Oh no! Steve Shives bullies Sarah Huckabee Sanders too!

Steve Shives doesn’t mince words in his defense of Michelle Wolf’s speech at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders chooses to work for Donald Trump, to go on TV for Donald Trump, to lie to journalists for Donald Trump. She is a mouthpiece for this administration that panders to White supremacists; that vilifies immigrants and people of color; that seeks to deprive women of their reproductive rights; that has tried repeatedly to ban Muslims from entering this country; that has cut taxes for the wealthy while moving to slash public assistance programs for the poor; that has proudly made itself an enemy of LGBTQ Americans, Americans with disabilities, Americans with mental illnesses; that has lied to, undermined and attacked the free press like no administration in this country since Nixon.

Trump, Sanders, Pence, Sessions, Scott Pruitt, Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Kellyanne Conway, Stephen Miller – every last rat-bastard motherfucker who works in that White House? You can’t be to mean too them!

He also clarifies that swinging as hard as you can is fine so long as it’s not actually aimed at anyone’s looks, or any other trait they aren’t responsible for. “Hit the ball hard, but hit the ball inside the foul lines.” The entire outrage around Wolf’s routine is manufactured, and that says everything you need to know about the people ginning it up.

Michelle Wolf speaks truth the DC media doesn’t want to hear

Michelle Wolf

Last night was the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, or as I prefer to think of it, the “saturnalia of incestuous ingratiation that does little to instill confidence in the public that the press isn’t ensorcelled by the powerful”. (Thank you, The Newsroom.) The only thing that ever came to mind when I heard the name was Stephen Colbert’s legendary shellacking of George W. Bush’s presidency and the mainstream media’s complicity, and how pricked that same media felt afterwards – comedians speaking truth to power is all fine and dandy, but how dare he do it to them?

Yesterday saw history repeat itself: Michelle Wolf, whom I know as an occasional correspondent on The Daily Show, took the stage and gave the Trump administration and its apologists, as well as the media that chose to elevate him rather than push back when it mattered in 2015–16, the talking-to they deserved. So naturally, the DC media is rounding on her, because the only comedy they apparently approve of is the kind that favors polite servility.

Adam Conover of Adam Ruins Everything is neither polite nor servile, and he takes to The New York Times to lay out some truth.

[I]n her performance at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on Saturday night in Washington, Michelle Wolf did exactly what a great comic is supposed to do. She made the crowd of assembled journalists, politicians and guests laugh; she made them squirm; and she made them gasp in astonishment (and yes, a little delight) when a sharp sliver of the truth cut a little closer to the bone than they were expecting.

In other words, she killed.

Yet in return for her excellence, Ms. Wolf was criticized not just by partisan defenders of the president, but by members of the press, too. Journalists called Ms. Wolf’s set “offensive,” “deplorable” and “a debacle.” Margaret Talev, the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, who booked the comedian to perform, released a statement on Sunday night that said “unfortunately, the entertainer’s monologue was not in the spirit” of the group’s mission.

There is no president of the Comedians’ Association, and though Ms. Wolf and I know each other professionally, I’m not her spokesman. But at risk of speaking out of turn, I’d like to offer this official response from America’s comics: If you don’t want comedy, don’t hire us.

[…]

Contrary to what several prominent journalists said, the transcript shows that Michelle Wolf did not make a single joke at the expense of Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s physical appearance. Rather, she did something much worse in the eyes of those assembled: She ridiculed the White House press secretary’s mendacity, hypocrisy and complicity. And in a searing, brutally funny segment, she criticized the willingness of the press to play along:

“You guys are obsessed with Trump. Did you used to date him? Because you pretend like you hate him, but I think you love him. I think what no one in this room wants to admit is that Trump has helped all of you. He couldn’t sell steaks or vodka or water or college or ties or Eric, but he has helped you. He’s helped you sell your papers and your books and your TV. You helped create this monster, and now you’re profiting off of him. And if you’re gonna profit off of Trump, you should at least give him some money because he doesn’t have any.”

No wonder the crowd seemed so uncomfortable.

