Nandini Jammi and Claire Atkin at Check My Ads explain “How Proctor & Gamble Ended Up Funding Steve Bannon’s ‘War Room,’” even though Proctor & Gamble’s executives talk a good game about not funding noxious content. Long story short: Proctor & Gamble still places ads on a streaming weather service called WeatherNation, now owned by a right-wing corporation called Performance One, which also owns Real America’s Voice (which distributes Mr. Bannon’s programming, such as it is), meaning that if you buy ad time on WeatherNation, you’re basically funding Steve Bannon. It might be generous to say P&G simply didn’t know all of that, but Performance One does seem to have gone rather far out of its way to hide what it's doing.
Judd Legum at Popular Information finds Republican candidates totally lying about their positions on abortion. OK, I guess the charitable thing to say would be “they’ve heard the popular will and are changing their positions to match it,” but we’re not schmucks: we all know what they’re going to do if they get power – they’re going to “change their positions back” to what they were, the popular will be damned. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, if you attended the George W. Bush Administration at all in the 2000s, none of this is a surprise to you. What Mr. Bush did actually betrayed our democracy and our great people – and no, that’s not the same as Joe Biden failing to get very much of his agenda through narrow House and Senate majorities.
Noah Lanard at Mother Jones reveals that Arizona Republican Senate candidate/man with a face even a mother could punch Blake Masters hated democracy even when he was a member of a vegetarian co-op at Stanford! I bet the other kids loved reading his emails about that, too – especially when he wrote that he was going to reveal some "independent thought." You know how Americans love hearing they're not independent enough! Seriously, if your email list tells you not to send political crap and you do anyway, it just means you don't care about other people. And that will always catch up to you, and make you friendless and loveless. The difference between Blake Masters and other people? When he's friendless and loveless, he might still be able to masturbate into thousand-dollar bills. In a sane and moral society Mark Kelly would bury this dude; in this sick, immoral, and decadent society, I suspect he still doesn't understand that money and reputation only take you so far. Against Martha McSally, it only took him to a 2.4-point victory.
Oh Jesus Mary and Joseph our “liberal” media claims we should oppose student loan debt forgiveness out of fear of inflation going up. Because making all your decisions out of fear is so American! And our “liberal” media apparently think making decisions for moral reasons isn’t, either – we tell people they need to spend an arm and a leg to go to college so they can compete for good jobs, and then we take all the good jobs away that we can; I think that alone is grounds for forgiving student debt. But I guess our “liberal” media don’t think accountability is very American, either. (Also too, even the right-wing think tank flogging this theory found it wouldn’t increase inflation very much. Seriously, 0.3%? If you're scared of that, get out of my foxhole.)
Ho hum, Donald Trump sure did a whole lot of fibbing about our FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago and the 2020 election at his rally in Pennsylvania earlier this month. We could describe them at length, but let’s just note that the Factcheck article starts out with a bulleted list of 10 items. You have to wonder how Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano and Republican Senate candidate Mehmet Oz – the folks the Trump rally was supposed to help out! – felt about being sidelined yet again in favor of Donald Trump’s whining. OK, I actually don’t wonder how Mr. Mastriano feels about that – whatever gets me the power to hurt people is pretty much his only thought – and maybe I just want to believe Mr. Oz is a human being, which I guess is my weakness.
Finally, David Hoffeld at Fast Company reveals “the Scientific Way to Win Any Argument and Not Make Enemies” – and, spoiler alert, it’s to “connect your own position to those beliefs” your opponents hold. OK, so I’ve been doing this for literally 20 years and while it should work – the logic is both impeccable and attractive – it doesn’t work, at least not with about a quarter of the electorate, and that’s because those folks only want to “connect” with their own rage. Yeah, it’s really that bad arguing with them! The good news? Three-quarters of the electorate should be able to outnumber one-quarter any time. And enact policies that help more good Americans make ends meet, which takes care of most of our rage problem.
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