A Question Too Ugly For Most Of Us To Contemplate-- Why Are Almost 40% Of American Voters Supporting This Orange Blot On Humanity?

 

Minnesota is a state Trump nearly won in 2016. Hillary took the usually dependably blue state, which had the highest percentage of voter participation in the country, by a very narrow 1.5%-- 1,367,716 (46.44%) to 1,322,951 (44.92%). The Democrats won two suburban congressional districts that had been held by Republicans-- and the Republicans won 2 rural congressional districts that had been held by the Democrats. Trump declared it a battleground state early last year and has been working the state heavily-- although to little avail. The Real Clear Politics polling average shows him losing Minnesota to Biden in a 9 point rout. A Langer poll for ABC News and the Washington Post has just 41% of likely voters casting their ballots for Trump (57% for Biden).

The 2016 electoral map by county looks very attractive to Trump and he isn't giving up in Minnesota yet-- but his efforts there could make the outcome even more lopsided against him. On Tuesday, the state reported 1,135 new COVID cases, bringing the state's badly spiking total to 114,574-- 20,316 cases per million residents. Over 2,200 Minnesotans have died from the disease-- and Trump super-spreader rallies in the state are making matters worse. At least two dozen of the new infections came directly out of Trump events. "Facing a steep surge in coronavirus cases," reported the NY Times, "health officials in Minnesota have connected two dozen virus cases to people who attended presidential campaign events in the past month, most of them attendees at airport rallies hosted by President Trump."

It would be hard to imagine Trump doing as well as he did in 2016-- or Biden doing as badly as Hillary did. But in small, rural counties like Morrison, Todd, Pipestone, McLeod, Clearwater, Sibley, Roseau, Isanti, Wadena, Ramsey, Lake of the Woods, Jackson, Pennington, Meeker, Redwood, Martin and Marshall Trump scored over 65% of the vote-- and many of those people are sticking with him, some with great enthusiasm and every expectation in the world that we're about to get another 4 years of his rule.

Reporting yesterday from another Upper Midwest state, Michigan, Politico's Tim Alberta noted that Michigan is looking less competitive by the day, and there’s a growing likelihood that Trump will be buried statewide November 3. In 2016, Trump narrowly won the state's 16 electoral votes by beating Hillary 2,279,543 (47.50%) to 2,268,839 (47.27%), one of the closest calls in the nation. Right now, it doesn't look so close. The Real Clear Politics polling average shows Trump down 7.2%. The most recent poll was released last week by Ipsos for Reuters showed Trump with just 43% to Biden's 51% (and with 22% of ballots already cast).

Alberta pointed out that although all 3 Rust Belt states that Trump improbably won in 2016 "are problematic," Señor T this year, Michigan looks bleakest of all. "His support has diminished among the white working-class. Black turnout appears certain to rebound after a dismal showing in 2016. New laws that allow for early voting and no-excuse-absentee balloting are expected to push voter participation to historic levels, with Democrats the expected beneficiary of low-propensity Michiganders flooding the ballot box. But the simplest explanation for the president’s trouble here is that he’s continuing to hemorrhage support from white, college-educated women in the suburbs of Detroit. It’s hard to overstate just how badly Trump is performing with this crucial demographic. Over the past several weeks, a raft of internal polls have produced numbers that political professionals here are struggling to comprehend. In Oakland County, the second-biggest voting area in the state, Gongwer reported that Democratic polling shows Biden leading Trump by 27 points; Republicans pushed back with a survey showing Trump down only 18 points. (For reference, Trump lost Oakland County by 8 points in 2016.)"

Yep, suburban women are over this goon, but in Michigan-- like in Minnesota-- there were counties where Trump did better than 65% in 2016 and those people are not abandoning him-- small rural counties like Missaukee, Kalkaska, Ogemaw, Hillsdale, Montmorency, Dickinson, Tuscola, Oscoda, Alcona, Lapeer, Newaygo, Gladwin, Otsego, Sanilac, Branch, Wexford, Luce, Huron and Osceola. Why? What the hell is wrong with the people in these places?

Yesterday, conservative columnist Max Boot-- long a right-wing Republican-- asked the same question in his Washington Post column, How can 42 percent of Americans still support the worst president in our history? Boot has an endless list of indictments against Trump that we've all internalized already: "Trump is on track to be the first president since World War II to see a net loss of jobs during his term. Even worse, he has presided over the loss of 214,000 lives 221,000 lives and counting from covid-19. That’s already nearly four times the U.S. fatalities in the Vietnam War, previously the nadir of presidential bungling. Even now, after having contracted covid-19 himself, Trump refuses to take the pandemic seriously. He keeps promising it will magically disappear of its own accord while holding rallies practically guaranteed to spread the disease. As if that weren’t reason enough to vote for Biden, there is also the fact that Trump has abused his power; he was even impeached for doing so. He has trafficked in racism and xenophobia. He has incited violence. He has kowtowed to dictators and trashed our alliances. He has welcomed Russian attacks on our elections. He has locked children in cages. He has called for his opponents to be locked up. In sum, Trump has made a strong case that he is the worst president in our history."

And then the nub: "Yet tens of millions of voters still support him. What are they thinking? I get that there are single-issue voters to whom Trump has a strong appeal-- people who feel passionately about tax cuts, judges, abortion or Israel. There are also people for whom Trump’s boorishness, racism and xenophobia are not a turnoff but a selling point... There are also, of course, many Trump voters who are convinced that he is the lesser evil, because Biden is supposedly plotting to turn the United States into a 'large scale version of Venezuela,' even while suffering from 'dementia.' They claim Biden is a 'puppet' of the far left, even though he opposes Medicare-for-all, the Green New Deal, a ban on fracking, defunding the police, expanding the Supreme Court and other progressive ideas."

Here's what's painful to think about our fellow Americans in places like Tuscola and Oscoda counties in Michigan, Pipestone and McLeod counties in Minnesota-- as well as Modoc County in California (71.8% Trump), Allegany County in New York (68.4% Trump) and even Wocester, Bristol, Plymouth and Barnstable counties in Massachusetts where Trump lost in 2016 but still managed to get over 40% of the vote in each. Boot blames Fox News:

A Pew Research Center survey makes clear the extent of the problem. Among those who get their election news primarily from Fox “News,” 86 percent say Trump is delivering the “completely right” or “mostly right” message about the pandemic, 78 percent that “the U.S. has controlled the outbreak as much as it could have” and 61 percent that Trump and his administration get the facts right about the coronavirus “almost all” or “most of the time.” Perhaps the most disturbing finding of all: 39 percent of Fox News viewers say that QAnon-- an insane conspiracy theory that posits that Trump’s opponents are satanic child-molesters-- is “somewhat good” or “very good” for the country.

