FairAndUNbalanced.com

 

From News Corpse:

Another excerpt from the book was just published by The Guardian. This one describes a meeting that took place last October between Barr and Fox News Overlord, Rupert Murdoch. News Corpse speculated at the time that the meeting resulted in the resignation of Fox host Shepard Smith, which was announced the next day. But Stelter’s book reports that there was another topic of discussion on their agenda:

“The attorney general, William Barr, told Rupert Murdoch to ‘muzzle’ Andrew Napolitano, a prominent Fox News personality who became a critic of Donald Trump, according to a new book about the rightwing TV network. […] Trump ‘was so incensed by the judge’s TV broadcasts that he had implored Barr to send Rupert a message in person … about ‘muzzling the judge’. [Trump] wanted the nation’s top law enforcement official to convey just how atrocious Napolitano’s legal analysis had been.’”

Just to be clear, intimidating and manipulating the media is not a part of the Attorney General’s job. In fact, it isn’t a part of any government official’s job. It is a totalitarian tactic to control speech and clampdown on the free press. And this sort of suppression of the constitutional rights of journalists is part and parcel of the Trump Doctrine that has designated the media in Stalinist terms as “the enemy of the people.”

Napolitano, the Senior Legal Analyst at Fox News, has been known to criticize Trump. And for that heresy he was entirely excluded from Fox’s coverage of Trump’s impeachment.

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From driftglass:

As the Republican Party dies an ugly, protracted, very public and long-overdue death, the Conservative elites and GOP nabobs who have scampered away from the flailing monster they helped to create now appear to be permanently stalled in “bargaining” mode.

This is a state of being in which Republican luminaries and message-makers who have hastily emigrated to a fairer shore will finally acknowledge that something has certainly gone badly wrong inside their former party, but would now like everyone to believe that they never had the slightest idea that the Republican Party was full of Republicans all along.

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From Cato’s Julian Sanchez:

Whether power is ever simply a means to address an emergency is worthy of discussion. Seems to be its own end in this case.

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• Frances Langum gets the humor. Steve Bannon jokes publicly about ripping off We Build the Wall enthusiasts, then actually does rip them off, in exactly the way he laughed about doing it. Yachts, anyone?
   
• At News Corpse, Trump dimly recalls meeting Steve Bannon sometime in the distant past but doesn’t remember any fraudulent fundraising effort called We Build the Wall. NewsCorpse senses something is missing here and checks it out.
   
• M. Bouffant at Web of Evil just can’t believe what’s being aired as my President appreciates the support of QAnon lunatics.
   
• The Borowitz Report brings the angry reaction of my president to Biden’s pro-empathy acceptance speech. He demands that Biden apologize to the nation’s sociopaths for the insult.
   
• A crazed conservative pastor comes up with proof that Democrats are all worshipers of Satan. If you look at the 5 pointed star in the convention logo sideways, it looks like a pentagonal sign popularly associated with Wicca. Wow! That certainly settles it! Then tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors messes it all up by thoughtfully providing a similar display that is precisely 50 times worse. Anyone who guesses what it is gets to stay and clean the erasers.
   
• Tuesday was a hell of a day. In Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson notices that, on the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, my president manages to trip over Susan B. Anthony, Michelle Obama, COVID-19, and the US Postal Service. Tough Tuesday.
   
• driftglass yields time to Humphrey Bogart who makes the case against Trump.
   
• At The Moderate Voice, a long ago immigrant from Ecuador who defended our nation as an officer in the US Air Force, teaches my president about five words and cognitive testing.
   
• A few days ago, Max’s Dad watched my president semi-gloat to a loyal audience that New Zealand, the so-called success story in the fight against COVID-19 with zero cases in over three months, was suddenly experiencing a massive explosion of new cases. Seems New Zealand was desperately trying to track down the source of those 9 new cases.
   
  That would be nine.
   
  Mr. Trump recently shrugged at 170,000 US cases with “It is what it is.”
   
