Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I’m only here for the duck photos.

I swear, each month of 2020 will have its own history degree.

How has Obama failed you today?

This blog goes to 11…

Naturally gregarious and alpha

Dinky Hocker shoots smack!

Not all heroes wear capes.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

Screw the Judean People’s Front. Splitters.

Women: they get shit done

I did not have this on my fuck 2020 bingo card.

I can’t take this shit today. I just can’t.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

I personally stopped the public option…

The math demands it!

Let there be snark.

Nevertheless, she persisted.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Deploy the moving finger of emphasisity!

It’s not even safe to go out and pick up 2 days worth of poop anymore.

How do you get liars to care about the truth?

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

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Opinions Differ

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Here’s how a real newspaper writes a headline: Trump asked if disinfectants could be injected to kill the coronavirus inside the body. Doctors answered: ‘People will die.’ See how they did that? First, they quote him accurately (he talked about injecting disinfectant — how fucking dumb do you have to be to think that Lysol in the vein is a solution to anything but your continued presence on the planet?) Second, when the preponderance of Doctors say that something will kill you, it’s OK to write “this will kill you”, even if Dr. Oz, Dr. Phil and Dr. Dolittle disagree.

It’s 8 AM on a Friday, and I’m already feeling like there’s not enough gin in the fucking world.

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Consider This – The Hint of the Century

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I hope all none of the Bill Barr fans in the audience are sitting down, because there was a WaPo news alert last night that you might have missed:

Attorney General William P. Barr has told people close to President Trump — both inside and outside the White House — that he is considering quitting over Trump’s tweets about Justice Department investigations, three administration officials said, foreshadowing a possible confrontation between the president and his attorney general over the independence of the Justice Department.

Almost every word of this is bullshit:

  • Nobody is “close to” President Trump. He has no close advisors – he just have people who do his bidding, try to manipulate him, or try to curry his favor.
  • There’s no “administration” – there is no “White House” as it was conceived by journalists in the past, something Jay Rosen is constantly pointing out.
  • Barr is considering quitting in the same way that I’m considering flying to the moon on a spaceship made of spun unicorn hair and hobbit spit.
  • A “confrontation” between Trump and Barr over the “independence” of the Justice Department is impossible, because you need to have a disagreement to have a confrontation, and both of those guys are in violent agreement about the role of Justice in enabling Trump to do whatever the fuck he wants.

This is just noise, but every day the noise is different. The four (!) reporters bylined on this story just live in a box that won’t allow them to admit the obvious truth that Barr is fully on board with whatever Trump wants. So, we have this “breaking” news that just shows us that the DC media is broken.

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Late Night Horrorshow Open Thread: “How did the Republican party arrive at this place?”

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Trumpschemes 2020 Open Thread: Normal Parscale Grandiosity, or Fear of A Breaking Story?

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On the one hand, it’s extremely in character for Brad Parscale, drunk on his self-perceived “power” to announce that You guys don’t get to sit at our table so there!!!, should make an outsized fuss about the media outlet owned by a real billionaire who is now challenging Brad’s boss.

On the other hand, it’s extremely in character for Brad Parscale, strip mall PC specialist turned campaign ‘data expert’ by the grace of the GRU, to try and preempt a(nother) breaking-news investigation by a major media outlet that will (further) damage Parscale’s direct report. Per Politico:

News organizations reacted warily to the Trump campaign’s announcement Monday that it will no longer credential Bloomberg News reporters for campaign events in response to the outlet’s decision not to investigate its owner, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, or his Democratic rivals for president.

Trump Campaign manager Brad Parscale said the move, which Bloomberg News said would ensure equal footing for each Democratic candidate, indicated a bias against Trump because the outlet would continue to cover him critically while going easy on his Democratic rivals…

The move is reminiscent of the 2016 election, when the Trump team denied press credentials to numerous outlets, including POLITICO, The Washington Post, and BuzzFeed News, because of coverage the campaign considered biased or unfair.

The 2020 campaign’s policy may extend beyond Trump’s rallies, with Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the Republican Party, announcing that the GOP will “no longer credential” Bloomberg representatives. It could also affect White House coverage, given that Bloomberg reporters regularly travel with the president to events as part of the White House pool…

Bloomberg News, a global news organization of 2,700 journalists and analysts, has long had a policy of not initiating investigations into the billionaire businessman, his family or his foundation, and announced last week it would extend that practice to his 2020 Democratic rivals, in the wake of Bloomberg’s entry into the race.

