Trump Goes Viral, Con't

Trump voters simply don't believe coronavirus is a problem, so they don't care about it, won't change their behavior, and they certainly won't blame Donald Trump when it spreads.

Americans who now find themselves politically divided over seemingly everything are now forming two very different views of another major issue: the dangers of the new coronavirus.

Democrats are about twice as likely as Republicans to say the coronavirus poses an imminent threat to the United States, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted this week.

And more Democrats than Republicans say they are taking steps to be prepared, including washing their hands more often or limiting their travel plans.

Poll respondents who described themselves as Republicans and did not see the coronavirus as a threat said it still felt remote because cases had not been detected close to home and their friends and neighbors did not seem to be worried, either.

“I haven’t changed a single thing,” Cindi Hogue, who lives outside Little Rock, Arkansas, told Reuters. “It’s not a reality to me yet. It hasn’t become a threat enough yet in my world.”

Many of the U.S. cases that have been reported so far have been in Washington state and California, more than 1,000 miles away from Arkansas.

COVID-19 is something those filthy blue states and their immigrants have to worry about, not Real Americans In The Heartland™.   Steve M. explains the theory:

Here's what I wrote late last month:

Most Americans never travel. Trumpism is popular among the untraveled; they're suspicious of people who gad about the planet rather than settling into a small town or gated retirement village. They'll regard this as a disease of rootless cosmopolitanism -- or, rather, as a disease rootless cosmopolitans have spread to simple, decent, travel-averse Volk.  

And if they never get real numbers from the federal government, they'll learn to mistrust the numbers from state and local governments, from "the fake news," and from private organizations. If they don't have real numbers from the one source they trust -- Trump and his government -- they'll experience a combination of denial and (if the virus shows up where they live) scapegoat-blaming.

Trump might not be able to avoid coronavirus accountability forever -- but with some lucky breaks and careful misdirection, he might avoid it until November, the way Bush avoided accountability on Iraq in November 2004. Avoiding accountability is all that matters to Trump.

The rush to blame Democrats, specifically immigrants and those people for COVID-19 is going to be the name of the game. Trump voters believe it's a Chinese bioweapon that Beijing lost control of.

Conspiracy theories infect us faster than the virus itself, it seems. This time, the basic idea behind all of them is that the origins of COVID-19 in Wuhan, home to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, is suspicious. From there, some claim that it escaped the lab accidentally after being used in a regular, if risky, experiment, or a bioweapons program. Others suggest it was released intentionally, though it gets convoluted when you try to determine who, exactly, was being attacked: As the podcast Knowledge Fight has documented, Alex Jones has said that COVID-19 is both a false-flag style attack by the Chinese government against its own people and a “ChiCom” (that is, Chinese communist) plot to attack the West, a conspiracy repeated by Rush Limbaugh.

Responsible outlets have covered the conspiracy theories, attempting to debunk them. But even some experts don’t seem immune here. One rejected the idea of the virus being a biological weapon and praised the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a “world-class research institution that does world-class research” to the Washington Post at the end of January. Less than a month later, he was tweeting sympathetically about a New York Post opinion piece claiming the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the virus that causes COVID-19, had escaped from the same lab. 

So no, Trump voters will never blame Trump for COVID-19 even as the illness ravages both red and blue states.  They will be mobilized to vote against those people who "brought the virus into America".

If you think racism and anti-immigrant fervor was bad before, it will absolutely get much, much worse.

Meanwhile in Italy, the government there is quarantining the entire Lombardy region of 16 million.

Italy's prime minister has said at least 16 million people are in mandatory quarantine in Lombardy region and also in 14 provinces.

The lock-down will last until early April.

The dramatic escalation in the country's efforts to contain the new coronavirus will close gyms, pools, museums and ski resorts.

Italy is Europe's worst-hit country and reported a steep rise in virus infections on Saturday.

The new measures, which also apply to financial centre Milan and tourist hotspot Venice will last until 3 April.

The death toll in Italy has passed 230, with officials reporting more than 50 deaths in 24 hours. The number of confirmed cases jumped by more than 1,200 to 5,883 on Saturday.

Imagine all of the mid-Atlantic and New England locked down from Philly to Maine, a quarter of the US population, and you have an idea of what Italy is going through.  Here in the states, the White House refuses to quarantine anyone, or even recommend safety procedures of any sort.

The White House overruled health officials who wanted to recommend that elderly and physically fragile Americans be advised not to fly on commercial airlines because of the new coronavirus, a federal official told The Associated Press.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention submitted the plan this week as a way of trying to control the virus, but White House officials ordered the air travel recommendation be removed, said the official who had direct knowledge of the plan. Trump administration officials have since suggested certain people should consider not traveling, but they have stopped short of the stronger guidance sought by the CDC.

The person who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity did not have authorization to talk about the matter. The person did not have direct knowledge about why the decision to kill the language was made.

On Friday, the CDC quietly updated its website to tell older adults and people with severe medical conditions such as heart, lung or kidney disease to “stay home as much as possible” and avoid crowds. It urges those people to “take actions to reduce your risk of exposure,” but it doesn’t specifically address flying.

Vice President Mike Pence, speaking Saturday after meeting with cruise ship industry leaders in Florida, targeted his travel advice to a narrower group: older people with serious health problems.

“If you’re a senior citizen with a serious underlying health condition, this would be a good time to practice common sense and to avoid activities including traveling on a cruise line,” Pence said, adding they were looking to cruise line officials for action, guidance and flexibility with those passengers.

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar suggested older Americans and those with health problems should avoid crowds “especially in poorly ventilated spaces.”

What does the White House want to do?

Give tax cuts to airlines and cruise lines.

We've known for years that a pandemic scenario of a flu-like disease with a higher contagion and mortality rate was always likely.  It was just a matter of when. 

"When" is now.

