Team Trump wants a jury as diverse as a Trump rally

Posted on August 7, 2023 (Updated August 8, 2023) by Laura Clawson

Donald Trump is trying to make federal criminal charges go away the same way he’s dealt with every other difficult thing in his life: through an aggressive media campaign coupled with delay and denial. And, being Trump, he has surrounded himself with lawyers who are happy to go along with it, even though blustery media appearances are not typically the best way to defend a client against federal criminal charges.

The judge and prosecutors are unlikely to be impressed by this approach, but when you consider the media response it’s getting, it’s not hard to see why Trump likes it so much. Take this truly shameful moment on CBS’ “Face the Nation” Sunday. Trump and his lawyers are waging a campaign to, depending how you look at it, get Trump’s trial moved from Washington, D.C., to West Virginia, or simply convince a lot of people that Trump’s trial was unfair because it wasn’t moved out of Washington, the place where he committed his crimes. That led to this exchange:

MAJOR GARRETT: Are you still going to pursue a change of venue?
JOHN LAURO: Absolutely. We—we would like a diverse venue, a diverse jury. One that—that reflects the—

MAJOR GARRETT: Do you have any expectation that will be granted?

JOHN LAURO: That reflects the—the—the—the characteristics of the American people.

It's up to the judge. I think West Virginia would be an excellent venue to try this case.

MAJOR GARRETT: Speaking of the judge—

JOHN LAURO: They're close to D.C. and a much more diverse—

MAJOR GARRETT: Understood.

West Virginia is “much more diverse” than the District of Columbia, Lauro claimed, and Garrett’s response was simply “understood.” Well, Garrett may well understand, but his viewers don’t necessarily. This is a claim that requires some pushback and clarification. Partisanship is the one measure Trump and his lawyers care about here: West Virginia is heavily Republican, but it’s somewhat less heavily Republican than the District of Columbia is Democratic. That’s it. At the same time, West Virginia is extremely white, with much lower percentages of Black, Hispanic, Asian, and American Indian people than the United States as a whole. Trump and his lawyers are using “reflects the characteristics of the American people” and “more diverse” to mean “more Republicans and, related, also more white people,” and Garrett has absolutely nothing to say about that.

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When Trump himself argued on Truth Social last week for a move to West Virginia, he didn’t bother with this “more diverse” nonsense, admitting that the issue was all about the partisan breakdown of the location. West Virginia was “impartial” and “politically unbiased,” he claimed, while it was “IMPOSSIBLE to get a fair trial in Washington, D.C., which is over 95% anti-Trump, & for which I have called for a Federal TAKEOVER in order to bring our Capital back to Greatness.” When he returned to the subject during his weekend of Truth Social ranting, it seems someone had gotten through to him that he couldn’t admit he just wanted a location with fewer Democrats, because he leaned more heavily on his claim that he was just too unpopular in the District due to his call for a federal takeover—a call he’s actively promoting as a strategy to argue for a venue change.

For the record, the U.S. Constitution has this to say about where crimes should be tried:

The Trial of all Crimes, except in Cases of Impeachment, shall be by Jury; and such Trial shall be held in the State where the said Crimes shall have been committed; but when not committed within any State, the Trial shall be at such Place or Places as the Congress may by Law have directed.

Speaking of the Constitution, Lauro also continued trying to push the claim that Trump wasn’t committing crimes, he was merely exercising his free speech when he tried to overturn the 2020 election—another claim the media has treated far too credulously. On “Meet the Press,” Chuck Todd did a slightly better job pushing back against Lauro’s most ridiculous claims than Garrett on “Face the Nation,” with Todd repeatedly noting that the crimes Trump is being charged with are different than the many ways he legally exercised his right to free speech and took his election theft claims to court—where he lost again and again.

Todd and Lauro also had this exchange for the ages:

CHUCK TODD:
[Pence] said the president asked him to violate the Constitution. He said the president asked him to violate the Constitution, which is another way of saying he asked him to break the law.

JOHN LAURO:

He never said, he never said—no, that's wrong. That's wrong. A—a technical violation of the Constitution is not a violation of criminal law. That's just plain wrong. And to say that is contrary to decades of legal statutes.

A “technical violation of the Constitution,” the man said.

Trump and his lawyers want to try this case in the media for good reason. His rabid fans will buy every word of it and it will at least give less-committed Republicans something to work with in justifying their continuing support of him. And every reporter and interviewer who lets Lauro make these claims without robust and fully informed pushback is aiding Trump’s defense in the public eye if not in the courts.

Ted Cruz grows his brand with popular tool — a podcast

Posted on August 1, 2023 (Updated July 31, 2023) by Dominick Mastrangelo

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has been a familiar face and voice on Fox News, right-wing talk radio and elsewhere in the conservative media ecosystem since first being elected to the Senate more than a decade ago.

But these days, Cruz is getting a boost in raising his profile through a media product of his own making.

The Republican lawmaker hosts a now thrice-weekly podcast that has grown in popularity since its first episode published during former President Trump’s first impeachment trial.

Over the last three years, “Verdict” has helped Cruz amass a following of millions of listeners each month, all while promoting frequent GOP talking points, blasting his political enemies and keeping the senator's name in the headlines.

“I’m not interested in being a pundit,” the Republican senator told The Hill during an interview this week. “But part of fighting successfully is communicating and explaining what the issues are that matter. So, I view the podcast as fulfilling one of the really important responsibilities of representing Texans.”

