What Tom Bakk and Dave Tomassoni did this week in Minnesota, it seems Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia is doing, more or less, in the US Senate.

And progs aren’t happy about it:

While he would certainly never acknowledge it, Joe Manchin just took it upon himself to go on national television, and had the brilliant idea to singlehandedly throw away any reason someone in the state of Georgia would have to vote for a Democrat in order for them to take the Senate. If he has already positioned himself as someone more interested in catering to the right as opposed to the left, and it’s all but guaranteed he will act as a barrier to any meaningful legislation whatsoever that Democrats could pass, does he not understand he just essentially told people that nothing was going to get done if Democrats control the Senate? Does he not realize he essentially just told voters to go ahead and make the Democrats the majority, while at the same time telling them there was actually no reason to do so considering he has made himself the barrier to anything their base wants to see done?

However the George Senate runoffs turn out, Joe Manchin is going to be one of the most powerful people in the United State for the next two years, at least.

A friend of the blog emails:

St Paul City Councilmember Mitra Jalali says that capitalism crushed a local alternative weekly.

I’m scratching my head at this because the print and online versions were free. So, if they couldn’t survive by giving away whatever they had, how did capitalism crush them? One would think something free would “crush” something more expensive. That’s usually what is said of Walmart- they offer things so cheaply that the small businesses can’t compete. In this case, what is the issue? Free publications can’t compete with more expensive subscription news? Or is it actually can’t compete with better sources online that are also free? Is that capitalism? I guess maybe it is because we here in the USA do have lots of choice and are also free to start another weekly in City Pages place. So, if that choice and opportunity bothers Mitra Jalali, just what alternative does she want for us? 

I suspect councilwoman Jalali – who was “Mitra Jalali-Nelson” until having a hint of Scandinavian became a negative in Metro DFL politics – knows this.

I suspect she, like all DFL pols, knows her voters don’t think about it all that hard, and that nobody in the media is ever going to make an issue of it.

Not sure where this graphic came from, but it’s one of the best bits of journalism I’ve seen lately.

On the left – real science.

On the right…

…NPR’s, and the rest of the media’s, version of “science”.

I should do a similar one for journalism and “journalism”.

The 2024 campaign has started…

…and the Associated Press is doing its job: trying to undercut Republican challengers.

In this case, South Dakota’s Kristy Noem, widely seen as a solid dark-horse contender (I’ve added emphasis):

It’s unlikely that much, if any, of the money will end up going to Trump, said Paul S. Ryan, the vice president of policy and litigation at Common Cause, a campaign finance watchdog. Ryan, a campaign finance lawyer, pointed out that the governor can give a maximum of $2,800 to Trump’s campaign under federal law. If she wanted more to flow to Trump, she could have directed donors to the president’s own donation site.

“In all likelihood, she is keeping this money that she is raising,” Ryan said. “If she were actually interested in raising money for Donald Trump’s own legal efforts, she would use a joint-fundraising committee.”

Note the source – Common Cause, a “campaign finance watchdog”…

…that is part of the progressive non-profit industrial complex, outside of media quotations.

They must worry about her.

Kool 108 has already gone to the all Christmas music format.

No. Just no.

Joe Doakes 

Enjoy it while you can. A Biden FCC will require equal time for lesbian coffee shop folk music.

A friend of the blog emails:

MPR hires a white heterosexual male for a management position?

I’m sure he had to prove his bona fides.

So the pre-election polling saying the electorate was going toward Biden in landslide lots was wrong?

Who could have possibly figured that out?

Oh, yeah – anyone that’s been reading this blog for the past ten years.

There are three possible explanations:

1. Evolution! – The pollster’s craft hasn’t caught up with the “new normal”, in a society where people legitimately fear being “canceled”, losing jobs, social standing and being targeted for violence because of their beliefs.

That is simultaneously possible, and not mutually eclusive

2. Incompetence! – The pollsters absorbed the lessons of 2016, where they actually did a little better than they did this year…

…and learned nothing.

3. Never Ascribe to Incompetence What Can Be Chalked Up To Malice – I’m going to present three facts and a conjecture:

Fact 1 – On December 1, 2016, representatives of the New York Times and Washington Post newsrooms went on WNYC radio’s “On the Media“ program (syndicated on NPR) and said, In as many words, that was time to change the rules of journalism. It was time to move past “passing the facts on to people and letting them make up their own minds” to “Denormalizing Donald Trump“.

Fact 2 – in 1986, a UCLA psychology professor, Dr. Mehrabian, showed the existence of a “bandwagon effect“; when polls showed that a candidate had no chance of winning, “swing“ voters tended to stay home or vote for someone else.

Fact 3 – for the past 30 years, the Star Tribune “Minnesota Poll” has had a fairly clear pattern; the closer a race ended up being, the more wildly distorted pre-election polling numbers were. For example, they showed Tim Pawlenty, Norm Coleman and Tom Emmer getting blown out just before the election. All three races ended up being famously close. On the other hand, they tend to report blowouts pretty accurately; they had Amy Klobuchar and Kurt Bills pretty much dead on.

Conjecture: It’s not an “accident”, or a learning error, that polling predicting a landslide up until election day was completely wrong.

Thoughts?

I do “get” nostalgia.

My first radio station – KEYJ, which became KQDJ during my senior year of high school – was one of the formative experiences of my life. 

But sometime around 2000, it changed from a local middle-of-the-road station to a “computer in a closet” station relaying ESPN Sportsradio and the occasional high school sports event.  They moved the studio from above the drugstore on mainstreet to a nondescript suite in a strip mall downwind from a Walmart.  I don’t drop by to visit, because it’s not the station it was when I was 16.  It’s not a radio station anyone in 1980 would have recognized at all. 

The past is a keen, formative memory.  The present is a 10 year old PC passing along people jabbering about the NBA.   

If it disappeared tomorrow, the memory would remain.  The present wouldn’t be lamented at all. 

The CIty Pages – which was the last survivor of an endless stream of “alternative” weekly tabloids (Twin Cities Reader, Nightbeat, Cake, Buzz, and no doubt others) that used to sit in bins outside record stores, co-ops and cafes all over town – has closed, effective whoah, that was fast:

“Since City Pages revenue is 100% driven by advertisers and events—and those investments have dropped precipitously—there’s no reasonable financial scenario that would enable us to continue operations in the face of this pandemic,” Star Tribune Chief Revenue Office Paul Kasbohm said in a statement. “Unfortunately, we foresee no meaningful recovery of these sectors or their advertising investments in the near future, leaving us no other options than to close City Pages.”

City Pages will stop publishing in print and online immediately, according to a news release. The last print edition of City Pages will be distributed this week.
The closure eliminates all City Pages positions.

I come not to praise the City Pages, but to bury it. But fairness demands a little clarity.

The City Pages were the last survivor of what used to be a bumper crop of freebie tabloids that popped up in bins outside restaurants, co-ops, record stores and bars. There were a bunch – Nightbeat in the eighties, Twin Cities Reader in the eighties and nineties, joined by Cake and Buzz and a few others in the nineties. The field winnowed down to just the City Pages by about 2000.

In the eighties, it was where writers like David Brauer, Brian Lambert and James Lileks got their starts – indeed, it was where Lileks gave me my first legit-media plug, 33 years ago.

And for a few years, in the ’90s and early 2000s, City Pages did some great journalism. They did more, better long-form and investigative reporting than the Strib or PiPress, at their best, under editor Steve “Don’t even think about singing ‘Oh Sherry’ around me” Perry. It was biased to the left to a fault. But beneath all that, the reporting was otherwise generally solid. And Perry could go off the reservation; in about 1997, Perry was the first journo in the Twin Cities to write that the swelling push for carry permit reform in Minnesota hadn’t brought blood to the streets of a couple dozen other states, wasn’t going to bring it to Minnesota, either.

When Perry left in 2005-ish (to return as editor of the Soros-funded attack-PR site Minnesota Monitor, which became the Minnesota Independent, and distinguished itself in journalistic glory under neither guise), the City Pages slid and slid hard. For most of the past 10-15 years, the paper’s “journalism” has been at best risible hackery, or incompetent hackery, self-parodying hackery, or sloppy gurgitations of DFL chanting points or, when female conservative politicians were involved, creepy panty-sniffing.

If the City Pages had been its 1998 self, its collapse would have been something to mourn, maybe, for some reason other than the nostalgia local establishment journos have been venting about.

But the City Pages of the 21st Century has been not a shadow, but a mockery, of anything of real value that it may once have been.

The media:

“The week before the election, Mike Pence is coming to a state that our polling says is supposed to be a blowout for Biden AND HAS BEEN EXPOSED TO COVID!

I have two observations about Joe Biden’s performance in last Thursday’s debate.

First – his campaign is all platitudes. He has a “plan” for everything. A government “plan” and three bucks will get you a cup of Caribou. It’s all there to gull the gullible.

Second – like all Democrats, he can pretty much say any billshut he wants, because his voters are all low-information drones who have the critical thought skills of herd animals, and the media like it that way.

There were many examples of this during the debate on Thursday – “I never said I’d ban fracking”, “nobody lost their plan to Obamacare”, and on and on.

The one that made me jump out of my seat with the most incredulity? “We had a great relationship with Hitler before he invaded Europe”.

He was half right. The US had a lousy relationship [1] with the Nazi regime – to FDR’s rare credit

The U.S. didn’t have a good relationship with Hitler before he “invaded Europe. The German dictator was, however, beloved in certain quarters, including the editorial offices of the New York Times.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt didn’t attack Hitler directly before the war began, but relations between the U.S. and Nazi Germany were by no means good. In September 1938, Roosevelt sent a telegram to Hitler lecturing him about the importance of keeping the peace and stating: “The conscience and the impelling desire of the people of my country demand that the voice of their government be raised again and yet again to avert and to avoid war.” Implying that Hitler was a warmonger was hardly a hallmark of cordial relations between the two countries.

Failing to get a satisfactory response from Hitler, on October 11, 1938, Roosevelt announced that he was increasing national defense spending by $300 million (over $5 billion in today’s dollars). No one thought that money was going to build up our defenses against Britain and France.

But the New York Times? They loved them some Hitler:

The historian Rafael Medoff recently noted that on July 9, 1933, just over five months after he became Chancellor of Germany and years after his virulent anti-Semitism and propensity for violence had become notorious worldwide, the New York Times published a fawning puff piece on Hitler that rivals even today’s media adulation of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Nancy Pelosi in its one-sidedness, myopia, and disdain for essential facts.

Pulitzer Prize-winning “journalist” Anne O’Hare McCormick traveled to Berlin to become the first reporter from an American news outlet to interview the new chancellor, and she was an intriguing choice for the Times editors to make to conduct this interview, as in the presence of this man whose name has become justly synonymous with evil, she was decidedly starry-eyed: “At first sight,” McCormick gushed, “the dictator of Germany seems a rather shy and simple man, younger than one expects, more robust, taller. His sun-browned face is full and is the mobile face of an orator.”

As if that weren’t enough, she continues with a description of the Führer as outlandish and adulatory as likening the supremely zaftig Stacy Abrams to a supermodel: “His eyes are almost the color of the blue larkspur in a vase behind him, curiously childlike and candid. He appears untired and unworried. His voice is as quiet as his black tie and his double-breasted black suit.”

This, of course, as Walter Duranty was all but french-kissing Joseph Stalin. The NYTimes were equal-opportunity up-suckers.

It wasn’t just the NYTimes, of course – Time named Hitler their “Man of the Year” in 1938:

Although as Time laboriously clarifies:

That choice abided by the dictum of TIME founder Henry Luce, who decreed that the Man of the Year — now Person of the Year — was not an honor but instead should be a distinction applied to the newsmaker who most influenced world events for better or worse. In case that second criterion was lost on readers, the issue that named Hitler dispensed with the portrait treatment that cover subjects typically got. Instead he was depicted as a tiny figure with his back to the viewer, playing a massive organ with his murdered victims spinning on a St. Catherine’s wheel.

Which, in context, makes sense.

Moreso than the NYTimes’ excuse, anyway.

[1] Speaking generally in re the government, of course. Some in the government – Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, Ambassador to the UK, Democrat eminimento and father of progressive icons John F. and Robert F. Kennedy – spent the early years of the war pulling for the Nazis to conquer the Brits, whom he hated.

…the nation turns its lonely, topical limerick and haiku writing eyes to you. And Ryan Rhodes.

But since Foot is retired and Ryan is MIA, we’ll have to fill in ourselves.

There once was a fellow named Toobin
(Don’t confuse him with Jennifer Rubin).
His career met its doom,
when he dropped trou on Zoom
Now there’s a different part getting the lube-in.

Toobin takes “lid” off,
Two weeks’ frenzy erupts, as
Biden’s lid stays on.

So Toobin had fun of the kind,
the nuns said would make you go blind.
But there’s no point in moping,
it’s just Jeff’s way of hoping
for less trouble than the conjugal kind.

Carry on.

Remember December 1, 2016?

Maybe not.

But if you don’t, I consider it my mission to make sure that date lives on – dare I say, in infamy.

It was the date that reps from the New York Times and Washington Post newsrooms went on the air and told the nation…

…well, the tiny, self-selecting part of the nation that listens to NPR on the weekend – that it was time for the news media to stop playing by the rules that they always told the nation they played by, the whole “telling people the facts and let them draw their own concusions” thing, and started using their power to “de-normalize” President Trump.

And almost four years later, here we are:

Not Martin Van Buren, the most genuinely corrupt president in history.