 

I’m sorry, these are not issues on which rational people can legitimately disagree. Trump’s covid-19 message-- that, as he said Saturday, “it is disappearing”-- is objectively false. In the past week, daily confirmed coronavirus cases in the United States have increased by 13.3 percent and hospitalizations by 9.8 percent. Trump’s claims to the contrary, we have done far worse during the pandemic than most wealthy countries. If we had the same death rate as Canada, 132,000 victims of covid-19 would still be alive. And it should go without saying that QAnon, whose adherents have been linked to numerous acts of violence, is a bane, not a boon.

Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) used to say: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” That’s no longer true.

...[T]he rise of Fox News and Facebook allows “fake news” to spread much more readily-- and Trump gives it the imprimatur of the Oval Office. It’s bad enough that the president lies so much; what’s worse is that so many think he is telling the truth.

Unfortunately, even if Trump is defeated, a large portion of the country will continue to believe a lot of things that simply are not so-- and a small but significant number could be led into violence by their lunatic beliefs. The disturbing plot by members of a right-wing militia to kidnap the governor of Michigan may be a taste of what is to come. As Francisco Goya warned, “the sleep of reason produces monsters.”

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

 

by Noah

Another FOX "News" goon has gotten the boot, not for what they did, of course, but for being caught. It seems that Judge "Randy Andy" Napolitano likes to walk into a room pantless, jump on "daddy's" lap, and begin masturbating while demanding "Spank me while I masturbate. Spank me while I masturbate!" Is this a thing he got from Rupert Murdoch himself or one of the Murdoch sons? What must the job interview have been like!

How long before "Spank Me While I Masturbate" is set to music and becomes the FOX "News" theme song? I can see the "We Are The World" styled video now! All of the FOX "News" knuckle-draggers there on the soundstage taking turns at a chorus, singing out as best they can:

Spank me while I masturbate. I'm forever yours. Spank me while I masturbate...

It's more than obvious by now that being a sexual abuser of any sort is a job qualification at News Corp. The list of those exposed just grows and grows. Bill "Loofa Man" O'Reilly, Roger "23 & Me" Ailes, Ed "Be My Little Whore" Henry... There will be more. Accusations have already hit Tucker "Come to my hotel room" Carlson and his KKK buddy Sean Hannity who reportedly likes to whip out a wad of cash and throw it on the table. No wonder these cretins are so into Bret Kavanaugh and Donald Trump! C'mon you know when you look at Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee they're into something both kinky and abusive. We already know Newt's a bit off when it comes to how he treats his mates. Huckabee? He's from the Ozark hills and goes around pounding a bible. Is there a pool boy in the barn? Laura Ingraham? If there isn't an Ilsa movie reenactment there, color me surprised. Screamin' Jeanine? There's a dominatrix if there ever was one. Poor Lou Dobbs! Back to Tucker and Sean: I bet there's something that involves painting the face brown and being forced into a doggie training cage wearing only a foil blankie. The only questions I have about those two at this point is do they do it as a couple and is that before or after primetime? I mean let's be honest, it's hard to look at any of these people, especially now, and not know in your heart that they're all x-rated Satyricon material. They fiddle and diddle themselves while we burn. Not that I'm being judgemental or anything like that.

Spank me while I masturbate, I'm forever yours...

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

As the graphic I'm using for tonight's meme shows, the sales of video games have nothing to do with gun violence. It's a simple compare and contrast exercise. As one traitorous nutball $enate Majority Leader would say, "Case Closed." And, in this case, it actually is. Since Sunday, our Neo-Nazi President and his staff, his advisors at FOX "News," and the rest of the Republican Party loon and goon universe have been going overboard in their twisting themselves into the ground trying to redirect the blame for the El Paso shooting away from their years of advocating white supremacy. They have been pointing to other external causes that aren't even remotely possible causes. The Republican Looniverse has been doing this, not as denial to self (They are proud of what they are), but as a simple yet pathetic attempt at "Hey, look over there!" politics. One republican, Ohio legislator Candice Keller even blamed both the El Paso shooting and the Dayton shooting on marijuana, "homosexual marriage" and drag queens. Drag queens? She said this, of course, while accusing "the democrats" of (in her very words) "playing the blame game." I guess she felt she had to top Pat Robertson. Speaking of which, c'mon Pat, whaddya got to top that? A nation turns its lonely ears to you, Pat. And Candice, whatsamatter? Why are you blaming drag queens? Anger issues? Catch your hubby steppin' out in your wedding dress and heels the other night?

The El Paso and Dayton shootings have turned the Republican Party into even more of a freaky shitshow than normal! I know. Seems impossible to believe. Who would have thought it possible? One thing's for sure, the next horrific shooting will result in even more bizarre claims. It's who they are. It's what they do. Inbred Jesus goon Mike Huckabee even went so far as to blame the shootings on a lack of... get ready for it... a "lack of thoughts and prayers." Ladies and gentlemen, the dark comedy stylings of Mike Huckabee! Let's give him a big hand! God! Where do they get these imbecilic cretins? We not only need gun control, we need procreation control! Fast! I know it's too late for Huckabee, but someone needs to send the Vasectomy Truck to wherever his grandkids live. Don't worry, they do Tube-Ties too. What's next? Teletubbies pulled the triggers?

The biggest, most popular claim among the republikooks though is that video games are to blame for the shootings. How's that for an old reliable canard of misdirection? Sure, to republicans; drag queens, lack of "thoughts and prayers," Sponge Bob's chain of Secret Underwater Gay Instruction Camps and Hillary's emails all carry some blame, but not once do republicans mention their own people like Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump pushing white supremacy and Neo-Nazi conspiracy theories such as their favorite made up nonsense about South African blacks being engaged in the genocide of South African white folks having anything to do with encouraging the Republican Party's base to get violent. Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick rushed to the FOX "News" studios to implore the federal government to "do something about the video game industry." House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy did the same. If you were stupid enough to follow what passes for that Republican logic, you would have to assume that people in countries such as Japan, South Korea, and Germany never played a video game in their lives.

