Hypocrisy is to GOP politics as the pun is to humor. Sometimes it can be sublime, but usually it’s just dumb

I asked “family values” Republicans if Acosta should resign after giving Epstein a sweetheart deal. Epstein, of course, is the pedophile that preyed on and raped scores of underage girls.

When Republicans refused to answer, I asked them how they came to support the “I moved on her like a bitch” President.

When they ignored that question, I asked if they had any thoughts about the United States having a First Lady that did a lesbian porn shoot.

Alas, not many of them had anything to say about anything:

Senator Richard Burr simply lies about the law

Here’s the law:

Upon written request from the chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means of the House of Representatives, the chairman of the Committee on Finance of the Senate, or the chairman of the Joint Committee on Taxation, the Secretary [of the Treasury] shall furnish such committee with any return or return information specified in such request, except that any return or return information which can be associated with, or otherwise identify, directly or indirectly, a particular taxpayer shall be furnished to such committee only when sitting in closed executive session unless such taxpayer otherwise consents in writing to such disclosure.

Section 6103(f)(1) of the Internal Revenue Code (IRC)

There’s an excellent discussion of the legislative history at American Progress. Here’s a snip:

The legislative history behind the provision is richly described by University of Virginia School of Law Professor George Yin in a recent article. In sum, in 1922, President Warren Harding’s secretary of the interior accepted bribes from businessmen in exchange for favorable no-bid leases on public oil reserves, including the Teapot Dome oil field in Wyoming. Word of the shady transactions got out in the press, and Congress began a multiyear investigation. As part of that investigation, Congress sought some of the tax returns of those involved in the scandal. But President Harding’s successor, Calvin Coolidge, initially refused. At the time, Congress had no power to compel tax returns; the president had to approve any release, including to Congress. Although Coolidge ultimately granted Congress’ request, this episode helped convince Congress that its requests for tax return information to aid investigations should not be dependent on the president’s approval.

Around the same time, some members of Congress were also frustrated by their inability to obtain tax information from Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon to determine whether his sprawling business interests influenced his recommendations to Congress on tax policy. Mellon was one of the country’s wealthiest men, and the tax policy changes he recommended to Congress would surely have affected his finances; thus, members sought information on those interests to determine how much weight to place on his recommendations. The Senate also launched an investigation into the Bureau of Internal Revenue, now known as the IRS, including whether it was showing favoritism toward businesses owned by Mellon. Senators found their investigation hampered by their reliance on the executive branch to obtain tax returns and by President Coolidge’s hostility to the investigation.

Against this background, Congress, via the Revenue Act of 1924, gave itself the power to compel the secretary of the treasury to furnish tax returns upon request. In approving the provision, legislators cited Congress’ need to review tax return information “to evaluate Administration tax proposals, develop its own tax legislative initiatives, and carry out investigations.” The provision faced opposition from some parties, including Coolidge, Mellon, and members of the business community, on the grounds that it could compromise taxpayer privacy. But in enacting the provision, Congress determined that access to tax returns was important for its legislative prerogatives, including gathering information for prospective legislation and performing oversight of the executive branch. The 1924 provision, with some amendments, is still in effect today.

I need your help exposing Republican dirt and dirty tricks.

I’ve been assaulted, arrested, and thrown in jail on three different occasions since October, 2017. Why? Simply because I report on Republicans and their dishonesty, hypocrisy, insanity and crimes.

You see, Republicans do not believe in accountability or a free press. These are desperate times for GOP, and they’ll do anything to win.`And that includes having their ideological opponents jailed on false charges.

I’ve written about what they’ve done to me:

  1. Watch the video of cops beating me up and read about Ed Gillespie lying about who I was, all but accusing me of being a terrorist, and having me arrested and jailed.
  2. Watch the video and read about Ryan Zinke and Heather Swift (his spokesperson and the press secretary for the Department of Interior) assaulting me, lying about it, and having me jailed.
  3. Watch the video and read about Adam Laxalt and his confederates having me jailed in Las Vegas on trumped up charges that I assaulted his campaign manager.

The first two cases are finished: I proved my innocence at court and the cases are dismissed. Unfortunately, outside of anything I do, there will be no consequences for Ed Gillespie or any of the GOP operatives that had a hand in my false arrests and jailing.

The third case is ongoing and it looks like the state is doing everything they can to convict me, including destruction of evidence. To wit, four (4!) separate videos under the state’s control have gone missing: the venue security camera video, two different police body-camera videos and the patrol car video have all mysteriously vanished. Of course, from the day of my arrest, I’ve insisted that these videos be retrieved and preserved; that they have disappeared is 1) a remarkable coincidence, and 2) not really.

See, I was told by a senior aide to Senator Harry Reid (the former United States Senate Majority Leader from Nevada) that the Laxalt family controls Nevada and that I should just apologize, plead guilty, and hope for the best. But I’m stubborn, I’m not guilty, and I’ve never been one to run from a fight. So here we are.

In fact, this is where I need you.

These three arrests didn’t happen by accident. The truth is that in October 2017, I had never been accused of assaulting any political operatives, let alone a woman. But by October, 2018, I had been accused of assault by three GOP female campaign operatives. Fortunately, I had clearly exonerating video of each instance, but that’s not the point.

No.

