Trump's Big CON: The Donald is a Russian Agent, CONt. Part 4 (Why Are He, "His" Party, and "His" Propaganda News Friends So Worried?)

UPDATE X:  Trump is really worried about and afraid of the Russian investigation, and he and his supporters are working vigorously to stop it or at the very least discredit it.

Why?

Because Putin has the kompromat to control Trump, and Trump knows it since he knows his own compromising financial and personal information.

Read the Washington Post, In new interview, Trump openly rages at checks on his authoritarianism, which show how much Trump wishes he were a dictator, free to lock up critics and opponents.

Read also the Washington Post, Why is Trump so obsessed with Russia? We’re finally going to find out.

My guess, it is worse than compromising financial information, those salacious stories in the ‘Steele Dossier’ might even be true!

UPDATE IX: ANOTHER MUST READ, the Washington Post, To what circle of hell are Republicans about to consign themselves?, which states in substantial part:

"At our political costume ball, it is definitely ’90s nostalgia night. A president obsessed with attacking all things Clinton stands accused of serial sexual harassment, sends out underlings to dismiss the accusers as liars, condemns a federal investigation as a politically motivated fraud and is attempting to destroy the reputation of the leader of that investigation. Hillary Clinton may be President Trump’s continuing target, but the Clinton years are clearly his inspiration.

It worked the first time around. In President Bill Clinton’s case, the Democratic Party almost uniformly honored tribal loyalties above legal or moral principle. Even the feminist left generally fell into line for partisan reasons. 'American women,' said columnist Nina Burleigh, 'should be lining up with their presidential kneepads on to show their gratitude for keeping the theocracy off our backs.' What is a little sexual misconduct and obstruction of justice among friends when legal abortion is at stake?

Now Trump appeals to the same type of team solidarity, this time on the right. “The Dems are using this terrible (and bad for our country) Witch Hunt for evil politics,” tweeted Trump, “but the R’s are now fighting back like never before.” Note how a federal investigation of Russian influence on American democracy has become “the Dems.” Note also that it is not the president and his lawyers fighting this investigation but the “R’s.” Trump is conditioning Republicans and conservatives to view his upcoming legal defense entirely through the lens of partisanship. With the broad cooperation of conservative media, there is every reason to think he might succeed.

Trump’s ultimate objective in all this matters greatly. If he wants to recruit Republicans into a defense of the shady political and business dealings of Paul Manafort and the rest of the president’s political circle — now exposed by federal indictment — it will be discrediting and humiliating. A party that rallies to the defense of corruption will eventually be seen as a swamp in need of clearing.

As the indictments begin to come down, Republicans need to ponder what legal and ethical lines, if any, they are willing to draw. Continuing the attacks on Hillary Clinton’s own dishonest dealings is all fun and games (except to Clinton, I suppose). Joining the defense of slimy political figures such as Manafort makes one, ceteris paribus, into a slimy political figure. Obscuring or excusing Russian influence on the American political process is a dangerous disservice to the country. Supporting Trump in a power play against the special prosecutor and his investigation would be an attack on the stability and legitimacy of the Republic — a source of infamy in American history. . .

It is worth making clear that every conservative media voice — including, recently, the editorial voice of the Wall Street Journal — that attacks the objectivity and legitimacy of Mueller is giving Trump cover and encouragement to move against him. They are dropping lit matches in the dry tinder of American politics. And they would be responsible, in part, for the resulting wildfire.

Do Republicans and conservatives really want to be remembered as a bodyguard of enablers for this man? For this cause? Few enter the fray of political ideas, or make the considerable sacrifices of entering public life, to defend corruption and the abuse of power. That is now the calling of the Republican partisan, and the downward path of dishonor."

So, 'what legal and ethical lines, if any, the Republi-CONs are willing to draw'?

Think back to Watergate.

UPDATE VIII:  "Look at the whole story and tell me this isn't suspicious. . .

The Trump campaign was filled with operatives connected in shady ways to the Russian government. It included individuals who knew that the Russians had obtained Clinton-related emails and who lied about that knowledge to federal investigators. Top campaign officials (and Trump family members) dropped everything to meet with Russian operatives when they believed there was useful opposition research on offer. Trump publicly asked Russia to hack into Clinton’s computers to find and release her missing emails.

We also know the Russians really did hack into John Podesta’s and the DNC’s email accounts and found and released emails that damaged Clinton. They really did conduct social media operations designed help Trump. Both their targets and their timing were extremely sophisticated for a foreign government that has traditionally shown itself to have a poor understanding of American politics. After winning the White House, Trump attacked the CIA and fired the director of the FBI in an effort to discredit or end their investigations into Russia’s role in the election.

At this point, it would be a truly remarkable coincidence if two entities that had so many ties to each other, that had so much information about what the other was doing, and that were working so hard toward the same goal never found a way to coordinate."

Read Vox, It sure looks like there was collusion between the Trump operation and Russia.

UPDATE VII:  And The Donald and his Propaganda News, AKA Hedgehog News, are really, really worried.

Read the Washington Post, The Fox News-cum-Murdoch effect: Mueller must resign! Or be fired!

UPDATE VI: Of course, given The Donald's intense desire to win at all cost, it is possible that he and/or those very, very, very close to him knowingly and actively colluded with Putin to win the election.

Read the Washington Post, How bad will Mueller probe get for Trump? The Papadopoulos plea may be a big tell., which notes:

"While the biggest news of the day is the indictments Robert S. Mueller III has handed down against former Trump aides Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, today he also released a plea bargain with a heretofore minor figure in the Russia scandal by the name of George Papadopoulos. And that could actually be the day’s biggest news. . .

Who does Papadopoulos have information on? We don’t know. The plea document mentions his discussions (his efforts to set up a meeting with the Russians) with people who are referred to as 'Senior Policy Adviser,' 'Campaign Supervisor,' and 'High-Ranking Campaign Official,' but we don’t know who those are. Then there’s this:

    On or about May 4, 2016, the Russian MFA Connection sent an email (the 'May 4 MFA Email') to defendant PAPADOPOULOS and the Professor that stated: 'I have just talked to my colleagues from the MFA. The[y] are open for cooperation. One of the options is to make a meeting for you at the North America Desk, if you are in Moscow.' Defendant PAPADOPOULOS responded that he was '[g]lad the MFA is interested.' Defendant PAPADOPOULOS forwarded the May 4 MFA Email to the High-Ranking Campaign Official, adding: 'What do you think? Is this something we want to move forward with?' The next day, on or about May 5, 2016, defendant PAPADOPOULOS had a phone call with the Campaign Supervisor, and then forwarded the May 4 MFA Email to him, adding to the top of the email: 'Russia updates.'

This exchange happened not long before Paul Manafort, Donald Trump Jr., and Jared Kushner had their infamous meeting with representatives of the Russian government who purportedly had damaging information on Clinton to offer. Given that context, it seems rather unlikely that Papadopoulos would not have mentioned the possibility that the Russians had of 'dirt' on Clinton contained in 'thousands of emails.' But we don’t yet know for sure.

What we do know is that the prosecutors believe that Papadopoulos’ information will be valuable to them in building a case against others. Manafort, on the other hand, is not cooperating — at least not yet. . .

If Manfort is going to flip, there are only so many people he could flip on who are closer to the center of whatever happened than he was. That could include Jared Kushner, perhaps Donald Trump Jr., and of course President Trump himself.

But right now, Papadopoulos is the one who is providing Mueller an entry into the heart of the Trump campaign and its relationship to Russia. Which is why McQuade says, 'That one, because of its relevance to that larger question, strikes me as maybe the more important development today.' And this is just getting started."

One hint that this is possible -- The Donald doth protest too much, methinks.

UPDATE V:  As I said early on, The Donald is a Russian agent, perhaps he was originally an unwitting agent, but Putin has the kompromat to control Trump, and Trump knows it since he knows his own compromising financial and personal information.

