Friday, April 30, 2021

After FBI Raids, Rudy Appears On Fox Chanting Conservative Mantra: "Hunter Biden"
Former Guy: "He Does These Things ... And They Raid His Apartment. It’s Like, So Unfair"

Point/Counterpoint
Donald Trump: "Rudy Giuliani Is A Great Patriot"
Michael Cohen: "Rudy Is An Idiot And He Drinks Too Much"

You Say "Making Progress For The Most Vulnerable",
I Say "Allowing (And Enjoying) The Deaths Of 500,000+ Americans"

Remember That Trump's Cybersecurity Adviser Had No Clue How To Unlock His iPhone
(And Repeatedly Butt-Dialed Reporters, Allowing Them To Listen To Him Committing Crimes)

Trump Cultist Mimics Trump's Taking-A-Massive-Dump Sitting Style
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William Kristol (1995): Deriding The Media As Liberal Was "Used As An Excuse By Conservatives For Conservative Failures" (They "Were Never That Powerful")
Patrick Buchanan (1996): "For Heaven Sakes, We Kid About The 'Liberal Media', But Every Republican On Earth Does That"

The idea that the mainstream media is liberal is laughable.

Numerous writers (in print and online) post a never-ending number of examples showing how the coverage at the media outlets derided by right-wingers as liberal is actually quite conservative.

The myth of the liberal mainstream media is one of the biggest and most successful scams of all-time.

Who is calling it a "scam"? Not me.

Some of the most prominent conservative commentators and/or deeply-seated Republicans in recent decades have said that.
There is some strategy to it [bashing the "liberal" media] . . . . If you watch any great coach, what they try to do is "work the refs". Maybe the ref will cut you a little slack on the next one.

Rich Bond, Deputy Chief of Staff to Vice President George H.W. Bush, several positions
at the Republican National Committee under Presidents Ford, Reagan, and George H.W. Bush,
Chairman of the Republican Party (1992-1993) (Washington Post, August 20, 1992, page C1)


There were days and times and events we might have had some complaints [but] on balance I don't think we had anything to complain about.

James Baker, White House Chief of Staff and Secretary of the Treasury under
President Reagan, and White House Chief of Staff and Secretary of State under
President George H.W. Bush (On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency,
by Mark Hertsgaard (1998), page 4)


I've gotten balanced coverage, and broad coverage – all we could have asked. For heaven sakes, we kid about the "liberal media", but every Republican on earth does that.

Patrick Buchanan, White House Communications Director under President Reagan,
assistant and special consultant to Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Reagan,
Republican presidential candidate in 1992 and 1996, Reform Party presidential candidate
in 2000, an original host of CNN's Crossfire (Interview with Los Angeles Times,
March 14, 1996)


I admit it. The liberal media were never that powerful, and the whole thing was often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures.

William Kristol, Chief of Staff to Vice President Quayle, founder and editor-at-large
of The Weekly Standard, current editor-at-large of The Bulwark, founder and director
of Defending Democracy Together, associated with several conservative think tanks,
New Citizenship Project  (Chairman, 1997-2005) and the Project for the New American
Century (Co-founder) (The New Yorker, May 22, 1995)

Kristol proved his point six years later.

In a subscription mailing for The Weekly Standard, his Rupert Murdock-funded magazine, Kristol wrote:

The trouble with politics and political coverage today is that there's too much liberal bias. . . . There's too much tilt toward the left-wing agenda. Too much apology for liberal policy failures. Too much pandering to liberal candidates and causes.

Eric Alterman received this subscription mailing in June 2001 and mentioned it in his 2003 book What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News.

Kristol, 1995: "The liberal media . . . was often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures."

Kristol, 2001: "The trouble with politics . . . is that there's too much liberal bias. . . . Too much apology for liberal policy failures."

* * *

Matt Taibbi, an author and journalist who had written about politics and media, describes Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, published in 1988 by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky as "a dazzling book . . . intellectually flamboyant, wild even".

The book's central idea was that censorship in the United States was not overt, but covert. The stage-managing of public opinion was "normally not accomplished by crude intervention" but by the keeping of "dissent and inconvenient information" outside permitted mental parameters: "within bounds and at the margins."
The key to this deception is that Americans, every day, see vigorous debate going on in the press. This deceives them into thinking propaganda is absent. Manufacturing Consent explains that the debate you're watching is choreographed. The range of argument has been artificially narrowed long before you get to hear it.

This careful sham is accomplished through the constant, arduous policing of a whole range of internal pressure points within the media business. It's a subtle, highly idiosyncratic process that you can stare at for a lifetime and not see. . . .

[I]n a process that is almost 100% unconscious, news companies simply avoid promoting rabble-rousing voices. Advancement is meanwhile strongly encouraged among the credulous, the intellectually unadventurous, and the obedient. . . .

