Truthiness must not prevail Adam Serwer considers the implications of Fox fending off the Dominion voting machine defamation lawsuit (The Atlantic): Fox News executives understood the election-fraud allegations were nonsense, and they also understood their audience wanted to hear them. Misinformation and propaganda are not novel problems, but modern technology renders the incentives to lie to an audience particularly clear, and the means to reach that audience particularly easy to access. There will always be a potentially profitable demand for self-flattering lies; ethical people and institutions resist supplying them. The ability of individual hustlers to amass an audience of sycophants by feeding them conspiracies puts pressure on more mainstream outlets to gently appease conspiracism, if not to fully capitulate to it. Isn’t that an authoritarian’s wet dream? SLAPP suits would proliferate. Investigative journalism would dry up. The Biggest Brother could shape what the public knows. The network may ultimately prevail; that’s what all those fancy lawyers get paid for.
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This is in the …. National Review? President Biden’s secret visit to wartime Kyiv is an example of America in its finest tradition. The New York Times reports that after a “trans-Atlantic flight to Poland, Mr. Biden crossed the border by train, traveling for nearly 10 hours to Kyiv as other American officials have in recent months.” This trip took guts. The Times reports that Biden “slipped out of Washington in the dark of night without notice” in the early hours of Sunday morning on the East Coast: “Just a few reporters sworn to secrecy and deprived of their telephones were brought with him, along with Jake Sullivan, the president’s national security adviser; Jen O’Malley Dillon, his deputy chief of staff; and Annie Tomasini, the director of Oval Office operations.” The moment reminds me not so much of Presidents Bush, Obama, and Trump flying unannounced to Iraq or Afghanistan, but of President Roosevelt’s wartime travels across the Atlantic. Make no mistake, there was risk involved in this trip. Traveling to the capital of a nation fighting a shooting war with a great power, the U.S.
Isn’t that special? In late 2021, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene briefly referenced “a National Divorce scenario” that seemed to allude to the dissolution of the United States. About a year later, the Georgia Republican seemed to predict a “national divorce” in response to the CDC adding Covid shots to its list of recommended vaccine schedules. This morning, as some elected officials released statements recognizing the Presidents’ Day holiday, the right-wing congresswoman published a message to Twitter that steered clear of traditional American patriotism. .. At face value, this isn’t especially surprising. Greene has earned a reputation as one of the most radical members of Congress in recent memory. She’s expressed support for violence against Democratic elected officials, and a year ago, the Georgia Republican appeared at a white-nationalist event. The fact that the congresswoman has endorsed a vision in which Americans “separate by red states and blue states” is entirely in line with everything we know about her.
Josiah Mortimer reports on a family's campaign for change at company Bolt
On one side, we have Elon Musk as a critic of fiat money. On the other, we have Ford and Edison—the tech-billionaires of their time—as fans of fiat money. Who do you trust? Neither: you work it out for yourself from first principles. And this is much harder that just ranting about “fiat money” on … Continue reading "When Billionaires Collide"
A conservative vision for America Is there a single term for describing these people? Revanchist? Political Luddite? Social Darwinist? Misanthrope? None of those quite capture it. Sen. Mike Lee (R) of Utah famously told a campaign-stop crowd in 2010, “It will be my objective to phase out Social Security, to pull it up from the roots and get rid of it … Medicare and Medicaid are of the same sort, they need to be pulled up.” Last week, @BasedMikeLee (yes, it’s his personal account) asked, “Until the mid-1930s, the federal government’s footprint didn’t extend much beyond the departments of state, defense, treasury, justice, and interior, along with the postal system. Are we better off with everything we’ve added since then?” His question is rhetorical. But Lee seems to think We collectively are not. We would be better off without Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and a host of other public services that make the United States a place of opportunity that people from around the world want to come to. That’s a problem? Maybe making the U.S.
From the founding, the loudest “believers” never did Josh Marshall finds the Times framing on “fixing” the social safety net wanting: Social Security is not broken. Or bankrupt. Or whatever other doomsaying framing its longtime enemies deploy to trick the public into thinking so. “In about a dozen years,” Marshall tweets, “it will likely require additional revenue – not even that much. When the pentagon needs more revenue we don’t know it’s broken. There are very straightforward ways to provide that revenue – mostly tied to raising or eliminating the cap on payroll taxes. Not complicated.” Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman concurs, Marshall continues. “There are no macroeconomic problems with just adding the additional revenue. None. It’s just whether you think it matters or not or whether tax cuts are more important.” What’s the issue with raising (or eliminating) the cap on payroll taxes? Marshall adds, “It’s a significant hike on anyone who makes much over 250k a year. If you make 5 million in a year it’s a big deal.
There was some polling done in Arizona recently and it’s very interesting: Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) leads Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) and a series of other Republicans in potential match-ups for Arizona’s 2024 Senate race, according to a new poll. The poll from OH Predictive Insights released Thursday showed Gallego leading in eight hypothetical match-ups, four of which against Sinema running independently and four with Gallego facing a Republican in a head-to-head race. The four Republicans included in the poll was former Gov. Doug Ducey, former gubernatorial candidate Karrin Taylor Robson, former gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake and former Senate nominee Blake Masters. In a three-person race, Gallego leads by as little as 5 points in a race with Ducey and as much as 9 points in a race with Masters. He leads by 7 points in the race with Taylor Robson and by 8 points in the race with Lake. He also leads in the two-person match-ups, but the margin varies significantly based on who the Republican candidate is.
It looks like they’re going to try… Each new iteration of wingnut budget “expert” is more extreme than the last. Meet the latest GOP budget guru Russ Vought who now works for a Trump think tank (an oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one) and is the guy who was behind the Freedom Caucus’ extortion of Kevin McCarthy: Vought’s agenda represents a major departure from traditional conservative ideas about balancing the federal budget. Once, former house speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) pushed cuts to Social Security and Medicare, the main drivers of federal spending, as the answer. Vought argues for something different. A Trump acolyte, he echoes the former president’s insistence that the popular federal retirement programs — which go to the middle and upper classes as well as the poor — should be walled off from cuts. Instead, Vought has sold many Republicans on the untested premise that the GOP can push to obliterate almost all other major forms of federal spending, especially programs that benefit lower-income Americans, and dare Biden to stand in the way.
That’s from a twitter thread by Seth Cotler: A dispatch from the same shit, different day files. In 1976 Jon Voight’s great-uncle, a virulent anti-semitic far right propagandist named Joseph Kamp, wrote an article for The Spotlight (published by neo-Nazis) identifying Jimmy Carter as a puppet of radical left “globalists.” That same 1976 newspaper (that was in the possession of Oregon's Walter Huss, a far right activist with neo-Nazi ties who became chair of the OR GOP in 1978) featured this story about how Carter was supposedly going to grab all of your guns. The same 1976 newspaper quoted far right, Christian Reconstructionist theologian R.J. Rushdoony to "prove" that Carter, with his affinity for the Bilderbergers and other "globalists," was a strange (and wrong) kind of Christian. The back page summed it up nicely. Carter is controlled by "a globalist clique" and his main advisor is a beta male who is dominated by his wife but who is also an all-powerful pinko brainwasher. Wouldn't be a far right moral panic without drugs thrown in there somewhere…and as we all know, Carter was totally a cocaine runner who was just running a peanut farm as a front.