When two generals, John Kelly and Mark Milley, who worked for Dear Leader call him a dangerous fascist, shouldn't that be enough for all of us to make the right choice for president? Listen to the felon's own words:
As president, you have tremendous — it's called extreme power. You have extreme power. You can, just by the fact, you say, "Close the border," and the border's closed. That's it. Very, very simple. You don't need all of this nonsense that they talk about.
I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within, not even the people that have come in — and destroying our country and, by the way, totally destroying our country. The towns and villages, they're being inundated. But I don't think they have the problem in terms of Election Day. I think the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think. And it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard or if really necessary by the military, because they can't let that happen.
The Harris campaign condemned the remark.
[Von Clownstick] is suggesting that his fellow Americans are worse "enemies" than foreign adversaries, and he is saying he would use the military against them.
Ian Bassin adds:
There is not a case in American history where a presidential candidate has run for office on a promise that they would exact retribution against anyone they perceive as not supporting them in the campaign. It's so fundamentally, outrageously beyond the pale of how this country has worked that it's hard to articulate how insane it is.
The issue came up during Harris' interview on Fox during which Bret Baier showed a clip of the Orange Turd that conveniently left out a crucial part of his response. Harris pointed that out and Baier later said he made a "mistake".
Brian Karem praises Harris' effort on Fox and characterizes this election as "Democracy vs. new-age nazis".
That [Fuckface] is still in this race is a testament to the poisonous nature of American politics, the gullibility of the American electorate, the greed of those in power and the influence that the rich and informed have over the poor and misinformed. And it shows just how badly the media is doing its job.
This motion provides a comprehensive account of the defendant's private criminal conduct; sets forth the legal framework created by [the former guy] for resolving immunity claims; applies that framework to establish that none of the defendant’s charged conduct is immunized because it either was unofficial or any presumptive immunity is rebutted; and requests the relief the government seeks, which is, at bottom, this: that the court determine that the defendant must stand trial for his private crimes as would any other citizen.
Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein highlight eleven details from the document.
Much of Smith's brief focused on [Fuckface's] state of mind in the weeks leading up to the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021. Smith described a slew of conversations suggesting that the then-president knew his claims of election fraud were spurious. And Smith laid out evidence that [the] sole objective was to stay in power — not, as he and his lawyers have claimed, to exercise legitimate authority over election integrity.
Alone with his phone
[Dear Leader] asked: "So what?"
Disregarding the results
Inventing statistics
Broken promises of evidence
Mocking Sidney Powell
[The] January 5 call to Steve Bannon
A preview of forensic evidence
"Make them riot"
Rudy's rise
Rudy's follies
Tim, I’m focused on the future.
Vance is pretty slick. I found a comment immediately after the debate from NBC telling--it was described as a good, old-fashioned policy debate and nothing weird happened. Vance lied his ass off, but made the Orange Turd look like a lunatic in comparsion.
Four more observations:
Vance Made The Case For Himself As [the felon's] Heir
Minnesota Nice
Walz Found His Footing On Abortion
Vance's Too-Slick Answer on Health Care
Harris had [the felon] shake her hand during their first-ever meeting.
Harris effectively baited the former president on crowd sizes and his 2020 election loss.
[He] went on wild tangents focused on false claims.
The moderators fact-checked some of [Fuckface's] wildest claims.
Conservative pundits were not happy with [Dear Leader's] performance.
Harris wants a second debate. [He] hasn't committed.
Update (September 11): Heather Digby Parton sums up the debacle.
[Von Clownstick] relentlessly hammered on migrants which will probably play well with his base, along with all the other lies and conspiracy theories, but to anyone else he sounded like a lunatic, surly, rude and out of his depth. His laziness and inability/unwillingness to learn anything new caught up with him last night. He lost this debate, as he would say, bigly.
And Amanda Marcotte says there's no way to "sanewash" this performance.
After last night's debate performance, hopefully, the questions about [his] basic brain functionality will grow even louder.
These are just two recent examples of crazy shit the Republican presidential nominee says:
Whoever heard you get indicted for interfering with a presidential election, where you have every right to do it.
