From MSNBC's latest "oof" to Biden's blob setting us up for World War III, it's a mixed bag of a Saturday morning. Make yourself a cup of java and sit a spell.
🎶Cause, here’s the thing: To know how it ends And still begin to sing it again As if it might turn out this time I learned that from a friend of mine🎶
—From the closing song from Hadestown
Whoops, they did it again.
This should be a FFSF story, but I’m off next week, so I had to share.
Here was the original headline for a piece on MSNBC about the Jose Ibarra verdict.
Now, I’m going to be honest. If I didn’t know it was MSNBC, I would have found the headline a little . . . odd. But since it was MSNBC, what is my (and virtually everyone else’s) automatic assumption?
That’s right. MSNBC is actually going to try to argue that this POS didn’t get a fair trial because [fill in the blank—Trumpism, racism, he’s an immigrant, pick your “woke” poison].
After a significant amount of backlash . . .
Including Elon Musk joking he might buy MSNBC . . .
They changed the headline.
Now here is the strange thing that has me . . .
The stories are not different. They literally just changed the headline.
And the piece’s main point is this . . .
Sometimes defense counsel just gets handed a truly awful, unwinnable case. The defense’s choice of a bench trial not only saved the state the resources of a wasted jury trial; it also likely avoided unnecessarily prolonging this traumatic experience for the victim’s family.
It’s not a trick. It’s hard to believe, but MSNBC played it straight with this one. The article admits the case was “unwinnable” because the evidence that Ibarra did it was overwhelming, not because of “racism” or “politics” or anything else outside the facts of the situation.
So it really was a decent piece about why Ibarra chose a bench trial and why he’s in prison for the rest of his life anyway and how that’s what anyone should have expected given the situation.
In fact, I’m not sure why anyone would write the article to begin with given that if you have even a passing knowledge of how the legal system works, you knew this already.
But it’s the headline that befuddles me. Just why? Did the person who wrote the headline not read the article and, given they worked at MSNBC, figured the same thing we figured: we’re going to defend Jose Ibarra? Was the headline writer so out of touch with how people regularly use English (the connotations and intimations behind words and phrasings) that they didn’t really know how this would come across? Do they not know how people look at MSNBC? (I mean, honestly, the headline sounds like a Joy Reid segment.) Was it clickbait that backfired? What?
It’s a head scratcher.
Did the “resistance” finally figure out they were being played?
On TV, after beating CNN on election night for the first time ever, MSNBC saw its audience plummet: In the six days after the election, Democrats’ favorite network tumbled from its 2024 prime time average by 36 percent. CNN was off by 19 percent. During the same period, Fox exceeded its typical 2024 number by 56 percent.
So people are tuning out the channels that lied to them. (Not that Fox won’t lie to them, but not in the same way.)
There are also signs of a post-election exodus from Elon Musk’s X, with media figures like MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace and NPR’s Kai Ryssdal announcing plans to pull back from a platform increasingly associated with far-right content. Neither has deactivated their account, but both have said that they’re less interested in consuming what it is serving. Wallace said she had taken the app off her phone “as an act of self-preservation.”
So they’re less interested in consuming the product that represents the makeup of the country as a whole versus their own little blue utopia.
That should help. These people don’t ever learn, do they?
What they’re trying to “preserve” are their delusions.
Aaron Rupar, the journalist best known for posting viral lefty videos on the platform, told me this week that his follower count had fallen by 40,000 since election day — a number he largely attributes to like-minded readers leaving the platform.
Actually, that’s people who stopped “hate-following.”
But this isn’t limited to the digital world or to cable news.
“I talked to a dozen editors last week to check in with them and to see what they were planning to do for political books in a Trump era. They were all exhausted at the thought of doing more anti-Trump books,” the agent said. “It’s like walking out of the stadium in the fourth quarter when your team is down and they played like shit all day. … No one has the energy to go through another four years of publishing this stuff even though the first four years were very good for publishers.”
I don’t even know if people would show up to read them.
