The New York Times is sane washing RFK Jr. Here’s Jeff Tiedrich on that topic, as well as Scott Lemieux and Paul Campos at LGM.
The Times is also lending its platforms to Democratic strategists, like Adam Jentlesen, to tell us that the only way to win in the future is to tack even more right, and also that Harris didn’t. So I guess we were just imagining all those appearances with Liz Cheney. Here’s Steve M on that nonsense.
If the Times was ever “liberal”, their anti-trans op-eds, tolerance of vaxx “skepticism”, and fawning coverage of the happenings at Trump palace should have set us straight years ago.
I thought this was a good point from Jamelle Bouie:
The context is that Bluesky’s block feature basically shuts down the whole Twitter culture where people drag and harass in the replies. Bluesky posters just block and move on, and that bothers people who think they have the inalienable right to be assholes.
Anyway, the Times is in a NY/DC bubble where consequences are for the little people, and major Trump administration appointments that could wreak havoc on the country for a long time to come, such as the RFK Jr appointment, need to be seen through a prism of “well, this guy who has bonkers opinions comes from a rich, important family, so we must treat his views somewhat seriously, even though he’s obviously nuts.” I mean, shit, do they even remember the portable morgues outside the hospitals in 2020? You’d think they’d be just a little bit afraid that they might feel a consequence or two.
TBone
https://www.econotimes.com/Donald-Trump-Declares-War-on-Media-10-Billion-Lawsuit-Targets-Fake-News-Giants-in-Explosive-Legal-Battle-1694052
Miss Bianca
Didn’t you just point out that consequences are for the little people? These media moguls and mogulites obviously don’t imagine there might be a portable morgue – or tumbril, or what have you – in store for *them*.
Chief Oshkosh
A portable morgue for the NYTimes is kid’s stuff. A permanent morgue is what’s needed.
VeniceRiley
@TBone: Well, that’s going to be interesting when he claims he’s too busy to fight lawsuits.
Jackie
MSM; Welcome to the world you helped sane-wash.
Consequences.
TBone
@TBone: can you smell the gas(light)?
Bupalos
This is an amazing sentence.
TBone
@VeniceRiley: he’s not doing the “fighting,” he has attack dogs for that.
lgerard
I need some pictures of Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman riding around in their new Mercedes to lift my spirits.
trollhattan
@TBone:
What, not for trillions? Weaksause.
Baud
Y’all know I don’t like the NYT, but it’s hard for me to get too mad at them when I’m seeing the analogous facile argument from the left side. Blowhards gotta blowhard.
Chris
Walking out of CVS today the headline, I don’t even remember if it was Times or Post, was something like “Trump follows own lights in forming cabinet.”
… sure! That’s one way to phrase “Trump chooses vaccine denialist to run national health and longstanding Putin and Assad supporter to run intelligence community.” Yes, he’s just following his own lights. What a little rascal. (Don’t you just love him?)
TBone
@trollhattan: we’ll see who among them bends the knee, so I guess that’s something (who settles out of court).
All of them, Katie?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Sure they do, but even worse in their minds having to suffer the indignity of wearing a mask ever again and look like they are someone who works with their hands.
Quinerly
About that turnout:
“Harris even met or topped Biden’s vote totals in Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina and Wisconsin, and turnout has far eclipsed that of the 2016 presidential election, when 135.6 million voters cast ballots in a race won by Trump over Democrat Hillary Clinton. The problem for Democrats is that Trump did better in the battlegrounds than four years ago.
‘The Harris campaign did a pretty good job getting voters out who wouldn’t have come out,’ said Tom Bonier, a Democratic data analyst. ‘She did get her voters out. Trump got more.’
Those Trump turnout victories included first-time voter Jasmine Perez, 26, who voted for Trump at the Las Vegas Raiders stadium.
‘I’m a Christian and he really aligns with a lot of my values as a Christian in America, and I like that he openly promotes Christianity in America,’ Perez said.
Voting alongside her was Diego Zubek, 27, who voted for Trump in 2016 but didn’t vote in 2020 because he figured Trump would win easily. He voted for Trump this year.
‘I wasn’t going to let that happen again,’ Zubek said.”
https://apnews.com/article/election-2024-voter-turnout-republicans-trump-harris-7ef18c115c8e1e76210820e0146bc3a5
Ebony
Given that Trump was reelected, no they don’t remember the portable morgues in 2020 due to Covid. It has been memory holed a long with the millons of people who died or were injured by Covid.
I have a cousin who got Covid early in the pandemic. She was hospitalized and in ventilator and due to complications she had a stroke. As a result she was paralyzed and had to go to a nursing home. Here is the plot twist, she was in her 40’s!!! People forgetting. People forgetting that Covid pandemic was more than just lockdowns that closed schools and public places. It was a wide scale health emergency. People forgot about all that misery and voted for Trump in such numbers that he won, and I’m supposed to be empathetic with such people who voted for Trump due to economic anxiety.
TBone
@Quinerly: AP pre-bending the knee!
Jackie
@lgerard:
They’d immediately be targeted by Trumpies. 😢
Baud
Good infographic on Blue sky.
Chris
@TBone:
“Freedom of the press is the theory that the media knows what it wants and deserves to get it good and hard.”
