We are about to attempt a crash landing
Please extinguish all cigarettes
Place your tray tables in their
Upright, locked position
Your Captain says: Put your head on your knees
Your Captain says: Put your head in your hands
Captain says: Put your hands on your head
Put your hands on your hips. Heh heh
This is your Captain – and we are going down
We are all going down, together.
This is amazing and depressing and terrifying all at the same time:
Thursday evening, Alex Jones dropped a bomb on Twitter. After a week of roiling controversy surrounding the conspiracy theorist’s upcoming interview with Megyn Kelly, Jones announced a plan to take the interview into his own hands and scoop NBC. He’d been secretly recording Kelly’s day-long interview and was going to release the tapes in full on his own website three days before the primetime airing.
“I’ve never done this…in 22 years I’ve never recorded another journalist but I knew this was a lie,” Jones said in the teaser, which featured the voice of a woman who sounded like Megyn Kelly assuring Jones he’d be getting a fair interview.
“The next time I want to get somebody, they’re going to say, ‘Look what you did to Alex Jones,’” the voice purported to be Kelly said. “It’s not going to be some gotcha hit piece, I promise you that.”
What a trainwreck. It’s a shame this isn’t just hurting Megyn Kelly and NBC, but it is bringing the country down with them. Fucking morons.
Served
NBC/Kelly let themselves get played by a nutjob, and with the same con these guys pull all the time. What a bunch of rubes.
Yutsano
If NBC had any shred of dignity they would cancel this farce. But the almighty RATINGS must win over all!
Alain the site fixer
Sorry to bigfoot you John. I deleted the post.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOCOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONODE?!?
Sourmash
Lie with dogs, you get fleas.
trollhattan
1st in with the Laurie Anderson call.
rikyrah
Former Trump campaign adviser Michael Caputo has been contacted by FBI in Russia probe and has hired his own attorney, a source confirms.
— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) June 16, 2017
rikyrah
Republicans are employing a new ruse to destroy Obamacare. Don’t fall for it:
washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2017/06/16/republicans-are-employing-a-new-ruse-to-destroy-oba…
? ?? Goku (aka Junior G-Man) ? ?
What’s the wider significance of this? I haven’t been following it
rikyrah
NBC never should have interviewed him. They were wrong. They got played.
Oh well.
trollhattan
Reposting from last night, this is exactly how you handle Alex Jones in an interview. Note that in addition to the BBC host is a “Times” reporter; the Times is owned by Murdoch.
“Why are you alive?”
Corner Stone
My only hope is they put Andy Lack, Hugh Hewitt, GvS and Megyn Kelly into the spacecraft that’s headed toward the sun.
dr. bloor
Grifters-for-cash have no chance against people like Jones, who troll for the pure pleasure of doing so.
Comrade Jake
Speaking of trolling, anyone catch McMegan’s latest and greatest?
bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-06-16/beware-of-blaming-government-for-london-tower-fire
It would be unbelievable were this anyone else besides someone who had suggested kids should be trained to bum rush shooters.
Andrew Abshier
It doesn’t matter that Alex Jones is on the teevee to the NBC suits. All that matters is that Alex Jones is Good Television™. Which is how we got stuck with Trump as our President.
trollhattan
@Corner Stone: You have to shoot Greta to Xenu.
hovercraft
@? ?? Goku (aka Junior G-Man) ? ?:
The Newtown parents and families are very upset that she’s giving him a national after he’s spent years calling the murders of their children and loved ones a false flag operation to steal America’s guns. Some sponsors stopped advertising on the network for the week, so basically she got a lot of buzz for her flailing new show. She’s been beaten by 60 Minutes re-runs the first two weeks, and since they are paying her 17 million a year, I’m sure they were looking forward to a ratings bonanza. If he pre-empts her all this will have been for nought.
Corner Stone
@trollhattan: Burn em all, and let Xenu sort them out!
gratuitous
I think right now Alex Jones is playing for the interview getting pulled. That way, nobody can say whether it was fair or slanted. A lot of people who’ve never seen Jones in action (that would include me) won’t have a frame of reference for fairness one way or the other. Then he can play the “poor, poor pitiful me!” card, and whine about censorship because he’s getting too close to some unspecified truth that “they” don’t want his fans to know about. He’ll milk it for the rest of his miserable career.
Keith P.
So when he says he’s “never recorded another journalist”, he means that he recorded a journalist once and he never recorded another one, right?
Swannie
NBC screwed the pooch when they hired Megyn Kelly.
Villago Delenda Est
No one in their right mind would ever trust Alex Jones about anything at all.
Megyn is not in her right mind. Nor are her corporate overlords at NBC who could see only ratings numbers not the hit their credibility would take, because credibility doesn’t show up on a spreadsheet.
MattF
@Keith P.: Note, though, that Jones is now calling himself a journalist. The end is nigh, folks.
Corner Stone
@MattF: They gave him a platform. A top 3 network platform.
Betty Cracker
What a debacle for NBC. I can almost understand the rationale for interviewing Jones. He’s a vile crackpot, but candidate Trump appeared on his crackpot show, Jones’ crackpot outfit has been cited by the current president* in recent fundraising letters, and Jones’ crackpot organization received White House press credentials.
That the president* considers a vile crackpot a valued, credible source of information is newsworthy. In fact, it should be widely covered.
