This “Huh huh Hunter Biden’s laptop” story is too dubious even for Fox News.

Mediaite has learned that Fox News was first approached by Rudy Giuliani to report on a tranche of files alleged to have come from Hunter Biden’s unclaimed laptop left at a Delaware computer repair shop, but that the news division chose not to run the story unless or until the sourcing and veracity of the emails could be properly vetted.

With the general election just three weeks away, Giuliani ultimately brought the story to the New York Post, which shares the same owner, Rupert Murdoch.

And an even worse reputation.

But even New York Post reporters didn’t want their names on the story.

On Sunday night, the New York Times reported that the New York Post had a difficult time finding a reporter to put their byline on the story amidst internal concerns about its dubious sourcing. The Times reported that the staff writer who mostly wrote the story, Bruce Golding, refused put his name on the report because he doubted its credibility. Post editors then “pressed staff members to add their bylines to the story — and at least one aside from Mr. Golding refused,” according to the Times report, which cited two unnamed Post journalists. 

Normally reporters want their bylines on a story…

Concerns that Giuliani has been targeted by Russian intelligence to launder election misinformation about Biden raised more concerns about the reporting. According to the Washington Post, the U.S. intelligence community made that assessment last year, and went so far as to warn the president that Giuliani could be an unwitting conduit of false or manipulated claims, with the goal of sowing dissension and chaos in the 2020 election.

Questions of Giuliani’s credibility are well-founded. President Trump’s personal attorney has admitted that he is looking to dig up any negative information that could benefit his client.

And by “information” he doesn’t mean “true information” but just…stuff.

While Fox’s news division appears to have applied basic journalistic standards in declining to run such an explosive story without verification, much of the network’s opinion programming has covered the story and even had Giuliani on air to tout it, using the Post’s reporting as its shield while blaming the rest of the media for not covering it. Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum also had Giuliani on to discuss the story the day after it broke.

That’s cute. The news people won’t touch it but the opinion people are all over it, so…win-win.

The Republicans are restless.

A member of Republican leadership in the US Senate has likened his relationship with Donald Trump to a marriage, and said that he was “maybe like a lot of women who get married and think they’re going to change their spouse, and that doesn’t usually work out very well”.

Not very flattering to men…

Trump spent some of the weekend in a public fight with Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska. Sasse criticised Trump in a call with constituents, lamenting among other things his treatment of women and the way he “kisses dictators’ butts” and “flirts with white supremacists”.

You know, little things like that.

Trump fired back with insults, forcing Republican National Committee chair, Ronna McDaniel, on to the defensive on the Sunday talkshows.

Or she could just admit the truth, but whatever.

Blasting back at Sasse, Trump showed he never forgets a slight. The Nebraska senator, the president tweeted, “seems to be heading down the same inglorious path as former senator Liddle’ Bob Corker”, who became “totally unelectable” because of his criticism “and decided to drop out of politics and gracefully ‘RETIRE’”.

Two weeks…

Trump is in Las Vegas, where he should stay until he is imprisoned.

Trump joined a campaign staff call from his hotel in Las Vegas, where he is staying before his two campaign rallies in Arizona later today.

The president tried to instill confidence in his campaign staff, insisting he would win the election, despite the recent disappointing polls.

He insists a lot of things. Insistence doesn’t make it true.

He relieved his frustrations by trashing Fauci.

“People are tired of coronavirus,” the president said, according to reporters who listened in on the call. “People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots.”

We’re tired of coronavirus – you don’t say! Here I thought we were loving it, with all the deaths and miserable protracted illnesses and restrictions and deprivations. And yes how very sensible to get angry at the medical experts who advise us on how to reduce the spread of the virus, and how sensible and reasonable and fair to call them idiots, especially when you yourself are…not conspicuously intelligent or thoughtful.

He said Fauci had been around too long. (You know someone else we could say that about? Of course you do.)