Young reporters learn early on what is and is not permitted behavior. They learn to recognize, almost more by smell than reason, what is and is not a "good story."

Chomsky and Herman described this policing mechanism using the term "flak." Flak was defined as "negative responses to a media statement or program." . . .

What Herman and Chomsky described was a system of informal social control, in which the propaganda aims of the state were constantly reinforced among audiences, using a quantity-over-quality approach.

Here and there you might see a dissenting voice, but the overwhelming institutional power of the media (and the infrastructure of think-tanks and politicians behind the private firms) carried audiences along safely down the middle of a surprisingly narrow political and intellectual canal. . . .
As it turns out, there is a utility in keeping us divided. As people, the more separate we are, the more politically impotent we become.

This is the second stage of the mass media deception originally described in Manufacturing Consent.

First, we're taught to stay within certain bounds, intellectually. Then, we're all herded into separate demographic pens, located along different patches of real estate on the spectrum of permissible thought. . . .

Fake controversies of increasing absurdity have been deployed over and over to keep our audiences from seeing larger problems.

We manufactured fake dissent, to prevent real dissent.

* * *

Matthew Sheffield launched the conservative website NewsBusters in 2005, which complained about "media elites being 'unfair' to conservative views". Sheffield now understands he was not living in journalistic reality and he says that most conservatives believe the purpose of journalism is to wage partisan political warfare, and they fight on a battlefield where facts and reality are irrelevant.

As Jon Ward, Chief National Correspondent at Yahoo, wrote in December 2020:

This dynamic is at play most recently in the move by many Trump supporters to stop watching Fox News because, while it is conservative, it is not slavish enough toward the president. Instead, many Trump supporters are moving toward channels that repeat the president's lies about a stolen election without any scrutiny or standards for fact checking.

Sheffield, in an interview on "The Long Game", a Yahoo News podcast:

If you go to and look at the history of conservative media enterprises that are large scale and exist presently, every single one of them was created to propagate and propagandize for a particular political viewpoint, literally without exception. And that is not the case for just so many mainstream outlets.

Seven of Sheffield's tweets from November 6, 2020:

What I did not realize until I began expanding my work into creating actual media and reporting institutions such as the Washington Examiner (I was the founding online editor) was that U.S. conservatives do not understand the purpose of journalism.

I eventually realized that most people who run right-dominated media outlets see it as their DUTY to be unfair and to favor Republicans because doing so would somehow counteract perceived liberal bias.

While I was enmeshed in the conservative media tradition, I viewed lefty media thinkers . . . as arguing that journalism was supposed to be liberally biased. I was wrong. I realized later that I didn't understand that journalism is supposed to portray reality.

I also discovered as I rose through the right-wing media ranks that most conservative media figures have no journalism training or desire to fact-check their own side. 

[C]onservative-dominated media outlets were MUCH more biased than outlets run by liberals.

Truth for conservative journalists is anything that harms "the left." It doesn't even have to be a fact. Trump's numerous lies about any subject under the sun are thus justified because his deceptions point to a larger truth: that liberals are evil.

Conservatives are willing to believe them [specious claims of voter fraud] even if there is no evidence, simply because anything negative about liberals is true. This mentality extends to the very highest ranks.

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Wednesday, April 28, 2021

FBI Raids Giuliani's Home & Office; Rudy Promises A Live Statement – Then Hides All Day

Rudy Giuliani Promises 'Live Statement' After FBI Raids His NYC Home — Then Is A No-Show

Chris Sommerfeldt, Daily News:

Rudy Giuliani took to Twitter on Wednesday to let it be known that he would appear on his talk radio show later in the day as usual even though the FBI had hours earlier raided his Manhattan home and law firm as part of an ongoing criminal investigation.

"Tune in to WABCradio.com at 3 PM EST for a live statement," the embattled ex-New York mayor-turned-Trump attorney wrote to his more than 1 million followers shortly after 2:30 p.m.

But Giuliani deleted the tweet within minutes, and once the time came for his radio hit, he was nowhere to be seen or heard. . . .

[Giuliani attorney Robert] Costello confirmed the FBI agents came armed with a search warrant focused on Giuliani's alleged "failure to register as a foreign agent" while lobbying the Trump administration on behalf of Ukrainian government officials and oligarchs.

However, Costello claimed his client is innocent and a victim of anti-Trump prosecutors. The Giuliani lawyer failed to mention that the federal investigation into Giuliani was opened while Trump was still president.

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Tuesday, April 27, 2021

Tucker Carlson Urges His Viewers To Harass Children Wearing Masks Or Call Cops/Child Protective Services And Report Their Parents For Abuse (Also: Fox Admits "Biden Bans Beef" Story Is A Total Lie, But Has Not Stopped Promoting (And Whining About) It)

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Friday, April 23, 2021

May 2020: Trump Admin Gave Company $1.3 Billion To Produce Vaccine Syringes.
April 2021: The Company Has Not Even Built Its Production Plant.

The Trump administration awarded a series of contracts worth $1.3 billion to ApiJect Systems Corp., a Connecticut company, to supply an essential syringe for the Covid-19 vaccine rollout.

In a May 2020 statement, ApiJect said it would use the government money to produce 100 million prefilled syringes by the end of 2020 and have the capacity to supply more than 500 million syringes in 2021.

As of late April 2021, zero syringes have been made. None of the 650 jobs promised by the company exist. In fact, the plant in which the syringes would be produced has not even been built. Pretty soon, everyone will be vaccinated and there will be no need for syringes.

Yet another blatant Trump scam.

I wonder how much of that $1,300,000,000 was kicked back to various Trump officials?

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Howard Dean Nails It: The Current Republican Party Mostly Consists of "Racist, Delusional, Neo-Fascist, Whack-Job Nutcases", Some Of Whom Are "Basically A Sentient YouTube Comment Section"

When he's right, he's right.

Howard Dean tells Molly Jong-Fast of The Daily Beast's podcast "The New Abnormal" that the GQP has suffered a total moral collapse (wait a minnit . . . they had morals?) and now is mostly populated with racist neo-fascist nutcases:

I hate to call Republicans right-wing fascists because often they supported me, but this is unrecognizable. They believe in autocracy, not democracy, they are racist. It's just shocking what's happened to the Republican Party. . . .

There are some House Republicans who are basically a sentient YouTube comment section. They have nothing to contribute, frankly, to American politics, except for incendiary and sometimes delusional public statements. . . .

These people are crazy. They're conspiracy theorists, they're whack jobs. They're embedding their own reality. I mean, if they ever really run the country, it's going to be a disaster for us. 'Cause you... this is why autocrats don't run good economies, because they start believing in their own BS. You have a Republican Party, which emotionally, essentially are neo-fascist. They fundamentally do not believe that another legitimate point of view exists other than theirs.

Now . . . HOLD ON RIGHT THERE, Howard!

That's not fair.

They are also the party of sex trafficking, death-worshipping, puppy-drowning, pedophiles.

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Wednesday, April 21, 2021

Older Recordings Of Tucker Carlson Surface: Publicly Supporting Child Rapists & Saying Rape Shield Laws Are "Totally Unfair" (Plus Racist Shit, Of Course)

Meet The 24-Year-Old Who Found The Tucker Carlson Tapes
Eli Rosenberg, Washington Post, March 17, 2019
Madeline Peltz works the night shift at the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters for America. Given the timing of that particular shift, one of her main responsibilities is watching Tucker Carlson's 8 p.m. show on Fox News.

And she's watched a lot of Tucker Carlson. . . .

Peltz dug into his recent past and discovered a trove of appearances he made on shock jock Bubba the Love Sponge's radio show between 2006 and 2011. She found a series of misogynistic, racist and homophobic remarks Carlson made, the audio of which Media Matters published this week.

In response, Carlson was defiant, casting himself as the victim of "the great American outrage machine," a mob of power-seeking organizations and people he says are waging a political war to censor him.

In reality, credit for the tapes' publication is due to Peltz: a 20-something in her first adult job who lives in the basement of a D.C. house she rents with five other people, a few cats and a dog named Noodles. . . .

The organization released the first audio of Carlson on Sunday. In that, Carlson called rape shield laws "totally unfair" and was adamantly supportive of Warren Jeffs, the former leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who is serving a life sentence for child rape. Carlson also said he would "love" a scenario involving young girls sexually experimenting and described women as "extremely primitive."

The next day, Media Matters for America released another audio file just moments after Carlson's show began. In that, Carlson said that white men deserve credit for "creating civilization," called Iraqis a bunch of "semiliterate primitive monkeys," and spoke about his desire for a presidential candidate to blame the "lunatic Muslims who are behaving like animals."

There was more on Tuesday. This time, Carlson could be heard joking about having sex with someone he thought was an underage beauty pageant contestant.

On his Tuesday night show, Carlson . . . took aim at Media Matters, calling it "a George Soros-funded lobbying organization whose sole mission is to punish critics of the Democratic Party." . . .

While Carlson described Media Matters as working to "bully" corporations, it is a fraction of the size of Fox News, whose revenue for 2018 has been estimated to be more than $3 billion. Media Matters has about 80 employees and a budget of about $14 million that mostly comes from private donors, Carusone said. . . .

Carlson has responded by attacking Media Matters for America . . . He has also been engaged in a long-running feud with CNN; on Tuesday he called anchor Brian Stelter a "eunuch" multiple times, name-calling that was omitted from the text of his monologue later posted on the Fox News website. . . .

