THURSDAY, JUNE 19, 2025
So two C-Span callers now said: The murders, and the attempted murders, occurred in the middle of the night.
Technically, they took place on June 14, very early on Saturday morning. CNN's first report of this terrible event came right at the start of that morning's 9 o'clock hour, Boris Sanchez reporting:
SANCHEZ (6/14/25): We begin this hour with the breaking news out of Minnesota. A massive manhunt is underway as police are searching for the person behind the assassination of a top Democratic lawmaker and the attempted assassination of another state lawmaker.
There had been no mention of this event in that morning's 8 o'clock hour. For that transcript, you can click here.
CNN's viewers were thus apprised, for the first time, of these horrific events. For viewers of the Fox News Channel, time was possibly passing a bit more slowly up there in the mountains.
Fox & Friends Weekend had come on the air at 6 a.m. sharp, primed for its standard four-hour run. Searching on "Minnesota," we find no sign that the shootings were ever mentioned during that morning's program.
In fairness, the friends were already in D.C. that morning, broadcasting from the scene of that evening's military parade. Also, the military strikes in Israel and Iran had emerged as the day's top news event.
The "No Kings" demonstrations would take place around the country that day. On Fox & Friends Weekend, the trio of friends focused this day on the military parade and on the events from the Middle East.
That may explain why Minnesota went unmentioned on Fox until 10:32 a.m. At that time, Bryan Llenas returned from a commercial break with a bit of a Fox News Alert:
LLENAS (6/14/25): We've got some breaking news. This morning, Minnesota residents are being ordered to shelter in place after multiple shootings today. Here's what we know:
Democratic senator John Hoffman and Democratic House representative Melissa Hortman and their spouses have been shot by someone impersonating a police officer. Minnesota Governor Walz is calling this a targeted attack.
Police say the suspect is a white man with brown hair wearing black body armor over a blue shirt and blue pants. He's considered armed and dangerous.
Wow! We will keep you updated on this story as we learn more.
That was part of the 10 o'clock broadcast of Fox News Live.
As you can see, Llenas identified the victims as Democrats. As we'll eventually see, that bit of information may have tended to disappear from Fox News Channel programs last weekend as the channel kept its viewers "updated on the story."
To his own substantial credit, Llenas actually used the term "Democratic" when he noted the party affiliation of the victims. That's a standard courtesy which is widely observed in the breach as childish employees of this "cable news" channel demonstrate their tribal loyalty by persistently referring to "the Democrat [sic] Party," in their occasional news reports but also in their constant pseudo-discussions.
Also, Llenas had somehow managed to refer to Governor Walz without calling him "Tampon Tim!" As our nation and its discourse devolve, that also marks Llenas as a bit of a standout on Fox.
Llenas behaved exactly as a broadcast journalist should have. Later in that hour, Fox News Live aired the first briefing conducted by Governor Walz other Minnesota officials. Indeed, Fox News Live aired the event in its entirety.
During that briefing, Governor Walz referred to the Minnesota budget bill which had passed into law the previous week—a budget bill which would soon be part of the disinformation campaign which swept across substantial parts of Red America.
We aren't giant fans of Governor Walz ourselves, but his remarks that day were wholly appropriate—indeed, were quite instructive. So was the behavior of Fox News Live as it reported this emerging news event.
The shootings had occurred at 2 a.m., and then at 3:30 a.m., Central time. CNN reported the basic news first, at 9 a.m. Eastern—but the Fox News Channel soon followed.
From there, the Fox News Channel spent much of the day reporting events from the Middle East, but also from the D.C. parade route. We now skip ahead to something which happened the next day, early on Sunday morning, during the 7 o'clock hour of C-Span's Washington Journal.
If you're an American citizen, you currently live in a type of modern-day Babel. It's the type of Babel which takes form after the so-called "democratization of media"—after the explosion of broadcast capability which has made "every person a king" with respect to the spread of information, or possibly with respect to the spread of its various opposites.
We were surprised by some of what we heard as we watched Washington Journal that morning. At 7:33 on Sunday morning, a phone call from Queens went on the air as C-Span viewers listened.