The blaming of video games is even beyond conservatives of the 1950s claiming that comic books were causing gang violence and then their calling for the burning of Beatles records in the 1960s. How long before the Trump Party starts burning play station gear, burning down movie theaters, and calling for a complete shutdown of Netflix "until we figure out what the hell is going on." But, the fact is that Trump's racist rallies and FOX "News" are to white supremacists as Inspire, the al Qaeda online magazine is to the Muslim terror network. Both exist to radicalize their audience. Tucker Carlson, himself an obvious white supremacist on an open mission of pushing white supremacy, went so far as to claim that white supremacy is a hoax. Really, Tucker? Is that supposed to mean that you yourself are a hoax? Poor Tucker. I guess he feels that if white supremacy is under threat, he might lose his job, or worse.

Another FOX single digit IQ knuckle-dragging Goon, Brian Kilmeade, echoed the El Paso shooter's Nazi manifesto, like all good white supremacy Republicans from the sewer of Trump are doing, as he fearfully lamented an "invasion" of Latinos, Republican code for "brown people," as if that justified a mass murderer driving 10 hours to El Paso to kill and kill and kill. Kilmeade also puked up the following proof of his idiocy-

I'm just wondering if, did George Bush ever condemn President Obama after Sandy hook?

Well Brian, no, he didn't. But, you see even George Bush had more smarts and class than your white supremacist idol, plus, President Obama never railed against the 1st graders and teachers of Sandy Hook Elementary School as an evil invasion of rapists and disease-carrying drug smugglers. President Obama also never smiled and laughed at the idea that someone might shoot them since no one at his rallies suggested that someone should. So, there's quite a difference even if your minuscule little FOX "News" brain can't grasp it.

Trump, of course, immediately tweeted Kilmeade's words to his rabid following of racists and went back to looking for new ways to damage the lives as many Americans as possible.

Some People Are Already Saying "Anyone But Trump" And They Include Status Quo Joe

As Philip Bump pointed out yesterday in his Washington Post column, after Trump's latest anti-Fox Twitter-tirade, "Trump’s objection to Fox News polling is possibly largely due to the fact that they’re good polls. Fox’s on-air programming is often heavily weighted in Trump’s favor, but their polling isn’t." The poll shows Trump's overall disapproval 51-48% and even worse on the key issues he plans to fight the 2020 election on. Underwater on every issue but the economy:

• Border security- 44-52%
• Immigration- 41-54%
• Trade- 40-49%
• Race relations- 32-57%

Worse yet, the Fox poll shows him losing to Biden 49-39%, losing to Bernie 46-40% and within the margin of error in matchups with Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren.

Matt Taibbi is in Iowa and what he's seeing on the ground has him worried that the Democrats are going to blow this again.

The front-runner-- the front-runner!-- is septuagenarian gaffe machine Joe Biden, who started running for president in the Eighties and never finished higher than “candidacy withdrawn,” with a career delegate total matching John Blutarsky’s grade-point average, i.e., zero point zero. The summer’s “momentum” challenger is California Sen. Kamala Harris, who spent all year sinking in polls but surged when she hit Biden with “I don’t think you’re a racist . . . but . . .” on national TV.

A third contender is Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a famed red-state punchline who already has 10,000 Pocahontas tweets aimed at her head should she make it to the general. Her “I have a plan for that” argument for smarter government makes her a modern analog to Mike Dukakis-- another Massachusetts charisma machine whose ill-fated presidential run earned him a portrait alongside the Hindenburg in a Naked Gun movie.

A fourth challenger, Bernie Sanders, is a self-proclaimed socialist born before the Pearl Harbor attack who’s somehow more hated by the national media than Trump. A fifth, Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has never earned more than 8,515 votes in any election. The claim to fame of a sixth, Beto O’Rourke, is that he lost a Senate bid to the world’s most-hated Republican. It goes on.

The top Democrats’ best arguments for office are that they are not each other. Harris is rising in part because she’s not Biden; Warren, because she isn’t Bernie. Bernie’s best argument is the disfavor of the hated Democratic establishment. The Democratic establishment chose Biden because he was the Plan B last time and the party apparently hasn’t come up with anything better since. Nothing says “We’re out of ideas” quite like pulling a pushing-eighty ex-vice president off the bench to lead the most important race in the party’s history.

...In a mid-June appearance in Iowa, Biden tipped off reporters that he’d be making remarks about Trump. Dressed in dark-wash dad jeans and blue shirt, he became the 10,000th Democrat this year to call the president an “existential threat.”

Trump wasted little time laying into Biden. “Joe’s a loser,” he quipped, adding Biden was a “dummy” who was “even slower than he used to be.” Saying he’d rather run against Biden than anybody, Trump said, “I think he’s the weakest mentally. . . . I like running against people that are weak mentally.” He then ripped Biden for keeping a light schedule, saying, “Once every two weeks . . . he mentions my name 74 times in one speech. . . . That reminds me of crooked Hillary. She did the same thing.”

Next thing you knew, we were right back in 2016, with reporters dutifully conveying Trump’s insults and even kinda-sorta suggesting they were true. “There’s been a lot of questions about your schedule, and that it’s been a little lighter than some of the other candidates,” a reporter asked Biden in Ottumwa, Iowa.

MSNBC gave Trump more than a minute of airtime for “Joe’s a loser,” while the Washington Post and the New York Times put the exchange on the front page. This is how things went in 2016. Trump would taunt an opponent, the opponent would face-plant the effort at return fire, ratings would go up, and the cycle would repeat.

The logic of the Biden candidacy is a facsimile of our last memory of normalcy, like if Barack Obama were on vacation, or sick, maybe. Biden’s labors to remind us he was the understudy of the last president are painful. His launch speech contained 35 uses of the word “folks.” This included a rare double-folks (“Folks, I know some of the really smart folks say Democrats don’t want to hear about unity. . . .”). He constantly references the “Obama/Biden administration” and chides audiences that “we don’t say often enough as a party or a nation” that Obama was awesome.

Biden on the trail will spit out the campaign equivalent of clip art, e.g., “America, folks, is an idea, an idea that’s stronger than any army, bigger than any ocean,” or, “America has always been at its best when America has acted as one America.” By the end of the campaign, Biden will be plunked behind podiums to mutter, “America America America America America . . .” And we’ll vote for him.

The problem is that he’s got almost a year of Democratic primary left, and has to keep saying actual things until he wins. He seems engaged almost daily in cleaning up verbal messes. When Harris oar-smacked him with her “that little girl was me” busing story (T-shirt now on sale for $29.99 at store.kamalaharris.org!), Biden’s response was the debate equivalent of “Check, please,” saying, “My time is up.”

