Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Narcissists are always shocked to discover other people have agency.

If a good thing happens for a bad reason, it’s still a good thing.

Dear Washington Post, you are the darkness now.

The “burn-it-down” people are good with that until they become part of the kindling.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires Republicans to act in good faith.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

Balloon Juice, where there is always someone who will say you’re doing it wrong.

You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.

Well, whatever it is, it’s better than being a Republican.

Rupert, come get your orange boy, you petrified old dinosaur turd.

The desire to stay informed is directly at odds with the need to not be constantly enraged.

In my day, never was longer.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

I would gladly pay you tuesday for a hamburger today.

I might just take the rest of the day off and do even more nothing than usual.

The National Guard is not Batman.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

Live so that if you miss a day of work people aren’t hoping you’re dead.

The way to stop violence is to stop manufacturing the hatred that fuels it.

This country desperately needs a functioning fourth estate.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

Do we throw up our hands or do we roll up our sleeves? (hint, door #2)

When you’re a Republican, they let you do it.

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Late Night Open Thread: Confusion to Our Enemies!

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They’re pretty confused already…


Quietly: Always putting substance(s) first:


Just totally normal foreign espionage, nothing dirty about it!


 
Meanwhile, back in the center ring:

one of the basic problems with the Trump campaign at the present moment is that it does not appear to exist. there are very few ad buys. there are very few field offices. there are very few staffers. trump himself isn't out campaigning. what is even going on?

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— rev. howard arson (@theophite.bsky.social) Aug 7, 2024 at 5:37 PM

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War for Ukraine Day 897: More on Ukraine’s Kursk Offensive

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Two quick housekeeping notes. First, Rosie is still doing great. Thank you all for the good thoughts, well wishes, prayers, and donations.

Second, it’s been a long week, I’m fried, so I’m go going to try to keep this short.

As I started tonight’s update – 7:35 PM EDT/2:35 AM local time in Ukraine – all of eastern and central Ukraine, minus Kyiv and Chernihiv Oblasts, are under air raid alerts. An air raid alert is now also up for Kyiv Oblast as of 8:10 PM EDT/3:10 AM local in Ukraine.

Last night lore asked:

I am confused. Why do they all assume Ukraine is going to occupy Russia? Couldn’t this be a march to the sea situation? Seems like that could damage Putin regime and Russian invasion forces too. At least to this ignorant layman.

This was my response:

I have no idea. Unless Ukraine has managed to pull of the most effect military deception operation (MILDEC) in history and is hiding hundreds of thousands of troops that no one has been able to track, they don’t have the capability to hold anything outside their borders.

It is possible the Ukrainians are trying to teach the Biden administration an object lesson: that it doesn’t matter what Putin says his redlines are for escalating to the tactical use of nuclear weapons in a conventional dispute, he won’t. Which all the readers here know, even if the Biden administration doesn’t, because I’ve been telling you all this for almost a decade.

There’s some strategic objective here that is not yet clear. I’m looking forward to finding out what it is once the Ukrainians decide to show/tell us.

I think we can rule out the MILDEC. The more I think about it, the more I think the second answer – that the Ukrainians are trying to demonstrate to the Biden administration, as well everyone else, that the emperor – Putin – has no clothes. That no matter what red lines he declares, no matter what he says he’ll do if they’re breached, such as tactically using nukes during a conventional war, these are just agitprop and hollow threats in order to establish reflexive control over the leaders of his adversaries in order to give himself a preemptive veto in their decision-making process. I also think they have studied Prigozhin’s aborted revolt from a little over a year ago, how Putin personally responded, and how Russia’s military, security services, and law enforcement were unable to do anything to actually stop his Wagner mercenaries. I think they have a very, very, very good understanding of what Russia is an is not able to do to actually defend itself within its own borders and is exploiting those weaknesses.

CNN has the details:

Ukrainian forces are pushing further into the Kursk region of Russia, in a cross-border incursion that surprised even American officials, multiple US and Ukrainian officials tell CNN.

Ukrainian forces are comprised of a mix of Ukrainian regular and special operations units, unlike previous Ukrainian operations inside Russia that often involved undercover units and local sympathizers.

The intention, say US and Ukrainian officials, is multifaceted, in part to disrupt and demoralize Russian forces and in part to divert Russian forces away from other parts of the eastern front. US officials do not believe Ukraine intends to hold Russian territory for the long-term.

Ukraine has not officially confirmed its forces conducted a ground operation inside Russia. Neither the Ukrainian military nor the government in Kyiv has publicly commented on the operation.

Russia accused Ukrainian troops of crossing the border into its Kursk region on Tuesday, claiming that Ukrainian forces launched a “massive attack” and attempted to break through the Russian defenses.