Carmen from Queens was now on the air. Here's part of what she said:
MODERATOR (6/15/25): Let's hear from Carmen in Queens, New York, Republican line. Good morning!
CARMEN FROM QUEENS: Yes, good morning. Thank you for taking my call.
I'm calling as someone who used to be a Democrat my entire life and then switched over in 2020 to Republican. I see here that people are calling because they definitely are haters of Trump, and everything they think or do is driven by that hatred.
[...]
As far as the murders in Minnesota, I can't believe no one's even mentioning this. The person who committed the murders, the alleged murderer who they're looking for, appears to have been someone appointed into position by Governor Walz, and he is someone who had "No Kings" fliers in his car. And he apparently was a Democrat supporter.
According to this caller, the murderer was apparently "a Democrat supporter!"
This claim seemed fly in the face of widespread reporting which had emerged in the course of the previous day. That said, the caller said she couldn't believe that no one was even mentioning this state of affairs.
The murderer has been appointed into position by Walz. Also, he had "No Kings" fliers in his car.
On that basis, the caller had apparently concluded that the murderer was "a Democrat supporter," apparently of Governor Walz. At 7:46, a similar call came in:
RUDY FROM OHIO: ...As far as these people getting shot up in Minnesota, I don't hear nobody saying that the guy worked for Walz—worked for Governor Walz. All these—he was a political appointee, a Democrat political appointee.
Why doesn't these news— C-Span, NBC, they don't want to mention the fact that the guy's a Democrat, you know? It's amazing to watch this on TV unfold.
I watched TV about all say yesterday, and nobody— Once the fact got out that he's a Democrat, they don't even talk about it no more. You know, it's really sick to watch these people lie, lie, lie, you know?
[...]
MODERATOR: That was Rudy in Ohio. Bill, also in Ohio—line for Independents. Good morning, Bill!
Bill expressed a different overall view. But in the calls from Queens and Ohio, the discourse was well on its way to the astonishing pair of posts advanced by Senator Mike Lee.
The news was first reported on CNN at 9 o'clock on Saturday morning. Less than 24 hours later, this surprising claim was being advanced, with great certainty, by a pair of C-Span callers:
The murderer was a Democrat—a supporter of Governor Walz!
That's what two callers insistently said, less than 24 hours later, as other viewers listened.
Those phone calls had come from one important region of our deeply entrenched, and deeply destructive, American Babel. That Babel has largely gone unexplored by major news orgs here in our own Blue America.
There's nothing took at! Move right along! our major new orgs seem inclined to say.
Thoe callers had already become convinced that the murderer was a Democrat. Each caller expressed anger and shock at the way this fact was being suppressed by the lies of the mainstream press.
Tomorrow, with time running out for the week, we'll show you what was being said on Sunday's edition of Fox & Friends Weekend even as those calls were being aired on C-Span.
Then, we'll skip ahead to that evening's edition of The Big Weekend Show. on which we heard some of the dumbest presentations we've ever heard on an alleged news program. That two-hour "cable news" program also airs, each weekend night, on the Fox News Channel.
Our nation is in a world of hurt. We're plainly entrenched in a Babel.
A revolution has taken place. It's a revolution in values, but also in the promulgation of bogus claims and preferred tribal Storyline.
Various clown cars are involved in this sad situation. None of those vehicles match the size of the clown cars maintained by Fox.
Is there something to look at here? We'd say there probably is.
We'd recommend the saying of names—the discussion of ludicrous conduct.
Tomorrow: On Sunday morning, Johnny Joey Jones had some questions—or did he? On Sunday evening, we sat through two of the dumbest hours we've ever seen on TV.
Is there something to look at here? We'd say there possibly is!
ReplyDeleteWell, generally Democrats are the deranged ones these days. Deranged idiots, raging and raving, and generally acting crazy.
Consequently, assuming that anyone, in the news, acting crazy must be a Democrat is perfectly reasonable.
It's just commons sense, Bob.
Brilliant, trumptard. Time well spent.
DeleteThe Democrat party is defined by mental illness.
DeleteThis is true, Dems care about mental health, recognize the significant impact mental illness has on society, and wants to fund treating mental health.
