Let’s be clear about two of the reasons prices — including the price of gas — are so high right now: COVID and Vladimir Putin.
I’m doing everything I can to lower costs for Americans, and it’s time Congress act as well. pic.twitter.com/KJtCnk7KxO
— President Biden (@POTUS) April 25, 2022
You may not agree with his choices, but you can’t say President Biden isn’t out there pitching his proposals…
Oh great CERN is going to split the timeline again??
I'm just kidding, that would be wildly unscientific, generally impossible, and at odds with my role as STEM educator.
But please please choose a sane timeline this time???? https://t.co/ml8XFPxpPA
— Naomi Wu ???? (@RealSexyCyborg) April 25, 2022
While it’s highly unlikely, it could have a placebo effect if we all believe that it’s going to shift the world back to a sane timeline.
I’m desperate for any positivity https://t.co/YYtjnJWu2a
— jackalovski (@jackalovski1) April 25, 2022
President Biden has announced his nomination of Bridget A. Brink for the next Ambassador to Ukraine. As Russia's war against Ukraine continues, an Ambassador with considerable experience and a strong commitment to diplomacy is paramount. https://t.co/GgEdxbOemD
— CEPA (@cepa) April 25, 2022
Perspective | Covering the French election, framing matters. https://t.co/kgbF1EGNXo
— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) April 25, 2022
Subtweeting, but at column length:
… [T]he take industry seemed transfixed by the possibility of a Macron loss or a weak Macron victory. I listened to Michael Barbaro’s “The Daily” podcast on the French runoff election on Thursday and suffered from some cognitive dissonance while doing so. The entire tenor of the podcast was why Macron was struggling and why Le Pen was outperforming her 2017 campaign. New York Times Paris bureau chief Roger Cohen detailed all the ways that Macron had alienated the French electorate. He said that Le Pen was touching on pocketbook issues and that her support of Putin would not hurt her all that much.
At the same time, Cohen also confirmed the polling taken after the first round showing that Macron was in the lead. Barbaro also closed the podcast by noting more recent polling indicating that Macron had widened his lead to double digits.
The Atlantic’s Thomas Chatterton Williams also wrote about the French election this past Saturday, and I experienced the same cognitive dissonance while reading. He acknowledged the polls showing a widening Macron lead but nonetheless concluded, “Whatever happens tomorrow, then, the story of this election cycle is the appeal of the extremes against Macron, who just a few years ago burst onto the political scene as an Obama-like golden boy. That’s worrying for Macron, of course, and dangerous for the health of transatlantic liberalism more broadly.”
On Sunday, the second round of the French presidential election was held, and based on the tweets Macron barely eked out a victory…
“Holding off,” “staves off,” — sounds like a near-run thing! Except that Macron defeated Le Pen 58.8 percent to 41.2 percent, a margin of more than 17 points. That is not eking out a victory…
I want to be clear about what I am saying here. It is entirely fair to point out that France’s extreme political wings have gained strength in recent years. Gaming out what a Le Pen presidency would have looked like once she advanced to the second round is a proper journalistic exercise. That said, the framing matters. The tenor of the U.S. press coverage played down the polling and played up the possibility of the most disruptive outcome; I am not the only observer to notice this. In the end, Macron exceeded expectations. But the framing for the past month has been that Le Pen is the real winner. And that seems off…
It’s not that our domestic Media Village Idiots want Democrats to lose; it’s just they find it so much more exciting to fantasize about the GOP Death Cult winning!
Benw
I’m at CERN right now! Just across the street from the ATLAS site. Dunno what’s in the mystery box though
RandomMonster
How long before the first joke about high-stakes Brinksmanship in Ukraine?
Ken
I think it’s more likely (though no less dangerous) that the press pushes the “close race, could be an upset” narrative to maximize ad revenues. I don’t imagine many people would bother reading or watching a report that Putin is expected to once again be re-elected with 103% of the vote.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@Benw:
The mystery box is where the new timeline is focused, and the President of Russia in that box is Medvedev….
Jim, Foolish Literalist
also, too:
Remember James Mattis?
Jeffro
Can we all put our noggins together and figure out how to incentivize the snooze media to just report. the. news. without adding their blessed ‘take’ on everything?
Put every last one of them on guaranteed salary*, regardless of ad revenue/”clicks”/page views/whatever?
*subject to quarterly performance reviews, of course: “Congratulations, Ken – you reported the news factually without any ad-libbing, unsupported speculation, or partisan ‘takes’ 89% of the time! You won’t get a bonus, but you have earned your full pay for another three months.”
danielx
Any jackals who have undergone cardiac catheterization?
Anyway
@Ken:
The media has become enamored with far-left and right/far-right narratives. This is in keeping with not reporting on complex policy (which is mostly pushed by Dem/ Center-Left admins — the RW just breaks things) – details are sooooo boring. Reporting on personalities, gossip is the go-to model. This hurts our side (and the vast majority of citizens).
jeffreyw
@Benw: It’s a cat.