• Okay, so Trump’s last discovery of a sure cure for COVID-19 was a dud. Who could have known? But Green Eagle has great news. My president has discovered a new for-sure cure! He is pushing for approval by the Food and Drug Administration right away! Experts are alarmed. They insist there is no scientific indication it works, and it does cause heart problems. But those experts are always raining on parades. And it IS endorsed by the my-pillow guy.
   
  Besides, a lot of us who listen to our leader just want this pandemic hoax to end so we can stop injecting household cleaning products.
   
• North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz presents Christians with Christian logic. If, as we believe, God exists, then science comes from God. Science presents us with knowledge that we can use to save lives. So we also must know that God wants each of us to wear a mask. So wear the damn thing!
   
• Iron Knee at Political Irony takes a brief look at Corona deaths and then at mail-in voting fraud and breaks the brain of a hypothetical Trump supporter.
   
• So President Trump will be visiting a restaurant in Virginia? At The Onion, alarmed restaurant officials are creating emergency plans in case Trump refuses to leave.
   
• Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger brings an analysis that gives us an 85% chance of a Biden Presidency. It occurs to me that it would be close to your chance of surviving a game of Russian Roulette. Anyone comfortable with those odds? How about, instead of pulling that trigger, we all vote?
   
• Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara objects to a study of Trump appeals to white fear. Eddie Glaude of Princeton University says that it is an appeal to apprehension about change: “It’s all rooted in this panic about the place of white people in this new America.” Michael is indignant. The professor should realize that no group should have a special place in American society! In my home we call this missing the point.
   
• Scotties Toy Box carries the angry reaction of a public performer to being fired, just for criticizing Dolly Parton. I mean, who can’t benefit from a little constructive criticism? Like “freak titted” or “slut” or “old Southern bimbo”? We can be glad he had the tiny bit of good sense to use a euphemism when he got around to calling her “a BLM Lover”. Her endorsement of Black Lives Matter is what set the guy off. Why should a performer lose his job just for that? For some reason, Scottie seems unsympathetic.
   
• Dave Dubya is kind of proud at successfully getting banned by a self-described Proud Boy, who nonetheless insists he is not a racist. Dave provides highlights of the beating Proud Boy was getting in print before Proudy ran away.
   
• Republican Senator Martha McSally is in election trouble in Arizona. She pleads with conservatives to sacrifice a few meals to give her some recovery funds. Cato’s Julian Sanchez reacts with a much more entertaining response than “Huh?”
   
• In The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, we discover the biblical truth. The Bible does not order us never to judge. And, interestingly, Christians who believe that we are told not to judge, spend much of their salvation doing lots and lots of just that.

 
From Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit:

The power of the president is enormous – and may be even more so with presidential emergency action documents (PEADs), classified orders granting vast presidential authority in response to extraordinary situations. PEADs are so secret even Congress cannot see them – and that troubles constitutional scholars. “Sunday Morning” special contributor Ted Koppel reports

If you watch it, you’ll see that the only person who is not troubled by the vast powers claimed by the 48-odd PEADs (or up to 60) is John Woo, the Torturers’ Lawyer, a man who, if the US was not so powerful, would have been tried in The Hague a long time ago for crimes against humanity.

So what happens if Trump uses those powers to suspend habeus corpus, to postpone or cancel the election, to round up his enemies? Short answer: Nobody knows.

During the 1970s, when military officers engaged in informal discussions in the wake of the Nixon Administration, it was the majority consensus that, if Nixon had done such things, that the military would have obeyed their oath of fealty to the Constitution and moved against Nixon.

I don’t have that confidence today.

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From Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson:

Note from Ray: I had to look for a few seconds before I got what conservatives are finding scandalous this time.

Wisconsin was abused again by the Democratic National Committee’s decision to reduce the party’s national convention to the size of a typical Wednesday night softball league tournament. The Democrats actually removed Wisconsin from the logo for the national convention.

We don’t rate a visit from the Democrats’ candidates. We don’t rate a visit from their delegates. We don’t even rate a silhouette on the convention logo.

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From The Journal of Improbable Research:

In 2007 (or thereabouts) researchers from Colby College, US, the University of Connecticut, US and the College of the Holy Cross, US, jointly came up with the ‘Rocking Chair Paradigm’.

