Month: April 2019

 
From News Corpse:

The Rachel Maddow Show has achieved yet another milestone in her program’s ratings surge. She has been outperforming her competition since the midterm election last November. That includes staggering routs of Fox News and its primary Trump-fluffer, Sean Hannity.

In a press release from MSNBC, Maddow is shown to have beaten “all other FOX News and CNN shows, according to Nielsen data from December 31, 2018 through March 28, 2019.” Furthermore, “this quarter was ‘Maddow’s’ highest-rated quarter ever in total viewers, averaging 3.07M total viewers at 9pm.” It’s a record-breaking achievement that demonstrates the audience appeal for an aggressively honest brand of reporting that respects the viewer and delivers facts that are well-sourced and documented.

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From Andy Borowitz:

NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—After praising Donald J. Trump, on Sunday, for cutting aid to “three Mexican countries,” the cast of “Fox & Friends” blamed former President Barack Obama for creating additional Mexicos during his tenure in the White House.

“When Barack Obama took office, there was only one Mexico,” the host Ed Henry said. “He allowed these additional Mexicos to develop.”

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From Neil Bamforth at MadMikesAmerica:

That is one of my many problems with religion. The bit after you die is a particular puzzle for me.

I’m not great in crowded places as a rule. I get ‘people claustrophobia’. It’s all those sweaty armpits and things.

Billions and billions of humans have died since we first got here. Billions and billions of souls in eternity, squashed together without anywhere to live. Homelessness in heaven and hell must be at epidemic proportions.

Religion makes about as much sense as standing in a public place in ‘middle America’ and announcing that God doesn’t exist and Jesus was a nutter or, to maintain balance, standing in the middle of Islamabad and declaring Mohammed was a pedophile.

Not only would you be extremely nuts to do such a thing, you would, shortly afterwards, find out whether there is an afterlife and just how crowded the place is.

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From Deborah Long at The Moderate Voice:

“Now, Here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” – Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking-Glass

Yesterday, Adam Schiff, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, finally spoke the truth: The strategy employed by Donald Trump and his Republican toadies in Congress is not “OK”. Schiff’s speech should be seen as a watershed moment in our recent political history – a statement of truth where two rivers of thought are emphatically separated. Schiff’s exceptional speech was in the tradition of Joseph Welch, chief counsel for the US Army when it was under investigation by Senator Joe McCarthy during the Senate Army-McCarthy Hearings of 1954. Welch’s famous words were: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.…. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?”

Schiff said to the president and his Republican committee members that their refusal to protect the interests of the United States for the last two years is immoral, unethical, unpatriotic, and corrupt. Finally.

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From Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged:

I don’t think allegations about Biden are exactly of a “Me too” nature–they are “me too-ish”. What he does physically regarding people isn’t sexual in nature, but it is gendered. It is more avuncularly affectionate than many people are with their natural uncles, but it isn’t nephews he’s showering with noggin smooches and careless kuniks. It’s the nieces he’s loving to pieces, and that is possibly an unconscious bias, but one that has to be recognized. We’ve discovered lately that Congress has been stupid about sexual harassment, so many years after Sen. Packwood’s scandal, and it’s been in a somewhat smoochy and gladhandy environment an older politician like Biden might have formed his ideas about good touch and not so good touch. And those ideas might be as outdated as rumaki and Jello salads. It isn’t intentionally harmful in his case–it just isn’t really good.

So is this disqualifying? Well, not exactly? It’s not so much “bad wrong” as “different culture” wrong, where people have a more clear sense of touch they don’t want and so many human resource department manuals all over the country have defined things like these interactions as being so much “nope” here in 2019.

Is it something Biden can overcome…

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From PZ Myers:

Poor man. His empire of lies is falling down around his ears. He can’t even sell his hokey ‘supplements’ (he was making $20 million a year off that nonsense!) because he’s finally been banned from all the social media sites he needed to peddle snake oil. His lies have been killing people, though, so my sympathy is non-existent.

Jones, who tells his viewers that his wild claims are based on “deep research” and high-level government sources, admitted that he actually relies on anonymous internet message boards and random emailers. Unable to justify his past conduct, an uncharacteristically subdued Jones blamed “psychosis.”

The deposition, filmed March 14 and published online last Friday, was released as part of a lawsuit filed by Scarlett Lewis, the mother of a child murdered in the Sandy Hook massacre. Lewis, one of several parents currently suing Jones, says that she has been a target of harassment as the result of Jones’ repeated claim that Sandy Hook was a “hoax” and no children died.

Jones accused grieving parents of being paid actors complicit in a far-reaching government conspiracy — and many people believed him. Throughout the deposition, Jones expressed little remorse.

Last week another Sandy Hook parent who faced harassment, Jeremy Richman, died in an apparent suicide.

How can one lone crank like Jones have so much impact on people?

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From Frances Langum:

A whistleblower comes forward: Trump overrode the security clearance process for twenty-five officials, including his own National Security Adviser. Feel safe yet?

It’s even worse than we thought. This press release from Elijah Cummings’s committee is on fire:

[Press Release]

Today, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, the Chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Reform, revealed that a whistleblower who currently works inside the White House Security Office sat for a confidential, on-the-record, day-long interview with Democratic and Republican Committee staff to relay grave concerns about the dysfunction she has witnessed over the past two years, highlight the dangers these actions present to national security, and implore the Committee to immediately conduct independent oversight of these matters.

The revelation came in a letter Cummings sent this morning to White House Counsel Pat Cipollone announcing that the Committee is moving forward with compulsory process since the White House has refused to produce a single piece of paper or a single requested witness over the many months since the Committee launched the investigation.

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From Tommy Christopher:

CNN host Brian Stelter lit into Fox News over a series of missteps — including the Fox & Friends banner that proclaimed Donald Trump had cut off aid to “3 Mexican countries” — and told his viewers “I don’t know what’s going on over there.”

On Sunday’s edition of CNN’s Reliable Sources, Stelter teased a segment by noting that “The only network that actually is apologizing for something this week is Fox News. I’ll show you what they’re apologizing for in just a moment.”

After the commercial break, Stelter noted that “If President Trump was watching Lou Dobbs the other night, he heard that foreigners may kill millions of Americans.”

He then played a clip from Fox host Lou Dobbs‘ Fox Business Network show, in which Dobbs claims that “tens of thousands, perhaps millions of Americans” stand to be murdered by immigrants. His intro was accompanied by the first of several priceless reaction shots…

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From Jonathan Bernstein:

Cooperation with the party’s mainstream works a lot better than picking fights with the leadership.

The verdict is in: Three months into her term, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez isn’t the forerunner of an emerging House Freedom Caucus of the left, no matter how many people have speculated that would be the case.

Conservatives are quite correct to dislike, or at least oppose, AOC. Her policy preferences aren’t just different from theirs; she is an honest-to-goodness leftist, which sets her apart from most mainstream liberal Democrats in Congress.

Her approach however isn’t remotely similar to the one House Freedom Caucus members took with their fellow Republicans. She treats mainstream liberals as allies with whom she will often disagree, not as the enemy.

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From Iron Knee at Political Irony:

And then proves it.

Alex Jones of Infowars is being sued by several parents of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre for spreading conspiracy theories claiming that the massacre was staged using actors. He also claimed that the children who died “never existed”.

In a deposition posted to YouTube, Jones defends himself by claiming that “a form of psychosis” brought on by the stressful nature of his job caused him to spread lies and unsubstantiated conspiracy theories.

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