Those salacious stories in the ‘Steele Dossier’ might even be true!

"Like a poker player whose flagrant tell gives him away, President Donald Trump telegraphed a twitchy bit of direction to Trump Tower scandal-watchers this week. Or was it indirection? After the founder of the oppo-research company Fusion GPS that commissioned the infamous Steele Dossier told the House Intelligence Committee he would take the Fifth Amendment if subpoenaed to testify, Trump responded with a brain-bender of a tweet that thrust the dossier to the center of the stage again.

'Workers of firm involved with the discredited and Fake Dossier take the 5th. Who paid for it, Russia, the FBI or the Dems (or all)?' Trump's tweet said.

Like many Trump tweets, it proved more difficult to untangle than a mound of last night's dried out spaghetti. Why was Trump screaming about the dossier now? Does he sense that investigators are closing in on him and he needs to divert them? BuzzFeed published the 35-page smutty and salacious document, which purports that the Russians had compromised Trump personally and financially, more than nine months ago. Was it because the dossier had floated back into the news because Fusion GPS's Glenn Simpson had refused to testify and Trump's a reflexive beast? Or because he worries that the investigations may be used to unlock his secrets? Or is it just a new tactic in his campaign to undercut its origin?

Trump may claim that the contents of the dossier have been discredited, but as Reuters' Mark Hosenball wrote last week, elements of the dossier may have been denied but none of it has been disproved. Trump reliably affixes the "fake" label to every utterance he dislikes or finds threatening, and the dossier abounds with potentially damaging assertions like, 'Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years.' By jumping up and down with the fury of a Yosemite Sam, is Trump really confirming the accuracy and potency of the dossier?"

Read Politico, Trump Singes Fingers Trying to Torch Dossier.

UPDATE IV:  In the investigation of  "Russia’s role in the 2016 presidential campaign . . . three facts are both important and undisputed . . .

Trump’s family and the top echelons of the campaign hoped that a meeting with well-connected Russians would yield dirt on Clinton. The Trump White House dissembled on the purpose of this meeting. And Trump admitted that the primary reason he fired the FBI director was because of the Russia investigation.

These are the facts of the case, and they are not in dispute."

Read the Washington Post, These are the facts of the Russia investigation, and they are not in dispute.

I would add, Putin didn't want Clinton as president, he wanted The Donald.

UPDATE III:  "President Trump and his surrogates — most especially the Fox News lineup (which includes a fleet of conservative pundits who disgrace themselves by facilitating a political distraction game for Trump), obsequious Republicans in Congress, old allies such as Roger Stone (who wound up getting banned by Twitter) and the talk radio crowd — have been frantically fanning Hillary Clinton non-scandals about Uranium One (it was baseless before and baseless now) and the dossier’s funder. (Fusion GPS initially was hired by the conservative Free Beacon, which at one time claimed not to know the identity of the Republican outfit that first hired Fusion.) The unhinged rants from Trump’s defenders demanding Clinton be locked up for one or both of these reveal how tightly Trump and the right-wing ecosystem that supports him rely on Clinton as an all-purpose distraction.

Upon a moment’s reflection, the non-scandals make no sense (Clinton was colluding with Russia to beat herself in the election?), have been debunked before and in no way affect the liability, if any, of current or ex-Trump administration figures. This is “whataboutism” run amok. It does expose the degree to which Fox News has given up the pretense of a real news organization, preferring the role of state propagandist. (And it’s not just the evening hosts; the non-scandals now monopolize the rest of the schedule.)

The intensity of Trump’s frenzy underscores the peril in which the president now finds himself. Beyond the indictments unsealed this morning, Trump does not know what special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has uncovered; which witnesses are flippable; what financial documents have revealed about the Trump business empire; and whether, for example, Mueller finds support for an obstruction of justice charge from Trump’s own public dissembling (e.g., hinting at non-existent tapes of former FBI director James B. Comey). For someone who insists on holding all the cards and intimidating others, Trump finds himself in a uniquely powerless position."

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s meltdown in anticipation of indictments is telling.

UPDATE II: What is The Donald hiding?

We may soon find out.

Read the Washington Post, Indictments signal the beginning of Mueller’s work, not the end. 

UPDATE: The RepubliCONs are engaged in a "careful, coordinated, and comprehensive strategy" hoping you ignore and forget the "Russian interference in the 2016 election, which it is more than clear was 1) comprehensive, involving hacking, propaganda, and outreach to Trump representatives; and 2) clearly intended to help Donald Trump win the election, or at the very least wound Hillary Clinton should she become president. . .

It has three essential components. The first is the cranking up of the conservative calliope: all of the right’s information sources, from Fox News to conservative talk radio to web sites like Breitbart and Drudge, immediately begin shouting about the same story and repeating the same line. Then to keep it going and force mainstream media to cover it, they create an official 'investigation' that will provide a steady stream of tantalizing leaks and events that can become the occasion of news coverage, even if it all ends up proving nothing. Then the whole narrative gets validated by top-level Republicans whose words are news in and of themselves.

All of these components are now in motion. Fox and the other outlets are doing hour after hour of discussion about what they are calling the 'Russia dossier,' an opposition research document prepared for Democrats that gathered together facts and rumors about Trump’s dealings in Russia (I explained why their line on this document is so bogus here). Now that story is being joined to absurd charges about the sale of a uranium mining company, with all kinds of dark allegations of corruption."

Read the Washington Post, The GOP strategy on the Russia scandal: ‘No puppet. You’re the puppet.’
"There may be no talent the Republican Party and the conservative movement have that is more astounding than the way they are able to take a ludicrous idea with zero relationship to actual facts, light a fuse on it, and turn it into an explosive firework of spin that manages to confuse everyone who tries to look at the issue that started the whole controversy. . .

The most Clinton did was hire an opposition researcher who interviewed sources he knew in Russia to see if her opponent had engaged in any questionable activities there. We don’t even know if she (or anyone else on her staff) even read Steele’s report, since he was a few steps removed from the campaign. Nothing about that even remotely resembles 'collusion with Russia.'" [Emphasis added.]

Read the Washington Post, GOP spin about the new ‘Steele Dossier’ story is disingenuous nonsense.

The End of the World, Again, Cont., Again, Part 2 (It Never Ends! (Pun Intended!!))

 UPDATE: Who ever thought that after the Rapture I'd have to update this post ;)

"The man whose biblical doomsday claim had people worried about Sept. 23, 2017, is not backing down.

The world did not end over the weekend, and David Meade, a self-described 'specialist in research and investigations,' is saying that’s exactly what he had expected. Now, he is focusing on another date, Oct. 15, 2017, which he claims is the beginning of the world’s destruction.

It is 'the most important date of this century or millennium,' Meade wrote on his website. The action starts that day, he claimed, when the world will enter what’s called a seven-year tribulation period, a fairly widespread evangelical belief that for seven years, catastrophic events would wreak havoc on Earth.

'Hold on and watch — wait until the middle of October and I don’t believe you’ll be disappointed,' Meade wrote, before going on to promote his book, which he claims has all the details.

'You don’t have long to read it,' he added."

Read the Washington Post, The man who had people worried about a Sept. 23 apocalypse is peddling a new doomsday date.

Trump's a CON Man, but who cares!

"Unsealed, an evangelical Christian publication, foretells the Rapture in a viral, four-minute YouTube video, complete with special effects and ominous doomsday soundtrack. It’s called 'September 23, 2017: You Need to See This.'

Why Sept. 23, 2017?

Meade’s prediction is based largely on verses and numerical codes in the Bible. He has homed in one number: 33.

“Jesus lived for 33 years. The name Elohim, which is the name of God to the Jews, was mentioned 33 times [in the Bible],” Meade told The Washington Post. “It’s a very biblically significant, numerologically significant number. I’m talking astronomy. I’m talking the Bible … and merging the two.”

And Sept. 23 is 33 days since the Aug. 21 total solar eclipse, which Meade believes is an omen.

