Skip to content

Month: March 2023

Tucker grovels

Published by digby on March 21, 2023

But can Dear Leader ever really trust him again?

This is just … pathetic:

BO SNERDLEY (HOST): Tucker, listen, I’ve had a number of people saying they read all these things in the paper — “You hate Trump blah, blah, blah.” But this it — does Tucker like Trump’s policies, any policies of his? What’s the deal with you and Donald Trump?

TUCKER CARLSON (GUEST): Oh, let’s see. I spent four years defending his policies and I — I’m going to defend them again tonight. And actually, and I’m pretty straight forward, I’m — I love Trump. Like, as a person, I think Trump is funny and insightful. And and I said this to Trump when he called me, you know, all wounded about those texts. That was a moment in time where I was absolutely infuriated.

And I think this is in the text — and those were all grabbed  completely illegitimately, in my opinion, in this court case, which I guess I’m not allowed to talk about, but I’m enraged that my private texts were pulled.

But those — those particular texts were pulled at exactly — at the moment where I was texting with one of my producers because some idiot on the Trump campaign had sent us the name of these dead voters who had voted. And we went and I repeated them on air, and it turns out some of them were alive.

SNERDLY: Oh.

CARLSON: So. I was just — I felt humiliated. Yeah. Like what? And I thought then and I think now that that election was not on the level, it was not a free and fair election. I thought that then. I think it now.

And so, I was trying to — I wanted, you know, evidence. I mean, there’s no way the guy got 81 — he got more votes than Barack Obama. Really?

You know, who — whatever you think of Obama — I never liked Obama — but he’s a really talented, very talented politician. And Joe Biden is senile and hid in his basement. Tell me how he got 81 million votes.

So, I’ve always thought that was not on the level. And so I said to the Trump people, you know, “You’re saying the election was rigged. Send me some examples of it and I’ll put it on the air.”

And one of them was these dead voters. Well, it turned out some of them were still alive. And I was so mad by the incompetence of that campaign, which was completely incompetent. I mean, completely you know, I’m like the one guy who’s open minded about the election being unfair. And — and that’s what they send me? Anyway. Whatever. I was mad. That was a moment in time.

And I will say this. My comments on TV — I think my texts reflect who I am. And I’m vulgar in public, in private, rather. And I use, like bad language and stuff. I worked in a newsroom my whole life and my wife’s always trying to improve me, which is fair, but my views are pretty transparent. I always say what I think. I can’t keep track of too many lies, you know what I mean? So anyway.

SNERDLY: I know exactly what you mean. And people forget this, that we say things. We’re human beings and we can say things in a peak of anger.

CARLSON: Exactly.

SNERDLY: And at that very moment we’re saying things in a peak of anger, but it does not represent the whole body of our thoughts.

CARLSON: Well, that’s exactly right. And I was — I was actually even thinking about it. Makes me mad now. I reached out to this one Trump aide who’s — I’m not going to name, he’s a nice guy, but he’s totally incompetent. And I said, “I agree with you. There was something really wrong with this election. Send me evidence.” And then to have the voters call in and be like, “No, I’m still alive.” I’m so embarrassed and mad.

Everything about that is hilarious. The alleged dead people called him up and said, “Hay, I’m alive????” Oh my god.

Commemorating Waco

Published by digby on March 21, 2023

Trump’s rally can’t be a coincidence. Even he isn’t that clueless.

I don’t know if Trump will mention this at his rally on the 30th, but you can bet that the violent, anti-government extremists in this country — and there are many — will see this as a signal.

Former President Donald Trump – launching his bid to return to the White House even as he rallies supporters to protest against an arrest he claims is impending –  chose an auspicious location for one of his earliest rallies for the 2024 election: the city of Waco, Texas. 

The rally, planned for Saturday, will fall during the 30th anniversary of the siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco. Federal agents, aiming to arrest cult leader David Koresh, surrounded his walled compound in an armed standoff that lasted more than a month. It ended in a botched raid that left 76 people, including 25 children, dead.

