Month: January 2020

 

From News Corpse:

If there’s one thing we can learn from 2019 it’s that hostile, melodramatic lies can boost the profits of a flagrantly biased organ of propaganda like Fox News. The right-wing network abandoned all pretense of journalistic integrity (what little it had) in order to sign on to the Donald Trump White House’s perverse distortions of reality.

The reward for Fox News was the undying devotion of an audience of willfully blind cult followers who agreed to believe only what they saw on Fox and heard from Dear Leader Trump. And their loyalty helped propel Fox News to the number one cable news network for the year.

Fox News – and their number one viewer, Donald Trump – surely celebrated this achievement. But as the year comes to a close it’s important to place this statistic in perspective. The numbers that produced this “victory” represent about 2.5 million viewers per night, or about 0.8% of the television audience on the United States.

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From Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson:

President Donald Trump will be the first president to be impeached twice. Republicans will not have a Col. Nicholson moment and Trump will be acquitted by the U.S. Senate both times.

Democrats could win the White House with a promise to “return to normalcy.” Since that won’t happen, Trump will win Wisconsin in November. Democrats will blame Canada.

Bernie Sanders will win the Wisconsin Democratic Presidential Primary. Joe Biden will win the nomination when the delegates gather in Milwaukee.

Protesters at the Democratic National Convention will smash windows along Old World Third Street, Water Street and around Cathedral Square. Paul Krugman will explain in a column how this will contribute to economic growth.

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• So an important Iranian General is killed in Iraq at the order of the American President. Peter Nicholas, at The Atlantic watches Donald Trump tell the American people and the world at large why this is a good, very good, thing and why he did it for reasonable reasons. Then Peter explains, slowly and carefully, why nobody will believe Mr. Trump. Seems to have something to do with earned trust.
   
• As always, Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged has a thoughtful perspective on Qassem Soleimani. She explains why this killing differs from that of Osama bin Laden.
   
• Senator Lindsey Graham is “Very proud of President @realDonaldTrump acting decisively in the face of threats to our embassy in Baghdad.” So are we all… sort of. Frances Langum has the timeline. As the attack on the US embassy in Baghdad results in an angry crowd finally bursting through the fortified perimeter into the embassy grounds, my president is preoccupied with tweeting attacks on Biden during a day of golf. That’s … decisive. Makes me kind of wonder how much deliberation later went into the killing of General Soleimani. Okay, I’m not really wondering.
   
• Before that killing, the protests in Iraq has faded out. Green Eagle looks closely at that very temporary resolution, which hadn’t stopped until a sort-of-successful attack on the US embassy, and determines who exactly benefited from it all.
   
• Jonathan Bernstein makes a couple of pertinent political points touching on Trump’s impeachment. The process has not affected his popularity. One reason may be that his approval rating is already historically low. It isn’t that so many folks don’t like him. It’s that so many folks really, really don’t like him.
   
• Dave Dubya points to a few reasons this year’s election means more than most.
   
• M. Bouffant at Web of Evil reads Sinclair Lewis and predicts when and how fascism can come to America.
   
• MadMikesAmerica is hopeful about the 2020 election for reasons that supersede polling data.
   
• Scotties Toy Box provides a brief layperson’s diagnosis of my president’s mental, emotional, and ethical condition. All in a sentence, actually. I’ve had similar thoughts about my President.
   
• Author John Scalzi at Whatever has some thoughts on conservative efforts to keep citizens from voting and adopts a new personal project.
   
• Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson is at it again. Conservatives in the Wisconsin legislature passed a caging law. Caging is the discredited practice of sending postal cards to voters in minority neighborhoods and quickly disfranchising anyone whose card is returned as undeliverable. Those who move within the same neighborhood, the most common move, are still valid voters but they are declared ineligible and wiped off the books.
   
  Until recently, Republicans were found to have been guilty of abusing voters, and prohibited from using the practice anymore. In Wisconsin, a conservative group got a judge to order that voters numbering in the hundreds of thousands be taken off voting rolls immediately. James accuses the Wisconsin Election Commission of defying a lawful court order.
   
  Actually, the Commission is awaiting the outcome of an appeal by the Wisconsin Department of Justice and a separate federal lawsuit by the League of Women Voters. Both are on behalf of legal voters who would illegally be put through additional requirements to reapply for the right to vote. He briefly mentions the DOJ lawsuit toward the end of his piece, but only to say that it was not authorized through a vote by the Election Commission. The federal suit is not mentioned at all. An oversight, I imagine (My imagination is expansive).
   
  So, as conservatives see it, lawsuits to protect the rights of voters are not actually legal unless authorized by government commissions assigned to remove those rights. Such is the regard for citizenship in today’s conservative world.
   
• Jon Perr at PERRspectives totals the miracles provided to a grateful nation by the Republican party. Re-reading this a few times, I’m tempted to think it may be some form of satire. Just sayin.
   
