Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

“Cheese and Kraken paired together for the appetizer trial.”

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the GOP

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

An unpunished coup is a training exercise.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

Republicans in disarray!

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

I did not have this on my fuck 2022 bingo card.

Fuck the extremist election deniers. What’s money for if not for keeping them out of office?

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

If you’re pissed about Biden’s speech, he was talking about you.

Thanks for reminding me that Van Jones needs to be slapped.

You are here: Home / Politics / Biden Administration in Action / Wednesday Morning Open Thread: Who Are You Gonna Believe?…

Wednesday Morning Open Thread: Who Are You Gonna Believe?…

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Speaking of parsing one’s lies… Bill Barr is washing his hands of TFG yet again, leading me to believe there’s lots more skells waiting to fall out of the Mar-A-Lardo closets:

Reader Interactions

181Comments

  2. 2.

    Scout211

    Dylan Byers reports  that Chris Licht is out.

    ETA: Posted at the same time as Layer8.  Deserves to be repeated.  Repeatedly.  :)

    Now, after a year of leadership missteps, programming misfires, a disastrous Trumptown hall and the near-total decimation of staff morale in the wake of a chilling all-access Atlantic story, Licht will be vacating the C.E.O. position. I’m told that Warner Bros. Discovery will soon announce that Licht will be stepping down as chairman and C.E.O. of CNN, ostensibly bringing an end to one of the most turbulent periods in the network’s 43-year history.

    Licht will be replaced for an interim period by Amy Entelis, the revered longtime CNN executive, talent whisperer and CNN Films chief who served as a loyal deputy for years to Licht’s predecessor, Jeff Zucker.

  3. 3.

    Baud

    sexualizes children with graphic public displays,

    Is he talking about the bat boys and ball girls?

  4. 4.

    Baud

    Also, too, Nancy Pelosi threw out the first pitch yesterday in DC!

    Baseball is ours!

  5. 5.

    Baud

    Is there really still a lot of Bernie fan fic on Twitter, or does AL find the nuggets among the Nazis?

  6. 6.

    Jackie

    @Scout211: Not realizing a new post popped up, I posted the same link on the late night thread lol

    No excuses for anyone not getting the news!

  7. 7.

    bbleh

    “no, you don’t understand! i was hurting you as a means, not an end!” 

    “Plus also, it’s your fault for making me do it, by being out and not staying where you belong!“

  8. 8.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    @Baud: I guess I don’t know what kind of show the Sisters of Perpetual Responsibility are putting on, but the few drag shows I’ve seen could be seen as partially about gender, but not about sex.

  10. 10.

    dmsilev

    @Layer8Problem: The real question is whether the ownership will admit that their theory of operation for CNN (“Pander to the right, just not like Fox does!”) is really really wrong. Guessing not.

  11. 11.

    Matt McIrvin

    On cultural hot-button stuff like this, Bernie Sanders is to the right of the Democratic Party. He wants to deemphasize it in favor of class/economic stuff, where he doesn’t disagree on substance. That’s the aspect his fans either deny or insist is a feature of true leftism. That (and pure sexism) were why there were 2016 voters who saw him as the moderate alternative to Hillary Clinton.

  12. 12.

    dmsilev

    Apple pie, Old Glory and white picket fences are going to be lib-coded by year’s end.

    Surely the picket fences will have to be repainted in a broad spectrum of colors.

  16. 16.

    narya

    I watched Parlatore on Chris Hayes last night, and, hoo-boy . . . Hayes did push back on a number of things (I wasn’t taking notes), but I also hope that Jack Smith was watching, because it was a display of potential TFG pushbacks, even though Parlatore has left TFG’s team. What a load of horseshit. He also played a clip of the excrable Cruz. The thing that’s most interesting to me is that there does seem to be a certain amount of flailing all over that side of the aisle; I’m just hoping it’s not wishful thinking on my part.

  17. 17.

    Scout211

    @dmsilev: I am guessing that the plan to capture “the middle” will be framed as a Chris Licht problem. But from all the analyses on the opinion sections everywhere, what pushed him out was the Atlantic article about him that angered everyone who worked at CNN and Discovery. He tried to apologize to staff but the damage was (publicly) done.

  19. 19.

    Baud

    @Matt McIrvin:

    He’s schtick is to officially take the left-most position on almost every issue and then not really talk about the issues that he doesn’t want to emphasize.  That way there’s always something his supporters can cite when critics call him out.

  21. 21.

    OzarkHillbilly

    A lawyer for Santos had said identification of the guarantors would imperil their “health, safety and wellbeing”, and claimed the New York congressman would rather go to prison than reveal the names.