The transgender thing is incredible. Think of it. Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child.
But many of these kinds of statements aren't adequately covered in the press. Parker Molloy argues that media "sanewashing" is a form of misinformation.
By continually reframing [the felon's] incoherent and often dangerous rhetoric as conventional political discourse, major news outlets are failing in their duty to inform the public and are instead providing cover for increasingly erratic behavior from a former — and potentially future — president.
The consequences of this journalistic malpractice extend far beyond misleading headlines. By laundering [the orange turd's] words in this fashion, the media is actively participating in the erosion of our shared reality.
Update (September 5): Greg Sargent notes that news stories about President Biden's age were justified as relevant to his ability to do the job if re-elected.
But if so, then why don't things like [Dear Leader's] obvious cognitive impairment, his frequent inability to speak and think coherently, his resolute refusal to acquire minimal baseline knowledge on many consequential issues, his tendency to invent things on the fly that are wildly disconnected from reality, his intense narcissism, his deliberate lying and bigotry and misogyny—to name just a few traits—also go to his core mental and characterological capacity to do the job as president?
Sargent argues that reporting about the Republican candidate needs to "treat signs of the subject's questionable mental fitness for the presidency—and the politics surrounding them—as themselves being the real news".
Update (September 6): Chris Hayes on "the quality of brains we've got over there".
And Heather Digby Parton points out another Fuckface train wreck answer to a question about child care.
But the media covered for him as they so often do. He has the whole press corps acting as his ghostwriter, sanitizing his babble for the public. But Joe Biden and Kamala Harris aren't so lucky. They have to campaign and govern in a world where they are held to the standard that requires a president to be able to demonstrate his or her fitness for the presidency.
For the press to do otherwise
Why, they might even conclude that he doesn't have the mental capacity to be president. I guess that would be rude.
Update (September 7): Additional reactions:
SiriusXM host Dean Obeidallah likened [the felon's] comments on child care to a "dementia clinic." And political commentator Digby said the ex-president "sounds like a 4th grader who didn't read the book." And Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell noted that she "can't even find a complete sentence" when reading the transcript of his comments.
Update (September 9): Jennifer Rubin offers her take on the "sanewashing" phenomenon.
Imagine obsessing over polls in the 1933 German election without covering Mein Kampf. That is what is going on now.
It's utter journalistic malpractice if not outright bias to refuse to ask [Dear Leader] at the debate about his threats of bloody mass arrests. It's an easy call for ABC. I have no idea if they are up to it.
And again, Christians: Get out and vote! Just this time. You won't have to do it anymore! Four more years, you know what? It'll be fixed, it'll be fine. You won't have to vote anymore. In four years you don't have to vote again, we'll have it fixed so good you're not gonna have to vote.
Update (July 29): Heather Digby Parton offers her take.
If it weren't for his constant praise for dictators and tyrants and his repeated comments that he should be allowed to stay in office beyond two terms, I might be willing to believe some people's interpretations of this startling remark to mean that he will fix everything in four years so they will have no reason to be involved in politics after that. But that makes no sense since unless he means he's not leaving office, people will always have to vote lest their opponents reverse their gains as [Fuckface] himself is promising to do right now. No, he said what he said and we know what he means.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat warns of more "troubling rhetoric" to come.
[The felon] is really making very clear his intentions of telling people that they need to get him into office — and then, there will be no more need for elections. And the way he phrases it is as though it's a bother, it's a burden to have to vote. [T]his is obviously disturbing from so many points of view.
[T]he authoritarian, from Mussolini onward, has always presented himself as not just the savior of the nation, but the person who will take care of things and lighten the burden of the people.
Update (July 30): Yeah, this clears it up.
Don't worry about the future, you have to vote on November 5. After that you don't have to worry about voting anymore, I don't care. The country will be fixed and we won't even need your vote anymore.
Even worse, a Rolling Stone investigation finds that about 70 election officials in swing states are willing to block election certification.
Certification of election results is what legal experts consider a "ministerial task," and one required by state and local law. But as [the felon's] lies about the 2020 election have taken hold, Republicans nationwide have decided that certification provides them an opportunity to hear fraud allegations — and refuse to officially count their local votes. Republicans have refused to certify election results at least 25 times since [Fuckface] lost the 2020 election to President Joe Biden.
