As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.
We've recently heard from coup-adjacent Trump sycophants Sen. Lindsey Graham and Rep. Kevin McCarthy complaining about Democrats "politicizing" the January 6 insurrection. Joel Mathis says we should do more politicizing, especially after January 6:
Politics, after all, is how we work out our collective problems. But
it's a messy and sometimes ugly process, which makes charges of
"politicization" so easy and potent: Regular Americans often don't like
the way politics makes them feel. A USA Today poll
taken last month found that for all our political polarization, nearly
three-fourths of us would love for there to be less political hostility
and more focus on finding common ground.
That sounds lovely. Almost.
With
rare exception, we don't start with common ground on big issues. We
have to journey to meet there. Sometimes that doesn't happen, sometimes
it does, and sometimes it occurs only after a years-long process of
bickering and argument. Americans — humans! — have wildly disparate
visions of what constitutes the common good and how to achieve it. We
use politics to hash out those disagreements so that we can come to some
mutually acceptable (or acceptable enough) resolution of our
differences. To complain about the politicization of some issue or
event, then, is often an attempt to silence that process — a way to
shout "shut up!" from some ostensible moral high ground.
The release of text messages exchanged by Fox "News" blowhards and then-Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows before and during the January 6 insurrection opened the door to more revelations about just how much Dolt 45 relied on "advice" from right- wing talking heads, and what a problem it was for his staff:
Michael
Pillsbury, an informal Trump adviser, said he realized how powerful Fox
News was in Trump’s orbit when the former president began embracing
Sidney Powell — an attorney promoting Trump’s false claims of widespread
voter fraud — and other election fabulists after seeing them on Dobbs’s
show. Pillsbury added that while it seemed obvious that many of the
claims were patently false, Trump was inclined to believe them, in part
because he was watching them on TV and had affection for Dobbs in
particular.
“It
taught me the power of the young producers at Fox, and Fox Business
especially,” Pillsbury said. “These young producers who are in their
mid-20s. They come out of the conservative movement, they‘ve never been
in the government. They are presented with these reckless, fantastical
accounts. And they believe them and put them on for ratings.”
Alyssa
Farah, a former White House communications director, said the four most
influential Fox hosts were Dobbs, Hannity, Igraham, and Pirro — and in
the final year of the Trump administration, Hannity was the most
influential. Other former top administration officials also mentioned
Mark Levin, another Fox News host, and Maria Bartiromo, a Fox Business
host, as two other network stars in regular touch with the White House.
From
the point of view of the staff, Farah said, the goal was simply to “try
to get ahead of what advice you thought he was going to be given by
these people” because their unofficial counsel “could completely change
his mind on something.”
An unqualified, deluded President being advised by unqualified, deluded entertainers: what could possibly go wrong?
James Fallows wonders about coverage of inflation vs. improving job numbers:
Why does it matter that worsening inflation gets so much more play than dramatically improving job prospects?
—There’s
an obvious national-politics answer, which is that this emphasis makes
people “feel worse” than they should about overall economic trends. This
in turn makes them feel more cynical and fatalistic about the chance of
progress on any policy front. It’s related to the long-term pattern of
U.S. crime rates going down, but fear of crime going up.
—For
those in economist-land, there’s the intensifying discussion about the
“transitory” versus the “persistent” nature of this moment’s inflation.
And about how the relationship between unemployment and inflation rates
has changed, since the era when I learned about the Phillips curve in grad-school economics courses long ago.
But
to me, the “human” importance of the mismatch matters most, and it
spills over into the media-related, political, and economic dimensions.
The over-emphasis on inflation numbers, relative to employment trends,
blurs the fact that while both are problems, for the people living
through it unemployment is much worse.
Inflation erodes a family’s purchasing power. Unemployment eliminates it.
That makes a huge difference.
The James Webb Telescope achieved a major milestone on Saturday:
Work for the James Webb Space Telescope is just beginning.
On Saturday (Jan. 8), the new observatory, the largest space telescope ever built, successfully unfolded its final primary mirror
segment to cap what NASA has billed as one of its most complicated
deployments in space ever. The Webb mission team is now turning its
attention to directing the telescope to its final destination, while
getting key parts of the observatory online for its astronomy work.
Webb
is expected to arrive at its "insertion location" by Jan. 23, putting
it in place to fire its engines to glide to a "parking spot" called Earth-sun Lagrange Point 2 (L2)
about 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) away from our planet. If
Webb gets to the right zone, it can use a minimum of fuel to stay in
place thanks to a near-perfect alignment with the sun, Earth and moon. [snip]
As commissioning ends, Rigby said the team plans a set of "wow
images" that are designed to show the telescope's capabilities. Those
first targets have not yet been released to the media, but Rigby said
the goal of these first pictures will be to "showcase all four science
instruments and to really knock everybody's socks off."
The
first images will include things such as stars (to check for precise
alignment) and the Large Magellanic Cloud (to assess the telescope's
ability to render shades of luminosity, or inherent brightness),
officials said during the press conference.
Following
commissioning (which will take about six months) will be a preliminary
five-month science operations period made up of "early release science programs", with a set of six categories of work ranging from planet formation to stellar physics.
Trust me, our socks will be ready to be knocked off!
Lastly, a visit over to Infidel 753's link round-up is strongly encouraged to appreciate the array of links that he somehow manages to curate every week, in addition to his thoughtful essays.