But Kelly apparently intended to do a straight news interview with Jones instead of examining him the way a scientist would examine a particularly hideous and venomous bug. That’s a huge mistake, not because he turned the tables on Kelly but because Jones is the kind of crackpot who stirs up crazies who do monstrous things, like renew their harassment of the Newtown parents.
trollhattan
Drew Magary (of Why your team sucks fame) tackles “civility” lessons.
Peale
@hovercraft: Just to make something clear. Alex Jones did more than just claim that there was no Sandy Hook or that the whole thing was a false flag. By doing so he subjected those family to threats from nutjobs for being liars. Personal threats and harassment.
joel hanes
@trollhattan:
Greta to Xenu
Xenu, in his spaceship that looks remarkably like a DC-10, is still very far away, beyond the reach of our puny space technology.
Much easier to sentence her to evaluation by an actual Earth-bound psychiatrist, which she will regard as the equivalent.
(Scientology claims that “psychs” are unwittingly in league with the tyrants of the galactic Marcab Confederation, led by master-brainwasher Xenu, and that psychiatry works continually to enslave mankind)
piratedan
gotta love the supposed mutual contempt for each other… Megyn, supposedly swimming in legitimate waters, Jones, decidedly out on the fringe and both of them using the other for their own perceived benefit with the biggest loser, the American public having this promoted as somehow educational and beneficial for the public.
fuck them
Bobby Thomson
Meh. I have a hard time caring about this or even seeing its significance. It was shitty of NBC to record what he was saying. Does it matter that he also recorded it? To the extent it deters misleading editing, he’s actually in the right for a change.
Barbara
Any familiarity with Alex Jones at all should have led NBC to secure an enforceable written promise that he would not to do something like this. A guy who claims parents fabricated a story about the death of their children and also made up a story about a pizza owner having a child sex side gig in the basement of his restaurant — and disseminated both widely in order to make money — is unlikely all of a sudden to observe the niceties of ethical behavior in show business. Dear NBC, you can never “use” Alex Jones, you can only be used by him. The only reason you would have him on a show is to call him a motherf*cking idiot and ask him when he stopped raping his children and beating his wife.
Baud
NBC’s only option now is to hire Alex Jones.
I think All In with Chris Hayes and Alex Jones has a nice ring to it.
Wjs
You know who’s thrilled right now? James and Lachlan Murdoch. They got rid of Kelly and billo and they jettisoned that whole fair and balanced bullshit. They’re building an empire around their last remaining piece of glory, Sean hannity…
Aw, crap.
Olivia
It won’t hurt anyone. Everyone will watch the interview to see the difference between what he said and what she said…ratings bonanza!
I see a new reality show idea from this. I am so cynical that when I heard what Jones did, the first thing that came to my mind is that NBC and Kelly were in on it to create a phony scandal and lots of buzz.
sharl
@Comrade Jake: Yeah, McMegan has been getting severely (and properly) dragged here – see comments in the two posts prior to Alain’s greennotGreen tribute post – and on twitter (and I assume elsewhere). Elon Green pulled up that infamous advice from her to future 6-year olds threatened by gunmen, and noted that Steve Scalise should have just run directly toward the guy who shot him. Easy peasy.
Timurid
She knew it was a snake when she picked it up.
Wjs
@trollhattan: everyone Trump touches turns into shit. This is a fact.
MattF
@Wjs: You may laugh, but wait until Trump names Hannity Attorney General.
John Cole
@trollhattan: Correction. Drew Magary is famous for Kissy Suzy Kolber, THE GREATEST SPORTS WEBSITE EVER. RIP.
Villago Delenda Est
@Barbara: Mind you, it’s a restaurant that doesn’t have a basement, even!
Comrade Jake
@sharl: Thanks! I haven’t been here much but know the crew enjoys McMegan stupidity whenever it appears.
smintheus
The fault, dear brute, is in our stars. Who the heck decided that Megyn Kelly was presentable to any but a Fox News audience? Interviews with monsters like Putin and Jones were the predictable result.
Baud
@MattF: You realize that would be an improvement.
hovercraft
@MattF:
Twitler gave him White House credentials if I recall correctly, and even of I’m wrong, he went on his pukefest at least a couple of times during the campaign.
@Betty Cracker:
I guess as part of setting her/NBC up he did try to fudge his record:
via Zero Hedge
From JP Morgan’s chief marketing officer:
hovercraft
@Peale:
Yes I know, he has made it so bad, that I read about some of the parents being stalked on line by insane people determined to discover the “truth” and expose the “Sandy Hook Lie”. He is a vile piece of shit.
Jeffro
@Comrade Jake:Jesus, this woman…
See, this is why we can’t have nice things: because we can’t have them nationwide, instantly…
by her logic, since living involves breathing and that’s a lot of work and takes time, we should all just quit breathing right now. YOU FIRST, Megan!
TenguPhule
@Corner Stone: Straight to Venus would be faster and equally final.
Brachiator
@Baud:
Best solution I’ve heard to this total farce.
Also, Jones and Rachel Maddow might make a great team.
trollhattan
@smintheus: 100% the NBC Big Brains assumed the Fox droolers would follow her over and ad revenue magic would ensue (all Gold Bond and ED ads all the time). Wonder how that’s working out?
trollhattan
@Jeffro: The tone is always like she’s addressing first-graders.
p.s. Lemieux has front-paged it at LGF, wondering how The Onion got so good at mimicing McMegan.
