Ukraine CAN Be Saved...by JESUS!
Zelenskyy to meet with Trump today and let Him into his heart
Sept. 27: Trump, Zelenskyy meet … Harris at the border borders on border fear-mongering … Dems expand the map … Newsmax caves on election-theft lawsuit …
Ukrainian Pres. Volodymyr Zelenskyy reportedly is meeting today with former Pres. Donald Trump. Analysts suggest that Zelenskyy may have a chance of winning Trump’s support if he does a full surrender…to Trump, falling to his knees, admitting his sinfulness, and accepting that his soul can only be redeemed by Trump as his personal Lord and Savior.
Trump said Thursday that the two men were set to meet this morning at Trump Tower in New York, even though Trump is omnipresent.
The meeting comes at a time when the right is especially down on Zelenskyy. He just called Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) “too radical” in a recent interview, and on Wednesday Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) demanded that Zelenskyy fire his ambassador to the U.S. because no Republicans were invited to an appearance in Pennsylvania on Sunday (your diligent Fucking News unfucked that claim yesterday).
Trump has been pushing Zelenskyy to make a deal…by which he means Zelenskyy should agree to let Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin keep at least some Ukraine stuff. Like pieces of it. Or maybe the tens of thousands of kids Russia’s taken. Anyway, Trump didn’t get bogged down in those kinds of petty details.
But what literally no one except readers of The Fucking News and Jonathan Larsen’s Substack know, is that Zelenskyy’s got something else he can surrender to avoid surrendering pieces of Ukraine’s land.
As the JL Substack has reported, U.S. and Ukrainian evangelicals have been pushing Zelenskyy to Jesus-ize his country. Which, of course doesn’t mean more poor-feeding or leper-washing, it means less hot gay Ukrainian sex and fewer Ukrainian women removing things from their uteruses.
Republicans turning up the heat on Zelenskyy could mean they’re less likely to sign off on more weapons if they win in November. Or it could mean those weapons will just come with a higher price…for Ukraine’s women and LGBTQ+ people.
And odds are we won’t know the implications of today’s meeting on that front, because most corporate media ignore theocracy until the end is more than nigh.
Harris Goes to the Border Today to Personally Beat Up Immigrants
Vice Pres. Kamala Harris will visit the U.S. border in Arizona today to send multiple messages to voters.
Her campaign wants to show voters that Democrats are just as tough as Republicans when it comes to preventing illegal entry across the border by people who then spread throughout the country, wantonly lowering crime rates as they go and unabashedly contributing to the economy, including bolstering American manufacturing during the pandemic and saving us all from a recession.
But Democrats aren’t just hoping to beat Republicans when it comes to toxic messaging predicated on racist falsehoods. Part of Harris’s message today will be that Pres. Donald Trump screwed up all that performative toughness by torpedoing a Draconian immigration bill earlier this year.
Another reason for the trip: The New York Times reports that the number of border crossings has dropped dramatically since Pres. Joe Biden tightened restrictions on asylum-seekers in June. That’s right, we tightened restrictions on desperate people seeking to improve their lives and ours by fleeing countries we helped fuck up and helping us lower crime and boost the economy in ours.
Not surprisingly, with Democrats joining the chorus of immigrant-phobia, polling shows a sharp rise in American anti-immigrant sentiment. Except, of course, here at The Fucking News. Bienvenido!
Dems Shock Nation with Plan to Fight Everywhere
The Democratic National Committee (DNC) is sending campaign cash to all 50 state party committees for the first — and this should blow your mind — time ever.
In past years, including years so recent they start with a 2, the national party didn’t send a dime to some states. So, every year, there were races where Democrats not only didn’t put up a fight, they didn’t put up a candidate.
Now, before you let this make you all giddy with your vibes and your joy and such, remember that we are still talking about Democrats. The amount of money to be divvied up among the fifty (50) states is an unwhopping…$2.5 million.
Now, that number might have taken your breath away with how high it is if you hadn’t been snorting milk out your nose over low it is, but as Politico reports, the way it’s getting allocated might actually move the needle in places where the needle has been stuck in red for years.
A big, targeted focus of the spending is to try to nudge enough races in state legislatures to try to break some of the Republican supermajorities and/or trifectas (where Republicans hold all the chambers of power).
So Missouri is getting $100,000 to hire campaign organizers between now and Election Day in hopes of picking up the handful of seats needed to end a GOP supermajority. Florida’s getting more than $400,000.
And Democrats are spending $70,000 in Idaho, where Republicans have held such overwhelming control for so long that they’re thisclose to having the votes needed to outlaw Democrats.
