I watched Tim Walz speak to a crowd in his home state of Nebraska, and he was wonderful.
I encourage you to watch this good, decent man. He knows that what matters most in our leaders is their character and their values. He has them.
The above link is for Tim Walz’s speech.
If you want to watch the whole event, including his introduction by his wife Gwen, open this link. If you are a teacher, you will love her call-out to teachers, and the crowd roaring “TEACHERS! TEACHERS! TEACHERS!”
Trump has repeatedly sneered at soldiers and veterans. He avoided service in Vietnam by getting five draft deferments from a podiatrist who rented a storefront office in Queens from Donald’s father. Fred Trump Sr. asked for a favor and he got it, according to the foot doctor’s daughters.
According to one of his chiefs of staff, General John Kelly, Trump called fallen soldiers “suckers” and “losers.” He couldn’t understand why they served. What was in it for them? He mocked Senator John McCain, who spent five years in a prison camp after his plane crashed in Hanoi. Trump said he didn’t like soldiers who had been captured.
His latest insult occurred recently. While he was President, he conferred the Presidential Medal of Freedom on friends, allies, professional athletes, and contributors. Among them were Congressman Jim Jordan, Rush Limbaugh, Orrin Hatch, and Edwin Meese. One recipient was Miriam Adelson, wife of the late casino mogul, Sheldon Adelson. The Adelsons were one of the biggest funders of his campaigns. Miriam is Israeli-born, and she is passionate in her support for Israel.
On Thursday he said that the Presidential Medal of Freedom–awarded to civilans for outstanding achievements–was “much better” than the Congressional Medal of Honor–awarded to soldiers for outstanding service to their country.
Michael Gold of The New York Times wrote this story:
Former President Donald J. Trump on Thursday described the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which honors civilians, as being “much better” than the Medal of Honor, because service members who receive the nation’s highest military honor are often severely wounded or dead.
Mr. Trump’s remarks follow a yearslong series of comments in which he has appeared to mock, attack or express disdain for service members who are wounded, captured or killed, even as he portrays himself as the ultimate champion of the armed forces.
At a campaign event at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., billed as a discussion about fighting antisemitism, Mr. Trump recounted how he awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Miriam Adelson, the Israeli-American widow of the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. Ms. Adelson, who attended the event, is among his top donors.
“It’s actually much better, because everyone gets the Congressional Medal of Honor, that’s soldiers, they’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets, or they’re dead,” Mr. Trump said, using a common misnomer for the military award. “She gets it, and she’s a healthy, beautiful woman.”
Standing in front of six American flags, Mr. Trump added that the honors were “rated equal.”
Brian Hughes, a Trump campaign spokesman, said that Mr. Trump’s comments referred to “how it can be an emotionally difficult experience to give the Congressional Medal of Honor to veterans who have been wounded or tragically killed defending our country, as he proudly did when he was commander in chief.”
But Mr. Trump’s remarks drew swift criticism from Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans, who argued that he has exhibited a pattern of disrespect toward military service members that has made him unfit for command.
“Donald Trump knows nothing about service to anyone or anything but himself,” a spokeswoman for Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, Sarafina Chitika, said, adding that his comments “should remind all Americans that we owe it to our service members, our country, and our future to make sure Donald Trump is never our nation’s commander in chief again.”
Mr. Trump’s remarks also threatened to undermine efforts by his Republican allies to attack the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, over his military record. Mr. Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, who spent four years in the Marine Corps, has accused Mr. Walz of leaving the Army National Guard to avoid being deployed to Iraq and of exaggerating his service record to claim falsely that he had served in combat…
Mr. Vance on Friday defended Mr. Trump, telling reporters at a campaign event in Milwaukee that the former president was a “guy who loves our veterans and who honors our veterans.” Though he acknowledged he had not heard Mr. Trump’s full remarks, Mr. Vance characterized them as compliments for Ms. Adelson that were not “in any way denigrating those who received military honors.”
Mr. Trump, who never served in the military, has faced bipartisan blowback over his posture toward service members and veterans throughout his political career. While campaigning for president in 2016, he disparaged the record of Senator John McCain, a former naval aviator who was held prisoner for more than five years during the Vietnam War.
