Re: the meme here, sorry to say, but that doesn’t matter. It could be 90+% (like the percentage of Americans who favor universal background checks for prospective gun owners) and that wouldn’t matter either.
The only think that counts here is that our lawmakers are in the pockets of the gun industry.
That’s as may be. But, spelling aside, do you know what would concern the hell out of me? Taking investment advice from the professional liars at the ultra-right-wing “news” sources. Before his ouster from Fox News, Tucker Carlson was also hawking investments in precious metals.
I’m wondering how many baby boomers with elderly parents are worried about the safety of what will soon be their inheritances. Are dear old mom and dad following the advice of people who spread disinformation for a living? That’s not exactly what I’d call “peace of mind.”
And if that doesn’t scare you, imagine you’re an investor in Fox Corp. itself. Not only did you take a 6% haircut the other day, but your company now faces a $2.7 billion damages claim for defamation, this one from Smartmatic, whose attorneys will be taking the same tack that forced Fox to settle the Dominion case out of court for a cool three-quarters of a billion dollars.
Hmmmm. Wait a second here. How much money does Fox actually have? It’s possible that we may soon see Fox News belly-up. That won’t end the GOP’s assault on U.S. democracy, but it’s one heck of a good start.
We’re all looking for reasons why Tucker Carlson got whacked from Fox News. Here’s yet another theory that doesn’t ring true.
Reader Dolly Lindley notes about the video below: It occurred to me almost immediately when I heard about Tucker, that he was the only newsperson being very vocal about Big Pharma and Psych Drugs being present at all the shootings and violence. (more…)
In his campaign for the 2024 presidency, Donald Trump has announced that he won’t be participating in the debates leading up to the Republican nomination. He didn’t say why not, but let’s apply a little common sense here.
How would Trump fare in a stage filled with political opponents, each of which will be pointing out that the former president is a criminal? That he attempted to overthrow the U.S. federal government? That now we have complete proof that there was no significant amount of voter fraud? That it’s very likely that he would have to run the country from a federal prison?
That, dear reader, is what’s referred to as a s***-show.
Baby-boomers recall a day when being a Republican was equivalent to the statement: “I have mine. Everyone else can go to hell.” There really is nothing to like about that, at least for people with a sense of decency and morality.
Yet fast-forward to the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency. Now these people are living in a cult of ignorance, and, in many cases, paying for it with their lives.
The college professor quoted here believes the correct answer to the question in the headline above is the latter of the two possibilities offered, and I agree.
Immanuel Kant’s concept of the categorical imperative (i.e., a moral statement that always needs to be followed, regardless of our desires) is a restatement of the golden rule, and translates from the German as “act only in accordance with rules of conduct that you would declare to be universal laws.”
From Columbia University: In lay terms, this simply means that if you do an action, then everyone else should also be able to do it.
Now, that Kant wrote this is a fact. I read it with my own eyes. It’s not the interpretation of some bearded Marxist somewhere; it’s an important part of the history of Western philosophy.
It’s likely that we’ll never learn the truth here, but here are a few theories:
• Fox and/or its chairman Rupert Murdoch was angry that Carlson cost them $757.5 million in the Dominion Voting Systems defamation case, and that they now face a much larger settlement to Smartmatic, on the precise same case elements. This explanation seems unlikely, considering that Fox had, via Carlson and others, promoted the Big Lie from the start, right after the thumping that Trump took in the election, in an attempt to maintain its viewership base. Millions of Americans were, and continue to be, hungry to receive that message, regardless of whether it’s true.
Enormous amounts of ad revenues hung in the balance. If Fox admitted what they and the rest of the world knew to be the truth, i.e., that there was no evidence of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, their viewers would have quickly jumped to Newsmax or OAN, “news” organizations that have even lower levels of integrity than Fox itself. This story, of course, came straight from Murdoch’s under-oath deposition in the Dominion case.