I finally agree with [my uncle]: It would be a huge mistake to elect the oldest candidate in American history.
Former presidential candidate Nikki Haley had an insightful comment in January.
The first party to retire its 80-year-old candidate is going to be the party that wins this election.
And Joe Scarborough sums up the Republican reaction to the news that the President will not seek re-election.
Joe Biden puts country first and Republicans meltdown. What a tell.
Update (July 23): Heather Digby Parton describes the sorry state of the GOP.
So what do the Republicans think about all this?
They seem to have been caught completely flat-footed.
It seems that they may not have anticipated that Joe Biden gracefully withdrawing from the race might be seen as an act of selfless patriotism in contrast to their [Dear Leader], the grasping egomaniac who incited a riot rather than admit that he lost. The contrast couldn't be more vivid.
And Amanda Marcotte points out the advantages of a Kamala Harris candidacy.
[The felon] and his team aren't hiding their full-blown panic that Biden dropped out. They're scared for many reasons. Their entire campaign could be boiled down to "Biden is too old," and now it's [Fuckface] who is the old and incoherent guy in the race. But I suspect it's also because Harris could blow up their strategy to turn out young male voters. The campaign obviously hoped they could send misogynist signals to certain kinds of young men, without female swing voters noticing. And it probably would have worked with Biden at the top of the ticket, unable to draw attention to what [Manbaby] is doing. Harris won't have that problem. She can do one interview and speech after another where she reminds female voters that [the Orange Turd] is a sexual predator and that he and his team would ban abortions, even for rape victims. With her background, she may be in a better position to push this issue than any other potential Democratic nominee could have been.
Update (July 24): Marcotte further elaborates.
With Harris as the Democratic nominee [the felon] is caught in a no-win situation. If he continues to hang back from the campaign trail while she's out there hustling, he'll start inviting the questions about whether he's too old and weak, the exact questions that plagued Biden. But if he starts doing more media and events that are outside the MAGA bubble, he will draw negative attention and remind voters why they hate him.
Update (July 29): Ryan Teague Beckwith sees a strong, simple theme for the new candidate.
Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign message is clear. She loves freedom and [Dear Leader] is weird.
It doesn't hurt that the campaign got permission from Beyoncé to use the song "Freedom" at events.
Sabrina Haake notes another strong message from the Vice President.
Harris talks about abortion rights clearly, forcefully and unapologetically, and will help shape abortion into the pivotal issue in November.
Update (August 9): Democrats are energized and Heather Digby Parton notices that the felon just isn't the same after a "meltdown" press conference.
He was dour and angry and frankly is starting to look a whole lot older, just in the past few months. He's not enjoying himself and it shows and compared to the excited crowds greeting Harris and Walz this week this sad, pathetic appearance seemed almost funereal. [Fuckface von Clownstick] isn't fun anymore.
I think he's considering for the first time that he might lose again and he is not psychologically equipped to deal with that reality.
Update (August 16): Frank Luntz describes the results he found from a focus group comparing the vice president to her opponent.
On these personality traits, Harris has a tremendous advantage over [the felon] and there are people who had voted for [him] in 2020 that will not vote for him again because they're tired of his rude and abusive behavior.
Update (August 19): Vice presidential candidate Tim Walz spoke to the Aliquippa High School football team.
Politics isn't so much different than this. It's about something bigger than themselves. It's about setting a future goal and trying to reach it. It's about doing it with dignity and hard work. It's about doing it with humility and when you lose, you walk across the field, you shake hands with the other team and know they played hard, too. But we're all in it together to try and make it better.
Our country's not that different. Our neighbors wanna be with ya, our neighbors wanna do what's right and the more we figure out that we're in this thing together and we have more in common than we have separated, we're gonna do a heck of a lot better.
Heather Digby Parton sees a reason for optimism.