This is very bad. I don’t know if it will immediately result in violence but it’s a clear directive to “stand back and stand by.” I guess, as usual, there’s no one around him to tell him how dangerous this is. In fact, someone obviously told him to do it — he didn’t know anything about the Waco standoff anniversary. But the wingnuts sure do.

Where is the MSM headed in this election cycle?

Published by digby on March 21, 2023

I’ve been wondering about this too. From what I can tell, MSNBC is maintaining its anti-Trump stance but CNN is going to do a modified Crossfire strategy with a Trump liar on one side, a DeSantis toady on another and a reporter in the middle. Think about how that goes.

Puck’s Tara Palmieri and Dylan Byers discussed the possibilities today:

Tara: … Beyond Fox, how do you think the rest of the networks will cover Trump and other candidates on the campaign trail? I’m not seeing a lot of Trump, while Glenn Youngkin and Mike Pence both got “town hall” events at CNN. How do they rate? And will we see more of them? 

Dylan: Well, we know what MSNBC’s posture will likely be: “a pox on all their houses.” The open question—and it will be fascinating to watch—is CNN. In its new iteration under Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN has positioned itself as a nonpartisan, news-first outlet catering to Republicans and Democrats alike. And, indeed, WBD C.E.O. David Zaslav and CNN chief Chris Licht have made a very big deal about getting a lot of Republican lawmakers to come on air, to the point where it occasionally seems like the only metric by which they measure their success (it’s certainly not ratings, or revenue).

I’m sure Licht sees 2024 as an opportunity to showcase New CNN’s editorial posture. But a Trump vs. DeSantis primary campaign is going to stress-test the thesis, because both these candidates have shown a penchant for demonizing the media merely for acting as fact-checkers. Licht may believe that he is restoring trust and redefining the network’s reputation, but it’s more likely Trump and DeSantis will define it for him. Now, he may not encourage his hosts to go after the Republicans when that happens, à la Jeff Zucker, but I can’t imagine folks like Jake Tapper and Don Lemon are going to bite their tongue once lies and incivilities are back in the headlines. So it’ll be a tough line to toe.

As for those town halls, no, they don’t rate. The Pence town hall, which drew more than a million viewers, was an exception in part because it came on the heels of the 2022 midterms. But Youngkin drew just 364,000, and a mere 89,000 in the demo. That should surprise no one at CNN, because almost every town hall the network has done over the last five years has drawn roughly those numbers. And yet, Licht’s new CNN primetime strategy is to add more of these town halls, even though they’ve been a drag on the network’s already lackluster ratings. But as Zaslav said when he dropped by CNN headquarters last week: “Ratings be damned!”

Tara: That’s fascinating. In terms of covering Trump directly, what is Licht’s calculation? Is he hiring more reporters? I see journalists sourced in Tallahassee getting snapped up, like my old Politico colleague Matt Dixon, who was hired by NBC News. What do you think? 

Dylan: Historically, news organizations go on a bit of a hiring spree heading into a presidential campaign cycle, or at least move more of their existing reporters onto campaigns and then backfill the vacant positions. With CNN coming off mass layoffs last year, and still needing to cover a budget shortfall this year, I imagine Licht will try to leverage his existing bench. Moreover, he has made a very big point of diversifying CNN’s broadcast beyond “all politics all the time,” so he may not feel the need to flood the zone with political correspondents the way his predecessor did.

But, perhaps the more pertinent question is: Do you think the candidates still care about how they’re covered and portrayed on CNN? Isn’t so much of their press strategy these days about going direct to the voter? And what about lawmakers on the Hill? Do they need CNN as much as they need, say, Punchbowl?

Tara: They do care about how they’re portrayed on CNN, and I know that G.O.P. leadership has been encouraging members to appear on the networks. A lot of them were banned for supporting the election conspiracies—remember when Tapper said he wouldn’t have election deniers on his show? Others were afraid to go on and face tough questions about January 6. In the end, Republican leaders felt that the midterm elections were a reflection of the fact that they weren’t able to take their message to potentially independent voters, who are watching CNN and the broadcast networks. It’s never good when the only G.O.P. voices making the arguments for the party are anti-Trump “pariahs” like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, who buck the party and leadership. It all plays into the narrative that the party is too extreme, which is hurting them in elections. 