• Carlson’s ouster was part of the settlement, the details of which are very unlikely ever to be revealed.
• Carlson left voluntarily so as to begin to distance himself and his $420 million net worth from the sinking ship that is Fox News. That also seems unlikely, since the damage has been done. He can say that he used to be a professional liar (or that he used to “hate Donald Trump passionately”), but now he’s found Jesus, or whatever. But what value could that possibly represent against future plaintiffs in defamation cases that focus on the lies he told before the day he was dismissed from Fox?
• There is scuttlebutt to the effect that Carlson’s genius-level capacity get away with these lies makes him a long-term liability to Fox, but this I find most preposterous of them all. The entire right-wing “news” industry is based on deliberately misleading viewers with lies or other distortions. In his former position, Carlson was no more egregious than anyone else; in fact, he’s more credible to my Fox-loving mom than Sean Hannity, whom she considers to be “over the top.” Unless Fox plans to re-invent itself as an online shopping network or a cooking or sports channel, this makes no sense whatsoever.
Perhaps the answer to the mystery will reveal itself as Fox News continues to receive its ongoing legal pelting/public flogging of epic proportions.
I doubt it.
A Republican reader and I were talking recently about Biden’s spending. She was of the opinion that it was too large, but she couldn’t name what it covered. To be fair, I didn’t have a complete command of it myself.
I told her that ever since I was a child I couldn’t recall a single presidential administration that avoided criticism from its opponents for its lavish overspending. The graph at left shows that the national debt has risen steadily regardless of which party is in office. The only real difference is that Republicans like to spend on national defense, and Democrats favor social programs that are aimed at providing long-term value to our society via better education, universal healthcare, etc.
Here’s Biden’s budget for 2024. Feel free to scan through the headers to get a general sense for the key issues that he and his people propose to address. In addition to the traditional focus, there is special emphasis on infrastructure, which is normally construed to mean roads, bridges, tunnels, airports, railroads, but here is expanded to include clean energy and transportation. He’s taking a position that Republicans find outrageous: that perhaps we should join our scientists and acknowledge the fact that our environment is in the process of collapse, and that the U.S. government should play a role in mitigating that catastrophe.
The budget supports itself by raising taxes on billionaires and corporations, and it accomplishes that, in the main, by closing loopholes. Wealthy people’s income is essentially all capital gains, taxed at significantly lower rates than everyday Americans’ ordinary income; that difference goes away. And rich people can afford top-level tax attorneys who know how to game the system on behalf of their clients who have no problem in shelling out thousands of dollars per hour for professionals at the very pinnacle of this (arguably criminal) artform. That vanishes with a mandatory minimum 25% tax on the income of the top 0.01%.
Maybe we should be asking ourselves where this all ends. Some economists are unconcerned with our $30 trillion debt given its relation to our GDP per capita. OK, but what happens when our GDP per capita starts to crash? Keep in mind that this can happen in dozens of different ways.
Here’s one: Republican congresspeople, driven by billionaire donors, successfully convince American voters that climate and epidemiological scientists are frauds, and that, as a result, the United States becomes marginalized in world affairs? Other developed countries’ policies will be based on fact, and ours will be rooted in the whim of our uber-rich.
So what happens then? We will become a shambles. And, the saddest part of all, we will have gotten precisely what we so richly deserved.
….And one of these exceptions is people whose thinking goes like this:
A) Tucker Carlson went on camera for more than two years and claimed, even though he knew it was 100% false, that the 2020 presidential election was rigged in favor of Joe Biden.
and
B) Tucker Carlson is an honest and reliable source of investment advice.
Sorry, but it’s absurd to have sympathy for people whose intelligence is that feeble.
Re: the graphic at left, Mike Tucker writes: Looks a lot like the red\blue maps you see around election time. Almost the same distribution too. What a coincidence?
It’s certainly close.
What is certain is that more guns per capita means more gun deaths per capita. If more guns made us safer, we would be the safest country on Earth. Instead:
