Friday, January 03, 2025

WHY AREN'T PUNDITS PROPOSING A "UNITY" SPEAKER NOW?

A new session of Congress begins today. In the House, things don't look great for Mike Johnson:
Speaker Mike Johnson is facing an alarming revolt from conservative hardliners....

Johnson has a tenuous single-digit majority, while a dozen hardliners have publicly questioned whether he deserves to remain speaker.

... It’s entirely possible that Johnson could lose the speakership today or this weekend, or that the balloting goes more than one round.
If there's no Speaker by Monday, Congress can't ratify the election of Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. And if the impasse continues for another two weeks, what happens?
If there is still no speaker, no functioning House, and no certification by Inauguration Day on Jan. 20, then the new GOP-controlled Senate’s president pro-tempore, 91-year-old Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa), would become president, according to the presidential line of succession.
I suspect Republicans will either elect Johnson today or resolve their differences by January 20 -- but the fact that they might not has the Washington press corps talking.

But here's something no one in the press is suggesting: that the House should elect a compromise "unity" Speaker, chosen by a mix of Democrats and Republicans.

This is a completely unrealistic outcome, obviously. But imagine if the parties were reversed. Imagine an alternate 2024 election in which a Democrat won the presidency with a popular-vote margin of less than 2 points and Democrats had a tiny majority in the House. Now imagine that angry Democratic progressives threatened not to vote to give Speaker Hakeem Jeffries a majority, and there appeared to be no compromise candidate who could win the necessary 218 votes.

Under those circumstances, every mainstream pundit in America would be recommending that the House choose a candidate who wasn't beholden to the Democrats. Maybe it would be a House Republican perceived as being middle-of-the-road. Maybe -- because the Constitution doesn't require the Speaker of the House to be a member of the House -- it would be a wild-card figure like retiring senator Mitt Romney or a plutocrat like Jamie Dimon. So many names would be bandied about: Liz Cheney! Elon Musk! Andrew Yang! Anyone but a Democrat in good standing, because Democrats are icky. Everyone in Washington agrees on that, including Democrats.

No pundit is proposing a "unity" Speaker now because, according to conventional wisdom, Republicans are entitled to their partisanship and extremism. Democrats are incessantly accused of extremism, even though, in the aggregate, their party is cautious and centrist, while Republican extremism is just accepted as a fact of life, like the weather -- you can't change it, obviously. Republicans battle over the speakership on a regular basis, but the tone of the media coverage is always Oh look, more GOP infighting. It's never When will the GOP abandon this offputting extremism and tack to the center, where the majority of the American people are?

The reasons for the double standard are obvious: The small handful of Democratic leftists challenge the interests of billionaires, while Republican far-rightists don't. Also, the nerdy, bespectacled members of the press corps admire right-wing extremism, which they associate with the rugged frontier manliness they hate themselves for lacking.

Even if this fight goes on for weeks, or is repeated several times over the next two years, the press will never scold Republicans and demand that they abandon their own ideology. That treatment is for Democrats only.
Posted by Steve M. at 9:57 AM 0 comments

Thursday, January 02, 2025

IMPERFECT INFORMATION-GHAZI!

Right-wing media figures and influencers have a thousand different ways of making the Republican base angry at their enemies. One important way of making the rubes angry is by accusing the enemies of dishonesty and bad faith just for doing their jobs in an environment where all the facts aren't known.

Twitchy rounded up several outraged X posts that accused the Associated Press of disinformation merely for saying that a Tesla Cybertruck caught on fire in Las Vegas on New Year's morning:



But in the original version of the story, AP did "simply just publish what happened" as far as its reporters knew. The vehicle did catch fire and explode. At the time, AP said, "No cause was given and details were sketchy." Even Eric Trump tweeted that this was "a reported electric vehicle fire." But it's important to keep topping up the base's level of rage, so Elon Musk tweeted that AP should be called "Associated Propaganda."

A Hot Air post collects other tweets that accuse multiple news organizations of disinformation for reporting what they knew when this was a breaking and imperfectly understood story:



It should be noted that Cybertrucks have actually been known to catch fire, and that there have been so many reports of Tesla vehicles catching fire that the dedicated website tesla-fire.com has documented 232 such incidents.

In the other major terrorist incident on New Year's Day, in New Orleans, right-wingers were told to be outraged at the FBI because it hesitated before declaring the incident an act of terrorism. Early reports told us:
LaToya Cantrell, the mayor of New Orleans, described the incident as a "terrorist attack." The FBI said it wasn't yet using that term.
The FBI called the attack an act of terror later that day. But that wasn't good enough for right-wing rabble-rousers such as this leader of the British far right...