“Verdict” became a quick success in terms of listenership during Trump’s first impeachment drama, quickly climbing podcasting leaderboards, with Politico noting at the time it beat out “The Daily” from The New York Times and Joe Rogan’s popular talk show on iTunes.

Today, it ranks among the top podcasts in the “politics” category and among the top 25 among all “news” podcasts, according to podcast tracking website PodBay. This month alone, “Verdict” has raked in 2 million downloads, including more than a million unique listeners, Cruz said.

The Republican argues that his show, which often features lengthy discussions on constitutional law and politics, has seen success because of what he described as the failings of the mainstream media in acknowledging topics important to conservatives.

“Much of the corporate media does not provide in-depth coverage of what is going on,” Cruz contends. “The reason why people faithfully listen three times a week is because when they’re done they’ve learned something … far better than what they’re able to get from the vast majority of media sources.”

Started initially as an explanatory program laying out and poking holes in the impeachment charges against Trump, Cruz now uses each episode of “Verdict” to pontificate about everything from President Biden’s family to foreign policy issues and other news of the day.

During one recent episode, Cruz explained for his audience the legalese around Hunter Biden’s plea deal, which fell apart in a Delaware courtroom last week after the president’s son was expected to plead guilty to two misdemeanor counts of willful failure to pay income taxes as part of a deal announced last month with the Department of Justice (DOJ).

“It’s a plea deal that is designed to be a slap on the wrist, so Hunter serves no jail time whatsoever, and that it’s real purpose as we’ve discussed is to protect Joe Biden from any exposure to Hunter’s influence-selling and corruptions,” the GOP senator said during the episode.

Cruz, a second-term senator who mounted an unsuccessful campaign for president against Trump in 2016, fashions himself as a media-savvy national political operative — one who is mindful of audience demographics on each platform he appears on.

“If I’m walking through an airport and a woman in her 70s comes up and says, ‘Hey I loved you on TV,’ you know many of the demographic that are watching TV interviews are of an older generation,” the senator said.

“On the other hand, if I’ve got another guy with a ponytail and tattoos comes up and says, ‘Hey, I love what you’re doing,’ I know what the next words he’s going to say. He’s going to mention the podcast.”

Other high-profile lawmakers have also dipped their toes in the podcasting arena. Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) are regulars on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast.

Other up-and-coming lawmakers have used social media to boost their brand, such as freshman Rep. Jeff Jackson (D-N.C.), who has mobilized an aggressive campaign on TikTok to reach voters, and progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who has made news with opinions given while speaking on Instagram Live.

Cruz, likewise, makes it clear his goal with his podcast is to drive the news cycle as much as he can.

“It’s a way of raising issues and advancing issues that matter to Texans,” he told The Hill.

Cruz’s podcasting venture has been met with some criticism, including over the ethics of a sitting U.S. senator operating a talk show.

The Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint with the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Ethics after he reached a syndication agreement with iHeartMedia, one of the largest providers of audio content in the country, contending the deal violated Senate rules on accepting gifts from lobbyists.

iHeartMedia is a registered lobbyist, according to OpenSecrets.

Cruz has said he receives “no financial benefit” from his podcast.

“It’s no surprise Democrats and their allies in the corrupt corporate media take issue with Sen. Cruz’s chart-topping podcast — it allows him to circumvent the media gatekeepers and speak directly to the American people about what is really happening in Washington,” a Cruz spokesman told the Austin American-Statesman at the time.

“Sen. Cruz receives no financial benefit from 'Verdict.' There is no difference between Sen. Cruz appearing on a network television show, a cable news show, or a podcast airing on iHeartMedia.”

While Cruz, who is up for reelection in 2024, still sees some value in traditional cable news hits and radio appearances, he says the show he puts on himself allows for extra flexibility in pushing his agenda.

“Let’s say you’re doing a TV interview and it’s six or eight minutes. That can be valuable if you reach a lot of people,” he said. “But in six or eight minutes, you can’t engage in a whole lot of substance. You can have a few talking points, you can have kind of a clever one-liner, but it’s difficult to have really detailed analysis in a short TV or radio interview. The podcast format, I’ve really grown to like.”

C-SPAN’s cameras have been enjoying free rein and the American people are better off for it

Posted on January 7, 2023 (Updated January 8, 2023) by Walter Einenkel

This past week Americans experienced something that has not happened for 100 years: The House of Representatives took more than a couple of days—and no fewer than 14 votes—to agree upon a speaker. It has been something of a fiasco for the Republican Party because there is no ideological division here. It is simply a power play by the most outspoken oligarchs in the party to force its establishment dinosaurs to concede an extraordinary amount of control to a very small group of fascists.

Something else historic has also happened this week: Americans have had a chance to watch and see so much more of the in-chamber processes that go on when voting gets messy in the modern American legislative branch. The old Saturday Night Live joke in the 1980s was that whenever you had to watch something political on C-SPAN the coverage came through the single camera the network owned. Not this week. This week, C-SPAN has been freed up to give new angles throughout the proceedings of the House voting process.

This has made the entire process so much more interesting to watch and follow than it might normally be.