The point is that these accusations do not simply blink into existence out of some random primordial quantum soup. Not three specific accusations that I assault women.

So what did happen?

Well, I was effective. And so far as I know, I was the only one doing the work I was doing: going to Republican campaign events with a video recorder, pointing my finger, and mocking the naked emperor. No other journalist did that, or does that today. But, man… Was it effective. I had NowThis videos earning 10M views. One of my videos was featured in a Stephen Colbert opening monologue in its entirety. I was pissing off elected Republicans on the hill, and my videos were killing the Republican brand.

That kind of effectiveness did not go unnoticed. Soon I had NRCC “minders” following me around on the Hill. And then the first accusation came, from James Damore and his Roger Stone-linked handler, Christie-Lee McNally. A week or so later, Heather Swift had me arrested and jailed on false charges. And just a few months later, the same thing happened again in Las Vegas.

Like I said, these accusations don’t emerge independently.

Nope. Nope. Nope.

Instead, I’m convinced that this was a coordinated hit. They couldn’t stand the accountability I was bringing, so they did something about it.

That’s how you can help: I’m suing the RNC, NRCC, NRSC, RGA, the Daily Caller and 17 other organizations and individuals for conspiring to defame me and deprive me of my civil rights. To see this suit through to discovery will cost me at least $30,000. To see it through to the end of trial will cost another $50 or $60K. But I can only get there with your help.

Have you ever wondered what kind of filth lurks on GOP email servers? What kind of depravity is stored on their phones? Well, this lawsuit may be one way to find out.\

Please… You can donate to me directly through Paypal at stark – dot – m – at – gmail – dot com, or you can visit my GoFundMe page.

Thanks… and I’ll be writing more soon.

Ed Gillespie (2017)

Starting in the late summer of 2017, I was hired by ShareBlue on a contract gig to provide beat coverage of Ed Gillespie’s run for VA governor. My first assignment was to attend a fundraiser to record his stump speech. I had been to GOP campaign events before, but it had been a really long time. And this event was disconcertingly intimate since it was held at former Republican Attorney General nominee Mark Obenshain’s home. I was already a bundle of nerves when I arrived; making eye-contact with John Norton, one of my former law professors, provided no relief. Thankfully, he didn’t recognize me.

Some people can work a room. Any room. They simply walk in and their charismatic shine allows them to mingle with and win over everyone they meet.

That’s definitely not me. I could never be a wedding-crasher.

So venturing into this den of Republicans and trying to fit in was… shall we say… discomfiting. I did my best to make small talk, and ended up spending most of my time speaking with Bill Holtzman, the owner of the Liberty gas station chain. He regaled me with the story of how he became a billionaire and talked a little about about his daughter, Jill Vogel, the GOP’s nominee for Lt. Governor. (In a not-so cosmic twist of fate, her firm has been retained to sue me; I’m currently awaiting service).

Anyway, eventually Gillespie made his way through the crowd and spent a little time with me. I asked about the trail and his fundraising and the difference between running for Governor and Senate (he had challenged Mark Warner for Senate in 2014). We parted amicably, and he took the floor to give his stump speech.

The speech was mostly unremarkable, except one throw-away line: Obenshain introduced him and mentioned how hard Gillespie was campaigning. He said he even saw Ed in Northern Virginia working the Metro stations… Ed chimed in, “Yup, it’s enemy territory, but I was working it!”

Well, you just can’t call the most populous part of the state “enemy territory” when you are running for state-wide office. Not if you want to win, anyway.

So I flagged the recording for use later in the race and escaped the fundraiser without raising any suspicions.

Next up for me – a few weeks later – was a town-hall style public forum in Kilmarnock, VA. It was your typical political event – Gillespie told his personal story, put a gloss on what it meant to him to be a conservative Republican, and then opened the floor to questions. I had my hand up from the beginning, but the microphone never seemed to find me until the very end, when Gillespie personally picked me out of the crowd, saying I had my hand up the longest. Of course, the truth was everyone had their hands up from the beginning, but he had recognized me from the fundraiser and thought I’d lob a softball. So he must’ve been surprised when I pointed out that in the 90’s everyone in America knew that the big tobacco companies had been lying about what they knew with regards to cancer, that they had been manipulating nicotine levels in cigarettes to maximize addictions and consumption, and that they had developed strategies to market their deadly product to children… so, I asked, could he please walk me through the moral calculus he went through that made him think it was OK as a lobbyist to take Big Tobacco as a client.

I have to give Ed credit. If he was rattled, he didn’t let on. He smoothly brazened his way through the answer, explaining he was proud of his work as a small business owner that advocated for a settlement agreement with the government that provided a lot of money for health care and smoking cessation programs. (Of course, that was a lie – he didn’t care about people’s health or smoking cessation, but rather he was looking out for his murderous clients’ interests and did everything he could to minimize that settlement).

The funny thing about that event was that I met with American Bridge’s tracker that afternoon. He told me that I’d have one and only one chance to ask Gillespie a question. And he was right.

A couple of days later, Gillespie was scheduled to speak to a group of education professionals at a hotel in Charlottesville. I arrived early, registered as media with my ShareBlue credentials, and quietly sipped coffee while waiting for Gillespie to speak. I had a question ready for him: “Generally speaking, what’s a good salary for an experienced and competent teacher in Virginia?”

