So I thought it was interesting that Mike Pence finally made a stand. For such a long time he tried to play the middle. Trying to please the Trump faithful while still trying to hold on to something coming close to intelligence. I guess he finally realize that he is never going to get that Trump core base and anything effort trying to please them while standing up to how he handled Jan 6 was a waste of time. Should be interesting to see how things go once we can see who lines up for the Republican primary come 2024.

If the left has "embraced" Rogan, than what exactly was Ball complaining about? Clearly she thinks there is some powerful force on the left which hasn't embraced Joe Rogan, so this argument is lost on me.

Also, when I describe Rogan as "pseudo-intellectual", I am describing Rogan as pseudo-intellectual, not every person who goes on his show. He really likes to nod along when he has someone smarter than him (or someone who pretends to be smarter than him) on his show, but he does a very poor job at actually challenging his guests and I don't believe this is really a hot take, even among people who like him. But let me ask you, do you think it is good of him to try to educate his viewers by "such diverse talents" as Alex Jones and Steven Crowder onto his show? 

I also don't like Maddow (and she isn't popular among a lot of leftists) so I'm not sure what this whataboutism really seeks to accomplish. 

The take away from Hillary's Dems and Fox teaming up against Nina Turner, is how terrified they are of her, and her 'for the public good' ideas 

This move says a lot about the Establishment actually, how they have tried to crush opponents to stay in politics for the Powerful helping stop ideas like M4A

Nina is actually standing against that, it's crucial for the US Public that she succeeds, the forces of "Of the Rich and Powerful, business as usual model" have rallied  

Nina in the most recent poll currently has 50% of the vote, the next closest candidate has 15% 

https://www.wkyc.com/article/news/politics/nina-turner-leads-poll-11th-congressional-district-race/95-5842fe8f-4824-4185-8020-c0f16a47da96 

There's an epidemic of right-wing debate bros running away from debates with the left. The latest one was quite entertaining. It involved a prominent right anti-intellectual Steven Crowder, who is anti-science, an anti-vaxer, open racist, open homophobe/transphobe, and flat Earther.

Crowder got pissed off at H3 Podcast host Ethan Klein's pro-science approach, and wanted to debate him on vaccines. He accused Ethan about "likely going to run from the debate because it would be a layup for Crowder." -- a statement that would later prove to be dripping with irony.

Ethan agreed, he's not a debate guy, but accepted anyway. Steven Crowder was surprised he accepted, and then understood why he should be frightened, very frightened. Just before the debate was scheduled to go off, Crowder quit, and said they'd have to reschedule. Crowder made up a dirtbag lie, saying his wife had an emergency at the hospital. This lie was later exposed.

To find out why Crowder was so desperate to avoid the debate with Klein that he'd lie about his wife having a medical emergency, a little backstory is needed. We have to rewind to 2019, Steven Coward earned the hashtag #ColdFeetCrowder after ducking The Majority Report host Sam Seder at Politicon. Making excuses, constantly, as to why he's unable to debate Sam Seder. Of course, Crowder didn't want to admit he was dodging Sam Seder.

Ethan Klein happened to be friends with Seder, and this was brought to his attention. Crowder had been monitoring The Majority Report live show, and noticed it went off the air early, suspecting that Sam Seder might stand in for Klein, they went into panic mode, and cancelled the debate with the false excuse; but he told Klein (as previously stated) that there was a medical emergency with his wife.

Crowder and Klein rescheduled the debate. This time a little earlier, coincidentally, at the same time The Majority Report live show would begin. Crowder didn't make an appearance until 2 minutes after The Majority Report went live. 

What Crowder didn't know is that The Majority Report had been pre-recorded.

Crowder starts bragging about how easy it will be, makes fun of Klein's tourettes syndrome. Klein agreed, it would be easy... if he had come alone. But Klein brought an equalizer. Sam Seder shows up, and Crowder FREAKS out, solid. Crowder was so white faced shocked that he blurted out that he knew it last week when he saw the show go off the air early, admitting that the whole story about his wife was a lie, and that cancelling and rescheduling the debate was actually all about dodging Sam Seder, once again.