The president also claimed (without evidence) that the US death toll would have been as high as 800,000 if he had followed Fauci’s advice.“Fauci is a disaster,” Trump said.

Without evidence and without anything else. No reasons, no explanation, no chain of reasoning, no argument – just a stupid assertion, as always. His name should be Stupid J. Assertion.

Yesterday this happened:

Allons enfants:

Thousands have attended rallies across France in support of Samuel Paty, the teacher beheaded after showing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad to his pupils.

People in the Place de la République in Paris carried the slogan “Je suis enseignant” (I am a teacher), with PM Jean Castex saying: “We are France!”

The Place de la République in Paris filled with people rallying in support of Mr Paty, 47. Mr Castex and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo joined them.

The square was the scene of a huge demonstration in which 1.5 million people showed solidarity with Charlie Hebdo following the deadly attack of January 2015.

Nathalie, a teacher from Chelles who was at the Paris rally, told Le Monde she was there because she had “realised you can die of teaching”.

In Lille, people carried banners and placards with the simple words “I am Samuel”.

Thousands of people also gathered in Place Bellecour in Lyon to pay their respects, with another large turnout in Nantes.

Demonstrations are also being held in Toulouse, Strasbourg, Marseille, Bordeaux and elsewhere.

More bad PR for Mo.

Originally a comment by Bruce Gorton on Blaming the beheaded.

Remember a few years ago when the in meme was the paradox of tolerance?

The paradox of tolerance is that pure tolerance doesn’t produce a tolerant society because there comes a point at which tolerating the intolerant means that the intolerant dominate the more reasonable people.

The solution to the paradox is that tolerance isn’t an absolute virtue. There is a line beyond which you don’t tolerate any longer. That line, according to the original argument, was drawn at the use of violence for political ends. You don’t tolerate terrorism.

Unfortunately, this same argument was used to endorse violence against bigots.

The problem is that violence is habit forming, and the habit generally expands beyond the initial target. It is difficult to deny that there is a misogyny problem on the left right now, and a part of that I think is the Nazi puncher movement. It didn’t take long at all for the Karens and “Terfs” to become the new Nazis.

Learning from this, we can conclude that it is thus very important to be very hesitant at the use of violence, and yet, the base argument the paradox is founded on is sound.

We saw this in the days of unmoderated comment threads; this is why so few news vendors even allow comments anymore because they can descend into such utter toxicity so easily due to a small number of highly intolerant, basically shitty people, who crowd out the decent majority.

It is all about where you draw the line, where you decide that freedom of speech dies. Personally, I draw it at the endorsement of violence for the aforementioned reasons.

For example, Dana Nawzar Jaf:

I fully condemn French police’s brutal senseless murder of the Muslim suspect last night. Macron and his security apparatus should explain to the public what was the need for the use of the disproportionate force against someone suspected of a knife crime. France is in crisis.

Bullying Muslim children in the name of teaching them free speech has to stop. Showing caricatures to Muslims kids disrespecting Prophet Muhammed is child abuse. Macron’s ass will be on fire if a teacher promoted Holocaust denial in front of Jewish kids to ‘promote free speech’.

Is this in the realms of tolerable intolerance?

#NotallMuslims, but the ones who are pushing this shit matter. #Notallmen, does not excuse those men who abuse women, and does not solve the problem of those men who do. What I am talking about here isn’t all Muslims, it is the specific Muslims who push this line.

And this man is mainstream enough to have written for the New Statesman, at least according to the Daily Mail.

Of course he claims this article is full of lies, yet his tweets speak for themselves.

Caricatures of Mohammed do not constitute calls for violence, can the same really be said for Jaf’s tweets? I’m not sure. I don’t think equating showing children caricatures in a lesson about free speech to child abuse after the teacher who did that was beheaded, can be said to be anything less than an active endorsement of the beheading.