He points to the Book of Revelation, which he said describes the image that will appear in the sky on that day, when Nibiru is supposed to rear its ugly head, eventually bringing fire, storms and other types of destruction.

The book describes a woman 'clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head' who gives birth to a boy who will 'rule all the nations with an iron scepter' while she is threatened by a red seven-headed dragon. The woman then grows the wings of an eagle and is swallowed up by the earth.

The belief, as previously described by Gary Ray, a writer for Unsealed, is that the constellation Virgo — representing the woman — will be clothed in sunlight, in a position that is over the moon and under nine stars and three planets. The planet Jupiter, which will have been inside Virgo — in her womb, in Ray’s interpretation — will move out of Virgo, as though she is giving birth.

To make clear, Meade said he’s not saying the world will end Saturday. Instead, he claims, the prophesies in the Book of Revelation will manifest that day, leading to a series of catastrophic events that will happen over the course of weeks."

Read the Washington Post, The world as we know it is about to end — again — if you believe this biblical doomsday claim., which notes that Hedgehog News published a "story with a headline that appears to give credence to the doomsday claim — and was published in the Science section under the label “Planets.”

Republi-cons are such suckers for snake oil salesmen.

Any question how The Donald got elected.

Trump's Big CON: Celebrating Stupidity

Yesterday's afternoon New York Daily News cover announced:

"NOT TOO BRIGHT!
Trump ignores fake news warning, stares at eclipse."

"Trump’s disregard of expert advice is unsurprising. We are talking about the man who once said, 'I know more about ISIS than the generals do. Believe me.'

Claiming to know better than people who actually know better is part of Trump’s shtick.

Plus, he’s a contrarian. His former communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, explained last week that 'it’s almost like a counterintuitive thing with him, as it relates to the media. The media’s expecting him to do something; he sometimes does the exact opposite.'

Like look at an eclipse without special glasses, when the media is expecting him to don shades.

[On Hedgehog News, Tucker Carlson said it was 'perhaps the most impressive thing any president has ever done.']

Carlson’s appraisal of Trump’s move ('impressive') reflects an appreciation of the president’s unconventional style. Trump doesn’t do what’s predictable — what he should, in some cases — and his supporters love him for it. Some voters seem to find Trump so refreshing that they overlook the moments when the standard course of action really would have been the best course of action.

A recent situation involving white supremacists comes to mind."

Read the Washington Post, Trump looking at the eclipse without glasses is ‘perhaps the most impressive thing any president has ever done,’ says Tucker Carlson.

Stupid is as stupid does, and Trump has proven himself to be too stupid to be president.

Trump's Big CON: His Newest Republi-CON Media CONplex Enabler

Watch out Hedgehog News, Trump and his Republi-CON's sycophants have a new member.

"One America News is an obscure TV channel struggling to emerge from the cellar of the cable ratings, but it is nonetheless one of President Trump’s favorite media outlets. It’s not hard to see why: On One America newscasts, the Trump administration is a juggernaut of progress, a shining success with a daily drumbeat of achievements. . .


[S]ince its inception in 2013, and especially since Trump began his march to the White House, One America’s owner, Robert Herring Sr., a millionaire who made his money printing circuit boards, has directed his channel to push Trump’s candidacy . . .

OAN, based in San Diego, made its first splash in the opening weeks of the Trump campaign, when the channel became the first to carry Trump’s campaign speeches live and in full — a decision followed quickly by the owner’s directive that other candidates’ rallies not be given the same treatment, according to internal emails.

Since then, OAN has become a reliably sympathetic voice of the administration’s goals and actions. Trump’s former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, has a deal to appear regularly on the channel. The network’s White House reporter, Trey Yingst, has become an administration favorite who was called on at the daily news briefings 27 times in Trump’s first 100 days in office. On Friday, OAN won a seat in the White House briefing room, albeit in the back row and shared with the BBC."

Read the Washington Post, An inside look at One America News, the insurgent TV network taking ‘pro-Trump’ to new heights.

The Donald just love his sycophants.

Read also Trump's Big CON: His Enablers.

Trump's Big CON: The Beginning of the End

UPDATE:  Trump doesn't know it, but he is done.

"It’s the moment Stephen Colbert has been waiting for.

CBS’s “Late Show” host has spent months eviscerating President Trump on television, clearly trying to provoke a reaction.

It didn’t work. Until Thursday."

Read the Washington Post, Stephen Colbert gleefully responds to President Trump calling him a ‘no-talent guy’.

Better yet, watch it:

I got this from a Southern "conservative", who got it from social media:

In the past, when the President needed to be protected, the Secret Service would say "Get down Mr. President."

Now they say "Donald Duck!"

If conservatives, his core supporters, are telling jokes about The Donald, it's only a matter of time.

Watch for Republi-CONs to realize the utter seriousness of the situation and start to abandon The Donald.

Or it might be Hedgehog News.

In either case, it's the beginning of the end.

The Republi-CON-Hedgehog News Benghazi 'Stand Down' Myth

UPDATE:  "You’ll never guess who comes off as a hero of the Republican-drafted House Benghazi committee’s majority report: President Obama.

Within 90 minutes of the Sept. 11, 2012, surprise attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and an aide, the report tells us, Obama had told his secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to do everything possible, implicitly including using military force, to protect Americans.

These were 'very clear directions,' according to Peter Roskam (R-Ill.), one of Obama’s harshest critics on the panel.

How different from the version of the president’s conduct propounded on right-wing talk radio and TV in the aftermath: that he and his aides coolly watched live video of the mayhem in Benghazi, supplied by drones flying overhead, but declined to order a rescue mission.

Not only does this new Republican report debunk that smear, but it actually shifts blame from Obama to 'a rusty bureaucratic process not in keeping with the gravity and urgency of the events happening on the ground.'"

Read the Washington Post, The dangerous delusion that the Americans in Benghazi could have been saved.

"A just-released Senate Intelligence Committee report . . . explored claims that there was a 'stand down' order given to the security team at the Annex. Although some members of the security team expressed frustration that they were unable to respond more quickly to the Mission compound, 12 the Committee found no evidence of intentional delay or obstruction by the Chief of Base or any other party.The situation on the ground that night was chaotic and unclear: A call to the CIA annex near the under-attack diplomatic compound came in at 9:40 p.m., and it took the security personnel about 25 minutes to move in.

The original Fox News 'stand down' story still hangs on the Fox News Web site, unmolested by these factual challenges."

Read the Washington Post, Benghazi: More 'stand down' fallout for Fox News.

That article has links to twenty other articles regarding the many 'stand down' lies by the Republi-cons and their masters at Hedgehog News.

Read also, Republi-CON Political Opportunism and Hypocrisy

Are You a Hedgehog or a Fox?

UPDATE II:  "How do you spot a hedgehog? [Philip Tetlock, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who has spent decades studying how people make predictions,] says to listen to their arguments and watch out for 'the experts who say 'moreover' more often than they say 'however'' — i.e., people who double down on their arguments without qualifying them with contrasting information — as well as those who declare things 'impossible' or 'certain.'

You can probably guess that Tetlock's superforecasters are not 'hedgehogs.' Instead, they are the kind of person that Tetlock dubs 'foxes.'

According to Tetlock, foxes are more pragmatic and open-minded, aggregating information from a wide variety of sources. They talk in terms of probability and possibility, rather than certainty, and they tend to use words like 'however,' 'but,' 'although' and 'on the other hand' when speaking.

When it comes to prediction, the foxes outfox the hedgehogs. While the hedgehogs managed to do slightly worse than random chance, the foxes had real foresight. The foxes weren’t just more cautious in their predictions, they were a lot more accurate.

Unlike hedgehogs, foxes also had a desire to keep reviewing their assumptions, updating their estimates, and improving their understanding — a kind of attitude that Tetlock calls 'perpetual beta.' Tetlock says that this approach is the single most important ingredient for learning to make accurate predictions. 'For superforecasters, beliefs are hypotheses to be tested, not treasures to be guarded,' Tetlock and Gardner write.

