The Daily Show with Trevor Noah

Last night was the premiere of The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. This was the beginning, which makes me optimistic.

I wasn't wild about the latter part of the show, but I'm not a big fan of celebrity interviews. Even when Jon Stewart was running the show, I often skipped them. And it might take awhile for Noah to hit his stride.

But The Daily Show will continue without a big format change, it seems. I'm glad of that.

Today in racism and guns

From TPM:

A South Dakota man is in custody for lying to police about how he landed in the emergency room with a gunshot wound to the penis.

Donald Anthony Watson, 43, told police he was shot by “a black guy (who) tried to rob” him while he was taking out the trash at his apartment, the Argus Leader reported Friday.

But police weren't able to corroborate Watson's story of an attempted robbery after a search of his apartment, where they found blood, bullet fragments, and an empty gun case.

Watson eventually admitted he had made the story up, and had instead placed a handgun he was considering purchasing in his pocket, where it fired and hit his genitals.

Luckily, this guy doesn't really need a penis, because that's what the gun is for, right? His penis-substitute? Isn't that what most guns are for? Handguns, at least.

You know, I don't think I've ever seen a news story about someone lying to the police and inventing a crime without that imaginary criminal being described as a black man. And I've seen lots of stories like this. (Well, not exactly like this. Shooting his own penis is an interesting GunFail, to say the least.)

A few years ago, here in Lincoln, there was a prominent news story about a woman attacked on the bike trail near me, when a 'big black man' jumped out of the bushes and grabbed her. A week or so later, I happened to notice a tiny retraction buried in the back of the paper. She'd made the whole thing up, apparently just for attention.

Why was the imaginary man who attacked her black? Well, who else would she pick to slander? And she probably didn't even consider herself to be a racist, either (few racists do).

But I had to wonder how many people had seen that first story, prominently displayed in the newspaper, but never noticed the tiny little retraction later. Well, that's not 'news,' huh? The first story was sensational. The fact that it wasn't true was just a minor detail.

Best of Sean Carroll

Sean Carroll does a great job in these debates, doesn't he? His arguments are so easy to understand.

Republicans want to ban religion,... just not their own

Incredible, isn't it? It's the 21st Century, but even Americans don't fully accept and affirm freedom of religion, one of the founding principles of our country.

Oh, sure, they want their own religious beliefs to be sufficient excuse for doing... whatever they want, even for oppressing other people. But that's not freedom of religion. After all, every theocrat wants that. The Taliban wants that. Al-Qaeda wants that. ISIS wants that.

How can Americans not even understand what freedom of religion is - or not support it, if they do understand? Yeah, Republicans have become batshit crazy in recent years, but this crazy? I shouldn't be surprised by this, especially since I'm continually surprised by this kind of thing, but I still am.

The Unicornstitution

(TPM)

Josh Marshall at TPM explains the Unicornstitution:

Seeing so many stories like this one I've become increasingly convinced of the existence and the importance of what I will call the Unicornstitution. Related but by no means synonymous with the US constitution, the Unicornstitution exists as a sort of ersatz Platonic ideal form of the Constitution which exists in the ether and is ready at hand to give a big thumbs up and attaboy and 'you go girl' to whatever crazy bullshit thing you already decided to do, especially if you're really angry and stupid and fundamentally see life in America as as matter of other undeserving people taking away your stuff and your not being able to do anything about it.

This is related to a point I made earlier this year ("No. Sorry. You're not a constitutional conservative.") But it goes a bit beyond that - the desire to wrap every completely nutball idea you have onto the Constitution. Because generally because ...

Ritzheimer is a somewhat extreme example, I grant you, but the Unicornstitution has become increasingly prevalent among high-ranking elected leaders who for instance really really think Obamacare is socialism and Kenyan and therefore unconstitutional. You just have to look hard enough to find out how. But you don't need to look all that hard because the Unicornstitution is always right there at hand waiting, sort of like an imaginary friend.

Take a look at that first link. In an America where crazy bullshit is common - indeed, where it's basically the Republican Party - that's still shocking in just how crazy and just how big a pile of bullshit it really is.

But in a land where crazy bullshit is so widely accepted (just look at the GOP presidential primary), there really is no limit. If you're OK with crazy bullshit, how can you say that anything is too insane or stinks too badly?

