12th September 2024
Associated Press.
More women chose to have their tubes tied after Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, a new study shows, and the biggest increases were in states that ban abortion.
A research letter published Wednesday in JAMA examined insurance claims data from 2021 and 2022 for around 4.8 million women who got tubal ligations, which are surgeries to close the fallopian tubes so the patient can no longer get pregnant. The data came from 36 states and Washington, D.C., and researchers categorized these places as “banned,” “limited” or “protected,” based on their abortion policies.
In the 18 months before the Dobbs decision in late June 2022, tubal ligations remained stable in all three groups of states. But in the latter half of 2022, the procedure rose in all three groups. Researchers also looked at sustained change in the numbers over time, finding that tubal ligations rose by 3% each month in banned states.
Good. Excising their defective genes from the gene pool is a welcome development. Think of it as evolution in action.
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11th September 2024
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Clear partisan lines can be seen here, too. Although certain elements of the debate do suggest that, like Harris, Muir and Davis were out for Trump.
The moderators ‘fact-checked’ and ‘corrected’ the former president four times—on issues as contentious as immigration and abortion. They chose not to correct a single statement by Harris.
No surprises here. The Narrative Media are in the tank for Harris and everybody knows it. The only question is why Trump would put up with this horseshit. Well, if he loses, he’s only got himself to blame.
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9th September 2024
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On today’s Morning Joe, a furious Mika Brzezinski accused the so-called “mainstream” media of “sanewashing” Trump — never confronting him with his alleged affronts to democracy as described by Dick Cheney in his statement explaining why he, like his daughter Liz, will be voting for Kamala Harris.
You knew it was going to be a tough morning for Mika and Joe Scarborough, having to deal with the new New York Times/Siena poll showing Trump with a one-percent lead among likely voters. Scarborough dismissed NYT/Siena polls as regularly being an “outlier.” In fact, Five Thirty Eight has rated it the #1 poll!
Any look at the 2020 polls demonstrates most of them were “outliers” compared to the actual vote totals.
They actually pay these people.
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8th September 2024
There’s a reason that Doonesbury is located on the editorial pages.
Remember the days when Nixon was The New Hitler? Ah, the memories….
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5th September 2024
The New Yorker.
There is no such thing as a ‘magazine for mercenaries’, any more than there is a ‘magazine for drug cartels’ or a ‘magazine for car repos’–and if there were, you wouldn’t know about it.
In the early nineteen-eighties, Susan Katz Keating was living in California, working as a freelance journalist with a side gig waiting tables. On a newsstand, she came across Soldier of Fortune, a monthly magazine infamous for its gonzo war reporting and its gun-for-hire classified ads. “I wanted to write about mercenaries,” she recalled recently. So she placed an advertisement in the publication. “You paid by the word, and I was quite young and didn’t have any money. The ad said, ‘Are you a mercenary? Contact S. Katz.’ And then I gave my home address.”
Keating was flooded with letters. A handful of seemingly professional warrior types arrived at her door unannounced. “I also got some government agents showing up, because they thought that I was trying to raise a mercenary army,” Keating said.
In 1986, Keating began contributing to Soldier of Fortune, the rare woman to do so. Two years ago, she achieved a longtime dream by purchasing the magazine from its founder, the retired lieutenant colonel Robert K. Brown, for an undisclosed sum. She now operates as its publisher and editor-in-chief.
Another Narrative Media down-the-alimentary-canal-with-gun-and-camera look at ‘flyover country’; popular zoology for the Coastal Crust. Read it for the entertainment, but don’t take it too seriously.
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3rd September 2024
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31st August 2024
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In a public hearing exclusively recorded and streamed by NewsBusters, on Friday, CNN defended their use of Taliban Sharia law in the courtroom. CNN’s lead counsel Deanna Shullman (of Shullman Fugate PLLC) repeatedly argued that the network was correct to suggest Plaintiff and Navy veteran Zachary Young took part in an illegal “black market” because he was getting women out of Afghanistan “without permission of the Taliban;” an argument that got some push back from Judge Scott Henry.
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30th August 2024
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How many times have you heard the mainstream media tell you that the economy is doing just great in recent months? Personally, I have seen the word “booming” used over and over again to describe the economy, and it makes me sick. The level of gaslighting that we are witnessing right now is off the charts. Millions of Americans are sleeping in their vehicles, thousands of businesses are failing all over the nation, and most of the country now believes that the American Dream is no longer attainable.
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29th August 2024
Trump shares social posts with QAnon phrases, calls for jailing lawmakers and special counsel (Michelle L. Price/Los Angeles Times) I give up–what are ‘QAnon phrases’? (Remember: If you hear the ‘dog-whistle’, you’re the dog.)