Sam Challenges Steven Crowder to debate the issue, and after trying to make excuses to get out of the debate, Crowder flees the scene... you know, the way a coward would.

This is only the most recent of prominent American right-wing personalities (such as "Cold Feet" Steven Crowder, Dim Tim Pool, and Ben Shabibo) chickening out of debates with left-wingers. Interesting enough, these guys built their reputations off of their so-called debate prowess... mostly against teenagers.

David Pakman has a theory on this... that these right-wing debate bros are just shit at debating when up against anyone remotely competent, as evidenced in this compilation.

Since we seem to collectively be so bored with events these days that we're no longer even talking about the actual news and current events so much as about how much we trust, or don't trust, individual program hosts and outlets to deliver that news we wish existed, thought I'd weigh in.

Gotta admit that these days I don't typically watch more than like 20 or 30 minutes worth of news in a day, though there are some days when I'm just bored and opt to watch for hours. In any event, I have a viewing schedule of news programming that's on after work on the weekdays that I can dip into or drop out of as I feel the need in a given moment. That schedule is (currently) as follows:

6-7 PM: The PBS News Hour
7-8 PM: Tucker Carlson Tonight
8-9 PM: The Rachel Maddow Show

Other than that, it's mostly my online niche preferences and stuff people link me to. I like to get a variety of perspectives anymore, as you can doubtless gather. So let's go through why I like these programs the most:

I've been watching what is today called the PBS News Hour off and on since I was a kid back in the '90s. It's my favorite news program. I'm a lifelong socialist -- a real one who favors social ownership and democratic control of the means of production, not a Bernie Sanders type welfare state "socialist" -- and a strong believer in public television and really favor the News Hour's glorious lack of commercial "breaks" and fancy, animated corporate logos and ticker tape reels and stock prices distracting you on the bottom of the screen. There's a welcome minimalism to it that keeps your focus on the story, or topic, at hand. Most of all though, I like the program's wide variety of stories -- many of which you can't get on the for-profit news networks because they're not sensational or U.S.-centric enough -- and its civil tone. I find it both interesting and calming. The show often even ends with the reading of a poem or the performance of a song or some other kind of artistic reflection on life. No sports updates or weather (unless it's a hurricane or something), as gets views on your local news broadcast. Art and science news instead because it's public television and they're not in it for the ratings and the money. It's just so refreshing!

As to the other two, Tucker Carlson is the highest-rated conservative news host on television and Rachel Maddow is the highest-rated liberal news host on television. I suspect these things are true for a reason. That's why I watch them both. Since it will likely be the most controversial, let me start with the topic of Tucker.

Yes, I do like to get a dedicated, more conservative take on current events anymore. I have to admit that I really couldn't bear this during the Trump era when it was all just pro-administration propaganda, but now that Republicans are relatively powerless at the federal level and liberals run all the major social medias, and in a media climate wherein it really does feel like the press writ large really has started showing a clear political leaning and wherein most major advertisers have stopped airing their commercials on Fox News, Fox really has started feeling like opposition media to me, and I find there's something almost intrinsically refreshing about that. Traditionally, I'd have watched All In With Chris Hayes during this time window instead, but these days his show is so fixated on Trump and Covid and the killer racist cops and state-level election laws and all the other same subjects as last year that it doesn't feel like it's really keeping up with the times anymore. It feels intellectually frozen in 2020 (or January 6th at the latest). Carlson's show is often more interesting to me. It certainly always provides me a different perspective on events. I find I agree with Carlson's perspective only about a third of the time, but that's way up from a year ago. It's the stories his show covers that you don't find on the other networks that I find most interesting, NOT his latest anti-vaccine bullshit type of stuff. Any time he starts going off on like how getting vaccinated will surely kill you or how maybe George Floyd died of a heart attack and not the painfully obvious knee pressed against his neck for some nine minutes or interviews Marjorie Taylor Green or some other idiotic violation of my basic sensibility, I reflexively change the channel or turn off my TV. No, what I come back for again and again is the actually rational stories on, critical race theory, new gender identity policies, the silencing of free speech in this country, that sort of thing. If Republicans are to make an electoral comeback next year, I guarantee you those sorts of things will be the reasons why because topically they certainly interest me!