DeleteThose that suffer the most from mental illness are Republicans (essentially definitionally), yet Dems are the only ones offering help. Republicans, obsessed with dominance, reject that help because solving mental illness would essentially eliminate the Republican Party.
Democrats are all retards, obviously. Just read their comments here. But mental retardation is not a mental illness. It's genetic, it's not curable.
DeleteNeither is Mao's Disease.
DeleteSome traumatic brain injury patients lose their ability to filter their words. They may frequently use offensive words or phrases that are offensive or even threatening.
DeleteSo what happened to you, @1:36?
Don't rule out Tourette's.
DeleteAre you accusing me of threatening you, 1:58? While still denying that you're retarded?
DeleteOne can threaten others, without the target of those threats feeling threatened.
DeleteIt is apparent that 2:14 feels very threatened, even though no one is threatening them, and is lashing out to cope with the discomfort of those feelings.
Even trolls deserve peace of mind, we pity poor 2:14.
From yesterday:
ReplyDeleteI agree with Ilya that the deficit during Biden's term was lower than during Trump’s first term and was a little lower than the projected deficit in the House bill. But all three of these deficits are catastrophic. Look at the DEBT. None of these budgets improved things. They all made the national debt MUCH MUCH worse.
We are mostly arguing who to blame. We should be arguing how to fix this problem.
Quit putting out incorrect right wing propaganda, including, last week, the suggestion that the killer was likely a Democrat. Blaming someone has to do with a concept foreign to Trump and his cult: accountability.
DeleteWhich golf course will Prince Orange Chickenshit be spending the weekend at, Dickhead?
Delete"Who to blame" gets at the root cause, without which, problems are unlikely to be solved.
DeleteDuh.
Who is to blame for our debt?
Primarily it is the tax cuts and ballooning of defense spending from just two presidents: Bush and Trump. The other significant entity is Reagan and his neoliberalism, propagating the largest transfer of wealth in human history, redistributing $50+ TRILLION since 1981 from the bottom 90% to the top 1% - wiping out the middle class while letting the wealthy live off low to zero taxes and government handouts.
Indeed, Trump contributed, in his first term, in only four years, about one third of our entire national debt we have been accumulating for the past 200+ years.
That is a single president in a single term, causing one third of our entire national debt.
Republicans, in reality, do not care about fiscal responsibility; they only care about dominance.
Which is why we have trolls like DiC saying moronic things.
@1:08 says our debt is primarily due to tax cuts and defense spending. This is a popular misconception. Here are some actual numbers and facts
Delete1. The annual federal deficit is in the range of $2 trillion to $2.5 trillion.
2. Federal spending is around $7 trillion per year
3. On a real, inflation-adjusted basis, federal spending doubled since when Clinton was President
4. The Trump tax reductions cost around $300 billion.
5. The Trump increase in defense spending is around $200 billion IIRC.
Bottom line:
-- the tax cuts and defense spending amount to less than a quarter of the deficit
-- If our spending were the same as Clintons, there would be no deficit. On the contrary, we would be running an enormous budget surplus.
2:06 you seem to be very confused.
DeleteIt is true that if spending AND TAXES were the same as Clinton, we would not have deficits. Everything else you claim is pure nonsense.
Federal spending as a percent of GDP has stayed in the same range since WWII, with notable peaks being Reagan, Bush, and Trump, primarily due to increases in defense and tax cuts to the wealthy, as well as bumbling on things like Trump mishandling the pandemic.
In reality, the bottom line is: Reagan, Bush, and Trump blew up the deficits and our debt with increased defense spending and enormous tax cuts for the wealthy.
Here is something I find interesting about the economy, expressed by Claudia Goldin, who won a Nobel Prize in 2023 for her work on the contribution of women to our economic prosperity. She says that women entering the workplace added 20-25% to our productivity and prosperity during the 70s going forward. This was made possible by women's lib and birth control, coupled with the increased college graduation and professional education of women (law, medicine, accounting), outpacing men by the 1980s.