Tom
John, I’ve got to disagree that its bringing the country down. It’s ruinous (I hope) for Megyn Kelly, who richly deserves it, both for giving this nut job a platform and more generally for for consciously choosing to be an asshole and get rich by enthusiastically doing everything in her power to ruin the level of discourse in this country while giving a platform for “alternative facts”. (And unlike Steve Doocey [is that really his name?], she can’t play the “I’m just too stupid to know what I was doing” card. She voluntarily gave her looks, intelligence and talents over to the service of evil, and I hope she never works again). NBC will survive, but they’ll get the snot slapped out of them, as they richly deserve for hiring her in the first place. Hopefully there will be firings of the various high level people who made the decision to bring her in in the first place. With any luck at all, Alex Jones will have his full assholishness on display, and its a trifecta.
Gelfling 545
@sharl: Whick you’ll notice none of our GOP congressmen did.
germy
Kelly’s response to the criticism was to pretend she’s Edward R. Murrow: “It’s important to shine a light on these individuals… blah blah blah”
But then I keep seeing the photo of her and MagicAlex posing together in the SUV wearing sunglasses and grinning like they’re blasting the Doobie Bros.
I never saw Edward R. pose with McCarthy like that.
Gelfling 545
@Villago Delenda Est: Aha! The old invisible basement trick!
ruemara
Having read some of the insanity his fans put out on the twitters to stalk Sandy Hook victim’s families, it’s even more repulsive that NBC has given him a platform.
Tom
In other news, has anybody asked Megan McArdle when she’s going to condemn Rand Paul and the other Republican senators and congressmen for not rushing the shooter?
trollhattan
@germy:
“At long last sir, have you no Marlboros?”
trollhattan
@Tom:
Yeah, and why didn’t those residents rush that fire when they had the chance?
Tom
By the way, given that this will stir up Alex Jones’s crazies to make renewed threats against the Sandy Hook families, hopefully they can sue Megyn, strip her of her ill gotten wealth, and reduce her to living in public housing. I’d applaud that result if it weren’t for the other families in public housing having to put up with her.
germy
@Gelfling 545:
The basement’s on the second floor.
Ryan
Thanks Andy Lack!
Gelfling 545
@germy: clever. Very clever.
Tom
@trollhattan: Damn straight!
germy
Ah ha! that’s the name I’ve been trying to remember.
He’s the guy who fed Mat Lauer the questions for HRC. The interview where he spent half an hour asking about EMAILZZZ and then lobbed softball questions to herrDrumpf.
When I learned about the Kelly hire, I had a gut feeling Andy had something to do with it.
Brachiator
@smintheus:
Maybe some producer thought they could hit tv pay dirt with a kind of “Beauty and the Beast” twist on her interviews.
sharl
Where corporate media is concerned, my impression has been that the most cynical explanations for their otherwise-inscrutable actions are most likely to be correct (or at least come closest to being right). So I’m on board with this tweet:
Ocotillo
NBC chose to dance with the devil by hiring her. Yeah, they thought some Fox viewers would follow her over to NBC, surprise, it doesn’t matter which bottle blonde is reading the prompter over at Fox, their channel is locked on that channel only.
Also, any Fox “journalist” should be a pariah once they have worked over at the GOP Propaganda mill. If other news outlets really took journalism seriously, they would never hire anyone once they had worked there. There is plenty of wingnut outfits to give them a steady paycheck that they don’t have to sully real news outlets.
Silly me though, there are no more real news outlets, it’s all clicks and ratings now.
Betty Cracker
The cop who shot Philando Castile got away with it.
Chris
I always liked the Col. Jack O’Neill version of this:
“Mayday! Mayday! We are so going in!” ::static::
germy
@sharl: After GE owned them. And 30 Rock was on the air when NBC was bought by “Kabletown” and 30 Rock spoofed the comcast “kulture”
D58826
@Served: I have a slightly different take on the interview. To the extent that Jones has national following that seems to include Der Fuhrer it is important that the wider population knows who and what he is. Given the RWNJ conspiracy theory normalization process where what Alex Jones says doesn’t stay on his planet he can’t be ignored. Some of his stuff does work it’s way to Faux news and the larger media environment.
So what to do. Seems they refer to the 15 minute segments as the A.B C,D blocks. So in the A block a segment on fake news, conspiracy theories and how they get normalized. IN truth she probably could do an entire show and maybe should in the future. In the B block an interview with Sandy Hook families. They can talk about their dead children, how the are coping and how Jones and the rest of the scumbags like him are making it more difficult to move on. In the C block, the Jones interview. In the D block deconstruct another of his conspiracy theories. In this way you can expose this dangerous individual while at the same time providing a wider context for exactly what he is doing. Simply deep sixing the interview will not make him go away. It will just give him and his Faux news look alikes such as Hannity and Tucker one more example of why they are martyrs. And there is an audience for this crap.
Ric Drywall
@Tom: As much as i sympathize with the Sandy Hook families, they shouldn’t be allowed to sue Megan Kelly for things said and done by Alex Jones and his followers.
D58826
@Betty Cracker: Did you expect it would go any other way. Just a variation of the ‘I could shot someone on Time square and not lose a vote’. You just have to be sure to shot the right demographic.