“He’s not a war hero,” Mr. Trump said then, adding, “I like people who weren’t captured.” Republicans, many then wary of Mr. Trump, immediately rushed to Mr. McCain’s defense.
Mr. Trump also during that campaign fought with the family of Humayun Khan, a slain Muslim-American soldier, after Mr. Khan’s father spoke at the Democratic National Convention in 2016 and railed against Mr. Trump for smearing the character of Muslims. Mr. Trump argued the family had “no right” to criticize him, and the squabble led top Republicans to voice their solidarity with Mr. Khan’s family.
During his 2020 campaign, Mr. Trump was forced to defend his support for American troops after The Atlantic reported that he privately called American soldiers killed in combat “losers” and “suckers,” setting off a political firestorm.
Democrats highlighted the reported comments as evidence of his contempt for those who serve, and left-leaning veterans groups condemned him.
Mr. Trump has vigorously denied he made those remarks. But John F. Kelly, a retired four-star general who was once Mr. Trump’s White House chief of staff, confirmed the former president’s comments disparaging veterans. And at the time, people familiar with Mr. Trump’s private conversations said that he has long expressed scorn for those who served in Vietnam as not being smart enough to have gotten out of it, as he did through a medical diagnosis of bone spurs in his heels.
In a statement to CNN last year, Mr. Kelly cast Mr. Trump as “a person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family — for all Gold Star families — on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.”
Mr. Kelly’s statement came days after Mr. Trump suggested in a social media post that Gen. Mark A. Milley, his former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, should be executed for treason over calls he made to Chinese officials to reassure them of the nation’s stability after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by a mob of Mr. Trump’s supporters.
Mr. Trump’s comments about military troops and veterans became an issue earlier this year during the Republican primary, after he insinuated that the husband of one of his rivals, Nikki Haley, accepted a deployment to Africa with the National Guard to escape her. The Haley campaign attacked Mr. Trump’s “anti-veteran record” and distributed an open letter from dozens of veterans that condemned his statements.
Mr. Trump met with Ms. Adelson on Thursday to reconcile with her after he insulted her over text messages sent by an aide at the end of July. When he bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom to her in 2018, the White House cited her work supporting “Jewish schools, Holocaust memorial organizations, Friends of the Israel Defense Forces and Birthright Israel, among other causes.”
The Presidential Medal of Freedom, established by President John F. Kennedy, is intended to honor people who have “made an especially meritorious contribution” to national security, world peace or “cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.” A president may unilaterally bestow the award.
The Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest commendation for valor in combat, is awarded to a soldier who exhibited “conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity” that went “beyond the call of duty” and involved “risk of life,” according to the Department of Defense. Being wounded or killed is not a requirement for receiving the medal, which is awarded only after approvals throughout the military chain of command.
Thom Hartmann encourages readers to beware of political scams right before the elections. The economy is cooling off. Why isn’t the Federal Reserve lowering interest rates? Is it because the chair of the Federal Reserve is a Republican? Did you know about Trump’s increase in wealth during his presidency? I don’t agree that Trump wants to get elected to make money; I think he wants to stay out of jail. But we may both be right.
He writes:
— Is the Fed Chair “trying to get Donald Trump elected” by keeping rates high? The anti-corruption watchdog group Revolving Door Project is claiming that lifetime Republican and former commercial banker Jerome Powell, now the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, is “trying to get Donald Trump elected.” Fully two months ago, Powell noted that “this is no longer an overheated economy” and “the labor market appears to be fully back in balance.” Yesterday’s jobs numbers — lower than expected new jobs (144,000) and a jump in unemployment to 4.3% — suggest the economy is on the verge of tipping into recession, an event that Trump yesterday pointed out and proclaimed is happening because of “Kamalanomics.” The Project’s Executive Director Jeff Hauser was explicit: “That Powell’s Fed still refuses to lower interest rates—after Trump said that rates shouldn’t be lowered before the election—raises questions about the central bank’s independence. Whether the Fed keeps rates high or brings them down, one of two presidential candidates will benefit. While lower rates would provide much-needed economic relief to the American people, Powell has instead chosen to stick it to the people and give an electoral boost to Trump.” Senator Elizabeth Warren yesterday called on the Fed chair to “cancel his summer vacation” and “lower interest rates now.” The warnings signs are flashing bright red — with worldwide declines in stock market indexes — and if Powell and the Fed don’t lower interest rates at least a half point within the next few weeks, it’ll be safe to conclude that Hauser is exactly right in his diagnosis of this situation.
