ON TONI MORRISON'S BIRTHDAY, FOX COMMENTERS EXPRESS QUITE A BIT OF "ECONOMIC ANXIETY"

Today would have been the 92nd bithday of the Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison, who died in 2019. There's a commemoration of Morrison on the Fox News website that's fairly respectful of the author and her works.

The commenters, however, show a lot less respect:

Only good news she’s dead

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Toni Morrison - never heard of her.

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Yes you have, she sang for The Doors...

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I've always contended that she is more of an affirmative action read. But she is very popular with virtue signalers.

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Only ten more days 'til the end of BHM.

(Black History Month.)

Then we have to hear about gays for a month.

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They should be able to take out at least a hundred more of their "brothers" by then.

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Meanwhile, 90% of people are like....who?

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More like 99.99%.

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No, she was never a 'household name', as stated by the article.

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if she had been, she likely would have been canceled, like Aunt Jemaima!

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You weren't alive during her time. Nor were you alive during slavery. Let's move on, can we?

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Unfortunately, One has to Wonder if She actually Achieved her acclaim do to her Talent or her Skin Color.

Thank The Make Believe People for Equality of Outcome which You Always have to Question Now.

Shalom, My Sista.

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In that one picture she looks similar to Aunt Jemima that was removed from the syrup label because it was demeaning to blacks.

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How can this be?

We are being told and our children taught that white privilege prevents blacks (especially women) from achieving anything in life?

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On this day in history in 1861, Confederate President Jefferson Davis was inaugurated in Montgomery, Alabama.

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A Democrat who started the Civil War set up a concentration camp giving the command to a German immigrant named Wirz. Then when Jeff was captured, he was wearing women's clothing! LOL

It seems the Democrats have not changed that much!

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How about a Swampy Washington Democrat who married a Democrat President's daughter who started the War Between the States. I'd accept that characterization. Aren't you proud that the US Republicans hustled the first Jewish Cabinet secretary in North America out of town forever as a result? Republicans sent the democrat jew Judah Benjamin back to England (where he was elected an MP)?

Oh, so history isn't really your strength?

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When Morrison was about two years old, her family's landlord set fire to the house in which they lived, while they were home, because her parents could not afford to pay rent. Her family responded to what she called this "bizarre form of evil" by laughing at the landlord rather than falling into despair. Morrison later said her family's response demonstrated how to keep your integrity and claim your own life in the face of acts of such "monumental crudeness.

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No source == Lie. Morrison wasn't even old enough to remember this. It's someone else's lie ABOUT her.

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Please provide documented proof of this assertion. Thank you.

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In today's example of "never happened"

(The story appears in a 1993 Washington Post profile of Morrison, in which she doesn't claim to remember the fire, but recalls being told about it. A 2003 New Yorker profile says the home was an apartment.)

Should it be toast or a bagel this am? Toast is good with a good grape jelly but im thinking cream cheese with the bagel. Any thoughts?

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The Philly Cheesesteak is one iconic, tasty sandwich.

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On this day in history my great grandpa had the hiccups.

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,,,I remain hopeful to have a cheese, onion, bacon omelette this morning, if my wife accommodates me.,,.

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Wife?.... Not Baby Mama? How dare you!

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In short, a black woman wrote a book.

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She learned to read and wrote a book.

That’s nice.

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They have to fill Black History Month with something.

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This has been a public service announcement from Woke FoxisDisney

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Yet another oppressed black militant who has fought a lifetime of racism, and yet managed to win a Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize and earned a few million on the side....America is truly the land of opportunity FOR ALL!!

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Has to be kinda embarrassing fir the Africans as this is the best they can come up with to fill the giant void of black history month

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blacks never got to the wheel. what do you expect?

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Quota article?

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When is it OJ's turn for Black History month recognition ?

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The black race trots out these halfies and octoroons and claim some type of accomplishment?

If they are not railhead blue gums, then you have nothing!

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Not my culture.

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blm terrorist month filler material... tomorrow will be a review of morris day and the time...

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Who? Does she know who her daddy is?

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she’s not an american.

I understand that many people don't read literary fiction and don't understand why they should care about it. But I'm reasonably certain that there wouldn't be this kind of nastiness if Fox decided to commemorate the birthday of, say, John Updike.

This is the Republican voter base. Every day these people are told which groups and individuals aren't worthy of being treated as humans, and they've now internalized a very long list of those who are deemed unworthy. We can't reach these people. We can only try to outvote them.

THE REPUBLICAN PLAN TO ENSURE THAT NO ONE WATCHES THE PRIMARY DEBATES

What are these people thinking?

Republican presidential candidates will be blocked from the debate stage this summer if they do not sign a pledge to support the GOP’s ultimate presidential nominee, according to draft language set to be adopted when the Republican National Committee meets next week.

