It's The Satirists Who Are Keeping The Strange, Scary News Straight For Us

Satirists like Samanatha Bee are becoming
some of the most trusted news sources. 

Like most people, I get lost in the endless chatter and shoutfests and lame "analysis" on the cable news networks.

Sure, I watch them a lot, but they get to yakking about all the outrages going in Washington to the point where none of it makes sense.

When I get confused like that, I turn to satirists like Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Samantha Bee, Seth Meyers and sometimes the cast of "Saturday Night Live" to set me straight.

Yes, they all have a point of view, but satirists cut through the bullshit, instead of adding to it.

When the news gets confusing, satirists like John
Oliver are there for the rescue. 

I just encountered a video that backs up my point of view exactly. The point of the video, from Vox, is that comedians have learned to cover the Trump administration much more effectively than any news network.

Here's why:

Big news networks will accurately report that something Trump said is a lie, or totally fabricated, or has no evidence to back it up.

So far, so good.

Then the TV channels spend hours and hours and hours parsing the latest lie or stupid remark. Plus, they bring on Trump sycophants to defend the lie, to spin the lie, to make it all seem better.

All this has the effect of confusing the viewer. Including people like me, who are pretty sophisticated news consumers.  

Frankly, I trust Stephen Colbert more than I trust
much of what passes for cable news. 

The news network reporters all know the latest Trump lie du jour is bullcrap, but they take it seriously, and make an effort to "report all sides of the issue."

But when something is bull, just call it that, for crissakes!

Which is what satirists do. You don't necessarily have to agree with the satirsts' point of view, but at least you know you're getting to the heart of the matter.

In a humorous way. Humor often makes things so much easier to understand.

A few journalists are starting to get the message. Jake Tapper on CNN, for instance, is starting to make sarcastic remarks when a Trump surrogate says something over the top. He's calling the bullcrap.  

On MSNBC, Rachel Maddow isn't really a satirist, but she's sure doing a good job of digging through the mountains of dirt in Washington to give us some insight into what's really going on. I like how she enthusiastically explains things in ways any bozo (like me!) can understand.

So all that is a start.

Yes, journalists ought to try to over all sides and be fair. But when someone is calling the Earth flat, time to go for the jugular.

It's no wonder satirists through history have had they heydeys when the leaders are failing particularly badly. If you're a good satirist, enjoy your current success. We need people like you.

In the video at the bottom of this post, you'll hear Sophia McClennen, a co-author of "Is Satire Saving Our Nation?" give this money quote that is spot on: "Political satire is about showing you the system is faking you out...It fires up the mind to say, 'Hmmm, this doesn't seem right.'"

Yes, I think satire can inspire needed political activism.

 The video below is about seven minutes long, but you should really watch it. It's a great guide to how to report on, and how the public ought to try and understand bullcrap. The video is NSFW, because of some language, but worth it.

Horrifying First Video Of So-Called Swedish Terrorist Attack Trump Referred To

I've got the scoop on the "terrer attack" in Sweden
Trump referred to last night. 

Pretty much everybody, including the entire population of Sweden, was mystified by the terrorist incident in Sweden Donald Trump referred to during his apparent 2020 presidential campaign kickoff in Melbourne, Florida Saturday.

"You look at what's happening in Germany, you look at what's happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this. Sweden," Trump marveled to the crowd Saturday.

I guess the fake news mainstream media hid this terrorist attack from the public, just like Trump said the media is hiding all terrorists attacks.

Swedish news media had reports Saturday of a disturbed man setting himself on fire, a fatal workplace accident, and closed roads because of winter storm in northern Sweden, but nothing about a terrorist attack.

Trump did apparently watch a Fox news program Friday about refugees in Sweden committing crimes, so maybe that's what he's talking about?

The president would not confuse that with a real terrorist attack, would he? Of course not, and I've got the proof.

I was able to obtain video of the terrible attack in Sweden Friday. Here it is, but warning, it's not for the sensitive. It's scary - especially the gunfire towards the end:

How Trump Will Try To Stay In Office Indefinitely

Among the very, VERY few instances of actual voter
fraud uncovered in last November's election was this woman
who voted for, yes, Donald Trump twice because she really,
really wanted him to win. 