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Of course, the only reason this has been happening is that there is no official majority party making rules for Congress this session. Usually, the party in control creates specific views of what C-SPAN cameras can cover and broadcast and what they cannot. C-SPAN is operating under the rules established by Speaker Nancy Pelosi for the opening day of the 118th Congress in 2022. Of course, back then, Speaker Pelosi was able to get the confidence vote of her political party without days of theatrics. It has been a game changer in loosening up some of the stodginess of the political process.

Showing the entire chamber and the many interactions that go on or do not go on is an evolution of what the media gets to see. As CNN reports, when cameras were first allowed onto legislative branch floors, in the 1980s and 1990s, folks like Republican Rep. Newt Gingrich of Georgia used the limited visibility they offered to pretend to be big men when, in fact, they were simply pretenders.

When cameras were first allowed, they became a potent political weapon. In the 1980s and early 1990s, congressmen such as Republican Rep. Newt Gingrich of Georgia – later the House speaker – would give speeches criticizing Democrats meant only for the TV cameras. There would be few people in the chamber, and since lawmakers could speak on any subject, it seemed as if there were no answers from the other side.

There have been all kinds of moments showing the various group-ups different sets of representatives had during the many failed votes. Many of those meet-ups included political theater major Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida.

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There was this moment between Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Paul Gosar where AOC showed her patience with a man very few people can stand to be around for more than a minute or two. Reportedly the two discussed the possibilities of a deal where Democratic representatives might throw enough votes McCarthy’s way to give him the Speaker position.

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Now we get to see things like Florida man Matt Gaetz having half of his political party walk out on him while he was speaking.

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Then there was the tragically comedic moment where the incompetent and lying Republican from New York, George Santos, wasn’t even able to do the single job he had.

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All good things must come to an end and at some point, I’m sure the Republican Party will make sure that the cameras in the House stick tightly to a very narrow view. It isn’t that the conservatives in the party do not want Americans to see how they actually act on the floor of the House; it is that they don’t want the American people to become at all interested in what they actually do on the floor of the House.

Cruz picks up corporate partner for podcast

Posted on October 12, 2022 (Updated October 12, 2022) by Jared Gans

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is expanding his weekly podcast to three times per week after picking up iHeartRadio as a corporate partner.

Michael Knowles, the co-host of “Verdict with Ted Cruz,” announced on an episode of the podcast that they received the offer to expand, which he said will take the show to a “huge national audience” on radio stations in addition to the podcast.

“It will make this show sustainable, not just for the next few months going into the midterms but for the next years,” Knowles said.

Cruz described iHeartRadio as a “monster” that has 850 stations across the country. He said they were not looking for the partnership, but iHeartRadio saw the podcast and said they want to take it to “the next level," promoting it on their radio stations and podcasts.

Cruz began the podcast in January 2020 during former President Trump’s first impeachment trial as a forum for him to share his opinions on major political news.

Knowles said on the show that he will not be able to continue to serve as co-host under the agreement due to his own arrangement working on a radio show for The Daily Wire. Ben Ferguson, a conservative podcaster who works for iHeartRadio, will take his place as co-host.

IHeartRadio carries podcasts and talk shows for several other conservative hosts, including Glenn Beck and Fox News’s Sean Hannity.

The podcast episode took place in the midst of a 17-day bus tour Cruz is conducting leading up to the midterm elections next month to campaign for candidates in a wide range of states.

Meet Politico’s new maverick publisher, Peter Elon Bezos Yang Musk or whatever

Posted on September 11, 2022 by Hunter

The Washington Post has a long read on the man now in control of American political news site Politico, and it comes with the newsworthy snippet that Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner sent a rather bizarre email to his executive team "weeks" before the November 2020 elections.

"Do we all want to get together for an hour in the morning on November 3 and pray that Donald Trump will again become President of the United States of America?" he asked his team.

That the rich "entrepreneurial"-styled head of an international news company might have still been backing ridiculous clownburger Donald Trump—after transparently corrupt acts and a pandemic response that relied heavily on his clownburger son-in-law poking his nose into things before everyone lost all remaining interest—is not really news. Much of the news you read comes through the filter of right-leaning corporate owners who don't give a particular damn about anything but themselves and their personal cash flows, whether it be the Post's own worker-gouging Bezos or the unmitigated malevolence of the Murdoch clan. It's baked in.

The weirder part is that Döpfner apparently insisted quite boldly he had never sent such a message, right up until the Post showed him their copy of the email in question, after which he claimed he might have sent such a thing as "an ironic, provocative statement in the circle of people that hate Donald Trump."

You know, just to get a rise out of his own executives. As one does, when one wants to be a free-spirited provocateur.

The “I only did that to be an asshole” defense is itself usually a pretty solid one when it comes to any profile of any chief executive who has rapidly risen through the ranks and now stands on the top of the common rabble, and Döpfner might have had a shot at selling the Ironic Asshole Defense had the email not also contained a numbered list of Trump's supposed best accomplishments, aside from the being impeached for corruption and leading a staff of incompetent mostly-crooked buffoons through a campaign of screwing up any part of government any one of them was aware of.

"No American administration in the last 50 years has done more," wrote Döpfner after listing off successes like "defending the free democracies" against Russia(?), pressuring NATO to spend more money(??) and, of course, "tax reforms."

A complete failure to respond to worldwide pandemic disaster didn't make the cut of Döpfner's concerns, and whether or not Trump instituted a policy to intentionally separate refugee children from their parents is not worth mentioning. It just couldn't compete against the powerful success of "tax reforms."