His awesome vulnerabilities on the woke front have him saying things that sound like Trump quotes, like his response to Booker on working with segregationist senators: “There’s not a racist bone in my body.”

Biden’s early front-runner flubs are reminiscent of Jeb Bush’s $150 million failure to handle Trump tweets. There are many such parallels. Biden is Jeb. O’Rourke, running in what the Times calls the “younger face” lane, is Marco Rubio. Unseen Steve Bullock is unseen Jim Gilmore. Bill de Blasio is the same “Why is he running?” New Yorker George Pataki was. And this election’s version of John Kasich, the embittered realist barking, “What are we doing here?” from the literal edge of the debate stage, is former Maryland Rep. John Delaney.

Noon on a weekend, Room 103 of the Statehouse, Des Moines. John Delaney is addressing Iowa’s Asian and Latino Coalition. Stocky and bald, the co-founder of a health care lender is the umpteenth Democrat to address the influential group, which is full of local small-business owners. I will later hear this is one of the smallest turnouts of this group any Democrat candidate has yet attracted, a list that includes self-help author Marianne Williamson.

Delaney seems to sense this and looks peeved, not with the Asian-Latino coalition but with the Almighty. In a normal campaign year, he’d be the “crossover” candidate, praised for being a straight talker-- he’s already gotten accolades from both George Will and David Brooks, usually a sign of media love to come. Yet the love hasn’t arrived. Delaney, whether on TV or in person, throws off the same “I can’t believe I’m losing to this field” vibe Kasich often exuded.

Like Kasich, Delaney just wants the American people to get along, and if it’s not too much trouble, elect him president. But nobody is complying.

Flipping through Delaney’s book, The Right Answer, it’s clear he is genuinely saddened by the state of American politics. The epigram in the opening pages is from Kennedy, and begins, “Let us not despair...” About what is Delaney despairing? Mainly, it seems, that Bernie Sanders is pulling 15 percent on a promise to give everyone Medicare.

“Why do we have to go further than Germany and France and Sweden and the Netherlands, and throw out the entire U.S. health care system?” he pleads. “That doesn’t make sense to me. We should attack the problems, and fix those. And not mess with what’s working.”

He goes on to propose that from birth to age 65, all Americans be covered by “a federal health care policy, for free, as a right of citizenship.” This plan, he says, would allow America to avoid a fully government-run health care program. “Look, maybe in 20 years, people will like their government health care so much, they’ll drop their private insurance and we’ll get to the same place in the end,” he says. “But we have to live in the real world.”

At the end of his speech, a therapy dog in the crowd barks. Delaney flashes a look like he can’t catch a break. He did fine here, and may have won a convert or two from health care skeptics, but the “Why not me?” tone of his campaign captures something. It’s a familiar narrative: Republican state governments and a CEO-friendly administration are hacking away at policies dear to working people, while Democrats can’t seem to settle on an electoral formula to stop them.

They’re paralyzed by Delaney’s question: Do we really have to make radical changes? The centrists want the progressives to step aside for the sake of “unity,” while the progressives believe they’re the new mainstream and are the better bet in a world where traditional notions of electability are upside-down. While this argument rages, traditionally Democratic constituencies are taking losses all over the place.

Mark Rocha, a Communications Workers of America official, liked that Delaney grew up in a union household, but he seemed more focused on the idea that whoever the nominee was, that person needed to stop the bleeding quick.

Noting that Iowa’s Republican leadership has passed laws attacking the right of public-sector unions to organize, he says private-sector unions are dying too. His CWA once had 1,200 members statewide. Now it has 525, and the new members can’t pay much in dues.

“If they even come in the door, if I even get ’em to sign, they’re the lower-paid workers, they make $15 an hour,” he says. “We’re getting beat up.”

In the 2020 race, a succession of Democrats have already taken star turns as darlings-for-a-news-cycle, only to splat in polls right after. The pattern is incredible.

Harris is on her second run up the hill (her first was a “dazzling” debut in January). O’Rourke earned the death-knell “Kennedyesque” title, and raised a record $6.1 million in the first 24 hours of his campaign, but cratered in polls even before his 8,800-word Vanity Fair springboard profile officially hit newsstands. “How About Pete?” asked New York magazine, atop a backlit cover photo that made the 37-year-old look like a Midwest Jesus; a South Bend police scandal later, Buttigieg was polling at zero percent with black voters. Then came Biden, who soared to 41 percent after launching to become what CNN called the “clear front-runner.” He’s lost a third of his support since then and is struggling to keep the lead.

Reporters show up at events with anxious smiles on their faces, like parents looking for a child at a department store. Maybe this one? How about her, or him? This is an extension of a phenomenon that began in the second half of the last GOP primary, when the press tried lavishing compliments on the “real” candidates they hoped would stop Trump. The internet remains littered with the wreckage of these efforts, in headlines like “Signs of ‘Marco-mentum’ for Rubio in New Hampshire.”

Then as now, in their zeal to find someone, anyone, to beat Trump, the press is once again too focused on the candidates themselves, ignoring warning signs that are almost always sitting right there in front of them, in the crowds.

Winterset, Iowa, a Monday afternoon in July. “Amy” “Amy” “Amy” read the alternating green and blue signs on cafe walls, as a packed house awaits Klobuchar. Gently spinning ceiling fans mark the passing time in this classic Iowa campaign stop. The Northside Cafe was founded in 1876, in the heart of Madison County-- yes, that Madison County, the one with the bridges-- and its comfort food, saloon walls covered in handmade quilts, and entranceway portraits of hometown hero John Wayne are familiar scenery for campaign journalists.

The rear of the cafe buzzes. Reporters love Klobuchar. She cracks jokes, gives good quotes, and reminds everyone of a relative. Maybe her? “She’s great,” someone whispers from the nest of tripods. “And funny too!” Some are repeating their favorite Klobuchar lines, like her bit about Trump being “all foam and no beer.” This is the Minnesota version of “all hat and no cattle,” a standby that holds the record for being told the most times by the most politicians without earning a genuine laugh.

Klobuchar plunges into her speech. It’s border crisis, climate crisis, and jokes about Trump. “All foam and no beer” takes a turn as a metaphor for Trump’s tax plan: “All the beer went to the wealthiest people.”

...Papers like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe ran stories suggesting Warren’s campaign might be fatally “wounded” before it even began in January, because of her too-liberal politics and her infamous claim to Native American heritage. But she persisted and suddenly looks like one of the favorites. Numerous stories about the Iowa race point out that she has the largest paid organization in the state, with 50 staffers here.