Alas, I never got to ask.

While making small talk with other media, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was the event organizer summoning me into the hallway. I knew before the words left his lips that I was going to be asked to leave. Gillespie’s advance staff had spotted me, and they didn’t want anymore surprises from the sneaky liberal reporter.

(To be honest, the whole go to a fundraiser undercover, then pose as a concerned citizen at a townhall… Well… I just don’t know where that stacks up in terms of journalistic ethics, but thinking about how I’d feel if I were in the Gillespie campaign’s shoes, I cannot blame them for thinking of me as something less than an honest broker. Moreover, from a practical perspective, I cannot deny that the ultimate goal of my coverage was to help Gillespie lose his race, and they knew that. So, given it was their job to win, I cannot blame them for taking steps they felt necessary to protect their candidate. But on the other hand, there is this thing in the United States called the “First Amendment” and “Freedom of the Press”. Excluding unfriendly media from political events certainly gave off a strong whiff of un-American unseemliness.)

Anyway, I was kicked out of the event and because it was held on private property, there was nothing I could do. I had to leave or risk arrest for trespass. So I left.

But that made clear where I stood with his campaign, which was a good thing, because…

…fortuitously, Gillespie had a second event that day in Richmond: another public forum, only this one was held at a Virginia state memorial where the hosts were a consortium of urban (black) radio stations.

Before I go further, it’s worth reminding you that a searing controversy driving water cooler discussions across America – but especially in Virginia – was the discussion of what to do about Confederate monuments. Even more important, Heather Heyer had just been killed while counter-protesting the torch-bearing white supremacists that had seemingly taken control of Charlottesville.

Race would be an issue at this event.

And true to form, Gillespie’s silver tongue served him well. He talked a good game about equality and the disgust he felt at the events in Charlottesville.

But I knew Gillespie was hiding something. I knew he had made the noted racist (and former Governor and Senator from Virginia) George Allen, a Chair of his campaign. I also knew that George Allen kept a Confederate Flag and a noose in his office. And I knew that Allen refused to sign into law a bill that would have made Martin Luther King’s birthday a holiday, but he was happy to officially recognize “Confederate Day”. And I knew that in 2006 scores of people attested to the fact that George Allen loved to use the n-word.

So as the event wound down and Gillespie worked the crowd, I stationed myself at his elbow, asking him loudly enough for everyone in the vicinity to hear, why he kept George Allen on his senior campaign staff. Either he abhors racism and racists, or he doesn’t, right? So why campaign with a man that adores he Confederacy and would keep a noose in his office? Why keep a man that opposed celebrating Martin Luther King’s birthday and constantly used the n-word on your campaign staff?

Gillespie gamely ignored me. It wasn’t the most comfortable question to ask, but it seemed mighty relevant, especially at that event.

Five or ten minutes of this was all he could tolerate: Gillespie hastily found his way to an exit.

After that, the lines were drawn. His campaign realized that this was something new: a hybrid reporter/activist that really didn’t give two shits about access; that for me it was all about accountability. And if Gillespie was going to ignore me, or have me thrown out of events, or sneak in and out of venues through side doors or kitchen entrances… well… I was going to do everything I could do to defeat the campaign’s countermeasures and ask the questions that needed to be asked.

Again, a full measure of honesty requires that I say something about how fun this could be at times – for both sides! Don’t get me wrong: there’s no doubt I consistently annoyed Jimmy (Gillespie’s bodyman) and Tucker (another of Gillespie’s invaluable campaign aides). They were working incredibly hard, and at every turn, there I was trying to gum up their events. I remember one day I said “Hi” to Tucker at an event they couldn’t have me removed from, and she said “Hi” back, but in a way that was incredibly reminiscent of the way Jerry Seinfeld used to say “Newman”. I pointed that out, and it became a running joke between us.

But none of that took away from the fact that I had a job to do, which was to hold Gillespie accountable by showing Virginian’s the different things he wanted to keep hidden from voters. For example, in Northern Virginia, he certainly didn’t want to answer questions about guns, or about immigrants. He was running a base-driven campaign that required him to embrace the NRA and support Donald Trump. The problem for him was that both those positions were anathema to Northern Virginia, which happened to be the largest voting bloc in the state. So again and again, at event after event, I’d catch Gillespie going in and coming out of events and ask him questions about these issues. He’d always ignore me. We’d publish the videos at ShareBlue and write our story: “Ed Gillespie won’t denounce Donald Trump’s immigration policies” or “Gillespie avoids gun questions”.

By the end of the campaign, we had settled into a routine. Since almost all of Gillespie’s announced events were held at private venues, I’d show up early, and catch him on video as he traversed the parking lot on his way into the event. I’d then immediately leave (so nobody could tell me I’m not welcome and make me vulnerable to trespass charges), and only to return an hour or so later to catch Gillespie again when he left the event. I’d ask him a question about refugees, or his relationship with Donald Trump, or why he wouldn’t release his NRA questionnaire, or maybe something about his racist and fear-mongering ads that all but suggested most Latino immigrants were affiliated with MS-13.