Trump Goes Full Fascist in Truth Social Posting Spree (Rolling Stone)
How to give thousands to Trump without giving his campaign a cent (Philip Bump/Washington Post)
Harris Camp Trolls Trump with Ad Targeting Mar-a-Lago (Marc A. Caputo/The Bulwark)
Vance repeats a bogus Trump claim on ‘factories’ debunked years ago (Glenn Kessler/Washington Post)
Trump Reposts Crude Sexual Remark About Harris on Truth Social (Michael Gold/New York Times)
Sulky CNN Can’t Take Zuck’s Biden-Censorship Mea Culpa: ‘Election-Season Gift’ to GOP
Trump Images at Grave Dismay Family of Green Beret Buried at Arlington (New York Times)
Trump Dishonors Fallen Soldiers Again (Charles Sykes/The Atlantic) Yeah, laying a wreath–totally disrespectful.
How a Trump visit sparked turmoil at America’s most sacred cemetery (Washington Post)
CBS, NBC Outraged Trump Dared Visit Arlington, Unlike Biden-Harris
‘Furious’: Veterans slam Trump team’s altercation at Arlington National Cemetery (USA Today)
CNN’s Kasie Hunt Airs MORE ‘Resurfaced’ Dem Clips of Vance ‘Childless’ Leftist Talk
Trump Goes on Crazed, Violent Rant Calling for Death of His Enemies (Hafiz Rashid/New Republic)
Randi Weingarten, Jewish teachers union boss, calls J.D. Vance ‘gross’ for saying she ‘doesn’t have a single child’
MSNBC Host Puts Trump Campaign Adviser ‘On Notice’ For Pushing ‘False Quote’ On Air (Ben Blanchet/HuffPost) I’ll bet he’s worried.
Abba demands Trump campaign stop using their music at rallies (Miranda Bryant/The Guardian) “They may have won all the battles/But we had all the good songs!” — Tom Lerer
What the performative patriotism of Donald Trump reveals about his character (Jos Joseph/The Hill)
EXCLUSIVE: Gold Star Families Had Trouble Getting Trump Into Arlington Until House Speaker Intervened (Henry Rodgers/The Daily Caller)
Speaker Mike Johnson Helped Trump Break The Law (Jason Easley/PoliticusUSA)
Someone Take This Man’s Phone (William Kristol/The Bulwark) Kristol reveals his Inner Fascist.
CNN Host Kasie Hunt Slams Trump Words on Zuckerberg, Trump Aide Responds with MRC Poll
Playbook: 3 Trump transition issues that aren’t Project 2025 (Politico)
Exec at Trump Media Jumped the Line for U.S. Visa After Company Lobbied GOP Lawmaker (ProPublica)
Crockett on Arlington incident: MAGA is not ‘party of law and order’ (Tara Suter/The Hill)
24 hours of Trump: QAnon tributes, crude attacks and hawking pieces of his suit (Hannah Knowles/Washington Post)
Utah Gov. Cox faces scrutiny for using military cemetery photo with Trump in campaign email (Hannah Schoenbaum/Associated Press) Oh no! Trump cooties!
Trump aide ‘abruptly pushed aside’ an Arlington National Cemetery employee during commemoration, official says (NBC News)
Trump Threatens to Jail Mark Zuckerberg for Life (Nikki McCann Ramirez/Rolling Stone)
Trump campaign strategy pivots to praying he wins September debate (Hugo Lowell/The Guardian)
Republicans for Harris: GOP gets ready to rescue MAGA from Trump (Brian Karem/Salon) MAGA is the New Nigger.
PolitiFact Rules Vance Was ‘False’ in Mocking Walz’s Weird ‘Trans Refuge’ Law
ABC Joins Smearing of Trump Over Arlington, Livid With Vance’s ‘Charged Language’
Trump’s Arlington Cemetery Campaign Event (Josh Marshall/Talking Points Memo)
ABC Treats Kamala’s 21-Year Old Misstatement about Prosecutions as News but Not Trump’s Daily Lies about His Own Crimes (emptywheel)
Fallout from Trump’s Arlington National Cemetery visit continues after campaign video (NPR)
Johnson pulled strings to get Trump into Arlington – and now the scandal is spreading (David Badash/Raw Story) In the Narrative Media, anyway.
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Today in Trump Derangement Syndrome
29th August 2024
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The assembled cast of MSNBC’s Morning Joe joined former Obama State Department official and former managing editor of Time magazine, Richard Stengel, on Thursday in hailing Vice President Kamala Harris for supposedly taking back the mantle of American exceptionalism from Republicans.