The Post's profile of Döpfner is gawdawful familiar, even to the point of being rote. We're told that Döpfner's politics are hard to pin down, but that he thinks the Post and The New York Times have gone too far left while he is not a fan of conservative media's "alternative facts." He believes there is a nonpartisan path between the two, between "predictable political camps." He is an iconoclast, spending his money on "a collection of female nudes by female artists" rather than the usual yachts. He's not a fan of racism or homophobia, but as his plaudits for Trump's alleged successes show, neither is a dealbreaker.

Oh, and he calls Elon Musk "one of the most inspiring people" he's met, and the man’s son works for the fascism-promoting white-nationalist-boosting Peter Thiel, and it just happens that the two news outlets at the top of the company's German media empire are a hard-right skeevy tabloid and a not-as-hard-right mostly corporatist paper—an arrangement we here in America are already quite familiar with and do not find "hard to pin down" in the slightest.

By the time you're even halfway through, then, the Post story paints a picture of the sort of big-media iconoclast who is utterly rote at this point. Got it. He's a right-leaning new-money self-promoting entrepreneur type who wants to chart a path where rich people get lots of tax cuts, but we maybe don't burn his LGBTQ friends at the stake. He's here to revamp journalism around a version of centrism that thinks Donald Trump was doing a bang-up job when he was scooting around the world dragging his bare ass on the carpets while not giving a particular damn about the crooked parts or the authoritarianism.

We heard this biography when it was about Musk. Or about Thiel. Or when Andrew Yang declared that all this fuss over hard-right fascism and not-fascism was super-super partisan and what the world needed instead was a new party that didn't care about such things and instead cared about whatever Andrew Yang cared about—cryptocurrencies, maybe. We heard it when it was the Starbucks guy who wanted to run for president on the same platform.

This isn't being a maverick. This is the most bog standard of all possible Rich Person Political Stances. This is the utter, magnificent laziness of men at the top of their profession quickly coming to decide that Politics Itself is wrong and that they, uniquely and truly, are the ones who can see through the nonsense and give us a nice, semi-fascist middle ground.

Jeebus Cripes, this is Great Gatsby stuff. New Wealth Fixes The World is what Ayn Rand choked her pages with. This sort of nihilistic I-can't-be-defined-by-your-politics hokum is the essence of every "tax cuts for rich people, marijuana for the poor people" college libertarian rant—and the people in charge of the world love this vapidity. Each of them is convinced they, personally, may have invented it.

We get it. The moment a certain kind of man gains elevated wealth and power, they can't rest until the rest of the world knows that it's because they have the brain to solve all problems, and the answer they come up with every last time is: A middle position! One where both sides agree that I get tax cuts and we compromise down the middle on the fascism and book-burning and whatnot!

I mean ... whatever. The Post is doing us a service in showing us that time after time, the leaders of all the stuff you watch and read are, for the most part, vapid people who rose through the ranks of other vapid people to become the new earls and dukes of vapidity, but there’s not a lot of divergent thinking among any of them. Is there any question that newspapers find people to own newspapers to be the cleverest and most interesting people in the world? Are you surprised when a new network head is feted by the rest of the industry as having a bold new take on things that only looks exactly the same as the previous take to you because you aren't a media visionary?

Eh. Seriously though, to write a letter boosting Donald Trump for overseeing corporate tax cuts in the fall of 2020, with half a million American pandemic dead, a prior impeachment over corruption, and a list of accomplishments that can best be described only as a campaign of international blowhardism: The new head who will be steering Politico into yet another vision of wealth-backing neutrality seems to have spent a lot less time on his political stances than he has on his art collection. Can't all these iconoclasts follow their hearts, building space yachts shaped like naked women or whatever it is animates them without dragging the rest of us into it? Why dip yourself into politics at all? If all you want are tax breaks, sure, whoever develops a new space program gets a tax break. Whoever figures out a way to keep the state of Florida above water when Greenland's ice sheets collapse gets a tax break, and we'll rename Miami to whatever new name you want.

We'll agree to that if you all stop telling us how your own indifference to the slow dismantling of world democracies amounts, when balanced against new tax policies, to a heretofore unseen and brilliant Third Way. Gawd, just stop already.

No Surprise: New Study Says Cable News More Biased Than 10 Years Ago, Especially After Trump Elected

Posted on August 3, 2022 by Becky Noble

A new study out is showing what anyone who has been alive for more than five minutes was already well aware of, that cable news networks are biased, and that bias has grown much more pronounced in the last ten years especially after the election of Donald Trump.

The study, just published in the “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,” is called, “Measuring Dynamic Media Bias.” The level of network bias was based on guest appearances.

How The Study Was Conducted

Researchers took a look at who came on networks like the Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC, as guests for more than 10 hours between January of 2010, and August of 2020. Those guests were rated on a bias scale which was based on their political views.

The bias scale, dubbed “visibility bias” by researchers, showed what has been apparent to most Americans for years. Fox News was more right leaning, and CNN and MSNBC were more left leaning. However, this visibility bias also determined, based on the guest list, that CNN programs like “Anderson Cooper 360,” and “CNN Tonight,” were even more liberal than MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show.”

Those conducting the study noticed what they believed to be an interesting detail. While Fox News has always been more conservative than either CNN or MSNBC, at one point during the time period being studied, CNN seemed a tad more conservative than MSNBC. After 2015 though, the researchers say that changed.