— Did Egypt give a $10 million bribe to Trump? The Washington Post published a blockbuster report yesterday, detailing how the Egyptian government pulled together $10 million in cash in 2016 right after Donald Trump sought out Egyptian dictator El-Sisi and promised him a presidential visit (which he fulfilled) right after his inauguration. The Department of Justice found out about it in 2019 and the FBI began an investigation, but Attorney General Bill Barr — one of the most publicly corrupt senior government officials in modern history — put the kibosh on the investigation. As a result, nobody knows if or how the money was delivered to Trump, although right around the time it would have been delivered Trump took the unusual step of putting exactly $10 million of his own money into his campaign. Saudis and Russians own large parts of Trump Tower and multiple nations funneled millions to Trump by booking blocks of rooms in his DC hotel and then just leaving them empty. Forbes estimates that Trump’s businesses brought in $2.4 billion during his four years as president; hundreds of millions of that came from foreign governments and from his charging the Secret Service and our US government a small fortune for their stays at Trump properties around the world. His entire presidency, it turns out, was a giant grift; no wonder he wants back into office.
— Senate Republicans tell us who they are. President Biden’s American Rescue Plan increased child tax credits in a way that lifted an estimated 30 million children out of poverty, cutting the US child poverty rate in half. They expired last year, and legislation to reinstate them passed the House with roughly equal votes from both Democrats and Republicans. Iowa Senate Republican Chuck Grassley famously opposes help to poor families, saying “passing a tax bill that makes the president look good mailing out checks before the election, means he could be reelected and then we won’t extend the 2017 tax cuts.” Senate Republicans got the message and killed the bill on Thursday afternoon, keeping child poverty in America at a higher level than any other developed nation in the world.
Republicans say that the child tax credits are an effort by Democrats to buy votes. Maybe they are but when they were in effect, they cut child poverty rates in half. That’s reason enough for both parties to support them.
Shortly after Senator Ben Sasse left the U.S. Senate, he accepted the presidency of the University of Florida. Silas Morgan of the Orlando Sentinel relied on reporting by the student newspaper, the Independent Florida Alligator, to describe how former Senator Sasse upped the budget for his office by millions of dollars.
The University of Florida’s student newspaper reported Monday that former university president Ben Sasse spent millions of the school’s money to hire GOP political allies.
Sasse, a former Republican U.S. Senator from Nebraska, gave several one-time Senate staff members and other GOP officials lucrative remote positions at UF, according to records obtained by the Independent Florida Alligator.
Among the Senate staffers who joined him at UF are his former chief of staff, Raymond Sass; his former communications director, James Wegmann; his former press secretary, Taylor Silva; and three other former staffers. Both Sass and Wegmann worked remotely from the Washington D.C. area.
Sass’ salary, at $396,000, was more than double his Senate salary. Wegmann’s new position at UF earned him $432,000, while his predecessor in the position had made $270,000.
The hirings contributed to a $4.3 million increase in presidential salary expenses, part of a tripling of his office’s spending compared to what his predecessor, Kent Fuchs, spent during his last year in office, the Alligator reported. Sasse’s office employed more than 30 staff members, while Fuchs had fewer than 10.
Sasse also hired former Tennessee Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn, who worked remotely from Nashville, in a newly-created position that paid a starting salary of $367,500 and U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham’s former scheduler, Alice James Burns, who also worked remotely and was paid $205,000.
A report obtained by the Alligator says Sasse spent over $20,000 flying his employees to UF between April 29 and July 29. The only hire who lives in Florida received a $15,000 stipend to relocate to Gainesville.
UF hasn’t responded to requests from the Alligator for a complete log of Sasse’s travel expenses. His travel expenses rose to $633,000 over his first full fiscal year, more than Fuchs spent on travel in eight years.
He also spent $7.2 million on consulting contracts, nearly two-thirds of which went to consulting giant McKinsey and Company, where he used to work as an advisor on an hourly contract. This amounts to more than 40 times what Fuchs spent on consulting in eight years.
Sasse abruptly resigned at the end of July, citing his wife’s failing health. The Alligator says the university did not respond to questions about what would happen to the hires now that Sasse is gone. Fuchs has returned as interim president until the UF Board of Trustees can hire a permanent replacement for Sasse.
Sasse’s hiring by the Board in 2022 resulted in the UF Faculty Senate passing a no confidence resolution in Sasse’s presidential search process due to transparency issues. Legislation passed by Florida’s GOP-controlled legislature earlier in 2022 made records relating to public university presidential searches exempt from Florida’s open public meetings and public records requirements.
His appointment by the board of trustees also generated controversy among parts of the student body, especially the LGBTQ+ community, for political positions Sasse had taken while in the Senate.
Dan Rather warns about the danger of one-man control of a major social media company. He had Elon Musk in mind. Musk is supporting Trump, and he is using Twitter, his personal megaphone, to help Trump and smear Harris.
I have been locked out of Twitter since mid-July, because Twitter says I am underage. Really! So I am no longer influenced by Musk propaganda. But millions of other people are.
Rather writes on his blog “Steady”:
Imagine having the ability to instantly lob information, true or not, to millions of people across the globe. Elon Musk, the owner of X (formerly known as Twitter), has that ability. One would hope that with that power would come responsibility. In a perfect world, the owners of social media companies would be fair-minded and objective. Alas.
For all the talk of social media reform after 2016 and the Facebook fiasco when misinformation ran rampant across that platform, it now appears that Musk has decided not only to support the Republican candidate for president but to personally help spread misinformation about voting and the election.
Plus, in 2024, Musk has more powerful tools than Facebook ever imagined eight years ago. Artificial intelligence is coming into its own, and the dangers it presents to our democracy are profound.
Musk has recently released an AI chatbot, which, if you don’t know, is basically a computer that can simulate a human conversation. Musk named his Grok, and within hours of President Biden bowing out of the race, it created a post that read: “The ballot deadline has passed for several states for the 2024 election,” naming nine states: Alabama, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington. The message suggested that Kamala Harris had missed the filing deadline to get on the ballot in those states.
This is 100% false and was shared with millions of users on X.
Secretaries of state in five of the nine states have written a letter to Musk urging him to “immediately implement changes” to Grok. I’m not holding my breath.
When Grok was launched late last year, Musk called it the anti-“woke” chatbot — his characterization. He said he wanted the AI search assistant to “answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems.” Those other AI systems, powered by OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft, are specifically designed to avoid controversial topics.
But it’s not just Grok that is pushing out lies. Musk himself reposted a manipulated version of Harris’s first campaign video. It featured an altered voice track that sounds just like Harris. In it “she” says she didn’t “know the first thing about running the country” and that she is the “ultimate diversity hire.” Musk tagged the video as “amazing” and didn’t include a disclaimer. His post has garnered 135 million views, so far. It has not been taken down.
Talk about strange bedfellows. Over the years, there has been no love lost between Musk and Donald Trump. As recently as May, Trump was a vociferous and vocal proponent of the oil and gas industry. Remember the Mar-a-Lago get-together where he promised to end Biden’s green energy initiatives, including his electric vehicle policies, in exchange for $1 billion in campaign contributions?
Apparently Musk and Trump have mended some pretty tall fences. For his part, Musk has promised lots of cash to the pro-Trump America PAC. Maybe Trump didn’t get what he asked for from his oil and gas friends.
The Musk-backed America PAC is already helping Trump in swing states. The PAC’s website is tricking people into sharing personal data. The site promises to help people register to vote, but when a user enters a zip code in a battleground state, after also giving their name and phone number, they are directed to a page that says “thank you.” They are then asked to “complete the form below.” But there is no form. And there is no redirection to a voter registration site.
In exchange, Trump now thinks electric vehicles are “incredible.” What a shocker. At a rally in Georgia on Sunday, Trump told his supporters, “I’m for electric cars. I have to be because, you know, Elon endorsed me very strongly. So, I have no choice.”
The Michigan secretary of state is investigating Musk and the PAC. “Every citizen should know exactly how their personal information is being used by PACs, especially if an entity is claiming it will help people register to vote in Michigan or any other state,” a spokeswoman for the secretary of state’s office said.
In 2022, President Barack Obama gave a speech at Stanford University about the dangers of artificial intelligence, foreseeing that “regulation has to be part of the answer” to combating online disinformation. His closing thought is a reminder that AI can be a help as well as a hindrance — but that it can’t exist in a vacuum.