The paradigm provided a new method to investigate whether, in some situations, people are prone to (consciously or unconsciously ) synchronize their movements with each other. The paradigm differs from previous methodologies (e.g. using swinging pendulums*) in that the experimental participants don’t have to be instructed to oscillate – they like doing it, and so they do it anyway.

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From nojo:

You run out of things to say after awhile. Anything new, anyway. That thing you’re thinking of saying, you already said it, what, two years ago? Three?

“Donald Trump spent the weekend at one of his resorts after Puerto Rico’s infrastructure was devastated.” We said that almost three years ago. Iowa’s been dark all week. Trump went golfing again.

Here’s something new we can say: It’s not just Brown people any more.

But at least that’s a natural disaster. Trump’s been demolishing the post office without divine assistance. Part of this is a longtime Republican dream to put a public service in private hands, where profits can be made. More immediately — well, you know that part. The easier it is for people to vote, the easier it is to vote against him.

See the past ten years of American history for more information. Or the past 230.

But in this latest attack on American citizenship, there’s a new twist: It ain’t just ballots. A lot of stuff still gets mailed in the Internet age. Bills. Payments.

Medicine.

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From Athena Scalzi at Whatever:

I understand that people just naturally care about a certain handful of issues, or one specific issue, more than all the rest. Like, maybe you care a lot about the BLM movement, but not so much about the rain-forest being destroyed. Maybe you care a lot about homelessness, but not so much about mask/face-covering laws and whatnot. It’s okay to put the focus of your attention towards the things you care about, I totally get that.

For someone that lives in Flint, maybe the issue they care about the most is getting clean water to their community. If you live in California, maybe your focus is on wildfires. It is totally valid to be more concerned about your community than one across the country — even if, ideally, you should care about both. It doesn’t have to be an equal amount of focus you put towards the issues, but you should at least care a smidge about the other.

Let’s say there are multiple buildings on fire at the same time. It’s possible that one fire is much larger than the others and should be focused on a little more, or maybe the contents inside the building are somewhat more important that the others’, but the other fires should not be ignored entirely. This is basically a metaphor to the fact the world is constantly on fire (sometimes literally), and there’s a lot to focus on.

So now that it’s been established it is okay to care a little more about certain topics than others, it’s important to address something I’ve been seeing a lot lately, which is people posting things like “this topic is more important than all the other issues in the world right now” or “this is the only topic that matters to me and if you don’t agree then you’re wrong.”

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From Strangely Blogged:

The long-awaited 5th volume of the Senate Intelligence Committee regarding Russian active intelligence measures is public, and goddamn. So, Russia was definitely trying to interfere, right? And the Trump campaign was definitely okay with that. And it really looks like there was probably kompromat, and like Trump lied about whether he ever spoke with Roger Stone (you know–this Roger Stone) about Wikileaks, and it looks like Wikileaks was laundering the DNC emails for Russia, and Paul Manafort is understood to have definitely been sharing campaign information with a “Russian intelligence officer”, Konstantin Kilimnik. It also shows that criminal referrals were made to DOJ regarding untruthful statements being made by folks like Steve Bannon and Don Jr. in 2019–although somehow the DOJ must have eaten them, because whatever could have happened? (Why, AG Barr happened, just like he happened to the end of the Mueller report. I reckon he means to be the wall-to-wall rug of Trump cover-ups.)

What we find is, in short, there was plenty of reason for a counter-intelligence investigation into the potential manipulation of a US presidential election by a hostile foreign power (not that Donald “Love Letters to Dictators” Trump understood it as such) and real concern about the many contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia. along with the obvious business connections Trump had in Russia, despite his vehement denials about both (which only made things more suspicious). It would have been derelict not to have investigated.

And now, here we are–the Senate Intelligence Select Committee produces this (with intriguing redactions) report covering what I’ve been trying to cover with TrumpWorld Grab-Bags. The conclusion appears to be that, well, it looked bad because it was bad.

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