‘Orwellian’ does not even begin to describe it

This video clip montage show how Fox News personalities suddenly switched from asserting that the coronavirus pandemic was a hoax to suddenly proclaiming its seriousness. What caused the change? Notice that the abrupt message reversal started after Trump’s address to the nation on March 11, after he must have realized that this crisis could not be combated by his usual bluster and lying and where he suddenly switched from proclaiming the pandemic to be a hoax to saying that it was a serious crisis. All these lemmings unquestioningly reversed course and followed him.

The next debate and primaries

This coming Sunday the 15th there will be a debate between Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden starting at 8:00 pm Eastern time and it will be a good occasion to compare where the two candidates stand on key issues, especially now that chronic interrupter Pete Buttigieg has bowed out and we will be able to hear what each person says. Unfortunately, the debate will be hosted and moderated by CNN which has not covered itself with glory so far in its political coverage, so we can expect the questions to be inane and slanted in a way that disparages Sanders, just like the last time the network moderated a debate.

Then the following Tuesday the 17th there will be four primaries in Arizona, Florida, Illinois, and Ohio for a total of 577 delegates. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won all four of them suggesting that this will be difficult terrain for Sanders before the subsequent primaries where he has a better chance.

Birds of a feather …

Guess who has come out in support of Chris Matthews, who resigned from his MSNBC show Hardball following many allegations of inappropriate behavior towards women, not to mention his highly inflammatory and offensive Nazi analogies against Bernie Sanders?

Yes, it is that champion of free speech and critic of political correctness, Bill Maher. The way he minimizes Matthews’s conduct is typical of such apologists.
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Great moments in mathematics

Michael Bloomberg spent $500 million on his campaign. The US population is 327 million. How much does that work out to per person? Brian Williams and his guest on MSNBC seem to be working with pundit math rather than the mathematics that ordinary people use.

What is astonishing is that this was not an off-the-cuff mistake that anyone can make, though one would have thought that the figure was so outlandish that it would have given them pause before saying it on air. This had been thought of before the broadcast aired, as can be seen by the fact that they had prepared a graphic of it. So the many people involved in putting these shows on also did not notice the glaring error.

The other swing voters

The public radio program On The Media had an excellent interview with Ibram X. Kendi about how the media is obsessively focusing on the wrong swing voters, and because of that error, party establishment Democrats are trying to persuade people who are unlikely to switch back to them, at the cost of ignoring those voters who previously voted Democratic but either did not vote in 2016 or voted third party. He says that these latter voters are far more persuadable to vote Democrat this time and should be the primary focus of the campaigns.
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Bye, bye, Chris Matthews

The veteran TV personality on MSNBC has announced his retirement from his show Hardball effective immediately. I for one am not sorry to see him go, because in addition to his highly problematic treatment of women and his virulent antipathy towards progressive ideas in general and Bernie Sanders in particular, he was a terrible interviewer, constantly interrupting his guests and not letting them finish their thoughts. This last behavior seemed to happen more frequently when his interview subjects were women or people with ideas he disagreed with.

The veteran MSNBC host Chris Matthews announced his immediate retirement from Hardball, citing his inappropriate comments about women and a conversation with network executives.

“The younger generation” is “improving the workplace” with “better standards than we grew up with, fairer standards,” Matthews said.

Matthews said “compliments on a woman’s appearance” that some men, himself included, once “incorrectly thought were OK, were never OK.”

I hope other TV personalities take note. The times, they are a changing.

Anderson Cooper is no journalistic hero

The CNN TV personality has been garnering a lot of praise for his interview of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich where he really dragged him across the coals. Blagojevich was one of the well-connected people Donald Trump pardoned recently when he was serving his sentence for trying to sell the Illinois senate seat that became vacant when Barack Obama became president. In the interview, Cooper strongly challenged Blagojevich’s attempts to rewrite history in self-serving ways.
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“Out-of-touch aristocrats in a dying aristocracy”

One of the interesting features about Bernie Sanders’s rise in the Democratic race is that in addition to the panic that it is causing in the party and media establishments and the oligarchy, one also senses a deep sense of puzzlement. In a political and media environment that has been dominated by political and media consultants who carefully polish and market test the image and words of candidates, how can a cranky, disheveled, old person who calls himself a socialist be generating such enthusiastic support across such a diverse population, especially the young?
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Don’t mess with the ‘misfit black girls’

Someone named Jason Johnson, a commentator on MSNBC (that is one of the most anti-Sanders mainstream media outlets) and elsewhere, has been promoting the idea that the Bernie Sanders campaign is largely supported by ‘racist white liberals’. This is of course a variation on the Bernie bros narrative that originated in 2015 despite the lack of a strong evidentiary basis and was heavily promoted by Hillary Clinton’s supporters during the 2016 campaign. The originator of the term Robinson Meyer expressed some regret in 2016 for coining a term that had exploded well beyond the very limited usage he had originally intended, especially since the Sanders coalition has grown to be so wide and diverse.
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