And this I think is the point: outrage takes energy. I don’t think the energy is there. You keep people at an 11 too long, and they will flame out.
The media piece of the first resistance, too, was a mixed bag. The sense of crisis boosted subscriptions to reporting-heavy outlets like the Washington Post and New York Times. But it also supercharged some tendencies that served the left poorly during the Biden years. The resistance vibe fostered an overemphasis on vocabulary, as if saying “lie” instead of “falsehood” was what it took to overcome election denialism. And the dynamic strengthened the urge to shout down reporting that might be seen as helping the other side, as the breathless coverage of Hillary Clinton’s emails had done in 2016. Ahead of 2024, though, this news-policing surely contributed to the lack of attention to Biden’s age and the icing out of those who wanted a primary challenger when that was still possible.
A media ecosystem that left so many Democrats surprised about Kamala Harris’ loss doesn’t much help the resistance, does it?
Maybe things are turning around after all if Politico is coming this close to enlightenment.
A reckoning around polling . . .
Speaking of “bubbling,” . . .
It seems as if Democrats live in a “you build it and they will come” psuedo-reality.
John McIntyre couldn’t believe it. The publisher of the Real Clear Polling National Average, America’s first presidential poll aggregator, woke on October 31st to see his product denounced in the New York Times. Launched in 2002 and long a mainstay of campaign writers and news consumers alike, the RCP average, he learned, was part of a “torrent” of partisan rubbish being “weaponized” to “deflate Democrats’ enthusiasm” and “undermine faith in the entire system.”
“They actually wrote that our problem was we didn’t weight results,” says an incredulous McIntyre. “That we didn’t put a thumb on the scale.”
The New York Times denounced a poll aggregator’s lack of subjectivity.
The Times ended its screed against RCP’s “scarlet-dominated” electoral map projection by quoting John Anzalone, Joe Biden’s former chief pollster, who said: “There’s a ton of garbage polls out there.” But being called “garbage” in America’s paper of record was nothing compared to what happened to RCP at Wikipedia.
What did Wikipedia do? It pulled RCP out of the polling averages. (And this is why I don’t donate to the effort to keep Wikipedia afloat, even though it can be useful in a pinch.)
Every major aggregate, that is, but RCP. McIntyre’s site was removed on October 11th, after Wikipedia editors decided it had a “strong Republican bias” that made it “suspect,” even though it didn’t conduct any polls itself, merely listing surveys and averaging them. One editor snootily insisted, “Pollsters should have a pretty spotless reputation. I say leave them out.”
And how did that work out for them? Well, RCP was pretty much on the mark, even perhaps underestimating Trump’s performance in the Electoral College, whereas all the other “weighted” polling aggregators were—what’s the word?—delusional.
After last week’s election, when RCP for the third presidential cycle in a row proved among the most accurate of the averages, Wikipedia quietly restored RCP.
Did we not see this coming?
Okay, well, not them. But I could have guessed. When you pit “cross my fingers and hope” against brute reality, brute reality has a tendency to win, even when you’re trying to tilt the scales.
The FBI seized a cellphone and other electronic devices of betting site Polymarket’s CEO, Shayne Coplan, in a raid on his New York City apartment early Wednesday, according to a source familiar with the matter.
The company’s markets wagered correctly and controversially in Donald Trump’s favor in bets on who would win the presidential election, even though opinion polls showed a tight race. . . .
Polymarket, which Coplan founded in 2020, has recently been the subject of intense debate and scrutiny over its creation of election betting markets. It brought in more than $3.6 billion from bets placed on the presidential election, including $1.5 billion on Trump and $1 billion on Vice President Kamala Harris, according to an NBC News analysis.
Speculation has swirled around the identities of major bettors who wagered on Trump and whether or not the odds and the existence of the markets could have had an effect on voters.
You see, I really do think that a certain segment of our “elite” believe that they can easily manipulate people with polls. I used to think this was about covering for electoral shenanigans, but now? I really think they do think voters are this gullible, and if the polls point a certain way or the betting markets point to a certain outcome, then “reality” will be forced to play along.