Kay
I know there are good things on cable news and I watch and enjoy tv- I’m not claiming otherwise- but are the few bright spots on cable news worth how over-all horrible it is?
Shouldn’t it just die a market death? It’s mostly really bad.
D58826
And the real reason I jumped back on. Some truly shocking news over on the Great satan KOS. It is news that no one would ever expected to happen
OH wait maybe it isn’t so shocking after all.
dailykos.com/
James Powell
@John Cole:
Correction: The greatest sports website ever was Fire Joe Morgan!.
No one else even comes close.
Citizen Alan
@Comrade Jake:
I hate you for putting in a clickable link to a particularly monstrous column by that she demon.
Chris
@D58826:
Really, the smart thing to do for the Cuban bigwigs, if they’ve been learning from their Russian and Chinese and Saudi counterparts at all, is to immediately invite in every Trump-affiliated business under the sun with open arms and special rates.
low-tech cyclist
@Served:
They sure did.
And all they had to do to not get played, was have the minimal common sense to not give air time to a total nutjob.
Megyn Kelly’s spent years on Faux News, so her ability to distinguish reality from fantasy, reasonable theories from conspiracy theories, is probably long out the window. But what was NBC’s excuse?
D58826
@Ocotillo: I didn’t read the article since I try and stay away from anything Faux related. But it seems that one of the bottle blondes violated the cardinal rule of wearing a skirt hitched up to her … whatever and actually wore slacks on the air.
sharl
@sharl: FYI, in my link to a search for recent critical tweets aimed at McMegan, I see that the link works fairly well, but does capture a few innocent tweeters named “McArdle”. Just a precautionary note to anyone who clicks that link…
Tenar Arha
@Betty Cracker: This is one of those decisions where you wonder how many people had the right to say “why do you think this is a good idea?” Or research skills where there was someone who could have looked up “holocaust denial” and “how not to interview a holocaust denier.”
ETA I mean hell’s bells there’s studies and court transcripts even!
D58826
@Chris: Yep and after beating up on Qatar all week he signed off on a multi-billion dollar arms deal. The Trumplites must be over there looking for more hotels or golf courses.
Kay
Everyone blames FOX for making old people scared and mean, but how different is CNN? CNN is like a continuing threat level. They’re selling fear. Threat Level Code Red every fucking day.
Gin & Tonic
@hovercraft: Uh, Zero Hedge quoting Alex Jones? How far down the hole are you willing to go?
Baud
@Betty Cracker: I almost feel bad for the ones that don’t get away with it. How unlucky are they.
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
@rikyrah:
For a second I thought this said “has been contacted by the FBI in Russia,” which would make almost as much sense.
I wonder who will be the first Trumpista to make a break for it and flee to Russia?
rikyrah
New post:
Are GOP Senators really upset with the super-secret health bill process?
I call bullshit:t.co/1AtClnC1R9
— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) June 16, 2017
Baud
@Comrade Colette Collaboratrice: Snowden.
catclub
something seems wrong in these two headlines side-by-side.
SiubhanDuinne
NEVER have I been gladder not to own a TV.
jl
This dishonesty and conniving bad faith is not just from loons in the reactionary media, it is standard operating procedure for the Trump political organization. And Paul Krugman has made the point in his NYT columns and blog over the last week that is SOP for the whole GOP now. I think Krugman is right.
An example that I first heard about earlier this week and seems to be hitting the presses today is the supposedly new Trump apprenticeship program. It is really a repackage of a Democratic Congressional caucus/Obama program, with the budget slashed. They just put out some press releases and did a big PR campaign to con the media and the sad dupes who believed Trump when he said he would ‘bring the jobs back’.
rikyrah
No one should think there is a single White House staffer who doesn’t deserve every minute of this. They knew what we all knew about Trump.
— Lawrence O’Donnell (@Lawrence) June 16, 2017
catclub
@rikyrah: But they are happy to tell the NYT they are upset. Mitch McConnell they do not bother to tell.
Comrade Jake
@Citizen Alan: Hey man! It’s not like I didn’t tell you what it was a link to, did I? Nobody’s forcing you to click on it.
D58826
@Comrade Colette Collaboratrice: Well one way to promote job growth would be to open an FBI office in Moscow. Would probably approach the NY office in size. The least Vlad can do for his pal.
And Vlad is offering Comey asylum if he wants it
Yoda Dog
@Wjs: The hate-watching of Hannity is pretty delicious recently…”BUT WHAT ABOUT HILLARY YOU GUYS?!?!? WHY ARENT WE INVESTIGATING HER???!!!!”….. heh…
Gin & Tonic
@Comrade Colette Collaboratrice: For more better accuracy should read “Former Gazprom PR flack and Trump campaign adviser”
SiubhanDuinne
@Comrade Jake:
We all do, but nobody enjoys it more robustly than Tom Levenson. I know he said a couple of years ago that he was going to give up writing his eviscerative deconstructions of her “work,” but every now and then I do wish he’d reconsider.
Mnemosyne
@D58826:
As one of the bloggers at Very Smart Brothas pointed out, Trump did it because Obama is still living in the penthouse apartment in Trump’s head.
ETA: Swapped out the link for a non-Facebook one.
