news program. It's a performance.  It's InfoPorn.

Gentlemen, Start Your Christmas

Let's be careful out there.

Today's WTF

Dan Avery, NewNowNext:

MassResistance is an anti-gay hate group that opposes marriage equality and anti-bullying programs as attempts to “normalize homosexuality.” Members even attacked Governor Mitt Romney as being too soft on LGBT rights.

So it’s a little surprising the group’s Texas chapter opened its teen summit with… this.

That is possibly the best combination of Coming Out and Fuck-You-Trolling ever.