They have wrapped themselves into such an impenetrable bubble that they have no idea what’s going on outside their little blue world.
Which leads us to two pretty funny clips from the last week . . .
Cenk Uygur, of all people, called him out. (Or maybe not of all people. I think Cenk truly does want to win, and you can only win with decent information.)
As we discussed, Lichtman’s “keys” are just fine. They work. But you can’t be lazy about it. You have to figure out what voters are actually thinking rather than what you want them to be thinking. In other words, you have to break free of the bubble.
Do you think they can? Or are they continually going to be surprised?
Matt Gaetz and Donald Trump play 4D chess?
So if you haven’t heard, Matt Gaetz removed his name from consideration for AG. This led to a lot of speculation. (The first twelve minutes or so are about Gaetz; the last few are about Smollett.)
Almost immediately (within about four hours), Trump nominated Pam Bondi, the former AG of Florida.
I know nothing about her, other than she comes completely out of left field. If you know anything about her, please weigh in.
And it turns out that Gaetz isn’t returning to Congress, so that settles the question of his taking over for Marco Rubio.
He added: “I’m going to be fighting for President Trump. I’m going to be doing whatever he asks of me, as I always have. But I think that eight years is probably enough time in the United States Congress.”
The former congressman, who has sat in on a number of transition meetings and given input, said he would continue to be part of staffing the next Trump administration.
It may be a snow job, but we may have found the one man who would actually throw the ring into the fires of Mordor.
That makes me even sadder to see him go. There are few like him, whatever his personal failings may be.
ICC arrest warrant for Bibi, and is Biden’s blob trying to start WWIII? A “countdown to the apocalypse” update. (I sincerely hope I’m joking about that.)
I thought things would get crazy before the election, but here we are, after the election, and the dying leviathan is wreaking havoc as it spasms.
So will this warrant stand up? I doubt it. Live by the political sword, die by the political sword.
But that doesn’t mean Bibi and Gallant shouldn’t be facing war crimes charges, just as the Hamas leader is. Wanton killing of civilians is wanton killing of civilians, no matter the excuse. (Oh, yes, there are US leaders who should have faced similar charges.) And, yes, I know that’s a bit of an unpopular opinion, but we’re facing a moment when we get to decide which rules we want to live and die by (though honestly, this may be a purely academic discussion as the decisions are being made for us).
And that brings us to the next development.
In an irony so miserable it must be true, widespread belief that peace talks are coming after Donald Trump’s inauguration is pushing Russia and the U.S. into a game of nuclear chicken, leaving us with “60 days to decide on World War,” as one Russian newspaper put it this week.
While the story may not be getting Cuban Missile Crisis treatment here, Joe Biden’s decision to green-light launches of U.S.-made ATACMS missiles into Russia has that country’s media in freakout mode. Rhetoric was hotter than ever today, the 1000th day of the war, after at least six ATACMS were fired into Russian territory.
An unnamed American official told ABC this was no ICBM but an “experimental medium-range ballistic missile.” Others said it was an “intermediate-range ballistic massile,” or IRBM. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said otherwise in a post on Telegram: “All characteristics — speed, height — point to an ICBM,” he said, while Ukrainian army officials said they were “95% certain” it was an ICBM. Russians offered no comment, but Moskovsky Komsomolets reported the missile may have been an R-35M, which was once believed to give Russia first-strike capability and nicknamed “Satan” by NATO. The Russian daily added:
If the information about the launch of an ICBM is confirmed, this will become a clear signal to Kyiv: a nuclear warhead may arrive next.
Of course, Taibbi’s point in this article is that we’re on the doorstep of nuclear war and we have no idea who is in charge. None. Biden was bumbling about in the Amazon, Harris took a pity vacation to Hawaii, and so who’s steering the boat? Anyone?
I’ll let Alex Christoforou explain better than I can. In the first two thirds of the video, he talks about the ICC warrants and the crisis with Russia.
