IT'S ALL ABOUT THE MONEY

 

The recent lawsuit brought by the Dominion voting machine company against Fox News has taken an interesting turn.  If you haven't heard,  the voting machine company is suing the news network because it believes that the news broadcasters and commentators on the network echoed Donald Trump's assertions that Dominion's voting machines were rigged against him in the 2020 election.  Those assertions were echoed without any proof, even when Fox News knew there was no evidence for them.  Not surprisingly, the network has responded to the lawsuit by claiming that they have freedom of the press and we'll see how it turns out.

The really crazy thing here is that the company's lawsuit against Fox has turned up some internal communications between people at Fox working both behind and in front of the cameras who knew full well that many of the claims made by the guest speakers on their shows concerning the election were simply not true.  Not only did they know that were untrue, they sometimes expressed that in stark terms: “Sidney Powell is lying by the way. Caught her. It’s insane.”  Messaged on air personality Tucker Carlson to fellow on air personality Laura Ingram.  She responded by saying that Powell was a "complete nut.”  Powell was the lawyer who pushed some of the more aggressive (and crazy!) conspiracies about the 2020 election, and who was given multiple chances to appear on the network and rant away unchallenged.   Another on air personality, Sean Hannity, called Powell a "fucking lunatic".  Meanwhile,  Fox News president Jay Wallace described the craziness of on air personality Lou Dobbs by saying "The North Koreans put on a more nuanced show."

What this reveals is what those of us who do not reside in the right wing news bubble have known all along: while they may be sincere in their conservative beliefs, many people at Fox do not  believe many of their own stories.  They fully understand that their network is more about making money than news reporting or even pushing a political agenda.  Putting it bluntly, coming up with ways to make their mostly old, white, male audience angry so that they won't change the channel is their bottom line.  If that means putting on people on their shows that they themselves characterize as  "fucking lunatics", then that's what they will do.  

This cynical, money driven philosophy by the biggest news network in the country shows what a lie the false equivalency people draw between Fox News and MSNBC is.  You can disagree with Rachel Maddow all you want, but the idea that she would have people on her show that she knows are liars and allow them to spew nonsense without questioning them, is absurd.  These communications show that Fox News (and let's face, most of the right wing media) lie openly to profit from telling their viewers what they want to hear without ever challenging them in any way.

The specific reason behind Fox's turn to conspiracies after the 2020 election illustrates that point: it was Fox News that first called the state of Arizona for Biden in the 2020 election, which was a big step towards Biden's eventual victory.  When Fox viewers, egged on by Trump, were mad about this "betrayal" (even though the call was correct), they started turning towards the new, even more right wing network, Newsmax.  When Fox saw this happening, they quickly turned towards stolen election theories in their "reporting", inviting on Powell and other conspiracy theorists.  So, it was just all about greed, or as Hannity messaged about the possibility of another conservative network rising during the fallout from the Arizona call, “Serious $$ with serious distribution could be a real problem.”

"I DON'T KNOW IF THERE'S ANYTHING YOU CAN DO..."

 After the horrific beating video of 29 year old Tyre Nichols by five police officers was released to the public, Republican House member Jim Jordan spoke about it on "Meet the Press", saying "I don’t know that any law, any training, any reform is going to change...I don’t know if there’s anything you can do to stop the kind of evil we saw in that video.”  While he was understandably disgusted by the violence on the video, his assertion that there's no training or reform that would change things speaks volumes.  It's obvious that the majority of the Republican party don't want any kind of police reforms passed, and will simultaneously call overly violent police bad while opposing passing any kind of changes, much in the same way that they condemn mass shootings without supporting any gun control measures.  Police brutality and mass shootings are two things that the party would rather shrug off than deal with.

To be fair, that's not true of all Republicans; Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina tried in 2020 to pass some reforms after the killing of George Floyd, but his bill died in the Senate when Democrats didn't think it went far enough.  There is a chance that this latest tragedy could lead to some reforms, but it will be hard to get them through the Republican House.