Her policy prescriptions are detailed and bold, including a two percent overall “ultramillionaires tax” that measures by net worth instead of income (theoretically closing a giant loophole), along with the cancellation of student debt and the breakup of Silicon Valley monopolies.

In late spring, the same media outlets that pummeled her in winter began swooning over a Warren “surge,” in a lovefest that frankly was just as phony as the previous reports of momentum for Harris, O’Rourke, Mayor Pete, and Biden. But at least the pundit predictions of her campaign dying before birth were wrong.

The problem for Warren is “I’ve got a plan for that!” is a dubious strategy in an era in which the campaign promise itself is a declining currency. On paper, she’s done just about everything right. But if she advances, voters will soon be introduced to the fact that plans and promises similar to the ones Warren is making have been made many times before. It’s not a referendum on her but on how much belief is left out there.

Her “economic patriotism” plan, which envisions the government using levers like the Fed and the Treasury to protect jobs, has earned praise from left and right (Tucker Carlson gave it an “attaboy” on Fox). But the catchphrase was used not only by Obama, but also by two other Massachusetts Dems Warren resembles: 1992 presidential contender Paul Tsongas, and Dukakis. The Duke’s 1988 message of “new economic patriotism” included proposals for universal health coverage, a higher minimum wage, scholarships for students committed to teaching careers, etc.

Politicians often sound great. They may sound like they understand issues up and down. They may even have passed laws that ostensibly address problems. But for a lot of Americans, speeches never catch up with reality. Legislation designed to prevent pollution, contractor corruption, sexual assault, predatory lending, and countless other abuses may earn approving headlines-- but create few results on the ground. This gap between reality and political proclamation is what opened the door for Trump in 2016.

“I work at Walmart, along with 1.5 million other people,” Morgan Baethke says. “Those employees are used to the idea that if the Walton family says X will happen, X happens. If a businessman says X will happen, X will happen.” He pauses. “But if a senator says it, who knows?”

Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a Sunday morning, just after services at the Unity Center, an alternative church that preaches a “practical approach to Christianity.” It’s a place you might expect to buy healing salts or take hypnotism lessons. The crowd is younger and more female than at most campaign stops.

Marianne Williamson, the self-help author made famous by Oprah Winfrey, is speaking to about 50 people. “When we get bad news, when we learn that something really terrible is going on, so many superficial concerns drop away. And we become very intelligent,” she says, glaring and pausing for emphasis.

Williamson is a small, almost ethereal figure with silver-streaked hair and intense eyes that 19th-century authors would have described as being “like coals.” Her superficial eccentricities and occasional incautious statements (she once said “there’s a skepticism which is actually healthy” on the issue of vaccines) have caused reporters to chortle at her run.

But her speech is not a lifeless collection of policy positions. It’s an interesting, tightly written diagnosis of the American problem. Precisely because socioeconomic stresses have pushed them into heightened awareness, she says, the American public sees what she calls “a transition from democracy to aristocracy,” and the corporate sector’s “insatiable appetite” for money that dominates American life.

Williamson is not a traditional orator, with a voice that fills the room. You can barely hear her without a microphone. But she grabs crowds. Nobody is checking sports scores or Twitter. They’re in.

Williamson goes on to say that most Americans are aware that their government is now little more than a handmaiden to sociopathic forces. She describes a two-party system that, at its worst, operates in perfect harmony with the darkest impulses of corporate capitalism, and at best-- presumably she refers more to Democrats here-- sounds like institutionalized beggary.

“ ‘Pretty please, can I maybe have a hundred-thousand-dollar grant here?’ ” she says. “ ‘Pretty please, can we maybe have a million dollars in the budget for all this?’”

Heads are nodding all over the place.

“They say, ‘I can get you a cookie.’”

This elicits a few yeahs from the crowd.

Christ, I think. This woman is going to win the nomination.

Trump, she says, can’t be beaten by conventional thinking. “[He is] not just a politician,” she says. “This man is a phenomenon. . . . The only way we are going to defeat a phenomenon at the polls in 2020 is by creating a phenomenon.”

She stumbles a bit in Q&A, especially when a woman asks what she would do about the credit-score system. Williamson frowns, seeming genuinely perplexed. She clearly doesn’t know what having bad credit is like, and promises to look into it, in the tone of voice of a person who promises gamely to try a jellied-eel appetizer.

Still, she gets a rousing ovation at the end of her speech. After, she takes a few minutes to talk.

“The political establishment has the veneer of a deep conversation,” she says. “They think their political dialogue is so sophisticated. But it’s not sophisticated. It’s very unsophisticated.”

That lack of sophistication, she says, is what made Trump possible. Young people, in particular, have no more patience for the phoniness. “I see it especially in people who were born this century,” she says. “They’re tired of the nonsense.”

Williamson belongs to a category of candidate you might call the Ignored. They’re candidates blown off by national political wizards who don’t believe, or don’t want to believe, they can win. How anyone can think this way after 2016 is mind-boggling.

The list includes Williamson, entrepreneur and Universal Basic Income proponent Andrew Yang, Hawaii congresswoman and regime-change opponent Tulsi Gabbard, and, most conspicuously, Bernie Sanders.

It’s unseemly, the degree to which the press is rooting for Sanders to get his socialist tuchis out of the race. This is an actual headline from Politico after the first set of debates: “Harris, Warren Tie for Third in New Poll, But Biden Still Leads.”

The Washington Post/ABC poll showed Biden dropping to 25 percent nationally, with Harris and Warren jousting for third at nine percent. Where’s Waldo? The missing data point is that Sanders doubled both Harris and Warren in said poll at 18 percent. He also has the highest number of unique donors, and is the leading fundraiser overall in the race.

That doesn’t mean Sanders is going to win. He’s the only candidate with a more or less insoluble base of voters, but unlike Warren, who seems really to want this, Bernie has sometimes seemed dispirited. Still, the undeniable truth is that the Democratic race is about Sanders. Most of the candidates either support Medicare for All or try to sound like they do. They also tend to support a $15 minimum wage and call for wealth taxes, a Green New Deal, antitrust actions, and some rejection of corporate donors. Even Joe Biden, he of the lengthy career deep-throating credit-card-industry bucks, has parroted Sanders’ anti-corporate themes, noting that the Constitution reads “ ‘We the People,’ not ‘We the Donors.’”

There is an irony in the fact that Sanders has become the bête noire of Clintonian politics, given that Sanders represents the culmination of Bill’s 1992 electoral formula: “Change versus more of the same.”

