How Arizona ‘audit’ became biggest gaslighting charade in history of Fox News
Down the memory hole
Eric Boehlert
1 hr ago

snip//

Forget about the ethical shortcomings of the current blackout — the gaslighting — since those kinds of failures represent the network’s hallmark. What I’m struck by is the sheer cowardice displayed by Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Jesse Watters, Maria Bartiromo and others who, when faced with a bad outcome in Arizona, couldn’t even summon the courage to acknowledge the story. Instead, they turned and ran like scared school children.

This represents North Korea-level of propaganda. Fox News didn’t try to spin the Arizona results, which confirmed Biden’s victory again. Instead, the network made a wholesale decision not to cover a story which the network had covered all year long.

In truth, Fox News created the Arizona ‘audit’ story because it was Rupert Murdoch’s network that first called the state for Biden on Election Night, sending Trump and his acolytes into a frenzy. Their hysteria soon led loyalists in Arizona to launch an absurd review, over the objections of local Republicans in Maricopa County, who insist there was no fraud, ever.

The Arizona election results were so consuming for Fox News that this spring they purged two key news executives who were responsible for the Election Night call, senior vice president and D.C. managing editor Bill Sammon, and politics editor Chris Stirewalt. And of course, in the weeks directly following Trump’s 8-million vote loss last year, Fox News did everything in its power to fuel right-wing lies about the election being “stolen.”

Yet when the crucial ‘audit’ tabulations were released, Fox News ordered a blackout, one that persists to this day.

more...

https://pressrun.media/p/how-the-arizona-audit-became-biggest

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/09/lynn-fitch-mississippi-abortion-roe-v-wade

Abortion
Mississippi Attorney General Says Overturning Roe v. Wade Will Give Women “Amazing” Choices
According to Lynn Fitch, curtailing legal access to abortions will improve women’s lives.
By Bess Levin
September 29, 2021


In less than three months, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments concerning a Mississippi abortion law and the stakes, for those who think pregnant people should have the right to decide what to do with their bodies, could not be higher. The case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, will offer an opportunity for the court’s conservative judges to overturn Roe v. Wade, and given their decision to let Texas effectively ban abortion at six weeks, there’s a very real possibility that nearly five decades of precedent will be shredded overnight. Obviously, that’s a horrifying prospect to millions of people, particularly the ones who may decide at some point that they don’t want to have a child. But according to Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch, forcing someone to carry a pregnancy to term will actually improve their life, and they’ll probably even thank the government in the end.

In an interview last week, Fitch boldly claimed that ending most legalized abortion will “empower” women to both raise children and pursue careers. “Think about this,” Fitch told EWTN Pro-Life Weekly host Catherine Hadro, “The lives that will be touched, the babies that will be saved, the mothers that will get the chance to really redirect their lives. And they have all these opportunities that they didn’t have 50 years ago. Fifty years ago, professional women, they really wanted you to make a choice. Now you don’t have to. Now you have the opportunity to be whatever you want to be. You have the option in life to really achieve your dream and goals, and you can have those beautiful children as well.”



Ya hear that, ladies? You can have it all, minus the right to choose. An amazing life is just around the corner, as soon as you give birth to, raise, and pay for a child the government insists you have.

The American Prospect

How the Democrats Can Pass the Entire Reconciliation Bill
It just requires enacting it for four years.
by Harold Meyerson
September 28, 2021


This week, Democrats face some excruciating choices. They have to find a consensus across almost their entire caucus to pass the most comprehensive and long-overdue provision of socially and economically necessary public programs since the New Deal. Senators like Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) have balked at the topline spending number of $3.5 trillion, though progressives have called this the bare minimum needed for their constituents on health care, climate, education, child poverty, affordable housing, and a host of other priorities that have been delayed for far too long.

It’s a choice that my colleague David Dayen has labeled a “Sophie’s Choice”: In order to reduce a $3.5 trillion package to, say, $2 trillion (or whatever the negotiations between the party and its center-right outliers yield), should Democrats preserve every program at a half-funded level, or fully fund some programs while dumping the others? The former option leaves open the possibility that they could more adequately fund all those programs, once established, in future Congresses, though the public benefits of those half-fundees may be so scattershot that they don’t gain much public support. The latter option will produce some programs that do indeed satisfy public needs, while putting the rest on indefinite, perhaps decades-long, hold.