I know, I know, it's like this blog is turning into all Trump, all the time, but you have to hand it to the guy, he sure knows how to dominate all aspects of one's life.

Kind of like a nasty flu bug.  

The latest, of course, is Trump's Big Plan to investigate his whackadoodle premise that he lost the popular vote through voter fraud.

His insane claim is that he lost the popular vote in the election by three million people because the election was marred by up to 5 million illegal voters.

Everybody knows that's hooey, of course, and the first impulse is to chalk it up to Child Trump's super fragile ego and the need for adoration.

It's that of course, but he knows what he's doing.

I know I sound conspiratorial, but this "investigation" is part of his big plan to make sure he stays in office for eight years (and either continues on beyond that or one of his evil minions does.)

Everthing Trump does is stagecraft and this is, too. The big investigation will "reveal" widespread voter fraud, but it will be, forgive me, trumped up, bogus allegations against lots and lots of people who have had the gall or will have the gall to vote while black. Or vote while Hispanic. Or vote while poor. Or Muslim.

You get the picture.

So, his compliant GOP Congress creatures will go along with this and come up with all kinds of new laws to ensure blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, gays, the poor who tend not to vote for the likes of Trump won't be able to vote at all. Meaning Trump will take millions of potential votes away from any would-be opponents of his.

This isn't just me coming up with this conspiracy theory. I'm seeing it from a lot of observers.

One example is the New Republic, which points out that Trump's "investigation" will "reveal" the reality (really! not alternative facts!) that there are indeed outdated voting rolls and people who are registered to vote in two states.

Voting districts have ways of making sure these outdated voting rolls don't result in fraudulent voters, or that somebody who is registered in one state doesn't go back to the other state and vote again.

I'm all for bipartisan efforts to make sure voter record keeping is correct and that things be kept up to date in voter precincts, but that's not what's happening here.

Republicans will use the outdated voter rolls, et al  to say that voting fraud could occur, so they'll pass laws to make sure people who usually cast ballots for Democrats,  like I said, racial minorities, etc.) can't vote and thus hand a re-election to Trump.

As the New Republic notes: "That's ultimately what Trump's investigation will be about: surfacing just enough information to destabilize the truth, which is that practically nobody voted for Clinton illegally. At the same time, it will give Republicans at the state level and in Congress the ammunition to try to make sure Trump doesn't lose the popular vote again in 2020."

I can see the GOP heading that way already, with their voter suppression moves in places like North Carolina and Texas.

And it's really telling that Republican congress creatures, when asked about claims by Trump there were three to five million illegal votes in November, would not agree the idea is absurd, and just mumbled a bunch of well, maybes.

Of course, if we really wanted to make everything as small-d democratic as possible, we'd make voting easier for everybody, not harder.

That won't be the case because a bunch of cruel, delusional, throw back old white men want to cling to power.

Trump: "Mine Is Bigger Than Yours"

The Women's March in Washington DC and many other cities
Saturday was even bigger than Donald Trump's ego
and he is STILL fuming about it instead of being President

Well, the first full day of the Donald Trump administration Saturday was a total waste, wasn't it?

At least for him it was.

Trump could have gotten down to work dismantling Obamacare, throwing people off insurance plans, restricting rights for women and gays, changing regulations to give money to his rich cronies and starting a war with Iraq or something,.

Instead, he had a day-long hissy fit over the size of the crowds at his inauguration. And the much bigger crowds at the Womens' Marches in cities across the nation, including the nation's capital.

We ended the day with the embarrassing spectacle of Trump's press secretary, Sean Spicer, reading from a prepared statement no doubt ordered by his boss. Spicer  yelled at the media for supposedly about the lackluster crowd sizes at Trump's inauguration Friday.

"This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the world," Spicer thundered.

Well, no, it wasn't, and the raging Spicer statement was full of lies. But that's besides the point for Trump, who, rather than feeling a sense of accomplishment for getting something done, only feels good if the ratings are yuuge, as he would say, be it crowd size, television ratings, or fan letters or something stupid like that.

I've always noticed it's particularly galling for Trump to be outdone by women. I'm sure Saturday's Womens' Marches really set him off.  He was outdone by women!  The horrors!