Read the Washington Post, The secrets the world’s top experts use to make really good predictions.

UPDATE: Humble, perceptive and self-reflective leaders seem to outshine their more brash and charismatic counterparts. Read The New York Times, The Humble Hound.

Are you a humble hound?

Don't know what I mean, then read The New York Times, Learning How to Think.

Hint: "The Hedgehog and the Fox" was the title of an essay by Isaiah Berlin about Russian author Leo Tolstoy's theory of history.

So I ask again, are you a hedgehog, or a fox?

Vote Republi-CON, the Party of Fear, Anger, and Hatred in 2016!

UPDATE IX:  "Conservatives love Donald Trump’s racism, lies, and lslamophobia."

Read Slate, Trump’s Week of Fearmongering and Falsehoods.

UPDATE VIII:  "GOP voters are attracted to Trump for his bravado and belligerent rhetoric against real and perceived foreign threats. Far from undermining his campaign, the Paris attacks strengthen the atavistic nationalism that fuels his campaign."

Read Slate, Why the Paris Attacks Will Only Boost Donald Trump.  

UPDATE VII:  "'One of the reasons why Donald Trump is doing so well is because he's saying things people believe. . . People are angry out there, and he's striking a nerve.'"

Read the Washington Post, Donald Trump is leading for a simple reason, according to Mike Huckabee.

UPDATE VI:  "Mr Trump’s detractors, who form arguably one of the largest bipartisan coalitions in memory, comfort themselves that he is simply on an ego trip that will turn sour. That may be true. But they are missing the point. The legions of Republicans flocking to Mr Trump’s banner are not going anywhere. If he crashes, which he eventually must, they will find another champion. . .

The latest poll shows that only 8 per cent of Republican graduates support Mr Trump against 32 per cent of those without a degree.

These are the angry swaths of America that feel left behind, belittled and insulted. They want to take their country back but cannot put their finger on what exactly they mean. For them it is evening in America. Nobody argues their case.

Then along comes Mr Trump. Foreigners may be tempted to see him as uniquely American. But he has his equivalents everywhere. Think of Silvio Berlusconi in Italy or even the UK’s Nigel Farage.

The worse they sound, the better they do. That is the power of anti-politics. Mr Trump is merely a symptom. His Republican rivals should beware. Trump Towers will fall. Other skyscrapers loom. "

Read  the Financial Times (subscription may be required), Donald Trump leaves indelible mark on Republicans. 

UPDATE V:  For more on the Republi-con Party's  Franken-Trump/Trumpenstein (© NoBullU.com) dilemma, read the Washington Post, Trump has the GOP establishment’s number, which again notes:

"The problems that bother us most are the ones we bring on ourselves. This is why Republicans are so out of sorts with Donald Trump. The party created the rough beast it is now trying to slay. . .

[T]he real Donald Trump has been in full view for a long time, and Perry’s new glasses can’t explain his newfound clarity. I don’t credit Trump with much. But he deserves an award for exposing the double-standards of Republican politicians. They put their outrage in a blind trust as long as Trump was, in Perry’s words, 'throwing invectives in this hyperbolic rhetoric out there' against Obama and the GOP’s other enemies.

Only now are they willing to say: 'You’re fired.' No wonder Trump is laughing."

UPDATE IV:  Who made Trump the Republi-con candidate he is?

You can thank Hedgehog News, which has "set quite a standard for sycophancy.

It was a steady engagement: Trump would share his views on the issues of the day with the 'Fox & Friends' crew on Monday mornings. He’d talk and talk and talk as the hosts nodded in agreement. Anyone who has listened to a Trump speech these days would recognize the talking points . .

The Republican establishment has worried that Trump’s travels in recent weeks have dragged down the party’s brand. Those worries may well prove legitimate. Yet 'Fox & Friends' needn’t be concerned about a similar dynamic stemming from its association with Trump, given its already-well-proven awfulness. This is one brand that not even Trump can sully."

Read the Washington Post, ‘Fox & Friends': Donald Trump’s very own media bubble.  

UPDATE III:  "Do not worry about Donald Trump becoming president. Worry, instead, about what his current — emphasis on current — stratospheric standing in the polls says about two things: the Republican Party and the other GOP candidates."

Read the Washington Post, Donald Trump and the anger of conservatives.

UPDATE II:  Joseph McCarthy was a 'notorious Republi-con demagogue'.

But initially, "McCarthy, like Trump, was an opportunist, not a zealot. Although the Wisconsin senator later grew famous hunting communists, communists in the Milwaukee branch of the Congress of Industrial Organizations played a key role in his initial Senate victory in 1946. In his first three years in the Senate, McCarthy hunted for an issue on which to make his name. He considered proposing a national pension plan or championing the St. Lawrence Seaway. But by 1950, the U.S.S.R. had tested an atomic weapon, communists had won China’s civil war, and alleged Soviet spy Alger Hiss had been convicted of perjury. Midwesterners, long suspicious of the East Coast’s foreign-policy class, and Catholics, bitter over Moscow’s domination of their co-religionists in Eastern Europe, were particularly receptive to claims that Washington elites had sold out America to the U.S.S.R.  So in February 1950, McCarthy began loudly exploiting those grievances, famously declaring in Wheeling, West Virginia, that 'I have here in my hand a list of 205 [communists] working and shaping policy in the State Department.'

In his search for scapegoats, Trump has proved ideologically flexible too. In 1988, when he first publicly mulled a presidential campaign, the scapegoat du jour was Japan, whose economy appeared to be overtaking America’s. 'The Japanese, when they negotiate with us, they have long faces,' Trump told a New Hampshire crowd in 1987. 'But when the negotiations are over, it is my belief—I’ve never seen this—they laugh like hell.' His suggestion: 'Whatever Japan wants, do the opposite.'

When Trump flirted with a presidential campaign again, in 2000, he played the centrist. He was leaving the GOP for Ross Perot’s Reform Party, he announced, because 'the Republicans are just too crazy right.' He even attacked his likely Reform Party opponent, Pat Buchanan, for being anti-black.

In the Obama era, however, Trump has discovered the power of racial and ethnic grievances himself. As early as 2007, when Obama began running for president, pollster Mark Penn sent Hillary Clinton a memo declaring that Obama was 'not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and values.' Obama critics relentlessly questioned his connection to, and love of, the United States. Polls showed that a plurality of Republicans believed Obama was not born in the United States.

Like McCarthy during the red scare, Trump saw his opening. 'I have people that have been studying [Obama’s birth certificate] and they cannot believe what they’re finding,' Trump declared in 2011. 'If he wasn’t born in this country, which is a real possibility…then he has pulled one of the great cons in the history of politics.' . . .

If McCarthy and Trump are similarly opportunistic, their party’s initial response to them was similarly craven."

Read The Atlantic, The New McCarthyism of Donald Trump.

UPDATE:  "Donald Trump is now the 2016 GOP frontrunner. . .

[W]hat do people see in the guy?

A lot, as it turns out. On a recent trip to rural Upstate New York I was surprised by the intensity of support for Trump among friends and family members I talked to. In many cases, their support for Trump boiled down to a simple fact: they were angry.

Angry at Obama, angry at congressional leaders, and angry at the political establishment as a whole. And they're not alone -- surveys show that anger toward the government, particularly among Republicans, has been rising over the course of Obama's two terms in office. When asked how they felt toward the federal government, 37 percent of Republicans said "angry" in a Washington Post poll from last fall. By contrast, in September 1998, at the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, only 14 percent of Republicans said they were angry.

Anger toward the establishment is a powerful motivating force. And Donald Trump is currently the candidate in the best position to channel it. . ."

Read the Washington Post, The real reason so many Americans support Donald Trump. 

Go Donald, Go!

"You might think that the recent poll showing Donald Trump spiking among Republicans is about Donald Trump. It is not. It is about the Republican Party and its very dark soul when it comes to immigration. The rank and file didn’t much care for Trump as recently as May. It swooned this month when it discovered he’s a bigot.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gestures and declares "You're fired!" at a campaign rally in Manchester, N.H., in this file photo taken June 17, 2015. (Dominick Reuter/Reuters) Donald Trump gestures and declares “You’re fired!” at a campaign rally last month in Manchester, N.H. (Dominick Reuter/Reuters)

In May, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll, 65 percent of Republicans saw Trump unfavorably. In their relative and blissful ignorance, these Republicans had it about right. But then Trump declared his candidacy in a frothing statement about Mexican rapists, and the GOP’s heart started to pound. The numbers got reversed. All of a sudden only 40 percent of them view him unfavorably. The rest — about 60 percent — can hardly quiet their hearts.

This stunning turnabout — this depressing and somewhat scary endorsement of frustration, fear and old-fashioned hate — is sure to be noticed by the other GOP candidates. . .

What Trump is showing is not just that a hard line on illegal immigration pays off, but it pays off big if the overall message contains, like a rock in a snowball, a core of anger. As The Donald himself knows, his text is just a piece of his message. More important is his demeanor. He’s giving the GOP establishment the finger. . .

At the moment, no one is more anti-establishment than Trump. Americans frightened by a changing and, when it comes to good middle-class jobs, constricting economy are looking for a champion. They see one in Trump, a Mussolini with a comb-over, who is now as much admired for the enemies he’s making as for his inflammatory statements on immigration. For the moment, he stands alone. If his numbers stay high, he won’t be alone for long."

Read the Washington Post, Donald Trump illuminates the GOP’s dark soul.

Go Donald, Go!!

Be Very Very Afraid of 'The Invisible [Republi-CON] Bond Vigilantes'

UPDATE XII:  What ever happened to those preditions of hyperinflation?

Read the Washington Post, And now let us remember the worst economic prediction ever.

UPDATE XI: "When it comes to views on economics, Republicans have been consistent, clear and wrong."

Read The New York Times, G.O.P. Monetary Madness, which notes "that hard-money doctrine and paranoia about inflation have taken over the party, even as the predicted inflation keeps failing to materialize. For example, in February, Representative Paul Ryan, who is somewhat inexplicably regarded as the party’s deep thinker on matters economic, harangued Mr. Bernanke on how terrible it is to “debase” a currency and pointed to a rise in commodity prices in late 2010 and early 2011 as evidence that inflation was finally coming. Commodity prices have plunged since then, but there is no sign that Mr. Ryan or anyone else is having second thoughts."


UPDATE X: How about those invisible Republi-CON bond vigilantes. Read the Washington Post, Average rate on 30-year fixed mortgage ties low of 3.94 pct.; 15-year also hits record.


UPDATE IX: For all the anti-Keynesian folks out there, please explain:




UPDATE VIII: A told ya so by the 2008 winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, in The New York Times, One Point Seven Seven:

"That’s the current interest rate on 10-year US bonds.

Remember, back in 2009 there was a big debate between people like me, who said that we were in a liquidity trap and that interest rates would stay low as long as the economy was depressed, and people like the WSJ editorial page and Niall Ferguson, who said that government borrowing would bring on the bond vigilantes and send rates soaring.

How’s it going?

And just to be clear: this isn’t just about I-told-you-so. We’re talking about different models, different visions of how the economy works. Their vision led to calls for austerity now now now; mine said that the overwhelming danger was that we wouldn’t provide enough stimulus, and that we would pull back too soon. Sure enough, we didn’t and we did. And now catastrophe looms."

Republi-cons continue to sacrifice workers to appease their imaginary inflation gods.


UPDATE VII: It has been several weeks since the so-called downgrade. So how are those bond vigilantes doing? Read The New York Times, Mortgage Rates Hit 50-Year Low.


UPDATE VI: "Fitch Ratings said Tuesday it will keep its rating on U.S. debt at the highest grade, AAA, and issued a 'stable' outlook, meaning it expects the rating to stay there." Read The New York Times, Fitch Ratings Keeps U.S. at Top Credit Rating.


UPDATE V: "Thirty years ago, it became clear that defeating inflation was crucial, even if the means needed to accomplish that would cause a deep recession. . . . [But i]t is time for a new lesson to be learned. Sometimes we need inflation, and now is such a time. " Read The New York Times, Sometimes, Inflation Is Not Evil.


UPDATE IV: "Behold the power of a stupid narrative, which seems impervious to evidence." Read The New York Times, The Downgrade Doom Loop.


UPDATE III: More from that 'liberal' commentator won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics:

"[T]here is no reason to take Friday's downgrade of America seriously. These are the last people whose judgment we should trust.

And yet America does have big problems.

These problems have very little to do with short-term or even medium-term budget arithmetic. The U.S. government is having no trouble borrowing to cover its current deficit. It's true that we're building up debt, on which we'll eventually have to pay interest. But if you actually do the math, instead of intoning big numbers in your best Dr. Evil voice, you discover that even very large deficits over the next few years will have remarkably little impact on U.S. fiscal sustainability.

No, what makes America look unreliable isn't budget math, it's politics. And please, let's not have the usual declarations that both sides are at fault. Our problems are almost entirely one-sided - specifically, they're caused by the rise of an extremist right that is prepared to create repeated crises rather than give an inch on its demands.

The truth is that as far as the straight economics goes, America’s long-run fiscal problems shouldn’t be all that hard to fix. It’s true that an aging population and rising health care costs will, under current policies, push spending up faster than tax receipts. But the United States has far higher health costs than any other advanced country, and very low taxes by international standards. If we could move even part way toward international norms on both these fronts, our budget problems would be solved.

So why can’t we do that? Because we have a powerful political movement in this country that screamed “death panels” in the face of modest efforts to use Medicare funds more effectively, and preferred to risk financial catastrophe rather than agree to even a penny in additional revenues.

The real question facing America, even in purely fiscal terms, isn’t whether we’ll trim a trillion here or a trillion there from deficits. It is whether the extremists now blocking any kind of responsible policy can be defeated and marginalized. "

Read The New York Times, Credibility, Chutzpah And Debt.


UPDATE II: "Virtually unnoticed last week was that [another ratings agency] kept a Triple A rating on the United States." Read The New York Times, Moody’s: Why the U.S. Is Still AAA.


UPDATE: So much for the inflation fear-mongers.

Today the Bank of New York began charging a fee on large deposits. Read the Wall Street Journal, BNY Mellon Deposit Fee: Life in the Liquidity Trap.

BTW, a liquidity trap, "in Keynesian economics, is a situation where monetary policy is unable to stimulate an economy, either through lowering interest rates or increasing the money supply. Liquidity traps typically occur when expectations of adverse events (e.g., deflation, insufficient aggregate demand, or civil or international war) make persons with liquid assets unwilling to invest."

I guess John Maynard Keynes was right after all.

Of course, one 'liberal' commentator has been scoffing at inflation concerns for years.

From more than two years ago, read The New York Times, The Big Inflation Scare, where he speculates that "inflation fear-mongering [was] partly political, coming largely from economists who had no problem with deficits caused by tax cuts but suddenly became fiscal scolds when the government started spending money to rescue the economy. And their goal [seemed] to be to bully the Obama administration into abandoning those rescue efforts."

I guess that's why that 'liberal' commentator won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.

I wonder what the Hedgehog News prize winning economist would says now.

(Warning, that is a satirical comment.

Hedgehog News doesn't have any prize winning economist on the payroll.

But Hedgehog News does have many Republi-con candidates on the payroll.)

"S&P has triggered another invisible attack by the invisible bond vigilantes." Read The New York Times, What If They Announced A Downgrade And Nobody Cared?

BTW, a bond vigilante "is a bond market investor who protests monetary or fiscal policies they consider inflationary by selling bonds, thus increasing yields."

If you don't understand this post, you should refrain from debating fiscal policy issues.

