False Equivalency

Hard to imagine America being overthrown simply because of a torrent of lies from a media trying to make a buck off advertisers. But it could very likely happen.

Truth and fairness usually go hand in hand but now we have two parties where one embellishes but the other tells fantastic lies because they know everyone to some extent operates on an idea of fairness in media and this allows them to radically game the system.

Birthdays

I had a birthday not long ago and because of my medical history over the last year it is obvious I am not going to have that many more. We are both fortunate and possibly unfortunate to live at this time in history because of technology.

More to come…

Thom Telling Us What Happened

The greatest wealth inequality in the history of the world. Billionaires pay 8% income tax. Three families are worth more than the bottom half of America. 50 trillion dollars was taken out of the homes and retirements of the working class and transferred to the 1 percent with tax cuts…given to about the 11,000 families worth more than 100 million dollars.

Since Reagan.

Taking civics out of school and many other deletions has ended the middle class. Why would they take civics out of school? Because it teaches democracy.

One Year Ago and now Kamala

How did we get here? The dumbing of America, from Reagan to Trump and beyond

by Brian Karem writing for Salon

How screwed are we? I’ll tell you.

On Wednesday, the news was all about a big bag of wind destroying Florida and flooding the South, spreading destruction and threatening pestilence and death.

Then there’s Hurricane Idalia.

Also on Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell froze and stood motionless in front of an assembly of reporters — for the second time this summer — so that’s encouraging.

But seriously, folks. Last Thursday, Donald Trump turned a 22-minute booking for a felony indictment in Georgia into a six-hour media special, complete with a larger motorcade than the actual president’s — with dozens of camera lights on the runway and a chopper-talk session.

Meanwhile, Joe Biden, the aforementioned actual president, quietly lent assistance to Hawaii after the devastating wildfires on Maui, for which he was criticized by Republican members of Congress. He also met with international leaders at the White House this week, and went after Big Pharma to negotiate reduced Medicare prices for 10 common prescription drugs.

The press? Well, we completely missed the point, as usual, and covered every juvenile tantrum Donald Trump threw in his malevolent attempt to stay in the news. The context is missing. The press is failing us, and people are too ignorant to notice the problem. That’s because we’re busy dividing ourselves into teams of social cheerleaders, cheering on our champions and literally booing the opposition.

Welcome to politics 2023. One man, who claims to support Christian values, continues his run for the highest office in the land based on revenge and hypocrisy, while our president, a devout Catholic, is insulted by the likes of Ted Cruz, accused of being anti-Catholic and “the face of corruption” in a post on X (formerly Twitter). Biden, in case anyone cares, goes to church every Sunday. Trump never went once in his four years at the White House. Rumor was it would burst into flames if he did.

It would be easy to claim that all of this is new. But that would also be wrong. The seeds of today’s political division and reporting began with Ronald Reagan.

While lying to the press, Reagan also set out to destroy it. He himself was quoted in the New York Times on Oct. 6, 1985, saying, “A substantial part of the political thing is acting and role playing and I know how to do that.”

Of course that’s literally all it is today.

What else is different?

Well, the press itself is different too. Reagan destroyed the FCC’s “fairness doctrine” and encouraged media consolidation. Decades later, as social media rose to take the place of the corporate media’s diminished role in providing vetted information, the slide accelerated.

People hiding behind anonymous handles rather than their actual names hurled insults and threats. Twitter offered “verified” names as a way to combat that — until Elon Musk took over and turned the verification process upside down, once again making anonymous insults and trolls fashionable.

Every tool used to legitimize and verify information in the last 40 years has evaporated under the push to make money. Fewer companies own most of the corporate media. Fewer independent news platforms exist — and they often get lumped in with bloggers and trolls.

The end result is chaos. Confusion.

That’s how America became stupid. Neil deGrasse Tyson, while trying to address how the U.S. is being left behind in areas such as physics, math and engineering (not to mention infrastructure) observed in a recent speech that “Science illiteracy is rampant in our culture.” When he addressed the problems of journalism, he pointed out a headline that read, “80 percent of airplane crash survivors had studied the locations of the exit doors on takeoff.”

As Tyson noted, there are quite a few things wrong with that headline, including this: Did they manage to interview those people who didn’t survive plane crashes? Another headline reported that half the schools in a certain district were “below average.” No kidding: That’s what “average” means. (OK, technically that would be the definition of ‘median,” but to insist on nuance now is pointless.)

Our inherent, vapid stupidity in the news business makes us sound more like characters in the 1970s novelty song”The Streak” than the diligent investigative reporters played by Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford in “All the President’s Men.”

That’s right. We’re just as proud as we can be of our anatomy and we’re inviting public critique.

Too arcane? Try it this way: We don’t get it.

Donald Trump faces 91 felony charges in four different jurisdictions, brought by approximately 100 American citizens sitting on four different grand juries. This major play by the justice system is the last bid for accountability that I’ll see in my lifetime for Donald Trump, and by extension for those who hold power and are willing to break the law in order to keep it. If it fails, then, quite literally, God help us. There will be no holding the rich and the powerful accountable — for anything, ever.

Meanwhile, Trump himself is desperate. He smells of it as surely as a “Supernatural” demon smells of sulfur. Yet we continue to give him a thin veneer of credibility by allowing him to claim that a legitimate prosecution is political persecution.

Who cares what Donald Trump thinks?

When Charles Manson went on trial for orchestrating a series of gruesome murders, we did not dance on the head of a pin for his demons. Is Trump a lesser demon? No. If anything, he’s worse. His criminal activity has caused the suffering of millions, if not billions, across the planet and the fallout has only just begun.

We give his illegitimate political spawn, like Vivek Ramaswamy and Marjorie Taylor Greene, ample opportunity to propose bombing our allies for supplying drugs that millions of our citizens demand, while claiming climate change is a hoax. These minor demons are drafting off Trump while creating whole new lanes of lunacy.

In the corporate media, we keep fighting over competing inaccurate narratives while members of Congress contribute to the mayhem by “playing a role,” as Ronald Reagan put it 40 years ago.

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The stupidity of the press is actually harder to decipher than the pandering of our politicians to constituents whom they view as fans of their fictional personas. Most of us are vaguely aware of the danger posed by Donald Trump. Some of us are acutely aware of it. But we’re also insecure and ignorant and not sure how to write or speak about him. If we simply call him a liar and a charlatan, we risk being called partisan. If we don’t show respect for “both sides,” then we are sullying our reputation — unless of course we are overtly partisan, and in that case we don’t care.

Either way, we flail about because of our inexperience. Everyone — even corporate news managers — say they wish we had more Walter Cronkites than Tucker Carlsons in the profession. You know, people with experience and common sense, rather than clowns chasing shadows.

The very same managers who wistfully wish for the “good old days” do not hire or promote people like Walter Cronkite, particularly not in television. The grizzled beat reporter with vast experience has been replaced by smiling, blissfully ignorant and much cheaper talking heads who can either entice or enrage an audience with their good looks while sounding knowledgeable. They definitely aren’t. We too have chased the Reagan model, and cover politics the same way politicians conduct their business: flash over substance.

You don’t have to look at political reporters. Just look at how we cover natural disasters, like the hurricane in Florida. How many times have you heard a reporter tell an anchor during a live shot, “Great question!” That’s usually a self-congratulatory comment, since the reporter has likely scripted the question for the anchor. The routine descriptions of all hurricanes, since I began covering them in the 1980s, includes cliché phrases like, “Never seen anything like this before” and “unparalleled destruction,” while the reporters wade through flood waters trying to look brave.

Please. TV reporters have covered hurricanes and major weather events the same way since Dan Rather waded into the flood waters while covering Hurricane Carla for KHOU in 1961. His stunt reporting eventually led to him replacing Cronkite as the anchor of “CBS Evening News.” Rather is revered today, but his contemporary peers often did not see him that way. He was a product of television, seen as a performer in his earlier years. He grew into his role and earned his stripes, but he was also the anchor who critics argue ushered in the new era of flash over substance. The fact that he’s so respected today speaks not only to his growth as a reporter, but perhaps also to our lowered expectations of reporters.

But please: It’s all about the Barbie movie! Or the horse race of politics, or the polls.

We can report on numbers and fictional characters. They are simple and clean. People are not. Covering people takes a lot of experience, an ability to understand nuances of speech, actions and culture. We have none of that today — either among the press or among politicians.

Former House Speaker Tip O’Neill said of Reagan that “he knows less than any president I’ve ever known.” The joke that circulated around D.C. during his presidency was that Reagan had tried to defect to the Soviet Union but was sent back because “he didn’t know anything.” As a performer playing Reagan in the off-Broadway show “Rap Master Ronnie” put it, “If you’re right 90 percent of the time, why quibble over the remaining three percent?”

John Wayne, a notorious conservative and longtime ally of Reagan’s, wrote him a blistering letter in 1977 telling Reagan to stop misinforming people about the Panama Canal treaty. “I’ll show you point by God damn point in the treaty where you are misinforming people. This is not my point of view against your point of view. These are facts,” Wayne wrote.

Reagan didn’t care. He played to the crowd he helped create, which has proliferated since he won the presidency in 1980. “You’d be surprised how much being a good actor pays off,” he told the Washington Post in 1984.

Now you understand how Donald Trump and his minions can spout limitless hypocrisy and get away with it. And you understand how the press, which was once able to accurately point out the lies and hypocrisy, today cannot.

“Floating down the stream of time,” George Harrison once told us “makes no difference where you are or where you’d like to be.”

Yes. It is all too much.

We are led by aging and frail men and women who should step aside, or by grifters who con their constituents because they don’t know or don’t care about anything better.

And all of this is being reported by indifferent, insecure, ignorant and incompetent journalists whose only goal is to fill time, gain ratings and pretend they know what they’re doing.

That’s how screwed we are.

The only consolation is that if the Justice Department remains sound, then Donald Trump will likely spend his remaining years behind bars, staring at himself in the mirror with no access to the outside world.

Sowing Chaos

It is clear what their plan is; wreck the certification process and have congress and/or the supreme court place Trump in power.

“Organized conspiracy”: Experts warn Trump allies on Georgia election board are “sowing chaos”
Story by Marina Villeneuve

Allies of former President Donald Trump on the Georgia state election board are stirring up chaos by passing new mandates ahead of the November election in a bid to dissuade voters and overwhelm local election officials, election experts warn.

The Georgia elections board passed a handful of rule changes this month that election officials across the state have decried as unnecessary and burdensome.
One rule, passed by a 3-2 partisan line vote Aug. 19, would allow county election board members to delay the certification of votes by investigating discrepancies between ballots cast and the number of voters.

The board the same day also advanced a rule requiring those ballots to be counted by hand.
And earlier in August, the board adopted a rule to allow local election boards to conduct a “reasonable inquiry” of election results – without defining what exactly that means.

The Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials, which represents over 500 officials across the estate, asked the board to stop making sweeping rule changes in the weeks leading to the election.

Cathy Woolard, former Chair of the Fulton County Board of Registrations & Elections, said normally, the association itself would have come to the board to ask for particular changes – well ahead of an election cycle.
“That has not happened in any of these rule petitions,” she said on a call with reporters this week organized by advocacy group Fair Fight Action. “They have come from citizens who, generally speaking, have been, I hate to say it, but election deniers and activists who have kind of continued to stir the pot and have dialogue that there’s something wrong with our elections.

She continued: “This is 159 counties, election administrators and people who do the work day in, day out. When they come back and say: ‘You know, we don’t need this. This doesn’t clarify something. This is going to be a problem for us, just in terms of the logistics.’ And then they run roughshod over that and vote and with a partisan split. You have a problem there.”

Patrise Perkins-Hooker, the former chair of the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections, said the changes are driven solely by partisanship – in favor of Trump. “As they become more politicized, they have become a political weapon of parties, a preference to undo the confidence in the election system, to raise doubt about the election system so they become much more politicized in their approach, and these rule making things are just evidence of it,” Perkins-Hooker said on the call with reporters.

Perkins-Hooker, a county attorney for Fulton County, pointed out that research shows voter fraud is rare and that Georgia in particular has a solid reputation for handling elections.

“if there is nothing, if there’s no problem, and we’ve had courts say there’s no problem in the conduct of elections in Georgia, why do you need all of these rules?” she said.

She said political and outside influence is driving election board decisions – not what’s in the best interest of Georgians.

“What has happened with the SEB is it has been populated by public comment from people who will believe our election system is flawed, and they want to curtail the free access of voters to elect their candidates,” she said.
The Trump allies on the Georgia Election Board are focusing on a little-known part of the voting process: certification.

Local election officials are tasked with certifying election results as a ministerial duty under statute.

Certification doesn’t happen until local election officials have repeatedly verified the results during the canvas and audit process — which includes everything from cross-checking ballots and tallies against voter lists to verifying signatures on mail-in ballots. States can address suspected errors and fraud with mechanisms from recounts, to audits, to evidentiary hearings before state election boards.

State laws make it clear that election officials have no discretion to refuse to certify election results,

Legal experts have told Salon that they expect courts will reject any efforts by local officials to question election results and delay certification.

Those experts say they’re more concerned about the role of state legislatures and the Trump-friendly Supreme Court coming to Trump’s aid as he sows the kind of discord and doubt in the nation’s electoral processes that preceded the violence in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Woolard said it’s likely that Trump allies who try to delay certification will end up outvoted by other local board members.

“You may have counties where there’s a lot of attention right now, like Fulton County, where they most likely will be outvoted, because we understand what certification is,” she said. “But then you have other counties, where we might not be focused, perhaps maybe a county like Coffee County, where they might actually not certify the election.”

Still, she’s concerned about counties that might not certify and the confusion and disorder that could be unleashed.

“It gets back to that sowing chaos problem that you know that’s happening to this day, quite frankly,” she said.

Woolard said when she was previously director of the Fulton County board, the two Republicans and three Democrats on the board almost always ruled unanimously.

“We identified things that we needed to look into, and including things that were brought from my Republican colleagues, but we still came to a measured conclusion,” she said. “Now we have the same partisan split, but we have two people who aren’t voting for certification, who are entertaining notions of things that are being brought from other counties, from the Republican Party, from groups that don’t have anything to do with what is before us in terms of administering an election.”

ProPublica revealed that election deniers, through the rightwing Election Integrity Network, have secretly pushed a rule adopted by the state election board to make it easier to delay certification.

Woolard said she and other election officials are highly concerned about how the rule changes could throw election preparations into disarray.

“Getting ready to run an election like in Fulton County, we have 1000 volunteers, 250 Election Day precincts,” Wollard said. “Our traffic is a nightmare, and we’re having the same deadlines and time concerns in smaller counties that you know might have 1000 voters. We have 800,000 voters. It becomes very challenging to get about the work of running those elections when you’re constantly having this barrage of craziness that has nothing to do with what is before you as set out by law.”

She said our society often considers such logistical concerns will just get worked out at the end of the day.

“That’s sort of a concern that we don’t pay a lot of attention to, because you just assume it’s all going to go right,” she said. “But you know, what we do logistically is amazing, and it’s set up by state law. We follow it to the letter, even when it’s challenging. But then you throw all this other stuff on top of it that our staff has to deal with, and you really run the risk that you’re creating the potential for a failure that you know could have been avoided if people had time to actually do their work.”

Fair Fight Action CEO Lauren Groh-Wargo said even if votes end up certified at the end of the day, election deniers allied with Trump may achieve their overriding goal of stowing disinformation and distrust in the voting system.

“Their disinformation is already disenfranchising American citizens by getting it into law,” she said.

She pointed out that Trump allies are trying to invalidate categories of ballots, including provisional, out-of-precinct ballots.

“That is a successful strategy,” she said. “That is successfully disenfranchising voters. Number one, we have to take it seriously from that way, because it’s moving into statute.”

Groh-Wargo said the U.S. has seen more voter suppression, anti-voting bills passed in this country’s history in 2021 and 2023 than any time before.

She said the Trump effort in 2020 to pressure local officials to switch votes to him was alarming and noted that while some members of the Trump “voter suppression architecture” have ended up pleading guilty, the system moves slowly, and voters must understand both their rights and how local election officials have worked for years to develop a trustworthy system.

“Having gone through what we all went through four years ago, we take it seriously and know the power that these disinformation narratives have, and are ready for them to try to execute on all of this at a higher level,” she said. “Because the big difference from four years ago is that the MAGA, anti-voting election deniers, they have moved their way into so many local boards and state, state election boards all over the country. And so we know there’s an organized conspiracy, but we also know there are all those rogue actors.”

Wrecking the Election Process

Their plan is now clear and very little is being done to stop them except to…talk about it on the news. What is going to happen? They will wreck the election and then it will go to congress and/or the supreme court and it is very possible Trump will be President.

Chaos is their plan and on top of it they will absolutely call out the MAGA AR-15 army to shoot people in the streets and thus terrify everyone into just letting Trump walk back into the White House. It is crazy. It is happening.

Musk and Trump

The ticket to get into the MAGA club is to endorse the big lie. Trumpists know it is a lie, but the Orwellian transformation of their brains come with that lie being the truth of his “greater good.” That conspiracy is the communion wafer of MAGA. It transmutes in the mouth into holiness.

The same kind of pass is required for the Musk Cult. He is a malignant narcissist with the obvious goal of taking over the internet and making himself the god-emperor of cyberspace, and in his weird brain the ruler of the universe. Mars is his big lie and communion wafer of his cult. It was inevitable that Elon would end up in MAGA. Many of the worst people I have ever interacted with on forums have dual-membership.