It amuses me how another frequent criticism of Wolf and Colbert’s style of tell-it-to-their-faces humor is that it generates few laughs from those present. Wolf knew full well that the people worth impressing weren’t the stooges in the room, but the colossally larger audience watching at home. I didn’t even find her routine all that funny, but it was made all the more hilarious by the reactions she got from the stilted crowd, especially when she tore into Sarah Huckabee Sanders, noted professional liar for the (alleged) sexual-assaulter-in-chief.

Hi. Sarah Huckabee Sanders lies to the press on Donald Trump's behalf for a living. It's not theoretically possible to say something to or about her that is too mean. If Michelle Wolf never told a joke and just spent 20 minutes trying to make her cry, it would have been fine.

— Steve Shives (@steve_shives) April 30, 2018

When did it become okay to be more offended by what someone with no power says than by what someone with power does?

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) April 29, 2018

Watch Wolf’s full remarks below:

The Boston Globe saw it all coming

The Globe’s editorial board published this “parody” front page back in April 2016:

I’d propose the paper rebrand itself as the Daily Prophet, but that might incur stern legal letters from JK Rowling’s attorneys.

(via @fark)

Fox News’s Hume on media’s treatment of Trump vs. Obama

Brit Hume

Here I am, quite enjoying my little quasi-hiatus, when some dunce on TV says something that just needs to be shared and laughed at. Take it away, Fox News guest Brit Hume:

President Obama enjoyed a certain protected status because he was African-American and because he was a Democrat and a liberal. Those things do not normally apply to Republicans, particularly Republicans so universally loathed among most of our nation's news media as this president is, so he doesn't get the same kind of treatment.

Hey, Hume, you want to know why Republicans are “so universally loathed”? It’s because they just keep saying stupid shit like this. Obama was “protected” in the sense that he had charisma, intelligence, poise and at least basic knowledge of whatever matter was being discussed, all of which your boy Trump famously and flamboyantly lacks.

To be fair, Hume said this on Tucker Carlson’s show, where adhesion to reality (alongside basic sense and decency) isn’t a requirement.

Daily Links #111: House passes bad anti-sex-trafficking bill

• US House of Representatives passes an anti-sex-trafficking bill that would restrict online speech, endanger sex workers, and do absolutely nothing to fight sex trafficking.

• As Trump ^[pictured] makes noises about violent video games causing mass shootings, remember that endless studies have proven him completely and utterly wrong.
  (via @mccanner; retweet by @Popehat)

• New York man wins $1 million lawsuit after an NYPD officer tried to frame him for drunk driving to cover up how the cop blew through a stop sign and crashed into his car.
  (via @natemcdermott; retweet by @KFILE)

• Pamela Gellar’s daughters did not fall far from the bigoted tree.

• Finally, your headline of the day (and an uncomfortably informative article):
  (via @radleybalko)

Source: The Hill

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Gun owners who oppose gun control don’t deserve respect

I tweeted about this earlier today, but it’s so amazingly terrible that I need to blog it as well. Here’s a tweet by The New York Times promoting the latest column by their professional centrist, David Brooks:

If you want to stop school shootings, it’s not enough just to vent and march. It’s necessary to let people from Red America lead the way, and to show respect to gun owners at all points https://t.co/BBrlNIlzY3

— NYT Opinion (@nytopinion) February 20, 2018

Thousands dead every year, adults and children alike. Endless shootings in malls, churches, nightclubs, concerts and schools. A cartoonishly amoral cabal of gun manufacturers, lobbyists and bought-off politicians that’s spent decades flooding the country with weapons and then making it easier for wannabe murderers to own them whilst making it harder for law enforcement to keep track of them. A diseased culture that reacts with knee-jerk fury at the very thought of doing anything to staunch the hemorrhaging.

But no, those aren’t the real problem. The problem is that people who are tired of all the gun violence just aren’t respectful enough towards the people who enable the killings and empower the killers with their policies, who get their dander up at the thought of any kind of meaningful conversation about gun control.