    “My client would rather surrender to pre-trial detainment than subject these suretors to what will inevitably come,” the lawyer, Joseph Murray, wrote to the judge on Monday.

    We find your proposal acceptable.

  23. 23.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    Entertaining thread about how tech bros wrongly believe their expertise in one area means they’re experts in things even distantly related. The thread is about techbros trying to monetize fanfic, but detours into an ill-fated effort to take over the online knitting community. It includes the hilarious detail that they used a pic of someone crocheting in their publicity.

    hilariously, two business bros tried to do exactly this with knitting a couple years ago.they knew nothing about knitting, but they had a 150K+ budget. they bought knitting dot com for 80K. they meant to be a 8 figure brand within a year.knitting fandom ATE THEM ALIVE. https://t.co/zRy3dnCUCv— oui oui baguette 🥐 (@o_honeybees) June 6, 2023

  24. 24.

    Elizabelle

    It’s not just Chris Licht who took the fall here.  Anderson Cooper, lecturing us that we needed to see MORE Trump to understand who he is?

    That is something one does not forget.

  27. 27.

    narya

    @Baud: Yeah, that’s my thought, too. But here’s the thing (as long as I’m gonna make the argument): whenever I hear them ranting–e.g., Pudd’n Boots going on about “woke”–I wonder what normies hear. It makes zero sense, and increasingly sounds like a toddler having a tantrum.

  29. 29.

    Baud

    @narya:

    We shouldn’t assume that normies get the same bundle of information we get or process it in the same way. I doubt there is a single normie reaction to people like DeSantis.

  33. 33.

    Scout211

    On CNN’s front page, Oliver Darcy gets to make the announcement. Sweet!  Or was it “too emotional?” (Licht criticized his review of the Trump town hall as too emotional).

    New YorkCNN — 
    Chris Licht, the embattled chief executive and chairman of CNN, whose brief one-year tenure at the network was stained by a series of severe missteps, announced on Wednesday that he will depart the company.

    “I met with Chris and he will be leaving CNN,” David Zaslav, the chief executive of parent company Warner Bros. Discovery, told CNN employees at the start of the network’s daily editorial call Wednesday.

    Licht’s departure, which came days after a devastating 15,000-word profile in The Atlantic, capped a tumultuous year for CNN, marked by layoffs, historically low ratings, and rock-bottom employee morale.

  34. 34.

    Kyle Rayner

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: Love watching people dash themselves on the cliffs of trying to capitalize on feral ungovernable creative communities.

    Ao3 (et al.) is an oasis in the monetizing hellscape.

  35. 35.

    Obvious Russian Troll

    @OzarkHillbilly: I’m surprised. I thought he was already out!

    Licht used to be the showrunner for the Colbert version of the Late Show; Colbert told him not to take the CNN job. I’m beginning to think that Licht never knew that the old Colbert Report show on Comedy Central was satire.

  36. 36.

    Geminid

    @OzarkHillbilly: The assertion that identifying the people who paid Santos’s bail will imperil their “health, safety and well-being” is not credible. They will at most suffer reputational damage, and that is what Santos’s lawyer is trying to prevent.

    I think Santos has dirt on other New York Republicans, and that the bail is basically hush money.

  38. 38.

    JaneE

    How old are the people saying ” the Democrats haven’t moved to the right”?

    Have they read the GOP platform from ’56?

    They have not moved so far as the GOP, and took the entire middle ground by default.

  40. 40.

    narya

    @Baud: Good point. I admit I’m curious what they hear. (And now I’ve thought of that old Far Side cartoon . . . blah blah blah Ginger blah blah.)

  41. 41.

    Geminid

    @Baud: Axios has an article the other day about DeSantis’s primary strategy. The report was that his team thinks that the “swing vote” in the Republican primaries is on the rightward side of the party, and he intends to run to Trump’s right as much as possible. So he’ll pound social issues hard.

  42. 42.

    tobie

    What a way to start the day. Chris Licht gone. His tenure was so short it could have been a Scaramucci. No doubt he’ll blame “the intolerance of liberals” for this. Thomas Zimmer has an interesting analysis of Licht (and the Jack Dorseys and Bill Mahers) of the world. The right doesn’t put their social position as cis-gender, white, educated and privileged males in question. The left does. So all their animus is directed at the left.

    For many of the status-quo moderates, this change has already gone too far. They want to turn the clock back a little bit, to a time before what they see as the current excesses of “wokeism” – to when the privileged position of wealthy elites was a little more secure. So, while I don’t think Chris Licht is a MAGA Republican, his perspective on American politics is shaped by an underlying ideology that makes it just much more plausible to see the Right as not that big of a threat – and the Left as radical, unreasonable, and acutely dangerous.

  43. 43.