The Harris/Walz ticket has the momentum, creativity and palpable excitement on its side. Whether that's enough to overcome [the felon's] inexplicable hold on the Republican Party after eight years of his now very tired old schtick is unknown. ... [I]f the stars align and there is no external catastrophe, the Democrats might deliver that historic victory we all thought we were getting back in 2016, and our long [orange] nightmare may finally be over.
Onlookers have claimed Vance's morals have collapsed
Vance has been accused of lying about being a "working class hero"
[Fuckface] has complete control over Vance, critics have said
He's been criticized as being little more than a right-wing troll
Update (July 19): Heather Digby Parton is not impressed with the choice.
I have to say that in all the articles written about this decision, what comes across to me is that [Dear Leader] has lost a step. Maybe he's just so cocky about winning that he doesn't think it matters, which is possible. But from the way it sounds, he let himself be steamrolled into picking someone who on some level he knows wasn't the best choice for his electoral prospects. Maybe the 78 year old [felon] is just as weak and tired as that other old guy he's running against.
Among its numerous recommendations, [Project 2025] calls for the following (in no particular order):
Changing how the FBI operates.
Eliminating the Department of Education.
Defunding the Department of Justice.
Reversing Biden-era policies attempting to reduce climate change.
Stopping cybersecurity efforts to combat mis- and disinformation.
Changing immigration policies.
Restricting access to abortion.
Removing LGBTQ+ protections.
Cutting ties completely with China.
Reversing protections against discrimination in housing.
To execute the above-listed objectives, the roughly 1,000-page document calls for a federal government operated by political appointees equipped to "carry out the President's desires."
Put another way, [Kevin] Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, said in a July 2023 interview with The New York Times that Project 2025 leaders want to dismantle independent federal agencies that do not answer to the president. Then, they want to fill positions with people who subscribe to conservative politics — including jobs that are currently merit-based hires, not politically appointed.
Roberts has also said, "We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless ― if the left allows it to be."
Paul Dans, the head of Project 2025, was chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management during the Trump administration, and the group's roadmap for the next administration includes contributions from others who have worked for the former president, including his former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, former acting Deputy Homeland Security Secretary Ken Cuccinelli, and former deputy chief of staff Rick Dearborn. John McEntee, Trump's former director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office and one of his closest aides while in office, is also a senior adviser for the project.
Amanda Marcotte notes increasing interest in the plan.
If the chatter about Project 2025 continues in both the press and social media, the knowledge of [Dear Leader's] plans might start to influence the election — and in ways he will not like. [Fuckface] cannot win without a large percentage of voters backing him under the false belief he's "not so bad." The more they find out about what he intends to do in office, the more will have second thoughts about risking another [von Clownstick] term.
Update (July 11): In a speech to the Heritage Foundation in April 2022, the felon had a different take on their work with Project 2025.
They’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.
Update (July 14): Rick Perlstein notes that the Heritage Foundation puts out these policy proposals every four years.
The best part so far about the journalism about Project 2025 is how it has documented its cataclysmic aim of destroying the very notion of an expert and independent civil service—the people [MAGA] calls the "deep state". I don't point to antecedents to minimize that danger. I point to them to maximize it. The fact that conservatives have been trying so hard for so long is what makes it more dangerous.
Update (August 15): Despite Kevin Roberts delaying the publication of his book, and the felon's efforts to distance himself from the project, revelations continue. Russell Vought, with the Center for Renewing America, explained to undercover reporters that he is preparing "hundreds of executive orders that could be used to enact mass firings and deportation of immigrants living in the country illegally".
There are people like me that have his trust that will be able to get it to him in whatever position we’re at. The relationships will be there. The trust level will be there.
So, [Dear Leader is] very supportive of what we do.
Amanda Marcotte notes that Republicans are aware their policy proposals are unpopular and thus try to hide them from the electorate. And that screws up their presidential campaign strategy. Especially with an erratic candidate.
[Fuckface] doesn't talk about policy because it bores him and he will never take the time to learn enough about it to say anything meaningful about it. Project 2025 was set up precisely because [the orange turd] doesn't care about such things, and will delegate all those decisions to the wild-eyed fanatics who populate the conservative activist world in the MAGA era. When Republicans beg him to talk about "the issues," the best they can hope for is that he will offer incoherent non-answers like "we're going to look into that" and "we'll have a policy in two weeks," or his other strategies to pretend he has answers while avoiding any actual details. But he'll get bored with that, inevitably. So there's almost no chance he doesn't return to his favorite well: being a loudmouthed, racist weirdo.