The Washington Post’s Paul Kane wrote about this phenomenon recently, in which some of the most hardcore MAGA warriors are quietly returning to making appearances on “fake news.” Take Jim Jordan, who turned up on NBC’s Meet the Press last month for the first time in four years. It’s not just him—Kevin McCarthy, Michael McCaul, Michael Turner and James Comer have all been on the Sunday shows in this new congress. McCarthy himself had not been on the Sunday shows for two years, despite the fact that they garner an audience of about 10 million each Sunday between the five of them. I think Punchbowl and other newsletters in town, like this one, are great for talking to the inside audience which eventually trickles to the outside audience. But CNN and the Sunday show are a perfect place to deploy your message to independent voters and suburban women—you know, the people who decide elections. 

As for the presidential candidates, I think DeSantis et al. can probably ignore CNN and MSNBC ahead of the primary election, and continue to call them fake news. It all plays well with the G.O.P. base, for now. But I expect that before the general election, when they’re creeping to the middle, they’ll likely return to knocking on those same doors. Or at the very least, they won’t turn down their requests for a debate. 

Why anyone would think that Jim Jordan and James Comer will convince anyone that the party isn’t extreme is beyond me. McCaul and |turner aren’t exactly moderates either although they may not be as “Hunter Biden’s laptop” batshit as the others. But sure, have Jim Jordan on. Just make sure there’s someone other than a supposedly neutral reporter to balance him out.

And yes, DeSantis will be on CNN if he wins the nomination and because he will have vanquished Trump they will treat him like the second coming. The real question is how they will treat Trump if he’s the big winner. I don’t think we know that yet but I’m nervous.

Trump’s “down to the countryside” movement

Published by digby on March 21, 2023

Mao’s cultural revolution inspires Trump:

Actually, it’s probably more like Pol Pot’s version. He sent all the urban professionals and intellectuals to the country to learn to be good communists.

This is something he actually accomplished while in office. Recall that he moved the USDA researchers to Kansas City to be closer to the people. The last I heard a bunch of them quit and the department is now much smaller.

“Two Corinthians 3:17, that’s the whole ballgame…”

Published by digby on March 21, 2023

Lol. They should know better than to ask him for a biblical reference by now.

“I’m not sure I can hear you, if you’d like to say something, I’d like to hear that.” But don’t ask me for anything specific ok? I don’t have a clue about prayer and the Bible, ok?

Lucky for him they don’t care. Remember this?

There were a few stumbles during Donald Trump’s sojourn to Liberty University on Monday.

He mispronounced a book of the Bible. He cursed — twice. And on Martin Luther King Day, the GOP presidential candidate said he was honoring the slain civil-rights leader by dedicating to him the record crowds he says he drew for the school’s opening convocation. (Students are required to attend.)

“We’re going to protect Christianity. I can say that. I don’t have to be politically correct,” he thundered at the beginning of his speech at the conservative evangelical university.

Then he moved on to cite “Two Corinthians 3:17, that’s the whole ballgame. … Is that the one you like?” Trump asked. “Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.”

Liberty University students (from left) Austin Miller, James Ford, Jeremy Boyd, Josiah O’Boyle and Cody Hildebrand wear “TRUMP” shirts while waiting to hear the Republican presidential candidate.

Students in the room snickered and laughed, and advisers to two of Trump’s top rivals, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, were quick to point out the gaffe on Twitter.

Trump was once leading with conservative evangelical voters in the polls, but that support has slipped, especially in Iowa, which votes in two weeks. And it’s Cruz who’s challenging him the most heavily for religious conservatives.

Trump has boasted of his religious credentials, but there have been some missteps along the way. Last year, he told an Iowa evangelical gathering he had never asked God for forgiveness — a central tenet of the Christian faith — and he repeated that Sunday on CNN. He’s declined to cite his favorite Bible verse or even his favorite testament. And the Presbyterian church he says he attends in Manhattan has said he’s not an active member.