The Moar You Know
NBC fucking deserves this for hiring Kelly in the first place. By all rights she ought to be working a drive-thru window in some backwater town in Georgia.
gene108
I am jealous of Alex Jones.
I wish I could make a living peddling fiction.
bystander
@TenguPhule:
Putting the taxpayer first is why Baud should be naming you his Secretary of Defense.
SiubhanDuinne
@Jeffro:
I know. That whole message of “We can’t possibly save everybody (nor should we try), therefore there’s no point in trying to save anybody” permeates everything she writes. Towering infernos, mass killings, health care.
Fuck her. Fuck her very much, and don’t come back.
JMG
The entire history of television is as follows. The people in charge have always known nothing about their own business. They fiercely opposed every hit before it went on the air from I Love Lucy onwards. The idea of hiring Kelly was bad enough, because Fox viewers are NEVER leaving Fox except to head for the Big Barcalounger in the Sky, but to debut a news program in June and putting it up against the oldest most successful news program of all compounded the error. Then giving Alex Jones airtime, well, the mind boggles. No suit upstairs had the brains to say, “hey, maybe this isn’t a good look for us.” Kenneth the Page would do a better job than Lack.
Mnemosyne
@gene108:
As an aspiring fiction writer, I resent that remark (a little). Jones is more like the people who write fake “memoirs” than the honorable profession of writing fiction. He’s a hoaxer, not a fiction writer.
Tenar Arha
@Kay: I’ll admit I wish they’d do it for policy right now. If McConnell continues pulling a fast one, AHCA is going to pass and great aunts and grandmas really won’t have anywhere to go, rural hospitals will close, people with employer health plans may end up back in lifetime cap hell, pre-existing conditions like c-sections and premature birth and diabetes and cancer will be back most places.
(I know: ETA I’m preaching to the choir & I should feel bad for being okay with people being afraid, but….)
chopper
@Gin & Tonic:
now we just need natural news to quote the ZH article and we’re set.
SiubhanDuinne
@Betty Cracker:
Saw that breaking headline, haven’t read the story. But it makes me sick, and sad, and furious.
Mnemosyne
@D58826:
That would require Kelly to do an investigative report instead of a celebrity profile. Nah. Gah. Happen. She’s a talking head, not a reporter.
Yoda Dog
@Mnemosyne: I would rather characterize it as you and gene both being the proud owners of souls… whereas Jones probably sold his off before he even hit puberty.
Mnemosyne
@Betty Cracker:
Fuck. The later reports were that it was a terrible mistake — they were looking for an armed suspect who had dreadlocks, they pulled over Mr. Castile, the cop panicked when he saw the perfectly legal gun — but if I mistakenly killed someone at my job, I would be out on my ear. With cops, they just get a pat on the head.
sharl
@Betty Cracker:
Jeebus. I would like to have found this surprising, but at this point, I don’t, especially after reading about the white neighborhood where it happened, and the behavior of their cops up to that point (and maybe still, for all I know).
Homicidal Barney Fife, with no Sheriff Andy motivated to order him to remove the bullets from his service piece.
liberal
@trollhattan: she’s always been a fucking tool.
Elie
@Olivia:
THIS. This was immediately what I thought.
TriassicSands
@Betty Cracker:
Millions of Americans are too stupid to vote and too stupid to serve on juries.
different-church-lady
@Gin & Tonic: You’ve heard of the dark internet? This is the oily internet.
Morzer
thehill.com/homenews/administration/338092-trump-disapproval-hits-64-percent-in-ap-poll?rnd=14976149…
Yeah, I’d say they’re tired of the winning, so much winning, bigly.
Mnemosyne
@Bobby Thomson:
Dude, have you been feeling well lately? Because you’ve been saying some weird stuff. Alex Jones was being interviewed for a TV show. Why was it “shitty” of them to record an interview for a TV show?
randy khan
@catclub:
I think they’re pretty different situations.
The Minnesota case reconfirms my opinion that we need to radically change the standards by which police shootings are evaluated in court. (They need to have good reason to be in fear of their lives, at a minimum, and there probably are other changes we need to make as well.)
I’ve read pretty extensively about the suicide case, and the prosecution made sense to me. I can’t say whether the conviction was right or not – if you’re not in the room hearing the testimony and seeing all the facts, you can miss things – but it doesn’t really surprise me. After all, you can convict someone of inciting to riot if he gives a speech telling people in a big crowd to smash all the shop windows, so “it was just talk” defenses aren’t absolute at all.
D58826
@Mnemosyne: The photo says it all. While Obama has been adhering to the tradition of not criticizing your successor, I think he has enjoyed quietly trolling Der Fuhrer with his large crowd visit in Berlin and his meeting with Prince Harry in London.
Mnemosyne
@sharl:
Like I said, the follow-up reports were that Mr. Castile was killed because of a mistaken identity. Which to me says that cop should at a minimum be FIRED for killing an innocent person by mistake.
But, nope, we all have to accept that cops are allowed to kill us for any reason or else the terrorists win. Or something.
Quinerly
Raul Castro stepping down. Elections in October. I’m just seeing this on the MSNBC banner. Apologies if already discussed. I’m surprised he is doing this.
trollhattan
@Mnemosyne: In California it would have been illegal for Jones to record without informing them.
trollhattan
@Quinerly: Isn’t he eleventybazillion years old? Maybe it’s just time. Maybe he can challenge old man McCain to a two-year cribbage match. There.