There is a deep hypocrisy within the Islamist mind, whereby we are supposed to tolerate those who endorse the killings of cartoonists, teachers, authors, artists, and people who happen to work near the former offices of any of the prior individuals, and yet not tolerate the drawing of pictures of a certain long dead Middle Eastern pedophilic warlord.

We are supposed to place respect for the feelings of people who are fundamentally not respectable (and again, that’s #NotallMuslims, but certainly is those who agree with Jaf), ahead of the value we place on human lives. Is this a tolerable state of affairs?

If we are going to talk about freedom of speech, and whose speech should be banned, I do not think it is the speech of the cartoonist, but rather the speech of groups like 5 Pillars, of individuals like Jaf. If we are to restrict freedoms, we should restrict the freedoms of those who have demonstrated that they cannot handle living in a free society.

This is not a joke, repeat, not a joke.

The White House issued a proclamation a couple of days ago because it’s “National Character Counts Week.” Thank fuck we have the president to remind us and inspire us.

Personal responsibility, integrity, and the other values which define our unique American spirit underpin our system of self-government…In looking to these examples of honor and virtue…From small acts of kindness to supreme selfless sacrifice…Individuals of integrity and principle lift us all to greater heights…selfless giving of time and assistance to people in need…social and cultural awareness, intellectual curiosity, and a sense of responsibility…how far decency and compassion can go in helping others…we recommit to being more kind, loving, understanding, and virtuous.

Signed, Donald Trump. Not a joke.

Source is Jake Tapper:

Lara Trump mocks Biden for stuttering and then claims to be very concerned that it’s an indication of “cognitive decline.”

Lara TRUMP says that. Lara Trump says that in an effort to boost the campaign of the stupidest most ignorant sack of wind who has ever held that job.

Originally a comment by Papito on Blaming the beheaded.

Freedom of speech isn’t worth civil war.

I simply cannot get past the way in which this statement holds an implicit threat. Another, ruder way to say the same thing is:

You better shut up, or we’ll keep killing you.

Isn’t it already a war? One could say that Samuel Paty was killed as a defender of the French nation and its values. This is the country where the first universal declaration of the rights of man was written, and among those rights the following:

Article XI – The free communication of thoughts and of opinions is one of the most precious rights of man: any citizen thus may speak, write, print freely, except to respond to the abuse of this liberty, in the cases determined by the law.

This right is not just enumerated among other rights, it is a foundational right of the French state. To act against this right, as the murderer did, is, as the education minister said, “an attack on the French nation as a whole.” To justify action against this right is also to act against the French nation as a whole. To die defending this right is to die a martyr to the nation. Samuel Paty should be buried with state honors.

There may appear to be no civil war in France now, but this was an act of war. When one side is fighting a murderous war and the other is not, but only responding with police arrests and stern speeches, one calls it asymmetric warfare. In this case, France is already in an asymmetric civil war, with combatants like Abdoulakh A and the multiple villains involved in Charlie Hebdo attacks.

Roshan M Salih is also a combatant in this war, in the propaganda division. France should revoke his permission to visit, as he has declared himself an enemy of the laws and values of the French nation. Of course, France should welcome people of all religions to live peacefully in France, but if one cannot respect the laws and values of France, why should they be welcomed?

France must recognize that it is already in a state of war, whether it likes it or not, and stirring speeches will not end this war.

Robert Reich compares different ideas of freedom:

Trump and many Republicans insist that whether to wear a mask or to go to work during a pandemic should be personal choices. Yet what a woman does with her own body, or whether same-sex couples can marry, should be decided by government.

Trump and most Republicans are not very good at thinking about (or noticing) the ways individual acts can affect other people and/or the world we have to live in. In the abstract, absolute freedom sounds appealing, but in the reality, we live among people and most of what we do affects others. It’s about degrees and kinds as opposed to freedom v not-freedom. Flouting public health measures during a pandemic doesn’t take a whole lot of careful thought before you can figure out how it harms anyone.

