Monday Reading

 

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:

The rising sun illuminated entire cities in ruin as morning broke Saturday in western Kentucky. Piles of bricks appeared where buildings had stood. Roofs torn open revealed mangled furnishings inside. Bicycles and refrigerators dangled from trees like ornaments.

The deadly tornadoes that caused devastation in Kentucky and five other states came just a few months after a 7.2-magnitude earthquake rocked Haiti and Category 4 Hurricane Ida tore through the Eastern United States and Atlantic Canada. In an interview Sunday morning on CNN’s “State of the Union,” FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell said the agency is preparing for severe weather events of similar magnitude.

“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.  

Monday Reading

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.

Will Bunch in the Philadelphia Inquirer discusses the recent Nobel Peace Prize given to Filipino journalist Maria Ressa and Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov, as both a warning and a "do better" for American journalists:

It’s fitting that — thanks to Friday’s Nobel Peace Prize — world history will likely cherish Ressa, Muratov, and their brand of death-defying journalism far longer than it will remember the totems of modern U.S. media like recently retired Washington Post editor Marty Baron — whose uninspiring response to the threat to democracy posed by Donald Trump was, famously that “we’re not at war … we’re at work” — or the New York Times’ Dean Baquet, who doesn’t see journalism as activism but something he blandly calls “sophisticated true objectivity.”

Huh? [snip]

For all the Beltway journalists so eager to restore a breathless access journalism and the most cynical, “savvy” form of politics-as-a-game news coverage, the embrace by both the Nobel committee and the wider world of the more daring vision of journalism as a chief weapon in the war against rising neo-fascism — the stance so boldly adopted by Ressa and Muratov — ought to serve as a wake-up call. [snip]

The future of American democracy depends, frankly, on whether journalists stop burying their head in “the work” of balanced-but-misleading reporting and admit that, yes, actually, we are at war. We need to glom onto Maria Ressa’s vision — that when the truth is under attack, truth-telling is not a clinical science. Journalism is activism.

Sadly, due to the existential need to get clicks, ad dollars and subscriptions, we don't see the basic business model of American journalism changing, with the occasional exception for an investigative piece that makes a splash but is soon forgotten.  How far from their examples our "journalists" are.  

Speaking of American "journalism," Fox "News" recently celebrated its 25th anniversary.  Washington Post media critic Eric Wemple takes a few well- deserved swipes at the one institution news sewer that can claim responsibility for the poisonous, divisive, downward- spiraling state of American politics today:

If nothing else, Fox News had a talent for self-promotion, even before there was anything to promote.

“Fox News Channel to stress fairness” read the headline on the July 1996 story the Houston Chronicle published in the run-up to the Oct. 7, 1996, launch of Fox News, under the management of network chief Roger Ailes and News Corp. mogul Rupert Murdoch.

It’s not too late for a retraction, Houston Chronicle!  [snip]

... It’s one thing to corral a constituency; it’s quite another to poison that constituency. We won’t belabor the extensive and atrocious misadventures of Fox News, which this blog and many, many other sources have highlighted to our mutual exhaustion. There’s enough to fill a mammoth website.

For the sake of brevity, we’ll just highlight a development that so happens to coincide with the big 25th anniversary: The ongoing lawsuits against Fox News by voting-tech firms Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems. Both of these companies claim they were the subject of false coverage in the aftermath of November’s presidential election, and both sued the network for the efforts of key hosts — Sean Hannity, Maria Bartiromo, Jeanine Pirro and Lou Dobbs (who no longer has a show on Fox Business Network) are among the offenders — to associate their work with election-rigging. [snip]

It’s a machine, in other words — promoting lies, and then reporting their traction as national news. That’s what Fox News has done with the vocal plurality of Americans in its corner, 25 years running.

Their business model is stoking white grievance, racial hate, fear, all in service to their cult leader in his on- going coup.

On that on- going coup, laying the foundation for the next coup -- voter suppression laws, gerrymandering, allowing legislatures to overturn election results, etc. -- requires the willingness of elected Republican "leaders" to maintain the Big Lie.  Rep. Steve Scalise (Coup- LA) at your service:

The House’s second-ranking Republican, Rep. Steve Scalise, repeatedly refused to say on Sunday that the 2020 election wasn’t stolen, standing by Donald Trump’s lie that Democrat Joe Biden won the White House because of mass voter fraud.

More than 11 months after Americans picked their president and almost nine months since Biden was inaugurated, Scalise was unwilling during a national television interview to acknowledge the legitimacy of the vote, instead sticking to his belief that the election results should not have been certified by Congress.

“I’ve been very clear from the beginning,” he said. “If you look at a number of states, they didn’t follow their state-passed laws that govern the election for president. That is what the United States Constitution says. They don’t say the states determine what the rules are. They say the state legislatures determine the rules,” the Louisiana congressman said on “Fox News Sunday.” 

These are human weasels (no offense to weasels).  In Scalise's case, his description of himself as KKK leader "David Duke without the baggage" tells you exactly who he is.

This is the sub- moronic cult leader they're so desperate to re- install in the White House:

A new book reports that former President Donald Trump asked his top intelligence official to investigate an absurd conspiracy theory that Chinese thermostats changed votes in the 2020 election.

In an excerpt from the soon-to-be-released Betrayal by ABC News’s Jonathan Karl, which was shared on Sunday’s edition of This Week, the former president was said to be “intrigued” by the theory – which was presented to him by Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark, who Trump wanted to install as acting attorney general.

“[Clark] believed that wireless thermostats made in China for Google by a company called Nest Labs might have been used to manipulate voting machines in Georgia,” Karl wrote. “The idea was nuts, but it intrigued Trump, who asked Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe to look into it.”

Some tinfoil hats should take care of it!  Also, Jeffrey Clark, the skunk willing to subvert the Department of Justice to cast doubt on the validity of the 2020 election, appears to be as nuts as his cult leader.

Lastly, for the best collection of links to posts from around the Internet, please visit Infidel 753's link round- up, which appears to get more comprehensive every week.  Keep it coming; we can handle it!.