To give you an idea of how small-bore we’re talking about — and how little might actually be needed! — Idaho is getting a ground organizer in one (1) competitive district that includes the Nez Perce Reservation, and a Latino community organizer in two counties. Democrats won one seat in those counties by just 37 votes, and lost one by just 80 votes in 2022, Politico reports.
The DNC appears to be somewhat invigorated, like so much of the party, by the switch at the top of the ticket, which was fiercely opposed by itself. As former colleague Candice Cole reported for TYT last year, the DNC was all in on stifling challenges to Pres. Joe Biden in the early days of the not-primaries.
And DNC Chair Jaime Harrison reportedly was putting his thumb on the scale for Biden along the way. But unlike years past, fealty to the top of the ticket no longer means abandoning local and state parties. The DNC tells Politico the new spending is part of a broader, longer push to help out down-ballot. The DNC says it’s increased state-party funding by 25% under Harrison.
Newsmax Surrenders to Smartmatic
Newsmax has reached a deal to settle Smartmatic’s defamation lawsuit. Newsmax advertises itself as a news outlet that wants nothing more than to share all the facts with its viewers except how much shit they had to eat in this settlement.
Before having to consume said unknown quantities of shit, Newsmax first had the shit sued out of it by Smartmatic, over Newsmax’s wildly false claims about the 2020 presidential election that Pres. Donald Trump lost fair and square.
Newsmax lacked any evidence that Smartmatic software was widely used in the voting, or that it was hacked, but they spread that shit all over Newsmax anyway. The software was actually only used in Los Angeles, which Pres. Joe Biden won, just like he won America.
The Smartmatic suit was scheduled to go to trial on Monday, so it’s possible that Newsmax lawyers finally googled the Fox/Dominion lawsuit this week and filled their legal briefs with Shitmax when they learned Fox paid out $787.5 million.
Smartmatic had already reached an also-secret deal with self-styled news outlet OAN, and the Fox suit is still pending in New York (which Biden also won).
Just as with Fox, there was evidence that Newsmax knew it was spreading a Liemax. Here’s an internal letter from Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy: “Newsmax does not have evidence of widespread voter fraud.”
Instead, he said, “We have reported [sic[ on significant [sic] evidence [sic] of widespread [sic] election irregularities [sic] and vote fraud [sic].”
Ruddy rationalized Newsmax’s “reporting” on a thing that didn’t exist by saying, “We have no evidence of a voter fraud conspiracy nor do we make such claims on Newsmax,” trotting out the old defense of hey, we’re just reporting what uncredible people with zero evidence say in contrast to all the known facts when we choose to put them on our air instead of all the informed, knowledgeable people in the universe.
As Newsmax host Bob Sellers wrote, “How long are we going to have to play along with election fraud?” The answer, of course, was four more years.
Here Comes the Trump (Media) Dump
A company that owned more than one out of 20 shares of the Trump Media & Technology Group has dumped virtually all of it, the AP reports.
The company, United Atlantic Ventures, is owned by people who know exactly how good/not-good former Pres. Donald Trump is at businessing. That’s because they were “contestants” on The Apprentice, which means they didn’t see the commanding, strategic Trump that producer Mark Burnett put on screen before deep fakes were easy.
No, these guys saw the real Trump, the scattered, arrogant, unschooled, incurious blowhard who’s dumber than a guava.
Andrew Litinsky and Wesley Moss were not only Apprentice “contestants” who knew Trump when, they helped orchestrate the merger that created Trump Media and will inevitably lead to its bankruptcy.
In a filing yesterday, the two revealed that they sold off all but 100 shares out of the 7.53 million they previously had. It’s not clear whether or how much the former Apprentice apprentices paid for the shares, but as the AP notes, anyone who paid $79.38 at its peak is now the proud owner of shares valued at $13.98, or just enough to cover the cost of a set of two (2) handsome champagne gift bags featuring a bottle of Trump’s failed somehow still-existing champagne.
Act now, and Trump will throw in a signed bottle of Blanc de Blanc for just $999.99 not including shipping or the shock of finding out that it’s signed by Eric Trump.
Media Watch
“IS” This story neatly illustrates why I’m uncomfortable with the public pressure for journalistic name-calling and labeling. I mean, how do we know that Herr Hitler is a Nazi? Granted, that’s a terrible example, but it’s especially bad considering the story in question.
Follow the bouncing cursor!
On Sept. 13, the Detroit Metro Times1 published remarks by Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) regarding the prosecution of campus protesters who think the U.S. should not help Israel kill civilians. From the article:
“We’ve had the right to dissent, the right to protest,” Tlaib says. “We’ve done it for climate, the immigrant rights movement, for Black lives, and even around issues of injustice among water shutoffs. But it seems that the attorney general decided if the issue was Palestine, she was going to treat it differently, and that alone speaks volumes about possible biases within the agency she runs.”