What’s public, what’s private and where should government intervene? The question suffuses the impending election and much else in modern American life.

It is nonsensical to argue, as do Trump and his allies, that government cannot mandate masks or close businesses during a pandemic but can prevent women from having abortions and same-sex couples from marrying.

Trump doesn’t really give a shit about either abortions or same-sex marriage, he just likes sticking it to the liberals and being the meanest Republican who ever republicanned.

During wartime, we expect government to intrude on our daily lives for the common good: drafting us into armies, converting our workplaces and businesses, demanding we sacrifice normal pleasures and conveniences. During a pandemic as grave as this one we should expect no less intrusion, in order that we not expose others to the risk of contracting the virus.

But we have no right to impose on others our moral or religious views about when life begins or the nature and meaning of marriage. The common good requires instead that we honor such profoundly personal decisions.

The when life begins question is tricky, because ordinarily you could say that’s a scientific or philosophical question, or both, or some of each. The reason you can’t leave it at that in the case of pregnancy and abortion is the troublesome fact that the question takes place inside the body of a person, a woman. All the way inside it. The pregnancy, the process of becoming, is internal to one particular woman. It’s personal to her first of all. Even if you think the fetus has rights, even if you think the fetus has a soul, even if you think the fetus is not just alive but a person, you still have no right to dismiss the fact that the fetus is inside a woman. Her wants have to matter.

Ooh ooh I know this one.

I know this one! Yes of course people are frustrated over the restrictions but you know what’s even more restricting and frustrating? A bad case of the virus! Even more so? Being dead! Also frustrating is accidentally infecting your beloved friend or spouse or parent or sibling or child. It’s all terribly frustrating! Spreading the virus won’t help. Trump is spreading the virus like crazy, and it’s not helping.

Bex Stinson is “Head of trans inclusion, Stonewall.” The meaning of “trans inclusion” of course is not the ordinary, commonly understood meaning of inclusion, but a new and paradoxical meaning: the “inclusion” of men with women and women with men, when the included identify as the other sex.

Nicola Adams is

a British former professional boxer who competed from 2017 to 2019. She retired with an undefeated record and held the WBO female flyweight title in 2019.

Bex Stinson is of course lying when he says Nicola Adams “is trying to prevent trans people from playing sports.” Saying men should not compete against women is not saying they should not play sports. It’s pretty simple.

Man who identifies as woman wants other men who identify as women to be able to box against women despite their large physical advantage. I wonder how long it will take for Trans Allies to see how grotesque this is.

Does it even matter that Trump goes to Michigan and incites violence against its governor? Yes, it does.

After Donald Trump attacked Gretchen Whitmer at a rally in Michigan on Saturday, prompting chants of “Lock her up!”, an aide to the governor said: “Every single time the president does this at a rally, the violent rhetoric towards her immediately escalates on social media. It has to stop. It just has to.”

…

At his rally in Muskegon, Trump targeted Whitmer several times, criticising state rules to stop the spread of coronavirus, calling her “dishonest” and making light of a rightwing plot to kidnap her – and possibly to kill her – that was foiled by the FBI.

He’s behind in the polls, and this is what he does to try to claw his way back. Trump’s America is a mean abusive rage-driven hell of bullies and the people they persecute.

On CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, Lara Trump, wife of Eric Trump and a campaign surrogate for her father-in-law, said the president “wasn’t doing anything I don’t think to provoke people to threaten this woman at all.

“He was having fun at a Trump rally and quite frankly, there are bigger issues than this right now for everyday Americans people … he wasn’t encouraging people to threaten this woman, that’s ridiculous.”

He was “having fun” at a Him-rally by shouting venom at a Democratic woman while his audience cheered and screamed “Lock her up.” Of course he was encouraging them to threaten “this woman.”

Make.him.go.away.