DeleteWhat do you think will happen to our overall prosperity and productivity, our GDP, if women are abruptly required to retreat from the workplace and are deprived of control over the spacing of their children's births by repeal of access to contraceptives, so that they are again working only in the home?
This is akin to the impact of Trump's persecution of immigrants, which is already affecting so many fields including agriculture, hospitality, manufacturing, service and health care jobs. Removing women from the workforce will affect all of the jobs they are now performing in a range of sectors. If you remove that 20-25% contribution there will surely be a recession/depression that makes adding to the debt extremely foolish because there will be much less revenue to pay any debt down. The increased contribution by women happened gradually, but if Trump forces women to leave the workforce abruptly, I would expect a crash. And no, AI will not replace women and immigrants in the workforce, nor will robots. Robotics has already automated industries where it can be applied, so this impact would not be compensated for by technology that has already been applied to jobs.
Who does Trump think will work in assembly jobs in manufacturing when those kinds of jobs are already predominantly women's jobs?
Obviously, no one on the right is talking about this because they don't want to raise obstacles to their plan of returning women to baby-making and pushing them out of men's manly endeavors in every sphere. Or maybe this is just another Republican blind spot in their understanding of economics.
Goldin, Claudia Dale (2021). Career and Family: Women's Century-Long Journey toward Equity. Goldin is a professor of economics at Harvard University. She received her doctorate from the University of Chicago and was President of the American Economic Association in 2013 and the Economic History Association in 2000. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (if Trump still has one).
Note that housework, volunteer work, unpaid care (such as for elderly parents) and community work have never been included in the GDP from the initial development of that measure. This is work that has traditionally been performed by women and without which men could not devote themselves to their own productivity in the workplace. Because this is not measured, figures measuring economic progress and the health of our economy are incomplete and thus may not be as accurate at predicting what would happen if the debt and sources of revenue are estimated.
DeleteFor example, during covid, many families were required to home school their kids because schools were closed or inadequate. That was only temporary, but imagine what would happen in public education were moved from public to private to the home (especially for those with lower incomes). Women would be expected to help their kids but would they be able to do that if college education were concurrently reduced? What would be the impact on businesses if their source of manpower were suddenly less educated (even in basic reading and math) requiring business to take over training of workers or incurring more waste and lower productivity because of a lower quality workforce? These plans of Trump and the right are interconnected and will have much broader impacts than the right is anticipating. That makes these discussions moot to me. A great deal of damage can be done to our current prosperity without the resources to recover that we had during covid. Think covid on steroids, deliberately inflicted on us by right wing incompetence.
(2) Federal spending includes SS and Medicare, which are separately financed. Looking at the tax receipts from 2024: payroll taxes: $1.7T; individual income taxes: $2.4T; corporate taxes: $553B.
Delete(4) Wrong. Absolutely inaccurate! Given that tax cuts are offset by large medicaid and other cuts, the real impact is much, much greater.
Your bottom line is WRONG!
Bottom line:
- Corporate taxes are paltry. Income taxes on high earners are ridiculously low. SS taxes are by far the largest burden on the low and middle income earners. Our taxation scheme is seriously out of whack.
@2:48: Mostly right, but there are a couple of details you're leaving out.
DeleteYou said that federal spending as a percent of GDP has "stayed in the same range" since WW2. That's not quite right. Immediately following the war, spending plunged to just over 11 percent of GDP. From the late 60s through the 70s, spending remained between 18 and 20 percent of GDP. Spending increased during the Reagan years and eased again during Clinton's two terms in office. But near the end of Clinton's second term, spending crept up again to about 20 percent and the dot-com collapse raised spending to 24 percent early in George Bush's term, before settling back to previous levels where they remained steady through most of Trump's first term.
Then came COVID. Federal spending soared to 30 percent of GDP. The Biden administration whittled that back significantly, but estimates for the current year and for the near future put spending at about 24 percent of GDP.
Of course, it makes sense for the government to spend money in an emergency. But spending levels haven't completely returned to the steady state you described. We're projected to spend about 4 percent of GDP more than the post-war trend line. And that difference, I'm sad to say, is approximately the amount of our budget deficit.
In short, DiC is correct that inflation-adjusted spending at Clinton administration levels would produce a vast budget surplus. You are also correct when you say that spending at Clinton-levels as a percent to GDP would leave us with virtually no deficit.
However, you neglected the COVID spike in federal spending that remains, stubbornly, with us.
Check it out here:
https://taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/federal-receipt-and-outlay-summary
Trump's spending since he took office is way bigger than Biden's, despite DOGE cost-cutting efforts. It will increase more if Trump goes ahead with supporting Israel's attacks on Iran. There is little point to a budget if you don't use it to control spending. He has spent $200 billion more since his inauguration than was spent during the same period last year under Biden.
Deletehttps://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-promised-cuts-spent-200-billion-more/
Quote of the Day:
ReplyDelete"Donald Trump never met a war he wouldn’t pretend he could easily solve"
Trying to end a war and failing is pretty much the same as not trying to end the war. Either way, the war doesn't end.
DeleteI suspect that most Americans appreciate Trump's efforts to find peace, even though they were not successful.
Get help David, although your decline is likely helpless at this stage. Locking you in a padded room may be the best option at this point.
DeleteA war is when two armies fight.
DeleteI did not know Trump was unsuccessful again, like he always is in negotiations. So weak.
DeleteThat's why Trump will forever be known as our TACO president.
DeleteTrump's method:
DeleteIn 1996, the Association to Benefit Children held a Manhattan ribbon-cutting ceremony to celebrate the grand opening of a nursery school that would serve children with AIDS. According to the Post, Trump unexpectedly appeared at the event and took a seat on the dais alongside top donors such as then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former mayor David Dinkins. The seat he took was saved for Steven Fisher, a developer who had donated a hefty sum to help the charity build the nursery.
“Nobody knew he was coming,” Abigail Disney, another donor sitting on the dais, told the Post. “There’s this kind of ruckus at the door, and I don’t know what was going on, and in comes Donald Trump. [He] just gets up on the podium and sits down.” Trump had never donated to the charity.
And so it goes with Ukraine and Gaza and Iran. Trump hopes to put himself on the scene when something good happens so he can claim unearned credit for causing it. He's not "trying to end the war," David, He's just trying to be standing there when the combatants come to their senses.
Trying to end a war and failing is pretty much the same as not trying to end the war. Either way, the war doesn't end.
DeleteTrue: Biden tried to end the war but was not successful; Trump never made a serious effort before giving up entirely and calling for normalizing relations with Russia.
President Biden did everything possible to warn the world and Ukraine of the impending Russian invasion. And to let Putin know that he would pay a steep price if he did invade. When Putin went ahead and launched his invasion, Trump praised Putin and called him a genius.
DeletePutin held on and would not even talk to Biden, while working to help trump's re-election.
Go fuck yourself, Dickhead.
Trump is just a standard run of the mill Republican neocon. Trump is very pro war.
DeleteTrump does not like Ukraine's effective defense against Russia because Trump is pro Putin.
Biden knee capped Putin, exposed Putin as a paper tiger, strengthened NATO, made the world safer. (Biden should have done more to protect the Palestinians, without knowing the behind the scenes issues, it appears to be a shameful circumstance.)
Trump, Putin, and Netanyahu will join Reagan, Bush, and Hitler in the ash heap of history (and that lake of fire) designated for pernicious neoliberals and fascists.
Before 10/7, it may have been difficult to protect the Palestinians without also strengthening Hamas. That wasn't Biden's doing.
DeleteOne reason Biden was not successful in his negotiations to end the Gaza conflict was that Trump was engaging in his own diplomacy with Netanyahu to sabotage Biden's efforts.
Delete"We aren't giant fans of Governor Walz ourselves" - I know right, being a very effective and popular leader is so passe'. What is up with these old codger Democrats anyway? Also too, fuck off Bob.
ReplyDeleteWalz is opposed to sexism and oppression of LGBTQIA+, as well as for helping those in need, that is why Somerby is not a fan of Walz.
DeleteThis is how Somerby gets to claim he is liberal while taking every opportunity to knock our party's candidates. Also, there is a high likelihood that Somerby believes the smears voiced against Walz by the right and thinks it was Walz who put tampons in the boys bathroom, etc. After all, he is a 24/7 Fox News watcher, by his own admission.
