Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

It’s a doggy dog world.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

Republicans in disarray!

No Justins, No Peace

Somebody needs to explain to DeSantis that nobody needs to do anything to make him look bad.

Happy indictment week to all who celebrate!

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

Republicans would impeach Biden if he bit into a whole Kit Kat rather than breaking the sections apart.

“That’s what the insurrection act is for!”

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Hi god, it’s us. Thanks a heap, you’re having a great week and it’s only Thursday!

FFS people, this was a good thing. take the win.

Compromise? There is no middle ground between a firefighter and an arsonist.

“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.”

We need to vote them all out and restore sane Democratic government.

This really is a full service blog.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

Nikki Haley, who can’t acknowledge ‘slavery’, is a pathetic shill.

Michigan is a great lesson for Dems everywhere: when you have power…use it!

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

Usually wrong but never in doubt

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Media

Late Night Comic Relief Open Thread: Business Report from the Right-Wing Grifterverse

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Trump’s latest ‘social media’ venture, like every Trump enterprise, remains ten pounds of manure in a three-pound sack. Because cutting corners is his hallmark, not that stupid logo.

… Jimmy Carter built houses with Habitat for Humanity. George W. Bush learned to paint. Barack Obama hung out with Bruce Springsteen. And Donald Trump, 45th president of the United States, created his own alternate online universe for the MAGA-loving, Big Tech-hating common man. After months of hype, the site was here — and it looked a lot like the thing it’s supposed to replace.

Inside Truth Social, everything once blue was now a bright, jewel-toned purple. Tweets, a.k.a. posts, were now “Truths.” Retweets were now “ReTruths,” capital T. And above my username, I saw the site’s default avatar: Twitter’s cream-colored egg icon, the image given to all new users, had apparently given birth to a proud purple eagle. The rest of the site appeared familiar: Replies were still replies. Likes were still likes. Direct messages, still in development, were still direct messages. And Donald Trump was still @realDonaldTrump — followed, as of this writing, by 140,000 people, a tiny fraction of his onetime total audience on Twitter. Only one Truth appeared on his page: “Get Ready! Your favorite President will see you soon!” he wrote two weeks ago, before the app’s launch. The Truth displayed 7,750 ReTruths, 30,500 likes and 4,700 replies. (Inexplicably, unlike replies on other user posts, none of the responses to Trump’s message were visible to me.)…

The site promises a safe space for “free expression,” encouraging of “all viewpoints,” according to the welcome email, “as we do not discriminate against political ideology.” But inside the app, digital tumbleweeds blew through my feed. The site is a bit slow, and a bit empty. Its stalled roll-out, led by Devin Nunes, the Trump supporter and former Republican congressman from California, has become a source of frustration and confusion in MAGA-world, according to my colleague Meridith McGraw. Republican lawmakers like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz and Kevin McCarthy already have accounts and appear to be posting similar or identical content to both Truth Social and Twitter, along with right-leaning platforms like Gettr and Parler. (Apparently, no one is quite ready to turn their backs on an actual audience yet.) But when they do finally get their welcome emails, the thousands of regular Trump fans still waiting in line, eager for their chance to search for truth, will find a Twitter knock-off with no immediately discernible improvement on the original — a vanity project that has yet to prove its utility.

Put simply, there isn’t much happening on the site…

On Truth Social’s own account page, @truthsocial, site administrators advised users to please be patient as the platform continued to move through its waitlist and address tech bugs and inconsistencies. The site is the marquee offering of Trump’s tech venture, Trump Media & Technology Group, founded last year as part of a SPAC deal, with $1 billion from undisclosed investors, according to the company (which is now reportedly under investigation by federal regulators). Truth Social’s page is filled with memes: a car veering off the highway, away from a sign for “Big Tech” to an exit ramp for “Truth Social”; two doors, one for Twitter, showing a vacant room, another for “Truth Social,” with dozens of people trying to get in. But from the inside, Truth Social feels empty…

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Russian Affairs Open Thread: No News Is Putin’s News

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Know your information sources and bullshit checking

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I’m going to state a couple of facts.