The extent of the attack, including whether Ukrainian troops took over any settlements or caused damage to any strategic targets, remains unclear.

An incursion into Russia could be an attempt by Kyiv to divert Russian resources elsewhere. Given the spate of more negative developments from the frontline, the news of a successful incursion help Kyiv boost the morale of its troops and civilian population.

It could also be a message to Russia’s civilian population – a demonstration that Moscow’s war on Ukraine makes Russia vulnerable to attacks.

Here’s the machine translation from the German:

We can only wish the Ukrainian defenders every success, also at #Kursk . The more successful they are, the sooner people will understand at #Kreml that there is nothing to be gained at #Ukraine . This and only this can lead to a change of mind on the part of the aggressor.

Now we watch and wait and see what develops.

Here is President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump.

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Yes, Virginia. The Media Does Put A Thumb On The Scale

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Bias in the media is a tricky thing to nail down, no matter how obvious it seems from the cheap seats (where I sit, that is). What can seem like conscious choices to shape the narrative one way or another are often more likely to be structural flaws journalism (shorthand: quotes aren’t facts, or why access journalism rots your brain and your newspaper); or an unconscious process through assumptions not in evidence frame reporting and stories. (See, e.g., the Walz vs. Shapiro takes that posits that bog standard Democratic Party priorities do not represent the center of American policy preferences.  (Lots to talk about there, but for another post or posts).

But sometimes bias is right out there, and the mechanisms by which it wrecks civic discourse is in plain sight.  That’s the implication of  this study out of MIT’s Sloan School:

One year after COVID-19 vaccines arrived, the U.S. had a vaccination rate of about 64%. That rate — lower than in most other countries with comparable access to vaccines — resulted in many preventable deaths.

A lot of blame was cast about, much of it targeting fake news stories and the social media platforms on which they spread. But new research by Jennifer Allen, SM ’22, PhD ’24, found that another overlooked source had a stronger influence on slowing vaccination rates: slightly misleading or provocative headlines from mainstream news sources.

The impact of perniciously presented but accurately reported stories was huge–much more damaging than identified mis or disinformation:

Allen and her coauthors found that exposure to stories they came to define as “vaccine-skeptical” — that is, stories that were not false and alluded to potentially harmful health effects resulting from the vaccine — reduced vaccination intentions 46 times more than misinformation flagged by fact-checkers.

“If we translate this into a specific number, we find that about 3 million people could have gotten vaccinated had they not been exposed to these stories,” Allen said. “Of course, there is then some correlation between vaccine uptake and lives saved, and so the number of preventable deaths also turns out to be relatively large….

The basic explanation for this result is audience size. In total, vaccine-related headlines that the researchers looked at received 2.7 billion views on Facebook. Content flagged as misinformation received just 0.3% of them. The most influential vaccine-skeptical headline, which was published by the Chicago Tribune, read “A Healthy Doctor Died Two Weeks After Getting a COVID Vaccine; CDC Is Investigating Why.” It reached more than 20% of Facebook’s U.S. user base and received more than six times as many views as all flagged misinformation combined.

Crucially it’s not just, or perhaps even mostly a poorly or maliciously framed story that does the damage.  All it takes to produce harm is a misleading headline, “given that more than 90% of people read nothing beyond that when browsing social media.”

Yes, Virginia. The Media Does Put Thumbs On Scales With Headlines

That is: when you read a New York Times headline that, say, reads “Trump and Harris Agree to September Debate” you have both an error in fact (Harris had long ago confirmed her attendence at the debate. Trump had ducked it and is now surrendering on this one), and a journalistic sin of omission–leaving out the entire tenor of the press conference and the fact that it was mostly a tissue of lies.  The Times did do a decent fact check of the session; they would point to that to say (with some justice) that they are providing a critical analytical lens on Trump’s claims. But most people who see this coverage at all will see the “agreement” and miss the reality–that a tired and rambling old guy had a serial ragegasm.

That’s how so much of what we’ll have to fight against will play out over the next 90 days. Reasonably accurate reporting (however often driven by structurally flawed assumptions) that reporters and editors can point at to “prove” their commitment to fairness, while the work of seeding opinion in the digital town square gets done by headlines that mislead and worse.  As the story of the Sloan study concludes:

Importantly, this method generalizes beyond vaccination rates and could be used to understand social media posts’ causal effects on any outcome, from brand attitudes to political polarization.

We can have some effect on this. Screaming a lot did get the NYT to change an egregious headline last week. Working the refs is important. I’ll just put this out there: many NYT reporters put their emails up on their biography pages (click on their bylines). Short, polite, firm notes about both the substance of their writing and the headlines that get slapped on it may not have an immediate effect. But they read what comes in over the transom and it shapes how they work.

This thread, it is as open as the mind of a Minnesota school kid in one of Walz’s classes.

Image: Beatrix Potter, Spectacled Mouse Reading a Newspaper, 1890

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Grandpa Let Loose

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Grandpa Let Loose

Trump just gave a trainwreck of a news conference where he was unhinged, meandering, and he looked like shit.  Key points:

There’s a lot more but I can’t stand looking at him anymore.  The one possible piece of news is that he agreed to the already agreed-upon debate on 9/10 on ABC but who knows if he’ll show for that.

 

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Time Machine: Oct 2018, Before Tim Walz Was Elected Governor

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Time Machine: Oct 2018, Before Tim Walz Was Elected Governor
Tim Walz, right, and Gary Bloomberg, left, at Camp Guernsey, an artillery training facility in Guernsey, Wyo., in 1992. Walz was a U.S. Army National Guard staff sergeant at the time.Courtesy of Tim Walz

Leto sent me a great article about Tim Walz from Oct 2018, when he was running for his first term as governor.

Here’s how the article begins:

Two days after Tim Walz turned 17, he and a military recruiter drove 30 miles to a farm field in northern Nebraska.

A farmer, who was also a lieutenant in the Army National Guard, hopped down from the tractor he was using to till a field.

“And we did the oath of enlistment right there on the edge of a field with the recruiter and that led me on a 24-year journey,” Walz recounted recently as he reflected on what had been a family expectation of military service.

Not long after, Walz was off to basic training in Georgia. It was the first stop in a military career that would take him to Arkansas, Texas, the Arctic Circle and several outposts in between. “You go where you’re told to go.”

Is anyone surprised that in 2018 some partisan hack tried to attack Walz over his military service?

During that race, Walz’s service was a prominent feature, and also a source of a late-campaign dispute.

Tom Hagen, a military reservist from Waseca, Minn., who served in Iraq, wrote a letter to a newspaper in the district saying that Walz wasn’t being entirely candid about his record “through artful omission” about where his overseas missions took him. Hagen said voters deserved to know Walz didn’t deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan.

Walz didn’t let it go unanswered and criticized Hagan as dishonoring a fellow veteran.

“There’s a code of honor among those who’ve served, and normally this type of partisan political attack only comes from one who’s never worn a uniform,” Walz wrote in the same newspaper, The Winona Daily News, just days before being elected.

During his two decades, Walz was part of flood fights, responded to tornadoes and spent months on active duty deployed overseas.

He specialized in heavy artillery and had ribbons for proficiency in sharpshooting and hand grenades, according to military records obtained through an open records request.

Walz acknowledges he never saw combat.

“I know that there are certainly folks that did far more than I did. I know that,” Walz said. “I willingly say that I got far more out of the military than they got out of me, from the GI Bill to leadership opportunities to everything else.”

And of course Governor Walz refused to send National Guard troops to the border:

“I would not be comfortable having us be part of a mission that separates children from their families. That is a federal government role that needs to be carried out by civilian authorities in immigration control … (The Guard) is not and should not be used as immigration control. That is an absolutely inappropriate and wrong mission. And I think as the chief executive of the state of Minnesota being able to reflect those concerns adequately with personnel who know this in the Pentagon, at Guard Bureau, is critically important.”

As they say, read the whole thing.

 

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You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet, Baby

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You Just Haven't Earned It Yet, Baby

First, cry harder.

Second, after his NABJ catastrophe, I’m sure Trump’s press conference at his stately pleasure dome will be highly controlled press avail with only the best reporters asking questions that aren’t rude.  Still, I guarantee that the “mainstream” press covering it will do everything in their power to clean up any nonsense that Trump spouts, as they always do.

Third, both the Post and the Times are running stories about Walz’ decision to retire after 24 years in the military, where they quote disaffected Republicans who served with him, as part of a campaign of lies and deceit by Trump’s campaign manager, Chris LaCivita, the guy who invented swiftboating.  The same media outlets are just slavering to push the “bubble bursting/sugar high is over” storyline on the Harris/Walz campaign.   Why should Harris and Walz run to the mics to placate these fuckers when there’s no way they are going to get fair coverage or good questions?

Finally, the voters that Harris wants to reach are not reading the NYT, Post or Semafor, where Benjy Sarlin writes.  They’re on social media, because they’re young, and the Harris campaign is tearing it up there.  Harris announced her Walz pick officially on Instagram.  Her KamalaHQ account is killing it.  The “free media” from a press conference pales in comparison to the free media from the social platforms, as well as the media attention given to the rallies.

So, to Benjy and the rest of the whiners, sorry, you’re going to have to suffer and cry for a longer time.

If you want some reasonable takes on the Harris/Walz press conferences, Dave Weigel and Hunter Walker have posts on Bluesky worth checking out.

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