The proposal sets up a potential clash with former President Donald Trump, who has raised the possibility of leaving the Republican Party and launching an independent candidacy if he does not win the GOP nomination outright.

I'm sticking with my prediction that Trump won't run third party -- he'll never put together a team sufficiently competent to get him on all fifty state ballots and he won't want to lose twice in one year. But I think this will cause a problem for the GOP long before the primary voting starts.

It's safe to say that Trump won't sign this pledge. Why should he? Do you think he needs to introduce himself to the American public via the debates?

He'll simply refuse to sign, which means he'll look to his base like a tough guy playing hardball against "the Establishment" or "the Swamp" or whatever he'll call it. This will thrill those voters. It could also mean much lower ratings for the debates. Will people seriously want to watch Larry Hogan trading barbs with Mike Pompeo while Will Hurd raises an index finger and asks to be included in the discussion? Of course not. Who cares about those people? Viewers will want to see the guy who's a no-show. They'll want to see what he has to say to all those also-rans, as well as to Ron DeSantis. Trump knows this. So he'll wait for the party to beg him to debate.

In an August 2015 debate, Trump refused to pledge his support to a nominee other than himself. He signed the pledge the next month, but then abandoned it in March 2016. This time, Trump might not bother to capitulate, even temporarily. He doesn't need the exposure.

So Trump might never participate in a 2024 primary debate. Maybe that's what the party wants, in the vain hope that his absence from the debate stage will cut into his vote. It won't. It will just make him look like a threat to politcal insiders. That's his comfort zone.

LIBELING DOMINION WAS PROBABLY A SHREWD BUSINESS DECISION FOR FOX

Yes, they knew they were lying -- not that it will matter.

In the days and weeks after the 2020 elections, the Fox News Channel repeatedly broadcast false claims that then-President Donald Trump had been cheated of victory.

Off the air, the network's stars, producers and executives expressed contempt for those same conspiracies, calling them "mind-blowingly nuts," "totally off the rails" and "completely bs" - often in far earthier terms.

The network's top primetime stars - Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity - texted contemptuously of the claims in group chats, but also denounced colleagues pointing that out publicly or on television....

Those revelations and far more surfaced in legal filings made public late Thursday afternoon as part of Dominion Voting System's blockbuster $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox and its parent company.

Fox's superstars attacked colleagues who told the truth about the vote because Job #1 at Fox is protecting the brand. Fox's decision to call Arizona for Joe Biden before any other news organization was seen as extremely bad for the brand, as Dominion's brief notes:

... on November 9, the impact of Fox's Arizona call became more evident to Fox executives. Carlson told [Fox News CEO Suzanne] Scott directly: "I've never seen a reaction like this, to any media company. Kills me to watch it." ... Scott immediately relayed the email to Lachlan Murdoch.... She told [Fox senior vice president Irena] Briganti that [D.C. bureau chief Bill] Sammon did not understand the impact to the brand and the arrogance in calling AZ which she found astonishing given that as a top executive it was Sammon's job "to protect the brand." ... And on that day -- "day one," as Scott termed it -- Fox executives made an explicit decision to push narratives to entice their audience back.

The election was the top news story in America for the next two and a half months. The damage to the brand was clear throughout that period -- in January, after Biden's inauguration, it was reported that Fox was only the third most watched cable news channel in the post-election period, behind CNN and MSNBC. But promoting election conspiracies was probably what Fox needed to do to retain enough viewers to mount a comeback early in 2021.

We know how that comeback happened:

Fox News is now on its third segment about "cancel culture" in the last 65 minutes. Beyond parody. pic.twitter.com/6O132TtvQf

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 29, 2020

Fox News has mentioned "critical race theory" nearly 1,300 times in the past 3.5 months -- doubling month over month https://t.co/GUnBC7sb4P pic.twitter.com/w7DmIr9Nr3

— Media Matters (@mmfa) June 15, 2021

Cancel culture, CRT, "grooming," Hunter Biden -- Fox has generated audience-pleasing content since 2021, but election conspiratorialism got Fox through a rough patch with a lot less damage than two and a half months of telling would have caused. Fox was again the most-watched cable channel in 2021. In the spring of 2022, rival One America News Network was dropped by DirecTV, and Newsmax was dropped last month.

The $1.6 billion in damages Dominion is seeking seems like a lot of money, but it's about a month and a half of revenue for Fox Corporation. And there's no reason to believe that Dominion will be awarded this amount or anywhere near it, nor is there any reason to believe that any payout will happen soon.

Fox on-air personalities repeatedly spread lies about the election, and saved Fox's brand. It seems quite possible that the decision to spread these lies made Fox more money than it will ever pay out. The viewers are back. Tucker Carlson is the most politically influential media figure in America. At Fox, life is good. So it was probably worth the cost.