But at least in theory, there’s a third option: Fully funding every program in the $3.5 trillion package—not for the next decade, as the package proposes, but just for the next four years, at a considerable reduction in price.

The advantages that accrue to this course are social, economic, and, most pointedly, political. It would make the 2024 election a referendum on whether the public wishes to continue those programs by further funding them, or prefers to end them. Democrats would run on preserving the programs and re-upping their funding. That would compel Republicans to run against what should be widely popular policies, whether or not they nominate Donald Trump for president (but especially if they did, as Trump, even more than his GOP underlings, opposes everything Joe Biden supports).

The point here is that, once the public receives steady and reliable services to meet their individual needs—affordable child care, universal pre-K, Medicare coverage of vision and hearing and dental care, paid sick leave, child tax credits, tuition-free community college, significant climate mitigation—it won’t want to have them terminated.

more...

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/building-back-america/how-democrats-can-pass-entire-reconciliation-bill/

Headlines you won’t see: “GOP votes to derail U.S. economy”
Radical obstruction
Eric Boehlert
1 hr ago



Embracing their ever-expanding nihilist streak, Republicans remain committed to forcing the U.S. government to default on key payments by refusing to join with Democrats in lifting the debt ceiling this week. Walking away from what had been a long-standing tradition of bipartisan votes in order to ensure a functioning government, regardless of which party was in power, the GOP is purposely creating a looming economic crisis for the Biden administration, and for America.

And the press, led by the New York Times, is helping the GOP get away with it.

The party’s unanimous vote on Monday against raising the ceiling signaled its obstructionist strategy. The government’s funding is now set to expire 12:01 a.m. on Friday.

The United States could plunge into an immediate recession thanks to Republicans’ refusal, according to Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, who warns that 6 million jobs could be wiped out, sending the unemployment rate surging to 9 percent.

If the limit is not raised the government won’t be able to borrow more money, forcing officials to choose between missing payments on military salaries for more than one million troops, Social Security benefits for 50 million recipients, and the interest it owes to investors. (Trump’s massive 2017 tax cut means the government has fewer funds today, and therefore needs to borrow more.)

snip//


Retreating to its preferred Both Sides starting point, the Beltway press coverage often makes sure not to single out the GOP and its radical behavior. Refusing to publish accurate headlines such as, “Republicans Vote to Derail U.S. Economy,” news outlets prefer to dance around the disturbing truth by spreading the blame around and claiming the looming debt crisis is really “legislative gamesmanship,” as the New York Times recently stressed.

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https://pressrun.media/p/headlines-you-wont-see-gop-votes

https://www.politicususa.com/2021/09/27/cassidy-kennedy-disaster-relief.html

Posted on Mon, Sep 27th, 2021 by Jason Easley
Both Louisiana Sens. Cassidy And Kennedy Vote Against Disaster Relief For Their Own State


Republican Louisiana Senators Bill Cassidy and John Kennedy both voted against disaster relief for their own state.

Cassidy and Kennedy both voted no on a debt ceiling bill that contained disaster relief for Louisiana:
https://twitter.com/mkraju/status/1442616772939632642?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1442616772939632642%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.politicususa.com%2F2021%2F09%2F27%2Fcassidy-kennedy-disaster-relief.html
The total cost of the damage from Hurricane Ida could reach $70-$80 billion. People and businesses in the state urgently need help. One of the primary jobs of a US Senator is to help those in their state after a natural disaster, but Cassidy and Kennedy are putting their party first.

Republicans are so desperate to stop President Biden that they are willing to deny their own constituents disaster relief.

The votes by Kennedy and Cassidy are a middle finger to the people of Louisiana. They represent a new low in the Republican Party’s message that people come last.

Democrats should only offer disaster relief as part of a debt ceiling package and force Republicans to stab the American people in the back over and over again.

Mitch McConnell is driving Senate Republicans off of a cliff, and votes like these won’t be forgotten because when people were in desperate need of help, Republicans put their party first.

Idaho COVID Insanity Shows How Much Worse the GOP Can Get
HUNGER GAMES
The slightest hint of responsibility is enough to draw primary challenges in the party’s ever-accelerating race to the bottom.
Eleanor Clift
Published Sep. 28, 2021 4:58AM ET


As the morgues and ICUs in Idaho overflow with COVID patients, Republican Governor Brad Little said he would fine businesses with over 100 employees if they enacted a mask mandate.

