Today's Tweet

Eric Swalwell

Donald Trump will never be who House Republicans want him to be. He’s telling us all who he really is, if we have the courage to listen. pic.twitter.com/NZLAz8tD10

— Rep. Eric Swalwell (@RepSwalwell) December 13, 2019

Today's Fuckin' Wack-Doodle

Kayla Epstein, WaPo:

Matt Bevin is no longer the governor of Kentucky, but his decisions continued to send shock waves through the state’s legal system this week after he issued pardons for hundreds of people, some of whom committed violent offenses.

Bevin issued 428 pardons since his defeat to Democrat Andy Beshear in a close election in November, the Louisville Courier Journal reported. His list includes a man convicted of reckless homicide, a convicted child rapist, a man who murdered his parents at age 16 and a woman who threw her newborn in the trash after giving birth in a flea market outhouse.

He also pardoned Dayton Jones, who was convicted in the sexual assault of a 15-year-old boy at a party, Kentucky New Era reported.

It is not unusual for governors to issue pardons as they leave office, but Bevin’s actions boggled some of the state’s attorneys, who questioned his judgment.

“What this governor did is an absolute atrocity of justice,” said Commonwealth Attorney Jackie Steele, a prosecutor for Knox and Laurel counties. “He’s put victims, he’s put others in our community in danger.”

And the kicker:

“I’m a big believer in second chances,” Bevin said in a message left with The Washington Post on Thursday afternoon. “I think this is a nation that was founded on the concept of redemption and second chances and new pages in life.”

Can you say, "What a crock of shit that is"? I knew you could.

Outside of when they're taking about themselves and their god-knobber buddies, when was the last time you heard any Republican touting the value of giving anybody a second chance at anything - especially when the topic is crime and prison and shit?

There's something else at work here, and I'm gonna let the paranoia fly - I think it's a weird variation on Daddy State Awareness rule 3:

Every prediction of some dire consequence is a threat of the pain they intend to cause - or a signal that they’re already causing that pain - in an attempt to coerce us to do what they want.

First, I'll go ahead and say Bevins isn't actually mentally ill - no more than the usual pathologies that beset "conservatives" anyway.

So second, what Bevins is doing is planting time bombs that he figures will explode somewhere down the road "on the Democrats' watch". 

The main point is that he's sending a signal. ie: "You rejected me and now I will rain fire and fury down upon you. So don't do that again - we don't mind making it worse."

Alternate: Matt Bevins is guilty of some really bad shit and he's trying to soften things up a little so it doesn't land quite so heavily on his pointy little head when it comes out.

Today's Deja Vu

Editorials

This, of course, will be spun at DumFux news as proof of how evil and corrupt the Lugenpresse is.

And, just as of course-y, the Press Poodles are likely to be in perfect chorus as they fill their air time with "Are these editorial boards playing right into the hands of Trump's GOP?"

via Business Insider:

The Los Angeles Times:
"The evidence produced over the last two months is more than sufficient to persuade us that he should be impeached ... Trump flagrantly abused the power of his office."

The Boston Globe:
"The question before the country now is whether President Trump's misconduct is severe enough that Congress should exercise that impeachment power, less than a year before the 2020 election. The results of the House Intelligence Committee inquiry, released to the public on Tuesday, make clear that the answer is an urgent yes."

The New York Daily News:
"The House Intelligence Committee presents a coherent and compelling case for impeachment ... There may be no single, smoking gun, but there's ample acrid black stuff rising from the White House."

The Chicago Sun-Times:
"The president compromised our nation's best interests for pure political self-profit, as baldly as a Chicago alderman holding up a zoning change for a bribe. Trump has brought impeachment upon himself."

FiveThirtyEight is running a piece on the polling, tracking the growth in numbers of respondents who are being persuaded:

All Roads

With Cult45, all roads lead to Russia (hat tip: Nancy Pelosi).

I'm not sure Nunes gets by without taking some big hits. 

Aaron Rupar, Vox:

House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Devin Nunes (R-CA) is going to increasingly desperate lengths to spin phone records indicating he played a more central role than previously understood in the Trump administration’s shadowy Ukraine policy — one geared toward leveraging official White House acts into political favors benefitting the president.

Those records, which were included in Intelligence Committee Democrats’ impeachment report, indicate that Nunes communicated on the phone with Rudy Giuliani’s indicted Ukraine fixer, Lev Parnas, including an eight-and-a-half minute call on April 12.

Parnas’s lawyers have said their client is prepared to testify that Nunes worked to advance the Ukrainian investigations into the Biden family that are at the center of an impeachment inquiry. But Nunes didn’t disclose those contacts when he served as the top Republican overseeing the House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment hearings last month.