What I find distinguishes Tucker from other prime time hosts on Fox News is his willingness to criticize Republicans and corporate lobbying and hegemonic capitalism. I've observed that Josh Hawley seems to be the Senator he interviews most often and suspect that there's a reason for that. Tucker strikes me as a Josh Hawley type of conservative more than anything else. More so even than a true Donald Trump type of conservative really. Ya know, he supports Elizabeth Warren's bill to break up the tech giants and condemns the American Enterprise Institute for its history of hawking Purdue Pharma to rural America because they were among the principal donors to the AEI, this sort of thing. It makes the subsequent program, Hannity, seem like a jarringly partisan and brainless contrast to what you just saw in the previous hour sometimes. ...What I'm saying is that there's just a certain working class type of mindset to Tucker's program, in my observation, that isn't so present on any of Fox's other shows. That I think is what makes his show stand out the most and has helped it emerge as the most popular one on all of cable news. It's a quality I find appealing as, you know, a blue collar type myself. Even if I don't actually agree with his perspective more than like a third of the time.

Moving on, yes I also still like Rachel Maddow's program. She has such a distinctive style! Most every show of her's opens by telling a story, and it can go on for like 10 or 15 minutes even sometimes. I can't help but find all the dots she connects fascinating, and often brilliant! She also tends to revolve her entire show around one or two topics per evening anymore, which on the one hand makes for a sometimes-frustratingly narrow range of subjects, but on the other hand offers a really deep-dive into the selected topics of the evening in place of more topics. It's this unique sort of approach that keeps her liberal perspective from ever feeling generic or stale to me even in politically good times for the Democrats like we have on our hands today. I usually do come away feeling like I learned the importance of a topic I'd previously found mundane and uninteresting. No wonder her's is consistently MSNBC's highest-rated show!

The online spaces I like to occasionally check back in with are niche spaces mostly composed of offbeat feminist sites that fall outside the conventional conservative-to-progressive spectrum, like Canada's Feminist Current blog, Britain's Mumsnet Feminism sub-forum, South Korea's lesbian feminist Womad board (which is my favorite, to the extent I can read it anyway, as only a small minority of threads and posts are available in English), France's Femen organization site, and femcel social medias, each of which is, in their own way, more than a little controversial. So I do have my more radical fascinations too.

I'm just a curious person/weirdo.

double post

NYT gives a nice timeline of the Capitol Insurrection using tons of footage, some of which you probably haven't seen before:

Seeing how the GOP is blocking investigations into the insurrection, this may be the best look the general public gets.

I love this new grift by the former president. One thing you have to give it to Trump is his ability to milk his base. Now he is filing lawsuits against Twitter, Facebook and Google that they are state actors so that he can sue them on first amendment rights. Of course he has setup a donation to fund this adventure within the courts which I might add he still has a huge treasure chest of cash already. Every day I think, I should get into politics if its this easy to separate people from their cash.

So, what is the potential of Ivanka Trump rolling on her dad if she is facing some serious jail time for tax evasion. I can see Weis taking the fall for Trump because he is old and maybe he feels ok taking the fall but Ivanka is young with children and going to jail for a length of time probably is something she is definitely not in favor of. I can really see her rolling on her dad if she if there was an offer on the table. Now does that mean that Trump will serve any time, well that is something totally different but you have to say the drama never stops with this guy. I cannot wait until the made for TV movie comes out. I know someone has to be making either a TV show or movie. With all the books and material, I can see full mini series which we have not had in a while.

I haven't heard as much about how bad the outlook is for the Trump kids, but if there's a real chance of her facing jail time I wouldn't be surprised if she did flip. That said I'm sure she would do the bare minimum to satisfy prosecutors and incriminate her father as little as possible; kinda play both sides. Whether he's convicted of anything I would be surprised if Donald actually serves any jail time. What has me more curious right now is the talk I've heard around the Trump Organization. If these fraud allegations cause his lenders to call all his loans, can the organization even survive or does the business empire fall?