TBone
@Chris: until we end up with Russian State Media.
A dominance move because his legal resources are now endless. Post last night: “
WeYou Are The Media Now.”dr. luba
@trollhattan: Putin raises you $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That is the number a Moscow court wants the YouTube parent company to pay for blocking Russian media outlets. It is a sum “filled with symbolism,” the Kremlin told NBC News on Thursday, October 31. The fine has since increased.
narya
@Baud: Yup.
Aziz, light!
NYT: voice of the one percent since 1851.
narya
Yeah, well, wait until that bird flu mutates a few more times and we have a new pandemic AND expensive milk and eggs.
VFX Lurker
Yup.
sentient ai from the future
So I am active on a support board for parents of trans kids, since I have one myself.
The only time I ever hear the phrase “echo chamber” is after we’ve banned some hateful bigoted asshole. It’s such a frequent occurrence, the phrase has become strongly associated, for me, with pissypants bullies whining about how they aren’t being allowed to hurt their targets.
It’s almost like anyone deploying that criticism is necessarily arguing in bad faith.
Steve LaBonne
FTFNYT was liberal for a decade and a half starting in 1961 when John B. Oakes was editorial page editor- that’s the paper I grew up with, which is why some people my age still can’t see the reality of today’s rag. But before or after that time, nope.
Geo Wilcox
@Ebony: The next pandemic will be even worse. No vaccines, no masks, no social distancing, and no help from anyone. We’ll be on our own and millions will die as a result. Welcome to the hollowed out US of A.
Aziz, light!
@Baud: Deep blue western Oregon has lots of anti-science naturopaths and herbalists and woo-woo crunchy granolists who like what Brainworm is selling. Because of them we don’t have fluoridated water.
Steve LaBonne
@sentient ai from the future: It’s always bad faith. If people agree about something I disapprove of, obviously they constitute an echo chamber.
trollhattan
@dr. luba: Heh.
“How many dollars is all the dollars?”
“Eight times ten to the twentieth power, President Putin.”
“Okay, make it that times five.”
“Done, comrade!”
Chris
@sentient ai from the future:
I first heard the phrase in the mid or late 2000s to describe the hermetically sealed ecosystem Republicans had been building with Fox, talk radio, the WSJ, basically all coming together to ensure their supporters could get all their “news” without ever experiencing an unpleasant thought that didn’t confirm their priors.
Naturally, once the term was out there, conservatives promptly hijacked it to complain about how real news is the REAL echo chamber because argle bargle liberal media. And much of the media obligingly bent over backwards to “prove” that that wasn’t true.
sentient ai from the future
@Chris:
DARVO really is all they have
tam1MI
And yet, as addressed in the previous thread, Harris still lagged Biden’s vote totals by approximately 7 million votes.
Peal
@TBone: yep. They’ve made no secret of the fact that they plan on taking over all the cultural production centers that they can. I remember a poll that was taken in the 00s under Chavez where large majorities believed that Venezuela was the wealthiest country on earth. That’s what we’ll be dealing with going forward.
UncleEbeneezer
@sentient ai from the future: The term came up frequently at BJ, when some of us dared to push back against some blatant TERF bullshit and suggested that this blog should make that stuff officially not welcome. Echo Chambers, Groupthink, Silos etc., suddenly became the much bigger threat.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Quinerly:
I hope these fuckers get everything they deserve, good and hard
Chris
@sentient ai from the future:
Of all the popular Christian tropes I remember from my upbringing, one of those I remain absolutely convinced is true is “the devil can’t create, he can only corrupt.”
Another Scott
After looking for months and months, we just pulled the trigger on replacing our 22.5 year old refrigerator and ~ 30+ year old dishwasher. Decent “Black Friday” sales are going on now, on some things anyway (ordered them from Lowe’s). The fridge might pay for itself in 2-3-4 years as it’s much more efficient (I can’t find good numbers on the old model). We haven’t used our dishwasher in ages and I see that the door seal is bad, so it’s time. It will help reduce J’s aggravation with me keeping dishes in the sink overnight. ;-) And it’s supposed to be whisper quiet (compared to the factory noises of the old one).
Installation is planned for mid-December.
If you’ve been putting off big purchases, now might be the time to think hard about it some more, especially as installation times might be pushed out.
Hang in there, everyone.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@tam1MI:
What’s your point?
Mike S
We had 2 think tank people on our show last week. One from a centrist group and the other from a more progressive group.
The progressive guy was ok and felt that having Cheney around so much wasn’t a good idea because she should have been talking about the economy more. In hindsight he had a point since people are too stupid to have seen the danger Trump poses to our democracy.
The centrist was a bit ridiculous. She wanted a convention fight for a nominee and wanted to kick Kamala to the curb. No mention of what would have happened with the black base of the party.
Then she talked about their polling and said that Joe friggin Manchin would have been a better candidate.
What no one anywhere seems to be talking about is how Trump only got 50.1% and dropping of the popular vote.
This wasn’t a blowout like the media keeps saying and i may lose my mind if they keep acting like it was.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
I object to your notion that simply making appearances with Liz Cheney amounted to “tacking to the right”. That’s ridiculous
sentient ai from the future
Since it’s an open thread, I want to put down a marker about something.