Trump Goes Viral, Con't

As new cases of COVID-19 are showing up in Rhode Island as well as in Florida and also in Chicago and in Manhattan and much worse, could have been spreading undetected for weeks in Washington State, the Trump regime response goals remain protection of Trump's reelection chances, and not public safety.

Minutes before President Trump was preparing Wednesday to reassure a skittish nation about the coronavirus threat, he received a piece of crucial information: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had identified in California the first U.S. case of the illness not tied to foreign travel, a sign that the virus’s spread in the United States was likely to explode.

But when Trump took to the lectern for a news conference intended to bring transparency to the spiraling global crisis, he made no explicit mention of the California case and its implications — and falsely suggested the virus might soon be eradicated in the United States.

“And again, when you have 15 people — and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero — that’s a pretty good job we’ve done,” he said.

Trump’s playing down of the California patient at his news conference underscores the administration’s slapdash and often misleading attempts to contain not just the virus, but also potential political damage from the outbreak — which has tanked financial markets, slowed global commerce and killed some 3,000 people worldwide, including the first U.S. death, announced Saturday.

Since Trump touched down from a two-day trip to India early Wednesday morning, the administration struggled to cope with the fallout from the crisis — shaking up and centralizing its coronavirus response team under the leadership of Vice President Pence, floating plans to stabilize the markets and publicly seeking to minimize the threat posed by the potential pandemic.

Interviews with nearly two dozen administration officials, former White House aides, public health experts and lawmakers — many speaking on the condition of anonymity to share candid assessments and details — portray a White House scrambling to gain control of a rudderless response defined by bureaucratic infighting, confusion and misinformation.

“It’s complete chaos,” a senior administration official said. “Everyone is just trying to get a handle on what the [expletive] is going on.” 

I don't agree at all that the Trump regime is in chaos on this.  They absolutely have a message for the American people and a unified front.  And what is the message coming from the White House on COVID-19?  That the "alarmist" coverage is a plot to hurt Donald Trump and that Democrats want millions of people to die.

When Donald Trump Jr said Democrats hope coronavirus “kills millions of people” in the US because they want to bring his father down, he was merely “pushing back” at politicisation of the viral outbreak by Trump opponents, Mike Pence claimed in an interview broadcast on Sunday.

“It’s time for the other side to turn down the volume,” the vice-president told NBC’s Meet the Press.
At a White House press conference on Saturday, Trump was forced to defend his use of the word “hoax” in reference to the outbreak. Harshly criticised by contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, the president said he had been referring to politicisation of coronavirus, not the outbreak itself.

In the interview broadcast on Sunday, NBC host Chuck Todd played Pence clips of Trump allies discussing the outbreak which on Saturday claimed its first US death, a man in Washington state.

Rush Limbaugh, the conservative shock jock to whom Trump gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom, said: “The coronavirus is being weaponized, as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump.”

Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel said: “Democrats are using this for their political gain to try and stoke fear in the American people, which is shameful, wrong, and I think un-American.”

And Donald Trump Jr, appearing on Fox News, said: “For them to try to take a pandemic and seemingly hope that it comes here and kills millions of people so that they could end Donald Trump’s streak of winning is a new level of sickness.”

On CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, host Jake Tapper twice asked Pence if he agreed with Trump Jr’s claim that Democrats want coronavirus to “kill millions of people”.

Pence avoided the question, instead saying people need to set politics aside in the response to the outbreak and insisting Trump, who at his Friday rally claimed “the Democrat policy of open borders is a direct threat to the health and wellbeing of all Americans”, was directing all sides to take politics out of the equation.

Pence is in charge of White House efforts in response to the outbreak. Saying he was leading “decisive action to protect the American people”, he told NBC: “And when you see voices on our side pushing back on outrageous and irresponsible rhetoric on the other side, I think that’s important, and I think it’s justified.”

That's why Mike Pence is in charge of both the response and the messaging about the response.  The Trump regime response to COVID-19 is "Blame the Democrats when people die, and take your rage, anger, and vitriol out on them."

But in red states especially, states that have already trashed science, health, and preparedness program, the misinformation from the Trump regime is only compounding the problem, places like Anniston, Alabama, population 22,000.

Not long before local leaders decided, in the words of one of them, that federal health officials “didn’t know what they were doing" with their plan to quarantine novel coronavirus patients in town, a doctor here set out in a biohazard suit to stage a one-man protest along the highway with a sign. “The virus has arrived. Are you ready?” it asked.

The town didn’t think it was. Residents already were unnerved by strange stories posted on Facebook and shared via text messages about helicopters secretly flying in sick patients, that the virus was grown in a Chinese lab, that someone — either the media or the government — was lying to them about what was really going on.
The quarantine plan hastily hatched by the federal Department of Health and Human Services was soon scrapped by President Trump, who faced intense pushback from Alabama’s congressional delegation, led by Republican Rep. Mike D. Rogers. Americans evacuated after falling ill aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan would not be coming to Anniston, a town of 22,000 people in north-central Alabama, after all. They would remain in the same Texas and California sites where they were taken after leaving the cruise ship.

What happened here over the past week illustrates how poor planning by federal health officials and a rumor mill fueled by social media, polarized politics and a lack of clear communication can undermine public confidence in the response to the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease named covid-19. The rapidly spreading virus has rattled economies worldwide in recent weeks and caused the deaths of more than 2,900 people, mostly in China.

The panic and problems that burned through Anniston also provided a preview of what could unfold in other communities, as the spread of the virus is considered by health experts to be inevitable.

“Their little plan sketched out in D.C. was not thought out,” said Michael Barton, director of the emergency management agency in Calhoun County, where Anniston is located.

As local officials learned more, Barton added, “We knew then —”

“We were in trouble,” said Tim Hodges, chairman of the county commission.

