US Politics January 2018: "You All Just Got A Lot Richer"

yeah but emails

we really are living in a machine learning simulation aren't we

god everything is so fucking dumb and terrible

Can’t remember if we mentioned this here too but I’ve seen it expressed about the intense irony of people who worships all cops as troops wanting to purge the FBI.

Like it was a distinction born from only watching the cliche of 1,000 cop shows where the Feds show up to take over the case and get all the glory, like some Agents Johnson in Die Hard shit.

Also:

This profile of “blue-collar voters” looks at just one family, whose primary breadwinner is the chief of surgery at a hospital outside Pittsburgh. https://t.co/028Qh4Hv8Z

— Seth Masket (@smotus) January 31, 2018

Donald Trump is still the man to these blue-collar voters https://t.co/H5MsYVOM1Y pic.twitter.com/8nynJkJz4h

— New York Post (@nypost) January 31, 2018

Aaaand the actual article in the Opinion section:

https://nypost.com/2018/01/31/donald-trump-is-still-the-man-to-these-blue-collar-voters/

Donald Trump is still the man to this Pennsylvania home
-
[...]
Both Tony, 54, and Michelle, 41, voted for Trump is 2016. Tony is a grandson of immigrants and a highly regarded chief of surgery at a suburban Pittsburgh hospital. Michelle went to Carnegie Mellon University, is a breast cancer survivor and director of operations at the Ripepi home, driving the kids to piano lessons, tennis and hockey games and practices while also helping with her husband’s practice.

They are the upper-middle-class suburban voters who live in a blue-collar. upper-middle-class exurb whose vote most pollsters missed in their calculations on who would support Trump in 2016...

blue collar should not mean racist but

director of operations at the Ripepi home

God I hate capitalism

lol otm

I think it’s more that, even at the NY Post, every editor/journo involved with a Trump Safari is so deeply embedded in believing and reinforcing the idea that “trump supporter” = white = rural = working class/bluecollar that exurban upper-middle class white folks get shoved into that category, too.

Again, it just seems emblematic of the complete inability of professional media folks to possibly comprehend that politics is something other than a set of behaviors and decorum and cultural leanings.

So they can’t handle the fact that they could share identities with someone who could think so differently that they have to cast the other as this most alien of things. Trump supporters _have_ to be this alien crowd living in the alien conditions of another state and another economic level.

And the problem is that media coverage is the only way most folks see the world, so these bullshit ideas infect the consumers of this shit who reinforce it thru posting complaints against Them.

(Yeah this shit ain’t new, cue the Gramsci/Althusser/DeBord/Jameson/Žižek)

They are the upper-middle-class suburban voters who live in a blue-collar upper-middle-class exurb They are the upper-middle-class suburban voters who live in a blue-collar upper-middle-class exurb They are the upper-middle-class suburban voters who live in a blue-collar upper-middle-class exurb They are the upper-middle-class suburban voters who live in a blue-collar upper-middle-class exurb They are the upper-middle-class suburban voters who live in a blue-collar upper-middle-class exurb They are the upper-middle-class suburban voters who live in a blue-collar upper-middle-class exurb They are the upper-middle-class suburban voters who live in a blue-collar upper-middle-class exurb They are the upper-middle-class suburban voters who live in a blue-collar upper-middle-class exurb They are the upper-middle-class suburban voters who live in a blue-collar upper-middle-class exurb

i suspect the framing owes as much to flyover-country stereotyping as it does to trump-voter stereotyping. to the ny post, all of western pennsylvania is by definition blue collar

Nunes catches Dems by surprise by saying DOJ and FBI are under “investigation” by House Intel and should not be briefing them on the memo. “And I would urge my colleagues to vote no, we are not going to be briefed by people that are under investigation by this committee."

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) January 31, 2018

feel like when the movie gets made Nunes is gonna be the most implausible character of all

An amusement

Some background on the lawyer who drafted the Nunes memo, Kash Patel: He got benchslapped with an "order of ineptitude" by a federal judge in Houston in February 2016 for wasting taxpayer money and being "one more nonessential employee from Washington" https://t.co/QsZ4LmgbJ6

— Asha Rangappa (@AshaRangappa_) January 31, 2018

Ethnography reports of voters are just like reflections of reflections of reflections of abstractions; but like kingfish said, these stories influence how people see the world, strengthening tribal bonds and cartoonish ideas about the “other,” so reality becomes as stupid as journalism.

How safe is his seat?

(Nunes)

The Post describes the courtroom incident as “a Texas-size bollocking over proper attire, wasting taxpayer money and spying for the bureaucrats in Washington.”

The lawyer, Kashyap Patel, had arrived in court after flying to Houston from Tajikstan. “What is your role in this?” Hughes asked when Patel entered the courtroom. Patel responded that he was a member of the trial team.