Hoodie
It’s not just FOX and other rightwing propaganda organs. A lot of the stuff in the mainstream media can be more pernicious because, while not obviously false, it’s driven by a “take” logic that rewards the most hyperbolic presentation. This Macron victory is particularly revelatory, because he crushed Le Pen but so much of the media is obviously manipulating the mere fact that an opposition candidate got 40% of the vote (a commonplace occurrence in the US) to draw conclusions that fit a chosen narrative.
The coverage of the Afghanistan pullout was similar. What was lost in that was the incredible logistical feats accomplished by the US armed services with barely any losses and the fact that we were achieving nothing by staying in Afghanistan. I remember watching FlightRadar24 in awe as one C-17 after another did the trek to and from Kabul. I drove past Warner Robins Air Force Base in Georgia few weeks later and saw the vast numbers of C-17s and C-130s sitting there, ready to perform similar feats. This country is incredibly rich and most if not all of the problems we face are distributional or temporary. On the domestic front, we have record low levels of unemployment. The main sources of the current inflation are obvious, as Biden points out. There isn’t a lot any president could do about it other than to try to provide additional support to help cope with it, which, of course, the GOP is blocking. Why are people freaking out? The press is hysterical in its pursuit of content, and the GOP is all too happy to exploit this for political gain.
OzarkHillbilly
Sounds like must see TV to me.
Betty Cracker
Raising the alarm about a Putin-adjacent ethno-nationalist like Le Pen getting a higher share of the vote is legit, but framing it as a narrow race is just a straight-up lie. It really shouldn’t be this goddamned hard to get that right.
Speaking of media fail:
This framing actively makes readers DUMBER. If you click through, the CNN article does note that voter fraud is rare, blah blah blah. But the article neglects to cover a lot of hinky stuff in the bill.
The Miami Herald’s coverage of the bill is better. It includes details, such as that the bill bans ranked-choice voting in the state, that it does not address the “ghost candidate” fraud problem that netted FL GOP at least one stolen statehouse seat (Dem amendments addressing this were specifically rejected by Republicans), contains a provision to allow a specific FL Republican to move up a county commission election timeline by two years, etc.
terraformer
It’s disappointing Biden didn’t *also* include, along with COVID and Putin, the deliberate price-gouging by big oil as one of the reasons pump prices are so high
Hoodie
@Jeffro: The problem is the 24/7 news cycle and the human addiction to information. There is only so much content out there that can be easily and quickly investigated and packaged to meet this schedule. Because of this, the media constantly recycles material and pads content with their nonsensical takes because that’s all they’ve got.
Sometimes I listen to MSNBC when I’m driving down to our place in SE Georgia. Over the space of a few hours, they constantly rehash the same stuff, parading a line of “special contributors” who each throw out their 30 second takes to accompany it. These are not bad people, and many of them do have insightful things to say, but the whole thing ends up just saturating the information space with a flood of disjoint factoids and opinions such that nothing but chaos really emerges from it.
Gin & Tonic
@Benw: Go take a peek. Don’t keep us in suspense.
zhena gogolia
@danielx: no I haven’t, sorry. I hope someone speaks up
Omnes Omnibus
@Hoodie: Car radios can also play music.
Benw
@jeffreyw:
50% chance of that!
Gin & Tonic
And anyway, since I may have made a comment or two in the past about the absence of a US Ambassador to Ukraine, Ambassador Brink is a solid choice and I am glad that there is finally a nomination.
Betty Cracker
@danielx: No, but my husband’s father, uncle, aunt and brother all underwent the procedure — at varying ages and in a range of general health statuses — and all came through with flying colors.
Steve in the ATL
@Hoodie: St. Simon’s?
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
We’ve made a lot of progress educating our side about voter supression. It’s world’s better than it was even a decade ago. It’s a top tier issue for Democratic voters, where it was always a top tier issue just for AA Democratic voters. We’ve lost a lot of ground on federal protections for voting rights with the far Right court’s eradication of the voting rights act, but our VOTERS know more.
Hoodie
@Omnes Omnibus: Oh, I usually just play music, but did this recently as the Ukraine sage was first unfolding. I would not suggest it as a habit.
Brachiator
This is good stuff. BBC News, which has its own issues, was pretty clear in noting that Macron would probably win by a substantial margin. A few other British pundits claimed that some citizens were voting against Le Pen, not for Macron, or that they were holding their nose and voting for Macron despite the fact that he was a disappointment. Maybe they were trying to invoke the2016 US presidential election.
The latest reporting indicates that French turnout was 63 percent, the lowest since 1969. This still seems pretty good to me. And no matter how you slice it, voters rejected Le Pen.
Meanwhile, here at home, I like what Biden is doing. I would like to see him stick it to the GOP and challenge them to pass his inflation fighting legislation. I would also like to see Biden emphasize that inflation is a world wide problem. Conservatives want to blame Biden or stimulus payments or worse, suggest that if we did nothing and let people die of Covid, the economy would be stronger.
