Gym Jordan was on MTP this morning babbling about how law enforcement has been weaponized, but only when it comes to conservatives being investigated.  He’s all over the “weaponized” FBI trying to protect school board members whose lives are being threatened, but completely blind to the tsunami of blatant law breaking on his own side.  When Chuck Todd brought up the fact that the NY Assistant US Attorney, Charles McGonigal, has been charged with taking money from a Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, Jordan stated he was going to investigate that, but brushed Todd off when he pointed out that Paul Manafort was Deripaska’s primary contact between the TFG campaign and the Russians.  He wants to investigate the Steele dossier, but is not interested in investigating whether the US Attorney’s office in NY was suppressing the dossier and leaking other stories to the press intended to damage Hillary during the 2016.  The new conservative House majority has only a few goals for this term – cementing in their own power, hamstringing the federal government, and exacting revenge for TFG’s loss in 2020.  That’s it, period.  They don’t give a flying shit about their country or their constituents; their only tools are retribution and disinformation.

When asked about the George Floyd act and reforming policing in the US, Jordan took the usual position of conservatives today, saying that the US government has no role in policing reform and that it must be handled at “state and local levels”.  This is the strategy now followed by most Republicans who shirk responsibility to avoid being blamed for the consequences.  It’s also the SCOTUS’s normal response to all issues of privacy, individual rights, civil rights, and voting rights.  The Court, under Roberts, has now taken the position of taking no position on critical issues like privacy, gun safety laws, campaign finance, radical gerrymandering, and systemic voter suppression, punting all those issues to the state level which in 35 states is under the iron fisted control of minority Republicans cemented into power by…wait for it…radical gerrymandering and voter suppression.  The Court has also gone so far as drawing the idiotic conclusions that money doesn’t corrupt and that magically the Voting Rights Act is no longer needed.

At the state level, DeSantis and Abbott are the poster children for shirking their duty.  They both habitually override local county and city officials who are trying to protect their own citizens by grabbing power at the state level to hamstring them, but then take no responsibility for massive failures like the 2021 Texas power failure that killed 700 Texans.  By keep a “free market” ideology where free markets don’t exist, they avoid blame when their own constituents suffer from their negligence.  By hiding behind idiotic libertarian ideology that has never worked anywhere on the planet, they can blame faceless villains rather than doing their goddam jobs to improve the lives of their constituents.

This is the biggest fraud that’s been committed against the American people, but they retain power through two strategies – using disinformation to blame non-existent bogeymen for their own failures, and radical gerrymandering that creates a base of voters who believe their destructionist rhetoric and bullshit.  AND, it’s getting worse, not better.

My congressman is a precious little munchkin of a person who struts, even when he’s sitting down.

This is going to be one of my rare long stories because I haven’t written in so long that this stuff has been piling up.

Let me start here: My congressman is Troy Nehls.  He’s has lived on the public dole most of his life. First in the military, then he became a cop in a small town where he got fired for lying, and then he got elected constable, next he was sheriff, and finally congressman. During that time, he used his military education benefits to get a degree from Liberty University – Jerry Falwell’s laughable institution of higher learning.

The only thing of note he’s done in congress is to restore smoking to the capitol building.  He went on Tucker Carlson, lit up his ever-present cigar and declared that smoking is “all about liberty.”  But what is freedom to the Republicans if not the ability to imperil somebody else?

A couple of weeks ago, a You Tube flashed online with Congressman Nehls being either drunk, drugged, or totally out of his freeking mind over some guy named Dontarius who was escorted into his office for some reason unknown to either Nehls, Dontarius, or God Hisowndamnself.

During this visit Nehl’s behavior ranged from declaring, “I’m all about the little man. The little man,” while reaching out to touch his visitor, chit chatting for 8 minutes over things that multinational corporations and the Illuminati are both still scratching their heads over.  If you have eight minutes to watch this video, please note Nehl’s interactions during the picture-taking to “put the black man in the middle,” and the freaking size of his stand up humidor. This suckers ain’t cheap.

But it’s not over. Hell, the fat lady is only clearing her throat and putting on her panties.  Let’s go visit the Federal Elections Commission.

