Open-Mic Night!
Open-Mic Night!
Don't believe the hype, here's when ABC actually CAN open Trump's microphone...
Sept. 10: Debate night … Vance lies about pets … Vance lies about serious shit, too … DeSantis using cops to scare abortion-rights petition signers …
At tonight’s presidential debate, the future of the planet may depend on how lax ABC News is about opening the microphone of former President Donald Trump when he shouldn’t be speaking. Which is always.
That’s right, despite the headlines you’ve seen about microphones being muted when it’s the other candidate’s turn to speak, that reportedly might not always be the case.
And the loopholes might just be big enough for Vice President Kamala Harris to herd millions of inexplicably undecided voters through.
According to the rules agreed upon last week, if Trump one of the candidates constantly interrupts Harris the other, he’ll they’ll get a verbal warning from a moderator and his their remarks may be shared with the audience. It’s not clear whether that means their mike will be turned on or just that the moderator will repeat what they said.
But the rules also say that ABC News may decide to turn on both mikes at the same time if there’s significant cross-talk.
The fact that this discretion lies with the moderators means we are virtually assured of post-debate claims that ABC was acting in bad faith to help/hurt one of the candidates.
But it also means that Harris now has massive incentive to bait and engage with Trump, responding, for instance, if when Trump mouth-delivers his id garbage during her turn, even if it’s under his breath.
Given the microscopic odds of anything substantive coming out of tonight’s debate, the biggest chance to move the needle may lie at the intersection of Harris’s trolling game and ABC’s willingness to irk MAGA by letting their great leader be heard.
Because tonight is about vibes — not due to Harris, whose website now has a page on her issue positions — but because of our media and our electorate. Tonight’s debate likely won’t move many voters in the overnight snap polls. But it might change how our punditarchy frame this election in the less than two months that it and we have left.
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The pundits and people alike are already familiar with Trump and his noise-hole noises. Which means the challenge for Harris tonight is to win over undecided voters convince media to stop saying she’s got no policies and move on to some other bullshit, and hope that doesn’t stick either.
Our media are such basketcases that ABC’s recent polling shows that more Americans trust Trump on several issues:
One issue where Trump has the edge, fer instance, is the economy, despite the virtually unprecedented economic successes under Pres. Joe Biden, most notably the “soft landing,” curbing inflation without torching jobs. And despite Trump’s party killing the extended Child Tax Credit, returning millions of kids to poverty.
Then there’s immigration, where Trump himself torpedoed new border measures and funding. (Democrats can’t blame voter mistrust on immigration entirely on the media, since Democrats have embraced the border-crisis lie — allowing the real processing-of-migrants crisis to morph into the fake border-invasion crisis — thereby validating Republicans.)
And speaking of fake crises, let’s see whether Harris or the moderators bring up this one…
JD Vance’s Book of Impossible Cats
If I were a Freudian, I’d love to get Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) on the couch1 and find out what his fucking deal is with cats. First, and memorably, he blamed the woes of the world on childless cat ladies, specifically naming people who were neither.
And yesterday Vance’s obsession with cat fiction got a whole new chapter.
He Tweeted about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, OH, claiming that, “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn't be in this country.”
Vance added, “Where is our border czar?” referring to Vice President Kamala Harris, who was never border czar but was charged with looking at root causes of immigration. (Which are too often despair and desperation caused by U.S. fucking meddling.)
But yesterday, Springfield police responded both swiftly and heroically, assuring media that Vance was full of (weird) cat shit:
“In response to recent rumors alleging criminal activity by the immigrant population in our city, we wish to clarify that there have been no credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community…”
“Additionally, there have been no verified instances of immigrants engaging in illegal activities such as squatting or littering in front of residents’ homes. Furthermore, no reports have been made regarding members of the immigrant community deliberately disrupting traffic.”
In other words, Vance was calling on a fictional government official to fix a fictional problem. Boy, is Vance gonna have to eat crow on this one!
The Republican-controlled House Judiciary Committee responded, saying, “Protect our ducks and kittens in Ohio!” As you’d expect from a serious-minded legislative panel, they included a fake picture with the fake story, falsely depicting former Pres. Donald Trump as (a) not a germaphobe and (b) cuddly.
Vance’s office claims he got his info from constituents, without saying whether they offered any concrete details, or whether they had just seen a stupid, made-up Facebook post that went viral. Because that’s the kind of quality vetting you want from a vice president before they decide whether to make a national issue out of something and/or make an ass out of their ass.
But while the media went catshit for Vance’s purrfect storm of fe-lies, his subsequent, much more grave attack on immigrants went virtually unchallenged. Except by The Fucking News!
Vance’s Grave Attack on Immigrants Went Virtually Unchallenged
Last night, responding to yet another social-media “report,” Sen. JD Vance retweeted a post from Fox’s Bill Melugin about a release last week in which federal immigration officials in Baltimore announced the apprehension of Madai Gamaliel Amaya, an undocumented immigrant from from Honduras whose criminal record includes raping a Maryland resident.
Melugin’s tweet says, “ICE’s Baltimore office announces the arrest of their 153rd illegal alien sex offender of this fiscal year, a record.”
And while everyone was distracted by Vance’s Haitian cat bullshit, Vance shared the Fox tweet, adding:
“153 arrests. Of course many who commit these crimes are never arrested.
“Kamala Harris invited these people in to our country.”
You all strapped in and ready for some facts, thrill-seeking Newsfuckers?
Despite Melugin’s implication that this is the 153rd undocumented sex offender arrested in Baltimore, it’s actually the Baltimore office, which specifically says in its release that 153 is the number for all of Maryland.
