How “not mopey” is Pres. Obama? Not mopey enough to send an email blast less than a week after the 2014 midterm elections that leads respondents to the screen shot shown.
Hertzberg: ‘Elections are decided by low-information voters, people who cannot be troubled to figure out whether they are Democrats or Republicans’
Republicans were already complaining that Obama wasn’t contrite enough about the recent Democratic election losses. They, of course, took the results as a mandate for their issues, like repealing the Affordable Care Act, building more fences along the border with Mexico, and keeping women from carrying out their reproductive lives in private.
FOX News is indisputably the most popular cable news channel. And yet in 13 years, Fox has never broken a story. That’s okay, because it is not in the news business. It is in the news-shaping business. Its programming is an admixture of right-wing propaganda and fear-porn for feeble-minded paranoiacs, served up by spokesmodels who have no clue what they are reading.
– Pensito Review quoted from 2009 in answer to the question “What is FOX?” in “Understanding The History And Purpose Of Fox News,” at Addicting Info.
The billionaire Koch brothers have been running feel-good, folksy image ads about their company, Koch Industries, the nation’s second largest privately held corporation, on liberal outlets, particularly MSNBC and now on Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show,” on Comedy Central.
Stewart fired back with a parody of the brothers’ ad on his show this week. “Clearly,” Stewart said, “the Koch brothers are trying to say to our audience of not yet dying-off voters: ‘Even though you may have heard certain things about the Koch brothers, how bad could they be? I mean, if they were evil, would a baby agree to appear in one of their advertisements?’”
The amount Fox News requires cable subscribers to pay for its service every month whether they want it or not, according to Pew Research. Fox “now claims one of the highest average rates per subscriber. Only six non-premium cable channels command higher fees than Fox. CNN, by contrast, is estimated to average 57 cents per subscriber per month and MSNBC, 18 cents,” according to Pew.
The PewResearch Journalism Project has released a study that confirms what is already clear: The American right gets most of its information about politics from Fox News, while the left relies on multiple sources, including CNN, NPR, MSNBC and the New York Times.
Five cases of Ebola have been treated in the United States so far this year. Three were contracted in Africa. Two of these victims were Americans who were flown home for treatment. The other was the Liberian national, Thomas Duncan, who developed symptoms after he arrived in Texas from Africa. The last two were healthcare workers who treated Duncan in Dallas. Of the five, only one patient has died — Thomas Duncan.
Tragic as these cases are, the hysteria they have unleashed in the media and among Republican politicians is beyond over the top. The Ebola “crisis” has topped the hour on cable news channels for days. The lowest point, so far, was when news choppers tracked an ambulance for an hour or so one early evening last week as it transported one of the nurses to a hospital, bringing to mind the infamous “slow speed chase” on L.A. freeways that kicked off the O.J. Simpson murder scandal in 1994.
Meanwhile, with the midterm elections a few weeks away, Republicans have worked nonstop to blame the Ebola outbreak on Pres. Obama and, by extension, the Democrats. They have also incorporated the outbreak into their get-out-the-vote strategy by fanning the flames of fear to get their easily terrorized followers to the polls. Their unified message on Ebola — a call to ban flights into the United States from the affected areas in Africa — is typically anti-scientific and counterfactual. Experts say such a ban would likely create a bona fide crisis here, and there is the embarrassing fact that there are no direct flights into the United States from the affected countries.
On Fox News Sunday, Ted Olson, the Republican on the legal team that argued for marriage equality in California’s Prop 8 case — but who led the witness-bribing, anti-Clinton “Arkansas Project” in the 1990s, and who represented Bush/Cheney in the 2000 Bush v. Gore case in which Republicans on the Supreme Court appointed George W. Bush as president — debated Tony Perkins, one of the grand wizards of the anti-gay hate movement. Transcript follows:
The air of inevitability surrounding Hillary Clinton is unlike anything we’ve ever seen – since 2008, that is — when she was also considered inevitable. Then a first-term Senator from Illinois came along, and we know how that story ended.
— Gwen Ifill, anchor on the PBS Newshour, in a blog post titled, “Beware The Clickbait (Or Why There’s Always More To The Story), which is pretty self-explanatory.
The United States’ ranking out of 180 nations in the 2014 Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index.
Conor Friedersdorf: “Countries that scored better include Romania, South Africa, Ghana, Cyprus, and Botswana. And 40 others. Put simply, it’s an embarrassing result for the country that conceived the First Amendment almost 240 years ago.”
To hear Trump talk, he’s the only one
Who’s ever stood trial for crimes he’s done.
But instead of courtroom drama,
We get Trump in his pajamas,
That’s how he earned his new nickname: Don Snoreleone.
“This week has been a howling vortex of suck for the MAGA movement and Donald Trump. Imagine a black hole in the profound interstellar vacuum in the cold emptiness of space, drawing all matter and energy into its brutal singularity, an ineluctable and final journey into nothingness. … That’s the GOP this week. It’s been bad and will get worse.”
“I am not resigning. And it is, in my view, an absurd notion that someone would bring a vacate motion when we are simply here trying to do our jobs. It is not helpful to the cause, it is not helpful to the country, it does not help the House Republicans advance our agenda, which is in the best interest of the American people here — a secure border, sound governance – and it’s not helpful to the unity that we have in the body.”
— Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) on the “resign or be fired” ultimatum from the GOP’s Freedom Caucus just 174 days into his tenure as sp[eaker, reported by Punchbowl News.
“Trump’s head slowly dropped, his eyes closed. It jerked back upward. He adjusts himself. Then, his head droops again. He straightens up, leaning back. His head droops for a third time, he shakes his shoulders. Eyes closed still. His head drops. Finally, he pops his eyes open.”
— Law360 reports from the second day of Donald Trump’s “hush money” criminal trial.
“Functionally, Chris Sununu is as active a part of Trump’s campaign as Matt Gaetz or MTG, or any of the other MAGA freaks. And it seems not to bother him that these people would poleaxe him if given a second’s chance. It seems not to bother him that his political career is over. He’s not just willing to exit public life on his knees—he’s eager to do it. … In the end, it doesn’t matter if Sununu is a mountebank, a coward, or a fool. Those three characters are equally pernicious. … What matters is that the rest of us understand that it is the Chris Sununus of the world who make this ongoing authoritarian attempt possible.”
“He’s f**king crazy! The press often will ask me if I think Donald Trump is crazy. And I’ll say it this way: I don’t think he’s so crazy that you could put him in a mental institution. But I think if he were in one, he ain’t getting out!”
— New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu (R), quoted by the Associated Press two years ago. Sununu is now backing Trump for president.
Punchbowl News: The DCCC [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee] raised $45.4 million in the first quarter of 2024, outpacing the NRCC [National Republican Congressional Committee] by $12 million. That’s the DCCC’s best quarter of the 2024 cycle and includes a $21.4 million March haul. This is a massive show of force for House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.The DCCC has $71.1 million on hand. Compare that to the NRCC, which has $45.2 million on hand.
A new Harvard Institute of Politics poll of voters under age 30 finds Joe Biden leading Donald Trump 56% to 37% among likely voters. Pollster John Della Volpe: “For a Democrat to comfortably win the Electoral College, he or she needs to win 60 percent of the youth vote. Biden and Obama, ’12 and ’20, won 60 percent. Obama got 66 percent in ’08. John Kerry and Hillary Clinton got 55 percent. Biden is in the mid-50s. Can you improve that to get to 60 percent? It’s within reach.“
Financial Times: “In another troubling sign for Republican fundraising efforts, Trump has 270,000 fewer unique donors than he did at the same stage of his 2020 White House run. His campaign and affiliated political action committees got money from 900,000 donors from July 2023 to the end of the first quarter of 2024, down from 1.17 million four years earlier.”
New York Times: “Of the 96 possible jurors brought into the room, more than 50 raised their hands to say they couldn’t be fair. They were immediately excused.”
“Nationwide, homicides dropped around 20% in 133 cities from the beginning of the year through the end of March compared with the same period in 2023. … Homicides in American cities are falling at the fastest pace in decades, bringing them close to levels they were at before a pandemic-era jump,” the Wall Street Journal reports.