Speaking to Maria Bartiromo for her Fox Business show on Sunday morning, Nunes advanced a type of alternative explanation that has gotten some play on Fox News, suggesting the aforementioned call he received from Parnas on April 12 may have been placed by Parnas’s wife, not Parnas himself.

“I got a call from a number that was Parnas’s wife,” Nunes said. “I remember talking to someone, and I did what I always do which is that if you don’t know who they are, you put them to staff, and you let staff work with that person.”

The notion that Nunes is as accessible on the phone as he wants people to believe might be easier to buy if Nunes didn’t have a reputation for ducking town halls in particular and his constituents in general. But his explanation is tough to swallow for another reason — the phone records indicate that the calls didn’t just flow from Parnas to him, but, on at least two occasions, from Nunes to Parnas.

As far-fetched as Nunes’s spin was, Bartiromo let him get away with it. Fox’s softball approach accounts for why Nunes feels comfortable going on the network, even as questions about his role in the Ukraine caper mount as he files half-a-billion-dollar lawsuits against outlets trying to get to the bottom of them. But a video published by The Intercept on Sunday shows Nunes in a less comfortable situation and going to comical lengths to avoid answering questions about his phone calls with Parnas, including waving a camera in a reporter’s face.

Nunes’s interview with Bartiromo marked the second Sunday in a row he’s gone on her show and made headlines for reasons that don’t really reflect positively on him. Last week, he joined her and threatened to sue CNN and the Daily Beast for publishing pieces about him based on statements they received from lawyers representing Parnas, seemingly oblivious to the fact that’s not how lawsuits works.

Today's Burn

In a tweet from Andrew Wortman - @AmoneyResists

Matt Gaetz rambled on with a smarmy tale about Hunter Biden's trouble in the past with a rental car company because they supposedly found a crack pipe in the car he returned - or some such - I dunno.

Here comes Hank Johnson (GA) with a bitch slap that puts Mr Gaetz's face all the way around to the other side of his fool head.

.@RepHankJohnson replies to @mattgaetz: “I don’t think the pot calling the kettle black is something we should do. I don’t know if any members on this committee have had problems with substances or DUI’s, but if I did I wouldn’t raise it.”

THIS IS AMAZINGpic.twitter.com/fzYKK87XTk

— Andrew Wortman (@AmoneyResists) December 12, 2019

Today's Tweet

Eternal Sadness narrowly averted.

And notice how she never lets go of the gun - cuz that's what's really important here in USAmerica, Inc.

CLUTCH CATCH: Surveillance footage shows a pawn shop manager swoop in to save a baby who toppled head first off the counter as two women shopped for a gun in Utah. https://t.co/Se3HmZsrBK pic.twitter.com/THO8DK5qv6

— ABC News (@ABC) December 11, 2019

Dys-Informed Nation

(the whole banana from) Wired (cuz it's pretty fuckin' important):

Monday’s split-screen drama, as the House Judiciary Committee weighed impeachment charges against President Trump and as the Justice Department’s inspector general released a 476-page report on the FBI’s handling of its 2016 investigation into Trump’s campaign, made one truth of the modern world inescapable: The lies and obfuscations forwarded ad infinitum on Fox News pose a dangerous threat to the national security of the United States.

The facts of both dramas were clear to objective viewers: In the one instance, there’s conclusive and surprisingly consistent evidence that President Trump pushed Ukraine to concoct dirt on a domestic political rival to affect the 2020 presidential election, and in the other, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz found that the FBI was proper to investigate Trump’s dealings with Russia in the 2016 presidential campaign.

But that set of facts is not what anyone who was watching Fox News heard. Instead, Fox spent the night describing an upside-down world where the president’s enemies had spun a web of lies about Trump and Ukraine, even as Horowitz blew open the base corruption that has driven every attack on the president since 2016.

Sean Hannity, who had long trumpeted the forthcoming inspector general report and expected a thorough indictment of the behavior of former FBI director James Comey and other members of the “deep state,” had a simple message for his viewers during Fox’s Monday night prime time: “Everything we said, everything we reported, everything we told you was dead-on-center accurate,” he said. “It is all there in black and white, it’s all there.”

Except they weren’t right and it wasn’t there. But Fox News’ viewers evidently were not to be told those hard truths—they were to be kept thinking that everything in their self-selected filter bubble was just peachy keen.

Over on Fox Business, Lou Dobbs said the mere fact that the IG found no political bias in the FBI’s investigation of Trump and Russia in 2016 was de facto proof of the power of the deep state.

John Harwood, long one of Washington’s most respected conservative voices in journalism, summed up Fox’s approach Monday night simply: “Lunacy.”

