Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

tucker ccarlson is an irresponsible idiot fantasist conspiracy theorist and anyone who believes him is deep into nonreality. and is a credulous fool.

Terribly sorry to hear about Jane, Bernie.

Always eager to stay in the news, former president Trump issued statements today insulting former secretary of state and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin Powell, who passed at 84 yesterday after suffering complications from Covid-19. Trump also complained about the removal of a statue of Thomas Jefferson from the New York City Council Chamber. Unfortunately, he undermined his claim to be defending American history when he misidentified Jefferson as “a principal writer of the Constitution of the United States.”

Jefferson was in France when the Framers were drafting the Constitution. Jefferson is the principal author of the Declaration of Independence.

The rest of the government was dealing with the real world today, and their actions were not frivolous.

Early this morning, the FBI raided the homes associated with Russian oligarch and aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska in New York City and Washington, D.C. Deripaska is closely associated with Russian President Vladimir Putin and worked with Paul Manafort, who directed Trump’s 2016 campaign. During that campaign, Manafort shared secret polling information with his associate Konstantin Kilimnik with the understanding that Kilimnick would give that information to Deripaska. In 2018, the U.S. government put sanctions on Deripaska, but maneuvering by then–Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) meant Congress lifted them in 2019. Just months later, Deripaska invested in an aluminum plant in Kentucky.

The FBI did not comment on the raids.

After yesterday’s report recommending that the House of Representatives hold Stephen K. Bannon in criminal contempt of Congress for his refusal to honor a congressional subpoena, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol tonight voted to hold Bannon in contempt.

Both committee chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and vice-chair Liz Cheney (R-WY) spoke before the vote. Thompson called out Bannon as the only witness who was stonewalling the committee, and he warned that the committee would not excuse anyone. “No one in this country, no matter how wealthy or how powerful, is above the law,” he said.

Republican Cheney was more pointed. She noted that Bannon appears to have had “substantial advance knowledge of the plans for January 6th and likely had an important role in formulating those plans.” She also suggested that the arguments Bannon and Trump were making “appear to reveal one thing: they suggest that President Trump was personally involved in the planning and execution of January 6th. And we will get to the bottom of that.”

Cheney went on to “add one further thought, principally for my Republican colleagues.” “You all know that there is no evidence of widespread election fraud sufficient to overturn the election; you all know that the Dominion voting machines were not corrupted by a foreign power. You know these claims are false. Yet former President Trump repeats them almost daily.”

She asked her colleagues to “consider the fundamental questions of right and wrong here. The American people must know what happened. They must know the truth. All of us who are elected officials must do our duty to prevent the dismantling of the rule of law, and to ensure nothing like that dark day in January ever happens again.”

The issue now moves to the House floor for a vote.

Cheney was not the only one admonishing the Republicans to put aside partisanship and stand up for the country. The Senate will vote tomorrow on whether to take up the Freedom to Vote Act, with Republicans threatening to filibuster that procedural vote. Senator Angus King (I-ME) established himself today as a key advocate of the measure, and as the Senate’s conscience.

He reminded his colleagues that in a world of absolute monarchs, the U.S. was founded on the radical idea “that the people… are the ultimate source of power and can govern themselves through their elected representatives.” That idea “was tested at Gettysburg, Antietam, Shiloh, and the Wilderness. It was defended at Anzio, Iwo Jima, and Normandy, and was reaffirmed in 1965.”

But democracy is fragile, and it most often fails “from erosion from within.”

The senator warned that most failed democracies start with legitimate elections, but that leaders then manipulate the system to stay in power, just as they have done recently in Russia, Turkey, Venezuela, and Hungary. In the U.S., if the new laws suppressing the vote and permitting partisans to choose their own electors over the wishes of the voters are allowed to stand, “we will be left with a downward spiral toward a hollow shell of democracy, where only raw power prevails and its peaceful transfer becomes a distant memory.”

King noted the profoundly dangerous breakdown of trust in the electoral system and called out the Republicans’ “overtly partisan attempt” to use the loss of trust as a justification to skew elections in the future. He demolished the idea that our elections are corrupted by “voter fraud,” and suggested the new election laws going into effect in Republican-dominated states are “stone-cold partisan voter suppression.”

King urged his colleagues to change course, “to pull our country back from the brink, and to begin the work of restoring our democracy as we did in the Revolution, as we did in the Civil War, and as we did in the Civil Rights struggles: first, by simply telling the truth and then by enacting a set of basic protections of the sacred right to vote.” If they will not, he said, we will lose “our identity as a people,...the miracle of self-government, and…the idea of America.”

“We are the heirs and trustees…of a tradition that goes back to Lincoln, Madison, and, yes, our friend John McCain,” Senator King reminded his colleagues. “All of them were partisans… but all shared an overriding commitment to the idea that animates the American experiment, the idea that our government is of, by, and for the people…. Now is the moment that we’re called upon to reach beyond our region, our state, our party, ourselves to save and reinvigorate the sputtering flame of the American idea.”

“Indeed,” he said, “destiny has placed us here at one of history’s fateful moments. Our response to it will be our most important legacy…. I believe we all know our responsibility, and whether we like it or not, history will record whether we, each of us, meets that responsibility.”

As far as the "f*** Joe Biden chants" go, it isn't political criticism, it's simply a mob voicing obscenity to gain attention, like something adolescent boys might do to show contempt for society.

