As Tom mentioned this morning, Bob Woodward has a new book out and its full of juicy revelations as usual. CNN reports that there’s some good stuff about Biden in it — he calls Netanyahu a “son of a bitch” and a “bad fucking guy” which is actually a relief. At least the “unwavering” support for Israel’s ongoing ultraviolence isn’t based upon Biden’s inexplicable regard for Bibi. Biden has also reportedly said that he regrets naming Garland as AG because of the persecution of Hunter which I think is fair enough (although there are other reasons for wishing there had been a different AG during this period as well.) But it’s the Trump stuff that really grabs: The book also contains new details about Trump’s relationship with the Russian president. In 2020, Woodward writes, Trump had “secretly sent Putin a bunch of Abbott Point of Care Covid test machines for his personal use.” During the height of the pandemic, Russia and the United States did exchange medical equipment such as ventilators.
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Meidas Touch reports: After his VP debate, JD Vance went fishing with a pro-Trump trophy hunter group that publishes kills of endangered animals including pygmy hippos like Moo Deng, the adorable and feisty pygmy hippo baby that has gone viral across the internet. The pro-trophy hunting group, Safari Club International (SCI), organized a fishing trip for Vance in Michigan before recording an interview for the MAGA Republican Ruthless podcast. Phony weirdoJD had this to say about the group: “I think something that people don’t fully appreciate, especially far lefties who pretend to care about the environment, is they assume that these guys just want to take, take, take from the environment. Like they want to kill every animal. They want to get every fish out of the lake and they want to take them home and they don’t think about conservation. When in reality the people who are hunting and fishing they care the most about conservation. They care about the balance I think more than people who never spend any real time in the environment.” He is lying.
Oh look. Here’s Ron DeSantis’s hardcore MAGA spokeswoman discovering that the disinformation culture she has cultivated for years now may not be such a great idea: That stuff is clogging the Twitter sewer right now and the Republican leaders in these disaster area are starting to realize that it’s affecting their own voters. If they’d understood this during COVID, studies show that many lives could have been spared. This is the result of the MAGA death cult exploiting conspiracy theories for their own ends and killing people in the process. For the sake of Florida citizens I hope this time they do not listen.
Did you know it’s illegal to knowingly broadcast false information about a catastrophe, especially if such communications may cause substantial “public harm?” Public harm includes direct & actual damages to people or property & the diversion of law enforcement or public health & safety authorities from their duties. Link to FCC rules on FALSE INFORMATION/BROADCAST HOAXES https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/guides/hoaxes But Elon Musk & X are not regulated by the FCC. So, HOW DO WE STOP THIS? Make it illegal, just like we did for broadcast TV and radio. I know that the internet is not subject to the same laws as broadcast radio & TV. But we can create them. We can use the same criteria that the FCC uses, which will protect people who spread the false information unintentionally. But to just ignore it is to abdicate the need to protect people during this vulnerable time. Dash, on Mastodon pointed out some of the reasons why Musk is getting away with this. He also understood that this is a call for a change @CatDragon @spocko because the internet isn’t subject to the same laws as broadcast tv (so he isn’t breaking the law).
It never was Kamala Harris’s communications team is top notch. Tuesday’s headlines about Donald Trump secretly sending COVID-19 testing equipment to Russian President Vladimir Putin for his personal use (amidst test shortages here) became an attack ad before Harris appeared last night with Stephen Colbert. For those not glued to social media, Harris herself drove home the message on “The Late Show.” Trump thinks Putin is his friend. “What about the American people? They should be your first friend.” Harris responded. Trump has not had a good week. Little Lord Flauntleroy has gotten away his entire life with spouting bald-faced lies. A conman at heart, he trades in bullshit in place of facts he’s never possessed the bandwidth to master. Sychophants — people like Speaker Mike Johnson even — smile and nod and parrot what he says without blinking. But now there’s blood in the water. Even Laura Ingraham of Fox News is fact-checking Trump to his face. He cannot abide being called out for his lies. Unfair. UNFAIR!
Are you Dad enough? To support a woman for president? To choose your own daughter over a felon and adjudged rapist? View this post on Instagram A post shared by Jacob Reed (@typographynerd) The Lincoln Project asks the latter question: Are you Dad enough to choose your own daughter’s safety over a felon and adjudged rapist? Especially if you did in 2016 and 2020? Will you once again vote with a political party that’s made obvious lying company policy? Ugh. After that vid, perhaps a lighter chaser. And finally, a philosophical tool custom-made for the disaster in North Carolina and the one coming to Florida (checks watch) about 2 p.m. CT today. By that, I mean the disinformation maelstrom. Hanlon’s razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. What prompts this citation is an incident a couple of days ago in Burnsville, NC. A North Carolina National Guard (NCNG) Black Hawk helicopter looking to deliver generators could not spy a space large enough and safe enough to set down in the Sav-Mor Foods parking lot.
A standing ovation for this: Trump on how his mass deportation will impact other countries: “We’re bringing them back, and we’re gonna shove them right down their throats.” Trump on how his mass deportation will impact other countries: "We're bringing them back, and we're gonna shove them right down their throat." pic.twitter.com/Zg6FoMrZcP — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 6, 2024 Heil Trump. Do all those Hispanic men who love his guy think they are are immune from this? I don’t think Trump’s cult makes many distinctions when it comes to someone with brown skin and a Latino last name. I hope they watch their backs. If he wins they’re in for a rude surprise.
They will defend disinformation to your death It’s been an article of conservative faith for as long as I can recall that government ought to be run more like a business. On that topic…. A long time ago, in a high school far, far away, a decade before the breakup of Ma Bell, I read a book about corporate rip-offs. It included a tale of a private school bus service in Greensboro or High Point, NC that (IIRC) had a run of burned-out clutches in its fleet of brand new buses. Despite his repeated complaints, the owner kept getting the runaround from the maker’s regional manager who claimed that no other customers had experienced similar problems. This was a lie. The owner had contacted other fleet owners by long distance and letter (remember when this was) and had a file of receipts. Yet the regional manager insisted the breakdowns must have been caused by the service’s drivers. The money quote went something like this: “He was lying to me. I knew he was lying to me. He knew I knew he was lying to me.
Joe Scarborough, former hardcore right winger, dealing with what the GOP has become: “The level of un-American activity that you just saw is stunning. That is un-American. They know they’re lying. Donald Trump knows that’s a lie. He will tell you that the Secret Service, he thought, did the best job they could do. The fact that JD Vance and Trump’s family would out and out say what they said takes the threat of violence, takes the threat beyond where it was even leading up to January the 6th. This is an increasingly desperate person, an increasingly desperate family, who is preparing for civil war. They just are.” He’s not wrong. The desperation is just dripping from the Trump clan.
We’ve known that for years He’s still on this except now instead of touting his own allegedly superior genes he’s condemning immigrants’ allegedly inferior genes: In an interview on “The Hugh Hewitt Show” that aired Monday morning, former President Donald Trump criticized Vice President Kamala Harris for her policies on the southern border and suggested that migrants have “bad genes.” “When you look at the things that she proposes, they’re so far off she has no clue. How about allowing people to come to an open border, 13,000 of which were murderers,” he said, referring to the vice president’s immigration proposals. “Many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States,” he added. “You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now. They left, they had 425,000 people come into our country that shouldn’t be here, that are criminals.” This isn’t the first time that Trump has invoked race science.