DURING THE NEXT PANDEMIC, WILL THE VACCINES EVEN BE LEGAL?

Republicans are a menace:

Two Idaho lawmakers have introduced a bill to charge those who administer mRNA vaccines with a misdemeanor.

Sen. Tammy Nichols, R-Middleton, and Rep. Judy Boyle, R-Midvale, sponsored HB 154. It was introduced in the House Health & Welfare Committee on Feb. 15 by Nichols. According to the bill text, "A person may not provide or administer a vaccine developed using messenger ribonucleic acid technology for use in an individual or any other mammal in this state."

... Nichols ... later clarified she was referring to the two COVID-19 vaccines, Pfizer and Moderna.

... The bill requires a future vote in the committee to pass onto the House floor for debate.

I don't know Idaho politics, so I don't know whether this bill has a chance of passing. I'm hoping it doesn't -- but even so, its introduction is one more step down a slippery slope.

The bill was introduced the same day Ron DeSantis's handpicked state surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, posted this on the Florida Department of Health website:

The State Surgeon General is notifying the health care sector and public of a substantial increase in Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reports from Florida after the COVID-19 vaccine rollout.

In Florida alone, there was a 1,700% increase in VAERS reports after the release of the COVID-19 vaccine, compared to an increase of 400% in overall vaccine administration for the same time period (Figure 1).

The reporting of life-threatening conditions increased over 4,400%. This is a novel increase and was not seen during the 2009 H1N1 vaccination campaign.

Well, of course there wasn't a big increase in reports of adverse effects during the 2009 H1N1 vaccination campaign, for two reasons: (1) H1N1 wasn't a life-altering event for most Americans, so many of us never got vaccinated, and (2) there wasn't a massive anti-vaccine propaganda campiagn in 2009 led by first-tier right-wing pundits and "experts."

It's important to remember that anyone can report an adverse reaction to VAERS, including people waith political agendas who haven't actually experienced ill effects. The reporting system was set up in the hope that people would honestly report ill effects they'd had following vaccinations; some might be unrelated, but others might be worth investigating, especially if a number of people reported the same adverse effects. But as the website of the school of public health at Johns Hopkins notes,

Anti-vaccination fringe groups have attempted to spin false stories using VAERS data, adding to misinformation about the safety of COVID-19 vaccinations....

VAERS is a publicly available, searchable database of reports that have not been verified. It simply contains whatever people have voluntarily reported. Moreover, the CDC and FDA do not restrict what people can report, as long as it happened at some point following a vaccination.

That means events that happen even years later and have no obvious connection to a vaccine, such as feelings of anger, end up reported in the system, says [Dr. Kawsar] Talaat [of the Institute for Vaccine Safety]. “It’s very open and public and searchable. Since it’s so transparent, people don’t really understand what it’s for. They think it’s things that are vetted and have causal relationships with the vaccine.”

Dr. Ladapo cites VAERS data as if he's one of the people who believe VAERS reports are vetted. Undoubtedly he knows better and is simply citing the data because he doesn't like the mRNA COVID vaccines and sees the VAERS reports as an effective propaganda tool.

Please note that if Ron DeSantis is elected president, Ladapo will probably be named America's surgeon general, or given another prominent position in the federal government.

I'm looking at these stories back to back and I'm wondering what will happen if there's a new pandemic during a DeSantis presidency, especially if Republicans control both houses of Congress. Complete GOP control is quite possible after the 2024 election -- and we might soon face another pandemic, possibly bird flu, as Zeynep Tufekci recently noted:

This pathogen, especially the H5N1 strain, hasn’t often infected humans, but when it has, 56 percent of those known to have contracted it have died....

The virus, which has long caused outbreaks among poultry, is infecting more and more migratory birds, allowing it to spread more widely, even to various mammals, raising the risk that a new variant could spread to and among people.

Alarmingly, it was recently reported that a mutant H5N1 strain was not only infecting minks at a fur farm in Spain but also most likely spreading among them, unprecedented among mammals. Even worse, the mink’s upper respiratory tract is exceptionally well suited to act as a conduit to humans, Thomas Peacock, a virologist who has studied avian influenza, told me.

If this happens, what kind of vaccines might become available? Every available flu vaccine except one needs to be incubated in an egg -- a problem when the flu itself threatens the health of poultry. One possible alternative, according to Tufekci:

The mRNA-based platforms used to make two of the Covid vaccines ... don’t depend on eggs. Scott Hensley, an influenza expert at the University of Pennsylvania, told me that those vaccines can be mass-produced faster, in as little as three months. There are currently no approved mRNA vaccines for influenza, but efforts to make one should be expedited.

Sooner or later, we're likely to face a public health crisis for which the best response is an mRNA vaccine. But I don't know whether Republicans will ever allow another mRNA vaccine to be distributed in America. Republicans are in a banning mood these days -- surgical abortion, abortion pills, CRT, ESG, medical care for trans people, drag queen story hours. I don't think it's crazy to imagines that mRNA vaccines will be next -- nationwide.