You either care about reality or you don't. If you don't, you're faith-based. If you don't, you believe whatever crap you want to believe. That's why most Republicans think that Barack Obama is a Muslim (and most of the rest are "unsure").

That's crazy, sure, but it's not the craziest. In fact, there is no 'craziest.' There's just what's the biggest pile of bullshit so far. Once you no longer care about reality - or you have a financial/political reason to push crazy, and no ethical qualms about it whatsoever - there's no limit.

Limits exist in reality, but not in fantasy, not in batshit crazy. That's the problem with faith-based thinking. No matter how crazy you get, someone can always out-crazy you. If crazy bullshit is acceptable at all, it will just get crazier and crazier.

The GOP's Muslim strategy

You know, I've become more and more impressed with Amanda Marcotte. Here she is again with a great post at TPM:

This week has epitomized the bizarro world American politics has become. It’s a week during which the media and politicians have been enraptured by a debate over whether or not a Muslim could become president. ...

Why? Well, Ted Cruz’s answer to a question about this new controversy hinted at what is really going on here. After affirming that he can read by noting that the constitution requires no religious test for office, Cruz said, “The broader question, and what I think Ben was trying to get at, is what are the consequences been in the last six and a half years of the Obama presidency?” ...

Obviously the answer is that both Carson and now Cruz are referencing the widespread belief amongst conservatives that Obama is secretly a Muslim but is concealing his true beliefs for nefarious reasons, possibly to impose sharia law on the nation. (Any day now.) The last public poll on this belief showed that 86 percent of Republicans are warm to it, with 54 percent believing that Obama is a Muslim and 32 percent saying they are unsure. Only 14 percent of Republicans correctly describe Obama’s religion as Christian.

In other words, the belief that Obama is a Muslim is an entrenched “fact” on the right, much like the belief that global warming is a hoax or Planned Parenthood is a for-profit company that makes its money selling fetal parts. Carson and Cruz aren’t really talking about a hypothetical Muslim president in some future world. This is all a coded way to talk about Obama.

In that light, the discussion makes more sense. When Carson says that “I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation,” he’s aligning himself with right wing forces that don’t accept the legitimacy of Obama’s presidency, even going so far as to float conspiracy theories that Obama faked his birth certificate to conceal his Kenyan origins. ...

No one is going to come right out and accuse Obama of being a foreign invader—or maybe just a secret Muslim—who comes to ruin Mom and apple pie, because they want to be taken seriously by the mainstream media. So they just talk in coded language that their conspiracy theorist supporters understand but which coats their discourse in plausible deniability. If confronted, they can just say they aren’t talking about a specific person who happens to be a Muslim in the White House who is out to destroy us all through nefarious means. Just a hypothetical one, wink wink.

There are a couple of major benefits to this game, beyond just being able to demonize political opponents without being called out by the media for lying. For one thing, it reinforces the conservative narrative that they’re victims of a liberal elite suppressing their great truths through the almighty power of political correctness. After all, they have to talk in coded language like they’re all in some spy network! Clearly, they are being oppressed and censored by people who can’t handle the truth. ...

There may be a silver lining with conservatives increasingly relying on coded language and ever more complex rhetorical traps. Yes, the strategy helps conservatives communicate radical ideas to each other under a blanket of plausible deniability. Yes, they drive liberals up the wall while they do it. But they’re starting to sound like a bunch of jabbering idiots to people who aren’t already well-versed with the various conspiracy theories and coded beliefs. Pissing off the liberals is fun, but it might be at the expense of making sense to voters who don’t speak fluent Right Wingese.

This is perceptive (note that I butchered her column pretty badly so I could post just an excerpt here), but I'm not so sure I agree with that last paragraph. Republicans have been using coded language - racist dog whistles - since they began their 'Southern strategy' of deliberately wooing white racists, decades ago.

It worked great then, and it still seems to work. The mainstream media rarely call them on it, because it is in code - easily deciphered code, but there's still that plausible deniability. And voters who don't completely understand the code, and don't fully agree with it, aren't hit over the head with blatant racism and other bigotry.

The whole point of using coded language is because it works. If it didn't work, the Republican Party would stop using it.

The Hungry for Power Games - another one bites the dust

I would have bet on Scott Walker, if I'd had to bet on the Republican primary. He seemed to have the Koch brothers backing him - and other billionaires, too. And he was a right-wing loon governing a rather blue state. How did that happen, if he wasn't electable?