While each network catered to either a more conservative or liberal audience, the ideological bent of all three networks became more definitive in 2016.

Yphtach Lelkes is an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communication, and one of the co-authors of the study. He explained, “For many years, Fox News was to the right of MSNBC and CNN, but they used to track each other. When Fox moved to the right, so did MSNBC and CNN. They all flowed together. After Trump came into office, they responded to events in the news by leaning away from each other and more strongly toward their respective ideologies.”

The Big Disconnect

What is also becoming more pronounced is the disconnect between those who report the news, and the average viewer who is watching them. The Political Insider reported back in June that a Pew Research Center poll found that 65% of journalists believe they are doing a good and accurate job of reporting news.

That is not what a large portion of the American people think. Only 35% said journalists were actually doing their job the right way. Of the five different areas of journalistic integrity the poll surveyed, journalists gave their overall performances a thumbs up. The reading, listening, and viewing public on the other hand, gave them a hearty thumbs down.

Back in April, during a Q&A session at a University of Chicago forum entitled, “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy,” CNN’s Brian Stelter was part of a panel to whom students posed questions.

It was college freshmen Christopher Phillips who gave those who heard his question to Stelter, hope for future generations. He addressed Stelter’s implication that Fox News was the sole purveyor of misinformation and listed a series of, what turned out to be false stories, that were pushed by CNN. Phillips then asked the money question.

“All the mistakes of the mainstream media, in particular, seem to magically all go in one direction,” Phillips stated. “Are we expected to believe that this is all just some sort of random coincidence or is there something else behind it?”

Death Of Journalism?

For many viewers of cable news, Professor Lelkes and his colleagues have only verified what they have long know to be true. In fact, they have the date— 2016.

It was then New York media columnist Jim Rutenberg, who stated that when covering then candidate Donald Trump, his fellow journalists were essentially justified in breaking every journalistic rule of objectivity they had been taught. The reason why, because Trump was a Republican, and therefore, the enemy.

Even now, names like Joy Reid, Lester Holt, and Don Lemon have said things such as conservatives and Republicans being a threat to freedom, fairness is overrated, and that, “Republicans are doing something that is very dangerous to our society and we have to acknowledge that.”

This study may be attempting to blame Donald Trump and the 2016 election for more obvious bias among cable news networks, but average Americans who knew it was there all along are thanking Trump for verifying it.

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Republicans don’t want to talk about their past actions on Ukraine. They should have to

Posted on March 18, 2022 by Laura Clawson

Oh, hey, Republicans don’t think anyone should be talking about how they had Donald Trump’s back when he withheld military aid from Ukraine to extort personal political favors, and Politico is ready to report on just how unimportant Republicans think that was, drawing on quotes from six Republicans and, to rebut, one single Democrat.

Republicans “don’t see a shred of comparison” between Trump’s extortion effort and President Joe Biden not giving exactly the aid Republicans now claim to want the U.S. to send Ukraine, Politico reports. Republicans “are brushing off any suggestion that their frustration with Biden’s pace of Ukraine aid is at odds with their earlier defense of Trump’s posture toward Kyiv.”

It took three Politico reporters to come up with this, an article that alternates between the reporters’ paraphrasing of Republican dismissals, Republican quotes (sample: “That was the biggest nothing-burger in the world that resulted in an impeachment by the House,” according to Sen. Kevin Cramer), and a few carefully chosen facts about what exactly it is that Republicans are dismissing.

But lots of facts didn’t make it into Politico or are mentioned only in passing. The Washington Post reports, for instance, on the dozens of Senate Republicans who are attacking Biden for not sending more aid to Ukraine after they voted against the government funding bill including $13.6 billion in Ukraine aid. That vote and the funding at issue do not make a single appearance in the Politico article about how Republicans don’t think their past defense of Trump withholding support from Ukraine has any relevance to the current situation.

On that one, Republicans are deploying the “I voted against the thing I say I support because there were also things I opposed in the bill” argument, but as Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy said in response, “Inside every piece of legislation are elements that many of us disagree with. Inside that budget that you voted against are all sorts of things that I disagree with. But in the end, in order to govern the country, you have to be able to find a path to compromise.”

Or, as Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz put it, “It’s very simple: If you don’t vote for the thing, you’re not for the thing,” Schatz said. “That is literally our job, to decide whether we are for or against things as a binary question.”

Republicans decided they were against impeaching Donald Trump for withholding military aid to Ukraine to extort personal political favors from Zelenskyy. Quite a few of them decided they were against aid for Ukraine if it involved also funding the rest of the U.S. government. And they’re getting plenty of space in Politico to explain why the first was merited without being challenged on their reasoning or asked about the second.

Republicans suddenly claim to be the biggest allies of the nation they once denounced as corrupt

Is The Washington Post’s Ashley Parker kidding with this Ukraine aid take? Unfortunately not

Posted on March 17, 2022 by Laura Clawson

The New York Times usually wins the awards for the worst, shallowest political coverage most driven by the imperative of normalizing Republican extremism and attacking Democrats. But Washington Post White House Bureau Chief Ashley Parker has dropped in with a doozy of an entry. She’s taken the serious problem of a brutal war and how the United States can respond without risking a broader and even more devastating war, and making it all about the optics.