Hoodie
@Steve in the ATL: St. Marys
Dorothy A. Winsor
I’m in Paris right now, and it’s thronged with tourists. The TV news is still talking about the election. As far as I can tell (since it’s in French), they’re talking about whether Le Pen should count as the leader of the opposition party.
Our hotel is in an area that has a lot of African and middle-Eastern immigrants. It’s a very different Paris than what you see around the big monuments.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@danielx:
Is that the same as having a stent inserted? Because I had that.
japa21
@Gin & Tonic: I have been waiting for your take. Thank you.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
We also successfully marginalized some of the nuts of on our side, people who discredit protection of voting rights by insisting something like a patch on a program is diabolical.
The Right is FULL of voting conspiracy theorists. They not only didn’t marginalize them, they are nominating them for public office. I was a pollworker last cycle. This is now mainstream on the Right. Every single on their candidates is required to recite it.
Doug R
putin backing trump, trump coming to power, the trump administration ripping up the pandemic playbook and pulling scientists from Wuhan China meant a pandemic was INEVITABLE. It was just a matter of time.
So it all goes back to putin.
Hoodie
@Brachiator:
What else is new? Voters are always disappointed, e.g., lots of people were disappointed with Obama after his first term.
mali muso
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Jealous! If you get a chance to sample some West African cuisine in your arrondissement, go for the yassa poulet, ris au gras/thieboudienne, or mafe (peanut sauce). Those are the Senegalese names but pretty much the same dishes I came to love living in Mali. Hope you are having a great trip!
Kropacetic
If only the media could find a way to report this without seeming like criminally partisan Democrats. The slightly pro-Republican framing in BC’s tweet is a start, but they have to do more to show they’re True American Patriots (Trademark of the Republican Party).
JAFD
@danielx: Well, the docs ran a catheter and an auxiliary balloon pump thru me after my heart attack, write a couple of postings here, December 2018 or thereabouts. Was unconscious at time of the catheterization, tho.
My cardiologists think doing a catheter ablation to correct my atrial fibrillation would be beneficial, will probably have that done later this summer, good Lawd wilin’ and no new covid mutations appear…
Doug R
@Brachiator:
Low turnout usually implies voters are generally satisfied with the current government or at least wary of electing the opposition.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@mali muso:
We’re having a great trip. I’ll have to see if Mr DAW is up to eating local
JMG
@Hoodie: As a 30 year veteran of the news business (print division), it has ALWAYS been the curse of the racket that most days are slow news days (that’s good for everybody else, of course). For cable news, which has to sell news 24/7, the premise “today’s the most important day EVER” becomes a prime directive. This creates an inevitable bias, not ideologically, but towards creating an inflated version of reality.
Kay
I find the discussion on the Right about women really chilling. Just the glee they take in their new powers over women, how they graciously offer an “exception” for her life – a reprieve- but only in very rare instances which they will determine makes me feel like I’m suffocating.
Media have just blithley skipped over the fact that the entire Right now wants abortion banned with no exceptions for rape and incest and accepted their terms of the new “norm”, which is that they MIGHT, might, offer exceptions on a case by basis if the woman will die.
No discussion on how these cases- these possible reprieves- will be adjudicated, or by whom. It’s just not important enough to even ask them. There will be some kind of code or rule or whatnot that anti-abortion people will throw together last minute, or who knows maybe they’ll just let judges make the laws on a case by case basis, your local county judge will decide if you live or die, no one knows and it isn’t important enough to ask.
Geeno
@Benw: Is it alive or dead?
JMG
@Doug R: Highest amount of nonvoters were from the left, dissatisfied with both choices. How many of those were performative abstentions because they knew Macron was going to win is unknown. But the French are perpetually dissatisfied with their government’s performance. It’s almost a matter of patriotic pride.
The Moar You Know
In a democracy, 60-40 is a pasting. A blowout. An ass-kicking.
I’m beginning to suspect that the press may be the real bootlicking authoritarians in our society.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
The Macon victory takeaway that the MSM will never tell you:
A moderate incumbent with low job approval ratings can win a significant reelection victory if their opponent is sufficiently extreme.
Takeaway: Great news for Joe Biden!
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@The Moar You Know: Don’t forget the drama kings and queens. They’re here to entertain!
Betty Cracker
@Kay: Good. Awareness is important. Maybe knowing Republicans are placing obstacles in their path will inspire some people to vote out of sheer spite.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@JMG:
What I hate the most is that every story, even if it’s three days old, is “breaking news”, and the most dramatic footage is replayed as if it’s live. It especially sucks when events are churning the way they have been since /checks watch/ what feels like forever.
I was looking at a post about cable news ratings and 1) almost nobody’s watching, the audience for all three big news networks is fewer than 10M people, and 2) MSNBC ratings take a marked dip during Chuck Todd’s hour
JCJ
@Benw:
Do they still play the Large Hadron Rap?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j50ZssEojtM
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Kay: Pretty frightening.