Bloomberg News will continue to investigate the Trump administration, though it plans to reassess its policy if Michael Bloomberg becomes the Democratic nominee…

Dean Baquet, executive editor of the New York Times, took issue with the move against Bloomberg News. “We condemn any action that keeps quality news media from reporting fairly and accurately on the presidency and the leadership of the country,” he said in a statement.

But Bloomberg’s policy of not covering its owner has also drawn criticism from journalists for departing from how news organizations typically handle such situations. The Washington Post, for one, doesn’t restrict reporters from digging into its billionaire owner, Amazon chief Jeff Bezos…

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Late Night Horrorshow Open Thread: Florida (Thanksgiving) Man

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Cranky grandpa, like others of his ilk, gets hauled away from his comfort zone for the big media-friendly “family” holiday. (Hey, it’s not like anyone in his biological family was gonna miss him.) Kudos to his handlers, who seem to have succeeded in readjusting his meds to the point where he can, however briefly, perform well enough to excite the Media Village Idiots. Such as Politico, back to d/b/a Mr. Pierce’s Tiger Beat on the Potomac:

… It was a journey shrouded in more secrecy than usual even for a presidential trip into a war zone. And it merged the made-for-TV drama Trump savors with a military display he loves: the U.S. commander-in-chief on Thanksgiving, less than a year from the next election, surrounded by cheering troops in Afghanistan.

For a president who at times seems to be at war with his own military leaders, it was a celebration of America’s troops that a small circle of White House aides planned carefully for weeks to prevent leaks that could scuttle the trip…

This time, 12 of the 13 journalists who traveled with Trump — representing news wires, print and broadcast outlets — were picked up on the roof of a public parking garage near Joint Base Andrews just outside Washington and not even told where they were traveling until just before they arrived in Afghanistan. Cell phones, hotspots and any other devices emitting a signal were confiscated from everyone traveling on Air Force One — yes, even the president himself…

The president moved through the sprawling base in a 15-vehicle motorcade that included tan Toyotas with soldiers standing in the truck beds holding combat rifles. Trump was followed into each location by teams of heavily armed combat troops in fatigues, helmets and night-vision goggles.

[Just like a Tom Clancy movie, if Tom Clancy’s hero was a fat old man who can barely strut from his motorcade to his golf cart.]

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Friday Evening Open Thread: All Too True

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Urban Dictionary attributes the original usage to Rahm Emmanuel in 2009.

The article, by “founding editor of POLITICO” John F. Harris, absolutely lives down to its original title:

… It is too early to tell what will come of House Democrats’ decision to launch an impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump, but not too early to conclude that Speaker Nancy Pelosi has failed to revive the concept of solemnity in American politics.

That was the obvious intent Tuesday, when she stood in front of a bank of flags, invoking the Founding Fathers and Constitutional Convention of 1787, as she announced the impeachment inquiry.

But the reaction, underway even before she started speaking, made clear that for much of the country, it was just another day in what Rahm Emanuel, when he was Barack Obama’s chief of staff, called the metropolis of “Fucknutsville.” The news may be important, it may be swerving wildly in surprising ways, but never these days is it something that commands reverent attention.

People below a certain age may not have firsthand experience with news events that did indeed command that reaction — and impeachment proceedings against a president unambiguously would have been one of them…

He blames — you will no doubt be shocked! — what he calls ‘the Lewinsky Affair.’ The beclownification of which, of course, was very much a boon for the men who would later found Politico, but then irony is dead and therefore cannot sue for libel.

Because this remains the internet:

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DC Press Corpse Open Thread: President As CEO vs. President As Cultural Phenom

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Many years ago, when I subscribed to a dead-tree Washington Post weekly, a friend who’d grown up in the area explained that Washington DC is a company town where the monopoly industry is national politics. Which means that the Post treats every President as a CEO analogue — someone responsible for keeping the local industry running on an even keel, so that government workers and the hundreds of thousands of people whose livelihoods depend on those workers prosper.

The NYTimes considers itself as the national financial capitol; what interests them about any President is how he’s perceived by global business interests. The current Oval Office Occupant, however disastrous for individual Americans and the larger world, has *so far* been satisfactory as a novelty performer whose directors have not, to date, interfered in the ever-burgeoning prosperity of the oligarchs who support the NYTimes…

Thing is… when the profit-taking fails, the performer’s zany antics no longer disguise the smash’n’grab, there’s nothing left to loot… what becomes of the NYTimes? Or at least its most public face?

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