• Seems fitting in an election year. Sometimes poetic justice leads to justice. Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit provides 3 sentences and a link about a reckless driver who helped solve his own crime. Police were left with little to investigate. If only voters would react to self-revealing criminal candidates that way. Oh come on. You do too know who I mean!
   
• At The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, Bruce points out to religious folk like me that facts ought to matter. He’s right, you know.
   
• driftglass does not have fond thoughts of Chuck Todd, and doesn’t seem dejected at network moves to shift him to a less prestigious time slot. But driftglass doesn’t much care for their reasoning.
   
• nojo reviews all the progress we’ve made during the decade, and is not at all pleased.
   
• The Onion celebrates the new year with a review of the dogs and cats who were sure you would be the one to adopt them in 2019.
   

 

From News Corpse:

Indeed, Giuliani may have been the acorn that grew into the mighty oak of Trump’s criminality. At the very least, Giuliani was watering the seedling every time he appeared on Fox News making statements that further incriminated Trump. The Daily Beast interviewed several Senate sources from both parties who indicated an aversion to dealing with Giuliani, whose credibility they said was suspect. Even White House sources were reticent to deal with Giuliani for fear of being caught up in his crackpot schemes. But surprisingly, one of Trump’s most devoted fluffers, Lindsey Graham, is also putting distance between himself and Trump’s lawyer:

“My advice to Giuliani would be to share what he got from Ukraine with the IC [intelligence community] to make sure it’s not Russia propaganda. I’m very suspicious of what the Russians are up to all over the world.”

That’s right. Trump’s sentinel in the Senate can’t be sure whether Trump’s attorney is a Russian asset.

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From tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors:

I don’t know if Bloomberg has a chance of winning the primaries (I kinda doubt it), but I suspect that he’s playing something similar to chess, where you don’t wound the king, you kill the king (and in this analogy, the king is Prznint Stupid). Even if Bloomberg doesn’t get any delegates, his relentless saturation bombing, er, advertisements against Trump are hogging the commercial airwaves. I don’t even watch teevee but I’ve seen his ads every where I go.

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From Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger:

Did you get a 25% raise this year? If you make minimum wage, that would be a raise of $3770. If you make about the median wage in this country, that would be in the neighborhood of about $15,000.

I doubt any in the middle or working classes got a 25% raise in 2019. In fact, I’ll bet that most American workers didn’t even get the $3770 raise to give a minimum wage earner that 25%.

Most Americans, especially the bottom 90%, are just struggling to keep up with inflation. A 25% raise would be a dream come true, but it’s really a dream with no chance of coming true with the Republicans in power.

But the super-rich, the people who didn’t need to make more than they already do, got a 25% raise in 2019.

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From Infidel753:

One of the disadvantages of a blog becoming more widely read is that it starts attracting the attention of various kinds of nutcases and obsessives. These include ideological purists who feel obligated and entitled to post tendentious screeds in the comments to “correct” me whenever I deviate from the mandatory orthodox position on something or other (Brexit and Israel come to mind). They practically never address the specifics I raise, but just regurgitate their own canned talking points. Such incursions remain rare, however, probably because I don’t post about those topics very often.

Recently, though, I’ve been targeted by much more intensive trolling focused on one particular issue — transgender ideology. This is odd because I’ve only ever written one post on that topic, which says pretty much everything I have to say about it. However, almost every time one of the link round-ups includes a link related to transgender ideology, one of these trolls (I’m not sure whether it’s multiple people or one person using multiple names) shows up and tries to hijack the comment thread into a squabble about that issue. The degree of obsessiveness displayed is disturbing.

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From Joe Gandelman, Editor-In-Chief, The Moderate Voice:

The emergency lights are now flashing in many Jewish synagogues, homes and among many Jews in America.

At a time when antisemitism is rising in the world and in the United States, the most recent horrific event, a string of stabbings during a Hanukkah celebration at a rabbi’s Monsey, New York, is part of a larger pattern of attacks on Orthodox Jews. Orthodox Jews are more easily recognizable by the way they dress. But as anyone who is Jewish will note: an antisemitic attack or action against any Jew is an alarm bell for all Jews. Particularly if it becomes part of a pattern.

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From The Journal of Improbable Research :

If you’re earnestly chasing something that can’t tun as fast as you do, a cursory mathematical analysis of the situation can give a reassuring result – you’ll probably catch up with it. (Despite what the Ancient Greek philosopher Zeno might have said about it). But what if the entity being chased knows that it’s being chased – and takes unorthodox avoidance measures. Such as running straight towards you, or deliberately trying to lead you towards a trap of some kind? The math(s) becomes considerably more complex.

Professor Andrew Gard of the mathematics and computer science department at Lake Forest College, Illinois, US, has extensively explored such situations.

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