In Anniston, local leaders were stunned to discover serious problems with the federal government’s plan for dealing with patients infected with the virus — starting with how the patients would get to Alabama, according to interviews with county and city officials, along with business leaders who dealt with the federal response.

“I was shocked,” Anniston Mayor Jack Draper said. “I was shocked by the lack of planning. I was shocked by the manner in which it was presented to us.”

Be very, very scared of what the Trump regime will do once things start going very badly for this country in the weeks and months ahead.  Should we survive this intact, it will be in spite of Trump, not because of him.

But if you thought the violations of the Constitution were bad before, just wait until we're deep into a pandemic scenario.  Places like Anniston aren't going to be given a choice about where to house the sick.  The Trump regime will use the full force of the federal government against the very people who voted for them and won't hesitate to use it against the rest of us.

After all, Trump's inevitable autocratic and dictatorial response will be justified because the Democrats said bad things about him.

All of us will suffer, sick or not.

StupidiNews!

Only one story this morning.

The Iowa Democratic Caucuses were a complete disaster last night.

More later today.

Well, make that two stories, Rush Limbaugh has advanced lung cancer.

Have a nice one.

Last Call For Rush (No Longer) In Roulette

Rush Limbaugh has signed on for another four years of his radio show, meaning he'll be polluting the airwaves through 2024, and apparently the person to break the news was...Donald Trump.

"The Rush Limbaugh Show" will continue well into the new decade. 

Limbaugh, whose contract was due to expire later this year, has renewed his deal, the syndication company Premiere Radio Networks confirmed to CNN Business. 

Premiere is a division of the radio giant iHeartMedia. A spokeswoman said Limbaugh renewed a "long-term agreement" and declined to comment on any specific terms, like the length of the new deal. 

But according to President Trump, it is a four-year deal. 

CNN Business inquired about Limbaugh's status after Trump blurted out the information at a rally in Miami on Friday. 

The president was there to launch an "Evangelicals for Trump" coalition. After lodging his usual complaints about news outlets that challenge him, he turned to praise some of his biggest radio and TV boosters. 

"We have great people," Trump said. "Rush just signed another four-year contract. He just wants four more years, okay. Rush, Sean Hannity, Laura -- a lot of great people -- Tucker's been great, 'Fox & Friends,' right?" 

Trump went on, listing off other supporters in the media. But the Limbaugh shout-out was curious because the host and the syndicator had not announced a new deal yet. Premiere's most recent acknowledgement about Limbaugh's contract was back in August 2016, when he re-upped. 

It turns out the president had some inside information -- perhaps from one of Limbaugh's visits to Trump's properties. 

Trump and the radio host were seen eating launch and chatting with others at Trump's West Palm Beach golf club a few days before Christmas. 

The two men have been allies for many years, pre-dating the president's run for office.

The cult of Trumpism continues to destroy America.  Hooray!

Last Call For The Party Of Caitlyn Jenner

America met Caitlyn Jenner (nee Bruce) Tuesday, and it took less than 24 hours for the Republican party she supports to turn on her completely.  Brendan O'Neill at the Spectator:

The worship of Caitlyn, and the hectoring of anyone who refuses to scrape before her icon, has graphically exposed the intolerant edge to trans thinking. The insistence that we not only refer to Bruce/Caitlyn as ‘she’ but also project this backwards – recognising, in the words of the Guardian, that she has ‘always been a woman’ – is borderline Orwellian. It’s a rewriting of history, a memory-holing of old inconvenient facts. Strikingly, the Guardian writer says people like Bruce/Caitlyn have ‘always been women… even when they were “fathering” children’. Notice it’s the ‘fathering’ bit that is in scare quotes, suggesting it wasn’t real, while the description of Bruce as a woman is treated as an incontestable truth. War is peace, freedom is slavery, man is woman.

Nice.  And then today, El Rushbo went on the offensive:

Limbaugh said on his radio show Tuesday that liberals are trying to “redefine normalcy” in an effort to stigmatize conservatives and that conservatives shouldn’t agree to their terms by accepting Caitlyn Jenner as a woman.

He likewise dismissed a conservative blog that wrote that Republicans should embrace Jenner as one of their own to seem more humane, saying that doing so would constitute falling into a liberal trap. 

Under this system, “conservatives and Republicans are the new weirdos, the new kooks,” the pundit said, “and that is part of the political objective here in normalizing all of this really marginal behavior. I mean, if less than 1 percent of the population is engaging in it, it’s marginalized behavior. It isn’t normal, no matter how you define it.” 

“We should not be celebrating this, we should not be lionizing this, we should not be encouraging this. These people have a very serious problem, and they need treatment,” he said. “They need help, not encouragement.”

You didn't honestly think that with Bruce being a long-time Republican that Republicans would accept Caitlyn, did you?

More GOP Minority Outreach, Post-McDaniel Edition

Conservatives are fuming over the loss of Mississippi Tea Party darling Chris McDaniel to GOP Sen. Thad Cochran in Tuesday's GOP primary runoff, and really all they know about why McDaniel lost is that black people were allowed to vote and that kind of thing clearly has to be stopped.  El Rushbo led the charge...

Some conservatives aren't happy that their preferred candidate, state Sen. Chris McDaniel (R) lost to Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS) in the runoff of the GOP primary for U.S. Senate in Mississippi. Many tea party types are openly speculating foul play and that Democrats and black voters were involved. Take Rush Limbaugh who wondered if Cochran's campaign slogan in Mississippi over the last few days was "Uncle Toms for Thad."

"I wonder what the campaign slogan was in Mississippi the past few days, 'Uncle Toms for Thad'? Because I thought it was the worst thing you could do as an African American, vote for a Republican. The worst thing you could do," Limbaugh said on Wednesday. "But somehow they were made to believe that voting for old Thad would be fine and dandy. And why? Because they were told Thad's done a lot for black people in Mississippi. Must be the first time they were told that."