In every city where they were held, attendance was much higher than anyone expected.  Half a million in Washington DC. Even where I live in Vermont, a Women's March was held in tiny capital city of Montpelier, population 8,000.

Close to 20,000 people showed up for the rally in Montpelier, such a huge crowd that Vermont State Police had to close off Interstate 89 exits into the city because the area was so overrun with cars and people attending the rally.

Facts don't matter to Trump and his minions, though. Because his mantra is always: "Mine is bigger than yours."

I don't know if his denying of facts is very scary or hilarious. Probably both.

Berating the press for reporting accurately, creating alternative "realities" and demanding the press do their bidding or else is the terrifying stuff of North Korea and the Soviet Union.

On the other hand, this kind of bullcrap is hilarious. Spicer today is being compared to Baghdad Bob, the Iraqi information minister who bombastically declared the during the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 that, among other things, no American troops had successfully invaded while U.S. tanks rolled by in the background.

All this makes Trump looks small and silly, and a passing fad. Too bad he's already President.

Now we know how to shut down anything the Trump administration wants to do. Hit him in the that monstrous ego of his, and he won't get anything done.

But then we get the depressing back and forth that will go on forever. Today's news headlines surely pissed Trump off even more.  A couple examples:

The New York Times:

"With False Claims, Trump Attacks Meia on Turnout And Intelligence Rift. "

CNN Money: 

"White House Press Secretary Attacks Media For Accurately Reporting Inaugural Crowds."

Trump's minions predictably fired back Sunday. The odious Kellyanne Conway, counselor to President Trump, had a big fight with Meet The Press host Chuck Todd Sunday morning, in which she said that Spicer didn't lie, but gave "alternative facts."

Todd pointed out that "alternative facts" are falsehoods, and it all went downhill from there. Conway finally sniffed, "If we're going to keep referring to the press secretaty in those types of terms I think we're going to have to rethink our relationship here."

Awww...

Trump is never as successful as he claims he is, and he's clearly in over his head here. He's too busy massaging his ego to actually do any work, so the future of his presidency is already pretty uncertain.

Unfortunately, so is the rest of the country's future for the next several years.

Donald Trump Isn't Creating All Those New Jobs, At Least Not Yet

Is President Trump unfarily taking credit for job
creation that would have happened with or without him?

Anybody would be cheered by the flurry of news that companies are hiring, or moving jobs back to the United States from overseas.  

Donald Trump takes a lot of credit for this, and as much as I dislike him, if he's responsible for actually bringing new, well paying jobs to the United States, who am I to complain?

Job growth is job growth, so it's something to be celebrated.

However, like so many things involving our new president Donald Trump, things aren't as they seem, at least if a really interesting NBC news report is correct. 

As always, the problem involved Donald Trump's tweets.

He has the ability to send a corporation's stock plummeting if he is displeased with the company and tweets about it.

No CEO or PR department wants that, so some corporations are issuing jobs annoucements to stave off the dreaded Donald Trump negative tweet.

So the companies are making annoucements that they're creating new jobs. The trouble is, says NBC, that these annoucements are recycled. Usually, the added jobs were already planned before Trump came along.

Trump is conning again. He's taking credit for jobs that would have been created whether he was around or not.

That's what I mean when things aren't as they seem. Companies look great if they announce now they are creating jobs, even though this has nothing to do with Trump. It just gets Trump off their back.

Trump knows this. That's why he tweets those negative things. So he can look good and claim he is already creating jobs.

Maybe he's hastening things a little. General Motors said it has long planed to increase capital expenditures, including hiring more workers, but Trump accelerated the plans a little.

Planned job increases at Wal-Mart are planned to be at roughl the same pace as recent years, so there's nothing too special there.

Of course, Trump has responded to the NBC News story as fake and wrong in, you guessed it, a series of tweets in the days before he wass inaugurated on Friday.

Trump's bluster and threats might also be keeping jobs in the U.S., at least temporarily, as company's don't want to face the bad PR Trump can create.

However, I wonder if that's a sustainable job creation ploy. A really sound economic foundation helps create jobs, and that takes work and skill.

I wonder if Trump can go beyond threats and tweets and actually help build the nation's economy.