Remember All That Republi-CON Doom and Gloom on Obamacare

UPDATE VI:  "Remember how much Republicans wanted to repeal Obamacare?

The Republican majority in the House of Representatives has voted more than 50 times to repeal the law. Conservatives have twice brought challenges to the Supreme Court — a court with powerful voices that often lean in their direction — only to be largely rebuffed both times. The last government shutdown was driven by Republicans who insisted on defunding Obamacare . . .

When it comes to meeting one of its most important goals — providing coverage to the uninsured — it is working extremely well."

Read the Washington Post, The success of the Affordable Care Act is a hugely inconvenient truth for its opponents, which notes that "the success of the ACA strikes at the heart of the dysfunction strategy employed extremely effectively by anti-government conservatives. This is the self-fulfilling-prophecy strategy that campaigns on: 'Washington is broken!' . . .

Never mind that those making that case are the ones doing the breaking."

UPDATE V:  So much for that Republi-con "Obamacare would destroy the economy" myth.

"In a 2011 press conference, John Boehner used the phrase "job killing" once every two minutes. Then in 2012 we had the best year of job creation since 2005. In 2013 we had an even better year of job creation. Then in 2014, we had an even better year, the best since 1999."

The article included this graph:

Read also, the Washington Post, Can someone please print this graph on a T-shirt?! Sharp decline in the uninsured since the ACA came online, which included this graph:

Read Vox, A chart that Obamacare's fiercest critics will have a hard time explaining.

UPDATE IV:  The "uninsured rate has dropped over four points since Obamacare went into effect a year ago — and that the uninsured rate, now at 12.9 percent, is at its lowest point since Gallup began to 'track the measure daily in 2008.'

Gallup describes its findings this way: 'The Affordable Care Act has accomplished one of its goals: increasing the percentage of Americans who have health insurance coverage.'"

Read the Washington Post, As GOP continues denouncing Obamacare as failure, uninsured rate falls yet again. 

UPDATE III:  It's the 2014 election, curious why you haven't heard more about Obamacare, because it is working.

Read Topix, Stunning Admission From This Republican Governor: Obamacare Helps People.  

UPDATE II:  "One of the many, many, many predictions of Obamacare failure made by conservatives is that insurance companies would systematically drop out of the exchanges. They made this prediction many, many, many, many, many times. The data is starting to come in and, guess what, insurance companies are joining the exchanges. Dan Diamond reports that, in every state that has reported information so far, the number of insurance companies competing in the exchanges will expand in year two."

Read New York Magazine, Today’s Obamacare Non-Train-Wreck News. 

UPDATE:  Saved by Obamacare:

"Dean Angstadt fells trees for a living.

He's a self-employed, self-sufficient logger who has cleared his own path for most of his 57 years, never expecting help from anyone. And even though he'd been uninsured since 2009, he especially wanted nothing to do with the Affordable Care Act.

'I don't read what the Democrats have to say about it because I think they're full of it,' he told his friend Bob Leinhauser, who suggested he sign up.

That refrain changed this year when a faulty aortic valve almost felled Angstadt. Suddenly, he was facing a choice: Buy a health plan, through a law he despised, that would pay the lion's share of the cost of the life-saving surgery - or die. He chose the former.

'A lot of people I talk to are so misinformed about the ACA,' Angstadt said. 'I was, before Bob went through all this for me. I would recommend it to anybody and, in fact, have encouraged friends, including the one guy who hauls my logs.' . .

Read The Philadelphia Inquirer, Once opposed to ACA, now a convert.

Angstadt  now realizes it was Republi-con lies repreated on Hedgehog News that almost got him killed.  

"All the disasters conservatives have predicted to date have failed to materialize. The website did not have to be rebuilt from scratch. The exchanges did not have to push back their start date. The administrative fix did not render the law unworkable. There has been no actuarial death spiral. Democrats have not called for repeal. All the disasters have simply been pushed further into the future. . .

[N]one of the things conservatives warned about happening have actually transpired. The evidence to date is completely consistent with the hypothesis of success. Costs and premiums have come in under projections, young people have signed up, insurers plan to expand their participation, and actuaries project stable premiums."


Read New York Magazine, Obama Declares Obamacare Victory.

Those Wacky Wepubli-CONs

UPDATE: "As a House analyst for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, I’ve personally interviewed over 300 congressional candidates over the course of seven years, both to get to know them and evaluate their chances of winning. I’ve been impressed by just as many Republicans as Democrats, and underwhelmed by equal numbers, too. Most are accustomed to tough questions.

But never have I met any candidate quite as frightening or fact-averse as Louisiana state Rep. Lenar Whitney, 55, who visited my office last Wednesday. It’s tough to decide which party’s worst nightmare she would be.

Whitney, a graduate of Nicholls State University who is running for Louisiana’s open 6th District, owned a dance studio in Houma, La., for 34 years and also worked in sales for small telecommunications and oilfield equipment companies. She clearly relishes poking Democrats in the eye, cites Minnesota’s Rep. Michele Bachmann (R) as a political role model, and takes kindly to the nickname 'Palin of the South.' . .

The GOP’s fringe fears aren’t limited to the Deep South. In Wisconsin, state Sen. Glenn Grothman is locked in a fierce three-way primary for retiring moderate GOP Rep. Tom Petri’s 6th District, near Sheboygan. In 2012, Grothman sponsored a bill to classify single parenthood as a contributing factor to childhood and neglect. Grothman has derided the Democratic group Emily’s List as a 'historically racist organization' and has been quoted alleging 'unwanted pregnancies are the fault of mothers … many mothers lie about the circumstances of their pregnancies.' If Grothman wins the August primary, he would be the favorite in November. . .

[A]t the moment, there are more than enough exotic Republican candidates not easily persuaded by basic facts or scientific evidence to overshadow others in the GOP laying out cogent policy alternatives, such as retiring GOP Rep. Dave Camp, whose tax reform plan died a quiet death this spring. The newest pack of provocateurs threatens to continue wreaking havoc on the party’s image among the growing ranks of independents and college-educated voters in 2015 and beyond."

Read the Washington Post, The most frightening candidate I’ve met in seven years interviewing congressional hopefuls.  

 "Timothy Ray Murray lost out to opponent Frank Lucas in the Oklahoma Republican Primary and rather than take defeat gracefully he, well, he claimed Licas wasn't human.

In an incredible statement on his website after his defeat, Murray wrote: ‘It is widely known Rep. Frank D. Lucas is no longer alive.’

He went on to claim that Lucas was in fact HANGED in a televised execution in Ukraine in 2011 and replaced by a robot body double."

Read Daily Star, Failed US politician claims opponent was executed and replaced by a ROBOT.

According Murray's webite:

"This is a situation similar to the Senators’ from Kentucky situation in the 2012 election. I am contesting that this matter has happen since his election was blocked, because of the U.S. Defense Department’s use of Mr. Murray’s DNA. To my knowledge, the U.S. Defense Department has not released to the public that information, as it is their confidential information about many people. Congress is likely wanting me to state that all my DNA used will not result in benefits to people I have never had relations with of a family nature. I have been bound to protect that information unless it causes harm to The People."

Read also Business Insider, Oklahoma Republican Claims His Opponent Is A 'Robot Look-Alike'.

Another one lost to hysteria, dispair, and rage, thanks to Hedgehog News and the tea party radio network. 

Republi-CON Political Opportunism and Hypocrisy, Cont.

UPDATE V:  "Critics question whether Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl should have been rescued from the Taliban in light of claims that he was both a deserter and a ballerina."

Watch The Colbert Report, Bergdghazi:

The Colbert Report
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Again, this is possibly the most brazen and disgusting political opportunism and hypocrisy I have ever heard.  Republi-cons would have preferred Bergdahl be publicly beheaded before giving any credit to Obama.