DeleteI would pay more attention to Somerby's so-called media criticism if there were evidence he isn't rotting his mind with excessive right wing disinformation.
Fox News/CNN/MSNBC are not part of, nor the result of, the "democratization of media", they are corporate media outlets, and have been around for decades. CSPAN has been around since the 70s.
ReplyDeleteIn reality, it is likely that if we had had the "democratization of media" during Bush's presidency, we may have avoided the disaster of the Iraq war, which resulted in up to one million innocent deaths.
Via the "democratization of media" conflicts between the isolationist Repubs and the neocon Repubs (Trump and his admin are mostly neocons) are more significant and impactful, and exposes Trump's phony antiwar rhetoric.
Somerby whines about "every person a king", a circumstance where people generally have more agency and are not ruled by a hierarchy of elites, whining which aligns with Somerby's right wing worldview and his cynicism towards democracy.
Somerby is a poor thinker.
ReplyDeleteDuring TDH's heydey, when it was appreciated for calling out corporate media for being little more than stenographers for Republicans/neoliberals, most of Somerby's ideas were cribbed from better thinkers, people like comedian Al Franken (not excusing his alleged inappropriate behavior towards women) and economist Dean Baker, people who would be horrified by Somerby's current right wing content. (Somerby turned to nicking ideas from others, because at that time his right wing inclinations would not serve his ambitions.)
To sense the promise of having some modicum of influence on public discourse and then having it all go away, must engender some anger and bitterness; likely not dissimilar from how Trump inherited about $400 million from his racist father and squandered it all, losing all of it and and having to file bankruptcy at least 6 times.
Republicans are weak and petty, angry and bitter, tragically wounded and traumatized, taking out their pain on others, attacking the oppressed and those in need in order to sooth their emotional discomfort.
When Somerby's suite-mate Al Gore ran for the presidency, their mutual friend Tommy Lee Jones helped Gore's campaign by introducing Gore and appearing on stage with him at his rallies. Somerby was either not invited or chose not to participate in Gore's campaign, despite being a stand-up comedian and thus a performer too. Given Somerby's ongoing outrage about the way the media talked about Gore, I was surprised that Somerby never provided more direct support to his campaign. But after years of seeing Somerby's inability to commit, to ideas or to people or to a party, I understand that he perhaps couldn't bring himself to declare for Gore in public. His writing here never constituted an endorsement of Gore, just a complaint against the press.
DeleteIt may be that Somerby has never been much of a liberal (perhaps in rebellion against his Boston Irish mother) and that he was right wing himself back when he roomed with Southerners (expecting them to be conservative) and tried to change his identity to a Baltimore good ole boy. Maryland is considered a Southern state trying to be Northern, so it is just right for someone like Somerby who wants to be neither fish nor fowl.
I'm old enough to remember Somerby attacking the what little criticism there was in the media and in discourse of Bush's phony justifications for going to war with Iraq.
Delete2:20 and 2:39 are spot on.
"It may be that Somerby has never been much of a liberal (perhaps in rebellion against his Boston Irish mother)"
DeleteThe stupid! It burns!
Namecalling is easy. What is your evidence (beyond his own assertion) that Somerby is any kind of liberal?
DeleteWhen, without evidence, you disparage someone's relationship with their mother, you're just not worth talking to.
DeleteYou don't seem to understand that everything Somerby has written here is evidence. Writers reveal unintended things about themselves when they write.
DeleteSomerby gave a one-man show after his mother's death, exploring his troubled relationship with her:
"When he began shaping the show, Somerby drew on routines long ensconced in his repertoire. But World became something entirely different after the November 1993 death of his mother, with whom he had a troubled relationship. The comedian inherited not only his share of the estate but a trove of family photographs that triggered a cascade of memories, both pleasant and harsh. It occurred to Somerby that the emotional notes he was feeling might resonate with audiences, so he experimented with them.
