In a Commerce Department filing, General Motors said that if the new Trump tariffs take effect, the company will have to scale back operations and cut US jobs to survive. Whatever idiot is filling Trump’s orange head full of tariff bullshit needs to be run out of DC.  I’m not sure how much more “winning” we can stand.

There is a place for anger, and THIS is it.

You remember Trump’s victory lap a couple of weeks ago after his “summit” with Kim Jung Un?  You know, the summit where he lavished praise on Little Rocket Man and saluted his general?  Remember when he declared that North Korea’s nuclear threat was over?

Not so fast, bucko.  New satellite images FROM LAST WEEK show that the North Koreans are rapidly constructing new buildings and expanding facilities at Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center.  Noted are additions to the facility where plutonium is extracted from spent fuel rods.

As Trump boasts of his negotiating prowess and his neutralizing of Kim, it appears we need to add yet another lie to his pile of lies that now exceeds 3,200 since the inauguration.

There is a place for anger, and THIS is it.

By all means, whatever you do, don’t be uncivil to a Trump staffer.  We must all be nice to each other, right?

Michelle Goldberg published a great piece today, one you’ve got to read.  A couple of her quotable quotes:

“Naturally, all this has led to lots of pained disapproval from self-appointed guardians of civility. A Washington Post editorial urged the protesters to think about the precedent they are setting. ‘How hard is it to imagine, for example, people who strongly believe that abortion is murder deciding that judges or other officials who protect abortion rights should not be able to live peaceably with their families?’ it asked.

Of course, this is not hard to imagine at all, since abortion opponents have assassinated abortion providers in their homes and churches, firebombed their clinics and protested at their children’s schools. The Roman Catholic Church has shamed politicians who support abortion rights by denying them communion. The failure to acknowledge this history is a sign of the reflexive false balance that makes it hard for the mainstream media to grapple with the asymmetric extremism of the Republican Party.”

And…

“But unless and until that happens, millions and millions of Americans watch helplessly as the president cages children, dehumanizes immigrants, spurns other democracies, guts health care protections, uses his office to enrich himself and turns public life into a deranged phantasmagoria with his incontinent flood of lies.”

There’s a time for anger – and THIS is it.

This is the latest handy-dandy chart on political media bias put out by allgenearlizationsarefalse.com, home of mediabiaschart.com which rigorously studies media outlets for systematic bias.  Media outlets are charted on two axis, with the x-axis used as a measure of political bias with neutral in the center.  The y-axis scales from factual news at the top to inaccurate and fabricated at the bottom.  The developer of this chart is a patent attorney from Denver who also has a degree in English.  She uses both her legal skills and technical English skills to decode bias and then chart it. If you click on the pic, it will give you a bigger chart to see the detail.  Most interesting is the grouping of media outlets by characteristics of each’s reporting – the green box is News; the yellow box is Fair Interpretation of the News; the orange box is Unfair Interpretation of the News; the red box is Nonsense Damaging to Public Discourse.

Let’s look at who’s in the red box.  On the left are the obvious ones that no one I know reads or reposts since they are so biased.  But look on the lower right corner.  Look at that group.  From Fox News, to the Daily Caller, Newsmax, RedState, Breitbart, and the Blaze, these outlets make up the sources of “news” for the vast majority of conservatives.  This is how you get the arguments that “Bill Clinton passed a law in 1997 to separate kids from families” and “Barack Obama separated kids just like Trump”, or that immigrants are flooding the country when they’re not, or that Trump is the most accomplished president in history, when in fact he’s actively destroying what’s left of our democracy.  Even today, they are raging about “liberals attacking” Melania Trump for her tone-deaf fashion faux pax last week on her trip to south Texas.  Down is up, up is down, and the sun rises in the west.  This is why you can’t get anything accomplished through debating these folks.  They are so far out in right field that you’ll never get anything done trying to talk to them.

I highly recommend the posts on this blog describing the methodology of plotting the media companies in this light.  Oh, and go show it to one of your conservative friends.

Just don’t get splattered when their head explodes.

Today, the US announced it is withdrawing from the United Nations Human Rights Commission Trumping up (no pun intended) charges of bias against Israel and the US.  Democracy dies in darkness.  And it is closing in.