Not James Buchanan, the inept buffoon who all but sent out engraved invitations to the Civil War.

Not Woodrow Wilson, the Princeton dean who lied about keeping the nation out of war, did more than any other single person to federalize and weaponize Jim Crow and empower the Klan, and launch the bureaucratic state that’s eating the nation alive today.

No. Trump. A coarse populist buffoon who has, nonetheless, pretty much done what he said he’d do (start bringing troops home, revive the economy after the slowest recovery since the Depression, nominate conservative SCOTUS justices), a few nobody expected (roll the ball farther toward peace in the middle east than any president, defeated ISIS), and brought the extreme delusional madness of the left fully out in the open, where (if America is wise) it can be stomped on hard, God willing…

…oh. I get it now.

…if citizens can’t trust their institutions.

And we can’t trust our institutions. And they know it, and don’t care.

So what choice does that leave us?

…to punch up. To treat people with respect. To treat people the way I’d like to be treated. To always take the high road.

But Maureen Dowd?

I’m going to take a walk on the dark side, here.

MoDo is an invincibly stupid person.

The flotsam and jetsam of the left’s social media legion of the invincibly depraved has legs so tingly this morning at the news the POTUS and FLOTUS have Covid, they had to drag themselves hand over hand to the kitchen to make their avocado toast.

Of course, they were in Duluth before the news broke, so the Twin Cities media has jumped into high gear to investigate, not ballot harvesting (oh, good heavens, no) but just how close Minnesota’s GOP congresspeople and candidates actually were to the President.

Strib columnist Jennifer Brooks:

Don’t worry, Jen. John Thompson is on it.

If the FCOTUS recover without complications – fingers crossed, prayers being prayed – I’m almost tempted to send all these “journalists” sympathy cards.

A whole bunch of general counsels for a whoooole bunch of media outlets are changing their drawers right about now:

I’m smelling panicky settlements in the air.

The NYTimes is trying to disappear some of their own paper’s history in re the “1619 Project”, which claimed that, based on the premise that America was founded primarily to exalt slavery, the nation was really founded when the first slave arrived.

Or…so they said. For a while:

Editors recently removed (without explanation or acknowledgment) the provocative statement that the project “aim[s] to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding” from the article series’ online introduction. Lead author Nikole Hannah-Jones has repeatedly claimed it is a myth that the project proposes 1619 rather than 1776 as the country’s birth year: She blamed bad-faith critics on the right for tricking the media into believing otherwise.

“One thing in which the right has been tremendously successful is getting media to frame stories in their language and through their lens,” wrote Hannah-Jones in a subsequently deleted tweet. “The #1619Project does not argue that 1619 is our true founding. We know this nation marks its founding at 1776.”

Forget for a moment that Hannah-Jones’ Twitter banner is a picture of 1776 crossed out and replaced with 1619. Forget that multiple progressive media outlets that were sympathetic to the project’s aims used the 1619-as-true-founding summary in order to explain it. Forget that a year ago, after the articles were published, both Hannah-Jones and New York Times magazine editor Jake Silverstein described the project in exactly these terms: “We sort of proposed the idea in a variety of ways that if you consider 1619 as the foundational date of the country, rather than 1776, it just changes your understanding and we call that a reframing of American history.” Just consider one last piece of evidence that Hannah-Jones is being deceptive about who invented the 1619-not-1776 framing.

My guess – she’s not being “deceptive”. She, and the Times, are backfilling and memory-holing because Identity Politics stands to cost the Democrats.

Again.

During the Bush years, as many as a third of Democrats had some level of belief that 9/11 was an inside job.

Today, a significant number – on social media, it looks like a supermajority – believe that Trump colluded with Russia, that Kavanaugh raped someone, that “white supremacists” started the riots, that “Anti”-fa is anti-fascist, that Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s purported “dying wish” should have some legal merit and that the Electoral College disenfranchises them.

Which is why we’re seeing this sort of “journalism”, doubtlessly placed by a Democrat attack-PR firm, about a movement whose adherence among the GOP is likely in low single digits.

Yep – it’s Berg’s 7th Law, and Urban Progressive Privilege – a gaslighting twofer!