UPDATE IV:  "Rep. Richard B. Nugent (R-Fla.), a lawmaker whose three sons have served in the military, made the case of captive soldier Bowe Bergdahl a personal cause. Nugent delivered speeches about Bergdahl on the House floor. He introduced two resolutions affirming that the United States would not abandon him in Afghanistan.

What Nugent wanted, he told a crowd at a rally for Bergdahl in February, was for 'the United States to do everything possible not to leave any members of the armed forces behind.'

But now, Nugent says that — when he said 'do everything possible' — he did not actually mean everything. Now that Bergdahl is free, the Florida Republican has become a critic of the deal that freed him. . .

Nugent is one of several conservatives in Congress who have made a similar shift this week. First, they demanded that President Obama get Bergdahl back. Then, when the soldier was released, they blasted Obama for giving up too much to get him.

Those conservatives have been mocked by Democrats and cable-news talkers, who accuse them of playing politics. “It is clear they are worried his release could be seen as a victory for President Obama,” Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said on the Senate floor Wednesday.

In interviews and statements, some in the group have said they did not contradict themselves. They always wanted Bergdahl back. They expected it might take a deal with the Taliban. Indeed, the broad outlines of this deal — including the five Taliban commanders to be exchanged — had been discussed publicly since at least 2011.

But still, these conservatives say, they didn't expect the final deal would be this bad.

In February, The Washington Post reported on the revival of talks to free Bergdahl in exchange for releasing five Taliban commanders held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, into the custody of Qatar — the exact outlines of the deal that was eventually announced. When asked at the time by CNN’s Anderson Cooper about reports of such a deal, Sen. John S. McCain (R-Ariz.) said he might support an agreement for Bergdahl that included some kind of prisoner exchange.

'Obviously I’d have to know the details, but I would support ways of bringing [Bergdahl] home, and if exchange was one of them I think that would be something I think we should seriously consider,' McCain said.

But after Obama announced Saturday that he had swapped the Taliban prisoners for Bergdahl, McCain criticized the exchange as 'a mistake.' . .

Several members of Congress from both parties issued tweets celebrating Bergdahl’s return, only to delete them as the story grew murky. . .

Just after Bergdahl’s release, Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) released a statement that said: 'Our prayers have been answered and we offer our thanks for the perseverance of the family and the many Idahoans who have kept this vigil. We appreciate the men and women who made this release possible.'

Five days later, Crapo expressed doubts about the exchange, telling a local news outlet: 'I believe that is a problem . . . that could potentially result in a problem for our national security.'"

Read the Washington Post, The Bergdahl boomerang: GOP lawmakers who long urged a rescue now sour on the idea. 

In other words, Republi-cons were for doing everything possible to get the POW back, before they were against doing anything to save him. 

This is possibly the most brazen and disgusting political opportunism and hypocrisy I have ever heard.  Republi-cons would have preferred Bergdahl be publicly beheaded before giving any credit to Obama.

UPDATE III:  "So the prisoner exchange in Afghanistan is 'much like' the 2012 attacks on U.S. facilities in Libya because, in both cases, the administration did or didn’t do something and then later gave an account of why it did or didn’t do that something. Scandalous.

And this is just the beginning of the uncanny similarities. Both events happened — you’re not going to believe this — under President Obama! And in both instances, one of the people involved was — yes, you guessed it — Susan Rice! Don’t forget that Bergdahl and Benghazi both begin with the letter 'B,' and although Afghanistan is in Asia and Libya is in Africa, both continents begin with the letter 'A.' . .

A bit of idle speculation was all Obama’s critics (particularly those at Fox) needed to fire up the Benghazi scandal machine. . .

Former congressman Allen West (R-Fla.) found the two instances similar because 'there is a lot to this whole episode — like Benghazi — that we may never know.'

Luckily for West, knowledge is not a requirement. He has already declared l’affaire Bergdahl an impeachable offense."

Read the Washington Post, From Bergdahl to Benghazi, Republicans fire up the scandal machine. 

UPDATE II: How important is the Benghazi so-called scandal to the Republi-con reelection strategy?

Says Iowa Republi-con Rep. Steve King "We need to try this thing, really, in the public eye, the autopsy of Ambassador Stevens should be released to the public. That's another piece of information that's missing."

Read Slate, What House Conservatives Want From the Benghazi Committee.

UPDATE:  What ever happened to the [fill in the blank] scandal.  "It went the way of pretty much every Obama administration 'scandal,' which is that it turned out to be not nearly as scandalous as Republicans had hoped.

In fact, a clear pattern has emerged on how these scandals have unfolded, one that might be helpful to keep in mind as we start paying attention to [yet another so-called scandal]. Here’s a handy guide:

Stage 1: Worse than . . .

Stage 2: The facts show something problematic, but . . .

Stage 3: The (not so) dramatic hearings.

Stage 4: The rage at the media for not paying enough attention.

Stage 5: The last gasp."

Read the Washington Post, The five stages of GOP scandal-mongering: A reader’s guide. 

Repeat as necessary, the same or another so-called scandal, with indignation and outrage.

"If you compare the costs of the Reagan Administration’s serial security lapses in Beirut to the costs of Benghazi, it’s clear what has really deteriorated in the intervening three decades. It’s not the security of American government personnel working abroad. It’s the behavior of American congressmen at home."

Read the The New Yorker, Ronald Reagan’s Benghazi.

Read also:

The Daily Dolt, Rumsfeld Asserts Embassy Attacks Due To "Perceived American Weakness." Wait, How Many Embassy Attacks Were There Under Bush?,

The Huffington Post, 13 Benghazis That Occurred on Bush's Watch Without a Peep from Fox News

The Huffington Post, Jon Stewart Tears Fox News Apart For Benghazi Hypocrisy, which notes the lack of Hedgehog News hysteria over "a long list of intelligence failures under the Bush administration, including a pre-9/11 report on Osama bin Laden's intentions to strike inside the U.S. and the false claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which led to the 2003 U.S. invasion", and

Media Matters, Krauthammer Whitewashes Bush's History To Bash Obama Over Embassy Attack, which includes a list of embassy attacks over the last 35 years.

See also, Republi-CON Political Opportunism and Hypocrisy.

 

The Republi-CON "America's Got the Greatest Health Care System in the World' Myth

The Daily Show visits "a place with shockingly poor health care conditions, they're still reeling from the loss of a civil war, a quarter of the young people are living in poverty, they have high rates of cancer, heart disease."  

Responds a regular Hedgehog News commentator: "This is how bad it could get, sure, if we keep going down the path of more government control, less innovation.  I don't know if we could be that place unless great catastrophe happens to this country."  

Unfortunately for him, it is that bad already.

Watch the Daily Show, Third World Health Care - Knoxville, Tennessee Edition:

The Daily Show
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From Upworthy, Watch 15 Magically Awkward Seconds Roll By While A Man Panics After Accidentally Insulting America: "At 4:00 is the most awkward 15 seconds I've seen in quite some time."

Sorry Republi-CONs, Jesus Would Be Be a Democrat

UPDATE II:  And sorry Republi-cons, "Jesus was, like most first-century Jews, probably a dark-skinned man. If he were taking the red-eye flight from San Francisco to New York today, Jesus might be profiled for additional security screening by TSA."

Read The Atlantic, Insisting Jesus Was White Is Bad History and Bad Theology.

He's more like Santa, "the result of wild imaginations and creative input from many people across centuries . . . utterly divorced from his religious and historical roots."

Read Slate, What Fox News Doesn’t Understand About Santa Claus.

In fact if you think about it they are both like Hedgehog New, the result of wild imaginations and creative delusions, utterly divorced from facts and reality.

UPDATE:  "If Francis’s embrace of the disabled, his focus on the poor and his mercy for the sinner sound vaguely familiar, that’s because you’ve heard them before. From that Jesus guy."

Read the Washington Post, Like Pope Francis? You’ll love Jesus.

Pope Francis has been under fire from Republi-cons after he criticized capitalism as "'a deified market' and 'a crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power.' He is particularly tough on ideologies that assume economic growth is a sufficient social goal and that would deny to governments an active role in humanizing free markets.

Some American conservatives, issuing a different sort of papal bull, have accused the pope of “pure Marxism” and being “the Catholic Church’s Obama.” In the process, they are demonstrating how ideology can become a consuming substitute for faith. . .

Those surprised that Catholic social thought is incompatible with libertarianism haven’t been paying attention — for decades. Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI said the same. And all warned of the danger when a mode of economic exchange becomes a mind-set. Absent a moral commitment to human dignity, justice and compassion, capitalism is conducive to materialism, individualism and selfishness. It is a system that depends on virtues it does not create. "

Read the Washington Post, Pope Francis and the argument for compassionate capitalism.

If you need more proof, consider how capitalism has corrupted Christmas, which the article notes is now little more than a "shopping season — as evidenced by loud, repetitive commercials — . . . all about seizing the objects of our desires. Christmas songs are turned into commercial jingles. 'Do You Hear What I Hear?,' in the gospel according to J.C. Penney, becomes, 'Do you see what Liz sees? A jacket, a skirt and peep-toe shoes. She’ll be rocking the peep-toe shoes.'".

Happy Shopmas!

Read also:

WWJC ('What Would Jesus Cut?')

Would Jesus Occupy Wall Street?

HWJRFO
 
WWJT (Who Would Jesus Torture)

The Republi-CON Media CONplex

UPDATE VIII:  "There's a direct connection between the shutdown and hyperbolic, partisan journalistic outlets driven more by profits than the search for truth."

Read The Atlantic, How the Broken Media Helped Break the Government. 

UPDATE VII:  "The theme of Ted Cruz’s filibuster this week was 'Make D.C. Listen.' But Cruz himself doesn’t listen; he talks. And talks. And talks. It’s no wonder the Texas senator can’t hear what the public is actually saying. . .

A poll this month from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that 69 percent of Americans, including many who disapprove of the law, want Congress to 'make the law work as well as possible.' Only 23 percent of Americans say Congress should try to 'make the law fail.'

The Republican Party, however, has focused like a laser on making the law fail. Congressional Republicans have withheld crucial implementation funds and sent letters to everyone from the National Football League to local health groups warning them against helping with the rollout. Republican governors have, for the most part, refused to set up health-care exchanges or participate in the Medicaid expansion authorized by the law.

And now Republicans in Congress are considering shutting down the entire government or defaulting on the national debt in order to prevent Obamacare’s implementation. They’ve gone from trying to make Obamacare fail to threatening to make the country fail. . .

In return for a one-year suspension of the debt ceiling, House Republicans are demanding a yearlong delay of Obamacare, adoption of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s tax-reform plan, construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, more offshore oil drilling, more drilling on federally protected lands, looser regulations around ash coal, a suspension of the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulation of carbon emissions, more power over the regulatory process in general, reform of the federal employee retirement program, changes to the Dodd-Frank Act, more power over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s budget, repeal of the Social Services block grant, expanded means-testing for Medicare benefits, repeal of the public health trust fund and more.

Yes, that’s right: 'and more.'

If this policy grab bag sounds familiar, it’s because Republicans have proposed it all before. It was, more or less, Mitt Romney’s agenda during the 2012 presidential campaign. The voters rejected it -- another message, it seems, that Republicans in Washington somehow failed to hear. . .

This is the strange world much of the Republican Party now inhabits. The 'voice of the people' is the one they hear when they whisper into one another’s ears. And they have just enough power to force the rest of the country to listen to it, too."

Read Bloomberg, Ted Cruz Republicans Listen Only to Themselves.  

UPDATE VI:  "[T]he conservative movement is, among other things, an elaborate moneymaking venture by which the wealth of the rabid and gullible conservative rank and file is redistributed to already rich celebrities. . .

From miracle health cures, to get-rich-quick schemes, to overpriced precious metals and seed banks, talk radio hosts and conservative news outlets are making a killing by trading their platform and credibility for the hard-earned cash of their unsuspecting listeners."

Read Salon, Secrets of the right: Selling garbage to your fans.

The article notes that the Republi-CON Media CONplex includes WND, "the birther website that . . . delivers some exciting offers that strain credulity, then break it, kill it, and cremate it."

UPDATE V:  "The Republican National Committee is finally acknowledging what dissidents on the right have warned about for years: 'We have become expert in how to provide ideological reinforcement to like-minded people," a new report on reforming the GOP states, "but devastatingly we have lost the ability to be persuasive with, or welcoming to, those who do not agree with us on every issue.'

This isn't a problem that the national party can solve on its own. Conservative principles and Republican policy ideas mostly reach the rank and file via mass media. But Fox News, most talk-radio hosts, most right-leaning websites, and even donor-driven organizations with communications shops, like the Heritage Foundation, aren't just 'preaching to the choir' out of stubbornness.

It's their business strategy."

Read The Atlantic, The GOP Can't Reach Beyond Its Base Without Confronting Its Hucksters.  

UPDATE IV:  The Hedgehog News modus operandi, lying and screaming.  Read the Washington Post, Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly: Relevance via screaming?

UPDATE III:  As I've said before, so many lies, so little time. (In fairness, Republi-cons don't consider it lying, to them it is "created reality.")

Four months ago, The Daily Caller ran an explosive, Drudge-leading story with a dynamite, Drudge-worthy hed: 'Women: Sen. Bob Menendez paid us for sex in the Dominican Republic' . . .

[The 'escort' who was allegedly] paid her for sex has told Dominican Republic police that she was instead paid to make up the claims in a tape recording and has never met or seen the senator before, according to court documents and two people briefed on her claim."

Read Slate, The Daily Caller's Call Girl's Total Recall.  

UPDATE II:  Even Hedgehog News has limits.

"No more Fox News contributor Dick Morris. His contract to spout republic-damaging nonsense on Fox airwaves has expired, and the network isn’t renewing it.

Taken together with the news that Sarah Palin will no longer be contributing, the Morris development is strong evidence that Fox News has glimpsed the underside of allowing charlatans to brand its coverage. Palin was a roboto-contributor, who responded to everything with a little crack on the lamestream media and a reference President Obama’s socialist heart."

Read the Washington Post, Fox News drops Dick Morris: Hooray.

The article ironically notes that "[v]ast arrogance and loose, poorly substantiated facts: a great combination for a cable-news contributor in these modern times."

Remind you of anyone locally?

UPDATE:  The wacko-sphere, from Rusty to Hedgehog News "and friends can still crush their own, as Obama noted. But that only drives the Republican Party further to the fringes. Virtually everything the broadcast bullies are against -- sensible gun measures, immigration reform, raising taxes on the rich -- are favored by a majority of Americans.

It makes sense, then, that the logical next step for these folks is to retreat into an actual bubble of brick and mortar -- their own city. Glenn Beck has announced plans to build 'Independence, U.S.A.,' a sort of new urbanism for paranoids. In that world, at least, all the fantasies of the far right are always true."

Read The New York Times, Right Flight.

"The conservative media movement exists primarily as a moneymaking venture. As Rick Perlstein explained in the Baffler, some of the largest conservative media organs are essentially massive email lists of suckers rented to snake oil salesmen. The con isn’t limited to a couple of newsletters and websites: The most prominent conservative organizations in the nation are primarily dedicated to separating conservatives from their money. . .

The problem this presents for the movement, beyond the threat of eventually bankrupting the people who give it power, is that the business of money-making, for consultants and media personalities and Herman Cains, is at this point getting in the way of the business of advancing conservative causes. The groups exert massive influence, and they only ever push the Republican Party to get more extreme. Apocalyptic hysteria is much more effective at getting people to open their wallets than reasonable commentary. There are a lot of people whose livelihoods depend on keeping lots of conservatives terrified and ill-informed. The groups that exist to raise funds raise more funds when they endorse the crazier candidate."

Read Salon, The conservative movement is still an elaborate moneymaking venture.