 As a result, neighboring Alabama is calling for immediate laws to close that state's primaries.

The chairman of Alabama's Republican Party fears that Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran's (R) triumph Tuesday over a tea party primary challenger could have a ripple effect on runoff elections in his state unless party registration is implemented.

"I think what happened in Mississippi last night definitely sends a strong signal to us in Alabama that until we have party registration that same kind of thing could happen here in our state," Chairman Bill Armistead said, as quoted by AL.com.

And Moose Lady offered some more Authentic Frontier Gibberish.

"When an election is questionable, with potential legal violations, politics MUST be put aside and the irregularities MUST be fully investigated," Palin wrote on Facebook. "Regardless of party, we owe it to voters and to democracy within our Republic. The integrity of the vote speaks directly to the integrity of those who serve and the trust we ask the American public to put in our institutions."

To recap, the "irregularities" that Sarah Palin and others are screaming about being illegal is "black voters voting in an open primary to defeat a Tea Party candidate."  This is apparently against some sort of law somewhere that we just made up, and dammit, we have to be collectively punished by Republicans.

The fact that Mississippi is 38% African-American, nearly three times the national average, simply didn't occur to conservatives when it came to a state with an open primary system.  The real problem Republicans have with black voters is apparently when we are actually are allowed to vote.  Republicans want to resolve that little problem, and fast.

Just a reminder too that a year ago this week, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act.  You're insane if you think today's Republican party will ever lift a finger to restore it. Because remember, Chief Justice Roberts assured us that racism is over in America when it came to voting, as evidenced by the reaction in Mississippi this week.

Clearly.

Not Helping On The Climate Thing

Just to make it clear, there's helpful strategies for dealing with climate change deniers...and then there's Gawker's Adam Weinstein, who thinks it's time to start dealing with professional climate deniers through legal means as they put all of us in jeopardy.

I'm talking about Rush and his multi-million-dollar ilk in the disinformation business. I'm talking about Americans for Prosperity and the businesses and billionaires who back its obfuscatory propaganda. I'm talking about public persons and organizations and corporations for whom denying a fundamental scientific fact is profitable, who encourage the acceleration of an anti-environment course of unregulated consumption and production that, frankly, will screw my son and your children and whatever progeny they manage to have.

Those malcontents must be punished and stopped.

Deniers will, of course, fuss and stomp and beat their breasts and claim this is persecution, this is a violation of free speech. Of course, they already say that now, when judges force them into doing penance for comparing climate scientists to child-rapist and denial poster-boy Jerry Sandusky.

But First Amendment rights have never been absolute. You still can't yell "fire" in a crowded theater. You shouldn't be able to yell "balderdash" at 10,883 scientific journal articles a year, all saying the same thing: This is a problem, and we should take some preparations for when it becomes a bigger problem.

Willful, profiteering public deniers of climate change can compare themselves to Galileo all they want, pretending that they're voices of sanity in a cruel wilderness. But Galileo had science on his side. He had a telescope aimed at the cosmos. Climate deniers have their heads jammed in the sand... or in a barrel of money.

I agree with Weinstein that the multi-billion dollar effort to convince Americans that there is nothing we can or should even bother doing about climate change is pretty awful.  Unfortunately, it's not criminal.  (However I have the same problem with anti-vaxxers, and at least you can make individual child endangerment arguments there from a legal standpoint.)

But this is entirely unhelpful and just feeds the "climate cult/persecution complex" that all of these guys are counting on.  It's playing into their hands and frankly, it's stupid to do so.

The entire point is that this is a battle of public opinion, and Weinstein is doing more damage than good.  Besides, the real problem is of course Republicans who are trying to make climate research all but illegal in the first place.

Zandar's Thought Of The Day

It doesn't matter how awful of a human being you are, it doesn't matter what despicable acts you do, Republicans will publicly back you as long as you say you don't like Barack Obama.  Steve M on Nooners, El Rushbo, and Vlad The Dudesplainer:

But even if Limbaugh and Noonan think that the disdain for the notion of U.S. exceptionalism is shared equally by Putin and Obama, they've decided the two are identical in this and yet have essentially chosen to side with the Russian authoritarian rather than the head of our own country. (Noonan: "Still, in general, Mr. Putin made a better case in the piece against a U.S. military strike than the American president has for it." Limbaugh: "My God, we have the communist leader of Russia more proudly quoting the Declaration of Independence than our own president does!") And, well, that's no surprise, because hating Obama, all other Democrats, and all liberals is what conservatism means now. It's all that conservatism is about now. 

Republicans in 2013 exist to oppose Barack Obama.  That's that they have, that's all they care about, and that's all they need.

Last Call For Hannity And Rush

And finally, the end may be near for the radio hatemongers on the right, done in by the most implacable foe of all...

...capitalism.

In a major shakeup for the radio industry, Cumulus Media, the second-biggest broadcaster in the country, is planning to drop both Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity from its stations at the end of the year, an industry source told POLITICO on Sunday. 

Cumulus has decided that it will not renew its contracts with either host, the source said, a move that would remove the two most highly rated conservative talk personalities from more than 40 Cumulus channels in major markets.

The decision comes after negotiations between Cumulus and Premiere Networks, the division of Clear Channel that distributes Limbaugh and Hannity's shows, broke down due to disagreements over the cost of the distribution rights, the source said. Cumulus is known to drive a hard bargain on costs, and Clear Channel is known to seek top dollar for big names. 

As industry insiders caution, Cumulus and Clear Channel have come to the brink before during contract negotiations only to resume talks. But the source told POLITICO that Clear Channel was unlikely to reduce the cost for distribution rights to a level that would satisfy Cumulus.