IS TRUMP TELLING REPUBLICANS TO COMMIT VOTER FRAUD?

The Wall Street Journal reports that Donald Trump "is having a change of heart" on mail voting:

His team is studying state laws governing absentee and mail-in voting as well as ballot collection, called “ballot harvesting” by critics, in which third parties gather and turn in votes....

Mr. Trump highlighted the move in a fundraising email this week, saying, “The radical Democrats have used ballot harvesting to cancel out YOUR vote and walk away with elections that they NEVER should have won. But I’m doing something HUGE to fight back.”

The email added, “Our path forward is to MASTER the Democrats’ own game of harvesting ballots in every state we can. But that also means we need to start laying the foundation for victory RIGHT NOW.”

In December, Mr. Trump told Breitbart News that the GOP has no choice but to “live with the system that stinks,” while maintaining “a mail-in ballot will always be corrupt” and that Republicans should seek to change laws.

Trump is describing methods of voting that Democrats and independents, as well as a smaller number of Republicans, use legally and honestly -- but he's addressing a crowd that thinks Democrats use them to cheat. His audience believes that Democratic "mules" stuff dropboxes with ballots cast in the name of illegally registered voters, or dead people who should have been dropped from the rolls years ago, or legitimate voters who have no idea that votes for Democrats are being cast in their names.

Quite a few Republicans have been caught committing voter fraud in recent years, some of whom claim that Democratic election fraud is widespread. The percentage of GOP voters who believe that Democrats cheat in every contested election is large. So many Republicans are likely to believe that the only way they can win is to cheat themselves.

We know that Trump cares only about winning -- preserving democracy isn't important to him. So he'd be happy to win in 2024 as a result of election fraud, as long as the fraudsters get away with it.

So yes, I think he's telling GOP voters to cheat. And I think that's how they're interpreting the message. I don't how many of them will try to cheat, and I don't know how many will manage to cheat waithout getting caught. But I think we can safely predict a serious uptick in attempted ballot box stuffing by Republicans in 2024.

HALEY WON'T WIN PRIMARY VOTES BY ATTACKING TRUMP ON NORTH KOREA, EVEN IF HE DESERVES IT

This should be a way for Nikki Haley to discredit Donald Trump, but it won't work:

When Nikki Haley opens her presidential campaign on Wednesday she will be joined by Cindy Warmbier, whose son died days after he was released from North Korean prison in 2017....

Warmbier credits Haley with giving her the strength to continue fighting against the North Korean regime after the death of her 22-year-old son, Otto....

Warmbier had admired Haley’s determination when it came to North Korea sanctions and asked for the meeting when she was in Washington, DC, for then-President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address.

“It took someone like Nikki Haley to light the fire under me,” Warmbier said in an exclusive interview with CNN. “She took me out of that survival mode and put me in a fighter mode.”

This is clearly meant to draw attention to Trump's mancrush on Kim Jong-un, although Haley and Mrs. Warmbier avoid mentioning Trump's name. In February 2019, a few months after she left her job as UN ambassador, Haley publicly disagreed with Trump about Kim:

President Trump has criticized North Korea's role in Warmbier's death in the past. But since he began building his reputation as a diplomat and dealmaker on his budding relationship with North Korea's Kim, his rhetoric has changed dramatically.

... after a meeting with Kim in Vietnam ended abruptly without a deal, the president said that he believed the North Korean strongman when he says he was not responsible for the young American's death.

"He tells me he didn't know about it, and I take him at his word," Trump said of Kim during the press conference. "I don't believe he would have allowed that to happen…. It just wasn't to his advantage to allow that to happen."

Haley responded:

Americans know the cruelty that was placed on Otto Warmbier by the North Korean regime. Our hearts are with the Warmbier family for their strength and courage. We will never forget Otto. ❤️🇺🇸

— Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) February 28, 2019

But it doesn't matter. Voters who like Trump -- even voters who used to like Trump but now think Ron DeSantis or some other candidate would be more electable -- aren't ready to say Trump's approach to North Korea was bad. They like to think of him as having been the tough guy who was never pushed around by any foreign leader. There's no reason to think that they'll allow the facts to change their mind.

Republicans have been this way for years. They saw Ronald Reagan as a tough guy who stood up to global bad guys, so they ignore terrorist attacks on Americans in Lebanon, and shrug off Iran-Contra. They regard him as fiscally prudent, so they don't allow themselves to think about the massive budget deficits he ran up. They hate immigration, so they choose to ignore the fact that he was the last president to offer amnesty to immigrants who were in the country illegally.

Republican voters don't want to believe that Trump, a man they voted for twice, allowed himself to be pushed around by a commie dictator. In their eyes, that would make him a Democrat! So they'll keep telling themselves that he was tough and there was nothing wrong with his response to the Warmbier case. No one wants to admit being deceived by a fraud, so they'll ignore the obvious fraudulence of Trump's toughness.

REPORTERS ARE SUPPOSED TO MAKE (GOP) POLITICIANS FEEL COMFORTABLE, SAY FOX NEWS AND TEAM DeSANTIS (BUT I REPEAT MYSELF)

DeSantis World isn't even pretending that it believes in a free press, and Fox News thinks that's just fine:

A local reporter in Florida was caught on a hot mic saying her job is to make Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis "uncomfortable."

During a livestream of an event attended by DeSantis in Jacksonville, First Coast News reporter Atyia Collins was heard chatting with someone about her role at the press conference.

"No my job is to ask the tough questions and make him uncomfortable I guess," Collins said.

The reporter is correct. In a country with a free press, journalists are supposed to ask questions the powerful would rather not answer.

Later on in the exchange, Collins spoke about how her web manager urged her to "just run up to him" as he gets off the stage and "just yell questions at him," something she did not believe would work.

"He already doesn't like the media," Collins is heard saying.

DeSantis rapid response director Christina Pushaw called out the "journactivist" on Twitter.

For a little more than a year, Pushaw was DeSantis's gubernatorial press secretary, but what that really meant was that she was a Twitter troll paid by Florida taxpayers to agitate on DeSantis's behalf. She later became the director of rapid response for DeSantis's reelection campaign -- that's the most recent job on her LinkedIn page. She hasn't found another job or been rehired by the governor's office, which means that a presidential campaign is imminent and she'll be the spokesperson for that as well. She's clearly still flacking for DeSantis. Here's what she tweeted about this reporter:

For reference, this is the journactivist today: pic.twitter.com/A6J0cRIil6

— Christina Pushaw 🐊 🇺🇸 (@ChristinaPushaw) February 14, 2023

Pushaw has been trying to make the word "journactivist" happen, presumably because "fake news" is identified with Trump and "Lügenpresse" is associated with ... well, you know. It's an ugly, cumbersome word, but Pushaw has more than a quarter million Twitter followers, so it's catching on a bit.

When you define anyone who asks you tough questions as not really a journalist, all while freezing out journalists who might be adversarial and working hand in glove with (and helping to create) an ecosystem of friendly media partisans, you're a lot more dangerous than Trump, who said "fake news" a lot but also spent a lot of time talking to Maggie Haberman, Bob Woodward, and other alleged enemies.

DeSantis also made clear last week that he'd like to make it much easier for politicians to sue journalists for libel, a goal Trump also talked about but DeSantis actually seems to know how to accomplish:

... Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida convened a round-table discussion about the news media....

Over the course of an hour, Mr. DeSantis and his guests laid out a detailed case for revisiting a landmark Supreme Court decision protecting the press from defamation lawsuits.

Mr. DeSantis is the latest figure, and among the most influential, to join a growing list of Republicans calling on the court to revisit the 1964 ruling, known as The New York Times Company v. Sullivan.

The decision set a higher bar for defamation lawsuits involving public figures, and for years it was viewed as sacrosanct. That standard has empowered journalists to investigate and criticize public figures without fear that an unintentional error will result in crippling financial penalties.

But emboldened by the Supreme Court’s recent willingness to overturn longstanding precedent, conservative lawyers, judges, legal scholars and politicians have been leading a charge to review the decision and either narrow it or overturn it entirely....

“How did it get to be this doctrine that has had really profound effects on society?” he said at the event, which featured two libel lawyers known for suing news organizations and a conservative scholar who recently published an essay titled “Overturn New York Times v. Sullivan.”

Portions of this took place before a backdrop that was a tad Orwellian....

The Alito court is probably coming for Sullivan no matter who wins the presidential election, so maybe DeSantis isn't the person we need to worry about. But he's setting a new standard for illiberalism. He wants to destroy what he calls "the legacy media." We'll get scarily close to that goal if he's president.

CALLING IT NOW: NIKKI HALEY WON'T EVEN BE A RUNNING MATE

What does Nikki Haley think she's doing? What Republican electorate does she imagine will respond positively to this?



Haley alienates the typical Republican voter from the very beginning of the video. Over an image of her hometown, she says:

The railroad tracks divided the town by race. I was the proud daughter of Indian immigrants. Not Black, not white, I was different.

She goes on to say that her parents told her to focus on similarities rather than differences, and said that America is a great country -- but the damage is already done. Right-wingers hate being told that institutional racism has existed in America within living memory. They regularly say, "Why does everything have to be about race?" Right up front in this video, as Republican voters will see it, "everything" is "about race."

Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark says that Haley comes off as the perfect Republican presidential candidate for 2015. But 2015 was when Trump began his presidential campaign with an explicitly racist speech that put him in first place in GOP opinion polls. I'd say maybe she's the perfect GOP candidate for the 2000 campaign, which was won by a candidate who sold himself as a Spanish-speaking "compassionate conservative" -- except that it's hard to imagine a woman of South Asian descent winning then. (That year, John McCain was the victim of a smear campaign in Haley's home state when rumors spread that he'd fathered a Black child; the truth was that he and his wife had adopted a daughter born in Bangladesh.) It's really hard to imagine any moment when GOP primary voters might have embraced Haley.

The next part of the video has some red meat for the base. Over images of right-wing voters' enemies (the 1619 Project, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), Haley says:

Some look at our past as evidence that America's founding principles are bad. They say the promise of freedom is just made up. Some think our ideas are not just wrong, but racist and evil. Nothing could be further from the truth.

"I have seen evil," she says -- and then cites genocide in China and the killings of protesters in Iran, adding,

And when a woman tells you about watching soldiers throw her baby into a fire, it puts things in perspective.

This is Haley sending the kind of signal a late-twentieth-century presidential candidate might have sent: I have foreign policy experience! I have foreign policy experience! But GOP voters don't care. Trump had no foreign policy experience in 2016 and it didn't matter to them. Also, GOP voters want to be told about the evil being done to people like themselves. What about the fascist Democrats right here in America? What about the global persecution of Christians? (Republicans believe that Christians are the most persecuted people on earth, with the possible exception of white conservatives on the Internet.)

From there Haley talks at length about how awesome life was in South Carolina when she was governor, which is fine but lacks the zing of Ron DeSantis's life in Florida is amazingly great while everyone else in the country lives in the lowest circle of Hell, thanks to wokeness.

At the 1:55 mark, Haley says:

And when evil did come, we turned away from fear toward God and the values that still make our country the freest and the greatest in the world.

She's talking about the 2015 mass shooting by a white supremacist at a Black church in Charleston. She doesn't mention her decision to remove the Confederate battle flag from the statehouse grounds under pressure from anti-racism activists. In fact, she doesn't mention the nature of the "evil" deed at all. (Voiceovers from news broadcasts are edited to omit references to the victims' race and the shooter's race and ideology.) She's trying to have it both ways. But just alluding to a racist murder -- race again! -- will alienate GOP voters, who'll see her as trying to curry favor with liberals.

Then Haley talks about how the GOP has been faring in elections:

Republicans have lost the popular vote in seven out of the last eight presidential elections. That has to change.

But Republican voters don't believe this. They believe that when Democrats win, it's because they cheat.

There's an effort to equate Democrats with foreign adversaries that might connect with Republican voters a bit:

Some people look at America and see vulnerability. The socialist left sees an opportunity to rewrite history. China and Russia are on the march. They all think we can be bullied -- kicked around.

This is the closest Haley comes to modern Republican thinking. She says this while we see images of Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Bernie Sanders, alternating with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.

But that leads to:

You should know this about me: I don't put up with bullies. And when you kick back, it hurts them more if you're wearing heels.

Everyone tells me that Ron DeSantis can't win the nomination, much less the general election, because his personality is too unpleasant. But here's Haley trying to be cheeky and personable, and succeeding to some extent -- and it falls flat. She doesn't really seem like someone who fights her enemies and relishes the fight. DeSantis looks as if he hates his enemies and genuinely wants to hurt them. Trump too. That's why they're the two top contenders. Haley comes off as a people-pleaser who's just pretending to be a fighter.

And also, of course, pundits see the reference to "bullies" as a coded attack on Trump, but it's so coded that it hardly seems to be about Trump at all.

Haley can't win the presidential nomination, but I don't think either Trump or DeSantis will want a running mate who concedes any arguments to liberals or moderates, such as agreeing that white racism continues to exist, or that Republicans might be off-putting to many swing voters. They also won't want a running mate who's half-hearted about the culture wars. So she won't be on the ticket in 2024.

YOU MUST HAVE THESE PEOPLE CONFUSED WITH SOME OTHER REPUBLICAN PARTY

New York magazine's Ed Kilgore recognizes that Senator Tim Scott's presidential campaign is highly unlikely to lead to the nomination:

... in a field of candidates implicitly and explicitly promising to usher in a glorious post-Trump future for the GOP, Scott will need an ideological identity that goes beyond legitimizing his party’s “color-blind” racial policies....

The two distinctive policy ideas that Scott is most associated with are ... tax preferences for private capital investments in low-income areas and “school choice.” ... Scott’s going to need something a little more novel than promoting these chestnuts that virtually all Republicans support anyway.

But as the usually astute Kilgore strains to imagine how a Scott campaign could succeed, he loses his grip on reality:

One of Scott’s best assets in what could be a vicious primary season dominated by Trump and DeSantis is his sunny disposition.

“He truly believes that God is great and America is great and we are provided with incredible opportunities. So I think a Ronald Reagan ‘Morning in America’ hopeful America vision is one that Tim has, lives and breathes and is really needed in our country,” Republican senator John Barrasso told the [Wall Street] Journal.

It’s possible Republicans could grow sick of nuclear exchanges that drive up the negatives of the big-time candidates and hurt the party as well. Scott could catch on as the beneficiary of a murder-suicide scenario involving the equally saturnine Floridians Trump and DeSantis.

Ed, just stop. Republican voters don't want "sunny." It's questionable whether they even wanted "sunny" in the Reagan years. (Right-wingers didn't use the phrase "own the libs" back then, but that's what they thought Reagan did, and that's what they liked. His attacks on Democrats, liberals, and government may have come with a wink and a smile, but they were meant to sting, and his policies were meant to make us howl.)

If Republicans somehow reject the two leading nasty people in the race, or if the two of them exit the race early, or stay out altogether -- all extremely unlikely scenarios -- then the GOP base will be desperate to find someone who's equally nasty. Maybe Mike Pompeo can fill that role, or maybe there'll be a late entry by Mike Flynn or Mike Lindell, Steve Bannon or Stephen Miller, or Donald Trump Jr.

Or maybe it'll be the person who's the subject of the lead story at the Fox News website right now:

A photo of former Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake attending Super Bowl LVII has gone viral, but for reasons you might not expect.

The former news anchor turned GOP firebrand was seen sitting during the controversial playing of the Black national anthem ahead of the game, which took place Sunday at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona.

A photo of her refusing to stand for the anthem was posted on social media and quickly sparked a frenzy of people praising her decision.

"Never been easier to be a hero these days," wrote one user responding to the photo of Lake seated during the song.

Another Twitter user stated: "Good for her. No one should support this. It was created to divide the country."

"I’m just here for THE National Anthem," Lake responded to one Twitter post about the photo.

Lake is a failed candidate who lost a winnable race, but she's the center of what Fox considers the most important story of the moment -- because she's disrespecting this song. And she's being cheered for this.

Given the specifics of this story, it's hilarious that anyone thinks a Black senator could win the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. And it's hilarious that anyone thinks being positive and upbeat can win it for anyone. GOP voters love divisiveness. They love darkness and "saturnine" politicians. That's how they'll vote in 2024 even if they don't vote for Trump or DeSantis.

TRUMP CALLS DeSANTIS "MEATBALL RON" BECAUSE "GOOMBAH RON" WOULD CONFUSE IOWANS

Michael Bender and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times seem to be too posh to understand one of Donald Trump's insult nicknames for Ron DeSantis:

Since November, despite the criticism he faced at the time, Mr. Trump has periodically hit out at his potential rival.... he has insulted Mr. DeSantis in casual conversations, describing him as “Meatball Ron,” an apparent dig at his appearance....

I'm pretty sure DeSantis's appearance is not the point of the nickname.

Sure, Urban Dictionary's definitions of "meatball" include some references to appearance ("fat narcissist, especially one prone to deception and theft"; "A fat Bitch who can't jump"), as well as intelligence and savvy ("Noun: Usually applied to persons of evidencing a lack of common sense"; "Meatball is a term to describe a rather dumb person. We all know the kind of people who never get the joke when its told. That is a meatball and they usually lack common sense"). But then there's this definition:

a miserable, short italian kid who always thinks hes right

"Meatball" was also a term used by some of the women on MTV's Jersey Shore to refer to themselves. (Urban Dictionary: "a girl who is very short, under 5 ft 1, thick, with a big ass and boobs to match. She is always a blast to be around and knows how to party! Made popular by Snooki and Deena." Snooki, who was born in Chile but was adopted by an Italian-American family, said she would have endorsed Trump if he'd run for president in 2012, then appeared on the post-Trump Celebrity Apprentice in 2016.) At the Racial Slur Database, "meatball" is listed as a slur referring to Italians ("Self-explanatory"). And in The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, "meatball" is defined as "a dim-witted, gullible person," but one example of its use is from the 1988 crime novel Shakedown by Gerald Petievich, best known as the author of To Live and Die in L.A.:

I'm pretty sure that's not just a generic insult.

Trump grew up in a city that was very conscious of ethnic tribes. We know he still sees the world the way he saw it when he was a young man working alongside his racist father. A recent news story noted that Mary Trump, Donald's niece, told Rachel Maddow in 2020 that residents of Jamaica Estates, the neighborhood where the former president grew up, were "scandalized when 'the first Italian family moved in.'"