A friend of the blog writes:

Here is the President’s press briefing from March 16. http://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-vice-president-pence-members-coronavirus-task-force-press-briefing-3/ 

As I read it for the first time ever, I am amazed at how similar his statements are to almost every other elected leader, regardless of party. President Trump tells us here that he recommends social distancing, limit gatherings to 10 people, avoid restaurants, bars. Choose take out. Choose distance learning if possible. And he states, way back in March, that this is going to be going on for a while, maybe past August, he suggests.
These are his prepared statements. What I mainly heard reported at the time was his off the cuff responses to the media. He is a wild man with his words when he’s not reigned in. Everyone knows it.
The media is now complaining that Trump knew the whole time how dangerous this was and “minimized” it. Yet, here, on March 16, his prepared remarks do not minimize it. In fact, he even asks us Americans to make sacrifices. He reminds the young that they will have milder cases, but can easily spread it. Think about the vulnerable elderly around us.
It is all there. But, the media chose to focus on other things, chose to portray this as political- Republicans versus Democrats. 
Now, the President’s rallies in some counties in Nevada have been cancelled. The media again wants us to believe that Trump is not on the side of protecting citizens by reporting a faux conflict between the President and the Governor of Nevada. Yet, the White House guidelines recommend smaller gatherings due to current virus spread in those areas where the President would rally. As the Press Secretary said, no one is forbidding a spontaneous gatherings. But, the President cannot host a large gathering himself. These distinctions are important. It shouldn’t take research to read between the lines. When can we hold the media responsible for the public reaction to the virus?

I think we are holding them responsible.

Problem is, the people who aren’t inclined to trust the media can’t disdain them more, and the Legion of the Invincibly Ignorant who still do aren’t going to be convinced no matter what.

…I can think of for this piece of bilge in The Atlantic is that the magazine didn’t know why Babylon Bee should have all the fun, satirizing Big Left.

I rarely watch pay television, I’m generally reading a book or watching a movie on Netflix. So I was surprised at the quality of Joe Biden’s campaign ads.

If I didn’t know he’s been hiding in the basement the last six months, didn’t know he stumbles and flubs his way through interviews, didn’t know he’s been silent in the face of riots across the nation, I’d be impressed. He talks like a patriotic American. 

The ads are lies,  but they are good lies. 

We know hardcore conservatives will vote for Trump and hardcore liberals will vote for Biden. It’s the mushy headed individuals in the middle, who don’t make up their mind until right now, just before the election. Those are the ones who decide the election in the end. If these ads work for them, Trump is in trouble.

Joe Doakes

They are good – although if you listen to the audio, you can tell Biden’s voice-over track is spliced together. There’s no way the old fella did those reads sitting behind a mike in one take.

This may be the greatest lower-third super (aka “Chyron”, aaka the graphic at the bottom of the shot)) in the history of propaganda:

When life gives you rotten fruit, ferment it down until you can make a flaming sambuca:

While the Democrats work at quietly deflecting the nation’s attention from their senile soon-to-be-nominee, the media would seem to be working hard on keeping anyone from digging too hard into Kamala Harris’s past.

With good reason.

During her decade-and-a-half tenure as a chief prosecutor, Harris would fail to prosecute a single case of priest abuse and her office would strangely hide vital records on abuses that had occurred, despite the protests of victims’ groups.

Harris’s predecessor as San Francisco district attorney, Terence Hallinan, was aware of and had prosecuted numerous Catholic priests on sexual misconduct involving children. And he had been gathering case files for even more… Hallinan’s office had launched an investigation and quickly discovered that the San Francisco Archdiocese had extensive internal records concerning complaints going back some seventy-five years. In spring of 2002, Hallinan demanded the church turn them over to his office.

Now, there were reasons for this – some of them legal…

…and some of them apparently, er, convenience:

…many of the cases were past what had been the statute of limitations. And just as the cases were heating up, the U.S. Supreme Court decision overturned a 1994 California law that retroactively eliminated the statute of limitations for sexual abuse cases. So instead of criminal prosecution for the older cases, Hallinan was forced to change his strategy. He wanted to hold the offenders accountable by releasing the clergy abuse files to the public and aiding the victims in civil cases.

But then Terence Hallinan made a big mistake. He lost his reelection bid to Kamala Harris. Of course, she had a little help from the local Catholic organizations that were freaking out over the prospect for Hallinan releasing the documents and helping the abuse victims.

The media’s job is covering stories about Democrats.

With a pillow.

Until the convulsions stop.

Far be it for me, a mere peasant, to question the journalistic integrity of the New York Times…But, may please the court of opinion, there might be a slight difference in the way the “newspaper of record” carried the two different announcements of vice presidential candidates, four years apart.Well, the key and I might notice it, anyway. Let’s see how you do:

Flashback four years:

But don’t you dare say the media is biased.

Q: “But Mitch – why do you say science “journalism“ is a spiraling vortex of ignorance, credulity and stupidity?“

A: Oh, no reason in particular“

Bonus question: how will intersectional theory affect the thesis? Especially if you look at it post-structurally?