Those discrepancies haven’t mattered yet to many evangelicals, and also didn’t seem to faze many Liberty students either.

Sophomore Kathy Abdallah said she liked what Trump had to say, but as to whether his faith was genuine, she said she was taking his word for it.

There were still other head-scratching moments from Trump. He was speaking on Martin Luther King Day, a choice which had already angered some students and alumni due to inflammatory and controversial remarks Trump has made about Muslims, Mexican immigrants, women and other minorities during the course of his campaign — something they say isn’t in line with the spirit of Dr. King.

The school defended the pick, telling Yahoo News, “I think this one was picked to afford Mr. Trump the opportunity to, among other things, honor Dr. King. It wasn’t like we said, ‘Let’s go find someone who would be anti-Martin Luther King.'”

But Trump did not use his speech to pay homage to King and only acknowledged him in the context of boasting about the record crowd size he drew.

“And the first thing I said to Jerry and Becki [Falwell] when I got here: ‘Did we break the record?'” he told students. “They said, ‘Yes, you did, by quite a bit.’ So we’ll dedicate that to Martin Luther King, a great man. And that’s a little bit of an achievement, I will tell you.”

That was nothing to the visit he paid in 2012 in which he advised student to get a pre-nup and wreak revenge on their enemies.

And yet, nobody loves him more than conservative evangelicals. They form the backbone of his MAGA movement.

Dan Froomkin on the press failure of 2002-2003

Published by digby on March 21, 2023

Have they learned anything since then?

In a nation that considers itself peaceful and civilized, the case for military action should be overwhelmingly stronger than the case against. It must face, and survive, aggressive questioning.

When political leaders are too timid to push back, that responsibility falls entirely to the media.

But in 2002 and 2003, covering the run-up to war in Iraq, our nation’s top reporters and editors blew it badly. Their credulous, stenographic spreading of the administration’s deeply deceptive arguments made them de facto accomplices to a war undertaken on false pretenses.

I’ve written about this failure countless times, but – believe it or not — the best thing I’ve ever read about it was actually written by Scott McClellan, the former Bush White House press secretary. In an era of almost universally self-congratulatory memoirs from government officials, McClellan’s 2008 book, “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception,” was full of confessions and accusations.

I first wrote about it for NiemanWatchdog.org, a since-shuttered website from the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, where I served as deputy editor.

As press secretary, McClellan was a robotic and iconic source of deception himself. But then he came clean. This is what he wrote in his book:

In the fall of 2002, Bush and his White house were engaging in a carefully-orchestrated campaign to shape and manipulate sources of public approval to our advantage. We’d done much the same on other issues–tax cuts and education–to great success. But war with Iraq was different. Beyond the irreversible human costs and substantial financial price, the decision to go to war and the way we went about selling it would ultimately lead to increased polarization and intensified partisan warfare…

And through it all, the media would serve as complicit enablers. Their primary focus would be on covering the campaign to sell the war, rather than aggressively questioning the rationale for war or pursuing the truth behind it… the media would neglect their watchdog role, focusing less on truth and accuracy and more on whether the campaign was succeeding. Was the president winning or losing the argument? How were Democrats responding? What were the electoral implications? What did the polls say? And the truth–about the actual nature of the threat posed by Saddam, the right way to confront it, and the possible risks of military conflict–would get largely left behind…

If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq. The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should have never come as such a surprise. The public should have been made much more aware, before the fact, of the uncertainties, doubts, and caveats that underlay the intelligence about the regime of Saddam Hussein. The administration did little to convey those nuances to the people, the press should have picked up the slack but largely failed to do so because their focus was elsewhere–on covering the march to war, instead of the necessity of war.

In this case, the “liberal media” didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.

It took members of the elite media a remarkably long time after the invasion and the resulting chaos to realize just how credulous and wrong they had been. In a February 2004 piece in the New York Review of Books, media observer Michael Massing then asked the obvious follow-up question: Why?