It’s worse than lunacy, though. Fox’s bubble reality creates a situation where it’s impossible to have the conversations and debate necessary to function as a democracy. Facts that are inconvenient to President Trump simply disappear down Fox News’ “memory hole,” as thoroughly as George Orwell could have imagined in 1984.

The idea that Fox News represents a literal threat to our national security, on par with Russia’s Internet Research Agency or China’s Ministry of State Security, may seem like a dramatic overstatement of its own—and I, a paid contributor to its competitor CNN, may appear a biased voice anyway—but this week has made clear that, as we get deeper into the impeachment process and as the 2020 election approaches, Fox News is prepared to destroy America’s democratic traditions if it will help its most important and most dedicated daily viewer.

The threat posed to our democracy by Fox News is multifaceted: First and most simply, it’s clearly advancing and giving voice to narratives and smears backed and imagined by our foreign adversaries. Second, its overheated and bombastic rhetoric is undermining America’s foundational ideals and the sense of fair play in politics. Third, its unique combination of lies and half-truths has built a virtual reality so complete that it leaves its viewers too misinformed to fulfill their most basic responsibilities as citizens to make informed choices about the direction of the country.

In the impeachment hearings, former National Security Council official Fiona Hill and other witnesses made clear how those who, like Fox News hosts and the president, advance the false narrative that Ukraine meddled in the US election are serving the Kremlin’s interests. Russia is playing a weak hand geopolitically—its economy is sputtering along and its population shrinking—and so its greatest hope is to stoke internal discord in the West. Robert Mueller warned of this; James Clapper has warned of it; and now Fiona Hill has done the same. “Our nation is being torn apart,” she said. “Truth is questioned.” Yet Fox, and the GOP more broadly, has warmly embraced almost every twist of Kremlin propaganda, up to and including the idea that Russia never meddled in the 2016 election to begin with.

Fox’s clear willingness to parry the wingnuttiest ideas in service of the president, long-term implications to the United States be damned, should worry all concerned about the state of the United States. The Ukraine myth is hardly the only example; for years, it has repeated false conspiracies about the murder of Democratic staffer Seth Rich, a conspiracy literally cooked up by Russian intelligence and fed into the US media. (To say nothing of Fox’s long-term commitment to undermining and questioningclimate science, leaving the US both behind in mitigating the worst effects of climate change and also ill-equipped to face the myriad security consequences of a warming planet.)

It’s possible to paint Fox with too broad of a brush—Chris Wallace remains one of the toughest and best interviewers on television and has repeatedly stood up to vapid GOP talking points, and Bret Baier is a talented journalist and historian—but it’s clear from this year that something fundamental and meaningful has tipped inside the network.

While propagandizing has long been a key facet of Fox’s business (Stephen Colbert debuted his own Fox News host alter ego, in dedicated pursuit of “truthiness,” all the way back in 2005), the situation is clearly getting worse: the lies deeper, its always-tenuous commitment to “Fair and Balanced” unraveling further. Whatever loose adherence to a reality-based world the Fox worldview once possessed, whatever guardrails on truth the network might have once installed, are now gone. Shep Smith, long one of the network’s biggest names and best reporters, literally walked out of the Fox building this fall, departing abruptly after apparently deciding that he couldn’t in good conscience be part of a “news” operation that treated facts so fungibly.

Indeed, as the year has unfolded, Fox’s evening talk shows and its presidentially endorsed morning show have proven to be a particularly egregious and odious swamp of fetid, metastasizing lies and bad faith feedback loops that leave its viewers—and, notably, its Presidential Audience of One—foaming at the mouth with outrage and bile.

It’s hard not to think that the increasingly odd behavior and untethered-to-reality pronouncements of the president’s two top lawyers—Attorney General Bill Barr and personal defender Rudy Giuliani—have not been deeply influenced by the filter bubble on the right created, fostered, and fertilized by Fox News. As Lawfare’s Susan Hennessey tweeted after Barr set out on his Quixotic quest to prove the deep state was behind the FBI’s 2016 investigation, “The Attorney General is a fully-committed Fox News conspiracy theorist.”

The network’s pantheon of Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Lou Dobbs, and the rotating couch-cast of Fox & Friends’ morning show dunces-by-choice together represent a level of ill-informed demagoguery that would make Father Coughlin and Huey Long wince.

More than simply embarrassing themselves by spouting obvious falsehoods, though, Fox News’ incendiary, fanatical rants serve to delegitimize to its viewers the very idea of a political opposition. Every Democrat is evil. Every person who disagrees with President Trump is an enemy of the state. Every career federal employee is a member of a deep state opposition.

As writer Gabe Sherman, who authored a history of Fox News, tweeted over the weekend, “Been thinking a lot about why Trump will survive impeachment when Nixon didn’t. For 20+ years Fox News (and rightwing talk radio) has told GOP voters that Democrats are evil. As lawless as Trump is, Republicans believe Dems are worse. That’s the power of propaganda.”