Projected onto a screen, Somerby’s snapshots became breathtaking documents: the mother who once disowned him, in the bloom of young womanhood; the father he barely remembered, standing tall as a man of power and substance; the sister who always seemed far ahead of him, revealed for the little girl she had been. It was as if he were seeing these people and his childhood for the first time. And as he thought about what these pictures said and what he remembered, he found his theme. Now, when the lights go down in a club and Somerby guides an audience through his story, the laughter is tinged with a shock of recognition arising as much from something sad and true as from something funny."
https://washingtoncitypaper.com/article/293770/laugh-trick/
There are other reviews and interviews with Somerby readily available via the internet. There are also things Somerby has said about his own college years and his life in his own archives. There is a video of Somerby being interviewed behind the scenes before a performance. He introduces every male comic who passes by during that interview but pointedly ignores the female comic in the room, not giving her the same exposure as the men. That shows a certain attitude toward her, even if Somerby was unaware of revealing anything.
I've presented evidence many times here, especially when I first advance an idea. You haven't.
Dogface, be a man and apologize to @4:12.
DeleteDG, you forgot to refer to Somerby's mom as "his sainted mother." This reminds me of the time when the worst thing you could do to affront a man was to insult his mother. But then black culture invented the "yo mama" playing the dozens in which men vie to find the cleverest insult:
Deletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22Yo_mama%22_joke
Tucker Carlson would be impressed by how insulted you are about insults to someone else's mother. No ball tanning needed by you.
Somerby's mother supposedly disinherited him because he refused to go to Harvard, but then the draft came along and he had a motive to go after all. NOTE to DG: Somerby himself said in this blog that he went to college and became an inner-city teacher to avoid the Vietnam draft.
Maybe DG is Bob in thin disguise?
DeleteOther alternatives:
""Dogface George" is a nickname given to at least two different individuals, both known for their bravery or unique characteristics. One is a WWII veteran, Sgt. George Moje Jr., who was nicknamed "Dogface Soldier" and laid to rest after 58 years. The other is a Jack Russell Terrier named George who was known for his bravery in saving children from a dog attack in New Zealand according to Find a Grave. Additionally, there's a house in Bodie, California, known as "Dog-faced George House".
There is a Bodie State Park in Bridgeport CA, in Mono County. Somerby used to live in that approximate area and may have visited that place and found the name Dogface George charming. Anything is possible.
Run away Dogface, run run run.
Delete"We now skip ahead to something which happened the next day, early on Sunday morning..."
ReplyDeleteWhy does Somerby entirely ignore the No-Kings march coverage all day Saturday that competed with coverage of the manhunt on MSNBC and was never mentioned by Fox News except to show police in groups, armed and poised to deal with the expected violence Fox kept mentioning over and over? Somerby has still not discussed the marches at all. Why? They are the most positive indicator that we are not at the mercy of fascists yet and that change can be accomplished if We the People join forces.
Is this part of Somerby's inherent negativity, that he would never want to focus on events that give us hope and optimism about the future and our ability to fight back? Or is the effectiveness of the marches something that Somerby in his conservatism doesn't want to advance or help in any way, because it works against his desire to support the right here at his blog (and in real life?). Hard to know since Somerby is always so coy about his own motives and never listens to feedback from his readers -- although he is johnny-on-the-spot to hear the nonsense spewed by CSPAN callers.
"It's the type of Babel which takes form after the so-called "democratization of media"—after the explosion of broadcast capability which has made "every person a king" with respect to the spread of information, or possibly with respect to the spread of its various opposites."
ReplyDeleteSomerby is a very passive consumer of information himself. Perhaps he thinks everyone is that way, and always has been, but now things have changed so that people can propagate as well as consume information. But is it true that people in the golden age that Somerby refers to (when Cronkite was a gatekeeper) didn't spread misinformation and disinformation and total nonsense via channels beyond the limited channels on TV?