“The internet is a tool. Social media is a tool. At the end of the day, tools don’t control us. We control them. And we can remake them. It’s up to each of us to decide what we value and then use the tools we’ve been given to advance those values,” Obama said.
For all intents and purposes, social media has become our town square — but unlike most communities, it has no sheriff, and it very much needs one. In his or her absence it is up to us, social media’s users, to be wary consumers.
Ohio adopted a voucher program. Then another and another. There are five different voucher programs. The Republicans who control the State Legislature hate public schools, so they eventually decided to make vouchers universal. They removed the income limit so that every family could obtain vouchers.
The cost of vouchers yearly went from $124 million last year to $966 million this year—and it may go even higher.
Do Ohioans really want to underwrite the tuition of every student who chooses to enroll in nonpublic schools?
You will not be surprised to read that the vast majority of students who use vouchers are already students in private and religious schools.
Poor kids are not being “saved” by vouchers. Affluent families are getting a subsidy from the states. Many private schools have raised their tuition in response to the new voucher money.
Ohio also has many charter schools. Typically they get worse academic results than public schools. Some have been mired in financial scandals. The most notorious charter scandal involved an online for-profit school called The Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT). Over two decades, it collected $1 billion from the state. Its owner contributed to politicians. It had big-name speakers at its graduation ceremonies, like the Governor and, on another occasion, Jeb Bush. It has the lowest graduation rate of any high school in the nation. When the state auditor asked ECOT to return $67 million due to phantom students, it declared bankruptcy.
Texas Governor Greg Abbot said last year that voucher legislation was his top priority. Was it because Pennsylvania billionaire Jeff Yass gave him $6 million to vouchers through the legislature? A score of Republicans from rural districts voted against vouchers. They knew that their district schools would be crippled by vouchers. Although Governor Abbot called multiple special sessions, although he offered bribes and threats, the rural Republicans defied him and said no to vouchers. The people who taught in their local public schools were their sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles, children and friends.
So Governor Abbot took Jeff Yass’s $6 million and used it to fund extremist Republicans who would vote for vouchers, putting their local public schools at risk.
Many of the Yass extremists won, paving the way for Abbot to win his vouchers.
Democrats are challenging Abbot’s puppets in November, the ones that Jeff Yass paid for.
The Pastors for Texas Children have not given up the fight.
Their leader Charles Foster Johnson post the following on Twitter:
As we write this, we are in the hearing room with our pastors. We are told the committee will hear testimony tomorrow, too.
This written testimony by PTC Trustee Bill Jones is superb! It is a sterling example of what effective written testimony is. It is not too late for you to submit written testimony. You may do so here.
#######
I am Bill Jones, a resident of Collin County for the past 37 years. My state representative is Jeff Leach. I have three grandchildren in Frisco ISD and one in Allen ISD. My daughter is a schoolteacher in Frisco ISD and formerly taught for many years in Plano ISD. Both of my children grew up in Plano ISD schools. I am a trustee of Pastors for Texas Children, where I have served since 2013, and a member – since 2004 – of Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas, where I serve on the Christian Advocacy Committee.
With respect to your August 12 hearing on “educational opportunity” proposals, I testify to oppose any bill that would transfer public taxpayer funds to private entities. Public taxpayer funds should go ONLY to public schools that benefit all, not to private schools that benefit only a privileged few. Any bill that would give public funds for the support of private schools would drain funds from our children’s and grandchildren’s neighborhood public schools, which are already gravely underfunded.
Any claim by voucher proponents that vouchers benefit the underprivileged is an outright lie. The vast majority of parents who would take advantage of vouchers – as has been the case in other states – are those whose children are already in private schools. They go to parents who are able to afford the private school tuition, and the voucher is merely a supplement to reduce their expense. Voucher amounts are never even close to sufficient for those who cannot afford private schools in the first place. They benefit the well-to-do.
Above all, I do not want my tax money to go to support someone else’s religious indoctrination any more than I want the tax money of those of other faiths to support mine.
In addition, private schools are not accountable to the state – their teachers do not have to be certified; their curriculum is not subject to oversight; and they are free to refuse applications from, for example, special needs children, which they almost always do. Public schools, on the other hand, are required to meet state standards, and they must take ALL children, including those with special needs. We should not be further draining them of the resources needed to serve children of every type of need, every faith, every color, every ethnic background.