There were times this devolved into a theater of the absurd. After one event, I literally hid in the bushes, lying in wait to ask Gillespie a question as he left an event. He saw me come running toward them, started running himself, and made it into his campaign SUV just as I got close enough to begin my question – but not finish it. I was laughing, and inside his SUV, I could see that, along with his driver Jimmy, Gillespie was laughing just as hard as I was.

When I was interviewed for this job, I mentioned that if Gillespie was going to make a mistake, it’d happen in late October. By then, nobody on the campaign is getting any sleep, and everyone is in a constant cold-sweat. The election is looms, and nobody is in the mood to take risks.

And so it was that on October 28, 2017 the annual Halloween Parade was held in Annandale, VA.

Of course, parades are public events.

Annandale is one of the more diverse neighborhoods in Virginia.

You see where I’m going with this, right?

I was excited! This was an opportunity to repeat what I had done in Richmond when Gillespie couldn’t escape my questions about racist campaign chair George Allen while he was surrounded by a bunch of folks with real reasons to care about the issue. But in Annandale, rather than catching him for five minutes as he left a venue, I’d be at his elbow for the entirety of the 90 minute parade route, asking him about his racist MS-13 ads.

Alas, it was not to be.

I was filming Gillespie’s campaign bus, waiting for him to disembark, when a policeman told me to leave them alone. I’m a reporter, and I’m there to get a story for ShareBlue, so I challenged the cop’s authority. I told him I was going to do my job.

It didn’t end well for me. (video)

Remember how I said late October was the time things would go sideways? Well, that applied to me too. I was dead-committed to holding Gillespie accountable for the duration of this parade, and I was pissed off that Gillespie thought he could commandeer the police force and keep me from doing my job.

So… The cop swore at me, I swore back in kind. They told me that if I were to swear at them again, I’d go to jail. I’m a lawyer and I knew that statute had to be unenforceable, so I turned away from them and said, “Fuck this!”

The cop said, “Take him to jail.”

I tried to put my cell phone away, knowing it had my “get out of jail free” evidence on it because I had been recording the entire interaction. The police took that as resisting arrest and I ended up on the ground with six cops beating on me.

And I missed the parade, and any opportunity to hold Gillespie accountable.

I was charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. At District Court (a kind of junior varsity court for low level offenses where the judge didn’t appear to pay much attention to the law (or the case – he was shuffling through paperwork while my attorney was putting on my defense), instead going with his gut) I was found not guilty of resisting arrest, but guilty of disorderly conduct. I immediately appealed which had the effect of nullifying the conviction, but damage had been done. The press reported that I had been convicted.

Ultimately the appeal was never heard. The Circuit Court judge encouraged both sides to negotiate a deal. In exchange for the case being dismissed, I gave up any rights to sue over the incident and promised not to disparage the police. The appeal cost me $2000, but I felt like it was something I had to do. My arrest and trip to jail was all over the news and it was horribly embarrassing for my wife and kids. And considering the job I was about to take, I just couldn’t abide having a criminal conviction on my record, no matter how insignificant.

I’m back, at least for now

So it’s been almost two years since my last post. I’ve been busy!

Suddenly, I’m not so busy anymore, so over my next few posts, I’ll share highlights of what I’ve been up to while I consider options for my next adventure…

From the right: Rampant conspiracy, designed paranoia, devotedly mistaken, and hermetically sealed.

Rush Limbaugh and Chris Plante demonstrate how they lure their listeners into an inescapable Manichean world of fantasy.

The first audio comes from the Rush Limbaugh program that aired on December 5, 2016 (transcript below and at the link). Here are the cliff notes, drawn directly from the transcript:

  • The Obama stimulus in 2009 was not a stimulus. That was just rhetoric, and it was designed to fool people, low-information voters and others into thinking that $780 billion… Let’s use the term a trillion because that’s what it actually ended up being.
  • So where does Obama get that trillion dollars to put into the private sector? He doesn’t have it. [So he takes it from the private sector.]
  • Even if you’re printing it, or borrowing it, it’s still coming from the private sector and being put right back there. It’s nothing more… It was a scam. But it was a bigger scam than that because of where Obama stimulated. He stimulated unions! Seventy-five percent of that trillion dollars went to unions and union jobs to keep them employed during this recession. Why? Because union workers pay dues.
  • What does the union do with the dues? A lot of that money is donated back to the Democrat Party, which is used for campaign commercials, campaign elections and so forth. It’s used to elect Democrats. In one sense, it was a circuitous money-laundering scheme.
  • So Obama can’t go to the Treasury and withdraw a trillion dollars for the Democrat Party, but this was the next best thing.

Can you imagine how pissed off you’d be if this was true? That the Democrats took a trillion dollars in tax dollars, gave almost all of it to lazy union members (who are probably paid better than you, have better health insurance and retirement plans, and don’t work past 5 o’clock) and their corrupt bosses, and then got it back from the unions to support their re-election. If I didn’t know the truth*, I’d be white-hot with outrage (and rage). The picture he paints is utterly diabolical**.