Oh, well. Who could have predicted Donald Trump?

This is the second drop-out in the past week or so. (At this rate, they'll all be gone in a few years, huh?) Maybe I should post Stephen Colbert's tribute to Rick Perry, too, since this seems to have become a series...



I suppose they won't all drop out, huh? Too bad. This is the party of Abraham Lincoln, after all, and the party of Teddy Roosevelt.

Well, no, it isn't. This is actually the party of Strom Thurmond. It's the Dixiecrat Party in GOP clothing. They did that to themselves with their 'Southern strategy' of deliberately wooing white racists.

But it worked so well. That's the depressing thing. And the fact that it's still working, with a disturbingly large part of America, is even more so.

Outsourcing America

I really like Stephen Colbert, but I think he's got the wrong idea here. This campaign ad wasn't a mistake. Jeb 'Don't-Call-Me-Bush' Bush is a Republican. He was just trying to demonstrate to the wealthy (his base) how easy it is to outsource jobs in America.

The lack of an exclamation point is more worrisome, though. Someone might see that and accidentally add "Bush" to "Jeb," which would be disastrous for his candidacy. Then again, maybe not, since so few people seem to remember that he's even running.

Half the support of Donald Trump in his own state? He's toast.

Sorry, I mean he's toast! (Let's not forget those exclamation points!)

Ben Carson not Christian enough

This is from TPM:

Dr. Ben Carson was left out of a Christian pastors' conference earlier this year in part because his own religious beliefs deviated too much from Christian orthodoxy.

The snub was ironic in hindsight, as Carson is now under fire for saying over the weekend that he didn't believe a Muslim should be President of the United States because his or her religious beliefs would be in conflict with the Constitution.

Willy Rice, the pastor of Florida-based Calvary Baptist Church, invited the retired neurosurgeon to speak at the Southern Baptist Pastors' Conference earlier this year. The invite for the June conference came before Carson was a declared Republican presidential candidate.

However, several organizations and individuals within the Southern Baptist community publicly expressed their displeasure with having Carson, a Seventh-day Adventist, address the conference. Those complaints, in addition to Carson's expected presidential campaign launch, led Carson and the conference organizers to mutually agree to not have him speak at the event.

Funny, isn't it? This particular Christian bigot isn't Christian enough for other Christian bigots.

This is why we have the separation between church and state. This is why there's no religious test for any political office in America, why there's no state religion, why our founders wrote into the Constitution of the United States that your religious beliefs, if any, are your own fucking business, no one else's. (I'm paraphrasing a bit.)

You know something. In my entire life - my adult life, at least - no president has ever shared my own opinions about religion. Not a single one. So what? In presidential elections, we're not voting for pope. We're electing the secular leader of a secular country.

Five stupid things

You know what's really sad? Steve Shives does these regularly. Yeah, this degree of stupidity isn't even unusual in America these days. In fact, it's common as dirt.

Isn't American exceptionalism great?

GOP debate - who was the biggest liar?

"Goddamn it, do journalism! Do journalism!"  Yeah, Cenk, I feel the same way.

CNN didn't fact-check the debate, didn't object to even the most obvious lies, because if they did that, they'd never hold another Republican Party debate. Ever.

They had the biggest audience in CNN's history. They'd never had so many people watching CNN. That's hugely important to their corporation's profits. There's no way in hell they'd risk that. So of course they let these politicians lie with impunity.

Now, sure, you can always find out the truth later, if you want, on websites and in videos like this one. But all of those combined won't receive as many views as the debate. And what's the narrative afterwards? Are these politicians forever after branded as liars, then?

When it comes to Carly Fiorina, TPM puts it well:

Press failures, especially massive ones, tend to be right there in plain site and yet totally invisible, entirely ignored. And yet we have a massive one coming out of Wednesday night's Republican debate that the press seems inclined or insisting on totally ignoring. Commentators are toasting Carly Fiorina as the break-out winner of the debate. And yet she not only made a string of false statements, or claims that showed a willful disregard for or ignorance of reality, she almost certainly manufactured a bogus memory entirely out of whole cloth. And all of this is cast into particularly high relief since Fiorina went into the debate intent on branding Hillary Clinton as a liar. "Her track record of lying about Benghazi, of lying about her e- mails, about lying about her servers," is something Hillary will have to answer for, Fiorina bellowed in the debate.

Now it may seem odd to call this a press failure when I'm about to cite several press organizations that quickly noted all these distortions and outright lies. But this is always the case with a press failure of this magnitude. Someone is always making the point here or there. But it doesn't take shape as part of the narrative of what happened in the debate or the campaign. That's certainly the case here. Vox, ABC News and Esquire have each in one way or another been all over this. But the reality of what Fiorina did in this debate and a number of earlier press encounters is totally absent from the basic themes of the post-debate coverage.

Fiorina has a habit of simply making things up. In the case of the parts of the Planned Parenthood videos, the way she made it up seems to verge on the pathological. Again she says she saw something in these videos that completely wasn't there. And she doubled down on it the next day. This is just lying through your teeth or just being so indifferent to whether things are true or not that it amounts to the same thing.

The narrative, which you see everywhere, is that Carly Fiorina won the debate. Her ratings went up. The fact that she said nothing but lies doesn't seem to matter in the slightest. It certainly doesn't seem to matter to the mainstream press. That's not part of the narrative at all.

If there's no downside to lying, then politicians will lie. Well, successful politicians will lie, anyway. Why wouldn't they?

Remember when Al Gore claimed to have invented the internet? That was a lie. Of course, it wasn't Al Gore's lie, because Al Gore didn't say that. He didn't even come close to saying that. The lie, from the Republican Party, was that he said it. But that lie became the narrative. That lie successfully tarred Al Gore with something completely untrue.

Lying works, especially if you have enough money and enough propaganda outlets like Fox 'News' and enough people willing to repeat the lie. There's no downside to lying, especially in a debate broadcast to millions of people, if the media won't immediately call out lies.

Or even make a big deal about the lies. The established narrative of the debate isn't that Carly Fiorina lied through her teeth, but that she 'won' the debate.

Why do we let this happen? Personally, I think it's mostly about money. The Republican Party won't let a media company hold one of their debates if their candidates can't get away with lying.

Similarly, if a journalist asks tough questions in an interview (like asking Sarah Palin which newspapers she reads!), that journalist will get no more interviews. Indeed, the journalist's employer would be punished for that. Some other company would get access, not theirs.

But TMP says it's laziness:

Why is the press ignoring or hushing this up? It's almost always a matter of laziness. Hillary is the shifty-eyed liar, Rick Perry was the dolt, Obama is stand-offish and cerebral. Everybody has their cliche or caricature through which all their actions are understood. Confirmatory news is kept; disconfirmatory news is tossed aside. To an important degree, this is simply human nature. We all do it to some degree in our daily lives. But journalists have special responsibilities to look past caricatures and the familiar. In this case, they're failing that test. You should not be able to tell a slew of small fibs in a big debate and one mammoth one and not have it become part of the campaign discussion at all.

Of course, all politicians lie, right? That's the other excuse you'll hear. If everyone is tarred by the same brush, then it doesn't matter how outrageously you lie. There's no downside to lying if the response is that 'everyone does it.'

That's how we get politicians we can't stand. That's how we get a dysfunctional Congress. When a politician does something outrageous, the common response - and not just by that politician's supporters - is that 'they all do it.' Thus, there's absolutely no downside to being exceptionally bad.

In a democracy, we get the kinds of politicians we deserve.

Muslim hysteria

I meant to post this earlier (it's a couple of weeks old), but now turns out to be a good time.

Why would you call the police even if the sign had been in Arabic? (It's Hebrew.) How stupid can people get? How timid? How cowardly?

Here's another incident, from Texas (naturally):



This bright 14-year-old kid made an electronic clock. But because he's brown - and Muslim - he was arrested and taken in handcuffs to juvenile detention.

Here's the article in the Dallas Morning News.

Police say they may yet charge him with making a hoax bomb — though they acknowledge he told everyone who would listen that it’s a clock.

Trickery dickery Fox, phony war on cops

The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore
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Larry Wilmore is pretty good here, isn't he? I don't particularly like the format of the rest of his show, but the opening is always great.

Give me that old-time religion

(Tim Eagan)

Thank God that Republicans are working to bring back that old-time religion!

Sarah Palin to be President Trump's Secretary of Stupid

Hilarious, isn't it? But ignorance isn't a disqualification to their faith-based supporters. Intelligence, education, knowledge - those are suspect.

Furthermore, they think that anyone can work in government, because government - their own government - is worthless. The Republican Party pushes that idea (and then demonstrates it when they get in power).

If they needed medical care, would they go to an amateur? If they needed legal help, would they go to an amateur? Heck, if they needed a plumber or an electrician - and they were paying for it - they wouldn't want an amateur. (They might do it themselves, or with friends, to save money, but they'd want to hire professionals.)

But they want amateurs in government - running our government, not just in low-level positions. And this degree of ignorance just demonstrates their amateur standing, I guess. (Of course, Sarah Palin was a governor - for one-half of one term - so she shouldn't be this ignorant.)

Dick Cheney - wrong then, wrong now

This was put together by the White House. Nice, huh? And they barely even mentioned the part about the Iraq War 'paying for itself.'

Maybe that was some other faith-based war-monger in the Bush Administration? But they didn't mention torturing prisoners of war either, and Dick Cheney was definitely involved with that.

Glitter Jesus is... fabulous!

Nothing is as funny as that 'prosperity gospel' scam. Man, faith-based people will believe anything!

Nude selfie gets teen charged with child porn

Could we get any more hysterical about sex in this country?

Here's the story in the North Carolina newspaper:

After a 16-year-old Fayetteville girl made a sexually explicit nude photo of herself for her boyfriend last fall, the Cumberland County Sheriff's Office concluded that she committed two felony sex crimes against herself and arrested her in February.

The girl was listed on a warrant as both the adult perpetrator and the minor victim of two counts of sexual exploitation of minor - second-degree exploitation for making her photo and third-degree exploitation for having her photo in her possession.

A conviction could have put the girl in prison and would have required her to register as a sex offender for the rest of her life.

Get that? She's being considered a child victim, but simultaneously an adult criminal, for the same incident: taking a picture of herself.

As the 16-year-old 'adult,' she's considered a sex offender for taking a picture of herself, for taking advantage of herself, as a crime against herself as a 16-year-old child. Crazy, isn't it? Even in the South, how could they be this insane?

Her boyfriend, who was also 16 at the time, also faces charges, "possible prison time and the requirement to register as a sex offender if convicted." For having the picture in his possession that she sent him!

You want to know what's even weirder? The age of consent is 16 in North Carolina - and younger than that for teens who are less than four years apart in age - so it would be perfectly legal if they were having sex.

But this young woman can't even take a picture of herself without being considered a sex offender! She's considered a child when it comes to sex and an adult when it comes to criminal activity, even when that 'criminal activity' is just taking a picture of herself!

Also, keep in mind that, according to the Sheriff, these pictures weren't being shown to anyone else. This was entirely a private matter between two sixteen-year-olds.

Jebus! And I thought the Janet Jackson nip slip incident had been hysterically blown out of proportion. That's nothing compared to this. America, huh?

Defending traditional marriage

Hilarious, isn't it? You know this woman was always a Christian. Raised Christian from infancy in an overwhelmingly Christian society, she would have identified as a Christian at any time in her life.

But her adultery and multiple marriages are OK, because she's decided she wasn't a 'real' Christian back then - not by her current standards, at least. Heh, heh. Yeah, right.

Besides, you can bet that she never once denied a marriage license to a couple because they'd been divorced (like her), even though that's just as much against the Bible as gay marriage. Why not, if this is actually about her religious beliefs? (Well, admittedly, her religious beliefs are only whatever she wants them to be. That's why she's faith-based.)

Still, she undoubtedly swore an oath to uphold the Constitution when she took office. If she's no longer willing to do that, she doesn't have to work as the County Clerk. No one is forcing her to keep her job, and there's nothing in the Bible about working for the county.

Obviously, she's willing to cause problems for other people, but she doesn't want to lose her paycheck, which would cause problems for herself.

GOP race to the bottom

Jebus, what next! Republicans don't even live in the real world, but just in some crazy fantasy world in their own head.

How can a democracy survive with citizens like this? And with their attacks on science, on education, on journalism, they're determined to make everyone else as ignorant and as fantasy-based as they are.

Reality doesn't matter to them. And yet these are the people electing our school boards, our representatives in Congress, and - if worse comes to worst - the President of the United States, the most powerful nation on Earth.