This Is Literally What FOX News Viewers Think

I spoke with my Dad on the phone last night (Sunday morning his time).  I wished him well and was glad to hear he's only going into town once a week for food and supplies.  Then he let me know that, obviously, the coronavirus was created by China to hurt Trump and help Biden in the November election.

You'll be relieved to know that Nancy Pelosi was not involved in the virus' initial creation (Duh!  She's a politician, not a bio-weapon engineer!), but she did sign off on it in February via a secret meeting with Chinese Premier Xi.

How Are You Spending the Apocalypse, James?

Ugly Delicious season two is even better than the first, which was truly good stuff.

I mean, let's state the obvious -- it's really not about food at all, but family and culture.

"mostly unready to confront it even as it has become unmistakably what it is"

When it comes to the dumpster fire that our American national media has become with its instinctive "both-sides-do-it" bullshit, Joan Walsh gets it:

"But I need to come clean with a 'both sides' of my own. My party, the Democratic Party, was utterly unprepared for the carnival of racist bigotry the Republican Party was becoming, and remains mostly unready to confront it even as it has become unmistakably what it is. After Obama’s insufficient stimulus (I know, he didn’t have the votes for more, but he didn’t need votes to at least talk about what economic recovery, and more important, economic justice in the wake of the financial meltdown required), he pivoted to preaching deficit reduction and attempting a bipartisan 'Grand Bargain' that would have trimmed or gutted Social Security and Medicare. (Which makes me rejoice that at least in one case the GOP defeated my president.) We suffered through Obama’s Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction commission and endured idiotic movements like 'No Labels.'

And when a thoroughly compromised bipartisan immigration reform bill passed the Senate in 2013, only to be locked up in the Tea Party-controlled House, not enough of us realized that the GOP was on its way to becoming a nativist party. It didn’t happen when Trump descended that gilded escalator and called undocumented Mexican immigrants 'rapists' and 'criminals;' it happened when Senator Jeff Sessions and Santa Monica’s white nationalist Stephen Miller took charge of GOP immigration policy. Still, I’ve lost count of the times I’ve been told in a television debate that Democrats don’t 'want' comprehensive immigration reform, or else a bill would have passed. 'Both sides' profit politically from the immigration stalemate, we’re told.  I calmly recite the terms of that 2013 'compromise' to pundits who should know better — usually to no avail. That’s how a country that once protected young 'Dreamers' wound up putting brown kids in cages instead."

It's really quite simple -- you don't negotiate with hostage takers.  Obama thought it was possible, but seemed to wake up a bit during his second term.  Biden (groan) still thinks it is.

The Republican Party, and specifically Mitch McConnell in the Senate, have broken the system.  And come November 2020, we either get to keep a semi-functional Democracy or we get four more years of Trump, which means at least a generation of Trumpism via the Supreme Court.

"some of us grow up instead to be Bari Weiss"

Alex Pareene on the death of "rude media," (e.g., Gawker, Deadspin) because being rude means being honest about the overpaid cretins who run the world:

"But writers whose insufficient deference to power rendered them unemployable by The New York Times still had, until recently, hope of finding employment elsewhere. When I was growing up, every major American metro area had both a polite press—the local dailies—and a rude one: the alt-weeklies. The alt-weeklies were funded by advertisers the family-friendly media wanted nothing to do with. Craigslist put a large dent in that revenue (and the government has now effectively banned much of it), and Facebook vacuumed up the rest of it, leading to the alternative press’ rapid decline. But it was not merely the market speaking: In the end, many of these publications were also simply killed by rich idiot owners or corporations that routinely purchase publications and ruin them out of both greed and incompetence. And so we (mostly) don’t have alt-weeklies anymore.

Still, we thought as we watched this process, it was fine, because, after all, we had blogs! Blogs were a refreshing novelty in the rapidly constricting world of print because they were allowed to be rude. This made many people—primarily people whose most consistent belief is that they are owed deference because of their social or professional status—outraged. David Denby, America’s worst living film critic, actually wrote a book about how much he detested this rhetorical mode he couldn’t even accurately describe."

I'll be the 1,000th person to point out the obvious as well -- Deadspin was actually profitable, but got killed by suits who had no idea that plenty of sports fans actually care about the larger world as well, and happen to vote for Democrats.  But he's right that the larger problem is that calls for "civility" have really come to mean "never criticize the powerful or the privileged."

Also, this kills:

"Rudeness is not merely a tone. It is an attitude. The defining quality of rude media is skepticism about power, and a refusal to respect the niceties that power depends on to disguise itself and maintain its dominance. It’s often hard for me to imagine that anyone can grow up in this era and not end up doubting the competence and motives of nearly everyone in charge of nearly every American institution, but some of us grow up instead to be Bari Weiss."

Enough said.