In recent months, US news organizations have rushed to expose the Bush administration’s pre-war failings on Iraq. “Iraq’s Arsenal Was Only on Paper,” declared a recent headline in The Washington Post. “Pressure Rises for Probe of Prewar-Intelligence,” said The Wall Street Journal. “So, What Went Wrong?” asked Time. In The New Yorker, Seymour Hersh described how the Pentagon set up its own intelligence unit, the Office of Special Plans, to sift for data to support the administration’s claims about Iraq. And on “Truth, War and Consequences,” a Frontline documentary that aired last October, a procession of intelligence analysts testified to the administration’s use of what one of them called “faith-based intelligence.”

Watching and reading all this, one is tempted to ask, where were you all before the war? Why didn’t we learn more about these deceptions and concealments in the months when the administration was pressing its case for regime change—when, in short, it might have made a difference?…

The nearer the war drew, and the more determined the administration seemed to wage it, the less editors were willing to ask tough questions.

Bill Moyers devoted a show on PBS in 2007, entitled Buying the War, to the issue:

How mainstream journalists suspended skepticism and scrutiny remains an issue of significance that the media has not satisfactorily explored. How the administration marketed the war to the American people has been well covered, but critical questions remain: How and why did the press buy it, and what does it say about the role of journalists in helping the public sort out fact from propaganda?

The heroes of Moyers’s story are editor John Walcott and reporters Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel, then of the Knight Ridder Washington bureau. Their relentlessly skeptical reporting was nearly unique in Washington – and almost entirely ignored.

In 2008, Walcott was the first person to receive the I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence from the Nieman Foundation – an honor I’m proud to say I helped create.

We asked him and other astute observers – among them New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer, author Tom Rosenstiel, and Massing – how to encourage the kind of courageous journalism practiced during that period by Knight Ridder.

They agreed that fear was the biggest factor in the press’s decision not to challenge Bush and his aides as they made what turned out to be a plainly specious case for war. The country was solidly behind Bush after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, his White House maligned those who raised too many questions as unpatriotic. Corporate chieftains were afraid they’d lose audience if they were seen as un-American. And newsroom managers went along.

Read on for Froomkin’s advice on how to do better. It’s worth reading in full. Let’s just say I’m skeptical, The incentives haven’t changed much, I’m afraid.

Standing on the Back of No One Dept.

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 21, 2023

An oldie but goodie

The conservative columnist best unnamed and cited below went viral last week for being unable to define “woke” after claiming to have devoted an entire chapter to it in her recent book. Matt Binder (better him than me) dredged up a classic tweet by her from 2012.

It’s “the conservative mindset perfectly distilled in a single tweet.”

Sorry, it’s giants all the way down.

A country of slow learners

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 21, 2023

No country for Black men (among others)

Virginia’s Central State Hospital’s original name (according to its Wikipedia entry) was Central Lunatic Asylum. The Petersburg facility “was the first institution in the country for ‘colored persons of unsound mind’.” On March 6, it was the site of the alleged second-degree murder by asphyxiation of shackled Irvo N. Otieno who is unavailable for comment.

The Washington Post reports:

As many as10 sheriff’s deputies and medical staff at Virginia’s Central State Hospital can be seen piling on top of a shackled Irvo N. Otieno for approximately 11 minutes until he stops moving, according to new video showing the encounter that led to the 28-year-old Black man’s death.

The hospital surveillance video, which has no sound, shows Otieno’s final moments on March 6, from the time Henrico County sheriff’s deputies drag him into a hospital admissions room in handcuffs and leg irons, to the 11 minutes in which they restrain Otieno on the ground, to the moment when they release Otieno’s limp body around 4:40 p.m.

Most of those visible in the video appear Black themselves.

A Virginia prosecutor has charged seven Henrico County sheriff’s deputies and three staff members at the hospital with second-degree murder in Otieno’s death, and has said she expects more arrests and charges.

The prosecutor, Ann Cabell Baskervill, said she was planning to release the video to the public on Tuesday. The Washington Post obtained it ahead of the release by clicking on Dropbox links, which Baskervill listed in a public court filing as part of her obligation to turn over relevant information to defense attorneys.