... or this former Ted Cruz communications aide:



News organizations and the FBI are being accused of dishonesty and bad faith for reporting on partial information in an obviously good-faith way. Meanwhile, America's president-elect and his allies have linked the two terrorist incidents to immigration, even though the culprits in both cases were born in America. CNN reports:
During the 10 a.m. hour on Wednesday, Fox reported that the New Orleans suspect’s truck crossed the US border in Eagle Pass, Texas “two days ago.” Some of the right-wing network’s coverage explicitly said “the suspect” drove across the border, leaving viewers with the impression that a foreigner might be responsible for the deadly carnage.

In fact, the New Orleans attack suspect was a US citizen and Army veteran. But those facts weren’t publicly established at the time Fox aired the faulty information.

Eight minutes after the first Fox segment that mentioned the border, Trump issued a statement about “criminals coming in” from other countries....

Some of Trump’s family members and political allies also immediately connected the attack to illegal immigration and cited Fox.

“Biden’s parting gift to America — migrant terrorists,” Donald Trump Jr. wrote, sharing the Fox claim on X. “Shut the border down!!!” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene exclaimed.
(Both of those tweets are still up as I write this.)

As the CNN story notes, Fox reported this incorrect information -- for whatever reason -- without fact-checking it:
Fox tried to walk back its incorrect report about an hour and a half later. The network said the truck used in the attack was actually in Eagle Pass nearly two months ago, not two days ago. More importantly, the truck was being driven by someone else at that time – it was available on the car rental app Turo – so the detail about the border was completely irrelevant.

But the damage was done. References to Eagle Pass continued to spread across social media. Fox continued to stream a clip on its website of the incorrect information. “Some Republicans continued to beat the border drum well after Fox News retracted its initial report,” The Daily Beast’s Josh Fiallo reported.
But Trump continues to rabble-rouse about "open borders":



Oh, but Trump and Fox are allowed to mangle the truth -- no one expects them to have standards, right? Meanwhile, when mainstream news organizations tell us only what they know, they're branded as liars, and there's more overall anger in America about their conscientiousness than about Trump's flagrant dishonesty.
Posted by Steve M. at 3:08 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, January 01, 2025

BRAD SPAFFORD MIGHT HAVE BEEN DREAMING OF A TERRORIST ATTACK, BUT AT GATEWAY PUNDIT, HE'S JUST A PATRIOTIC AMERICAN

On a New Year's Day when we're waking up to reports that a man killed ten people when he drove a vehicle into crowds on Bourbon Street in New Orleans last night, there's another disturbing story about a possible would-be terrorist:
A Virginia man was arrested this month with what federal prosecutors described in court papers on Monday as the largest cache of “finished explosive devices” ever found in the F.B.I.’s history.

The man, Brad Spafford, was taken into custody at a farm outside Norfolk on Dec. 17 on the basis of a single-count criminal complaint accusing him of illegally possessing an unregistered short-barrel rifle. When investigators searched his 20-acre property, in Isle of Wight County, they found in a detached garage more than 150 explosive devices — mostly pipe bombs, some of them labeled “lethal,” prosecutors said.

They found more pipe bombs in a bedroom inside Mr. Spafford’s house, loosely stuffed in a backpack that bore a patch shaped like a hand grenade and a logo reading “#NoLivesMatter,” prosecutors said.

No Lives Matter is a nihilistic, far-right ideology that largely exists on encrypted online messaging apps like Telegram. The movement’s adherents promote “targeted attacks, mass killings and criminal activity” and have “historically encouraged members to engage in self-harm and animal abuse,” according to a threat assessment released in August by the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness.
It's hard to know what if anything Spafford was planning to do, but there's this:
... the investigation into Mr. Spafford began last year, after a neighbor reached out to the authorities. Mr. Spafford had lost three fingers on his right hand while working with a homemade explosive device, the neighbor said, and he was stockpiling weapons and homemade ammunition.

The neighbor reported that Mr. Spafford had told him that he and his friends were “preparing for something” that he “would not be able to do alone,” the court papers said.