The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune.
Update (July 3): Heather Digby Parton explains the history behind the decision.
It is apparent that the Supreme Court majority, like the average MAGA voter and [the felon] himself, is filled with bitter resentment. In fact, I would suggest that this entire unitary executive, imperial president philosophy stems from grievance over Richard Nixon being forced out of office all those years ago. [This ruling] was the culmination of many years of careful, strategic planning by the right-wing legal community. The six partisan justices in the majority played the long game and when they got the chance to implement their dream of an imperial presidency they did not hesitate. Not even the prospect of allowing a corrupt president unlike any other, including Richard Nixon, gave them pause.
Update (July 14): David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research and a former voting rights attorney at the Department of Justice, expresses his concern.
If there is a president intent upon committing crimes, this decision gives him a very clear path to that.
Ordering the Justice Department to institute a sham investigation? Absolutely immune. Ordering the military to seize voting machines, as the former president almost attempted in 2020? He’s talking to the military, that’s a core function [of the presidency], he would be immune. Ordering the National Security Agency to conduct secret surveillance on a political opponent? The NSA is part of the executive branch, immune.
[Dear Leader] is a felon. He joins his campaign manager, deputy campaign manager, national security advisor, foreign policy advisor, political consultant, and personal lawyer as felons.
Update (May 31): Chauncey DeVega reminds us not to celebrate too much just yet.
How will [Manbaby's] conviction and status as a felon will impact how the American people will vote in the 2024 election? Again, we do not know. But with [his] historic conviction, there is at least the reasonable hope that he will have a more difficult time of winning the 2024 election and becoming the country’s first dictator. That final decision will be made not in a courtroom by a jury and a judge, but in the voting booth by the American people.
Heather Digby Parton expresses our frustration with the opposition.
You'd think after losing all these elections, civil cases and now criminal trials Republicans would get it through their heads that this man who calls everything a hoax and a fake is actually talking about himself.
Amanda Marcotte describes how pathetic the former guy is.
The main theme of the testimony was [Fuckface] the Coward, who hides behind a series of "fixers" so he never has to deal directly with the fallout from his poor choices. ... His crimes aren't exciting strikes against "The Man." He is "The Man," preying on vulnerable people, like the 27-year-old Daniels or the financially desperate people he defrauded through [Orange Turd] University or even some of the lost souls he snookered into storming the Capitol on Jan. 6. The regular folks on the New York streets weren't cheering [Dear Leader], but the brave jurors who stood against him.
And Brian Karem proposes an unlikely outcome.
I believe that the Republicans now have the leverage they need to take back their party from the MAGA extremists - if they have the energy to do so. If the Republican Party wishes to survive, [the felon] will not be on the ballot in the fall.
Update (June 3): Parton has a warning.
[The convicted felon] says a lot of foolish things and half the time he doesn't know what he's talking about. But when it comes to his lifelong thirst for vengeance there is no doubt that he means it. And he is now backed by the vast majority of elected Republicans who are clearly slavering at the prospect of taking down their political enemies. They will do it.
Update (June 4): Marcotte has a question for Republicans who claim Democrats will rue the day.
[U]ltimately, it comes down to this: If getting convicted of crimes is so goshdarned awesome for [Dear Leader], then why are his allies doing everything in their power to delay [his] other criminal trials?
April was the eleventh consecutive month that set an all-time temperature record since data has been collected. The month was 1.58 degrees Celcius warmer that the 1850 to 1900 average.
Last summer was also the warmest in the Northern Hemisphere in the past 2000 years.
Permafrost is thawing, the Thwaites glacier is heading toward collapse, the Amazon rainforest is under increasing stress, and the world's oceans having been setting temperature records for the past year.
The barrage of stories gets to be too much.