It’s an insane stance rooted in his desire not to give his challenger, Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin, any cause to attack him as she guns for his job.

Dying people be damned, as Republicans turn against each other in contests up and down the ballot and across the country to see who can get farthest to the right to claim the Trumpian mantle.

snip//

The Republican primaries are shaping up like the Hunger Games, dystopian battles among the Trumpian faithful. “What you’re seeing are incredible races to the bottom as they one up each other to be the craziest and the Trumpiest in whatever context presents itself,” says Matt Bennett, a co-founder of Third Way, a moderate Democratic group. The fights and the lies can be over mask mandates, or vaccines, or how we teach children about slavery, with all of them tying into the Big Lie that Trump somehow won the election and was cheated out of his supposedly rightful victory.

more...

https://www.thedailybeast.com/idaho-covid-insanity-shows-how-much-worse-the-gop-can-get?ref=home

Just so sad.


Wife Films as Husband, Friend Are Swept to Sea After Cliff-Diving Goes Wrong
HELPLESS
The family of Daniil Gagarin, the man in the video, are waiting on emergency visas and PCR test results, desperate to get to Spain in time for his cremation later this week.
AJ McDougall
Breaking News Intern
Published Sep. 27, 2021 10:49PM ET
Instagram/Facebook


A Russian fitness coach’s rescue attempt of a friend trapped in churning Mediterranean waters turned deadly after both were swept out to sea—as the entire tragedy unfolded on video, captured by the coach’s distressed wife.

The horrifying footage subsequently went viral on Russian social media, even as the coach’s family has been scrambling to secure permission to travel to Spain for his cremation.

On Sept. 23, Daniil Gagarin, 30, traveled to a stretch of jagged cliffs known as La Zorra cove along the Costa Blanca with his wife, Darya Gagarina, and a woman they were friendly with, Finnish fitness instructor Emma Mönkkönen.

The video that Gagarina, 24, shot had been meant to capture the group’s cliff-diving feats. Instead, it became a terrifying chronicle of Gagarin and Mönkkönen’s final moments.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1442461924822851587

more...

https://www.thedailybeast.com/daniil-gagarin-emma-monkkonen-swept-to-sea-after-cliff-diving-as-horror-struck-wife-darya-films?ref=home

https://www.thedailybeast.com/rolling-stones-kick-off-us-tour-with-emotional-tribute-to-charlie-watts?ref=home

‘We’ll Miss Charlie So Much’: Rolling Stones Kick Off U.S. Tour With Emotional Tribute to Drummer
MISS YOU
Jamie Ross
News Correspondent
Published Sep. 27, 2021 5:16AM ET
Reuters/Lawrence Bryant

Shocked I am, but she wants to get something done.


https://politicalwire.com/2021/09/27/pelosi-de-links-spending-bills/

Pelosi De-Links Spending Bills
September 27, 2021 at 7:55 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard 446 Comments

https://pressrun.media/p/they-miss-trump-so-much

They miss Trump so much
Normalizing an insurrectionist
Eric Boehlert
3 hr ago


American democracy is teetering increasingly close to the abyss as the Republican Party embraces cult-like conspiracies and races to shred the electoral process, now in the form of undemocratic ballot “audits.” Against that dark backdrop, the press continues to play a treacherous game by refusing to acknowledge the danger in play, and insisting that its job is to merely record Trump’s game of demolition.

Even in the wake of the newest revelations of how Trump and his team aggressively tried to engineer a coup by invalidating millions of votes last year, he’s still being normalized in the day-to-day coverage, as the press eagerly awaits his return to the campaign trail. (“When Will Trump Answer the Big 2024 Question?” the New York Times asked.)

There’s nothing Trump could do at this point that would invalidate him in the eyes of the political press, and that includes him shooting someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue.

snip//

Today, the D.C. press can barely contain its excitement at the idea of the 2020 loser running again, and possibly returning to the White House. And they have signaled they’ll make no changes in how they cover him. That glee stands in sharp contrast to the same press corps that told Hillary Clinton to “go away” after she lost in 2016.

We know news outlets miss Trump because everyone knows if he wins a second term, every minute of every White House press briefing would be carried live and in full, just as they were for his first term. For Biden’s White House though, the live coverage was curtailed just weeks into the Democrat’s presidency.

A dangerous autocrat who’s devoted to wrecking the American election process is waiting in the wings to become the GOP nominee in 2024, and the Beltway press can’t wait.