And there are so many reforms that should be passed, from banning choke holds to having police stop pulling drivers over for routine moving violations (officers can photograph the offenders license plate and sent the ticket in the mail).  One of the big problems is that over the years, police officers have been getting surplus army material from the military, from rifles and body armor to tanks (!).  Add to that the fact that in cities where violent crime is a problem, special task forces with macho names are formed by the police (the police officers who beat Nichols to death were part of a task force called SCORPION) as a way to show the public that they're serious about fighting crime.  So you're arming these police officers with military weapons that make them feel more like soldiers entering enemy territory than cops and then telling them that they're part of an elite violent crime stopping force, and basically you have a recipe for violent behavior.

After the killing of George Floyd, not only were no serious police reforms passed on a federal level, the early cries of "defund the police" were later turned against progressives by Republicans, and funding for the police often wound up being increased (this in a country that has failed at dealing with our problems with addiction, mental health and homelessness).  Hopefully this time there will be some positive changes made, with perhaps the most important change coming in the training and screening process of the officers.  As Stephen Downing, a retired Los Angeles deputy police chief and former SWAT officer once said,  “The guys who really want to be on the SWAT team are the last people you should be putting on the SWAT team.” 

BIDEN'S DOCUMENT SCANDAL

 Just a week ago, Joe Biden seemed to riding pretty high.  Oh sure, the Republican party was retaking the House of Representatives, but it was doing so with far less members than they had hoped for, and the clown show of multiple votes that were held to appoint a Speaker of the House made the party look weak.  Also, inflation finally seems to be letting up, and Biden's approval ratings were starting to rise.

But last week a story broke about how classified documents were discovered in his old office from his days as vice president during the Obama administration.  A further search found more documents in his garage.  While the White House tried to shrug all this off by saying that the documents were "inadvertently misplaced", it was not a good look. In fact,  shortly thereafter Attorney General Merrick Garland was compelled to appoint a special counsel to investigate the matter. Not surprisingly, this was all catnip to the right wing media, who immediately called Biden a hypocrite for previously condemning Trump for his hoarding of classified documents.  Calls for his home to raided, like Trump's was, rang all over right wing media outlets.

Part of me wants to quickly point out that what Trump did was far worse; he took hundreds of classified documents to Mar-o-Lago, compared to the ten or so that Biden had.  Perhaps even worse, when Trump was told by the Justice Department that he needed to return the documents, he did not return all of them, eventually prompting the FBI raid on his home.  Unlike with Trump, there is no reason to believe that Biden intended to hold on to these documents, and he promptly returned them.  Also, in an interview with conservative commentator Sean Hannity, Trump asserted that the documents in his home were declassified, because the president has the power to declassify documents just by thinking about it.  Isn't it then reasonable to say that the documents found in Biden's possession were  declassified because then president Barack Obama thought about it?  That's only fair, right? 

But jokes aside, this is a serious matter: Biden clearly was sloppy in his handling of the documents, and while that doesn't brand him the criminal that I think it does with Trump, it looks bad.  Sadly, this could be the "Hillary's emails" scandal of the next election. Since most Americans don't follow politics that closely, many of them will just hear headlines about Biden and classified documents and assume he did the same thing as Trump.  Of course, we have no way of knowing how much this story will affect the American public's feelings about Biden, and it may turn out to be more like the "Obama's tan suit scandal" than Hillary's emails.  One thing though, the timing of this couldn't be any worse, because this could be the break Trump needs; now Merrick Garland is the tricky position of possibly prosecuting an ex president for the same crime that the current president will be widely perceived to also have done.  So, like so many other times in his life, Trump will probably walk away from doing something terrible unscathed and emboldened.  How such a horrible person can have so much luck throughout his life is the best argument against the existence of a god that I can think of.