The basis for the segment was an article Stengel wrote for Time where he claimed that Harris’s DNC acceptance speech was “the most full-throated and sincere expression of American exceptionalism since the presidency of George W. Bush, and the most direct and unambiguous expression of that idea by a Democratic presidential candidate since John F. Kennedy.”
…
In proof that the thesis may need some revisions, elsewhere in the segment, Stengel would dance around counterexamples, such as the anti-American, anti-Israel demonstrators.
As it was, after Stengel claimed the Iraq War alienated many Democrats from the idea of American exceptionalism, he turned his attention to Donald Trump, “I mean, the other thing, the flip side, the fact that Republicans are embracing American exceptionalism, when their own candidate has basically derogated the term when he said the American dream is dead and has run as a declinist, as political scientists call him, someone who thinks America is in decline.”
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29th August 2024
NBC News.
If it’s ‘conservative’ it’s got to be bad.
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28th August 2024
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Gee, imagine that. Funny how all of these ‘conspiracy theories’ turn out to be true.
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28th August 2024
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The word capitalism has no stable definition and should probably be permanently retired. That won’t happen, however, because too many people are invested in its use and abuse.
Indeed. The widespread use of ‘capitalism’ is based on Marx’s discussion of ‘the capitalist means of production’ in the beginning of Das Kapital, but really boils down to ‘buying machines run by workers in order to produce stuff’–the most accurate term for which is industrialism, because it’s used in all modern forms of production (including those used by socialists and communists).
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27th August 2024
Bolts.
The Nebraska Voting Rights Restoration Coalition was ready for July 19. A new state law, Legislative Bill 20, would take effect that day, instantly granting voting rights to some 7,000 people with past felony convictions. Because the law requires state officials to do very little to notify people of their newfound eligibility, let alone to automatically register them, the work of contacting and assisting those affected would largely fall to community groups.
And so the coalition reserved ad space on print, digital, and radio platforms. It organized registration drives in Omaha and Lincoln, each to be held in the first days of the law’s enactment. Those events were to kick off a statewide campaign that would touch many more towns and cities, and go through late October, when Nebraska cuts off new voter registration ahead of the general election.
But the ads never ran. No one was registered at the events in Lincoln and Omaha. More than a month after its planned launch, the campaign has yet to begin.
That’s because two Republican elected officials in Nebraska—Attorney General Mike Hilgers and Secretary of State Bob Evnen—halted implementation of the new law, shutting down new registrations for people with past felonies and throwing into question the voting rights of tens of thousands of other Nebraskans who, until last month, were legally, unambiguously eligible to vote.
Vote Democrat, that is.
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media, You can't make this stuff up. | Comments Off on Nebraska Reverts to 19th-Century Voting Restrictions, Clouding Rights for Thousands
27th August 2024
Read it.
Hey, it’s not as if they had anything better to do with their time.
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25th August 2024
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22nd August 2024
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22nd August 2024
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Russia’s FSB security service said Thursday it had opened a criminal case against a journalist working for CNN who it said had illegally crossed the Russian border to film a report inside the Kursk region following a Ukrainian cross-border incursion.
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21st August 2024
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20th August 2024
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The corpses are stacking up! Oh, wait a minute….
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18th August 2024
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At critical moments over the past 25 years, the New York Times has aided the interests of a power faction within the Chinese Communist Party responsible for atrocities against practitioners of the spiritual discipline Falun Gong.
On top of implicating itself ethically, the paper has also, as a result, distorted its China coverage and misled its readers, as revealed by an analysis of The New York Times’ China coverage as well as interviews with half a dozen experts on Chinese Communist Party (CCP) politics and geopolitics.
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17th August 2024
Off-Guardian.
That’s how it is now, the world we are allowed to see is largely fake, and as technology masters the art of deception, it will only get worse.
Of course, we can blame a lot of things for this, first on that list is AI. But now not just AI art, but AI video, AI news, AI novels, AI everything. We can also obviously blame marketing and advertising for much of this fakery that hits us in the face every day.
Commercial marketing has always done that, certainly since the days of Bernays, the psychological wizard-mind of brainwashing and propaganda. A relative of Sigmund Freud no less.
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Breaking News
16th August 2024
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This week, alleged comedian Stephen Colbert had on CNN’s Kaitlan Collins to discuss the 2024 presidential election. In the middle of the interview, Colbert began to ask Collins a question, in all sincerity: “I know you guys are objective over (at CNN), you just report the news as it is.” Colbert, presumably, expected his audience — all Kamala Harris fans, since Colbert is the most left-leaning host on late night television — to nod along. Instead, they laughed.