How the pro-murder for “blasphemy” side sees things:

Salih is the editor of 5 Pillars. It’s fascinating to see his anxiety about oppression and brutalization of Muslims in France as a response to the murder of a teacher by an engraged Muslim. Obviously Muslims in France should not be oppressed or brutalized, because no one should, but if we’re going to talk about “terrible violence” what about that teacher?

Not his problem, it seems.

The teacher didn’t show his pupils “blasphemous caricatures” because “blasphemy” is a word that doesn’t mean much to people who don’t share the religion in question. It’s not “blasphemy” for me to say Jesus is not sitting at God’s right hand, because I don’t adhere to the religion that says Jesus is too so sitting at God’s right hand. Believers may see it as “blasphemy” but that’s their problem. Some people think it’s a form of blasphemy to tell the truth about Donald Trump, but that’s their problem. Some people think it’s a form of blasphemy to say that men are not women, but that’s their problem.

This is a guy who fancies himself a news editor.

Remember – some vigilantes were just arrested by the feds for plotting to abduct this same governor and “put her on trial.”

More on the Paris nightmare:

Samuel Paty, 47, who taught history and geography at the school in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine , north-west of the French capital, was attacked on Friday evening by an 18-year-old man who was shot dead by police shortly afterwards.

Because of a cartoon.

Earlier this month, Paty had shown a class of teenage pupils a caricature from the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo during a moral and civic education class discussion about freedom of speech, sparking a furious response from a number of parents who had demanded his resignation. Before presenting the caricature, the teacher reportedly invited Muslim students to leave the classroom if they wished.

Afterwards, the father of a 13-year-old girl who did not leave the class posted a video on YouTube claiming the teacher had shown a “photo of a naked man” claiming he was the “Muslim prophet”. The father called on other parents to join him in a collective action against the teacher, whom he described as a “voyou” (thug).

In other words the father lied and the teacher was murdered.

Jean-François Ricard, France’s anti-terrorist prosecutor, said the teacher had been “assassinated for teaching” and the attack was an assault on the principle of freedom of expression. “This is the second attack to take place during the Charlie Hebdo trial which shows the high level of terrorist threat we face,” Ricard said.

…

Ricard said: “The first investigation shows the victim had during a 4th year class a discussion about freedom of expression as allowed under the national curriculum.” Later a parent posted a complaint on Facebook about the professor showing a “naked picture” of the Prophet. This same parent went to the school to complain, and later posted a video with the message “stop”. The father then went to the police station with his daughter to lodge an official complaint against the professor for the distribution of “pornographic images”.

That is, an official complaint full of lies.

Macron visited the scene of the attack on Friday evening. “One of our compatriots was assassinated today because he taught pupils freedom of expression, the freedom to believe and not believe,” he said. “This was a cowardly attack on our compatriot. He was the victim of a typical Islamist terrorist attack.”

…

The hashtag #JeSuisProf (I’m a teacher) was spreading on social media on Saturday. It is reminiscent of #JeSuisCharlie, which emerged as a global wave of support for the journalists and staff of Charlie Hebdo killed in 2015.

Brilliant. Well done us.

More than 68,000 new cases of Covid-19 were recorded in the US on Friday, the highest number in a single day since July, further confirmation the country is in the midst of a coronavirus resurgence.

That’s the worst it’s been since the end of July. Wrong direction, folks.

Cases dipped from August to mid-September. But public health experts have long feared a rise in cases as the weather starts to cool, leading people indoors, where the virus is more likely to spread. Cases are increasing in a majority of states, particularly in the northern midwest, including the Dakotas, Montana and Wisconsin – where Donald Trump was due to stage a rally on Saturday night.

This week, the US has averaged 55,000 new cases a day, a 60% increase compared with mid-September.

“You can’t enter into the cool months of the fall and the cold months of the winter with a high community infection baseline,” said Dr Anthony Fauci, the top US infectious disease expert, on Friday, while discussing the difficulties the virus will present in the coming weeks.

You can’t but we are.

