Grandpa has gone 51/50

Not immediately enough.

Loony Toons.

DC restaurants are losing business due to the troops in the streets, and the steep decline in foreign tourism.

So, OK, Fox is also a bunch of idiots.

Can Congress pass laws to stop Russia?

Israeli war crimes continue in Gaza

 

Israel is simultaneously attacking Iran, FFS.

You understand that Israel could not continue without US backing, US weapons.

Thanks, Trump, who doesn't even know if Iran already has nuclear weapons.

And the Trump Brigade is fanning the flames.

Save Tesla!

 Poor pathetic Elon.  They're reduced to hawking his tanking product.  Sad! 

Giving them away?  LOL.  Or maybe the "details" include giving money to Trump.

Tesla owners are finding out. Even dressing their Teslas up as something else.

UPDATE 03/13/2025:

President Donald Trump absolutely despises green energy. He regularly boasts that he is killing the “green new scam,” which means he’s terminating as many of his predecessor’s investments in renewable energy as he can. That could have an immensely detrimental impact, leading to far fewer electric vehicles on our roads—and far fewer factory jobs constructing them.

But after careful deliberation about what truly serves the national interest, Trump has now made one considered exception to his dislike of green technologies.

[...]

This bizarre eruption is worth dwelling on, because it opens a window on the perils of what political theorists describe as our national descent into “clientelist” rule. It attempts to reduce the federal government’s actions and functions to instruments for rewarding friends and punishing enemies.

[...]

Trump is moving to roll back federal subsidies for electric vehicles, attempting to cripple plans to build charging stations nationwide, and reversing tailpipe pollution regulations meant to encourage the E.V. transition.

According to a new Repeat Project study, all this could cause E.V. sales to drop by 40 percent in 2030, relative to Biden’s policies.

[...]

Now Trump is using the power of the presidential bully pulpit to encourage people to buy electric vehicles that happen to be the leading product of his top billionaire crony and campaign benefactor—as a display of loyalty to both of them. This jarring contrast—E.V.s are bad, and the federal government must not incentivize them; but buy Teslas because Trump’s top ally deserves gratitude and devotion—shows that there’s no discernible conception of the national interest animating any of this.

[...]

Why does Trump care about Tesla’s sales, anyway? Most crudely, Trump doesn’t like it when charts and metrics reflecting on his presidency go in the wrong direction. Right now, Trump is contending with charts showing the markets tanking over his tariffs, charts showing his net approval sliding, and now, charts showing Tesla’s stock plummeting. Charts going down look weak. Charts going up look strong.

[...]

Trump notoriously does not believe polls. But one metric he pays attention to is business success. The president knows his fortunes are now inextricably entangled with whatever Musk authors, and the stories about Tesla sales tanking are a metric of Musk’s failings that are clearly cutting deep with Trump. As his angry midnight rant displays, he knows that metric is very much going in the wrong direction.

[...]

[Trump is] instituting a system based on favoritism and graft, while openly sabotaging procedures designed to safeguard neutrality in public service. Trump’s undisguised vow to shape energy and tax policy to benefit wealthy donors, his firing of inspectors general who are insufficiently dutiful to him, his mass purges of civil servants to give way to loyalists, his selection of top law enforcement officials who openly promise to target his enemies—all these reflect this change [from a depersonalized beaurocracy to a clientelist government].

[...]

Musk’s ascension represents a striking twist to all this. Trump has delegated him extraordinary power over the government, yet he is almost entirely unfettered from mechanisms of basic accountability. [...] [T]he government is now shaped around the personal interests and whims of not one man but two.

What Trump has discovered is that his own public standing is yoked to Musk’s. The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie has observed that in empowering Musk, Trump is putting his presidency in the hands of a figure “who is accountable to no one but himself,” and if the consequences of his DOGE cuts strike, “Musk can walk away,” leaving the mess with Trump and the GOP.

  New Republic

Trump never was very good at seeing past the present moment. He functions on a reptile brain, reacting to stimuli and seeking only personal gratification.

LOL Epstein files

 

The President and Donald Trump sit with Sean Hannity

 

MAGA

JFC.

UPDATE 12:44 pm:

Fucking idiots.

As ridiculous as it is insulting to the rest of the world.

And, FFS, Republicans can't even govern the territory they're in charge of now!

They have a brain virus

Fox News hosts and guests and other right-wing media figures are minimizing the public health risk of the cloud of particulate matter from Canadian forest fires that descended on much of the United States this week and mocking people for taking steps to protect themselves.

  Media Matters

What in Bob's name is wrong with these people?

Major metropolises were under hazardous air quality warnings, and a reddish-orange haze choked New York City, which at one point had the lowest air quality of any major city in the world. On Thursday, the smoke-filled air is expected to spread further into the Midwest and South even as conditions improve in the Northeast.

Scientists say such wildfires are becoming larger and more frequent as “forests around the world increasingly dry out amid the warming climate,” a fact calmly observed by Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal but furiously derided by his Fox employees.

Why haven't they taken on the religious cry that God is burning the earth in these end times as prophesies foretold?

Many major news outlets published reports noting that experts recommend people in affected areas wear high-quality masks to prevent health problems caused by the smoke. Those can include “trouble breathing, burning eyes, dizziness, headache or nausea,” particularly among high-risk populations including children, seniors, and people with respiratory problems including asthma.

[...]

On Wednesday afternoon, Jeanine Pirro presented the notion as a left-wing conspiracy, saying, “Democrats are pumping up climate hysteria and bringing back, you guessed it, mask insanity.” That night, Sean Hannity mocked “young, healthy people” for putting on masks, Jesse Watters lashed out at government officials for recommending their use, and Laura Ingraham claimed they “seem a little giddy to be back in the masks” and are promoting “panic porn.”

[...]

"I work out regularly, so I think I'm relatively in tune with my body,” Hannity said. “I think if it was difficult -- if I was having difficulty breathing, I would notice. But these are young people saying this. Are they all snowflakes?”

[...]

[N]o one's denying it is unpleasant. My eyes are pretty itchy and watery, yesterday and a little bit today, and it might go on for a couple more days,” Ingraham said [...] “But is this wholly out of the ordinary?”

Why yes, Laura, it IS. Have you noticed anything like it before in your lifetime? JFC.

"This happens anytime there's a wildfire in the West. I mean, it's unusual in the East. Look, the air is ugly, it's unpleasant to breathe, and for a lot of people, they get anxiety over it. But the reality is there's no health risk,”[Steve Milloy, a notorious climate denier and former cigarette and coal lobbyist] replied. “We have this kind of air in India and China all the time — no public health emergency.” (Both countries reportedly see more than 1 million premature deaths a year from air pollution.)

“This doesn't kill anybody, this doesn't make anybody cough, this is not a health event,” he further explained.

“Particulate matter is very fine soot. It's just carbon particles — they’re innocuous,” Milloy later added. “There's nothing in them. They have no effect.”

Oh, really?

Meanwhile, at Fox’s cable news competitor Newsmax, host Greg Kelly highlighted the upside of the hazardous levels of smoke blanketing New York City. “I'll tell you, it actually smells like wood smoke. It's not an unpleasant odor, to be honest,” he said. “It is pretty, it actually is pretty. It's a beautiful, interesting aura the city has right now.”

WTF?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Dominion lawsuit against Fox revelations

[A] newly unsealed court filing [...] which pulls from a host of internal communications from Fox News employees involved in election coverage, includes comments and quotes revealing that producers, executives and stars of the network knew that the election wasn’t stolen and that many fraud claims were bogus.

The filing is the latest made public in the defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems, one of the largest manufacturers of U.S. voting equipment, against Fox News for $1.6 billion.

[...]

Even certain hosts who sometimes embrace conspiracy theories on their shows said in private that they knew that Sidney Powell, who filed election lawsuits to stop multiple states that Joe Biden won from certifying their elections, was not telling the truth, according to the filings.

