BC POLITICS
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As usual is maddening how easy this is to understand and how much everyone refuses to understand it. There are two things happening here, and they aren't super hard to understand. There's the asshole administration and the asshole reporter.

 The court said asshole administration revoked asshole Jim Acosta's press pass without due process. WH deemed him press, gave him a press pass, then they kicked him out without even being able to say who made the decision or on what grounds.
We want hostile, combative reporters. We **want** that. **You** want that. We want that because the press secretary of every single administration is a liar. Even the ones you like. Lying is their job. They show up to avoid answering, but give the appearance of being answerable.
It shouldn't be easy for government to just refuse to be answerable. It should be hard to dodge. Hard to kick people out. Hard to control the narrative. That shouldn't be easy for the gov't. Not even your most favoritest president.
You, the American citizen, want the truth. Reporters should be there to get it. That means asking questions doggedly, demanding answers. This is not an obscure idea. It should be obvious to anyone who's experienced having a president you didn't vote for. Super rare right?
There are a lot of reporters that do that, even biased reporters. April Ryan. Jake Tapper (when he was there.) Major Garrett. Jon Karl. Chip Reid, Cecilia Vega, Kevin Corke. Good reporters doing good reporter work.
But THEN there are the other people. The actors. They come in two flavors. One is that Gannon guy from the Bush administration, asking fawning, fake, softball questions to help the administration.
The other flavor is Jim Dam Acosta. He is NOT there to find out answers or the truth. He isn't even pursuing stories. He just isn't. Come on.
You know what he "asked" Trump once? He said "how can you be America First while rubbing elbows with all these bigwigs?" Because Trump was meeting with foreign heads of state and world economic leaders. Acosta asked that. Shouted it. Then tweeted that he did it!
That's not a real question, it's not even a real issue. What was he trying to uncover? Reveal? Learn about on our behalf? Nothing. He was trying to make the rhetorical point that "America first is stupid, you dick."

Most of his "questions" have nearly audible hashtags.
That's policy debate, and BAD, lame, lazy policy debate, at that. It's a verbal tweet, not a real question from a real reporter. And everybody knows it.
When people say that what Acosta does is a performance, or grandstanding, that's not just a snarky observation, it's an actual and important point. He is literally not doing the job of a reporter.
It's not merely being a biased liberal hack, which he is, its being a bad faith, dishonest, non-reporter taking up the time when the real press should be asking real things. It's well beyond fame-seeking, it's glory-seeking. He's smitten with himself and his perceived status.
It would be bad for the future, and bad for the First Amendment, to let the Trump administration get away with just kicking him out. And you can say that without moralizing about Acosta's sacred duty and trust. He ain't that guy.
So yeah, the press is right to stand together against bad action by this free press-hating, free speech-hating administration and the would-be tyrant over it. But spare me piously standing arms linked with that jackass who just ruined it for the rest of you. And we the people.
You know how a teacher might allow your whole 3rd grade class to have one cookie, and that one asshole kid kept taking too many, and then, because the teacher can't smack sense into the asshole kid, she has to take away everyone's cookies forever?
That's him. And now you have stupid rules to follow. Stupid, one-cookie rules with no follow-ups. Everyone loses. Because one asshole kid just couldn't stop taking all the fucking cookies.

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Funny, before the election I recall lefties muttering the caravan must have been a Trump setup because it made the open borders crowd look so bad. Why would the pro-migrant crowd engineer a crisis that played into Trump's hands? THIS is why. THESE are the "optics" they wanted.


This media manipulation effort was inspired by the success of the "kids in cages" freakout, a 100% Stalinist propaganda drive that required people to forget about Obama putting migrant children in cells. It worked, so now they want pics of Trump "gassing children on the border."

There's a heavy air of Pallywood around the whole thing as well. If the Palestinians can stage huge theatrical performances of victimhood with the willing cooperation of Western media, why shouldn't the migrant caravan organizers expect the same?

