November 6, 2022
Peter Baker & Alan Rappeport of the New York Times: "Taking the stage to roaring applause and blaring music [in Philadelphia last night, President] Biden and [President] Obama joined hands with Josh Shapiro, the Democratic candidate in the Pennsylvania governor's race, and John Fetterman, the Democrat running for a Senate seat. Mr. Biden, who spoke first, hailed the legacy of Mr. Obama, whom he called 'a great president, a historic president -- I'm proud to say, a dear friend.'... On Saturday, Mr. Biden spoke in fiery bursts, lacing into his predecessor, Donald J. Trump, and Republicans. Describing the election as a battle between two vastly different agendas, he said that 'character is on the ballot' and warned that Republicans would try to roll back America's safety net programs if they won power in Washington.... Each addresses in his own way the threat they see in a passel of election deniers loyal to Mr. Trump taking power in the midterm elections.... With his can-you-believe-this tone, no one skewers the other side with sarcasm quite like Mr. Obama." A Politico story, which also devotes some ink to Trump, is here.
Maureen Dowd of the New York Times: "Much to our national shame, it looks like ... over-the-top and way, way, way out-of-the mainstream Republicans -- and the formerly normie and now creepy Republicans who have bent the knee to the wackos out of political expediency -- are going to be running the House, maybe the Senate and certainly some states, perhaps even some that Joe Biden won two years ago. And it looks as if Kevin McCarthy will finally realize his goal of becoming speaker, but when he speaks, it will be Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan and Lauren Boebert doing the spewing. It will be like the devil growling through Linda Blair in 'The Exorcist' -- except it will be our heads spinning.... These extreme Republicans don't have a plan. Their only idea is to get in, make trouble for President Biden, drag Hunter into the dock, start a bunch of stupid investigations, shut down the government, abandon Ukraine and hold the debt limit hostage." ~~~
~~~ Marie: Here's something I missed when it happened. From the Guardian: "Earlier this year, [Rep. Lauren] Boebert [R-Colo.] hinted that Jesus may have prevented his crucifixion if he had owned AR-15 rifles. 'How many AR-15s do you think Jesus would have had?' Boebert asked a crowd at a Christian event in Colorado. 'Well, he didn't have enough to keep his government from killing him.'" Maybe the most amazing part of Boebert's gun-weilding Jesus is that she understand absolutely nothing about what she claims is her own religion. All of Christian theology hangs upon the crucifixion story. The crucifixion is not an aberration; it is essential to the faith. ~~~
~~~ Here's Matthew's fairly succinct explanation (Chap. 26). As Jesus' enemies come to the Garden of Gethsemane to seize Jesus & denounce him before Pontius Pilate, one of Jesus' followers took out his sword & cut off the ear of an attacker. Jesus admonishes his sword-wielding follower: "Put your sword back into its place. For all who take the sword will perish by the sword. Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then should the Scriptures be fulfilled, that it must be so?" I doubt the legions of angels would have come strapped with AR-15s, but you get the point. Unfortunately, Boebert does not. And that's my Sunday sermon.
Florida Governor. Ron DeSantis adds some verses to Genesis, & wouldn't you know it? They're all about DeSantis. Jared Gans of the Hill: "'And on the eighth day, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, "I need a protector." So God made a fighter,' DeSantis's ad begins. The ad shows pictures of DeSantis meeting with officials and civilians while serving as governor. It describes a series of traits God 'said' he needs in someone, including a willingness to 'travel thousands of miles for no other reason than to serve the people, to save their jobs, their livelihoods, their liberty, their happiness.'"
Virginia House. Meagan Flynn of the Washington Post: "Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the GOP&'s most vocal critic against Trumpian politics' threats to democracy, has endorsed Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) over Spanberger's Republican challenger in one of Virginia's most consequential races this year, transcending party lines to push for the vulnerable Democrat days before the election. In a statement to The Washington Post, Cheney acknowledged that she and Spanberger have policy differences, but said she was 'honored' to back Spanberger, describing her as a lawmaker 'dedicated to working across the aisle to find solutions' while criticizing her Donald Trump-backed Republican opponent, Yesli Vega, >a member of the Prince William County Board of Supervisors."
Danny Hakim & Alexandra Berzon of the New York Times: "Because elections in America are more fraught than ever, the scrutiny of ballot counting now starts well before Election Day, and the legal challenges have already begun. The Republican Party and allied groups, many seized by Donald J. Trump's falsehoods about fraud in elections, are training monitors around the country to spot what they see as irregularities at absentee ballot counting centers. The monitors are told to take copious notes, which could be useful for potential court challenges, raising the prospect of a replay in state and local elections of Mr. Trump's attempt to use the courts to overturn his loss two years ago. The activity has not produced reports of major disruptions or problems."
Lies And the Lying Liars
Cecilia Kang of the New York Times: "Voting-related falsehoods and rumors are flourishing across social media in the final stretch before Election Day on Tuesday. Much of the misinformation and conspiracy theories, which are swirling on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms, builds on familiar and unsubstantiated narratives spread about the 2020 presidential election. They include debunked claims of meddling with voting equipment, falsehoods about fraudulent ballots, alleged malfeasance by elections officials and unsubstantiated rumors about mail-in voting. Many of the posts are outright falsehoods, while others appear intended to simply raise doubts and undermine confidence in voting.... Here are some of the most widespread falsehoods and rumors related to voting." ~~~
Adam Gabbatt of the Guardian: "Ballot boxes being stuffed. 'BlueAnon'. Men in underpants. Every Democratic candidate: a 'complete weirdo psychopath'. To dive into Truth Social, Donald Trump's Twitter-but-for-conspiracy-theorists social media platform, is to enter a world where all of the above are real topics of debate, breathlessly discussed by Trump-backing Republicans and anonymous rightwing provocateurs. Truth Social has always been a platform for lies and obfuscations; about the 2020 election, the Democratic party, vaccines, Hunter Biden. But with less than a week before the election, the platform and its users have become even more unhinged. The site, formed as Trump's alternative to Twitter after he was banned from that platform in the wake of the January 6 insurrection, is awash with false theories about how the Democratic party is attempting to manipulate the midterm vote, false claims about the attack on Paul Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi's husband, and false accusations about Democratic candidates themselves." ~~~
~~~ Republicans Can't Handle the Truth -- That a Brutal Attack is their Fault:
Annie Karni, et al., of the New York Times: "Within hours of the brutal attack last month on Paul Pelosi, the husband of the speaker of the House, activists and media outlets on the right began circulating groundless claims -- nearly all of them sinister, and many homophobic -- casting doubt on what had happened. Some Republican officials quickly joined in, rushing to suggest that the bludgeoning of an octogenarian by a suspect obsessed with right-wing conspiracy theories was something else altogether, dismissing it as an inside job, a lover's quarrel or worse. The misinformation came from all levels of Republican politics. A U.S. senator [Ted Cruz] circulated the view that 'none of us will ever know' what really happened at the Pelosis; San Francisco home. A senior Republican congressman [Clay Higgins (La.)] referred to the attacker as a 'nudist hippie male prostitute,' baselessly asserting that the suspect had a personal relationship with Mr. Pelosi.... Donald J. Trump questioned whether the attack might have been staged. The world's richest man [Elon Musk] helped amplify the stories. But none of it was true." ~~~
~~~ Annals of "Journalism," Ctd. Paul Farhi of the Washington Post: "NBC News reporter Miguel Almaguer had what seemed like a scoop on Friday about an intruder&'s attack last week on Paul Pelosi. The curious new details he presented on the 'Today' show quickly went viral on right-wing sites and social media accounts.... Much of Almaguer's account was inaccurate, based on flawed information provided by a source who was unnamed in the report.... [NBC News] said Almaguer was incorrect when he reported that the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) gave police no indication he was in danger when he answered the door. In fact, San Francisco police have said that Pelosi was struggling with the intruder, David DePape, when they first saw him. But before NBC News' hasty removal of the video from its website -- accompanied by a vague note that the story 'did not meet NBC News reporting standards' -- it spawned a sinister new narrative ... [that] fed the unfounded speculation and conspiracy theories that have been swirling around the incident ever since the Oct. 28 home-invasion assault."
** Trump's DHS Falsely Accused 100s -- or 1,000s -- of Americans of Terrorism. Dell Cameron of Gizmodo: "The Department of Homeland Security launched a failed operation that ensnared hundreds, if not thousands, of U.S. protesters in what new documents show was as a sweeping, power-hungry effort before the 2020 election to bolster ... Donald Trump's spurious claims about a 'terrorist organization' he accused his Democratic rivals of supporting. An internal investigative report, made public this month by Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat of Oregon, details the findings of DHS lawyers concerning a previously undisclosed effort by Trump's acting secretary of homeland security, Chad Wolf, to amass secret dossiers on Americans in Portland attending anti-racism protests in summer 2020 sparked by the police murder of Minneapolis father George Floyd. The report describes attempts by top officials to link protesters to an imaginary terrorist plot in an apparent effort to boost Trump's reelection odds, raising concerns now about the ability of a sitting president to co-opt billions of dollars' worth of domestic intelligence assets for their own political gain." ~~~
~~~ Marie: Most of Trump's lies are terrible, but targeting real people, many of them Black people -- abducting them, arresting them, charging them, accessing their financial records, & developing "dossiers" on them -- is right out of the Brown Shirt handbook. Comparing Trump's tactics to Hitler's is well past the false argumentum ad Hitlerum. It was real.
Way Beyond the Beltway
Ukraine, et al. The New York Times' live updates of developments Sunday in Russia's war on Ukraine are here. The Guardian's live updates are here. ~~~
~~~ The Washington Post's live briefings for Sunday are here: "The United States is pushing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to reconsider his stance against negotiating with Russian President Vladimir Putin, The Washington Post reports. The effort is intended as a means to maintain international support, not necessarily to induce bargaining between the warring nations. Meanwhile, Iran acknowledged publicly for the first time that it had given Russia deadly drones -- albeit, it said, before the Kremlin's full-scale invasion began in February. Zelensky called Tehran's statement a 'confession' after weeks of attacks from Iranian Shahed drones.... More than 800,000 tons of food left three Black Sea ports during the week ending on Saturday, Zelensky said. The ships are on their way to Africa, China and the Middle East."
News Lede
New York Times: The Houston Astros won the World Series.
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Reader Comments (23)
Holy Christ! I’m reading that Merrick Garland is now thinking of appointing a special counsel to investigate Trump. Are you fucking kidding me? A special counsel? Like Robert Mueller? Because that went over so well.
First, it would take six months, minimum, to get a special counsel’s office up and running. Another six months to read through all the stuff DoJ already has. Then a year to haul in all the necessary witnesses to re-interview everyone, not to mention all subpoenas that will go for naught, requiring more litigation and more time. I’m gonna say 2025 before anything is completed. Then they’ll issue a doorstop of an unreadable report. By that time, Fatty will have stolen the election and his justices on the Supreme Court will have dismantled the Justice Department and made Trump dictator for life.
As of yesterday Garland was “considering” doing something. Maybe. Sort of. Now it appears he’s decided to do nothing.
Special counsel? Fuck me. Do your job. Indict this piece of shit. Special counsel is a gift to the Fat Fascist.
@Akhilleus: Yeah, both CNN & the NYT independently verified the special counsel story (see Friday's Reality Chex page for links).
I don't know what it is about Donald Trump that scares the bejesus out of people who stand up to other mobsters, but Garland's timidity is especially surprising. Maybe Trump abducted Garland's granddaughter, locked her in a closet at Mar-a-Lardo, & every time there's another DOJ filing against Trump, the Fat Fuck lumbers down to the basement & smacks the kid around a little. I don't know. Trump seems to have something over Garland.
At any rate, appointing a special counsel is yet another DOJ delay tactic: "Oh, it will take him/her some time to get up to speed, blah-blah." "Oh, the lead prosecutor died." It isn't only Trump who is trying to run out the clock. As I said, I give Garland till Thursday to charge Trump with something.
Marie,
No wonder Trump says he could shoot someone in broad daylight in Times Sq. without consequences. But wait…there might be a consequence…he might get re-elected!
He steals top secret documents, hides them, lies about it…nothing happens. He’s responsible for decades of fraudulent business practices, everyone knows about it; they have proof! Nothing happens. He tries to steal an election. Zip. He mounts an insurrection in which innocent people are murdered because of his orders. Nada. Rapes women. Same thing. This could go on and on and on…
I just don’t get it. He’s amassed enough criminal activity to imprison entire mafia families, but he’s out playing golf giving everyone the finger. And now he’s running for president and the top law enforcement officer in the country is hiding under the bed.
I’d like to think that he’ll be brought to justice in some fashion, at some time, but I’d love it to be before I die.
It’s not looking good.
I just thought of something. Maybe Garland is reading about how if the traitors take over, they’re gonna have him arrested and impeached, or tortured, or something, and he wants to be able to say, in all honesty “Hey! I din’ do nothin’!”
That would be correct.
But you know what, Merrick? They’re gonna do that shit anyway.
@Akhilleus: I wonder why it is that so far, the only people with the guts to go after Trump are two Black women: Letitia James of New York & Fani Willis of Georgia.
BTW, that story I just linked about the DHS arresting & creating fake dossiers on Americans -- probably mostly Black Americans -- is as chilling as anything I've read. This is the first I'd ever heard of it; it should have been front-page news in all the papers instead of being buried on Gizmodo. Real people were abducted & falsely imprisoned -- and NOTHING happens to Wolf, John Radcliffe & Trump???
I turned my clocks back 6 years and pretended there was no
electoral college and the winner was the woman with the most votes.
And in those 6 years I've heard nothing or read nothing about the
crybaby who now lives in Florida.
Oh! I just woke up from that dream and have lots of clocks to turn back an hour.
@Forrest Morris: I hope now you finally see the advantage of being a Trumpbot. You shook off your dream & got back to reality. If you were a Trumpist, you would "know" at every waking moment that Donald Trump was the "real" president*.
But we all know how independent, how even-handed, how objective, how insulated from political pressure those special prosecutor gods we create are.
Just look at Kenneth Starr, who went after a real estate scam and years later found a semen stain..
Or John Durham who spent millions finding next to nada...
Or Mueller who couldn't make a case for anything from the 100 plus known contacts between Pretender operatives and Russia during the 2016 campaign, or the many clumsy efforts to cover them up.
Even worse: a prosecutor too timid to prosecute.
Problem is: We create our gods in our own image.
And this Sunday morning's bout of election dread has me thinking our own image isn't worth much at all.
@Ken Winkes: Well said. It should not be lost on us that the three useless/disruptive special counsels you cite are all Republicans. At it won't surprise me at all, should he choose a special prosecutor, that Garland will pick a Republican for the job.
THE HEIRS OF THE MAMA BEAR:
When I first saw Sarah Palin on stage, listening to her grizzly rhetoric, seeing how the audience was energized and enthralled I thought, "we gots a live one here." Today the Times features an essay by Rosie Gray that captures this phenomenon that has been incorporated by the new wave of female followers.
"It's ironic that Ms. Palin, with her mama bear politicking, should be an afterthought during a moment so clearly borne of her own trailblazing prime. But that's often how it goes politically, where an innovation's impact is obvious only in hindsight––-once someone else has perfected it."
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/05/opinion/sarah-palin-election-midterms.html
Marie: Yes, that had occurred to me...
BTW what's this gremlin that just appeared in the midst of the entries above?
"Our systems have detected unusual traffic from your computer network. This page checks to see if it's really you sending the requests, and not a robot. Why did this happen?
IP address: 2606:54c0:76c0:dc0::1c:263
Time: 2022-11-06T13:49:19Z
URL: https://www.youtube.com/embed/skkWNbVGeBk"
Is everyone reading it or is it directed only to me, asks paranoid Ken?
@Ken Winkes: I'm not aware of this. I did open the YouTube video you cited, and all I got was an error message. I expect the original message came from Elon Musk.
Will someone explain this to me: Tiffany Cross' MSNBC show "The Cross Connection" was cancelled because the Tucker fucker had a problem with it???????https://www.huffpost.com/entry/msnbc-cancels-cross-connection-tiffany-cross-tucker-carlson_n_6366cc50e4b05f221e7a9250
Marie,
Looking back over it (it's still there), the captcha message appears to have replaced the "Weekend Update" you had posted....
No gremlins here, top to bottom. 12:46 EST
I don't think we have enough dread. I wonder why we aren't reading about the weird phenomenon which has been going on with people dropping dead since the media silence about our covid epidemic started.
So Here's my attempt to increase our shared dread. Between 2021 and now there has been a stunning increase in unexpected deaths completely unrelated to covid. The easiest way to follow this is now through actuarial statistics, since the CDC has been destroyed by the orange menace. The average increase in deaths ranges between 5-40% increase over expectation of all types of death. The deaths are by far and away due to cardiac deaths but all kinds of illnesses have increased to a lesser degree. The age group that had the most deaths of all was the so-called healthy working age population (age 18-64), with an increase over expected deaths of 200%. The insurance industry has been generally the only institution raising the alarm, because between 2021 and 2022, their death benefit payouts went from $500 million to $1.2 billion. This increase in noncovid deaths is a world-wide phenomenon. Dr. John Campbell UK has studied the noncovid deaths per week in the UK and compared them to the deaths at the beginning of the first British Lockdown at the start of the pandemic. In early days of 2020, the deaths were 1300 per week (noncovid), and now there are 1800 deaths per week (noncovid). I have to report the UK data because the US data is incomplete and about 3 months delayed (thank the orange menace).
https://youtu.be/bGZJfVR9-wo
It is curious that the media's hair isn't on fire.
And:
Does everybody know that the House has now published the results of the examination of when Covid developed and how it is more likely that it was NOT the wet market escape hypothesis that was responsible for the rapid spread of Covid. More data is emerging that an illness exactly like covid was circulating in China in the summer of 2019.
The House committee made the inference that China knew it was dealing with covid much earlier than it admitted by studying the lengths of time it took to develop good vaccines for covid. The J&J and Pfizer took between 150-180 days to develop the methods and testings of the vaccine. China took 63 days. Everybody had the biochemical platforms at the beginning; the time between getting things ready and testing the product is pretty standard, so the inference is that China had started much sooner because it knew exactly what Covid was.
They used evidence and logic; and came up with a conspiracy by China.
I read the news. I missed this. Am I the only one?
@Victoria: I've read a few articles on this on Yahoo News occasionally.
The last one I read said that over 52,000 of those deaths were alcohol
induced. I don't really get the connection, unless maybe it has
something to do with depression. Or more people are not working,
staying home working remotely and imbibing?
https://news.yahoo.com/alcohol-related-deaths-saw-massive-
164834906.html?fr=syscrp_catchall
I am terrified. Dems are behaving as if this is an ordinary election-- launching Biden and Obama to help out, while the Orangutan appears in Crazy Country. The scariest part is that the people who are paid to be on our side, congresspeople, are not. The Dems are fighting for their lives and the Rs are all in with the new, approaching actual civil war and death of reason, logic, communication, truth and "the American way" (ie democracy) as it used to be.
I am not putting on anything today, and I am already tired of the treacle produced by Hallmark, but will continue to wipe my mind clean of everything except the holidays. (It's not working. I am so nervous.)
I gathered from some remark made by Joy Reid on Thursday or Friday that something had occurred starring that POS TUKKKER. Guess I will have go back and look at that. I have not been a Tiffany fan because her sharp whiny voice gets on my every nerve, although she seems to have improved. Can't wait to find out how cowardly custard MSNBC has screwed her show.
I haven't seen a House analysis on COVID origin, but here is the Senate analysis just published:
https://www.help.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/report_an_analysis_of_the_origins_of_covid-19_102722.pdf
It doesn't hedge words, says the preponderance of current information is that C19 was the result of (a) human research incident(s) at Wuhan Institute of Virology.
It doesn't say "and China knew that," but it does show that Chinese government and research leadership took some steps in summer and fall 2019 that are consistent with dealing with biohazard containment failures. Circumstantial evidence, but pretty strong.
Also, note that the Senate COVID report is a minority report, not a report of the full committee. Nonetheless, it has the earmarks of a serious effort ... unlike the tree-killer published by the minority House Judiciary just now, on the FBI, which reads like a Page 6 expo done by a journalist student intern (high school student).
Forrest: It was not ONLY alcohol, it was every metric. The most common cause of death was cardiac related because it always is. It makes a kind of sense that if you coop up millions of people, there's going to be an increase in drugs, alcohol, violence, etc. What is weird is that it is every conceivable medical metric. And it wasn't in just the very old or very young. Our deaths are floating along on a higher curve than previously seen. Why?
@Victoria: Don't kill me off yet, please. It was my birthday the other day, and when I did the arithmetic, I realized I was a year younger than I thought I was. It gave me the hope I had miles to go before I sleep!