Otieno’s is by now a familiar story, yet another tragedy in a long list of Black men killed in American police custody. It matters little what color those who squeezed the life from him were. How many such tragedies had the participants witnessed in the news before making the news for perpetrating the same?

As with many like American behaviors, the infuriating truth, is how deadly Americans being slow learners is for others.

We never learn

Six people were shot overnight in Milwaukee, Wisc. and one, a 15-year-old boy, has died.

In Florida Monday, “The Alachua County Sheriff’s Office arrested a 15-year-old girl accused of making an online threat to commit a mass shooting at a high school in Alachua County.”

In Arlington, Texas, “One student is dead and another injured after a shooting outside Lamar High School in Arlington Monday morning, the school district and police said.”

A study released Monday reveals “mass and active shooters have distinct patterns of buying guns compared to other legal purchasers. The UC Davis Violence Prevention Research Program (VPRP) research was published in the Journal of Criminal Justice.”

I have a bridge to sell you in Manhattan if you think any of that will change Americans’ behavior surrounding the availability of guns and the plague of gun violence.

Nor the media

The media, too, are slow learners, as Dan Froomkin laments in citing the 20th anniversary of “shock and awe” in Iraq. The unindicted war criminals of that effort paint in Texas, write memoirs and fly fish, and teach at Berkeley. From the ashes of the American invasion was born ISIS and destabilization. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians died and thousands of Americans. And the Bush administration’s claim that ousting Saddam Hussein would lead to a flowering of democracy in the region? They sold us a bridge over the Tigris River.

Twenty years later, “the press corps has learned nothing,” Froomkin laments.

Former Bush White House press secretary Scott McClellan was “a robotic and iconic source of deception” in the propaganda campaign to sell the war, Froomkin writes. Yet McClellan came clean in his memoir. He confessed that “Bush and his White house were engaging in a carefully-orchestrated campaign to shape and manipulate sources of public approval to our advantage.” And the press went right along, McClellan writes:

And through it all, the media would serve as complicit enablers. Their primary focus would be on covering the campaign to sell the war, rather than aggressively questioning the rationale for war or pursuing the truth behind it… the media would neglect their watchdog role, focusing less on truth and accuracy and more on whether the campaign was succeeding. Was the president winning or losing the argument? How were Democrats responding? What were the electoral implications? What did the polls say? And the truth–about the actual nature of the threat posed by Saddam, the right way to confront it, and the possible risks of military conflict–would get largely left behind…

If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq. The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should have never come as such a surprise. The public should have been made much more aware, before the fact, of the uncertainties, doubts, and caveats that underlay the intelligence about the regime of Saddam Hussein. The administration did little to convey those nuances to the people, the press should have picked up the slack but largely failed to do so because their focus was elsewhere–on covering the march to war, instead of the necessity of war.

In this case, the “liberal media” didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.

Fear was the biggest factor in the press not questioning “a plainly specious case for war,” Froomkin adds. He assembled in 2007 “lessons that should have been learned after Vietnam, and then again after Iraq.” But they weren’t, were they?

Here we go again

Throughout the 2016 presidential campaign and the Trump presidency that followed, the press gave Trump what the “deeply wounded narcissist” wanted: their endless attention. The press helped normalize the toxically abnormal. January 6 was one byproduct. Hundreds injured and several dead. Democracy imperiled.

Heading into the 2024 campaign cycle, it is not clear this country has gained any wisdom from Pete Seeger either.

Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?

Meanwhile, back on planet earth

Published by digby on March 20, 2023

We have some bad news

I don’t think this is even hitting the front pages but it should:

Scientists have delivered a “final warning” on the climate crisis, as rising greenhouse gas emissions push the world to the brink of irrevocable damage that only swift and drastic action can avert.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), made up of the world’s leading climate scientists, set out the final part of its mammoth sixth assessment report on Monday.

The comprehensive review of human knowledge of the climate crisis took hundreds of scientists eight years to compile and runs to thousands of pages, but boiled down to one message: act now, or it will be too late.

