“It’s a little too quiet” - US Politics February 2021

"And I say we can do things as, um, as sloooooow as possible."

Can clemenza (or any other CNN viewer) confirm this?

Just one month into President Joe Biden's term, the all-news cable channel last week stopped airing the daily White House press briefings. Perhaps the events weren't entertaining enough, as White House spokesperson Jen Psaki has routinely declined to insert Biden into cultural war debates, refused to castigate reporters, and won’t make stuff up in the name of partisan warfare, the way her Republican predecessors did.

There were no blockbuster stories or public crises unfolding back in early 2017. It was simply the D.C. press collectively deciding that every Trump utterance and each one of his administration's briefings had to be carried live, which meant hundreds of hours of free airtime.

...

Early on, reporters knew the Trump White House press briefings were a sham and a waste of time. In June 2017, CNN's Jim Acosta called the events "useless" and "pointless" because so little relevant information was being given to reporters.

I read about it on Monday.

I don't know, I thought they were still covering them--I guess I've been watching less myself. The worst thing to me is that they continue to put Scaramucci and Michael Cohen on air, like they're fundamentally different than all the sycophants they castigate. They're not, they just fell out of favour.

My perception is that they are still covering them but I also never watch them, so 🤷🏾‍♂️

to be fair to cnn, the trump administration was a public crisis

my anime teen fan self (recently stirred loose by the discovery of Ranma 1/2 on Hulu) is now suddenly wishing i'd had Bubblegum Crisis deep-cut "Bye Bye My Crisis" on my election results day playlist

just saying what everyone's thinking here

So it turns out Neera Tanden criticized @Sen_JoeManchin's daughter for her extraordinary pay increases, after she raised the price of the Epi-Pen from $100 to $600 and moved Mylan's HQ to the Netherlands to reduce taxes. https://t.co/K59rrwM05N. pic.twitter.com/snYaAK9Xfu

— Mark Elliott (@markmobility) February 24, 2021

the fact that Republicans suddenly care about tweets from 2015 when they spent years pretending like they didn't know who the president was is so infuriating. like, I don't care if you're right or wrong, you fuckers don't get to have an opinion on this

yep, and they (and Manchin) are just going use it as pretext to get someone even worse

ha I had this started but I got distracted with work before I hit 'submit post':

GOP 2019: "How can I possibly comment on what the president said, I don't even know what the Tweeter is!"

GOP 2021: "Well, here in 2015 you retweeted this and shared that, so I think we got you, YASSS. That's it, that's the tweet."

Don't do that "YASSS" thing

yeah, I've wanted to shut that down for several months.

This asymmetrical warfare shit is the GOP's stock in trade. Desperately with the dems would learn to counter that nonsense with their own brand of mindfuckery.

with wish

Sorry, I have never typed that out before in my life, was just trying to come up twitter slang that a GOPer might misuse.

I keep stepping in it on every corner, nothing life feeling a failure here as well.

I get it but the ongoing trend of the past ten years of taking affirmative Black gay slang and weaponizing it as something dismissive and negative should be checked

Understood and agreed.

Another sign of stiff Republican opposition to Biden’s Covid relief plan: at closed-door meeting today, one House GOP member after another railed against the measure, per members. Tom Reed, a member of bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, told me that he will vote against the plan

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) February 24, 2021

well, the problem's solved. Next!

Let me guess— they want to give more money to rich people and corporations and let us peasants starve?

"as a member of the problem creators caucus, i can't in good conscience vote for a bill that helps so many americans"

>@GOPLeader Kevin McCarthy on @JoeBiden’s covid package: “Too costly, too corrupt and too liberal.”

First big package of the year.

— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) February 24, 2021

never wanna see "Kevin McCarthy" and "big package" in the same place again

well then, they're gonna love the economic recovery package that's coming next

because no one posts news in here anymore since bad cheeto man is gone

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-relief-bill-1-9-trillion-house-vote/

"The bill, which includes $1,400 in direct payments to Americans making under $75,000, extra money for vaccine distribution and funding to state and local governments, was approved by the Budget Committee on Monday by a vote of 19 to 16. Congressman Lloyd Doggett was the sole Democrat to join Republicans in voting against the bill, although a spokesperson for Doggett later said in a statement that his "no" vote was a mistake and he "supports the COVID-19 relief legislation.""

durrr oops i checked the wrong box?????

christ

Doggett's a good guy of long standing, I got to vote for him a couple times. Although I honestly am not sure how you vote no by mistake?

“i thought it was NO we DO have bananas”

Must be one of those Dominion voting booth things, not.

There were no blockbuster stories or public crises unfolding back in early 2017. It was simply the D.C. press collectively deciding that every Trump utterance and each one of his administration's briefings had to be carried live, which meant hundreds of hours of free airtime.

i was alive in early 2017. there were a series of blockbuster stories and public crises unfolding in plain daylight, back in early 2017. some of them were petty (crowd size at inauguration), some of them were indisputably important and urgent (flynn, the muslim ban). even the crowd size stuff was a bit more than petty - the reason we were transfixed is because we suddenly had a president who was lying to us. we've always had presidents who lied to us. but this time we as a country elected someone and ASKED him to lie to us (i was inspired by an old interview yesterday, check it out below). that's what was different. i tuned into the press conferences - and they showed them - because it was a new level of being directly lied to, something that pointed toward Big Lie style lies to the public.