Dominion is also suing Powell for defamation.

Tucker Carlson told a producer soon after the election that Powell “is lying,” the documents show.

Sean Hannity said, according to the legal filing: “That whole narrative that Sidney was pushing. I did not believe it for one second.”

  NBC

But he pushed it on Fox audiences anyway.

Even Fox’s internal fact-checks after the election found that claims of election fraud were “incorrect” and “not evidence of widespread fraud.”

$1.6 billion isn't enough. When they lose this case and have to pay up, do you suppose Fox News will tell its viewers?

A top network programming executive wrote privately that he did not believe the shows of Carlson, Hannity and Jeanine Pirro were credible sources of news.

Even so, top executives strategized about how to make it up to their viewers - among Trump's strongest supporters - after Fox News' election-night team correctly called the pivotal state of Arizona for Democratic nominee Joe Biden before other networks. A sense of desperation pervades the private notes from Fox's top stars, reflecting an obsession with collapsing ratings.

[...]

The audience started to erode severely that fall, starting on Election Night itself. Fox executives and stars equally obsessed over the threat posed by the smaller right-wing network Newsmax. Hannity texted Carlson and Ingraham that Fox's Arizona call "destroyed a brand that took 25 years to build and the damage is incalculable." Carlson shot back that it was "vandalism."

[...]

After Fox's correct projection of Arizona for Joe Biden, network leaders schemed to woo back Trump supporters. Fox News chief executive Suzanne Scott texted Lachlan Murdoch, the Fox Corp co-chairman, that "the AZ [call] was damaging but we will highlight our stars and plant flags letting the viewers know we hear them and respect them."

[...]

The claims against the election tech company recurred on Fox News despite Dominion sending thousands of communications dissecting and disproving the false claims - even taking to the opinion pages of Fox News' corporate cousin, the Wall Street Journal, to do so. (Both Fox News and the Wall Street Journal are part of the Murdoch family's media empire.)

[...]

On Nov. 5, 2020, just days after the election, Bret Baier, the network's chief political anchor texted a friend: "[T]here is NO evidence of fraud. None. Allegations - stories. Twitter. Bulls---."

The following week, a producer for Ingraham sent a note conveying similar disgust. "This dominion s--- is going to give me a f---ing aneurysm."

In answering questions from Dominion's attorneys under oath, former Fox Business host Lou Dobbs said he had never "seen any verifiable, tangible support" that Dominion was owned by a second voting-tech company Smartmatic. Yet that claim was repeatedly said on air by Fox hosts and guests. Dobbs also said he was aware of no evidence that Dominion rigged the election, according to Dominion's legal filings.

On the air, Dobbs was among the most muscular proponents of Trump's baseless claims of election fraud. He was forced out of Fox the day after Smartmatic filed its own $2.7 billion defamation case against the network.

Meanwhile, fixated on the erosion of viewers to smaller right-wing rivals, Fox News executives purged senior journalists who were fixated on reflecting the facts. In a note to the network's top publicity executive, Fox News CEO Scott denounced Sammon, the former Washington managing editor. Scott wrote Sammon did not understand "the impact to the brand and the arrogance" in projecting Arizona for Biden, saying it was Sammon's job "to protect the brand."

  NPR

Word at election time was that Trump would call Hannity for advice about what to do.  Apparently he didn't always do it.

In their counterclaim, Fox attorneys wrote that when voting technology companies denied the allegations being made by Trump and his surrogates, Fox News aired those denials, while some Fox News hosts offered protected opinion commentary about Trump’s allegations.

Fox’s counterclaim is based on New York’s “anti-Slaap” law. Such laws are aimed at protecting people trying to exercise their first amendment rights from being intimidated by “strategic lawsuits against public participation”, or Slapps.

[...]

Fox attorneys warn that threatening the company with a $1.6bn judgment would cause other media outlets to think twice about what they report.

  Guardian

Other outlets that spew propaganda knowingly, like OAN and Newsmax, perhaps. And that would be a good thing.