Peltz said there's no doubt in her mind that Carlson has been trying to "thread the needle of mainstreaming overt white nationalism" while also avoiding the consequences for it. She cited well-publicized instances: when Carlson said in December that immigration was making the country "dirtier," and another segment in which Carlson claimed the South African government was seizing land from white owners, simply because they were white. Carlson has defended that story.

Peltz said she believes the extremism has been escalating.

"It's clear in the editorial choices that he makes that he covers demographic change as basically the end of white people," Peltz said. "As someone with one of the largest platforms in media, he frequently portrays himself as a victim. And that's a long tactic of white nationalists, going back all the way to the civil rights struggle in the South." . . .

Media Matters says it has more material . . .

* * *
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Jimmy Kimmel's Obsession With MyPillow's Mike Lindell

Jimmy Kimmel is obsessed with MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell:

A lot of people said the C.E.O. of a pillow company couldn't successfully launch a major social media site, and those people were 100 percent correct. . . .

He's been going nonstop since 7 o'clock [Tuesday] morning. In 17 hours, he's taken maybe two breaths. At one point he claimed they had 75 million people watching. Even Trump was like, "Oh, please, quit exaggerating." . . .

Lindell, who has countered Dominion Voting Systems' $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit against him with a $1.6 billion lawsuit (he thinks Dominion is stifling free speech), is a uniquely unhinged and compelling slow-motion train wreck, so I understand his obsession.

April 19 ("MyPillow Mike's 48-Hour Yellathon") (starts at 0:00)

 

April 20 ("MyPillow Mike Reacts to Jimmy Kimmel's Monologue") (starts at 1:36)



Kimmel has also done a couple of skits with someone playing Lindell. (Videos below.)

This guy is amazing and needs his own show. Now.

April 8 (starts at 6:40) 

   

April 15 (starts at 6:35) 

 

Lindell also claimed recently Trump will be back in the White House as President in August 2021!

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Tucker Carlson Is Literally Losing His Mind Over Chauvin Verdict, Stating That Punishing A White Man For Casually Murdering A Black Man In Public Is "An Attack On Civilization"

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Monday, April 19, 2021

From The "Good God Above"









Juli Briskman

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Sunday, April 18, 2021

Donald Jr. Posts 9 Photos Showing How Great His Father Was As President (But Most Are Idiotic, Unnatural, Unflattering & Were Used As Memes To Ridicule Him)


* * *
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Friday, April 16, 2021

Seditionist Death Cult Launches "America First Caucus", Dedicated To "Anglo-Saxon Political Traditions", aka White Supremacy, Nazism (Klan Hoods/Robes Optional)

Sarah Churchwell, a professor of American literature and humanities at the University of London, is the author of Behold, America: The Entangled History of "America First" and "the American Dream" (2018). From an interview she did with Vox (here):
It was a Republican campaign slogan in the 1880s, which means it appeared much earlier than most people think. But it didn't become a national catchphrase until President Woodrow Wilson used it in 1915. He was using it to try to keep America out of the first World War. But he was kind of doing a tap dance, because he wanted to placate the isolationists, although he was himself an internationalist. . . . It was ostensibly about maintaining neutrality in the name of leadership.

But then the phrase gets taken up in the name of isolationism almost instantly, and it is quickly connected with other ideas that were also on the rise at the time, especially the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. It became linked to anti-immigration movements, and sympathizers of fascism, and was popularized by Charles Lindbergh, the famous American pilot who lead the "America First Committee" — a group of some 800,000 Americans who wanted to keep us out of WWII.

[So it began as an antiwar isolationist slogan, and then morphed into an explicitly xenophobic and fascist slogan?]

Yeah, and it happened pretty predictably. . . . Put America first, native-born people first. It connects back to the nativism of the 1840s and 1850s, and it sounds broadly anti-immigrant. In a moment where people were very concerned about waves of immigration, which was a big motivating force for the KKK, it was only natural that America First would become a rallying cry for nativists and racists.

[To be clear, who did the America First-ers want to keep out?]

Anybody who's not white, not Protestant, not what they saw as a native-born American, an old-style American. And that was their notion of what America was supposed to be. So America First did have very strong resonances with ideals like "Make America Great Again," which was a phrase that they nearly echoed as well. The idea then, as now, was that the true version of America is the America that looks like me, the American fantasy I imagine existed before it was diluted with other races and other people. America First spoke directly and powerfully to that segment of white America that felt they were losing their power, their dominance. It was a way of saying me first, only my version of America should be allowed to have any sway here. . . .

[Former Trump advisor Steve Bannon] knows this stuff. Bannon has read history, and he uses phrases like "economic nationalism" which were also associated with America First in the 1920s. It's not a coincidence. They chose the phrase "America First" pretty late in the campaign, and it seem pretty deliberate. Donald Trump didn't stumble on it.

Good News
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