Decades later, this is no longer just a marketing formulation. About 20 of the candidates exist somewhere on the spectrum of traditional Democratic politics, with Klobuchar, Mayor Pete, and Biden on one side, and Warren on the more progressive end. Sanders is the revolutionary. His election would mean a complete overhaul of the Democratic Party, forcing everyone who ever worked for a Clinton to look toward the private sector. That’s what a vote for “change” would mean in 2020.

Ames, Iowa, a house party. Reporters love this tradition, standing in the home of a real-life actual ordinary person.

House parties for me bat about .250. A major danger is ending up sardined in a room with insufficient air conditioning and no during-speech egress. This is the case at the gathering for Robert “Beto” O’Rourke.

After his dicey debate performance, O’Rourke was called to the carpet by his biggest donors, including Louis Susman, the former investment banker and Obama bundler. Susman reportedly ordered O’Rourke to unfuck himself before the next debates.

It’s bad enough when the money people are bossing around the candidates. It’s worse when one of those backers actually tells the story to the media; Susman went so far as to be quoted saying of O’Rourke, “The needed improvements are purely stylistic.”

After O’Rourke became a social media meme for his gringo Spanish, and got walloped in the debate on his pet issue, immigration, the campaign’s solution was to send him to Ciudad Juárez, across the Rio Grande, for an emergency session of Looking as Concerned as Julián Castro. Now the poor guy is back in Iowa reporting on his adventures and delivering a speech entirely about the crisis. He describes the border scene in horrific, Boschian detail, down to the “little kiddos” who are “pooping in their pants” and on the floor where they will sleep and eat.

Most are listening intently, but there’s some wincing in the heat. There’s no way to avoid wondering how this would play in a general-election setting. One can already hear what Trump would say about his emergency Juárez trip: If it was Susman’s idea, why isn’t Susman running?

Four years ago, the rank inadequacy of the Lindsey Grahams and Scott Walkers and Jeb Bushes who tumbled into the pastures of Iowa made great sport for snickering campaign journalists, myself included. We dubbed the field of governors, senators, and congressgoons who couldn’t beat a game-show host the “Clown Car,” and laughed at what many of us thought was the long-overdue collapse of the Republican Party. The joke turned out to be on us.

The GOP error was epic in scale. The Republicans sent twice the usual number of suspects into the buzz saw of a Throw the Bums Out movement they never understood, creating the comic pretext for the Clown Car: twice the canned quips, twice the empty promises, double the rage, frustration, and eye rolls.

Nobody will want to hear this, but Democrats are repeating the error. The sense of déjà vu is palpable. It might and should still work out, according to the polls. But a double catastrophe seems a lot less impossible than it did even a year ago. Lose to Donald Trump once, shame on the voters. Lose to him twice? It’s glue-factory time for the Democratic Party, and another black eye for America, which is fast turning its electoral system into a slapstick reality show.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

If Wednesday night's batshit insane "Send Her Back" chanting at Trump's North Carolina rally (as he nodded along and stifled a smile) showed us one thing, it's that republicans are now in a (to them) glorious full racist meltdown. They hardly even pretend to hide their racism anymore, and those like the propagandists at FOX "News" who push racism and then claim what they just said or did isn't racist have been encouraging racism for years. It would be hard to believe that anyone is happier about the storm we're in than Rupert Murdoch, unless his name is Trump. Neo Nazi's know they have sympathetic partners in FOX and Trump and they are letting their freak flags fly.

It's not like any Republicans in the media or among the voters every really did hide their racism, at least not completely. They may have thought so but now they don't even bother with the pretense or they will deny that what is obviously racist is racist, with a smirk of course. The racism has always been there to see. It's just that now, even more than before, Republicans are proudly and even more loudly proclaiming it. Trump's rallies are now the stuff of lynch mobs. The doors to the Republican Party closets have been blown off their hinges by a wind that howls right out of 1963 Mississippi and Alabama.

I don't know who the racist FOX "News" goon in the above picture is but, really, does it matter? You could just plug in virtually any FOX "News" goon. Sure, some airhead defenders of the white supremacist network who might claim to be Independents or even Democrats, will point to Shep Smith and claim "Not him, he's ok. They'r not all bad." But, let's get real, if you're happily riding in the back seat, you're still going along on the ride to whatever mayhem the cretin behind the wheel is driving to. The rhetoric that the White House, FOX "News" and the rest of the Republican notables is engaging in is the same as the "rotten apple" rhetoric that led us to Oklahoma City, Jackson State, Kent State, and the bodies of 3 civil rights workers being buried in an earthen dam.

One, FOX a-hole named Chris Stirewalt even recently tried to minimize republican racism by shrugging it off and saying-

Democrats will tell you every Republican is racist. Republicans will tell you every Democrat is a socialist.

Talk about your false equivalencies! Think about that one. Play it over in your mind. To Herr Stirewalt, being a racist is as acceptable as being a socialist. I'd love to see him say something like that in a crowd in Denmark, or even at a Social Security office here in the good old U.S.A. for that matter.

Well, to Republicans, being a racist is perfectly acceptable. In fact, it's encouraged and, as I've said here for years, being a racist is among the qualifications to join the Republican Party. This was well-evidenced by Tuesday's House vote on a resolution to condemn Trump's racist tweets and remarks in the White House Rose Garden. Only 4 out of all of the House Republicans voted against the resolution and they will henceforth be ostracized. The rest fiercely made their embrace of Trump's racism and their own a matter of public and congressional record. This is the Republican Party in 2019 and, horrifically, the future.

Another Republican goofball who has embraced his racism, is North Carolina $enator Thom Tillis who met Trump at the airport and was thrilled to ride with him to the rally. Thursday morning, the morning after the now infamous rally, Tillis ran as fast as he could to the FOX cameras where he enthused about all of the support for Trump in North Carolina as exemplified by crowds along the route to the rally and at the rally itself. Among other statements, he played the "fake news" card claiming media "obfuscation" of recent events and joining in with a FOX "News" blonde bozo who appeared to be right out of a Nazi S.S. central casting call as he whined to Tillis that the people in the rally arena "are being characterized as racists." Aw, poor baby! Gee, now why would people characterize racists as racists? This has been a standard tactic at FOX that they've really stepped up in recent days. Just like the White House, at Fox, whatever actions or statements by republicans that are racist just aren't racist. It's Queen of Denial Journalism 101. It's getting so bad that I expect the next time I put FOX "News" on, they'll all be looking at a picture of a lynched black man hanging from a tree and saying "that's not racist." It's FOX. It's who they are, from Rupert Murdoch on down. These are the people who turned over their shows to birtherism when Barack Obama was running for and then serving as president. These are the people who dismissed the circulating pictures of President Obama dressed as a witch doctor with a bone in his nose while the healthcare bill was being put together as not racist. That just wasn't enough for them and they will continue to escalate and escalate and escalate.

