Vote Steal Suit, Fake News, Tucker, Fox, Biden Bad Good Maybe, GOP, Greene

Made it to the end of the week with @momwino98:

@momwino98

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♬ original sound – @Momwino98

• Begin with a long and special story – touching, in a vindictive sort of way:
   
  The conservative narrative was solid! Dominion Voting Systems stole the Presidential election from Trump and gave it to Biden. Switched votes, not counted votes, illegal votes, what have you. It wasn’t true, and the fact that it wasn’t true was provable. Dominion sued Fox, Rudy Giuliani, and Sidney Powell for mega-millions, and named Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo, and Jeanine Pirro in the suit.
   
  Fox made the smart move and backtracked. The network disavowed the Dominion conspiracy and had Lou Dobbs read the story on camera.
   
  After that, Fox, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo, and Jeanine Pirro pretty much watched their steps. Dominion and vote manipulation were not to be mentioned within an hour or so of each other, except to point ouot that they were definitely not connected, and Dominion was a great, fine, ethical company with a wonderful record of vote counting integrity. Which, by the way, has the virtue of truth going for it.
   
  The new narrative has been that some voting system other than Dominion stole the Presidential election from Trump and gave it to Biden. Smartmatic seemed like a good candidate.
   
  That wasn’t true either, and the fact that it wasn’t true was also provable, but the ethic in some quarters is never let truth interfere with a good story.
   
  News Corpse has a report. Smartmatic is suing guess who?
   
  This time Fox, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo, and Jeanine Pirro are not being hauled into court for mere hundreds of millions. Smartmatic is going after all of them for a total of 2.7 billion dollars. That’s with a B.
   
  The introductory part of the lawsuit is hilarious. On the other hand, my humor tends toward the juvenile, so your mileage may vary.
   
  Still, just to provide an idea of scale: If you give your spouse a million dollars with the understanding that your partner will spend exactly $1,000 a day and not return until the money is gone, you will not see each other for 3 years.
   
  Got it? Three years.
   
  But if you give your spouse a billion dollars with the same understanding, you will not see each other for three thousand years.
   
  Word is within hours after getting legal notification of the suit, Fox tossed Lou Dobbs under a few billion buses and let him go-go. He’s still employed and under contract, but his new office is without windows, floor, cealing, heat, water, or running assistants. And he is off camera.
   
  Depending on who else they go after, Smartmatic may end up owning a whole lot of over-priced pillows.
   
• In related non-fake news, The Journal of Improbable Research finds a study published by the National Academy of Science devoted to whether fake news – documented to be false – is most effectively refuted before, during, or after the fake is read.
   
• PZ Myers finds a pattern and develops a pretty good idea of why Tucker Carlson opines, rants, and endorses in the direction he opines, rants, and endorses.
   
• Scotties Toy Box has two images pulled from television that illustrate how Fox and factual media cover the news as President Biden signs some popular orders.
   
• My long time conservative friend Darrell Michaels, at Unabashedly American, really, truly, does not like the terrible harm that President Biden and his leftist minions are doing to the nation. Leftist minions would be me and 81 million other Americans, I suppose.
   
  Well, my friend is not QAnon and has not advocated the assassination of Nancy Pelosi or the overthrow of the US government, so there is that.
   
• OH! By the by, Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger finds that our new President’s immigration policies, which my friend Darrell hates as the province of Biden’s extreme leftist minions, are overwhelmingly popular. 55%, 69%, 72%. Not bad for us minions. And it seems the public supports the rest of Biden’s actions as well.
   
  Buncha durn leftist radicals, that American public.

• Infidel753 proposes ten potential accomplishments that will provide a way to measure the success or failure of the Biden administration. Defeat of Covid-19, bringing back jobs, establishing a higher minimum wage, on down to the interesting tenth accomplishment – meeting the unanticipated challenge that will come from some unexpected direction. Thought provoking, well considered.
   
• At The Moderate Voice, Dorian de Wind profiles one Republican who discovers a way to put his country first when it comes to an extremist colleague. Has to do with courage.
   
• The Republican party, judging from the reaction of its Congressional leadership, wants to identify as a big tent, open to a wide range of ideas. driftglass provides a short lesson on the range of choices, from extremely conservative all the way to howling-at-the-moon crazy right.
   
• Remember Merrick Garland, the distinguished jurist that President Obama didn’t have a right to nominate to the Supreme Court? Something to do with only 10 months to go in office, and the Constitution only allowing him 3/5 of a second term. Okay, so I’m making that last part up (sort of – Republicans couldn’t say that out loud). But now, unaccountably, Republicans also don’t want to allow this same distinguished person to be confirmed as Biden’s Attorney General.
   
  One thing I like about some podcasts is the thoughtfulness of providing a transcript. Imani Gandy at Rewire News Group joins Jessica Pieklo in podcasting the law. They have come up with a strategy that really would turn reluctant conservatives into wild eyed fanatics backing the Garland nomination. And there IS a transcript available in pdf form.
   