A trial is set to begin in mid-April.

Oh, THAT's rich, Tucker. 

September 25, 2020:

Fox News got to claim victory on Thursday after a new ruling in a lawsuit brought against the company came out in its favor, but the win arrived at a steep cost. To deflect an allegation of defamation, the network was forced to claim that one of its highest-profile personalities can't reasonably be expected to consistently provide accurate information to viewers.

[...]

Federal Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil found:

This "general tenor" of the [Tucker Carlson] show should then inform a viewer that he is not "stating actual facts" about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in "exaggeration" and "non-literal commentary." . . . Fox persuasively argues . . . that given Mr. Carlson's reputation, any reasonable viewer "arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism" about the statements he makes.

[...]

Fox News' official position is that its lead commentator cannot be counted on to be accurate when discussing the news of the day, even when he says he's simply stating the facts of a case.

  Yahoo

Michael Cohen client #2 lied

What a fucking surprise, eh?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The coup attempt was a widespread conspiracy

Larry Ellison, the billionaire co-founder and chairman of the software company Oracle and the biggest backer of Elon Musk’s attempted Twitter takeover, participated in a call shortly after the 2020 election that focused on strategies for contesting the legitimacy of the vote, according to court documents and a participant.

The Nov. 14 call included Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.); Fox News host Sean Hannity; Jay Sekulow, an attorney for President Donald Trump; and James Bopp Jr., an attorney for True the Vote, a Texas-based nonprofit that has promoted disputed claims of widespread voter fraud.

  WaPo

The November 6 immediate fallout in the Republican party is looking less and less like a momentary stroke of conscience and more like attempts to disavow participation in the attempted coup.

It is the first known example of a technology industry titan joining powerful figures in conservative politics, media and law to strategize about Trump’s post-loss options and confer with an activist group that had already filed four lawsuits seeking to uncover evidence of illegal voting.

[...]

Details of the November 2020 call and questions about Ellison’s role in it were revealed in new filings made in litigation brought against True the Vote and its representatives by Fair Fight, a political action committee associated with the voting rights organization founded by Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams.

[...]

“Jim was on a call this evening with Jay Sekulow, Lindsey O. Graham, Sean Hannity, and Larry Ellison,” True the Vote’s founder, Catherine Engelbrecht, wrote to a donor on the night of the call, referring to Bopp, her organization’s lawyer. “He explained the work we were doing and they asked for a preliminary report asap, to be used to rally their troops internally, so that’s what I’m working on now.”

[...]

[An unnamed participant in the call] said the GOP megadonor was probably looped in by Graham, as part of a discussion about whether the Trump campaign had assembled an effective legal team.

[...]

Sekulow said his involvement in election-related litigation was limited, largely ending after he helped file a motion with the Supreme Court seeking to separate out mail-in ballots that arrived in Pennsylvania after Election Day from those that had come before. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. granted the motion on Nov. 6.

It should be obvious by now that Alito is a card-carrying MAGA activist, and Lindsey Graham is an amoral, self-serving POS.

True the Vote has raised its profile significantly in recent weeks by collaborating with conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza on a film that alleges there was widespread “ballot harvesting” in the 2020 election. The film, “2000 Mules,” was shown at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club last month and has become a focal point of ongoing efforts to deny the legitimacy of the election.

Several such claims were dismissed this week by the Georgia State Elections Board, casting doubt on the premise of the movie.

[...]

Oracle has contributed sizable sums to conservative causes, including as much as $499,000 in 2019 to the Federalist Society and as much as $499,000 in 2021 to the Internet Accountability Project, a nonprofit that accuses major technology companies of anti-conservative bias, according to corporate disclosures.

Obviously contributions of $500,000-plus trigger some sort of scrutiny.

Ellison personally has invested significantly in Republican candidates and causes. He hosted Trump for a fundraiser for his 2020 reelection campaign on the same day the administration took Oracle’s side in a high-stakes copyright dispute with Google unfolding at the Supreme Court. Ellison backed Graham’s reelection in 2018 to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. And this year, he donated $15 million to a super PAC aligned with Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), among the largest individual contributions this cycle.