It’s appalling that she would write that war-news-as-fashion-analysis sentence,* and it’s worse that this is the sentence she was proud to use to represent her story in the tweet. “Look how clever I am,” that tweet screams. “Aren’t I just at the pinnacle of my profession?” Which, sure, given that her specific profession is the kind of media that caused every other reporter in the White House press briefing room on Wednesday to ask Press Secretary Jen Psaki the exact same question—not because they expected her answer would change, but so their networks would have their own reporters on video asking the same not very interesting question.

President Joe Biden’s comments, Parker wrote, “at times took on an almost defensive tone,” a total flipping mystery of an observation in a story blatantly aimed at putting Biden on the defensive. Parker then goes on to offer three-plus paragraphs of concrete actions Biden has taken to support Ukraine and attempt to get Russia to back away from war before writing, “But since the actual war between Russia and Ukraine began three weeks ago, Biden and his European counterparts have articulated no clear end game, and Wednesday’s Biden-Zelensky juxtaposition offered something of a split screen, with the U.S. president and his team trying to explain why the administration was falling short on meeting Zelensky’s stirring request.”

They’re not trying to explain why they’re falling short. They’re explaining why a U.S.-imposed no-fly zone would be a very bad idea—and even many Republicans committed to attacking Biden agree on that point, though many are urging him to send fighter jets, a move Psaki explained would cross the line from providing defensive weapons to sending offensive ones. As Psaki also said, “If we were President Zelenskyy, we would be asking for everything possible as well, and continuing to ask for it.” Zelenskyy is doing what he should be doing as the leader of his country. Biden’s job is to lead this country, and as long as there is any other possible option, that means avoiding war with Russia.

About Republicans, by the way: Parker quotes two of them—Sens. Ben Sasse and Susan Collins—urging the administration to send fighter jets. What she doesn’t do is what should be mandatory every time a Republican who was in office in 2020 is quoted on Ukraine: Describe how they voted on the impeachment of Donald Trump for withholding nearly $400 million of military aid and public shows of support from Ukraine and Zelenskyy while Trump engaged in a pressure campaign aimed at getting Zelenskyy help him harm Biden’s political prospects.

In a reasonable media environment, one does not get to go from defending the withholding of aid to demanding the immediate, not fully considered, provision of an entirely new category of powerful military equipment without facing some serious questions about one’s partisan motives. But as Ashley Parker went all in on showing us with this story, this is not a reasonable media environment.

* To be clear, fashion analysis is an important thing when done well. In this case, it was embarrassingly misplaced. Because it was shallow, unserious fashion analysis, it added to the overall offense of this article.

The U.S. economy is beating the world, thanks to Joe Biden, but you wouldn't know it from the media

Fascism: Trump vows pardons for Jan. 6 seditionists, calls for nationwide protests if indicted

Posted on January 30, 2022 (Updated January 31, 2022) by Hunter

Republican Party leader and traitor to the nation Donald Trump continues to test new rally waters in anticipation of a repeat presidential bid. On Saturday the delusional narcissist made no particular effort to hide his disgust for the law and for those who would hold him to it, delivering an ugly, unhinged, and unabashedly fascist speech to a crowd of like-minded traitors.

His most newsworthy proclamation was a vow to pardon the seditionists of the January 6 insurrection. "If I run and I win, we will treat those people from Jan. 6 fairly."

"And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons. Because they are being treated so unfairly."

BREAKING: President Trump promises to PARDON Jan. 6 prisoners if he runs and wins in 2024 pic.twitter.com/teYbYNBcuB
— RSBN 🇺🇸 (@RSBNetwork) January 30, 2022

It is not immediately clear if the traitor, who gathered and incited a crowd to "march" to the U.S. Capitol on that day and hour as part of a multi-pronged plan for his Republican Party to nullify his presidential election loss while using "emergency" presidential powers to either militarily oversee a "new" election or simply declare himself the legitimate winner, is promising a blanket pardon of all those involved in the violence. He may also be vowing to use presidential pardons to erase legal consequences for only his own inner circle of co-conspirators, just as he used it to immunize those allies when he last had the power to do so.

The intent of the message is clear either way. Trump is allying himself with those that helped him carry out his seditious—and deadly—insurrection, and is dropping promises of "pardons" as encouragement to his allies to keep fighting to block probes into the violence. Stonewall the prosecutions and refuse to cooperate with investigators, the traitorous criminal hints, and he will make your troubles go away again when he is returned to power.

But Trump went even farther. Citing the (many) investigations against him for crimes ranging from the previous insurrection to the pressure on Georgia officials to "find" new votes to a lifelong pattern of financial fraud, the fascist leader pushed his fascist supporters to respond to any potential indictment against him by taking to the streets.

"If these radical, vicious, racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal, I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protest we have ever had in Washington D.C., in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere, because our country and our elections are corrupt. They're corrupt."

After ranting about the prosecutors investigating him, Trump calls the prosecutors racist and says if they do anything illegal, he hopes there are massive protests in DC, New York, and Atlanta pic.twitter.com/RnY6F5OJNv
— Acyn (@Acyn) January 30, 2022

It is the hallmark of a fascist leader and his party: The claim that prosecution of his own crimes, or the crimes of his violent supporters, proves only that the whole nation was "corrupt" and needed to be remade. Trump is wedging racist in there because, both in Georgia and in New York, the head investigators of his crimes are Black.

