Misinformation

[Overlander]

Like so many, victim AND vector.

Lots of history will be re-written over the next few years.

Pro Tip: Invest in Sharpies

[BiggDick]

Lots of history will be re-written over the next few years.

let's leave this here.

After this comment, and in this thread, it fits so well.

https://edworkforce.house.gov/news/docu ... tID=412077

House Pushes Back on Communist Influence in American Schools

WASHINGTON – Education and the Workforce Committee Chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R-NC) today celebrated the U.S. House of Representatives' passage of the Crucial Communism Teaching Act with a bipartisan vote of 327 to 62...

[Overlander]

Lots of history will be re-written over the next few years.

let's leave this here.

After this comment, and in this thread, it fits so well.

https://edworkforce.house.gov/news/docu ... tID=412077

House Pushes Back on Communist Influence in American Schools

WASHINGTON – Education and the Workforce Committee Chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R-NC) today celebrated the U.S. House of Representatives' passage of the Crucial Communism Teaching Act with a bipartisan vote of 327 to 62...

Yep. Gonna get dark soon

[BiggDick]

What we are dealing with is exactly what you say: a great many people feel entitled to have their opinions treated as facts.

Unilateral!

Unprovoked!

[jfish26]

What Makes A Scandal

https://defector.com/what-makes-a-scandal

Is Pete Hegseth in trouble? Midway through the week, the major newspapers were reporting that Donald Trump was considering replacing the Fox News personality with Ron DeSantis as his nominee for secretary of defense. When a leak like that comes out about someone, as a rule, it's over. But then Friday morning, Trump posted "Pete is a WINNER, and there is nothing that can be done to change that!!!" and Hegseth made it through the weekend with his nomination intact.

The Hegseth coverage had the rhythm of a scandal, with one leading outlet after another after another breaking news about the nominee's misconduct and incompetence. Hegseth, the individual stories said, had been accused of rape and had paid to confidentially settle with his accuser. His own mother had sent him an email describing him as "despicable and abusive" to one of his ex-wives and serially cruel to women. He had reportedly ruined the finances of the nonprofits he was supposed to be running while overseeing a lewd and abusive workplace. Former colleagues described him as an out-of-control drunk, to which he eventually responded by saying he would refrain from drinking as secretary of defense.

Even all that seemed a little inadequate or misfocused, though. The part of the story that appeared to be gathering the most corroboration was the drinking. Partly there were just more witnesses to be had, attesting to things like Hegseth openly sucking down warm stale prop beers on the Fox News set after shooting ended at 10 a.m. But also excessive drinking made for a comfortable, traditional sort of story; it was booze and womanizing that took down John Tower when George H.W. Bush tried to make him defense secretary in 1989. Objective, nonpartisan reporters surely weren't going out on a limb to believe the top of the Department of Defense was no place for someone struggling with alcohol—were they?

But the real problem with Pete Hegseth is that he's Pete Hegseth. Trump thought it was a good idea to hand the world's most powerful military—and the country's largest employer—over to a guy whose job was saying pugnacious stuff on TV. Hegseth has written a book about how the military is undone by "affirmative action promotions" and weakened from within by a "cultural Marxist revolution," in which he describes the country as a whole as under attack from "progressive storm troopers." He's an enthusiastic supporter of war criminals. He has extremist Crusader tattoos that led the National Guard to judge him too risky to trust with inauguration security duty. He's a sexist and a Christian nationalist. When he reportedly got drunk and started shouting "Kill all Muslims!" the drunkenness was not the most dangerous feature of the incident.

These are the features that made Donald Trump nominate Hegseth in the first place—not because Trump considers himself to be Richard the Lionhearted, but because Hegseth is exactly the kind of loser and fanatic that Trump wants to build his administration around. Existing military standards, or laws, have no use for someone as flagrantly unfit as Hegseth; his power is Trump's power and nothing more. His loyalty to the president would be existential.

How do you make the case against someone like that? Nobody understands how scandals are supposed to work anymore. A scandal is a social ritual, and American political society has ruptured. The idea that Pete Hegseth was faltering was based on a series of assumptions about reputation, public opinion, and their consequences: that Hegseth would be embarrassed by an escalating series of stories about his alleged misdeeds and failures; that Trump would be embarrassed to stand by Hegseth as those stories accumulated; that the Senate would be ashamed to vote to confirm Hegseth; that the American people wouldn't tolerate such a situation.

