QOTD -- On The First Lying Republican Bill Introduced

 

"Republicans took charge of the House of Representatives this week — and put forward as their first act a bill that is based on a repeatedly debunked falsehood.

"We call these 'zombie claims' because they keep rising from the dead no matter how often they have been fact-checked. But we haven’t before witnessed such a roundly criticized claim set the agenda for a new Congress. On Monday night, on a party-line vote of 221-210, the House approved a bill stripping $71 billion in funding from the Internal Revenue Service. (It has no chance of passage in the Senate, and President Biden has promised a veto.)  [snip]

"Republicans clearly prefer to say 'agents' rather than a more accurate 'employees' — we suspect polling shaped this talking point — but that’s untethered from reality. Yet, here’s this zombie claim again, enshrined in a proposed law." -- Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler on the first of what will be many performative bills based on lies passed by the new House Republican/ Coup/ QAnon caucus (see Tweets, below).  Expect, in addition to multiple "investigations" to gather "evidence" to support already- arrived- at conclusions, performative bills on "wokeness" in the military, "border safety and security," restricting abortion rights, and other red meat for MAGA meathead consumption.

Quotes Of The Day -- Asymmetry

 

Margaret Sullivan on the hiring of former Trump enabler Mick Mulvaney by CBS News (our emphasis):

Mulvaney has been on the wrong side — the deeply, undemocratically wrong side — of America’s most important political issues in recent years.

The larger issue here, though, is the news media’s blind and relentless pandering to the outdated notion that both sides of the aisle are pretty much equal these days — that they’re similar, just with different governing philosophies.

That’s simply not the case.

“We have a two-party system and one of the two is anti-democratic,” as NYU professor and press critic Jay Rosen put it. This basic asymmetry, he noted, “fries the circuits” of the mainstream media, which largely refuses to recognize it or do anything about it in their coverage.

To paraphrase one commenter's view, democracy doesn't die in darkness, it dies because of shit like this.

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Washington Post fact- checker Glenn Kessler on Russian disinformation on Hunter Biden that's being weaponized by Republican media shills and parroted by the pandering, Republican- wired media (our emphasis):

The Russian Defense Ministry knows how to stir up the interest of the right-leaning news media in the United States — just mention Hunter Biden, the president’s son.

Russia for years has been seeding the ground to claim that the United States set up biowarfare labs in Ukraine and other former Soviet republics — claims that have been revived as part of the invasion of Ukraine. As part of his media presentation, Igor Kirillov of the Russian armed forces alleged the labs were part of the U.S. plot to study the natural immunity of the population to identify the most dangerous pathogen for people in the region.  [snip]

First of all, as we have previously documented, these are not bioweapons labs, but biological research facilities focused on better detecting, diagnosing and monitoring infectious-disease outbreaks. Second, random emails can be easily misinterpreted without additional reporting.

We’ve dug into the records and discussed the deals in question with people involved. The reporting from those news outlets is false. Hunter Biden has come under scrutiny for business deals in places such as Ukraine and China that took place while his father was vice president. But he was not “financing” these labs. In fact, he was not part of a decision to invest in a company at the center of the Russian allegations, he did not profit from it as he was kicked out of the investment firm over cocaine allegations, and the company made little money from its tiny bit of business in Ukraine.

Kessler goes into some detail, debunking the various allegations being fed by the Russian Defense Ministry into our media culture (most recently at the encouragement of the Malignant Loser and other cultists).  Just the latest (and continuing) example of the asymmetry of the two parties and the brain- dead media's "relentless pandering" to the worst among us.

QOTD: Trump Rewrites His History With NATO

The WaPo's fact checker Glenn Kessler looks at the Putin-loving Malignant Loser's recent lies that he was the savior of and best thing NATO ever had. Here's his lede:

"Only days ago, Trump lauded Russian President Vladimir Putin as 'very savvy' for making a 'genius' move by declaring two regions of eastern Ukraine as independent states and dispatching Russian armed forces to seize them. 'Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful,'Trump said Feb. 22 on the 'Clay Travis and Buck Sexton' show, referring to the troops as 'the strongest peace force I’ve ever seen.'

Of course, it turns out that Putin launched an invasion of all of Ukraine. With Ukraine putting up a gallant fight and the United States and its allies imposing harsh sanctions on Russia, Trump on Monday issued a defensive statement repeating falsehoods he regularly made during his presidency.

With Trump, it’s hard to know if he’s willfully ignorant or if he has simply swallowed his own spin. Far from being a savior of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, he frequently sought to undermine it."  (our emphasis)

The rest of Kessler's article debunks each claim made by the Malignant Loser, who repeatedly tried to undermine NATO, even to leave NATO, and was stopped (by their accounting) by the efforts of his advisors, including John "Yosemite Sam" Bolton and Gen. John Kelly. 

(photo: It's all about body language. Trump's Helsinki humiliation at Putin's hands. AP)