babylonsister
babylonsister's JournalNorth Korea Bans Laughing for 11 Days
https://politicalwire.com/2021/12/20/north-korea-bans-laughing-for-11-days/
North Korea Bans Laughing for 11 Days
December 20, 2021 at 7:31 am EST By Taegan Goddard
Head Of Watchdog Group Says Trump's D.C. Hotel Was 'Epicenter' Of Corruption
Head Of Watchdog Group Says Trump's D.C. Hotel Was 'Epicenter' Of Corruption
The head of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington argued Donald Trump shouldn't have been allowed to retain ownership of the hotel as president.
Mary Papenfuss
12/19/2021 12:40am EST | Updated 3 hours ago
Former President Donald Trump raked in payments from foreign interests at his Pennsylvania Avenue hotel in an operation that was the “epicenter” of a corrupt presidency, the head of a citizen watchdog organization says.
Bookbinder slammed the operation in the wake of a scathing report issued by the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. The report, released Thursday, asserts that Trump received payments ― unfettered and unmonitored ― through his hotel from foreign entities.
The General Services Administration, in charge of monitoring the landmark Old Post Office property that the Trump Organization leases from the public, was found to have “ignored glaring constitutional issues.” The report also stated the administration “allowed for conflict of interest” when Trump refused to divest from the property while serving as president.
The emoluments clause of the Constitution prohibits federal officers from receiving payments or benefits from foreign interests to safeguard against undue influence.
Yet, the GSA “washed its hands of any responsibility” to track foreign government payments to the hotel or identify the origins of more than $75 million in loans arranged by Trump and his family, according to the report.
more...
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/watchdog-group-trump-hotel_n_61be9aeae4b0c7d8b8909b79
Eric Boehlert: Press Stopped Caring About Critical Race Theory Exact Time GOP Did
https://crooksandliars.com/2021/12/media-critical-race-theoryPress Stopped Caring About Critical Race Theory Exact Time GOP Did
Shocker! Now that the racists have been elected, the journalists don't need to highlight the GOP crying about CRT anymore!
By Eric Boehlert — December 18, 2021
Published with permission of PRESS RUN, Eric Boehlert’s must-read media newsletter. Subscribe here.
Whatever happened to critical race theory?
Just one month ago, the media bombarded news consumers with CRT coverage, announcing it had been the defining issue in the GOP’s surprise Virginia governor victory, and was likely going to sink Democrats nationwide during the 2022 midterms. All year, the press couldn’t be bothered with pointing out that CRT isn’t actually taught in public schools, and that the GOP’s hysterical campaign — it’s an attempt to “indoctrinate the kids” — was based on lies.
Yet suddenly, the topic seems to have disappeared into the ether. “No one is talking about CRT now that the election is over,” tweeted journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of the acclaimed 1619 Project. “That media stopped reporting this made-up controversy speaks to the complicity in the propaganda campaign.”
snip//
A lengthy October piece from the New York Times, “How Republicans Are Weaponizing Critical Race Theory Ahead of Midterms,” was another classic of the genre. It wasn’t until the 13th paragraph that the Times acknowledged CRT isn’t taught in public schools. Incredibly, four paragraphs later the Times reported, “But Republicans say critical race theory has invaded classrooms.”
That broken model was used all year by the press — CRT represents a political boon for Republicans, regardless of whether or not its classroom claims are built on lies. Instead of forcefully debunking, journalists remained overly impressed with how the GOP was able to turn CRT into a big news story, while journalists helped them turn CRT into a big news story.
In a rare bout of Republican truth-telling this year, when Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson allowed the state’s CRT classroom ban to become law without his signature, he conceded it “does not address any problem that exists.”
That should have been the media story all year.
Ted Cruz Tweeted 'Hush Child ... The Adults Are Working' And You Know What Happened Next
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ted-cruz-adults-are-working-tweet_n_61bd8aa1e4b04b42ab5fff55Ted Cruz Tweeted ‘Hush Child ... The Adults Are Working’ And You Know What Happened Next
The Texas Republican received a sharp reminder of his infamous Cancun holiday and other controversies.
Lee Moran
12/18/2021 02:44am EST
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) fired off a patronizing tweet on Friday and received a series of blunt reminders in response.
Cruz, replying to Rep. Eric Swalwell’s (D-Calif.) criticism of his slow-walking of President Joe Biden’s State Department nominees, wrote: “Hush child. The adults are working.”
Critics went to town on Cruz, recalling his fleeing on a family vacation to Cancun in February as devastating winter storms struck his home state. The historic freeze killed hundreds and left millions of Texans without power.
They also mocked his recent vital work of attacking Sesame Street character Big Bird for saying they’d received the COVID-19 vaccine.
