Steve King dared a conservative outlet to release audio of him calling immigrants ‘dirt.’ It did. https://t.co/W6dPBFBisl

— Nope. (@JoyAnnReid) November 12, 2018

From the Post:

Rep. Steve King, the newly reelected Iowa Republican with a history of incendiary comments about race and immigration, dared a conservative magazine to show evidence that he had called immigrants “dirt.”

“Just release the full tape,” King, who eked out a narrow victory last week despite affiliations with white nationalists, told the Weekly Standard’s online managing editor Saturday on Twitter. Days earlier, the magazine reported that King had made an inflammatory joke about immigrants.

The Weekly Standard released the recording — a two-minute audio in which King can be heard bantering with a

This is dumb reporting: Kim Hart at Axios on what “Democrats” think of “Republicans” and vice versa.

Many Americans think people in the other party are ignorant, spiteful, evil and generally destroying the country, according to a new Axios poll by SurveyMonkey, aired on HBO on Sunday night. 61% of Democrats see Republicans as “racist/bigoted/sexist.” 31% of Republicans say they view Democrats in the same light.

Why it matters: If Americans are this convinced that the other side isn’t just wrong, but dumb and evil, they’ll never be able to find enough common ground to solve real problems. And they’re more likely to elect leaders who can’t do it, either.

So we should have one party instead of … Read the rest

Olivier Blanchard offers analysis of a manipulative meme:

Chances are that you have seen this meme floating around, especially around elections. It isn’t what you think it is. It is not a friendly digital handshake. It isn’t meant to help neighbors mend fences. It is a deliberate instrument of psychological manipulation.

I have seen that meme, and cordially hated it.

I worked in Marketing for nearly two decades. I know this kind of device when I see it. Let me explain.

1. The image
Note the childlike simplicity of the image, the super basic smiling face. The finger pointing up at it. The open posture. The baby-like head. What part of the brain is this image stimulating? It looks

Originally a comment by Dave Ricks on Trump chastises the people of California.

As the Washington Post reported, the California Professional Firefighters president Brian Rice issued a response that I’ll copy here in full:

The president’s message attacking California and threatening to withhold aid to the victims of the cataclysmic fires is Ill-informed, ill-timed, and demeaning to those who are suffering as well as the men and women on the front lines.

At a time when our every effort should be focused on vanquishing the destructive fires and helping the victims, the president has chosen instead to issue an uninformed political threat aimed squarely at the innocent victims of these cataclysmic fires.

At this moment, thousands of our brother

For crying out loud.

The Labour Party has threatened a member with disciplinary action for referring to a transgender woman as “a man”.

Janey Hutton made the comment on a closed Facebook group, writing: “Its (sic) painful to see biological women say trans women (men) are sisters. The desperation to appear PCWOKE is vomit inducing. These are MEN.”

She then received a letter from Sophie Goodyear, head of complaints of Labour’s National Executive Committee, describing the remarks as “offensive”, saying “abuse of any kind, whether direct attacks or pejorative language which may cause offence is not acceptable and will not be tolerated in our party.”

But it’s not “pejorative language” to say that men are men, or to say … Read the rest

For Trump’s other loving contribution of the day, he decided to shout at California for being on fire.

Hours after officials announced grim new statistics in California’s Camp Fire — nine dead, more than 6,700 structures incinerated — President Trump blamed poor forest management for the destruction and threatened to pull federal funding.

“There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor,” Trump tweeted Saturday morning. “Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!”

A normal president would express compassion and concern, and nothing else. While the fires … Read the rest

Now here’s a nice credential for our new Attorney General:

Matthew G. Whitaker, the acting attorney general, served on the advisory board of a Florida company that a federal judge shut down last year and fined nearly $26 million after the government accused it of scamming customers.

The company, World Patent Marketing, “bilked thousands of consumers out of millions of dollars” by promising inventors lucrative patent agreements, according to a complaint filed in Florida by the Federal Trade Commission.

Court documents show that when frustrated consumers tried to get their money back, Scott J. Cooper, the company’s president and founder, used Mr. Whitaker to threaten them as a former federal prosecutor. Mr. Cooper’s company paid Mr. Whitaker nearly $10,000

Tim Weiner at the Post tells us that Trump can’t kneecap the FBI.

Not even Richard Nixon could stop the G-men. God knows he tried. Trump is no student of history, but he would do well to recall Nixon’s battle with the bureau.

When Hoover died in May 1972 — six weeks before the Watergate break-in — Nixon installed a politically loyal stooge, L. Patrick Gray, in his place. “You’ve got to be a conspirator,” Nixon counseled Gray. “You’ve got to be totally ruthless.” Nixon tried to sabotage the FBI as soon as it started looking into the break-in, ordering the CIA to obstruct the bureau’s investigation, on spurious national security grounds. Gray destroyed devasting evidence linking the

Benjamin Wittes in the Atlantic tells us that last week he told a small audience that it was too late to fire Mueller; now he wonders if he was too optimistic.

Whitaker is the kind of bad dream from which career Justice Department officials wake up at night in cold sweats. He’s openly political. The president is confident in his loyalty and that he won’t recuse himself from the investigation—notwithstanding his public statements about it and his having chaired the campaign of one of the grand jury witnesses. There are legal questions about his installation at the department’s helm. And he’s known as the White House’s eyes and ears at Justice.

It’s bad—very bad.

But, he says, he still thinks … Read the rest