Another major win for Angelo Carusone, the Media Matters crusader who went after Glenn Beck's advertisers and got him off the air.  He's been going after Rush and Hannity's advertisers, and without the ad revenue, Clear Channel is forced to raise rates on distributors.  And they're not going to pay for a damaged product that could cost them listeners and advertisers to boot.

Hitting Hannity and Rush in the wallet has been the most effective strategy so far.  We need to keep it up.

Opening Salvos From The Slope

President Obama's opening fiscal cliff slope offer, made through Tim Geithner, was a dose of cold, hard reality for the Republicans.  Naturally they're in full panic mode and screaming to the "liberal media" to punish the President for daring to make such an offer.

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) on Thursday rejected a White House offer to avoid the "fiscal cliff" that would include $1.6 trillion in tax increases, $400 billion in spending cuts and a more permanent increase in the debt ceiling, Republican aides said.

Aides said the offer was made by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Rob Nabors, a top White House adviser, during their meeting with Republican leaders in the Capitol.

While the Obama administration described the offer as reducing the deficit by $4 trillion over 10 years, Republicans told The Hill its tax increases amount to $600 billion more than what the Democratic-led Senate passed earlier this year when it approved legislation that would allow tax rates on top earners to rise.

“We’ve offered a balanced approach to deal with the fiscal cliff: raising revenue in a way that protects jobs while cutting spending,” said a Republican congressional aide familiar with the proposal. “But, after two weeks of discussions, the offer the White House made today is completely unbalanced and unreasonable, and amounts to little more than reiterating the president’s budget request — which failed to get a single vote in the House or Senate.”

As BooMan suggests, the Republicans are more than a little stunned by the boldness of the offer.  This is what President Obama's second term mandate means for them, and they don't like it a bit. They now know the President isn't bluffing.

The administration is threatening to weaken their ability to obstruct in the Senate or to blow up the economy by holding the debt ceiling hostage, while also demanding their tax hikes on the rich and refusing to offer anything remotely satisfactory (from the Republicans' point of view) in spending cuts.

Give the president what he wants or over the cliff we go. And the GOP gets the blame no matter what happens. Maybe you shouldn't have fucked with the president so much. 

Indeed, GOP meatheads like Newt Gingrich and El Rushbo are already saying the Republicans need to announce they are walking away from the table and that they don't care if the country burns if they go over the cliff slope.

Briar patch.  Just like it's been for the last four years.  Advantage:  Obama.  You can tell he's winning because the usual Village suspects are having a collective heart attack. 

Watch the fun begin.

Praying For Rain

As Isaac churns westward in the Atlantic towards the Gulf Coast, the storm track puts Tampa and the GOP Convention right in the crosshairs.  Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn says the convention could be called off in case of a serious storm.

Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn told CNN the city is prepared for severe weather if it hits during the Republican National Convention next week. Tropical Storm Isaac is forecast to head toward the Florida by early Monday.

"We're prepared for it, we've trained for it, we have contingency plan after contingency plan," Buckhorn said. But in the event of dangerous weather, "human safety, human life trumps politics," he said.

Here's your latest storm track:








Interpret that as you will.

PS, El Rushbo says NOAA is faking the forecast on purpose under the direction of the Obama Administration in order to close the convention down.  Remember, Republicans want to get rid of the National Weather Service and NOAA altogether and replace it with private for-profit weather forecast systems.  Which get nearly all of their data from...the National Weather Service.

Radio-Free Rush

Jane Fonda, Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan have an op-ed at CNN calling for Rush Limbaugh's firing.  Needless to say, the wingers are going completely ballistic.

If Clear Channel won't clean up its airways, then surely it's time for the public to ask the FCC a basic question: Are the stations carrying Limbaugh's show in fact using their licenses "in the public interest?"

Spectrum is a scarce government resource. Radio broadcasters are obligated to act in the public interest and serve their respective communities of license. In keeping with this obligation, individual radio listeners may complain to the FCC that Limbaugh's radio station (and those syndicating his show) are not acting in the public interest or serving their respective communities of license by permitting such dehumanizing speech.

The FCC takes such complaints into consideration when stations file for license renewal. For local listeners near a station that carries Limbaugh's show, there is plenty of evidence to bring to the FCC that their station isn't carrying out its public interest obligation. Complaints can be registered under the broadcast category of the FCC website: http://www.fcc.gov/complaints

This isn't political. While we disagree with Limbaugh's politics, what's at stake is the fallout of a society tolerating toxic, hate-inciting speech. For 20 years, Limbaugh has hidden behind the First Amendment, or else claimed he's really "doing humor" or "entertainment." He is indeed constitutionally entitled to his opinions, but he is not constitutionally entitled to the people's airways.

It's time for the public to take back our broadcast resources. Limbaugh has had decades to fix his show. Now it's up to us.

My main question is where these fine ladies were on Rush 20 years ago when he was going after Hillary and Chelsea Clinton, or a decade ago going after Al Gore, or even five years ago when he was singing songs about Barack Obama "The Magic Negro."  But apparently going after a white female Georgetown law student was the last straw for El Rushbo, go figure.

The tidal wave of invective coming from the right this morning about Fonda and Steinem especially is as bad, if not worse than what Rush has been saying on the air lately.  The difference?  Rush is bleeding advertisers and he's scared.  The entire right is scared.  And they're lashing out.

If Rush goes down, all bets are off on what the unhinged wingers do next.

The Grand Unifying Theory On Bigotry

The word "racism" doesn't mean whatever the right says it means.

The winger right has been losing the argument on race for quite some time now, culminating in 2008's election of Barack Obama as President of the United States.  It's driving them insane, too.  ABL talked about the idiotic Derrick Bell "hug-troversy" yesterday, and the right is gleefully pointing to young Harvard Law Review president Barack Obama speaking about diversity and Harvard faculty as proof he's a "racist".