I believe that betting sites like predictit and polymarket (now shuttered, I think) represent a threat to democracy, in part because of the fucking electoral college.
Because just like fElon’s fake sweepstakes, it allows foreign actors to directly incentivize otherwise unlikely voters. It is a backchannel for pay-per-vote.
The people most susceptible to that pitch are precisely the ones who turned out in larger than expected numbers in swing states to submit what I understand to be larger than normal of undervote ballots.
And since it is a bro ecosystem, that definitely means the axis of Russia/Rogan has it’s fingers in it.
Yes, I understand this is conspiracy-theory-adjacent, but these sites and the culture they feed are pernicious for lots of other reasons as well.
Quinerly
@Another Scott:
Congrats! Don’t forget to check for rebates for energy efficient appliances from your electric company. I am getting cash back for the refrigerator I just replaced.
sentient ai from the future
@Another Scott: you’ve probably heard this before, but modern dishwashers are a good deal more water-efficient than hand washing.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Mike S:
Harris talked about the economy plenty during the campaign
Another Scott
@Quinerly: Thanks for the reminder. I appreciate it.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Another Scott
@sentient ai from the future: I saw a blurb for one of the ones that I was looking at, that a cycle takes all of 4 gallons of water!
Zooks!
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Steve LaBonne
@tam1MI: And yet again I point out, as I did in the other thread, that this is NOT true in several swing states where she actually campaigned- the same states in which she roughly halved the rightward swing seen elsewhere. Your statistic is politically meaningless.
cain
@TBone:
What journalistic integrity? Maybe they’ll finally start interviewing dems at diners, eh?
Quinerly
@tam1MI:
You really have to look at it state by state.
When you find some actual data that 7 million would be Biden voters decided to stay home because big, bad George Clooney called for him to step aside, I am sure you will share it.
I’m looking for data and answers. Actual numbers. A fuller picture does seem to be emerging.
It sure looks like Harris out performed Biden’s favorables by over 8%.
Mike S
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): if the media doesn’t cover you talking about the economy did it happen?
trollhattan
@Another Scott:
IDK what ours uses but not much–barely a blip on the smart water meter. Also, so very quiet. I’ve had apartment dishwashers so loud you need to leave the room.
cain
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
It’s curious that the christian vote was so strong, trend lines were that less and less people were identifying as Christian.
But funnily enough, it’s the Latinos that seems to coming in especially because of abortion. But these people don’t seem to care about other pro-life stuff like genocide. Immigration is actually an advantage for GOP not the other way around. The problem is that evangelicals don’t like catholics.
Quinerly
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
He has no valid point.
Baud
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Agree. They always talked about the threat to democracy and never any other issue.
trollhattan
Donny overcoming his hatred of dogs, whether eaten or not eaten.
cmorenc
A family member was hospitalized (for a non-covid related problem) during the covid pandemic, but at a point where area hospitals had just begun allowing patient families to visit one-at-a-time under a strict mask and disinfectant sanitizing protocol. On my way to the patient’s room, over several visits I had noticed a black shrouded gurney out in the hallway – a gurney in the hallway of a patient floor of a hospital isn’t particularly remarkable, but a gurney maintained with a thick shroud whose particular location moved around from visit to visit does provoke curiosity in the context of the times, and so I asked a nurse about it. It was being kept available for safe handling of covid patients who succumbed rather than recovered.
Another Scott
@trollhattan: We’ve still got 3 of the original 1960s toilets. 6+ gallons per flush. :-/. (The valves have been replaced over time, but they still use a lot of water.). Of course, they are 3 different colors, so we haven’t wanted to spend a zillion dollars on new colored ones, and white would not look right at all. (sigh)
4 gallons for the dishwasher is tiny, and a welcome development.
Cheers,
Scott.
p.a.
Did tRump say, “I hearby refudiate the concept of discovery” when the lawsuit was announced?
tobie
NYT reporting Biden has given a green light to Ukraine to fire into Russia.
(Apologies for the link to the NYT website. I don’t know how else to access it. ETA: I heard this first on Mastodon. Some of us still use that app.)
Quinerly
@trollhattan:
New dishwashers are amazing. I have to be really cognizant of water usage here. I am on community water but we do have water restrictions. I cut back on a lot of personal water usage inside so I can have my drought tolerant gardens and roses that still need some water. I also put in rain barrels. I do a lot of hand watering of the roses. Good exercise.
My Whirlpool dishwasher I bought 2 years ago was an investment. I paid a little extra to get a higher end one that ranked high on really not having to use much water for rinsing before loading. I really just scrape and that’s about it. Plus, I can’t even hear it run. I am very impressed with it.
Living in the desert in a drought really rewires your brain about water. No even letting the water run while brushing your teeth. Full dishwasher and washer before even considering running them. I really want to capture and divert gray water for my fruit trees (that were here. Planted long before me when there was no drought).
trollhattan
@Another Scott:
Ours (1 ba house) was a ’20s two-piece contraption with a ginormous tank, bolted to the wall. “Lots” is how much I’d guess it held. But we didn’t have a water meter then, so flush on!
Now we have Japanese 1.6 gal units in our two bathrooms. They work okay, parts can be a bit of a challenge.
Baud
@Quinerly:
Good on her. I respect people who fight for what they want.
Quinerly
@Another Scott:
Unfortunately old toilets are a huge issue re water consumption. I’m seeing a lot of toilets now with the choice of flush on top depending on what you are actually flushing. I am sure there is a name for them. Just haven’t gone that deep into it.
Good luck with all you are doing. Lowe’s does give that 5% off if you have their card and pay it off. That helps a little. I finagled a contractor’s/commercial card awhile back. Actually think it gives me a little more off.
They also have a discount for veterans. At least, I know HD does. Pretty sure Lowe’s does too.
Chris Johnson
They are literal Pravda now. What are you even expecting. They’re saying the quiet part out loud in a public nod to Russia. https://medium.com/ama-marketing-news/the-new-york-times-truth-campaign-drives-digital-subscriptions-3c1fcd2cc4e9
I prefer it in the original Russian. You’ve got to be kidding if you expect anything else. They, more than any other media outlet, are purely RT now. They’re TRUMPETING it, as a flex.
Hob
@Baud:
The post you’re responding to complained about several things the NYT has been doing: sanewashing RFK Jr.; “lending its platforms to Democratic strategists, like Adam Jentlesen, to tell us that the only way to win in the future is to tack even more right”; anti-trans op-eds, tolerance of anti-vaxism, and “fawning coverage of the happenings at Trump palace.”
What is “the analogous facile argument from the left” on any of those? And whoever you’re counting as “the left” there, do they own and operate a massive world-famous media outlet?
Baud
@Hob:
The Dem strategy part. Lots of Bernie Bro tyoe stuff in my bubble.
Quinerly
@trollhattan:
I had one of those giant 2 piece ones attached to the wall in my 1880’s St. Louis house. We figured it had been added when that bathroom first got carved out when indoor plumbing came on the scene. I really never gave water consumption too much of a thought until I started traveling and then moving out here. Had a flat rate with the city based on #of bathrooms.
Now I constantly think about water. Have friends who have private wells that are running dry. They are having to put in the huge tanks and the set ups to have 5000 gallons of water to be delivered. Very expensive. And, then there are the people on shared wells. No written agreements between the parties on who pays/how divided up when something breaks or has to be maintained.
David Collier-Brown
@Enhanced Voting Techniques wrote: Sure they do, but even worse in their minds having to suffer the indignity of wearing a mask ever again and look like they are someone who works with their hands.
@narya replied: Yeah, well, wait until that bird flu mutates a few more times and we have a new pandemic AND expensive milk and eggs.
Other countries will mask up, and buy RNA vaccines from the US (unless forbidden), the EU and Canada.
As a Canadian, I wonder what it would have been like if the US had had COVID and we didn’t. How advantageous would that have been to our industry?
Raven
@Quinerly: HD has a $1000 limit Lowe’s is 10%
UncleEbeneezer
@tobie: Genocide!!1!
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
On the r/askpolitics subreddit, somebody was asking whether AOC removing her pronouns from her social media handles was indicative of the future political direction Dems may go in.
I really hope to god not and I would think AOC would have better political instincts than that. A political party that did that would lose my respect
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Baud:
Uh, you mean the opposite right?
Baud
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Did she answer?
Baud
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
No.
tobie
@UncleEbeneezer: Stephanik will vote for any resolution Russia brings before the UN Security Council complaining about this.
@mistermix.bsky.social
@Baud: Links please. Otherwise I’m skeptical that they’re anyone of consequence.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Mike S:
Valid point, but that progressive that was interviewed presumably should be more plugged into politics and media coverage. They should know better that Harris did talk about economic issues, especially housing. Was he corrected on the show?
Baud
@@mistermix.bsky.social:
Google Bernie Sanders.
ETA: and none of these pundits are people of consequence
frosty
@Quinerly: I haven’t let the water run while brushing teeth ever since we had a drought in 1966 in the mid-Atlantic.
Leto
@Raven: we try to stick to Lowe’s so we’re not funding further right wing assholes (Home Despot). Ofc, it really is assholes all the way down so ymmv.
Subsole
In fairness, those portable morgues might have been very, very hard to see from all the way up in their offices and studios on the 88th floor.
Hard to make out detail at that height, y’know. All the little bodies just look like dots.
Or ants, maybe.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Baud:
I didn’t have the heart to actually read the reddit post. I just saw the post title on my feed and some of the opening sentences of the post. I was hoping anybody here had any insight on it
@Baud:
Oh ok, I think read your comment wrong.
Like, I recognize that Liz Cheney is a bad person and I don’t agree with most of her politics. Or those of her father. But she was an important voice holding Trump accountable after January 6th on that House Commission/special committee.
@mistermix.bsky.social
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): AOCs Instagram still has pronouns.
Raven
@Leto: Marcus just died,
Steve LaBonne
@Baud: Also, I don’t see any of the fierce opponents of gerontocracy in Democratic leadership complaining about Bernie getting re-elected to the Senate at age 83.
cain
@Hob: That’s not going to work, we did that already in the 90s. It didn’t change anything. When your voters are al ‘vibe’ based and uses age old wisdoms it’s not going to matter.
For instance, no matter how many times we cut taxes, be more efficient, we will always be the “tax and spend” party. Lot of that is done by lazy journalists who started in the 80s and 90s.
I’m not sure how you reach people and change expectations, but we need some folks who understand anthropology and understand how to change things. But also I also think that we are also going to have to allow the system to fail.
You can bet in 2 years, there will be all kinds of fun editorials. Focus on keeping the house and senate. Do not keep the presidency. If you have large majorities in the senate we can still control who gets on the SCOTUS and judges using the McConnell way. But trying to get the presidency for the next two terms is one way to changing how we are perceived.
@mistermix.bsky.social
@Baud: You said Bernie Bros. Name a couple. Show receipts or I assume you don’t have them.
Quinerly
@Raven:
Thanks. I think I get close to 10% with what I got Lowe’s to give me. Long story and kinda a fluke. Mine has nothing to being a veteran since I am not.
I am a very loyal Lowe’s customer. They started in NC. My dad was a building contractor. I remember them pretty much as hardware stores when I was little. Of course, back then you had your separate lumber yards, electrical supply houses, plumbing supply houses, lighting and fixture houses….and so on. I was glued to my dad in the 1960’s and 1970’s going to all those places and then back to his job sites with him. Loved me some Grady Building Supply in Lenoir County, NC at age 7. They treated me like the princess that I was.😉
gene108
@TBone:
Isn’t this the kind of lawsuit Bob Barr got the DOJ to represent Trump for because the DOJ’s job is to represent the government or something? Or people suing Trump on matters unrelated to his presidency?
Also, outside of tariffs, there’s very little Trump will do that is different from any other mainstream Republican.
Geminid
@tobie: Back in 2022 I bacane interested in the part Turkiye played in the war in Ukraine. One good source on this was Stijn Mitzer’s article in Oryx titled, “The Stalwart Ally: Turkish Arms Provisions to Ukraine” Nov. 23, 2022.
According to Mitzer, Turkiye had in fact supplied plenty of weaponry to Ukraine,* but unlike the US and other Nato colleagues, Turkiye did not publicize shipments.
And unlike the US and other Nato countries, Turkey did not restrict the use of their weapons to Ukrainian territory. If Ukrainians wanted to use their Bayraktar drones to shoot up Kursk or Rostov-on-the-Don, the Turks were like, “Go for it. We use our Bayraktars to kill Russians in Libya and Syria, and you might as well make the most of yours.”
* Mitzer said if he wanted to develop information about Turkish weapons supplies to Ukraine, he had to get it from Ukrainian officials speaking off the record or from battlefield reports.
Some of these weapons were shipped in the critical days leading up to Russia’s invasion. Two Turkish Air Force cargo planes were stranded in Ukraine on February 22, 2022, and they weren’t hauling rugs and baklava.
Russia did not destroy the planes but they wouldn’t let them fly out either. Then after a few months, R.T. Erdogan made a deal with his Best Frenemy Forever, Vladimir Putin, and the Turkish Air Force got its planes back.
Quinerly
@frosty:
I still don’t have any of these house guests here trained about this water thing. Probably best not to get me started. A guy I have known 30 years was here with his wife who I really didn’t know. She had a lot of common sense about it all. He didn’t….with his 2 showers a day in MARCH. Like I said…best not get me started.
Chief Oshkosh
A Trump-appointed judge just killed the Biden initiative to protect overtime pay for about 4 million workers. From the bits I’ve read, a lot of those people fit the description of the people who voted for Trump.
Who’s gonna tell ’em?
Baud
@@mistermix.bsky.social:
I don’t save social media swarms. I don’t care what direction the party goes in anymore, so I’ll drop out of this debate now. You can assume t my they don’t exist if you like.
Layer8Problem
@Chief Oshkosh: The Newspaper of Record? They’re in the truth and reportage business I’m told.
Chief Oshkosh
@Raven: And the other HD founder, who is still very much alive, is not a RW wacko, AFAIK.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Quinerly:
I don’t want to relitigate everything, but I’m not sure how him and some others thinking keeping Biden was going to work. The Arab-Americans in MI certainly weren’t going to vote for him for obvious reasons, he had already fucked that up completely. He wouldn’t even meet personally with them in the lead-up to the primaries; I recall news stories where people were pissed at him for that when he only sent representatives. Looking back, it was very callous and stupid.
I also don’t understand what he or his campaign/WH staff thought they were doing if he wasn’t physically capable of campaigning the way he needed to in order to win. Somebody should’ve taken him aside and told him it wasn’t going to work
ETA: Sorry if I ruffle any feathers. I was away most of July when everything was going down, I couldn’t take it, so I never got to participate.
@mistermix.bsky.social
@Baud: Just as I expected. Thanks for confirming.
Baud
@@mistermix.bsky.social:
Absolutely.
FNWA
I had already cancelled the Post. This put me over the edge with the Times. I’ll miss Krugman, but not much else.
Kathleen
@Ebony: Add to that the ignominy of Trump giving free testing machines to Putin while Americans were like your cousin will suffer for life. That story sure disappeared into a rabbit hole quickly.
narya
@gene108: You’re possibly thinking of the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), which basically says that the federal government takes on the defense of federal employees (and some others) if they’re accused of something while in the employ of the government. Since TCFG is making this accusation as a candidate, NOT as an employee, FTCA shouldn’t apply.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@@mistermix.bsky.social:
I would assume naming Bernie Sanders, an influential US Senator and two-time presidential candidate, would be sufficient
narya
@FNWA: Krugman is on Bluesky!
tobie
@Chief Oshkosh: How much do you want to bet that Trump will introduce some watered down version of this and the same judge will accept it and overtime will be paid with a little sticker saying “Courtesy of Pres Trump”? It’s happening now with credit card late fees. The Biden admin reduced the fee to $8. A Trump judge in TX ruled the provision unconstitutional. Trump now saying he’ll reduce fees to $10. Bernie’s already praised him for this.
The insurrection didn’t end in Jan 6, 2021. It continued through conservative judges in TX, at the 5th Circuit and SCOTUS, in social media and in conflicts spawned by Russia and Iran. We lost the war we didn’t even know we were fighting. That’s the one thing I fault Biden for. He should have leveled with us.
tobie
@Geminid: Arms trading can lead to the strangest alliances. It doesn’t surprise me that Turkey quietly sold weapons to Ukraine with no restrictions.
Geminid
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): One thing I keep in mind about Michigan’s Arab American voters is that a substantial portion of them were already voting Republican before this war began. If this subject interested me more I’d have a better idea of the numbers, but I bet someone has done a deep dive into this year’s voting behavior of Arab voters in Michigan and elsewhere, or will do one soon.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@tobie:
Why the fuck would Sanders praise him for this and not Biden, who he was supposedly friends with? Who stuck by him after the June debate? Sanders is fucking Jewish, why the hell is he praising a man like Trump for?!
cmorenc
Any R senator who is a licensed attorney should be reminded sharply and often that the behavior Gaetz is accused and likely guilty of would be sufficient cause in any state to deny Gaetz receiving a law license as a new attorney or disbar him as an already-licensed one. The state bars across the land, or even the federal house or representatives of itself, have an abundantly ample supply of members clean of any disqualifying ethics problems who are by ideology and mean asshole-ness able to gladly undertake being an attack dog as AG for Trump’s agenda.
Beyond that being a member of the bar in good standing with no problems that could undo that status should be one key requisite for AG – the other is that the AG appointee needs to be someone who owes nothing to the President appointing him or her except brief thanks for choosing them. Gaetz fails spectacularly on both counts. This is exactly the sort of thing Harris meant when she described Trump as an unserious man (but with serious consequences for his irresponsible choices).
Steve LaBonne
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): He is not trustworthy and never has been.
glc
No particular comment but thanks for posting regularly. It’s appreciated.
Quinerly
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): all good points.
I don’t want to re litigate it either. I’m just looking for data and #s. I will continue to pushback on bullshit, though, until I decide to take a break and drift away for awhile.
In the past, I disappear from here when other things come up in my life. I’m not a flouncer and I certainly don’t feel threatened.
gene108
@cain:
I agree we will have to let the system fail. We are trying to hold our institutions together with duct tape, while half the population has been hammering away at them to try to get them to fail. The hammering half keeps winning.
We need new institutions built from the ground up.
I don’t think two years is long enough for the current political dynamic to substantially change.
Baud
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
It’s all a game. Media and social media. I’m old so I can drop out. I’m sorry you’ll have to deal with it.
Soprano2
@Quinerly: That’s what I’m looking for too, we don’t even have a full vote count yet. I have decided that anyone who thinks it was about “woke” doesn’t know what they’re talking about. They’re probably the people who were hollering about that before the election
Quinerly
@Quinerly:
I cut myself off
“I don’t feel threatened just because everyone won’t agree with me.”
Soprano2
@Another Scott: Or you can’t find the right color. We needed a gray bathtub, and Kohler had the only one I could find, so that’s what we got.
Geminid
@tobie: Ukraine and Turkey are natural allies and trading partners. Both nations share Russia as a common, centuries-old enemy.
Turkiye upped its military cooperation with Ukraine after Russia seized the Crimea in 2014. European nations pretty much shrugged that one off because Crimea is a long ways from Berlin or Paris, but Sevastopol is 400 miles from Istanbul and and a good missile can cover that distance in less than 10 minutes. So the Turks could feel the danger, and see the Europeans’ indifference as well.
So Turkiye helps Ukraine, but it refuses to involve its substantial military directly in this war. One thing they keep in mind is that the West’s interests in the Black Sea region is a recent phenomenon and could be short-lived. In ten years, Americans may have forgotten about Ukraine. But Russia will still be sitting there across the Black Sea from Turkiye.
Quinerly
@Geminid:
I am reading where Tiffany Trump’s FIL played an outsized roll in reaching out to Arab Muslims in the campaign. That all flew under my radar.
tam1MI
As I have stated in many previous threads, I am a woman.
Starfish
@@mistermix.bsky.social:
Here is a video where they are talking to Bernie Sanders after Bernie ran his mouth.
Here is another person that Balloon Juice loves to hate. Astead Herndon
Hob
@Baud: You really don’t think there’s any meaningful difference between the highest-profile US media outlet in the world giving a platform to “the Democrats should abandon progressive ideals” (plus all the other shit that this post specifically mentioned, which you haven’t mentioned), and some Bernie Bros annoying you on social media or in your friend group or whatever?
Quinerly
Speaking of snapping right into line, you gotta love this Rolling Stone piece.