They laughed because everyone in America knows, at this point, that the media have become stenographers for the Democratic Party.
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15th August 2024
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15th August 2024
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My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.
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13th August 2024
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12th August 2024
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11th August 2024
Newsbusters.
On Friday morning, MSNBC’s Jose Diaz Balart devoted a segment to complaining about both the Joe Biden and Donald Trump administrations slowing down the entry of illegal immigrants as the liberal host fretted that limiting immigrant entry makes it take longer for LGBT asylum seekers to enter the country.
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9th August 2024
Public Notice.
Elon Musk is busy. No, not because he’s attending to any of his multibillion-dollar companies.
For Tesla and SpaceX and Starlink, he’s full of wild promises with very little actual progress. But what Musk is really spending time on these days is attacking the core foundations of American democracy on multiple fronts.
There’s his thus-far successful effort to get rid of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). There’s his political action committee, America PAC, which pretends to help register people to vote but is just hoovering up voter data to give to the Trump campaign. And there’s his lawsuit seeking to force companies to advertise on X, despite the fact advertisers generally do not want their ads running next to the Nazi content X is full of now.
All of these efforts have the potential to succeed because the federal courts are broken, and the administrative state is dying a slow and painful death.
So–what exactly are these ‘core foundations of American democracy’? Apparently they include the NLRB, a keystone of centralized governmental intrusion into business; hatred of Donald Trump; hatred of the ‘Nazi content’ on X (the social media platform formerly known as Twitter); the (pre-Trump) federal courts; and the administrative state.
Good to know.
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9th August 2024
Huffington Post.
Alabama Republican congressional candidate Caroleene Dobson, who has been vocal about her support of school choice on the campaign trail, graduated from a private, so-called “segregation academy,” in 2005.
Ah. ‘So-called”. I guess that makes it true.
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8th August 2024
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PBS “special correspondent” Simona Foltyn, who covers the Middle East, appeared on Tuesday’s edition of the taxpayer-funded PBS News Hour to make the case for the anti-Jewish terrorist group Hamas, after the assassination of Hamas terrorist chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran.
Anchor Amna Nawaz introduced the report from Lebanon by making the familiar fatalist argument that there’s no point in killing Hamas leaders because it only strengthens the Palestinian populace against Israel.
Nawaz explained that Foltyn (who has a virulently anti-Israel X feed) had gained “rare access” to factions of “the militant group” Hamas within Lebanon for her report. You gain access by sounding like a propagandist.
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7th August 2024
UnHerd.
When Richard Nixon resigned as president 50 years ago, the country witnessed the birth of a monster. I am not talking about some sinister influence he exerted after his fall. I am talking about the media.
Having gratifyingly removed a leader who had become dangerous and unstable, the media, like a grizzly bear that kills its first human and will only eat human flesh from then on, shifted its purpose from investigate, report and expose, to search and destroy. In the process, it has normalised disaster thinking about American life, from the most ordinary experiences — love and work — to the highest echelons of human activity. If America is on the verge of political calamity, it is because for the past five decades, the media has kept the country on the edge of its seat expecting no less.
Unable to come up with another Watergate, the media tried to force every story it could into the Watergate template. Someone big had to be exposed as doing something really bad, with the result that they had to be made to fall exceptionally hard. There was some precious, honest, public-spirited journalistic work as a result. But the media, as befit its proud new image as heroic saviour of democracy, gradually robbed democracy of its vital essence: the freedom to live life privately, secretly, incalculably. (When Socrates said that “the unexamined life is not worth living”, he did not have in mind 24/7 cable news.)
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7th August 2024
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The concept of hate has proved very useful to the Cultural Marxist project to overturn conventional society and its norms.
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6th August 2024
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6th August 2024
Newsbusters.
Comedy Central’s weekly temp host of The Daily Show, Michael Kosta, reacted to the outrage that Algerian boxer Imane Khelif is allowed to compete in the women’s Olympic boxing tournament on Monday by spreading fake news about pro-life laws in America in an attempt to argue conservatives are being hypocritical. He also conveniently never said the words “failed gender test.”
For the International Olympic Committee, Khelif is a woman because her passport identifies her as such, and that is good enough for Kosta, “Because, again, this female boxer is female. Can we stop this before America turns it into a presidential campaign issue?”
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6th August 2024
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The BBC described a riot in Birmingham during which a pub was besieged, innocent people violently attacked and news reporters harassed and followed as “largely peaceful,” while failing to identify the people behind it.
Sound familiar?
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