Here's Tillis joining in on the whining-

We've gotta shift the attention back to some of the positions they're taking that are extreme. Now the media here on Capitol Hill only wanna talk about parsing the president's words. I'm not gonna answer a question of them (sic) unless they come back and talk about the things that actually lit this candle and it's the extreme positions taken by A.O.C., Omar, and the so-called gang.

Yeah, there you have it. Tillis thinks the media's time would be better spent reporting the so-called "extreme" views held by the 4 congresswomen of color that republicans are focusing so much hate upon these days. Right. As if there's nothing extreme in saying that they should go back to where they came from. Hey Thommy, how about you tell that to the president's wife and her family! Go ahead. We're waiting asshole!

A parting note: On most Sunday's, I devote the Midnight Meme Of The Day! to a subcategory I call "Sunday Thoughts." Events, however, are overrunning us. I will point out, though, that tonight's meme does contain a cross and the KKK is as Republican Jesus-like as penny loafers and Mike Pence's khakis, and has been since Nixon took the racist dixiecrats, with the notable exception of former klansman Robert Byrd, into the Republican Party back in 1968. Byrd, however, unlike the rest, repudiated his former ways. Don't hold your breath waiting for that from any modern day Republicans. They have a true white supremacist messiah in Donald Trump now and it is him in whom they place their trust, no other, and certainly not the Constitution.

Let's Re-Visit The North Carolina Republican Party Vote Theft Mess

We left off Sunday night before the meeting of the North Carolina Board of Elections. All the background about the case, the candidates and the 9th district can be found there, as well as my predictions how just how horrible Democrat Blue Dog Dan McCready is likely to be and how progressives would be better off without him in Congress. But I know you want to cheer for Team Blue anyway, so here's the update.

Voter fraud galore and it seems like these Republicans absolutely have to go to prison for trying to steal the election. On Monday Leslie McCrae Dowless, who was paid by Republican Mark Harris to steal the 2018 primary and general election, was aware of that and said he will not testify with a grant of immunity from prosecution. That makes sense-- especially after his stepdaughter testified how his ballot harvesting operation worked.

Lisa Britt, whose mother was married to Leslie McCrae Dowless in the early 1990s, testified that Dowless paid workers to collect absentee ballot request forms and mail-in absentee ballots and drop them off at his office and his home.

She said Dowless and others made copies of request forms and had specific criteria for matching pen colors, where to mail ballots from, how many to mail at a time and even how to place stamps to avoid setting off alarms.

“He fussed at me for putting on stamps upside down,” Britt testified before the N.C. Board of Elections. “We didn’t want to throw up a red flag.”


...Britt’s testimony was the beginning of the attempt by a new, five-member state board to prove what Executive Director Kim Westbrook Strach called “a coordinated, unlawful and substantially resourced absentee ballot scheme operated during the 2018 general election in Bladen and Robeson counties.”

The hearing took place in a makeshift courtroom at the state bar and drew dozens of potential witnesses as well as national media. When it ends, the board will vote to either certify the victory of Republican Mark Harris, call for a new election or deadlock, which would throw the matter into limbo.

Harris leads Democrat Dan McCready by 905 votes in unofficial results in the district, which runs from Charlotte to Bladen County in the east.

Dowless was hired by Red Dome Group, Harris’ campaign consulting group at Harris’ direction. The state board said Red Dome Group paid Dowless $131,357.57 from July 3 to Nov. 7, but said that it could not be certain all of the money was for Harris’ campaign.

Monday marked the first time that state officials revealed their findings in the investigation, which launched in November and twice caused the old nine-member state board not to certify the election results. 
Britt, a convicted felon who had previously spoken to investigators, said she didn’t think Dowless would have her do anything illegal. Britt, who testified without immunity and without a lawyer present, admitted to multiple election fraud activities.

“I don’t want to get him in trouble. I don’t want to get anyone in trouble,” Britt said. “Mr. Dowless has been a father figure to me for 30 years. There’s certain things you would place trust in. He’s not going to put you out here to do something illegal.”


 But Britt outlined a process by which she and other workers often signed as witnesses for ballots they did not see signed, traced over signatures to make sure the ink colors matched that of the voter’s, dated forms incorrectly, forged signatures and filled in down-ballot races on some ballots.

It is illegal in North Carolina for anyone outside of a close relative to handle a voter’s absentee ballot. Her testimony was backed by another witness, Kelly Hendrix, who testified that she collected ballots and turned them into Dowless with only one of the two required witness signatures. The forms were signed later, Hendrix said, by people who did not see them collected.

Britt also told the board that Dowless-- on at least two occasions-- tried to influence her public statements and testimony. As controversy swirled over the election results last year, Britt said Dowless called her and other workers together for a meeting at his house.

“As long as we all stick together we’ll all be fine, because they don’t have anything on us,” Britt said Dowless told them.


Britt, who along with her two young children lived with Dowless for a time last year, said late last week, Dowless sent her a note, urging her to say she had not done anything wrong, that Dowless had never instructed her to do anything wrong and to take the 5th Amendment against self-incrimination before the board.

The note was entered into evidence.


Britt testified that she made false statements during a December interview with WBTV, in which she denied collecting absentee ballots.

“I do feel I have done wrong,” she said.


 ...“You heard direct evidence of a scheme to deprive voters of the 9th Congressional District of fair balloting,” McCready campaign attorney Marc Elias said after the hearing. “And you heard that that direct evidence winds up doorstep and the telephone of Republican candidate Mark Harris.”

Republicans say unreturned ballots don’t necessarily suggest fraud. An attorney for the Harris campaign pointed out that the Bladen County Improvement PAC, a Democratic group, was working to request numerous absentee ballots as well. Republicans say McCready must show that any fraudulent ballots actually made a difference.

“The burden is on McCready to prove absent the irregularities he likely would have won the race. The burden is not on Mr. Harris or the NCGOP to prove the election system is perfect. It is not, never has been, and never will be,” tweeted Dallas Woodhouse, executive director of the NC Republican Party.

Under state law, the board can call for a new election if “Irregularities or improprieties occurred to such an extent that they taint the results of the entire election and cast doubt on its fairness.”