TRUMP MAKES RFK JR POSE WITH MCDONALD’S MEAL
The airplane meal this weekend undoubtedly contained seed oils, which RFK Jr. called “one of the most unhealthy ingredients that we have in foods” on Fox News last month, adding that “they are associated with all kinds of very, very serious illnesses, including body-wide inflammation.” The ingredients have become something of a buzzword among online health influencers — the kind who post themselves eating meals that look like what you would feed a pit bull on its birthday.
Kennedy argues that McDonald’s french fries, which are fried in a canola oil blend, would be healthier if they were fried in beef tallow, or rendered beef fat. He is selling hats and bumper stickers that say “make frying oil tallow again.”
I would say that RFK Jr is obeying in advance.😉
(And maybe someday I will be able to block quote and format correctly on this phone)
Baud
@Hob: No measurable difference in terms of influence that I’m aware of. It’s all part of the marketplace of ideas.
gene108
This was posted by a commenter on Wonkette recently. Read the whole thing.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/muslims-who-voted-trump-upset-by-his-pro-israel-cabinet-picks-2024-11-15/
Starfish
@Quinerly: I remember that! He is Lebanese, right?
Baud
@gene108: The war isn’t going to last for four more years, so he’s correct, Trump will end the war.
Quinerly
@tam1MI:
Sorry. I really don’t read your comments unless directed at me. So I missed your past comment saying you were a woman.
Geminid
@Quinerly: I think Tiffany Trump’s father-in-law came from Lebanon’s Christian Arab community. His involvement in this area of the campaign was a recent phenomenon dating from the escalation in the war between Hezbollah that began in September with Israel’s notorious pager attacks.
This war has a different dynamic than the Gaza war because a lot of Lebanese are hostile to Hezbollah. I’m not sure how that plays out in this country or how the father-in-law fits in, except that Trump’s appeal to American Arabs is not based on policy proposals because he really has none. Trump’s appeal is based on a spurious reputation as a deal-maker.
Trump may be in a fortunate position though. These wars have dragged on for many months now, and they dragged down Joe Bidens reputation all along. Neither war is winnable by conventional standards and the various sides are nearing exhaustion. So they may be settled at least temporarily and if and when they are, Trump will of course claim credit.
lowtechcyclist
@Quinerly:
Yeah, he’s the very embodiment of “love your neighbor as yourself,” isn’t he? These people.
Quinerly
@Starfish:
Boulos Enterprises. Pretty good Wiki page for a quick overview. Boulos started with the FIL’s father who was a Lebanese silversmith who emigrated to Nigeria.
Massad Boulos is the FIL.
Michael Boulos is married to Tiffany. Michael and Tiffany met through Lindsay Lohan in 2018.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@gene108:
What a bunch of fools. I guess that Muslim Ban from Trump’s first term was memory-holed by them
What planet is this guy living on?
Quinerly
@Geminid:
I just took a spin around the Wiki pages. Good overview. And, I learned that Tiffany is pregnant.
gene108
@Geminid:
Whether Trump claims credit or not, he will be given credit. He got credit for Obama’s recovery.
A large part of the country is wired to view whatever Republicans do as good, society only being good when Republicans are in charge, and will never think these things with a Democrat in charge.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Geminid:
Biden should’ve used his leverage and followed our own laws about supplying weapons when he had the chance. He completely mismanaged it
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@gene108:
What a bunch of fools. I guess that Muslim Ban was memory-holed by them.
What planet is this guy living on?
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@gene108:
What a bunch of fools. I guess that M*slim Ban was memory-holed by them.
What planet is this guy living on?
lowtechcyclist
@gene108:
I have no doubt about it! After Israel annexes the West Bank with the encouragement of the incoming Administration, and finishes leveling what’s left still standing in Gaza, those wars will be over, and there shall be peace!
The peace of the grave for far too many Palestinians already, and undoubtedly thousands more to come. But they’re not lying: peace there will be.
It boggles my mind that this isn’t blatantly obvious to Arab-Americans. I’d say what I think of them, but I’m sure they’ll be beating themselves up over this soon enough.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@gene108:
What a bunch of fools. I guess that Muslim Ban was memory-holed by them
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@lowtechcyclist:
I’m pretty pissed at them. In Hamtramck, MI at least, the city government is majority Muslim and male, and were already as of a few years ago discriminating against LGBTQ+ people. The piece of shit “Dem” mayor endorsed Trump earlier this year, calling him a “man of principle”
cain
Don’t count on it. One thing I’ve seen his how much these people will avoid doing any critical thinking.
How long did it take for some of the people who voted for Nader to understand the harm they did?
cain
@gene108: lol, the man who instituted the Muslim bans loves these voters because they are suckers.
But not to worry, they’ll get it, but they’ll still try to vote Republican later because they love the culture wars and hate liberals.
We lost because immigrants from conservative religious countries hate liberals, hate the gays, and hate black people.
Geminid
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): That may be so. When it came ro regulating Israel’s actions, this administration has been behind the curve throughout.
But restricting weapons supplies might have worked against our efforts to achieve a ceasefire, because Hamas would have taken that as a sign their strategy was working, and if they could just get another 10,000 Palestinians killed the US might cut Israel off altogether.