But it doesn't surprise me in the least, that it's either flying right over your head, or you're choosing to ignore the ramifications, or the impetus behind it.

The fact that the media isn't acknowledging what's going on, gives it even more weight, in the eyes of the public.

Why journalists are failing the public with ‘both-siderism’ in political coverage - LA Times

BY JACKIE CALMES COLUMNIST
OCT. 15, 2021 3 AM PT
American politics has changed dramatically since my post-Watergate generation of journalists began covering the story. Political journalism hasn’t kept up.

For years it was easy to cover “both sides” — Republicans and Democrats — as equally worthy, and blameworthy, partners in democracy. While we reporters had come of age as witnesses to the unprecedented resignation of a Republican president who’d tried to corrupt the institutions of government to affect an election — imagine! — what remained was a Republican Party still capable of a creditable role in a healthy two-party system. After all, Richard M. Nixon was forced to resign when congressional leaders of his party began abandoning him. Again, imagine that, Kevin McCarthy.

Now, when reporters or pundits use the words “both sides” in regard to some political problem, I stop reading or listening.

I started to chafe at false equivalence a quarter-century ago, as a congressional reporter amid Newt Gingrich’s Republican revolution. One party — his — was demonstrably more responsible for the nasty divisiveness, government gridlock and norm-busting, yet journalistic pressure to produce seemingly “balanced” stories — pressure both ingrained and imposed by editors — prevented reporters from sufficiently reflecting the new truth.

By 2012, as President Obama dealt with the willful obstructionists, conspiracists and racists of an increasingly radicalized Republican Party, political scientists and long-respected Washington watchers Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein put the onus for the dysfunction squarely on the GOP in their provocative book “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks.” Significantly, they implicated journalists: “A balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon is a distortion of reality and a disservice to your consumers.”

The ascension of Donald Trump four years later should not have been such a surprise. With his continued hold on the Republican Party in the Biden era, Mann and Ornstein’s admonition is truer than ever.

Yes, it’s critical for political journalists to remain fair and balanced, in contrast with the right-wing network that cynically co-opted those adjectives. And, yes, variations on the word “lie” justifiably made it into the mainstream — something I never thought I’d see, let alone write — to describe what comes out of Trump’s mouth whenever his lips move. Sadly, that was progress.

Yet, now that Trump is no longer president and his words no longer can fire senior officials, move troops or launch bombs, his unhinged utterances go largely uncovered, for better and worse. Better, for everyone’s mental health. Worse, because he is the favorite to be Republicans’ 2024 nominee and perhaps president again, and still commands his party — enabled by his sycophants in Congress, state capitals and thousands of local public offices. Attention must be paid.

To the extent, then, that journalists and pundits focus critically on President Biden and Democrats and give short shrift to Republicans’ obstructions — as if the cancer of Trumpism was in remission, if not cured — that indeed distorts reality and disserves readers, listeners and viewers.

Democracy is literally at stake: As Republicans block federal voting rights legislation, those in red states continue to challenge the 2020 votes for Biden (but not their own), pass laws to suppress future votes in ways disadvantageous to Democrats, gerrymander legislative districts and replace nonpartisan election overseers with partisan ones.

In Congress, the Democrats’ disarray, to use a favorite alliterative phrase of journalists, is real and merits dissection. But it must be said that it owes much to the fact that Democrats, with their minimal House and Senate majorities, can’t count on a single Republican vote for most legislation, while one Republican senator can routinely block action with a filibuster.

Meanwhile, the scrapping between liberals such as Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and moderate Democratic holdouts Sens. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona over potentially transformative domestic spending proposals reflects the normal debate process.

Numerous news reports suggest that Biden is politically liable for the persistence of COVID-19. Yet many are silent on Republicans’ opposition to his efforts promoting vaccines and masks, and the not coincidental fact that the rates of hospitalizations and deaths are highest in red states. Trumpists on social media seem to gloat over high case numbers. “COVID is raging out of control,” Trump himself said in an anti-Biden statement Wednesday. “Do you miss me yet?”

This is a Republican Party that is not serious about governing or addressing the nation’s actual problems, as opposed to faux ones like critical race theory.

Healthcare costs, child care, climate change, income inequality, you name it — Republicans don’t even acknowledge the problems, let alone propose solutions. Statewide candidates from Nevada to Virginia echo Trump in claiming that addressing (nonexistent) election fraud is, as he put it in another statement Wednesday, “the single most important thing for Republicans to do.”

Republicans in Congress scandalously opposed a bipartisan commission to investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection, which threatened them as well as our democracy. They won’t support a must-pass increase in the nation’s debt limit, despite the trillions of debt that they and Trump piled up. Yet it was Sen. Charles E. Schumer of New York, the Democratic majority leader, who came in for pundits’ rebuke last week when he lambasted Republicans for flirting with a default, just after they’d allowed a temporary debt-limit measure to pass. What was he supposed to do? Celebrate the Republicans’ “bipartisanship” in defusing, only until December, the dynamite they’d lit under the economy?

On Saturday, the Senate’s most senior Republican, Sen. Charles E. Grassley, gleefully accepted Trump’s endorsement for reelection at a rally in Iowa where Trump repeatedly lied that he’d beaten Biden. The next day on “Fox News Sunday,” the second-ranking Republican in the House, Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, repeatedly refused to say that the election was not stolen from Trump.

Democrats can’t be expected to deal with these guys like they’re on the level. Nor should journalists cover them as if they are.