You see the problem here, to make it explicit, is that it would be bad enough if the US had just supplied the weapons. But . . . the Ukrainians can’t operate them. They need our soldiers, our intelligence, and our guidance systems.
In case you don’t see it yet, if missiles are hitting inside Russia, our soldiers are effectively doing the firing. That means our soldiers are sending missiles into Russia and potentially killing Russians.
Yes, you should be horrified. How would we react if Russia gave Mexico missiles and then helped fire them into the US, killing civilians?
So now let’s return to the question before us: which rules are we willing to live and die by? I have no beef with Russia. I don’t want the US government involved in this. I’m powerless to stop them, however.
But we have set aside the idea that civilians are off limits in wars. That is no longer a “thing.” We can excuse civilian casualties in the thousands if not hundreds of thousands because—chose one—Hamas is “hiding” or said citizens didn’t overthrow their leader or they had an “election” and that makes the citizens liable.
Now that the missiles could be turned on us here in America because of what the Biden blob is doing, is that really a rule we want to apply to us?
It’s easy to say “war is war.” But I personally am a little uneasy to be on the receiving end of that cliche, and I can’t help but think we of the “collateral damage” class might have served ourselves better by not excusing the deaths of other “collateral damage” so cavalierly when we had the chance.
Just something to ponder.
Escapism
I didn’t finish a book this week. I’ve been reading some thicker ones and a few nights the evening got away from me and I didn’t have time.
But I did get to watch the series Chapelwaite over a course of nights.
It’s not bad. The “monsters” involved kind of threw me off until I learned that the series was based on Stephen King’s short story “Jerusalem’s Lot.”
But I won’t tell you more so I don’t spoil the ending.
I remember as a kid every Thanksgiving, they would have on the Wizard of Oz, and we’d always have to watch it. Then Jurassic Park came out, and I don’t know if it was one Thanksgiving or a few in a row when the local station showed that one.
I found a certain irony in the ancestor of the birds eating humans on the day when we traditionally consume turkey.
Anyway, are there any traditions surrounding what you watch with family on Thanksgiving?
Finally, the musical Hadestown came to Billings’s Alberta Bair Theater this week, and my sister, my niece (who loves musicals), the other half, and I went.
It’s based on the story of Eurydice and Orpheus, perhaps the most depressing story in Greek mythology.
Orpheus, a demigod, falls in love with Eurydice, a nymph. Just as they are about to be married, Eurydice is bitten by a snake and dies. Orpheus, whose “god-ish” talent is music, finds his way to down to the Underworld and plays a song so beautiful that Hades strikes him a deal: he can take Eurydice back “up top” if he can lead her out of the Underworld the way he came. But she has to follow behind him, and he can’t look back until they are both completely out in the sun.
Well, it’s a tragedy, so you know what happens. Orpheus looks back and Eurydice is still in the tunnel, and she disappears to return to Hades. Orpheus never recovers and dies of a broken heart and the gods put his lyre in the sky as a memorial.
I thought the musical might give them a happy ending.
I thought wrong.
But there’s a lesson in that.
Well, here we are, my friends. I’m stepping back a bit for the next week, to take a break and clean house and plan my routes around the traffic cluster that is Twenty-Fourth Street for the next month.
I don’t partake of Black Friday shopping. I’m too lazy.
How about you? Do you fight the crowds or pull out the computer?
I’ll see you back here in December, if I don’t see you in the comments.
My guess on the disappearing headline is that some woke editor was hoping to make it vague enough that their primary audience wouldn’t read the article and also wouldn’t get upset that they didn’t defend a minority immigrant.
My guess on the disappearing headline is that some woke editor was hoping to make it vague enough that their primary audience wouldn’t read the article and also wouldn’t get upset that they didn’t defend a minority immigrant.
Breakfast of Champions!
https://photos.app.goo.gl/15c9RTjgv1mAGBEW8
Mornin', Lil. *waves*