  1. Russian GDP in 2021 on an exchange rate basis was about 1.71 Trillion dollars
  2. Russian GDP in 2021 on a Purchasing Power Parity basis was about $2.6 Trillion dollars.
  3. Depending on how we do our calculations, Russia’s daily GDP is between $4.7 to $7.1 Billion
  4. Russia’s 2021 military budget was about $42 billion dollars for the year

Let’s keep that in mind when we look at the following viral tweet.

Know your information sources and bullshit checking

Given the previous facts, is $20 billion dollars per day even in the plausible realm of reality?  That is 2 to 4 times daily Russian GDP or 50% of the annual defense budget.

Is that $20 billion per day estimate plausible?

I don’t think so.

UPDATE 1 The 20 billion in the original document was RUBLES not DOLLARS. The math then is extremely plausible. My apologies. I stand by the rest.

Everyone is looking for information.  I am looking for information.  Just be careful about what information and who is reporting and analyzing what.

  • Look for people who have been thinking long and hard about particular problems for years or decades instead of a few hours, days or weeks on Google or Youtube.
    • Look for people who aren’t routinely experts of the week on whatever is in the news
    • Don’t look at pundits who are expected to be a mile wide and a millimeter deep.
  • Look for people who have specific subject area expertise.
  • Look for people who have gotten major questions right in the past.
  • Look for people who are very well aware of the limits of their knowledge and can flag when they are switching from analysis to opinion.
  • Look for people who are capable of saying “I don’t know” and “I was wrong about X for these reasons…”
  • Look for people whose numbers are in the realm of plausibility.

This applies to the invasion of Ukraine.

This applies to COVID and public health measures.

This applies to almost everything.

Finding legitimate expertise is challenging.  It is tough. The sudden spike of sustained public interest in a field that typically has a small cluster of practitioners and professionals speaking only with themselves to a massive opportunity space for  grifters and cranks and enthusiastic amateurs (all non-mutually exclusive) to fill with incredible information and story telling.

Be careful about the information environment out there.  It is ugly.

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Wednesday Evening Open Thread: Over-Social Media

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I literally LOL’d, because it’s not *just* Twitter…

2/ That statement is not meant to attack people with clinical personality issues, which we need to destigmatize.

3/ Also, I don’t mean to imply there are “normal sentences,” which could be seen to “other” people with dyslexia and other sensory processing issues.

4/ I also don’t mean to disrespect to vital work of consciousness building through Twitter critique, which makes us all better. The beauty of this app is it’s all made us aware of other people’s perspectives.

5/ I also don’t want to imply that there is a thing as “too much time on Twitter.” I know that social media addiction is a real thing, and one that psychological professionals are finding ways to treat.

I know I’m not a professional and cannot judge.

6/ I’m sorry to imply that “writing” is the default, as I know people with disabilities need alternate ways of inputting text. I’ve publicly supported work of Apple to increase accessibility options, and have lobbied tech companies to be more robust with speech-to-text options.

7/ I do apologize if the above caveats could be seen as “sarcastic,” or “a joke.” I know that these issues are serious and need to be acted upon.

8/ Anyway, you can tell when someone has spent too much time on Twitter because it breaks their ability to express ideas clearly.

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Muckrakers (Open Thread)

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In the thread downstairs, there was some talk about how Democrats face a permanent media disadvantage since there’s no equivalent of Fox News that serves the left side of the political spectrum. A propaganda outlet that favors the Democratic Party probably won’t happen for a variety of reasons.

But I do wonder if it would help if Dem-friendly donors funded “investigative reporting” books on Republican opponents that could be released exclusively to big media outfits. Wingnuts do that routinely, as y’all know. One prominent example is Clinton Cash, written by a disreputable wingnut hack. The NYT ate it up and then crapped it out as narrative-setting stories, to disastrous effect (for Democrats).

It’s possible MSM outlets wouldn’t be interested in tearing Republicans down since the GOP is generally better for their owners’ bottom line. But I don’t believe that’s always the controlling principle. In 2020, MSM outlets mostly passed on the Hunter Biden laptop stuff, probably because the Trump clowns were dumb enough to aggressively push it instead of letting the Beltway types discover it at a respectable remove.

Imagine an exposé on a prominent Republican (say, Ron DeSantis) authored by someone independent enough not to be immediately dismissed as a political operative. If the material it contained was salacious and/or damaging enough, maybe a book like that could get legs. Heck, we could do the wingnuts one better and hire an honest-to-dog investigative journalist instead of a washed-up Sarah Palin hagiographer/stalker.

Maybe there have already been attempts to replicate that unfortunately effective tactic for good rather than evil, but I can’t think of an example that really took off and shaped narratives the way Clinton Cash did. It seems like the trick is to get out in front of political movements so the book can take advantage of Beltway journo laziness by providing a pre-fab framing. What do y’all think?

Open thread.

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Wednesday Evening Open Thread: Tucker Carlson Remains A Respected ‘Source’ Among His Theoretically Responsible Media Peers

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Wednesday Evening Open Thread: Tucker Carlson Remains A Respected 'Source' Among His Peers

(John Deering via GoComics.com)
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I’d repeat the famous quote about power without responsibility, but no honest sex worker deserves to be classed with Tucker Carlson. Operation ‘Pretend the GOP Isn’t A Wholly-Owned Trump Property’ fires another salvo:

… [T]text messages — newly released by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection — between Fox News hosts and former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, crystallize with new specificity just how tightly Fox News and the White House were entwined during the Trump years, with many of the network’s top hosts serving as a cable cabinet of unofficial advisers.

As the Jan. 6 attacks on the U.S. Capitol unfolded, Meadows received texts from Fox News hosts Laura Ingraham and Brian Kilmeade, as well as Hannity, according to the newly released communications…

Other texts released by the committee reveal that Hannity also offered the White House advice in the run-up and aftermath to the attacks that resulted in five deaths. On Dec. 31, 2020, Hannity texted Meadows to warn, “I do NOT see January 6 happening the way he is being told.” And on Jan. 10, 2021 — referring to a conversation he had with Trump himself — Hannity texted Meadows and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a close Trump ally, to try to discuss strategies to rein in Trump.

“Guys, we have a clear path to land the plane in 9 days,” Hannity wrote. “He can’t mention the election again. Ever. I did not have a good call with him today. And worse, I’m not sure what is left to do or say, and I don’t like not knowing if it’s truly understood. Ideas?”…

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Pull the Press Tags

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Why the White House should strip Fox News of its press credentials, part infinity:

DAILY BEAST: [Fox News host Jesse] Watters had urged [Turning Point USA] attendees to “go in for the kill shot” and “ambush” Fauci if they see him in public, using violent rhetoric to encourage them to confront Fauci with conspiracy theories over the origins of the coronavirus pandemic.

“The kill shot, with an ambush—deadly, ’cause he doesn’t see it coming. This is when you say, ‘Dr. Fauci, you funded risky research at a sloppy Chinese lab, the same lab that sprung this pandemic on the world. You know why people don’t trust you, don’t you?’ Boom, he is dead! He is dead! He’s done!” Watters told the crowd, referring to the baseless claim among conservatives that the virus was “engineered” by a lab Fauci funded.

Watters also encouraged supporters to film their “ambush” of Fauci so they could become famous.

“You do that—30 seconds, it’s all you need. Now you get that footage to us, you get it to Fox… Imagine Tucker Carlson teases that…,” he said.

Fauci said Watters should be “fired on the spot.” Predictably, Fox News is standing by BillO’s gropenführer-in-training:

“Based on watching the full clip and reading the entire transcript, it’s more than clear that Jesse Watters was using a metaphor for asking hard-hitting questions to Dr. Fauci about gain-of-function research and his words have been twisted completely out of context,” Fox News said in a statement obtained by Newsweek.

Imagine how the Fox News personalities who were texting their leader’s chief of staff on January 6th to protect their joint reputations would respond to a garbage rationalization like that if you switched the names “Fauci” and “Trump” in Watters’ script. Actually, we don’t have to imagine it. I know it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, but the Fox News team shrieked in unison like 10,000 simultaneously scalded ferrets when comedian Kathy Griffin did the stunt with the fake Trump head, and Griffin suffered real professional consequences.

It’s pretty obvious to me at least why Watters chose violent imagery when smearing a public health official who has worked to keep Americans safe from deadly diseases for decades. The network’s business model is to radicalize viewers against political opponents. Another Fox News personality recently compared Fauci to Josef Megele. She wasn’t fired either. Kyle Rittenhouse was the celebrity guest at the event where Watters babbled about “kill shots.” Viewers can put two and two together.

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