Midweek Meh-Ness [DOT 10/7/24]

10/7/24 MegMegMcGee 28

Hope everyone is having a good week so far!

It is a good week to not be in DC

NATO vows lasting support for Ukraine but won’t promise membership
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/07/09/nato-biden-ukraine-membership

Also a good week to not be in Texas

Beryl leaves millions of Texans without power as dangerous heat descends on the region
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/09/weather/beryl-storm-texas-power-outages-heat/index.html

Stonks!

Fed Chair Powell says holding rates high for too long could jeopardize economic growth
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/09/fed-chief-powell-says-holding-rates-high-for-too-long-could-jeopardize-economic-growth.html

Sprots!

Lamine Yamal’s wonder goal leads Spain past France and into Euro 2024 final
https://www.theguardian.com/football/article/2024/jul/09/spain-france-euro-2024-semi-final-match-report

Not all heroes wear capes

Have a great day!

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28 Comments

  2. Rabid climate change denying ex-senator James Inhofe is now going rancid.

    https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/09/politics/jim-inhofe-dies/index.html

    Inhofe gained tons of publicity for lies and propaganda from the political press corps due to stunts like bringing snowballs from rare DC snowstorms onto the Senate floor.

    Inhofe knew the DC press corps cared far more about hackneyed bad humor than doing their jobs, and they regularly slanted their stories to give him the headlines and ledes he sought.

    Inhofe would make a dumb joke about Al Gore flying somewhere to push for solar power, and the DC press corps would act like he was a genius comedian making completely valid points.

    He lacked even the wit of Jackie Mason redelivering a four decade old Catskills joke about his wife. What Inhofe did was offer up anti-humor aimed at right wingers who thought talking about Hillary Clinton’s hair and then smirking was a standup routine.

    So of course the DC press corps couldn’t get enough. Because their souls are just as curdled and incapable of understanding even the simplest humor.

    • Glad he’s now a figure of derision, but he dragged/muted any efforts to limit Man Made Global Climate Change so his grand kids (and the rest of humanity) will suffer dying in a hellscape of our own making.

      • His obits are pulling punches on him and even more importantly, his party and his industry backers.

        They still can’t acknowledge what he wrought, in part because they don’t want to admit their complicity.

        This long, supposedly serious piece about why it took so long for something like Biden’s climate measures to pass is a great example.

        https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/07/climate/senate-climate-law.html

        Thousands of words about lack of political will until 3021, and not one single mention of press failure. The world is baking and a big part of the politics that  got us here was both-siderism and addiction to balancing out reporting on a deeply unbalanced subject.

  3. So why are Trump staffers and Trump rushing to pretend they never heard of Project 2025?

  4. For BDC:

    ‘Do Something’ Is Not A Plan Or Wise Counsel Or A Way Out

    Fast forward to the political crisis that President Biden is facing today. Unlike the Deepwater Horizon disaster, you can properly lay the debate disaster and his failure to reckon with his own aging it at his feet and his alone. But the feeding frenzy that has ensued, the type of coverage that we’ve been bombarded with for the last 12 days, and the expectation that this drumbeat demanding that he and/or the Democratic Party “do something!” is a choice, a whole series of choices in fact, rooted in a particular kind of news judgment. That news judgment is itself a product of a certain way of seeing politics and political journalism. A prism with some utility sometimes. But it also has its own distortions and limitations.

    The greatest of these limitations is that much of political journalism is divorced from policy and the substance of politics. It’s the horserace coverage, the who’s up and who’s down, the who’s in and who’s out. And no matter how complex the topic, or carefully balanced the various competing public interests are on a given issue, or how long the history of tackling the issue in a substantive way, once it enters the realm of political journalism it goes through a reductive process that distills it to whether it’s good or bad politically. Does it help or does it hurt? And if it hurts, what are you going to do about it?

    Once you’re in the lane occupied by political journalists, there are certain rules, customs, and expectations that subsume everything else. You’re in our lane now and you’re going to play by our rules. If all you know is politics, everything gets reduced to a craven political calculation. Actually, it’s worse than that. If all you know is political journalism, then it gets reduced to the political journalist’s projection of what politics is, what winning looks like, and who’s losing under that particular contrived set of calculations.

    In a complicated and challenging world that exceeds our capacity to understand it, there is comfort in certainty. Political journalism and sports journalism have many unfortunate parallels. Sports itself offers the comfort of reducing the world to what happens between the lines on the field or pitch court, where there are set rules and assigned enforcers of those rules. We can tune everything else out. But politics is not a sport.

    • I’m still waiting for someone—anyone—to air a super cut of Trump’s inane ramblings and mental lapses over the past few years. Jon Stewart could have done that. He’s better at it than anyone else. Instead he decided to pile onto the political media shit show.

    • A huge piece of the emptiness of the political press on this subject parallels the utter humorlessness I was talking about regarding dead  Senator Inhofe.

      They can’t tell the difference between a good joke and a bad joke because they have no sense of humor. They can’t meaningfully talk about policy because they don’t have the vaguest understanding of it.

      Which leaves a vacuum to be filled by sources who know the political press will run with anything that fills the bare minimum form of policy. Does a guy in a suit say something with a frown? Good enough for most.

    • And again, like, let’s say they “do something.” No matter who comes out as the nominee, this drumbeat will start again IMMEDIATELY about something else, and if it were Kamala — and honestly if it’s not, holy shit is that a terrible idea — she’s not gonna get any less Black or female between now and November and guess what? That’s gonna be “an issue” just like old was for Biden (and “female” was for Hillary).

      • It has to be Harris or they have to start fundraising again from zero. Which basically brings me back to the point I made yesterday: She’s already running as Biden’s backup. There’s not a significant amount to be gained by putting her at the top of the ticket, and there’s a lot of potential downsides. The Democrats seem to be calming down, so hopefully it’s a dead issue. Of course, the press is now emboldened to run with crazy speculation so we’re going to get all of that nonsense.

        • Not just the logistics: The party telling a Black woman who is currently No. 2 on the ticket “thanks but no thanks” is just openly shitting on two of its biggest and most valuable constituencies. That’s an electoral nightmare that none of the fantasyland pundits ever seem to consider a problem!

          But I’ll put it a way even they would understand: Imagine Trump picking Henry Cuellar as his running mate and saying that getting the Hispanic vote was the key to the election so he was going to back off the wall idea. His base would go apeshit! And so would the Dems if they passed over Harris!

  5. i guess everyone’s gotta have a hobby (collecting receipts) even if it seems weird to other people.

    /stares at his own collection of model aircraft, avoids making judgements on other folks hobbies./

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