Update (June 28): An article in Nature Geoscience discusses a possible tipping point for Antarctic ice sheets. Matthew Rosza explains:
British Antarctic Survey researchers discovered that warm ocean water is seeping beneath the Antarctic ice sheet at its so-called "grounding line," or the point at which the ice from a large body rises from the seabed and begins to float. When warm water moves under a grounding line, the ice melts at an accelerated pace and could pass a threshold where the body's ultimate collapse is inevitable. While this process occurs, sea levels will rise at a much faster rate than currently predicted, resulting in millions of people from coastal communities being displaced over the upcoming decades and centuries.
Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to those campaign finance violations [of making unreported in-kind donations to help win the election], saying in court that he did so at [Dear Leader's] direction. [David] Pecker ... corroborated Cohen's account that [Fuckface] was in on the scheme. ... "Individual 1" ... was let off the hook even though it was clear that he was guilty of the same crimes for which Cohen was going to prison and Pecker was given immunity.
Pecker was the first witness to testify in the trial.
Victoria Bekiempis quotes prosecutor Matthew Colangelo's opening statement:
This was a planned, coordinated, long-running conspiracy to influence the 2016 election, to help [von Clownstick] get elected through illegal expenditures – to silence people with something bad to say about his behavior.
It was election fraud, pure and simple.
Falsifying business records is a felony whenever someone:
1. Knowingly
2. Makes or causes to be made
3. A false entry in business records
4. With an intent to defraud [deceive]
5. Which includes an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission of that other crime.
The totality of proof establishes beyond a reasonable doubt that [Fuckface von Clownstick] was at the hub of a conspiratorial scheme to falsify business records with an intent to defraud New York officials, federal officials and the public in order to promote his own candidacy in the 2016 election.
Update (May 30): Aftergut also explains the jury instructions.
When these scientists question the usefulness of "tipping point" terminology, they are not discounting the genuine threat posed to humanity by global heating. They all agree that climate change is changing the planet in ways that will harm hundreds of millions of people. Yet how we frame these issues is critical to how we start to address them and experts argue that the idea of a single occasion in which humans cross a barrier from "climate change can be fixed" to "climate change is unfixable" is inaccurate.
Rozsa quotes James Hansen:
The delayed response of the climate system to human-made climate forcing is what makes these issues so difficult to communicate with the public. The time scales are very slow as seen by the public, even though human-forced climate change is occurring very rapidly compared with geological time scales.
Rozsa continues.
This is why it's misleading to frame the climate change crisis in terms of a climax or tipping point — it establishes false expectations about how exactly global warming is harming everyone's lives. It is instead more useful to view climate change as a multifaceted dilemma that will require an equally multifaceted response. ... [T]his still emphasizes that the issue is very difficult to beat — but also ... not an impossible dilemma.
Dilemma refers to a difficult choice. I've seen the word predicament used to describe a problem with no solution. The terms could go together to suggest a situation too overwhelming for humans to grasp with nothing but unpalatable options available. The task seems to be to build resilience so that things get worse less quickly. I can see how refering to "tipping points" might impose a sense of a looming deadline when the effort needs to be ongoing.
Speaking about Chinese automobile exports, but reminiscent of his "stand by" comment in 2020, Dear Leader gave a not-too-subtle command:
Now if I don't get elected, it's going to be a bloodbath for the whole — that's gonna be the least of it. It's going to be a bloodbath for the country. That will be the least of it. But they're not going to sell those cars. They're building massive factories.
If this election isn't won, I'm not sure that you'll ever have another election in this country.
Are people taking Fuckface out of context? Michael Beschloss doesn't think so.
[I]t's important to know as we talk about this campaign, as it unfolds, we have never seen anything remotely like this in American history: a major party candidate is saying, you elect me, there's going to be dictatorship, bloodbath, violence, retribution against my political enemies, that equals what we saw in Italy, in Germany and other places.
Joe Scarborough calls bullshit.
If you think there's going to be a bloodbath in the auto industry ... I'm not sure he's talking about the niceties of international trade. But let's just take that argument as is. Then he goes on and he says, "That’s going to be the least of it," and repeats it. "It's gonna be the least of it."
Obviously, he's talking about a bloodbath for America.
