Another debunking years later One of the most infuriating aspects of the right-wing Contract On America is how obvious the cons are. No, that’s not it, either. It’s that we, the reality-based community, dumbly play along as if there’s some factual basis behind them. The collective We give “the miners, and sappers–of returning despotism” the benefit of the doubt. Like parents with a toddler still trying to grasp object permanence, we play along when the child acts as though the red ball we’ve palmed has ceased to exist. So, too, with the right’s allegations of election fraud that time and again prove to be the actual fraud. Why? Because it would be bad form to call out the infant-like credulity of diner-dwelling Real Americans™? Or impolite to brand them liars and cheats and unAmerican, even if justly deserved? The tactic: Lob a “voter fraud” smoke grenade into the news cycle and shout fire. The “news” compliantly plays along, front-paging the false story.
Uncategorized
The Devil didn’t go down to Georgia MSNBC just reported jury selection for Donald “91 Counts” Trump’s trial in Manhattan on hush money payments will begin March 25. Washington Post: Former president Donald Trump is in a Manhattan courtroom Thursday for a hearing in one of his criminal cases, while a hearing in a different case is held in Atlanta. In New York, a judge ordered jury selection to begin on March 25 in Trump’s trial related to 2016 hush money payments. The judge also denied a motion to dismiss the case. The Atlanta hearing centers on allegations that Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis (D) engaged in an improper relationship with a special prosecutor she named to lead the case. In Manhattan, Trump faces “34 counts of falsifying business records connected with alleged hush money payments made to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential campaign.” Trump is in the courtroom now. In the Georgia case, Trump and others were charged with conspiring to overturn the 2020 presidential election results there.
I will be shocked if Maryland sends Hogan to the Senate. He was a popular governor but his time has passed. I’m not even sure he can get Republican votes since the rural areas are very MAGA and he’ll have to separate himself very strongly from Trump. It’s a blue state and I think Democratic voters understand the stakes this time. I hope …
One of the more frustrating aspects of this “But He’s Old!” theme that the media has made into this year’s “But Her Emails!” is the fact that Biden is not slipping and we know this because he’s always been gaffe prone. It’s his personality, not his age. I suppose if people really don’t like that about him, that’s legitimate, but then they are back to square one deciding if this guy is the better choice: “When I say that Obama is the president of our country they go: ‘He doesn’t know that it’s Biden! He doesn’t know,’” Trump said Wednesday. “So it’s very hard to be sarcastic.” He went on to say: “I’m not a Nikki fan and I’m not a Pelosi fan, and I when I purposely interpose names, they said: ‘He didn’t know Pelosi from Nikki, from tricky Nikki.’” “I interpose [the names], and they make a big deal out of it,” Trump said. “I said: ‘No, no, I think they both stink. They have something in common—they both stink,’” he added.
This was ultimately what they expected to happen. They wanted the real winners of the election to riot so they could justify calling for the Insurrection Act and put the military on the streets of America. That’s what Trump meant when he said that he pre-authorized the Department of Defense to be prepared to deploy troops in DC in the days before the Insurrection. And, in fact, that’s what Trump and Steven Miller are planning to do in the second term except this time they plan to use immigration as their excuse. They just want to use the military against Americans one way or another. There is no doubt that he will do it this time.
The book banning isn’t going well. Ron is now seeking some adjustments. Seems some members of his anti-woke mob are out of control. Here he is today: “With objecting – if you go to a school board meeting objecting. If you have a kid in school, okay. But if you’re somebody who doesn’t have a kid in school and you’re gonna object to 100 books? No, I don’t think that’s appropriate. So I think the legislature is interested in limiting what the number of challenges you can do, and maybe making it be contingent on whether you actually have kids in school or not. We just want to make sure we’re not trying to incentivize frivolous objections or any type of games being played.” Who could have ever predicted?
Guess what? The Biden administration is meeting its commitment to under served communities There was a bit of a brouhaha on Xitter in the last couple of days when an economic reporter for the NY Times posted that his friends in Brooklyn didn’t know about Biden’s economic successes and when confronted with the fact that the media bore some responsibility for that he fired back that he isn’t the Biden administration’s PR company. Let’s just say it wasn’t well received. Apparently, Biden hasn’t been entertaining enough for them to cover it. He needs to up his “PR” so the news media will feel it’s important to cover it. Having said that, here’s a shout out to Axios for reporting this, which I did not know before: There’s an unprecedented building boom underway in America. With it has come a less-noticed phenomenon: a surge of investment into communities left behind in the last economic expansion. Why it matters: Poorer counties with lower employment rates have attracted a large share of the hundreds of billions of dollars allocated for clean energy projects, semiconductor mega-factories and more.
They counted on MAGA to be stupid. Always a smart bet. This is an interesting tick-tock of the Border/Foreign Aid bill from the NY Times. (Gift link, here) It starts off recounting how the Republicans thought they could back the Dems into a corner by demanding a border component to Ukraine funding which they knew was vitally important to the White House. The Democrats decided that they would call their bluff and negotiate a border bill and one that would be seen as credible by serious border hawks. But they were not surprised when the Republicans balk: The possibility that Republicans would bolt from their own deal had occurred to Mr. Schumer from the start, given his previous experience. “We knew it way back then,” he said. But Mr. Schumer saw a political upside should that occur: Democrats would be able to say they tried and point to the Republican opposition for failing to halt a surge of migrants illegally crossing the U.S. border with Mexico. “It’s a win if Republicans abandon us at the last minute,” Mr.
Lara finally gets her star turn Poor RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel. Nobody has debased and humiliated herself more chasing the approval of Donald Trump, even going so far as to change her name from Romney McDaniel to just McDaniel because Trump despises her uncle Mitt. But it didn’t really do her any good in the end because like so many others before her, loyalty and Trump are a one way street and he has decided that he’s done with her. In some ways you can’t blame him.The RNC is a mess. The Federal Election Commission released its year end fundraising reports and they showed that the RNC had its worst fundraising year since 2013 only managing to take in $87.2 million in 2023. According to Fox News, “if adjusted for inflation, the RNC’s fundraising was last this low in 1993 — before the 2002 McCain Feingold Act restricted political committee fundraising from corporations and capped donations from individuals.” They started off this year with just $8 million in cash. That’s bad. To make matters worse, the Democrats raised three times as much last year and are rolling in the dough.
Lol. The greatest sore loser in the history of the world has a few words: You really have to wonder when the wingnuts are going to get tired of this. Ever? Or are they so brainwashed they’ll never learn?