WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2026
Much as we've recently said: We don't expect to be posting again until next week, much as we've recently said. Then again, you never quite know.
In the meantime, we're glad to see the new AMC at Mediaite, making such statements as this.
Just when Republicans in November elections are running away from Trump in their campaigns, like he was some dime a dozen pedophile.
ReplyDeleteIndeed.
DeleteThat is likely what is in those 37 pages the FBI does not want to release.
Adam Carolla is part of an ecosystem that caters to young, almost entirely white, male angerpunks. He panders to them -- there isn't something wrong with HIM, per se, but rather, his audience. HE'S making millions. I pay attention to other panderers like Carolla, and they are becoming more extreme -- whinier, angrier, and more frank in their bigotry and resentment. They used to disguise what they do as mere social criticism and so on, but in the past year or so, the disguise has been dropped.
ReplyDeleteI suspect part of it is caused by the utter failure and worse, RIDICULOUSNESS, of Trump, criticism of whom they used to slough off as the product of ridiculous, bitter, purple haired women sporting tattoos and nose rings. But now that Trump is indefensibly ridiculous -- and ridicule is supposed to be THEIR domain -- it's breaking them. Carolla is just pandering to that brokenness.
And it seems to be working, unfortunately.
DeletePandering works. That's why people do it.
DeleteIt works because our society is so far adrift from our innate nature, people are stressed out and warped.
DeleteOur society didn't create itself. People created it.
DeleteYes.
DeleteSociety is not a supernatural feature.
People created our society but most people were not involved, our society is dictated by the powerful.
The ultimate reason why those powerful people shaped our society to be primarily beneficial to them and not the masses is related to how their innate nature was warped, and then typically manifests via various oppressive behavior.
Ana Marie Cox is not new to left wing sources. Only to Somerby, who doesn't read independent media, and presumably not Wonkette (which she founded). She has also written for The New Republic, the New York Times Magazine, appeared on Pod Save America, and contributed political reporting, columns, and criticism to The Guardian, The Daily Beast, GQ, Time, Mother Jones, The Washington Post, Sports Illustrated, and Suck.com.
ReplyDeleteFor a while, Somerby never heard of Mediaite, then all of a sudden he was touting their authors and stories, several times a week. That is what it looks like when an influencer gets a new sponsor.
In her article about Adam Corolla and Jimmy Kimmel, Cox refers to Corolla's misogyny as youthful indiscretion that has morphed into hate speech. She says Kimmel outgrew it but Carolla did not. It seems more likely, Carolla was always a true believer whereas Kimmel was in it for the fame and money on The Man Show, back when Andrew Dice Clay was considered funny and Howard Stern was a thing.
Ana Marie Cox has always been feminist. She didn't change that in order to write for Mediaite. So why refer to her as "new," as if she has reinvented herself? I am glad to see complaints about these man-o-sphere assholes go mainstream enough to catch Somerby's attention, but Cox is more visible than Somerby and she didn't abandon her principles to support Trump in 2015, the way Somerby did.
Didn't Somerby used to tear into Cox for her chumminess with Maddow?
DeleteBob Somerby has always been a sexist.
Do you mean Carolla? Corolla is a small Toyota.
ReplyDeleteWere you trying to reply to 2:42?
DeleteNo, just making a general observation.
DeleteYou’re as dishonest as you are stupid.
Deletetypo
DeleteAll Toyotas, aside from their mediocre ergonomics and overrated reliability, only come in two versions: extremely bland, or ultra ugly.
DeleteAdam embodies both of those.
I prefer the Honda Civic.
DeleteJust when you think Somerby is done whining about Gutfeld being bad for Republican branding, he goes off and whines that Adam Corolla is bad for Republican branding.
ReplyDeleteSomerby doesn't mention it, but the other new hire at Mediaite, Brad Slager, described as being from the right, wrote a debut column too. He attacks the AP for suggesting that the hanging death of a black woman evokes memories of lynching of black people during Jim Crow. He accuses AP of media malpractice because they didn't mention that (1) the death was considered a suicide, (2) a man suspected in the death was also black, (3) electrical cord not rope was used in the hanging. To be clear, a ruling of suicide or an accusation against an unconvicted and uncharged black man do not preclude the death being a white hate crime. Such lynchings in the past were covered up by poor investigations and wrongful accusations of innocent people. Further, regardless of the facts of this woman's death, such a hanging DOES evoke the memory of Jim Crow lynchings. That is unavoidable. AP did not say this death was such a lynching but that doesn't stop Slager from accusing them of lies they did not tell. It is very odd for a black woman to be left hanging from a tree, given our racial history, and especially so for a black woman or a black man to have done this by their own hand. It takes extra effort and sends a bizarre, potentially very ugly message to black people, just as it did during Jim Crow. Slager explains none of that.
ReplyDeleteApparently, attacking AP and other mainstream press is now a conservative talking point. Mediaite does point out that this is only Slager's opinion, no one else's, but this participation in Trump's war against the media seems wrong, especially when promoted by a media source itself.
Republicans hate being called out for their racism, primarily because it is a highly effective strategy for electoral politics.
DeleteSlager obviously has no compassion for a black woman who was so depressed that she hanged herself from a tree using an extension cord. His anger at the AP is all-consuming leaving him the inability to feel anything about the person who died. A liberal would express sympathy for her family and loved ones and say something about how a life cut short is always a human tragedy (to borrow Somerby's phrase). Slager has a big career ahead of him in the right wing.
DeleteBut still, it had nothing to do with lynching.
DeleteBut still, it had nothing to do with lynching.
Delete3:57 Ah you're a racist too, cool!
DeleteYou are speculating, just as Slager did. Without knowing what happened, the fact of a black woman hanging from a tree does evoke lynching because that is what produced black bodies in trees during the recent past. There have been other black bodies found in trees in the South in the last few years. Given the racial history involved, you do not automatically assume they are all suicides or black murderers disposing of their victims in trees.
Delete"Reports by civil rights and advocacy organizations have identified dozens of hanging deaths of Black individuals in recent years, with at least 22 reported in the U.S. within a single recent period (including at least 10 in 2026 alone), while a broader civil rights report documented more than 70 suspected modern-day lynchings across select Southern states between 2000 and 2025."
Did you know that?
This is why Trump and his appointees have done away with reporting statistics about race in all areas of govt. The FBI used to investigate this stuff, but Trump doesn't want Patel to embarrass any of his whiite supremacist followers as they go about "improving" their neighborhoods and implementing long-planned projects, such as restoring the Confederacy.
DeleteSomerby also thinks we live in a post-racist society.
DeleteClassic racist stance.
Right wingers like Thomas Sowell tend to think that there's too much focus on racism and too little focus on other factors that negatively impact black Americans. That leads to ineffective civil rights policies. He would say that this approach is designed more to make liberals feel good, than to help blacks.
DeleteIn this case, the AP writer can feel a moral boost by deploring lynching, even though the past lynching is not relevant to the problems and opportunities of today's black Americans.
You missed the point that lynchings are still happening.
DeleteBut the case under discussion was not a lynching. Although David is demented, he is not always wrong.
DeleteThe case under discussion was closed as a suicide with a suggestion that a black suspect might have killed her. Such cases have been poorly investigated before, which is why lynching was made a federal crime. Sowell has nothing to do with anything.
Deletelol, as we all have observed, dickhead scrupulously sticks to the topic : Bwahahaha!!!
DeleteDavid is less cognitive than Cecelia, but this was no lynching.
DeleteDavid is Mao with half of Mao's intellectual depth.
DeleteBut there's no such thing as a Republican voter who isn't a bigot.
Mediaite annoyingly blocks content to the majority of its articles for non-subscribers. If you select a blocked article and repeatedly select it over and over, it will eventually show a small message saying "continue without supporting us" allowing you to read the article you want.
ReplyDeleteFor some media, it is only about the money. Why else would a source like Mediaite deliberately select two strongly biased new writers, one left and one right, instead of striving for objectivity? That is not exactly what it means for a paper to be "fair and balanced." I like Cox but I don't want to be presented with articles that have a strong bias without knowing what I am consuming. You know that at Wonkette but Mediaite pretends to be a news source, not opinion.
And here we have Slager defending Susan Collins by attacking Pro Publica:
ReplyDelete"Over at ProPublica, its editors worked overtime to deliver an innuendo-filled, scathing hit on the senator from Maine, Susan Collins. That is, “scathing” would only apply so long as you do not read past the headline."
I trust Pro Publica over this guy Slager. But this isn't being presented as an opinion piece by Mediaite, but as news reporting. Hilariously, Slager says that the guy who bribed Collines is not a reliable witness because he is now in jail for his crimes. They tried to use that one as a defense of Trump against Michael Cohen, who was convicted of paying off Stormy Daniels on Trump's behalf.
Slager's hit piece is not against Collins (accused of being bribed) or Kao (the perp) but against Pro Publica, for not telling readers that Kao was ultimately convicted. Hilarous!
Somerby really shouldn't be pushing Mediaite now that it has decided to feature this conservative asshole pushing garbage (propaganda at best) on unsuspecting readers.
This is a better use of your time: https://www.propublica.org/
How dare actual journalists report about Collins' bribe scheme and about how Trump dropped the investigation once he was inaugurated, and suddenly afterwards Collins dropped her supposed "independence" and fell in line, voting with Trump on all the key issues.
DeleteDoktor Zoom at Wonkette commented on Trump's UN speech:
ReplyDelete"Trump insisted that the official name [of AI] is now “super intelligence,” apparently unaware that AI researchers already use that term for something completely different, a so-far hypothetical version of machine intelligence that “has cutting-edge cognitive functions and highly developed thinking skills more advanced than any human.”
Exactly nobody expects Trump’s term to reshape the field, but it will be mandatory in a lot of government documents that will need to be fixed after he’s gone. Actually, that’s one task that current non-intelligent “AI” could handle pretty easily without blowing us all up or converting all mass in the universe into paperclips. Or uploading everyone’s brain into a My Little Pony simulation.
In another remarkable display of saying a mostly true thing but turning it into a completely backwards lie, Trump went on to crow that artificial intelligence is no more a threat to humanity than climate change is."
He also threatened to annihilate Iran.
DeleteAgain.
The Iranians don’t even care. They know Trump is full of shit.
DeleteIran can afford to ignore Trump, since they defeated the U.S. on Day One of the war.
Delete