THE INFLUENCE OF THE CRAZY 30%

 

As a progressive, I couldn't help laughing at now House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's pathetic four day bid for the speakership, in which he went down in flames 14 times before finally eking out a victory.  And to get that victory he had to make concessions to the far right Freedom Caucus, a group of house members on the extreme right.  So my amusement at McCarthy's string of losses is tempered by the fact that the house is now about to get down to business, and for many of those members that means attacking the Joe Biden regime with baseless investigations and holding up things like the debt ceiling vote, which could have catastrophic economic consequences.   While I have no sympathy for McCarthy, who condemned Donald Trump in congress after January 6th and then quickly flew out to Mar-o-Largo to kiss his ring, it will be hard to watch him trying to appease the extreme members of his party for the next two years.   

What the whole voting debacle shows is that there is a significant wing of the Republican party that see the role of government in America only as funding the military and protecting their guns.  Or, as former House Republican speaker John Boehner put in back in 2010 when he had to deal with the extreme Tea Party movement in the House, they only want “to throw sand in the gears of the hated federal government until it fails and they’ve finally proved that it’s beyond saving.”

The sad fact of the matter is that about 30% of the American electorate are on the extreme right, and because they own one party and vote faithfully, they are able to have an influence far beyond their numbers.  Just look at how the supreme court recently overturned  abortion rights despite those rights being supported by around 60% of the American public, and you can see how a determined minority can slowly but surely drive the country in their direction.  And it's not just abortion rights, the 30% are the ones who think that Donald Trump won the 2020 election, reject coronavirus vaccines, believe in Qanon, think that the earth is only 20,000 years old and marinate themselves in right wing media exclusively.  Quite simply, they hold the rest of the country back, trying to return the country to a past where white straight Christian men ran everything.

Is there anything the 70% of sane people in this country can do about this?  Not much other than vote and wait; the Republican party currently has a serious problem with younger voters, who strongly disagree with them on nearly every major issue.  The party is literally dying out as their voters age.  (And the old notion that people get more conservative politically as they age has never been proven true).  Someday the Republican party will have to start tempering its beliefs or time will throw it in the dustbin.  Sadly, the 30% will go down fighting all the way.

WHEN DO YOU GIVE UP ON A CELEBRITY?

 Micheal Jackson.  Woody Allen.  Bill Cosby.  Kevin Spacey.  These are some of the celebrities that the world has turned on recently when they were reasonably accused  of criminal sexual  behavior (only Cosby was actually convicted, and even that was overturned).  I myself will admit that I once was an admirer of all them,  but I still have moved away from supporting them to different degrees (I still have Thriller on my itunes, and sometimes watch Woody Allen movies).  It's always hard to separate art and artist, especially since so many great artists over the years have done terrible things (Miles Davis, Lou Reed, James Brown and John Lennon all used to make great music, and they all physically abused their wives and girlfriends).  The decision to admire the work of any artist always raises many questions, like  is there a waiting period after their death that makes it alright to admire them?  I noticed that the recent Sight and Sound magazine list of the 100 best films ever made included no films by Allen or Roman Polanski, but did have two by Charlie Chaplin, who once impregnated a 15 year old girl when he was 32.  Obviously, these things are complicated with no easy answer.

Which brings us to a recent concert I attended with Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock.  Like many other people, I've been a fan of Chappelle ever since his sketch show blew up about 20 years ago, and I've always enjoyed his stand up specials in which his incisive bits about race combined with his likable persona and gift for imitations were great.  That is, I did admire him until his recent Netflix special in which he declared himself a "Trans-exclusionary radical feminist" or "Terf" and railed against the rights (and really, the existence) of trans people.  It was a mean spirited bit  that played into the recent conservative demonization of trans people that has lead to hatred and even violence against them all around the country.  Chappelle has described himself as a Democrat, but here he was playing right into the Republican playbook of division and hatred against a small group of Americans who just want to lead their best lives.

So when a friend of mine asked me if I wanted to go see Chappelle performing with  Chris Rock here in San Francisco, I reluctantly agreed since I'm also a fan of Rock and I knew that he would be going first and I could always leave early if Chappelle started bashing trans people.  Thankfully, except for one brief reference, Chappelle didn't touch the issue, mostly sticking to crude sex jokes that didn't much for me (an entire bit built around the infamous Chuck Berry sex tape was not one I needed to hear).  Still, his set wasn't bad, even though I think Rock was better.

