THURSDAY, APRIL 23, 2026
"Cable news" bullroar mocked: We transported you to the set of The Five in Tuesday afternoon's post. Today, we take you to that gong-show program again, in part for some comic relief.
We take you to yesterday's second segment, in which the gang pretended to discuss the state of Virginia's redistricting vote. In theory, ten congressional districts in the state will favor Democrats if the new House map survives court review. Only one district will favor Republicans under the new (and temporary) configuration.
Needless to say, The Gang of Four wanted to savage the Dems for engaging in such a practice—but how well were Red American viewers informed about the convoluted chronology of this year's highly unusual mid-census redistricting process?
Were such viewers suitably informed about the long and winding road which started in Texas, then moved on to California and to other states? As he threw to liberal co-host Jessica Tarlov, this is the way resident "silly boy" Jesse Watters filled in the background history:
WATTERS (4/22/26): All right, so Jessica, you guys have been gerrymandering for quite some time. You're very good at it. Trump tried his hand at it, did it in Texas, got some good results. [Chuckling] And then you guys have just been running the table. Can you stop! Can you slow down?
The silly fellow made it sound like a tsunami of gerrymandering had been underway "for quite some time," and that President Trump then decided to give it a try in the Lone Star State.
Redistricting efforts this year in other Republican states went unmentioned by Watters. To our ear, this was a rather modest attempt to present the background to Virginia's aggressive effort.
At this point, a question comes to mind. We wonder if viewers of programs like The Five have ever heard a reasonably full-blooded account of this year's highly unusual mid-census redistricting efforts.
As someone who suffers through The Five on a regular basis, we'll guess that the answer could possibly be no. Agitprop rules the day on The Five, information much less so.
At any rate, that's where the comic relief entered the scene! Tarlov responded with this:
TARLOV (continuing directly): No! All gas, no brakes!
So the top ten gerrymandered states in the country, only two of them are Democratically controlled, by the way. So this isn’t really all about how we’re the evil gerrymandering force.
But you are correct in your setup, which I think has never happened in recorded history, at least of me being on The Five, that you guys were the ones who started it.
The lady continued from there. But she had mocked Watters' fleeting reference to President Trump's demand that Texas reconfigure its House districts, saying it was the only time in her long history on The Five in which Watters presented a setup which was at least partially accurate.
Tarlov continued from there. You can see the videotape of her fuller statement by clicking to this report by Mediaite.
Tarlov appears in the liberal chair on this imitation of a news show roughly two days per week. Within the past month or so, we've gotten the impression that producers may have coached her to fight back a bit more, though that may not be the case.
Yesterday, Tarlov openly mocked the ridiculous way this ridiculous "cable news" program is run. She said Watters' overview was an historical first, in that it was at least partially accurate!
For the record, The Five is our nation's most watched "cable news" program. No large modern nation can expect to prosper by proceeding in the clownish, tribalized way performed each day on The Five.
Karoline Leavitt announced a false story (from X) that the mainstream media reprinted without checking. Tiedrich describes it today:
ReplyDelete"“only President Trump could saves the lives of these eight beautiful Iranian women.”
what the fuck is Karoline Lie-vitt blithering about?
never before in the entire history of the multiverse has the question ‘are these eight beautiful Iranian women in the room with us right now’ been a more appropriate thing to ask — because in fact, these eight women have never been in the room with anyone, ever. they don’t exist.
they’re the figment of the imagination of some janky plagiarism bot, and Donny swallowed it — hook, line and sinker — like the swamp-brained nincompoop he is.
“To the Iranian leaders, who will soon be in negotiations with my representatives: I would greatly appreciate the release of these women. I am sure that they will respect the fact that you did so. Please do them no harm! Would be a great start to our negotiations!!! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP”
this is so shittacularly stupid, it hurts my head to even type this out.
some complete rando on the internet had an AI gin up a bunch of fake images of nonexistent women he claimed were about to be executed by Iran’s regime. he then posted them to Elon’s Nazi Bar and Child Porn Emporium, where they came to the attention of our Moron-in-Chief, who decided on the spot to use them as a start to the next round of peace negotiations.
David S. Bernstein @dbernstein.bsky.social
President urges Iran to start peace negotiations by releasing non-existent, AI-generated women some rando posted about on X
but wait — it gets stupider. the next day, out of the clear blue, Donny proudly proclaimed that he had saved the lives of these eight imaginary women.
“Very good news! I have just been informed that the eight women protestors who were going to be executed tonight in Iran will no longer be killed. Four will be released immediately, and four will be sentenced to one month in prison. I very much appreciate that Iran, and its leaders, respected my request, as President of the United States, and terminated the planned execution. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”
where is Donny getting his information from? because — and I cannot stress this enough — THESE WOMEN DON’T EXIST.
it’s so monumentally stupid that even Iran ended up mocking Donny, right to his big, dumb pumpkin face.
[Tweet from Iran embassy saying: Hurray! Trump saved 8 AI-generated people.
think about how clownfuckingly insane this is. Dear Leader was fooled by fake images he saw online, and then farted out an entire narrative wherein he successfully appealed for these bogus women’s lives to be spared.
it’s as if Donny were a child playing with Barbie dolls, inventing stories for them.
‘you get released immediately — but you’ve been a bad girl, and you have to spend a month in jail.’
imagine that Joe Biden’s autopen had done anything like this when he was in office. the press would have had a fucking field day. the New York Times would have run seven hundred overheated editorials about Joe needed to resign immediately, for the good of the country.
but because we live in the shittiest possible timeline, the worthless scribblers of the corporate-controlled press took Donny’s fever-swamp hallucination as fact, and printed it verbatim."
[Series of press citations repeating Trump's fake news.]
--------------------------
In what universe is this presidential behavior? Why are we tolerating this? It is time for Trump to be removed from office.
“Hello, Mr. President? I am calling on a secured line from the Deep State Security team. There’s been a breach in the Nuclear ICBM codes, and we need to help you to reset them. To reset them, first I need you to pull up those codes and we will plug them in to the computer to reset the codes. No problem? Great, let’s get started.”
DeleteTrump's behavior is bad enough without the adults in the room pretending he isn't a moron. Again, from Tiedrich:
ReplyDelete"Elizabeth Warren: “[Donny] claims that TrumpRX has reduced prices by as much as 600%”
Bobby Brainworms Jr: “President Trump has a different way of calculating— there are two ways of calculating percentages. if you have a $600 drug and you reduce it to $10, that’s a 600% reduction.”
pro tip: claiming you can reduce the price of something by 600% isn’t ‘having a different way of calculating’ — it’s being a fucking moron. you can’t reduce the price of anything by more than 100%.
you know this, and I know this. anyone with half a brain know this — but because Dear Leader said it, and Elizabeth Warren called him out for it, Bobby Brainworms has no choice but to gather up the few remaining shreds of his self respect, drag them out back to the gravel pit, whisper a few pathetic words of comfort, and shoot them straight in the face.
once again, Donny utters something moronic, and his flunkies scramble to explain that no, Donny’s actually some kind of super-genius, and we’re the morons who don’t understand that there are actually two kinds of math — your stupid kind, and the Emperor’s new kind.
now, because I’m a responsible journalist and everything, I picked up my phone and fired up its calculator app.
it was a wild experience. I actually saw numbers dancing in front of my head, just like in the gif.
I can now break the news that if you lower the price of something from $600 to $10, that’s a reduction of 98.3%.
you’re welcome, America.
now here’s are some numbers I’d like to see Donny explain his way out of. tell me, is a 33% approval rating bad?"
----------------------
Somerby pretends to be a media critic today, while Tiedrich does the real thing. He is absolutely correct that the media should have calculated the actual percentage and informed the public of the president's ridiculous statement AND RFK Jr's attempt to cover for him. It is true that most people don't like numbers and find them confusing, but that is no excuse for the press to play along like this.
Trump's abuse of statistics is particularly annoying to me, given my background. The practice may fairly be called "dishonest", but it's not at all stupid. Trump is a huckster using big numbers to sell his performance. He isn't answering a question on an actuarial exam.
DeleteIt is stupid to be dishonest in such an obvious manner.
DeleteTrump may not be answering a question on an actuarial exam but that doesn't mean he's not stupid.
DeletePart of Trump's enduring fascination is trying to figure out where the dishonesty leaves off and the stupidity begins.
Probably stupidist is electing a clown with over 40,000 lies to his credit, and expecting a war staged by him and his clown car of imbeciles to go well. It’s one thing to lie about fucking a pornstar or a 13 year old. It’s another to lie when sending the 82nd airborne into harms way. The Iranians aren’t nearly as tolerant of his bullshit as is DiC, the Republicans in Congress and the rest of the dead ender deplorables.
DeleteDavid in Cal,
DeleteSome would say it's actually genius of Trump to lie to fucking morons in order to get elected.
Watters lies his head off, but Tarlov is supposed to rescue the situation all by her lonesome? How fair is that. Is it a 4-1 imbalance on the gerrymandered Fox panel? Watters beats up on Tarlov, Trump says she is the worst person on TV, then Somerby beats up on her some more. How does that prove Somerby is any kind of liberal, much less a fair person?
ReplyDeleteNo one thinks that Tarlov would have been permitted to correctly and fully explain the history of gerrymandering to Fox viewers. So, what was accomplished by Somerby's essay today? Are we supposed to feel sorry for Tarlov and perhaps wonder if she is mentally ill? Fox is being Fox just as surely as Trump is being Trump these days. What is supposed to happen? Elsewhere across the liberal media, the lengthy explanation of the history of gerrymandering is being discussed. It is no doubt where Somerby got his own facts today, unless we're supposed to think he knows that history himself -- I've seen no evidence of the truth of that.
"So, what was accomplished by Somerby's essay today?"
DeleteBob was able to distract you from the Epstein Files.
Is Somerby not aware that Tarlov was being sarcastic?
ReplyDelete"No large modern nation can expect to prosper by proceeding in the clownish, tribalized way performed each day on The Five."
ReplyDeleteHas Somerby written a letter to the editors over at Fox? Why does he continue to watch Fox when it is so unreliable? Yes, it is a horrible station. EVERYONE knows that already. What is Somerby contributing to reader knowledge beyond that?
I don't see any way in which Tarlov "pushed back" any differently than she ever does. I don't really understand why Somerby wrote this essay at all, except that he vaguely knocks Tarlov for letting Watters lie. Meanwhile, there are actual stories in the news that Somerby could focus upon. Tiedrich has no trouble finding ridiculousness in the news:
ReplyDelete"here’s yet another way you can tell you live in a shithole country: it’s when your Acting Secretary of the Navy pretty much has his job because Dear Leader is a child who giggled over his name.
yesterday, John Phelan got fired as Navy Secretary, and his second in command took over. his name? Hung Cao.
the first thing you need to know is that our overgrown toddler president thinks the name ‘Hung Cao’ is super fucking hilarious.
“It’s really an honor to be with you,” Trump said with Cao to his right. “Thank you. And we’re gonna be with this man. This is a great gentleman. I love his name — Hung Cao. I love that name. And that name alone should get you elected, right?”
spoiler alert: Hung Cao’s name didn’t get him elected in 2024, because Hung Cao is a fucking crackpot who ran for Senate because, quite frankly, somebody needed to do something about all these witches.
[Hung Cao interview]
“there’s a place in Monterey, California called Lovers Point. the original name was Lovers of Christ Point. but now they took out the Christ, it’s become Lovers Point — really, Monterey is a really dark place now, a lot of witchcraft and the wiccan community has really taken over there, and we can’t let that happen in Virginia.”
Hung Cao seems sane, doesn’t he?
and because Donny has a knack for always being able to find the worst person possible for each job, he plucked Wytchfinder Cao from the shitpile of failure and made him his Undersecretary of the Navy.
for once in his entire stupid life, Donny didn’t hire a flunkie because he looked good on Fox News. no, he this time picked the dude whose name makes him think of a big-dick bovine.
and now, Cao — the scourge of witches from Monterey to Virginia — is our Acting Secretary of the Navy."
Harold Meyerson says:
Delete"Paranoid purges of generals and admirals are common to dictators and tin-pot wannabes.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s firing yesterday of Navy Secretary John Phelan would normally be bound for the “world will little note nor long remember” file, but for its ironies and its context. As for ironies, Phelan was a perfectly typical Trump appointee: a Florida-based investor whom President Trump had hailed as “one of the most successful businessmen in the country.” Phelan even was aligned with Trump’s nostalgic desire to have the Navy build more battleships—power symbols of Trump’s youth—even though naval officials and scholars universally believe that they’ve been obsolete since 1942. But even all this was not enough to make Phelan the kind of Hegseth acolyte who can enjoy job security (at least until the criteria for Hegseth acolyte change, as they do every few weeks).
But it’s the context in which the firing occurred that makes it part of a broader and more important story. That context is the purge of top commanders that we’ve seen under Trump and Hegseth: the firing of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Navy’s chief of staff, and the commandant of the Coast Guard, who violated Trump and Hegseth’s norms of propriety by being, respectively, Black, female, and female. Those discharges preceded the firing of the Air Force chief of staff and, earlier this month, Army Chief of Staff Randy George, even as our war on Iran was raging. According to a Wall Street Journal report, George was upset that Hegseth had struck Black and female colonels from the Army’s list of candidates about to be promoted to generals, and George was also close to Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, whom Hegseth views as a rival.
The Hegseth purge, which also has cost the jobs of leaders of intelligence agencies, legal advisers, and sundry other chiefs of staff, exemplifies the normal staffing criteria of the Trump administration. It assumes that any officials who are not both white and male are only in their jobs due to some dastardly DEI machinations, and, fundamentally, just don’t look the part. (See, e.g., battleship nostalgia, above.) It assumes that any officials who stand up for their nonwhite, non-male colleagues are woke themselves, which is reason enough to get the axe. It makes support for Trump and his whims (“whims” being the real meaning of “policy” in this administration) the sine qua non of the ability to continue to hold an administration job, and the same goes for support for Trump’s appointed department heads (e.g., Hegseth). It is suffused with paranoia about real or potential or imagined rivals. And it dismisses—indeed, disdains—knowledge of the official’s area of responsibility and the empirical facts therein as grounds either for being hired (see, e.g., Hegseth again) or for staying on the federal payroll. One of the world’s greatest universities could be assembled from the ranks of the scientists whom Trump and his underlings have canned."
Cont.
Delete"
There’s one more context in which Hegseth’s purges comfortably fit. He’s hardly the first leader to have purged military chiefs for non-military reasons—chiefly, for a deficiency (either real or imagined) of loyalty to him even when facts compel those military chiefs to dispute the leader’s judgment. In this, Hegseth is following the example of China’s President Xi, who has arrested, fired, or disappeared 29 of China’s 44 top generals and admirals since 2023. Even Xi’s paranoia pales alongside that of Stalin, who notoriously purged roughly 80 percent of his army’s generals and thousands of colonels and other officers in 1937 and 1938, in many cases executing them. The purge, which coincided with the “show trials” of virtually every Communist leader who wasn’t entirely a creature of Stalin’s every impulse, goes a long way to explaining why the Soviet army was repeatedly repulsed by the Finnish army in 1940 when the USSR invaded Finland, and why Stalin wasn’t at all prepared when Hitler invaded Russia in 1941."
https://prospect.org/2026/04/23/hegseth-xi-stalin-paranoid-purges-military/
Here is an analysis of why Phelen was fired, in the context of Hegseth's masculinity insecurity and his daddy issues:
Deletehttps://www.wonkette.com/p/buffoon-navy-secretary-replaced-with
Apparently, Phelen lived down the street from Mar a Lago and was talking with Trump directly, going around Hegseth to talk about battleships, which made Hegseth jealous enough to fire him. None of these men know anything about the Navy, so it perhaps doesn't matter except that someone show perhaps have some naval experience if they're going to be fighting a war.
You inflate Hepseth's importance.
DeleteHe's merely a cheerleader and "an errand boy sent by grocery clerks" to do their bidding, which is to make us less and less safer.
@ 5:05 - when's your book scheduled to be published?
DeleteElecting a fucking moron to be President of the United States of America, for the sole reason that he is a gigantic bigot, is not going to work out well for the USA.
DeleteOTOH, you can't say the country doesn't deserve it.
Somerby is like a child playing with Barbie Dolls himself when he writes these totally empty essays, pretending they mean something important.
ReplyDeleteHis only purpose today seems to be to knock Tarlov. What's new about that? Well, Trump dislikes her and she is a youngish female journalist, so what's not to criticize?
Back in the day, other liberals have appear on Fox News. I don't recall Somerby mentioning this interview by Sean Hannity of Gavin Newsom:
ReplyDelete"In a June 2023 Fox News interview, California Governor Gavin Newsom sparred with host Sean Hannity in a one-hour sitdown, defending President Biden's economic record and cognitive fitness while criticizing "red state" policies. The contentious yet respectful interview highlighted sharp divides on homelessness, tax rates, and pandemic policies, with Newsom arguing that California offers better support for working families."
Maybe it was because Newsom attested to Biden's mental competence at a time when Somerby was working very hard to portray Biden as senile? It seems Somerby lets his own political motives interfere with his admiration of Democrats who are willing to tell the truth on Fox News.
Watters, the “silly fellow.” How’s that for an inadequate description of this piece of shit?
ReplyDeleteDid Watters’ mom take his cookie away from him at some point?
Hey, DiC. The KKK is viciously antisemitic. But you’d rather the DOJ go after opponents of the KKK?
ReplyDelete