The Moar You Know
@Kay: Not a dime’s worth of difference between them, save that Fox has admitted in court that they’re an entertainment enterprise and not in any way an actual news network. CNN claims just the opposite.
waspuppet
@Betty Cracker:
All worthy topics, none of which will be addressed by a full-length interview with Jones. You probe these questions, then you get a comment from Jones. That’s it.
But of course that would probably mean talking to some stoopid libruls while they explain how they’ve been right for the past 30 years, and what’s the fun in that?
SiubhanDuinne
@Mnemosyne:
I clicked, and spent several minutes looking at the photo accompanying the article.
It was taken, IIRC, two days after the election.
Donald Trump should be the happiest man on the planet. He just became the most powerful man on earth, leader of the greatest nation in the world… He should look ecstatic, or, at the very least, pleased.
But he doesn’t. He looks glum, angry, despondent, and worried.
Barack Obama, by contrast, should look just awful. His worst electoral nightmares have just come true, his legacy is at risk, and he should look glum, angry, despondent, and worried.
But he doesn’t. While he doesn’t look ecstatic or pleased or anything close to happy, he looks concerned, engaged, focused, but at peace.
What a telling difference between these two men. It’s a terrific photo, and I’m not sure I’ve seen this particular one before now.
liberal
@TriassicSands: it’s not a matter of stupidity. They’re fine with cops executing black people. Hell, they execute white people too and get off.
TriassicSands
@Villago Delenda Est:
Agreed, but would you trust Megyn Kelly?
D58826
@Villago Delenda Est: Sigh, Hillary has worked her green lantern magic on you to convince you it doesn’t have a basement. When you approach it dressed in your Captain Courageous suit with the Winky Dink accessory beanie and from the proper astral plain, the basement is just so obvious.
Weaselone
@Quinerly:
He announced this 4 years ago.
liberal
@trollhattan: where was it recorded?
The Moar You Know
@Morzer: Really important to note that in surveys like this they do not track the only number that matters: Trump’s approval ratings among Republicans.
Which has currently declined from 81% to…75%.
Gonna have to go below 50 before the GOP even starts thinking about cleaning the huge lump of shit out of their bed.
D58826
@The Moar You Know: at least CNN also makes you afraid to fly
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Weaselone: But I’m sure that Trump will say this is the result of his new Cuba policy.
Quinerly
@Weaselone:
I guess I wasn’t paying attention or if I did didn’t realize his term was up. At least I’m not the only dummy with a bad memory or a life outside of international news (or both!) MSNBC reporting it on its crawl like breaking news.? Carry on!
TenguPhule
@bystander: I could not possibly do a worse job then the one currently there.
TriassicSands
@liberal:
Sorry, but I think you have to be stupid to be OK with the cops killing people unnecessarily. Stupid is not just the inability to do math or follow directions. It’s also not being unable to figure out what is just or fair.
Just as there are many types of intelligence*, there are many types of stupidity.
*See Howard Gardner
TenguPhule
@Mnemosyne:
Indeed. As a reminder, fiction generally has to make sense.
liberal
@TriassicSands: that’s a long winded way of saying they’re evil.
Mnemosyne
@Weaselone:
I’m assuming they’re making it a crawl on CNN because people assumed he wouldn’t actually follow through on his promise. Though now I’m wondering who made their announcement first: Trump or Castro?
Quinerly
@trollhattan:
I have been “schooled” by another commenter that said this is 4 year old news. Quite honestly, I thought I paid pretty close attention to Cuba…both my memory and MSNBC’s are obviously fading. I figured he would stay on longer. Yes, he’s old but not as old as Fidel when he stepped aside.
Weaselone
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
I’m sure that the announced change in Cuba policy happening today was just a coincidence.
D58826
@Quinerly: If confirmed it shows the wisdom of Obama’s opening to Cuba and Iran. Neither country are going to turn into Switzerland over night but isolating them on the world stage is not going to turn them into Switzerland either. We have had diplomatic relations with Russia/USSR since the mid-1930s and China since what 1971-72. Neither country has become Sweden. John McCain has no problem with our diplomatic relations with Vietnam. While Der Fuhrer was butt kissing the King of SA, the Iranians had a reasonable fair and open election with the moderates (I know a relative term in Iran as in any other country) were the big winners. Would they have won w/o the nuclear deal – who knows. IN both countries Obama was trying to start a process that may take a generation or more to fully play out.
O. Felix Culpa
@Morzer:
Huh? Since when has president-asterisk been doing that?
TenguPhule
@Mnemosyne:
The judged by twelve instead of carried by six is going to start swinging the other way sooner or later.
When you literally have police officers caught on camera killing without justification and then having a jury let them off, inevitably someone somewhere is going to have a legitimate fear of their life from an officer and react accordingly.
Why these idiots can’t see they’re making everyone’s lives more dangerous is something I will never understand.
Amir Khalid
@trollhattan:
The Times of London is a much older and traditionally more conservative newspaper than The New York Times.
bemused
I didn’t realize I had msnbc on and was horrified to hear Chuck Todd saying something about Ted Nugent. Quickly changed channel. I don’t want to know. Alex Jones and now some “news” about Nugent. So fed up with daily shit shows.