• So Marjorie Taylor Greene, of strange theory & promotion of assassination fame (Jews used a special laser from a secret satellite to start California fires), is tossed off all Congressional committees, mostly by Democrats (there were 11 Republicans) – other GOPers instead giving her a standing ovation. So, as Andy Borowitz reports, the ever defiant Greene person will form her own one-member committee on Semitic Aerospace Weaponry. HEY!! I know it’s satire.
   
• Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson is unimpressed with his Republican Congressional representative, who sends home a poetic sort of accounting of his accomplishments since being elected, which accounting is stronger on poetry than accomplishment. It doesn’t help that, after the attempted violent pro-Trump coup, his rep voted to disfranchise millions of legal voters (by coincidence, mostly minority legal voters). James pretty much disapproves (with anger) the riot and the votes to overturn the election. Refreshing.
   
• Iron Knee at Political Irony reads a poll and finds an illustration of why and how the Republican party is sinking.
   
• The circumference of the Earth is not quite 25,000 miles. Want to know why that especially matters in Colorado? Via Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire we can find out.
   
  Colorado Newsline carries a mysterious coincidence. Georgia’s QAnon Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Colorado Republican co-extremist, Lauren Boebert, claimed to have traveled around her district last year between campaign events for almost 39,000 miles. That’s like driving all the way around the world – through oceans and over mountains, then deciding that’s not enough and going halfway around the world again, landing almost exactly on the other side. And, since that was for traveling between campaign events, you might expect to find, I dunno, campaign events? Journalists could only find a record of one event advertised during her campaign. So she traveled around the world and then halfway around the world between one campaign event.
   
  Yup, between one campaign event. Kind of like the classic nonsense question: How many sides of a duck? The answer is One leg is both the same. Between one campaign event.
   
  Which brings up the coincidence.
   
  She owns a restaurant, and sort of forgot to pay some business taxes. She owed almost $20,000 in back taxes. Now that’s a bit of a bite, especially now that COVID-19 has arrived and business has gotten sick. So where’s she gonna get that kind of money?
   
  Can you see the punchline coming?
   
  A candidate is allowed to have her campaign pay to her any mileage for campaign travel, including travel between campaign events. Excuse me, that would be campaign event. Singular.
   
  The total for travel around the world then halfway around again? It happens to be a little more than $22,000. Her campaign directly paid her $22,000 and she paid off the tax lien.
   
  How about that? Almost like it was meant to be.
   
• A region is not responsible for the fringes of its population, I suppose. But I do wonder why so many reports are about the west coast. Portland anarchy is enough to set my teeth on edge. But now…
   
  M. Bouffant at Web of Evil lets us know about a small group of right wing thugs and anti-vaxxers who managed to close down a vaccination site, depriving a few hundred, who had been waiting in line, of their anti-COVID-19 vaccinations. Nice.
   
• JoAnn Williams is briefly regretful about her own lack of pandemic isolation induced ambition – no advanced degrees while waiting for it all to end. But she is motivated to survive, which is something, and to find a novel way to care for her cat.
   
• Sarah Cooper finds a way to make life more exciting.
   

• At The Onion, reactions are coming in after the emotional account by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who hid just out of reach of screaming attackers attempting to find her. Republicans are pointing to inconsistencies, accusing her of not being anywhere close to where they told the Capitol rioters she would be.
   
• Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit mourns the loss of actor Hal Holbrook. Like me, she especially liked his well-researched, carefully authentic, portrayal of Mark Twain. She especially enjoyed the author’s advice to young folks about the deadly handling of old firearms.
   
• North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz takes on those who describe themselves as God and Gun Christians. They join the two terms so often, speaking of them both so reverently, they often conflate the two, regarding them as one. The pastor suggests that a religious person can only worship one. And that only one of them is compatible with Jesus of Nazareth.
   
• In The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, Bruce addresses the notion that personal experience is proof of God. I have my own perspective on personal witness.
   
• Are you an atheist? Nan’s Notebook suggests the answer may be a matter of definition. As in What the ‘ell is an atheist?
   
• David Greenberg, in MadMikesAmerica, remembers a lesson from his youth: that the cost to bigots of their bigotry does not just come from some outside cancel culture.
   
• Athena Scalzi at Whatever is presented with a very special cookbook from 1877 that includes helpful advice on what it takes to be a real woman or a real man.
   
• Floating shelves are supposedly all the rage these days. At least aside from QAnon and Marjorie Taylor Greene and laser-from-space Jewish conspiracies. Reductress provides all you need to know, step by zany step, to install your own shelf and then worry for the rest of your life about when it will fall.
   
• SilverAppleQueen provides a brief selection of poetry from “her book of dreams”, this one about a free soul happy in her own skin, joyful carving out a place in the universe, adventurous in her surroundings. You might perceive that I like it. You might as well.

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