— Jeff Mayers (@TimeLordJeff) December 17, 2021
— Patti Stone (@Pjstone1030) December 17, 2021
snip//
Signed,
Texas voter https://t.co/AY5EO1e7s8
— JamieNT (@jamient1776) December 18, 2021
'Anti-5G' Necklaces Worn by Conspiracy Theorists Are Actually Radioactive, Nuclear Experts Warn
https://www.thedailybeast.com/anti-5g-necklaces-worn-by-conspiracy-theorists-are-actually-radioactive-nuclear-experts-warn?ref=home
‘Anti-5G’ Necklaces Worn by Conspiracy Theorists Are Actually Radioactive, Nuclear Experts Warn
PUT THAT DOWN
Anna Venarchik
Breaking News Intern
Published Dec. 17, 2021 8:32PM ET
Reuters
"My father, the white supremacist"
My father, the white supremacist
I’d inherited his family’s money, his height, his arthritis. Could I inherit the very worst parts of him, too?
By Caira Conner Updated Dec 17, 2021, 7:00am EST
snip//
No one explicitly used words like “anti-Semitic” or “racist,” but after he died, a relative opened the browser history on his computer, and a list of web searches for deaths of Black people from AIDS filled the drop-down menu. He liked researching the kinds and causes of disease that afflicted African men. In his last days, he’d also been researching me.
He’d kept a blog for more than 20 years, unbeknownst to me; once I found it, I combed through it for details on what his life had been. I took screenshots of some of the pages and kept them in a folder on my desktop. Mostly I was curious to know if he’d ever written about my childhood, about our time together. I harbored a perverse longing to see his words about me, and I liked to hunt for them the way someone might scrounge around in the back of a closet for a missing sweater.
In his last entry before his death, I found the start of what I was looking for: hate speech, pure and simple, published in unevenly sized italic font — a vile screed against Jewish people, Black people, “filthy liberals and their homo agenda.” Very little of it made sense, but he’d also expressed his dismay that his own daughter was in New York, “lickin’ up all those perverted, progressive New York beliefs, sodomy-style.” All of the text was in black, except for the sentence with my name, which he changed to a yellow font and highlighted the background in gray. “Yes, you know who you are. That would be you, Caira Conner, my daughter even.”
“Oh, he’s insane,” I said to myself, laughing nervously, when I read it for the first time. But that night, as I was getting ready to go to sleep, I had the sudden thought that someone who read his blog, who believed what he believed, could come to my apartment and shoot me dead. I took a picture of the entry and pulled my phone out to show the photo to my partner, Sam, to my therapist, to the occasional horrified friend.
In the early months of 2019, I’d ordered a 23andMe DNA test to see what my genetic makeup might look like.
My mother had been mistaken. The results showed that 10.5 percent of my ancestry on the maternal side was Ashkenazi Jewish. I’d started dating Sam, who was more or less 100 percent Ashkenazi Jewish, a few months earlier. My father died right after I confirmed my genetic inheritance. Later, I mentioned to Sam that it was good that my father was dead, because if he knew that I was part Jewish, I’d have to worry about him coming to kill us both. My father had unwittingly created the very thing he hated. “After all,” I said, “he might want to destroy it.”
more...
https://www.vox.com/22785686/father-white-supremacist-asatru-folk-assembly-neo-nazi
Altercation: MSM Discovers Fox 'News' Isn't News
The American Prospect
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Altercation: MSM Discovers Fox ‘News’ Isn’t News
Only 25 years after it became obvious
by Eric Alterman
December 17, 2021
On the PBS NewsHour Tuesday night, anchor Judy Woodruff and NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik discussed the recent text messages sent by Fox News hosts to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows during the January 6 violent insurrection. Woodruff wondered whether “in terms of what we knew about—we have known in the past they have spoken favorably of a former President Trump for years. But does this take it to a different level, do you think?” Folkenflik added, “And so I think that what you have here is a question of Fox News having that word ‘news’ appended to its name, but not operating like a news operation.”
I’ve been writing about Fox News since it first began broadcasting 25 years ago. The first story I remember had to do with the fact that New York’s then-mayor Rudy Giuliani, at the behest of Roger Ailes, used the power of his office to force Time Warner Cable to carry Fox in New York. It had originally been left off the dial and could not likely have survived without that market. That gives you a clue that maybe it was not a typical “news” station from moment one.
Those clues have been mounting on a daily basis ever since. I can’t count the number of times I’ve felt compelled, in different fora, to argue that what Fox does is not and has never been “news.” I think my clearest statement of this fact, and of the problem that everybody pretended that this was not case, came in a “Think Again” column I wrote in 2010 on the website of the Center for American Progress. The piece, headlined “Just What Exactly Is Fox News?” began with this:
This is a mistake. Fox is something new—something for which we do not yet have a word. It provides almost no actual journalism. Instead, it gives ideological guidance to the Republican Party and millions of its supporters, attacking its opponents and keeping its supporters in line. And it does so at a hefty profit, thereby turning itself into the political equivalent of a perpetual motion machine.
snip//
I can’t bear at this point to list all the times I’ve tried to make the point that “‘real’ journalists debase themselves and their profession by participating in the destructive and debilitating charade” of treating Fox “journalists” as their colleagues. Readers might recall that, at one point, the Obama administration tried to address Fox’s dishonesty by barring its officials from appearing on Fox’s Sunday shows. The administration was attacked—and Fox defended—by the likes of CNN’s Jake Tapper, and The Baltimore Sun’s David Zurawik, with assists from Maggie Haberman, the Times’ White House correspondent, NBC’s Jonathan Allen, the Associated Press’s Zeke Miller, and Politico’s Jack Shafer, and sadly, many, many others; thereby helping to enable Fox’s lies, and with them the systematic destruction of our democracy and our planet.
more...
https://prospect.org/politics/altercation-msm-discovers-fox-news-isnt-news/
A Disturbing Gun Case Further Reveals the Peril of January 6
37 mins ago
A Disturbing Gun Case Further Reveals the Peril of January 6
US prosecutors disclose more evidence of how armed Trump extremists attacked Congress.
Mark Follman
National Affairs EditorBio | Follow
Last month, the Justice Department unsealed the latest case involving gun charges against an alleged participant in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. Though the case drew relatively little media attention just ahead of Thanksgiving, it further shows that the grim events of that day involved numerous people with guns, despite repeated false claims to the contrary from Republican lawmakers and Donald Trump. The case also adds disturbing new details to the broader picture of January 6 defendants who have espoused political extremism and misogyny and who have allegedly attempted to cover up criminal activity stemming from the siege of Congress nearly a year ago.
According to federal prosecutors, Mark Mazza, 56, of Shelbyville, Indiana, committed multiple crimes at the Capitol, including carrying a pistol loaded with highly lethal ammunition, helping a mob attack police officers, and assaulting police with a baton. Prosecutors say he subsequently lied to authorities about the gun, which he lost during the mayhem:
Mazza, who faces assault, obstruction, and gun charges, was ordered held without bond by a federal judge
When a pair of Capitol Police investigators interviewed Mazza at his Indiana home in late March, statements he made about his actions on January 6 included apparent references to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, court documents show. “I thought Nan and I would hit it off,” he told the agents, but he said that he “never did get to talk to Nancy.” He added, “I was glad I didn’t because you’d be here for another reason.”
more...
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/12/guns-january-6-insurrection-trump-congress-taurus-judge/
Succession...we just can't.
Gave it a valiant effort, 8 shows, but the ugliness of the characters I find to be a real turn-off. Seems none of them have any redeeming qualities, and I can't find a character who is actually likeable. I can see that in real life (wink wink).
It's a shame, too, because there have been so many articles about this show, I may be party-of-one in not enjoying it.
Liberals With Tin Ears
The American Prospect
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Liberals With Tin Ears
Today on TAP: We need to get a lot better at political language.
by Robert Kuttner
December 15, 2021
There has been a lot of discussion lately about the coinage “Latinx,” which violates the rules of Spanish grammar, and is rejected by 98 percent of Hispanic Americans polled. Our friend and former colleague Matt Yglesias, who is of both Latino and Ashkenazi Jewish heritage, has written a very astute essay suggesting that the imposition of “Latinx” by well-meaning white lefties doesn’t explain most of the Democrats’ problems with the Hispanic vote, but it sure doesn’t help.
Not to beat a dead caballo, but imagine if earnest progressive wannabe allies came up with must-use terms for Blacks, Jews, or Asian Americans rejected by those groups themselves. I’d like to expand the discussion to other instances of liberal tin ears. Here are three more self-defeating terms that should be retired.
Safety Net. This widely used synonym for social insurance is metaphorically and politically wrong. A safety net catches you when you fall off a high wire. It suggests something for losers and unfortunates rather than universal social income that binds us all together.
snip//
The word “entitled” has come to describe an obnoxious person who claims privileges that are excessive or undeserved. Sheesh, does that describe Social Security and Medicare? No, but they are described in budget lingo and more broadly as entitlements.
snip//
Union Density. This clunker is a case of academic language being picked up by journalists and liberals who want to sound with-it. Union density refers to the proportion of workers who are members of unions, as in “Union density has declined from 33 percent in 1958 to 13 percent in 2020.”
But density evokes stodgy union bureaucracy rather than a spirited social movement. Who wants to be part of something dense? What’s wrong with the simple word “membership”?
one more para....
https://prospect.org/blogs/tap/liberals-with-tin-ears/
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