In those days, I recall many fringe publications conveying alternative facts and ideas that people could read and discuss. I remember never being allowed to read The Watchtower or Muhammed Speaks or John Birch Society publications or books such as None Dare Call It Treason. The National Enquirer was bad back then (as it was when it discussed Hillary's Alien Baby) and we were forbidden to read it, except among the other tabloids at the market checkout counter. Aimee Semple MacPherson was on one of the Independent Channels on my TV. There was Paul Harvey as a balance to This I Believe, and Joe Pine on radio, who out-Limbaughed Limbaugh and the emerging shock jocks. This was in Los Angeles. The radio personalities on rural radio were more colorful, extreme and undereducated, especially the religious voices, just as they remain in many areas of the country.
These were divergent press voices and the people who read them transmitted their information across the backyard fence, at coffee in the morning, in letters to relatives, at family dinners, and they wrote letters to the editors of local newspapers, which were plentiful and closely read by everyone.
In those days, Los Angeles had several major newspapers (dailies) and weeklies. With the advent of internet and the difficulty finding paid subscribers, print newspapers died out, were merged with each other or went bankrupt.
Somerby seems to recognize the widespread use of social media but he fails to discuss the die-off of other sources of information beyond the web. The number of people participating has not changed, but the medium has. But people only have so much time, they have kept the same interests and willingness to read, but are distributing their attention differently across the new offerings.
Somerby seems to have correctly noticed that things have changed, but he doesn't seem to know how and what it means. He just thinks it is all bad, but that is too simplistic a view to be correct. His tendency to invent his own terms for things, independent of the way other people use such terms, is confusing and annoying. Democratization of information is an example of just one of his misuses of meanings. His idea that a revolution has taken place is bizarre. Revolutions are sudden but this change in sources of knowledge has taken a few decades to accomplish, growing along with the internet and access to computer processors in the home and on phones. Slower change that maintains existing sources but modifies them (as has actually occurred, not a replacement of newspapers or gossip rags or readers) is called evolution. But "revolution" is a scare word, hyperbole, histrionic.
Somerby presents no actual case showing that people are less well informed than in the old days, that their misinformation is more damaging to any of us, that any values have changed (as opposed to becoming more visible to Somerby himself in his viewing choices). And he has certainly not establish cause and effect between his favorite bad guys (cable news) and the stupidity of a Mike Lee.
DeleteRobert A. Heinlein wrote a short story in which he described the "silly season," a time when the TN legislature legally established the value of pi at 3.14 exactly because irrational numbers are annoying. But his story (with other examples of odd behavior) was written in the 1950s. So people were making laws to govern the ungovernable and implement their own biases even back in those golden days. The difference now is that Somerby is more aware of it, because it is easier to find on the internet. That doesn't mean behavior or the amount of ignorance or the meanness of people, their cruelty and sins, have worsened just because they are more salient to Somerby when he looks around. Is that a revolution? Hardly!
Is there an actual liberal in the USA who wasn't aware of the No-Kings marches nationwide? Somerby has barely mentioned those marches or their press treatment. Would the marches have been possible on this scale without the internet publicizing them and connecting individuals with organizers and information about how to participate? Would people have wanted to participate without the press continuously informing their readers about the perfidies of the right, the threat to our democracy, the abuses of power and illegalities committed? Is it perhaps a good thing to have a press that is readily accessible so that the people can know what is happening and take action to correct these wrongs?
ReplyDeleteThere is a lot Somerby might be discussing that falls within his defined topic-space, yet has been ignored by this supposed liberal. Is Somerby afraid of Trump? Either that, or he is more demented Biden (who I am sure knows there were marches on Saturday and that the most important press activity was NOT on Sunday).
How many times now has Somerby repeated that the murderer was a Democrat, without refutation? I don't see any explanation that the right made up that supposed fact or any statement of the actual facts now known, that the shooter was a Republican and a supporter of Trump (who voted in the last MN Republican primary according to voting records) and that the guy left a manifesto (not yet published) listing a bunch more Democrats, including several in other states (debunking the idea that it was MN legislature votes that set him off).
ReplyDeleteIf you repeat the talking points of the right without supplying fact-check info, you are advancing those talking points and doing the right's job for it. It is relevant to this discussion to say that the murderer was not a Democrat or any kind of lefty. Would it be so difficult for Somerby to throw in a sentence or two telling the truth whenever he features a right wing bit of misinformation in a prominent place (such as the main headline of his essay)?