As the show wrapped up, it looked like controversy had been avoided.  But then Chappelle impulsively invited Elon Musk to come up and share the stage without considering how Musk's recent chaotic takeover of Twitter had made him unpopular in San Francisco.  It was an awkward moment in that Musk clearly didn't know what to do on stage, made even more awkward when many people in the audience started to boo him loudly.  At first Chapelle made a pretty good joke about how some of the people in the audience were the ones that Musk had just fired from Twitter.  But then he later added that all the booing seemed to be coming from the cheap seats in the back row, which didn't exactly help the situation.  (When Chapelle,  who's paid tens of millions of dollars for his comedy specials, introduces one of the richest men in the world to the stage and then ridicules the poorer members of the audience for booing him, he inadvertently laid bare the unfair class issues in this country).  At that point, Musk tried to say something, but then a serious fight broke out in the crowd (between a Musk supporter and a Musk hater?  Who knows).  Chapelle then tried to calm things by saying how much he wished well for the whole audience, and then quite lamely got Musk to shout out one of Chapelle's old catch phrases from his show ("I'm rich, bitch!") before drawing this odd spectacle to a close.

At first, I mostly shrugged off this show's crazy conclusion as just a strange way for things to end.  But then I wondered about why Chapelle thought that bringing Musk out on the stage was a good idea.  Did he really think that the crowd would cheer for Musk just because he's rich?  Has he no idea how terrible Musk's takeover of Twitter has been, with a resurgence of hate speech on the social media site?  When I combine his comments about trans people with his open ridiculing of the poor at this show, I've decided that I can't support his career anymore.  I hope that other fans of his will join me.

THE CONSERVATIVE WAR ON PUBLIC EDUCATION

 

During the pandemic, harsh tensions arose between school teachers and parents concerning school lockdowns.  Parents were stressed about their school age children being home all day, and having to use a remote learning system that clearly wasn't the same as a classroom.  Teachers were stressed about a reopening of schools exposing them and their families to covid.  It was a difficult situation in which there were no easy answers, and it lead to school board meetings that turned into shouting matches.

Not surprisingly, even with the pandemic mostly over, teachers still feel undervalued, underpaid and overworked, and many of them have responded by leaving the profession, making those who choose to remain work even harder to cover for those missing positions.  Currently, polls show that over half of teachers are considering quitting.  You would think that this situation would result in a reevaluation of how our country treats the teaching profession, with higher salaries provided for their essential work.  Instead what we have mostly seen is right wing politicians sensing a weakness in public education and pouncing.

Since 2020, Republican politicians have seized on the issue of so called "Critical Race Theory", implying that "woke" public school teachers are teaching white students how to hate themselves when they teach American history.  Ignoring the fact that there was no such specific curriculum in out public schools, the right wing media whipped up  fear of white children being "brainwashed".  Then, quickly moving onto another school issue, conservatives dusted off the old chestnut of children being exposed to "pornographic" books, and started pushing for concerned parents to start searching and purging school libraries.  As with the whole CRT controversy, this was all absurdly overblown, with one conservative politician running an ad in which her young son appeared and  said he once got nightmares from a book he read in school, without mentioning that he read that book when he was 17 and in an AP literature class, and that the book in question was Toni Morrison's Beloved, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.  Things got even worse earlier this year when Florida Governor RonDe Santis passed  the so called "Don't say Gay" bill that limited what teachers and students could talk about in classrooms concerning sexual orientation.  After passing the bill, he claimed that anyone opposing it supported  sexually grooming children, which now has become another conservative talking point.  As the New York Times pointed out, in the last two years a dozen states have passed laws limiting what teachers can teach, and even say, in their classrooms.