But the news room is cootie-free!
JCJ
@danielx: Yup. With three stents. Two in the LAD and one in the RCA. I named them Larry, Lloyd, and Ralph.
Kay
The kind of proud strutting around proclaiming what each individual Republican will or will not allow in a pregnancy and we just have to wait until they utter the vague, poorly thought out decree. They have wanted this control a long time. It’s a hammer. They’re not even pretending it’s anything else. All the gauzy Hallmark card language the religious Right used to use about mommies and babies is gone. Judge and jury, and thrilled with their new control.
The pregnancy police have arrived and they intend to use this tool they have been handed to punish.
Everything pro choice people said about them was true.
indycat32
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Has Mr. DAW needed his rain coat?
germy
@terraformer:
SFAW
@Doug R:
Fixed
Dorothy A. Winsor
@indycat32:
No, the weather has been cool and windy but mostly sunny. It’s supposed to warm up a little this week.
SFAW
@germy:
During the last gas price run-up, some 10 or so years ago, I noticed that oil company profits increased commensurately (more or less). Since it was highly unlikely that consumption increased as much as profits did, that pointed to oil companies charging more because they could — not because they “had to.”
danielx
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Aye, the very same – my turn in the barrel evidently. As with dental surgery, I hope they put me out for it since I really don’t want to see what they are doing. Fortunately they go through an artery in the wrist now- Don’t Phuck With The Phemoral Artery being one of my mottoes.
waspuppet
The thing about the “Le Pen basically won” takes is, they don’t spend any time explaining why she lost, and/or why she’s, you know, bad. You come away from these takes with no understanding that a bullet was dodged.
jonas
Covering the death of democracy and of civilization as we know it? Think of the clicks!
SFAW
Re: the newly-installed Mystery Box near
The Gates of Hellthe Large Hadron Collider: I think it looks like a Time Cube, maybe? Someone should investigate!! Let’s get Joe Arpaio, Orly Taitz, Sidney Powell, and Roland Burton Hedley III to investigate! Right TF now!!!Benw
@JCJ: that’s a blast from the past
jonas
@SFAW: Same as it ever was. If companies were just passing on higher costs, rather than just gouging, it would be a wash on their balance sheets. Instead — every f-ing time — we see prices spike and — voila! — so do corporate profits. Funny how that works.
Kathleen
JCJ
@danielx:
I should add that the procedure was done through then radial artery in my right wrist instead of the usual approach the femoral artery in the groin. I thus did not need to lay still with pressure on the access site afterward. I had a wristband that was inflated with air to apply pressure over the site.
OzarkHillbilly
Just what musk wants twitter to be?
SFAW
@danielx:
When I got stented, I was awake (but sedated) and watched the display, while the heart guy explained to me what I was seeing. It was pretty cool.
Except for the part where he implanted a Bill Gates Tracking Microchip (Pat. Pend.) in my brain. [Fortunately, there was a lot of unused space in my cranium, so he was able to do it quickly, without hunting around for “free spot.”]
jonas
@germy: If libs had the highly-coordinated media ecosystem capable of carpet-bombing the American public with the outrage-of-the-day the way the GQP does, we’d have mobs with pitchforks and torches outside every oil company headquarters in North America. Unfortunately we have to settle for the occasional tweet from POTUS or whomever that absolutely no one, least of all in the media, will pay the slightest attention to. Sigh.
NotMax
(eyes still focusing while slowly shuffling to what passes for awake mode from a scrumptious post-prandial nap)
Are we there yet?
Howzabout some >Tuesday? (Bonus homage.)
;)
Steeplejack
@Benw:
Run! Run for your life!
JCJ
@Benw: I sent that to one of my colleagues who remembers it well from grad school. I can’t believe that is from 2008. How can 14 years have passed so quickly!
MagdaInBlack
@Kay: Keep going, Kay, you’re doing my rant for me and doing a fine job too.
SFAW
@jonas:
Exactly.
OzarkHillbilly
@danielx: After I got my stents in my femoral veins and the bleeding had finally stopped, I sat up and had this sudden wet warmth spreading very fast across my groin.
“Uh, R? I seem to have sprung a leak.”
Which didn’t really bother me as she was a very attractive young lady.
NotMax
@Benw
That’s the Higgs Boson Motel™. Elementary particles go in but they don’t come out.
Maybe.
;)
Kropacetic
Shhhh. That’s Obama’s time machine that he will use once he is born ten years from now in Kenya.
Steeplejack
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Not eating local? Has he been getting Royales from McDonald’s?
Eunicecycle
@The Moar You Know: and do they realize, in an authoritarian country, their jobs will disappear
ETA: the press, I mean.