This is because the right loves to reframe the definition of anything bad as "something that applies primarily to liberals."  It goes something like this:  "We're tired of being called racist by you people, so we're going to define racism as 'including race in the consideration of anything' and therefore that means all liberals are racists.  We win.  What are you going to do about it?  You can't deny that liberals are aware of race in differing points of view and take them into consideration through diversity and inclusiveness.  That means you're defining people by race, and that makes you racists, Q.E.D.  Oh, and we're done talking to you about this, because we don't talk to racists."

Pretty amazing stuff, and yet this perfectly encapsulates the conservative viewpoint on race, where Arizona Republicans have banned Latino Studies classes in school as "indoctrination" and the Supreme Court has to take another look at race in college admissions because consideration of race is in and of itself "racist".  Mention, consideration, attention to race is the new definition of what it means to be racist, and that means liberalism itself is the source of "the real racism in America."
As ridiculous as it is, it serves a very real purpose:  the wingers use this argument to defuse and dismiss any real criticism of racism.  "You can't accuse us of racism in any way when you support diversity and affirmative action!" they bellow.  Such breathtaking false equivalence, literally equating the awareness that race affects social and political fabric of the nation with actual, overt racism, is the key to how the rabid right "wins" arguments.

It applies to not only race, but virtually all aspects of liberalism's inclusiveness of viewpoints by definition:  gender, socioeconomics and class, religion (or the absence of it), sexual orientation, you name it.  And all of it becomes ammunition to use against liberalism itself.  Once you accept the first false equivalence that considering sexual orientation is discriminatory against heterosexuals, or that discussing race is in an of itself racist against whites, every other argument you can make to defend that is a loser.

That's what makes the media's acceptance of these "well both sides do it!" frames so absolutely poisonous.  If you accept the possibility that Derrick Bell's call for faculty diversity makes him a racist, there's nothing you can say that can then "prove the negative" that he's not one.  From there, you can't "prove the negative" that Barack Obama's association and introduction of Bell possibly racist views in 1990 didn't adversely affect the formative views on race for the now President Obama.  These folks are literally arguing that because you cannot prove that the President isn't a racist when he's talking about race, it's as bad as him being a racist.

It's sophistry on a grand, transformational scale, and yet once again this same level of lunacy is driving our national discourse.  It applies to the ongoing Rush Limbaugh misogyny as well:  Bill Maher said bad things about women at one point, making him just as bad as Rush and proving that feminists all hate men because they cannot prove liberals' consideration of gender issues isn't in turn misandry.  Everything then becomes a situation where liberals are "forcing" their views upon conservatives, thus robbing them of their freedoms, bringing us to the recent contraception "controversy" where having employers agree to birth control coverage is in fact an abridgement of their religious liberties, proving liberals are the religious bigots.

It applies to secular arguments as well, take science, evolution, and global climate change.  The false equivalence here is that liberals cannot prove 100% that these theories are absolute fact, so that refusal to accept the "equally valid" theories of creationism and sunspots being responsible is proof that liberals are the closed-minded ones who reject science and the scientific method, never mind that this awesome argument means I can have a theory that the Earth was created by Doozers leaving underneath Fraggle Rock and that rejection of it by Dr. Stephen Hawking means he's not a real scientist.

Everything is related here, folks.  It all ties together, forming a multi-pronged attack on liberalism itself, the rejection of valid new ideas because they challenge the old, the holding of ridiculous fallacies as proof of victory and that in the end, all conservative ideas are correct because classic liberalism, the creation of new ideas itself, is an inherently evil act precisely because you can't prevent those new ideas from possibly being evil.

It's Dick Cheney's One Percent Solution taken to the application of pretty much everything.  It might be wrong, so it must be wrong.  And it must be destroyed.   The faster we recognize these false equivalencies for what they are, the more we can point them out to others and say "This argument is terrible and here's why, and they're using this argument because they don't have anything else."  It's something that we have to keep fighting until we win.

If we don't, then we'll be the "racists, bigots, and haters" forever and it will always be unacceptable to call it out, which is precisely what they want the situation to be.

Show Me Stupidity: Busty Edition

So, Zandar tipped me off that Missouri is putting a bust of Rush in the Missouri State Capitol, where there are many famous Missourians.  Facepalm.  Headdesk.  A cussing rant that made my cat blush, followed by a thin trail of drool from when I went into a StupidiComa trying to digest this.  I can't say I have never been more ashamed of my state, but it's pushing the limit.

Of course the Democrats are protesting, and rightfully so.  Famous does not mean good, celebrity status does not equal worthiness.  Limbaugh is a disgrace to his profession and everyone who backs him, and I'm mortified that he may be forever associated with Missouri.  For what it's worth, I had missed out on that fact until this called it to my attention.

He does not belong in the same hallway as Mark Twain, Harry Truman, and other people who actually contributed to the world.  To continue to "honor" Rush Limbaugh is to give value to his attitude towards women and minorities.  It's like Missouri is saying "it's cool, we don't give a crap about them either, please proceed."  On the flip side, can you imagine the message it would send if Missouri changed their minds after he called Fluke a slut?  That's a powerful message, but I'm afraid this backwards state just doesn't have the balls or the brains to take a stand.

The same sculptor is working on a bust of Dred Scott, taking mixed messages to a scary level.  Scott was a slave who sued for his freedom and was denied in the infamous Dred Scott Decision.  Scott's plight eventually led to massive changes, due to the outrage of people at the reasoning for the decision.  Basically, his human rights weren't as valuable as the theoretical inconvenience to his owner.  Makes me think a lot of Republicans voting against fair pay for women because of the burden it might put on businesses to have to be fair.  Now that is a man and a statement worth honoring.  That says that unfair things happen, but good will triumph in the end.

Rush is a publicity whore, to reward him is disgusting.

The Short Answer Is No

TPM's Evan McMorris-Santoro asks:

Does Obama Have A Bill Maher Problem?

Yeah, see, I like Evan, I follow him on Twitter, I've cited his articles, but...this?  This is just silly.  To whit:

Faced with what appears to be a losing fight over Rush Limbaugh, Republicans are trying to turn the tables in the condemnation game by urging President Obama to repudiate comedian Bill Maher, who donated $1 million to Obama’s super PAC and has said some nasty things about Sarah Palin and other Republican women.

Republicans think they’re really on to something here. And some observers agree.

If Obama wants to have credibility on the Limbaugh attacks, says Siobhan “Sam” Bennett, president of the Women’s Campaign Fund and a former Democratic House candidate, he’s going to have to show he’ll step up to all sexism when he sees it, even the sexism that comes from huge donors.

“They’re absolutely identical,” Bennett said. “It’s completely unacceptable when Maher said sexist things about Bachmann and Palin. It’s completely unacceptable when Rush called Sandra Fluke a ‘slut.’”

“If you attack one woman, you attack all women, period,” she added. “If it goes uncalled against, we’re saying it’s OK. It’s not.”

This zero tolerance/false equivalence nonsense stuff is exactly how the right gets out of headlocks like this, and McMorris-Santoro goes right for it.  Siobhan Bennett is on FOX News all the time as the "official" voice of "liberals are the misogynists" anyway.  Of course BECAUSE BILL MAHER is going to be the new argument to allow Rush to continue to call women "sluts" and "whores" for the rest of his career.

There is such a thing as intent and amount.  Rush's attacks have been constant and consistent for 20 years now.  Maher has stuck his foot in his mouth of course and he should apologize, but equating the two is like taking a pitchfork to do something about the enemy battalion occupying your town and then being told your pitchfork usage makes you equally morally bankrupt.  Maher has not the political or financial power or the social outreach of Limbaugh.  Nor do Maher's crimes stack up to his either.

It's pointless, and the acceptance of the false equivalence that what Maher did and what Rush did are congruent is nonsense of the highest order.

Evan, you should know better.

Last Call

Steve M. is right, of course.  Under no circumstances are liberals ever alowed to fight back, or it's all our fault.  Witness Michael Kinsley defend El Rushbo:

These umbrage episodes that have become the principal narrative line of our politics are orgies of insincerity. Pols declare that they are distraught, offended, outraged by some stray remark by a political opponent, or judicial nominee, or radio talk-show host. They demand apology, firing, crucifixion.

The target resists for a few days, then steps downs or apologizes. Occasionally they survive, as Limbaugh probably will, but wounded and more careful from now on.

More careful means less interesting. Limbaugh is under no obligation to stop saying offensive things just to keep me entertained. Still, it's a pity....

Rush is just "a radio talk-show host".  He's not important at all.  He's certainly not responsible one iota for the political climate we find ourselves in these days, of course.  You stupid liberals keep bringing this up.  It's all your fault.  Steve:

Give me a freaking break. Nobody with a conscience wants Rush Limbaugh to wallow in the pig-trough of his misogyny on the public airwaves for several days, directing his unbridled hate at a genuinely vulnerable target. (Well, nobody except Michael Kinsley, perhaps, or others who consider this sort of thing "interesting.") Wanting Limbaugh (or Murdoch) to get his comeuppance for beyond-the-pale behavior isn't the same as cheering the fact that that behavior happened in the first place.

Kinsley has set a standard whereby no one can call out an opponent's behavior without being accused of insincerity. If I opposed the Catholic Church on abortion or gay marriage or condom use and then felt it was justifiably disgraced in the priest sex-abuse scandal, was I delighted that boys got raped? Where's the limit? How do I escape Kinsley's la-di-da-everyone's-a-cynic infinite loop?  

You don't.  And our media never will, at least not in my lifetime.  It's always false equivalence.  "Because you guys compared Bush to Hitler" will forever justify any behavior by Rush and his friends.

Last Call

Rush Limbaugh wants credit for apologizing, after reaping a week of free publicity. For a troll like him, negative is as good as (if not better) than positive attention.

Though I'm sure everyone has read about it, I'm going to include a quick summary of what he said. He called Sandra Fluke a "slut" and "prostitute" for insisting women have access to birth control. He said he would like to see her put some sex tapes online, and said her costs would be higher because of all the sex she was having.

If he worked for a real corporation, he'd have been fired in a hot second and the victim of this blatant harassment would have a legitimate lawsuit. But because he's a coward he hides behind his own "absurdity" and entertainer job as permission to take cheap shots at a young woman, who took it in stride and showed him what the high road looks like.  By the way, this is exactly what Zandar was saying, even down to the use of the word absurd in his defense.

"For over 20 years, I have illustrated the absurd with absurdity, three hours a day, five days a week. In this instance, I chose the wrong words in my analogy of the situation. I did not mean a personal attack on Ms. Fluke."

Really?  So you'd call your own mom a slut or a prostitute because those words aren't a personal attack? How else should she have interpreted the use of those words?  How about apologizing for implying that she was having so much sex she was going broke?  That seems pretty personal to me, and no accident.  This apology is an even more insulting pile of bullshit than the comments that started this entire episode.  His original comments exposed the ignorance that is so common among his intended audience.

When sponsors began to drop, Limbaugh had found the perfect time to try to play it both ways.  He rolled his eyes and "gave in" to the liberals.  He had gotten his publicity out of it and milked it to death anyway.  He'll try to claim it as sincere when it is convenient.  He calls it an attempt at humor in his apology statement.

As soon as it affected the money, he chose to play martyr and let himself be coerced into an apology.  But don't kid yourself for a second, he didn't mean it.  He doesn't give a damn, and would sell all women out in a heartbeat for a little ratings spike.  Oh look, he just did.