Here’s a letter they sent him  last week asking about “Apparent Excessive, Prohibited, and Impermissible Contributions Nehls for Congress (C00730150)” And, just one of those full page of hinkey contributions was way too much money from Steve Wynn.  Look, if you’re going to take money from Steve Wynn, don’t take so much that it’s illegal because that’s like putting a neon sign over it saying “I’m not just dumb. I’m dumb and a damn crook.”

And, there’s something I can’t figure out. An unauthorized expenditure at Misty J Productions? What the hell? I can’t even figure out who Misty J is, and Lord only knows what she produces.

So if you’re wondering why my congressman has to take so much questionable money, I have a little explanation for you.

First off, exercising your liberty to foul my air is not cheap. Apparently he doesn’t purchase his own cigars but allows his contributors to pay fr them from his tax-free campaign account.

Here’s Shelly’s Back Room. So, if you’re ever in DC and need the smell of farts and sludge, you can visit Shelly’s and have yourself a white boy experience.  You’ll see more from Shelly’s in a minute.

But wait, liberty also means never paying for your own food.

Yeah, there’s some more money to Shelly’s and two payments to simply “Nehls” which is beyond normal reasoning.

There’s more but I’m tired of typing.  I’m gonna keep an eye on this fella.  What information I got from the FEC came from Alfredo over at the Dairy Queen and this anonymous Facebook page here.

There will be more.

 

“I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.” — Howard Beale

Beale is a fictional character. He was an anchorman in the movie “Network”. In the movie. Beale asks all of the viewers to open their windows and shout out the above refrain at the same time. Referencing a fictional character and a fruitless gesture seems oddly apropos in the moment. Naturally, you are just going to have to take my word for it.

 

What you are looking at above is the media bias chart we teach our students. See, most people naturally just assume that media sources should only be measured by where they are on a left-right scale. The more important axis is percentage of factual content provided on these programs. The lower you are on the chart, the fewer facts that get dispensed on your network.

I’m sure you noticed that the left and right axis is pretty balanced on both sides. There are more right wing sources than left wing sources when you absolutely count them out, but it’s close enough not to make a difference. It is the factual axis that is most revealing. You’ll notice all but two left to center stay above the line that denotes selective or incomplete story information. Quite a few right leaning sources fall below that. In other words, it’s not symmetrical. Both sides do not do the same thing.

We set this in the backdrop of the latest right wing hysteria piece about DirecTV dropping Newsmax from it’s channel list. The right wing noise machine has called this censorship. Sure. If anyone leaning right accidentally stumbles onto this space I want you to listen very carefully. Censorship happens when the government stifles your ability to speak. It is not happening if your boss fires you for saying something offensive. It is not happening if a social media site blocks your commentary or decides to ban you from their site. For the love of God, it is not happening when a cable company decides not to carry your channel.

If you look carefully you can find Newsmax on the site above. It exists on the far right hand wing on the chart and is one of the least accurate. It comes somewhere between OANN and Fox News. That is terrific company. Since most commentators can’t be bothered to explain this nuanced point, I will make an attempt in case you are conservative and stumbled into this space.

All media outlets are biased in some sense. There are two kinds of bias. The first kind of bias reflects the editorial judgment of the outlet. What stories do they pump up? What stories do they bury? On this level, everyone in the mainstream media deserves all of the criticism that gets hurled their way. We amp up conflict. We amp up controversy. We amp up whatever sensationalism we can for eyeballs, clicks, and advertising dollars.

The second level of bias is the kind of bias most people think of. Are you actually telling the truth? You can see the chart above as easily as I can. There simply is no equivalency here. The notion that both sides do it is not only wrong, but it is inherently dangerous. I suppose that when someone exaggerates the importance of an issue then we can consider it a form of lying. That of course depends on how cynical you want to be.

However, take a look at your chart. MSNBC and CNN are reliable sources. They exercise a ton editorial discretion in what they choose to focus on, but they generally report facts. OANN, Newsmax, and Fox News do not. I don’t subscribe to DirecTV. They can allow any channel they want and they can cut any channel they want. It’s called capitalism. Maybe conservatives can give it a try.

So TFG may have a corner on the secret and classified documents hoarding market, but both Biden (as a VP) and TFG’s Mike Pence have now discovered inadvertantly retained classified documents in their posessions.

But contrary to TFG’s control of them because he thinks having these docs is “cool”, the two former VP’s seem to be caught in an embarrassed surprise.