that's not 20/20 hindsight, that's how it was at the time. i was there, we were all there, we saw it. we can argue that the press corp shouldn't have covered it so much. they shouldn't have given it so much air time, of course (but did anyone expect the media to do anything other than that? ).

i don't like the rebubbling theme of "trump actually didn't do much that was bad, he just got a lot of press coverage". he did an amazing number of bad things, and we're lucky that he failed at so many of them. yes, he is diminished now that he doesn't get press coverage. but he's getting less press coverage (and he's banned from twitter) because he no longer has power. but, he DID have power in early 2017, so yes, his terrible deeds were on the news, and yes i watched them all because i wanted to see what american fascism looked like

octavia butlers shares some of her passages from Parable of the Sower (1993), which at the time of the interview (2005) appear to be especially salient regarding the bush administration. they are even MORE powerful regarding the trump era, i think:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0UgiE8vYuI

I tried to read the Parable books last year, but a 1/3rd of the way into Parable of the Talents it was too much, had to stop.

the two readings start at 6:08

and the reading is from parable of the talents, not sower, whoops. I've only read Kindred (so far)

(not to derail overly much but Wild Seed is AMAZING, need to read the Parables)

CNN does continue to cover the entirety of the COVID briefings every day, and that's good.

the Parables are brutal, I'm not sure I could read them again.

here. this is better than anything i will ever say

Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought.
To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool.
To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen.
To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies.
To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.

and

Beware: All too often, We say What we hear others say. We think What we're told that we think. We see What we're permitted to see. Worse! We see what we're told that we see. Repetition and pride are the keys to this. To hear and to see Even an obvious lie Again And again and again May be to say it, Almost by reflex Then to defend it Because we've said it And at last to embrace it Because we've defended it And because we cannot admit That we've embraced and defended An obvious lie. Thus, without thought, Without intent, We make Mere echoes Of ourselves— And we say What we hear others say.

Doggett's a good guy of long standing, I got to vote for him a couple times. Although I honestly am not sure how you vote no by mistake?

― fbclid=fhAZ3l (f. hazel), Wednesday, February 24, 2021 10:58 AM bookmarkflaglink

He was saying "no-urns"

lol

String it all together like that and it just read like a crazy email to City Council from a guy with piles of junk in his yars who's convinced the codes enforcers are conspiring against him.

― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra), Monday, February 22, 2021 4:31 PM (two days ago)

funnily enough, over the summer "that guy" in my hometown was arrested by the feds because he had sent threatening letters to the local public health official, had ties to boogaloo groups, and a lot of guns.

That’s powerful stuff, KM.

one of his classic communiques involved how he shouldn't have to pay for sidewalk repair because fuck people in wheelchairs and with other mobility issues -- they can either take a different street or drive a car.

First part was horrifying because Trump was all of the above. Second part just that sequence of - we say it because we heard it, we defend it because we said it, we embrace it because we’ve defended it - explains so much of how people like Trump, backed by media like Fox, can exert so much power over people that it’s like mind control.

i was alive in early 2017. there were a series of blockbuster stories and public crises unfolding in plain daylight, back in early 2017. some of them were petty (crowd size at inauguration), some of them were indisputably important and urgent (flynn, the muslim ban). even the crowd size stuff was a bit more than petty - the reason we were transfixed is because we suddenly had a president who was lying to us. we've always had presidents who lied to us. but this time we as a country elected someone and ASKED him to lie to us (i was inspired by an old interview yesterday, check it out below)

Thank you Karl. That bothered me about that article. We almost immediately had a travel ban targeting countries with heavy Muslim populations, reports of the CBO defying the injunction against it, and Bannon calling the press the "opposition party".

Never mind the chilling af way he dismissed acting AG Yates, by saying she "betrayed the country".

the willingness of basically every conservative in the country to defend literally everything the man did and said was maddening. so many times I'd think "surely this is a bridge too far" and all you'd get were furrowed brows for 48 hours before "well the fake news is really just trying to take him down, why don't you talk about the GOOD things he's doing?". like, I voted Biden, and was actually quite excited to do so, but I still think he sucks in a lot of fundamental ways, and won't defend him on a bunch of issues. it's weird that virtually no Republicans I knew treated Trump like that. they all saw Trump as an extension of themselves.

well this is disgusting

https://medium.com/@lindseyboylan4NY/my-story-of-working-with-governor-cuomo-e664d4814b4e

xpost even the REpublicans that didn't *like* him still preferred him to us 'pathetic libs' so they'd defend a guy they didn't even like cos he '0wned' us

Cruz said it was “really creepy” that a reporter captured a picture of his dog forlornly staring out a window, and “even more creepy” that his wife Heidi was photographed on the beach “in her bikini” by paparazzi.

“I will tell you, that she is pissed about. All the rest of it, she’s fine,” Cruz said, adding: “Heidi is smoking hot, so I looked at the pictures and said, ‘Man, you look great.’”

Contributed without comment.

shout out to the cable news watchers ITT

This is a good glimpse at ... how no real people actually watch cable news https://t.co/wEZMtuT0a6

— Ben Smith (@benyt) February 24, 2021

(xpost) Not commenting on his wife here at all...Cruz is clearly trying to paper over his spinelessness re his wife five years ago. He'll probably casually make mention at some point of how much his dad was a staunch anti-conspiracist and lover of JFK.