Fauci says we’re still in the first phase, because the count has never gone down enough to say that phase is over.

New cases reached 4,100 in Wisconsin on Friday, a record daily high. The state has set up overflow hospital facilities and the national guard is manning extra testing sites.

Joe Biden currently leads Donald Trump by about seven points in Wisconsin, generally considered a battleground state. On Saturday Trump was due to stage a rally in Janesville, about 175 miles away from La Crosse, Minnesota, his intended venue until local officials urged the president to move the rally amid a surge of cases.

That’s confusing. They mean he was going to do the rally in LaCrosse but now he’s doing it in Janesville.

While incidents of coronavirus transmission in open-air environments have not been documented as thoroughly as viral spreading in indoor settings, Wisconsin’s governor, Tony Evers, a Democrat, suggested it was reckless for the president to draw thousands of people together in a “red zone” for transmission.

“The president could do two things: one is maybe not come to these two municipalities and cities that are ranked right up towards the top of all the places in the country [for infections],” Evers said.

“The second thing that could be done is for him to insist that if people are there, they wear a mask. He can make that happen. He could wear one too. Those are the two things that he could do to make sure that it doesn’t become a super-spreader event.”

He could do that but he won’t.

Originally a comment by iknklast on Zero more years.

In 2016, his bitter account of the nation’s ailments struck a chord with many voters

This is one of the things that annoys me. Always saying this, without noting that the ailments he described were not in many cases ailments, but signs of a country that has people that are diverse and many of them have sentiments more in line with the modern world than with the one Trump voters long for. It’s time to quit playing this game of saying things in a way that sounds like he was describing legitimate bad things, things most of us could agree are bad, but which Trump didn’t solve.

The things that “struck a chord with many voters” include racism, misogyny, homophobia, nastiness, name calling, contempt for the disabled, contempt for everyone who is not them. As long as we keep pussyfooting around these realities, we legitimize them. Trump is not the cause of these things, he is the result of these things. His voters got what they wanted…a mindless buffoon who breaks things. A racist who works to dismantle protections for minorities. A misogynist who thinks grabbing unwilling women is just fine, and something to brag about.

I imagine the NY Times doesn’t like to think about the implications. If this is what 40% of the voters want, what does that say about this country? About our neighbors? Our families? So they act like it is all because Trump didn’t live up to what the voters wanted, rather than admitting that the voters elected the Trump they got.

The NY Times editorial board says get Trump out of there.

Donald Trump’s re-election campaign poses the greatest threat to American democracy since World War II.

Mr. Trump’s ruinous tenure already has gravely damaged the United States at home and around the world. He has abused the power of his office and denied the legitimacy of his political opponents, shattering the norms that have bound the nation together for generations. He has subsumed the public interest to the profitability of his business and political interests. He has shown a breathtaking disregard for the lives and liberties of Americans. He is a man unworthy of the office he holds.

The editorial board does not lightly indict a duly elected president. During Mr. Trump’s term, we have called out his racism and his xenophobia. We have critiqued his vandalism of the postwar consensus, a system of alliances and relationships around the globe that cost a great many lives to establish and maintain. We have, again and again, deplored his divisive rhetoric and his malicious attacks on fellow Americans.

But political rhetoric is always going to be “divisive” in some way, because it takes positions, and that means some people will disagree. Calling Trump’s horrendous abusive bullying way of talking “divisive” lets him off far too easily. He’s an evil sadistic down-punching thug. Don’t pretty that up with mere “divisive.”

Mr. Trump stands without any real rivals as the worst American president in modern history. In 2016, his bitter account of the nation’s ailments struck a chord with many voters. But the lesson of the last four years is that he cannot solve the nation’s pressing problems because he is the nation’s most pressing problem.

He is a racist demagogue presiding over an increasingly diverse country; an isolationist in an interconnected world; a showman forever boasting about things he has never done, and promising to do things he never will.

That’s more like it.