Mnemosyne
@O. Felix Culpa:
He’s always believed it — we all need to unite around doing what he wants, and then we’ll be unified! If you don’t want to do what he wants, then you’re divisive and oppose the unity that only he can bring.
Villago Delenda Est
@Mnemosyne: The terrorists are the police.
D58826
@TenguPhule: Small consolation but the city just announced that they will fire the cop.
Just one more canuck
@smintheus: Putin? Alex Jones? Who’s next – the reanimated corpse of Pol Pot?
Johnnybuck
@liberal: They’re issuing “Back the Blue” specialty tags here in Georgia to go with the “In God we trust” stickers.
TenguPhule
Speaking of Trolls.
Looks like FuckerMcFuckFace is really going to do it. Nixon’s ghost is laughing somewhere.
TenguPhule
@D58826: Damage has been done. The world is a more dangerous place.
HeleninEire
Watching “The Shawshank Redemption” Love this movie. One of the few I can watch over and over again. The others? Godfather (1 and 2), The Sting, Butch Cassidy, and Jaws.
Also, too “Love Actually” Yeah stop judging me!
Baud
Vox
TenguPhule
@HeleninEire: Why is the first Alien not on your list? Are you xenophobic?
O. Felix Culpa
@Mnemosyne:
In other words, we unify around kissing the narcissist’s ring. Now I get it. Thanks for illuminating my darkened mind.
Villago Delenda Est
@TenguPhule: That’s Fuckface von Clownstick, and don’t you forget it, buster!
Mike in NC
@bemused: Maybe MSNBC is giving Nugent his own show, or he’ll co-host with Hugh Hewitt.
D58826
@bemused: I didn’t have it on but Ted the terrorist made some news last night when he said he has decided to turn over a new leaf and only say nice things. He hopes that the terrible liberals will follow in the path of enlightenment that he has pioneered. He did not apologize for any of his previous death threats. I guess they still stand since they were made in the ‘before the victims are GOOPPERs’ era.
Chuckles, I guess, is using it as an example of how both sides do it, and how the GOP is trying to make the political environment less poisonous.
Mnemosyne
@D58826:
What was the rationale for not firing him before? As I said above, even if you take his story at face value, he still killed an innocent person by mistake while he was on duty. How is that not an immediate firing offense?
Quinerly
OK, here’s a link on Raul Castro’s Sunday announcement: cnbc.com/2017/06/16/cuban-leader-raul-castro-says-he-will-retire-in-2018.html
TenguPhule
@Villago Delenda Est: I am duly chastised, Great Leader!
SiubhanDuinne
@HeleninEire:
Did I tell you, I finally saw “Godfather” a week or so ago, for the first time? Haven’t seen GF2 yet, but will at the first opportunity. I gather GF3 isn’t worth the bother.
randy khan
@Mnemosyne:
There’s a fascinating (if somewhat depressing) article in New York magazine this week about a cop who killed someone, claiming incorrectly that the victim had a gun. It took a long time, but they finally fired him over the incident. The kicker, though, was that he wasn’t fired for shooting – he was fired for not following proper procedure before that, even though the city had paid a multi-million dollar settlement to the family. Of course, he wasn’t convicted for the killing, although the DA did try. (They got an indictment that was then thrown out and, to what was apparently everyone’s surprise, the second grand jury wouldn’t indict.)
Quinerly
Here’s a link re the president making an ass out of himself yet again (Raul Castro): politicususa.com/2017/06/16/trump-humiliates-credit-raul-castros-2013-decision-step.html
Major Major Major Major
@HeleninEire: Jaws is great.
D58826
@Baud: Once he made the announcement he apparently defaulted to campaign mode by bragging about his great victory and dropping into a Ricky Ricardo Spanish accent at certain points. The article didn’t mention if he was selling autographed limited addition copies of the electoral map. For $100 you to can own of the the 10 trillion limited addition copies.
randy khan
@The Moar You Know:
But the number of self-identified Republicans also is shrinking. If the Republicans have any brains, they’ll realize that matters, too. Also, if he’s losing a point a month (actually more) in Republican approval and it continues, he’s going to be so far underwater in overall approval that you might not even be able to see the bubbles coming from his mouth.
SiubhanDuinne
@HeleninEire:
It may not be the greatest film ever made, but it sure has one of the greatest casts of all time!
And personally, me? I’ll see pretty much anything with Bill Nighy in it.
Quinerly
@SiubhanDuinne:
Still need to see GF3. It’s disjointed but still worth it.
jl
@The Moar You Know:
” Which has currently declined from 81% to…75%. ”
True, But that is quite a drop in just a couple of months. Yesterday, only 69% of Republicans thought that Trump had a good for even fair amount of respect for US democratic traditions and institutions. So, GOP support for Trump is softening.
Also, I’ve read that much of the continued support for Trump is GOP is because fewer people are identifying as Republican. And tracking pools of party identification are consistent with that. GOP party identification is dropping rapidly. Surprisingly, and disappointing to me is fact that Democratic identification is dropping too. If those drops are a result of Trump, seems be that the toxic Trump clown show is producing continuing disillusionment with both parties.
Link to yesterday’s AP-NORC poll
apnorc.org/projects/Pages/Views-on-President-Trump%27s-Job-Performance.aspx
D58826
Just watching the news headlines on my IPHONE and Der Fuhrer has released his 2016 financial disclose forms but obviously no tax return. I’ll leave it to the accounts as to whither the form is of any real value.