Cue the National Archives, who quite expectedly this week issued an APB to all former presidents and vice presidents to check their closets and under their beds for any stray nuclear codes they might have packed along with their memorabilia of office.

The Nixon Library has responded that any and all classified documents that they might have had in the past have all been inadvertantly erased by Rose Mary Woods.

I write about gun violence on occasion knowing full well that it’s an exercise in futility.  Why?  Easy; our elected representatives, our law enforcement organizations, and now the courts have been overtaken by weirdos and ideologues who have morphed the powers of local, state, and federal government from “law and order” to an alternate reality believing that overturning over 200 years of legal precedent and history and putting guns into the hands of everyone is somehow sane public policy.  We’re 24 days into the new year and have already had 40 mass shootings in the US, killing 74 and wounding 170.  In that same period of time, over 2,800 people have died from guns and over 2,100 have been wounded.  Gun violence has overtaken car accidents and drug overdoses as the leading cause of death in children in America.

There has been an unrelenting effort by the gun lobby to rewrite the Second Amendment from its original intent into a gun-humper’s dream.  The amendment that provided for a citizen army to protect the newly formed government in the late 1700s has been turned onto its head with junk law and fake “studies” to turn the amendment into a Guns for Everyone ideology.  In unwinding 200 years of case law, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito have relied on bullshit and junk law to justify their politically motivated rulings which included gutting Washington, DC and New York gun safety laws.  They’ve relied on a doctrine of  “originalism” which, translated from Bullshit to English, is an excuse to turn everything on its head forcing 21st century technology into an 18th century framework of law.  The Heller case was the death blow to sanity by declaring that an amendment that provided for a citizen army lead by state and local authorities was actually enumerated a person right for any idiot to carry a firearm anywhere he/she damn well pleased.  Using this insanity, even more insane state politicians use the same junk law codified by the SCOTUS to unwind centuries of gun safety laws all over the country.  As Michael Waldman, Director of the Justice Brennan Center at NYU Law, said after the Court struck down the NY gun safety law,

“The ruling Thursday says that all these judges got it wrong. Instead, the majority said, courts must assess gun rules especially focusing solely on ‘history and tradition.’ Don’t look at public safety; search for analogies to past laws from a very different time.”

Waldman has written extensively about the history of the effort to rewrite the Second Amendment.  The gun lobby did it in plain sight, pumping out bullshit and fake studies while at the same time paying Republicans to kill federal funding into gun violence for almost 40 years.  Add that to decades of gutting the ATF and attacking any authority trying to curb gun violence, and the takeover of America by gun nuts is complete.  SCOTUS has already communicated that the gun safety law debate is over and insanity won.  The Congress won’t protect us, the President can’t effectively act alone so he can’t help; red state governments have completely unraveled what gun safety law we had left, and ideologues sue local and state governments who dare try to protect their citizens.  This war is lost.

Until the Court was bought by the multi-billion dollar Federalist Society, we had a chance.  But that was lost with the triple assist from TFG.  The SCOTUS is now a zombie court that has asserted that it has no authority to protect Americans from massive gun violence, radical gerrymandering and unlimited money that has completely corrupted our elections and destroyed democracy from within.  This war is lost so we have two choices – give up and go arm ourselves and join in the chaos and carnage; OR fight back.  Grass roots is all that’s left and the job is massive.

The only solution to this dystopian alternate reality is to get rid of the Second Amendment.  I know that sounds crazy, but we’re already up to our eyeballs in crazy, so we have nothing to lose.  In 2018, Justice John Paul Stevens proposed just this in an op-ed in the NY Times.  He was right then, and remains right today.  Let’s stop niggling over definitions of assault weapons and semi-auto firearms.  The solution is to start – and win –  a new war that takes back the safety of our citizens away from the gun nuts and zealots.  I know that by no means is this going to be easy, but it’s the only solution left.

Lookie what was on CNN just now:

You get a classified document, you get a classified document, you get a classified document, everybody gets a classified document!You get a classified document, you get a classified document, you get a classified document, everybody gets a classified document!

 

 

You get a classified document, you get a classified document, you get a classified document, everybody gets a classified document!

Have they been to Jimmy Crater’s house yet? Maybe we’ll get lucky and find Hunter Biden’s laptop and Hillary Clinton’s server there.

And you know if Bill Clinton has any, he’s already smoked them.