And the release itself explicitly refers to “153rd noncitizen sex offender” arrests, with no breakdown of how many were sex offending while here legally. But Melugin specifically says “153rd illegal alien2 sex offender,” as if he knows melugin about journalism, or reading comprehension.
It gets better/worse.
Vance says “Harris invited these people” here. But Amaya was arrested for rape on Jan. 8, 2009. Which means it was then-Pres. George W. Bush who personally invited Amaya here.
“Wait a second,” you might say, “the point isn’t when Amaya committed the crime, it’s that he got back into the country after he served time and was deported in 2013.” Okay, let’s go with that!
First let’s note that it was under then-Pres. Barack Obama that Amaya was deported. And then caught again in the U.S. by the Border Patrol after crossing back in 2016. And it was under Obama that Amaya was sentenced to 30 months in prison before being deported again at the end of his sentence in 2018. Thanks, Obama!
So when did Harris ask Amaya to come back? Some time after Jan. 20, 2021, when Pres. Kamala Harris was inaugurated along with pretend-Pres. Joe Biden and Harris was put in charge of everything, including The Office of Undocumented Immigrant Invitations, right? That must be true for Vance to say Harris invited Amaya, right?
In fact, we don’t know. From the Baltimore ICE office:
“Amaya unlawfully reentered the United States on an unknown date, at an unknown location, without being inspected, admitted or paroled by a U.S. immigration official.”
In other words, the rapist that Obama personally convicted and twice caught and who’s now been been caught personally by moonlighting Border Patrol Agent Joseph Robinette Biden might actually have been here at the personal invitation of his fellow rapist, Donald J. Trump.
DeSantis Sends Cops to Intimidate Abortion-Rights Terrorists Activists Petition Signers
Giving Florida voters even more motive to show up at the polls in November, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) yesterday defended state police going to people’s homes to question them about signing petitions to put abortion rights on the ballot.
The Tampa Bay Times reported last week that the state Department of, uh, State claims it has “uncovered evidence of illegal conduct with fraudulent petitions.” There is, however, no evidence of this evidence.
“We know that this group did submit [signatures] on behalf of dead people,” said DeSantis, best known to viewers as the star of The Sixth Sense.
But the lack of evidence hasn’t stopped the state from referring its non-existent evidence of suspicious signatures to state police. Never mind that almost a million people signed the petition — putting it well over the legal standard. Never mind that the deadline for signature challenges already diedlined. Never mind that local elections officials have already certified the petitions.
DeSantis, of course, created a whole-ass police force to investigate fictional-ass voter fraud, and so far has bupkis to show for it. And the abortion amendment — along with weed legalization — are threatening to motivate tons of voters to vote on Election Day.
Crime Watch
GOOGLE The recidivist search engine of destruction went on trial again yesterday. The Justice Department and multiple state attorneys general are suing Google for illegally building and operating a monopoly with almost total control over the $300 billion digital-ad market.
As Politico notes, it’s been 20 years since the U.S. went to court to break up a company like this (Microsoft) and 40 years since they succeeded (RIP, AT&T).
Google has already been found guilty of illegally dominating the search market, but hasn’t reached the sentencing phase of that trial yet. In that trial, Politico reports, potential outcomes include forcing Google to sell off Chrome.
And if you’re thinking that a divided Google/Chrome might introduce new nightmares of compatibility on top of what Cory Doctorow has termed the enshittification of search, keep in mind that none of this would be an issue if then-Pres. Bill Clinton had treated the then-new internet as a public utility from the moment it was still a tiny cluster of cells instead of flushing it away like just another Bill Clinton abortion.
MURDER The federal trial began yesterday of three Memphis, TN, police officers charged with depriving Tyre Nichols of so much civil rights that he died. Two others have already pleaded guilty.
The officers beat Nichols in January 2023 so badly that he died three days later. His family is suing the city of Memphis for $550 million. Body-camera footage showed that Nichols did not resist violently the way the lying cops said he did, unless you count calling for your mother as resistance.
An AP analysis compares the footage with what the officers and detectives said about the incident in their filed reports about it. If you’re already inured to the sight of police reveling in unrestrained and unjustified brutality, the most shocking part may be the apparent lack of concern about getting caught for it or for lying on the reports…knowing that what they did was on camera.
What does that tell us? It tells us how often no one sees what’s on those cameras. How seldom anyone even asks. Not because no one cares, but because victims and families lack resources for lawyers. Because local media either don’t care or don’t exist. Because who watches the watchmen?
James Earl Jones
Actor James Earl Jones died at the age of 93 yesterday. In a depressing symptom of the state of our media, many outlets failed to lead with, or even mention, the most stunning examples of his work on both stage and screen.
The man debuted on Broadway in 1957, electrifying audiences in some of Shakespeare’s greatest works, and winning two Tony awards.
He was nominated for an Oscar for recreating on film his stage role in the boxing classic “The Great White Hope.”
In 2011, he won an honorary Oscar for his film career, which also included “Fences,” “Claudine,” “Matewan,” “Field of Dreams,” “The Sandlot,” Jack Ryan movies, and fucking Thulsa Doom in “Conan.” The man rocked low-brow fun as powerfully as his soaring dramas. And he nailed it in comedies like “Coming to America.”
He was also an Emmy winner, and was featured in the sequel to “Roots.” And his voice — that voice — emerged after he overcame a childhood stutter. Jones was the voice of CNN (“This is CNN”), gave us Mufasa in “Lion King,” and, yes — Jesus Christ, news outlets unable to tell us anything new — everyone knows he was Darth Vader.
But, man, he was so much more.
TCB
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Go get ‘em, kids.
I swear this wasn’t an intentional couch joke.
Italics added for stupidity/mendacity emphasis.
One more credit to James Earl Jones: his first film appearance in Dr. Strangelove as the bombadier on Slim Pickens’ B-52.