Another Scott
@Brachiator: The BBC report I heard on the radio just after the election results were announced, by some woman reporter that I haven’t been able to track down with certainty, was different. It might have been Katya Adler (who I usually like). In the audio report, she seemed almost angry that Macron had won, going on and on about how well Le Pen had done and how Macron better address her voters concerns or he’s doomed, etc., etc. Here’s a slightly more circumspect written piece.
I don’t know where these reporters were taught about elections, but it doesn’t seem to be in any democracy. 99.8% of the vote may have been the norm for Stalin and Mao, but anywhere else, a 17 percentage point, 5.5 million vote margin is a blowout. That doesn’t mean that everyone loves the winner, but it doesn’t mean that they’re doomed and have to turn on a dime and support the loser’s policies, either. It means that they won a resounding victory.
(sigh)
Cheers,
Scott.
sab
@danielx: Is that anything like an ablation?
Steeplejack
@JMG:
This. Macron is the first president to win reëlection in, what, 20 years?
Benw
@Steeplejack: I’m running at 0.99c!
Cliosfanboy
@danielx: yes, a couple years ago. But everything was fine (the tests showing a problem were wrong) and it was an easy process. I was home that afternoon.
Another Scott
@waspuppet:
About 1/4-way down this page:
Next time for sure!!11ONE.
Cheers,
Scott.
RaflW
@Another Scott: Not the same reporter, but this one seems ripped from the pages of the NYT (or DougJ)
Hugh Schofield goes on in his piece to say these things, which sound distinctly not-polarizing to me, but what do I know?
“So, Emmanuel Macron is the first president in modern times who, after running every aspect of foreign and domestic policy for a full term, has once again won the trust of the people” and “there are millions of French people of the middling type who feel that Emmanuel Macron has not been at all a bad president.”
Huh.
The balance of the article is about how, in Hugh’s mind, by occupying the ‘personalised’ center (whatever that means) Macron has forced the oppositions to head for the far left and the far right.
I guess it was inevitable that even centrism would fail by winning, and thus become a force for bad.
[facepalm (dot) gif]
Kay
@MagdaInBlack:
Imagine the response of political media if the entire Democratic Party had adopted a position on changing existing law that polls at 32% ?
It would be the focus of every op ed and Sunday show.
Radical! Wildly unpopular! Kowtowing to the far Right base! Instead they’re “sir, is there a chance you would consider sparing the mother’s life under the new regime?”
NotMax
@RaflW
Victors in disarray!
//
Cameron
@danielx: I had several of them that went in through my shoulder; docs wanted to have a good look around before they cracked me open.
Kay
@MagdaInBlack:
Has there been a SINGLE piece on how Republicans might be “going to far” with their radical far Right lurch on abortion? Any of the stern warnings Democrats get every time they propose anything?
Nope. They said it so it’s now the position of all “Americans”. Anyone who opposes it is immediately in the “other” camp.
Joe Biden gets more pushback from them on masks on airplanes than the fact that the entire GOP is radically altering 50 years of existing law on the regulation of every pregnancy. It’s women so it doesn’t matter.
Benw
@NotMax: so that’s what lepton number conservation means!
NotMax
@Benw
“Elementary, my dear
WatsonFermi.”//
MagdaInBlack
@Kay: I’d join in but I’m at work, so just quietly cheering you on =-)
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: Some Central American countries passed strict abortion bans (much stricter than their already existing abortion bans!) in a wave of enthusiasm following a visit from Pope John Paul II, and I recall some of them explicitly did not have a life-of-the-mother exception because proponents simply denied any such cases existed. Ectopic pregnancy? You have to wait until the fallopian tube bursts.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Steeplejack:
No way. I was talking about food that would be home-based for many of the immigrants in the area.
We had croissants and coffee for breakfast and baguette sandwiches for lunch. That’s pretty French, though not fancy French. We’re going out shortly to spend some time poking around on the Left Bank before we go to dinner. Our hotel is pretty far out in the 20th Arrondisement, so we have to take the Metro and change trains at least once. We have our Navigo cards in hand now, though, so it should be easy.
Kristine
@Benw: If you find out, do tell!
Dorothy A. Winsor
@danielx:
In my case, I was pretty groggy. I could hear them talking but didn’t care. I was in the middle of a heart attack and immediately felt better
Betty Cracker
@Kay: I keep thinking I just missed it somehow, but nope, I haven’t seen a single piece on the radical rightward lurch on abortion. I see lots of process stories about what rights Republicans might decide to obliterate next or how they might extend the radical laws that govern red states to blue ones.
Here’s what I wonder: does the media treating this radical rightward lurch as normal condition lots of voters to accept it as normal too? I think it does, at least to some extent.
Sure Lurkalot
@Kay: I totally agree that those who seek to restrict access to abortion “except in very rare instances for the life of the mother” should tell us what those instances are. I want one of them to say “if she has other children”, because I have little doubt this is what they think. Otherwise, the life of the baby will take precedent.
Eolirin
@OzarkHillbilly: This highlights another media problem. This obsessive need to look “balanced” leading to a deliberate attempt to try to find good things to say about an awful experience. That’s generating its own kind of bias.
danielx
@sab:
Dunno, this is all new to me. Had some chest pain while cutting grass and moving landscaping rocks and decided not to wait around. Talked to a friend who is a cardiologist, he said his first ten guesses would be a blockage of some sort.
Edit: discovered that Indianapolis is an excellent place to be if you have cardiac issues, humongous concentration of heart specialists/facilities in these parts – much more than in most cities of comparable size.
Another Scott
@Betty Cracker: I know you and all the women know this, but there are good people out there trying to get the word out. Guttmacher.org:
Chasing after better coverage by the click-addicted MSM is probably a lost cause for a while (maybe longer). We need to work around them.
Cheers,
Scott.
RaflW
@Betty Cracker: Normalizing? You mean like this from Axios? (Grrrrrr!)
To which this response was darkly perfect:
Reporters have just dispensed with even the milquetoast “baseless” in discussing the outright GOP free-for-all that is coming.
“Up next at Axios: The first domestic Gulag is under construction in Idaho. Find out why this job-creating strategy is winning new friends in Pocatello!”
Betty Cracker
Headline for WaPo article:
You don’t say…
NotMax
@RaflW
“Um, don’t believe you can impeach the Poet Laureate.”
//
eclare
@Steeplejack: Hahaha….
no comment
@Benw:
Gwyneth Paltrow’s character’s head?
No. Wrong genre.
After watching Dark (Netflix), I’m thinking it’s a large, floating, black, amorphous god particle.
trollhattan
@Gin & Tonic:
Seconded. Peek through the flap labeled “Do not open flap.”
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Eolirin:
This. Journalists hate examining their own (and their industry’s) biases, because they’ve bought in to this fantasy that the don’t have any. Which makes them even more biased!
Calouste
@Eunicecycle: In an authoritarian country, the media personalities’ jobs (don’t call them press) will be even better. They don’t even have to think what to say, they can just read what the Ministry of Propaganda sends them. You assume these people want to be an independent press, I think they just want a cushy sinecure.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
Ugh, I can’t stand JJ Abrams.
WhatsMyNym
Twitter stock price continues to fall, trying to stay above 50. Tesla is crashing.
NotMax
@WhatsMyNym
Schadenmuske?
//
gvg
@Betty Cracker: What radical right lurch? Seriously, they have always been this extreme, even the past centerest right. They just didn’t have the power to do anything because they hadn’t managed to stock all the judges who didn’t care about the law or actual women over a period of 30 years, especially on the supreme court. This was a slow moving disaster, but most of the nutty mean statements from now, I heard back when. Especially from their voters who have always been more extreme than the actual politicians. A good part of why I am atheist too, but quietly.
Gin & Tonic
Incidentally, those of you who live in Maryland might be interested to know that the state Department of Health apparently does not license or regulate “urgent care” clinics in any way. That’s really reassuring.
Soprano2
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I would love to go to France again. I’ve been looking at Viking river cruises in France, maybe for next year, or we could go on the university’s choir trip to France in 2023. They usually allow adults to “accompany” the choir if they want to pay the full price for the trip, plus you get to hear them sing!. Sometimes you get to see things the tourists don’t – we got to see a room in Westminster Abbey they never show to tourists, for example.
RaflW
@WhatsMyNym: Dow is down 5.6% from just this past Thursday morning. I know a lot of it is the Fed threatening a half-percent rate hike, but one does wonder how a lot of people turning their eye to the wildly over-valued Tesla (more ‘market capitalization’ than the next 9 car companies combined) might matter.
Despite decades of investing, I’ve never been swift enough, nor risk-tolerant enough, to short a stock. But both Tesla and Twitter could be candidates for the more bold.
Betty Cracker
@gvg: It’s a radical lurch to the right when Republicans eliminate abortion rights with no exception for rape or incest. Or when Republicans magnanimously consider whether to grant women an exception if their own life is at stake.
Of course there have always been radical right wing nuts — nobody said that’s new. But yeah, it is a radical lurch to the right that these extremist positions are now mainstream within the Republican Party and being enacted in states all over the country. I’d also add the concepts of abortion bounty hunters and trying to restrict what happens in other states as radical.
Brantl
@Ken: I thought it was 150%?
Brantl
@danielx: That’s a method, a means to an end, what is the end they’re trying to achieve?
Another Scott
@WhatsMyNym: Interesting. Tesla’s down 10% from the open at the moment. But it looks like it’s had similar or larger crashes in the past. The traders must be loving it.
Cheers,
Scott.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
They never again asked him about his bipartisan plan to reform the electoral count act, after he assured them it was all but complete.
Manchin and Sinema refuse to repeal the Trump tax cuts. That is now and always has been the sticking point to any progress at all. That’s why Manchin now says he wants a bipartisan deal. He knows Republicans, like him, will never repeal the Trump tax cuts so they will borrow any climate change mitigation funding or push the cost off to lower and middle class people with accounting tricks. But the Trump tax cuts to the rich must be protected at all costs.
RaflW
@Betty Cracker: So much of the media ‘viewpoint’ is still firmly the male gaze. If Democrats were running around putting harsh limits on diesel-dually pickups and trucknutz, it’d be nonstop pundit meltdown for months.
Steamroll Roe and make ectopic pregnancies fatal? Two days of ‘balanced’ headlines and we’re movin’ on. It’s insanely misogynistic (and deeply saturated in class barriers – bigtime journalist/pundit girlfriends will always be able to travel somewhere or get a surreptitious mail order script for what they need).
Brantl
@Kay: Pain educates. Always.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
It’s almost endearing how many pundits still believe Joe Manchin has any intention of raising taxes on the rich.
I want some of the magic the West Virginia weasel has. I don’t know how he does it. It’s right in front of them what the block to any progress is and they still believe.
Another Scott
@Kay: You keep saying this about Manchin and the Trump taxes, but I think you consistently misread him.
Warning Politico (from 2017):
Yes, it’s performative. Yes, it’s nonsensical. But he’s been consistent about it. He doesn’t like TFG’s tax cuts. He wants “regular order” to write new bills (which will never happen because the GQP will never go along with it and will demand 60 votes to move forward).
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
Geminid
@gvg: I think there has been a lurch. The radical tendencies in the Republican party go way back, and Gingrich’s “Contract for America” was just a way station. The “tea party” movement of 2010 was a continuation. But trump turbocharged this tendency, and the Chamber of Commerce types who used to be a brake on the excesses are now marginalized and maligned as “RINOs.” There really is a difference from ten yars ago. I can see it in this year’s Republican primaries.
The question I have is whether voters will reject Republican extremism and overreach. Back in 2004 Karl Rove thought that he was helping to create an enduring “Center-Right” majority. Had it not been for the Iraq war Republicans might have pulled this off. But now Republicans have a “Radical Right” party. They’ve ceded the center, and this could set up an enduring “Center-Left” coalitional majority for the Democratic party.
I think Republicans recognize this danger. One reason (besides meanness) they are leaning so hard into voter suppression and election subversion is that for all their “We the People” rhetoric, they know that they represent a minority, and a shrinking one at that.
Kay
@Brantl:
Our voters are smarter and better prepared now. It’s so true it’s used by the Right to justify no federal protection for voting rights. They point to our voters ability to understand each round of the ever-changing round of hoops they need to jump thru and vote despite the Right’s efforts to deny them the franchise. I think their furious efforts to stop people voting actually juices D turnout. It’s a diminishing reward.
Ramona Rosario
@WhatsMyNym: Heheheh!
Benw
@no comment: how was Dark?
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon: sooooo many lens flares and nonsensical plotlines!
Calouste
@WhatsMyNym: I think the plan to take Twitter private is a recipe for disaster for the company. A private company just can’t compete for the best engineers with publicly traded companies that can promise serious wealth with their stock options. There are limits to how many stockholders a private company can have, and it’s significantly lower than the number of people currently working for Twitter.
Kay
@Another Scott:
Sorry. It’s bullshit. Democrats would take anything from him right now IF it’s paid for with repeal of the tax cuts.
Saying he insists on Republican backing is saying he won’t repeal any of the Trump tax cuts, because that’s the condition to get ANY Republican. No Republican will raise taxes. If Joe Manchin’s condition is “Republicans” then taxes are off the table, unless it’s some bullshit with “fees”. It is now and was always the Trump tax cuts. Nothing he or Simema said ever mattered without that block addressed.
Kay
@Another Scott:
There’s no practical or functional difference between saying “my condition is Republicans” and “my condition is no repeal of the Trump tax cuts”. They are the same condition. All he’s done is add a bullshit layer.
debbie
@Another Scott:
I used to do graphic design and editing for a number of women’s groups, including the one at the forefront of the right’s abuse, and just about every paper/report/brochure created cited something from the Guttmacher Institute.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@terraformer: He didn’t. That is the only thing I wish Biden did that was more Trump-like. He should be hammering these companies by name.
Benw
@Gin & Tonic: @Kristine: aha it’s a prototype of a detector that is proposed to be installed in the shaft above ATLAS to look for very very long-lived decay particles from proton collisions in ATLAS. Fun!!
Another Scott
@Kay: He and Sinema did not vote for TFG’s tax cuts – no Democrat in the Senate did.
I understand where you’re coming from – he’s been a pox on Biden’s agenda, but there is nuance in Manchin’s position that lumping him (and Sinema) in with the GQP misses. Politics is slow and frustrating, but the way forward with closely divided teams is to work the nuance.
Cheers,
Scott.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@OzarkHillbilly:
Its all about ethics in game journalism, y’know. That and keeping my browser history away from prying eyes.
Geminid
@Another Scott: I’ve always tended to dismiss the notion that Manchin would turn his coat and join the Republicans. Now, though I wonder if he is looking at the possibility of a Republican majority in the next Congress and is hedging his bets. Manchin likes being in the Majority. He might turn Independent and caucus with the Republicans if he thought he would better maintain his clout during the last two years of his term. I think McConnell would be accommodating as to committee assignments.
Kay
@Another Scott:
I actually prefer Sinema. I consider her outright disdain for her voters and the Democratic Party the more honest position than Manchin’s silly and obviously dishonest game playing.
It got close to where we were finally going to address whether Joe Manchin was telling the truth about raising taxes aaaand- look at that! A brand new condition! One that necessarily exludes raising taxes.
He must be relieved. Slithered out of another promise.
Kay
@Another Scott:
I don’t blame Democrats in Congress or Biden at all for Manchin and Sinema. There’s nothing you can do with people like that. They never once operated in good faith, and that’s fatal to a negotiation. It’s a character issue. They are of poor character. Back stabbing, goalpost moving, deal breaking, the whole works.
Soprano2
In MO they are trying to pass a law that would have criminal penalties for a woman who leaves the state to have an abortion in a state where it’s still legal (this is if they can completely outlaw abortion here). They are incandescent with rage that PP set up a clinic about 10 miles from St. Louis in Illinois, and they want to prevent MO women from going there to get an abortion. How much commentary have you heard about how they’re trying to illegally inhibit women from interstate travel to get a legal medical procedure? Probably precious little. The things that the press believe only effect women are given short shrift in the national press, especially when it’s about an “icky” subject like abortion. They just wish abortion would go away already so they could quit having to talk about it.
Citizen Alan
@Another Scott:
The only difference is that Synema and manchin presently belong to a party in which they would be unelectable if they ran on a platform of “rich people shouldn’t have to pay taxes.” That doesn’t mean they don’t believe that position in their hearts or that they would be unwilling to find a pretectual reason to support it.
Kay
Purge the liberals! Shriek the former cancel culture warriors!
Soprano2
Yes, of course it does. People think “I don’t agree with that, but they’re talking about it as if it’s completely normal, so most people must agree with them”. I think the press believes abortion is “icky”, so they just want to quit talking about it. I guess they hope if the right gets their way on the issue, they’ll quit talking about it. Guess what, no chance in hell that happens. They’ll be on to trying to ban types of birth control (all the most effective ones, of course) that they believe cause abortions to happen. All these people in the press who are ignoring the current huge rightward lurch on abortion will be horrified and say “Who could have known this was going to happen?”
Kay
@Citizen Alan:
It was always going to be really difficult to repeal any of the Trump tax cuts. A massive wealth transfer to the wealthiest people is worth fighting for. They will and are fighting it. It’s worth hundreds of billions to them. ‘
In hindsight, and if I were magically in charge of Democratic negotiations, I’d just do a tax cut repeal. It would clarify matters immediately and it’s popular. They could even sweeten it with deficit reductions but that wouldn’t get Manchin. They already offered that and he declined. But we would know and there’s value in clarity.
Soprano2
@RaflW: Does the press even talk about what they want to impeach these people for? Of course, we all know it’s revenge for the Trump impeachments, but I think the press will feel like they have to cover it “fairly” by acting like there are actual grounds for impeachment of the whole Biden administration.
Gravenstone
@Betty Cracker: The “election police farce” will be a new means to commit electoral crimes, not probe them.
Soprano2
@Kay: Where does Shapiro think Musk is going to get the people he needs to work for him? Has he checked the job market lately? Musk might not have to fire them – I saw somewhere that upwards of 70% of Twitter employees are already looking for new jobs. Would serve Musk right if he got a shell of a company by the time the deal is finally done.
Gravenstone
Brings to mind a witticism found on the Commons blackboard one morning during college finals week.
“Phuck Physics II”
Soprano2
Here’s the kind of person we have in the MO legislature right now:
Hateful, the lot of them.
Geminid
@Soprano2: This is what you get with gerrymandering. It incites a race to the bottom and Republicans are running as hard as they can.
sab
@danielx: Ablation is for arrhuthmias. Tjey go in through a bein in the groin and work a with lasers. So treating a whole different condition.
It is amazing what they can do working through catheters.
cain
@Calouste: As long as they get paid, and have access to govt repos and maybe get to party with them – that’s all they want.
cain
@Betty Cracker:
The thing is, that won’t be enough – that is only one pillar – so the next will be guns and/or religion.
They are on a spiral downwards, needing to be more and more extreme to keep people outraged.. but I don’t know what happens at that point.
RaflW
Ben Shapiro says “Musk needs to come in and he needs to fire everyone. I mean everyone”
G-d, what a brilliant man. Next, Ben will suggest hiring Devin Nunes to be the new Jack.
James E Powell
@Kay:
This is the key to that messaging or branding thing.
ABC. Accuracy, brevity, clarity. Always Be Closing.
Geminid
@James E Powell: That is a good summary of what can make political messaging effective.