Roger Moore
@Comrade Colette Collaboratrice:
I figure they’re going to load up Air Force One and go as a group.
HeleninEire
@SiubhanDuinne: Do not bother with GF3. It is horrible. Really unwatchable.
SiubhanDuinne
@D58826:
Please tell me you made that up. Because if not, I am just curdled and cringing with shame (even though it’s not my fault, yeah).
TenguPhule
@randy khan:
If Republicans had brains, they’d be Democrats.
Mnemosyne
@randy khan:
IIRC, the Minnesota case was even worse than that: they pulled Castile over thinking he might be the suspect, and he wasn’t. He didn’t even do anything wrong, and he ended up dead because the cop panicked when he saw Castile’s legal, licensed gun. So the cop doesn’t even have the excuse of he was a criminal even if he was unarmed like they had with Michael Brown. Castile was a totally innocent guy driving with his girlfriend and daughter.
SiubhanDuinne
@HeleninEire:
Okay, thanks. That’s what I’d heard.
D58826
@SiubhanDuinne: Well I added the Ricky Recardo part but he did drop into a fake Spanish accent.
TriassicSands
@randy khan:
I have argued for years that the correct standard is not “can the use of deadly force be justified” but “was it necessary?”
Clearly, in the Philando Castile case, it was not necessary.
SiubhanDuinne
@TenguPhule:
Both LOL and QFT. Both.
Major Major Major Major
@SiubhanDuinne: @D58826: I mean, this is coming from a member of the party that has a Senator who told Justice Sotomayor that she had some splainin’ to do. It’s quite plausible.
SiubhanDuinne
@D58826:
Ay caramba! He has some splainin to do.
ETA: Woops to MMMM @185.
HeleninEire
@SiubhanDuinne: Yeah Bill Nighy. He be my fantasy boyfriend. See “The Girl in the Cafe” The last sentence of that actual girl in the cafe is the best sentence in any movie ever. I sat there stunned. Watch it if you can.
trollhattan
@SiubhanDuinne:
“GF3 is the BEST Godfather movie.”–Donald Trump
GF2 is rightfully lauded as a perfect sequel, perhaps even a better film than the original. GF3 wraps up some story arcs but past that….
Major Major Major Major
@SiubhanDuinne: Missed it by that much!
Mnemosyne
@jl:
When the media tells you constantly that both sides do it and the problem with our government is “Congress” without pointing out that one party controls Congress, then people get mad at both parties. It’s human nature.
bemused
@D58826:
I guess doing stupid Nugent news was vastly more important than talking about health care bill skullduggery.
D58826
@SiubhanDuinne: Long past time he sees a physaseeaqrist. (Psychiatrist for those who did not see the show) No idea how it was really spelled in the script, if there even was a spelling and not just Desi Arnez adlibing. .
D58826
@bemused: Of course. What made you think otherwise (sigh)
Kathleen
@Betty Cracker: I’ve missed Chez Pazienza’s these past crazy months but I especially miss his evisceration of NBC. Chez’s scalpel knew where to cut Lack and Co. and how to cause the most pain.
D58826
and over on the ORange Satan a twofer
dailykos.com/stories/2017/6/16/1672368/-EPA-and-Dept-of-Interior-held-a-private-briefing-with-45-gas…
Kathleen
@Wjs: Sean Klannity?
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
@Mnemosyne: I read that he got fired after the verdict.
bemused
@D58826:
Infuriating that msm isn’t covering GOP bill coverup.
Kathleen
@HeleninEire: I’m with you on Love Actually! I’m a sucker for Hugh Grant.
henqiguai
@Corner Stone (#12):
Ah! A Kornbluth fan.
Keith P.
@Baud: “Shirts and Skins with Alex Jones”, following “The Rachel Maddow Show”
Bobby Thomson
@Mnemosyne:
“you’ve been saying some weird stuff. Alex Jones was being interviewed for a TV show. Why was it “shitty” of them to record an interview for a TV show?”
because he’s a horrible human being and they shouldn’t be giving him free air time. Duh. Not sure why that’s “weird.”
ThresherK
You can take the hack out of Fox News, but you can’t take the Fox News out of the hack.
debbie
NPR interviewed the mother of one of the Sandy Hook victims. Absolutely heartbreaking. That people feel free to walk up to the parents and tell them to their faces they don’t believe it really happened is testament to the horribleness of the human species. Forget wiping them out. Wipe us all out.
J R in WV
OK. Here I go again.
I quit watching NBC completely during the last Democratic National Convention, when they had Andrea Greenspan Mitchell on every night, lying about things I had just watched with my own eyes and listened to with my own ears. She distorted things, and no one spoke up about her distortions and lies.
We switched to CBS, where Scott Pelley did a consistent and truthful job of taking Der Drumpf not seriously at all. I thought he was doing a great job, and committing great journalism every night. But their ratings were down, in third place.
I guess I’ll have to try ABC, or just give TV news up for good. Because NBC has no self respect, and deserves no respect from anyone not being paid to admire them.
Matt McIrvin
@Mnemosyne: Republicans are horrible -> Republicans control the government -> government is horrible -> Republicans are anti-government -> vote Republican, because they’re horrible!