    Layer8Problem

    @Dorothy A. Winsor:  That was absolutely delightful schadenfreude.  “Grandmas.” The arrogance, the belief that this couldn’t miss! You come at the knitters you best not miss.

  44. 44.

    Anyway

    @Baud:

    We shouldn’t assume that normies get the same bundle of information we get or process it in the same way.

    My normie neighbors were over last night and repeated the story about litter boxes in primary schools because children identified with cats  – something like that. Aaaaargh!

  46. 46.

    Betty Cracker

    I finally got around to reading the piece on Licht in The Atlantic, so I’m unsurprised to hear he’s out. He’s in the narrative creation business, so he should have known it would be fatal to lose control of his own story like that.

  47. 47.

    narya

    @Anyway: I hope you told them it’s actually so the kids have a place to pee when they’re on lockdown for a shooting . . .

  49. 49.

    Barbara

    “But I treat my gay and trans friends well” is not actually a defense to harming and threatening gays and trans people as a group.  It’s basically an admission of wrongdoing in service to political expediency, and it’s more or less the flipside of the rather obvious pattern Republicans have of not caring about issue X until  one of their own (child, friend, whoever) experiences X.  The primo example of this is guarantees for mental health treatment spearheaded by Pete Domenici after his daughter experienced significant mental health issues.  Or Rob Portman’s “tolerance” for gay people once his son came out to the world.

  50. 50.

    Anyway

    @narya:

    I hope you told them it’s actually so the kids have a place to pee when they’re on lockdown for a shooting . . .

    Yes, I did. I had seen that here on BJ. Thing is these are reliable Ds – couldn’t believe they bought into the cat-identification story.

  56. 56.

    Baud

    @Anyway:

    Also good to remind them that there is a lot of misinformation out there.  Especially if they are reliable Ds.

    Too many are still naive about what’s going on.

  58. 58.

    Anne Laurie

    @Geminid: I think Santos has dirt on other New York Republicans, and that the bail is basically hush money.

    *I* think Santos is now being funded by people who’d rather not have their names revealed, but it’s not ‘hush money‘ so much as ‘enhanced ratf*cking’.

    His campaign was, AFAICT, pure self-dealing grift… but keeping him in the GOP chambers is useful, partially as a media distraction, partially to collect info on the other Freedumb Carcass members.

    Some of those backers might even be American citizens!

  60. 60.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Matt McIrvin: If you look at his congressional record especially before he ran for the Democratic nomination he was pretty right wing on guns and immigration too. Positions he has moderated some what for the national campaigns.

  61. 61.

    OzarkHillbilly

    Four years ago, Fawcett was having a workshop built at his house in Boxford, Berkshire, in which he hoped to pursue his new retirement hobby of wood-turning, when contractors called him over.

    “They asked me to look at something they had pulled out of a hole in the ground,” he said. “It looked like a big stump of wood. I wondered if I could turn it into some nice bowls.”

    After hosing it down, Fawcett noticed curious markings on the piece. “I could see they were possibly man-made. I recognised straight away that this was something unusual.”

    The piece of oak had been lying in peat – known to be an excellent preservative of organic material – 1.5 metres (5ft) below ground.

    Fawcett contacted a local archaeologist, who in turn contacted Historic England. Its experts, working with scientists from the Nottingham Tree-ring Dating Laboratory and the Centre for Isotope Research at the University of Groningen, carried out radiocarbon dating of a timber slice from the wood.

    They concluded there was a 95% probability that the piece of wood dated to between 4640BC and 4605BC. That made it 500 years older than the only other known decoratively carved timber discovered in Britain, found near Maerdy in Wales and dating to the late Mesolithic/early Neolithic period (4270BC – 4000BC).

  62. 62.

    Tony Jay

    @Layer8Problem:

    That was one astonishingly successful rebranding exercise, wasn’t it, Mr Licht?

    Please to move to Fox News and repeat the format.

  64. 64.

    SFAW

    @Baud:

    Well, I read it at the time; it didn’t make any sense to me.

    Of course, I was about one year old, so …

  65. 65.

    Scout211

    @Jackie: He’ll land with TFG, who has been defending him since the infamous town hall.

    Possibly. But more likely, he will be hired to executive  produce a new “Real Housewives of __________. “

    His days producing news shows is likely over, IMHO. I am guessing that Trump will say that he hardly knows him, but will claim he was treated “very unfairly.”

  68. 68.

    OverTwistWillie

    I guess John Malone will continue the search for his Roger Ailes. Micro targeting CNN content for an eighty-two year old right wing billionaire is sure to payoff in a ratings and revenue bonanza.

  70. 70.

    Layer8Problem

    I expect we’ll soon be reading concerned deep-think pieces from the usual suspects about how Licht was canceled by merciless intolerant liberal backlash, for merely trying to give all sides a fair hearing.

    No, he gave Trump an in-kind campaign donation and called it “informing the viewers.”

  72. 72.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Omnes Omnibus: I don’t think I have to worry about her self esteem. I’m still trying to get her to do timeout.

    @SFAW:

    He has donated the piece to the West Berkshire Museum in Newbury where it will go on display.

  73. 73.

    Suzanne

    “no, you don’t understand! i was hurting you as a means, not an end!” is the craziest common conservative objection.

    It’s so true. So much of the right confuses the idea of personal animus as racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. Like, I honestly do not give a shit how they feel. The more pressing problem is the construction of a society that disadvantages people based on those characteristics.

    I mean, I kinda hate everyone.

  76. 76.

    cain

    @Layer8Problem: It looked like he got spanked hard. Yesterday, there was a lot of coverage about him in all the various newspapers. He lost all trust. Good riddance.

  78. 78.

    Chris

    @Layer8Problem:

    I expect we’ll soon be reading concerned deep-think pieces from the usual suspects about how Licht was canceled by merciless intolerant liberal backlash, for merely trying to give all sides a fair hearing.

    Yeah.  I’d love to believe that the whole Licht episode will have been so blatant that it finally put a stake through the delusion that CNN was “liberally biased.”  But the much likelier result is that the only thing anyone’ll remember is “CNN Liberal Hive Mind Punishes Heterodox Conservative For Not Towing The Party Line.”

  82. 82.

    Ihop

    Sweet fancy moses pence, links or it didn’t happen.

    But as a side note, I have over the years seen a number of vids showing unfettered hetero couples in the act (especially in the center field hotel in toronto) of public stadium fornication.

     

    Perhaps mommy is unaware of all his hobbies…

  84. 84.

    Citizen Alan

    @Ken: I don’t really know much about knitting. But it is amusing to think that probably the most famous knitter in history was madame defarge.

  86. 86.

    glory b

    @Matt McIrvin: Bernie used to be a regular on Lou Dobbs show, both of them agreeing that “They’re takin’ our jerbs!”

    THAT certainly seems to have been shoved down the memory hole.

  87. 87.

    Layer8Problem

    On the dubious superlatives front I’m told hereabouts had the worst air in the world yesterday.

  88. 88.

    Manyakitty

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: don’t mess with knitters. We make things with pointy sticks and string. You’ll get buried under a stack of blankets in the sink of an eye. 🧶🧶🧶

  89. 89.

    Betty

    @Barbara: And then you have politicians like Glenn Thompson who shortly after his son’s same sex marriage voted against it in Congress.  Pathetic.

  91. 91.

    Soprano2

    @narya: I think “normies” can’t understand most of what they say, because it’s all self-referential and dependent on knowing what happened on Twitter yesterday. What is “cultural Marxism” anyway? They talk about it all the time, but never tell you what it actually is, and I think most normal people just tune crap like that out. I guess they think if they say “Marxism” people will be turned off by it.

  92. 92.

    Betty

    @Baud: Apparently my cousin’s twin granddaughters decided they are cats. I have to believe it’s connected to some other family problems.

  94. 94.

    Layer8Problem

    @Manyakitty:  The name of the knitting club at New College of Florida is (and hopefully remains) Anarchy Deathsticks.  I’m just saying.

  97. 97.

    Geminid

    @Betty: Zeldin is a possibility. Maybe Elise Stefanik too. I noticed a few days into his Congressional term that Santos included a picture of Stefanik in his Twitter heading. It semed like a blackmail move.

    Not long after Santos’s skeletons started pouring out of the closet, I read an intriguing story- that when Republicans realized they were close to flipping multiple New York Congressional seats, additional money was directed to several candidates but not to Santos. I have not seen this confirmed, but if true it supports the theory that he wasn’t supposed to win. At the time, Republicans thought they would pick up 20 or more seats and wouldn’t need Santos’s vote..

  103. 103.

    UncleEbeneezer

    On Tuesday (6 June) police were called to a school board meeting in the city of Glendale, California – just north of Los Angeles – after demonstrators came to blows with each other.

    The confrontation happened as board members for the Glendale Unified School District, which represents 25,000 students, met to discuss recognising June as Pride Month. An agenda item they unanimously approved later in the evening.

    The public comment section of the meeting was cut short by police due to the violent situation outside the building, with officers giving attendees instructions not to leave for a short period for their own safety.
    Footage and images shared on social media showed hundreds of people from both sides outside the school district headquarters on North Jackson Street in the city.

    LGBTQ+ activists and allies waved Pride flags and held signs which read “protect trans kids” while those protesting the school district’s inclusive policies held American flags and wore white t-shirts with the phrase “leave our kids alone” printed on, a phrase they also chanted.

    Reports have surfaced on social media that a number of the anti-LGBTQ+ protesters were members of the far-right extremist group Proud Boys.

  105. 105.

    Trivia Man

    “But I treat my gay friends kindly” reminds me of a story from South Africa in the PJ o’Rourke book Hilidays In Hell.

    The wealthy, white person was very distraught about a rumor going around – all the black housekeepers we’re going to rise up on a prearranged night and execute all of the whites. “But I treat you so well! I consider you family.”

    The housekeeper was equally distraught.”Oh, no! I could never do that to you! You have been so kind to me for so many years! On that night I am going next door to kill that family. Their housekeeper will come over here for you.”

  107. 107.

    Manyakitty

    @schrodingers_cat: fair enough, but this is clearly a pro-immigrant crowd here. Not sure what you hope to gain.

    Anyway, have a great day. By the way, your art is lovely and your new kitty is super adorable.

  112. 112.

    Scout211

    Another Trump aide is testifying in front of the Florida grand jury.  link

    Taylor Budowich, who has worked as a spokesman for Donald Trump, has arrived at the federal courthouse in Miami to appear before a grand jury as part of special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the former president’s handling of classified documents.

    Budowich and his attorney, Stanley Woodward, declined to answer questions as they arrived.

    Still aligned closely with the former president, Budowich now runs a super PAC backing Trump called MAGA, Inc.

    The grand jury based in southern Florida has heard testimony from multiple witnesses in recent weeks as part of the federal investigation that has relied for months on grand juries in Washington, DC, to help gather evidence and witness testimony.

  114. 114.

    satby

    @OzarkHillbilly: They listed 12 right wing “parent’s rights” groups including the vile Purple for Parents Indiana, who have specifically targeted my friend Meghan, a transgender rights activist, and her organization.

  116. 116.

    UncleEbeneezer

    Seven years ago today we walked up to Farnsworth Park and proudly voted for Hillary in the Dem Primary.  So much of this mess could have been avoided or at least attenuated had everyone did the right thing in November of 2016…it will always make me sad and enraged how our country (and even our side) did her.

  119. 119.

    Chris

    @glory b:

    @Matt McIrvin: Bernie used to be a regular on Lou Dobbs show, both of them agreeing that “They’re takin’ our jerbs!”

    I remember alllllll the way back in 2015, when I read an interview by him that was basically “well blacks vote for us because of civil rights and Latinos vote for us because of immigration and but like we need to find things that speak to EVERYONE not just special interests!” which is completely indistinguishable from your basic white whine about how These People get too much attention.  Which was pretty much the end of my even considering voting for him.

  122. 122.

    Chris

    @Soprano2:

    What is “cultural Marxism” anyway?

    The term goes back to the OG fascists at least.

    I think the root issue is that if you explain words like “Marxism” or “socialism” in crude terms of “it means we take money from the rich and give it to the common people,” 90% of people will either be okay with it or they’ll decide that it’s really not a hill they give a shit about dying on.

    You need to put the “cultural” spin on it, to explain that Marxism means “taking money from the white people and giving it to the Jews/the blacks/the immigrants/wev” before the average white Gentile considers it an outrage.

  123. 123.

    glory b

    @Manyakitty: Hmm. And here I was thinking of getting stabbed & hung. My sister happens to be a hell of a knitter, so maybe I’m just thinking of what her first thought would be lol.

  125. 125.

    glory b

    @schrodingers_cat: Fortunately few on this site, but it feels uncomfortably like there are those who would threaten not to vote unless their desires are addressed & that the rest of us are just a sacrifice their willing to make.

  126. 126.

    Captain C

    @Barbara:

    “But I treat my gay and trans friends well” is not actually a defense to harming and threatening gays and trans people as a group.  It’s basically an admission of wrongdoing in service to political expediency

    I think this is often combined with “we shouldn’t let politics get in the way of our friendships &c.”

    Yeah, you may not want me (or whoever) personally to be eradicated, but you’re enthusiastically voting for people who will do so, and loudly supporting their program.  How could that not put at least a little crimp in our friendship.  Of course this is personal:  you’re voting for me (or whoever) to be eradicated.

    In fact, when it’s whoever, it might be more insulting:  I’m supposed to stay friends with someone who casually votes to erase an entire class of people?

  127. 127.

    satby

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: The article is worth a read. Like the Tea Baggers before them, they’re a fake “grass roots concerned parents” group actually funded by the right wing swamp. There are branches in several states so that the agitators can appear to be locals spontaneously upset about whatever the outrage du jour is.

  129. 129.

    ...now I try to be amused

    @Anne Laurie:

    *I* think Santos is now being funded by people who’d rather not have their names revealed, but it’s not ‘hush money‘ so much as ‘enhanced ratf*cking’.

    His campaign was, AFAICT, pure self-dealing grift… but keeping him in the GOP chambers is useful, partially as a media distraction, partially to collect info on the other Freedumb Carcass members.

    Santos reminds me of Zaphod Beeblebrox, whose real job as President of the Galaxy was distracting attention away from the people who really ran the galaxy.

  132. 132.

    Anyway

    @Suzanne:

    It’s so true. So much of the right confuses the idea of personal animus as racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. Like, I honestly do not give a shit how they feel. The more pressing problem is the construction of a society that disadvantages people based on those characteristics.

    Exactly. I hate pieces where they talk to friends, siblings of public figures. Who gives a rat’s ass? Your public record is sufficient.

    I mean, I kinda hate everyone.

    Amen, sistuh!

  133. 133.

    Elizabelle

    Thinking more on the deplorable Chris Licht:

    You have really screwed the pooch when tens of millions of your network’s most likely viewers are waiting avidly for news of your firing. And celebrating its occurrence.

    His name might enter the meme world.  Much like a Scaramucci.

  135. 135.

    narya

    @Soprano2: Yeah, when I hear some of them going on (and on and on and on) I want to stop them and ask them to explain what they mean. Like, which parts of Marxism are they referencing? What’s cultural Marxism? What does “woke” mean, exactly?

  136. 136.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    Reading the Atlantic piece about Licht people are referencing. At least, I assume this is the piece.

    On every line, I keep asking the question, “what was he thinking?” This quote for instance.

    I asked Licht to explain that mission to me, as plainly as possible.

    “Journalism. Being trusted. Everyone has an agenda, trying to shape events or shape thought. There has to be a source of absolute truth,” he told me. “There’s good actors, there’s bad actors, there’s a lot of shit in the world. There has to be something that you’re able to look at and go, ‘They have no agenda other than the truth.’”

    I’ll take it at face value that this is what he truly believes. But how does any action of his, most particularly holding a T***p rally with pre-screened rabid MAGAts, square with that mission?

    There’s also this:

    A few weeks into his tenure, Licht instructed his producers to downplay the first hearing of the January 6 committee

  142. 142.

    ArchTeryx

    @…now I try to be amused: Zaphod Beeblebrox at least knew how to throw a first class party. He was a harmless Bohemian, which made him a perfect cat’s paw to the real powers of the galaxy.  Of course, when he decided to steal the Heart of Gold and go chase pots of gold at the end of rainbows, that changed the situation somewhat.

    Santos is just a plain old crook being funded by much nastier people.  Beeblebrox probably would stick BOTH his noses up at him.  He has zero class and less style.

  144. 144.

    glory b

    @Chris: I think that they stopped talking about CRT and moved to LGBTQ because it was too difficult for their minions to understand.

    The other day Trump referred to Smith as a Marxist & that was the reason for his unfair prosecution. Any bets on Trump’s ability to define Marxism?

  146. 146.

    Scout211

    In another example of “Who are you gonna believe?”

    Florida acknowledged that they did send the planes with asylum seekers to Sacramento. But they wanted to go to California and were treated well.  They have video to proof it, too!

    But who are you gonna believe? Link  (The Hill, but the story is everywhere this morning).

    The Florida Division of Emergency Management on Tuesday confirmed the state was behind recent migrant flights to California amid a growing feud between the Golden State’s Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and the Sunshine State’s Gov. Ron DeSantis (R).

    “From left-leaning mayors in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, Colorado, the relocation of those illegally crossing the United States border is not new,” division of emergency management spokesperson Alecia Collins said in a statement to The Hill. “But suddenly, when Florida sends illegal aliens to a sanctuary city, it’s false imprisonment and kidnapping.”

    . . .

    “As you can see from this video, Florida’s voluntary relocation is precisely that – voluntary. Through verbal and written consent, these volunteers indicated they wanted to go to California,” Collins said.

    The video shared with The Hill does not explicitly mention whether the passengers were there voluntarily but shows individuals looking at and signing documents in videos and photos. The video also includes footage of individuals on a party bus and of individuals walking toward a plane on a tarmac with luggage.

    . . .

     

    Sixteen South American migrants were dropped off outside the Roman Catholic church in Sacramento last week, a move that California had immediately suspected Florida was responsible for. Eddie Carmona, campaign director at faith-based organization PICO California, said at the time that the migrants had no idea where they were being dropped off, adding they “were lied to and intentionally deceived.”

    California Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) said in a statement Saturday he met with the migrants who were brought to Sacramento on a private plane, noting that there was “no prior arrangement or care in place” for them. He said the migrants were carrying documentation from Florida.

  152. 152.

    prostratedragon

    @Elizabelle:  Could be a good replacement, as Scaramucci has apparently come to some moments of wondering what he could have been thinking, which must be precise technical language since in scrolling down here I note that Ceci n’est pas had the same response to Licht.

  153. 153.

    Kayla Rudbek

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: I always love seeing this story again! The older I get, the less I like Silicon Valley dudebros and their ilk. If we had invested their money in chemistry, physics, textiles, medicine, and biology research, we’d be much better off. “Manufacturing and farming are the only two real games in town”

  154. 154.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Manyakitty:

    wow, that’s awfully reductive.

    Not very reductive this time.  In 2016 we saw it eloquently on display.  Sanders’ message is that everything is class warfare.  He explicitly says that civil rights issues should be downplayed because eating the rich will fix everything.  In practice most of his followers were white men with a ‘minorities should shut up because only my problems are important’ attitude, and got very nasty about it.  The misogyny was definitely on display in his campaign staff as well.  There were issues.

    Warren drew most of the economically focused but strongly pro-civil rights crowd.  I definitely did see Bernie fans who, when they couldn’t get their angry ‘eat the rich’ leader, switched to ‘vote Democrats because Republicans are evil.’  So, Sanders’ supporters are not a monolith.

    @Soprano2:

    What is “cultural Marxism” anyway?

    There are two main aspects of the term.  Represented as how they see it:

    First, economic Marxism means everybody gets the money evenly, which means the people who earned it have to drag the lazy losers and the whole system is wretched and miserable.  Cultural Marxism means every demographic is raised/reduced to the same level, so the noble straight white Christian men are dragged down to the level of brown skinned Muslims (the term is big with islamophobes) and civilization collapses.  Yes, this is direct bigotry.  The term is directly European white supremacist.

    Second, Marxism was a plot by the Jews, so cultural Marxism is a plot by the Jews.  Yes, they believe that insanity, don’t blame me.  So it’s a major anti-Semitic trope as well.

  156. 156.

    gvg

    @bbleh: And us normal people  (don’t have any traits the right says they hate so far) should find this terrifying. That means these people are willing to kill anyone. They don’t have to hate you. They just have to see a momentary advantage and they will kill you. And smile and be nice to you, but still kill you if they think of a reason.

    There was this movie where a little blond girl turned out to be a born psychopathic killer. Her nice old lady neighbor said she could have her parakeet after she died and the little girl said that birds don’t live as long as people. Then she went and either killed the neighbor or tried to. Can’t remember after all these years. It was one of several murders where the motive was so childish, people didn’t catch on for quite awhile.

    Don’t think not being fill in the blank will save YOU. This is what it means to be a society. You have to stick together and not try to throw out sacrificial victims. It doesn’t work. Look at who they are.

  157. 157.

    Gin & Tonic

    Greenpeace with a bold statement about the Kakhovka HPP sabotage/ecocide:

    What happened in Ukraine yesterday was a considerable catastrophe for the country and the environment. The most immediate impact of the massive downstream flooding is on the people who have already been subjected to 15 months of full-scale war. pic.twitter.com/QhdAcRdBST
    — Greenpeace CEE (@GreenpeaceCEE) June 7, 2023

    “What happened” indeed. So, what *did* happen? Opinions differ, amirite?

  162. 162.

    Suzanne

    @Frankensteinbeck:

    Warren drew most of the economically focused but strongly pro-civil rights crowd.  I definitely did see Bernie fans who, when they couldn’t get their angry ‘eat the rich’ leader, switched to ‘vote Democrats because Republicans are evil.’  So, Sanders’ supporters are not a monolith. 

    I know a shit-ton of people who voted for Bernie, who adore Bernie…. and not a single one of them sat out the general election or voted for Trump. I am not denying that there’s a slice of the Bernie cohort who sucks, but FFS, perspective is merited. The constant whining from some commenters here about Bernie Sanders’ supporters is really stupid AF. Stop being so damn online, Twitter is not real life.

  164. 164.

    Geminid

    @Anne Laurie: Santos backer Andrew Intrater and his cousin Viktor are certainly big pieces of the Santos puzzle. Santos appears to have been a cash conduit between them and New York Republicans. Intrater and Viktor Vekselberg have been under the watch of federal investigators since the war on Ukraine began at least. FBI agents searched Vekselberg’s Long Island house last September, and carried away multiple boxes of evidence.

    Intrater and Vekselberg strike me as shrew operators, so the feds may come up with nothing. Or maybe they’ll come up with a big fat indictment.

    Santos must have had value to Republicans beyond himself. Why else would he be nominated for the NY 3rd CD twice, in 2020 and 2022. Nassau County Republicans knew Santos was shaky. It was a D+6 district, but they still could have gotten better candidates. They could have found a young, ambitious person or two from that part of Long Island. Hell, they probably could have gotten someone who did work on Wall Street, actually graduated from Baruch College and really did play on the volleyball team. I think Santos got the inside track to the nominations because he was a rainmaker.

    Maybe we’ll find out more at Santos’s trial,  or in a plea agreement. We may have to wait until he gets out of prison though, and publishes his memoir, Santos: My Stories.

  165. 165.

    Matt McIrvin

    @JaneE: Those statements always have to be qualified with a baseline.

    The Democrats moved to the right in the 1980s and 90s, in response to the whole electorate moving to the right. Rock bottom was the early post-9/11 period, the early 2000s. Things have turned around since then.

    And on some things, positions are really unprecedented. No major party was supporting same-sex marriage or pot legalization in the 1950s. It would have sounded insane.

  166. 166.

    ...now I try to be amused

    @Geminid:

    Maybe we’ll find out more at Santos’s trial,  or in a plea agreement. We may have to wait until he gets out of prison though, and publishes his memoir, Santos: My Stories.

    If he lives that long. Santos is a minnow trying to swim with the sharks.

  167. 167.

    Nelle

    @Suzanne: fyi, real life.  Last month, I ran into two who say that they will never vote for a D again because Democrats betrayed Bernie.  I said, but Bernie was not a Democrat.That was waved away.  I actually didn’t believe these people existed, but, yep, they walk among us.

  168. 168.

    Paul in KY

    @Anyway: I hope you rolled around on the floor laughing your ass off and gasping and then telling them they actually believed that complete nonsense lie!!!

  169. 169.

    tam1MI

    @zhena gogolia: Re-hire all the people he fired, for a start.

    And fire all the people he hired, starting with Kaitlin “My Only Journalistic Qualification Is That I Passed The Fox News Twirl Test” Collins.

  171. 171.

    Suzanne

    @Nelle: Sure, #OnlyBernie douchebags exist. It’s a big country, everything exists. But they’re not a big cohort, and they don’t have much influence. And the constant blah blah blah in these comment sections would suggest that they’re some huge and active movement. They’re not. They’re the same kind of dead-ender cranks we’ve had forever.

  172. 172.

    NotMax

    @Geminid

    We may have to wait until he gets out of prison though, and publishes his memoir, Santos: My Stories

    In the format of one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books.
    //

  173. 173.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Frankensteinbeck:

    Not very reductive this time.  In 2016 we saw it eloquently on display.  Sanders’ message is that everything is class warfare.  He explicitly says that civil rights issues should be downplayed because eating the rich will fix everything.  In practice most of his followers were white men with a ‘minorities should shut up because only my problems are important’ attitude, and got very nasty about it.  The misogyny was definitely on display in his campaign staff as well.  There were issues.

    Warren drew most of the economically focused but strongly pro-civil rights crowd.  I definitely did see Bernie fans who, when they couldn’t get their angry ‘eat the rich’ leader, switched to ‘vote Democrats because Republicans are evil.’  So, Sanders’ supporters are not a monolith.

    I think you’re eliding 2016 and 2020. Warren didn’t run in 2016.

  174. 174.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Nelle: I have followed Bernie’s career since the midaughts when he voted to tank immigration reform and was a regular on Lou Dobbs.

    My antagonism towards his stances has little to do with Twitter. So I agree with you.

  175. 175.

    sab

    I am so old that I remember what utter misogynistic assholes sixties radicals were, so Bernie bros don’t surprise me.

    What did surprise me was how many really lovely Bernie Bros moved on and jumped on the Hillary bandwagon when that was all there was. Worked their asses off.

    The too bored or whatever to participate folks were our problem. Not most of the Bernie Bros. except the national level big names. The ground level Bernie worker bees were mostly  with us.

  178. 178.

    Citizen Alan

    @Suzanne: My complaint about Bernie and his cohort is that I believe they actively damaged Hillary’s chances by pushing the monstrously false narrative that there was no difference between the Dems and the GOP, to the point that the media gleefully showed Bernie delegates to the convention vowing to vote for Jill Stein at the end. And not just because it helped that Putin stooge Stein any–I firmly believe that for ever person who voted for Stein, 3 or 4 people accepted the false “Republicrats” but simply stayed home rather than going to the trouble of voting third party. The real risk of 3rd Party candidates and leftist Dem insurgency candidacies is not that they’ll drive down Dem turnout in close elections. Which, they fucking did.

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