[...]

Ellison joined the board of Tesla, Musk’s electric-car company, in 2018, disclosing that he had purchased 3 million shares earlier that year, which earned him 12 million additional shares in a stock split in 2020. He owns nearly all of the Hawaiian island of Lanai.

“I’ve always been very ambitious; I’ve always been very curious,” Ellison said in a 2018 interview with Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business, describing how he dropped out of college and moved to Silicon Valley to work as a computer programmer, founding Oracle in 1977.

Ambitious enough to help try to overthrow democracy in America.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Brilliant minds

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

"The heroes of the pandemic" 🤔

So Hannity is in favor of blocking highways in SOME protests. I'm ok with it for all protests, but I find it interesting that the white guys use huge trucks instead of hundreds of their actual bodies. 

 

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:  The red tide turns.  Always, it's okay when our side does it.

UPDATE:

Why the Jan 6 committee wants to talk to Sean Hannity

“Guys, we have a clear path to land the plane in 9 days,” Hannity wrote to then-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio). “He can’t mention the election again. He can’t mention the election again. Ever. I did not have a good call with him today. And worse, I’m not sure what is left to do or say, and I don’t like not knowing if it’s truly understood. Ideas?”

The committee wrote that the text indicates Hannity appears to “have detailed knowledge regarding President Trump’s state of mind” in the days following the riot.

[...]

Thompson and Cheney also cited “dozens” of text messages Hannity exchanged with Meadows about efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, as well as Hannity’s direct communications with President Trump around Jan. 6.

[...]

Hannity was concerned ahead of Jan. 6, as well, referring to a text message sent on the night of Jan. 5 in which he says he’s worried about what could happen over the course of the next two days.

[...]

“Yes,” Schiff said on MSNBC. “I think you’ll see an announcement about that very soon. We believe that he was texting with the chief of staff and that he has information that would be relevant to our committee. He was more than a Fox host, he was also a confidante, adviser, campaigner for the former president.”

  Rolling Stone

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Jesus wept

Oh yeah, it's coming

Sean Hannity said on his radio and television shows Monday that he thinks President Trump should pardon himself in order to avoid a potential prosecution from the incoming Biden administration.

  

Well, that's it then. Hannity is Trump's number one adviser.

"If that's what they want to do, if Biden ever became president, I'd tell Trump to pardon yourself and pardon your family," Hannity said on his Fox News show late Monday.

[...]

What do you mean, "if Biden ever became president"?

His comments came days after Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), one of Trump's biggest allies in Congress, also urged the president to pardon himself and those around him.

"President Trump should pardon Michael Flynn," Gaetz said during a Fox News interview. "He should pardon the Thanksgiving turkey. He should pardon everyone from himself to his administration officials to Joe Exotic if he has to.”

Lay off the sugar, Matt.

When President Nixon was considering pardoning himself at the end of his administration, the Department of Justice issued a memo in 1974 saying it would not be legal.

Well, if Bill Barr wants a pardon for his possible crimes, he won't be issuing a memo like that.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Say what?

They certainly weren't invited in to Portland.  Or Seattle.  Or DC.

Gaslighter in Chief.

Regarding Tucker's "vacation"

All four of these Fox celebs have been accused of sexual misconduct up to and including rape.  This is a Fox News culture, as witnessed by previous allegations against Bill O'Reilly and Roger Ailes, and Megyn Kelly's testimony.

Fox should be heavily - very heavily - fined and put on probation in order to continue to keep its license.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

He's preparing himself for a loss

Sad!

Also from the "interview":

What on earth does that mean?

Unreal.  He's the one who was always ranting about awful wind turbines! 

In other Trump news...

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Sigh

I don't want to make America great again.  I want to make America better.  I don't think it's going to happen.  There are too many Sean Hannitys in the country these days.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Trumpistas like to sue

Here's the Times' response to Sean Hannity's attempt to sue: