The inimitable driftglass, who regularly combines scalpel and hatchet in his dissection of American political life has his say about the media’s role in electing Donald J. Trump in All of This Has Happened Before. Here’s a taste to whet your appetite:
All of this will happen again.
Once again, we usher in another cycle in which the Right, drunk with majority power, will lay waste to everything they touch.
And once again the Both Siderist media clowns and con men are dutifully climbing into their assigned roles: clutching their pearls and feigning shock and outrage —
— even as they go right on defending the Big Lie that makes this whole, awful fraud possible in the first place.
But as any honest citizen who has followed American politics for more that five minutes knows, there is absolutely nothing new in the Republican playbook: the only thing that has changed is that the con man leading the party is now brazen enough to play his lie-and-deny cards face up (From HuffPo) —
[Regarding the hacking of our election by his puppet-master Vlad the Elector] “I think we ought to get on with our lives,” Trump said Wednesday, according to the pool report. He was at his Mar-a-Lago resort, standing next to boxing promoter Don King. “I think that computers have complicated lives very greatly. The whole age of computer has made it where nobody knows exactly what is going on..."
—and the meatheads and bigots at the base of the party are now aggressively ignorant enough to cheer him on for doing it. [...]
There’s much more following that ellipsis at his site.
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2012—Poor in Georgia? Don't expect anything but humiliation from the state:
The fact that today, just 27 percent of Americans who are poor enough to qualify for cash benefits under Temporary Assistance to Needy Families actually receive those benefits is one of the great successes of welfare reform, if you measure success by the "get everyone off of welfare at whatever cost to their health and well-being" standards the reformers intended. And by that measure, Georgia is amazing: Less than 7 percent of Georgia families living in poverty receive TANF, Slate's Neil deMause reports.
In 2004, the state hired a new Department of Human Services commissioner whose overriding goal was to get people off of welfare. Not to make them not need it, just to keep them from receiving it. (Again, in the spirit of welfare reform.) Under her leadership, 60 percent of those who had been receiving benefits—a number that had already plunged in the immediate wake of welfare reform—dropped out of the program, and the percentage of applications approved dropped from 40 percent to 20 percent. Today, Georgia receives $330 million a year from the federal government for TANF, but it doesn't go to TANF.
On today's Kagro in the Morning show: Yes, Trump will still be in violation of the emoluments clause on Day One. That hasn’t changed. Neither has his denial of the hacking, the fantastic claims, or the civil service witch hunt. Then, just for fun, Armando calls in to redesign the Constitution.
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