Since our "liberal" media organs don't seem to know what to do when right-wingers practice cancel culture on folks like AP reporter-for-12-minutes Emily Wilder, Dan Froomkin at Salon provides a helpful form letter these news organs can use when confronted by such campaigns. Money paragraph: "When (reporters) join our organization, we make it very clear that they need to adhere to the highest professional standards in journalism. That doesn't mean renouncing their opinions, or never having had any. It means not allowing their opinions to get in the way of fairly gathering, assessing and presenting facts." That doesn't seem hard to understand, but then right-wingers have, for decades, squealed TEH BIASEZ!!!!! whenever a media report disagrees with their strongly-held opinions. Time we stop giving such opinions legitimacy, maybe?
Rebecca Watson at Skepchick tells us about a(nother) study finding it's actually not terribly helpful to directly debunk the obvious rubbish you see on Twitter -- and, in fact, folks who've passed on such rubbish tended to double down on it in the 24 hours immediately thereafter. But Ms. Watson reminds us that "this is only an immediate reaction to correction" that "doesn’t account for the possibility that (the debunking) planted a seed in those subjects’ minds." Toward that end, I'm reminded of this account from an ex-right-winger about how she changed her mind, an article that suggested (among other things) that we tend to change our worldview out of everyone's sight, that conversations we overhear will more likely change us than the pitched battles we're in, and that we more likely change after conversations we have with people who are more or less like us, which in turn suggests that former right-wingers are the best candidates to reach current ones.
The Project on Government Oversight presents "The F-35 in Two Minutes." OK, with intro and outro it's actually two minutes, 37 seconds, but it's still a terrific summary of a "the most expensive weapons program in history," one that's hemorrhaged taxpayer money (which is to say your money) for two decades. Long story short: the F-35 is a fighter jet that can't fight and can't fly, which means, at the very least, that we could have spent that money on something that actually can fight and can fly. How do the fiscal hawks in Congress allow this to continue? I kid, of course -- the "fiscal hawks" only care about the "expense" of programs that actually help good Americans, and then they make up hysterical arguments about "national security" if we don't keep throwing money away on things like the F-35.
In a related note, William Rivers Pitt at TruthOut reminds us, in re yet debt limit threat, that Republicans only care about the debt limit, and debt generally, when a Democrat's President. If you're thinking "this can't work again" -- a reasonable thought, if the debt limit battles of 2011 and 2013 are as fresh in your mind as they are in mine -- consider that every time Republicans foment drama and chaos and Democrats try to reason with them, Republicans win, as in they win the House (in 2010), the Senate (in 2014) and the Presidency (in 2016). I hope President Biden has figured out the same thing, especially considering he had a front-row seat to all of it. If not, we'll just have to remind him.
Look out, midterm wave-riders: Democrat Melanie Stansbury buries her Republican opponent in New Mexico's 1st House district special by over 24 points, larger than now-Interior Secretary Deb Haaland's margins in both 2018 and 2020, and the second-largest margin of victory since Democrats started routinely winning this seat in 2008. (Before that, Republicans had won this seat for 40 years. Things sure have changed.) Note well that Ms. Stansbury supports Medicare-for-All health insurance and the $15/hour minimum wage, when there's not exactly a shortage of Democratic consultants who would have told her to take the opposite position on both those issues so she could "better protect herself against right-wing attacks," attacks that would always come even if Jesus H. Christ himself were the nominee.
Finally, Donald Trump appears to have ended his experiment with blogging, which sure seems premature to me -- I thought his natterings were starting to get him back into the news, where he obviously hungers to be, and I thought reports of his "low" metrics (I should have such "low" metrics!) were largely meaningless. I guess he didn't think those reports were that meaningless, though, or he'd still be spewing his spew.
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