Personally, I do't think that any of those attacks on public schools would have happened if the pandemic hadn't primed already angry parents to vent at school board meetings.  With teachers already pushed to the breaking point, the time was ripe for conservatives to strike.  Conservatives  have been angry at public schools for decades; part of it is from the Christian fundamentalist wing of the party, that miss the days when creationism was taught as fact.  Another part is the fact that public school teachers are one of the few remaining union jobs in the country, and unions have favored Democrats ever since President Ronald Reagan fired members of the Air Traffic Control union way back in 1981.  

And there's an even deeper movement at play here: the conservative school voucher movement, which has been used  already in some states, and which would allow parents to take the government funds that were to be used on their children's schooling and use them to pay for tuition to private schools.  Conservatives know that the more public schools are thrown in disarray, the more popular the school voucher movement becomes.  And the real danger of the voucher movement is that it provides an end around over that pesky separation between church and state.  Putting it bluntly, if conservatives have their way, government tax dollars could be used to pay for children to attend schools that teach them dinosaurs were too big to fit on the ark!  For conservatives, this is a no brainer, as it's a simultaneous attack on unions and a way to try and turn our nation's children into good little right wing voters.

Sadly, the days of school vouchers could become a reality soon (I can't imagine that the current Supreme Court would oppose them).  The only recourse we have for now is Americans to start appreciating the difficult job that our public school teachers have and support them as much as we can.

MITCH MCCONNELL HAS NO ONE TO BLAME BUT HIMSELF

 

Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell has been the Republican leader of the Senate for the past 15 years.  Recently, Florida Senator Rick Scott has decided to challenge him for that position given the poor showing that the Republican party just had in the midterms; normally, the party not in the White House makes gains in the midterms, and the Republicans were expecting a so called red wave this time.  But it never came and while the party will in all likelihood take the House, they made no gains in the Senate, and may even lose a seat depending on how the run off in Georgia goes.

While I doubt that Scott will defeat McConnell, the fact that he is being challenged after building a reputation as a conservative hardliner while leading his party in the Senate is surprising, and if he were pushed out it would be quite a come down for a man that even Democrats have admitted was an effective leader.  

Even if Scott doesn't depose him, McConnell will still have to spend the next two years as a minority leader with little power.  He saw all of this coming: as far back as August, when he  openly complained that his party's chances of winning the Senate were being undermined, saying that "candidate quality has a lot to do with the outcome.”  This was, of course, his diplomatic way of saying that former President Donald Trump was endorsing a poor crop of Senate candidates (like Dr Oz) who were running extremist campaigns that alienated swing voters.  And, as it turned out,  he was right. But what he won't mention is that this is all his own fault.

Why?  Because after the January 6th riot of 2021, McConnell did little to hide his disgust with Trump's actions, saying on the Senate floor that the former president's actions before the riot were "a disgraceful dereliction of duty."  Clearly he thought that Trump was guilty of inciting a riot.  And yet, he still couldn't bring himself to vote to remove Trump from office, and, without his support, the vote failed to reach the 67 vote majority that was needed in the Senate by 10 votes.  (While we don't know for sure, it's pretty safe to say that if McConnell, as Republican leader in the Senate,  had voted to remove Trump, it would have paved the way for other Republican Senators to follow).  Trump, in typical fashion, still insulted McConnell after the vote, calling him a "stupid person" and nicknaming him "Old crow".

While it appears that McConnell and other Senators thought it wasn't necessary to vote to remove Trump given that he was almost about to leave the White House anyway, they miscalculated something.  Removing him from office would have crucially prevented him from ever running again.  Which meant that Trump's hold over the Republican party would have been broken, and with no chance of ever running again, he would have retreated to Mar-a-Lago to lick his wounds.  And with him out of the picture, the midterms could have just been about Joe Biden and the economy with normal Republican candidates instead of Trump forcing his hand picked candidates to constantly say that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and the Republicans would almost surely have taken the Senate. 

Instead, as we all now know, Trump has decided to run again in 2024, and the Republican party is stuck with the choice of supporting him despite his losing streak of three straight election losses, or trying to find another candidate and alienating his cult like followers in the Republican Party.  Either way, McConnell looks like a fool for missing the opportunity to expunge Trump from his party, and there may be more losses coming soon.  I hope.