Tlaib doesn’t say what bias she referring to. But some politicians and “journalists” knew. And so they made the leap to characterizing instead of quoting.
“Tlaib claimed that Nessel is only charging the protesters because she’s Jewish,” conservative writer Josh Kraushaar wrote for Jewish Insider even though he’s not a Tlaib insider and even though Tlaib never mentioned the attorney general’s religion and even though Kraushaar didn’t even offer a single quote in which Tlaib said what he said she said.
Attorney General Dana Nessel (D-MI) is Jewish and she, too, has suggested Tlaib’s remark was antisemitic. But was it?
Is it possible that Tlaib was referring to biases other than personal, religious-based biases? Remember, if you’re a journalist and you can’t imagine any other explanation, that doesn’t entitle you to assume there is none.
And here’s how we, but not Kraushaar, know for an absolute fact that Tlaib was saying there’s at least one possible bias other than Nessel’s religion: Tlaib referred to biases. Plural.
And she didn’t even say she was talking about Nessel specifically! It’s just possible Tlaib was referring to a bias against the pro-Palestinian protesters…which lots of people share who are not Jewish.
Nevertheless, the fallacious assumption and the consequent incorrect characterization of what Tlaib said replaced the actual words she said in the public discourse. CNN’s Jake Tapper flat-out stated as fact that Tlaib said Nessel prosecuted the protesters “because [Nessel’s] Jewish and the protesters are not.”
Tlaib never said that, but Tapper wouldn’t know that if he read — and thought he could trust — the reporting by Kraushaar and others.
And I’m not the only one banging on about this. The claims about Tlaib were fact-checked by an extremely good authority: The paper that quoted her in the first place.
And what did the Metro Times fact-check say yesterday? Let’s end your suspense, patient Newsfucker:
To their credit, the Metro Times notes that their story about Tlaib mentioned the fact that Nessel is Jewish. But just because a journalistic outlet mentions a fact in close proximity to a quote doesn’t mean the quote was related to that fact. Here’s the Metro Times:
“Tlaib never once mentioned Nessel’s religion or Judaism. But Metro Times pointed out in the story that Nessel is Jewish, and that appears to be the spark that led to the false claims.”
Reading comprehension is important. It’s literally the core skill set for journalism. But so is not characterizing when you’ve got direct quotes sitting right there for you to use.
Four Quickies
Alabama’s government yesterday did the one thing right-wingers believe governments are capable of doing well: Killing its citizens! But, you know, humanely. In this case, for only the second time, Alabama’s official killing was carried out by strapping a gas mask on the to-be-killed guy’s face and swapping out oxygen for nitrogen gas. Alan Eugene Miller shook for two minutes and then gulped for breath for six minutes until he stopped. State Attorney General Steve Marshall said the killing was carried out “without incident,” notwithstanding the incident of killing a guy. “the State proved once again that nitrogen hypoxia is both humane and effective,” said Marshall, who has no idea how long eight minutes without oxygen feels.
Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) yesterday signed a new law paving the way for California to formally apologize for enforcing laws on returning escapees to slavery and for allowing more than 2,000 people to be enslaved even after 1850, when California was admitted to the union as a free state. The law and apology follow an historic effort to interrogate the state’s history of discrimination and explore ways of making up for it that don’t involve paying one thin dime to a single person living today whose economic status has been held down by the weight of history.
Much of Florida was overwhelmed last night by rain and flooding, with winds blowing even harder than they have since Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) first made landfall at the statehouse in 2019. With record storm surges, the death toll — from Hurricane Helene, not DeSantis — is now at least four people in Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina. Three million people were without power this morning, far more than the number usually without power because of Hurricane Capitalism, and Pres. Joe Biden has signed natural disaster declarations for several states.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is launching a full ground assault this morning on perhaps the most hostile territory there is, the General Assembly of the United Nations. Netanyahu is planning to offer a forceful defense of his forceful offense in Gaza and now Lebanon. His speech is expected to be a bomb, but not made in the U.S.
You can get free COVID tests again! Because you can still get COVID!
TCB
WHY SO SIRIUS? This afternoon, The Fucking News is joining Joe Sudbay live on Friday at 3:30pm eastern time, on SiriusXM’s Progress channel, 127. Joe is guest-hosting The Michelangelo Signorile Show.
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Go get ‘em, kids! And have a great, safe — but not intellectually safe — weekend!
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“But unlike years past, fealty to the top of the ticket no longer means abandoning local and state parties.” Whomever could you mean? 🤔