Voucher plans, no matter what name or euphemism is attached to them, are bad policy, hurting our children and grandchildren, and the dedicated public servants – schoolteachers, principals, superintendents, and other staff – who serve them.
Please vote against any bills that provide public taxpayer funds for the support of private schools.
Lawrence O’Donnell appears nightly on MSNBC at 10 pm EST. I love his show because he is so smart.
As a bonus, here is Robert Reich wondering why the media doesn’t report honestly about Trump’s dementia.
I don’t know how any self-respecting journalist could work for FOX News. It offers a good job in a competitive industry, but why sell your soul to the devil? I have recently seen tweets by Megyn Kelly, viciously attacking Kamala Harris, and every time I do, I remember Trump saying of her in 2016, after the first GOP debate, that she had blood coming out of her orifices. Yet still she is his sycophant.
In The New Republic, Thom Hartmann writes that Tim Walz may be the perfect antidote to FOX’s vitriol. If you want to reprogram family members, introduce them to Tim Walz. He is a good man, a decent man, not a FOX liar.
Hartmann writes:
All across America families are in mourning: Their parents and grandparents, particularly the men in their lives, have been stolen from them by the right-wing hate and rage machine.
Jen Senko produced a movie—The Brainwashing of My Dad—about losing her own father to Fox “News”; it was also made into a book of the same title. She’s been a guest on my radio show a few times, and her story is one replicated across America millions of times. Her father—a totally normal Midwestern guy—began watching Fox “News” when he retired, and within a year had become withdrawn, bitter, angry, and filled with hate.
Jen and her family staged an intervention and locked Fox out of Dad’s TV with the child lock option built into her cable system; within a few months, back to watching normal TV news like CNN, MSNBC, and the BBC, Dad made a full recovery from the temporary mental illness Murdoch’s infamous hate machine had thrown him into.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’s vice presidential pick, is America’s intervention against the mind poison that Trump, Fox “News,” and right-wing hate radio have infected our nation with.
He’s a normal guy, who joined the Army National Guard right out of high school at 17, rising to the rank of Commander Sergeant Major and becoming a top advocate for America’s veterans during his decade in Congress.
He used the G.I. bill to go to college, getting his master’s degree and going on to teach high school social studies. He coached his school’s football team, taking it to the state championships for the first time ever.
He smiles. His students love him, as does his family. He’s a normal guy. He’s the father everybody who grew up in a dysfunctional family wishes they had. He’s the grandpa everybody who’s lost one to Fox “News” wishes could sit down with their own and set him straight.
He carved butter at the state fair. He helped start his school’s first gay-straight alliance back in the 1990s when homophobic hate was still widely accepted; he said the coach doing so would be a powerful statement of support. He loves his country, his community, his family, and his nation.
No purchased bone-spur X-rays for Tim Walz; he embodies the very definition of patriotism that I grew up with in the Midwest. He reminds me of my own dad, who joined the Army at 17 to go fight Nazis in World War II, an echo of the past that most Americans recognize.
His contrast with Trump’s infidelities, con jobs, and constant angry bitterness is a sunlight-like disinfectant for our body politic. He shows up J.D. Vance—with his creepy obsessions with women’s genitals and birth rates and fealty to his billionaire patrons—for the weird guy that he is. He even highlights jokes about Vance, saying: “I can’t wait to debate the guy. That is, if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up.”
Trump and Vance are riding a wave of hate, fear, and bigotry made acceptable and even viral by a multibillion-dollar media machine that emerged from the Reagan years.
To steal the minds of America’s grandparents, President Reagan fast-tracked citizenship for Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch in 1985 so Murdoch could legally purchase U.S. media properties; Reagan ordered the Federal Communications Commission to stop enforcing the Fairness Doctrine, and Republicans in Congress later gutted the Equal Time Rule.
In this, Reagan knew what he and the GOP were getting: Murdoch had by that time already flipped both Australian and British politics toward the hard right using frequent and lurid stories featuring crime by minorities.
Writing for The Sydney Morning Herald (the Australian equivalent of The New York Times), former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd called Rupert Murdoch and his right-wing news operations “the greatest cancer on the Australian democracy.”