Trump and Harris-- perfect pair of cheats

Exciting, right? Tuesday the fireworks continued with a finding that "votes were counted days before Election Day in the rural county at the center of the disputed results." AP reported that "The officials also said the election was marred by falsified signatures, blank ballots that consultants could complete and disappearing documents. The state elections board on Tuesday heard from Bladen County poll workers who admitted tallying results on the Saturday before Election Day when early, in-person voting ended. That’s contrary to proper practice... [and] the practice of early counting raises questions about the vulnerability of the county’s voting results."

This process was expected to end today tomorrow with a decision by Friday. That looks less likely as the magnitude of the criminal activities continues to unfold. The Republican Party has been whining about voters fraud for years and years and they have finally found it. Now we all know why they were so sure of it too. Except for people who get their news from Fox. They don't get a reality-based perspective on anything. It's kind of scary. For example, this Tucker Carlson piece with Dutch historian Rutger Bregman hasn't been aired-- and won't be. You should watch it though... for a whole variety of reasons, done of which have anything directly to do with Republican Parrty election theft in North Carolina.





UPDATE: BREAKING NEWS!

In an unexpected shock today, Mark Harris' son. John, testified that he had warned his father-- more than once-- about fraudulent absentee ballots in Bladen County and told him in no uncertain terms that McCrae Dowless is a GOP career criminal.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

I've often said in my posts that FOX "News" is a modern day equivalent of Tokyo Rose. For those younger readers that may not know who Tokyo Rose was (due to cuts in education and censored textbooks no doubt), Tokyo Rose was a "radio personality" who broadcast out of Tokyo during World War II. Her role, was to essentially sweet talk American and Australian military personnel into believing that, not only were the allies losing the war but they would be rewarded if they laid down their weapons and surrendered. Even swearing allegiance to Emperor Hirohito was, at times, suggested. Tokyo Rose offered an extremely twisted reinterpretation of things occurring in both naval and land battles, even events leading up to the war. If you believed Tokyo Rose, you would wonder why you were fighting. You might have even thought that it was us who had attacked Japan's navy on December 7th 1941. The whole Tokyo Rose thing was aimed at lowering the morale of the troops and weakening the war effort against Japan. It was propaganda put out even in hopes of influencing our political leaders to stop fighting Japan.

Sound familiar? Substitute Russia for Japan and the likes of Sean Hannity for Tokyo Rose and you pretty much have it. Throw in Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh and fellow traveling accomplices like Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and the rest of their party for good measure, but FOX "News" is their epicenter. It is their oracle, their oracle of bullshit, treasonous bullshit. Whether it's crackpot Nunes memos, Seth Rich conspiracies, birtherism, Hillary's emails, or, more pertinent to this post, Robert A. Mueller's investigation of Russian influence in our elections, chances are damn close to 100% that the talking points of any Republican politician, Republican voter, or Putin apologist stem from there. If you factor any Russian internet bot "sources" into the conversation, it just becomes a "which came first, the chicken or the egg" scenario. Does it matter? No, because, no matter what the nonsense, FOX "News" is the bigger funnel through which all of this bullshit gets to the larger amount of our gullible, naive, and hate-run fellow citizens.

Notice that I didn't mention Donald J.Trump. I only omitted him because comparing him to Emperor Hirohito would be a grave insult to Emperor Hirohito.

So what set me off about FOX "News" this time? It was their coverage of Friday's announcement that Robert Mueller had issued 13 indictments of people involved in the engineering of swaying public opinion in favor of Comrade Trump in the 2016 election. Their spin was a thing to behold. Tokyo Rose would have been gleeful.

I watched FOX "News" on Friday and Saturday. I know you ask why, but I do it out of morbid curiosity, and so you don't have to. It's not a strictly a morbidity thing. It's just that deranged people and how they got there almost fascinates me. I watched because I wanted to see just how they would twist or ignore such a momentous story. The United States of America has been attacked by a foreign adversary and the evidence of the severity keeps mounting up. Meanwhile our so-called "president" says nothing. I knew how pro-American news outlets would react. The question in my mind was exactly how would FOX "News" react. I wasn't surprised. They sank even lower.

The only question left about FOX "News" now is can we really call them treasonous since they are owned by an Australian and a Saudi or does the visibility and weight of the Tokyo Rose-speak outweigh that? I vote for the later. It's obvious. The majority of those who work at FOX "News" and those who deliver the message are Americans. They are doing the work of Russia but they are Americans. They may think others are prime targets for arrest and deportation (or more) but maybe they should look in the mirror.

The goons on FOX twisted the indictment story so heinously it was breathtaking. What the Mueller indictments actually mean went basically unmentioned. To FOX "News," the indictments somehow showed, in true opposite world fashion, that our fake president is now vindicated. They enveloped the indictment story in their ongoing Nunes conspiracy and, most despicably, tied it to the horrific murders of 14 students and 3 staffers at Parkland Florida's Stoneman Douglas high school which had occurred just 2 days before. Keep in mind that this is the same channel that has been pushing their Nunes conspiracy and anti-law enforcement conspiracies for months. They tied the shootings into those conspiracies to create one all-encompassing super vomitous conspiracy by saying that the Parkland Florida high schoolers who are vocally protesting the shootings are only doing so because Democrats are paying them to do so; George Soros and Tom Steyer, no doubt. Think how deranged and downright evil you have to be to go there in the service of your twisted agenda. And, how dare they protest! All of this was done in order to assault the credibility of the Mueller investigation and protect our apparent Manchurian president.

To FOX and fellow travelers, the indictments were not a reason to discuss what to do and what Señor Trumpanzee should do in response to the attack on our country; they were just all part of a conspiracy to get at their boy Putin, er, Trump. It's obvious that FOX "News" and Comrade Trump don't want us to respond at all, certainly not by imposing the sanctions or investigating how we might defend this country from further attacks.

Just imagine if FOX "News" and wacko social media had existed during World War II. FOX "News" viewers might not even know what actually happened at Pearl Harbor. A Trump version of FDR (sorry Franklin) would have not given his stirring "Day of Infamy" speech. There would have been no Jimmy Doolittle raid on Japan. No Rosie the riveter. No battle for Guadalcanal or the Philippines. Half the country would be speaking Japanese and half would be speaking German. If that's what we really want, we should all probably sign up for Russian language lessons right now. If it isn't, then we need to start having a lot of trials and convictions. Oh, and by the way, Tokyo Rose was an American.