'Now They’re Calling for Violence
[...] Dinesh D’Souza, a right-wing provocateur who received a pardon from Trump for campaign-finance violations, said, “The FBI, an organization set up to fight organized crime, has become the most powerful organized crime syndicate in the world. We now need to carry the fight against organized crime to its logical conclusion: Shut down the FBI and prosecute this gang of dangerous criminals.”
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich suggested that the FBI might have planted evidence against Trump. [...] “We’d be better off to think of these people as wolves”—wolves who “want to eat you, wolves who want to dominate.” According to Gingrich, the FBI has “declared war on the American people at such a level and with such total dishonesty.” We are seeing “the ugly face of a tyranny.”
One of the most popular figures on Fox News, Jesse Watters[...] “How do we know they’re not planting evidence right now?” [...] “I’m angry. I feel violated. The whole country feels violated. It’s disgusting. They’ve declared war on us and now it’s game on.”
Sebastian Gorka, a former Trump adviser [...] said the FBI’s actions were “a declaration of war.” Monica Crowley, a right-wing commentator who worked in the Trump administration, tweeted, “This is it. This is the hill to die on.” Another popular right-wing talk-show host, Mark Levin[...] “This is the worst attack on this republic in modern history, period.”
[...] Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene [...] called for Congress to “DEFUND THE FBI!”'
Anger at the Mar-a-Lago 'Raid' Can’t End Well
'Republicans Are Outraged at Joe Biden for Accurately Describing the Economy
[...] we can now add the basic language of economics to the list of things Republicans have decided to go to war on.
[... Biden:] “Zero percent. Here’s what that means. While the price of some things went up last month, the price of other things went down by the same amount. The result, 0 inflation last month.”
Biden then added a slightly wonky flourish, noting that core inflation rose at its slowest rate in “several months.”
[...]
Republicans [...] erupted in furor and mockery. In tweet after tweet and article after article, right-leaning journalists, GOP officials, and party operatives accused of Biden of lying or misleading the public, since inflation is still up 8.5 percent over the past 12 months. [...] “There’s 8.5% inflation and basically everything anyone ever buys went up in price. This is just cruel gaslighting from the Biden admin.” Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee managed to wrap in some transphobia, tweeting that, “In Joe Biden’s America, men are women, and 8.5% inflation = 0% inflation.” Classy.
When journalists widely pointed out that what Biden said was basically accurate, conservatives promptly accused them of being patsies for the administration.
This is now the second month in a row in which conservatives have thrown a fit over economic lingo. [...] the right collectively excoriated journalists and the Biden administration for supposedly attempting to redefine the meaning of the word “recession,” [...] According to a commonly used rule of thumb, which you will often hear repeated by Wall Street traders, two quarters of negative growth qualifies as a recession.
[...] The task of deciding when recessions begin and end traditionally falls to the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Business Cycle Dating Committee. The group of esteemed economists isn’t an official government office, but professionals rely on it as the final arbiters when it comes to this topic. The committee defines a recession as “a significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and that lasts more than a few months,” which they clock “based on a range of monthly measures” including income, spending, and hiring, among others.
Nonetheless, Biden’s insistence that, no, we are not in an official recession left the right apoplectic. The fight online boiled over to the point where Wikipedia had to halt edits on its page for the term recession. Conservatives accused Biden of “governing by gaslighting.”'
Biden said there was zero inflation in July—accurately. The GOP was apoplectic
'Virginia Republicans are testing a new way to ban books and restrict their sales. In the long run, it might just work.
[...] would allow the judge, if she found the books obscene, to ban bookstores, libraries, and even private citizens from selling or sharing them, everywhere in Virginia.
[...] A Court of Mist and Fury is a mainstream (straight) fantasy/romance about a human transformed into a faerie, the second in a hugely successful YA series[...]
[...] “There is a movement spreading around the country that seeks to make this a political wedge issue, trying to cast books with any sexual content whatsoever as legally obscene,” [...] Many, though not all, of the books targeted are about LGBTQ issues, which many Republicans deem “sexually explicit” whether or not there’s actual sex involved. [...] “It’s a small group of people trying to decide what everyone should have access to.”'
Book banning: a Virginia Republican’s new scheme has a hidden agenda
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amphibian, on 09 August 2022 - 01:14 PM, said:
