Talk to the Organ Grinder...

...Not the Monkey.

From CBS:

Trump backs Johnson at Mar-a-Lago as speaker touts "election integrity" bill

 

I Am The Liberal Media

Run Away! Run Away!

I Am The Liberal Media

Professional Left Podcast Episode #794: MSNBC Wins and Loses

"Trust everybody, but cut the cards." -- Finley Peter Dunne, writer.

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Arizona: A Land of Contrasts

In this crazy, mixed-up world, I suppose there is a weird kind of solace to be found in knowing that The New York Times is just gonna keep right on being exactly the same kind of awful, over and over again, rain or shine.   As mathematically predictable and certain as tides and eclipses.

From today:

Arizona Ruling Spurs Strong Reactions, but Election Impact Is Unclear

This Magic Eight-Ball level of reporting was based on New York Times journalists wandering around the greater Phoenix metro area until they found two people with two different opinions -- y'know anecdotal reporting, which, as everyone knows, all the top-tier J-school hold to be the most accurate, useful and predictive kind of journalism.  

So the Times reporters met some people who thought Donald Trump is disgusting and the abortion ruling in Arizona is barbaric, but they also met a 25-year old-retail manager named Maverick, and that's when they knew they had struck gold in the Grand Canyon state:

“Leave it up to the female,” said Maverick Williams, 25, a retail manager who was walking his dog in the conservative Anthem neighborhood on the northern edge of Phoenix. “It’s her body, then she needs to decide.”

...

But voters like Mr. Williams suggested that it might not be so simple in this closely divided desert battleground. Although he opposed the state court’s abortion decision, he said he was more worried about the rising cost of living, and he called President Biden too old and unfit to serve another term. He said he would vote for Mr. Trump.

Bam!  Right there!  Call the Pulitzer people and tell them the contest is over.

Sure they could have looked at, y'know, all that data from all those other states where the abortion issue had flipped the script and had the anti-woman fanatics on the ropes.  Or all those dozens of polls and focus groups.  But the Time's didn't need any of that.

With "Maverick" in one hand and other people in the other, they had their scoop.

Arizona Ruling Spurs Strong Reactions, but Election Impact Is Unclear

And it's not just the headline.  The article is packed with gems like this:

The decision upending abortion care in a critically important battleground state inspired passionate reactions from Arizonans across the political divide, ranging from elation to disgust. 

And this:

Some conservative voters and the state’s most ardent critics of abortion hailed it as a victory for women. Many Democrats, moderate independents and some Republicans said the Arizona Supreme Court had gone too far. But it was far from clear Tuesday that the decision would tip the balance in the November presidential election.

I can't decide is this is the Times still being so freaked out about being so very, very wrong in 2016 that it's in-house default position is to publish this kind of garbage, or this kind of garbage arises naturally from the Times' decades-old Both Siderist fetish.

Buit one thing I can say for sure.  Arizona is a land of contrasts.  

 

I Am The Liberal Media

Professional Left Podcast Episode #794: No Fair Remembering 2016/Trump's Abortion FAIL

"Don't you know there ain't no devil, it's just god when he's drunk." -- Tom Waits.

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Over at MSNBC, the Turds Are in Full Bloom

This is a written reprise of some of the stuff we covered on this week's episode of The Professional Left podcast.  It happens sometimes.  I get on some subject, start outlining it for a post, then comes podcasting time, and what I'm writing about is current, interesting and top-of-mind, so it makes its way into the show.  

My understanding is that Sophocles did this all the time on his podcast.

So...

Of all the things that can and have been said about MSNBC, one thing remains clear.  There is absolutely no fucking shortage of current and recently-former Republicans on that small, leaky lifeboat.  They Republicans them coming and going and waiting in the green room or in the comfort of their camera-ready living room, just waiting for their turn to tell Democrats how we should be running their party.

And given all the recent layoffs at NBC, you might have have thought, well, they even though they have no ethical qualms about colonizing their network with Republicans, they have obviously reached some kind of financial boundary on their Republican shopping spree and now there's just had no more money in the "Put More Republicans On The Air" jar.  But you'd have been wrong.  The ransacked the sofa cushion in Cesar Conde's office and what'd ya know!  They found they had just enough skrilla to wedge in one more GOP douchebag into their lineup.  

Ronna McDaniel. 

But for reasons other than financial, she proved to be just one, wafer-thin Republican too many and it all went *boom*.

But despite all of this supersaturation of NBC/MSNBC with so many current and recently-former Republicans that you'd think there is just no more room for even one more, Ari Melber managed to find space for not one but two Republicans, who are each, in their own right, the worst kinds of insufferable scumbags.

Karl Rove and Reince Priebus.

Here's the video, which you are under no obligation whatsoever to watch.   

Allow me to interpret.  Rove makes it clear that he does not want a "Democrat" president, but that Trump's embrace of January 6th "thugs" makes him problematic as well.    However, being a completely amoral creature, Rove frames Trump's depravity as merely tactical.  A campaign problem, not an existential threat.  That this is the fault of Trump's campaign staff being unable to manage Trump's public behavior better.  That Trump would have been smarter if he had done this or that.

Next up was Rinse Pubis who appeared to be both drunk and bitter, with a real, Wrath of Khan, "No, you can't escape!" vibe.  

However, some of what he said was 100% right.  

Not the stuff about about "the independent voters in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and North Carolina".  That's all bullshit, because those aren't "independent" voters. Because for all practical purposes, there are no independent voters.  It's just the Tea Party scam all over again.  "Independent" voters are just Republicans who don't want to take any shit for being horrible human beings.  

However what he says about "this is not the 1990s electorate" is quite correct.  And what the panel never got to -- and what Ari Melber never asked -- was, well, why is the 2024 electorate completely different than the 1990s electorate?  

What changed?

Because that is a subject that current and recently-former Republicans dare not discuss, and teevee goofs like Melber will not pursue.   But over here in what remains of the Liberal blogosphere we are under no such corporate restrictions on our lines of inquiry.  In fact, all need to do is dare to remember the past.   Simply look at the public record and answer the question,“What happened to the Republican party over the last 40 years?”

Lee Atwater happened.  Rush Limbaugh and Hate Radio happened.  Newt Gingrich happened.  Mitch McConnell happened.  Michael Steele happened.  Fox News happened.  Glenn Beck happened.  The Fake Tea Party happened.  George W. Bush happened.  Dick Cheney happened.  Tom DeLay happened.   The Federalist Society happened.  The whole, multi-billion dollar infrastructure of Citizens United enabled  think tanks and SuperPACS, and media spinoffs and book deals and National Review cruises and white nationalist evangelicals happened.  

It is a long and ugly list, all of it aided and abetted by a complicit mainstream media.

And that guy up there on stage bleating about how awful and uncivil the MAGA thugs are? Karl Rove?  He happened.

Because the reason those “thugs” that Rove is so troubled by attacked the capitol on January 6th is because they believed what a lying Republican scumbag named Donald Trump told them.  That Democrats had stolen the election.  That the diabolical Liberal conspiracy that secretly ruled everything had colluded to rob them of their democracy. 

So then the question becomes, how did the Republican base ever come to believe such nonsense?  Believe that Democrats were devils, so monstrously evil, well organized and ruthlessly efficient that we could and would do such a thing?

Because that is exactly what men like Karl Rove told them.  Over and over again.  For decades.  This was Rove in 2005:  

Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.

14 years later, in 2019, here is Hero of the Resistance, Liz Cheney, calmly calling Democrats baby murdering monsters.  The "face of pure evil".  

For decades, lying about Democrats is the most horrific terms has been the everyday vocabulary of Right.  They have been steeping in this filth for decades, so is it any surprise that they had no trouble believing that those vile, terrorist-loving, baby-murdering Democrats would steal an election?

But what about all the election court cases Trump lost?  All the so-called election fraud evidence that proved to be nonsense?  All of the wild election conspiracy theories that came to nothing?  Who taught these people to simply ignore inconvenient reality?

This is a quote from journalist Ron Suskind’s 2004 article in the New York Times Magazine.  The source is widely believed to have been Karl Rove: 

The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'.

This is what happened to the electorate of the 1990s.  

This kind of fascist propaganda, echoed by every Conservative media platform over and over again for decades by propagandists like Rove and Priebus, is what happened.  

And this is where that relentless and well-funded tidal wave of lies and conspiracy mongering has taken them:

Texas Supreme Court Justice John Devine, who rules on election disputes: “Do you really think the Democrats are gonna roll over and let Trump be president again? You think they’re just gonna go away, all of a sudden find Jesus and be an honest election?” pic.twitter.com/1mh35KDjDJ

— Robert Downen (@RobertDownen_) April 4, 2024

Step-by-step Republicans built a doomsday machine with no "off" switch.   

Now they pretend to be shocked that there's no way to turn it off.

I Am The Liberal Media

Professional Left Podcast Episode #793: What's Rove Got To Do With It?

“That awkward moment when Karl Rove’s bullshit doesn’t even work on Fox News Anchors…” -- Greg Berlanti, election night 2012.

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Is Illinois Ground Zero For The Apocalypse?

I'm not saying it is or it ain't, but consider:

Revelation 9:  Then the fifth angel sounded his trumpet, and I saw a star that had fallen from heaven to earth, and it was given the key to the pit of the Abyss. 2 

The star opened the pit of the Abyss, and smoke rose out of it like the smoke of a great furnace, and the sun and the air were darkened by the smoke from the pit. 3

And out of the smoke, locusts descended on the earth, and they were given power like that of the scorpions of the earth.…

So blotting out the sun?  

Check.  

From the Illinois Department of Natural Resources:

Seven years after the 2017 total eclipse thrilled and delighted viewers in the Midwest, another total solar eclipse will be visible over 128 miles of Illinois the afternoon of April 8, 2024. The next total solar eclipse visible in the United States won’t be until 2044. 

Thirty-one Illinois state parks and sites managed by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources are in the eclipse’s path of totality. Numerous other parks and sites lie just outside the path of totality, offering equally spectacular views of the eclipse, though for shorter periods of time. 

Southern Illinois is considered the eclipse crossroads of America because it was in the centerline for the path of totality in 2017 and will be again in 2024. 

The largest Illinois city in the path of totality is Carbondale. In downtown Carbondale the eclipse will begin moments before 2 p.m. and last for 4 minutes and 9 seconds, which is nearly double the length of time of the 2017 eclipse.  

A nearly unprecedented swarm of big, loud, scary-looking flying bugs?  

Check.  

From ABC News, Chicago:

17-year cicadas in Illinois part of 'double brood emergence' that will soon unleash billions of bugs

In a matter of months, they will dig their way out from underground, red eyes shining, deafening song filling the air. It will be a confluence of creatures the likes of which hasn't been seen in the United States since Thomas Jefferson was president - and won't happen again until 2245. It's a rare emergence of insects some are referring to as cicadapocalypse.

Billions of cicadas are expected to surface this spring as two different broods - one that appears every 13 years, and another every 17 years - emerge simultaneously. The 13-year group, known as Brood XIX, or the Great Southern Brood, is the largest periodical cicada brood, stretching across the southeastern United States. The Northern Illinois Brood, or Brood XIII, emerges every 17 years.

Not saying the end of the world is definitely coming and that it'll begin within shouting distance of my house.  

All I'm saying is, if I feel the slightest rumble from the New Madrid Fault -- which runs right through Southern Illinois -- I'm outta here.  

I Am The Liberal Media