It's business as usual for Anarchy, Inc. - the worldwide shredding of national sovereignty to increase the power of transnational organizations and left-wing ideology. Many in the media are true believers. Others just cannot resist the narrative of "change" and "social justice."

The product sold by Anarchy, Inc. is victimhood. It always boils down to the same formula: once the existing order can be painted as oppressors and children as their victims, chaos wins and order loses. Look at the lefties shrieking in unison about "Trump gassing children" today.
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Pretending that voting for Trump or denying climate change or suggesting the solution to every problem is more guns is a legitimate point of view, worthy of respect is not "how America works." It is how it dies.

People in a free society are entitled to any point of view no matter how obviously wrong or outlandish or destructive provided they do not impose their views on others.

But suggesting that something ignorant or divorced from reality warrants the same kind of treatment in public debate as something based in fact or at least credible is absurd and when done on behalf of a society in public media or academic settings it is self-destructive.

We would not grant media coverage or much bandwidth at all to a group that argued that unicorns exist or that there was a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Yet views like denying climate change or basing policy decisions on sweeping, obvious lies, are just as unsound.

Somewhere, somehow, judgments must be made. Some behaviors are wrong and must be condemned. Someone must challenge lies and demand facts. Coddling people who embrace idiocies does not help them no matter how loudly they demand to be coddled.
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Good morning, electoral lunacy followers. Welcome to what I suspect will be the 2020 equivalent of the Orly Taitz litigation: Sidney Powell Sues Everoyen For LAL Of Teh ThInGs

This is the first of what will (hopefully) be a limited number of #Kraken-related threads.

That said, I doubt the number will be limited. I think Sidney Powell is the Orly Taitz of the Biden Administration.

And I doubt I've acquired enough maturity since my younger birther-watching days to ignore these. So, yes, at least for cases with public dockets, I'm here.

We've got two filings so far - a Michigan one (King v Whitmer) that has been filed, and a Georgia one (Pearson v Kemp) that cannot presently be located on PACER.

This may be because there are parallel Quorts not in the system but maybe it just didn't get filed.

Here's how I'm going to deal with that - I'll start livetweeting King (the filed one) in a little bit, after I do some turkey prep. I'll do that in this thread, but probably even slower and more interrupted than usual - so you might just want to bookmark and come back later.

Tonight, if there's interest, I might be both willing and able to stream a read of the (maybe unfiled) GA case on Twitch tonight.
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Brossentia @ Home!
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Watching the Congress hearing on Gamestop/Robinhood/Reddit. I'll let people know if there's anything super interesting.

Right now, it seems like both Democrats and Republicans are sympathetic with average Americans rather than the companies. It'll be interesting to see what happens.

I kind of like Rep. Patrick McHenry's (R) take. Basically, he says it's dumb that it's easier to buy a lottery ticket than to invest.

Now, Congressional hearings in committees are often more about figuring out problems than attacking each other; I fully expect both Democrats and Republicans to have good insight here.

Rep. Al Green says that fines -have- to outweigh the benefits from breaking the law. I completely agree.
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Ezra Klein
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So I've been reporting a story about how you'd fix the impeachment process. It doesn't work for removal, as currently designed. Impeachment was built for a political system without parties. It fails in a system with polarized parties.

The one time it functioned as intended, confusingly, was the time it didn't happen: Richard Nixon wasn't impeached! But the impeachment process, which came at the low ebb of party polarization in American history, convinced his party to force him to resign.

Would Republicans force Nixon to resign today?

Oh, you're cute. Thank you. I needed that.

The problem of impeachment is pretty simple: Presidents are leaders of parties. Parties are tied to the political fortunes of presidents. You're asking a party to basically wreck its immediate political future for the good of the system.

This doesn't just have the effect of making impeachment ineffective as a remedy. It's worse than that. It makes impeachment dangerous to the president's party, and gives them a reason to defend him and either normalize or minimize his crimes. As we are seeing right now.
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