So, yeah, maybe I'm hypersensitive because I'm also of Italian descent, but I think this is about DeSantis's ethnic background. Bender and Haberman should have suggested that possibility, too. But letting Trump give the nickname a soft launch in the nation's Paper of Record is excellent journalisming, isn't it, Maggie?

HOW TO WRITE A RON DeSANTIS PUFF PIECE WITHOUT THE ICKY RON DeSANTIS PART

Right-wingers love Ron DeSantis for his nastiness and cruelty, but how do you promote him to moderate voters who might believe that a politician should have skills other than owning the libs in as sadistic a manner as possible? Since DeSantis (a) has no other skills and (b) has committed himself to lib-owning so fully that it suffuses all aspects of his very unpleasant personality, I guess you have sell him the way Charles Gasparino does in this New York Post column -- by excluding him from the sales pitch entirely.

Gasparino begins with several paragraphs of Biden-is-a-senile-old-coot boilerplate, followed by a swipe at Donald Trump ("another old dude who offers up his own set of personal baggage so large, we don’t have room in this column to describe it"). Then he writes:

And yet there is a ray of hope — sunshine, to be precise — beaming down south in Florida. If you want to see the American experiment flourish, spend a few days down there, particularly in the melting pot known as Miami, as I recently did.

Gasparino continues:

Florida is more than just Disney World and orange groves these days. Big tech, Wall Street, crypto, hospitality and amazing restaurants are the state’s — and city’s — lifeblood.

I like how he throws "hospitality" in there, as if there was no tourism in Florida until DeSantis was inaugurated in 2019. (My parents honeymooned there -- in 1954.)

So are the people who are arriving, many of them immigrants, a lot of them transplanted northerners, all of them seeking opportunity that statists like Joe Biden have been discouraging for decades.

So these immigrants left countries where Joe Biden isn't the head of state and came to the country where he is head of state ... to avoid his policies?

Again, spend some time talking to these strivers as I did. They’re grinders. Not just the brokers and bankers, but the people who work during the day in restaurants, then drive an Uber at night.

That actually sounds pretty hellish. It also sounds exactly like the lives of hundreds of thousands of immigrants residing in Brooklyn and Queens.

My cabdriver told me how he’s a first-generation Cuban American. His family came to Miami in the 1970s.

And he's still just a cabdriver? Even though the streets are paved with gold in Florida?

The now-glitzy South Beach area was largely a “dump,” as he put it. No longer, he proudly explained as we passed a booming stretch of restaurants and high-end fashion shops that employ the locals and give them a chance at a better life.

The South Beach revival was well established when I visited in 1997, which would have been a few months after DeSantis graduated from high school. I don't think he gets the credit.

At a restaurant, I was served by a waiter from Italy, who escaped the stifling economy of the southern region known as the “Mezzogiorno.” He left some years ago and by the sound of it, he’s never going back because he can actually make a decent living here without paying off the local Mafia boss.

So now Biden is responsible for poverty and organized crime in Italy? For a doddering old dementia case, he gets around.

I touched base with a friend of mine, a local born in Cuba who came here and made it pretty big as a bond salesman. Before talking business, he gave me a tour of Little Havana. We had lunch of arroz con pollo at the amazing Versailles Restaurant....

Which has been in business since 1971, despite the fact that Florida was an unlivable hellscape until Ron DeSantis became governor in 2019.

... the downtown business district, which back in the 1990s looked like a ghost town in the middle of the day, is bustling with financiers. New construction of luxury high-rises and office buildings is seemingly everywhere.

I hate to admit it, but Gasparino is right. Even the liberal New York Times acknowledges this! Here's a Times story headlined "Downtown Miami in Midst of a Building Boom." (Oh, wait -- it's from 2006.)

Of course, Miami and Florida aren’t utopia; drugs, gangs, fentanyl, illegal immigration, homelessness, they’re all here. So is Florida Man. But people don’t come here for utopia. They come for the chance that Sleepy Joe won’t give them.

Even though Biden is president of all fifty states, including Florida.

DeSantis is completely absent from this puff piece. Maybe that's because the governor was too busy collaborating with newly created right-wing propaganda sites to give an interview even to a Murdoch-media fanboy. Or maybe it's because Gasparino knows that describing DeSantis's actual approach to governing -- or his approach to any kind of human interaction, for that matter -- would alienate the Post's readers, many of whom aren't right-wing ideologues.

I continue to believe that DeSantis would be a strong candidate in 2024 -- Republicans will close ranks around him, the "liberal" media will treat him with kid gloves while bashing Biden, and many low-information swing voters who are dissatisfied with the state of the country will just shrug and say, "Let's give someone new a chance." But he's a profoundly unlikable person, which means his campaign staff -- which includes all of the Murdoch media -- will have to create the DeSantis equivalent of 1968's "new Nixon," someone who's really not that bad a guy once you get to know him. But with DeSantis, that might be impossible. Maybe this is the best they can do.