I'm dubious.

New Relationship Low: Snaring Mates With Positive Pregnancy Tests Bought On Craigslist?

I'm no worldwide expert on relationships but here's a mini-trend reported on Salon that I don't think bodes well for the potential marriages of the people involved.

One of those weird "Buy My Pos. Pregnancy
Test" ads on Craigslist.  

According to Salon, some women are buying posiitve pregnancy tests on Craigslist to convince their mates to marry or stay with them. 

The theory is, the guy thinks he's going to be a father, and that will convince him to stay with the woman who bought the pregnancy test.

I don't think these women buying the positive tests have really thought this through, do you?  What happens when the pregnancy, which is somebody else's after all, doesn't happen like the guy thought? And what happens if the guy discovers the deception? I bet it won't make him want to stay with the gal who lied to him.

Even if the guy involved never figures out the Craigslist trickery, is this anyway to build a relationship or marriage? Based on trickery and lies?  Again, I'm no expert, but I don't think these marriages can be saved, as they say.

Idiot Posts False Sandy News Updates, News Outfits Annoyed

Chaotic disasters like Hurricane Sandy can make it hard to figure out which reports about the catastrophe are true, which aren't.

It didn't help when a New York financial worker and campaign manager for a Republican congressional candidate decided to spread false stories through his Twitter feed, ComfortablySmug

And it didn't help that the guy, identified as Sashank Tripathi,  thought it would be harder for people to unmask hin than he thought.

Happy Halloween, Sashank!

Yes, they did put sandbags in front of the NYSE, but
unlike Tweets the media bit on, it didn't actually flood.

He was Tweeting all these storm updates during the worst of Sandy that the New York Stock Exchange was flooded out, or that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was stranded in New York City.

None of this was true, but he apparently hoped some news outlets would bite and report this stuff. A few actually did.

Um, you can't always believe what you read on the Internet, right?

Tripathi's ComfortablySmug was what The Guardian newspaper described as a friendly troll. He often posted over the top remarks, just to be snarky and fun. Unlike a lot of trolls, he usually didn't aggressively attack people.

Problems started during the storm when some of his Sandy Tweets seemed plausible, like the Stock Exchange flooding. And the rush to be first, and the struggle to get news out, prompted some retweeting, which ended up in places like the Weather Channel.

Which, as the Guardian article points out, shouldn't have happened. A quick check would have shown that ComfortablySmug was unreliable, but this of course is 20/20 hindsight.

Maybe part of the reason why we in the media are mad at ComfortablySmug because some of us got hoodwinked?

Yeah, ComfortablySmug, aka Tripathi, was irresponsible and stupid for Tweeting falsehoods in the middle of a crisis, but this is a lesson for us in the media: Even when things are happening at a breathless pace, does every bit of information have to go out immediately? If it's a life and death situation, maybe. But if the public had to wait five minutes to learn whether it was true the New York Stock Exchange was a giant bathtub, we would have all survived.

Our buddy ComfortablySmug was one of many people to post false images and statements in social media during the superstorm. Especially during a crisis,  they crave attention so intensely that they have to make sure they get it.  There were an incredible number of photoshopped, misleading or photos that had nothing to do with Sandy posted on Facebook and Twitter during and after Sandy.

During disasters, people quite naturally pay attention to storm victims, the news, the destruction. They don't care about some loser Tweeting in his basement. And the loser in the basement resents everybody turning attention away from him.

Well, our guy Sashank sure got attention once Buzzfeed figured out who he was and blabbed it to all of us. 

Once he was unmasked, he apologized, I think mostly because he was caught with his hand in the cookie jar. He never did explain why he posted false stuff, though.  Maybe  he thought he was committing harmless jokes. That was his M.O, after all, and he probably didn't think to switch tactics when people were in the middle of a disaster.

The whole episode really screwed up his job as a consultant for a Republican congressional candidate though. He resigned from that gig after this came out.

On the bright side, when there is a lot of false stuff swirling around out there, a lot of self appointed fact  checkers go through and tells us which is true, which is not.

So inaccurate information gets out there and spreads far and wide. But if at least if we pay attention, we can get the right story.

Sometimes.