The neighbor also told investigators that Mr. Spafford sometimes used photographs of President Biden for target practice at a local shooting range and believed that “political assassinations should be brought back.” After the attempt on President-elect Donald J. Trump’s life in Pennsylvania in July, the papers said, Mr. Spafford told his neighbor that he “hoped the shooter doesn’t miss Kamala,” an apparent reference to Vice President Kamala Harris.
The New Jersey report on No Lives Matter (NLM) finds ties to global groups that want to use violence to spread chaos:
* In July 2024, NLM shared a post on its Telegram channel to announce a partnership with Mordwaffen Division (MWD)—a European neo-Nazi group—stating “NLM x MWD deadly alliance” and “Support your local nazi terrorists.” In 2023, NLM partnered with a Russia-based WRME [white racially motivated extremist] group, Maniac Murder Cult (abbreviation MKU based on Russian translation) to co-author the NLM Kill Guide, which provided attack tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). Several pages in the guide reference MKU, calling the group its “brothers in arms” and stating “NLM x MKU we can strike anywhere, at any time.”

* In June 2024, NLM released two extremist publications called the Terror Guide and the Manhunt Guide, both of which provide TTPs for members to “sharpen” their skills.” The Terror Guide includes instructions for making poison and constructing various improvised explosive devices. The guide also provides operational security (OPSEC) practices, weapons preferences, fighting techniques, and instructions for “manhunting” victims. The Manhunt Guide provides additional tactical guidance and OPSEC techniques while providing “manhunt requirements” such as recording “brutal” beatings.
(By the way, "Mordwaffe" means "murder weapon" in German.)

In a post about all this, Digby links to a long and informative report from West Point's Countering Terrorism Center (which I'm guessing Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will seek to eliminate). The report focuses on MKU (which it transliterates as MKY) and its links to No Lives Matter, the Mordwaffen Division, a group called 764 that engages in online sexual extortion (although No Lives Matter has now dissociated itself from 764), and Satanist/neo-Nazi groups such as the Order of Nine Angles. This is a very deep rabbit hole, but I'll give you just a small taste of what's in the West Point report:
M.K.Y. has published three ideological and instructional “handbooks”....

The third edition of the Haters Handbook officially stated that an alliance had been formed between M.K.Y. and NLM (No Lives Matter). Chapter 8 of this edition is titled “Weapons of Anarchy” and contains a compilation of previous instructional materials disseminated by M.K.Y. Included in this compilation is a version of the document “NLM Terror Guide,” now named “MMC/NLM Murder Guide.” This guide contains a section titled “Just Terror Tactics Truck Attacks.” ... The second tactic described in the guide is how to carry out attacks with bladed or blunt weapons....

NLM acts as the English language hub of M.K.Y., seeking to recruit and mobilize individuals from the English-speaking world. NLM has published three original instructional manuals in English, as well as many translated M.K.Y. documents.
The Sweden Herald reported in September that "At least eight attacks in Hässelby in western Stockholm can be linked" to "the Swedish part of 764 and its subgroup NLM (No lives matter)," including the stabbing of an 80-year-old man by a 14-year-old boy.

Is it possible that Spafford was planning something like this? I went to Gateway Pundit and learned that, unsurprisingly, the commenters there don't care -- they think the authorities are acting like totalitarians, while Spafford is just an ordinary American citizen exercising his fundamental human rights:
... Since when is a short barreled gun illegal? And registering arms? WTF is that all about?

Last I checked the 2nd Amendment hasn't been repealed. Every single thing this guy owned was legal, if the Constitution still means anything.

And the FBI says he was using political figure X for target practice. Still no violation of any law.

Disband the FBI now!

****

Yeah and them freaking out about him making 50 rounds of ammo per day. Seriously. You shoot way more than that going to the range. And when has it become illegal to stockpile ammo? Ever since the ammo shortage during the Obama years many people do this just to avoid being caught flat footed if there is another shortage.

****

If you have 25 freedom tools and 500 to 1000 rounds for each, which is normal, you are deemed a threat to society?

****

Except for the pipe bombs...I see no problems.
A commenter named Jack knows who's really at fault:
Sounds like a case of Judeo-Bolsheviks trying to disarm the peasants

AFT head Steve Berkowitz Dettelbach 🔯

FBI reports into AG Merrick Horowitz Garland 🔯

****

I don't believe a damn thing the media says either

Remember that BOTH sides are controlled by the minority that drove Bolshevism/World Communism

Did they take over the media for the good of the peasants -- or to enslave them?
No commenter pushes back on this. At Gateway Pundit, this is perfectly acceptable discourse.

It's hard to know whether Spafford was on the verge of engaging in a terrorist attack or was merely a garden-variety wingnut weapon hoarder. But it's a good idea for the authorities to look into him if he's violating laws. Nevertheless, much of the right believes that it's categorically impossible for a right-wing gun owner to commit an illegal act -- and the incoming Trump administration will probably agree.
Posted by Steve M. at 11:13 AM 0 comments
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