And Rex Huppke thinks the press is being unfair--by ignoring all the other horrible statements he's made.
[T]he man a majority of Republicans believe should be the next president spent the weekend: calling the sitting president a "numbskull"; calling former Republican primary candidates "terrible"; continuing to deny the results of a free-and-fair election; calling immigrants "animals" while continuing to embrace Hitlerian rhetoric, even after being reminded it's Hitlerian rhetoric; swearing; crudely making fun of someone's weight and another person's name; and calling the people who quite literally attacked the U.S. Capitol and assaulted more than 100 police officers "unbelievable patriots."
Update (March 19): Amanda Marcotte notes that the MAGA fascists didn't invent gaslighting.
[S]aying something risible and then pretending to be misinterpreted was a favorite Nazi strategy to muddy the waters and waste the time and energy of their opponents. The "bloodbath" debacle shows that the comments being argued over don't even really need to be ambiguous in order for fascists to pretend they are open to interpretation.
Marcotte argues the press shouldn't give in to bad faith denials and highlight Fuckface's violence as much as possible.
[A] lot of Americans have no idea how bad he's gotten because they don't pay much attention. The only way they will learn is if the press keeps up a steady drumbeat.
Some options: Dramatically reducing the "Biden is old" stories ... Doing more polls asking voters if they think it's okay ... to make these threats. Bringing in more context, like connecting [Dear Leader's] violent rhetoric to other MAGA aggression ... [A]sking people ... whether they approve of his calls for a "bloodbath." The media knows how to keep a story alive, if they want to.
Update (March 21): Looks like Charlie Kirk understands his marching orders.
I want to make sure that we all make a commitment that if this election doesn't go our way, the next day we fight.
Update (March 22): Heather Digby Parton points out that glorifying January 6 criminals as "hostages" and "patriots" is a classic move.
[I]t's more than just another [Fuckface] troll. By creating martyrs out of insurrectionists, [Dear Leader] is deploying a very potent propaganda tool, one that was perfected by, yes, Adolph Hitler during his rise to power exactly a hundred years ago.
And in an interview with Dean Obeidallah, Ruth Ben-Ghiat explains how MAGA is truly fascist, not just right-wing.
Fascists believe that violence is the way to change history. We saw that clearly enough on Jan. 6, 2021, with the attack on the Capitol mean to keep [the former guy] in power despite his loss in the 2020 election.
By defending the insurrectionists, MAGA gets the message that
violence is sometimes morally necessary and even righteous, and even patriotic. [This is] what we call sacralizing violence, giving violence a kind of ritual, religious tone.
[Offering] pardons [is] about encouraging people to do more violence, thinking that they're not going to pay any consequences. That's actually the essence of authoritarianism and fascism: You arrange government so that you can be violent and corrupt, and get away with it.
Update (September 8): It is maddening that Fuckface continues to get away with these threats.
I better win or you're gonna have problems like we've never had.
And more damage to election integrity.
WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again.
Since 2020, the richest five men in the world have doubled their fortunes. During the same period, almost five billion people globally have become poorer.
Oxfam estimates that the wealth of the bottom 60 percent of the world population (4.8 billion people with about 2.26 percent of total wealth) decreased from $10.51 trillion to $10.49 trillion (in constant dollars) from 2019 to 2022 (down 0.2 percent). This amounts to about $2000 per person.
Meanwhile, the world's 2566 billionaires grew their wealth from $9.58 trillion to $12.84 trillion (in constant dollars) from 2020 to 2023 (up 34 percent). This amounts to about $5,000,000,000 per billionaire.
NASA announces another record-breaking year.
Earth’s average surface temperature in 2023 was the warmest on record. Global temperatures last year were around 2.1 degrees Fahrenheit (1.2 degrees Celsius) above the average for NASA’s baseline period (1951-1980).
[This] was about 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit (or about 1.4 degrees Celsius) warmer in 2023 than the late 19th-century average, when modern record-keeping began.
The European climate agency Copernicus estimates that 2023 was 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit (0.17 degrees Celsius) above the previous record in 2016.
Update (January 19): Two views of the temperature anomalies (with different baselines):
Last year is exceptional--compared to the past.