No-one is shaming responsible gun owners, the vast majority of whom want tighter gun laws as much as anyone else. The only people being criticized are the ones who block any effort to take guns away from those who manifestly shouldn’t own them, the fetishists who cling to their right to stockpile as many military-grade rifles as they want. Those people don’t deserve respect; they deserve to be shamed until they go away and let the rest of the country clean up the mess they’ve helped perpetuate.

And right now, that includes revolting hacks like David Brooks and anyone at The New York Times responsible for publishing this drivel.

(via @petercoffin; retweet by @pzmyers)

Every time you think the conservative media can sink no lower

Deplorables gonna be deplorable.

Source: Pat Bagley at The Salt Lake Tribune

Don’t let conservatives pretend it’s only fringe elements who promote this, either. It’s fully mainstream on the Right.

(via @BadAstronomer)

Daily Links #103: Judge requests OK woman get sterilized

Judge Stephen Friot

• Oklahoma woman who used a counterfeit cheque receives a reduced sentence after getting sterilized at the request of a federal judge, who says the Supreme Court “has yet to recognize a constitutional right to bring crack- or methamphetamine-addicted babies into this world”. I have no words.
  (via @RoryFleming8A; retweet by @radleybalko)

• Utah “family values” Republican Rep. Jon Stanard, who believes in “traditional marriage” and voted for tougher anti-prostitution laws, resigns after using taxpayer money to – you know how this ends.
  (via @fark)

• This case of a Spanish man who’s fined almost $600 for hurting “religious feelings” after he Photoshopped his face onto an image of Jesus as a joke illustrates why religious feelings do not deserve respect.

• Fox News pulls column written by its own executive vice president attacking the US’s historically diverse Olympic team for being “darker, gayer, different”.
  (via @KFILE)

• Finally: Dumbed-Down Security Briefings Still Too Difficult for Trump to Read.
  (via @StephenAtHome)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Daily Links #102: San Diego County harasses reporter who exposed jailhouse deaths

Kelly Davis

• Reporter ^[pictured] helps expose how incompetence and negligence led to 60 deaths in San Diego County jails. So naturally, county attorneys are now harassing her.
  (via @radleybalko)

• Popehat presents: Don’t talk to the feds, Donald Trump edition.

• Fox News frequently touts its willingness to publish things no other outlet will. That’s probably because no other outlet would accuse the US Winter Olympics team of going “darker, gayer, different” by choosing athletes based on race rather than ability.

• US college student flunks an assignment because her professor says Australia is a continent, not a country. (It’s both.)
  (via @davidmackau; retweet by @Popehat)

• Finally, I’d joke that The Onion is no longer doing satire, but to be fair, it’s impossible to tell reality and satire apart anymore.
  (via retweet by @Popehat)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Trump’s erosion of truth empowers dictators around the world

We’ve already seen the impact the Trump presidency is having on the world stage: strained diplomatic ties, harmful economic and environmental policies, a skyrocketing civilian body count in war zones, and the general loss of respect in the eyes of almost all other nations – except dictatorships, funnily enough. But perhaps his greatest influence is the galvanizing effect he has on those dictatorships, particularly as he continually dismisses media institutions who say things he doesn’t like by claiming they’re “fake news”. And the effects are measurable:

• Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in February invoked "fake news" to dismiss an Amnesty International report that up to 13,000 prisoners had been executed in one of his military prisons, saying the allegations were a reminder that "we are living in a fake news era."

• A security official in Buddhist-majority Myanmar in December used the term "fake news" to deny the very existence of the Rohingya people, a persecuted Muslim minority who are being ethnically cleansed, according to the United Nations. "There is no such thing as Rohingya," the Myanmar official said. "It is fake news."

• Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro in July said it was "fake news" that a constitutional crisis was playing out in Venezuela against a backdrop of widespread protests, human rights abuses and long-standing economic privation. "The media spreads lots of false versions, lots of lies. This is what we call 'fake news' today, isn't it?" he told Russian broadcaster RT, which the U.S. government considers a Kremlin propaganda outlet.