The UN secretary general, António Guterres, said: “This report is a clarion call to massively fast-track climate efforts by every country and every sector and on every timeframe. Our world needs climate action on all fronts: everything, everywhere, all at once.”

In sober language, the IPCC set out the devastation that has already been inflicted on swathes of the world. Extreme weather caused by climate breakdown has led to increased deaths from intensifying heatwaves in all regions, millions of lives and homes destroyed in droughts and floods, millions of people facing hunger, and “increasingly irreversible losses” in vital ecosystems.

Monday’s final instalment, called the synthesis report, is almost certain to be the last such assessment while the world still has a chance of limiting global temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, the threshold beyond which our damage to the climate will rapidly become irreversible.

So anyway, Trump fucked a porn star and paid her off.

The primal MAGA fear Trump is counting on

Published by digby on March 20, 2023

A Black in power man trying to get a white man

No surprise: it’s working. He pulled that chain and they came running:

Bump writes:

One of Donald Trump’s less-appreciated political skills is getting his supporters to view attacks on him as attacks on them. His supporters have often seen him that way, viewing criticism of Trump’s presidency or of him personally as an attack on the political movement he leads and, therefore, on them. The tactic works.

Or: It generally does. When Trump’s primary frustration was the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and possible overlap between that effort and his campaign, turning the probe into a perceived attack on his supporters was tricky. Sure, there was a lot of “the Deep State is out of control and could do this to you,” but it’s not clear that this really landed. Instead of building his base’s reserves of empathy, the Russia probe drew from them. Instead of Trump making everyone the victim, he mostly fell back on complaining about being a victim himself.

Since he lost the 2020 election, though, he’s had better luck. That’s particularly true of the probes underway in New York and Georgia, where he has opted to point at a potent worry for his base: reverse racism.

Over the weekend, Trump declared on social media that he expected to be indicted this week by a grand jury empaneled by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. He’s been attacking Bragg for some time now, but the idea that things were coming to a head triggered a new round of scattershot protests from the former president.

At the platform he helped launch, Trump posted a lengthy, all-caps attack on Bragg, accusing the D.A. of letting murderers “walk free” and insisting that Bragg had “presided over the biggest violent crime wave” in the city’s history, which is not even close to true. But he led with his core frustration: that Bragg is a “racist, [George] Soros backed D.A.”

This “Soros-backed” claim is not a new one from Trump or others on the right. Soros, a left-wing philanthropist, is a frequent target of the right in part because of his willingness to spend to influence politics and, in some quarters, because he is Jewish. The link to Bragg is by no means direct: Soros has backed a nonprofit called Color of Change that includes a political action committee committed to electing Black candidates. Bragg, who is Black, received the group’s backing.

Bragg being Black is also why Trump accuses him of being “racist.” Trump has done this before; he has accused New York Attorney General Letitia James of being racist, as well as Fulton County, Ga., District Attorney Fani Willis. The two characteristics all of those prosecutors have in common are that they are Black and are involved in investigations into Trump.

Now we lumber into familiar territory when we’re talking about Trump. Does he actually think they are racist against him, echoing concerns about discrimination against Whites that is common among White Republicans, or is he simply being opportunistic? The answer, as it usually is, is that it’s probably a mix of both. Trump is both a driver and consumer of right-wing rhetoric, and it’s hard to disentangle what he believes from what he believes to be useful.

The effect is the same. Trump is not simply hoping that his supporters view him as a victim of an overzealous prosecutorial effort, as he hoped they might during the Russia travails. He is, instead, amplifying the idea that these Black prosecutors are coming after him because he’s White. While most Trump supporters were not likely to face a probe by the FBI’s counterintelligence infrastructure, most are White. And many of them think that Whites are targets of discrimination as often as Black or Hispanic Americans.

For years, conservative media has been rife with stories about how White Americans are disadvantaged relative to non-Whites, an exemplar of the form of political judo that tries to turn a weakness into a strength. Here’s Trump indicating to his heavily White often upper-middle-class supporters that Black officials might be targeting him just because he is also White. He’s turning fears of “reverse racism” into an empathy engine.