These pronouncements—uttered around the clock on weekdays and doubled down on weekends by hosts like the president’s favorite, Jeanine Pirro—are an attack on the very ideals and foundations of the American experiment.

The founders settled on political parties as a mechanism to institutionalize channels for ongoing debate. As historian Joseph Ellis wrote in American Creation, political parties “eventually permitted dissent to be regarded not as a treasonable act, but as a legitimate voice in an endless argument.” It is that willingness to view opponents as legitimate that has long allowed America to hold together even under trying political times and to deal with political disagreements in the political arena, rather than resorting to violence against national leaders. For all of Fox News and President Trump’s daily declaration of coups and attempted coups against the administration, American history has actually been shockingly free of actual coups.

Part of what drives the unique national interest in the rivalry of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr was that their fatal showdown represents the only case of a founder taking another founder’s life. It was one of only a handful of times in our entire national history where we’ve seen political figures fight each other and inflict real wounds. (The caning of Senator Charles Sumner in the pre–Civil War Capitol comes to mind as another such rare instance.)

In the midst of his own presidential run in 2008, John McCain stopped one of his own supporters in her tracks attacking Barack Obama as a Muslim to defend the Democratic nominee: “No ma’am,” McCain said. “He’s a decent family man, a citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and that’s what this campaign is all about.”

That tradition and idea of American politics as an ongoing conversation, an endless argument, is key to preserving our democratic experiment. The idea that you will be in power sometimes, and out of power other times, is what preserves norms and traditions, and curbs the worst abuses and impulses; politicians traditionally understand that actions taken in the majority could serve to bite them if and when they return to the minority.

Donald Trump, who rose to prominence trumpeting the very “birther” falsehood that McCain once batted away, seems bent on undermining that tradition; he has proven he’s perfectly willing to burn down political norms for short-term gain. Fox News seems intent on helping him—and on a daily basis, they’re telling their viewers he’s right and anyone who disagrees with him is less than human. Trump’s lies are the one constant and consistent position of his presidency (13,000 and counting!), and Fox News has gone all in.

We, as a democratic society, cannot survive such consequences-be-damned, winner-take-all, facts-don’t-matter politics. Fox News has upended Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous proclamation that “everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” Its daily programming seems driven by the idea that everyone might be entitled to their own facts, but that there is only one correct opinion: President Trump’s.

In 1984, George Orwell wrote his imagined dystopian regime “told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears,” but Fox News has actually figured out a tactic even more pernicious: Fox News’ own masters of Orwellian doublespeak, its Hannitys, Carlsons, and Doocys, the ones who smugly declare down up and up down, aren’t even bothering to tell their viewers to ignore their eyes and ears, because the truth never even approaches their airtime.

Let’s hope that Fox News today, unlike in Orwell’s world, doesn’t manage to succeed in transforming our country from a functional democracy into an authoritarian cult.

Driftglass:

The union cannot endure half free and half Fox.

Today's Drip

As in drip drip drip. 

But yeah, that other kinda drip too. As in "What a fuckin' drip that guy is."

The problem of course, is that the flow of bullshit Cult45 uses to cover their crimes is exponentially greater than the revelations of those crimes.

Because it takes time to look into it, and then decide if there's really been a crime, because we have this "process" thing.

So the process gets manipulated and subvered by the bad guys, who (surprise surprise) are the same guys who bitch about the process all the fucking time.

Either they bitch about how the process is being manipulated and subverted by "those people" (Daddy State Awareness rule 1: every accusation is a confession), or they bitch about how unfair the process is because (eg) the bad ol' Democrats are trying to hold someone accountable (usually a criminally douche-bag-y Republican).

David Fahrenthold, WaPo:

President Trump has paid $2 million in court-ordered damages for misusing funds in a tax-exempt charity he controlled, the New York attorney general said Tuesday.

The payment was ordered last month by a New York state judge in an extraordinary rebuke to a sitting president. Trump had been sued in 2018 by the New York attorney general, who alleged the president had illegally used funds from the Donald J. Trump Foundation to buy portraits of himself, pay off his businesses’ legal obligations and help his 2016 campaign.

The money was split among eight charities, according to a statement from New York Attorney General Letitia James (D). The charities were the Army Emergency Relief, the Children’s Aid Society, Citymeals-on-Wheels, Give an Hour, Martha’s Table, the United Negro College Fund, the United Way of National Capital Area, and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, according to the statement.

Today's Quote

A lie doesn't become truth, wrong doesn't become right, and evil doesn't become good just because it's accepted by a majority.

-- Booker T Washington