“You’re not a member of the trial team,” Hughes said. “It’s been going on for a month or so and you haven’t been here, have you?”

Nunes is Central Valley GOP, so safer than most. But there are signs the hometown crowd is getting tired of him a bit. Still, assume he'll be reelected unless he melts down on live TV (which I could see).

An American paper used the term ‘bollocking’?

A two page document from today, meantime, that suggests much:

https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4364040/1-31-18-Flynn-Status-Report.pdf

Two comments on Twitter about it:

Mueller's office and lawyers for Michael Flynn want more time, per new filing:

"Due to the status of the Special Counsel's investigation, the parties do not believe that this matter is ready to be scheduled for a sentencing hearing at this time."

That wouldn't appear to be consistent with the view that Flynn didn't have much to offer to Mueller and that's all Mueller could get him on.

Probable interpretation: "They're desperate to find something but they got nothing! Need to keep looking... So desperate! Sad!"

Per Mariotti

The sentencing of Papadopoulos and Flynn won't occur until any trial of any person who they're cooperating against is completed. That could take years. https://t.co/F1Z5sGW4iJ

— Renato Mariotti (@renato_mariotti) January 31, 2018

https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/31/politics/donald-trump-rod-rosenstein-december-meeting/index.html

Evergreen post:

A major blind spot of self-loathing coastal media is not understanding how many white people with blue collar sensibilities who don’t listen to NPR actually have higher incomes than most people in self-loathing coastal media. https://t.co/BmWxtKmg8p

— David Klion (@DavidKlion) January 31, 2018

Middle to upper-middle income white people who think of themselves as working class and lean Republican are a significant demographic throughout the country and the media and both parties all seem to pretend otherwise.

— David Klion (@DavidKlion) January 31, 2018

6. The re-imagining of mansion-dwelling wealthy suburbanites as some kind of heartland working class is a project of a dumb coastal media who can't get it through their heads that just because the state gamelands are down the road, that don't mean it's Deliverance.

— Jacob "Blockchain" Bacharach, LLC (@jakebackpack) January 31, 2018

idk if i would use a new york post story to assemble a grand thesis about coastal media but ok

Where do reporters assigned to interview your average trump supporter tend to go? Out of state, for one.

In other news, Will Sommers has been tracking in almost real-time how the train collision conspiracism has been sluicing thru the Maga Chud outlets to get to less unresponsible channels

Gateway Pundit's Jim Hoft is already spreading conspiracy theories that the GOP train crash was domestic left-wing terrorism pic.twitter.com/C2scZnrSe1

— Will Sommer (@willsommer) January 31, 2018

alex jones is already on the case too

my parents are coming to visit on friday and if this comes up in any way i'm going to fucking snap

I grew up mere minutes from Crozet VA

been there, super nice place

can't imagine why anybody would wanna think the left was behind the train crash, GOP politicians don't like to admit they were outsmarted by liberals......

it's the train part that has them suspicious

all those associations with the Finland Station, you see

standing athwart history yelling CAR

Hahaha

Retiring Rep. Gowdy "has found himself butting heads in recent months with Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes and other pro-Trump Republicans who have hinted at corruption at the FBI" https://t.co/irndalAsKM

— Tim Mak (@timkmak) January 31, 2018

transcript of Nunes hearing for anybody who wants to read it: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aYJN_lURy1knKe3I20OhoU9XOnDBBnu1/view

I'll probably get another 5 pages in before I have to put it down in rage

It can't be a lefty conspiracy because: What the fuck were a bunch of small-government rugged individualist Red Staters doing on subsidized public transportation anyway? Surely they ought to have been traveling in a fleet of coal-rolling F150s, or at least Suburbans.

Well, we survived January at least.

Shhh, someone will notice that there are still a few hours left in the month and take that as a challenge.

finished reading the transcript of the Nunes hearing.

want to hurt many many people. Nunes isn't actually doing much more than being a chairman in the meeting, but most of the talking (from Democrats) falls on deaf ears. it's obvious what this is - we'll watch it play out like the Iraq War narrative did.

memo dropping tomorrow per reuters

fuck this place

better still, fuck those cretins and leave this place a better place

https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/trump-job-promises

Hey, what has the Kush been up to lately?

xp - yeah, except the great majority of trump supporters are like Americans in general, to whom "millions of new jobs" has approximately the same meaning as "more than a few new jobs". innumeracy is ascendant.

the unwillingness of editors - because let’s be honest, that’s who is ultimately assigning these angles - to see the phenomenon klion outlines is especially odd given that long and staten island are both not far from manhattan!!!!

better still, fuck those cretins and leave this place a better place
― A is for (Aimless), Wednesday, January 31, 2018 8:44 PM (eighteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

true enough, feeling defeated and hopeless today though, and mad at myself about that, too

the state of the uniom is not strnen