Then they would survive the war with their control of Gaza’s people and resources intact. We might not think of Gaza as having resources, but Hamas has amassed a fortune raking off foreign contributions meant for the people’s welfare.
So protecting their institutional power is their central war aim, and the Gazan people we might care about are mere pawns to be sacrificed towards that end. That’s much of why Hamas has been the negotiating party from hell. They had perverse incentives few oyher parties would act upon.
This war presented the Biden administration with a lot of bad choices, and few good ones. They could have done better with their choices, but right now I don’t think they could have done much better under the circumstances.
cain
@Geminid:
Not surprising, even folks from African countries like Nigeria and Kenya will vote Republican.
But it’s the liberal part of the U.S. and others that allows these migrations to their countries. You can bet the reverse is not always true.
Every nation should allow a certain amount of people from other countries to move there and become citizens.
cain
@FNWA: Think how long it took you to resist dropping the Post and the Times given all the evidence of perfidy over the decades? Isn’t that interesting? What was it about those papers that kept you still a subscriber?
I wonder if conservative is the same thing, you’re still a subscribe to the damn thing even if it has shown you it’s ass.
Steve LaBonne
@gene108: Largely white people and wannabe-white people.
Baud
@cain:
Immigrant citizens have the same right to be monsters as natural born white people.
Starfish
@cain:
Explain that to the Emirates and the Saudis.
14 Hardest Countries to Immigrate To
John S.
@Quinerly:
He contributed in his own way, but we had plenty of major detractors from the left such as Rep. Tlaib.
Archon
I honestly think most immigrants look at America at core as a nation of prosperous, innovative white people and a violent, poor black underclass.
Getting into the good graces of white America to become this generations version of Italians is the goal of most immigrant groups even if it causes them to make some very short sided political choices.
gene108
@Steve LaBonne:
I think this gets over used and does not have much meaning.
White culture is the dominant culture. Most places you go to in the country are full of white people.
To not want to be white requires a level of non-assimilation into American culture by second generation immigrants, their parents, and subsequent generations.
Soprano2
@Baud: I agree, they aren’t going to like it though.
Quinerly
@John S.: truth
Ruckus
Money cures a lot of civility if one has enough of it AND if one has one’s head located in their (or someone else’s) exit port. As we mostly know, money is not an insignificant part of humanity, it’s just that so many seem to think that only certain people should have enough for a reasonable life. And no, enough does not mean more than enough to buy power (and no, I’m not talking about electricity)
Chris Johnson
@@mistermix.bsky.social: I’m with Baud on this. The only point I’d add is, trolls don’t count as real Bernie supporters and never did.
I worked for Bernie in New Hampshire. Don’t you tell me he didn’t get a bunch of troll support. He didn’t ask for it, but he quickly got identified as useful, and he got used something fierce. Again, I was there working for him and observing stuff that didn’t make sense at the time.
Don’t you know the trolls take ALL positions? Were you thinking they only impersonated MAGAs or something?
Chris Johnson
@Quinerly: Huh.
The one thing I know about that is the fries would get a lot more delicious. That was always the sneaky trick in those fries: can’t speak to whether it’s wildly unhealthy or not, but I doubt what they use now is any worse. Also, frying stuff in beef tallow is of course anti-vegetarian, any way you look at it.
AM in NC
@Quinerly: May she get the exact OB care available to black women in Mississippi.
Jinchi
Nobody remembers the portable morgues from 2020 which is why Trump was able to peddle his “Are you better of now than you were four years ago” nonsense and not get laughed out of the room.
Kayla Rudbek
@Quinerly: they used to be fried in beef tallow, which was dropped when they started losing business from people with religious and/or dietary objections if I recall correctly.
Gin & Tonic
@Quinerly:
I want canola to be called not by that made-up word, but by its proper name: Brassica napus or better yet, its common name: rape.
But that might make people in Trump’s circle uncomfortable.
Ramona
@sentient ai from the future: I don’t think that what you are hypothesizing is conspiracy theory adjacent because it is falsifiable (we’ll see what the authorities retrieved from the Polymarket owner), the mechanism by which it would work is simple: bet on Trump using a possible workaround to the legal prohibition and then go vote for him.
Miss Bianca
@Steve LaBonne: Yeah, THIS. Jesus Christ wept on a crumpet.
Miss Bianca
@Quinerly: Wait a minute. Two showers a DAY in the desert? Jeez, my motto is “Once a week whether you need it or not!”/
(fortunately, the air is so dry here that even working out I have to *work* to work up a sweat!)
catclub
@Quinerly: yes, water is the future. also the past. Chinatown.
Geminid
@Miss Bianca: So, did you and your sidekick ever build that sauna?
When you became scarce here a few months ago I wondered if you had dived into the sauna project. But I realize that your responsibilities as an eminent local journalist could also have claimed your attention.
RaflW
@Bupalos: Very late to this, but it reminds me of the one time my parents were sued. A realtor claimed they got injured during a showing of our for-sale house. Claim was $100,000.
Our ins. co. started asking for all sorts of info and was making it fairly clear they didn’t want to settle. That response go the plaintiff boosted the suit to $1M. The ins. co. said “We look forward to discovery”.
I’m glad the insurance people were less stupid that whoever wrote that bit of ‘journalism.’