So far, the first two of those assumptions have been stretched beyond their presumed limits, the third appears to be on its way there, and the fourth seems moot. The only public the Trump movement cares about is the public wrapped up inside the movement's own messaging machine, who are so far being treated to defenses of Hegseth and attacks on his potential opposition. The situation can't be intolerable as long as no one agrees what the situation even is.

The watchdog only bites what the watchdog can get its teeth into. The press still knows how to destroy the president of Harvard; the president of Harvard still exists in the same established social order. Chris Rufo, the controversy-manufacturing entrepreneur, knows the words and gestures that would send the press after the president of Harvard. No one knows how to send the press after Chris Rufo.

At the same time the press was trying to see if Hegseth's drinking mattered, it was also spending more than half a week excoriating Joe Biden for pardoning his son Hunter Biden: "Hunter Biden pardon fuels Trump's 'weaponization' arguments"; "Hunter Biden pardon undermines Democrats' defense of justice system" (URL: "biden-pardon-hunter-selfish-lies"); "Biden's Pardon for His Son Dishonors the Office"; "'This Is the Land of Wolves Now.'" Three days after the pardon, the print New York Times was still devoting a two-page interior spread to pardon coverage: "Biden the Father vs. Biden the Institutionalist," "President's Broad Pardon for Hunter Biden Troubles Experts and Raises Debates," "After Biden's Son, Prison Inmates Hope for Pardon Next," and, jumping from page one, "Justice Dept. Confronts Tests From Two Fronts" and "Pardoning His Son Complicates Legacy That Biden Envisioned."

Joe Biden didn't care ("Biden not answering questions about pardoning his son Hunter"). But his party could still be scandalized into headlines like "Democrats Sharply Criticize Biden's Pardon of His Son." What counted was not the scale of the scandal—a middling and sentimental abuse of the pardon power next to Trump's own abuses of it, or the abuses by either George Bush—but its cognizability. It had the old familiar scandal-parts built into it: Joe Biden pledged he wouldn't do a thing, and then he did the thing he's said he wouldn't do. He broke his word! He used his official powers for personal reasons! How could you care about integrity and good government and defend such a thing?

It read, in the end, like one last desperate yanking of the old levers, to avoid the question of what happens to those levers—or the lever-pullers—in January. For a few days, the political media could act as if accountability were a real and stable thing, as if anybody with power needed to care what they thought about right and wrong.

By the weekend, Trump would be on Meet the Press, pledging to break the constitution and commit atrocities: ending birthright citizenship, deporting U.S. citizens, pardoning the people convicted of attacking the Capitol on January 6. All this was delivered in his usual spongy rhetoric, where he simultaneously says he'll do a thing and then disavows the consequences of the thing. The House January 6 committee members "should go to jail," he said, and special counsel Jack Smith is "very corrupt," but he wouldn't order his new attorney general nominee, Pam Bondi, to prosecute any of them. "I want her to do what she wants to do," Trump said. When he put it like that, how could there be anything to blame him for?

[jfish26]

December 9, 2024

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.c ... ber-9-2024

The sudden collapse of the Assad regime in Syria yesterday took oxygen away from the airing of President-elect Trump’s interview with Kristen Welker of NBC’S Meet the Press. The interview told us little that we didn’t already know, but it did reinforce what we can expect in the new administration.

As Tom Nichols pointed out after the interview, when Donald Trump ran for the presidency this year, he “wasn’t running to do anything. He was running to stay out of jail. The rest he doesn’t care about.”

Nichols was reacting to the exchange that began when Welker asked the president-elect: “Do you have an actual plan at this point for health care?” Trump answered: “Yes. We have concepts of a plan that would be better.” “Still just concepts? Do you have a fully developed plan?” Welker asked.

The answer, nine years after Trump first said he would repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something cheaper and better, is still no. He went on to add, “I am the one that saved Obamacare,” although he spent his first term trying to weaken it.

Trump also reiterated his plans for revenge against those he perceives to be his enemies. He told Welker that when he is president, the Department of Justice should pursue and jail the members of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, more commonly known as the January 6th Committee. He singled out committee leaders Representative Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY).

But it was in his insistence on one specific lie that Trump was most revealing. He told Welker that there were “13,099 murderers released into our country over the last three years. They’re walking down the streets. They’re walking next to you and your family, and they’re very dangerous.”

This statement sets Trump up to be a strongman who will save America from great danger, but it is a lie that has been repeatedly debunked. It originated in a September 2024 letter from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to Representative Tony Gonzales (R-TX) listing 13,099 people convicted of homicide as being “non-detained.”

As Alex Nowrasteh of the libertarian Cato blog explains, “non-detained” does not mean free to roam the streets; it simply means that those in prison for homicide are not currently detained by ICE. Once they have served their sentences, they go back onto ICE’s docket to be deported unless their countries of origin don’t have repatriation agreements with the U.S., a condition that affects a very small number of people. Releases of criminal migrants into the U.S. dropped during the Biden administration from the numbers released during Trump’s term. In addition, as Nowrasteh points out, the 13,099 figure covers at least 40 years.

Welker tried to correct Trump: “The thirteen thousand figure I think goes back around 40 years,” she said. “No, it doesn’t,” Trump insisted. “It’s within the three-year period. It’s during the Biden term.”

Trump was intent on making Welker and the television audience accept an egregious lie, despite the fact it has been thoroughly debunked. His insistence echoed his determination in January 2017 to make the American people accept his lie that his inauguration crowd was bigger than that of his predecessor, Barack Obama, although we could see with our own eyes that he was lying. He was demanding we reject our own experience and instead let him define how we see the country.

Trump built on a history of narrative shaping that ran through the Republican Party. In 2004 a senior advisor to President George W. Bush famously told journalist Ron Suskind that people like Suskind lived in “the reality-based community,” believing that people could find solutions to problems based on their real-world observations. But such a worldview was obsolete, the aide said. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore.… We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality…. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

America’s right wing has been able to shape reality in large part because of the 1996 advent of the Fox News Channel (FNC), the brainchild of Australian-born media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Shows on the FNC used clear, simple messaging with colorful graphics that told a story of an America overwhelmingly made up of white, rural folks who hated taxes and an intrusive government, and would do fine if they could just get the socialist Democrats to leave them alone. To spread the new channel, Murdoch initially offered ten dollars per subscriber to each cable company that carried it.

That right-wing echo chamber has expanded until it is now so strong that nearly 70% of Republicans falsely believe Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election, despite the fact that the FNC had to pay more than $787 million to Dominion Voting Systems for defamation after it lied to viewers about that election.

Trump has built on that Republican narrative to create a fantasy world that is badly out of step with reality. It is not easy to see how he will reconcile his vision with real-world events.

He and his supporters might try simply to tell voters that they have done what they promised, and hope that story sells.

When Trump threatened to put a 25% tariff on goods from Mexico until Mexico stopped undocumented migrants from crossing the border, Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum told Trump that "encounters at the Mexico–United States border have decreased by 75 percent between December 2023 and November 2024.” Trump then simply told reporters that Sheinbaum had “agreed to stop Migration through Mexico, and into the United States, effectively closing our Southern Border,” and his supporters trumpeted on social media that Trump had closed the border with one phone call.

But convincing people of an alternative reality might be harder with issues closer to home.

Trump has vowed to place a tariff wall around the U.S., for example, at the same time he has promised to bring down the price of consumer goods. “Economists of all stripes say that ultimately, consumers pay the price of tariffs,” Welker told him on Sunday. “I don’t believe that,” Trump answered. He might not believe it, but producers do: car manufacturers as well as major shopping chains have warned that tariffs will force them to raise prices.

On other issues, Trump will have a vocal and established opposition. After his threat to go after the members of the January 6th committee, former representative Liz Cheney said in a statement: “There is no conceivably appropriate factual or constitutional basis for what Donald Trump is suggesting.“

“Here is the truth: Donald Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election and seize power. He mobilized an angry mob and sent them to the United States Capitol, where they attacked police officers, invaded the building, and halted the official counting of electoral votes. Trump watched on television as police officers were brutally beaten and the Capitol was assaulted, refusing for hours to tell the mob to leave. This was the worst breach of our Constitution by any president in our nation’s history.”

Cheney called for the release of the evidence and grand jury material special counsel Jack Smith assembled “so all Americans can see Donald Trump for who he genuinely is and fully understand his role in this terrible period in our nation’s history.”

Nobel laureates generally try to stay out of politics, but today more than 75 of them in medicine, chemistry, economics, and physics wrote a letter to senators urging them not to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick for secretary of Health and Human Services. They object to Kennedy’s stand against the scientists and agencies he would oversee. They noted that he has no credentials or relevant experience and that he has opposed life-saving vaccines, promoted conspiracy theories, and attacked the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health.

Putting him in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services, they write, “would put the public’s health in jeopardy and undermine America’s global leadership in the health sciences, in both the public and commercial sectors.”

[KUTradition]

the story is already selling

out resident, high IQ bigot says hello

[jfish26]

The GOP’s top priority for 2025: Repeal the laws of arithmetic

Republicans are reinventing math to justify extending pricey Trump tax policies.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... -math-gop/

What will Republicans prioritize when they regain their government trifecta next month? A tax overhaul? Energy production? Border security?

Nope. The GOP’s first order of business: getting rid of math.

The fractious Republican Party can agree on few things these days. But one of them is near-unanimous frustration with the pesky laws of arithmetic. That cutting future taxes would reduce future tax revenue, for instance, perpetually aggrieves them.

A large chunk of the 2017 Trump tax cuts expires next year, and extending these provisions will be extremely expensive. (That’s why Republicans scheduled them to sunset in the first place: to lower the price tag.) The Congressional Budget Office, the legislature’s official scorekeeper, estimates a full extension would add more than $4 trillion to the federal debt over the next decade.

That’s true even after considering any potential growth effects on the U.S. economy. It might also understate the full cost of GOP tax plans, since it doesn’t include Trump’s other pricey promises: slashing corporate taxes; eliminating taxes on Social Security, overtime and tips. Those would add trillions more in red ink — awkward for a party that fancies itself fiscally responsible.

Republicans’ solution: invent a New Math, Cold-War-style.

Incoming Senate Finance Committee Chair Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) says that since tax rates are currently low, extending these expiring rates another decade shouldn’t count as costing anything because it wouldn’t “feel” like a change. Crapo’s tax-writing counterpart in the House, Rep. Jason T. Smith (R-Missouri), agrees.

This is like saying even though your car lease is up this month, leasing another car should count as free because you got used to having a car. Alas, that is not how budgets work.

Elsewhere Crapo has said that Republicans haven’t paid for similar tax cuts before, so they sure as heck shouldn’t start now. Indeed, he opposed an earlier, fiscally responsible bipartisan deal to expand the child tax credit and certain business breaks because it was paid for.

The CBO’s current budget-scoring methods don’t support Crapo’s fiscal fantasies. But not to worry: House Republican leadership has also been scrounging around for dirt on the CBO, in an apparent attempt to preemptively discredit their ref.

This is hardly the only recent case of GOP legerdemath.

On “Meet the Press” last Sunday, Trump complained that the United States is allegedly “subsidizing Canada to the tune over $100 billion a year,” and “subsidizing Mexico for almost $300 billion.” He appeared to be referring to the size of our bilateral trade deficits with these countries.

Some problems with that: First, paying companies abroad for the products they sell you is not a “subsidy,” in the same way that paying your local supermarket for its bananas is not a “subsidy.” It’s a transaction. Does Trump expect Mexico to just give us avocados, free?

Second is a subtler, more sinister issue: the specific numbers Trump used.

Trump’s figures do not match the official statistics put out by the U.S. Census Bureau or the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative — they are much larger. This is probably because Trump and his MAGA allies have joined forces with some protectionist progressives in trying to change how trade figures are calculated to exaggerate the size of trade deficits. (The short explanation is: They want to stop counting goods that are first imported and then reexported as exports, without making a symmetric change for imports.) This change may sound small and technical but it would massively distort how we measure and understand economic changes — and is symptomatic of Trump’s habit of torturing the data until it confesses.

Trump’s trade guru, Peter Navarro, tried to bully career statisticians into changing how they measured deficits during Trump’s first term, but they resisted. Navarro is coming back for the second term.

So is Russell Vought, serving again as director of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget. An architect of Project 2025, Vought says he will force federal agencies entrusted with producing reliable, nonpartisan, independent statistics to bow to the president’s will.

“You can apply the concept of destroying independence at every agency,” Vought told Tucker Carlson last month. “I even saw it in aspects of OMB with regard to who gets to make the decisions on statistics. There are little pockets of independence that have to be, just we got to remove those.”

Indeed, Trump was frequently aggravated by his lack of control over official metrics last time around. He hated that anyone measured the spread of covid-19 (“If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any,” he proclaimed in June 2020.) He blew up an agricultural statistical agency that evaluated his trade wars’ impact on farmers. He tried to redefine “poverty” so that fewer people would count as poor under his watch. Likewise for pollution deaths.

These are but a few examples of Trump’s prior book-cooking efforts. They hint at what the president-elect, emboldened by a subservient GOP and friendlier courts, is more likely to succeed at this time: taking away the objective numbers that businesses rely on to make decisions, and that voters need to hold their elected officials accountable.

[Overlander]

It will work like a charm on the intended audience.

“I love the uneducated “
DJT

[twocoach]

Trump is nothing but smoke and mirrors, a cheap parlor trick of no more high quality than his spray tan and tenuous hairstyle.