• An op-ed with the headline "Trump is right, fake news is the enemy, something China has known for years" ran in May in the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Party in China, which is perennially a leading jailer of journalists.

• Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte in October said he had been "demonized" through "fake news" coverage of his brutal drug war, which has seen an unprecedented scale of extrajudicial killings, according to Human Rights Watch. At a joint press appearance in Manila in November, with Trump laughing at his side, Duterte called journalists "spies."

[…]

Trump popularized the phrase "fake news" over the past two years as a way to dismiss news coverage that is unsympathetic to him and his administration, even when the reporting is accurate.

There are more than a dozen recent instances where foreign leaders, including dictators and authoritarians, have similarly invoked "fake news" to dismiss allegations against them, including widespread extrajudicial killings and other human rights abuses. We found no mentions of "fake news" from foreign leaders before 2016.

Expanded use of the epithet has also emboldened authoritarian governments to jail more journalists under "false news" statutes, experts said.

We’ve long been living in an age of truth decay, the gradual erosion of the public’s respect for education and the media as credible sources of information. But never has the very concept of facts been under such sustained fire by leaders of the supposed free world, to the point where murderous autocrats are taking pages right out of their book. I can’t imagine a bigger mark of shame for any democratic leader, but then, Trump has shown little interest in either democracy or leadership. Hell, hearing that people like Duterte take after him would only please him.

Trump lied over 2,000 times in his first year

Trump’s first year in office is over today – only three to go! – and The Washington Post’s fact checkers have tallied up all the falsehoods and distortions he’s uttered in that time. The total?

One year after taking the oath of office, President Trump has made 2,140 false or misleading claims, according to The Fact Checker’s database that analyzes, categorizes and tracks every suspect statement uttered by the president. That’s an average of nearly 5.9 claims a day.

We started this project as part of our coverage of the president’s first 100 days, largely because we could not possibly keep up with the pace and volume of the president’s misstatements. Readers demanded we keep it going for another year. The database has proved so useful — and even sparked the interest of academicians — that we now plan to keep it going for the rest of Trump’s presidency.

Very ambitious of them.

By our count, there were only 56 days — or about 15 percent of the time — on which we recorded no claims. These were often days when the president golfed.

Essentially the only time Trump isn’t lying is when there’s no-one around to lie to. Dishonesty in politicians is nothing new, but Trump has taken the art of bullshit and raised it to something almost mythical. All presidents lie, but never before has a president lied so frequently (almost six times a day on average), so consistently, about so many things, and with such little apparent regard for whether people believe him. And never before has a president faced so few, if any, consequences because of it.

The fact that this walking sack of bullshit is still president and that some people inexplicably still listen to him without rolling their eyes at every other word is by itself enough to refute the notion that karma exists, because in any just universe he would have been thrown off the Truman Balcony by an angry mob long ago.

(via @KFILE)

Daily Links: 01/18/18 – Senate Democrats help Republicans give Trump mass spying powers

• Senate Democrats join their House counterparts in helping Republicans give the Trump administration vast warrantless powers to spy on Americans. Viva la #Resistance!

• British Columbia Supreme Court judge strikes down Canada’s indefinite solitary confinement regime. An Ontario court ruled similarly last month.

• Two dozen US state attorneys general file a lawsuit against the FCC over the repeal of its net neutrality rules.

• Supreme Court temporarily blocks a lower court order that North Carolina throw out its ridiculously gerrymandered electoral map that heavily favors Republicans.

• Deputy guns down an unarmed 16-year-old after he tries to stop the deputy from arresting his upset mother after a juvenile court hearing.
  (via @ShaunKing; retweet by @pzmyers)

• Christian-fascist legal group Alliance Defending Freedom is pushing to kill protections for trans prison inmates, because Christianist bigots just aren’t happy unless sexual minorities live in constant fear.

• Trump’s week-long-awaited Fake News Awards are out. If you must read about them, check out PolitiFact’s analysis.

• Finally: Quack who pretends to treat cancer with baking soda and vitamins is exposed as a quack, sues to silence the critic, prepares to run face-first into wall labeled “Streisand Effect”.

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.