Fox and Murdoch’s power in Australia came, Rudd says, from their ruthlessness.
It’s the same here. When Fox and Tucker Carlson set out to rewrite the history of the treasonous January 6 coup attempt at our nation’s Capitol with a three-part special alleging it could have been an inside job by the FBI, two of their top conservative stars, Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes, resigned in protest.
Text messages released by Congresswoman Liz Cheney and the committee that investigated the January 6 attempt to overthrow our government show that the network’s top prime-time hosts were begging Trump to call off his openly racist and murderous mob while at the same time minimizing what happened on the air.
Even worse, revelations from the Dominion lawsuit show that Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham all intentionally lied to their viewers for over two years with the encouragement of Rupert Murdoch himself. While they were privately ridiculing Trump and acknowledging he was a “sore loser,” they said the exact opposite to their audience.
Along with its relentless attacks on America’s first Black president, Fox’s support of Trump’s Big Lie helped tear America apart and set up the violence and deaths on January 6—while also making billions for Murdoch and his family.
Steve Schmidt, a man who’s definitely no liberal (he was a White House adviser to George W. Bush and ran Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign as well as John McCain’s 2008 campaign), has been blunt about the impact of Fox “News”:
Rupert Murdoch’s lie machine is directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans, the poisoning of our democracy and the stoking of a cold civil war. There has never been anything like it and it is beyond terrible for the country. Bar none, Rupert Murdoch is the worst and most dangerous immigrant to ever arrive on American soil. There are no words for the awfulness of his cancerous network.
While Biden press secretaries Jen Psaki and Karine Jean-Pierre have been humorous in their dealing with Fox’s Peter Doocy’s attempts at gotcha questions in the White House press room, there’s nothing funny about inciting attacks on our country and then openly lying on the air about “antifa” to cover it up, as Media Matters for America has repeatedly documented that Fox “News” did.
Tim Walz is the antidote to the Fox “News” poison that is now so widely imitated across the right-wing media ecosystem, stealing the hearts and minds of millions. He’s America’s everyman, a welcome dose of sanity, and a wake-up call about how badly our country has been damaged by billionaire-funded right-wing hate.
So let the dad jokes begin!
As Liz Gumbinner points out, Seth Meyers’s head writer, Sal Gentile, summarized it brilliantly on X: “Tim Walz will expand free school lunches, raise the minimum wage, make it easier to unionize, fix your carburetor, replace the old wiring in your basement, spray that wasp’s nest under the deck, install a new spring for your garage door, and put a new chain on your lawnmower.”
And God willing and we all show up to vote, he’ll soon be vice president of the United States.
CNN reported that Michele Morrow, the GOP candidate for State Superintendent of Schools in North Carolina, filmed a video on January 6 urging Trump to “put the Coonstitution to the side” and use the military to stay in power. Morrow was in DC for the January 6 rally but she says she never entered the Capitol.
In a deleted Facebook livestream she filmed from her hotel room, Morrow called for mass arrests of anyone who helped certify the 2020 election. “And if the police won’t do it and the Department of Justice won’t do it, then he will have to enact the Insurrection Act,” said Morrow. “In which case the Insurrection Act completely puts the Constitution to the side and says, now the military rules all.”
Morrow was at the Capitol as the attack occurred, according to public videos reviewed by CNN that show her in a restricted area on the northwest side of the Capitol. CNN has seen no evidence that Morrow entered the Capitol building that day or that she engaged in violence, and she was not charged with any crimes.
In March’s Republican primary, Morrow defeated the incumbent North Carolina Superintendent of Public Instruction, a job that manages the state’s $11 billion budget for K-12 public schools and helps set education priorities and implement curriculum standards.
That same month, CNN’s KFile reported Morrow had previously called for the public execution of Barack Obama and the death of Joe Biden and other prominent Democrats in comments on a since-deleted X account.
“I prefer a Pay Per View of him in front of the firing squad,” Morrow wrote in a since-deleted post from May 2020 about Obama. “I do not want to waste another dime on supporting his life. We could make some money back from televising his death.”
Morrow home-schooled her children. She previously lost a local school board election. She is running now to take control of the education of all the children in North Carolina.
A terrifying prospect.
Diane Ravitch's blog 