Transcript:

Limbaugh: The Obama stimulus in 2009 was not a stimulus. That was just rhetoric, and it was designed to fool people, low-information voters and others into thinking that $780 billion… Let’s use the term a trillion because that’s what it actually ended up being. Obama created the notion, and the media helped, that a trillion dollars from somewhere was gonna be plugged into the private sector economy, and that that trillion dollars was gonna provide such a stimulus. New jobs! Economic growth! It was gonna be great; it was gonna be an automatic recovery mechanism from the Great Depression or Recession of 2008. But there wasn’t a trillion dollars sitting somewhere unused. We were, at the time, about, oh, 11 or $12 trillion in debt.

So where does Obama get that trillion dollars to put into the private sector? He doesn’t have it. We are in debt. He had one of two options. He could order the money printed, or he could get it from the private sector. In either case, that’s where it came from. The government does not produce anything. So Obama stimulating the U.S. economy with a trillion dollars is no stimulus at all because before Obama can get it… Well, more correctly said, before Obama can insert it into the economy, he has to take it from the economy.

So he gets a trillion dollars from the economy and then puts it back? There’s no stimulus. There’s no growth. There’s no additional money floating around, unless they printed it. And that’s his point. If they printed the trillion dollars, then they vastly increased the supply of dollars, which reduced the value of dollars, but there wasn’t a trillion dollars lying around someplace unused that we could put into the economy and have that trillion dollars added, because it had to come out.

Even if you’re printing it, or borrowing it, it’s still coming from the private sector and being put right back there. It’s nothing more… It was a scam. But it was a bigger scam than that because of where Obama stimulated. He stimulated unions! Seventy-five percent of that trillion dollars went to unions and union jobs to keep them employed during this recession. Why? Because union workers pay dues. They don’t pay dues when they’re unemployed. When they’re employed, they’re paying dues. The dues go to the union.

What does the union do with the dues? A lot of that money is donated back to the Democrat Party, which is used for campaign commercials, campaign elections and so forth. It’s used to elect Democrats. In one sense, it was a circuitous money-laundering scheme. Go get a trillion dollars from the Treasury, stimulate unions by giving it to public employee unions and teacher unions — and you go state by state, and you’ll find out where the money went. In Wisconsin, most of it went to teachers unions. In California, a mixture of teachers and public works unions.

And a portion of that is gonna be donated right back to the Democrat Party. So Obama can’t go to the Treasury and withdraw a trillion dollars for the Democrat Party, but this was the next best thing.

This next clip from Chris Plante, demonstrates how right-wing radio traps their listeners in a closed loop mental prison.***

Transcript:

Plante: What’s your take on all of this, Russia hacking, and what do you think happened, what do you think is happening right now and what ought to happen as we proceed as a nation? 888-630-9625. Let’s go to Cathy in the Commonwealth of Virginia, Cathy, you’re on the Chris Plante Show.

Cathy: Good morning Chris

Plante: Good morning Cathy

Cathy: I have been twitching at all this Russia stuff because first of all, if we really think Russia is as smart as they are then they wouldn’t leave their signature on any type of action. The agencies that were supposed to know about this didn’t, and the ones that did weren’t supposed to be in it, so… all that left to the side, my mind just goes to the fact that I want to know why Russia would want Trump in office. He is a strong defender of America – America First. Why wouldn’t they want little Miss Reset Button to take the oval office, I mean that would be so much easier for them. Nobody has explained why.

Plante: Well I’ve heard one theory that’s been thrown out there and that is that Vladimir Putin is angry with Hillary Clinton because when she was Secretary of State, the United States, the Obama administration, the Hillary Clinton State Department allegedly contributed to or was in some fashion behind the anti-Putin protests in Moscow and that he holds a grudge. Now this is one theory. I’ve heard the news media peddling it, I haven’t heard anybody else peddle it but news media and a couple of Democrats, but I repeat myself. So… It sounds like you’re skeptical.

Cathy: I’m more than skeptical. I think it’s, it’s…

Plante: Why? Why are you so skeptical?

Cathy: Because the media is saying so, number one.

Plante: Because what?

Cathy: If the media says so, I’m not listening.

Plante: Yeah, you’ve got to assume that they are advancing a political agenda rather than reporting the news.

Did you catch that? “If the media says so, I’m not listening.”

The only way many of your friends and neighbors will believe anything at all is if Rush Limbaugh tells them it’s so. To these folks, if it wasn’t on Fox News, it’s fake news.

This kind of oblivious circular thinking is characteristic of many, many people on the right. Did you catch it the first time? Cathy said, “if we really think Russia is as smart as they are then they wouldn’t leave their signature on any type of action.” In other words, if Russia got caught, then it couldn’t have been Russia because Russia would never do anything we’d catch. Sheesh… If I’m Russia, I’d want to live in a world full of Cathy’s (but only as long as Rush Limbaugh wasn’t telling her I was the enemy).

So that’s what we’re up against: Masterful storytellers that have captured the trust of their listeners and sealed up their listener’s minds so much that the audience is impermeable to outside influence.

More on what to do about it soon…

More on Russia soon…

*According to the conservative Peter G. Peterson Foundation and Wikipedia, the stimulus was ~$850B, ~1/3 of it was tax cuts, about ~1/2 of it extended unemployment benefits and helped the states fund their Medicare and Medicaid programs, and about 1/2 of the remaining $150 billion or so was used for capital purchases, leaving, at most, ~$70 billion that could have been spent on actual labor, both unionized and not.

**If you are a Democrat that happens to live in Wisconsin or North Carolina or New Jersey, you probably know white-hot outrage (and rage) well. If you don’t live in one of those states, this story about Barbara and Neil always works for me. Truly diabolical, eh?

***Talk radio is an important part of the conservative lying apparatus, but of course Fox News, chain emails and propaganda websites like Brietbart and Gateway Pundit are essential to the brainwashing.

The signs were there

I’m not going to pretend as if I wasn’t just as surprised as anyone else at the election results. All the talk of HRC “running up the score” and locking up Florida with the early vote and her ground game vs. Trump’s utter lack of organization, and just the endless litany of Trump assaults on civilization… not to mention the idea of having a chance to shatter the glass ceiling…

Well… Taken together, I went into election day looking forward to another route akin to 2008. I was even hopeful we’d see a Democratic House and Senate come Wednesday morning.

Alas… Hindsight can be a bitch. Maybe I just didn’t want to see it, but it should have been more clear that the right wing base was a restlessly sleeping beast.

WMAL is my local conservative talk radio station. Aside from Limbaugh, Savage and Levin, they air a morning program hosted by Brian Wilson and Larry O’Connor. Before WMAL, Wilson was the Washington bureau chief for Fox News. O’Connor was an editor at Breitbart News until (how’s this for irony) he was released from his contract after credulously re-reporting a fake news story about Paul Krugman.

I could be wrong, but my hunch is that a lot of “serious progressives” sorta sneer at right wing talk radio as some sort of entertainment for the great unwashed mass of the GOP base. The medium is just such an insult to their intelligence that they cannot imagine that the stand-up Republicans they know as neighbors or co-workers could possibly be listeners. I suspect that a lot of folks believe talk radio is a medium for truck drivers, flyover state farmers, and tradesmen that spend a lot of time in their trucks or workshops.

Anyone that believes that needs to listen to this:

This was too long for me to transcribe, but if you couldn’t listen, the clip is a recording of Brian Wilson sharing a story of his weekend. He had attended a blue-grass concert and when he was brought to his VIP section, he discovered his seat was adjacent to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s. Enthralled, he introduced himself and was surprised when Scalia told him no introduction was necessary because he and his wife tuned into his program every morning.

Did you catch that? One of our country’s (for better or for worse… ok, for worse… much, much worse…) most influential jurists of the century got his news (and presumably a good portion of his worldview) from a two right wing talk radio show hosts: One was a Breitbart editor, the other was a former Fox News anchor and bureau chief.

Just 4 years later, and Breitbart’s CEO is in the White House as a top advisor (the same role Karl Rove was in) to the President of the United States. And the Vice-President of the United States was himself a former right-wing talk radio show host.

Right wing talk radio is not a joke. It’s time folks start paying attention to it. The most powerful people in the world certainly are.

United States of Exxon?

Over the weekend Trump’s camp leaked its expected nominee for Secretary of State. Rex Tillerson is Exxon’s CEO. His mentor and predecessor, Lee Raymond, had this to say about Exxon and its relationship with the United States:

“I’m not a U.S. company, and I don’t make decisions based on what’s good for the U.S.”

The context for that quote was that Raymond saw Exxon as an enduring institution that would last beyond any presidency and, probably, even beyond the lifetime of the United States. With that in mind, nation-states do not matter to Exxon – only their global ambitions as applied to the prosperity of the corporation matter. Put another way, the United States is important to Exxon only insomuch as the country adds to or subtracts from its bottom line and long term prospects.

If he is nominated, the first questions Tillerson should be asked at his hearings are:
A) if he believed Exxon’s interests trump those of the United States; and,
B) if he can and will, instantly upon taking office, switch his highest loyalties from Exxon to the United States.

The questions are not academic.

Tillerson was “hand-picked” by Raymond.

LEE RAYMOND, the combative chairman of Exxon Mobil, could be the most successful oilman in a century. During his decade and a half at the helm, his firm—a direct descendant of the original Standard Oil Trust founded by John D. Rockefeller in 1882—has outperformed its peers on almost every financial measure. The oil titan will finally step down at the end of 2005 in favour of Rex Tillerson, a company insider who is his hand-picked successor.

Before assuming the helm at Exxon, Tillerson was responsible for developing business in Russia.

He and Putin go way back. His ExxonMobil biography concludes with this gem: “In 2013, he was awarded the Order of Friendship by Vladimir Putin, president of the Russian Federation.”

[…]

Tillerson rose to the top of ExxonMobil based on his performance running the corporation’s Russia account, often negotiating directly with Putin during the last decade.

In 2011, Tillerson inked what may be the largest oil deal in history at Vladimir Putin’s Sochi palace.

The Arctic well will be among the most expensive Exxon has ever drilled, costing at least $600 million. The spending is justified by the potential prize. Universitetskaya, the geological structure being drilled, is the size of the city of Moscow and large enough to contain more than 9 billion barrels, a trove worth more than $900 billion at today’s prices.

But after Putin annexed Crimea from the Ukraine, the United States imposed sanctions that hit Exxon’s bottom line.

Exxon Mobil said in a 10-k filing with the SEC on Wednesday that it lost a maximum of $1 billion from sanctions. In July 2014, the European Union and United States imposed sanctions on the Russian energy sector. The West believes Russia is behind much of the civil unrest in eastern Ukraine. Sanctions began in March 2014 following Russia’s annexation of Crimea, a Black Sea peninsula that was once part of Ukraine. But the punishment was kicked up a notch in July with sanctions banning American companies from doing business with Russian oil and gas drillers. That hurt a new $723 million joint venture between Exxon and Rosneft , Russia’s largest state owned oil company. This year, the two companies were to start drilling for oil in the Kara Sea, located in the Arctic Circle in northern Russia.

Those sanctions remain in place, and Tillerson objects.

At the time, Tillerson expressed doubt that sanctions would prove an effective foreign policy tool.

“We don’t find them to be effective unless they are very well implemented,” Tillerson said at the company’s May 2014 shareholders meeting. Authorities imposing the sanctions should consider “who are they really harming?”

Any President is owed deference when it comes to his Cabinet picks. At the same time, the patriotism of our nation’s Secretary of State must be utterly beyond question. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether Tillerson meets that standard..

Fake news from Rush, Episode #1

As promised, I’m posting some of today’s Rush Limbaugh program. This will be a regular feature because I think it si critical that the media and everyone else realize that so-called “fake news” isn’t anything novel. Rush Limbaugh has been an absolute savant when it comes to twisting and exaggerating and manufacturing facts. By the end of one of his programs, his listeners are actually left with a net negative working knowledge of politics. Daily listeners build up that deficit until they inhabit a dangerous fantasy world filled with all manner of hatred and evil liberals.

Last night Farheed Zakaria hosted a two-hour special review of the Barack Obama presidency. Inevitably, Republican obstruction was discussed. Here’s Limbaugh’s reaction.

Transcript: [Zakaria] pontificated as ominous music played, ‘Did race play a role in the brick wall of Republican resistance to Barack Obama?'” Mr. Zakaria, there wasn’t any resistance. That’s not quite the…

There was all kinds of resistance. But not official. The Republicans announced every year they weren’t gonna oppose Obama. The Republicans made it clear they were not going to try to stop Obama, not legislatively. Now, you might have had individual Republicans out on TV criticizing Obama, but there wasn’t any opposition to him. It’s the exact opposite. Mr. Zakaria, if you want to bring in the racial component here, what you’re gonna have to admit is that the race of President Obama paralyzed this country.

It paralyzed legitimate criticism of the president of the United States. It amplified malcontent operations like Black Lives Matter. It gave rise to a thugocracy, and nobody had the guts to speak out against it for fear of what would happen to them. And it’s not just they were afraid of being called racist. It was what would happen to them by Black Lives Matter or whoever if anybody got wind of what they were saying.

As outrageous and racist as it is, let’s leave the BLM scare-mongering aside for the moment, though that is a critical component of many conservative’s worldview. Instead, here is Michael Grunwald in Time describing the GOP strategy for dealing with the overwhelming majorities Obama enjoyed in his first months in office:

But McConnell believed Republicans had nothing to gain from me-too-ism. He reminded his caucus that Republicans wouldn’t pay a price for opposing Obama’s plan if it succeeded, because politicians get re-elected in good times. But if the economy didn’t revive, they could return from the political wilderness in 2010. “He wanted everyone to hold the fort,” Voinovich later explained. “All he cared about was making sure Obama could never have a clean victory.”

The Republican strategy on the stimulus was as simple as it was clever. The Obama plan had $300 billion worth of tax cuts, plus all kinds of spending that had enjoyed some bipartisan support: unemployment benefits, infrastructure, research and much more. It even included the Race to the Top education reforms, anathema to Democratic teachers’ unions. But the GOP message never wavered: Big Government, big spending, big mess.

Inside the leadership team, though, there were tensions between Cantor, who wanted to put Republican politics first, and GOP conference chairman Mike Pence of Indiana, who wanted to put ideological conservatism first. Ultimately, the Republicans fell off both sides of the horse. The official $478 billion GOP alternative was a Pence-style ideological bill, consisting entirely of tax cuts and unemployment benefits. But Republicans also crafted a Cantor-style political bill, a $715 billion substitute with even more traditional infrastructure than the Democratic bill. Most House Republicans–including Ryan–voted for both. They never did explain how their stimulus could be good public policy while Obama’s similar $787 billion stimulus was freedom-crushing socialism, but their no vote was unanimous. “The caucus had decided we weren’t going to give Obama a bipartisan victory on this,” recalls moderate Republican Mike Castle of Delaware.

[…]

The stimulus debate established the pattern for the next four years. Republicans opposed the entire Obama agenda–a health care plan based on Romney’s, a cap-and-trade regime that McCain had supported in 2008, financial reform after a financial meltdown. Obama squeezed his health care and Wall Street reform bills through Congress anyway, but the quest for 60 votes in the Senate forced him to cut deals that made his initiatives look ugly. And the Tea Party–which held its first rally 10 days after Obama signed the stimulus–became a powerful force opposing the Obama agenda, and a double-edged sword for Washington Republicans.

Later in his program, Limbaugh told his listeners that Trump’s opposition were uncomfortable with the slogan “Make America Great Again” because they believe it to be code for advocating the re-imposition of slavery. (A classic conservative dodge is to pretend that Jim Crow and post-slavery racism never existed). Here’s Limbaugh’s take on race and white supremacy:

Transcript: …and the left looks at people by group, by the way. We don’t. They do.

[…]

Logic would say there aren’t enough white supremacists, but are there any? When you get right down to it, white supremacists? I mean, you could put ’em in a phone booth, for crying out loud. However, there are black supremacists. There are all kinds of minority supremacists, and they are perfectly fine in that state, according to the left. But whenever white people happen to vote their interests, have you picked up on the fact that that’s somehow illegitimate? But when any minority votes its interests, whether it be economic or cultural, when any minority votes its interests, why that’s perfectly fine, it’s justifiable, makes perfect sense. When white people do it, it’s unacceptable, it’s white supremacism, and it’s racism.

That, my friends, aside from being self-contradictory, is rhetoric straight out of the Alt-Right/White Supremacists fever swamps. It’s a very rich white man embracing his race and claiming victimhood.

Everything old is new again, part 2

At this very moment I’m listening to Rush Limbaugh vehemently argue that for the duration of his presidency, Barack Obama enjoyed the full cooperation of Congressional Republicans. Opposition to his agenda was impossible, according to Rush, because of his race. Republicans were afraid to fight him or criticize him, because they were afraid of the fate that would befall them at the hands of Black Lives Matter.

I’ll post the audio and relevant portions of the transcript later tonight, but for now I want to elaborate on one of yesterday’s posts. Here’s what I wrote:

In all the post-election analysis, naval gazing, blame-casting and caterwauling, there’s been much said about “fake news”.

As if this is a new thing.

As if “death panels” and “FEMA internment camps” and various signs of the apocalypse haven’t been slathered across Fox News, talk radio, the Drudge Report and your Aunt Abigail’s emails for the last two decades. The only difference between the fake news of 2008 and the fake news of 2016 is that the revenue stream has been democratized. It seems all the billions of dollars unleashed by Citizens United have overtopped the dam. You don’t have to be Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh anymore – there’s enough money in the pot for even the rankest of amateurs to publish their fever dreams (sincerely believed or not) and get paid.

I didn’t write enough about this whole “fake news” idea. Yes, there are new channels of distribution and new creative digital pulp writers filling them. But take a moment to reread (and later to hear) Rush Limbaugh’s argument at the top of this post. According to Rush, Obama’s race protected him from criticism. Moreover, Obama was able to accomplish his entire agenda because Republicans were afraid to oppose him – because of his race.

The truth?

That was September 9, 2009. (And Obama wasn’t lying, which means, of course, that Joe Wilson, the heckler Congressman, was.)

Anyway, there has been plenty written about Mitch McConnell’s unrelenting obstruction strategy in political magazines and deep within 40 paragraph analysis articles in a few of America’s newspapers. Politically active liberals know the lengths the GOP went to hamstring Obama throughout both of his terms.*

But most Democrats do not. They may be aware that things haven’t progressed under Obama the way they’d like, but they don’t know why. They chalk it up to politics and Washington D.C. and how it doesn’t really matter who you vote for because nothing really changes but, you know, Democrats are for the working class, Republicans are for the rich, so if I vote I’ll vote for the Democrats, but it’s probably not worth it to take the time off work to go stand in the lines because it won’t affect my life anyway…

On the other hand, your conservative Uncle Hermann is adamant that Barack Obama controlled the federal government for 8 years and used his power to “fundamentally transform America” for the worst. He’s convinced Obama did that with the assistance of a bunch of feckless Republicans in congress who were so afraid to criticize Obama because of his race that they cooperated with the President’s agenda every step of the way.

The point I’m making is that talk radio plays a crucial role in establishing powerful narratives in the minds of the GOP base. The Democratic base has nothing equivalent.

I’m not sure what Democrats could build to engage their base more fully. I think probably unions are key. But that’s not my expertise.

On the other hand, the only thing I know to do about the Republican hold on talk radio is to fight it. For me that begins with paying attention, evangelizing among other politically engaged liberals, and highlighting the truly absurd and offensive content that most of middle America isn’t exposed to (Like Rush Limbaugh with Sandra Fluke**, or Chris Plante with Ellen Degeneres).

* this was one of many true failures of the national press. The American political system is set up with two great centers of power – the Presidency and the Congress. Either one can check the other, almost at will. When the two are in opposition and nothing is moving, that’s the political story of the era. There should have been a running tally of filibusters (and Obama vetoes), with the most important stalled legislation explained. Instead, filibusters became some for of anti-news and were ignored by the press. In reality, their strategy made the obstructing Senators at least as powerful as the President, at least in terms of law-making.

** After Donald Trump, Limbaugh’s Fluke comments sound relatively anodyne, don’t they? That’s another reason I think right wing talk is about to get a lot more coarse. There’s both hazard and opportunity there. Opportunity in that they are bound to overreach and 2018 elections may surprise a lot of people. The hazard is in that a lot of right-wing news consumers occupy a grey area between sane and not. The nasty rhetoric will, I fear, often become one too many straws on the camel’s back.

[UPDATE 12-8-2016 14:22]
I just hit publish and Rush just went on a rant saying that you can fit the number of American white supremacists in a phone booth – they simply don’t exist. On the other hand, this country is overflowing with black supremacists. Check back later and I’ll have the audio for you.