As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.
As the death toll mounts from the historic tornadoes that ravaged several states late Friday, we're being warned that this is going to be "our new normal," due to global climate change:
“This is going to be our new normal, and the effects that we’re seeing from climate change are the crisis of our generation,” she said. “We’ll continue to work on helping to reduce the impacts, but we’re also prepared to respond to any community that gets impacted by one of these severe events.”
Severe tornadoes are uncommon this late in the year, with December usually considered a quiet month.
The people in the states affected are overwhelmingly represented by Republican denialists and fossil fuel shills in Congress. Tragically, the vast majority likely won't connect the dots.
Press Watch's Dan Froomkin asks "What Does the Republican Party Stand For:"
Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell has decided that the best way for Republicans to win back Congress in the 2022 midterms is to not tell voters what they stand for.
He has made no secret of his plan to make the elections a referendum on President Biden and the Democrats — and not to complicate things with anything remotely like a Republican legislative agenda.
It’s a brilliant strategy, if he can get away with it. And so far, all the signs are good. Pretty much every prognosticator inside the Beltway is predicting significant GOP advances, certainly enough to take back the House, if not the Senate.
But I’m old-fashioned. I think voters should know what they’re voting for, not just what they’re voting against. And if Republicans themselves won’t tell the voters about their agenda, then it’s incumbent on political journalists to do it for them. [snip]
The debate that’s currently raging about whether corporate media coverage of Biden is overly negative takes on even greater significance when you consider how the entire Republican strategy in the coming years will be to throw brickbats at him from behind a tree.
Biden’s shortcomings are certainly newsworthy. But paying a little more attention to who’s behind the tree, and what their intentions really are, is essential journalism.
Voting Republican, in this day and age, is not a simple protest vote. It’s a vote that carries unprecedented consequences. Political reporters should be telling voters about those consequences, and then asking if that’s what they really want.
Froomkin lays out several scenarios/ agendas that you'll have to go to the link for. It's worth it.
Fox "News'" Chris Wallace is leaving "Bullshit Mountain" for the new streaming service CNN+. Eric Wemple comments on Wallace's farewell to the network:
Omitted from the sayonara was any celebration of the broader Fox News product. Perhaps that’s because there’s not much to celebrate: In the last year of Chris Wallace’s tenure at Fox News, he’s had to watch as his colleagues on the opinion side of the network buttressed and amplified the “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen from former president Donald Trump. That strain of programming culminated in the recent three-part Fox Nation series from host Tucker Carlson titled “Patriot Purge,” which pushed the idea that the Jan. 6 rioters are victims, not perpetrators. “The domestic war on terror is here. It’s coming after half the country,” argues the documentary.
NPR reported last month that Wallace, along with news anchor Bret Baier, had expressed concerns to top Fox officials about “Patriot Purge.” It’s unclear what impact, if any, the feedback effected. What is clear is that the network has found its voice in Carlson, a longtime pundit who for years bounced around the margins of cable news. He was serving as a weekend host at Fox News in late 2016 when a prime-time slot opened up. Ever since then, his extremism — telling viewers that Democrats “hate” America; espousing the racist “replacement theory”; subverting science on the coronavirus — has emerged as the network’s defining ideology, a point of reckoning for colleagues wishing to practice anything approximating journalism.
The reward for Carlson was an elevated presence on Fox’s streaming service, Fox Nation.
He was at Fox for 18 years, watching the mountain of lies, divisiveness and hate grow. Let's not give him too much credit for bailing once the ascension of Carlson reached its apogee. Over those many years, he can't claim he "did Nazi that coming."
We're approaching a grim milestone, fueled by the unvaccinated. We have the tools to end the COVID pandemic, even as the new Omicron variant spreads:
The US government’s leading infectious diseases official, Anthony Fauci, on Sunday stepped up calls for Americans to get a Covid-19 booster shot, as the US is approaching 800,000 lives lost to coronavirus since the start of the pandemic.
Fauci warned that the Omicron variant appeared to be able to “evade” the protection of two initial doses of the mRNA-type Covid vaccines – Pfizer/BioNTech’s and Moderna’s – as well as post-infection therapies such as monoclonal antibodies and convalescent plasma.
Omicron is spurring new fears as US infections begin to surge again, with infections currently still led by the highly-transmissable Delta variant that has dominated since the summer.
Fauci said an extra vaccine shot provides “optimal” protection against Omicron, even though the government’s official designation of “fully vaccinated” remained at two doses of Pfizer or Moderna, or one of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine, which was developed by another method.
Finally, check out Infidel 753's link round-up, which has to be the most comprehensive, wide- ranging collection of links to posts from around the Internet. It's a remarkable curation every week.