Far from being deterred by the violence of his attempted insurrection, Trump is simultaneously promising to erase the crimes of those who attempted to topple the government on his behalf and pressing his Republican followers to mount even "bigger" street actions to keep his own criminal behind out of a prison cell. The man continues to betray his country in every way it is possible to betray it, and all of it is centered only around himself and his own desires.

In his previous rounds of presidential pardons, Trump pardoned those who committed war crimes; those who treated immigrants with illegal cruelty; those who obstructed investigations on his behalf; those who acted as agents of foreign powers. His pardons were all aimed at neutralizing prosecutions of those who did illegal things in service of racist, xenophobic, or Trump-promoting ends.

The Republican leader's promise to "pardon" those who engaged in violent insurrection on his behalf made barely a ripple on the Sunday shows or among the Republicans still loyal to that insurrection. Trump is overtly thumping for future seditious acts, and the Republican Party, purged of anyone who is not a willing accessory to even violent crimes, has little to say about it.

As gutless as ever, Sen. Lindsey Graham will only allow that it is "inappropriate" to promise pardons for insurrectionists. But only that; he will go no farther, lest he say something too bold and lose favor with the pro-fascist base.

"I think it is inappropriate" -- Lindsey Graham on Trump promising pardons to those convicted of crimes connected to the January 6 attack on Congress (Graham then tries to bothsides it by bringing up Kamala Harris) pic.twitter.com/Hr6Sgz8RPp
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 30, 2022

And as spineless as ever, Sen. Susan Collins—one of the few Republicans who dared vote to impeach Trump after the insurrection, will only allow that she is "very unlikely" to support Trump as future presidential candidate.

Susan Collins won't shut the door on supporting Trump in 2024 even after voting for his conviction following his second impeachment trial pic.twitter.com/tWfNt57kYv
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 30, 2022

So not even orchestrating an attempted coup is sufficient reason to fully and completely rule out support for the plotter? Truly, there may never be another political figure as relentlessly rudderless as this one.

More of the Sunday show debate was spent on allowing the defenders of insurrection to sniff about the alleged impropriety of Biden's promise to appoint a Black woman to the Supreme Court than was spent on asking those same Republicans to stand against Trump's visions of mass riots and promised pardons for insurrection.

The Sunday shows are still pointedly neutral when it comes to the choice between peaceful democracy and violence-led fascism. They do not care. Nobody involved cares. They will book the same guests to tell the same lies and support the same crimes from now until the end of the republic, and not a single host will stand against such violence if it means losing interview access to those backing it.

Trump's latest rally speeches are clear-cut attacks on the very fabric of the nation. He insists that elections are "corrupt," leading the entire Republican Party into similar rejections of our democracy's validity. He insists that those who investigate his alleged wrongdoing—up to and including violent insurrection—are "corrupt," and promises to immunize those who ally with them against the institutions that would prosecute them for such crimes.

He is a fascist-minded, mostly-delusional traitor to the republic. All those who cheer for him are the same. Trump himself appears to believe that it would be better to plunge the nation into a new civil war than recognize either the validity of his last election loss or the validity of a new one, and he has nearly all Republican Party officials and lawmakers as allies in the effort.

It is impossibly corrupt, all of it, and historians continue to scream that this is precisely how democracies are toppled. With a lazy, dull-witted press; with a party that emphasizes good corruption over bad prosecution; with a base that does not give a damn about any of it, because they are single-mindedly obsessed over the notion that the nebulous other is oppressing them and for that, must be punished.

There is no way this does not end in a tidal wave of political violence. And that, too, will likely be downplayed by Sunday show hosts looking to book those who would ally with it.

Fascism: House Republican extremists look to support candidates as devoted to Trump as they are

Posted on December 28, 2021 by Hunter

There's a lot to take in on this Washington Post story about House Republican extremists recruiting like-minded conspiracy freaks in order to move their party even farther to the right than it has already gone. On the surface, there's nothing too surprising here: House conspiracy theorists like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Madison Cawthorn are helping to boost the would-be careers of other conspiracy cranks in Republican primaries, so as to shove out more moderate Republicans who have beliefs like "presidents should not be allowed to commit crimes" or "overthrowing democracy rather than recognizing a valid election loss might, in the long term, not work out so well."

And the plan, to the extent that anything rattling around in Greene or Cawthorn's head could be called one, is also a tried-and-true one. The "MAGA" clown brigade wants to target insufficiently fascist-minded Republicans in hard-right districts, instead propping up like-minded conspiracy promoters and avid Dear Leader loyalists in places that will always vote Republican no matter who is thrown in front of voters. Greene is herself an example of that; there is absolutely nothing about her that would suggest she ought to be put in any position of power, her QAnon beliefs have been on the extreme end of batshit even compared to the normal batshittery promoted by Trump's own professional conspiracy inventors like Steve Bannon or Rudy Giuliani, her anti-democracy, pro-violence statements should have already gotten her driven out of Congress on grounds of bare decorum, and she is absolutely assured to keep her seat because Republican voters like angry, uninformed, and possibly violent conspiracy cranks.

The risk of such plans is that you can end up promoting cranks so dodgy that they end up doing something that even hard-hard-right voters can't quite stomach, resulting in a steep decline in Republican votes on election day as those voters stay home. Similarly, if your entire operation depends on promoting extremists with extremist views, the odds are high that a few of those newly chosen Republican candidates will end up having, ahem, past "hobbies" that get exposed to voters before election day and which may or may not constitute crimes.

The Republican MAGA brigade has been doing exactly zero vetting, basing support solely on candidate willingness to impeach Joe Biden, overturn the presidential election results, and/or appoint Donald Trump the God-King of the House. In fact, let's just pause right there, for a moment, to contemplate the thought of Marjorie Taylor Greene or Madison Fake Russian Wife Cawthorn and their combined staff attempting to "vet" would-be crackpot allies so as to weed out any that were too sketchy.

Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure it's a top-notch operation. And I'm sure it got even better when the staff sprung for a second Ouija board to go along with the first.

So that's the story. But there's a whole lot of other sketch in the Post's story even taking all that into account, and it's ... concerning? Off-putting? Odd? It's hard to pin down.

For example: "Trump critics warn that a stronger MAGA wing in Congress threatens democracy," says the Post. Really? Really, it's "Trump critics" who are saying that elevating candidates who publicly express demands that elections be overturned based on known-fraudulent propaganda poses a threat to democracy? As opposed to, say, Every Expert Ever? When a political party is making a pledge to overturn elections a core measure of candidate loyalty, do we really need to cite "critics" to assert that elections might be in danger? Huh.

Or this: "Candidates seeking [Trump's] approval meet with him at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., where he peppers them with questions that test their MAGA bona fides," says the Post.

Okay, but we know what that looks like. We don't need to guess; we saw it in every Cabinet meeting and on every campaign trail. Candidates meet Trump's "approval" by kissing his ass wholeheartedly and more imaginatively than the last guy to come along, and they lose his "approval" if they say even the slightest thing critical of him, personally. He doesn't give a rat's ass about any other policy or issue. It's just the ass-kissing. Painting those sessions as Trump "peppering" anyone with "tests" of their MAGA loyalty is very odd phrasing.

MAGA is, without question, devotion to Trump. Nothing else applies. There's no other "test." The party is divided into those willing even to end democratic government on Trump's behalf and those that might have second thoughts while doing it. The Post story makes that clear, not needing to cite any experts for their assertion that MAGA looks to "purge the GOP of those not deemed loyal to the former president and his false claims that the 2020 election was rigged."

Greene-supported candidate Rick Slabjaw—sorry, a generic conspiracy crank of certain complexion who goes by the name of "Joe Kent"—"wants to force Republicans into tough votes, starting with articles of impeachment against President Biden and a full congressional inquiry into the 2020 presidential election, which he says was stolen from Trump," reports the Post. And, glory be, the other competitors are also ex-military or ex-athlete types, "telegenic and mostly White male millennials," as the Greene-Cawthorn-Boebert-Jordan-Gaetz wing of the party pin their hopes on thickheaded Aryan faces with telegenic paranoias.

It's the subtext of the story that makes it so off-putting. This is a very, very gentle way for the Post to be alerting the public of plans to further purge Republicanism of anyone unwilling to topple democracy on a bumbling, lying narcissist's behalf. We are talking about the most openly fascist wing of the party, a group obsessed with retaliating against anyone who does not promote known-false hoaxes meant to undermine public faith in our elections. We're talking about the wing of the party unwilling to condemn politically motivated violence, a wing that is continuously flirting with the edges of endorsing such acts themselves.

Here's one of the "MAGA" Republicans currently aiming for Congress: Noah Malgeri.

Republican US House candidate Noah Malgeri called for General Mark Milley to be executed live on C-SPAN. pic.twitter.com/DcdoG00aQx
— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) December 27, 2021

Malgeri has the support of the white nationalism-allied fascist group "Republicans for National Renewal," and the endorsement of neo-Nazi dabbling Rep. Paul Gosar, and has been palling around in Lauren Boebert circles. He's a conspiracy-adjacent, fascism-promoting self-described "nationalist." There's not anything subtle about it.

Can you even talk about House Republican efforts to further radicalize their own party without that subtext? The "candidates" we're talking about are ones who so ally themselves with (1) Trump and (2) nationalist "renewal" that they are publicly demanding we throw away whatever parts of democracy conflict with it.

Five years from now, could this whole article be rewritten under the title How Fascism Happened? Because a group of House Republicans who are fervent conspiracy mongers, who continually tease at the edges of promoting violence, who vow to remove the current president and rewrite history to proclaim that Actually, Dear Leader was victorious all along—that feels like a lot to take in, and considerably more dire than "House MAGA squad seeks to expand" lets on.

We're in the odd place where anyone who knows anything about history or government is shouting at us that this, exactly this, is how democracies fall, but the papers are still trying very, very hard to write the story within the bounds of a normal political tiff. "Trump critics" worry that a party's devotion to malevolent propaganda, a rejection of facts, an insistence on anti-intellectualism that paints even dying in a pandemic as preferable to going along with scheming scientists, and a singleminded devotion to a showboating lifelong buffoon are all core fascist tenets that Republicanism has rewritten itself to accommodate.

Maybe that's because anyone unwilling to accept the new premise that a narcissist who has blamed "fraud" or "cheating" for every loss in his sorry-ass life was "cheated" out of reelection has been declared a "Trump critic."

Republican extremists have been very successful in defining that boundary and getting political reporters to adhere to it. If you are willing to denounce objective facts and declare that reality is now whatever Donald Trump last said it was, you are "MAGA." Everyone else, every other person in America regardless of party, partisanship, or profession, is now only a Trump critic.