Last Call

Steve M. is dead right about Santorum calling El Rushbo's comments on Sandra Fluke "absurd" today.  Santorum isn't attacking Rush, he's giving Rush a way out of this mess.

The key word here is "absurd," because it's a word Limbaugh proudly uses. For years he's described what he does as "demonstrating absurdity by being absurd" -- in fact, the title of a chapter in his first book was "People, Think for Yourselves, Or Demonstrating Absurdity By Being Absurd." In fact, just today he described his sex-video remark about Sandra Fluke as "illustrating absurdity here by being absurd."

Either Santorum knows all this (and as a card-carrying movement conservative, he presumably would) or Santorum in understands that saying this is an easy way to attack Limbaugh without actually attacking him.

Oh, and Limbaugh's an "entertainer," so it's silly for anyone to care, right? (Funny, back in January, when Santorum said "we've lost, unfortunately, our entertainment industry" to "the left," he seemed to regard entertainment as a lot more relevant to politics.) 

The entertainer dodge is an out Rush has used before.  He'll survive this.  He always does.  Santorum is calling Rush's comments absurd so that anyone attacking him for it is engaging in even more absurd behavior.

Here's the thing, of course.  It's false equivalence to the max, and ABL calls the GOP out on it.

Rush Limbaugh is calling your mothers, sisters, and daughters sluts and prostitutes. “Inappropriate” and “absurd” doesn’t begin to cover it.

And by the way, the “you sluts want us to pay to have sex” narrative is unimaginably stupid. Sandra Fluke testified about her friend who was prescribed birth control for a medical condition — ovarian cysts. Nobody’s asking to be paid to have sex.  Nobody’s asking for government-subsidized condoms. Besides, we women have been paying men to have sex for years. The only purpose of Viagra and Cialis and the like is to allow men to have sex.  Many health insurance plans cover Viagra.  Where’s Rush’s outrage about that?  Shouldn’t all men who take those little blue pills be forced post sex tapes online?

Agreed.

Last Call

This afternoon not only did a fourth woman come forward to accuse Herman Cain of sexual harassment, not only did she hold a public press conference with her lawyer Gloria Allred, but the accusations themselves really were nothing short of sexual assault.

Sharon Bialek alleged at a news conference today that Herman Cain reached under her skirt in 1997 as she sought help in finding a job. 

The Chicago-area mother, who is described as a Republican, urged the GOP presidential candidate to “come clean” and admit how he was “inappropriate” with her and other women.

Bialek’s story was immediately denied by the Cain campaign, which sent out a news release as the woman spoke publicly at a New York City news conference with her lawyer, noted defense attorney Gloria Allred, by her side. The stories of three other women have been reported by Politico and the Associated Press.

Oh, it gets worse.

Bialek described an incident in July 1997 where she and Cain were in a car and her offered to show her the trade group’s headquarters. 

“Instead of going into the offices, he suddenly reached over and … put his hand on my leg, under my skirt toward my genitals,” Bialek said.

“He also pushed my head toward his crotch,” she said.

Bialek replied that she was married had a boyfriend when Cain allegedly did this, his response was “You want a job, right?”


And if the unremittingly awful context of “You want a job, right?” doesn’t sum up the entire Republican Party over the last several years, then I don’t know what else could.  Cain’s stated policies are disgusting as it is, but this pretty much seals the deal.  Big gorram line between sexual harassment (which is never okay) and sexual assault, and Herman Cain just sailed over it.

Oh, and if that’s not enough to make you try to dent your monitor in with your fist, El Rushbo’s response to the presser will do it, if not Dick Morris's response.

It's Not About Race, They Tell Me

You can call wingnuts who have a serious problem with the nation's first African-America President just about anything you want, but never, ever, ever call them racists.

Rep. Sally Kern, R-Oklahoma City, said minorities earn less than white people because they don’t work as hard and have less initiative.

“We have a high percentage of blacks in prison, and that’s tragic, but are they in prison just because they are black or because they don’t want to study as hard in school? I’ve taught school, and I saw a lot of people of color who didn’t study hard because they said the government would take care of them.”

Kern said women earn less than men because “they tend to spend more time at home with their families.”

Never call them racists...

Yesterday during his press conference in New Hampshire –- after the cable news networks cut to President Obama’s remarks regarding the release of his long form birth certificate — potential GOP presidential candiate Donald Trump spent some time extolling infrastructure investments made by China and other countries, suggesting the U.S. should follow suit. This prompted Les Trent, a reporter for Inside Edition, to ask Trump: “Isn’t that what President Obama tried to do with his stimulus package?”


Trump’s response to Trent, who is African American, was “Look, I know you are a big Obama fan.” Trent replied, “Why do you say that?” 

...never call them racists.

The head of Orange County's Republican Party is vowing to keep up the pressure on a local GOP official to resign for sending an offensive email about President Barack Obama.

"This issue will not go away until she has taken 100 percent responsibility for sending out a racist email that offended millions," Chairman Scott Baugh said.

He commented by telephone on Wednesday after Marilyn Davenport, speaking for the first time, said she will not resign and had no racist intentions when she sent the email.

The message depicts Obama's face superimposed over a baby chimp's. The text under the image reads, "Now you know why — No birth certificate!"

 But it's not about race.



And if you think it's about race, you're the racist.

Trump said of Obama and race: "And he did it with (former President Bill) Clinton. Clinton was made into a racist by Obama, and he's never forgotten it. And there's nobody that's less of a racist than Bill Clinton… He did it with Bill Clinton, and with Hillary. He made them into racists. That's why I was amazed that Hillary went to work for him." He added that “the President is ‘probably’ trying to do the same to him, ‘and there's nobody who's less of a racist than me.’” More from Trump: "Here's two people, Hillary and Bill Clinton, who really devoted a lot to African-Americans. They did probably as much as anybody, and he made them into racists."

Because in the end, it's all the black guy's fault.